Just playing devil's advocate here, but the same thing could be said (arguably) of movies. There's all the set designers, costume designers, makeup people, camera operators, editors, graphic effects people, etc. who also work for years and put in more effort than the actors but don't get the same pay.
If the video game industry wants to be taken more seriously, they should start taking their product more seriously.
Well, who's to say that the games industry wants to be taken seriously? Currently, a blockbuster games makes somewhere between 2x and 6x the money of a blockbuster movie. For an industry that doesn't take itself "seriously", the games industry is doing rather well.
One good way I've found (as a customer) to help the tech support folks assess your technical competence is to say, upon calling in, "Before we begin, here's all the troubleshooting steps that I've already done."
This way, the tech. knows not to suggest things you've already tried, and is better able to look for things that you've overlooked.
It not really either lying or understanding. Many times the customer calling in believes that they automatically know more than you, since you're just a "script reading monkey." Once armed with this belief, they ignore everything you say and insist that their diagnosis must be correct, even when its absolutely bollocks.
XML and XSL are very good for large applications where you'll have many data formats and you'll want to be able to import and export data without having to hard-code in your data formats. That's way overkill for this application, though. I mean, all the guy wants to do is store a freakin' list. I'd consider JSON to be overkill here, much less XML.
Who's to say that this behavior is unethical? As far as I can see, Google responded to a legal subpoena by the Indian authorities to hand over the information. Its not really any different than them handing over information in response to a federal subpoena here in the US.
Saying that people who've never used e-mail are completely immune to e-mail scan is like saying pre-Columbian Native American civilizations were completely immune to smallpox. Lack of contact != immunity.
No. ED is the standard editor! You don't ask for a viitor or an emacsitor, you ask for an editor! Real programmers use ed. Vi (or, god forbid, vim) is for quiche eaters!
Heh. Like with you, the first thing that popped into my head upon reading the headline was, "Wait, IBM make supercomputers for starships now? Since when?"
Well, as far as AIM/ICQ goes, AOL controls all the servers for that protocol, so you're no better off than with MSN. AOL could choose to block all YouTube links tomorrow and you'd be just as out of luck on AIM/ICQ.
The thing is, this isn't being blocked at the client level. Its the servers that are blocking these links. Even if you switch to a different client, like Adium, or Pidgin, these links will be filtered.
While I'm all for greater regulation of corporations (especially with regard to environmental practices and shady finances), can you tell me what sort of government regulation (short of outright nationalization) would have prevented the loss of manufacturing jobs to other countries? The third world has such a huge comparative advantage over the US in terms of manufacturing costs that it would require truly draconian measures to stop the export of manufacturing.
Its probably not the VPN use per se. After all, China has lots of Western business people in it every day, and many of them will use a VPN to connect to their corporate offices. Most likely someone saw her browsing unapproved websites and mentioned it to someone who had the authority to do something about it.
That sort of philosophy may work very well in some ivory tower, but, out here in the real world, who's going to be doing the dissolution or alteration? You? You and what army?
Frankly, I think Twitter is doing the wrong thing here. Its a very rare case for the actual architecture of the program to inhibit performance. Usually, the bottlenecks occur in one or two suboptimal modules, that, when optimized, significantly increase program speed.
On the other hand, perhaps the bottlenecks are somewhere inside the Rails framework, and the Twitter team thinks that it'd be simpler to move to a new framework than to invest the effort to fix Rails.
That may be true, but you also have to look at the impact on China. Think of the thousands of factories that are dedicated almost exclusively to supplying companies like Dell, Wal*Mart, Apple, etc. If our companies go out of business, then, guess what? Those factories go out of business too. And, given that China is a totalitarian country, its more afraid of unemployment and economic hardship than we are. Historically, dictatorships have been more vulnerable to political discontent fueled by economic hardship than democracies.
It's always cheaper to build in countries that employ what amounts to Slave Labor.
You do realize that most third world factory workers want to be working in a factory, since its much better than the alternative, which is usually subsistence farming, right?
The thing with embargoes is that they work both ways. Currently, China is so dependent on the US consumer market to absorb its production that an embargo would hurt them as much as it hurts us.
The other thing is that, despite what you've been hearing, China is not the be-all-end-all for electronics. Korea still holds the crown for manufacturing memory, Taiwan is still the leader for TFT LCDs, Israel is still manufacturing networking equipment, etc. If China embargoes the US, these other countries will ramp up production and diversify their offerings to meet the redirected demand from the US market.
On the other hand, China's only large customer is the US. If they slap an embargo on the US, the US can go to other suppliers, whereas China has few other customers rich enough to buy the massive quantities of goods they are producing.
The Chinese know that, at least in the near future, an embargo will hurt them at least as much as it hurts us. This is why they've been actively growing their trade surplus vis a vis the US. Having a massive amount of dollar reserves gives them the option of manipulating our currency (and, by proxy, our economy) without resorting to something as blunt as an embargo.
I believe that Ubuntu has non-free drivers in the base install. Granted, you need to go into the restricted drivers manager and activate them to get the full benefit, but they are there.
Communism is a principle that says that everybody is equal.
Not quite. Communism says that, not only are all people equal, but that all people own all the property. As defined my Marx, true Communism only occurs when the means of production are owned and shared by the workers.
In this sense, Open Source is actually rather close to communism, in the sense that a GPL tool is free for all to use, share and modify.
Slashdot Mirror
Just playing devil's advocate here, but the same thing could be said (arguably) of movies. There's all the set designers, costume designers, makeup people, camera operators, editors, graphic effects people, etc. who also work for years and put in more effort than the actors but don't get the same pay.
Well, who's to say that the games industry wants to be taken seriously? Currently, a blockbuster games makes somewhere between 2x and 6x the money of a blockbuster movie. For an industry that doesn't take itself "seriously", the games industry is doing rather well.
One good way I've found (as a customer) to help the tech support folks assess your technical competence is to say, upon calling in, "Before we begin, here's all the troubleshooting steps that I've already done."
This way, the tech. knows not to suggest things you've already tried, and is better able to look for things that you've overlooked.
It not really either lying or understanding. Many times the customer calling in believes that they automatically know more than you, since you're just a "script reading monkey." Once armed with this belief, they ignore everything you say and insist that their diagnosis must be correct, even when its absolutely bollocks.
XML and XSL are very good for large applications where you'll have many data formats and you'll want to be able to import and export data without having to hard-code in your data formats. That's way overkill for this application, though. I mean, all the guy wants to do is store a freakin' list. I'd consider JSON to be overkill here, much less XML.
Oh, I fully understand that legal != ethical. I also fully understand that Google's responsibility is only to its shareholders.
The really frightening thing is that you seem to have fallen for Google's "don't be evil" marketing canard.
Who's to say that this behavior is unethical? As far as I can see, Google responded to a legal subpoena by the Indian authorities to hand over the information. Its not really any different than them handing over information in response to a federal subpoena here in the US.
India is a Democracy. China is not.
Saying that people who've never used e-mail are completely immune to e-mail scan is like saying pre-Columbian Native American civilizations were completely immune to smallpox. Lack of contact != immunity.
No. ED is the standard editor! You don't ask for a viitor or an emacsitor, you ask for an editor! Real programmers use ed. Vi (or, god forbid, vim) is for quiche eaters!
Heh. Like with you, the first thing that popped into my head upon reading the headline was, "Wait, IBM make supercomputers for starships now? Since when?"
Well, as far as AIM/ICQ goes, AOL controls all the servers for that protocol, so you're no better off than with MSN. AOL could choose to block all YouTube links tomorrow and you'd be just as out of luck on AIM/ICQ.
The thing is, this isn't being blocked at the client level. Its the servers that are blocking these links. Even if you switch to a different client, like Adium, or Pidgin, these links will be filtered.
How hard would it be to write a simple shell script that can do this for you?
In bash, for example:
#!mv $1 ~/.Trash/
While I'm all for greater regulation of corporations (especially with regard to environmental practices and shady finances), can you tell me what sort of government regulation (short of outright nationalization) would have prevented the loss of manufacturing jobs to other countries? The third world has such a huge comparative advantage over the US in terms of manufacturing costs that it would require truly draconian measures to stop the export of manufacturing.
Its probably not the VPN use per se. After all, China has lots of Western business people in it every day, and many of them will use a VPN to connect to their corporate offices. Most likely someone saw her browsing unapproved websites and mentioned it to someone who had the authority to do something about it.
Really? So you and your .45 cal. peashooter are going to stop a squad of National Guard troopers. Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.
That sort of philosophy may work very well in some ivory tower, but, out here in the real world, who's going to be doing the dissolution or alteration? You? You and what army?
Frankly, I think Twitter is doing the wrong thing here. Its a very rare case for the actual architecture of the program to inhibit performance. Usually, the bottlenecks occur in one or two suboptimal modules, that, when optimized, significantly increase program speed.
On the other hand, perhaps the bottlenecks are somewhere inside the Rails framework, and the Twitter team thinks that it'd be simpler to move to a new framework than to invest the effort to fix Rails.
That may be true, but you also have to look at the impact on China. Think of the thousands of factories that are dedicated almost exclusively to supplying companies like Dell, Wal*Mart, Apple, etc. If our companies go out of business, then, guess what? Those factories go out of business too. And, given that China is a totalitarian country, its more afraid of unemployment and economic hardship than we are. Historically, dictatorships have been more vulnerable to political discontent fueled by economic hardship than democracies.
Do you really think it'll be any better if we allow the people to vote through unfunded mandates?
You do realize that most third world factory workers want to be working in a factory, since its much better than the alternative, which is usually subsistence farming, right?
The thing with embargoes is that they work both ways. Currently, China is so dependent on the US consumer market to absorb its production that an embargo would hurt them as much as it hurts us.
The other thing is that, despite what you've been hearing, China is not the be-all-end-all for electronics. Korea still holds the crown for manufacturing memory, Taiwan is still the leader for TFT LCDs, Israel is still manufacturing networking equipment, etc. If China embargoes the US, these other countries will ramp up production and diversify their offerings to meet the redirected demand from the US market.
On the other hand, China's only large customer is the US. If they slap an embargo on the US, the US can go to other suppliers, whereas China has few other customers rich enough to buy the massive quantities of goods they are producing.
The Chinese know that, at least in the near future, an embargo will hurt them at least as much as it hurts us. This is why they've been actively growing their trade surplus vis a vis the US. Having a massive amount of dollar reserves gives them the option of manipulating our currency (and, by proxy, our economy) without resorting to something as blunt as an embargo.
I believe that Ubuntu has non-free drivers in the base install. Granted, you need to go into the restricted drivers manager and activate them to get the full benefit, but they are there.
Not quite. Communism says that, not only are all people equal, but that all people own all the property. As defined my Marx, true Communism only occurs when the means of production are owned and shared by the workers.
In this sense, Open Source is actually rather close to communism, in the sense that a GPL tool is free for all to use, share and modify.