I make a LOT more now playing full time than I did working as a software engineer. I would not say I am a great player but I am a sh!tload better than average. Yes everyone gets an equal distribution of the same cards and same situations. It is the ones who have a higher understanding of the underlying statistical probabilities of those situations that will profit from the ones who don't. The University of Alberta has an entire team devoted to trying to solve poker. The best bot they could produce can only equal the best players in the world heads up and cannot beat the best players in a multi-handed games - and this is only limit hold em. To equate a game of poker to a game of dice shows that you understand absolutely nothing about the subject at hand. Dice is solvable - if you get 6:1 odds on your number coming up, your net result will be 0 no matter what number you chose in the long run. Poker is not remotely in the same domain. The information is incomplete. There is no simple case of "if I follow strategy X then I will lose the least / win the most" ie. a Game Theory Optimal solution. In a game of pure chance and luck such a strategy would exist. Please get your facts straight before trying to sound clever and coming off as completely ignorant.
You make a huge leap of faith (which you fail to backup with any fact) that all the money goes offshore. So you are stating that Americans on average are worse poker players than the rest of the world?
You can statistically analyse your hands to determine if you have been running above or below what you should have been given certain situations. It is not hard to do. The only ones who peddle this nonsense are those who just suck at poker and want to blame someone else rather than improve their game "omgz online is rigged!!!1!". I have played both live and online a LOT and you will find just as many suckouts live as you do online.
Reading through this it is amazing the ignorance shown in a lot of the comments.
To elaborate - I will come out and say it. I play poker professionally online. Mid stakes limit hold em to be precise. Firstly, I have been paid in full every time I have made a withdrawal. There are PokerStars offices (yes, real offices, with people working in them) in many countries around the world. I have bought many items, including cash bonuses, through the site store. I have received every single one (including the cash) in a timely manner and have not once had an issue. International freight is via DHL and usually arrives within a week (with no charge on shipping to me). The statement that you will not get paid just shows pure ignorance of the subject. I am sure there are some dodgy sites out there, but there are many dodgy sites out there in other activities too. I suppose you should never buy anything off a site because there are some dodgy sites?
As for fair or not, let me continue...
You can purchase quite sophisticated statistical analysis software for poker. Most (possibly all) professional and serious amateur players use it. It will break down every single part of all the games you have played and you can pull numbers on almost any conceivable situation you have ever been in to find flaws in your game ("leaks" in poker jargon). The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database for you to access if you care to write your own front end. This software stores every single hand I have ever played in. Included is analysis that shows if you are running "lucky" - you can prove mathematically if you have been "lucky" or "unlucky" with how the cards have come out - that is - if your results are skewed due to the cards being dealt giving you statistically more or less wins than you should have on average. There are some VERY smart guys playing (as one would imagine with the money that is at stake) including pros who have post grads in statistics, finance etc. I personally studied electrical engineering and am currently doing some stats study on my own to improve my game and move my play towards the holy grail that is Game Theory Optimal (which may not even exist in multi-handed poker due to incomplete information). These guys are not some country yokels who have no idea if they are being duped or not.
As for bots... Firstly, I invite you to put your money where your mouth is, get a bot and play some mid stakes or higher multi-way poker (6-max or full ring). Your bot will be crushed. Period. Yes I know about Polaris (the University of Alberta bot which can match it with the best heads up limit players in the world). A few points to note. This is for heads up limit - more players than 2 and the game becomes exponentially more difficult for a bot to play. Bots are not all conquering in the poker world as some assume, a good player will crush almost any bot. Unlike other games poker is a loooooong way from being solved (if it can be). As for collusion, this happens unfortunately from time to time (as it does in a real casino) but there are protection mechanisms in place against it. Firstly, the sites employ poker and statistical specialists who have no other job than to keep the games honest. You can see if someone is playing statistically better than they should. Added to that, as a professional player many can quite easily spot when people are colluding on the table. If someone is caught cheating they have their entire playing account funds frozen and anybody who has played against them has their money refunded.
I have played pro live and online. I play online as I can get multiples more hands per hour against weak player in than I can in a live game. Also the rake is a small fraction of what I pay live. The only ones who say "omgz online is rigged" either have no idea what they are talking about, or are players who just suck at poker and instead of working on their game find something else to blame for why they always lose.
Re:Single provider and SOA?
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 1
I have been wondering the same thing. There is a lot of fuss about SOA. SOA this, SOA that. When you look at it, unless I am mistaken, the underlying concept seems to be to make applications data source agnostic. How is this a new concept? Surely I am missing something big here!
If using a tech savvy group as your sample, who know Apple's history then yes Apple == Steve Jobs. However if you talk to the average Joe on the street, Apple == iPod as much as Microsoft == Windows. I hold the opinion that the iPod is to Apple what Win 95 was to MS - it has given them a particular product that everyone knows and can recognize. Notice how Apple is not pushing the Apple brand so much as the iPod brand. People don't buy an iPod because it is made by Apple, if anything (non technical people we are talking about here) they buy an Apple computer because it is made by the same people who make the iPod.
You make light of the technical support, instead focussing on the "warm fuzzy feeling". Technical support is a very serious concern for PHBs when implementing an IT system. After all, it is his head on the chopping block if the system goes down and his response is to have parts of the business out of operation while his guys Google up possible fixes on the net, hoping that one exists. A free unsupported web widget is fine - if something goes wrong you use another one. A free unsupported RDBMS is not so fine - if something goes wrong a large business could be losing upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour if not more.
No arguments from me in regards to companies switching to Firefox (or average home users for that matter too). See it happening everywhere. With OOo usage we will have to agree to disagree on that one.
OO has been incredibly successful at replacing MS Office?? I am sure they exist but I am yet to come across a single work environment that uses OO rather than MS Office - either places I have worked or customer sites. That comment made made me laugh.
I will take it one step further. Most of the whiners on here won't be happy until they can get OS X for free. According to them software is worth $0 and what really peeves them off is that Apple is gaining marketshare with product that is closed source (oh the pain) and that actually costs money to buy (heresy!!) and can't be obtained legally for free.
There has been no evidence that desktop market share is influenced by how open a platform is. If openness was the dominating factor then Win wouldn't have >90% of the desktop market with Apple growing at a very healthy rate while Linux gains virtually nothing.
This is assuming that total cost is only the cost of the software itself. To make a blanket statement that Linux will cut costs if used on the desktop ignores: * cost of re-training end users on new applications * cost of deploying the new OS * cost of retraining / hiring SA's with Linux experience rather than Win SAs * cost of testing existing apps on the new desktops * cost of migrating legacy apps to the new OS
Just because the OS you are migrating to is free to purchase does not mean the cost of deployment and use == $0.
Yes Linux may pick up some marketshare in big business, however I hardly anticipate a massive move in a short period of time, especially in the current economic climate where businesses are trying to cut costs everywhere and can't justify the massive expense of deploying a totally new system when the current one is working.
Which is why Ubuntu is dominating the desktop market while Apple is fading away into oblivion. Ubuntu offers everything anyone could dream of on the desktop while Apple is listening to nobody.
This is all because all anybody cares about when using their home desktop is whether or not they can view the source code to the applications they run and if they can recompile the kernel. Usability has nothing to do with it for the average Joe.
Having done freelance web dev work and having the artistic talent of a brick, my approach was to avoid all graphics work entirely and outsource the lot to a professional graphic artist that I had worked with in the past and knew that his work was excellent. I would then pass on the cost at cost price to my customer. It definitely was not cheap, however I learnt the hard way that dealing with customers who were not prepared to pay professional prices generally meant they had no idea about the true cost of what they were asking for and getting any money at all from them was near impossible.
Yes most gun deaths are suicide or accident, not murders (which already suggests that the portrayed massive gun problem where people were running around shooting each other was massively exaggerated). I am curious about your second assertion - that another large chink are normal disputes which escalate as the direct result of the presence of a gun. Can you provide a link to some statistical proof of that - where it is demonstrated that a domestic dispute led to a murder that otherwise would not have? I am curious if there is any data on proving a direct link between a gun being present in a house and an increased murder rate. Not personal thinking, not an opinion piece by an anti-gun columnist, but something backed by statistics provided by the institute of criminology or the bureau of crime statistics.
In regards to the second part - again i would like to see proof that if I was armed I would be more likely to be robbed and injured / killed than if I were unarmed.
Not trying to be a smart arse in regards to asking for the proof, I am genuinely interested in seeing it if it exists. If it does exist I will gladly change some of my thinking, in the meantime I am not basing my personal safetly purely on the opinion of pacifists.
"It can *store* its data in a proprietary format, but if it can't at least export to some sort of interoperable format, that can raise objections."
I totally agree with you on that point and this one comes up time and time again. It is not uncommon for the question of "what happens to our data if we decide to flip the switch on you in a years time?" or "How will we get access to the retrieved data so we can use it in another system?" to raise its head. So generally whether the system itself is proprietary or not is not so much the question, it is more along the lines of is it possible to access the data in a non-proprietary way if the situation should ever arise that this was required. The potential customer does not necessarily want control of the code, it is more that they want control of their data. A subtle but important difference. They figure the code is the vendors problem and they like it that way - one less headache to worry about - however the data is their problem and they treat it accordingly.
This depends on what you mean by "coming in contact with it". If you mean sharing the same distribution mechanism ie CD, download etc then the GPL will not affect your code. If however your code links to the GPL'ed code then your code must also be GPL'ed, even if your code was not derived from the GPL'ed code.
"I know it doesn't look like that now, but big companies and governments are challenging very seriously the wisdom of having their data controlled by third parties."
Maybe for small and even mid sized apps. The big stuff is still very much the big third party proprietary vendors. Databases in gov and enterprise level is very much still Oracle, IBM and Microsoft generally with Oracle, IBM and Microsoft consultants working on site. ERP systems are very much third party vendors. Same goes for almost all the large scale systems.
Having been involved in a few large scale tenders (>$1million) for industries ranging from gov to universities to a host of others, I have not once seen a requirement in the tender stating that the data is to be kept in a non-proprietary format or that non-proprietary tools are to be used. Generally what the big boys are interested in first and foremost is support, who else in their industry is using the product and how are they maximising its usage, track record of the vendor (references are always called up when a case study is provided) and how well the product fits the requirements / how much customization will be required (as customization == ongoing costs, generally leads to budget blowouts - both time and money - and ongoing maintenance which is usually charged above and beyond the normal support contract). Customizing is viewed as a drawback, not a positive - if at all possible they want the product to work out of the box so to speak. Cost is important but comes further down the list, proprietary v non-proprietary does not even come into it.
Slashdot Mirror
So you believe all online games not hosted in the USA should also be banned, as the net flow of funds is offshore with nothing tangible in return?
I make a LOT more now playing full time than I did working as a software engineer. I would not say I am a great player but I am a sh!tload better than average. Yes everyone gets an equal distribution of the same cards and same situations. It is the ones who have a higher understanding of the underlying statistical probabilities of those situations that will profit from the ones who don't. The University of Alberta has an entire team devoted to trying to solve poker. The best bot they could produce can only equal the best players in the world heads up and cannot beat the best players in a multi-handed games - and this is only limit hold em. To equate a game of poker to a game of dice shows that you understand absolutely nothing about the subject at hand. Dice is solvable - if you get 6:1 odds on your number coming up, your net result will be 0 no matter what number you chose in the long run. Poker is not remotely in the same domain. The information is incomplete. There is no simple case of "if I follow strategy X then I will lose the least / win the most" ie. a Game Theory Optimal solution. In a game of pure chance and luck such a strategy would exist. Please get your facts straight before trying to sound clever and coming off as completely ignorant.
You make a huge leap of faith (which you fail to backup with any fact) that all the money goes offshore. So you are stating that Americans on average are worse poker players than the rest of the world?
You can statistically analyse your hands to determine if you have been running above or below what you should have been given certain situations. It is not hard to do. The only ones who peddle this nonsense are those who just suck at poker and want to blame someone else rather than improve their game "omgz online is rigged!!!1!". I have played both live and online a LOT and you will find just as many suckouts live as you do online.
Reading through this it is amazing the ignorance shown in a lot of the comments.
To elaborate - I will come out and say it. I play poker professionally online. Mid stakes limit hold em to be precise. Firstly, I have been paid in full every time I have made a withdrawal. There are PokerStars offices (yes, real offices, with people working in them) in many countries around the world. I have bought many items, including cash bonuses, through the site store. I have received every single one (including the cash) in a timely manner and have not once had an issue. International freight is via DHL and usually arrives within a week (with no charge on shipping to me). The statement that you will not get paid just shows pure ignorance of the subject. I am sure there are some dodgy sites out there, but there are many dodgy sites out there in other activities too. I suppose you should never buy anything off a site because there are some dodgy sites?
As for fair or not, let me continue...
You can purchase quite sophisticated statistical analysis software for poker. Most (possibly all) professional and serious amateur players use it. It will break down every single part of all the games you have played and you can pull numbers on almost any conceivable situation you have ever been in to find flaws in your game ("leaks" in poker jargon). The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database for you to access if you care to write your own front end. This software stores every single hand I have ever played in. Included is analysis that shows if you are running "lucky" - you can prove mathematically if you have been "lucky" or "unlucky" with how the cards have come out - that is - if your results are skewed due to the cards being dealt giving you statistically more or less wins than you should have on average. There are some VERY smart guys playing (as one would imagine with the money that is at stake) including pros who have post grads in statistics, finance etc. I personally studied electrical engineering and am currently doing some stats study on my own to improve my game and move my play towards the holy grail that is Game Theory Optimal (which may not even exist in multi-handed poker due to incomplete information). These guys are not some country yokels who have no idea if they are being duped or not.
As for bots...
Firstly, I invite you to put your money where your mouth is, get a bot and play some mid stakes or higher multi-way poker (6-max or full ring). Your bot will be crushed. Period. Yes I know about Polaris (the University of Alberta bot which can match it with the best heads up limit players in the world). A few points to note. This is for heads up limit - more players than 2 and the game becomes exponentially more difficult for a bot to play. Bots are not all conquering in the poker world as some assume, a good player will crush almost any bot. Unlike other games poker is a loooooong way from being solved (if it can be). As for collusion, this happens unfortunately from time to time (as it does in a real casino) but there are protection mechanisms in place against it. Firstly, the sites employ poker and statistical specialists who have no other job than to keep the games honest. You can see if someone is playing statistically better than they should. Added to that, as a professional player many can quite easily spot when people are colluding on the table. If someone is caught cheating they have their entire playing account funds frozen and anybody who has played against them has their money refunded.
I have played pro live and online. I play online as I can get multiples more hands per hour against weak player in than I can in a live game. Also the rake is a small fraction of what I pay live. The only ones who say "omgz online is rigged" either have no idea what they are talking about, or are players who just suck at poker and instead of working on their game find something else to blame for why they always lose.
Plenty more to say but that will do for now...
Appalled because employees follow scripts? Who woulda thunk it?
Now don't get me started on safety training! The hide of those companies to make employees follow set procedures!!!
"My store manager was paid 63K a year"
Umm, yes, and...?
You must be a student or just starting out, no?
I have been wondering the same thing. There is a lot of fuss about SOA. SOA this, SOA that. When you look at it, unless I am mistaken, the underlying concept seems to be to make applications data source agnostic. How is this a new concept? Surely I am missing something big here!
I was wondering the same thing. How did the poster produce a pdf that could not be opened?
If using a tech savvy group as your sample, who know Apple's history then yes Apple == Steve Jobs. However if you talk to the average Joe on the street, Apple == iPod as much as Microsoft == Windows. I hold the opinion that the iPod is to Apple what Win 95 was to MS - it has given them a particular product that everyone knows and can recognize. Notice how Apple is not pushing the Apple brand so much as the iPod brand. People don't buy an iPod because it is made by Apple, if anything (non technical people we are talking about here) they buy an Apple computer because it is made by the same people who make the iPod.
And two are the same distro!
You must be new here
You make light of the technical support, instead focussing on the "warm fuzzy feeling". Technical support is a very serious concern for PHBs when implementing an IT system. After all, it is his head on the chopping block if the system goes down and his response is to have parts of the business out of operation while his guys Google up possible fixes on the net, hoping that one exists. A free unsupported web widget is fine - if something goes wrong you use another one. A free unsupported RDBMS is not so fine - if something goes wrong a large business could be losing upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour if not more.
Only sensible post this entire topic
No arguments from me in regards to companies switching to Firefox (or average home users for that matter too). See it happening everywhere. With OOo usage we will have to agree to disagree on that one.
OO has been incredibly successful at replacing MS Office?? I am sure they exist but I am yet to come across a single work environment that uses OO rather than MS Office - either places I have worked or customer sites. That comment made made me laugh.
When we finally have the year of Linux on the desktop of course!
I will take it one step further. Most of the whiners on here won't be happy until they can get OS X for free. According to them software is worth $0 and what really peeves them off is that Apple is gaining marketshare with product that is closed source (oh the pain) and that actually costs money to buy (heresy!!) and can't be obtained legally for free.
There has been no evidence that desktop market share is influenced by how open a platform is. If openness was the dominating factor then Win wouldn't have >90% of the desktop market with Apple growing at a very healthy rate while Linux gains virtually nothing.
This is assuming that total cost is only the cost of the software itself. To make a blanket statement that Linux will cut costs if used on the desktop ignores:
* cost of re-training end users on new applications
* cost of deploying the new OS
* cost of retraining / hiring SA's with Linux experience rather than Win SAs
* cost of testing existing apps on the new desktops
* cost of migrating legacy apps to the new OS
Just because the OS you are migrating to is free to purchase does not mean the cost of deployment and use == $0.
Yes Linux may pick up some marketshare in big business, however I hardly anticipate a massive move in a short period of time, especially in the current economic climate where businesses are trying to cut costs everywhere and can't justify the massive expense of deploying a totally new system when the current one is working.
Which is why Ubuntu is dominating the desktop market while Apple is fading away into oblivion. Ubuntu offers everything anyone could dream of on the desktop while Apple is listening to nobody.
This is all because all anybody cares about when using their home desktop is whether or not they can view the source code to the applications they run and if they can recompile the kernel. Usability has nothing to do with it for the average Joe.
Having done freelance web dev work and having the artistic talent of a brick, my approach was to avoid all graphics work entirely and outsource the lot to a professional graphic artist that I had worked with in the past and knew that his work was excellent. I would then pass on the cost at cost price to my customer. It definitely was not cheap, however I learnt the hard way that dealing with customers who were not prepared to pay professional prices generally meant they had no idea about the true cost of what they were asking for and getting any money at all from them was near impossible.
Yes most gun deaths are suicide or accident, not murders (which already suggests that the portrayed massive gun problem where people were running around shooting each other was massively exaggerated). I am curious about your second assertion - that another large chink are normal disputes which escalate as the direct result of the presence of a gun. Can you provide a link to some statistical proof of that - where it is demonstrated that a domestic dispute led to a murder that otherwise would not have? I am curious if there is any data on proving a direct link between a gun being present in a house and an increased murder rate. Not personal thinking, not an opinion piece by an anti-gun columnist, but something backed by statistics provided by the institute of criminology or the bureau of crime statistics.
In regards to the second part - again i would like to see proof that if I was armed I would be more likely to be robbed and injured / killed than if I were unarmed.
Not trying to be a smart arse in regards to asking for the proof, I am genuinely interested in seeing it if it exists. If it does exist I will gladly change some of my thinking, in the meantime I am not basing my personal safetly purely on the opinion of pacifists.
"It can *store* its data in a proprietary format, but if it can't at least export to some sort of interoperable format, that can raise objections."
I totally agree with you on that point and this one comes up time and time again. It is not uncommon for the question of "what happens to our data if we decide to flip the switch on you in a years time?" or "How will we get access to the retrieved data so we can use it in another system?" to raise its head. So generally whether the system itself is proprietary or not is not so much the question, it is more along the lines of is it possible to access the data in a non-proprietary way if the situation should ever arise that this was required. The potential customer does not necessarily want control of the code, it is more that they want control of their data. A subtle but important difference. They figure the code is the vendors problem and they like it that way - one less headache to worry about - however the data is their problem and they treat it accordingly.
This depends on what you mean by "coming in contact with it". If you mean sharing the same distribution mechanism ie CD, download etc then the GPL will not affect your code. If however your code links to the GPL'ed code then your code must also be GPL'ed, even if your code was not derived from the GPL'ed code.
"I know it doesn't look like that now, but big companies and governments are challenging very seriously the wisdom of having their data controlled by third parties."
Maybe for small and even mid sized apps. The big stuff is still very much the big third party proprietary vendors. Databases in gov and enterprise level is very much still Oracle, IBM and Microsoft generally with Oracle, IBM and Microsoft consultants working on site. ERP systems are very much third party vendors. Same goes for almost all the large scale systems.
Having been involved in a few large scale tenders (>$1million) for industries ranging from gov to universities to a host of others, I have not once seen a requirement in the tender stating that the data is to be kept in a non-proprietary format or that non-proprietary tools are to be used. Generally what the big boys are interested in first and foremost is support, who else in their industry is using the product and how are they maximising its usage, track record of the vendor (references are always called up when a case study is provided) and how well the product fits the requirements / how much customization will be required (as customization == ongoing costs, generally leads to budget blowouts - both time and money - and ongoing maintenance which is usually charged above and beyond the normal support contract). Customizing is viewed as a drawback, not a positive - if at all possible they want the product to work out of the box so to speak. Cost is important but comes further down the list, proprietary v non-proprietary does not even come into it.