Ah, heh, it's just the mandatory "Top X Worst Y" kind of list, that became popular in the last half a decade or so. You know, so they can show they're hip, smack-talking, unbiased and irreverent like that, and aren't afraid to say it when a game sucked 20 years ago. (Although your mileage may vary a lot if it's a game from this year and from a major publisher.) It's the videogame reviewer version of building up street cred.
On the bright side, at least these guys don't talk too much smack. I've seen too many other such list which sound like the stereotypical pimple-faced 15 year old trying to sound like a wigger gangsta. They get brownie points for not doing that.
On the less bright side, it's as stupid and grasping at straws as any other such list. If you get past the first page, it becoes a lot more hit and miss, and more miss than hit. I'm kinda at a loss to see what's wrong with some of those names. Or why they are worse than a couple thousand other games from that era.
E.g., "Gun Club" may not be the most exciting name or concept, but it's neither stupid nor ridiculous. Plus, it doesn't sound any worse than any other shooting gallery kind of game, so no idea why they singled that one out.
E.g., "Chemist Tycoon" may get extra penalty points for being yet another attempt to cash in on the "tycoon" title. (Personally I'm still waiting for someone to come up with Battlefield Tycoon, and cash in on both;) But honestly it doesn't sound any worse than, say, Shopping Centre Tycoon, Restaurant Tycoon (if I recall its title right) or the two dozen other Tycoon games.
I mean, if you think running a chemist's shop is stupid, picture a buggy simulation of running a restaurant, plus a heavy-handed attempt at a story: that you're fighting to save the world from someone who cornered the market by having cheap prices and good quality. No, seriously, it's not even my interpretation of it, you have the "quest giver" (so to speak) tell you exactly that. So you're fighting to make the world safe again for overpriced and poor quality restaurant owners again, I guess.
E.g., "How To Be A Complete Bastard" may be morally questionable (but then they don't have a problem with GTA too?), but it sounds like it describes the game's content perfectly. And they endorse it as an old game to check out, so it can't have been that dumb a game idea either. As a sidenote, they're also wrong that no similar game has been made ever since. Check out Neighbours From Hell from Jowood.
E.g., "Barbie Horse Adventures" doesn't sound all that exciting for an adult, but, here's the important part, it's a game for little girls. It's not supposed to be Return To Castle Rammstein... err... Wolfenstein. Now I'll give them some slack there, because truly most games for little kids are an abomination, and those for little girls doubly so. But still, I'm curious, is there any reason to single out Barbie Horse Adventures there? I can think of a dozen titles along similarly silly premises for kids, and those didn't seem to make the list. Some even, yes, about riding a pony or caring for a pony. Was Barbie Horse Adventures that much dumber than those? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it something about Barbie that makes that concept dumber than usual?
E.g., Ship Simulator, well, it might not sound that exciting as a concept, but it's also not the worst. Perhaps more importantly, it's not there just because some devs were too retarded to come up with a better game concept. It's actually a training program that only incidentally also got sold as a video game.
But if we're going to include that and Bus Driver, how about Der Planner 3. It's also a training program, only this time for business. And not only it got published as a game, but also got saddled with some of the most uninspired things in history, to make it more game-like. Like it got a sorta Sims-like "at home" mode, except it missed all the points that Sims fans liked in The Sims. Plus a wife which could d
1. It's not an "evil apple" story, it's just a financial musing that in the long run it might limit its market share.
But it's this kind of fanboyish reactions ("OMG, they said that something Apple does is less then perfect, so they must be evil, sworn enemies of Apple and all that's good and holy") that brings me to the next point. In truth, such stories are written equally about any other company and corporation, by people who don't really give a fuck about whether that company even lives or dies. That's the job of financial analysts and magazine pundits. They scratch their heads and go, "Hmm, ya know, maybe Sun won't take over the world this year" or "I think Intel is going to lose a couple of percent of market share to AMD's Phenom". Talking out of the arse, maybe, but it doesn't make them enemies of Sun, Intel or Apple. But that seems to be lost on a whole slew of True Believers, who can't seem to see any shades between "you're 100% in Apple's camp and singing praise to it" and "you're 100% the sworn enemy of Apple and have an axe to grind." And if god forbid you even mention an apple vulnerability once a year, then that's positive proof that you're biased against Apple and pro-MS.
But, at any rate, it helps fuel the next point:
2. It's, if you will, a case of action and reaction. Apple hypes every fart as if it's the second cumming of Christ, especially if it's Steve Jobs. You know, it will revolutionize this, redefine that, it's the thing that noone else ever thought or dared, etc.
And it also has an annoying army of fanboys to carry the Word, and try to convert everyone to The One True Faith. Not even too skillfully, I'd add. If you look at where, Christian missionaries succeeded, they never went around telling people "OMG, you're all stupid sheep and brainwashed by the competition". It doesn't get people in a mood to listen, you know.
So it just _begs_ to have its stuff put under a microscope and dissected, and the results don't always come as "yep, it's 100% pure perfection." In fact, they usually reveal a fair share of shortcomings that just beg to be pointed out in return.
3. And if you keep pushing, or push too hard, hype builds resentment or even a backlash. Daikatana, for example, was merely a mediocre game, that would have otherwise been quietly forgotten, but the unskilled hype created a rather spectacular backlash. Apple so far managed to avoid creating a backlash, and kudos to Steve for managing to spew this much hype without that. He's good. But it did get a bunch of people annoyed.
You know, it's like if I came to you daily to tell you about how great I am at CounterStrike. (I actually had the mis-fortune of working with someone like that.) And maybe sent a few more people to. What maybe started as "I couldn't care less, let's nod politely and hope he goes away" eventually gets to the point of "Oh, ffs, not again. Go fuck yourself with a cactus already."
Briefly, if you will, the few people who do hate Apple, don't hate it for its perfection, they hate for the unrelenting annoyance that Apple's hype and Apple's fanboys can be.
Actually, that's not what the text of that amendment says. It says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Way I read it, it says that a militia (well regulated, no less!) is necessary for defense. You know, in case the British attacked you from the north again (Canada was still a British colony), or Spain from the South, or God knows what else, they wanted to have a large pool of armed men to defend against those. That's it. Whatever else those founding fathers might have had in mind, they sure didn't write that.
How much that militia is still needed, or even useful at all, in an age of tanks, airplanes, and nuclear missiles... well, I'll leave that for another time. For now, let's just say: learn what that constitutions and those amendments actually say, before waving them around.
Ah, sooo, that was their vulnerability. Before unleashing my hordes genetically-engineered mutant zombies TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD, I must first get all governments to ban Nerf guns. I won't be foiled again.
Did you know that if you stand in the sunlight for some time, your skin will burn?
Yes, but that's IR and UV. I explicitly said that those do get through.
But if you want to know what would happen without the atmosphere shielding you, let's just say that just one well aimed solar flare would put a few thousand rem worth of hard ionizing radiation within minutes. You wouldn't just get burnt skin, you'd up and die. That's what kind of a difference that the atmosphere and magnetic field make in the "but we have a big nuke overhead" scenario.
Disclaimer: I'm not among the "electrosensitive" crowd, and I couldn't care less about routers and cell-phones.
That said, I find the "but there's a big nuke overhead!!!" argument just as bunk.
The fact is: you don't get all the frequencies from that ball of light. There's this thick atmosphere, including such layers as the ozone layer and the ionosphere. Plus such things as the water in the atmosphere which are just as good there at absorbing a certain band of microwaves, as, well, when you heat water in your microwave. These things absorb almost anything to the left of infrared or to the right of UV-B.
Let's just say there's a reason why they worry about shielding the craft in which they'll send a man to mars. Or why the gamma ray telescopes are put in orbit, and not at ground level. Or why over-the-horizon radar can actually see beyond the horizon, by bouncing the signal on the ionosphere. It's just as almost-opaque to those signals from the other side, you know.
So, yes, you have a big nuke over your head, but you also have some hundreds of kilometres of damn good shielding between you and it. Most frequencies outside the visible spectrum, or nearby, you're _not_ getting the full radiation of that nuke. You're getting them in homeopathic doses, if at all.
Even briefer: It doesn't prove what you think it proves. Sorry. It's as irrelevant as saying that heat can't kill because you have billions of tons of molten lava under your feet and it hasn't killey you yet.
Well, I suppose they could stuff you full of this gas _and_ freeze you. I guess it just makes sense to solve it one step at a time anyway. It's probably enough work to find out what it does to a human and get it through FDA even at room temperature. They'll have time to worry about the freezing part after they get that sorted out.
While that's insightful in its own right, from reading the summary, I get the impression that they're not aiming for the kind of suspended animation where you freeze someone for 1000 years and wake them up later. Doing that at room temperature would be kinda dangerous anyway, since if you slowed their immune system 10 times they'll rot alive sooner or later anyway.
I'm getting the impression that this is more for rushing you to a hospital when they picked you up half-dead and bled half-dry off the side of the road.
If you're in serious shock for example, if the other mechanisms still work, the body will try to keep the brain alive, even at the cost of cutting off oxygen supply to the other internal organs. Which decay very fast. (Muscles have their own oxygen reserves, so they tend to survive, your liver doesn't.) Cells run out of oxygen and essentially commit suicide in an orderly fashion, i.e., apoptosis.
If it doesn't have enough even for the brain, which is often the case, the damage is irreversible and often fatal. Very fast.
So if they can slow your metabolism a lot, that might just give them extra time to haul you into ER. It might just turn that 5 minute rush before your brain starts getting massive damage, into, say, 50 minutes. Which might just do the trick.
I.e., briefly: it's not for colonizing Alpha Centauri, mate, it's just while they haul you to ER.
Well, it's also a problem of understanding the results, not just of one of knowing how to use Google.
1. Let's say I'm interested in legal advice, for example. I know how to use Google, but (A) it will take me disproportionately more time to understand it than it would take a lawyer, and (B) I'm still not sure if I understood it right, or if the person who wrote that does. Sometimes Google isn't the Alpha and the Omega. Sometimes I'd rather pay a lawyer to search for me, than trust my l33t operator-combining skillz and Google.
Not only I can see a manager doing the same, I can respect him more if he does. If you suspect you're not qualified enough to understand the points of this newfangled Snake Oil 2.0 Enterprise Edition framework, _don't_ Google personally. Delegate to someone who understands it.
2. Basically let's put it like this: bosses had secretaries for ages, and not because some "generation gap" makes him unable to use a typewriter or lick his own stamps. It's just that (supposedly) his time is worth more. If you have a secretary spending a hour on menial tasks, it's cheaper than if the CEO paid millions per year does it. Even if he's exactly as fast at running stuff through the photocopier and putting it into envelopes, an hour of that for him costs more money than an hour of the secretary's time.
Way I see it: same here. Even having the mad skillz, and understanding the topic (e.g., because it's something trivial), searching for some topics still is a major time sink. Yes, it'll be faster for someone with the mad skillz, but it's still a time sink either way. At least theoretically it's cheaper if the secretary does the searches, than if you have the CEO spend half his day googling.
Not outside the USA. Yes, I know, it must come as a surprise to you that there's a world outside your borders. And I don't mean "to the americans", I mean to _you_ personally, the sad loser who need the ego masturbation of finding one word to pick on.
Yeah. I know, you're in an all fired hurry to make sure you get one of those fucking Slashdot buzzwords into your post, in order to try to sound cool. Look, I'm not trying to be pedantic, and believe me, this ain't no strawman argument. It's just that I couldn't parse your statement. You made it an order of magnitude more confusing, that.
While I understand that maths is a proper word, nobody here in the U.S. uses it, unless they are trying to sound like a complete dork. And, playing the probablilites, I'm pretty damn sure you're from the U.S. So, please, stop acting like a dick. Regardless, that is not my point. What I am getting at is the incorrect usage.
In other words, you know it's a proper word, but (A) you're too retarded to parse it anyway, and (B) you need your daily dose of ego-masturbation that badly, that you construct a convoluted layer of false assumptions (no, I'm not from the USA) to build it on? Again, even knowing full well that it _is_ a real word? Heh.
No, I'll tell you what it really is: it's just you who are the kind of loser who needs to find one word (which incidentally wasn't even mis-spelled here) and blow it out of proportion into "look! There's someone more stupid than me! He mis-spelled a word!"
The problem is as follows: the kinds of people I can respect aim _upwards_. It's only the sad losers that need to prove that someone must have been _below_ them. It's only when you're a pathetic waste of sperm, and _know_ it, that you get your daily high out of crap like, "look, but there's someone who mis-spelled a word! I'm better than that!" If what you have to prove is not what you've achieved, but that there must be someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, then you already know you're pretty close to said bottom.
Far from feeling enlightened or berated by your crap, dude, you amuse me. I appreciate your confession of worthlessness, amusing as it is.
Just, if I'm allowed one humble advice, you don't want to do that IRL. It really spells _that_ blatantly "I'm a pathetic loser and I know it". It's ok to do that kind of confessions on the 'net as an AC, but avoid doing it in person. For your own good. Then again, I suspect most people around you already know it.
Indeed, the death of the PC as a gaming platform is the new "year of desktop linux" prophecy around here.
Umm, nope, I'm pretty sure it's older. "PC gaming death imminent!!!" vs "Consoles will disappear any day now!!!" prophecies have been around at the very least all through the 90's, possibly even earlier. I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as IBM released the first VGA card in the late 80's, some fanboy went, "OMGWTFBBQ, console gaming is dying! PCs can now display 256 colours! Take that, evil Nintendo empire!" (Never mind that it would be another half a decade before any major game actually displayed 256 colours.) Or conversely there have been waves after waves of "OMGWTFBBQ! consoles now have 16 BITS (or 32 bits, or 3D graphics, or CD), there's no way anyone will buy a PC or PC game ever again!!!"
Yes, I know that Linux existed in the 90's too, but I don't think I've heard anyone seriously proclaiming the year of the desktop linux until 2000 or so.
First of all, it was just one example, of one problem. Not even the hardest, but something that everyone would understand easily.
There's a reason why you see "these types of simple threading problems." Not because you're teh uber-genius and everyone else is teh drooling retard, but because they're supposed to be just that: extremely simple examples. We're not doing a Ph.D. level research paper into parallelization, we're shooting wind on a board, for the benefit of some people which may be nerdier than the average, but include a ton of non-programmers anyway. Trust me, it's not that it's the kind of stuff that stumps everyone but you, but the kind of stuff that you could use to teach your mother about it.
Second, snap out of it. You're essentially doing the same "I'm a genius, everyone else obviously is an idiot" crap act, that's actually the most common the least someone actually understands the domain.
Believe it or not, yes, some of us do know what a "critical section" is. Java even has "synchronized" as a keyword into the language itself, so it's hard to not run into the concept.
But some of us also know what the performance penalties are. It doesn't come for free, you know. Sometimes it _is_ more efficient to just update each player's coordinates in a single loop, than to have a thousand threads which try to lock each other out every dozen lines of code.
More importantly, it's easy to design something that doesn't scale. A very common performance problem, for example, is when all processes wait on one resource that only one can use at a time. E.g., if most processing happens trough a cache, and access to the cache is guarded by a mutex, congrats, 1000 threads on 1000 cores won't run much faster than 1 thread on 1 core. I've actually seen that exact problem in more than one web application.
Just having a concept of "critical sections" won't do jack squat for you there. You end up needing a bit more advanced stuff so you can go as deep as you can into the innards of that cache, before you synchronize access. The Java Concurrent package is there for a reason, and to solve just that kind of a problem, for example.
More importantly, it still needs more clued up (read: more expensive) people to get it right, and even those do occasionally get it wrong. But even skipping past the last part, essentially it means you do need a bigger budget for the cool multithreaded solution. So in the cases where it's not that much of a disadvantage to avoid that (e.g., because the CPU will be idle and waiting for the GPU 90% of the time anyway), there's actually a good economic reason not to.
Again, I'm not saying any of _that_ is unsolvable either, but I _am_ saying that it tends to be slightly more complicated than when looked through the goggles of "I'm such a genius and I've heard about critical sections in college!" _If_ you see the world as that simple and devoid of any other considerations, that's really just your clue that you still have much to learn.
You missunderstood my point. My point was _not_ "people like small companies." Of course you can hate a small company too, but that wasn't the point.
My point was more like that the companies themselves, at least the ones who are anywhere near successful, change their own behaviour based on where they are in the food chain. What a guy needs to be successful at the top, is the opposite of what he needs to be successful at the bottom. Basically, it's profitable to be an evil monopolist when you're at the top, but it's counter-productive to be an evil monopolist when you don't have a monopoly yet. What's good behaviour for the king, isn't good behaviour for the serf, and viceversa.
There are, of course, exceptions.
E.g., SCO's pump-and-dump adventure indeed doesn't really fit the pattern I was describing, because they didn't really try to find a new survival strategy. They just wanted to go with the biggest bang, and make siphon the most money from the sinking ship to their own pockets. But the key ingredient in that scenario was scuttling their own ship. What I was talking about is strategies for keeping your ship afloat, not strategies for when you decided to sink it for the insurance money, so to speak.
E.g., MS too had the chance to avoid being the nice champion of open standards on their way up, mostly because it never had to breach someone else's walled garden. It started in a market which was all for grabs and staking your own claim, and later was co-opted by IBM as keeper of IBM's nascent PC walled garden. And from there it just had to work on squeezing everyone else out of it, IBM included.
But if you look at the companies which enjoy some measure of success (i.e., among other things, _not_ those who just want to sell the shares and sink the ship), I think you'll see the same pattern everywhere. The guys at the top want to keep you locked in, the guys at the bottom want access to the big players' locked-in customers.
Ah, there we go. You're thinking like an experienced programmer. That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. The moment when you also know, or can extrapolate from past experience, what can go wrong if you do that. The 15 year old hotshot response would be more like, "woohoo, I get to play with threads!"
Of course, now a lot of people will see that as you being a boring old fart who'd rather stick to tried-and-tested stuff (like those thread pools), instead of being excited to try new stuff.
It's pretty simple, really. As I keep reminding people:
- when companies are at the top of their niche, and have their nice walled garden and penned sheep to shear at will, they want to keep their garden walled and their sheep penned. Then they want proprietary protocols, incompatible tweaks to the "standard", and they want those sheep scared shitless of even thinking about the world outside their pen. They want you to think "oh shit, if we switch from IBM mainframes to cheap Unix workstations, we'll have to retrain everyone, rewrite our software, rip out and change the whole infrastructure, etc. Naah, let's buy another workstation, it's cheaper." In fact, they don't even want you doing that kind of maths, they want you scared of what might pop up later that you haven't foreseen, and unsure if you even know the right sum it will cost you, and whether you'll get ass raped without lubricant by your clients _and_ accounting department if you changed anything.
The term FUD, now almost synonimous with MS tactics, was coined about IBM tactics. That's not even the tip of the iceberg of FUD there, but the very phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM" carried the thinly veiled threat that you _might_ lose your job if you go with something else.
- when they're at the bottom and scraping a living off the niches outside the pens, then they want access to those rich guys gardens and sheeps. Then they start screaming that such fences and walls are an abhomination and evil. Then they want open protocols, and ISO standards, and generally everything that will make it easy for them to get to those penned sheep.
And a company's attitude can change at the drop of a hat, if their position on the food chain changes enough. IBM was the big bad monopolist, as long as it was the king of the hill. IBM became the champion of open source and open standards when it got enough of their lunch money stolen by the likes of MS.
And occasionally you even get to see the schizophrenic fits of a company that just slowly slides somewhere around the middle point. So they're starting to covet the neighbour's penned sheep, but aren't quite ready to free their own penned sheep too. Sun was for a couple of years at that point, but now it seems to have mostly resigned to being in the latter camp.
So what I'm saying is that, yes, things can change with MS too. If one day it finds itself at the bottom of the food chain, then MS _will_ become the champion of open standards. And then a bunch of nerds will love them.
It's more like when you've got enough experience, you already know what can go wrong, and why doing something might be... well, not necessarily a bad idea, but cost more and be less efficient anyway. You start having some clue, for example, what happens when your 1000 thread program has to access a shared piece of data.
E.g., let's say we write a massively multi-threaded shooter game. Each player is a separate thread, and we'll throw in a few extra threads for other stuff. What happens when I shoot at you? If your thread was updating your coordinates just as mine was calculating if I hit, very funny effects can happen. If the rendering is a separate thread too, and reads such mangled coordinates, you'll have enemies blinking into strange places on your screen. If the physics or collision detection does the same, that-a-way lies falling under the map and even more annoying stuff.
Debugging it gets even funnier, since some race conditions can happen once a year on one computer configuration, but every 5 minutes on some hapless user's. Most will not even happen while you're single-stepping through the program.
Now I'm not saying either of that is unsolvable. Just that when you have a given time and budget for that project, it's quite easy to see how the cool, hip and bleeding-edge solution would overrun that.
By comparison, well, I can't speak for all young 'uns, but I can say that _I_ was a lot more irresponsible as the stereotypical precocious kid. I did dumb things just because I didn't know any better, and/or wasted time reinventing the wheel with another framework just because it was fun. All this on the background of thinking that I'm such a genius that obviously _my_ version of the wheel will be better than that built by a company with 20 years of experience in the field. And that if I don't feel like using some best practice, 'cause it's boring, then I know better than those boring old farts, and they're probably doing it just to be paid for more hours.
Of course, that didn't stop my programs from crashing or doing other funny things, but no need to get hung up on that, right?
And I see the same in a lot of hotshots nowadays. They do dumb stuff just because it's more fun to play with new stuff, than just do their job. I can't be too mad at them, because I used to do the same. But make no mistake, it _is_ a form of computer gaming, not being t3h 1337 uber-h4xx0r.
At any rate, rest assured that some of us old guys still know how to spawn a thread, because that's what it boils down to. I even get into disputes with some of my colleagues because they think I use threads too often. And there are plenty of frameworks which do that for you, so you don't have to get your own hands dirty. E.g., everyone who's ever wrote a web application, guess what? It's a parallel application, only it's the server which spawns your threads.
E.g., there was at some point an article about what Comcast does. They're not targetting the P2P ports or anything. They just look at which client opens a burst of connections at the same time and has a lot of connections going at the same time.
You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download. You know, all via the browser, plain old HTTP, on port 80.
Basically it's not as much targeting P2P, as just targeting everyone who doesn't behave like one user with a browser.
Because they're not as much hating P2P, as trying to keep the majority of moms and pops sending emails to their kids happy. Those guys don't open 20 connections at the same time, so they don't notice it.
The problem is, basically: The ISPs oversold the bandwidth _massively_, and I'm certainly not trying to defend that, but it would sorta work if everyone didn't use all that. Or if they all had the same number of connections, so they're all inconvenienced equally. P2P programs don't act like that. They keep opening bursts of connections until they saturate the pipe, everyone else be damned.
Think of the following example, basically. Let's say I'm lucky enough to have an 100 mbit/s Ethernet connection to my best buddy's ISP, and decide to share it with the whole neighbourhood. Essentially, I'd be a mini-ISP there. Now I don't want one guy saturating it all, so let's say I connect everyone to my hub via only 10 mbit/s Ethernet. I'd have enough bandwidth for 10 of them. But I figure most of them are old people and don't surf much, so I let 40 people connect there.
It's already oversold, but let's hope it works out.
Now if everyone used a browser and, say, 1 connection at a time, worst that can happen is that all 40 download a movie at the same time, and they all see 100/40 = 2.5 mbit/s bandwidth. That's only at peak times, so probably most will understand it, and some probably won't even do the maths there in the first place.
But then come some people with P2P clients. Those don't play that nice. If they don't get the whole 10mbit/s, everyone else be damned, they'll open more connections until they do. So now as little as a quarter of my users can saturate my whole backbone connection. The other 75% will suck air through a straw. Their 1 connection vs the two dozen connections of the P2P guys means they'll be happy if they see 100 kbit/s on their downloads. They can probably go brew a cup of coffee even while a simple site like Slashdot loads.
Now they _will_ complain.
That's the ISP's problem in a nutshell: P2P makes the traditional oversell no longer work. A minority of users running P2P stuff full time, can stuff everyone else's pipe, and massively amplify the effects of oversell for everyone else.
Not because it's P2P, but because it opens that burst of connections.
What can you do there?
1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.
2. Start charging per MB, and let free market economics solve who gets how much bandwidth. The moms and pops just reading their emails would probably pay cents, while if someone wants to download the whole internet, well, if they can afford it, why not? Downside, it would be extremely unpopular, and again it's a hole that their own marketing dug them in.
3. Target anyone who opens ridiculous numbers of connections, to stop them from squeezing everyone else out. Downside, it's easy to overdo it, and now P2P users will suck air through a straw and see analog modem speeds.
Heh. The thing is, most of us aren't really Christians any more either. Or at least not what it used to mean.
E.g., most people self-proclaimed as Christians think that the Christian thing to do is respect other people's religions, and believe that a nice guy is a nice guy, and will go to heaven anyway. Even the Catholic church nowadays came up with the "Anonymous Christian" doctrine to that effect.
That used to be a major heresy, namely that of Pelagius. Those are (according to at least one interpretation) the "snakes" that St Patrick drove out of Ireland.
So, yes, the Christian thing to do would be to say that if you're a Muslim, or Jew, or Buddhist, or were born on an island somewhere and never even heard of Christ, you're a monster in the eyes of the Lord and will fucking burn in Hell for eternity. Serves you right. Only by Christ can you be saved, and if you never even heard of him, well, tough beans for you.
But when someone goes and says that, pretty much 99% of the "Christians" are revolted.
E.g., most "Christians" nowadays believe that Jesus was the son of God, as in, really, a different person. That was the doctrine of Arius and the early church and Byzantine Empire fought hard to drive _those_ heretics off the continent.
Since I've already mentioned St Patrick, that's what the clover is supposed to symbolize: the three are _one_. It ended up a badge and the symbol of those believing just that, against those who insisted that the 3 are really separate entities.
E.g., tolerating other religions? Heh. That's why the early Christians were thrown to the lions, ya know? The Romans weren't opposed to your worshiping whoever the heck you want, and accommodated a large number of other religions. But they had laws against you telling other people that their gods are false. Well, ok, only the official Roman gods. You can worship this Jesus guy all you want, but don't go upsetting people by telling that Jupiter or Sol Maximus are false gods and they'll burn in hell for worshiping them. You know, because it's not nice, and it makes people upset.
Look at all those martyrs in your religious calendar, and the better half of them got killed for being insensitive arseholes towards other people's religions. We're honouring their memory for... being bigotted, intolerant, insensitive arseholes. Puts it into perspective, IMHO.
E.g., nowadays we think that the old Tridentine Mass was mean and insensitive, because used to call the Jews "faithless" and contain a prayer that they too are converted to Christianity. Excuse me? That's what the other half of the martyrs are honoured for. We _honour_ people for going to various kings and chieftains and telling them just that: your religion is false, your gods don't exist, and you'll freakin' burn in Hell unless you join _our_ religion. You're _supposed_ to think that you must convert everyone else. To save their souls, you see.
Etc.
What am I saying? I guess that most people proclaiming themselves Christians, aren't any more. You may identify yourself as Catholic, or Orthodox, or Protestant, but chances are you're not.
And probably if you wanted to really be one, you'd find that occasionally at odds with being nice and open minded.
And it gets funnier when the easy-going, open-minded, we-can-all-get-along "Christians" berate the others for not being Christian enough. No, chances are they _are_. _You_ aren't. If you were, you'd genuinely believe that God hates Muslims and Jews for being, well, non-Christians, and that he'll roast them alive for eternity for just that. Maybe he didn't explicitly say you should kill them, but, you know, it's only one step to inferring that. And maybe he won't be that happy if you go and help them print their islamic stuff or carry it on your servers.
Well, think positively: finally it'll be possible to have a nVidia north-bridge that does't have the equivalent of a fighter jet fan to cool it. (Or at least sounds like it's going to take off and smash into the mandatory case window.)
Ok, so it might build up static and fry the CPU. Big deal. If you bought one of those babies just to run 6-way SLI (3 slot x 2 GPU per 9800GX2 card), you don't want to hang on to one CPU for too long anyway. The CPU is the bottleneck in that setup, and is keeping your preciouss 3DMark score low. If you don't upgrade it immediately when a higher frequency becomes available, and post your new 3DMark scores immediately, your willy-waving rights might be at stake. Worse yet, people might start thinking you're a girl!;)
So just think of the static buildup as a gentle reminder to upgrade ASAP.
Plus, ok, so you already have every colour of led fan, near UV tubes, glowing SATA cables, and glowing dye in the water-cooling water. Big deal. Every cool kid has those nowadays. Just having a good look at the innards of a computer which looks like a terror attack at a clown makeup factory, only gets you so much willy-waving rights nowadays. So where do you go from there? A few electric sparks and a nice St. Elmo's fire discharge around the PSU and HDD connectors might just add that extra touch.
Everyone will be in awe of that computer at the next LAN party. If they move their stuff away from you and inquire politely about a fire extinguisher, it's just a sign that they're humbled by your greatness and know that their lame-ass girlie rig would look like loser-gear next to yours;)
Plus, there's probably some paint around that glows when hit by those ions. Like that stuff they put in fluorescent lights. Imagine having a bad-ass glowing logo on your case's window. Now that would proclaim you as "T3H UB3R-L33T H4XXX0R". I mean, it's simply hardcore;)
Sure, you might lose the contents of that HDD now and then, but it's not too bad. Windows fills with crud anyway, and eventually it might affect those preciouss 3DMark scores. A reformat now and then will do the sucker a world of good.
Again, nice fiction, but totally incorrect. Alcohol is a CNS despressant, but alcohol withdrawal doesn't make you manic.
You're oversimplifying it. The CNS isn't simply a lightbulb that goes between depressed and manic. It's a complex system where a chemical unbalance doesn't just move you between manic and depressed, but can disrupt the signal processing in a lot more ways. E.g., hallucinations, sympathetic nervous system malfunctions, and a whole slew of other problems.
Alcohol acts upon _some_ pathways and receptors, and the compensation in the other direction (i.e., downregulation of some receptors, and up-regulation of some transmitters) is somewhat understood by now. Yes, it essentially makes _some_ receptors "manic", or rather hyper-sensive, which is what creates those hallucinations. Unfortunately, some of those are in the sympathetic system, which is why you get arrhythmia and the like, and why it kills.
Or, if you will, take your own advice: stop making things up >:)
Again, there are long term changes to that chemistry. I don't care if your oversimplified alcohol-for-dummies pages didn't mention that, or maybe you think they'll go away if you refuse to believe in them, or whatever your problem is. Those long term changes are real and documented.
Since you've proved that you can read Wikipedia, I'll refer you again to that Delirium Tremens link I've already posted. It even spells out which neurotransmitters are involved, and that, yes, there are long term adjustments to them just like I've described.
Stop making things up: you evidently have no clue about the physiology of alcohol or alcoholism.
As opposed to your making up pversimplifications as strawmen? Heh. I'm amused. Yes, you've read the superficial executive-summary introduction pages. Big deal. Look a bit deeper into what neurotransmitters are actually affected, and what happens with them _without_ alcohol, an then we'll talk. We're not talking "well, generally a little alcohol does this or that to your mood" alcohol-for-dummies simplifications, but actual chemistry changes of very specific pathways and mediators. And you obviously don't have a clue beyond those generic alcohol-for-dummies oversimplifications.
Briefly, take your own advice: "Stop making things up: you evidently have no clue about the physiology of alcohol or alcoholism."
Huh? I can run Eclipse on the iPod Touch? And compile and run my own Java programs, as I damn see fit? Including such stuff as developping a servlet and running it in a web container?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, heh, it's just the mandatory "Top X Worst Y" kind of list, that became popular in the last half a decade or so. You know, so they can show they're hip, smack-talking, unbiased and irreverent like that, and aren't afraid to say it when a game sucked 20 years ago. (Although your mileage may vary a lot if it's a game from this year and from a major publisher.) It's the videogame reviewer version of building up street cred.
On the bright side, at least these guys don't talk too much smack. I've seen too many other such list which sound like the stereotypical pimple-faced 15 year old trying to sound like a wigger gangsta. They get brownie points for not doing that.
On the less bright side, it's as stupid and grasping at straws as any other such list. If you get past the first page, it becoes a lot more hit and miss, and more miss than hit. I'm kinda at a loss to see what's wrong with some of those names. Or why they are worse than a couple thousand other games from that era.
E.g., "Gun Club" may not be the most exciting name or concept, but it's neither stupid nor ridiculous. Plus, it doesn't sound any worse than any other shooting gallery kind of game, so no idea why they singled that one out.
E.g., "Chemist Tycoon" may get extra penalty points for being yet another attempt to cash in on the "tycoon" title. (Personally I'm still waiting for someone to come up with Battlefield Tycoon, and cash in on both;) But honestly it doesn't sound any worse than, say, Shopping Centre Tycoon, Restaurant Tycoon (if I recall its title right) or the two dozen other Tycoon games.
I mean, if you think running a chemist's shop is stupid, picture a buggy simulation of running a restaurant, plus a heavy-handed attempt at a story: that you're fighting to save the world from someone who cornered the market by having cheap prices and good quality. No, seriously, it's not even my interpretation of it, you have the "quest giver" (so to speak) tell you exactly that. So you're fighting to make the world safe again for overpriced and poor quality restaurant owners again, I guess.
E.g., "How To Be A Complete Bastard" may be morally questionable (but then they don't have a problem with GTA too?), but it sounds like it describes the game's content perfectly. And they endorse it as an old game to check out, so it can't have been that dumb a game idea either. As a sidenote, they're also wrong that no similar game has been made ever since. Check out Neighbours From Hell from Jowood.
E.g., "Barbie Horse Adventures" doesn't sound all that exciting for an adult, but, here's the important part, it's a game for little girls. It's not supposed to be Return To Castle Rammstein... err... Wolfenstein. Now I'll give them some slack there, because truly most games for little kids are an abomination, and those for little girls doubly so. But still, I'm curious, is there any reason to single out Barbie Horse Adventures there? I can think of a dozen titles along similarly silly premises for kids, and those didn't seem to make the list. Some even, yes, about riding a pony or caring for a pony. Was Barbie Horse Adventures that much dumber than those? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it something about Barbie that makes that concept dumber than usual?
E.g., Ship Simulator, well, it might not sound that exciting as a concept, but it's also not the worst. Perhaps more importantly, it's not there just because some devs were too retarded to come up with a better game concept. It's actually a training program that only incidentally also got sold as a video game.
But if we're going to include that and Bus Driver, how about Der Planner 3. It's also a training program, only this time for business. And not only it got published as a game, but also got saddled with some of the most uninspired things in history, to make it more game-like. Like it got a sorta Sims-like "at home" mode, except it missed all the points that Sims fans liked in The Sims. Plus a wife which could d
1. It's not an "evil apple" story, it's just a financial musing that in the long run it might limit its market share.
But it's this kind of fanboyish reactions ("OMG, they said that something Apple does is less then perfect, so they must be evil, sworn enemies of Apple and all that's good and holy") that brings me to the next point. In truth, such stories are written equally about any other company and corporation, by people who don't really give a fuck about whether that company even lives or dies. That's the job of financial analysts and magazine pundits. They scratch their heads and go, "Hmm, ya know, maybe Sun won't take over the world this year" or "I think Intel is going to lose a couple of percent of market share to AMD's Phenom". Talking out of the arse, maybe, but it doesn't make them enemies of Sun, Intel or Apple. But that seems to be lost on a whole slew of True Believers, who can't seem to see any shades between "you're 100% in Apple's camp and singing praise to it" and "you're 100% the sworn enemy of Apple and have an axe to grind." And if god forbid you even mention an apple vulnerability once a year, then that's positive proof that you're biased against Apple and pro-MS.
But, at any rate, it helps fuel the next point:
2. It's, if you will, a case of action and reaction. Apple hypes every fart as if it's the second cumming of Christ, especially if it's Steve Jobs. You know, it will revolutionize this, redefine that, it's the thing that noone else ever thought or dared, etc.
And it also has an annoying army of fanboys to carry the Word, and try to convert everyone to The One True Faith. Not even too skillfully, I'd add. If you look at where, Christian missionaries succeeded, they never went around telling people "OMG, you're all stupid sheep and brainwashed by the competition". It doesn't get people in a mood to listen, you know.
So it just _begs_ to have its stuff put under a microscope and dissected, and the results don't always come as "yep, it's 100% pure perfection." In fact, they usually reveal a fair share of shortcomings that just beg to be pointed out in return.
3. And if you keep pushing, or push too hard, hype builds resentment or even a backlash. Daikatana, for example, was merely a mediocre game, that would have otherwise been quietly forgotten, but the unskilled hype created a rather spectacular backlash. Apple so far managed to avoid creating a backlash, and kudos to Steve for managing to spew this much hype without that. He's good. But it did get a bunch of people annoyed.
You know, it's like if I came to you daily to tell you about how great I am at CounterStrike. (I actually had the mis-fortune of working with someone like that.) And maybe sent a few more people to. What maybe started as "I couldn't care less, let's nod politely and hope he goes away" eventually gets to the point of "Oh, ffs, not again. Go fuck yourself with a cactus already."
Briefly, if you will, the few people who do hate Apple, don't hate it for its perfection, they hate for the unrelenting annoyance that Apple's hype and Apple's fanboys can be.
Actually, that's not what the text of that amendment says. It says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Way I read it, it says that a militia (well regulated, no less!) is necessary for defense. You know, in case the British attacked you from the north again (Canada was still a British colony), or Spain from the South, or God knows what else, they wanted to have a large pool of armed men to defend against those. That's it. Whatever else those founding fathers might have had in mind, they sure didn't write that.
How much that militia is still needed, or even useful at all, in an age of tanks, airplanes, and nuclear missiles... well, I'll leave that for another time. For now, let's just say: learn what that constitutions and those amendments actually say, before waving them around.
Ah, sooo, that was their vulnerability. Before unleashing my hordes genetically-engineered mutant zombies TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD, I must first get all governments to ban Nerf guns. I won't be foiled again.
*cackles manically in his labcoat*
Very much so, indeed. Which is why I called it a problem to be solved, maybe in a future step.
Yes, but that's IR and UV. I explicitly said that those do get through.
But if you want to know what would happen without the atmosphere shielding you, let's just say that just one well aimed solar flare would put a few thousand rem worth of hard ionizing radiation within minutes. You wouldn't just get burnt skin, you'd up and die. That's what kind of a difference that the atmosphere and magnetic field make in the "but we have a big nuke overhead" scenario.
That's basically what I'm talking about.
May be intended as a joke here, but I've heard it used in all seriousness before.
Disclaimer: I'm not among the "electrosensitive" crowd, and I couldn't care less about routers and cell-phones.
That said, I find the "but there's a big nuke overhead!!!" argument just as bunk.
The fact is: you don't get all the frequencies from that ball of light. There's this thick atmosphere, including such layers as the ozone layer and the ionosphere. Plus such things as the water in the atmosphere which are just as good there at absorbing a certain band of microwaves, as, well, when you heat water in your microwave. These things absorb almost anything to the left of infrared or to the right of UV-B.
Let's just say there's a reason why they worry about shielding the craft in which they'll send a man to mars. Or why the gamma ray telescopes are put in orbit, and not at ground level. Or why over-the-horizon radar can actually see beyond the horizon, by bouncing the signal on the ionosphere. It's just as almost-opaque to those signals from the other side, you know.
So, yes, you have a big nuke over your head, but you also have some hundreds of kilometres of damn good shielding between you and it. Most frequencies outside the visible spectrum, or nearby, you're _not_ getting the full radiation of that nuke. You're getting them in homeopathic doses, if at all.
Even briefer: It doesn't prove what you think it proves. Sorry. It's as irrelevant as saying that heat can't kill because you have billions of tons of molten lava under your feet and it hasn't killey you yet.
Well, I suppose they could stuff you full of this gas _and_ freeze you. I guess it just makes sense to solve it one step at a time anyway. It's probably enough work to find out what it does to a human and get it through FDA even at room temperature. They'll have time to worry about the freezing part after they get that sorted out.
While that's insightful in its own right, from reading the summary, I get the impression that they're not aiming for the kind of suspended animation where you freeze someone for 1000 years and wake them up later. Doing that at room temperature would be kinda dangerous anyway, since if you slowed their immune system 10 times they'll rot alive sooner or later anyway.
I'm getting the impression that this is more for rushing you to a hospital when they picked you up half-dead and bled half-dry off the side of the road.
If you're in serious shock for example, if the other mechanisms still work, the body will try to keep the brain alive, even at the cost of cutting off oxygen supply to the other internal organs. Which decay very fast. (Muscles have their own oxygen reserves, so they tend to survive, your liver doesn't.) Cells run out of oxygen and essentially commit suicide in an orderly fashion, i.e., apoptosis.
If it doesn't have enough even for the brain, which is often the case, the damage is irreversible and often fatal. Very fast.
So if they can slow your metabolism a lot, that might just give them extra time to haul you into ER. It might just turn that 5 minute rush before your brain starts getting massive damage, into, say, 50 minutes. Which might just do the trick.
I.e., briefly: it's not for colonizing Alpha Centauri, mate, it's just while they haul you to ER.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, a bunch of british kids think that Sir Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the moon.
Well, it's also a problem of understanding the results, not just of one of knowing how to use Google.
1. Let's say I'm interested in legal advice, for example. I know how to use Google, but (A) it will take me disproportionately more time to understand it than it would take a lawyer, and (B) I'm still not sure if I understood it right, or if the person who wrote that does. Sometimes Google isn't the Alpha and the Omega. Sometimes I'd rather pay a lawyer to search for me, than trust my l33t operator-combining skillz and Google.
Not only I can see a manager doing the same, I can respect him more if he does. If you suspect you're not qualified enough to understand the points of this newfangled Snake Oil 2.0 Enterprise Edition framework, _don't_ Google personally. Delegate to someone who understands it.
2. Basically let's put it like this: bosses had secretaries for ages, and not because some "generation gap" makes him unable to use a typewriter or lick his own stamps. It's just that (supposedly) his time is worth more. If you have a secretary spending a hour on menial tasks, it's cheaper than if the CEO paid millions per year does it. Even if he's exactly as fast at running stuff through the photocopier and putting it into envelopes, an hour of that for him costs more money than an hour of the secretary's time.
Way I see it: same here. Even having the mad skillz, and understanding the topic (e.g., because it's something trivial), searching for some topics still is a major time sink. Yes, it'll be faster for someone with the mad skillz, but it's still a time sink either way. At least theoretically it's cheaper if the secretary does the searches, than if you have the CEO spend half his day googling.
Not outside the USA. Yes, I know, it must come as a surprise to you that there's a world outside your borders. And I don't mean "to the americans", I mean to _you_ personally, the sad loser who need the ego masturbation of finding one word to pick on.
In other words, you know it's a proper word, but (A) you're too retarded to parse it anyway, and (B) you need your daily dose of ego-masturbation that badly, that you construct a convoluted layer of false assumptions (no, I'm not from the USA) to build it on? Again, even knowing full well that it _is_ a real word? Heh.
No, I'll tell you what it really is: it's just you who are the kind of loser who needs to find one word (which incidentally wasn't even mis-spelled here) and blow it out of proportion into "look! There's someone more stupid than me! He mis-spelled a word!"
The problem is as follows: the kinds of people I can respect aim _upwards_. It's only the sad losers that need to prove that someone must have been _below_ them. It's only when you're a pathetic waste of sperm, and _know_ it, that you get your daily high out of crap like, "look, but there's someone who mis-spelled a word! I'm better than that!" If what you have to prove is not what you've achieved, but that there must be someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, then you already know you're pretty close to said bottom.
Far from feeling enlightened or berated by your crap, dude, you amuse me. I appreciate your confession of worthlessness, amusing as it is.
Just, if I'm allowed one humble advice, you don't want to do that IRL. It really spells _that_ blatantly "I'm a pathetic loser and I know it". It's ok to do that kind of confessions on the 'net as an AC, but avoid doing it in person. For your own good. Then again, I suspect most people around you already know it.
Umm, nope, I'm pretty sure it's older. "PC gaming death imminent!!!" vs "Consoles will disappear any day now!!!" prophecies have been around at the very least all through the 90's, possibly even earlier. I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as IBM released the first VGA card in the late 80's, some fanboy went, "OMGWTFBBQ, console gaming is dying! PCs can now display 256 colours! Take that, evil Nintendo empire!" (Never mind that it would be another half a decade before any major game actually displayed 256 colours.) Or conversely there have been waves after waves of "OMGWTFBBQ! consoles now have 16 BITS (or 32 bits, or 3D graphics, or CD), there's no way anyone will buy a PC or PC game ever again!!!"
Yes, I know that Linux existed in the 90's too, but I don't think I've heard anyone seriously proclaiming the year of the desktop linux until 2000 or so.
First of all, it was just one example, of one problem. Not even the hardest, but something that everyone would understand easily.
There's a reason why you see "these types of simple threading problems." Not because you're teh uber-genius and everyone else is teh drooling retard, but because they're supposed to be just that: extremely simple examples. We're not doing a Ph.D. level research paper into parallelization, we're shooting wind on a board, for the benefit of some people which may be nerdier than the average, but include a ton of non-programmers anyway. Trust me, it's not that it's the kind of stuff that stumps everyone but you, but the kind of stuff that you could use to teach your mother about it.
Second, snap out of it. You're essentially doing the same "I'm a genius, everyone else obviously is an idiot" crap act, that's actually the most common the least someone actually understands the domain.
Believe it or not, yes, some of us do know what a "critical section" is. Java even has "synchronized" as a keyword into the language itself, so it's hard to not run into the concept.
But some of us also know what the performance penalties are. It doesn't come for free, you know. Sometimes it _is_ more efficient to just update each player's coordinates in a single loop, than to have a thousand threads which try to lock each other out every dozen lines of code.
More importantly, it's easy to design something that doesn't scale. A very common performance problem, for example, is when all processes wait on one resource that only one can use at a time. E.g., if most processing happens trough a cache, and access to the cache is guarded by a mutex, congrats, 1000 threads on 1000 cores won't run much faster than 1 thread on 1 core. I've actually seen that exact problem in more than one web application.
Just having a concept of "critical sections" won't do jack squat for you there. You end up needing a bit more advanced stuff so you can go as deep as you can into the innards of that cache, before you synchronize access. The Java Concurrent package is there for a reason, and to solve just that kind of a problem, for example.
More importantly, it still needs more clued up (read: more expensive) people to get it right, and even those do occasionally get it wrong. But even skipping past the last part, essentially it means you do need a bigger budget for the cool multithreaded solution. So in the cases where it's not that much of a disadvantage to avoid that (e.g., because the CPU will be idle and waiting for the GPU 90% of the time anyway), there's actually a good economic reason not to.
Again, I'm not saying any of _that_ is unsolvable either, but I _am_ saying that it tends to be slightly more complicated than when looked through the goggles of "I'm such a genius and I've heard about critical sections in college!" _If_ you see the world as that simple and devoid of any other considerations, that's really just your clue that you still have much to learn.
You missunderstood my point. My point was _not_ "people like small companies." Of course you can hate a small company too, but that wasn't the point.
My point was more like that the companies themselves, at least the ones who are anywhere near successful, change their own behaviour based on where they are in the food chain. What a guy needs to be successful at the top, is the opposite of what he needs to be successful at the bottom. Basically, it's profitable to be an evil monopolist when you're at the top, but it's counter-productive to be an evil monopolist when you don't have a monopoly yet. What's good behaviour for the king, isn't good behaviour for the serf, and viceversa.
There are, of course, exceptions.
E.g., SCO's pump-and-dump adventure indeed doesn't really fit the pattern I was describing, because they didn't really try to find a new survival strategy. They just wanted to go with the biggest bang, and make siphon the most money from the sinking ship to their own pockets. But the key ingredient in that scenario was scuttling their own ship. What I was talking about is strategies for keeping your ship afloat, not strategies for when you decided to sink it for the insurance money, so to speak.
E.g., MS too had the chance to avoid being the nice champion of open standards on their way up, mostly because it never had to breach someone else's walled garden. It started in a market which was all for grabs and staking your own claim, and later was co-opted by IBM as keeper of IBM's nascent PC walled garden. And from there it just had to work on squeezing everyone else out of it, IBM included.
But if you look at the companies which enjoy some measure of success (i.e., among other things, _not_ those who just want to sell the shares and sink the ship), I think you'll see the same pattern everywhere. The guys at the top want to keep you locked in, the guys at the bottom want access to the big players' locked-in customers.
Ah, there we go. You're thinking like an experienced programmer. That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. The moment when you also know, or can extrapolate from past experience, what can go wrong if you do that. The 15 year old hotshot response would be more like, "woohoo, I get to play with threads!"
Of course, now a lot of people will see that as you being a boring old fart who'd rather stick to tried-and-tested stuff (like those thread pools), instead of being excited to try new stuff.
It's pretty simple, really. As I keep reminding people:
- when companies are at the top of their niche, and have their nice walled garden and penned sheep to shear at will, they want to keep their garden walled and their sheep penned. Then they want proprietary protocols, incompatible tweaks to the "standard", and they want those sheep scared shitless of even thinking about the world outside their pen. They want you to think "oh shit, if we switch from IBM mainframes to cheap Unix workstations, we'll have to retrain everyone, rewrite our software, rip out and change the whole infrastructure, etc. Naah, let's buy another workstation, it's cheaper." In fact, they don't even want you doing that kind of maths, they want you scared of what might pop up later that you haven't foreseen, and unsure if you even know the right sum it will cost you, and whether you'll get ass raped without lubricant by your clients _and_ accounting department if you changed anything.
The term FUD, now almost synonimous with MS tactics, was coined about IBM tactics. That's not even the tip of the iceberg of FUD there, but the very phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM" carried the thinly veiled threat that you _might_ lose your job if you go with something else.
- when they're at the bottom and scraping a living off the niches outside the pens, then they want access to those rich guys gardens and sheeps. Then they start screaming that such fences and walls are an abhomination and evil. Then they want open protocols, and ISO standards, and generally everything that will make it easy for them to get to those penned sheep.
And a company's attitude can change at the drop of a hat, if their position on the food chain changes enough. IBM was the big bad monopolist, as long as it was the king of the hill. IBM became the champion of open source and open standards when it got enough of their lunch money stolen by the likes of MS.
And occasionally you even get to see the schizophrenic fits of a company that just slowly slides somewhere around the middle point. So they're starting to covet the neighbour's penned sheep, but aren't quite ready to free their own penned sheep too. Sun was for a couple of years at that point, but now it seems to have mostly resigned to being in the latter camp.
So what I'm saying is that, yes, things can change with MS too. If one day it finds itself at the bottom of the food chain, then MS _will_ become the champion of open standards. And then a bunch of nerds will love them.
That's an oversimplified view.
It's more like when you've got enough experience, you already know what can go wrong, and why doing something might be... well, not necessarily a bad idea, but cost more and be less efficient anyway. You start having some clue, for example, what happens when your 1000 thread program has to access a shared piece of data.
E.g., let's say we write a massively multi-threaded shooter game. Each player is a separate thread, and we'll throw in a few extra threads for other stuff. What happens when I shoot at you? If your thread was updating your coordinates just as mine was calculating if I hit, very funny effects can happen. If the rendering is a separate thread too, and reads such mangled coordinates, you'll have enemies blinking into strange places on your screen. If the physics or collision detection does the same, that-a-way lies falling under the map and even more annoying stuff.
Debugging it gets even funnier, since some race conditions can happen once a year on one computer configuration, but every 5 minutes on some hapless user's. Most will not even happen while you're single-stepping through the program.
Now I'm not saying either of that is unsolvable. Just that when you have a given time and budget for that project, it's quite easy to see how the cool, hip and bleeding-edge solution would overrun that.
By comparison, well, I can't speak for all young 'uns, but I can say that _I_ was a lot more irresponsible as the stereotypical precocious kid. I did dumb things just because I didn't know any better, and/or wasted time reinventing the wheel with another framework just because it was fun. All this on the background of thinking that I'm such a genius that obviously _my_ version of the wheel will be better than that built by a company with 20 years of experience in the field. And that if I don't feel like using some best practice, 'cause it's boring, then I know better than those boring old farts, and they're probably doing it just to be paid for more hours.
Of course, that didn't stop my programs from crashing or doing other funny things, but no need to get hung up on that, right?
And I see the same in a lot of hotshots nowadays. They do dumb stuff just because it's more fun to play with new stuff, than just do their job. I can't be too mad at them, because I used to do the same. But make no mistake, it _is_ a form of computer gaming, not being t3h 1337 uber-h4xx0r.
At any rate, rest assured that some of us old guys still know how to spawn a thread, because that's what it boils down to. I even get into disputes with some of my colleagues because they think I use threads too often. And there are plenty of frameworks which do that for you, so you don't have to get your own hands dirty. E.g., everyone who's ever wrote a web application, guess what? It's a parallel application, only it's the server which spawns your threads.
It's not necessarily that easy.
E.g., there was at some point an article about what Comcast does. They're not targetting the P2P ports or anything. They just look at which client opens a burst of connections at the same time and has a lot of connections going at the same time.
You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download. You know, all via the browser, plain old HTTP, on port 80.
Basically it's not as much targeting P2P, as just targeting everyone who doesn't behave like one user with a browser.
Because they're not as much hating P2P, as trying to keep the majority of moms and pops sending emails to their kids happy. Those guys don't open 20 connections at the same time, so they don't notice it.
The problem is, basically: The ISPs oversold the bandwidth _massively_, and I'm certainly not trying to defend that, but it would sorta work if everyone didn't use all that. Or if they all had the same number of connections, so they're all inconvenienced equally. P2P programs don't act like that. They keep opening bursts of connections until they saturate the pipe, everyone else be damned.
Think of the following example, basically. Let's say I'm lucky enough to have an 100 mbit/s Ethernet connection to my best buddy's ISP, and decide to share it with the whole neighbourhood. Essentially, I'd be a mini-ISP there. Now I don't want one guy saturating it all, so let's say I connect everyone to my hub via only 10 mbit/s Ethernet. I'd have enough bandwidth for 10 of them. But I figure most of them are old people and don't surf much, so I let 40 people connect there.
It's already oversold, but let's hope it works out.
Now if everyone used a browser and, say, 1 connection at a time, worst that can happen is that all 40 download a movie at the same time, and they all see 100/40 = 2.5 mbit/s bandwidth. That's only at peak times, so probably most will understand it, and some probably won't even do the maths there in the first place.
But then come some people with P2P clients. Those don't play that nice. If they don't get the whole 10mbit/s, everyone else be damned, they'll open more connections until they do. So now as little as a quarter of my users can saturate my whole backbone connection. The other 75% will suck air through a straw. Their 1 connection vs the two dozen connections of the P2P guys means they'll be happy if they see 100 kbit/s on their downloads. They can probably go brew a cup of coffee even while a simple site like Slashdot loads.
Now they _will_ complain.
That's the ISP's problem in a nutshell: P2P makes the traditional oversell no longer work. A minority of users running P2P stuff full time, can stuff everyone else's pipe, and massively amplify the effects of oversell for everyone else.
Not because it's P2P, but because it opens that burst of connections.
What can you do there?
1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.
2. Start charging per MB, and let free market economics solve who gets how much bandwidth. The moms and pops just reading their emails would probably pay cents, while if someone wants to download the whole internet, well, if they can afford it, why not? Downside, it would be extremely unpopular, and again it's a hole that their own marketing dug them in.
3. Target anyone who opens ridiculous numbers of connections, to stop them from squeezing everyone else out. Downside, it's easy to overdo it, and now P2P users will suck air through a straw and see analog modem speeds.
4. Implement some kind of smart scheduling, so
Heh. The thing is, most of us aren't really Christians any more either. Or at least not what it used to mean.
E.g., most people self-proclaimed as Christians think that the Christian thing to do is respect other people's religions, and believe that a nice guy is a nice guy, and will go to heaven anyway. Even the Catholic church nowadays came up with the "Anonymous Christian" doctrine to that effect.
That used to be a major heresy, namely that of Pelagius. Those are (according to at least one interpretation) the "snakes" that St Patrick drove out of Ireland.
So, yes, the Christian thing to do would be to say that if you're a Muslim, or Jew, or Buddhist, or were born on an island somewhere and never even heard of Christ, you're a monster in the eyes of the Lord and will fucking burn in Hell for eternity. Serves you right. Only by Christ can you be saved, and if you never even heard of him, well, tough beans for you.
But when someone goes and says that, pretty much 99% of the "Christians" are revolted.
E.g., most "Christians" nowadays believe that Jesus was the son of God, as in, really, a different person. That was the doctrine of Arius and the early church and Byzantine Empire fought hard to drive _those_ heretics off the continent.
Since I've already mentioned St Patrick, that's what the clover is supposed to symbolize: the three are _one_. It ended up a badge and the symbol of those believing just that, against those who insisted that the 3 are really separate entities.
E.g., tolerating other religions? Heh. That's why the early Christians were thrown to the lions, ya know? The Romans weren't opposed to your worshiping whoever the heck you want, and accommodated a large number of other religions. But they had laws against you telling other people that their gods are false. Well, ok, only the official Roman gods. You can worship this Jesus guy all you want, but don't go upsetting people by telling that Jupiter or Sol Maximus are false gods and they'll burn in hell for worshiping them. You know, because it's not nice, and it makes people upset.
Look at all those martyrs in your religious calendar, and the better half of them got killed for being insensitive arseholes towards other people's religions. We're honouring their memory for... being bigotted, intolerant, insensitive arseholes. Puts it into perspective, IMHO.
E.g., nowadays we think that the old Tridentine Mass was mean and insensitive, because used to call the Jews "faithless" and contain a prayer that they too are converted to Christianity. Excuse me? That's what the other half of the martyrs are honoured for. We _honour_ people for going to various kings and chieftains and telling them just that: your religion is false, your gods don't exist, and you'll freakin' burn in Hell unless you join _our_ religion. You're _supposed_ to think that you must convert everyone else. To save their souls, you see.
Etc.
What am I saying? I guess that most people proclaiming themselves Christians, aren't any more. You may identify yourself as Catholic, or Orthodox, or Protestant, but chances are you're not.
And probably if you wanted to really be one, you'd find that occasionally at odds with being nice and open minded.
And it gets funnier when the easy-going, open-minded, we-can-all-get-along "Christians" berate the others for not being Christian enough. No, chances are they _are_. _You_ aren't. If you were, you'd genuinely believe that God hates Muslims and Jews for being, well, non-Christians, and that he'll roast them alive for eternity for just that. Maybe he didn't explicitly say you should kill them, but, you know, it's only one step to inferring that. And maybe he won't be that happy if you go and help them print their islamic stuff or carry it on your servers.
We had _crusades_ based on that inference, and
Well, think positively: finally it'll be possible to have a nVidia north-bridge that does't have the equivalent of a fighter jet fan to cool it. (Or at least sounds like it's going to take off and smash into the mandatory case window.)
;)
;)
;)
Ok, so it might build up static and fry the CPU. Big deal. If you bought one of those babies just to run 6-way SLI (3 slot x 2 GPU per 9800GX2 card), you don't want to hang on to one CPU for too long anyway. The CPU is the bottleneck in that setup, and is keeping your preciouss 3DMark score low. If you don't upgrade it immediately when a higher frequency becomes available, and post your new 3DMark scores immediately, your willy-waving rights might be at stake. Worse yet, people might start thinking you're a girl!
So just think of the static buildup as a gentle reminder to upgrade ASAP.
Plus, ok, so you already have every colour of led fan, near UV tubes, glowing SATA cables, and glowing dye in the water-cooling water. Big deal. Every cool kid has those nowadays. Just having a good look at the innards of a computer which looks like a terror attack at a clown makeup factory, only gets you so much willy-waving rights nowadays. So where do you go from there? A few electric sparks and a nice St. Elmo's fire discharge around the PSU and HDD connectors might just add that extra touch.
Everyone will be in awe of that computer at the next LAN party. If they move their stuff away from you and inquire politely about a fire extinguisher, it's just a sign that they're humbled by your greatness and know that their lame-ass girlie rig would look like loser-gear next to yours
Plus, there's probably some paint around that glows when hit by those ions. Like that stuff they put in fluorescent lights. Imagine having a bad-ass glowing logo on your case's window. Now that would proclaim you as "T3H UB3R-L33T H4XXX0R". I mean, it's simply hardcore
Sure, you might lose the contents of that HDD now and then, but it's not too bad. Windows fills with crud anyway, and eventually it might affect those preciouss 3DMark scores. A reformat now and then will do the sucker a world of good.
Bah. They used to say the same about darkness, before the Universal Theory of Dark ;)
You're oversimplifying it. The CNS isn't simply a lightbulb that goes between depressed and manic. It's a complex system where a chemical unbalance doesn't just move you between manic and depressed, but can disrupt the signal processing in a lot more ways. E.g., hallucinations, sympathetic nervous system malfunctions, and a whole slew of other problems.
Alcohol acts upon _some_ pathways and receptors, and the compensation in the other direction (i.e., downregulation of some receptors, and up-regulation of some transmitters) is somewhat understood by now. Yes, it essentially makes _some_ receptors "manic", or rather hyper-sensive, which is what creates those hallucinations. Unfortunately, some of those are in the sympathetic system, which is why you get arrhythmia and the like, and why it kills.
Or, if you will, take your own advice: stop making things up >:)
Again, there are long term changes to that chemistry. I don't care if your oversimplified alcohol-for-dummies pages didn't mention that, or maybe you think they'll go away if you refuse to believe in them, or whatever your problem is. Those long term changes are real and documented.
Since you've proved that you can read Wikipedia, I'll refer you again to that Delirium Tremens link I've already posted. It even spells out which neurotransmitters are involved, and that, yes, there are long term adjustments to them just like I've described.
As opposed to your making up pversimplifications as strawmen? Heh. I'm amused. Yes, you've read the superficial executive-summary introduction pages. Big deal. Look a bit deeper into what neurotransmitters are actually affected, and what happens with them _without_ alcohol, an then we'll talk. We're not talking "well, generally a little alcohol does this or that to your mood" alcohol-for-dummies simplifications, but actual chemistry changes of very specific pathways and mediators. And you obviously don't have a clue beyond those generic alcohol-for-dummies oversimplifications.
Briefly, take your own advice: "Stop making things up: you evidently have no clue about the physiology of alcohol or alcoholism."
Huh? I can run Eclipse on the iPod Touch? And compile and run my own Java programs, as I damn see fit? Including such stuff as developping a servlet and running it in a web container?