Hey! I just thought of something. I wonder if the wife would have any problems with a threesome with a copy. Let me go ask.....
Truly a burning and interesting question, and one amusingly explored in the movie Duplicity. But in all serious, do talk to your wife about group sex, but I wouldn't wait for people-duplication technology.
When I was a teenager in the mid 80's, I taught Logo to kids at a summer camp on IBM-PC's, this was right about the time the PC Jr. was released. There are of course many flavors and variants of the language. But the one that I taught was a real programming language with variables, loops, functions that took parameters, and the whole enchilada. We wrote some pretty fun, crazy and smart stuff.
You cannot, with a straight face, use the word "empowerment", and then make a compelling argument. The very word empowerment screams of power point jockeys and PHB.
I just meant that people can increasingly do things for themselves, rather than having to go to exports. Or that the skill level required for experts to accomplish goals isn't as high as it used to be.
But fair enough. How about different words for you, like "independence", or "self-sufficiency", or "douchebag".
Who gives a shit, seriously? 10 megs, 16 megs... Last time i did this in about 2004 with C# I think it was about 12 megs. But what difference does it make? It'd take a lot more than 10, 20, or 30 megs to make me raise an eyebrow.
You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code.
Maybe. On the other hand, this is called empowerment. Development horsepower is moving downhill. Power is moving out of the hands of the top developers into the hands of the merely mortal developers. And out of the hands of the merely mortal developers and into the hands of the power users. Here are some other things that are different today vs. the golden days of yore:
Empowerment of users. A lot fewer programmers are needed to get tasks done than used to be required. A huge portion of tasks users can now handle for themselves using spreadsheets, databases such as Access or their VB equivalents. Quite a few of the programming tasks I did professionally when I started 20 years ago are no longer needed, made no longer necessary by things such as label printing programs, easy to use mailmerge functions in word processors, and so on.
Software usability, and GUI. Back in the day, every single program needed documentation to come with it to explain how to use it. Today, most software is so easy to use that if you don't intuitively know how to accomplish what you want to do, it's pretty much crap. There are exceptions to this rule, like CAD programs and photo editing software, but mostly, software is way easier to use today than it used to be.
Programmers were forced to optimize their code, it wasn't like they had a choice. When you're working with 64k or 640k of main memory and bankswitching the rest of your memory or whatever, you kind of need to optimize your code. The difference in productivity between that kind of thing and what we to today is staggering. Today I write software by assembling modular bits of subprograms together rapidly, string it together with this or that, and wham, it's working. Back in the day, everything had to be written from scratch.
Radical productivity differences. Developers are radically more productive than they used to be. Things that used to take days or weeks to do are routinely done in hours now. Things that are considered routine today we didn't even attempt to do back in the day. (Example: Today, computers from different companies exchange data all the time easily and efficiently using webservices. Compare that to the nightmare of integration and taking forever or not getting done at all that EDI used to be.)
Sure, we use more memory now. And yes, it's easier to code than it used to be. I wouldn't say that drag and drop ide's are the be-all end all today, though. Non-gui development environments are just as popular as they used to be, don't you think? I'm thinking of Ruby on Rails, Django...
It's not a troll, it's informative-- from the perspective of explaining how trademark law works. The mod who marked it troll may not like it, but this is what the trademark law is about.
Did they actually implement the ranking now?...I remember the outrage a few weeks after the release, where players tried to deduce the formula for the ranking, and found out that your contribution score is actually a random number...
Yes, they did. You and the grandparent are both right, though. For "normal" world event quests, the ranking was based on your contribution, plus the bonus factor of how many times you've done it without getting the special goodie bags. Taking keeps, however, was done based on the random situation you described. Made for a pretty bogus situation.
There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.
...fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting...
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
Oh and Oracle's core DB business? Hmmm, I could have sworn they'd moved beyond that, strategically acquiring Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA and now Sun in recent years - employing an army of consultants to compete with IBM's.
The Peoplesoft acquisition is to a great extent all about strengthening their position in the database market. They bought Peoplesoft, announced that the Peoplesoft product is pretty much dying, and you should start thinking about converting to Oracle Apps (Oracle's ERP offering built on top of Oracle DB which competes against Peoplesoft). Peoplesoft runs (ran?) on multiple databases-- the user had a choice. Oracle Apps is built almost entirely on PL/SQL stored procedures, and will never, ever run on any other database than Oracle.
Those acquisitions you mentioned (at least the Peoplesoft one, the only one that I have been closely involved with personally) are moves designed to kill serious competition and consolidating the marketplace. It's designed to acquire new customers to lock in. It's not about increasing a portfolio of knowledge and capability.
That's a little harsh. The original article was vague about how they arrived at the numbers. He showed his work and provided some references. His number was a small fraction of ubuntu's estimate. Then that sparked some conversation about why it might be so radically different-- for example pointing out that the number of people isn't necessarily the same as the number of installs. It's called contemplation, or discussion. Contemplation and discussion may annoy you enough to just bag on all topics of discussion, and that is called trolling, or being a douchebag.
In all seriousness, though, iPhone and Android are rapidly changing the landscape of mobile devices and computing and inter-personal communications in general. Nokia's pretty much going to get left in the dust, unless their Android products catch on.
With regard to Macs, the world is changing to a more platform-neutral world, where Macs work as well as any other kind of computer. Actually, Mac laptops make better Windows machines than any other laptop I've ever used. Mac laptops have an impressive market share.
I realize you know all this, and are just pointing out that iPhone isn't the dominant phone. But 2007 was about mobile phones. 2010 and beyond is about mobile computing devices.
As someone who has a few years experience after graduating college, getting laid off due to budget cuts, and recently finding a new job, I can say that the hiring managers like you are horribly taking advantage of the bad economy.
Not so much. For every hiring manager like him who doesn't believe in discriminating against people that are overqualified, there are a bunch of do discriminate against people who are overqualified.
In 2001 after the dotcom crash, I was overqualified for most things that were available, desperate for any job. I started dumbing down my resume, posing as a more entry level position. People just didn't want to take a high power person and accept them into a low paying job.
My advice is to have something very specific that is compatible with the needs of who you're applying for. For example, I wanted to break into the telephony business. So I went and did a bunch of stuff with Asterisk (using softphones, because I couldn't afford to buy real hardware). I built some things that itnerested me, specifically phone sex dating sites. I was able to demonstrate that to the company I was applying to, and landed a really fun job. This was a few years ago, when people still used phones.
Figure out what interests you, and start building something you can demonstrate and talk about during your interviews, something that applies specifically to the class of job that interests you. And in the mean time, figure out how to live ultra cheap: no car, learn to cook beans and rice and make awesome burritos for $0.70USD per serving and so on.
Exactly right. Or to look at the flipside: In the C64 era, I often heard old timers talk about "kids these days! You just bring your computer home and plug it in! If you really want to know something about computers, build it yourself, like I had to do with my Altair and my Heathkit!" If you look at Popular Science from the 1950's it isn't even talking about computers much-- just a lot of radar, radio, and general electronics. Most people today don't know the first thing about RF, but that was all the rage then.
And before that, people probably raged about losing the art of sword mastery with the advent of guns. And on and on.
Nostalgia is great and all. But on a C64 I'd write a FOR/NEXT loop from 1 to about 400 to do a 1 second delay. Write that in C, or heck, Python or even javascript and see what happens. Computers are mind blowingly faster now. Plus, think of the wonders youngsters can learn Google now-- everything from the details of bestiality to the finer points of making explosives with things from the garden supply store. Or even useful things like honing their skills in other languages, or connecting with other cultures from their laptop. Get a grip people: it's better now than it was then!
You're right. But 1920x1080, with 2 or 3 monitors isn't unreasonably expensive to get. And it's getting cheaper with each passing month. I've got my main monitor at 1980x1080, plus 2 monitors on the sides of that slightly smaller. It's cost effective and reasonable to get multiple monitors. It's harder to use the screen real estate effectively than it is to get the real estate.
And you just described why I don't play MMO's. Why pay to "play" a game that's just designed to keep you playing as long as possible (fun doesn't even enter into the equation)?
You're right, and I've felt the same way. But your perspective starts with the assumption that you don't want to interact with the other people that are playing.
MMO's is the principal way that I stay in touch with old friends and family members. We play WoW, we hang out in Second Life, we play board games online- especially Ticket to Ride and some others. One of my sons is in the Army. I've got family members in multiple states, and we spend time together every day. How many dads spend time with their wife, kids, and parents every single day? Even though we're all over the world, we're together every day and generating new memories and experiences together.
In Second Life, you can go learn other languages, spend time with brilliant creators from all over the world. I know and see every day people from Japan, Singapore, Germany, and Great Britain. People that are currently in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The last few years of co-mingling with people from all over the world has been very enriching for me; I didn't really do that before virtual worlds. (Exchanging email or chatting some in IRC isn't the same as goofing off interactively, at least it has not been for me.)
Your point about MMO's being boring is spot on. But people themselves are not always boring, at least the cool ones aren't. MMO's and virtual worlds let people spend time together and dissolve geographical and cultural boundaries. This is why someone might want to play them. Because the game itself is just a computer has limits to how entertaining it can be, but spending quality time with valued friends and family is priceless.
Historically, and still true for the majority of content it is not delivered on a "channel" specific to the subscriber.
Its essentially "broadcast" over the cable network, and subscribers tap into the broadcast...
As systems move to digital delivery it becomes feasible, but requires much more investment than simply the physical cable/fiber network.
To do what you describe would require an "exchange" which would receive content from all supported providers, and a means ot switching incoming streams to individual subscribers.
You're basically describing, say, Ethernet, right? Packets, broadcast to everybody, then routers and switches to route and filter... This was a radical idea in 1960, but it's pretty well trodden territory now. I mean, Hulu.com or Amazon Video On Demand pretty much accomplishes everything stated above, right?
My hatred for RealNetworks defies rational analysis. And with good reason: they fried my machines really hardcore with some of their intrusive can't-remove-this crap way back when, and I never got over the emotional anger. They've cleaned up their ways since then, so I hear. And they were a big part of what inspired me years ago to set myself up to where I can reformat a machine without much effort and zero loss, so some good has come out of it.
I do share some of GP's hatred for Real, and it was well earned and fairly rational. My rational analysis is: they can bite me. I know some of the people from Real though, and they're awesome. Just saying I can't forgive rea networks for some things they did to my pc's in the 90's, or that I let them do when I wanted to play some sound and video and installed their stuff.
No, starting from scratch isn't fun. First you have to spend over a month just learning the learning skills...
Important to note: Eve's time-based training system can at first glance seem like it's going to take a very long time to get where you want to be. But it's way better in many ways than the traditional leveling system in two ways:
Wow or any other MMO takes at least that much time. It's going to take you a month or 3 to get to max level in Wow. Only in Eve, you're not chained to your keyboard. You're free to pursue whatever aspects of the game interest you most while you're training. And there are many more aspects than there are in other MMO's.
In Eve, you can be useful to your friends even before you're a badass. In level-based games, if you're not on par with your teammates' levels, you're useless. Not so in Eve. You can jump in and play with your friends pretty close to right away-- always helpful to have another gun (or at a minimum, target!) along. This is one of the many ways in which Eve is similar to the innovative ideas of UO.
Flip it around then. Do you actually believe that the government of the US does the will of its citizens? Really?
Believing that is at least as near-sighted and weak in critical thinking as believing that there are powerful forces at work behind the public faces of the government. The government does the will of rich lobby groups, and the consent of the people is bought through marketing, secrecy, and deception.
Slashdot Mirror
Truly a burning and interesting question, and one amusingly explored in the movie Duplicity. But in all serious, do talk to your wife about group sex, but I wouldn't wait for people-duplication technology.
When I was a teenager in the mid 80's, I taught Logo to kids at a summer camp on IBM-PC's, this was right about the time the PC Jr. was released. There are of course many flavors and variants of the language. But the one that I taught was a real programming language with variables, loops, functions that took parameters, and the whole enchilada. We wrote some pretty fun, crazy and smart stuff.
I just meant that people can increasingly do things for themselves, rather than having to go to exports. Or that the skill level required for experts to accomplish goals isn't as high as it used to be.
But fair enough. How about different words for you, like "independence", or "self-sufficiency", or "douchebag".
Who gives a shit, seriously? 10 megs, 16 megs... Last time i did this in about 2004 with C# I think it was about 12 megs. But what difference does it make? It'd take a lot more than 10, 20, or 30 megs to make me raise an eyebrow.
Maybe. On the other hand, this is called empowerment. Development horsepower is moving downhill. Power is moving out of the hands of the top developers into the hands of the merely mortal developers. And out of the hands of the merely mortal developers and into the hands of the power users. Here are some other things that are different today vs. the golden days of yore:
Sure, we use more memory now. And yes, it's easier to code than it used to be. I wouldn't say that drag and drop ide's are the be-all end all today, though. Non-gui development environments are just as popular as they used to be, don't you think? I'm thinking of Ruby on Rails, Django...
It's not a troll, it's informative-- from the perspective of explaining how trademark law works. The mod who marked it troll may not like it, but this is what the trademark law is about.
Yes, they did. You and the grandparent are both right, though. For "normal" world event quests, the ranking was based on your contribution, plus the bonus factor of how many times you've done it without getting the special goodie bags. Taking keeps, however, was done based on the random situation you described. Made for a pretty bogus situation.
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
The Peoplesoft acquisition is to a great extent all about strengthening their position in the database market. They bought Peoplesoft, announced that the Peoplesoft product is pretty much dying, and you should start thinking about converting to Oracle Apps (Oracle's ERP offering built on top of Oracle DB which competes against Peoplesoft). Peoplesoft runs (ran?) on multiple databases-- the user had a choice. Oracle Apps is built almost entirely on PL/SQL stored procedures, and will never, ever run on any other database than Oracle.
Those acquisitions you mentioned (at least the Peoplesoft one, the only one that I have been closely involved with personally) are moves designed to kill serious competition and consolidating the marketplace. It's designed to acquire new customers to lock in. It's not about increasing a portfolio of knowledge and capability.
That's a little harsh. The original article was vague about how they arrived at the numbers. He showed his work and provided some references. His number was a small fraction of ubuntu's estimate. Then that sparked some conversation about why it might be so radically different-- for example pointing out that the number of people isn't necessarily the same as the number of installs. It's called contemplation, or discussion. Contemplation and discussion may annoy you enough to just bag on all topics of discussion, and that is called trolling, or being a douchebag.
Not the phones. But otherwise yes.
If I had modpoints, I mod you both trolls! Watch it!
2007 called, and they want their phone back!
In all seriousness, though, iPhone and Android are rapidly changing the landscape of mobile devices and computing and inter-personal communications in general. Nokia's pretty much going to get left in the dust, unless their Android products catch on.
With regard to Macs, the world is changing to a more platform-neutral world, where Macs work as well as any other kind of computer. Actually, Mac laptops make better Windows machines than any other laptop I've ever used. Mac laptops have an impressive market share.
I realize you know all this, and are just pointing out that iPhone isn't the dominant phone. But 2007 was about mobile phones. 2010 and beyond is about mobile computing devices.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you don't live or work in the San Francisco area.
Not so much. For every hiring manager like him who doesn't believe in discriminating against people that are overqualified, there are a bunch of do discriminate against people who are overqualified.
In 2001 after the dotcom crash, I was overqualified for most things that were available, desperate for any job. I started dumbing down my resume, posing as a more entry level position. People just didn't want to take a high power person and accept them into a low paying job.
My advice is to have something very specific that is compatible with the needs of who you're applying for. For example, I wanted to break into the telephony business. So I went and did a bunch of stuff with Asterisk (using softphones, because I couldn't afford to buy real hardware). I built some things that itnerested me, specifically phone sex dating sites. I was able to demonstrate that to the company I was applying to, and landed a really fun job. This was a few years ago, when people still used phones.
Figure out what interests you, and start building something you can demonstrate and talk about during your interviews, something that applies specifically to the class of job that interests you. And in the mean time, figure out how to live ultra cheap: no car, learn to cook beans and rice and make awesome burritos for $0.70USD per serving and so on.
It's the natural state of many animals. The fact that it's not the natural state of affairs for humans is central to what makes us human.
Exactly right. Or to look at the flipside: In the C64 era, I often heard old timers talk about "kids these days! You just bring your computer home and plug it in! If you really want to know something about computers, build it yourself, like I had to do with my Altair and my Heathkit!" If you look at Popular Science from the 1950's it isn't even talking about computers much-- just a lot of radar, radio, and general electronics. Most people today don't know the first thing about RF, but that was all the rage then.
And before that, people probably raged about losing the art of sword mastery with the advent of guns. And on and on.
Nostalgia is great and all. But on a C64 I'd write a FOR/NEXT loop from 1 to about 400 to do a 1 second delay. Write that in C, or heck, Python or even javascript and see what happens. Computers are mind blowingly faster now. Plus, think of the wonders youngsters can learn Google now-- everything from the details of bestiality to the finer points of making explosives with things from the garden supply store. Or even useful things like honing their skills in other languages, or connecting with other cultures from their laptop. Get a grip people: it's better now than it was then!
You're right. But 1920x1080, with 2 or 3 monitors isn't unreasonably expensive to get. And it's getting cheaper with each passing month. I've got my main monitor at 1980x1080, plus 2 monitors on the sides of that slightly smaller. It's cost effective and reasonable to get multiple monitors. It's harder to use the screen real estate effectively than it is to get the real estate.
You're basically describing, say, Ethernet, right? Packets, broadcast to everybody, then routers and switches to route and filter... This was a radical idea in 1960, but it's pretty well trodden territory now. I mean, Hulu.com or Amazon Video On Demand pretty much accomplishes everything stated above, right?
My hatred for RealNetworks defies rational analysis. And with good reason: they fried my machines really hardcore with some of their intrusive can't-remove-this crap way back when, and I never got over the emotional anger. They've cleaned up their ways since then, so I hear. And they were a big part of what inspired me years ago to set myself up to where I can reformat a machine without much effort and zero loss, so some good has come out of it.
I do share some of GP's hatred for Real, and it was well earned and fairly rational. My rational analysis is: they can bite me. I know some of the people from Real though, and they're awesome. Just saying I can't forgive rea networks for some things they did to my pc's in the 90's, or that I let them do when I wanted to play some sound and video and installed their stuff.
Explicitly declaring thrown exceptions is one key thing I like *better* about Java over C#. It's a good idea, not a bad one.
Important to note: Eve's time-based training system can at first glance seem like it's going to take a very long time to get where you want to be. But it's way better in many ways than the traditional leveling system in two ways:
Flip it around then. Do you actually believe that the government of the US does the will of its citizens? Really?
Believing that is at least as near-sighted and weak in critical thinking as believing that there are powerful forces at work behind the public faces of the government. The government does the will of rich lobby groups, and the consent of the people is bought through marketing, secrecy, and deception.
Holy cow, dude, the things you did on this thread blew my mind. Rock on.