Before talking about my inability to read, you should look into yours, since you totally misread what I said. I said that "it should be legal to copy!!", while still saying "people with money should pay!!", right after saying "I feel games are too expensive", literally sound like "I want -others- to pay for me". Didn't I mention that from what I had read in your post, I assumed you didn't pirate? Whoops?
And yes, there are still AAA games being made, because it IS illegal to copy, enough that there is SOME (if not too much) crackdown being made, and thus there is still a lot of lawful people who go by the "Its illegal to copy, so I don't" moto. Go on any mainstream forum, thats the argument of 2/3rd of the people who pay for games. The last third is the "I feel fuzzy inside to support people who make me happy". If it was -officially- legal to copy stuff? You'd lose a heck of a lot of people.
And profitable? Roughly half of the game publishers are in DEEP RED (in the gaming division, for the publishers who do other things than publish games). Two of them is because they're taking heavy loss from their hardware market, and one of those making a heavy profit mostly do so from profitable hardware. On top of that, it makes for an extreme barrier for entry, since you need to be able to eat up the piracy hit. There are exceptions here and there from successful little guys, but almost none of them are their own publisher, either.
Finally, without the laws, I'm sure people would pay. Thats what I said, it would be donations. Donations can make a game like Geometry Wars come to reality. It can make a game like the Penny Arcade game come to reality. It cannot make a game like FF13 come to fruition (not that I'd mind if that -particular- one fell flat, its just an example).
And well, me buying "a game or two" would be quite the drop from "100+ games a year". I'm not going to support an industry alone:) Making entertainment isn't the same as a foundation to save children from cancer. You don't raise douzens of millions from 16 years old kids by making them cry.
Oh, its not? Sure, for things that just require an idea out of nowhere, no problem. For things that require multi-million investments? Oh yes, I really want to spend money in 50 PhDs and some engineers to research something, while a hundred or so companies are just waiting on their ass for me to spit out my product, get a few months (if that!) of early market penetration, and then have it copied by people who don't have the R&D overhead to pay back (and thus only need to provide for the overhead of manufacturing, no need to pay the PhDs and engineers).
Yes, totally sounds like an awesome business plan. Sure, some giants do it -anyway- because they cannot wait for someone else to copy, but... not everyone has IBM's ressources.
Also my moral belief is that copying should be legal in a non-comercial situation. But still I think people who can afford games/movies/music/software should buy most of what they consume.
And since there's (almost) zero commercial use for games, then you're basically saying that you shouldn't, legally, have to pay for games (aside for the rare occasion of a commercial tournement or something), and that people should pay for shit even if they don't have a single reason to do so legally. Yeah, lots of triple A games will be able to be produced on donation budgets...oh yeah/sarcasm.
What that sounds to me is "I dont want to have to pay for games, but I still want games, so -others- should pay for them, but not me". I realise its not what you said (you didn't even say if you pirated games or not, so I'll assume not), but its still what that last quote sounded like.
Because if it isn't good enough for me to buy, I don't want to play it
And because of that, you aren't really a pirate. Your "pirating" is pushing really close to fitting into fair use, and if everyone did that, no one would talk about piracy. The pirates they care about (and there are many, MANY of them), are those who'll pirate games and play the entire thing. How significant those people are, who knows. But there's enough of them to make quite the noise on game forums and more, INCLUDING a vocal minority who'll quite enthousiastly tell everyone who doesn't pirate that they are morons for wasting money, even on the good games.
Lumpy is correct, and that goes for everything, every job, open source, close source, non-software job, everything. All job market experts and professional resume writers will confirm it, too.
When you write your resume (or talk during an interview), you don't say "I worked on XYZ". No one gives a flying duck about what you worked on, because there's at least 10000 people who worked on the same thing, no matter how niche. What people care (and not only dumb ass PHBs and HR), is your achievements. The net gain you provided, the "out of the ordinary" stuff that pushes you ahead of others.
So that line : "and I saved project Z and single handed brought it from a failure to a viable product" is the most important one of the bunch, and thats a sure fire job lander.
Most of the examples you gave seem more like "Less restrictive copyright helps" than no copyright. Give your songs for free! The money is on the tour... Of course, as long as another band doesn't do -exactly- the same songs with a bigger marketing budget (and if everyone does it, ONE of the bands who copy you will most likely be bteter). Also, thats as long as the video of your show isn't in hi definition 7.1 surround blu ray the day after it for free (or even worse, SOLD by someone else). With absolutely -zero- copyright, its a lot less powerful as a promotion tool. (Now it works because you're only letting indiviuals step in... once corporations can rape your copyright too, things get a little grim). Oh, and without IP laws, people can rip off your name, your logo, everything, and not only sell it as free promotion to you... but make it -theirs- and use it for -themselves-.
If you're really well known... no one will think the "fake" Metallica is the real thing. If you're just starting though? BANG! Gone.
For the photographer... yes, giving their pictures away is great if they get their money from hired work (all photographers I know do this). But lets remove all IP laws for a sec there... The photographer's customers aren't going to be too too happy once their FACE (your pictures that you, not only gave away, but couldn't restrict in any ways, shape and form) is on a box of cereals or used on TV to advertise condoms.
Overly strong IP laws and copyright hurts, yes. None at all though... That will leave only niche markets. Heck, look at the extremes like China... their "illegal" copying practices are only working at all because there are people across the ocean who invest millions and billions in their IP products, because they have market for them. The result's good enough that a ton of people are willing to pay for even copies... But if no one needed the original?
And you'd want to stop regulations on medecines? If you did that, medecines would be even LESS tested than they are now... The customers would be "beta testers" like they are in software... oh yeah, that would work. Sure, its far from perfect the way it is now... (a lot of info is "hidden" to push the medecine out even if its known not to work), but without any market restrictions, they could just lie in your face legally on medecines that were barely tested on mice, woohoo!
The only example you gave that would still work with zero copyright or IP laws is your own (the writer stuff). We agree I think that the current system is overboard and doing way way too much, and its hurting rather than helping... Its an extreme. I don't beleive the OTHER extreme is any better, however...
Sounds like its not so much open source involvement, but generally ANY involvement with your field, helps. And thats true for any job, any field, anything. In IT, you could simply do unpaid internships and get similar results. Its just a bit easier to get involved in open source, because you can jump in a project just by writing patches and open they get accepted, and go from there...
But really, any field. Doing some volunteer work has always helped landing a job, its nothing new.
BUYING support is NOT critical for Linux adoption, and never was.
What is critical, is for it to exist. The day my in-house setup Linux network gets pwned because of a mistake I made and can't figure out, or that I lose my main senior Linux sysadmin, or if I want to start a migration before I can hire in-house people to do it, or even more, if my company is too small to have the people it takes, and so on, I want to have something to fall back to, -if- necessary.
Very few types of software can be adopted into the mainstream without paid support as an -option-, because when shit hits the fan, you don't have time to wait on the forums:)
I need to traval a lot between Canada and the US, in ways that cannot be accomodated by telecommunications... Now airlines are simply becoming rediculous... between stuff like this, and a 300$ ticket with 180$ of surcharges (plus a douzen or so charges not part of the surcharge!!!), which makes it a 600$ ticket for a 1 and a half hour flight, I'm seriously looking at turning to GreyHound now, as its 1/4th of the price, and with all of the airport security crap, that 1 and a half hour flight is usually a 4-5 hour flights anyway if you include the time spent at the airport (since most flights are late, canceled, whatever, going through customs, picking your shit, whatever).
So, I've heard a lot of bad stuff GreyHound, but really, how is it? If I have to take another plane, I'm going to go insane.
It is a flawed business model, they know it, and they need to change it... but being an air carrier is a huge investment, you don't move the ship that quickly. Fuel prices rose quickly, but in the last year, it skyrocketed for the carriers, and while they expected it to be bad, they didn't expect it to be THAT bad. So now they are in panic mode, and companies in panic mode do stupid shit.
Indeed. Its been what now? 6-7 years since Windows XP (depending where you draw the starting line)?
People have incredibly short memory, nothing else. Reading the Slashdot story of XP's launch is fairly amusing... Its -not-as bad as Vista's.. but its freakishly close. (Even funnier because I used to be an XP troll back then, raving about the superiority of Linux, didn't install XP until SP1, kept saying how it was crap compared to 2k and blah blahblah... and yet I was one of the early Vista adopter)
Well. If you need a software developer specialist in language XYZ: when economy is good and you have cash, you hire someone (for cheaper) right out of school, and spend time and money training them.
When the economy is bad, you pay up the ass (though cheaper than when the economy is good) for a specialist that can be productive right here and right now, because your ressources are spread thinner and cannot train someone new, even if you had money for it.
I'd widen your assertion a little. Companies want highly qualified people. The demand for those is totally insane. Senior developers, Network Architects (not just network admin), business intelligence specialists (who can also CODE the business intelligence solution and their integration), and so on.
In a semi-recession, its not really jobs that get cut (though of course some are). Its training. You want pre-trained people, and they'll pay premium for it (time is worth more than money in many cases). AND they'll fire everyone else.
The thing is, when.NET runs from anything besides the local computer, in a fully trusted way (that is, the app is on your hard disk, and you're running the exe directly, not through the browser or anything like that), they run with such rediculously low priviledge, you can do very, very little (as in, you can RUN the app... declare some variables... do some math, but not too much since memory will be very limited... and that is about freagin it).
Just running it with full -permissions-, but not full -trust- reduces priviledge by such a crazy amount, nevermind running it from Internet Explorer (where even things that should be completly safe aren't allowed).
I'd be quite interested as to what the exploit actually is.
Also a lot of.NET developers, despite using the latest tool/IDE still write.NET code as if they were coding using a scripting language
God yes. As much as people laugh at Microsoft's certifications... its stated right in their documentations: "Do not use Typed Datasets for large scale enterprise projects".
Yet, what do you see, in half the freagin "large enterprise projects"? Typed datasets!
Official Framework Design Guidelines? They never heard of em! hungarian notation up the wazoo baby! If its an object, it starts with obj!!! (so everything does!) The asp.net webform lifecycle? Whats that! Use Request.Form in page init and move your controls dynamically. Have fun when session timeouts! A datalayer and a business layer should fit in a SINGLE class, just like in the tutorials for newbies. 1500 stored procedures, 1 method per stored procedure, 12 lines of code per method. But thats fine! We'll just have 3 levels of nested #region.
Oh, and lets get the latest shiny asp.net 3rd party components that have 200 features listed on their web site. What do you mean, 150 of those are actually hard coded javascript and they don't tell you? Its shiny! Who cares if the backend API to use it sucks! SHINY!!!.
Its not all that crazy an idea. If you can stand Cobol anyway. I'm a.NET developer, but we have a COBOL department handling the stuff that hasnt been ported yet (and won't be anytime soon, there would be several hundred screens and thousands of processes to replace...no small project), and some of the devs there are in their late 20s... They weren't "lucky" enough to land a job in more recent tech, so they took what was available, and tadah, they make the same salary as people with twice their experience in.NET, Java or PHP now...
I rather take the pay cut, personally, than work with COBOL, but if it doesn't bother you...why not. Just keep yourself up to date for the day you need to jump ship (though potentially your future employer will eventually trash cobol, and you'll be among those who know the business processes upside down, so they'll just pay for your training...win win)
Indeed. Server 2008 is freagin badass, and Vista is actually a lot easier to manage than XP on a large scale, once you have all the tools. Also, who ever heard of companies rolling out new OSes anytime soon anyway? =P Never before the first service pack, and you only START to consider it after said SP is out... then it takes a year or two.
Hell, one of my previous employers upgraded to XP months after SP2...
Technically, if you have a good HDTV (and no, its not because its some fancy Sony one at 3000$ that its good, amusingly enough), SD stuff looks just fine, and there's no lag.
My current HDTV, a cheap Toshiba, has no lag whatsoever, and it looks ok with SD stuff (not perfect, but good enough). My girlfriend has a "shitty" Vizio that she got for like 500$ on sale for a 34 inch last year... zero lag, and SD (DVDs, Wii, PS2, SNES) content looks -exactly- as good (and sometimes better, it is using component instead of composite on the stuff that supports it) as on a tube TV... the upscaler is simply awesome.
Then my parents have some 3500$ sony, I forget the exact size... fancy stuff... HEEEEEEEEEEELLO LAG FEST!
Indeed... besides, if you watch it in a tiny window, the DVD's native resolution is possibly higher than the one of said tiny area, so you don't even need to upscale... All what Blu Ray would do is suck more CPU cycles (assuming you're using the computer to decode, and not just a TV-in)
The issue is the support afterward. You an pump out something in a fraction of the time, but building a new piece of software was always easy (analysis aside, but if people did their job back then, you can just dig out their doc... thats a huge IF though, as it doesn't happen often).
The catch is the support afterward. Take your typical internal web application. You can pump a fairly complex one of those in a few weeks, or a very complex and powerful one in a few months with a good thing.
Problems start after its deployed. There's all the session issues, the security concerns, integration with third party librairies that often become moving targets, cross-browser issues (yes, even if you ignore IE...Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 broke a few things, for example... nothing major, but enough to force some to go back in the code), and so on and so forth. Oh, and the quality of developers in general went way down, so even if it SHOULD be easy, idiots manage to make it hard for everyone else (coupled with management who won't fire them because its so hard to find people lately).
If you take a modern language, use only the default stuff, make the application command line via SSH/Telnet... you won't have all these issues... Once the software goes through QA, it most likely will work and always work (thus why many Cobol apps are still purring along... nothing to do with COBOL itself).
The same reason everyone using Windows isn't good enough, or that only using one type of antibiotic isn't going to do you much good in the long term. Any process will benefit from variety, else bad guys will have a static target to aim at.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not supportive of all these silly procedures (I take the plane all the time, and they sure do piss me off, and most are rediculously useless, considering the amount of metal I've passed through the scanners by accident...accident!), but if you have a single, static check that never change, even the dumbest lowest grade terrorist (the kind that usually kill themselves MAKING the bomb, nevermind blowing it up) will catch on, and thats bad.
I agree with you except for the "random star" thing. The best deterrant, and most efficient one, isn't to check everyone, or to check no one, its to check random people, just enough to get a "I may get caught" out of the bad guys. Its far, far from perfect, but its about as good as its going to get.
If you single out a certain demographic as "prime targets" for the random checks (which they do, but it make things worse, not better), you're nullifying one of the main benefits of that method. If having a family with kids and stuff would make it so you won't ever be the "random star", then bad guys will simply travel with fake family and some kids. If being from the middle-east makes you a bigger target, the bad guys will just enroll gullible westerners.
It has to be really random, and that means really, randomly, picking "anyone". Enough to put a doubt in the mind of bad guys, not enough that you'd get selected 4 times in a row.
Unfortunately, I did get selected over 6 times in a row myself (and I'm no more a "risk" than you described yourself), so something is wrong in the process =P
You jest, and I don't know about the music companies, but for software (both games and otherwise), many, many companies will actually do that.
Even Microsoft! If you have a valid cd key, they'll happily ship you medias for 5$. Heck, they go farther... if you bought Windows 32 bit, and want 64 bit (in Vista Ultimate you get both medias in the box, so I'm talking for the other editions and stuff), again for the same 5$ or so, they'll send you the 64 bit medias.
Agree or disagree with the "license" thing, but they DO handle it as a license, and -will- give you new medias at cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Before talking about my inability to read, you should look into yours, since you totally misread what I said. I said that "it should be legal to copy!!", while still saying "people with money should pay!!", right after saying "I feel games are too expensive", literally sound like "I want -others- to pay for me". Didn't I mention that from what I had read in your post, I assumed you didn't pirate? Whoops?
And yes, there are still AAA games being made, because it IS illegal to copy, enough that there is SOME (if not too much) crackdown being made, and thus there is still a lot of lawful people who go by the "Its illegal to copy, so I don't" moto. Go on any mainstream forum, thats the argument of 2/3rd of the people who pay for games. The last third is the "I feel fuzzy inside to support people who make me happy". If it was -officially- legal to copy stuff? You'd lose a heck of a lot of people.
And profitable? Roughly half of the game publishers are in DEEP RED (in the gaming division, for the publishers who do other things than publish games). Two of them is because they're taking heavy loss from their hardware market, and one of those making a heavy profit mostly do so from profitable hardware. On top of that, it makes for an extreme barrier for entry, since you need to be able to eat up the piracy hit. There are exceptions here and there from successful little guys, but almost none of them are their own publisher, either.
Finally, without the laws, I'm sure people would pay. Thats what I said, it would be donations. Donations can make a game like Geometry Wars come to reality. It can make a game like the Penny Arcade game come to reality. It cannot make a game like FF13 come to fruition (not that I'd mind if that -particular- one fell flat, its just an example).
And well, me buying "a game or two" would be quite the drop from "100+ games a year". I'm not going to support an industry alone :) Making entertainment isn't the same as a foundation to save children from cancer. You don't raise douzens of millions from 16 years old kids by making them cry.
Oh, its not? Sure, for things that just require an idea out of nowhere, no problem. For things that require multi-million investments? Oh yes, I really want to spend money in 50 PhDs and some engineers to research something, while a hundred or so companies are just waiting on their ass for me to spit out my product, get a few months (if that!) of early market penetration, and then have it copied by people who don't have the R&D overhead to pay back (and thus only need to provide for the overhead of manufacturing, no need to pay the PhDs and engineers).
Yes, totally sounds like an awesome business plan. Sure, some giants do it -anyway- because they cannot wait for someone else to copy, but... not everyone has IBM's ressources.
And since there's (almost) zero commercial use for games, then you're basically saying that you shouldn't, legally, have to pay for games (aside for the rare occasion of a commercial tournement or something), and that people should pay for shit even if they don't have a single reason to do so legally. Yeah, lots of triple A games will be able to be produced on donation budgets...oh yeah /sarcasm.
What that sounds to me is "I dont want to have to pay for games, but I still want games, so -others- should pay for them, but not me". I realise its not what you said (you didn't even say if you pirated games or not, so I'll assume not), but its still what that last quote sounded like.
And because of that, you aren't really a pirate. Your "pirating" is pushing really close to fitting into fair use, and if everyone did that, no one would talk about piracy. The pirates they care about (and there are many, MANY of them), are those who'll pirate games and play the entire thing. How significant those people are, who knows. But there's enough of them to make quite the noise on game forums and more, INCLUDING a vocal minority who'll quite enthousiastly tell everyone who doesn't pirate that they are morons for wasting money, even on the good games.
Lumpy is correct, and that goes for everything, every job, open source, close source, non-software job, everything. All job market experts and professional resume writers will confirm it, too.
When you write your resume (or talk during an interview), you don't say "I worked on XYZ". No one gives a flying duck about what you worked on, because there's at least 10000 people who worked on the same thing, no matter how niche. What people care (and not only dumb ass PHBs and HR), is your achievements. The net gain you provided, the "out of the ordinary" stuff that pushes you ahead of others.
So that line : "and I saved project Z and single handed brought it from a failure to a viable product" is the most important one of the bunch, and thats a sure fire job lander.
Most of the examples you gave seem more like "Less restrictive copyright helps" than no copyright. Give your songs for free! The money is on the tour... Of course, as long as another band doesn't do -exactly- the same songs with a bigger marketing budget (and if everyone does it, ONE of the bands who copy you will most likely be bteter). Also, thats as long as the video of your show isn't in hi definition 7.1 surround blu ray the day after it for free (or even worse, SOLD by someone else). With absolutely -zero- copyright, its a lot less powerful as a promotion tool. (Now it works because you're only letting indiviuals step in... once corporations can rape your copyright too, things get a little grim). Oh, and without IP laws, people can rip off your name, your logo, everything, and not only sell it as free promotion to you... but make it -theirs- and use it for -themselves-.
If you're really well known... no one will think the "fake" Metallica is the real thing. If you're just starting though? BANG! Gone.
For the photographer... yes, giving their pictures away is great if they get their money from hired work (all photographers I know do this). But lets remove all IP laws for a sec there... The photographer's customers aren't going to be too too happy once their FACE (your pictures that you, not only gave away, but couldn't restrict in any ways, shape and form) is on a box of cereals or used on TV to advertise condoms.
Overly strong IP laws and copyright hurts, yes. None at all though... That will leave only niche markets. Heck, look at the extremes like China... their "illegal" copying practices are only working at all because there are people across the ocean who invest millions and billions in their IP products, because they have market for them. The result's good enough that a ton of people are willing to pay for even copies... But if no one needed the original?
And you'd want to stop regulations on medecines? If you did that, medecines would be even LESS tested than they are now... The customers would be "beta testers" like they are in software... oh yeah, that would work. Sure, its far from perfect the way it is now... (a lot of info is "hidden" to push the medecine out even if its known not to work), but without any market restrictions, they could just lie in your face legally on medecines that were barely tested on mice, woohoo!
The only example you gave that would still work with zero copyright or IP laws is your own (the writer stuff). We agree I think that the current system is overboard and doing way way too much, and its hurting rather than helping... Its an extreme. I don't beleive the OTHER extreme is any better, however...
Sounds like its not so much open source involvement, but generally ANY involvement with your field, helps. And thats true for any job, any field, anything. In IT, you could simply do unpaid internships and get similar results. Its just a bit easier to get involved in open source, because you can jump in a project just by writing patches and open they get accepted, and go from there...
But really, any field. Doing some volunteer work has always helped landing a job, its nothing new.
BUYING support is NOT critical for Linux adoption, and never was.
What is critical, is for it to exist. The day my in-house setup Linux network gets pwned because of a mistake I made and can't figure out, or that I lose my main senior Linux sysadmin, or if I want to start a migration before I can hire in-house people to do it, or even more, if my company is too small to have the people it takes, and so on, I want to have something to fall back to, -if- necessary.
Very few types of software can be adopted into the mainstream without paid support as an -option-, because when shit hits the fan, you don't have time to wait on the forums :)
I need to traval a lot between Canada and the US, in ways that cannot be accomodated by telecommunications... Now airlines are simply becoming rediculous... between stuff like this, and a 300$ ticket with 180$ of surcharges (plus a douzen or so charges not part of the surcharge!!!), which makes it a 600$ ticket for a 1 and a half hour flight, I'm seriously looking at turning to GreyHound now, as its 1/4th of the price, and with all of the airport security crap, that 1 and a half hour flight is usually a 4-5 hour flights anyway if you include the time spent at the airport (since most flights are late, canceled, whatever, going through customs, picking your shit, whatever).
So, I've heard a lot of bad stuff GreyHound, but really, how is it? If I have to take another plane, I'm going to go insane.
It is a flawed business model, they know it, and they need to change it... but being an air carrier is a huge investment, you don't move the ship that quickly. Fuel prices rose quickly, but in the last year, it skyrocketed for the carriers, and while they expected it to be bad, they didn't expect it to be THAT bad. So now they are in panic mode, and companies in panic mode do stupid shit.
Indeed. Its been what now? 6-7 years since Windows XP (depending where you draw the starting line)?
People have incredibly short memory, nothing else. Reading the Slashdot story of XP's launch is fairly amusing... Its -not-as bad as Vista's.. but its freakishly close. (Even funnier because I used to be an XP troll back then, raving about the superiority of Linux, didn't install XP until SP1, kept saying how it was crap compared to 2k and blah blahblah... and yet I was one of the early Vista adopter)
Err, duh?
Well. If you need a software developer specialist in language XYZ: when economy is good and you have cash, you hire someone (for cheaper) right out of school, and spend time and money training them.
When the economy is bad, you pay up the ass (though cheaper than when the economy is good) for a specialist that can be productive right here and right now, because your ressources are spread thinner and cannot train someone new, even if you had money for it.
I'd widen your assertion a little. Companies want highly qualified people. The demand for those is totally insane. Senior developers, Network Architects (not just network admin), business intelligence specialists (who can also CODE the business intelligence solution and their integration), and so on.
In a semi-recession, its not really jobs that get cut (though of course some are). Its training. You want pre-trained people, and they'll pay premium for it (time is worth more than money in many cases). AND they'll fire everyone else.
The thing is, when .NET runs from anything besides the local computer, in a fully trusted way (that is, the app is on your hard disk, and you're running the exe directly, not through the browser or anything like that), they run with such rediculously low priviledge, you can do very, very little (as in, you can RUN the app... declare some variables... do some math, but not too much since memory will be very limited... and that is about freagin it).
Just running it with full -permissions-, but not full -trust- reduces priviledge by such a crazy amount, nevermind running it from Internet Explorer (where even things that should be completly safe aren't allowed).
I'd be quite interested as to what the exploit actually is.
God yes. As much as people laugh at Microsoft's certifications... its stated right in their documentations: "Do not use Typed Datasets for large scale enterprise projects".
Yet, what do you see, in half the freagin "large enterprise projects"? Typed datasets!
Official Framework Design Guidelines? They never heard of em! hungarian notation up the wazoo baby! If its an object, it starts with obj!!! (so everything does!) The asp.net webform lifecycle? Whats that! Use Request.Form in page init and move your controls dynamically. Have fun when session timeouts! A datalayer and a business layer should fit in a SINGLE class, just like in the tutorials for newbies. 1500 stored procedures, 1 method per stored procedure, 12 lines of code per method. But thats fine! We'll just have 3 levels of nested #region.
Oh, and lets get the latest shiny asp.net 3rd party components that have 200 features listed on their web site. What do you mean, 150 of those are actually hard coded javascript and they don't tell you? Its shiny! Who cares if the backend API to use it sucks! SHINY!!!.
Please kill me.
Its not all that crazy an idea. If you can stand Cobol anyway. I'm a .NET developer, but we have a COBOL department handling the stuff that hasnt been ported yet (and won't be anytime soon, there would be several hundred screens and thousands of processes to replace...no small project), and some of the devs there are in their late 20s... They weren't "lucky" enough to land a job in more recent tech, so they took what was available, and tadah, they make the same salary as people with twice their experience in .NET, Java or PHP now...
I rather take the pay cut, personally, than work with COBOL, but if it doesn't bother you...why not. Just keep yourself up to date for the day you need to jump ship (though potentially your future employer will eventually trash cobol, and you'll be among those who know the business processes upside down, so they'll just pay for your training...win win)
Indeed. Server 2008 is freagin badass, and Vista is actually a lot easier to manage than XP on a large scale, once you have all the tools. Also, who ever heard of companies rolling out new OSes anytime soon anyway? =P Never before the first service pack, and you only START to consider it after said SP is out... then it takes a year or two.
Hell, one of my previous employers upgraded to XP months after SP2...
Technically, if you have a good HDTV (and no, its not because its some fancy Sony one at 3000$ that its good, amusingly enough), SD stuff looks just fine, and there's no lag.
My current HDTV, a cheap Toshiba, has no lag whatsoever, and it looks ok with SD stuff (not perfect, but good enough). My girlfriend has a "shitty" Vizio that she got for like 500$ on sale for a 34 inch last year... zero lag, and SD (DVDs, Wii, PS2, SNES) content looks -exactly- as good (and sometimes better, it is using component instead of composite on the stuff that supports it) as on a tube TV... the upscaler is simply awesome.
Then my parents have some 3500$ sony, I forget the exact size... fancy stuff... HEEEEEEEEEEELLO LAG FEST!
Indeed... besides, if you watch it in a tiny window, the DVD's native resolution is possibly higher than the one of said tiny area, so you don't even need to upscale... All what Blu Ray would do is suck more CPU cycles (assuming you're using the computer to decode, and not just a TV-in)
The issue is the support afterward. You an pump out something in a fraction of the time, but building a new piece of software was always easy (analysis aside, but if people did their job back then, you can just dig out their doc... thats a huge IF though, as it doesn't happen often).
The catch is the support afterward. Take your typical internal web application. You can pump a fairly complex one of those in a few weeks, or a very complex and powerful one in a few months with a good thing.
Problems start after its deployed. There's all the session issues, the security concerns, integration with third party librairies that often become moving targets, cross-browser issues (yes, even if you ignore IE...Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 broke a few things, for example... nothing major, but enough to force some to go back in the code), and so on and so forth. Oh, and the quality of developers in general went way down, so even if it SHOULD be easy, idiots manage to make it hard for everyone else (coupled with management who won't fire them because its so hard to find people lately).
If you take a modern language, use only the default stuff, make the application command line via SSH/Telnet... you won't have all these issues... Once the software goes through QA, it most likely will work and always work (thus why many Cobol apps are still purring along... nothing to do with COBOL itself).
I can't tell if you're jesting, or if you simple don't know that most of the cobol variants you named actually do exist....
Yeah, cuz after catching 6 bad guys in the same day, you'll still let things go on normally, right? =P
The same reason everyone using Windows isn't good enough, or that only using one type of antibiotic isn't going to do you much good in the long term. Any process will benefit from variety, else bad guys will have a static target to aim at.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not supportive of all these silly procedures (I take the plane all the time, and they sure do piss me off, and most are rediculously useless, considering the amount of metal I've passed through the scanners by accident...accident!), but if you have a single, static check that never change, even the dumbest lowest grade terrorist (the kind that usually kill themselves MAKING the bomb, nevermind blowing it up) will catch on, and thats bad.
I agree with you except for the "random star" thing. The best deterrant, and most efficient one, isn't to check everyone, or to check no one, its to check random people, just enough to get a "I may get caught" out of the bad guys. Its far, far from perfect, but its about as good as its going to get.
If you single out a certain demographic as "prime targets" for the random checks (which they do, but it make things worse, not better), you're nullifying one of the main benefits of that method. If having a family with kids and stuff would make it so you won't ever be the "random star", then bad guys will simply travel with fake family and some kids. If being from the middle-east makes you a bigger target, the bad guys will just enroll gullible westerners.
It has to be really random, and that means really, randomly, picking "anyone". Enough to put a doubt in the mind of bad guys, not enough that you'd get selected 4 times in a row.
Unfortunately, I did get selected over 6 times in a row myself (and I'm no more a "risk" than you described yourself), so something is wrong in the process =P
You jest, and I don't know about the music companies, but for software (both games and otherwise), many, many companies will actually do that.
Even Microsoft! If you have a valid cd key, they'll happily ship you medias for 5$. Heck, they go farther... if you bought Windows 32 bit, and want 64 bit (in Vista Ultimate you get both medias in the box, so I'm talking for the other editions and stuff), again for the same 5$ or so, they'll send you the 64 bit medias.
Agree or disagree with the "license" thing, but they DO handle it as a license, and -will- give you new medias at cost.