I was under the impression that H&R Block simply hired trained monkeys that input your information into their software, rather than actual trained tax accountants.
Offtopic, but have you found anyone reliable? I've always preferred to do my own taxes, but this year my hand will likely be forced, due to marrying a K-1 Visa holder, plus some other fun issues.
You can put it on Impulse, GameTap, or make it a direct download on your site. You can port it to console and put it on WiiWare, XBox Live, or PSN. Seriously, there's a lot of alternatives here, and its hard for me to think of Steam as a monopoly.
Keep in mind that if you open it you may not be able to donate to Child's Play, however. In the past, they've rejected offers for used games and game consoles, because the hospitals wanted to avoid possible infection via pre-used controllers and whatnot.
It partly depends on when you buy the Mac. If you buy right after a hardware refresh, then for the same price you can get a Mac that is fairly close to the PC (there's still a markup, but its not dramatic). If you buy right before a hardware refresh, then there's going to be a very large discrepancy.
If you've ever read his "science" blog, his alternative to chemical rockets is to tap into a free, near-infinite clean energy lattice that supposedly exists all around us. He also speculates that we'll also be able to ignore inertia and momentum. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions about how realistic this hypothesis is.
Louis, you might want to try being a little less transparent when pimping your own posts. At any rate, your ideas concerning motion aren't really that insightful. They're little more than wishful-thinking, without empirical evidence, experimentation, and subsequent math to back them up.
Because 95% of the time he doesn't need anything more than that XT webserver? Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?
It seems to me that he's raging against architect astronauts or coders who like to stuff 50 billion design patterns in their code just because they've been told that they should. And I agree, to some degree.
Adding in abstraction, patterns, and architectural features adds time and complexity. The idea is that by adding some well-understood complexity you can compartmentalize and simplify the overall problem. But that requires that you actually understand why you are doing so. Often times its better to just get the work done, and then clean up the code on a second pass.
That being said, I think he's taking this too far. Calling out templates is being problematic seems short sighted. Skipping unit testing is only really acceptable if the opportunity cost of not shipping to tighten up testing is high enough to warrant pushing out a potentially-buggy program with high maintenance costs.
What Joel seems to be missing here is balance: your development process should be in-line with business needs. And you should always, always include support in that analysis. I find that most issues with bad products and lost business are, at their root, because a decision is made to ship a product without realizing that doing so will make the ongoing support issues expensive for you and terrible for the end user.
As far as multiple inheritance goes, I agree that its bad, but not for the same reasons as Joel. The issue is that multiple-inheritance tends to result in the blob anti-pattern and violation of the single-purpose principle. (Hah, anti-patterns an architect-speak! Take that Joel!)
One of the situations I had in mind during my post was the WoW launch, where irate players in queues demanded that Blizzard take some of their money down to Best Buy to buy new servers. Literally, and seriously.
Of course the same people kept asking why Blizzard didn't hire more programmers, even though they had job postings up for all the relevant positions. Apparently they expected that Blizzard could hire a lead server architect in a matter of weeks.
Most of these people claimed to be engineers or software developers.
People are stupid.
The other group of people I'm thinking are the newbies on sites like GameDev.Net, who expect to write a WoW-killer MMO in 1-2 years, and run it on their spare PC.
More worrying about Chase is that they don't allow any non-alphanumeric characters in the password for the online banking site. I was kind-of shocked to find this out, because it suggests one, or both, of the following:
1) They don't salt/hash their passwords. 2) They don't used parameterized queries to protect against SQL injection.
Yes, implicit in my statement was that you had a number of players equivalent to WoW, along with the uptime, reliability, and latency of WoW. Perhaps I should have specifically said:
"You would be surprised at the number of people who believe that you can run a WoW server, supporting several thousand players with the same reliability and quality of the official server, on a spare box under your desk."
I should have expected pedantic replies on Slashdot.:)
I thought the problem with that poll was that it was an online poll, which are notorious for selection bias (in other words, people with broken XBoxes are more likely to respond than people with working XBoxes). Regardless, I'd guess based on my personal experience that the failure rate is around 40% or so, which is pretty pathetic (and yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 50%). Of course, the newer model XBoxes are more reliable. None of my friends with the newer models have been hit with a RROD (although one has had the E97 error).
Its not persistent-world and actually works peer-to-peer when you're actually out questing. You can only party with a certain number of people (four I think?). At least in the Dreamcast/GC versions, your character data was stored locally, which caused rampant cheating.
When people talk about MMORPGs, they typically mean persistent, shared-world games with simultaneous interaction with a fair number of players (100+), run on a central server.
I didn't realize gaming was some sort of exclusive club that you could banish people from. Games are really just toys, including the XBox and, yes, even your super-awesome-godly-PS3. You know who also cries and fights over toys? Children.
PS: Most PS2 owners have gone through several, and the fact that first-gen PS2s weren't the best in terms of reliability is hardly a tightly-kept secret. I don't see how its shocking to realize that a system with moving parts like a DVD drive will eventually break.
There's nothing about Live that excludes dedicated server. FFXI (an MMORPG) is already running on the 360, which gives me pause to claims that Live is somehow not ready for MMOs. Left 4 Dead uses dedicated servers hosted by Valve. Section 8 plans to allow you to host dedicated servers for XBox players on your PC. Given that other companies don't seem to be having issues with Live, is there really a problem, or is the whole "Live is haaaaaard" thing just a cop-out to shift the blame for slipped scheduled onto Microsoft?
Contrast that by the current standard where no one wants to work past 40 hours a week...
This is about where I stopped reading your post. You're complaining that people aren't dedicating large portions of their personal lives, free of charge, to you, so you can make more money. You are the one being selfish, and I'm going to have to side with your employees. I'm glad I'll never work for you.
I think people simply feel that boot times are indicative of how "heavy" or "bloated" your operating system is. If it takes a long time to boot, chances are there is a lot of stuff loading in the background.
And how do I stop my WIFE/GIRLFRIEND/SIGNIFICANT OTHER from fucking other people? Putting on a wedding ring or giving special names to a person you're sleeping with doesn't give you ownership over them. They're still their own people and they get to choose who they sleep with. And in case you hadn't noticed, cheating isn't all that uncommon, even amongst people who place extremely high importance on faithfulness and monogamy.
Or are you saying that I would deserve to get AIDs because my wife cheated on me? And then, of course, there's always rape, and children of HIV-positive people, but I guess that doesn't factor into your moral superiority does it? It turns out life isn't simple, and sometimes bad things happen that aren't your fault.
You are the one making the claim that a soul or spirit exists, and by extension, that it is impossible for us to create replicas of the brain. Therefor the burden of proof is on you, not me.
As far as your question goes, if there were something that could not be empirically observed, I would not be able to prove its extension. If something is not empirically observable, then that means that either we cannot currently observe it and the theory will be modified when we finally do observe it, or it is impossible to observe, which would mean that it has no influence on our reality or understanding thereof. All of this, of course, makes your question nonsense.
There could be magical, invisible pink unicorns all around us, or a teacup orbiting Venus. However, given a lack of evidence for such things, the default position is the only rational one, until evidence of such things is observed. You have provided no evidence. In its stead you have given an emotional argument that we are arrogant because we do not believe in this thing of which you have no evidence (and that you suggest is impossible to prove).
To date, we don't have any evidence that the human mind is any more than the sum of its parts: that is, physical and chemical reactions. In fact, there is ample evidence that physical damage to the brain can cause profound changes in personality, which is usually what people consider to be the providence of the soul.
Well, lots of people have a concept of a soul, and claim that there's no way to replicate it. So yes, to a lot of people our thought processes are indistinguishable from magic.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that H&R Block simply hired trained monkeys that input your information into their software, rather than actual trained tax accountants.
Offtopic, but have you found anyone reliable? I've always preferred to do my own taxes, but this year my hand will likely be forced, due to marrying a K-1 Visa holder, plus some other fun issues.
You can put it on Impulse, GameTap, or make it a direct download on your site. You can port it to console and put it on WiiWare, XBox Live, or PSN. Seriously, there's a lot of alternatives here, and its hard for me to think of Steam as a monopoly.
Keep in mind that if you open it you may not be able to donate to Child's Play, however. In the past, they've rejected offers for used games and game consoles, because the hospitals wanted to avoid possible infection via pre-used controllers and whatnot.
It partly depends on when you buy the Mac. If you buy right after a hardware refresh, then for the same price you can get a Mac that is fairly close to the PC (there's still a markup, but its not dramatic). If you buy right before a hardware refresh, then there's going to be a very large discrepancy.
If you've ever read his "science" blog, his alternative to chemical rockets is to tap into a free, near-infinite clean energy lattice that supposedly exists all around us. He also speculates that we'll also be able to ignore inertia and momentum. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions about how realistic this hypothesis is.
This isn't going away.
How long do you anticipate this revolution to take anyway? 5 years?
Louis, you might want to try being a little less transparent when pimping your own posts. At any rate, your ideas concerning motion aren't really that insightful. They're little more than wishful-thinking, without empirical evidence, experimentation, and subsequent math to back them up.
Because 95% of the time he doesn't need anything more than that XT webserver? Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?
Why does this come up every time?
It seems to me that he's raging against architect astronauts or coders who like to stuff 50 billion design patterns in their code just because they've been told that they should. And I agree, to some degree.
Adding in abstraction, patterns, and architectural features adds time and complexity. The idea is that by adding some well-understood complexity you can compartmentalize and simplify the overall problem. But that requires that you actually understand why you are doing so. Often times its better to just get the work done, and then clean up the code on a second pass.
That being said, I think he's taking this too far. Calling out templates is being problematic seems short sighted. Skipping unit testing is only really acceptable if the opportunity cost of not shipping to tighten up testing is high enough to warrant pushing out a potentially-buggy program with high maintenance costs.
What Joel seems to be missing here is balance: your development process should be in-line with business needs. And you should always, always include support in that analysis. I find that most issues with bad products and lost business are, at their root, because a decision is made to ship a product without realizing that doing so will make the ongoing support issues expensive for you and terrible for the end user.
As far as multiple inheritance goes, I agree that its bad, but not for the same reasons as Joel. The issue is that multiple-inheritance tends to result in the blob anti-pattern and violation of the single-purpose principle. (Hah, anti-patterns an architect-speak! Take that Joel!)
One of the situations I had in mind during my post was the WoW launch, where irate players in queues demanded that Blizzard take some of their money down to Best Buy to buy new servers. Literally, and seriously.
Of course the same people kept asking why Blizzard didn't hire more programmers, even though they had job postings up for all the relevant positions. Apparently they expected that Blizzard could hire a lead server architect in a matter of weeks.
Most of these people claimed to be engineers or software developers.
People are stupid.
The other group of people I'm thinking are the newbies on sites like GameDev.Net, who expect to write a WoW-killer MMO in 1-2 years, and run it on their spare PC.
More worrying about Chase is that they don't allow any non-alphanumeric characters in the password for the online banking site. I was kind-of shocked to find this out, because it suggests one, or both, of the following:
1) They don't salt/hash their passwords.
2) They don't used parameterized queries to protect against SQL injection.
Yes, implicit in my statement was that you had a number of players equivalent to WoW, along with the uptime, reliability, and latency of WoW. Perhaps I should have specifically said:
"You would be surprised at the number of people who believe that you can run a WoW server, supporting several thousand players with the same reliability and quality of the official server, on a spare box under your desk."
I should have expected pedantic replies on Slashdot. :)
You'd be surprised at the number of people that think you can run something like a WoW server on a spare box underneath someone's desk.
I thought the problem with that poll was that it was an online poll, which are notorious for selection bias (in other words, people with broken XBoxes are more likely to respond than people with working XBoxes). Regardless, I'd guess based on my personal experience that the failure rate is around 40% or so, which is pretty pathetic (and yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 50%). Of course, the newer model XBoxes are more reliable. None of my friends with the newer models have been hit with a RROD (although one has had the E97 error).
Its not persistent-world and actually works peer-to-peer when you're actually out questing. You can only party with a certain number of people (four I think?). At least in the Dreamcast/GC versions, your character data was stored locally, which caused rampant cheating.
When people talk about MMORPGs, they typically mean persistent, shared-world games with simultaneous interaction with a fair number of players (100+), run on a central server.
I didn't realize gaming was some sort of exclusive club that you could banish people from. Games are really just toys, including the XBox and, yes, even your super-awesome-godly-PS3. You know who also cries and fights over toys? Children.
PS: Most PS2 owners have gone through several, and the fact that first-gen PS2s weren't the best in terms of reliability is hardly a tightly-kept secret. I don't see how its shocking to realize that a system with moving parts like a DVD drive will eventually break.
There's nothing about Live that excludes dedicated server. FFXI (an MMORPG) is already running on the 360, which gives me pause to claims that Live is somehow not ready for MMOs. Left 4 Dead uses dedicated servers hosted by Valve. Section 8 plans to allow you to host dedicated servers for XBox players on your PC. Given that other companies don't seem to be having issues with Live, is there really a problem, or is the whole "Live is haaaaaard" thing just a cop-out to shift the blame for slipped scheduled onto Microsoft?
Contrast that by the current standard where no one wants to work past 40 hours a week ...
This is about where I stopped reading your post. You're complaining that people aren't dedicating large portions of their personal lives, free of charge, to you, so you can make more money. You are the one being selfish, and I'm going to have to side with your employees. I'm glad I'll never work for you.
Except that a lot of the broken XBoxes are covered under warranty, and thus the replacement wouldn't show up in the sales figure.
I think people simply feel that boot times are indicative of how "heavy" or "bloated" your operating system is. If it takes a long time to boot, chances are there is a lot of stuff loading in the background.
Funny enough, I spent the first 18 years of my life going to military doctors and have the exact opposite opinion.
And how do I stop my WIFE/GIRLFRIEND/SIGNIFICANT OTHER from fucking other people? Putting on a wedding ring or giving special names to a person you're sleeping with doesn't give you ownership over them. They're still their own people and they get to choose who they sleep with. And in case you hadn't noticed, cheating isn't all that uncommon, even amongst people who place extremely high importance on faithfulness and monogamy.
Or are you saying that I would deserve to get AIDs because my wife cheated on me? And then, of course, there's always rape, and children of HIV-positive people, but I guess that doesn't factor into your moral superiority does it? It turns out life isn't simple, and sometimes bad things happen that aren't your fault.
You are the one making the claim that a soul or spirit exists, and by extension, that it is impossible for us to create replicas of the brain. Therefor the burden of proof is on you, not me.
As far as your question goes, if there were something that could not be empirically observed, I would not be able to prove its extension. If something is not empirically observable, then that means that either we cannot currently observe it and the theory will be modified when we finally do observe it, or it is impossible to observe, which would mean that it has no influence on our reality or understanding thereof. All of this, of course, makes your question nonsense.
There could be magical, invisible pink unicorns all around us, or a teacup orbiting Venus. However, given a lack of evidence for such things, the default position is the only rational one, until evidence of such things is observed. You have provided no evidence. In its stead you have given an emotional argument that we are arrogant because we do not believe in this thing of which you have no evidence (and that you suggest is impossible to prove).
To date, we don't have any evidence that the human mind is any more than the sum of its parts: that is, physical and chemical reactions. In fact, there is ample evidence that physical damage to the brain can cause profound changes in personality, which is usually what people consider to be the providence of the soul.
Well, lots of people have a concept of a soul, and claim that there's no way to replicate it. So yes, to a lot of people our thought processes are indistinguishable from magic.