comments got turned off and the only response was something to the effect that the new page design was really better and the customers didn't know what was good for them
If, over the course of the few weeks holiday I become your radioactive giant IT guy / overlord.
Oh hey, if you turn out to become IT Gigantor, Destroyer of Serverrooms, Crusher of Sysadmin Spirit, I have a job for you. It's a mostly harmless job that involves unleashing all of your radioactive rage onto a few buildings (and possibly people, depending on how much they resist). I'm sure we'd make a great team, and look forward to working with you and your destructiveness.
Do you accept pay in X-Rays? You like radiation, right?
I transferred some cash to BitCoins and back on Friday and it was paid out to me on Sunday. By the time I got the transfer, it had lost almost half of its value. Now imagine if that would constantly happen with your real money.
That happens with real money too, you know. There's this wonderful thing called hyperinflation, which if left unchecked leads to money with preposterous values printed on it. An example would be Zimbabwe dollar, which had bills worth several million dollars. It became so bad a couple of years ago that the days the 100.000.000 dollar bill was first printed, the 200.000.000 dollar bill was announced. They abandoned their currency that year and currently trade in foreign currency if I'm not mistaken. I know Zimbabwe is a terrible example to use, but still...
This is why PayPal and other ecurrencies are fixed to real world value - they are stable (as far as it can be)
The value of currency is like you imply not all that stable. Sure, it's not like the zimbabwe dollar, since most countries try to keep their currency in check as well as they can, but don't assume that over the course of a month suddenly your money isn't worth as much as it used to be.
As for Bitcoin... Well... Meh, who really gives a fuck. (Pardon my french) The only people who made any real profits on it are GPU vendors and power companies, and a lucky few which I doubt exceed a handful of people. FWIW, it behaves like a real currency would, but not a very reliable one.
How exactly are they defining professional though?
Don't you know? It's Tony Hawk PRO skater. This isn't just some average guy grinding on the curb, but a PRO. It says right so on the box. Hell, I'm getting my own channel, I'm a PROgrammer and I'm good at PROcastination. That's twice the professionalism of Mr Hawk.
I expect what they really mean is "content produced by people associated with Hollywood who have been paid upfront by a sponsor."
Well, there goes my ticket to riches... Oh well, I think I'll go flush some buffers for a while then. (See what you're missing out on ???)
They've just submitted your laptop as evidence. Let's for the sake of argument say there is 200GB of kiddy porn on it. They've got the burden of proof thing covered you know? Your laptop, your hard drive, thus your kiddy porn. They'll have an expert on the witness stand explaining how they used their fancy forensic toolkit to find it all. It is on your PC, therefor you must have downloaded all that.
You can now wave your arms around in court screaming "rootkit" until your throat is sore, but the burden of proof now lies with you. They submitted the evidence, and it's up to you now to submit yours. They don't have to prove that it wasn't a rootkit that downloaded all that, just that a laptop full of kiddy porn was in your possession. As long as they followed the procedures to make sure the evidence was not contaminated, as far as the court is concerned, it IS acceptable evidence against you. Once you have proven that the machine was rootkitted, only THEN do they have to prove that it wasn't the rootkit that did all that. If the prosecution fails in that, you go free, but if you draw the rootkit card, you still have to prove it.
how can the technically clueless general public be expected to?
That's beyond the point. Most people who own pets are technically clueless as how to train them not to bite people, yet most pet owners are somehow expected to not have their pets bite people (to draw upon another admittedly terrible analogy). Terrible analogy aside, being clueless of the law doesn't excuse breaking it. Your property, your responsibility. If you're not knowledgeable about IT, why didn't you hire someone for that? After all, if you don't know anything about cars, you tend to take it to a garage for maintenance don't you? (heave ho, bad analogy day)
deliberately opening up your wireless for the public to share is not the same as getting rooted
Stop dragging wireless into this. Wireless has nothing to do with this.
can you honestly tell me that you know your system doesn't have any unpatched vulnerabilities and can you account for every process and driver etc running?
I'm going to give you the best advice you'll ever get when it comes to the court system in ANY country: pay a lawyer and shut up unless spoken to. Be it Germany, or the UK, or whatever country you decide that "Innocent until proven guilty" means "lalalala, I can't hear you, lalalala". Like I said, the legal system everywhere is bound to suffer more than a few headaches when it comes to technology and Internet, but if you think that pointing out the flaw in the system will save you without proving it is flawed you're in for a hell of surprise. And I really hope you never get into that position, because going by this discussion you're going to lose that argument, and have quite a few years ahead of you to contemplate it.
You can easily get convicted without a single shred of hard evidence, for any type of crime. An example of this is in Belgium the parachute murder (sorry dutch, google for English) where defendant Els Clottemans had motive, opportunity, and an army of investigators and psychoanalysts against her, but not a single shred of hard evidence. 30 years, first request for appeal denied due to a technicality. Did she do it? Who knows, probably. The court says she did. Was there hard evidence? Nope. Was the burden of proof against her once the prosecutor presented his case? Most definitely. And you know what? She couldn't bring anything in front of a judge that broke the case made by the prosecutor. The prosecutor made fun of her in the courtroom saying that she was expecting "a legal system akin to game of Cluedo". And quite frankly, that's what you're expecting. You're expecting to roll the dice and say "the government did it" "with their spyware" "on my laptop" while ho
Your initial car analogy is terribly flawed. Don't draw bad car-analogies to prove a point. (If your car is stolen and you fail to report it, you're in for a fun ride, mind you. And reporting it doesn't automatically remove you from the suspect list either.)
Root-kit != WLAN hotspot.
As for the root-kit, you are responsible for the security of your own machine. If you go to court "Oh lol, rootkit get out of jail free" most likely you'll be laughed out of court (straight into jail) unless you can prove it. I wouldn't be terrible surprised if in the end this whole thing backfires in a spectacular way, but for the time being YOU are responsible for YOUR property. If there is no evidence to the contrary, the court assumes that you are in control of your property. Having said that, I'm pretty sure that the legal system in most countries are going to have more than a few headaches in the future when it comes to technology. Far too few people are properly knowledgeable on the technologies they use on a day to day basis, and there is far too much legal gray area.
Also, in before the terrible "burglar in an unlocked home" analogy, and various other scenarios that have nothing to do with computers and Internet.
I did NOT port the Source Engine to a browser, not even close.
I expected as much, but thanks for setting the faulty slashdot record straight.
FYI, I'm not too big a fan of the tendency to try and do as much as possible in the browser, but you've definitely earned your geek badge with this. Kudos sir, my hat's off to you.
We should have a response from the EU in several years, but it won't be quite clear and opinions will be divided. Some memberstates will say "Yes", some "No", and some "Maybe". In the end Germany and France get to do a lot of posturing and the UK tries not to look too butthurt while calling the president a wet rag. The UK ends up being opposed to everything that doesn't serve its interests, but tries to get the best benefits of being part of the European Union.
They'll come forward with a grand statement that will cost member states quite a bit of money, but will contradict themselves 5 minutes later. In the end, despite best efforts and intentions, the EU is nothing but a shared piggy bank with more and more people grabbing for the hammer. Sometimes I like to think that the only good thing in the EU is Neelie Kroes.
Warning : above post is of a humorous nature, actual opinions on EU may differ slightly from above content, exaggerations may have slipped into above post, batteries not included, Greece saving economic counter-measures not included either, do not consume after financial bankruptcy of more than 1 memberstate. (Gotta be careful nowadays when rumors can topple financial markets, you know)
Can't we just have the ever six week release story
How about we skip that step altogether and start ignoring these "major" releases. I mean, whooptidoo I can use twitter as a search engine. That's major release worthy.
one if they do something innovative?
Only if it hasn't been done before...
The only thing making Firefox still relevant for me is the extensions. And quite frankly, that's on the decline too.
It's true that the genre has done few changes to the formula. I recently picked up a few JRPGs after not having played any of them in a few years. I still had some fun playing them. There's a few design decisions gameplay-wise sometimes that really frustrate me (not having control over your party-members, insisting on a terrible skill-up system,...), and sometimes these games tend to feel like a chore to play through near the end. Some people will complain about the storylines, but to be honest, if you're expecting a western storyline don't play a JRPG.
Western RPGs keep growing and innovating.
Well, if you call "dumbing down" innovating. I know this is a somewhat trollish argument, but it's a trend that's really noticeable in the latest batch of games in the past 3-4 years or so. Take Mass Effect 1 vs Mass Effect 2, and you'll notice that they've removed a lot of the options when leveling your character. Bethesda did the same with Morrowind vs Oblivion, and is planning to cut even more options out of Skyrim. Much of the fun in a WRPG for me was tweaking the character just to my liking, and I feel like lately there's been less and less options to allow for that. Some people will like the simplicity, and from a corporate point of view "making things more accessible for a larger audience" is always a good idea, but I have this feeling that WRPGs have lost of bit of their charm.
Storywise many WRPGs have cut down on the pretext of a deep storyline and devolved into MMO territory : fetch X, kill Y, escort Z. I really like an engaging storyline for my games. Take classics like Baldurs Gate or Planescape: Torment (although that one sometimes went overboard with having more story than gameplay though). Sure, you had the same fetch, kill and escort-type of missions, but they were neatly wrapped in a nice story so that it didn't feel like you were doing Fetch Quest #12. Being out in the middle of nowhere exploring something and finding by pure chance a sidequest, instead of "Oh yeah, you're here for the main story quest, right? Boy oh boy, am I glad to see you, have a sidequest."
The focus by WRPG developers has shifted from delivering an awesome experience as an RPG to building an RPG-based platform to sell DLC on. I'm not saying that being able to buy extra content is a bad thing, but I'd love to feel like I'm actually buying extra content and not buying content that was left out. Dragon Age : Origins had some DLC that made me think that some stuff had been intentionally cut from the game to sell as DLC. I miss the feeling of having added value with most DLC, like which you had with say the Baldurs Gate expansion.
Japanese developers are stuck in a time warp
I think it's more of a matter of grabbing the attention of their target audience, which is mostly Japanese. Sure, a game like Final Fantasy or Persona sells in the west, but if they can't sell it at home their publisher isn't going to bother with trying to get it overseas. I think the problem with JPRGs today is far more complex than "being stuck in a time warp", most likely due to the completely different audiences at home and in the west.
I like to think that it's kind of like Hollywood, afraid to do something radically different, because if it bombs they'll stand to lose a fuckton of money, while more of the same is "guaranteed" success. But the same can be said about western FPSs, which haven't changed all that much since the more realistic FPS'es have started showing up, and those still sell like mad too.
No, it isn't. CS is programming. IT is the maintenance of computer systems.
Seems to me like that term is defined differently in various (international) job makets. We don't even have the term CS here. If you have a technical job that involves programming, systems administation, networking, etc you fall under IT. Doesn't matter if you're writing software for scientific purposes, or if you're configuring routers, you're IT here.
As for the question asked by the original poster:
would having IT experience hurt my job prospects down the road? Would future employers see that and be less likely to hire me — or pigeon-hole me into IT?
It depends on what you'll be doing. If you're going to be spending your days doing menial tasks below your level of education and skill set, it'll have an effect on your later career. My degree has never been important to my employers other than the paycheck of my first job. After the initial job it's more likely potential employers are interested in what you've been doing: what kind of projects, what kind of tasks you performed in those projects. Anything beyond that point is the interview and negotiating. However, there are still companies that look at your degree, but the further away you get from your graduation date the less important that becomes.
So will it have an impact on your further career? YES. Probably a more profound one than the degree you have.
How? That depends on what you're going to do. To give an example, I started out as a unix sysadmin for a consultancy firm with the odd job of programming various things in between (going from simple things like websites, to software to manage telco infrastructure, to writing a driver for a certain type of industrial lasers running linux). Now I do mostly C++ and java programming in the research sector and my background in being a sysadmin has helped me optimize hard- and software for use in an HPC environment. I doubt I would be where I am today if I hadn't taken the sysadmin job way back.
Having said that : if you pick a job you like doing and find interesting (if the jobmarket allows for that), it'll go a long a way to your personal happiness, which in turn indirectly improves your job performance, which opens new opportunities. Don't be afraid to change jobs if a good opportunity arises, but don't do so on a whim. And for the love of all that's good, don't stop learning and applying new things, even if they're not directly related to your field of expertise.
The browser is essentially a rendering machine which makes it trivially easy to show things and is largely machine independent. Instead of selling a huge monolithic program, companies can simply sell time on their servers to run their programs.
Hurray, now as a consumer of said program, I don't only have to worry about vendor lockin on the software side, but as well as no longer having any of my data available locally. Yes, I know this was a problem before (open and closed standards and all that jive), but now it's just kicked up a notch or two. What happens if the vendor goes bankrupt? Do I still get a copy of my data or does it go *poof* in the cloud?
Instead of paying $10,000 for a copy of the program and taking a chance that it's as good as it's marketing claims, you can buy a month of usage for $100, and the executable will run on the company's servers while using your browser to paint the screens.
There's a point where the software is going to cost you more in monthly usage than it is when you buy it. There's plenty of software around that once you have the basic functionality you really don't need any updates other than bugfixes. Let's take an (admittedly stupid) example of a basic calculator. You can buy calc.exe for $15, or you can rent it for $1 a month using an online service. Nobody is going to update calc.exe functionality wise since additions don't suddenly change, and an accounting firm really isn't interested in sin() and cos() which is supposedly coming in version 2.0. So after $15 months, the online calculator is suddenly costing you more money than the installed calc.exe is.
Furthermore, during the month that the taxes are due, all accounting departments across the nation decide to go into full overdrive and start doing some numbercrunching. With calc.exe each department goes ahead and does its thing in it's contained little environment, but with CalcOnline they all go to the same batch of load balanced server in the cloud, totally crushing the servers hosting the environment. Hell, some crazy routing hijinx happen lateron in the week, and some techie at LoadBalancedCalculators.com makes a mistake and the cluster of servers goes down in flames. Now the accounting department is stuck with a $1/month problem, which costs a hell of a lot more than than a $15 calculator.
Sure, in an ideal situation this doesn't happen. In an ideal situation all the right people are at the right place, and all the right hard- and software functions perfectly as planned. But there's already been plenty of examples of cloud environments failing, either due to a hardware problem or an operator error.
5) The vendor can keep backups of your files for you
I'm sure that they'll be all to pleased of simply hosting all your data for you. More lock-in of course. What if you work with privacy sensitive data? What if you're working on a project with data that the vendor might be interested in? Can you guarantee that the vendor in question doesn't simply swipe your files?
6) You can access your files and the application from anywhere on the net
Which is a strange way of looking at it sometimes. You see, on the one side of meeting table is a security guy constantly telling me how we should stop trusting the Internet so much. On the other end of the table is the cloud guy chanting "Internets! Internets! Internets!" in a Balmer-like fashion. I know it's not a black-and-white situation, but I'm somewhat reluctant to start handing over data that is important to my company to some third party. I'd much rather have a setup that I have more control over.
2) You don't need multiple versions for different architectures (reduced engineering)
The different architectures are no longer the version of the OS, but the different kinds of browsers and their little quirks. Or you could just flat-out say "only internet explorer allowed", but in that c
Not sure how much of a chance we have of changing things at this point, but if the MMO additions have made you decide not to buy Diablo 3, please consider lending your support at http://www.nodiablo.com/
If they did do physical tests, did they use a stack of paper as thick as the ipad, or as thick as the amount of notes the ipad would replace in an average political debate? [snip] And I bet your research completely left out the papercut factor...
I propose we use an old fashioned cannon. Load one up with ipads, and another one with paper. It would probably result in far worse cuts than papercuts. However, to complete the process we will need to yell sarcastic and cynical remarks at the test subject. It's all in the name of science, mind you, not some personal grudge.
We'll need a large enough pool of test-subjects, so I suggest we start immediately at the European level and skip the British parliament for now. On second thought, let's just gather all the politicians of the world together and just build a cannon large enough to launch them in orbit.
And yes, it has to be a cannon. Anything less is unacceptable. It IS for science after all.
Trek evolved alright, but in a good way? I don't know.
I used to (and for a large part still do) love Star Trek. Some of the TNG episodes, and especially DS9 were damn fine storytelling. They had a couple of writers that didn't focus so much on "particle of the week" and those are the episodes of Star Trek I fondly remember. Take "In the Pale Moonlight" from DS9 for instance. It was probably the episode of DS9 that made me love the series so much.
Then came Voyager. You know, the premise had a lot of potential. There was so much opportunity for doing something with the whole Maquis vs Federation thing, but after a couple of episodes (and a few occasional hints) all of a sudden they were one big happy family. "Oh, looks like someone blew up another shuttle. It's okay, we'll just create a new one from thin air." And of course, the ultimate letdown was the ending where the Borg was utterly defeated by giving the ship futuristic plot armor (if I remember correctly, I couldn't bring myself to watch it again honestly).
Lastly, Enterprise... I gave up on that show pretty early on. It's a personal opinion, but after Voyager I felt like the cow had been milked dry, was sent to the butcher, and yet someone was trying to milk the steak now. I guess you could say I felt like it was time for Star Trek to take a long nap.
The film by JJ Abrams, was an okay film, but... It's a whole different premise than the original Star Trek. It's like someone took the Star Trek universe, characters and all, mashed it down a blender and added Action Sauce and a pinch of Lensflare Powder. There's constantly people running, shouting, personal conflicts,... And sure, TOS TNG and DS9 had that too, but it was either much more subtle or it had more of dramatic flair. I'm not saying it's bad (because all things considering, it wasn't a bad movie), just that it's a different atmosphere from what you've come to expect from Star Trek. Hell, if you would have never seen Star Trek, I'm pretty sure that you would go out of the theater finding it to be an awesome movie.
But if you take Wrath of Khan or First Contact (despite all their flaws), those movies feel a lot more like Trek than Abrams' movie did. Or maybe I'm just getting older and more critical, and fondly look back while wearing my nostalgia goggles. I still feel like Star Trek needs far far more rest than it was given.
Star Wars on the other hand... Yeah... Those took a turn for the worse. I doubt you'll find many people defending Lucas on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
comments got turned off and the only response was something to the effect that the new page design was really better and the customers didn't know what was good for them
aka as the "You're holding it wrong!" approach
It just works.
If, over the course of the few weeks holiday I become your radioactive giant IT guy / overlord.
Oh hey, if you turn out to become IT Gigantor, Destroyer of Serverrooms, Crusher of Sysadmin Spirit, I have a job for you. It's a mostly harmless job that involves unleashing all of your radioactive rage onto a few buildings (and possibly people, depending on how much they resist). I'm sure we'd make a great team, and look forward to working with you and your destructiveness.
Do you accept pay in X-Rays? You like radiation, right?
I transferred some cash to BitCoins and back on Friday and it was paid out to me on Sunday. By the time I got the transfer, it had lost almost half of its value. Now imagine if that would constantly happen with your real money.
That happens with real money too, you know. There's this wonderful thing called hyperinflation, which if left unchecked leads to money with preposterous values printed on it. An example would be Zimbabwe dollar, which had bills worth several million dollars. It became so bad a couple of years ago that the days the 100.000.000 dollar bill was first printed, the 200.000.000 dollar bill was announced. They abandoned their currency that year and currently trade in foreign currency if I'm not mistaken. I know Zimbabwe is a terrible example to use, but still...
This is why PayPal and other ecurrencies are fixed to real world value - they are stable (as far as it can be)
The value of currency is like you imply not all that stable. Sure, it's not like the zimbabwe dollar, since most countries try to keep their currency in check as well as they can, but don't assume that over the course of a month suddenly your money isn't worth as much as it used to be.
As for Bitcoin... Well... Meh, who really gives a fuck. (Pardon my french) The only people who made any real profits on it are GPU vendors and power companies, and a lucky few which I doubt exceed a handful of people. FWIW, it behaves like a real currency would, but not a very reliable one.
How exactly are they defining professional though?
Don't you know? It's Tony Hawk PRO skater. This isn't just some average guy grinding on the curb, but a PRO. It says right so on the box. Hell, I'm getting my own channel, I'm a PROgrammer and I'm good at PROcastination. That's twice the professionalism of Mr Hawk.
I expect what they really mean is "content produced by people associated with Hollywood who have been paid upfront by a sponsor."
Well, there goes my ticket to riches... Oh well, I think I'll go flush some buffers for a while then. (See what you're missing out on ???)
$100 million is about what the US spends on Afghanistan in 36 hours. It would last 6 in Iraq.
<sarcasm>Well, that's great. There should be more money for science soon then... Right?</sarcasm>
glory days of Google Buzz
What glory days are we speaking of here? Oh, it was intended ironically, my bad.
burden of proof is on the prosecution
They've just submitted your laptop as evidence. Let's for the sake of argument say there is 200GB of kiddy porn on it. They've got the burden of proof thing covered you know? Your laptop, your hard drive, thus your kiddy porn. They'll have an expert on the witness stand explaining how they used their fancy forensic toolkit to find it all. It is on your PC, therefor you must have downloaded all that.
You can now wave your arms around in court screaming "rootkit" until your throat is sore, but the burden of proof now lies with you. They submitted the evidence, and it's up to you now to submit yours. They don't have to prove that it wasn't a rootkit that downloaded all that, just that a laptop full of kiddy porn was in your possession. As long as they followed the procedures to make sure the evidence was not contaminated, as far as the court is concerned, it IS acceptable evidence against you. Once you have proven that the machine was rootkitted, only THEN do they have to prove that it wasn't the rootkit that did all that. If the prosecution fails in that, you go free, but if you draw the rootkit card, you still have to prove it.
how can the technically clueless general public be expected to?
That's beyond the point. Most people who own pets are technically clueless as how to train them not to bite people, yet most pet owners are somehow expected to not have their pets bite people (to draw upon another admittedly terrible analogy). Terrible analogy aside, being clueless of the law doesn't excuse breaking it. Your property, your responsibility. If you're not knowledgeable about IT, why didn't you hire someone for that? After all, if you don't know anything about cars, you tend to take it to a garage for maintenance don't you? (heave ho, bad analogy day)
deliberately opening up your wireless for the public to share is not the same as getting rooted
Stop dragging wireless into this. Wireless has nothing to do with this.
can you honestly tell me that you know your system doesn't have any unpatched vulnerabilities and can you account for every process and driver etc running?
I'm going to give you the best advice you'll ever get when it comes to the court system in ANY country: pay a lawyer and shut up unless spoken to. Be it Germany, or the UK, or whatever country you decide that "Innocent until proven guilty" means "lalalala, I can't hear you, lalalala". Like I said, the legal system everywhere is bound to suffer more than a few headaches when it comes to technology and Internet, but if you think that pointing out the flaw in the system will save you without proving it is flawed you're in for a hell of surprise. And I really hope you never get into that position, because going by this discussion you're going to lose that argument, and have quite a few years ahead of you to contemplate it.
You can easily get convicted without a single shred of hard evidence, for any type of crime. An example of this is in Belgium the parachute murder (sorry dutch, google for English) where defendant Els Clottemans had motive, opportunity, and an army of investigators and psychoanalysts against her, but not a single shred of hard evidence. 30 years, first request for appeal denied due to a technicality. Did she do it? Who knows, probably. The court says she did. Was there hard evidence? Nope. Was the burden of proof against her once the prosecutor presented his case? Most definitely. And you know what? She couldn't bring anything in front of a judge that broke the case made by the prosecutor. The prosecutor made fun of her in the courtroom saying that she was expecting "a legal system akin to game of Cluedo". And quite frankly, that's what you're expecting. You're expecting to roll the dice and say "the government did it" "with their spyware" "on my laptop" while ho
Your initial car analogy is terribly flawed. Don't draw bad car-analogies to prove a point. (If your car is stolen and you fail to report it, you're in for a fun ride, mind you. And reporting it doesn't automatically remove you from the suspect list either.)
Root-kit != WLAN hotspot.
As for the root-kit, you are responsible for the security of your own machine. If you go to court "Oh lol, rootkit get out of jail free" most likely you'll be laughed out of court (straight into jail) unless you can prove it. I wouldn't be terrible surprised if in the end this whole thing backfires in a spectacular way, but for the time being YOU are responsible for YOUR property. If there is no evidence to the contrary, the court assumes that you are in control of your property. Having said that, I'm pretty sure that the legal system in most countries are going to have more than a few headaches in the future when it comes to technology. Far too few people are properly knowledgeable on the technologies they use on a day to day basis, and there is far too much legal gray area.
Also, in before the terrible "burglar in an unlocked home" analogy, and various other scenarios that have nothing to do with computers and Internet.
I did NOT port the Source Engine to a browser, not even close.
I expected as much, but thanks for setting the faulty slashdot record straight.
FYI, I'm not too big a fan of the tendency to try and do as much as possible in the browser, but you've definitely earned your geek badge with this. Kudos sir, my hat's off to you.
insert government moderated speech here
What does the EU say?
We should have a response from the EU in several years, but it won't be quite clear and opinions will be divided. Some memberstates will say "Yes", some "No", and some "Maybe". In the end Germany and France get to do a lot of posturing and the UK tries not to look too butthurt while calling the president a wet rag. The UK ends up being opposed to everything that doesn't serve its interests, but tries to get the best benefits of being part of the European Union.
They'll come forward with a grand statement that will cost member states quite a bit of money, but will contradict themselves 5 minutes later. In the end, despite best efforts and intentions, the EU is nothing but a shared piggy bank with more and more people grabbing for the hammer. Sometimes I like to think that the only good thing in the EU is Neelie Kroes.
Warning : above post is of a humorous nature, actual opinions on EU may differ slightly from above content, exaggerations may have slipped into above post, batteries not included, Greece saving economic counter-measures not included either, do not consume after financial bankruptcy of more than 1 memberstate. (Gotta be careful nowadays when rumors can topple financial markets, you know)
So how do you route around the police smashing down doors[...]?
Riots in the streets.
Until we outlaw streets, thus solving the problem once and for all.
Can't we just have the ever six week release story
How about we skip that step altogether and start ignoring these "major" releases. I mean, whooptidoo I can use twitter as a search engine. That's major release worthy.
one if they do something innovative?
Only if it hasn't been done before...
The only thing making Firefox still relevant for me is the extensions. And quite frankly, that's on the decline too.
That is not an OS in any established or even equivalent sense of the word.
Yeah, that's simcity 4 minus the disaster menu.
I also predict major driver issues.
For a moment I was thinking you were talking about road rage, that's how far this is away from an OS ;)
they are still JRPGs
It's true that the genre has done few changes to the formula. I recently picked up a few JRPGs after not having played any of them in a few years. I still had some fun playing them. There's a few design decisions gameplay-wise sometimes that really frustrate me (not having control over your party-members, insisting on a terrible skill-up system, ...), and sometimes these games tend to feel like a chore to play through near the end. Some people will complain about the storylines, but to be honest, if you're expecting a western storyline don't play a JRPG.
Western RPGs keep growing and innovating.
Well, if you call "dumbing down" innovating. I know this is a somewhat trollish argument, but it's a trend that's really noticeable in the latest batch of games in the past 3-4 years or so. Take Mass Effect 1 vs Mass Effect 2, and you'll notice that they've removed a lot of the options when leveling your character. Bethesda did the same with Morrowind vs Oblivion, and is planning to cut even more options out of Skyrim. Much of the fun in a WRPG for me was tweaking the character just to my liking, and I feel like lately there's been less and less options to allow for that. Some people will like the simplicity, and from a corporate point of view "making things more accessible for a larger audience" is always a good idea, but I have this feeling that WRPGs have lost of bit of their charm.
Storywise many WRPGs have cut down on the pretext of a deep storyline and devolved into MMO territory : fetch X, kill Y, escort Z. I really like an engaging storyline for my games. Take classics like Baldurs Gate or Planescape: Torment (although that one sometimes went overboard with having more story than gameplay though). Sure, you had the same fetch, kill and escort-type of missions, but they were neatly wrapped in a nice story so that it didn't feel like you were doing Fetch Quest #12. Being out in the middle of nowhere exploring something and finding by pure chance a sidequest, instead of "Oh yeah, you're here for the main story quest, right? Boy oh boy, am I glad to see you, have a sidequest."
The focus by WRPG developers has shifted from delivering an awesome experience as an RPG to building an RPG-based platform to sell DLC on. I'm not saying that being able to buy extra content is a bad thing, but I'd love to feel like I'm actually buying extra content and not buying content that was left out. Dragon Age : Origins had some DLC that made me think that some stuff had been intentionally cut from the game to sell as DLC. I miss the feeling of having added value with most DLC, like which you had with say the Baldurs Gate expansion.
Japanese developers are stuck in a time warp
I think it's more of a matter of grabbing the attention of their target audience, which is mostly Japanese. Sure, a game like Final Fantasy or Persona sells in the west, but if they can't sell it at home their publisher isn't going to bother with trying to get it overseas. I think the problem with JPRGs today is far more complex than "being stuck in a time warp", most likely due to the completely different audiences at home and in the west.
I like to think that it's kind of like Hollywood, afraid to do something radically different, because if it bombs they'll stand to lose a fuckton of money, while more of the same is "guaranteed" success. But the same can be said about western FPSs, which haven't changed all that much since the more realistic FPS'es have started showing up, and those still sell like mad too.
Temper temper, mon capitain.
No, it isn't. CS is programming. IT is the maintenance of computer systems.
Seems to me like that term is defined differently in various (international) job makets. We don't even have the term CS here. If you have a technical job that involves programming, systems administation, networking, etc you fall under IT. Doesn't matter if you're writing software for scientific purposes, or if you're configuring routers, you're IT here.
As for the question asked by the original poster:
would having IT experience hurt my job prospects down the road? Would future employers see that and be less likely to hire me — or pigeon-hole me into IT?
It depends on what you'll be doing. If you're going to be spending your days doing menial tasks below your level of education and skill set, it'll have an effect on your later career. My degree has never been important to my employers other than the paycheck of my first job. After the initial job it's more likely potential employers are interested in what you've been doing: what kind of projects, what kind of tasks you performed in those projects. Anything beyond that point is the interview and negotiating. However, there are still companies that look at your degree, but the further away you get from your graduation date the less important that becomes.
So will it have an impact on your further career? YES. Probably a more profound one than the degree you have.
How? That depends on what you're going to do. To give an example, I started out as a unix sysadmin for a consultancy firm with the odd job of programming various things in between (going from simple things like websites, to software to manage telco infrastructure, to writing a driver for a certain type of industrial lasers running linux). Now I do mostly C++ and java programming in the research sector and my background in being a sysadmin has helped me optimize hard- and software for use in an HPC environment. I doubt I would be where I am today if I hadn't taken the sysadmin job way back.
Having said that : if you pick a job you like doing and find interesting (if the jobmarket allows for that), it'll go a long a way to your personal happiness, which in turn indirectly improves your job performance, which opens new opportunities. Don't be afraid to change jobs if a good opportunity arises, but don't do so on a whim. And for the love of all that's good, don't stop learning and applying new things, even if they're not directly related to your field of expertise.
The browser is essentially a rendering machine which makes it trivially easy to show things and is largely machine independent. Instead of selling a huge monolithic program, companies can simply sell time on their servers to run their programs.
Hurray, now as a consumer of said program, I don't only have to worry about vendor lockin on the software side, but as well as no longer having any of my data available locally. Yes, I know this was a problem before (open and closed standards and all that jive), but now it's just kicked up a notch or two. What happens if the vendor goes bankrupt? Do I still get a copy of my data or does it go *poof* in the cloud?
Instead of paying $10,000 for a copy of the program and taking a chance that it's as good as it's marketing claims, you can buy a month of usage for $100, and the executable will run on the company's servers while using your browser to paint the screens.
There's a point where the software is going to cost you more in monthly usage than it is when you buy it. There's plenty of software around that once you have the basic functionality you really don't need any updates other than bugfixes. Let's take an (admittedly stupid) example of a basic calculator. You can buy calc.exe for $15, or you can rent it for $1 a month using an online service. Nobody is going to update calc.exe functionality wise since additions don't suddenly change, and an accounting firm really isn't interested in sin() and cos() which is supposedly coming in version 2.0. So after $15 months, the online calculator is suddenly costing you more money than the installed calc.exe is.
Furthermore, during the month that the taxes are due, all accounting departments across the nation decide to go into full overdrive and start doing some numbercrunching. With calc.exe each department goes ahead and does its thing in it's contained little environment, but with CalcOnline they all go to the same batch of load balanced server in the cloud, totally crushing the servers hosting the environment. Hell, some crazy routing hijinx happen lateron in the week, and some techie at LoadBalancedCalculators.com makes a mistake and the cluster of servers goes down in flames. Now the accounting department is stuck with a $1/month problem, which costs a hell of a lot more than than a $15 calculator.
Sure, in an ideal situation this doesn't happen. In an ideal situation all the right people are at the right place, and all the right hard- and software functions perfectly as planned. But there's already been plenty of examples of cloud environments failing, either due to a hardware problem or an operator error.
5) The vendor can keep backups of your files for you
I'm sure that they'll be all to pleased of simply hosting all your data for you. More lock-in of course. What if you work with privacy sensitive data? What if you're working on a project with data that the vendor might be interested in? Can you guarantee that the vendor in question doesn't simply swipe your files?
6) You can access your files and the application from anywhere on the net
Which is a strange way of looking at it sometimes. You see, on the one side of meeting table is a security guy constantly telling me how we should stop trusting the Internet so much. On the other end of the table is the cloud guy chanting "Internets! Internets! Internets!" in a Balmer-like fashion. I know it's not a black-and-white situation, but I'm somewhat reluctant to start handing over data that is important to my company to some third party. I'd much rather have a setup that I have more control over.
2) You don't need multiple versions for different architectures (reduced engineering)
The different architectures are no longer the version of the OS, but the different kinds of browsers and their little quirks. Or you could just flat-out say "only internet explorer allowed", but in that c
Not sure how much of a chance we have of changing things at this point, but if the MMO additions have made you decide not to buy Diablo 3, please consider lending your support at http://www.nodiablo.com/
To quote Bender:
Sorry man, best of luck with the website though.
Little did I know it would become a huge clusterf*** of small print and other crap that basically ruined all the enjoyment out of SC2
It got resolved eventually (a month after release) at which point I gave up and played other games
Let me guess, you named your profile "Poopfist" for the single player campaign and didn't get to change it anymore?
That was a "feature" I personally remember fondly. My rather obscene profile name violated the Terms Of Service. :-)
Now we just need someone to code a browser in that thing, and we're ready for web 3.0
Can we stop calling things "open" which are actually proprietary?
Richard? Are you trolling slashdot again? Haven't you got something better ... Nevermind. Carry on.
Think of the jobs.
And thus a new generation of "Apple Genius" salesmen was born.
If they did do physical tests, did they use a stack of paper as thick as the ipad, or as thick as the amount of notes the ipad would replace in an average political debate? [snip] And I bet your research completely left out the papercut factor...
I propose we use an old fashioned cannon. Load one up with ipads, and another one with paper. It would probably result in far worse cuts than papercuts. However, to complete the process we will need to yell sarcastic and cynical remarks at the test subject. It's all in the name of science, mind you, not some personal grudge.
We'll need a large enough pool of test-subjects, so I suggest we start immediately at the European level and skip the British parliament for now. On second thought, let's just gather all the politicians of the world together and just build a cannon large enough to launch them in orbit.
And yes, it has to be a cannon. Anything less is unacceptable. It IS for science after all.
Star Wars devolves, Star Trek evolves
Trek evolved alright, but in a good way? I don't know.
I used to (and for a large part still do) love Star Trek. Some of the TNG episodes, and especially DS9 were damn fine storytelling. They had a couple of writers that didn't focus so much on "particle of the week" and those are the episodes of Star Trek I fondly remember. Take "In the Pale Moonlight" from DS9 for instance. It was probably the episode of DS9 that made me love the series so much.
Then came Voyager. You know, the premise had a lot of potential. There was so much opportunity for doing something with the whole Maquis vs Federation thing, but after a couple of episodes (and a few occasional hints) all of a sudden they were one big happy family. "Oh, looks like someone blew up another shuttle. It's okay, we'll just create a new one from thin air." And of course, the ultimate letdown was the ending where the Borg was utterly defeated by giving the ship futuristic plot armor (if I remember correctly, I couldn't bring myself to watch it again honestly).
Lastly, Enterprise... I gave up on that show pretty early on. It's a personal opinion, but after Voyager I felt like the cow had been milked dry, was sent to the butcher, and yet someone was trying to milk the steak now. I guess you could say I felt like it was time for Star Trek to take a long nap.
The film by JJ Abrams, was an okay film, but ... It's a whole different premise than the original Star Trek. It's like someone took the Star Trek universe, characters and all, mashed it down a blender and added Action Sauce and a pinch of Lensflare Powder. There's constantly people running, shouting, personal conflicts, ... And sure, TOS TNG and DS9 had that too, but it was either much more subtle or it had more of dramatic flair. I'm not saying it's bad (because all things considering, it wasn't a bad movie), just that it's a different atmosphere from what you've come to expect from Star Trek. Hell, if you would have never seen Star Trek, I'm pretty sure that you would go out of the theater finding it to be an awesome movie.
But if you take Wrath of Khan or First Contact (despite all their flaws), those movies feel a lot more like Trek than Abrams' movie did. Or maybe I'm just getting older and more critical, and fondly look back while wearing my nostalgia goggles. I still feel like Star Trek needs far far more rest than it was given.
Star Wars on the other hand... Yeah... Those took a turn for the worse. I doubt you'll find many people defending Lucas on that one.