OK, this is scary. Two people have politely explained how I didn't get the joke (which I completely missed). Nobody has posted a "woosh". What has happened to the real Slashdot!?
True, although a lot of the characteristics I find particularly interesting about it relate to the filesystem layer. Various of the "competitors" are incorporating functions that are also (to some extent) outside the normal remit of the filesystem. Btrfs in particular, however its volume management and RAID-ing functionality is not used outside of that filesystem. Whereas I believe ZFS can subsume most storage management, although AFAIK only Solaris really takes this idea to its logical conclusion. ZFS has been ported to BSD already though and AFAIK they didn't need to replace their whole storage stack, so it can be done.
The thing that I thought was particularly interesting was that, for a while, it looked like everyone (except Linux and Windowsfor various reasons) was agreeing on ZFS as *the* next-gen filesystem. If Apple is now going in another direction too then that appears to no longer be the case - the next gen filesystem world is going to be as varied / competitive / cluttered / confusing / interesting (delete as appopriate) as our existing filesystem "market" is.
Steve Jobs commented on HAMMER FS inclusion in 10.7 during WWDC 2009. He said "due to legal and technical constraints we can't touch that"
Really? I'm somewhat surprised and impressed that somebody thought to ask him! Do you have a reference for that at all? Or do should I go watch the keynote? I'd be interested to see the context (and for that matter to know who thought to put the question).
The legal constraints can't be a license issue but perhaps they're worried about some particular patents. Hard to imagine that they could come up with next gen FS features, even if they chose a different implementation, which didn't potentially infringe *some* patents (as Sun and NetApp are also learning / demonstrating). Maybe there was something particular about HAMMER that tickled the patent lawyers in a way they didn't like.
The technical constraints claim sounds a bit more vague. Dragonfly's filesystem driver API is quite different to other OS structures AIUI; I had heard that the code was designed with a nod towards porting to other systems, though. Maybe it just doesn't do what they want.
Should be under a suitable license for their usage. It's written for DragonflyBSD which has a funny filesystem driver interface but AIUI the developer had ports to other OSes in mind, so it should still be doable. It can do cheap filesystem snapshots so it would support Time Machine-style operation well. The question is whether it could be adapted to fit Apple's uses well enough. Given one of the linked articles suggests Apple are hiring FS developers my guess would be that they've decided they'd rather build a ground-up filesystem that supports all the (slightly odd set of) features MacOS X wants.
Haha, that did make me laugh:-) You compressed quite a lot of truth into a very small amount of text. There is a certain elegant symmetry to the two companies when you put it like that.
Interesting - we're chugging happily along in Linux / Windows / Mac / Unix land having a load of competing filesystems where all the popular ones have *roughly* similar capabilities. Then ZFS appears in OpenSolaris and filesystem design becomes cool again. Everyone starts either porting ZFS or making filesystems with similar features... Now a major player that actually *had* ported ZFS (somewhat) is seemingly deciding to go it alone. It seems as though the next-gen filesystem space is also going to have a variety of competing filesystems.
I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
Posting anon, lest someone guess who my sources are.
The long and short of it was, Apple and Sun couldn't come to terms on the licensing. Sun wanted a lot of money for giving it to Apple under different terms and the amount they wanted was in the range of "hell, we could do it ourselves for that".
That sounds odd to me. Why would they need different licensing terms? Especially as they apparently had a port that was already somewhat distributed, at least in developer builds - presumably they thought that the license allowed them to do that at the time?
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
There generally seems to be a certain amount of frustration that the EU is holding up companies of US origin, although actually they have significant financial impact (and offices and presumably regional headquarters and subsidiary companies) in Europe too. Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?
Presumably Oracle and Sun would be welcome to merge if they had terminated their entire presence in Europe - they're not proposing doing that and one assumes it's because Europe is a big enough financial interest for them that they believe it's *worth the wait*. They may not have a choice, in practical terms, but one assumes they have years / decades of making money from their European dealings so it's not like the EU is just a plain dead weight for them.
This is the same EU that is cracking down on anticompetitive behaviour from MS and Intel, which generally seem to be popular moves with folks here. Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies.
To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
True, at least some of the stuff I've seen worked on isn't end-user ready yet (although if they had a "get it upstream" clause that would help ensure that it gets to users eventually). But typically EU projects seem to have a greater focus on creating stuff that's useful in the real world vs useful for publishing academic papers. They seem to have more freedom / inclination to build something that might be useful but isn't academically trendy. So it's more likely to improve the state of software in a direct fashion rather than by increasing the body of published papers. As you say, it's still a bit hit-and-miss whether something long-lasting comes out of it although one can hope that the companies and universities involved take the code somewhere. At least it gets written and published open source, though!
True. But that's an IO scheduler, whereas the code mentioned in the article is a realtime CPU scheduling class. Probably would have been good if the article summary had mentioned this explicitly!
True - those are IO schedulers, though, whereas the scheduler described in the article is a CPU scheduler. Not that IIRC the summary or myself went so far as to point that out explicitly, which was a mistake!
For CPU scheduling Linux has a general purpose scheduler (which is CFS, in recent Linux releases) and two realtime scheduling classes (round robin and FIFO), if memory serves.
Deadline scheduling is well established and has been done many times, in many flavours on other OSes. It's probably even been done on Linux before. But if this one gets upstream with the blessing of the kernel community, it would enhance Linux for everyone rather than just those running particular kernel patches.
Linux seems to be having a lot of realtime-related work (see PREEMPT-RT, a somewhat separate but related area of work) done, which is interesting - I would have said that the conventional wisdom was that large, general-purpose OSes cannot be realtime-ified. It seems like certain parties are determined to prove this wrong - and it's looking to me somewhat like getting to "good enough" realtime behaviour will make large segments of users happy even though it's perhaps unlikely to ever replace ground-up realtime OS designs.
I've not read TFA yet but will try not to spout rubbish;-)
Deadline-based scheduling is good for realtime processing and not necessarily better for your desktop or server. "Realtime" doesn't mean fast / high throughput and doesn't *necessarily* mean low latency. What it really means is "predictable", with low latency potentially being important. A server or desktop scheduling algorithm often does all kinds of crazy scaling of priorities according to process behaviour in the past, etc - it aims to keep processes running on the CPU as much as possible so that your overall performance is good. The desktop scheduler may also be tweaked to try and make sure interactive tasks respond quickly
Typically a realtime scheduling algorithm is more "stupid" and therefore more predictable, so applications that need regular helpings of CPU can run without the behaviour of the scheduler disrupting their operation. Linux currently supports realtime scheduling through "round robin" and "first-in-first-out" classes, which are extremely "stupid" scheduling algorithms but useful in some cases. Realtime tasks run according to the chosen algorithm, then the normal desktop/server scheduler handles other tasks. It sounds to me like the proposal is to add a slightly more intelligent realtime scheduler allowing administrators and applications to control realtime behaviour differently when necessary. It doesn't sound like they're proposing replacing the main scheduling algorithm, although some OSes have played with using deadline-based scheduling exclusively.
An EDF algorithm assigns each task a deadline and tries to always schedule the task whose deadline will expire soonest. Using a periodic deadline you can effectively specify stuff like "I need to be scheduled every 50ms, if at all possible" and the scheduler will try to make sure this happens. If you are, for instance, doing video streaming or interacting with a hardware buffer or controlling a robot arm you might have these requirements. In these cases, getting the CPU regularly is much more important than getting lots of CPU on average, which is why just renicing isn't sufficient.
The EU-funded projects are somewhat interesting in my experience. They tend to fund both academics and researchers from industry to do stuff and the projects tend to be more focused on practical results than a normal project funded by a research council. They can still generate research papers, etc, but there's more of an emphasis on producing new code that can actually be *used* to do stuff that wasn't available before. Whereas more academic research normally focuses on getting the code sufficiently robust that papers can be published about it, then it's often forgotten.
I think the more practically focused work of this kind is valuable and would like to see more. It is less "valuable", academically and as such I suspect academics are less inclined to attribute prestige to those who have worked on it. It would be nice to see a bit more glory given to folks who work on these projects (disclaimer, I have done a *very* small amount of work on one myself) as a valid direction vs industry or academia. Also, this mode of development does remind me a little of some of RMS's writings about how Free Software development could be funded - here we have effectively a government body giving money to worthy causes, as represented by a team of interested experts, to enhance open source software for everyone involved in reasonably directed ways. Ideally it'd be nice to see "get stuff upstream" be a completion goal for these projects, I'm not sure to what extent that is already true.
Sadly, you speak the truth. It's not *just* the technical aspects and openness that make the console sellable. I'll switch to a PS3 when I can use an Xbox-style controller and play Halo games. My PS3-using friends have the mirroring viewpoint, more-or-less. The PS3 has lots of benefits and one or two exclusive games I'd really like to be able to play - but for now the weight of "things I'd like to play" comes down heavily on the side of Xbox, with most games I'd play on the PS3 being available on both.
Not entirely fair to take GNOME and Compiz as examples as Linux software - they're cross-platform AFAIK so they probably run on BSD too. And they're very much high level applications code, some of which is either rather large or rather new. What are you using as examples of BSD code? The kernel? The BSD libc and userspace utilities? You'd always hope that core OS code is better written than application-level code, so if they're higher quality it's not entirely surprising, more reassuring.
If you compare the equivalent components in GNU/Linux and BSD then that would be interesting and a bit more fair IMO. Many people seem to think BSD still wins in that quality comparison but it would be interesting to see whether this is so much the case these days....
Myself and friends used to emit a fairly loud "Yarrrrrrrrrrr" every time a "Piracy is a crime" warning came up at the cinema. Sometimes even heard an answering one from across the cinema.
Don't know how it is in other chains but at Vue cinemas in the UK they now use night vision cameras to monitor the people watching the film. ]I once saw a spoof anti-piracy ad involving night vision and silenced sniper rifles - life imitating satire, so I guess I know the next step.
Secondly, this monitoring strikes me as being like the millimetre wave scanners at airports. Sure it's nominally for justifiable purposes but every time I see a message saying they're monitoring us with night vision for copyright purposes I have a mental image of a couple making out in the dark at the back of a cinema and a security guard in an office somewhere watching them using light-enhancing CCTV going "Oooh, go on! You dirty minx! Oooh, you like that, do you?". Seriously, copyright or not, it's not OK to watch cinema goers watching the film - that's plain just creepy.
To be fair, ST did the reverse too. The various crew members who just happened to be able to solve problems that had eluded humanity's scientists and engineers for decades, on demand, in a crisis. And it wasn't even dumb luck or inspiration sometimes - I remember Janeway suddenly turning scientist now and again and having tremendous academic expertise.
Like most people, I don't mind them taking some liberties with this sort of thing for the sake of plot. But when they start endowing any character they want with genius level intelligence / idiot level stupidity and then taking it away again when it doesn't fit subsequent plot points.
The risk is that if you don't try to correct stuff - particularly if it falsely made you look like a better candidate - and they do realise, you'll look like somebody who considers ethics to be optional. Especially if they go look up references from "employers" during periods you were actually job seeking. Personally I would hope a responsible manager would avoid employees who are so willing to compromise their integrity. Aside from that, some folks have a moral objection to lying, particularly for personal gain. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Were I in a position to interview staff I would certainly be inclined not to offer you a place, regardless of your technical skills, since you don't sound like you could be counted on to act in good faith. I'm even starting to doubt that your name is really "Anonymous Coward".
I think in an elected official the hypocrisy, though arguably expected by most of us, is probably the worst thing here and makes everything he's done in this instance questionable. Do we need the law to protect content-producers? If so he shouldn't be responsible for piracy himself. Or should we not have such a law, in which case he should come out against it.
Even if I thought copying were OK, I'd still think that doing it whilst overseeing the introduction of anti-copying legislation was morally wrong.
Various people on the previous article on this topic claimed that video games are simply not allowed to be classified as 18+, thus tying the classification board's hands on this one. Is this true? If so it's not so much censorship and more an obvious example of their rules needing sorting out - L4D was classified for 18 years or over here in the UK and L4D2 is substantially more violent, so it'd look pretty to me if the Australians shoehorned L4D2 into the 15+ category just because it's all they had handy.
It does sound like the kind of thing the Daily Fail would complain about. There doesn't have to be anything "wrong" with something (as far as, say, the law or pleasant liberal-minded people are concerned) for the Mail to hate it. I don't think they'd be bothered by the Christian-ness but stuff involving immigrants, political correctness, etc is going to set them frothing at the mouth. If it could also impact house prices and increase the number of recycling bins on our doorsteps they'd probably actually explode.
Does it? I always thought it meant to extract a significant amount of money out of your customers, a teeny bit at a time, here and there, masking the true cost. Under this definition, choosing to drip feed content apparently unnecessarily would qualify as nickle and diming.
however a 3-7 hour in-depth quest line with a few items scattered throughout is well worth $7. It's certainly not flipping horse armor.
I'm sure it's worth it - Bioware know their stuff. It's just that releasing it at the same time as the retail version of the game suggests a slightly cynical "You've bought the disk, now pay for the rest" approach to DLC - whereas if it had taken them a few more months of development it would look like "Hey guys, we value our customers so after release we made some more stuff - you can buy it if you want".
I don't think Bioware's necessarily ripping people off in terms of value-for-money here. Their stuff is good, I'll probably buy this game and the DLC. I just don't like it as evidence of a trend from "DLC = expansion packs after release" towards "DLC = a load of stuff we had for the game anyway, chopped up and sold for a higher total price than we could get on a single disk in stores".
They have a right to do that if they want but I'd rather they didn't - and if they persist or get worse I'll probably take my money elsewhere. Up to them if they think I'm the common case or not...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, now I feel more at home ;-)
OK, this is scary. Two people have politely explained how I didn't get the joke (which I completely missed). Nobody has posted a "woosh". What has happened to the real Slashdot!?
(thanks, by the way)
OMG I fail so hard!
True, although a lot of the characteristics I find particularly interesting about it relate to the filesystem layer. Various of the "competitors" are incorporating functions that are also (to some extent) outside the normal remit of the filesystem. Btrfs in particular, however its volume management and RAID-ing functionality is not used outside of that filesystem. Whereas I believe ZFS can subsume most storage management, although AFAIK only Solaris really takes this idea to its logical conclusion. ZFS has been ported to BSD already though and AFAIK they didn't need to replace their whole storage stack, so it can be done.
The thing that I thought was particularly interesting was that, for a while, it looked like everyone (except Linux and Windowsfor various reasons) was agreeing on ZFS as *the* next-gen filesystem. If Apple is now going in another direction too then that appears to no longer be the case - the next gen filesystem world is going to be as varied / competitive / cluttered / confusing / interesting (delete as appopriate) as our existing filesystem "market" is.
Steve Jobs commented on HAMMER FS inclusion in 10.7 during WWDC 2009. He said "due to legal and technical constraints we can't touch that"
Really? I'm somewhat surprised and impressed that somebody thought to ask him! Do you have a reference for that at all? Or do should I go watch the keynote? I'd be interested to see the context (and for that matter to know who thought to put the question).
The legal constraints can't be a license issue but perhaps they're worried about some particular patents. Hard to imagine that they could come up with next gen FS features, even if they chose a different implementation, which didn't potentially infringe *some* patents (as Sun and NetApp are also learning / demonstrating). Maybe there was something particular about HAMMER that tickled the patent lawyers in a way they didn't like.
The technical constraints claim sounds a bit more vague. Dragonfly's filesystem driver API is quite different to other OS structures AIUI; I had heard that the code was designed with a nod towards porting to other systems, though. Maybe it just doesn't do what they want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER
Should be under a suitable license for their usage. It's written for DragonflyBSD which has a funny filesystem driver interface but AIUI the developer had ports to other OSes in mind, so it should still be doable. It can do cheap filesystem snapshots so it would support Time Machine-style operation well. The question is whether it could be adapted to fit Apple's uses well enough. Given one of the linked articles suggests Apple are hiring FS developers my guess would be that they've decided they'd rather build a ground-up filesystem that supports all the (slightly odd set of) features MacOS X wants.
Haha, that did make me laugh :-) You compressed quite a lot of truth into a very small amount of text. There is a certain elegant symmetry to the two companies when you put it like that.
Interesting - we're chugging happily along in Linux / Windows / Mac / Unix land having a load of competing filesystems where all the popular ones have *roughly* similar capabilities. Then ZFS appears in OpenSolaris and filesystem design becomes cool again. Everyone starts either porting ZFS or making filesystems with similar features ... Now a major player that actually *had* ported ZFS (somewhat) is seemingly deciding to go it alone. It seems as though the next-gen filesystem space is also going to have a variety of competing filesystems.
I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
Posting anon, lest someone guess who my sources are.
The long and short of it was, Apple and Sun couldn't come to terms on the licensing. Sun wanted a lot of money for giving it to Apple under different terms and the amount they wanted was in the range of "hell, we could do it ourselves for that".
That sounds odd to me. Why would they need different licensing terms? Especially as they apparently had a port that was already somewhat distributed, at least in developer builds - presumably they thought that the license allowed them to do that at the time?
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
There generally seems to be a certain amount of frustration that the EU is holding up companies of US origin, although actually they have significant financial impact (and offices and presumably regional headquarters and subsidiary companies) in Europe too. Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?
Presumably Oracle and Sun would be welcome to merge if they had terminated their entire presence in Europe - they're not proposing doing that and one assumes it's because Europe is a big enough financial interest for them that they believe it's *worth the wait*. They may not have a choice, in practical terms, but one assumes they have years / decades of making money from their European dealings so it's not like the EU is just a plain dead weight for them.
This is the same EU that is cracking down on anticompetitive behaviour from MS and Intel, which generally seem to be popular moves with folks here. Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies.
To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
True, at least some of the stuff I've seen worked on isn't end-user ready yet (although if they had a "get it upstream" clause that would help ensure that it gets to users eventually). But typically EU projects seem to have a greater focus on creating stuff that's useful in the real world vs useful for publishing academic papers. They seem to have more freedom / inclination to build something that might be useful but isn't academically trendy. So it's more likely to improve the state of software in a direct fashion rather than by increasing the body of published papers. As you say, it's still a bit hit-and-miss whether something long-lasting comes out of it although one can hope that the companies and universities involved take the code somewhere. At least it gets written and published open source, though!
True. But that's an IO scheduler, whereas the code mentioned in the article is a realtime CPU scheduling class. Probably would have been good if the article summary had mentioned this explicitly!
True - those are IO schedulers, though, whereas the scheduler described in the article is a CPU scheduler. Not that IIRC the summary or myself went so far as to point that out explicitly, which was a mistake!
For CPU scheduling Linux has a general purpose scheduler (which is CFS, in recent Linux releases) and two realtime scheduling classes (round robin and FIFO), if memory serves.
Deadline scheduling is well established and has been done many times, in many flavours on other OSes. It's probably even been done on Linux before. But if this one gets upstream with the blessing of the kernel community, it would enhance Linux for everyone rather than just those running particular kernel patches.
Linux seems to be having a lot of realtime-related work (see PREEMPT-RT, a somewhat separate but related area of work) done, which is interesting - I would have said that the conventional wisdom was that large, general-purpose OSes cannot be realtime-ified. It seems like certain parties are determined to prove this wrong - and it's looking to me somewhat like getting to "good enough" realtime behaviour will make large segments of users happy even though it's perhaps unlikely to ever replace ground-up realtime OS designs.
I've not read TFA yet but will try not to spout rubbish ;-)
Deadline-based scheduling is good for realtime processing and not necessarily better for your desktop or server. "Realtime" doesn't mean fast / high throughput and doesn't *necessarily* mean low latency. What it really means is "predictable", with low latency potentially being important. A server or desktop scheduling algorithm often does all kinds of crazy scaling of priorities according to process behaviour in the past, etc - it aims to keep processes running on the CPU as much as possible so that your overall performance is good. The desktop scheduler may also be tweaked to try and make sure interactive tasks respond quickly
Typically a realtime scheduling algorithm is more "stupid" and therefore more predictable, so applications that need regular helpings of CPU can run without the behaviour of the scheduler disrupting their operation. Linux currently supports realtime scheduling through "round robin" and "first-in-first-out" classes, which are extremely "stupid" scheduling algorithms but useful in some cases. Realtime tasks run according to the chosen algorithm, then the normal desktop/server scheduler handles other tasks. It sounds to me like the proposal is to add a slightly more intelligent realtime scheduler allowing administrators and applications to control realtime behaviour differently when necessary. It doesn't sound like they're proposing replacing the main scheduling algorithm, although some OSes have played with using deadline-based scheduling exclusively.
An EDF algorithm assigns each task a deadline and tries to always schedule the task whose deadline will expire soonest. Using a periodic deadline you can effectively specify stuff like "I need to be scheduled every 50ms, if at all possible" and the scheduler will try to make sure this happens. If you are, for instance, doing video streaming or interacting with a hardware buffer or controlling a robot arm you might have these requirements. In these cases, getting the CPU regularly is much more important than getting lots of CPU on average, which is why just renicing isn't sufficient.
The EU-funded projects are somewhat interesting in my experience. They tend to fund both academics and researchers from industry to do stuff and the projects tend to be more focused on practical results than a normal project funded by a research council. They can still generate research papers, etc, but there's more of an emphasis on producing new code that can actually be *used* to do stuff that wasn't available before. Whereas more academic research normally focuses on getting the code sufficiently robust that papers can be published about it, then it's often forgotten.
I think the more practically focused work of this kind is valuable and would like to see more. It is less "valuable", academically and as such I suspect academics are less inclined to attribute prestige to those who have worked on it. It would be nice to see a bit more glory given to folks who work on these projects (disclaimer, I have done a *very* small amount of work on one myself) as a valid direction vs industry or academia. Also, this mode of development does remind me a little of some of RMS's writings about how Free Software development could be funded - here we have effectively a government body giving money to worthy causes, as represented by a team of interested experts, to enhance open source software for everyone involved in reasonably directed ways. Ideally it'd be nice to see "get stuff upstream" be a completion goal for these projects, I'm not sure to what extent that is already true.
Sadly, you speak the truth. It's not *just* the technical aspects and openness that make the console sellable. I'll switch to a PS3 when I can use an Xbox-style controller and play Halo games. My PS3-using friends have the mirroring viewpoint, more-or-less. The PS3 has lots of benefits and one or two exclusive games I'd really like to be able to play - but for now the weight of "things I'd like to play" comes down heavily on the side of Xbox, with most games I'd play on the PS3 being available on both.
Not entirely fair to take GNOME and Compiz as examples as Linux software - they're cross-platform AFAIK so they probably run on BSD too. And they're very much high level applications code, some of which is either rather large or rather new. What are you using as examples of BSD code? The kernel? The BSD libc and userspace utilities? You'd always hope that core OS code is better written than application-level code, so if they're higher quality it's not entirely surprising, more reassuring.
If you compare the equivalent components in GNU/Linux and BSD then that would be interesting and a bit more fair IMO. Many people seem to think BSD still wins in that quality comparison but it would be interesting to see whether this is so much the case these days....
Myself and friends used to emit a fairly loud "Yarrrrrrrrrrr" every time a "Piracy is a crime" warning came up at the cinema. Sometimes even heard an answering one from across the cinema.
Don't know how it is in other chains but at Vue cinemas in the UK they now use night vision cameras to monitor the people watching the film. ]I once saw a spoof anti-piracy ad involving night vision and silenced sniper rifles - life imitating satire, so I guess I know the next step.
Secondly, this monitoring strikes me as being like the millimetre wave scanners at airports. Sure it's nominally for justifiable purposes but every time I see a message saying they're monitoring us with night vision for copyright purposes I have a mental image of a couple making out in the dark at the back of a cinema and a security guard in an office somewhere watching them using light-enhancing CCTV going "Oooh, go on! You dirty minx! Oooh, you like that, do you?". Seriously, copyright or not, it's not OK to watch cinema goers watching the film - that's plain just creepy.
To be fair, ST did the reverse too. The various crew members who just happened to be able to solve problems that had eluded humanity's scientists and engineers for decades, on demand, in a crisis. And it wasn't even dumb luck or inspiration sometimes - I remember Janeway suddenly turning scientist now and again and having tremendous academic expertise.
Like most people, I don't mind them taking some liberties with this sort of thing for the sake of plot. But when they start endowing any character they want with genius level intelligence / idiot level stupidity and then taking it away again when it doesn't fit subsequent plot points.
The risk is that if you don't try to correct stuff - particularly if it falsely made you look like a better candidate - and they do realise, you'll look like somebody who considers ethics to be optional. Especially if they go look up references from "employers" during periods you were actually job seeking. Personally I would hope a responsible manager would avoid employees who are so willing to compromise their integrity. Aside from that, some folks have a moral objection to lying, particularly for personal gain. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Were I in a position to interview staff I would certainly be inclined not to offer you a place, regardless of your technical skills, since you don't sound like you could be counted on to act in good faith. I'm even starting to doubt that your name is really "Anonymous Coward".
I think in an elected official the hypocrisy, though arguably expected by most of us, is probably the worst thing here and makes everything he's done in this instance questionable. Do we need the law to protect content-producers? If so he shouldn't be responsible for piracy himself. Or should we not have such a law, in which case he should come out against it.
Even if I thought copying were OK, I'd still think that doing it whilst overseeing the introduction of anti-copying legislation was morally wrong.
Various people on the previous article on this topic claimed that video games are simply not allowed to be classified as 18+, thus tying the classification board's hands on this one. Is this true? If so it's not so much censorship and more an obvious example of their rules needing sorting out - L4D was classified for 18 years or over here in the UK and L4D2 is substantially more violent, so it'd look pretty to me if the Australians shoehorned L4D2 into the 15+ category just because it's all they had handy.
It does sound like the kind of thing the Daily Fail would complain about. There doesn't have to be anything "wrong" with something (as far as, say, the law or pleasant liberal-minded people are concerned) for the Mail to hate it. I don't think they'd be bothered by the Christian-ness but stuff involving immigrants, political correctness, etc is going to set them frothing at the mouth. If it could also impact house prices and increase the number of recycling bins on our doorsteps they'd probably actually explode.
Nickle and diming implies less value than cost,
Does it? I always thought it meant to extract a significant amount of money out of your customers, a teeny bit at a time, here and there, masking the true cost. Under this definition, choosing to drip feed content apparently unnecessarily would qualify as nickle and diming.
Yahoo answers seems to agree but then it *is* Yahoo Answers :-S
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061126203028AAuDJAf
Google will probably find better references.
however a 3-7 hour in-depth quest line with a few items scattered throughout is well worth $7. It's certainly not flipping horse armor.
I'm sure it's worth it - Bioware know their stuff. It's just that releasing it at the same time as the retail version of the game suggests a slightly cynical "You've bought the disk, now pay for the rest" approach to DLC - whereas if it had taken them a few more months of development it would look like "Hey guys, we value our customers so after release we made some more stuff - you can buy it if you want".
I don't think Bioware's necessarily ripping people off in terms of value-for-money here. Their stuff is good, I'll probably buy this game and the DLC. I just don't like it as evidence of a trend from "DLC = expansion packs after release" towards "DLC = a load of stuff we had for the game anyway, chopped up and sold for a higher total price than we could get on a single disk in stores".
They have a right to do that if they want but I'd rather they didn't - and if they persist or get worse I'll probably take my money elsewhere. Up to them if they think I'm the common case or not...