Morgaine already said it well enough, but let me throw my own details at why it's a problem.
The thing is relying _only_ on better graphics has worked well enough to motivate people to buy this year's 10,000 polygon game for $40 instead of last year's 5,000 polygon game for $10, or the game from 2-3 years ago for $3.
The way it works is that it creates an artiffically low supply, helping keep prices up. There are only so many games available which are up to this year's standards. It helps keep a certain ratio between supply and demand.
It's not that games from 5 years ago don't exist any more, it's that most people don't even consider them an option. When recently I bought an old city-building game, everyone I told about it was like, "why the heck do you play ancient games anyway?" Or even "eew, that thing has less polygons than a cube and smaller textures than a desktop icon" when I pointed them at the screenshots.
So artifficially everyone only considers 1-2 years worth of releases in their options.
Even better for the industry, it also addresses the other side of the equation. It raises demand too: it creates an artifficial sense of needing to "upgrade" to the latest games. Even if you have a game which you're happy with, you're told that, hey, don't you want the better graphics of a new one?
E.g.: You still like Quake 2? That's sooo old hat, you should move to the more photo-realistic newer games. You still like Gran Turismo 2? Eeew... that looks sooo pixelated, you should get GT4 instead. You still like the original Unreal? Tough luck finding many low ping servers, because everyone else moved to UT2004. Etc.
So basically this push is good for the industry at the moment.
And unless they change focus from just graphics to something else, it's coming to an end. Fast.
E.g., the game "Singles" already has 30,000 polygons per character. They look great. Doubling that won't make much difference. Even going from 30,000 to 100,000 polygons won't make the same difference that going from 300 to 1000 did.
Basically the race to make it _more_ realistic comes to an end: the point where it's _already_ photo-realistic anyway.
Which also brings an end to the above described pressure on both supply and demand. Once at that point:
1. There is not much more reason to buy the latest 100,000 polygon game, instead of a two year old 30,000 polygon game. Suddenly it creates a lot more supply and a lot more competition in the market.
2. There's a lot less reason to "upgrade" to the latest and greatest game, if you already have one you like. If you're already content with, say, a 30,000 polygon/char multiplayer FPS, there is no reason to ugrade to a newer 100,000 polygon/char one. Or not for the graphics.
That's the problem. Actually reaching the realism point will change the market a lot.
Will that mean the end of gaming? Dunno, probably not. But it will certainly _need_ a very abrupt change of focus to something else than "look, we have higher res textures this time".
Technically it's not _needed_, and I'm certainly not going to argue with that.
I hope you do realize, though, that it doesn't hurt either.
1. Any library which isn't actually used, isn't even loaded. Most of Windows is just.dll files (even if some have.exe,.vxd and whatever extensions), just like most of Linux is.so files. If you don't actually run a GUI program, they won't even be loaded.
2. Any memory page which isn't actually used, can be swapped to disc and _stays_ swapped. I.e., if after painting the desktop you don't actually run a GUI program on it, all that code to paint combos and whatnot will not even be in RAM.
So not installing a GUI would help with... what? With the few K of RAM needed to paint the clock in the tray? (Or not even that if the taskbar is set to auto-hide.)
And as opposed to... what? A typical Sun Solaris (UNIX) server also has all the GUI libraries, just in case you need to run some X stuff on it over the network. We have admins doing that every day. And that too means that they're loaded in memory when you do run graphics stuff, they're unloaded when you don't. Just like on Windows, eh?
Basically what I'm saying is: before deciding that including something is dumb, please actually do an analysis, rather than just letting your ideals of perfection do the talking. You'd be surprised how much stuff may not be, technically speaking, optimal, but nevertheless is not a liability either. A lot of flame-wars could be avoided if people asked themselves "well, exactly how much does it hurt?" instead of "is it 100% perfect and 100% optimal?"
Well, I have refrained from any comment on whether it's good or bad. It's just the way it is.
From one point of view, it could be argued as bad, though. One could argue it did stiffle diversity, or innovation. Intel did try to innovate its own 64 bit set, got told by MS "nope, we don't need another of those." Eerily reminiscent of centralized planning in Soviet Russia or China.
From other points of view, I guess someone could find plenty of good about it. I'm drawing blanks myself, but maybe I'm just tired.
Just as a piece of trivia: Intel did want to come up with its very own 64 bit extensions, but MS basically told it that it can't be arsed to support yet another different set of 64 bit instructions. So basically the choice Intel had was squarely (A) implement AMD's set that Microsoft supports, or (B) not have any 64 bit Windows support.
Any version of MacOS/X isn't actually 64 bit code, or not too much of it. It just uses some addressing extensions to be able to use more than 4 gigabytes RAM, but nothing else.
By comparison, 64 bit Windows _is_ almost entirely 64 bit code. If you want to run 32 bit code on it, it runs in a "WOW" (Windows On Windows) virtual machine. Well, not virtual in the same way as say, Java, but in the same way as, say, Wine.
The only way to get a BSOD on XP is to have some really broken drivers. So I'm guessing that as long as MS's servers stick to some hardware configuration known to work, they wouldn't need more reboots than any other OS does.
I mean, let's face it, it's a server. It doesn't really need the latest ATI gaming drivers, nor a 9800 XT running at 80 Celsius just from showing the desktop, nor some experimental NForce 4 software-RAID drivers, nor a fancy sound card, etc.
More importantly, it doesn't get all the crap installed as a driver, that a gaming rig gets. E.g., idiotic copy protection drivers. (StarForce comes to mind.) Nor the hundreds of spyware crap that your average desktop computer gets.
The purpose of a trademark is to uniquely identify a product (line) or company. You _will_ lose your trademark if you let it be used for anything else, and no longer associated with your product or company.
E.g., "aspirin" was once a trademark, but it was lost because it became a generic name for _any_ medicine containing that substance.
E.g., if "Nescafe" were to become a generic term that everyone uses, Nestle would lose that trademark.
Trademarks are the kind of beast that's easy to lose. You _have_ to defend it or lose it. If you knew someone is infringing upon your copyright and didn't sue, congrats, you've officially lost the trademark.
So TigerDirect's problem isn't Google page rank as such, it's that your average people searching for "Tiger" increasingly means the OS, rather than TigerDirect's trademark. I.e., that trademark is well enough under way towards the point where it's lost.
And TigerDirect's _only_ way to keep it is to sue.
It doesn't necessarily mean they have to win, though. If a judge decides some form of "no, mate. See, one is an OS and the other is a company, so there's no confusion possible", that's OK too. They then have an official permission to not defend it in that segment.
Frankly, "free" means "free". If I gave away a non-computer product, say a t-shirt, if I advertise it as "free", you'd expect it to be actually "free".
If it worked you would not expect that "free" means, buried 6 ft deep in the EULA, that I can come to your house, listen to your phone conversations, shout ads under your windows, switch your TV channels and read your mail. That's just not what "free" means. And if any company tried to pull that stunt, they'd have a fraudulent advertising lawsuit on their hands... or worse.
Yet when it comes to software, you see this kind of crap every day.
And not even just from small time slimeballs. Last time I've bothered installing RealPlayer (years ago, as it just had renamed it to Real One), it acted every bit as annoying as any spyware. It stayed in RAM even when told not to, drowned me in pop-ups even when not using the player, etc.
About time someone sues these idiots and brings back _some_ truth in advertising.
I wouldn't even mind it if they explicitly called it ad-supported-software or whatever. But calling it free, when in fact you have to give them something in exchange (e.g., control over your computer) is just the kind of bullshit that shouldn't have ever been allowed in the first place-
So his beef, if you've actually read that link, is that the VC actually started letting people work 40 hour weeks. No, really read the text. His company was oh, so profitable, based on asking people to work 6x12 weeks without compensation.
Also he says "it would have been hard to lose money paying MIT-educated programmers $50-85,000 base salaries". Yet the limit at which you don't have to pay for overtime any more, even for software, is $90,000 per year.
I.e., this fucktard was breaking the employment laws.
And his argument is, basically, "waah! but 40 hours work weeks and reasonable salaries cut our profitability!"
I dunno about you, but suddenly that makes the VC company seem like the good guys there to me. Or at least the guys with a _clue_.
His justifications are plain old bullshit. Every other paragraph he keeps trying to squeeze in that that's just the normal way to run a software company, and surely MS employees have to come to work on weekends too. Which is bullshit.
He also admits that he was at the point where he didn't know any more who does what, and until when. By any management common sense, there was no fucking way to continue that explosive growth in employees without extra management. You can't personally run 80 people (and growing fast), like you can run a 5 people start-up.
Yet he blames the VC CEO for bringing more managers, to actually manage those people. He files that under increasing the infrastructure costs. Well, gee, yes, that's what you get past a certain size.
Etc.
Gee, wizz... It seems to me like it wasn't the VC CEO that was the idiot PHB there.
No. I believe the words you're looking for is "that doesn't make sense" (in which case we can argue very quickly) rather than "that simply ain't true". Because in the Real World, it simply _is_ true.
It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, it's the way it works. The profitable core 3Com divisions being valued a _negative_ number of dollars at one point was a reality.
A _stupid_ reality, that's for sure. But a reality nevertheless.
The stock market doesn't work in the way that you own, say, a mom-and-pop bakery at the street corner. The best explanation I've ever read of it belonged to a psychiatrist-turned-stock-broker. He said it's acting like a manic-depressive.
But let's return to the point: If the company turns a profit and the money coffers grow, it still means exactly nothing, if the shares are already worth more than that.
Let's say 1 share is worth 10$ on the stock market, but only 5$ in assets (including that money coffer). That those assets grew last year by, say, 5%, making it a whole 5.25$ real worth of your share, is by far not enough guarantee to stabilize its 10$ shares. Those shares still have _plenty_ of room to fall, in spite of the company's turning a very healthy profit.
Now let's talk about the opposite situation, where the value of the assets (including that money-coffer) is _higher_ than the shares' value. It should stabilize the shares and make everyone buy them, right? Wrong. Chances are good it will just make the shareholders want to dismantle or sell the company and divide the loot. Because that loot is worth more than the shares.
Again, we're talking about a company which turns a profit.
That is, admittedly a very simplified view of the problem. The prospect of any kind of growth (e.g., that money-coffer growth) is one of the hype factors that can make investors buy. But the thing to understand is that _hype_ is the real factor, and the profits or assets are at most used to generate that hype. They are not the real things that dictate a share's value.
See, "profit" with stocks is _not_ the same thing as investing in a company that turns a profit from selling goods. Unless a company pays dividends, and most don't, the company's turning a profit is worth exactly _nothing_ by itself to a shareholder.
Trading stock is no more than trading pieces of paper, with no intrinsic value. The only value is what everyone else is willing to pay for one. It's an exercise in guessing what the other lemmings will do, and which company's hype is more.
The way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high.
Investing in a company that's steadily churning profit, but doesn't cause enough hype for its stock to rise, is actually a _bad_ investment. It's the kind of investment that gives _you_ exactly _zero_ profit. That's the kind of stocks you want to sell.
(Point in case, at some point the value of 3Com was _less_ than the value of shares it owned in Palm. So the rest of 3Com actually had a _negative_ value on the stock market. We're talking divisions which turned a solid steady profit. Yet the stock market considered them a _liability_.)
Investing in a startup that causes a lot of hype and whose shares quadruple in price within months, is good. It doesn't even matter if it makes a profit or even if it sells anything. Even if the company is dying a slow death, that quadrupling of share value means a 300% profit for _you_ if you sell before it bombs.
So let's look at investing in a company like Red Hat: Investing 10 million in a non-profitable company and ending up with half a _billion_ worth of grossly overpriced stock anyway... is it a success? Yes, it is a success. It's a freaking huge success. It's such a great success, it's every VC's wet dream. It's the stuff that causes them to wake up and go change their underwear.
On one hand, I will aggree that the hiring process of _most_ companies (not just large ones) is a sick joke. It's not just the bullshit requirements. (10 years experience with Windows 2000 or J2EE and the like.) It's that your average interview is just a bulshitting contest. The candidates are asked to prove one single skill: marketting. They're asked to market themselves to a PHB.
But on the other hand, the problem is simply that there aren't as many people who are mentally fit for the job.
I pretty much started myself from the nerd view point that programming is easy (and for that matter physics and maths are easy), and everyone even the janitor could do that if they wanted to. Enough years of working with other "programmers" just served to convince me of the exact opposite.
I've watched someone once try every single combination of "*", "&" and nothing on every single variable in a C program, until it stopped crashing. He never could understand pointers, and some 10 years later he still can't.
He moved to Java in the meantime, and it just illustrates that syntactic sugar can only do so much. His utter inability to understand the concept of a pointer still haunts him in Java. E.g., he has honest trouble understanding concepts like internalizing strings, or exactly how much is copied and how much is still modifiable when you pass an object as a parameter to a function.
He's by far not the only one. In fact, the majority of "idiots that know how to pad a resume" are far worse.
I've helped people debug some stupidity like passing an integer variable as a parameter to a function, and expecting that they can just set the parameter to 0 inside the function, to get the variable outside the function set to zero. Then do it again, because the whole "call by value" concept went right above their head.
I've spent hours in a meeting with people who couldn't understand the concept of key-value pairs. I was already in a mood to bash some heads in, after seeing it go around in circles around "but why does that table have only two columns? What if we need a third property?"
Etc.
Basically there just aren't that many people who are even capable of being programmers, and even less who are capable of understanding design or security. If everyone stopped hiring "idiots that know how to pad a resume", some companies just wouldn't have any employees at all.
Which I guess is Bill Gates's point. There _is_ a shortage of people capable of doing the job.
What, you mean I "missed" his waving around words like "democracy" and "free press" right in the first paragraph?
Let me spare you the effort of reading that first paragraph. This is the phrase I was answering to:
"This is a democracy; a free press is not some annoying thing we have to put up with, it's something we fought for."
Read that again patiently.
Exactly WTH did that have to do with shareholders or money? Exactly what does "democracy" or "a free press [...] it's something we fought for" have to do with shareholder meetings?
Seems to me like yet another clear cut case of waving around some "freedoms" around without even having half a clue what they mean.
Yes, MS is a monopolist and the DOJ "settlement" makes a sick farce of the whole idea of "justice". No arguments there.
But the fact that you're forced to deal with their "sucky" products is that for most people they don't count as "sucky" at all. Or didn't count as "sucky" back when it mattered.
Or let me explain, via a long metaphor: something I keep hearing is some variant of "if number of users meant quality, MacDonald would be the best restaurant." Guess what? For a lot of people it is.
Being "the best" isn't a question of only technical implementation merits for an OS, nor of only cuisine for a restaurant. For the restaurant merits also include stuff like:
- price: there's a lot to be said about paying a couple of euro for a burger, instead of 10 times as much for 5-star cuisine.
- speed of service: maybe I don't have the whole bloody evening to wait while someone cooks an elaborate meal for me. I just want to pick a burger and walk away ASAP.
- availability. If I have to drive through half the city to get a 5-star meal, while a MacDonald's is just around the corner, trust me, I'll get a Mac every time.
Etc. There are about a dozen criteria which get to be a part of the final decision, not just one. And insisting that _one_ aspect is the best, is maybe good for flame-wars, but a piss-poor way to evaluate a RL product or service.
As I've said before, RL decisions are more complex than "MS is evil" or "MS sucks". RL decisions are _never_ perfect. They're the "best" _compromise_, among a bunch of crappy compromises. You don't just have one criterion and take the clear best fit there, you try to end up with the compromise which doesn't suck too much in any of the many real life criteria.
So let's judge MS in that aspect.
Nowadays, MS Windows is "the best" not by means of its technical merits, but by means of having almost all the apps. MS Office isn't "the best" by means of it's technical merits, but because the format is available and accepted virtually everywhere.
Like it or not, that's the market reality: between choosing a rock-solid Linux that runs about 1 in 10 apps I want, and a crappy Windows which runs them all, Windows wins every time. In a sense, it _is_ the "best" OS.
But let's think about how we got here. Think back in the day when the OS market really was still up for grabs and Linux didn't even exist.
Who was going to win? A fragmented and self-incompatible Unix world, which charged more for a license than a whole PC cost? Maybe OS/2 which (A) saw no advertising from IBM, (B) wasn't even pre-installed on IBM computers, and (C) still let an application lock up the whole system, and (D) didn't even try getting developpers and apps?
Let me tell you, I was a flaming OS/2 fanboy at the time. But even _I_, when I look back at the train-wreck-in-slow-motion that OS/2 was, I can only think: "OMG! Was I _that_ retarded back then?" Looking back in retrospect, OS/2 positively sucked compared to Windows. Maybe not on technical merits, but when you consider all factors, it sucked.
I find it hillarious and sad at the same time that the nation most proud of their "freedoms" has no fucking clue what those freedom mean. I've seen "freedom of press", "freedom of speech" or "democracy" used for every possible bullshit (e.g., as some "right" to troll a site or cheat in an online game) _except_ the cases they actually cover.
Here's some free clue: "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Press":
1. Are _only_ applicable to your dealing with the _government_. Not with private persons, not with corporations, not with anyone else.
I.e., pay attention, lemming: it means that the government can't ban you from saying that Kerry was a better candidate than Bush, or viceversa. It doesn't however mean that Bush, as a private citizen, can't sue your pants off if you publish libel about him. E.g., if you were to start writing that Bush rapes small babies, he could very well sue your pants off, and "freedom of speech" would have nothing to do with it.
2. It never said that anyone has to print, broadcast or help sell your bullshit. If anyone, _including_ the government, doesn't want to publish your speech, sell your book, or pay for public access to your blog, they _are_ entirely within their legal righst.
E.g., "freedom of press" does _not_ mean you can go to NYT and have them publish whatever you want published in their newspaper. As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to whoever owns the press.
E.g., if Apple doesn't want to sell another company's books, "free press" and "democracy" have exactly _nothing_ to do with it.
E.g., if an ISP (even a state owned one) decided to unilaterally block all porn sites, or even all opposition sites, they _are_ within their legal rights to do so. Bad PR move? Yes. Violating your sacred "freedom of speech" or "democracy"? Nope.
3. Additionally "democracy" _only_ means you get to vote for your government. Period. Nothing more. It doesn't mean you get a vote in what books Apple should sell. It does _not_ mean you should get a vote even in what your CEO or CIO decides.
An action is just the same action, regardless of who does it. Good is good even if China or MS does it, and evil is still the same evil even is Apple or Google were to do it.
Judging an action by who did it, rather than for what it _is_, is the apex of stupidity and hypocrisy.
The PRC is evil, yes, but localizing web pages and URLs is _not_.
Every single western nation has its own localized URLs. E.g., as a random example, a German TV station's URL is "www.prosieben.de". They didn't translate it into "proseven" or some other english-sounding stuff for you. And, surprise, the site is in German too. Go figure.
It's only normal. Germans are more comfortable reading and writing German than English. French are more comfortable in French. Swedes are more comfortable in Swedish. And, surprise, the Chinese are better at reading and writing in Chinese.
If a Chinese person wants to find the site for, say, "The Beijing News" (made up newspaper name, I don't know if one actually exists like that), they'll be more likely to try it in chinese than to first translate it into English and/or transliterate it into 7 bit ASCII. There is no evil plot or conspiracy theory necessary to understand that.
There's nothing even China-speciffic about that. I would venture a guess that any other country with its own alphabet, has people who are more comfortable in that alphabet. That would include Japan, Greece, most arab countries, Russia, Ukraine, Korea (even south Korea), Taiwan, etc.
Some of those are very modern western countries. E.g., I haven't heard any "Great Firewall" stuff about Greece. (Although, there was that misguided ending up forbidding video games too when they tried to forbid gambling. But then it just shows that politicians are... politicians. Everywhere.)
You know, the place where the world is divided neatly into comfy extreme categories.
Intel = evil AMD = good Windows = evil Linux = good MS = double-plus-evil Sun = good Apple = double-plus-good
And of course, "China = double-plus-evil".
It's a comfy system. One doesn't have to actually engage the brains or anything. If it's about China or MS, it _must_ be some nefarious, sinister plot. Even if the new piece was, oh, say, that China funds some research into curing cancer or AIDS, it _must_ involve some Fu Manchu kind of villain cackling manically over a plan to use it to enslave the population.
Assembly is what taught me to use lots of comments. Every single line did have a comment, flowing like a column of text alongside the code, documenting what, why and how I've done.
I also very quickly learned to not use the "Decrement register ax and jump if not zero" kind of comments, but rather stuff like "if we got this far, the data must be valid, so store it and move to the next record".
Assembly is very cryptic stuff, as you already know. A 100 line C function can become a 1000 line ASM module. Worse yet, some 10 lines of C which are easily read, easily held in your head, and easily visible at the same time on the screen, can easily become 50 to 100 lines of assembly, which aren't either. You document it well, or you can't read it later.
So personally I'd say teach the students assembly early, and make them maintain that code the next semester. That should drive the point home about comments and software engineering.
It's not just that the programs to write are small, it's that they're write-only. You write them once, get graded, that's it. We churn generation after generation of students who are taught that code is written once, then never ever maintained.
Sure, you learn lots of things about design, software engineering, etc, in university, but they're pure theory. And seemingly useless theory at the moment. There is _nothing_ to illustrate there why some code organization is good, and why spagetti code is bad. All those lessons about maintenance as wasted when you never have to maintain anything, nor ever write anything big enough.
So while I'll say your idea does have merit, I think it can be done better. Don't just give them 1000 lines of someone else's code. Make them keep building and expanding the same program until the last year.
E.g., ok, in introductory programming they had to write some 100 line trivial program. But don't throw it away. When the next course comes along, give them the assignment to change or expand that original program.
E.g., if at some point you also get a computer graphics course, make them add a graphics module to that program. GUI programming? Sure, add a GUI to it. Database programming? Sure, make it save the data in a database. YACC? Ok, make them add a small scripting language to it. Different language? Make them port it to that language. Etc.
Make it a part of the grade to explain _what_ had to be changed and _why_.
Eventually it _will_ grow to be 1000 lines, and then it will grow even larger. And more importantly it'll be example of why code has to be readable and maintainable.
There is a difference between hundreds of MB and over 4 GB, though. IMHO.
Also, undo and the like doesn't have to be in one block. Each undo level (or each layer even) can very well be in a different segment without impacting performance much, or at all.
Whereas in the 16 bit days, you had to do segment maths inside a block. With a compiler, that sometimes even meant ending up with segment maths for each pixel. Which really meant a big performance hit.
Which in turn meant development time, hence money. You ended up having to optimize that to do, oh, maybe only one segment change per row.
Basically all I'm saying that now it's not _that_ bad with 32 bit.
If SCO gets bought, i.e., someone gives Darl a bunch of money in exchange for his shares in a worthless company, it just serves to encourage other parasites. It's bad enough that they made money out of selling stock when the hype peaked anyway, you don't want them to make even more.
Which is really why IBM doesn't do it. If you cave in to one bloodsucker with a frivolous claim, either by paying up or buying them out, you've suddenly got every single wannabe in the country doing that.
"A V-chip won't make a bad parent any worse; they're already a bad parent."
Well, if you only divide the world into pure black and white, I can see how it's not possible for one side to get any darker.
Not meant as an insult or anything. I mean, yes, you can divide any interval into something like "left of here is bad, right of here is good". And, yes, I wouldn't count "the absolute minimum" category I described there as good parents, either.
I'm just saying that it is possible to have infinite nuances of "bad", ranging from just "too self-centered to talk to the kid", all the way to murder or torture. (You occasionally hear about that kind of a parent too.) They're all "bad", yes, but most offer plenty of room to get even worse.
"Anyone who does "the absolute minimum" like you describe is no better than someone who does nothing; they're only lying to themselves."
Yes, well, I never said it makes them a good parent, just that they exist. Humans can be very good at lying to themselves.
"The jerks I described are unlikely to even purchase a V-chip. If they're not willing to spend their time parenting, why would they be willing to spend their money to buy an aid for parenting?"
Because throwing money at a problem is usually the _easy_ way, compared to throwing tens of thousands of hours of time at it. We spend money every day to save time and effort. (E.g., that's why we have cars or a washing machines.)
Also, because see above: some humans are very good at lying to themselves. Throwing some token half-arsed action (e.g., blowing some money) at a problem counts as doing _something_. It allows one to keep a straight face and say "well, I've done what I could, so it's not my fault" when it fails.
Look, noone says that you're in that category. If you worry about all this, then you're not the kind I'm worried about.
... but I see technology being used as some magic talisman every day. (And with much the same efficiency as a magic talisman. I.e., none whatsoever.) And invariably that meaning in lieu of a real effort, or as an excuse to not do some real effort.
I must say I see your point, though. We can aggree that a lot of those who'll buy a V chip are good parents, or at least are honestly trying to be.
But, I don't know, I'm probably just too jaded to believe that that'll be the only market. The temptation to use some magic amulet instead of real effort is, from my experience, an integral part of the human species.
Slashdot Mirror
Morgaine already said it well enough, but let me throw my own details at why it's a problem.
The thing is relying _only_ on better graphics has worked well enough to motivate people to buy this year's 10,000 polygon game for $40 instead of last year's 5,000 polygon game for $10, or the game from 2-3 years ago for $3.
The way it works is that it creates an artiffically low supply, helping keep prices up. There are only so many games available which are up to this year's standards. It helps keep a certain ratio between supply and demand.
It's not that games from 5 years ago don't exist any more, it's that most people don't even consider them an option. When recently I bought an old city-building game, everyone I told about it was like, "why the heck do you play ancient games anyway?" Or even "eew, that thing has less polygons than a cube and smaller textures than a desktop icon" when I pointed them at the screenshots.
So artifficially everyone only considers 1-2 years worth of releases in their options.
Even better for the industry, it also addresses the other side of the equation. It raises demand too: it creates an artifficial sense of needing to "upgrade" to the latest games. Even if you have a game which you're happy with, you're told that, hey, don't you want the better graphics of a new one?
E.g.: You still like Quake 2? That's sooo old hat, you should move to the more photo-realistic newer games. You still like Gran Turismo 2? Eeew... that looks sooo pixelated, you should get GT4 instead. You still like the original Unreal? Tough luck finding many low ping servers, because everyone else moved to UT2004. Etc.
So basically this push is good for the industry at the moment.
And unless they change focus from just graphics to something else, it's coming to an end. Fast.
E.g., the game "Singles" already has 30,000 polygons per character. They look great. Doubling that won't make much difference. Even going from 30,000 to 100,000 polygons won't make the same difference that going from 300 to 1000 did.
Basically the race to make it _more_ realistic comes to an end: the point where it's _already_ photo-realistic anyway.
Which also brings an end to the above described pressure on both supply and demand. Once at that point:
1. There is not much more reason to buy the latest 100,000 polygon game, instead of a two year old 30,000 polygon game. Suddenly it creates a lot more supply and a lot more competition in the market.
2. There's a lot less reason to "upgrade" to the latest and greatest game, if you already have one you like. If you're already content with, say, a 30,000 polygon/char multiplayer FPS, there is no reason to ugrade to a newer 100,000 polygon/char one. Or not for the graphics.
That's the problem. Actually reaching the realism point will change the market a lot.
Will that mean the end of gaming? Dunno, probably not. But it will certainly _need_ a very abrupt change of focus to something else than "look, we have higher res textures this time".
Technically it's not _needed_, and I'm certainly not going to argue with that.
.dll files (even if some have .exe, .vxd and whatever extensions), just like most of Linux is .so files. If you don't actually run a GUI program, they won't even be loaded.
I hope you do realize, though, that it doesn't hurt either.
1. Any library which isn't actually used, isn't even loaded. Most of Windows is just
2. Any memory page which isn't actually used, can be swapped to disc and _stays_ swapped. I.e., if after painting the desktop you don't actually run a GUI program on it, all that code to paint combos and whatnot will not even be in RAM.
So not installing a GUI would help with... what? With the few K of RAM needed to paint the clock in the tray? (Or not even that if the taskbar is set to auto-hide.)
And as opposed to... what? A typical Sun Solaris (UNIX) server also has all the GUI libraries, just in case you need to run some X stuff on it over the network. We have admins doing that every day. And that too means that they're loaded in memory when you do run graphics stuff, they're unloaded when you don't. Just like on Windows, eh?
Basically what I'm saying is: before deciding that including something is dumb, please actually do an analysis, rather than just letting your ideals of perfection do the talking. You'd be surprised how much stuff may not be, technically speaking, optimal, but nevertheless is not a liability either. A lot of flame-wars could be avoided if people asked themselves "well, exactly how much does it hurt?" instead of "is it 100% perfect and 100% optimal?"
Well, I have refrained from any comment on whether it's good or bad. It's just the way it is.
From one point of view, it could be argued as bad, though. One could argue it did stiffle diversity, or innovation. Intel did try to innovate its own 64 bit set, got told by MS "nope, we don't need another of those." Eerily reminiscent of centralized planning in Soviet Russia or China.
From other points of view, I guess someone could find plenty of good about it. I'm drawing blanks myself, but maybe I'm just tired.
To each their own, I guess.
Just as a piece of trivia: Intel did want to come up with its very own 64 bit extensions, but MS basically told it that it can't be arsed to support yet another different set of 64 bit instructions. So basically the choice Intel had was squarely (A) implement AMD's set that Microsoft supports, or (B) not have any 64 bit Windows support.
Any version of MacOS/X isn't actually 64 bit code, or not too much of it. It just uses some addressing extensions to be able to use more than 4 gigabytes RAM, but nothing else.
By comparison, 64 bit Windows _is_ almost entirely 64 bit code. If you want to run 32 bit code on it, it runs in a "WOW" (Windows On Windows) virtual machine. Well, not virtual in the same way as say, Java, but in the same way as, say, Wine.
You do realize that Intel's latest Xeons have the same AMD64 instructions too, right?
The only way to get a BSOD on XP is to have some really broken drivers. So I'm guessing that as long as MS's servers stick to some hardware configuration known to work, they wouldn't need more reboots than any other OS does.
I mean, let's face it, it's a server. It doesn't really need the latest ATI gaming drivers, nor a 9800 XT running at 80 Celsius just from showing the desktop, nor some experimental NForce 4 software-RAID drivers, nor a fancy sound card, etc.
More importantly, it doesn't get all the crap installed as a driver, that a gaming rig gets. E.g., idiotic copy protection drivers. (StarForce comes to mind.) Nor the hundreds of spyware crap that your average desktop computer gets.
So they don't really have a reason to crash lots.
The purpose of a trademark is to uniquely identify a product (line) or company. You _will_ lose your trademark if you let it be used for anything else, and no longer associated with your product or company.
E.g., "aspirin" was once a trademark, but it was lost because it became a generic name for _any_ medicine containing that substance.
E.g., if "Nescafe" were to become a generic term that everyone uses, Nestle would lose that trademark.
Trademarks are the kind of beast that's easy to lose. You _have_ to defend it or lose it. If you knew someone is infringing upon your copyright and didn't sue, congrats, you've officially lost the trademark.
So TigerDirect's problem isn't Google page rank as such, it's that your average people searching for "Tiger" increasingly means the OS, rather than TigerDirect's trademark. I.e., that trademark is well enough under way towards the point where it's lost.
And TigerDirect's _only_ way to keep it is to sue.
It doesn't necessarily mean they have to win, though. If a judge decides some form of "no, mate. See, one is an OS and the other is a company, so there's no confusion possible", that's OK too. They then have an official permission to not defend it in that segment.
Frankly, "free" means "free". If I gave away a non-computer product, say a t-shirt, if I advertise it as "free", you'd expect it to be actually "free".
If it worked you would not expect that "free" means, buried 6 ft deep in the EULA, that I can come to your house, listen to your phone conversations, shout ads under your windows, switch your TV channels and read your mail. That's just not what "free" means. And if any company tried to pull that stunt, they'd have a fraudulent advertising lawsuit on their hands... or worse.
Yet when it comes to software, you see this kind of crap every day.
And not even just from small time slimeballs. Last time I've bothered installing RealPlayer (years ago, as it just had renamed it to Real One), it acted every bit as annoying as any spyware. It stayed in RAM even when told not to, drowned me in pop-ups even when not using the player, etc.
About time someone sues these idiots and brings back _some_ truth in advertising.
I wouldn't even mind it if they explicitly called it ad-supported-software or whatever. But calling it free, when in fact you have to give them something in exchange (e.g., control over your computer) is just the kind of bullshit that shouldn't have ever been allowed in the first place-
So his beef, if you've actually read that link, is that the VC actually started letting people work 40 hour weeks. No, really read the text. His company was oh, so profitable, based on asking people to work 6x12 weeks without compensation.
Also he says "it would have been hard to lose money paying MIT-educated programmers $50-85,000 base salaries". Yet the limit at which you don't have to pay for overtime any more, even for software, is $90,000 per year.
I.e., this fucktard was breaking the employment laws.
And his argument is, basically, "waah! but 40 hours work weeks and reasonable salaries cut our profitability!"
I dunno about you, but suddenly that makes the VC company seem like the good guys there to me. Or at least the guys with a _clue_.
His justifications are plain old bullshit. Every other paragraph he keeps trying to squeeze in that that's just the normal way to run a software company, and surely MS employees have to come to work on weekends too. Which is bullshit.
He also admits that he was at the point where he didn't know any more who does what, and until when. By any management common sense, there was no fucking way to continue that explosive growth in employees without extra management. You can't personally run 80 people (and growing fast), like you can run a 5 people start-up.
Yet he blames the VC CEO for bringing more managers, to actually manage those people. He files that under increasing the infrastructure costs. Well, gee, yes, that's what you get past a certain size.
Etc.
Gee, wizz... It seems to me like it wasn't the VC CEO that was the idiot PHB there.
Yep, that's exactly what I was saying.
No. I believe the words you're looking for is "that doesn't make sense" (in which case we can argue very quickly) rather than "that simply ain't true". Because in the Real World, it simply _is_ true.
It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, it's the way it works. The profitable core 3Com divisions being valued a _negative_ number of dollars at one point was a reality.
A _stupid_ reality, that's for sure. But a reality nevertheless.
The stock market doesn't work in the way that you own, say, a mom-and-pop bakery at the street corner. The best explanation I've ever read of it belonged to a psychiatrist-turned-stock-broker. He said it's acting like a manic-depressive.
But let's return to the point: If the company turns a profit and the money coffers grow, it still means exactly nothing, if the shares are already worth more than that.
Let's say 1 share is worth 10$ on the stock market, but only 5$ in assets (including that money coffer). That those assets grew last year by, say, 5%, making it a whole 5.25$ real worth of your share, is by far not enough guarantee to stabilize its 10$ shares. Those shares still have _plenty_ of room to fall, in spite of the company's turning a very healthy profit.
Now let's talk about the opposite situation, where the value of the assets (including that money-coffer) is _higher_ than the shares' value. It should stabilize the shares and make everyone buy them, right? Wrong. Chances are good it will just make the shareholders want to dismantle or sell the company and divide the loot. Because that loot is worth more than the shares.
Again, we're talking about a company which turns a profit.
That is, admittedly a very simplified view of the problem. The prospect of any kind of growth (e.g., that money-coffer growth) is one of the hype factors that can make investors buy. But the thing to understand is that _hype_ is the real factor, and the profits or assets are at most used to generate that hype. They are not the real things that dictate a share's value.
See, "profit" with stocks is _not_ the same thing as investing in a company that turns a profit from selling goods. Unless a company pays dividends, and most don't, the company's turning a profit is worth exactly _nothing_ by itself to a shareholder.
Trading stock is no more than trading pieces of paper, with no intrinsic value. The only value is what everyone else is willing to pay for one. It's an exercise in guessing what the other lemmings will do, and which company's hype is more.
The way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high.
Investing in a company that's steadily churning profit, but doesn't cause enough hype for its stock to rise, is actually a _bad_ investment. It's the kind of investment that gives _you_ exactly _zero_ profit. That's the kind of stocks you want to sell.
(Point in case, at some point the value of 3Com was _less_ than the value of shares it owned in Palm. So the rest of 3Com actually had a _negative_ value on the stock market. We're talking divisions which turned a solid steady profit. Yet the stock market considered them a _liability_.)
Investing in a startup that causes a lot of hype and whose shares quadruple in price within months, is good. It doesn't even matter if it makes a profit or even if it sells anything. Even if the company is dying a slow death, that quadrupling of share value means a 300% profit for _you_ if you sell before it bombs.
So let's look at investing in a company like Red Hat: Investing 10 million in a non-profitable company and ending up with half a _billion_ worth of grossly overpriced stock anyway... is it a success? Yes, it is a success. It's a freaking huge success. It's such a great success, it's every VC's wet dream. It's the stuff that causes them to wake up and go change their underwear.
On one hand, I will aggree that the hiring process of _most_ companies (not just large ones) is a sick joke. It's not just the bullshit requirements. (10 years experience with Windows 2000 or J2EE and the like.) It's that your average interview is just a bulshitting contest. The candidates are asked to prove one single skill: marketting. They're asked to market themselves to a PHB.
But on the other hand, the problem is simply that there aren't as many people who are mentally fit for the job.
I pretty much started myself from the nerd view point that programming is easy (and for that matter physics and maths are easy), and everyone even the janitor could do that if they wanted to. Enough years of working with other "programmers" just served to convince me of the exact opposite.
I've watched someone once try every single combination of "*", "&" and nothing on every single variable in a C program, until it stopped crashing. He never could understand pointers, and some 10 years later he still can't.
He moved to Java in the meantime, and it just illustrates that syntactic sugar can only do so much. His utter inability to understand the concept of a pointer still haunts him in Java. E.g., he has honest trouble understanding concepts like internalizing strings, or exactly how much is copied and how much is still modifiable when you pass an object as a parameter to a function.
He's by far not the only one. In fact, the majority of "idiots that know how to pad a resume" are far worse.
I've helped people debug some stupidity like passing an integer variable as a parameter to a function, and expecting that they can just set the parameter to 0 inside the function, to get the variable outside the function set to zero. Then do it again, because the whole "call by value" concept went right above their head.
I've spent hours in a meeting with people who couldn't understand the concept of key-value pairs. I was already in a mood to bash some heads in, after seeing it go around in circles around "but why does that table have only two columns? What if we need a third property?"
Etc.
Basically there just aren't that many people who are even capable of being programmers, and even less who are capable of understanding design or security. If everyone stopped hiring "idiots that know how to pad a resume", some companies just wouldn't have any employees at all.
Which I guess is Bill Gates's point. There _is_ a shortage of people capable of doing the job.
What, you mean I "missed" his waving around words like "democracy" and "free press" right in the first paragraph?
Let me spare you the effort of reading that first paragraph. This is the phrase I was answering to:
"This is a democracy; a free press is not some annoying thing we have to put up with, it's something we fought for."
Read that again patiently.
Exactly WTH did that have to do with shareholders or money? Exactly what does "democracy" or "a free press [...] it's something we fought for" have to do with shareholder meetings?
Seems to me like yet another clear cut case of waving around some "freedoms" around without even having half a clue what they mean.
Yes, MS is a monopolist and the DOJ "settlement" makes a sick farce of the whole idea of "justice". No arguments there.
But the fact that you're forced to deal with their "sucky" products is that for most people they don't count as "sucky" at all. Or didn't count as "sucky" back when it mattered.
Or let me explain, via a long metaphor: something I keep hearing is some variant of "if number of users meant quality, MacDonald would be the best restaurant." Guess what? For a lot of people it is.
Being "the best" isn't a question of only technical implementation merits for an OS, nor of only cuisine for a restaurant. For the restaurant merits also include stuff like:
- price: there's a lot to be said about paying a couple of euro for a burger, instead of 10 times as much for 5-star cuisine.
- speed of service: maybe I don't have the whole bloody evening to wait while someone cooks an elaborate meal for me. I just want to pick a burger and walk away ASAP.
- availability. If I have to drive through half the city to get a 5-star meal, while a MacDonald's is just around the corner, trust me, I'll get a Mac every time.
Etc. There are about a dozen criteria which get to be a part of the final decision, not just one. And insisting that _one_ aspect is the best, is maybe good for flame-wars, but a piss-poor way to evaluate a RL product or service.
As I've said before, RL decisions are more complex than "MS is evil" or "MS sucks". RL decisions are _never_ perfect. They're the "best" _compromise_, among a bunch of crappy compromises. You don't just have one criterion and take the clear best fit there, you try to end up with the compromise which doesn't suck too much in any of the many real life criteria.
So let's judge MS in that aspect.
Nowadays, MS Windows is "the best" not by means of its technical merits, but by means of having almost all the apps. MS Office isn't "the best" by means of it's technical merits, but because the format is available and accepted virtually everywhere.
Like it or not, that's the market reality: between choosing a rock-solid Linux that runs about 1 in 10 apps I want, and a crappy Windows which runs them all, Windows wins every time. In a sense, it _is_ the "best" OS.
But let's think about how we got here. Think back in the day when the OS market really was still up for grabs and Linux didn't even exist.
Who was going to win? A fragmented and self-incompatible Unix world, which charged more for a license than a whole PC cost? Maybe OS/2 which (A) saw no advertising from IBM, (B) wasn't even pre-installed on IBM computers, and (C) still let an application lock up the whole system, and (D) didn't even try getting developpers and apps?
Let me tell you, I was a flaming OS/2 fanboy at the time. But even _I_, when I look back at the train-wreck-in-slow-motion that OS/2 was, I can only think: "OMG! Was I _that_ retarded back then?" Looking back in retrospect, OS/2 positively sucked compared to Windows. Maybe not on technical merits, but when you consider all factors, it sucked.
So you can probably see how MS won very easily.
I find it hillarious and sad at the same time that the nation most proud of their "freedoms" has no fucking clue what those freedom mean. I've seen "freedom of press", "freedom of speech" or "democracy" used for every possible bullshit (e.g., as some "right" to troll a site or cheat in an online game) _except_ the cases they actually cover.
Here's some free clue: "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Press":
1. Are _only_ applicable to your dealing with the _government_. Not with private persons, not with corporations, not with anyone else.
I.e., pay attention, lemming: it means that the government can't ban you from saying that Kerry was a better candidate than Bush, or viceversa. It doesn't however mean that Bush, as a private citizen, can't sue your pants off if you publish libel about him. E.g., if you were to start writing that Bush rapes small babies, he could very well sue your pants off, and "freedom of speech" would have nothing to do with it.
2. It never said that anyone has to print, broadcast or help sell your bullshit. If anyone, _including_ the government, doesn't want to publish your speech, sell your book, or pay for public access to your blog, they _are_ entirely within their legal righst.
E.g., "freedom of press" does _not_ mean you can go to NYT and have them publish whatever you want published in their newspaper. As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to whoever owns the press.
E.g., if Apple doesn't want to sell another company's books, "free press" and "democracy" have exactly _nothing_ to do with it.
E.g., if an ISP (even a state owned one) decided to unilaterally block all porn sites, or even all opposition sites, they _are_ within their legal rights to do so. Bad PR move? Yes. Violating your sacred "freedom of speech" or "democracy"? Nope.
3. Additionally "democracy" _only_ means you get to vote for your government. Period. Nothing more. It doesn't mean you get a vote in what books Apple should sell. It does _not_ mean you should get a vote even in what your CEO or CIO decides.
An action is just the same action, regardless of who does it. Good is good even if China or MS does it, and evil is still the same evil even is Apple or Google were to do it.
Judging an action by who did it, rather than for what it _is_, is the apex of stupidity and hypocrisy.
The PRC is evil, yes, but localizing web pages and URLs is _not_.
Every single western nation has its own localized URLs. E.g., as a random example, a German TV station's URL is "www.prosieben.de". They didn't translate it into "proseven" or some other english-sounding stuff for you. And, surprise, the site is in German too. Go figure.
It's only normal. Germans are more comfortable reading and writing German than English. French are more comfortable in French. Swedes are more comfortable in Swedish. And, surprise, the Chinese are better at reading and writing in Chinese.
If a Chinese person wants to find the site for, say, "The Beijing News" (made up newspaper name, I don't know if one actually exists like that), they'll be more likely to try it in chinese than to first translate it into English and/or transliterate it into 7 bit ASCII. There is no evil plot or conspiracy theory necessary to understand that.
There's nothing even China-speciffic about that. I would venture a guess that any other country with its own alphabet, has people who are more comfortable in that alphabet. That would include Japan, Greece, most arab countries, Russia, Ukraine, Korea (even south Korea), Taiwan, etc.
Some of those are very modern western countries. E.g., I haven't heard any "Great Firewall" stuff about Greece. (Although, there was that misguided ending up forbidding video games too when they tried to forbid gambling. But then it just shows that politicians are... politicians. Everywhere.)
You know, the place where the world is divided neatly into comfy extreme categories.
Intel = evil
AMD = good
Windows = evil
Linux = good
MS = double-plus-evil
Sun = good
Apple = double-plus-good
And of course, "China = double-plus-evil".
It's a comfy system. One doesn't have to actually engage the brains or anything. If it's about China or MS, it _must_ be some nefarious, sinister plot. Even if the new piece was, oh, say, that China funds some research into curing cancer or AIDS, it _must_ involve some Fu Manchu kind of villain cackling manically over a plan to use it to enslave the population.
Assembly is what taught me to use lots of comments. Every single line did have a comment, flowing like a column of text alongside the code, documenting what, why and how I've done.
I also very quickly learned to not use the "Decrement register ax and jump if not zero" kind of comments, but rather stuff like "if we got this far, the data must be valid, so store it and move to the next record".
Assembly is very cryptic stuff, as you already know. A 100 line C function can become a 1000 line ASM module. Worse yet, some 10 lines of C which are easily read, easily held in your head, and easily visible at the same time on the screen, can easily become 50 to 100 lines of assembly, which aren't either. You document it well, or you can't read it later.
So personally I'd say teach the students assembly early, and make them maintain that code the next semester. That should drive the point home about comments and software engineering.
It's not just that the programs to write are small, it's that they're write-only. You write them once, get graded, that's it. We churn generation after generation of students who are taught that code is written once, then never ever maintained.
Sure, you learn lots of things about design, software engineering, etc, in university, but they're pure theory. And seemingly useless theory at the moment. There is _nothing_ to illustrate there why some code organization is good, and why spagetti code is bad. All those lessons about maintenance as wasted when you never have to maintain anything, nor ever write anything big enough.
So while I'll say your idea does have merit, I think it can be done better. Don't just give them 1000 lines of someone else's code. Make them keep building and expanding the same program until the last year.
E.g., ok, in introductory programming they had to write some 100 line trivial program. But don't throw it away. When the next course comes along, give them the assignment to change or expand that original program.
E.g., if at some point you also get a computer graphics course, make them add a graphics module to that program. GUI programming? Sure, add a GUI to it. Database programming? Sure, make it save the data in a database. YACC? Ok, make them add a small scripting language to it. Different language? Make them port it to that language. Etc.
Make it a part of the grade to explain _what_ had to be changed and _why_.
Eventually it _will_ grow to be 1000 lines, and then it will grow even larger. And more importantly it'll be example of why code has to be readable and maintainable.
There is a difference between hundreds of MB and over 4 GB, though. IMHO.
Also, undo and the like doesn't have to be in one block. Each undo level (or each layer even) can very well be in a different segment without impacting performance much, or at all.
Whereas in the 16 bit days, you had to do segment maths inside a block. With a compiler, that sometimes even meant ending up with segment maths for each pixel. Which really meant a big performance hit.
Which in turn meant development time, hence money. You ended up having to optimize that to do, oh, maybe only one segment change per row.
Basically all I'm saying that now it's not _that_ bad with 32 bit.
If SCO gets bought, i.e., someone gives Darl a bunch of money in exchange for his shares in a worthless company, it just serves to encourage other parasites. It's bad enough that they made money out of selling stock when the hype peaked anyway, you don't want them to make even more.
Which is really why IBM doesn't do it. If you cave in to one bloodsucker with a frivolous claim, either by paying up or buying them out, you've suddenly got every single wannabe in the country doing that.
"A V-chip won't make a bad parent any worse; they're already a bad parent."
Well, if you only divide the world into pure black and white, I can see how it's not possible for one side to get any darker.
Not meant as an insult or anything. I mean, yes, you can divide any interval into something like "left of here is bad, right of here is good". And, yes, I wouldn't count "the absolute minimum" category I described there as good parents, either.
I'm just saying that it is possible to have infinite nuances of "bad", ranging from just "too self-centered to talk to the kid", all the way to murder or torture. (You occasionally hear about that kind of a parent too.) They're all "bad", yes, but most offer plenty of room to get even worse.
"Anyone who does "the absolute minimum" like you describe is no better than someone who does nothing; they're only lying to themselves."
Yes, well, I never said it makes them a good parent, just that they exist. Humans can be very good at lying to themselves.
"The jerks I described are unlikely to even purchase a V-chip. If they're not willing to spend their time parenting, why would they be willing to spend their money to buy an aid for parenting?"
Because throwing money at a problem is usually the _easy_ way, compared to throwing tens of thousands of hours of time at it. We spend money every day to save time and effort. (E.g., that's why we have cars or a washing machines.)
Also, because see above: some humans are very good at lying to themselves. Throwing some token half-arsed action (e.g., blowing some money) at a problem counts as doing _something_. It allows one to keep a straight face and say "well, I've done what I could, so it's not my fault" when it fails.
Look, noone says that you're in that category. If you worry about all this, then you're not the kind I'm worried about.
... but I see technology being used as some magic talisman every day. (And with much the same efficiency as a magic talisman. I.e., none whatsoever.) And invariably that meaning in lieu of a real effort, or as an excuse to not do some real effort.
I must say I see your point, though. We can aggree that a lot of those who'll buy a V chip are good parents, or at least are honestly trying to be.
But, I don't know, I'm probably just too jaded to believe that that'll be the only market. The temptation to use some magic amulet instead of real effort is, from my experience, an integral part of the human species.