Like your caveman, if I work hard so that I own enough land to feed myself, and build a house on that land, then, by your argument, I now have freedom. After all, I can feed myself, and live in my house. I now have as much freedom as that caveman.
Unfortunately I then must pay taxes on that house. If I do not pay taxes on that house then the government comes with guns and takes it from me. Since shelter is a basic need for life, and since in order to have shelter I must also generate coin to pay taxation under penalty of violence and incarceration, clearly I am a slave.
My point, in case I'm not clear, is that even one takes care of ones own needs, one is forced (men with guns) to do additional work to earn coin for the government. This is slavery. Your test fails:
A simple slavery test, I propose: Is a man allowed to take what action he thinks necessary to ensure his own survival? If he believes the methods that he is doing are not the best way, and would like to try differently, is he allowed to do so? Or will he feel the whip of oppression on his back, and will his chains grip tighter?
Just try it. Go and build a house and farm the land. This is what you need to survive. However, you will owe taxes and men with guns will come and incarcerate you and/or take away what you need to survive.
Since the introduction of property taxes and income taxes, we have all been slaves. Of course, this is a criticism of governments, not capitalism.
I got one in the back of my TV. It doesn't work. I would like to put one in my PC, but as you point out, you can't add one to a PC unless that PC was specifically licensed for it. And like my TV, it won't work.
So its a whole expensive pointless exercise when I can get my contact and avoid the middleman. I would have thought that the middleman would like to stay in business by making it work, but apparently not.
I have a "DVR". Its a Windows Vista Premium bx hooked into two digital set-top boxes. Its really nice. I have Blu-Ray and HD-DVD hooked into it too.
But when I get back from vacation in two weeks, I'm ditching my cable service completely, except for the cable modem (and if they don't allow that option, then I'm switching to DSL).
I've looked at the things that my family watches. I've looked at the price of cable. I pay $140 a month for all my cable services. If I get just the cable modem its $45. So I spend $95 extra for what? So the cable company can prevent me from recording HD, and ensure that I can only record Non-HD digital after piping it through a crappy NTSC analog signal.
We mostly watch Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, Battlestar Galactica, and American Idol. I can get 25 episodes of Dora for $20 from iTunes, ditto for Little Einsteins. Battlestar I shall have to get the DVDs, but at least they are in nice high quality.
So in two months of no-cable I can buy pretty much every Dora, Einsteins, Galactica ever made, and own them permanently.
Somehow the cable companies have decided that forcing me to rent a cable card (which doesn't work btw), and not even allowing me to put them in my computer, is a good way to do business. They haven't seemed to realise that they are now a commodity service provider: bandwidth. All I need is bandwidth. Other people provide the data. In trying to protect themselves they've built this military grade encryption technology that allows them to keep control of their content. Except that its not their content. It's Nickelodeons and Disneys. And I can get it from other people without all the bullshit, and for a lot less, and I get ownership.
So don't bother with a DVR unless its to record over-the-air transmissions. Get iTunes instead.
Wow. Oni is one of my favorite games ever. I think ICO #1, Oni #2, UFO (X-COM) #3. I loved being able to knock a gun out of the guys hand, and for the AI to be able to do the same to me. Given the AI, I probably imagined it, but I swear there were moments when me and the AI looked at the gun, then looked at each other, then dived for it! Truly inspired gameplay and done incredibly well.
Jamie
FTA: Sony appears to be saying that although Dell, etc will be putting Turbo Memory on their machines, Sony won't be because "Vista doesn't support it anyway."
Makes me think they just screwed up motherboard/case design and can't do it. I would be much more likely to believe them if they made it an option, thereby demonstrating that they were capable, and then informed purchasers that the features are not yet available.
I think they are dead-ending themselves by going high-end graphics etc. I never bought a Square game because of the graphics. I bought them because they were engaging and addictive. In fact they pretty much lost me after the Super Nintendo. If they would drop the high-end requirement they could do simultaneous development on 360/PS3 using (gasp) an engine, or they could do Wii. The reason Square isnt just Square is because of that movie fiasco. Hopefully they'll dig themselves a whole trying to make movies on the PS3, and someone will buy them and bitch slap them into making Wii games.
I know. Its not really the same company is it? I can but dream.
Its time the cable companies share-holders sat up and took notice. I'm already downloading and watching HDTV content using my XBox 360 (again, VGA cable, no HDCP), and I'm looking into how to do the same on my PC. In fact I'm getting pretty close to just killing off all my TV and just using the cable for its cable modem. And if they start throttling it, I'll switch to DSL, or hell, my cell phone gets about 1Mb.
I am exactly their target market, but they are actively driving me to their competitors. What the hell happened to this country?
The new MacBook Pro features the new Santa Rosa chipset and supports all those nice extra features on the motherboard, plus has a nice new 8600 graphics card. It would be truer to say that Mac customers got features before dell customers (which is not to be sniffed at, sure).
In order to buy a Dell with the same performance, with older hardware, yes its going to cost more. You have to go to their performance range, instead of their regular range, because regular new hardware performs about as well as extreme performance old hardware. For example you need a 7900 to come close to the 8600.
Dell typically takes a little longer to rev up to new hardware, and thats fine by me. Comparing the "last gen" products, our top of the line MacBook Pro just didn't have the grapical oomph to run our applications, where-as my $2000 Dell Inspiron had a 7800 in it. I expect that in a few months we'll see cheaper dells with better graphics, i.e. 8800's, and faster CPUs.
So if you are impatient, go and get the MacBook Pro. In a few months the Dells will be cheaper and faster. Of course, they wont be sexier.:-)
My Dell is a 1920x1080, 2Ghz C2D, 2Gb 667Mhz Ram, 7800GS. Cost under $2000. Weight 8lbs. I don't care.
My bosses MacBookPro is 1920x1080, 2Ghz C1D, 2Gb Ram, ATI1300. Cost over $2000. Weighs 4lb? Much slower than my Dell in all respects. He doesn't care. Looks much nicer.
I have a $2700 1080p HDTV. But it only does HDMI at 1080i. If I want 1080p I have to use VGA. So since the PS3 only supports Blu-Ray 1080p over HDMI, its just not an option. Many, many people have HDTVs with no HDMI at all, just DVI or VGA. In contrast, the HD-DVD drive for the XBox will happily output 1080p VGA.
Ironically, in trying to prevent me from copying my Blu-Ray discs, they've forced me to the only solution for viewing, which would, if I wanted, allow me to copy them, namely a PC with decryption software. Were it not for the PS3's HDMI DRM tosh I would be watching HD movies directly from my consoles with no need, or knowledge that such decryption software existed. Of course, now that I have both a Blu-Ray drive and an HD-DVD drive on my PC I am very happy with the situation.
And now that I've spent the bucks on the PC/HD-DVD solution, spending a few extra hundred bucks for a blu-ray drive (I got my sony for $300) was a lot nicer on my wallet too.
Actually I think its you who is confused. Java, Gnu etc remain free-as-in-beer, but are not free-as-in-speech. Free Speech is about what you are allowed to say. The publisher of such code gives it to the receiver provided certain rules are followed. What you do get with GNU is the ability to make changes to the code provided you also make those changes available. So in fact, GNU actually limits what you are allowed to do with your own "speech" in this case. Certainly, I have the choice not to, and certainly a great many people think its a fair trade, but it *is* a trade. The great irony, IMO, is that as a result all GNU software *is* free as in beer.
If you want to talk free-as-in-speech, you could at least pick the BSD license.
Its clear that you haven't watched the video yet. Those estimates, are once again, Big Oil FUD, and based on using corn, instead of high yield crops. I used to be pretty skeptical too. Wouldn't you prefer it if this nation was not dependent on extremely volatile nations for its economic stability? Trust me. Take a look. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-570288889 128950913
I agree with you on incentives. We should remove them all, including the corn subsidy / empty soil payment, and the mixing fee (for mixing the gasoline into the E85) that currently goes to the oil companies (!!!). On the other hand, what if we took all that money paying for Iraq, and used it subsidize our independence the middle east? As a libertarian I'm a little torn on the issue:-)
The government is the oil industry, or at least the executive branch. Bush, his dad, his Vice President, his NSA advisor, etc, are all involved with Big Oil, be they owning companies, or sitting on their boards. Hell, they've used the US military for "contract negotiation". "War is the continuation of business by other means" (with apologies to Clauswitz).
A few problems with that:
"Good ethanol crops" could compete with corn and reduce the profits of the average midwest corporate farm. (Don't worry - corn is subsidized, you'll never see any other crop compete with it.
Those plots of land are paid to sit empty in a misguided attempt by our government to raise crop prices from historic lows. Guess it's working.
Indeed, corn is subsidized. By, yes, the government. Now I'm sure that when they started subsidizing it, there was no ethanol industry, and it was purely to prop up US agriculture. However, there is now an emerging ethanol market, and rising corn prices. So the argument for the subsidy goes away. However, that it has not gone away, is because Big Oil doesn't want it to go away. They want corn, which is pretty poor for ethanol, to
be the farmers favorite crop, and they want entire fields left empty, again inflating the price.
So right now, we have people starving because corn is too expensive, and people paying terrorist-fund-raisers everytime they fill their gas tank. Both of these problems would be solved by promoting agriculture. Yes it is pretty scary to think that land would be used for both food and for fuel, but the fact is that the developed world produces vastly more food than it needs. The US and Europe could produce all the food and fuel they need and more from their agriculture belts.
We need change. If there are to be incentives, they should be for a balanced crop of food and fuel.
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned. There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty. Putting a moratorium on bio fuels just deters the very investment that we need to transfer to a non-oil economy. That people are starving only shows how effective the oil companies are at killing this alternative.
As for the claims that biofuels produce more carbon dioxide per ton than petroleum, well thats great spin. What these reports fail to tell you is that all this carbon that is released was *all* originally absorbed by the plants from the *air*. Its a net zero effect. Oil, on the other hand, is releasing carbon that was safely stuck underground.
The problem with people chopping down the rain forests is a difficult one. You can't put the genie back in the bottle: some 85% of cars in Brazil will run ethanol, so you can't legislate it away (try prohibition but for cars!). Bottom line, people need food and fuel. If the developed nations want to save the rain forests, I suspect they will have to buy them.
Then there's Joe TwoKids, who bought some hardware and in about an hour installed MCE2005 on it, and it ran, thereafter, for about a year and a half, with perhaps three shutdowns because he went out of town. Later, he decided to get Vista Premium, and spent another $200 upgrading his processor and mobo to one that could handle HD, and since doing so hasn't had to reboot that either. He's also bought a linksys iPhone to use skype, which plugged straight in and "just worked", as did his web-cam, all-in-one printer drivers, his Canon XTI software, his XBox360 HD-DVD drive, his Sony Blu-Ray drive, and everything else he had kicking around.
See, Joe TwoKids hasn't got time anymore to muck about endlessly rebuilding kernels because of this vulnerability or that, and just wants to install something and have it work. Joe TwoKids has a lot more money than time.
The moral is, when Joe Sixbits grows up, he might open his eyes and realize that everything he managed to do "better and better" already worked straight out of the box, if only he had some cash, and that maybe, his lack of cash, and his endless hours spent mucking about with linux might be related somehow.
In response to Mr/Ms Coward, It is absolutely true that management will use H1B's and offshoring to reduce costs. So the question for U.S. Citizens is, do we prefer:
a) Foreign Nationals working in the US for US comapnies paying US Taxes and contributing to the US economy, or
b) Foreign Nationals working in their home country for US companies paying foreign taxes, and learning skills that will allow them to start Foreign companies to compete with US companies.
As long as globalization exists, these are your only two options. In the past, the US was a power house because it welcomed the smart, free-thinking people from around the world. As a former H-1B myself, I can tell you: I don't want to live in rainy old England, but if I was forced to, I'd still do the job I'm doing now, just for less. I'd still be competing.
As for the original article, I do agree that this is a total abuse of the system. However, you have the system to blame. When these smart individuals arrive here, normal economics would allow them to say "Hey! I'm being paid much less than I should", and promptly leave and get another job. However, thanks to Congress, there is no chance of them getting an H-1B with another company, since the entire years quota for the entire country has gone by day 2. Since they cannot get another job, there is no mobility and no upward wage pressure. This is not how it used to be. When I arrived in the USA over a decade ago, pretty soon I found out how much others were making, and I was like "WTF?". So I went off and got another job for better pay.
Now I'm a manager, and struggling to find qualified people. I look at my counterparts in management, accounting, sales, etc and their salaries do not appear to be hurt even though they can find people readily. A total absence of good software engineers hasn't caused an increase in salaries: it has simply left many jobs unfilled, and the rest of us overworked, and quality reduced. In management's eyes, yet further justification for moving everything offshore. I believe that in the absence of artificial limitations, you get paid in proportion to the value you bring to the company. Limiting H1B's exerts an artificial downward pressure on salaries and overworks the rest of us.
If you were an evil genius trying to think of a plan to destroy the US's supremacy, preventing smart people from joining its ranks would be about the best plan I could think of.
We can't hire professionals fast enough (programmers, artists, animators). The years allocations of H1B's vanish in the first two months of the year. There are simply not enough Americans to fill the posts. So what are our options?
One of those options it to look into offshore development. The people exist to fill the seats, but unfortunately they are in other countries and we can't bring them here. So one option is to take the job to them. What does this mean? It means that Americans are still not getting the job. But it also means that not only is that one programming job going overseas, but so is the management, the HR dept, the IT support dept, the purchases of computers, the building, the air con maintenance guy, the DSL bill.
But most damaging is the expertise on how to put it all together. Frequently in this industry (I make games) teams split off from their parent companies and go it alone. When those offshore companies lose teams, those teams are now total losses to the American economy: we are basically funding other nations to develop a technology industry.
I'm British. I wasn't trained here in the states. I came here because I was good. If I were to have to go back to the UK, I would keep doing what I'm doing, just with less sunshine and less money. Better that I'm here paying US taxes and contributing to the US economy and keeping the US Industry paramount.
The programmers guild is unknowingly helping the very wealthy individuals move expertise and experience to places where it can be employed for less money.
LOL. I'm laughing because usually I'd agree:-) But why? Well, because most games studios I've worked involved near constant death-marches to ship product. I'm now a Senior Architect at High Moon (where Rory works) and I'm amazed to say that (a) I have spare time and (b) our productivity is much higher than any other place I've worked. Now I admit that being a total geek I end up working late a lot anyway, but its on interesting avenues and experiments rather than fixing the bugs that I introduced when I was asleep at the wheel 2am the night before as used to happen.
You were right about him hanging outside smoking though.
He's a multiple-time national Street Fighter tournament champion, author of the book Playing to Win, co-organizer of the Evolution Fighting Game Championships national tournament series, past member of Street Fighter Team USA
So this guy has twitch skills, but no time. And he's written an article complaining that WoW rewards time more than skill. I can't help but feel that the complaint is really only a valid complaint for the author. So then the question is, is the author raising a valid flaw in WoW's game balance and to answer that we have to ask "How many of WoW's players feel the same way as a multiple-time national Street Fighter champion?" Pretty few I'd imagine.
I haven't played WoW, but I've played DAoC and Raph Koster's Star Wars Galaxies. I had a lot of "fun". I'm glad that my progression was not linked to my ability to compete in joystick twitching contests against Street Fighter Champions.
At some level the author seems to be suggesting that in the real world, skill is more valuable than time. If we ignore the fact that the author is ignoring the many skills of WoW players, e.g. social skills, marketing skills, leadership skills, and accept his premise, do we find agreement in the real world? Honda makes many more cars than TVR. Honda's are assembled by people with less skill than the TVR engineers. Is an individual Honda worth more than an individual TVR? No. Is Honda as an entity worth more than TVR? Oh boy yes.
To teach anyone that maximizing one's personal skill is the way forward in life would be to fail to acknowledge that humans achieve much more in groups.
The problems that I need to solve will not be solved faster by "where" specifications or "using" shorthands. They will be solved by many, many iterations of the problem code, and this requires fast compile and link times - by which I mean near instantaneous.
I've been programming C++ professionally for 10+ years now in a near-real time field. A few years ago I started using C# for offline things (e.g. tools), and most recently, a domain-specific language for large chunks of the runtime. Some of our team uses C++, some use the DSL. The C++ guys are orders of magnitudes slower to produce results. The primary problem is compile and link time. Getting thousands of C++ files to compile quickly is a fulltime job in itself, and requires thought from every programmer all the time not to #include absolutely everything. (Feel free to respond with "try this!", but I probably have). C#, Java and Python are near instantaneous, and do not require time twiddling includes or forward declarations. If the committee could organize compiler developers to progress C++ away from #include files and towards live code databases (or whatever is required) we will be much better served.
What I find interesting is the searchengineguide.com's assumption that Google exists purely to direct consumers to suppliers. Shock horror that the search for "shelving" should direct users to a university about library shelving and to directory sites like Yahoo or Yellow Pages.
Bottom line, Google now wants people to pay for advertising. If a company wants to make money selling shelving, then it is going to have to advertise. I dont think you can run a shelving business and not advertise it in yellow pages. How can you consider not advertising with Google? At least Google does link to the Yellow Pages, so you're covered.
If Google doesnt find a business model that works, its going to go away. So complaining that Google should be free is just a bunch of commie hooey. The irony is that most people doing the complaining are techies who expect to get paid for the work they do. Or is it hypocrisy?:-)
Shame on you. It is totally possible to backup a windows XP box and restore it later. You can use many disc copying software tools or some hardware, such as ImageMasster. I have used Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Drive Image and ImageMasster. I personally and on many occasions have backed up one drive onto another, or as an image, either to store it for safe keeping, or simply to put a bigger drive into my PC.
If, on the other hand, you mean you want to copy one installation of Windows XP and put it on a second machine, while the first is in place on the network, or expect certain security features, then you may have problems - and that is what the Microsoft article is about. "Copy our software and there are implications." If you are a corporation, then there are tools to safely role out Windows XP across a network. If you are Joe User, buy another copy and install it. Big deal. Its not like you do it every day.
The headline might as well be "Microsoft Makes It Difficult For Users To Install A Single Copy Of Windows XP on Multiple Machines". But then it wouldnt be quite such big fucking news would it?
If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive.
RAID isnt about increasing MTBF, its about not having to bring the system down and not losing data when (not if) a drive fails. When one of their four drives fails, they will have to stop the system and restore from an old backup. It takes a while to restore a 250Gb drive. And of course all the data since the last backup is gone.
Then there's the fact that they have four seperate drives, while with RAID you get one big one.
RAID controllers, especially the Escalade one, do a much better job of managing disk writes than your onboard IDE controller. For server usage you will see a much higher response for multiple users using RAID. No reference is made to the different behavior of drives in a server compared to workstation drives.
They remark that RAID wont protect your data because the PSU or motherboard can fail. Ok, I have never had a motherboard fail. That doesnt mean that they don't, it just means that their MTBF is way beyond discs. I have had a PSU fail, but not in a way that damaged the computer. You could consider dual PSU solution. Or a post-psu UPS (i.e. where the battery is between the PSU and the motherboard), as opposed to, or in addition to, a traditional pre-PSU UPS.
But then, the whole article is something of a joke. A $3000 budget server with the most expensive RAM, CPU, Keyboard and a bloody LCD panel??? I dont know what planet they are on but for $3000 I built a dual P4 XEON box with a Promise SX6000 pro raid controller. (I buy escalade now, I might add). And a $160 Keyboard for keyboard and mouse? What's it need a keyboard for? For $160 you can buy a 4 port KVM switch and use a keyboard you've already got. Or spend $5 on a basic one.
They use one gigabit port to connect to the internet. Why not connect both ports to a capable switch and get 2Gb/s?
BTW, I tried low-end Seagate, Maxtor and WD, and finally found that Samsung Spinpoint drives survived the longest in a RAID box.
What have you paid for? The right to watch, or the right to record? Do you think you have the right to walk into a movie theater with a camcorder because you have paid for a ticket? You've got to get it out of your head that just because things were possible/free before that they will continue to be. Cable boxes available now can time shift shows, and in the future will honour the broadcast bits that prevent you watching the recording after X days. You will no longer have time shifting as a fair use defence, as the VHS did, because the companies can point out that you are now able to time shift. You just cant make a permanent copy. Try making a case for your right to copy, and the judge wont give you the time of day.
I think that politicians and businesses have realised that techies will manage to circumvent any such technology, and I suspect that privately they arent too bothered about it. As long as they get to milk the layperson they are happy. My DAT has a copy bit on it, but my PC can ignore it. I suspect that linux drivers for DTV cards will be able to be modified such that individuals will be able to record DTV but, say, TIVO would be prosecuted for distributing a product with the protection off.
I must also point out, as a content generator (I make games), that you have no right to free content, nor to record it. Some of you feel that the licensing of radio spectrum should include the right to copy as well as cash, but if so you should get involved in government and make sure the contracts are so amended next time they come up. This is all business, and complaining about it, and more importantly, not comprehending it, will get you nowhere.
I did enjoy the one post that said ketosis has been a natural part of the human metabolism for millions of years. The bit about "ketones providing energy for you to chase the rabbit even though you havent eaten for two days" is particularly relavent I feel, and yet no mention of exercise was made by the author, other than "it would be nice".
If one is to argue that ketosis is ok because our bodies are designed for it, surely one has to say that actually our bodies are designed for a combination of glucosis, ketosis and exercise. Arguing for just one (glocosis) is exactly what the author complains about, and then promptly goes off to do it himself.
There is also evidence to suggest that the human body has already evolved in the few thousand years that agricultural technology has been used. There is even evidence that blood groups have changed in this short period to accomodate new living practices.
My wife is a personal trainer and nutritionist and has investigated lost of different diets. Bottom line, if you want to loose weight and control your metabolism, exercise! Its the one aspect of your metabolism that has been unchanged for millions of years. You'll feel better too. Hell, you might end up meeting a pretty girl and marrying her:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Like your caveman, if I work hard so that I own enough land to feed myself, and build a house on that land, then, by your argument, I now have freedom. After all, I can feed myself, and live in my house. I now have as much freedom as that caveman.
Unfortunately I then must pay taxes on that house. If I do not pay taxes on that house then the government comes with guns and takes it from me. Since shelter is a basic need for life, and since in order to have shelter I must also generate coin to pay taxation under penalty of violence and incarceration, clearly I am a slave.
My point, in case I'm not clear, is that even one takes care of ones own needs, one is forced (men with guns) to do additional work to earn coin for the government. This is slavery. Your test fails:
Just try it. Go and build a house and farm the land. This is what you need to survive. However, you will owe taxes and men with guns will come and incarcerate you and/or take away what you need to survive.
Since the introduction of property taxes and income taxes, we have all been slaves. Of course, this is a criticism of governments, not capitalism.
I got one in the back of my TV. It doesn't work. I would like to put one in my PC, but as you point out, you can't add one to a PC unless that PC was specifically licensed for it. And like my TV, it won't work.
So its a whole expensive pointless exercise when I can get my contact and avoid the middleman. I would have thought that the middleman would like to stay in business by making it work, but apparently not.
I have a "DVR". Its a Windows Vista Premium bx hooked into two digital set-top boxes. Its really nice. I have Blu-Ray and HD-DVD hooked into it too.
But when I get back from vacation in two weeks, I'm ditching my cable service completely, except for the cable modem (and if they don't allow that option, then I'm switching to DSL).
I've looked at the things that my family watches. I've looked at the price of cable. I pay $140 a month for all my cable services. If I get just the cable modem its $45. So I spend $95 extra for what? So the cable company can prevent me from recording HD, and ensure that I can only record Non-HD digital after piping it through a crappy NTSC analog signal.
We mostly watch Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, Battlestar Galactica, and American Idol. I can get 25 episodes of Dora for $20 from iTunes, ditto for Little Einsteins. Battlestar I shall have to get the DVDs, but at least they are in nice high quality.
So in two months of no-cable I can buy pretty much every Dora, Einsteins, Galactica ever made, and own them permanently.
Somehow the cable companies have decided that forcing me to rent a cable card (which doesn't work btw), and not even allowing me to put them in my computer, is a good way to do business. They haven't seemed to realise that they are now a commodity service provider: bandwidth. All I need is bandwidth. Other people provide the data. In trying to protect themselves they've built this military grade encryption technology that allows them to keep control of their content. Except that its not their content. It's Nickelodeons and Disneys. And I can get it from other people without all the bullshit, and for a lot less, and I get ownership.
So don't bother with a DVR unless its to record over-the-air transmissions. Get iTunes instead.
Wow. Oni is one of my favorite games ever. I think ICO #1, Oni #2, UFO (X-COM) #3. I loved being able to knock a gun out of the guys hand, and for the AI to be able to do the same to me. Given the AI, I probably imagined it, but I swear there were moments when me and the AI looked at the gun, then looked at each other, then dived for it! Truly inspired gameplay and done incredibly well. Jamie
FTA: Sony appears to be saying that although Dell, etc will be putting Turbo Memory on their machines, Sony won't be because "Vista doesn't support it anyway."
Makes me think they just screwed up motherboard/case design and can't do it. I would be much more likely to believe them if they made it an option, thereby demonstrating that they were capable, and then informed purchasers that the features are not yet available.
That would rule! I would so buy it.
I think they are dead-ending themselves by going high-end graphics etc. I never bought a Square game because of the graphics. I bought them because they were engaging and addictive. In fact they pretty much lost me after the Super Nintendo. If they would drop the high-end requirement they could do simultaneous development on 360/PS3 using (gasp) an engine, or they could do Wii. The reason Square isnt just Square is because of that movie fiasco. Hopefully they'll dig themselves a whole trying to make movies on the PS3, and someone will buy them and bitch slap them into making Wii games.
I know. Its not really the same company is it? I can but dream.
Its time the cable companies share-holders sat up and took notice. I'm already downloading and watching HDTV content using my XBox 360 (again, VGA cable, no HDCP), and I'm looking into how to do the same on my PC. In fact I'm getting pretty close to just killing off all my TV and just using the cable for its cable modem. And if they start throttling it, I'll switch to DSL, or hell, my cell phone gets about 1Mb.
I am exactly their target market, but they are actively driving me to their competitors. What the hell happened to this country?
The new MacBook Pro features the new Santa Rosa chipset and supports all those nice extra features on the motherboard, plus has a nice new 8600 graphics card. It would be truer to say that Mac customers got features before dell customers (which is not to be sniffed at, sure).
In order to buy a Dell with the same performance, with older hardware, yes its going to cost more. You have to go to their performance range, instead of their regular range, because regular new hardware performs about as well as extreme performance old hardware. For example you need a 7900 to come close to the 8600.
Dell typically takes a little longer to rev up to new hardware, and thats fine by me. Comparing the "last gen" products, our top of the line MacBook Pro just didn't have the grapical oomph to run our applications, where-as my $2000 Dell Inspiron had a 7800 in it. I expect that in a few months we'll see cheaper dells with better graphics, i.e. 8800's, and faster CPUs.
So if you are impatient, go and get the MacBook Pro. In a few months the Dells will be cheaper and faster. Of course, they wont be sexier. :-)
My Dell is a 1920x1080, 2Ghz C2D, 2Gb 667Mhz Ram, 7800GS. Cost under $2000. Weight 8lbs. I don't care.
My bosses MacBookPro is 1920x1080, 2Ghz C1D, 2Gb Ram, ATI1300. Cost over $2000. Weighs 4lb? Much slower than my Dell in all respects. He doesn't care. Looks much nicer.
I have a $2700 1080p HDTV. But it only does HDMI at 1080i. If I want 1080p I have to use VGA. So since the PS3 only supports Blu-Ray 1080p over HDMI, its just not an option. Many, many people have HDTVs with no HDMI at all, just DVI or VGA. In contrast, the HD-DVD drive for the XBox will happily output 1080p VGA.
Ironically, in trying to prevent me from copying my Blu-Ray discs, they've forced me to the only solution for viewing, which would, if I wanted, allow me to copy them, namely a PC with decryption software. Were it not for the PS3's HDMI DRM tosh I would be watching HD movies directly from my consoles with no need, or knowledge that such decryption software existed. Of course, now that I have both a Blu-Ray drive and an HD-DVD drive on my PC I am very happy with the situation.
And now that I've spent the bucks on the PC/HD-DVD solution, spending a few extra hundred bucks for a blu-ray drive (I got my sony for $300) was a lot nicer on my wallet too.
Actually I think its you who is confused. Java, Gnu etc remain free-as-in-beer, but are not free-as-in-speech. Free Speech is about what you are allowed to say. The publisher of such code gives it to the receiver provided certain rules are followed. What you do get with GNU is the ability to make changes to the code provided you also make those changes available. So in fact, GNU actually limits what you are allowed to do with your own "speech" in this case. Certainly, I have the choice not to, and certainly a great many people think its a fair trade, but it *is* a trade. The great irony, IMO, is that as a result all GNU software *is* free as in beer.
If you want to talk free-as-in-speech, you could at least pick the BSD license.
Its clear that you haven't watched the video yet. Those estimates, are once again, Big Oil FUD, and based on using corn, instead of high yield crops. I used to be pretty skeptical too. Wouldn't you prefer it if this nation was not dependent on extremely volatile nations for its economic stability? Trust me. Take a look. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-570288889 128950913
I agree with you on incentives. We should remove them all, including the corn subsidy / empty soil payment, and the mixing fee (for mixing the gasoline into the E85) that currently goes to the oil companies (!!!). On the other hand, what if we took all that money paying for Iraq, and used it subsidize our independence the middle east? As a libertarian I'm a little torn on the issue :-)
The government is the oil industry, or at least the executive branch. Bush, his dad, his Vice President, his NSA advisor, etc, are all involved with Big Oil, be they owning companies, or sitting on their boards. Hell, they've used the US military for "contract negotiation". "War is the continuation of business by other means" (with apologies to Clauswitz).
Indeed, corn is subsidized. By, yes, the government. Now I'm sure that when they started subsidizing it, there was no ethanol industry, and it was purely to prop up US agriculture. However, there is now an emerging ethanol market, and rising corn prices. So the argument for the subsidy goes away. However, that it has not gone away, is because Big Oil doesn't want it to go away. They want corn, which is pretty poor for ethanol, to be the farmers favorite crop, and they want entire fields left empty, again inflating the price.
So right now, we have people starving because corn is too expensive, and people paying terrorist-fund-raisers everytime they fill their gas tank. Both of these problems would be solved by promoting agriculture. Yes it is pretty scary to think that land would be used for both food and for fuel, but the fact is that the developed world produces vastly more food than it needs. The US and Europe could produce all the food and fuel they need and more from their agriculture belts.
We need change. If there are to be incentives, they should be for a balanced crop of food and fuel.
Check out the video.
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned. There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty. Putting a moratorium on bio fuels just deters the very investment that we need to transfer to a non-oil economy. That people are starving only shows how effective the oil companies are at killing this alternative.
As for the claims that biofuels produce more carbon dioxide per ton than petroleum, well thats great spin. What these reports fail to tell you is that all this carbon that is released was *all* originally absorbed by the plants from the *air*. Its a net zero effect. Oil, on the other hand, is releasing carbon that was safely stuck underground.
The problem with people chopping down the rain forests is a difficult one. You can't put the genie back in the bottle: some 85% of cars in Brazil will run ethanol, so you can't legislate it away (try prohibition but for cars!). Bottom line, people need food and fuel. If the developed nations want to save the rain forests, I suspect they will have to buy them.
I would recommend viewing Vinod Khosla's google tech talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-570288889 128950913.
Then there's Joe TwoKids, who bought some hardware and in about an hour installed MCE2005 on it, and it ran, thereafter, for about a year and a half, with perhaps three shutdowns because he went out of town. Later, he decided to get Vista Premium, and spent another $200 upgrading his processor and mobo to one that could handle HD, and since doing so hasn't had to reboot that either. He's also bought a linksys iPhone to use skype, which plugged straight in and "just worked", as did his web-cam, all-in-one printer drivers, his Canon XTI software, his XBox360 HD-DVD drive, his Sony Blu-Ray drive, and everything else he had kicking around.
See, Joe TwoKids hasn't got time anymore to muck about endlessly rebuilding kernels because of this vulnerability or that, and just wants to install something and have it work. Joe TwoKids has a lot more money than time.
The moral is, when Joe Sixbits grows up, he might open his eyes and realize that everything he managed to do "better and better" already worked straight out of the box, if only he had some cash, and that maybe, his lack of cash, and his endless hours spent mucking about with linux might be related somehow.
In response to Mr/Ms Coward, It is absolutely true that management will use H1B's and offshoring to reduce costs. So the question for U.S. Citizens is, do we prefer:
a) Foreign Nationals working in the US for US comapnies paying US Taxes and contributing to the US economy, or
b) Foreign Nationals working in their home country for US companies paying foreign taxes, and learning skills that will allow them to start Foreign companies to compete with US companies.
As long as globalization exists, these are your only two options. In the past, the US was a power house because it welcomed the smart, free-thinking people from around the world. As a former H-1B myself, I can tell you: I don't want to live in rainy old England, but if I was forced to, I'd still do the job I'm doing now, just for less. I'd still be competing.
As for the original article, I do agree that this is a total abuse of the system. However, you have the system to blame. When these smart individuals arrive here, normal economics would allow them to say "Hey! I'm being paid much less than I should", and promptly leave and get another job. However, thanks to Congress, there is no chance of them getting an H-1B with another company, since the entire years quota for the entire country has gone by day 2. Since they cannot get another job, there is no mobility and no upward wage pressure. This is not how it used to be. When I arrived in the USA over a decade ago, pretty soon I found out how much others were making, and I was like "WTF?". So I went off and got another job for better pay.
Now I'm a manager, and struggling to find qualified people. I look at my counterparts in management, accounting, sales, etc and their salaries do not appear to be hurt even though they can find people readily. A total absence of good software engineers hasn't caused an increase in salaries: it has simply left many jobs unfilled, and the rest of us overworked, and quality reduced. In management's eyes, yet further justification for moving everything offshore. I believe that in the absence of artificial limitations, you get paid in proportion to the value you bring to the company. Limiting H1B's exerts an artificial downward pressure on salaries and overworks the rest of us.
If you were an evil genius trying to think of a plan to destroy the US's supremacy, preventing smart people from joining its ranks would be about the best plan I could think of.
We can't hire professionals fast enough (programmers, artists, animators). The years allocations of H1B's vanish in the first two months of the year. There are simply not enough Americans to fill the posts. So what are our options?
One of those options it to look into offshore development. The people exist to fill the seats, but unfortunately they are in other countries and we can't bring them here. So one option is to take the job to them. What does this mean? It means that Americans are still not getting the job. But it also means that not only is that one programming job going overseas, but so is the management, the HR dept, the IT support dept, the purchases of computers, the building, the air con maintenance guy, the DSL bill.
But most damaging is the expertise on how to put it all together. Frequently in this industry (I make games) teams split off from their parent companies and go it alone. When those offshore companies lose teams, those teams are now total losses to the American economy: we are basically funding other nations to develop a technology industry.
I'm British. I wasn't trained here in the states. I came here because I was good. If I were to have to go back to the UK, I would keep doing what I'm doing, just with less sunshine and less money. Better that I'm here paying US taxes and contributing to the US economy and keeping the US Industry paramount.
The programmers guild is unknowingly helping the very wealthy individuals move expertise and experience to places where it can be employed for less money.
LOL. I'm laughing because usually I'd agree :-) But why? Well, because most games studios I've worked involved near constant death-marches to ship product. I'm now a Senior Architect at High Moon (where Rory works) and I'm amazed to say that (a) I have spare time and (b) our productivity is much higher than any other place I've worked. Now I admit that being a total geek I end up working late a lot anyway, but its on interesting avenues and experiments rather than fixing the bugs that I introduced when I was asleep at the wheel 2am the night before as used to happen.
You were right about him hanging outside smoking though.
From the author's bio:
So this guy has twitch skills, but no time. And he's written an article complaining that WoW rewards time more than skill. I can't help but feel that the complaint is really only a valid complaint for the author. So then the question is, is the author raising a valid flaw in WoW's game balance and to answer that we have to ask "How many of WoW's players feel the same way as a multiple-time national Street Fighter champion?" Pretty few I'd imagine.
I haven't played WoW, but I've played DAoC and Raph Koster's Star Wars Galaxies. I had a lot of "fun". I'm glad that my progression was not linked to my ability to compete in joystick twitching contests against Street Fighter Champions.
At some level the author seems to be suggesting that in the real world, skill is more valuable than time. If we ignore the fact that the author is ignoring the many skills of WoW players, e.g. social skills, marketing skills, leadership skills, and accept his premise, do we find agreement in the real world? Honda makes many more cars than TVR. Honda's are assembled by people with less skill than the TVR engineers. Is an individual Honda worth more than an individual TVR? No. Is Honda as an entity worth more than TVR? Oh boy yes.
To teach anyone that maximizing one's personal skill is the way forward in life would be to fail to acknowledge that humans achieve much more in groups.
I've been programming C++ professionally for 10+ years now in a near-real time field. A few years ago I started using C# for offline things (e.g. tools), and most recently, a domain-specific language for large chunks of the runtime. Some of our team uses C++, some use the DSL. The C++ guys are orders of magnitudes slower to produce results. The primary problem is compile and link time. Getting thousands of C++ files to compile quickly is a fulltime job in itself, and requires thought from every programmer all the time not to #include absolutely everything. (Feel free to respond with "try this!", but I probably have). C#, Java and Python are near instantaneous, and do not require time twiddling includes or forward declarations. If the committee could organize compiler developers to progress C++ away from #include files and towards live code databases (or whatever is required) we will be much better served.
Bottom line, Google now wants people to pay for advertising. If a company wants to make money selling shelving, then it is going to have to advertise. I dont think you can run a shelving business and not advertise it in yellow pages. How can you consider not advertising with Google? At least Google does link to the Yellow Pages, so you're covered.
If Google doesnt find a business model that works, its going to go away. So complaining that Google should be free is just a bunch of commie hooey. The irony is that most people doing the complaining are techies who expect to get paid for the work they do. Or is it hypocrisy? :-)
If, on the other hand, you mean you want to copy one installation of Windows XP and put it on a second machine, while the first is in place on the network, or expect certain security features, then you may have problems - and that is what the Microsoft article is about. "Copy our software and there are implications." If you are a corporation, then there are tools to safely role out Windows XP across a network. If you are Joe User, buy another copy and install it. Big deal. Its not like you do it every day.
The headline might as well be "Microsoft Makes It Difficult For Users To Install A Single Copy Of Windows XP on Multiple Machines". But then it wouldnt be quite such big fucking news would it?
RAID isnt about increasing MTBF, its about not having to bring the system down and not losing data when (not if) a drive fails. When one of their four drives fails, they will have to stop the system and restore from an old backup. It takes a while to restore a 250Gb drive. And of course all the data since the last backup is gone.
Then there's the fact that they have four seperate drives, while with RAID you get one big one.
RAID controllers, especially the Escalade one, do a much better job of managing disk writes than your onboard IDE controller. For server usage you will see a much higher response for multiple users using RAID. No reference is made to the different behavior of drives in a server compared to workstation drives.
They remark that RAID wont protect your data because the PSU or motherboard can fail. Ok, I have never had a motherboard fail. That doesnt mean that they don't, it just means that their MTBF is way beyond discs. I have had a PSU fail, but not in a way that damaged the computer. You could consider dual PSU solution. Or a post-psu UPS (i.e. where the battery is between the PSU and the motherboard), as opposed to, or in addition to, a traditional pre-PSU UPS.
But then, the whole article is something of a joke. A $3000 budget server with the most expensive RAM, CPU, Keyboard and a bloody LCD panel??? I dont know what planet they are on but for $3000 I built a dual P4 XEON box with a Promise SX6000 pro raid controller. (I buy escalade now, I might add). And a $160 Keyboard for keyboard and mouse? What's it need a keyboard for? For $160 you can buy a 4 port KVM switch and use a keyboard you've already got. Or spend $5 on a basic one.
They use one gigabit port to connect to the internet. Why not connect both ports to a capable switch and get 2Gb/s?
BTW, I tried low-end Seagate, Maxtor and WD, and finally found that Samsung Spinpoint drives survived the longest in a RAID box.
What have you paid for? The right to watch, or the right to record? Do you think you have the right to walk into a movie theater with a camcorder because you have paid for a ticket? You've got to get it out of your head that just because things were possible/free before that they will continue to be. Cable boxes available now can time shift shows, and in the future will honour the broadcast bits that prevent you watching the recording after X days. You will no longer have time shifting as a fair use defence, as the VHS did, because the companies can point out that you are now able to time shift. You just cant make a permanent copy. Try making a case for your right to copy, and the judge wont give you the time of day.
I must also point out, as a content generator (I make games), that you have no right to free content, nor to record it. Some of you feel that the licensing of radio spectrum should include the right to copy as well as cash, but if so you should get involved in government and make sure the contracts are so amended next time they come up. This is all business, and complaining about it, and more importantly, not comprehending it, will get you nowhere.
If one is to argue that ketosis is ok because our bodies are designed for it, surely one has to say that actually our bodies are designed for a combination of glucosis, ketosis and exercise. Arguing for just one (glocosis) is exactly what the author complains about, and then promptly goes off to do it himself.
There is also evidence to suggest that the human body has already evolved in the few thousand years that agricultural technology has been used. There is even evidence that blood groups have changed in this short period to accomodate new living practices.
My wife is a personal trainer and nutritionist and has investigated lost of different diets. Bottom line, if you want to loose weight and control your metabolism, exercise! Its the one aspect of your metabolism that has been unchanged for millions of years. You'll feel better too. Hell, you might end up meeting a pretty girl and marrying her :-)