That clarifies things. Boxing and unboxing were the only terms from the original post I hadn't heard before. Of course, I immediately guessed what they referred to. Now, in my days (*cough* *cough*) we called this "referencing" and "dereferencing". Quite a bit clearer, but, of course, not sounding as cool as "boxing".
I mean, what would he need it for? Entertainment? I'm sorry, but I am not going to play support guru for my dad's entertainment. I support his text processing, because he writes books and so it's part of his needs. But if he wants to surf for pr0n, he should get a Mac.
Making customers happy has never been a Microsoft objective.
If it will get them more money, sure, happy customers is what they will go for. But in general, a happy customer is not going to make one money, quite the contrary.
The trick is to make the customer unhappy, but give him the idea that he will be happy with the next release. That's the way to sell things. Microsoft has been doing it for about two decades.
No, they can't. SCO stated that the licenses were of a 7-figure value. Not that EV1 paid seven figures for them. Since SCO values these licenses at $699, if they gave EV1 14,500 licenses, even for a measly ten bucks for the whole lot, that would be of the value of the aforementioned sum. It's even more funny because EV1 can't say what they actually paid, according to the contract, while SCO is allowed to suggest ridiculous amounts of dough. Poor EV1, they thought they had a good deal...
New material added to the movies is very unlikely. It's not for nothing that it takes Jackson almost a year to finish an extended edition. It's basically a whole new movie that is being made, starting with a new script, new footage that needs to be shot, new computer FX that must be created, new music that must be composed, new editting, etc, etc. It's more than "adding a scene that was deleted for reasons of time".
The Trilogy Edition will be the three EEs in one box. Perhaps a DVD added with extra material, who knows. If an idiot would add a scene to the movies at this point, it would make them worse.
Although it must be said that Jackson, in the commentary track of the FotR, remarks that Gollum in his one-second cameo looks different here than in TTT, so he will probably need to redo that shot.
Obviously, Black & White degenerated from an open game in the early design phase to a crap closed game when it was in published. It probably went like this:
Early design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature and you have a Populace. Go ahead, do what you like.
Molyneux: But we need challenges otherwise it's boring!
Not-So-Early design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature and you have a Populace. Go ahead, beat all the small challenges we supply you with.
Molyneux: But we need goals otherwise it's boring!
Late design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature, you have a Populace and you have a lot of small Challenges. Go ahead, find your way to all the other worlds we have supplied!
Molyneux: But we need something to struggle towards otherwise it's boring!
Published game: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature, you have a Populace, you have a lot of small Challenges, and you have other worlds to discover. Go ahead, beat the Other God that is competing with you!
Morrowind, if played right, does not contain a lot of walking and running. I can reach any spot in Morrowind from any other spot in two minutes or less (on the surface, that is). It takes a while before you are powerful enough to do this, however. But that's just another challenge!
It is really impossible to validate such numbers because they can be anything.
I once worked on a research project that implemented an application that could calculate the economic and environmental impact of creating certain kinds of windows. I was part of the team that created the application. Basically, what you could do was create a network of dependencies, like: this window uses a frame of a certain kind of wood. The size of the frame is such-and-such. To get from a cut tree to this frame, we need to cut up the tree in this way. Cutting the tree cost so much. It takes the guy who does it 10 minutes, and that costs so much. The distance from the tree's origin to the factory is this many miles, and transport costs... etc. This was then weighted against the life expectancy of the window and the expectation for energy conservation.
I conversed a lot with the people that used the application. For years I regularly was hearing discussions about what economical and environmental costs you could attach to the production of a window. For instance, the transport of the trees is done by a lorry. Obviously, you have costs in petrol. But also the lorry needs regular maintenance, so part of the environmental costs of the maintenance goes to the trees that are transported. And also, because it is used, at some point the lorry needs to be replaced. So part of the replacement vehicle goes to the costs of the trees. However, a replacement vehicle must be produced, so part of environmental damage of producing a lorry goes to the trees. But such a lorry is produced by workers who travel to work, so part of the environmental damage caused by their travelling goes to the trees, etc, etc. Continuing such a line of reasoning can make the production of one window frame responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.
If you are wondering: this was not a very successful project.
It's not the money. It's the fact that all that RAM is used by the OS. IF it is used by the OS, that means it costs processing cycles. Lots of them. That means processing power is moved from applications to the OS. Isn't that the wrong way around?
I have written several applications that really need speed (for instance, complex evolutionary learning stuff). I have one here that I wrote originally for Windows 3.1. When I moved to Windows 95, recompiling for 32 bits, I got a speed increase of about 400%. That is mainly because Windows 3.1 was so incredibly badly written. However, after that, every time I moved to later Windows versions I got serious speed decreases.
Comparing the 486DX33 I used for my earliest experiments and the P4/2.4GHz I've got now, I should have had a speed increase of something like 10,000%. The actual speed increase is about 500%. All the rest of that processing power is taken over by the OS. I ask you again, isn't this the wrong way around?
Before the hour is up, when all seems hopeless, the lead detective finds the criminal made "one fatal mistake" - like leaving an email around that specifies his evil plans to the detail.
Life is not like a television show. Chances are excellent this email is bogus.
I should check the spelling mistakes... maybe when you place all wrongly spelled letters together they form a phrase like "Hahaha I fooled you all - Billyboy".
Now job security has proven to be a whiff of smoke, I have been thinking about what I am going to do when I lose my job.
I love my job (I am a university researcher in computer science). I left my previous job as a commercial researcher, which I also liked and with a 30% higher salary and great benefits, purely for job satisfaction. The problem is that if I lose this job, I won't be able to find another research job in the neighborhood, and at the moment moving is impossible for me.
Considering this, I thought that, if I indeed lose my job, the best move would be to become either a plumber or an electrician. These people make serious money and are always in demand. And the best part is, it is a nine-to-five job (contrary to my current work which is more of a nine-to-nine job). When you get home, you wash up and have the rest of the evening all for yourself. I can play with computers as a hobby!
In one of my previous jobs I have been in the same position. My boss hired lots of outside consultants to give advice on how to do the job he hired me for in the first place (and he hired me because my credentials proved I was able to do that job very well). What I found was that most of those consultants, after having met the boss, started by doing exploratory research on the work floor to "identify the exact problems", which came down to them asking the work force their opinion on solving the problem at hand. They then wrote down those opinions in a report and presented it to the boss as their own.
The advantage of those consultants was that at least their report would present my own recommendations on solving the problem, albeit under the consultant's name. That is a whole lot better than those consultants that just didn't interview anyone but adviced the boss to take some draconian measure, which admittedly solved the problem but created five new ones alongside.
I eventually left this job precisely because of these situations. If I am good at a job, I want management to recognize that. If they can't do that, that is not the job for me.
The day I left I went around the office and also talked to some bosses of other departments. Many of them asked me to, instead of leaving, come to their department to a job with a lot more responsibility (and a much higher salary). It's funny how people from the relative outside can see more than your own boss.
I don't agree. I loved Thief 2, but lost interest playing Thief 1 after three missions. Thief 1 was too much like the regular first-person shooters: killing lots of things. While the first mission was about sneaking, the second one was zombie killing, the third one was zombie killing... and by then I didn't care anymore. While in Thief 2, the first mission that really required you to kill things is nine or ten, with the ape monsters. So, in my opinion Thief 2 was much more an original game than Thief 1 was - Thief 1 had the good idea, while Thief 2 brought it to perfection.
Incidentally, is anyone else worried that all the screenshots on the Thief 3 website are third-person view?
SCO distributed the program while declaring the GPL void. So, they did not distribute it under the GPL. That's a violation of the very first line of section 4.
It's true, SCO won't care a tinker's bit about what happened with NMAP and will continue to distribute it. If they would stop distributing it, it would confirm that they take the GPL seriously, and that's exactly the impression they do not want to give.
However, NMAP did something else: according to the release notes it removed compatibility with SCO's products. That means that SCO can not get a new version of NMAP, unless they create it themselves (and I seriously doubt SCO is interested in doing any programming), and their users will be b0rked if they download and install a new version of NMAP on their systems.
If a few more applications go the same way, SCO's own products will be seriously harmed. I don't think SCO is really bothered by this, seeing how they treat their own customers, but the point is that NMAP is doing something tangible that works outside the courts. That is, IMHO, a Good Thing.
Free speech (openness) and patents (restrictiveness) really have nothing in common, but I guess you know that and you are just trolling a bit.
That is not to say that patents are, in themselves, bad things. It is for what they are granted that is the problem.
If someone creates a totally new end-product, with a working prototype, and wants to find capital to produce and sell it, I'd say awarding this person a patent is the right thing to do.
If someone knows of a problem and thinks that you could possibly solve this with a computer, and then applies for a patent for "a method to solve this problem with a computer" without actually implementing this method, I'd say this person is just hoping someone will solve this problem eventually, and when it is with a computer, his cash register will start ringing. That patent application should be rejected. Unfortunately, nowadays patents like these are granted.
What is possibly even worse is that patents are granted not only for (ideas for) end-products, but also for (ideas for) obvious small steps that are part of many solutions. This is especially a problem in writing software, since writing software consists of stringing along thousands and thousands of small steps to form a new application. In the current environment, each of these steps may or may not be patented, and there is no way to find out if they are before the release of the software. And afterwards, you only find out if you are summoned to court (and even then it is not certain, unless you cannot afford such a good team of lawyers as - to coin a name - Microsoft can).
What's the solution? I think there is only one: abolishing all patents which are not granted for working protoypes of end-products. Personally, I think such an end-product can just as well be a software product as a more tangible product. But not an idea, or a process, or an algorithm.
Yep, but (as the name indicates) now they reload it automatically on start-up, so you only need to reload it yourself once more every day. That's progression, isn't it?
The stress of technology is nothing compared to the stress of having children. And having children is not really new.
However, it is undeniable that technology brings stress with it if you don't apply it in the correct way. Examples:
I have a cell phone, but I only turn it on when I need to make a phone call: it is for me to reach someone, not for someone to reach me.
I have a computer, but I am not worrying about using the latest and newest software which needs the latest computer model. I will only start thinking about getting a new computer when I can no longer do the work I need to do on my current one.
I use the Internet, but I am not spending any time on newsgroups - those take far too much of my valuable time.
If you don't let technology live your life, there is not much stress. Techonology helps to relieve it, actually. There is a lesson in this for the average/. geek.
when you are a convicted monopolist. the rules suddenly change.
Although IANAL, I am pretty convinced this is not true. The rules are the same for everyone. The point is that a monopolist can do things others can not, such as killing off a competitor in another market by bundling applications or making sure your competitor's stuff is incompatible with yours.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, using your monopolistic force to your advantage is. You are not allowed to do things others cannot do because they are not a monopoly. However, as a monopoly you do not suffer from restrictions others lack.
Of course, when you are a monopolist who abuses his power, a court may put special restrictions on you as a punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an online petition to complete this game. Only just over 8000 signatures yet, but maybe it can be slashdotted.
The movie industry? You mean Disney dumping their 2D animation for 3D crap?
That clarifies things. Boxing and unboxing were the only terms from the original post I hadn't heard before. Of course, I immediately guessed what they referred to. Now, in my days (*cough* *cough*) we called this "referencing" and "dereferencing". Quite a bit clearer, but, of course, not sounding as cool as "boxing".
I once did research into steganography, and could download HUGE porn archives at work for my research.
I mean, what would he need it for? Entertainment? I'm sorry, but I am not going to play support guru for my dad's entertainment. I support his text processing, because he writes books and so it's part of his needs. But if he wants to surf for pr0n, he should get a Mac.
Making customers happy has never been a Microsoft objective.
If it will get them more money, sure, happy customers is what they will go for. But in general, a happy customer is not going to make one money, quite the contrary.
The trick is to make the customer unhappy, but give him the idea that he will be happy with the next release. That's the way to sell things. Microsoft has been doing it for about two decades.
No, they can't. SCO stated that the licenses were of a 7-figure value. Not that EV1 paid seven figures for them. Since SCO values these licenses at $699, if they gave EV1 14,500 licenses, even for a measly ten bucks for the whole lot, that would be of the value of the aforementioned sum. It's even more funny because EV1 can't say what they actually paid, according to the contract, while SCO is allowed to suggest ridiculous amounts of dough. Poor EV1, they thought they had a good deal...
The Trilogy Edition will be the three EEs in one box. Perhaps a DVD added with extra material, who knows. If an idiot would add a scene to the movies at this point, it would make them worse.
Although it must be said that Jackson, in the commentary track of the FotR, remarks that Gollum in his one-second cameo looks different here than in TTT, so he will probably need to redo that shot.
Early design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature and you have a Populace. Go ahead, do what you like.
Molyneux: But we need challenges otherwise it's boring!
Not-So-Early design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature and you have a Populace. Go ahead, beat all the small challenges we supply you with.
Molyneux: But we need goals otherwise it's boring!
Late design: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature, you have a Populace and you have a lot of small Challenges. Go ahead, find your way to all the other worlds we have supplied!
Molyneux: But we need something to struggle towards otherwise it's boring!
Published game: You are a God, you have a World, you have a Creature, you have a Populace, you have a lot of small Challenges, and you have other worlds to discover. Go ahead, beat the Other God that is competing with you!
Players: What's the Creature good for?
Morrowind, if played right, does not contain a lot of walking and running. I can reach any spot in Morrowind from any other spot in two minutes or less (on the surface, that is). It takes a while before you are powerful enough to do this, however. But that's just another challenge!
I once worked on a research project that implemented an application that could calculate the economic and environmental impact of creating certain kinds of windows. I was part of the team that created the application. Basically, what you could do was create a network of dependencies, like: this window uses a frame of a certain kind of wood. The size of the frame is such-and-such. To get from a cut tree to this frame, we need to cut up the tree in this way. Cutting the tree cost so much. It takes the guy who does it 10 minutes, and that costs so much. The distance from the tree's origin to the factory is this many miles, and transport costs... etc. This was then weighted against the life expectancy of the window and the expectation for energy conservation.
I conversed a lot with the people that used the application. For years I regularly was hearing discussions about what economical and environmental costs you could attach to the production of a window. For instance, the transport of the trees is done by a lorry. Obviously, you have costs in petrol. But also the lorry needs regular maintenance, so part of the environmental costs of the maintenance goes to the trees that are transported. And also, because it is used, at some point the lorry needs to be replaced. So part of the replacement vehicle goes to the costs of the trees. However, a replacement vehicle must be produced, so part of environmental damage of producing a lorry goes to the trees. But such a lorry is produced by workers who travel to work, so part of the environmental damage caused by their travelling goes to the trees, etc, etc. Continuing such a line of reasoning can make the production of one window frame responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.
If you are wondering: this was not a very successful project.
I have written several applications that really need speed (for instance, complex evolutionary learning stuff). I have one here that I wrote originally for Windows 3.1. When I moved to Windows 95, recompiling for 32 bits, I got a speed increase of about 400%. That is mainly because Windows 3.1 was so incredibly badly written. However, after that, every time I moved to later Windows versions I got serious speed decreases.
Comparing the 486DX33 I used for my earliest experiments and the P4/2.4GHz I've got now, I should have had a speed increase of something like 10,000%. The actual speed increase is about 500%. All the rest of that processing power is taken over by the OS. I ask you again, isn't this the wrong way around?
No, it's an anagram of "bonzai phart". (I know the spelling is wrong, but that's Elvish for you!)
Life is not like a television show. Chances are excellent this email is bogus.
I should check the spelling mistakes... maybe when you place all wrongly spelled letters together they form a phrase like "Hahaha I fooled you all - Billyboy".
I love my job (I am a university researcher in computer science). I left my previous job as a commercial researcher, which I also liked and with a 30% higher salary and great benefits, purely for job satisfaction. The problem is that if I lose this job, I won't be able to find another research job in the neighborhood, and at the moment moving is impossible for me.
Considering this, I thought that, if I indeed lose my job, the best move would be to become either a plumber or an electrician. These people make serious money and are always in demand. And the best part is, it is a nine-to-five job (contrary to my current work which is more of a nine-to-nine job). When you get home, you wash up and have the rest of the evening all for yourself. I can play with computers as a hobby!
In one of my previous jobs I have been in the same position. My boss hired lots of outside consultants to give advice on how to do the job he hired me for in the first place (and he hired me because my credentials proved I was able to do that job very well). What I found was that most of those consultants, after having met the boss, started by doing exploratory research on the work floor to "identify the exact problems", which came down to them asking the work force their opinion on solving the problem at hand. They then wrote down those opinions in a report and presented it to the boss as their own.
The advantage of those consultants was that at least their report would present my own recommendations on solving the problem, albeit under the consultant's name. That is a whole lot better than those consultants that just didn't interview anyone but adviced the boss to take some draconian measure, which admittedly solved the problem but created five new ones alongside.
I eventually left this job precisely because of these situations. If I am good at a job, I want management to recognize that. If they can't do that, that is not the job for me.
The day I left I went around the office and also talked to some bosses of other departments. Many of them asked me to, instead of leaving, come to their department to a job with a lot more responsibility (and a much higher salary). It's funny how people from the relative outside can see more than your own boss.
Incidentally, is anyone else worried that all the screenshots on the Thief 3 website are third-person view?
I suspect it's some kind of money laundering racket.
Not so many anymore from the Netherlands since the police came down hard on a group of about fifty 419 spammers in Amsterdam.
SCO distributed the program while declaring the GPL void. So, they did not distribute it under the GPL. That's a violation of the very first line of section 4.
However, NMAP did something else: according to the release notes it removed compatibility with SCO's products. That means that SCO can not get a new version of NMAP, unless they create it themselves (and I seriously doubt SCO is interested in doing any programming), and their users will be b0rked if they download and install a new version of NMAP on their systems.
If a few more applications go the same way, SCO's own products will be seriously harmed. I don't think SCO is really bothered by this, seeing how they treat their own customers, but the point is that NMAP is doing something tangible that works outside the courts. That is, IMHO, a Good Thing.
That is not to say that patents are, in themselves, bad things. It is for what they are granted that is the problem.
If someone creates a totally new end-product, with a working prototype, and wants to find capital to produce and sell it, I'd say awarding this person a patent is the right thing to do.
If someone knows of a problem and thinks that you could possibly solve this with a computer, and then applies for a patent for "a method to solve this problem with a computer" without actually implementing this method, I'd say this person is just hoping someone will solve this problem eventually, and when it is with a computer, his cash register will start ringing. That patent application should be rejected. Unfortunately, nowadays patents like these are granted.
What is possibly even worse is that patents are granted not only for (ideas for) end-products, but also for (ideas for) obvious small steps that are part of many solutions. This is especially a problem in writing software, since writing software consists of stringing along thousands and thousands of small steps to form a new application. In the current environment, each of these steps may or may not be patented, and there is no way to find out if they are before the release of the software. And afterwards, you only find out if you are summoned to court (and even then it is not certain, unless you cannot afford such a good team of lawyers as - to coin a name - Microsoft can).
What's the solution? I think there is only one: abolishing all patents which are not granted for working protoypes of end-products. Personally, I think such an end-product can just as well be a software product as a more tangible product. But not an idea, or a process, or an algorithm.
Yep, but (as the name indicates) now they reload it automatically on start-up, so you only need to reload it yourself once more every day. That's progression, isn't it?
However, it is undeniable that technology brings stress with it if you don't apply it in the correct way. Examples:
If you don't let technology live your life, there is not much stress. Techonology helps to relieve it, actually. There is a lesson in this for the average /. geek.
Although IANAL, I am pretty convinced this is not true. The rules are the same for everyone. The point is that a monopolist can do things others can not, such as killing off a competitor in another market by bundling applications or making sure your competitor's stuff is incompatible with yours.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, using your monopolistic force to your advantage is. You are not allowed to do things others cannot do because they are not a monopoly. However, as a monopoly you do not suffer from restrictions others lack.
Of course, when you are a monopolist who abuses his power, a court may put special restrictions on you as a punishment.