Yup, even with the Xbox 360's RROD issues, I'm pretty confident that this had a BIG thing to do with the PS3's popularity among third party devs. Develop for the 360 when it had twice the user base, but get pirated 3/4rd of the time, or develop for the much smaller PS3 user base, but have 5 times the attach rate.
No brainer, so even when the PS3 looked like it would end up on life support, it was able to "recover" from that alone...
The catch is blackberries in india are, i assume, used a lot for outsourcing. I'm not sure north american IT companies that do business with indians would be too happy about this, either. So in that case, it would be an issue that directly affects local business.
I know you're jesting, but aside for their download/msdn sections sometimes being hosted by a third party who actually does run Linux, Microsoft.com for the most part runs on IIS. Not only that, but its actually hosted on SharePoint.
Unfortunately (and i am NOT a native english speaker), this is not true. For a while it was, until a few years ago when non-english speakers reached a critical mass and started pulling a lot harder. Now you need to localize everything, as the people of many regions will simply reject anything in english.
If there was ever a chance for a universal language (as that would make the world a much better place, regardless of WHICH language it is), its dead now. Or well, i guess it could be mandarin someday, though that is less than ideal once you toss in modern issues with learning writing systems, computers, and accents (which would mess the tones).
Something more akin to japanese systems (without kanji) would probably be ideal if used without the others.
It doesn't get to -40C very frequently in most of the populated (well, more than small villages anyway) regions of canada:). -35 happens, but its far from an average, unless you live all the way north in the middle of nowhere or in the territories.
I'm among those who thought Google Wave was the greatest thing ever. However:
-It only worked in HTML5 browsers (and for a while it was iffy even in Firefox, and of course it required a plugin in IE) -Its a communication program without a native desktop client. Gmail has POP3, IMAP, etc, as well as the Chrome-as-an-app installer to make them look like native-ish apps. Wave had nothing. -It was in BETA! You can only keep things in beta for 5 years so many times before people start stepping back.
Google hired Microsoft's project managers or something?
I didn't try many PDFs, mostly tech ebooks, and on my sony reader (though I only have the small one, not the one that supports PDF fully), it comes out pretty much the same as on a computer. it actually is an issue, because on such a small display tables and graphs and non-textual info is hard to read. However I am told the larger edition supports full pdf formatting. Who knows:)
And you're right, searching the whole collection isn't happening. I have a feeling if ADA and other groups didn't try their hardest to stop ebook readers from hitting colleges and universities, that these features would have made it by now... Unfortunate.
Hopefully as the devices become more and more mainstream, these kinds of capabilities will make it, in the same way MP3 players evolved.
Sony has a full size ereader that has pretty much perfect pdf support, full text search (so far kindle has that too), and has a touch screen that allows you to write all over it with a stylus (as well as gathering your notes on your desktop afterward to organize them if need be).
The success of companies like Microsoft, or more recently, Apple, come from multiple things. Sure, you need the code, but you also need the design, the art work, and the marketing. For the longest time the open source "world" only had the code. In the last few years it got the design and art work (You don't have to go too far back for the days where Linux didn't support any kind of good font engine, and all the themes/icons were rubbish).
And with Ubuntu, they got the marketing (enterprise marketing existed long before with IBM, Redhat, and the others, but they didn't do mass market too good).
And in the world we live, marketing has a LOT more to do with success than actual quality. Obviously we want the quality first and foremost, but without exposure, even contributors will dry out sooner or later.
I wouldn't even say supply is all that limited in practice. There's schools all over, you can go in another country, and overall, I'm pretty sure that there's room for nearly everyone who wants to go college (and have time), or close.
Its a lot worse, and you pointed it out: Its a culture of "everyone MUST have a bachelor, or else!", which gives an health-care-like situation. People end up feeling their lives depend on it, and as you said, the loans are there, and you have to take the decision (usually) at an age where you're not mature enough to understand the ramifications of being 10+ years into debt.
This all means, regardless of supplies, schools basically can charge anything. And they do. The only factor keeping things a little now is the maximum amount of loans one can get (its not quite unlimited) and competitions (at which point people go "screw it, I'm going to state school, harvard isn't worth it, patent lawyers make money anyway")
because for various reasons (some that are even good), Microsoft only normally release patches once a month. When they can't wait, they call it an emergency fix. Simple enough?
Exactly. This isn't the only field where thats true either. There are places where the government tries to help people buy houses in similar ways. End result: house price skyrocketing (that happened pretty badly in places that started allowing people to use their retirement money to pay cashdowns on mortages. House price goes waaaay up instantly.)
Still. If you want to make high lots of $$$, become a consultant where you're actually paid per hour. Find a company that pays time and a half for overtime, that way when you start working 80 hours, you rake in the cash.
Making 100k/year for 35 hours a week, and moving to 150k/year for 80 hours is one hell of a diminishing return, especially when there's better alternatives.
Note: before someone go "but there's only X hours in the weekend, you can't do that much", i'm obviously counting the time before and after the weekend without a break:) So if you work from friday morning to sunday night, well, thats a lot of hours straight spent in front of WinDBG or GDB trying to debug a core dump because you cannot reproduce a problem locally:)
When i worked for one of the top 3 former-US-investment-banks-now-normal-bank as a software developer, doing 70 hours in one weekend was the extreme, with 70-80 hours in one week being common (happened at least once a month, usually more), and 60 hours the rest. We had an amazing vacation package, as far as North America go (4 weeks as soon as you're hired), which no one ever had time to take.
I was more reasonable, doing about 50 hours a week, and everytime I left work, it was before everyone else, and i got dirty looks. I eventually got quite a mouthful from directors being unhappy with how much time i spent at work, and my boss routinely asking me to do stuff on nights and weekends (not just support duties, but actual projects). And I didn't last there, because with 50 hours a week (not counting night/weekend support), I had literally no hope of promotion.
Seriously, 80 hours was normal-ish. Not sleeping for several days in a row in front of the computer (via VPN of course) for an average employee was frequent. And for managers? One of my managers would routinely stay at the office for days on end ordering pizza and sleeping 2-3 hours on the floor before going back at it.
No, i'm not exaggerating. I then left for another company where i took a 2 week vacation cut, and a 25k salary cut, but if i calculate per hour on an average week, my salary technically went up significantly. And keep in mind that most of the developers for these companies work in NYC, London, Tokyo, Toronto, etc, where your 71k/yr base salary is below average for someone straight out of computer science, period (if you don't count people who don't find a job and people who work for universities as researcher), with housing cost being so high.
To work for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sach, JP Morgan, etc, in NYC for anything under 125k/year you have to be retarded, or very very very materialist. Your life is worth more than that:)
I will say this: having worked in one of those so called "investment banks" that did give much higher average salary in the area (you cant compare salary between 2 different areas...), it was DEFINITELY not 40 hours a week.
Weeks of 60 and 80 hours were common. Not sleeping at all on weekend wasn't unheard of.
It really depends how you calculate it. I used to work for a very very large US investment bank (well, former investment bank...if you guess 3 times which one it is you should get it right =P), and when they calculated cost for SAN, they included the rack, the machine to run the drives, all the drives in the raid, then multiply that for all the replicas (local and remote) of the drives as well as the more permanent tapes, then add the extra room needed for the hourly snapshots, plus the time of the support personnel.
The rack space was probably 90% of the cost, easy (and all the above took a lot of room, relatively speaking). Thus the cost was very, very high.
If you have free rack space and free slots in the boxes that has already been factored out, and you don't account for maintenance when calculating, then the price of GB becomes insignificant.
Only because their customer base is so large that even if they lost 90% of their potential customers it would still leave them printing cash.
Use public transportation of any large north american city and look at people using Nintendo DS. Look at the back where the cartridge is. Notice how almost all of them have a micro-sd card slot.
Making a big part of the game online is the only way publishers (developers tend not to care as much) can ensure they can have some sort of effective copy protection (since DRMs don't work because they don't control the client...but they sure as hell can control the servers).
Obviously that doesn't apply to peer-to-peer multiplayers that don't require any interaction with a central server. Sure, you can have an independent server to bypass the need of the main one, but then you lose a big chunk of the community. Not 100% effective, but sure as hell more effective than 99.9999% of DRM out there, so publishers go that route.
How many time do you hear hardcore pirates going "Bah, im gonna buy this game, I want to play online". I know I do almost daily... (yes, daily)
Sorry, my comment was actually a little off topic. I was just questioning the logic as to why (before ebooks) someone would buy a book, then resell it (a physical book).
There are exceptions obviously, but it shouldn't be something common: why would you buy a book to resell it when you can just borrow it for free.
Of course, now I can think "university books" as one hell of a big exception to my line of thought.
And yes, libraries do lend ebooks now, though not many.
Honestly, I don't get this. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you have a point. But good libraries will have virtually any book worth reading, or at least the vast majority (including tech books), and its freeeeeeeeee.
So if you don't plan on keeping the book, why buy it in the first place? And if you're not sure, borrow it first, then buy it.
I mean, i understand this DOES remove an option from you, but most of the time, that option was worthless in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not encrypted (by default: it -CAN- be encrypted using features out of the box), but there is a hash to prevent tempering of the viewstate.
However you have to be careful, by default this is still vulnerable to a replay attack, so its still better not to push your luck with it.
Yup, even with the Xbox 360's RROD issues, I'm pretty confident that this had a BIG thing to do with the PS3's popularity among third party devs. Develop for the 360 when it had twice the user base, but get pirated 3/4rd of the time, or develop for the much smaller PS3 user base, but have 5 times the attach rate.
No brainer, so even when the PS3 looked like it would end up on life support, it was able to "recover" from that alone...
Depends for what part, but Walmart's site runs at least partly on a "NoSQL" (I use the term loosely in this case) system.
The catch is blackberries in india are, i assume, used a lot for outsourcing. I'm not sure north american IT companies that do business with indians would be too happy about this, either. So in that case, it would be an issue that directly affects local business.
I know you're jesting, but aside for their download/msdn sections sometimes being hosted by a third party who actually does run Linux, Microsoft.com for the most part runs on IIS. Not only that, but its actually hosted on SharePoint.
Unfortunately (and i am NOT a native english speaker), this is not true. For a while it was, until a few years ago when non-english speakers reached a critical mass and started pulling a lot harder. Now you need to localize everything, as the people of many regions will simply reject anything in english.
If there was ever a chance for a universal language (as that would make the world a much better place, regardless of WHICH language it is), its dead now. Or well, i guess it could be mandarin someday, though that is less than ideal once you toss in modern issues with learning writing systems, computers, and accents (which would mess the tones).
Something more akin to japanese systems (without kanji) would probably be ideal if used without the others.
But we don't live in an ideal world :)
It doesn't get to -40C very frequently in most of the populated (well, more than small villages anyway) regions of canada :). -35 happens, but its far from an average, unless you live all the way north in the middle of nowhere or in the territories.
I'm among those who thought Google Wave was the greatest thing ever. However:
-It only worked in HTML5 browsers (and for a while it was iffy even in Firefox, and of course it required a plugin in IE)
-Its a communication program without a native desktop client. Gmail has POP3, IMAP, etc, as well as the Chrome-as-an-app installer to make them look like native-ish apps. Wave had nothing.
-It was in BETA! You can only keep things in beta for 5 years so many times before people start stepping back.
Google hired Microsoft's project managers or something?
I didn't try many PDFs, mostly tech ebooks, and on my sony reader (though I only have the small one, not the one that supports PDF fully), it comes out pretty much the same as on a computer. it actually is an issue, because on such a small display tables and graphs and non-textual info is hard to read. However I am told the larger edition supports full pdf formatting. Who knows :)
And you're right, searching the whole collection isn't happening. I have a feeling if ADA and other groups didn't try their hardest to stop ebook readers from hitting colleges and universities, that these features would have made it by now... Unfortunate.
Hopefully as the devices become more and more mainstream, these kinds of capabilities will make it, in the same way MP3 players evolved.
Sony has a full size ereader that has pretty much perfect pdf support, full text search (so far kindle has that too), and has a touch screen that allows you to write all over it with a stylus (as well as gathering your notes on your desktop afterward to organize them if need be).
No go on the scientific paper database though :)
Exactly.
The success of companies like Microsoft, or more recently, Apple, come from multiple things. Sure, you need the code, but you also need the design, the art work, and the marketing. For the longest time the open source "world" only had the code. In the last few years it got the design and art work (You don't have to go too far back for the days where Linux didn't support any kind of good font engine, and all the themes/icons were rubbish).
And with Ubuntu, they got the marketing (enterprise marketing existed long before with IBM, Redhat, and the others, but they didn't do mass market too good).
And in the world we live, marketing has a LOT more to do with success than actual quality. Obviously we want the quality first and foremost, but without exposure, even contributors will dry out sooner or later.
I wouldn't even say supply is all that limited in practice. There's schools all over, you can go in another country, and overall, I'm pretty sure that there's room for nearly everyone who wants to go college (and have time), or close.
Its a lot worse, and you pointed it out: Its a culture of "everyone MUST have a bachelor, or else!", which gives an health-care-like situation. People end up feeling their lives depend on it, and as you said, the loans are there, and you have to take the decision (usually) at an age where you're not mature enough to understand the ramifications of being 10+ years into debt.
This all means, regardless of supplies, schools basically can charge anything. And they do. The only factor keeping things a little now is the maximum amount of loans one can get (its not quite unlimited) and competitions (at which point people go "screw it, I'm going to state school, harvard isn't worth it, patent lawyers make money anyway")
because for various reasons (some that are even good), Microsoft only normally release patches once a month. When they can't wait, they call it an emergency fix. Simple enough?
Exactly. This isn't the only field where thats true either. There are places where the government tries to help people buy houses in similar ways. End result: house price skyrocketing (that happened pretty badly in places that started allowing people to use their retirement money to pay cashdowns on mortages. House price goes waaaay up instantly.)
Still. If you want to make high lots of $$$, become a consultant where you're actually paid per hour. Find a company that pays time and a half for overtime, that way when you start working 80 hours, you rake in the cash.
Making 100k/year for 35 hours a week, and moving to 150k/year for 80 hours is one hell of a diminishing return, especially when there's better alternatives.
Note: before someone go "but there's only X hours in the weekend, you can't do that much", i'm obviously counting the time before and after the weekend without a break :) So if you work from friday morning to sunday night, well, thats a lot of hours straight spent in front of WinDBG or GDB trying to debug a core dump because you cannot reproduce a problem locally :)
When i worked for one of the top 3 former-US-investment-banks-now-normal-bank as a software developer, doing 70 hours in one weekend was the extreme, with 70-80 hours in one week being common (happened at least once a month, usually more), and 60 hours the rest. We had an amazing vacation package, as far as North America go (4 weeks as soon as you're hired), which no one ever had time to take.
I was more reasonable, doing about 50 hours a week, and everytime I left work, it was before everyone else, and i got dirty looks. I eventually got quite a mouthful from directors being unhappy with how much time i spent at work, and my boss routinely asking me to do stuff on nights and weekends (not just support duties, but actual projects). And I didn't last there, because with 50 hours a week (not counting night/weekend support), I had literally no hope of promotion.
Seriously, 80 hours was normal-ish. Not sleeping for several days in a row in front of the computer (via VPN of course) for an average employee was frequent. And for managers? One of my managers would routinely stay at the office for days on end ordering pizza and sleeping 2-3 hours on the floor before going back at it.
No, i'm not exaggerating. I then left for another company where i took a 2 week vacation cut, and a 25k salary cut, but if i calculate per hour on an average week, my salary technically went up significantly. And keep in mind that most of the developers for these companies work in NYC, London, Tokyo, Toronto, etc, where your 71k/yr base salary is below average for someone straight out of computer science, period (if you don't count people who don't find a job and people who work for universities as researcher), with housing cost being so high.
To work for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sach, JP Morgan, etc, in NYC for anything under 125k/year you have to be retarded, or very very very materialist. Your life is worth more than that :)
I will say this: having worked in one of those so called "investment banks" that did give much higher average salary in the area (you cant compare salary between 2 different areas...), it was DEFINITELY not 40 hours a week.
Weeks of 60 and 80 hours were common. Not sleeping at all on weekend wasn't unheard of.
It really depends how you calculate it. I used to work for a very very large US investment bank (well, former investment bank...if you guess 3 times which one it is you should get it right =P), and when they calculated cost for SAN, they included the rack, the machine to run the drives, all the drives in the raid, then multiply that for all the replicas (local and remote) of the drives as well as the more permanent tapes, then add the extra room needed for the hourly snapshots, plus the time of the support personnel.
The rack space was probably 90% of the cost, easy (and all the above took a lot of room, relatively speaking). Thus the cost was very, very high.
If you have free rack space and free slots in the boxes that has already been factored out, and you don't account for maintenance when calculating, then the price of GB becomes insignificant.
Only because their customer base is so large that even if they lost 90% of their potential customers it would still leave them printing cash.
Use public transportation of any large north american city and look at people using Nintendo DS. Look at the back where the cartridge is. Notice how almost all of them have a micro-sd card slot.
Making a big part of the game online is the only way publishers (developers tend not to care as much) can ensure they can have some sort of effective copy protection (since DRMs don't work because they don't control the client...but they sure as hell can control the servers).
Obviously that doesn't apply to peer-to-peer multiplayers that don't require any interaction with a central server. Sure, you can have an independent server to bypass the need of the main one, but then you lose a big chunk of the community. Not 100% effective, but sure as hell more effective than 99.9999% of DRM out there, so publishers go that route.
How many time do you hear hardcore pirates going "Bah, im gonna buy this game, I want to play online". I know I do almost daily... (yes, daily)
Sorry, my comment was actually a little off topic. I was just questioning the logic as to why (before ebooks) someone would buy a book, then resell it (a physical book).
There are exceptions obviously, but it shouldn't be something common: why would you buy a book to resell it when you can just borrow it for free.
Of course, now I can think "university books" as one hell of a big exception to my line of thought.
And yes, libraries do lend ebooks now, though not many.
Honestly, I don't get this. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you have a point. But good libraries will have virtually any book worth reading, or at least the vast majority (including tech books), and its freeeeeeeeee.
So if you don't plan on keeping the book, why buy it in the first place? And if you're not sure, borrow it first, then buy it.
I mean, i understand this DOES remove an option from you, but most of the time, that option was worthless in the first place.
You did realize this was a parody and making fun of Apple's claims, right?
They should make PDFs open in a sandboxed Virtual Machine, now that will be secure!!