I left a company on good terms - 3 weeks notice, and a consulting gig to smooth over the transition to the people picking up my work.
Fast forward 6 years, and I end up on the street Monday morning. Wednesday I have a consulting offer from the old company, which eventually converted back to full time employment.
Don't burn your bridges, because you never know when you might need to retreat.
Right click on a shortcut and select "Pin to Taskbar" is more difficult? I'm not sure how to properly compare the difficultly of drag and drop vs a context menu, but it seems clear that neither should be described as difficult.
People make mistakes. Perhaps the coders of the loop thought that input protection located in code elsewhere would prevent this from ever being a problem.
assert() for that on entry to the function and it becomes immediately clear when your assumptions about elsewhere were lacking
It will assert on entry of course, but only in a debug build, and only when the proper input conditions are met. In the putative scenario of a loop coder thinking he was protected by input protection located somewhere else, the assert would only fire if the right test case was constructed. For all we know there is an assert in the code, but it won't help us in a release build.
Hmmm, there was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently that compared trash collection rates in cities that had it done as a municipal service vs cities that require residents to make their own arrangements.
In general the cities with municipal services were cheaper. And it eliminated a common traffic/noise/road wear complaint of residents in areas served by multiple haulers.
Where I live we contract with a hauler, but the city regulates it so that all the haulers have to come on the same day, just to cut down on the complaints from people who dislike seeing garbage trucks every day. Personally, I think people that can get worked up about seeing too many garbage trucks don't have enough in their lives to worry about.
The reason they don't has far more to do with psychology than anything.
First, the more decks, the longer it takes to shuffle. That represents a break in the action, and gives people time to think about whether they want to stay at the table or walk away.
Even though the huge majority of people in the casino don't try to count and likely couldn't do it effectively if they try, higher numbers of decks in the shoe are considered a negative by most people. It is not at all uncommon to see a 6 deck shoes at the $5 table, with single deck 21 games at $25 or $100 tables. It becomes a status thing with many players.
At one people I remember seeing continuous shuffle machines - as every hand was played it was dropped back in the machine, which was constantly shuffling the cards. It didn't last. Don't know whether that was because of cost, reliability of the machine, or player backlash.
"A developer may notice their game sales are slowing down so they do a price cut weekend which is impossible to do with the classic distribution chain."
Because price drops, sales, coupons, and other promotions/incentives don't exist.
They do indeed exist, and can be done quickly by a retail store. But for a publisher to do a price drop/coupon/promotion, push it out through the distributor and have it go into effect in the stores is something that takes weeks to months.
And yet, the actual facts say something different.
Rebuilding Germany and Japan was probably very much a realpolitik decision - the seeds of WWII were present in the terms imposed on Germany after WWI. Spending to rebuild those countries and avoid economic collapse was probably a very farsighted thing to do.
Talking about PNG replacing GIF is the wrong angle. You should be talking about PNG and TIFF. AFAIK, the TIFF format can do everything PNG can do (and then some), but was also encumbered by the LZW patent in a significant way at the time. PNG has no real reason to exist, and was a colossal waste of developer effort to create yet another image file format, all because of software patents.
Hmmm, so many things I disagree with in that paragraph. TIFF files can use LZW, but it is one of many supported compression methods, so it is easy to write TIFF codes that doesn't need LZW. TIFF files are limited to 4GB since positions in a TIFF files are 32 bit offsets from the start of the file. That also means that one piece of a multi image TIFF file can not be used without at a minimum knowing where it came from in the file, making it hard to split/join TIFF frames in a TIFF file. There is no restriction that the tags and data portion of a TIFF file be arranged in any particular way, so in general it is not possible to render a TIFF until you have the entire file in hand, making streaming difficult.
In contrast a PNG file is a block of chunks, each of which describes itself, and makes no reference to other locations within the file. It can be streamed easily, and the interpretation of the chunk does not depend on where in the file you find it. PNG files can be more than 4GB. The fact that PNG uses LZ77 rather than LZW is a footnote at best. In case you can't tell, having written software to work with both, I find PNG much more programmer friendly than TIFF.
All I see nowadays is price, price, price. Price is everything. All encompassing, all considering and the sole and only consideration in nigh every walk of life. Companies are gouging their businesses in order to save pennies whilst their products stagnate or regress. Consumers care not for long term value or even short term utility as price is the first and last arbiter in their purchase decisions.
What are you talking about? Most companies hate competing on price alone, since it inevitably means shrinking margins and no product differentiation. In my econ classes in school they talked about how few markets were really purely competitive based on price - money and gasoline were the ones typically cited.
Starbucks wants to charge you more for coffee than McDonald's. They try to convince you that it tastes better, is fresher, has a nicer atmosphere, whatever works. What they really want it to convince you it is better without actually spending any money to actually make it better. Neiman Marcus wants to charge you more than Nordstrom's, which in turn is more than Wal-Mart. Neiman Marcus has no intention of competing on price with Wal-Mart, and consumers don't expect them to.
Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again -- only this time, they're also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they've done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.
As if they were something pioneered by - or even unique to - Microsoft.
... and that makes it an acceptable practice?
But mom, everyone else is doin' it!
I think it is an acceptable practice.
First, can we admit that a company selling a product wants to maximize the revenue it receives, and that software prices are in general unrelated to the cost of media and distribution?
So anyone selling proprietary software will set prices in a way to maximize their profits. The features in Win7 Ultimate or Windows 2008 DataCenter had a non-zero development cost, and definitely have a non-zero support cost. But more importantly, people who need those features are willing to pay for them, and in some cases pay big bucks. So they set the price based on what the traffic will bear.
It is called market segmentation, and it is used in virtually every industry. Photoshop costs 6x more than Photoshop Elements. An Escalade is just a tricked out Suburban. The products are different, but share far more parts/modules than the company would like to admit. I guarantee the profit margins on the high end products dwarf the cheaper products. So you sell 10x the volume at a lower magin to the price sensitive crowd, and a smaller number at a huge markup for people willing to pay the price. Consumers get what they want, companies make money, the world goes round. Get over it.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
Of course, to play devil's advocate, if we had a 32 bit flat address space right off the bat, I wonder how much quicker RAM requirements would have grown. Many programmers love to complain about bloated code and system requirements, but imagine how much worse the issue might have been if there had been no architectural restrictions to adding oodles of RAM to your system. We might have already fully made the transition to 64 bit architectures.
I agree that it sucks that this verdict is likely to destroy her financially, but remember that the whole point of laws and lawsuits is to serve as a deterrent.
Imagine if the penalty for shoplifting was that you had to pay for the items you took. Hmmm, shoplifting is now a pretty attractive proposition. Buy items for $10, or steal them, and if caught pay $10. Only my high ethical standards prevent me from shoplifting now.
Now make the penalty $25. What is the likelihood of getting caught? Less than 40%? Still a good deal.
Now let the penalty be $1000. Suddenly its big enough that shoplifting starts to seem like a bad idea.
I think the verdict in this case is excessive, but have to admit that she passed up several chances to settle for lower amounts. A verdict in the 10-15K range would be big enough to send a strong deterrent signal without completely screwing her life.
Have you somehow missed the last 100+ years of corporations lying, cheating and doing whatever it takes to make a buck? Based on what history should anyone think that a corporation isn't going to do anything it takes to inflate the bottom line?
Have you really never worked for a company that actually practiced what it preached when it comes to ethics and responsibility?
I've had bad bosses and good bosses, but only once have I had a scumbag boss. Outside of the scumbag, everyone wanted to treat our customers fairly and be able to sleep nights. To a certain extent that is self serving because we wanted to keep our customers, but we often spent many hours trying to resolve a problem for a customer, or implement a feature they wanted. If a customer was unhappy we tried to make them happy. If they felt we had let them down we tried to fix that.
That behavior goes up the chain. If you are not a scumbag chances are you don't want to work for a scumbag, and that is a recursive relationship.
Now, every place I have ever worked has tried to figure out how we could get our hands on more money, and that includes charging whatever the traffic will bear for our products. But that is not lying or cheating. We set a price upfront, and if what we produced was worth it to our customers, they paid it and felt like they got value for their money.
I can't believe my experience in business is that different from most peoples. What makes you think that if you work for a corporation (which most people do) you suddenly turn into a scumbag?
Everyone always cites lazy developers... but I have to ask, is it really the programmers fault?
It is not just laziness, the rules have changed over the years. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote some software that controlled a device.
The PC could have multiple users, but only one of these devices. So I put the device settings in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and per user settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. I think this was all the way back in Windows 3.0, but maybe it was Win 95. Point is, at that point we had the concept of multiple users, but all the users were local - we thought in terms of a day shift and night shift worker sharing a machine. Most of these boxes didn't have network connections, let alone internet connections, so to the extent we worried about security, we were concerned with boot sector viruses.
Many years later, HKLM is locked down and everything should be in HKCU. But fixing it right will take a few days, and tweaking the installer to alter the registry permissions only takes a few hours. And marketing has other concerns with higher priority, and in many cases rightly so.
So was I lazy, when I wrote the code, or was marketing lazy when they decided to take the cheap fix and focus on adding new features to an app that has 20 years worth of cruft like that waiting to be fixed? Or maybe did we all make the right choice at the right time?
The great flaw in this argument is that you miss one case: People who will pirate because it's cheap, but do have the money and would buy it if the free option didn't exist.
There is another case being missed here. Suppose that piracy didn't exist, and everyone had to pay the retail price of the game or skip it. Now the people who can't afford $60 for a game would represent a great market for someone to come out with a good $30 game and make money from people priced out of the more expensive games.
People rationalizing that piracy is OK because they wouldn't pay X for a game is one reason that cheaper games aren't getting produced.
That is, if you ever see a "double extension", don't hide anything, and perhaps highlight it. Thus, instead of showing up as "partyinvite.doc.exe", it'd show up as "partyinvite.doc.exe".
Unfortunately, the rules for double extensions quickly become untenable. I see a lot of files with names like "Release plan for v2.3.doc". Is that a double extension? What about "Status report 10.5.09.doc?"
And I really don't see where this is a security hole at all. If people have extensions hidden then seeing a file show up as partyinvite.doc doesn't imply any particular safety, because they never expect to see partyinvite.exe.
But once it's up, it generally doesn't have a problem. It's only on initial boot that it's generating these problems. That's why a temp issue seems unlikely. More of a driver (at least after Windows starts) or perhaps a seating issue since it's not even getting to the BIOS/PCI screen at the moment.
It could be a power supply issue. I had a similar situation, where my PC starting having trouble starting, but would run fine once it was up. Eventually it failed altogether, telling me it had no VGA adapter. The real problem was my power supply was failing, and couldn't handle the load when the system tried to power up everything at once.
Does anyone "need" 1900x1200? I doubt it. "High-end" graphics haven't been used by anyone but a few people who look more for bragging rights than fun in gaming for years.
I run at 1900x1280, not because I want bragging rights but because that is the native resolution of my monitor and any non-native resolution looks fuzzy in comparison. The fact that I have a 24" monitor running at a high res may make me a pixel junkie, but that has nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with ordinary apps on my desktop.
Simple legislation, if you receive unsolicited communications and you complain to an legislated department they fine the advertiser and you receive half the fine as the victim, unless the advertiser can substantiate that you 'directly' opted-in (all the indirect opt-in also should be eliminated).
Um, at the risk of being regarded as trolling, isn't this the moral equivalent of 3 strikes laws against p2p users? Make an unsubstantiated allegation and the onus is on the other party to prove they are innocent? And in a way it is even worse, because you are making it one strike, and reversing the one-to-many relationship.
I thought metastasizing was a perfect word to describe a project where scope creep has been replaced by scope gallop. One where new requirements seem to come from everywhere, sprouting from what was once a tightly defined product.
Turn it around - suppose MS underpaid the severance? Do they actually owe the employee anything? Should they send the employee the correct amount or just keep quiet and hope nobody notices?
I can top that - at my first job out of college in 1983 I elected long term disability coverage, which should have been a few dollars every pay period.
I always wondered why they never actually collected it, but it was my first job and I assumed they knew what they were doing.
Sometime in the mid 90s I got a call from an external auditor - they had realized that I had been covered on their policy for a dozen years but never paid for it.
They didn't ask me to pay the arrears, but let me choose whether to start paying or drop the coverage.
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM's various research labs, 3M's research and others have all generated wonderful new things from their basic research.
And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies. Bell Labs had a fearsome reputation, but much of its output never ended up in BellCorp products - otherwise we would still be talking about AT&T as a dominant Unix vendor.
3M is a better example, but most of their projects are closer to home - production engineers working on product ideas of their own, rather than basic research.
MS Research may do great things, but few companies are willing to take the schedule and financial risk that goes along with productizing a new technology. Making the jump for R to D is difficult for a company that wants to know a schedule, budget, ship date and ROI within plus/minus 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
I left a company on good terms - 3 weeks notice, and a consulting gig to smooth over the transition to the people picking up my work.
Fast forward 6 years, and I end up on the street Monday morning. Wednesday I have a consulting offer from the old company, which eventually converted back to full time employment.
Don't burn your bridges, because you never know when you might need to retreat.
Right click on a shortcut and select "Pin to Taskbar" is more difficult? I'm not sure how to properly compare the difficultly of drag and drop vs a context menu, but it seems clear that neither should be described as difficult.
assert() for that on entry to the function and it becomes immediately clear when your assumptions about elsewhere were lacking
It will assert on entry of course, but only in a debug build, and only when the proper input conditions are met. In the putative scenario of a loop coder thinking he was protected by input protection located somewhere else, the assert would only fire if the right test case was constructed. For all we know there is an assert in the code, but it won't help us in a release build.
Hmmm, there was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently that compared trash collection rates in cities that had it done as a municipal service vs cities that require residents to make their own arrangements.
In general the cities with municipal services were cheaper. And it eliminated a common traffic/noise/road wear complaint of residents in areas served by multiple haulers.
Where I live we contract with a hauler, but the city regulates it so that all the haulers have to come on the same day, just to cut down on the complaints from people who dislike seeing garbage trucks every day. Personally, I think people that can get worked up about seeing too many garbage trucks don't have enough in their lives to worry about.
The reason they don't has far more to do with psychology than anything.
First, the more decks, the longer it takes to shuffle. That represents a break in the action, and gives people time to think about whether they want to stay at the table or walk away.
Even though the huge majority of people in the casino don't try to count and likely couldn't do it effectively if they try, higher numbers of decks in the shoe are considered a negative by most people. It is not at all uncommon to see a 6 deck shoes at the $5 table, with single deck 21 games at $25 or $100 tables. It becomes a status thing with many players.
At one people I remember seeing continuous shuffle machines - as every hand was played it was dropped back in the machine, which was constantly shuffling the cards. It didn't last. Don't know whether that was because of cost, reliability of the machine, or player backlash.
"A developer may notice their game sales are slowing down so they do a price cut weekend which is impossible to do with the classic distribution chain."
Because price drops, sales, coupons, and other promotions/incentives don't exist.
They do indeed exist, and can be done quickly by a retail store. But for a publisher to do a price drop/coupon/promotion, push it out through the distributor and have it go into effect in the stores is something that takes weeks to months.
And yet, the actual facts say something different.
Rebuilding Germany and Japan was probably very much a realpolitik decision - the seeds of WWII were present in the terms imposed on Germany after WWI. Spending to rebuild those countries and avoid economic collapse was probably a very farsighted thing to do.
In terms of direct foreign aid on a per-capita basis, the USA ranks quite low: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930884.html
Talking about PNG replacing GIF is the wrong angle. You should be talking about PNG and TIFF. AFAIK, the TIFF format can do everything PNG can do (and then some), but was also encumbered by the LZW patent in a significant way at the time. PNG has no real reason to exist, and was a colossal waste of developer effort to create yet another image file format, all because of software patents.
Hmmm, so many things I disagree with in that paragraph. TIFF files can use LZW, but it is one of many supported compression methods, so it is easy to write TIFF codes that doesn't need LZW. TIFF files are limited to 4GB since positions in a TIFF files are 32 bit offsets from the start of the file. That also means that one piece of a multi image TIFF file can not be used without at a minimum knowing where it came from in the file, making it hard to split/join TIFF frames in a TIFF file. There is no restriction that the tags and data portion of a TIFF file be arranged in any particular way, so in general it is not possible to render a TIFF until you have the entire file in hand, making streaming difficult.
In contrast a PNG file is a block of chunks, each of which describes itself, and makes no reference to other locations within the file. It can be streamed easily, and the interpretation of the chunk does not depend on where in the file you find it. PNG files can be more than 4GB. The fact that PNG uses LZ77 rather than LZW is a footnote at best. In case you can't tell, having written software to work with both, I find PNG much more programmer friendly than TIFF.
All I see nowadays is price, price, price. Price is everything. All encompassing, all considering and the sole and only consideration in nigh every walk of life. Companies are gouging their businesses in order to save pennies whilst their products stagnate or regress. Consumers care not for long term value or even short term utility as price is the first and last arbiter in their purchase decisions.
What are you talking about? Most companies hate competing on price alone, since it inevitably means shrinking margins and no product differentiation. In my econ classes in school they talked about how few markets were really purely competitive based on price - money and gasoline were the ones typically cited.
Starbucks wants to charge you more for coffee than McDonald's. They try to convince you that it tastes better, is fresher, has a nicer atmosphere, whatever works. What they really want it to convince you it is better without actually spending any money to actually make it better. Neiman Marcus wants to charge you more than Nordstrom's, which in turn is more than Wal-Mart. Neiman Marcus has no intention of competing on price with Wal-Mart, and consumers don't expect them to.
Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again -- only this time, they're also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they've done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.
As if they were something pioneered by - or even unique to - Microsoft.
... and that makes it an acceptable practice?
But mom, everyone else is doin' it!
I think it is an acceptable practice.
First, can we admit that a company selling a product wants to maximize the revenue it receives, and that software prices are in general unrelated to the cost of media and distribution?
So anyone selling proprietary software will set prices in a way to maximize their profits. The features in Win7 Ultimate or Windows 2008 DataCenter had a non-zero development cost, and definitely have a non-zero support cost. But more importantly, people who need those features are willing to pay for them, and in some cases pay big bucks. So they set the price based on what the traffic will bear.
It is called market segmentation, and it is used in virtually every industry. Photoshop costs 6x more than Photoshop Elements. An Escalade is just a tricked out Suburban. The products are different, but share far more parts/modules than the company would like to admit. I guarantee the profit margins on the high end products dwarf the cheaper products. So you sell 10x the volume at a lower magin to the price sensitive crowd, and a smaller number at a huge markup for people willing to pay the price. Consumers get what they want, companies make money, the world goes round. Get over it.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
Of course, to play devil's advocate, if we had a 32 bit flat address space right off the bat, I wonder how much quicker RAM requirements would have grown. Many programmers love to complain about bloated code and system requirements, but imagine how much worse the issue might have been if there had been no architectural restrictions to adding oodles of RAM to your system. We might have already fully made the transition to 64 bit architectures.
I agree that it sucks that this verdict is likely to destroy her financially, but remember that the whole point of laws and lawsuits is to serve as a deterrent.
Imagine if the penalty for shoplifting was that you had to pay for the items you took. Hmmm, shoplifting is now a pretty attractive proposition. Buy items for $10, or steal them, and if caught pay $10. Only my high ethical standards prevent me from shoplifting now.
Now make the penalty $25. What is the likelihood of getting caught? Less than 40%? Still a good deal.
Now let the penalty be $1000. Suddenly its big enough that shoplifting starts to seem like a bad idea.
I think the verdict in this case is excessive, but have to admit that she passed up several chances to settle for lower amounts. A verdict in the 10-15K range would be big enough to send a strong deterrent signal without completely screwing her life.
Have you somehow missed the last 100+ years of corporations lying, cheating and doing whatever it takes to make a buck? Based on what history should anyone think that a corporation isn't going to do anything it takes to inflate the bottom line?
Have you really never worked for a company that actually practiced what it preached when it comes to ethics and responsibility?
I've had bad bosses and good bosses, but only once have I had a scumbag boss. Outside of the scumbag, everyone wanted to treat our customers fairly and be able to sleep nights. To a certain extent that is self serving because we wanted to keep our customers, but we often spent many hours trying to resolve a problem for a customer, or implement a feature they wanted. If a customer was unhappy we tried to make them happy. If they felt we had let them down we tried to fix that.
That behavior goes up the chain. If you are not a scumbag chances are you don't want to work for a scumbag, and that is a recursive relationship.
Now, every place I have ever worked has tried to figure out how we could get our hands on more money, and that includes charging whatever the traffic will bear for our products. But that is not lying or cheating. We set a price upfront, and if what we produced was worth it to our customers, they paid it and felt like they got value for their money.
I can't believe my experience in business is that different from most peoples. What makes you think that if you work for a corporation (which most people do) you suddenly turn into a scumbag?
Everyone always cites lazy developers ... but I have to ask, is it really the programmers fault?
It is not just laziness, the rules have changed over the years. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote some software that controlled a device.
The PC could have multiple users, but only one of these devices. So I put the device settings in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and per user settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. I think this was all the way back in Windows 3.0, but maybe it was Win 95. Point is, at that point we had the concept of multiple users, but all the users were local - we thought in terms of a day shift and night shift worker sharing a machine. Most of these boxes didn't have network connections, let alone internet connections, so to the extent we worried about security, we were concerned with boot sector viruses.
Many years later, HKLM is locked down and everything should be in HKCU. But fixing it right will take a few days, and tweaking the installer to alter the registry permissions only takes a few hours. And marketing has other concerns with higher priority, and in many cases rightly so.
So was I lazy, when I wrote the code, or was marketing lazy when they decided to take the cheap fix and focus on adding new features to an app that has 20 years worth of cruft like that waiting to be fixed? Or maybe did we all make the right choice at the right time?
The great flaw in this argument is that you miss one case: People who will pirate because it's cheap, but do have the money and would buy it if the free option didn't exist.
There is another case being missed here. Suppose that piracy didn't exist, and everyone had to pay the retail price of the game or skip it. Now the people who can't afford $60 for a game would represent a great market for someone to come out with a good $30 game and make money from people priced out of the more expensive games.
People rationalizing that piracy is OK because they wouldn't pay X for a game is one reason that cheaper games aren't getting produced.
I'm not a physicist, but I seem to recall reading that a "nearby" supernova would be deadly beyond the immediate system.
The biggest problem I had was trying to snuff out a supernova with a black hole. Don't supernovas create black holes?
That is, if you ever see a "double extension", don't hide anything, and perhaps highlight it. Thus, instead of showing up as "partyinvite.doc.exe", it'd show up as "partyinvite.doc.exe".
Unfortunately, the rules for double extensions quickly become untenable. I see a lot of files with names like "Release plan for v2.3.doc". Is that a double extension? What about "Status report 10.5.09.doc?"
And I really don't see where this is a security hole at all. If people have extensions hidden then seeing a file show up as partyinvite.doc doesn't imply any particular safety, because they never expect to see partyinvite.exe.
I entered it wrong - 1920x1200 was what I meant.
But once it's up, it generally doesn't have a problem. It's only on initial boot that it's generating these problems. That's why a temp issue seems unlikely. More of a driver (at least after Windows starts) or perhaps a seating issue since it's not even getting to the BIOS/PCI screen at the moment.
It could be a power supply issue. I had a similar situation, where my PC starting having trouble starting, but would run fine once it was up. Eventually it failed altogether, telling me it had no VGA adapter. The real problem was my power supply was failing, and couldn't handle the load when the system tried to power up everything at once.
Does anyone "need" 1900x1200? I doubt it. "High-end" graphics haven't been used by anyone but a few people who look more for bragging rights than fun in gaming for years.
I run at 1900x1280, not because I want bragging rights but because that is the native resolution of my monitor and any non-native resolution looks fuzzy in comparison. The fact that I have a 24" monitor running at a high res may make me a pixel junkie, but that has nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with ordinary apps on my desktop.
Simple legislation, if you receive unsolicited communications and you complain to an legislated department they fine the advertiser and you receive half the fine as the victim, unless the advertiser can substantiate that you 'directly' opted-in (all the indirect opt-in also should be eliminated).
Um, at the risk of being regarded as trolling, isn't this the moral equivalent of 3 strikes laws against p2p users? Make an unsubstantiated allegation and the onus is on the other party to prove they are innocent? And in a way it is even worse, because you are making it one strike, and reversing the one-to-many relationship.
I thought metastasizing was a perfect word to describe a project where scope creep has been replaced by scope gallop. One where new requirements seem to come from everywhere, sprouting from what was once a tightly defined product.
Turn it around - suppose MS underpaid the severance? Do they actually owe the employee anything? Should they send the employee the correct amount or just keep quiet and hope nobody notices?
I can top that - at my first job out of college in 1983 I elected long term disability coverage, which should have been a few dollars every pay period.
I always wondered why they never actually collected it, but it was my first job and I assumed they knew what they were doing.
Sometime in the mid 90s I got a call from an external auditor - they had realized that I had been covered on their policy for a dozen years but never paid for it.
They didn't ask me to pay the arrears, but let me choose whether to start paying or drop the coverage.
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM's various research labs, 3M's research and others have all generated wonderful new things from their basic research.
And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies. Bell Labs had a fearsome reputation, but much of its output never ended up in BellCorp products - otherwise we would still be talking about AT&T as a dominant Unix vendor.
3M is a better example, but most of their projects are closer to home - production engineers working on product ideas of their own, rather than basic research.
MS Research may do great things, but few companies are willing to take the schedule and financial risk that goes along with productizing a new technology. Making the jump for R to D is difficult for a company that wants to know a schedule, budget, ship date and ROI within plus/minus 10%.