Perhaps, or perhaps we're too lost in hot button nonsense issues that we can't choose politicians based on anything other than their stated stance on our favorite issue (i.e. religion, abortion, environment etc.). While we're distracted with the fluff, real harm is being done to our freedom, finances and infrastructure.
Microsoft asks the copyright owner for a business arrangement in which both parties can get rich at the expense of the consumer. That is somehow less evil because I used the "business" word.
That's the way it is, he's not lying to you, although I don't necessarily think all nighters in college are fair considering he's sharing your time. I remember 24 credit course loads and professors like that, I'd drop him like a bad habit too.
You can find 8 to 5 jobs, but the lure of higher pay will undoubtedly steer you to those other places. Of course if you did the math, you're better off with the 8-5 and spending the extra time working at mcdonalds, but most of us would consider that beneath our status.
It's not about a labor shortage, it's about "keeping pace of the industry". Someone out there is going to release a product that competes with yours, next year. You have to get your latest and greatest out by the time they do, or mgmt will have to predict reduced yearly growth (since it's all about growth, not about stability). Of course, it's more work than can really be done in a year by a normal sized team working 40 hour weeks. You can add people to the project, but there are well documented inefficiencies. Or you can make your people work longer and keep the smallest possible team. Usually that gets the results, but obviously they burn out. That's the way it really is. No amount of off-shoring or H1Bs will fix it, companies that do that are looking to cut costs on labor and to combat attrition, that's it.
All in all, we have similar hours to doctors, and 2x the operating age (usually 24-50, after which it seems like it's hard to get hired) but crappier pay. I like what I do, but given life to do again, I'd have kept the geek stuff as a hobby and found other work.
Yet they have the same limitations we all do, namely certain companies refuse to open their device specs. Dell does not do ICs, so various graphics cards, sound cards and storage cards (the latter being most important in servers) either require closed source binaries, or, you elect not to use it. I don't think Dell or any system vendor should necessarily be in the position of writing and supporting those themselves, although it'd be swell to see them use their weight to make it come true.
Regardless of how the game mechanics work, it strikes me as the epitome of wrong for them to sue someone for a 3rd party app. It's not interacting with their servers any differently than the client (because it uses the client) and itself is not hurting their player base. Sure, players get annoyed by glider-farmers, but it was the concious decision of a person to use that tool. If anyone is responsible, it is the person using it on their account ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). Next, most players assume the person who runs in and kills stuff and doesn't talk is a bot, but it could easily be people like myself or my wife. We don't keep public chat up (emote/say/tell/yell/any general chat), and we play pretty...aggressively. Tag it or we take it. The point of all this being, it's impossible to figure out what the actual damages from bots are, opposed to just assholes like us. Finally, do we want bliz to be able to sue anyone who doesn't play the game a certain way to be able to sue? Is that even reasonable? Hard-core raider? Feel my lawsuit.
That sounds so easy, but as impossible as it is to know the will of the president of our country ahead of time, you can at least look at his history and try to read the tea leaves. It's a million times more impossible to know what some local yahoo you've never heard of is going to do. All you can really do is vote them out when they do something totally braindead that makes it into the news. Such as redefining science. Or using your tax dollars to build a $500k skateboard park. etc.
That pretty much sums up this article. We play the character we're given. We kill the characters we're expected to kill. If it's fun, the game is "good". If it's not fun, the game is "bad".
It depends on if you are a robot attempting to gain human rights, or if you're just a collection of greedy bastards trying to get the law to protect you from your own misdeeds.
They've got deep pockets, and/. group think irrationally favors Apple. In some pot induced wet dream, Apple is a believable competitor to both a) Dell and b) PCs. Just mentally mod down these things to -1 Fanboi
And why anyone would want a movie that was taped in a theater on a camcorder is beyond me. That sound wasn't the orcs coming from deep within the mountain, it was your feet sticking to the floor..
Having worked as a HW designer for a while, I am certain there is no relationship between price, brand name, and quality. Right out of school, I used to think "Screw it, just use ". Yet , one of the more reputable DRAM vendors that most engineers would choose if they had no price concerns, had one product that began to fail at higher end temps (well within spec) with a particular chipset, while ALL other vendors tried, did NOT fail, and while other factors under consideration (SI, etc.) were within spec sheet limits. Something was wrong with this component, fortunately it was revealed prior to mass production but we're not always so lucky, that part could have been substituted in later, and never gone through rigorous testing until customers found it the hard way. The vendor in question, refused to fix the problem, and was prevented on bidding for a number of years as a result. This is ALSO part of managing suppliers, and why you may see companies from time to time NOT allow certain vendors to bid, even though you may think of them as "better" than their competitors.
There are a number of variables you can control, it is your job as an engineer to spec out all criteria you care about, and get it in writing that the product in question will meet that criteria. All those meeting the criteria can then bid, and you take the lowest bid. If that vendor screws you, and it has happened, you punish them by taking business from them for a while and giving it to their competitor. That's also business. If you screw up your spec, and your business chooses a low quality supplier, then you've hurt your company, shame on you. Your suppliers will survive by having other people to sell to, who did a better job, or in the event where all companies fail to see the uncontrolled variable resulting in "low quality", you put your marketing machine in gear and advertise your advantage. If it is worthy, (and quality control is absolutely critical to the profitability of consumer HW, no matter where you work) people will take notice, otherwise you're just overpriced and producing something that the world doesn't need.
So many people, especially Apple zealots, like to pull the "quality part" card, but it's bogus. Apple, for example, uses Quanta for many of it's designs. So does Dell. So does HP. So do many computer mfg's. Money exchanges hands for the finished product. All they do is specify exit criteria (including tests to run). Quanta, and companies like that, are doing part selection and substitution maintenance.
There's very little "part quality" difference between most machines, what usually is different is the level of testing, and the standards for releasing a product. Apple may hold up a new product because of what PC vendors consider to be a minor flaw. That's the real difference between PC's and Apples, and it makes all the difference in the world.
Isn't this the point of a free market? You actually think suppliers should set their own prices? You must LOVE the phone company!
Running each supplier down to the lowest cost they will sell at is business. If you're not doing it, you're hurting yourself. If a supplier can't beat costs, either he is inefficient compared to his competitor, or his competitor is taking a loss. Either way, what would I care, as a purchaser, what the story is? How do I even know?
#1b - Come up with a criteria for what a minimally moral (by our definition) government is, and prohibit companies that interact with them from selling products in your country. The bill of rights is a good conversation starter.
I like this better as it puts civil rights in the hands of people, not corporations or governments. Somewhere in history this was shown to be better for us.
I agree, I use these all the time at airports (pay for WiFi in an airport with $2 waters and $1.50 small bags of chips? nfw). I know they're up to no good, but good luck trying.
My next paragraph, which I deleted because it was off topic, was that schools should not accept students without at least 3 years of field experience, and employers should throw out of consideration advanced degrees awarded without field work. At least insofar as engineering is concerned, pure science/math are somewhat different although I expect the same parallel can be drawn. You can't possibly know how to innovate in useful ways without having first worked in the field and seen the problems that need solutions. So many degrees are awarded for "original" ideas that are hardly useful. I'm not saying every single PhD awarded was for something trivial, but the majority are. That could be reduced by requiring actual work have been performned in the field for some interval, and also put a "for real" filter on graduate candidates.
I don't know what Bush being in the white house has to do with engineering or education. I mean that in pretty much every possible way.
Thinkers that can't do are worthless, sure they can learn, but it still takes a while and that costs money. Doers that can't think...can be used up like so much paper, but there's a dollar value that can be assigned in closed form. Business is about shipping product profitably. Businesses necessarily WANT people who already know how to do, and are the perfect size cog for their machine. They NEED cogs that adapt to their machine as time wears on, and can make it better, but are necessarily so short sighted they can't put a dollar value on it. MOST people that bother with a college degree, do so to get a job aftwards. Most people that went after engineering degrees, that I know, had something in mind to do with it, however vague.
You have to teach both what current solutions/tools/methods are, as well as processes for solving problems. People need both, one to enter, the next to adapt. Unfortunately in 4 years, that's a lot of stuff to absorb and college is too expensive to make the programs longer. My solution is to drop all the general ed crap no one needs, and allow students to focus more heavily on what they came there for. A lot of the "tradeskill" knowledge can be taught in the first two years of education, while the pure math/science coursework is occuring that provides the foundation for the "thinker" training that necessarily needs to occur later on. Further, it provides a much clearer feedback mechanism when you've done a "tradeskill project", went through the pains and the confusion, and then start getting hit with the "thinker" knowledge. It's a lot more obvious how you can use advanced analytical skills to solve a problem you have RIGHT NOW, than to listen to all this information being poured at you about how yesterdays problems were already solved.
The problem with non-technical documents is that they rarely contain actual data or fact to justify the wild claims. Making them great for politics and politicians, but worthless for genuinely smart people to make good decisions.
On the other hand, god help the world if defect tracking databases (or issue subsets) were made public on this. Any bug you ever had could become a lawsuit if it could be construed to have caused financial loss. The world would grind to a halt.
Given a country where local shops will sell you a system without charging you for the OS (in any way), how does a deep pocketed competitor from overseas compete? Linux. It can be shipped for free, without breaking laws, and avoiding lawsuits. I'm sure MS is well aware of this, and we have all read on/. how they keep making threats to China in efforts to solve this problem. Unfortunately, people that like to use cheap foreign labor to MAKE products, do not often understand that those same people can't afford to BUY them at those wages.
As far as I can tell, all systems that have been made are sold, or are in between factory and recipient. So far, all we have is hype. The Xbox 360 on the other hand, is definitely out and available for purchase casually.
I disagree. The fact is there are only X consoles out there, whether you paid $500 or $3000 is really just inversely related to your intelligence (and/or, your desire to spoil your child rotten, in some cases). One way or another, all consoles out there are sold. While I hope publishers burn in hell, neither they nor developers are hurt by this for two good reasons: 1) All consoles out there are sold, people who CAN buy their games, still can, 2) There aren't that many games out there, people w/these consoles are even buying junk, just for something to play. The only people who are hurt, are those foolish enough to pay for hyped consoles.
Most of us have the sense to wait until we can pick one up in the store without a pre-order or ebay. Some of us will have even more sense and wait until the price drops. These things, more than post-launch (and mostly meatless) criticism of the three consoles, are most likely affecting grey-market prices, just like hype and bullshit tend to inflate stock prices more than actual profits, but fade away as reality sets in.
The rest is just THC laced astro-turfing. In a world where innovation is dead or repressed, I guess this is the best/. can do.
There may come a point in time when you can copy human brains. We already more or less know how to copy bodies, all that's left is our hard drives. Ignoring robots, what would a world be like if no personality ever died.
You just need the right lawyer, let's get Cochran in here. Bring Shakespeare back from the dead, along with half a dozen english lit professors, and apply the following defense:
"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and thus we did deliver 12 carnations, according to the terms of our contract". Three weeks, a dozen expert testimonies later, and a carnation would legally be considered a rose, and no one will touch it with a 100ft pole for fear he might speak again.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, or perhaps we're too lost in hot button nonsense issues that we can't choose politicians based on anything other than their stated stance on our favorite issue (i.e. religion, abortion, environment etc.). While we're distracted with the fluff, real harm is being done to our freedom, finances and infrastructure.
And will be debunked 2 months ago.
Microsoft asks the copyright owner for a business arrangement in which both parties can get rich at the expense of the consumer. That is somehow less evil because I used the "business" word.
Nonsense, that tape is clearly defective.
That's the way it is, he's not lying to you, although I don't necessarily think all nighters in college are fair considering he's sharing your time. I remember 24 credit course loads and professors like that, I'd drop him like a bad habit too.
You can find 8 to 5 jobs, but the lure of higher pay will undoubtedly steer you to those other places. Of course if you did the math, you're better off with the 8-5 and spending the extra time working at mcdonalds, but most of us would consider that beneath our status.
It's not about a labor shortage, it's about "keeping pace of the industry". Someone out there is going to release a product that competes with yours, next year. You have to get your latest and greatest out by the time they do, or mgmt will have to predict reduced yearly growth (since it's all about growth, not about stability). Of course, it's more work than can really be done in a year by a normal sized team working 40 hour weeks. You can add people to the project, but there are well documented inefficiencies. Or you can make your people work longer and keep the smallest possible team. Usually that gets the results, but obviously they burn out. That's the way it really is. No amount of off-shoring or H1Bs will fix it, companies that do that are looking to cut costs on labor and to combat attrition, that's it.
All in all, we have similar hours to doctors, and 2x the operating age (usually 24-50, after which it seems like it's hard to get hired) but crappier pay. I like what I do, but given life to do again, I'd have kept the geek stuff as a hobby and found other work.
Yet they have the same limitations we all do, namely certain companies refuse to open their device specs. Dell does not do ICs, so various graphics cards, sound cards and storage cards (the latter being most important in servers) either require closed source binaries, or, you elect not to use it. I don't think Dell or any system vendor should necessarily be in the position of writing and supporting those themselves, although it'd be swell to see them use their weight to make it come true.
Regardless of how the game mechanics work, it strikes me as the epitome of wrong for them to sue someone for a 3rd party app. It's not interacting with their servers any differently than the client (because it uses the client) and itself is not hurting their player base. Sure, players get annoyed by glider-farmers, but it was the concious decision of a person to use that tool. If anyone is responsible, it is the person using it on their account ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). Next, most players assume the person who runs in and kills stuff and doesn't talk is a bot, but it could easily be people like myself or my wife. We don't keep public chat up (emote/say/tell/yell/any general chat), and we play pretty...aggressively. Tag it or we take it. The point of all this being, it's impossible to figure out what the actual damages from bots are, opposed to just assholes like us. Finally, do we want bliz to be able to sue anyone who doesn't play the game a certain way to be able to sue? Is that even reasonable? Hard-core raider? Feel my lawsuit.
That sounds so easy, but as impossible as it is to know the will of the president of our country ahead of time, you can at least look at his history and try to read the tea leaves. It's a million times more impossible to know what some local yahoo you've never heard of is going to do. All you can really do is vote them out when they do something totally braindead that makes it into the news. Such as redefining science. Or using your tax dollars to build a $500k skateboard park. etc.
That pretty much sums up this article. We play the character we're given. We kill the characters we're expected to kill. If it's fun, the game is "good". If it's not fun, the game is "bad".
It depends on if you are a robot attempting to gain human rights, or if you're just a collection of greedy bastards trying to get the law to protect you from your own misdeeds.
They've got deep pockets, and /. group think irrationally favors Apple. In some pot induced wet dream, Apple is a believable competitor to both a) Dell and b) PCs. Just mentally mod down these things to -1 Fanboi
I do. My Wii will sit alongside my ps3, once the Wii is available and the ps3 is more like $400. I'm skipping the MS thing.
And why anyone would want a movie that was taped in a theater on a camcorder is beyond me. That sound wasn't the orcs coming from deep within the mountain, it was your feet sticking to the floor..
Having worked as a HW designer for a while, I am certain there is no relationship between price, brand name, and quality. Right out of school, I used to think "Screw it, just use ". Yet , one of the more reputable DRAM vendors that most engineers would choose if they had no price concerns, had one product that began to fail at higher end temps (well within spec) with a particular chipset, while ALL other vendors tried, did NOT fail, and while other factors under consideration (SI, etc.) were within spec sheet limits. Something was wrong with this component, fortunately it was revealed prior to mass production but we're not always so lucky, that part could have been substituted in later, and never gone through rigorous testing until customers found it the hard way. The vendor in question, refused to fix the problem, and was prevented on bidding for a number of years as a result. This is ALSO part of managing suppliers, and why you may see companies from time to time NOT allow certain vendors to bid, even though you may think of them as "better" than their competitors.
There are a number of variables you can control, it is your job as an engineer to spec out all criteria you care about, and get it in writing that the product in question will meet that criteria. All those meeting the criteria can then bid, and you take the lowest bid. If that vendor screws you, and it has happened, you punish them by taking business from them for a while and giving it to their competitor. That's also business. If you screw up your spec, and your business chooses a low quality supplier, then you've hurt your company, shame on you. Your suppliers will survive by having other people to sell to, who did a better job, or in the event where all companies fail to see the uncontrolled variable resulting in "low quality", you put your marketing machine in gear and advertise your advantage. If it is worthy, (and quality control is absolutely critical to the profitability of consumer HW, no matter where you work) people will take notice, otherwise you're just overpriced and producing something that the world doesn't need.
So many people, especially Apple zealots, like to pull the "quality part" card, but it's bogus. Apple, for example, uses Quanta for many of it's designs. So does Dell. So does HP. So do many computer mfg's. Money exchanges hands for the finished product. All they do is specify exit criteria (including tests to run). Quanta, and companies like that, are doing part selection and substitution maintenance.
There's very little "part quality" difference between most machines, what usually is different is the level of testing, and the standards for releasing a product. Apple may hold up a new product because of what PC vendors consider to be a minor flaw. That's the real difference between PC's and Apples, and it makes all the difference in the world.
Isn't this the point of a free market? You actually think suppliers should set their own prices? You must LOVE the phone company!
Running each supplier down to the lowest cost they will sell at is business. If you're not doing it, you're hurting yourself. If a supplier can't beat costs, either he is inefficient compared to his competitor, or his competitor is taking a loss. Either way, what would I care, as a purchaser, what the story is? How do I even know?
#1b - Come up with a criteria for what a minimally moral (by our definition) government is, and prohibit companies that interact with them from selling products in your country. The bill of rights is a good conversation starter.
I like this better as it puts civil rights in the hands of people, not corporations or governments. Somewhere in history this was shown to be better for us.
I agree, I use these all the time at airports (pay for WiFi in an airport with $2 waters and $1.50 small bags of chips? nfw). I know they're up to no good, but good luck trying.
My next paragraph, which I deleted because it was off topic, was that schools should not accept students without at least 3 years of field experience, and employers should throw out of consideration advanced degrees awarded without field work. At least insofar as engineering is concerned, pure science/math are somewhat different although I expect the same parallel can be drawn. You can't possibly know how to innovate in useful ways without having first worked in the field and seen the problems that need solutions. So many degrees are awarded for "original" ideas that are hardly useful. I'm not saying every single PhD awarded was for something trivial, but the majority are. That could be reduced by requiring actual work have been performned in the field for some interval, and also put a "for real" filter on graduate candidates.
I don't know what Bush being in the white house has to do with engineering or education. I mean that in pretty much every possible way.
Thinkers that can't do are worthless, sure they can learn, but it still takes a while and that costs money. Doers that can't think...can be used up like so much paper, but there's a dollar value that can be assigned in closed form. Business is about shipping product profitably. Businesses necessarily WANT people who already know how to do, and are the perfect size cog for their machine. They NEED cogs that adapt to their machine as time wears on, and can make it better, but are necessarily so short sighted they can't put a dollar value on it. MOST people that bother with a college degree, do so to get a job aftwards. Most people that went after engineering degrees, that I know, had something in mind to do with it, however vague.
You have to teach both what current solutions/tools/methods are, as well as processes for solving problems. People need both, one to enter, the next to adapt. Unfortunately in 4 years, that's a lot of stuff to absorb and college is too expensive to make the programs longer. My solution is to drop all the general ed crap no one needs, and allow students to focus more heavily on what they came there for. A lot of the "tradeskill" knowledge can be taught in the first two years of education, while the pure math/science coursework is occuring that provides the foundation for the "thinker" training that necessarily needs to occur later on. Further, it provides a much clearer feedback mechanism when you've done a "tradeskill project", went through the pains and the confusion, and then start getting hit with the "thinker" knowledge. It's a lot more obvious how you can use advanced analytical skills to solve a problem you have RIGHT NOW, than to listen to all this information being poured at you about how yesterdays problems were already solved.
The problem with non-technical documents is that they rarely contain actual data or fact to justify the wild claims. Making them great for politics and politicians, but worthless for genuinely smart people to make good decisions.
On the other hand, god help the world if defect tracking databases (or issue subsets) were made public on this. Any bug you ever had could become a lawsuit if it could be construed to have caused financial loss. The world would grind to a halt.
Given a country where local shops will sell you a system without charging you for the OS (in any way), how does a deep pocketed competitor from overseas compete? Linux. It can be shipped for free, without breaking laws, and avoiding lawsuits. I'm sure MS is well aware of this, and we have all read on /. how they keep making threats to China in efforts to solve this problem. Unfortunately, people that like to use cheap foreign labor to MAKE products, do not often understand that those same people can't afford to BUY them at those wages.
As far as I can tell, all systems that have been made are sold, or are in between factory and recipient. So far, all we have is hype. The Xbox 360 on the other hand, is definitely out and available for purchase casually.
I disagree. The fact is there are only X consoles out there, whether you paid $500 or $3000 is really just inversely related to your intelligence (and/or, your desire to spoil your child rotten, in some cases). One way or another, all consoles out there are sold. While I hope publishers burn in hell, neither they nor developers are hurt by this for two good reasons: 1) All consoles out there are sold, people who CAN buy their games, still can, 2) There aren't that many games out there, people w/these consoles are even buying junk, just for something to play. The only people who are hurt, are those foolish enough to pay for hyped consoles.
/. can do.
Most of us have the sense to wait until we can pick one up in the store without a pre-order or ebay. Some of us will have even more sense and wait until the price drops. These things, more than post-launch (and mostly meatless) criticism of the three consoles, are most likely affecting grey-market prices, just like hype and bullshit tend to inflate stock prices more than actual profits, but fade away as reality sets in.
The rest is just THC laced astro-turfing. In a world where innovation is dead or repressed, I guess this is the best
There may come a point in time when you can copy human brains. We already more or less know how to copy bodies, all that's left is our hard drives. Ignoring robots, what would a world be like if no personality ever died.
You just need the right lawyer, let's get Cochran in here. Bring Shakespeare back from the dead, along with half a dozen english lit professors, and apply the following defense:
"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and thus we did deliver 12 carnations, according to the terms of our contract". Three weeks, a dozen expert testimonies later, and a carnation would legally be considered a rose, and no one will touch it with a 100ft pole for fear he might speak again.