That doesn't take anything away from the fact that the vast majority of people probably use them to play mp3s and frankly couldn't give a stuff about anything you've just mentioned.
Similar story - already been doing this for 6 years.
My wife and I live in Japan, my sister's family are in the UK and my parents have retired to Spain. We find Skype and similar services invaluable. One of the interesting things from a tech point of view is just how much the video/audio sync and framerate have improved over that time in various applications.
A large percentage of the BBC's material is licensed or subject to contractual agreement. That license/contracts normally coves the UK only. Since it would be ridiculous to expect the British to pay extra just so that the license can be extended for a overseas viewers who pay nothing, the BBC is usually left having to charge, or take advertising in order to offer overseas services.
If the British people (of which I am one) found out that they were paying for Auntie Beeb, while 'Johnny Foreigner' gets everything for free, there would be open revolt. It particularly affects me as I'm an expat living overseas. I would gladly pay the equivalent of the UK television license fee (that funds the BBC) in order to get 24/7 access to their output, but it's not available, so I'm left largely relying on selective torrents.
I may be able to pass you on, but I'd need to ask a couple of questions first about where you are now and what you do and have no way of contacting you. Since I'd rather not give out my email address on slashdot, I set up a temporary one at: slashdot.temp.contact@gmail.com - this would be the place to contact me.
Japan is where a lot of the video game industry is, so it could be fun looking for a programming job there. But, the market for PCs in Japan is shrinking (their cell phones are amazing and replace most uses of a PC) so there's probably not much future in "regular" software over there. And again, you're not going to be able to pick up Japanese very quickly, either, although a lot of people over there speak English. (Besides, I'm told that the Japanese aren't very friendly to foreign workers; that a foreigner taking a Japanese job will always be unwelcome. At least that's what a friend of mine said when he came back this semester, so your mileage may vary. I'd expect younger folk to be more forgiving.)
I think you're half right and half wrong. Speaking as one of probably only a handful of English speaking foreigners who holds down an IT job in Japan outside of Tokyo, it's a tough place to get into. A lot of people who claim the Japanese are hard on foreigners have a huge chip on their shoulder and far too often mistake legitimate job rejection for racism. Put yourself in a Japanese employer's shoes - you're interviewing 5 candidates, 4 of whom are native Japanese speakers and 1 who can barely string together a basic conversation. Who is going to be the easier to work with. Given that the interview process is often more about finding reasons to reject than reasons to employ (in any culture), it's a no brainer that the foreigner is going to have a very tough time unless they've studied the language to a pretty high level.
That said, in my experience if there are jobs that do benefit from having a foreigner in the position (which sadly are very very few), companies will often bend over backwards to assist you overcome the language barrier, which the Japanese themselves recognize as a huge problem.
If you're willing to put up with the unbearable heat and stifling humidity of Tokyo or perhaps Osaka, there are opportunities there with both Japanese and foreign firms. I personally know an IT recruiter/headhunter there who specializes in foreign recruits, and he must have opportunities because he keeps hitting me up with questions about whether I'm looking for anything.
Videogames are an extremely unlikely route in though. Visit any web forum relating to employment in Japan and you'll see a queue a mile long of foreigners wanting to find out how to get into either a) manga art or b) videogames programming in Japan. And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a large number of Japanese kids grow up wanting to to do the same, so it's a fiercely difficult industry to get into even for homegrown talent.
Just as an aside, I will pick you up on one point. Contrary to popular belief, most developed countries have more or less caught up with Japan now cellphone wise. It's true that in the past Japan was well ahead of everything else, but more recently the handsets that are coming out, particularly in Europe, have pretty similar feature sets to what's available over here.
this isn't about converting Apple employees. It's about making a spectacle in front of a bunch of third parties who are demonstratively willing to buck the Microsoft monopoly
In which case it's one of the most categorically stupid ways of doing it that I've ever heard. When people turn up to a store to use a service and find themselves unable to do so, I'm sure they're going to be delighted. They're sure to sit patiently and listen to a bunch of idiots who decided that their opinions counted for more than the customers who have probably paid for Apple products and would like to take advantage of the support that the genius bar offers.
I used to have a lot of empathy for the FSF and what they were trying to do. That's just ended.
I'll continue to support the cause, but despite the FSF not because of them.
Added to which, the likelyhood of Apple even bothering about games, let alone treating game designers "like rock stars" is unlikely given their past record. This is Gabe Newell on working with Apple to develop games in the past:
Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms.
From another site I read regularly, a forum member posted the following (the link was recently taken down, but I checked it at the time and it's absolutely true):
Some years ago I registered www.confuse.me.uk with some intention of doing something or other with it. Part of that was going to be a forum which I set up, then never had time to do anything more with it.
I took a look today and I have 14,140 members, 8,358 threads and 22,914 posts and each and everyone one of them is spam. Spammers replying to spambots replying to spammers.
After a shopper's membership card is scanned, and the goods are bagged and the customer is ready to go, the drone cashier will usually pipe (pretty much for ALL in earshot to hear), "Thank you, Mr/Mrs/Ms (last name)". THAT bugs the SHIT out of me. So, I would interrupt them -- as they say "Thank you" -- with "NO LAST NAME/DON'T SAY MY LAST NAME."
Safeway could someday become "Dangerway"....
Overreaction much? One wonders how you manage to step outside your house each day without the protection of your tinfoil hat. Personally I don't give a fuck if someone addresses me by my first, last or any name. Why? Because it's my name. That's why I have it.
There's a lot to be said for just living life without the need to have a panic attack about every possible bad thing that could (but almost certainly won't) happen to you. Getting riled up about people using my name, isn't something I feel the need to raise my blood pressure over. Good luck with your next medical.
If you can't afford a $99 developer program, you probably can't afford the $399 device to test it on or the computer to host it, or the food to eat while you code...
This is a common saying which is often seen as "insightful" (as it is modded here), but it makes no sense - the argument assumes that I can use the same money I spent on the iphone to use for the developer program, and on my food.
I can't see how you came to this conclusion. What the GP is saying is, if you can't afford $99 for the developer program fee, you're probably too poor to be able to afford an iPhone anyway, or even to feed yourself. Basically if you don't have 99 bucks, you're too poor to live. Whether or not you agree with him is another thing altogether, but your argument about using the same money multiple times is mistaken.
No, this statement is incorrect [...] please don't go waving around poisonous ideas like "standards compliance is a relative term."
Why the hell shouldn't he, when he's absolutely right. If standards compliance wasn't a relative term, we wouldn't be able to make constructs such as "different levels of standards compliance", or "the level of standards compliance fell somewhat short". You're simply confusing compliance (relative) with compliant (absolute). Really, you owe the guy an apology for your lecture on lax relativism.
And that backs up his credentials how? A bunch of largely honorary citations, awards and non-exec positions; a company he founded that closed a few years later; some donations to charitable causes. Where is the impact on the business world (or anywhere else for that) that you and I both know the parent was referring to?
The fact is that Wozniak is rightfully credited as having made some of the most significant engineering achievements in the history of computing is entirely justifiable. When it comes to electronics the man is a bona fide genius. But when it comes to his views on business, he's no more qualified to speak than anyone else. Apple isn't the same company it was when he was there. He might as well give his views on Walmart.
All that said, I actually agree with him on this one. The iPhone isn't 3G right now, because it means Apple will be able to sell the drones another one when they released it (planned obsolescence anyone?) and the Air is overpriced crap that stretches the limits of style over substance even by Apple's standards.
No, but the Republican party still wants a chance at this election. If another war was started, it would guarantee a Democrat victory.
The Neocons aren't Republicans by any definition of the term. They are a group of ultra-right extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party as a suitable vehicle to advance their cause. I don't think they care about what happens to the Republican Party - they're just hell-bent on carrying out as much of their destructive agenda as they can before Bush gets booted out, or (as some are predicting, although I don't believe it will happen) they declare martial law.
What a bunch of wankers the RIAA is. Talk about having an inflated sense of worth.
And therein lies the rub. It's SELF-worth. Self, meaning the people who run the record companies. This is money to line the pockets of the suits who've never even stepped inside a recording studio. You can bet that if this became law and the RIAA did manage to successfully win a case, it would be the execs that would trouser the money. The artists whose CDs were copied wouldn't get a cent.
Most of the reports of what happened immediately after the plane came down were based on journalists questioning an unrelated airport worker who relayed a brief conversation he had with the captain. In other words although quite possibly true, in terms of reliability it was nothing more than hearsay. There's a world of difference between second-hand comments from someone not involved in the situation, and the initial statements from official investigators.
Forgive me if your comment was meant to be some kind of humor that went over my head.
Given the insane amounts of data involved, I would imagine hooking it up to the 'net would provide an immediate threat. In fact I'd deliberately go down that route. I'd probably start by calling Google, and saying "Hey Schmidt, we'll give you access to the entire history of American film, and a 10 year agreement into the future, the rights to index it and make it searchable in whatever way you see fit, and allow you to provide limited 30 seconds-at-a-time clip downloads (of Youtube quality) based on searches. All you have to do is maintain a master archive it for us to a standard we both agree on."
I'd imagine the big G would fall over themselves to do it. And it would cost the movie industry zilch.
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface. I'm a web developer. Like most professionals I optimize my images for the web, and get them down to sizes which don't add up to the figure you seem to think they do. Most developers do the same. Javascript libraries are text, they're not all that big. The vast majority of sites don't even use iframes.
Typing the words "web page" into Google (first term that came into my head) brings up the following sizes for the first pages returned (44k, 52k, 13k, 17k, 76k, 12k, 37k, 52k, 21k). The definition of page size in this case is: "the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page, including the defining HTML file as well as all embedded objects (e.g., image files with GIF and JPG pictures)." Try it with as many terms as you want, I'm sure you'll get similar results. Plenty of headroom there before we even get close to 100k. Right now it looks like reality is on my side. I don't "only wish" anything, except in your imagination...
So, given that most web pages weigh in at under 100k, why the fuck does Firefox need "hundreds of megabytes" of memory just to make the back button work "super duper fast"? I haven't found a reason yet to click the back button several thousand times.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't take anything away from the fact that the vast majority of people probably use them to play mp3s and frankly couldn't give a stuff about anything you've just mentioned.
Similar story - already been doing this for 6 years. My wife and I live in Japan, my sister's family are in the UK and my parents have retired to Spain. We find Skype and similar services invaluable. One of the interesting things from a tech point of view is just how much the video/audio sync and framerate have improved over that time in various applications.
A large percentage of the BBC's material is licensed or subject to contractual agreement. That license/contracts normally coves the UK only. Since it would be ridiculous to expect the British to pay extra just so that the license can be extended for a overseas viewers who pay nothing, the BBC is usually left having to charge, or take advertising in order to offer overseas services. If the British people (of which I am one) found out that they were paying for Auntie Beeb, while 'Johnny Foreigner' gets everything for free, there would be open revolt. It particularly affects me as I'm an expat living overseas. I would gladly pay the equivalent of the UK television license fee (that funds the BBC) in order to get 24/7 access to their output, but it's not available, so I'm left largely relying on selective torrents.
I may be able to pass you on, but I'd need to ask a couple of questions first about where you are now and what you do and have no way of contacting you. Since I'd rather not give out my email address on slashdot, I set up a temporary one at: slashdot.temp.contact@gmail.com - this would be the place to contact me.
I think you're half right and half wrong. Speaking as one of probably only a handful of English speaking foreigners who holds down an IT job in Japan outside of Tokyo, it's a tough place to get into. A lot of people who claim the Japanese are hard on foreigners have a huge chip on their shoulder and far too often mistake legitimate job rejection for racism. Put yourself in a Japanese employer's shoes - you're interviewing 5 candidates, 4 of whom are native Japanese speakers and 1 who can barely string together a basic conversation. Who is going to be the easier to work with. Given that the interview process is often more about finding reasons to reject than reasons to employ (in any culture), it's a no brainer that the foreigner is going to have a very tough time unless they've studied the language to a pretty high level.
That said, in my experience if there are jobs that do benefit from having a foreigner in the position (which sadly are very very few), companies will often bend over backwards to assist you overcome the language barrier, which the Japanese themselves recognize as a huge problem.
If you're willing to put up with the unbearable heat and stifling humidity of Tokyo or perhaps Osaka, there are opportunities there with both Japanese and foreign firms. I personally know an IT recruiter/headhunter there who specializes in foreign recruits, and he must have opportunities because he keeps hitting me up with questions about whether I'm looking for anything.
Videogames are an extremely unlikely route in though. Visit any web forum relating to employment in Japan and you'll see a queue a mile long of foreigners wanting to find out how to get into either a) manga art or b) videogames programming in Japan. And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a large number of Japanese kids grow up wanting to to do the same, so it's a fiercely difficult industry to get into even for homegrown talent.
Just as an aside, I will pick you up on one point. Contrary to popular belief, most developed countries have more or less caught up with Japan now cellphone wise. It's true that in the past Japan was well ahead of everything else, but more recently the handsets that are coming out, particularly in Europe, have pretty similar feature sets to what's available over here.
In which case it's one of the most categorically stupid ways of doing it that I've ever heard. When people turn up to a store to use a service and find themselves unable to do so, I'm sure they're going to be delighted. They're sure to sit patiently and listen to a bunch of idiots who decided that their opinions counted for more than the customers who have probably paid for Apple products and would like to take advantage of the support that the genius bar offers. I used to have a lot of empathy for the FSF and what they were trying to do. That's just ended. I'll continue to support the cause, but despite the FSF not because of them.
Added to which, the likelyhood of Apple even bothering about games, let alone treating game designers "like rock stars" is unlikely given their past record. This is Gabe Newell on working with Apple to develop games in the past:
Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms.
There's a lot to be said for just living life without the need to have a panic attack about every possible bad thing that could (but almost certainly won't) happen to you. Getting riled up about people using my name, isn't something I feel the need to raise my blood pressure over. Good luck with your next medical.
The fact is that Wozniak is rightfully credited as having made some of the most significant engineering achievements in the history of computing is entirely justifiable. When it comes to electronics the man is a bona fide genius. But when it comes to his views on business, he's no more qualified to speak than anyone else. Apple isn't the same company it was when he was there. He might as well give his views on Walmart.
All that said, I actually agree with him on this one. The iPhone isn't 3G right now, because it means Apple will be able to sell the drones another one when they released it (planned obsolescence anyone?) and the Air is overpriced crap that stretches the limits of style over substance even by Apple's standards.
It's too late to mod you up any more, but I'd like to say thanks for doing that.
yeah, thanks for explaining his joke.
Most of the reports of what happened immediately after the plane came down were based on journalists questioning an unrelated airport worker who relayed a brief conversation he had with the captain. In other words although quite possibly true, in terms of reliability it was nothing more than hearsay. There's a world of difference between second-hand comments from someone not involved in the situation, and the initial statements from official investigators.
Forgive me if your comment was meant to be some kind of humor that went over my head.
I'd imagine the big G would fall over themselves to do it. And it would cost the movie industry zilch.
Glad you've clicked. Sooner or later people are going to realize what the "forever" in the title actually refers to.
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface. I'm a web developer. Like most professionals I optimize my images for the web, and get them down to sizes which don't add up to the figure you seem to think they do. Most developers do the same. Javascript libraries are text, they're not all that big. The vast majority of sites don't even use iframes.
Typing the words "web page" into Google (first term that came into my head) brings up the following sizes for the first pages returned (44k, 52k, 13k, 17k, 76k, 12k, 37k, 52k, 21k). The definition of page size in this case is: "the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page, including the defining HTML file as well as all embedded objects (e.g., image files with GIF and JPG pictures)." Try it with as many terms as you want, I'm sure you'll get similar results. Plenty of headroom there before we even get close to 100k. Right now it looks like reality is on my side. I don't "only wish" anything, except in your imagination...
So, given that most web pages weigh in at under 100k, why the fuck does Firefox need "hundreds of megabytes" of memory just to make the back button work "super duper fast"? I haven't found a reason yet to click the back button several thousand times.
Forgive me. I always thought jokes were supposed to contain humor.