Though, I suppose for a bit of false nostalgia, I could run some of the games on this list - on my phone.
Been there, tried it, it sucked. My phone only has 4 buttons on the front and my keyboard has 101 (I have some 104 key keyboards too) which is a slight mismatch. My phone has to be held within 2 inches of my eye to get the same field of vision of my current giant monitors, although back in ye olden days I had smaller screens so maybe as far away as 3 inches would be an acceptable nostalgic experience. Also the bandwidth response of my speakers hooked up to my soundblaster is immensely wider than the weird little speaker in my phone, yes its still 8-bit sound but its 50 Hz to 15 kHz sound on the computer, not the weird tinny speaker on the phone. Yes I could connect a bluetooth keyboard, a bluetooth stereo headphones, some phones with HDMI out (not mine) can connect to a monitor or a head mounted display... but its just easier to use a real computer, either 1985 vintage or 2012 vintage.
Oh so close. She dances over to you with somebody elses one dollar bill in the left cup and a two dollar bill in the right cup and this magically swaps the $1 into the right cup and the $2 into the left cup without using a third cup, or even a hand. So it is essentially the popular internet meme "1 Girl 2 Cups". Even worse, a sharp eye can see the process involves a colon in the regex... This is going downhill fast...
Three obvious ? perl concepts and the pitfalls surrounding them are: 1) You're operating on the default variable $_. If a single variable chugs thru a dozen processing steps you don't have to name it each time. This is a complete statement, not just the right side of an equation. 2) s/"before"/"after"/ is the simple search and replace operator. Guess how many times it S+Rs? There are options to control this other than the default and noobs always assume the default for s is what they want and it never turns out that way... 3) If your regex matches something in parenthesis, later on you can access whatever that found using positional variables $1, $2, you get the idea. This is why perl is not amused at the idea of user variable names beginning with digits. Why does perl count regex matches from $1 instead of $0 like you'd expect? Well $0 means something completely different, thats for sure...
If you need to "run" code, either in your head or on a computer, in order to see what it's going to do, you're probably not really programming and you're definitely not an engineer.
Would be a better post if you explained the "right way", hopefully its not mysticism.
Whats wrong with processing this line of perl in your head according to the rules to figure out what it does? (admittedly I have no idea why the heck you'd want to do this, but its the simplest example I can think of using about 3 key perl concepts...)
s/(.*):(.*)/$2:$1/;
The other aspect has to do with new code vs maint (even maint of my own code). If I have no idea what I'm doing with my own freshly written code, thats just wrong... but old code always has some element of intense CSI work to figure out what it does before I can modify it..
Yes, if only there were existing systems that worked that way. Such as the Lisp environment from 1958 or the Smalltalk environment from 1976. Such revolutionary new ideas about programming! I wonder if he will invent automatic refactoring tools next...
Lisp.. Smalltalk... Oh wait, I've got a FORTH answer oh no wait thats just the third... (Sorry bad joke, makes more sense if you know what FORTH is)
Gotta admit that the Venn diagram of languages with that kind of environment and "write only languages" nearly perfectly overlap. If someone would make a real time dev system for Perl and Basic then we'd have near perfect overlap.
The tough problems aren't about running the code and seeing what happens, they're about setting up very specific situations and testing them easily.
Handling non-specific unknown/unpredicted situations gracefully is also tough. Unsanitized user input, crazy failure modes, failure in other code making your state machines go bonkers... The trendy thing to do is just throw your hands up in the air and tell the user to reboot and/or reinstall, but that's not so cool.
Maybe another way to phrase it is at least one of the specific situations needs to be the input of a random number generator doing crazy stuff.
Your Arabic to Roman numeral converter accepts a INT? Well it better not crash when fed a negative, or zero, 2**63-1 (or whatever max_int is where you live), and any ole random place in between
Got it totally wrong... Didn't you ever see episode 19? Off the coast of either Manhattan or Somalia (both hotbeds of Ferengi activity), the Ferengi will take control of the Enterprise until the high tech redneck saves them all...
Given any position, in a large enough world, there exists at least one crank proposing everything, therefore there exists evidence for.. every position. This is not really very informative.
I can't believe I'm the only/. poster who has ever played the game, yet looking at the comments..
Its sort of a turing tarpit of RPG gaming. Do we need 3-D and fancy maps? naaw we'll just use fixed sprites on a 2-D "perspective" side view in (generally) open field battle. Do we need a full set of character attributes/numbers? Naaah we'll just use attack/defense numbers. You get tanks and ranged and healer characters thats all. Is there any difference between magic and arrow-based ranged fighters? Naah. Every 5 levels you get another feat, sometimes you get to select, sometimes not. The mid and advanced game seems to revolve around which characters you selected and your selection of feats, the early levels focus on the items you purchase using coin gathered from dead monsters. Much like a turing tarpit is a language designed to the minimum necessary, this is kind of the absolute minimum RPG you imagine that still has "RPG-like" gameplay.
Gameplay is grind MMORPG-like in that you're not allowed to loose, your skill level at playing determines how fast you advance, not if you advance. So if you're worried about casual gaming and a real world distraction destroying your carefully crafted character, don't worry, worst case is you just wasted some time. Its a ratchet, only turning "upward". Months ago when I was playing, there was no real world cash involved, although I could imagine the ability to trade dollars for coin would be... appreciated as often in the early levels I was grinding for coin. That would probably throw the balance of the game completely off.
Take something like nethack, remove all the maps, most of the monsters, most of the storyline, most of the items, most of the puzzles, tear it down to the absolute minimum RPG, add in some 2-d sprite graphics and some animations, and you're basically there.
Oddly enough, its actually pretty good. I completely beat it months ago, playing a knight, thief, wizard, healer group and haven't played since. Stereotypical "well, I'm sitting in the waiting room... what to do?" game.
I know OpenGL isn't made of magic, but isn't the idea of OpenGL that it's supposed to work over multiple platforms?
The point (and it was a good one) is that for iPhone he only has to do his shaders once. Bam, done. For Android, not only is he doing them again, but multiple times for different devices. His development cost to bring his app to iPhone is one set of shaders for a great return. What do you think his return is after he spends the time to fix his shaders for an obscure device that a few dozen people will likely purchase his game on?
I think I'm the only person here who has played battleheart, or at least who has played and is also a software dev (but not a game dev or graphical dev or even a android dev). I haven't done "game programming" since the 80s on ms basic...
I know what you're talking about WRT opengl and first person shooters and flight simulators and such. But battleheart is a basic more or less 2-D sprite RPG. There are some amusing and entertaining animations during battles. Its about as intensely graphical as perhaps a solitaire card game. Does that really need a byzantine 3-d interface? or rephrased, is the only available graphics API a byzantine 3-d interface? If so, that graphical API is the problem, not the OS, not the devs.
In ye olden days, ma bell would rent you a phone for $5/month. Why would you pay $20 for a phone at walmart if ma bell would give you one "for free"? This had two effects:
1) Ma Bell ancient telephones were indestructible and reliable because any problems meant the manufacturer faught with one of the worlds largest corporations, not some individual peon. Thats why a 1960s phone worked great and lasted forever, and you can only buy garbage now. The days of a mobile phone lasting more than a couple months are going to go away if cell phone subsidies go away... why shouldn't they?
2) Ma Bell made fat stacks of cash on the ghetto rent to own model. You'd laugh at a guy in the lowly socioeconomic circumstance of paying rent-to-own for a couch or TV, but supposedly that biz model is what the cool kids use when they get phones... You can't seriously think the telco is acting as an intermediary out of the goodness of their heart, can you? Basically, they're in the loanshark / payday loan biz, if you're too ghetto to front a couple hundred, they'll do it for you, at a long term cost of thousands. They have shareholders to support... this is a profitable operation, if competently run (which might be asking too much).
With the high number of abandoned wind farms I can't say I like the job security aspects of this. It might make a good summer job but I sure wouldn't plan a career around it.
Its also a capital intensive job. Back in the early 80s a cool blue collar "retraining" job was cable TV installer. The local vo-tech school had classes and graduated at least a hundred. Once all the hardline was strung up or buried, then.... From personal knowledge there are only about two dozen techs in that field in my area. What happened to the hundred or so other grads? Probably getting career advice to go into the (currently) lucrative windmill business. Endless bubble chasing, thats all the US has to offer anymore.
Retraining is a profitable industry all by itself. Much like the gold rush gold miners never made much money, but the general store types made fat stacks of cash, the place to make money in the windmill industry is in windmill industry training classes, not in windmills themselves.
...that still leaves 30,000 people. And yet the candidate pool doesn't even appear to be that deep.
They're the dotcom workers of the 2010s and they know it and they're not playing along.
For better or worse you're only as good as the last job on your resume... and if that is a dead industry then its soylent green time for you. On the other hand, if the last job on your resume is "real", lets say "Car Mechanic" or "Carpenter", although you're momentarily unemployed, the odds of being hired in the future are pretty good.
Would I go into a bubbly industry knowing it'll only last a couple years and then I'll never be employable again anywhere at any rate in the future... if I'm 60 then hell yes. The problem is this job requires the physique of a 20-something and they don't want to spend their 30s-60s unemployed.
Isn't $20 an hour better than no job at all? Or is there some reason the electricians can't work for that amount?
People like to say that your life and health are priceless, but as a group the wear and tear on the body and odds of not making it home alive have, as a group, determined its worth more than $20...
I regularly climbed towers for our amateur radio repeater network
Been there done that although I am more of a weak signal VHF operator.
Another issue is also the weather. Light breeze with two feet on the ground turns into OMG freaking hurricane 100 feet up. Both psychologically and meteorologically. Hams have the luxury of waiting for a perfectly calm day. The real tower workers earn their dough on the bad weather days.
Agreed. $20 an hour is less then what trash collectors and janitors around here. $30 seems like it would be the starting point for this work.
Google around a bit and you'll find skilled ironworkers seem to average about $30. $20 is a bit too low for apprentices, there are some ultra low rate areas where $20 would be decent apprentice wage but "most areas" seem to pull just a little more, low twenties is about right.
Hmm. If I wanted to climb giant metal structures and get all sweaty, the free market wage for a generic iron worker is about $30/hr, or I could go in the green industry and starve my children on $20/hr. Golly I wonder which I would select?
Electricians get paid a little more than ironworkers, so entering the field in that direction doesn't work.
Its a very limited supply of workers... Not unskilled labor, takes years to figure out what you're doing. Its a young mans game (I'm too old, and I'm not that old...) and you need what by American standards is excellent physical fitness, and you need to not be a follower, because the followers all went to college and graduated with a diploma in multicultural studies, $100K in debt, and a coffee barrista job to pay it off, and you have to be at least median to above median smart to literally survive the job.
Next thing you know, we'll be engraving our coinage with trust in religious beings.
You mean like "In God we trust"?
Lets poke the/. meme police and see if they accept that a JEFFERSONIAN NICKEL with "In God we trust" is... IRONIC... given his religious views, and his rather unique bible publishing venture? The truth of the matter flies directly in the face of the 1984 style rewrite of history where the founding fathers were, according to the ministry of truth, all devout evangelical christians...
keyboard and trackball here. I don't game on something as low res as 1080, not since I upgraded to that 1600x1200 CRT from the 90s.
Anyway the question I have here is what is the tendonitis effect of random force at random positions and times? My guess is its either really good to prevent repetitive stress injuries or really bad when it creates weird strain injuries.
It'll probably only be used as an obnoxious gimmick, but I could see something like skyrim style lockpicking having some real world force feedback.
1) Cloud can only make money as a new intermediary by efficiency, having less people employed. However, they could employ the same amount of people by selling data.
2) If scalability always worked, we'd only have one car company, one paper printing company, one taxi company, one book store, one food store... For their own sake I hope cloud stuff scales up that well, or we'll end up back where we started (at the usual great expense both monetary and human costs)
3) Big companies always insource when its cheaper overall than paying the outsourcer. Ideal minimum cost would seem to be keep enough work and servers inhouse to keep a precise integer number of employees busy and outsource any fractional FTE to outsourcer. But can a company make money of outsourcing fraction FTE worth of cloud computing from each corporation? My guess is, in the long run, no.
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
You can't insert a profitable intermediary in between the same IT people and the old company without cutting jobs somehow. Supposedly centralization will result in fewer people doing more work, so less employees allow a layer of profitable intermediaries.
So you'll have 10 former IT guys and 3 jobs. The other 7, well there's always soylent green. Oh well.
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life?
Yes, the folks in charge want the 3rd world model, or the roman empire right before the fall model, where a couple people own everything, and everyone else is in extreme poverty.
How did they account for the loss of jobs in the core business due to lower quality of service, lost data, stolen data, etc? Fundamentally no one wants to be in charge of spinning disks, and will savings from management voodoo make up for the cost of inserting a profitable intermediary?
Why would any of that be "trouble"? The publisher makes money off selling books, not people reading them. Ideally, they'd sell "coffee table books" that are never read, thus don't need to be edited or be any good.
The only justification I can come up with is if I could read more quickly, then they could theoretically sell more books. However my reading quickly does not automagically force my favorite living authors to write faster, nor does it force the dead authors to dictate from beyond the grave, so... This will have no effect on people buying the latest trendy whenever it comes out.
The crap part of the article is saying that this reflects on eBooks, instead of on the platforms.
They're probably angling to sell a megaDRMed and spyware drowned singletasker. OK you're gonna have a tablet or phone, but you'll never have the "full book experience" unless you read on a singletasker, which we coincidentally happen to sell at a nice profit... This might fit with the e-ink astoturfing, you know the "you can read on a LCD all day at work, and watch TV and video game all night on a LCD, but your eyes will explode like an indiana jones special effect if you try to read a "ebook" off a LCD, conveniently we sell something else"
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science, lots of things that science is not yet able to measure, and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
Name one thing.
Good troll response would be the miracle of Transubstantiation during daily mass, of course. That LOL funny. I'm betting we don't get anything this witty.
Slashdot Mirror
Though, I suppose for a bit of false nostalgia, I could run some of the games on this list - on my phone.
Been there, tried it, it sucked. My phone only has 4 buttons on the front and my keyboard has 101 (I have some 104 key keyboards too) which is a slight mismatch. My phone has to be held within 2 inches of my eye to get the same field of vision of my current giant monitors, although back in ye olden days I had smaller screens so maybe as far away as 3 inches would be an acceptable nostalgic experience. Also the bandwidth response of my speakers hooked up to my soundblaster is immensely wider than the weird little speaker in my phone, yes its still 8-bit sound but its 50 Hz to 15 kHz sound on the computer, not the weird tinny speaker on the phone. Yes I could connect a bluetooth keyboard, a bluetooth stereo headphones, some phones with HDMI out (not mine) can connect to a monitor or a head mounted display... but its just easier to use a real computer, either 1985 vintage or 2012 vintage.
I'd guess it slips a $1 and $2 bill ...
Oh so close. She dances over to you with somebody elses one dollar bill in the left cup and a two dollar bill in the right cup and this magically swaps the $1 into the right cup and the $2 into the left cup without using a third cup, or even a hand. So it is essentially the popular internet meme "1 Girl 2 Cups". Even worse, a sharp eye can see the process involves a colon in the regex... This is going downhill fast...
Three obvious ? perl concepts and the pitfalls surrounding them are:
1) You're operating on the default variable $_. If a single variable chugs thru a dozen processing steps you don't have to name it each time. This is a complete statement, not just the right side of an equation.
2) s/"before"/"after"/ is the simple search and replace operator. Guess how many times it S+Rs? There are options to control this other than the default and noobs always assume the default for s is what they want and it never turns out that way...
3) If your regex matches something in parenthesis, later on you can access whatever that found using positional variables $1, $2, you get the idea. This is why perl is not amused at the idea of user variable names beginning with digits. Why does perl count regex matches from $1 instead of $0 like you'd expect? Well $0 means something completely different, thats for sure...
If you need to "run" code, either in your head or on a computer, in order to see what it's going to do, you're probably not really programming and you're definitely not an engineer.
Would be a better post if you explained the "right way", hopefully its not mysticism.
Whats wrong with processing this line of perl in your head according to the rules to figure out what it does? (admittedly I have no idea why the heck you'd want to do this, but its the simplest example I can think of using about 3 key perl concepts...)
s/(.*):(.*)/$2:$1/;
The other aspect has to do with new code vs maint (even maint of my own code). If I have no idea what I'm doing with my own freshly written code, thats just wrong... but old code always has some element of intense CSI work to figure out what it does before I can modify it..
Yes, if only there were existing systems that worked that way. Such as the Lisp environment from 1958 or the Smalltalk environment from 1976. Such revolutionary new ideas about programming! I wonder if he will invent automatic refactoring tools next...
Lisp.. Smalltalk... Oh wait, I've got a FORTH answer oh no wait thats just the third... (Sorry bad joke, makes more sense if you know what FORTH is)
Gotta admit that the Venn diagram of languages with that kind of environment and "write only languages" nearly perfectly overlap. If someone would make a real time dev system for Perl and Basic then we'd have near perfect overlap.
The tough problems aren't about running the code and seeing what happens, they're about setting up very specific situations and testing them easily.
Handling non-specific unknown/unpredicted situations gracefully is also tough. Unsanitized user input, crazy failure modes, failure in other code making your state machines go bonkers... The trendy thing to do is just throw your hands up in the air and tell the user to reboot and/or reinstall, but that's not so cool.
Maybe another way to phrase it is at least one of the specific situations needs to be the input of a random number generator doing crazy stuff.
Your Arabic to Roman numeral converter accepts a INT? Well it better not crash when fed a negative, or zero, 2**63-1 (or whatever max_int is where you live), and any ole random place in between
Got it totally wrong... Didn't you ever see episode 19? Off the coast of either Manhattan or Somalia (both hotbeds of Ferengi activity), the Ferengi will take control of the Enterprise until the high tech redneck saves them all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_(Star_Trek:_Enterprise)
we now send a trillion every day.
Only if the "we" includes spam scripts. I suspect the true number of human sent mime emails is well under a billion per day.
Given any position, in a large enough world, there exists at least one crank proposing everything, therefore there exists evidence for .. every position. This is not really very informative.
I can't believe I'm the only /. poster who has ever played the game, yet looking at the comments..
Its sort of a turing tarpit of RPG gaming. Do we need 3-D and fancy maps? naaw we'll just use fixed sprites on a 2-D "perspective" side view in (generally) open field battle. Do we need a full set of character attributes/numbers? Naaah we'll just use attack/defense numbers. You get tanks and ranged and healer characters thats all. Is there any difference between magic and arrow-based ranged fighters? Naah. Every 5 levels you get another feat, sometimes you get to select, sometimes not. The mid and advanced game seems to revolve around which characters you selected and your selection of feats, the early levels focus on the items you purchase using coin gathered from dead monsters. Much like a turing tarpit is a language designed to the minimum necessary, this is kind of the absolute minimum RPG you imagine that still has "RPG-like" gameplay.
Gameplay is grind MMORPG-like in that you're not allowed to loose, your skill level at playing determines how fast you advance, not if you advance. So if you're worried about casual gaming and a real world distraction destroying your carefully crafted character, don't worry, worst case is you just wasted some time. Its a ratchet, only turning "upward". Months ago when I was playing, there was no real world cash involved, although I could imagine the ability to trade dollars for coin would be ... appreciated as often in the early levels I was grinding for coin. That would probably throw the balance of the game completely off.
Take something like nethack, remove all the maps, most of the monsters, most of the storyline, most of the items, most of the puzzles, tear it down to the absolute minimum RPG, add in some 2-d sprite graphics and some animations, and you're basically there.
Oddly enough, its actually pretty good. I completely beat it months ago, playing a knight, thief, wizard, healer group and haven't played since. Stereotypical "well, I'm sitting in the waiting room... what to do?" game.
I know OpenGL isn't made of magic, but isn't the idea of OpenGL that it's supposed to work over multiple platforms?
The point (and it was a good one) is that for iPhone he only has to do his shaders once. Bam, done. For Android, not only is he doing them again, but multiple times for different devices. His development cost to bring his app to iPhone is one set of shaders for a great return. What do you think his return is after he spends the time to fix his shaders for an obscure device that a few dozen people will likely purchase his game on?
I think I'm the only person here who has played battleheart, or at least who has played and is also a software dev (but not a game dev or graphical dev or even a android dev). I haven't done "game programming" since the 80s on ms basic...
I know what you're talking about WRT opengl and first person shooters and flight simulators and such. But battleheart is a basic more or less 2-D sprite RPG. There are some amusing and entertaining animations during battles. Its about as intensely graphical as perhaps a solitaire card game. Does that really need a byzantine 3-d interface? or rephrased, is the only available graphics API a byzantine 3-d interface? If so, that graphical API is the problem, not the OS, not the devs.
In ye olden days, ma bell would rent you a phone for $5/month. Why would you pay $20 for a phone at walmart if ma bell would give you one "for free"? This had two effects:
1) Ma Bell ancient telephones were indestructible and reliable because any problems meant the manufacturer faught with one of the worlds largest corporations, not some individual peon. Thats why a 1960s phone worked great and lasted forever, and you can only buy garbage now. The days of a mobile phone lasting more than a couple months are going to go away if cell phone subsidies go away... why shouldn't they?
2) Ma Bell made fat stacks of cash on the ghetto rent to own model. You'd laugh at a guy in the lowly socioeconomic circumstance of paying rent-to-own for a couch or TV, but supposedly that biz model is what the cool kids use when they get phones... You can't seriously think the telco is acting as an intermediary out of the goodness of their heart, can you? Basically, they're in the loanshark / payday loan biz, if you're too ghetto to front a couple hundred, they'll do it for you, at a long term cost of thousands. They have shareholders to support... this is a profitable operation, if competently run (which might be asking too much).
With the high number of abandoned wind farms I can't say I like the job security aspects of this. It might make a good summer job but I sure wouldn't plan a career around it.
Its also a capital intensive job. Back in the early 80s a cool blue collar "retraining" job was cable TV installer. The local vo-tech school had classes and graduated at least a hundred. Once all the hardline was strung up or buried, then.... From personal knowledge there are only about two dozen techs in that field in my area. What happened to the hundred or so other grads? Probably getting career advice to go into the (currently) lucrative windmill business. Endless bubble chasing, thats all the US has to offer anymore.
Retraining is a profitable industry all by itself. Much like the gold rush gold miners never made much money, but the general store types made fat stacks of cash, the place to make money in the windmill industry is in windmill industry training classes, not in windmills themselves.
...that still leaves 30,000 people. And yet the candidate pool doesn't even appear to be that deep.
They're the dotcom workers of the 2010s and they know it and they're not playing along.
For better or worse you're only as good as the last job on your resume... and if that is a dead industry then its soylent green time for you. On the other hand, if the last job on your resume is "real", lets say "Car Mechanic" or "Carpenter", although you're momentarily unemployed, the odds of being hired in the future are pretty good.
Would I go into a bubbly industry knowing it'll only last a couple years and then I'll never be employable again anywhere at any rate in the future... if I'm 60 then hell yes. The problem is this job requires the physique of a 20-something and they don't want to spend their 30s-60s unemployed.
Isn't $20 an hour better than no job at all? Or is there some reason the electricians can't work for that amount?
People like to say that your life and health are priceless, but as a group the wear and tear on the body and odds of not making it home alive have, as a group, determined its worth more than $20...
I regularly climbed towers for our amateur radio repeater network
Been there done that although I am more of a weak signal VHF operator.
Another issue is also the weather. Light breeze with two feet on the ground turns into OMG freaking hurricane 100 feet up. Both psychologically and meteorologically. Hams have the luxury of waiting for a perfectly calm day. The real tower workers earn their dough on the bad weather days.
Agreed. $20 an hour is less then what trash collectors and janitors around here. $30 seems like it would be the starting point for this work.
Google around a bit and you'll find skilled ironworkers seem to average about $30. $20 is a bit too low for apprentices, there are some ultra low rate areas where $20 would be decent apprentice wage but "most areas" seem to pull just a little more, low twenties is about right.
Hmm. If I wanted to climb giant metal structures and get all sweaty, the free market wage for a generic iron worker is about $30/hr, or I could go in the green industry and starve my children on $20/hr. Golly I wonder which I would select?
Electricians get paid a little more than ironworkers, so entering the field in that direction doesn't work.
Its a very limited supply of workers... Not unskilled labor, takes years to figure out what you're doing. Its a young mans game (I'm too old, and I'm not that old...) and you need what by American standards is excellent physical fitness, and you need to not be a follower, because the followers all went to college and graduated with a diploma in multicultural studies, $100K in debt, and a coffee barrista job to pay it off, and you have to be at least median to above median smart to literally survive the job.
Next thing you know, we'll be engraving our coinage with trust in religious beings.
You mean like "In God we trust"?
Lets poke the /. meme police and see if they accept that a JEFFERSONIAN NICKEL with "In God we trust" is ... IRONIC... given his religious views, and his rather unique bible publishing venture? The truth of the matter flies directly in the face of the 1984 style rewrite of history where the founding fathers were, according to the ministry of truth, all devout evangelical christians...
keyboard and trackball here. I don't game on something as low res as 1080, not since I upgraded to that 1600x1200 CRT from the 90s.
Anyway the question I have here is what is the tendonitis effect of random force at random positions and times? My guess is its either really good to prevent repetitive stress injuries or really bad when it creates weird strain injuries.
It'll probably only be used as an obnoxious gimmick, but I could see something like skyrim style lockpicking having some real world force feedback.
Three strange financial assumptions:
1) Cloud can only make money as a new intermediary by efficiency, having less people employed. However, they could employ the same amount of people by selling data.
2) If scalability always worked, we'd only have one car company, one paper printing company, one taxi company, one book store, one food store... For their own sake I hope cloud stuff scales up that well, or we'll end up back where we started (at the usual great expense both monetary and human costs)
3) Big companies always insource when its cheaper overall than paying the outsourcer. Ideal minimum cost would seem to be keep enough work and servers inhouse to keep a precise integer number of employees busy and outsource any fractional FTE to outsourcer. But can a company make money of outsourcing fraction FTE worth of cloud computing from each corporation? My guess is, in the long run, no.
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
You can't insert a profitable intermediary in between the same IT people and the old company without cutting jobs somehow. Supposedly centralization will result in fewer people doing more work, so less employees allow a layer of profitable intermediaries.
So you'll have 10 former IT guys and 3 jobs. The other 7, well there's always soylent green. Oh well.
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life?
Yes, the folks in charge want the 3rd world model, or the roman empire right before the fall model, where a couple people own everything, and everyone else is in extreme poverty.
How did they account for the loss of jobs in the core business due to lower quality of service, lost data, stolen data, etc?
Fundamentally no one wants to be in charge of spinning disks, and will savings from management voodoo make up for the cost of inserting a profitable intermediary?
Why would any of that be "trouble"? The publisher makes money off selling books, not people reading them. Ideally, they'd sell "coffee table books" that are never read, thus don't need to be edited or be any good.
The only justification I can come up with is if I could read more quickly, then they could theoretically sell more books. However my reading quickly does not automagically force my favorite living authors to write faster, nor does it force the dead authors to dictate from beyond the grave, so... This will have no effect on people buying the latest trendy whenever it comes out.
The crap part of the article is saying that this reflects on eBooks, instead of on the platforms.
They're probably angling to sell a megaDRMed and spyware drowned singletasker. OK you're gonna have a tablet or phone, but you'll never have the "full book experience" unless you read on a singletasker, which we coincidentally happen to sell at a nice profit... This might fit with the e-ink astoturfing, you know the "you can read on a LCD all day at work, and watch TV and video game all night on a LCD, but your eyes will explode like an indiana jones special effect if you try to read a "ebook" off a LCD, conveniently we sell something else"
Maybe they should consolidate all the courses into a survey-level "Placebo 101" class.
The homeopathetic version of that would be only one weekend. More effective that way, don cha know
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science, lots of things that science is not yet able to measure, and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
Name one thing.
Good troll response would be the miracle of Transubstantiation during daily mass, of course. That LOL funny. I'm betting we don't get anything this witty.