Ok...so first you have to meet the exact requested skills...I think we all know how insane most places are about that. Typically the idea on the company end is to list a ton of stuff they have, so they can just grab the folks that meet as many as possible and use them in multifaceted positions (see reduce cost by paying 1 guy to do 4 jobs). The other part I am really confused about, is that generally speaking isn't the internet a fairly raceless place when it comes to this sort of thing? I mean unless you are putting "Black" or "Hispanic" or other minority group under your qualifications on your resume, they are all pretty faceless, raceless submissions. Couldn't this open the door to a string of discrimination suits against affirmative action types? It seems like this could expose the problems of the most qualified applicants losing jobs because they aren't a minority and the company needs another minority group hired to keep in regulations. My impression has always been the online job searching sort of removed the racism factor, and it seems like this nonsense is putting it back in.
Similar to the DRM Virus comments...I can see this happening with a clever virus writer. So the virus writer patents his method for infection, then couples that with a patent on something like "Distributed Marketing" or some equally nonsense thing. Now he could sue the antivirus folks for A. Infringing on his patent by using his code to detect his infections, and B. Damages regarding interfering with his "Distributed Marketing".
Let me point out why you are wrong, and even thinking in that way is wrong. I only have to take one word out of everything you said to do this..."Obvious". If you have ever worked in, with, or around government work you would know how silly "Obvious" really is. If "Obvious" worked for anything related to government work, do you think we would have even a fraction of the issues we have today. Tax codes, voting, science vs religion in regards to government control, laws...any of them, from the trivial to the controversial are almost all FAR more complicated than required. I will now point how much of a horrible person you are for wanting to put all those poor lawyers out of business! If "Obvious" were true think how many lawyers would be having problems feeding their families!
I'm not terribly familiar with the exact history of the beast. Did AOL actually release Mozilla? The bit of history I could find said Netscape did it in 1998, which seems to be the same year they got bought by AOL, but I'm having a hard time finding much specifically about it. The article seems to imply that Mozilla was OS before AOL got involved. But hey, I may just be confused:) It is pretty early.
You know, I think I was mixing history...given that this has gone on so long, in so many places, in so many ways. There was that hemlock drinking fellow, sentanced to death for "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and "of corrupting the youth." Socrates. Still kinda goes along with my point...how exactly is this news? This is actually ancient history.
Honestly I'm not terribly sure on the browser history of AOL. I had always thought that they never completed anything with Netscape. But really being able to tell what browser wouldn't matter for the non-geeks, it is all the same to them. That wouldn't stop the geeks from knowing that AOL uses Mozilla and the resulting outlash against it as being related to AOL. The non-geek user doesn't care about the ideaology behind browsers, they just want "The Internet" to work, its the geek that will raise the call to war on issues like that.
I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?
Well...depending on how you look at it 1 in 64 could be good or bad. 1 in 64 of porn/warez/mp3 now installing spyware seems like a nice decline. 1 in 64 of ALL websites certainly is disheartening. It really all depends on what websites you are including in the sampling. I am sure I can go find well over 64 sites that don't install anything nasty...finding 64 porn/warez/mp3 sites not installing anything nasty would be much more of a challenge methinks.
You seemed to have missed the last few years. Blowjob in oval office = impeachment hearings. War = reelection. Personally I have a completely opposing view. I think ANYONE in charge of nuclear weaponry should have someone assigned to them to perform oral sex on a whim to keep them calm and happy. While anyone starting a war needs to be on the ground with the first wave to see what they are really getting us into. $0.02
So...religious fundamentalists ignore science again and try to use their political clout to silence views opposed to theirs? This has been fairly obvious for a great deal of time... Remember that whole Scopes Monkey Trial thing? Want to go back further, I seem to remember some fairly important intellectuals getting executed for saying that Earth WASN'T the center of the universe! How is this news? What is this, Slashdot?
Google is a company. As a website owner they will help people find your site for free so you can do business IF you follow there terms. As a web user they help you find the sites that are making use of their free indexing service and following the rules. Search engines are by no means required to list ANY page, and while I certainly wouldn't agree with a search engine that delists on more sheisty terms (for example, delisting Microsoft.com because they are linux users) it is still their right to do that. It's not like BMW is losing a service they paid for, they are losing a free service they abused. So now, BMW of Germany is forced to clean up their act, or move on to traditional marketing to get people to their site, boo freakin hoo. Access to a search engine isn't a right for anyone, its a privlidge.
Many modern games use the same game engines with different graphics and plotlines. To me that just seems efficient, no use reinventing the wheel. My only concern with that as far as ripoffs go is when the engine is copied almost exactly without credit or licensing. To me ripoff has more to do with the stolen idea part, rather than the copying part.
The situation changes a great deal with the type of game involved. A game that you play through the story line is a bit different there are lots more things you can change so its not just a ripoff. A Pacman or Super Mario Bros ripoff is more of a direct competition, copied graphics and all. In more modern complex games I think the ripoff thing has mostly gone away, and it really is just variant games. In the early games it was a bit of a different situation. Imagine if all of the wall textures and enemys looked identical in your two games. Look at Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, both are very similar, but to compare them like the ripoffs in the article would be like Silent Hill having a secret company called Raincoat and they produced a Z virus that turned everyone in Silent Hill into zombies, and the main char would be a member of an elite police team CIRCLES. I don't think it is the same problem to day as it was back then, some of those games are clearly copies done by ripoff artists, not someone elses take on the same game. To me this falls under copyright. I shouldn't be able to take Frank Herbert's Dune to Kinkos and just have them replace a few names and sell it as my own. Sure people would enjoy it, its the same story they enjoyed in Dune, that doesn't mean I have any right to claim it as mine.
Ok...maybe I am a little confused here. Why is there such an outrage and suprised reaction to this? Is it because everyone forgot how Blizzard(Vivendi) acted with the bnetd thing in favor for their latest shiney toy (WoW). What the hell? I thought we established some years ago that Blizzard sold out to a profit mongering monster (Vivendi). Given that homosexual partners (even in game where straight partners can pretend to be gay) are a very small percentage of the population, and homophobic people are the larger percentage...is anyone really surprised that they would defend the larger portion of the fee paying populace? This isn't some grand civil rights movement here, this is a purely profit driven move. Please wake up everyone, go outside, live life, turn off the video game, and if you are really offended by this behavior...for god's sake fight this battle where it means something...IN REAL LIFE...not in some stupid video game. I mean for christ's sake...this is a battle at the highest level of courts in the US with the president trying to ammend the US constitution to ban gay marriages and people are crying foul at a video game? GO OUTSIDE! People wonder why nothing gets done to stop these sorts of things from happening in real life...while so many people spend their time and energy screaming about how their virtual worlds are being oppressed.
I agree with you for the most part, but if you go through the article "ripoff" is a pretty accurate term. There is a difference between similar games and ripoffs. Some of the games mentioned in that article are clearly ripoffs meant to steal profit by producing a nearly identical replica, not on any similarities. Look at the Super Mario Bro vs Great Giana Sisters vs Commander Keen. The sisters game is clearly a ripoff and the Keen games are clearly based on, yet original. Hell the screenshots of half of the games in the articles are pretty damning evidence. Lets not try to cover ripoff artists under a broad blanket of protection with this. There is a difference in your cars argument as well.
Compare the Ford Mustang with the Chevy Camaro...two very different designs, yet both based on being a 4 wheeled vehicle...Now compare the Chevy El Camino with the Ford Ranchero... There will always be things based on original works that are indeed original...and there will always be ripoffs trying to copy the success of the original. Lets not mix the two into being the same thing...a ripoff is a ripoff.
I don't really care if anyone looks at this beyond the original parent poster here. That has got to be one of the best ways I have seen this whole marriage nonsense put in a long time. I don't know that it really is about keeping parents together, as much as it is about keeping valued economic entities together, but it certainly is a valid point. I think it has just as much to do with the idea that a "couple" has more economic value when it comes to savings, spendings, and overall participation in the economic machine that must keep moving. To me the claiming of dependents has more to do with the tax incentives of staying together. Ultimately I think that marriage should have NOTHING to do with the government in any way shape or form. Marriage (as the anti gay marriage folks cry) is FAR more tied to the church than the government in the terms of "What is marriage?". I think we should replace all of the government "marriage" nonsense with "civil union" and then let anyone living as a single economic group (roommates, same sex or not as an example) apply for "civil union" status. Marriage should be restricted to the various churches to deal with, "civil union" status should be the governments issue, and the government should deal with it on a strictly economic standpoint and not a moral/religious standpoint. This would be a much better solution using separation of church and state.
That is what irritates me so much about the situation. If I could get PS to run in linux, and be priced competitively I would probably buy it, even for my poor use of its features. If they charged $30 or something I think more people that use it at the hobby level would pay for it. Sure, that means that 20+ people need to buy it vs the 1 person at the $649 price, but you get to tap a much larger market when you aren't charging so much. If I get hooked on it, then I tell a friend "hey, PS is only $30 and is awesome, pick it up"...the market would grow quickly. Look at VMware GSX, previously priced at a disgusting level, now potentially being free...just as a lead in to getting people to buy ESX, and get people to quit using the competitions products...at least someone seems to get the idea. I know if GSX goes free I will download it...and if I ever run into a serious project...I would be shelling out for ESX because I am already familiar with the VMware line instead of someone elses stuff, oh...and because they treated me like a consumer they want to win over vs a criminal they want to lock in.
Honestly to me it still seems relatively trivial. It's like the difference between the original Xbox controllers being made for bigfoot and the later ones being made for normal man. I have seen dozens of controllers, keyboards, interfaces, that ultimately are the same, but I really havn't seen very many companies patenting (they may be there) or enforcing (the part that shows up in the news that exposes the companies patenting) this sort of thing. "Your qwerty is spaced differently!" Hell, if that is the case maybe the respective developers behind qwerty, dvorak, and others should start sueing for infringement on their innovative layouts.
I downloaded a fansubbed version quite some time ago. Amazing movie, incredibly well done. I will buy the DVD as soon as I can just to see it in all its glory. I am sure there are plenty of freeloaders that just downloaded it and don't intend to purchase, but I would guess a very large chunk of the people who downloaded it will still want a copy on DVD.
I am waiting for the next step in this sort of thing beyond the mindstorm kits. I have, however, seen some terribly impressive mindstorm robots. I think my favorite of all time was the rubics cube solving robot. 3 pincher type things and some cameras...it took snapshots of three sides and then proceded to solve the cube with its 3 rotating pinchers. Its rather humbling to see a kids toy solve that thing by itself so quickly when I have seen adults take hours or fail altogether.
I don't think its soley a function of money. However, fabrication of custom parts certainly does require more money. The first *early tech thing* are often built without huge cash expenditures. There is a trade off between intimate knowledge of the subject and cash required. I can build things with legos, but fabricating the lego itself is a considerably more expensive process. Fabricating the legos also takes considerably more engineering knowledge in what pieces you should make as well. Having a bucket of ready parts gives a bit of a jump start to the creativity I think. I would love it if I had the time to dig deeper into electrical engineering, but I don't right now. I just want to be able to tinker with premade things (much like the direction of the mindstorms). Modular robot tinkering goodness.
I have used both, but I'm not much of a graphics guy so I can't really judge that well. I know most of the people I have talked to that are graphics people and do use both say PS is better, but not $649 better, coarse alot of them pick it up for free through work or "other".
Slashdot Mirror
Ok...so first you have to meet the exact requested skills...I think we all know how insane most places are about that. Typically the idea on the company end is to list a ton of stuff they have, so they can just grab the folks that meet as many as possible and use them in multifaceted positions (see reduce cost by paying 1 guy to do 4 jobs). The other part I am really confused about, is that generally speaking isn't the internet a fairly raceless place when it comes to this sort of thing? I mean unless you are putting "Black" or "Hispanic" or other minority group under your qualifications on your resume, they are all pretty faceless, raceless submissions. Couldn't this open the door to a string of discrimination suits against affirmative action types? It seems like this could expose the problems of the most qualified applicants losing jobs because they aren't a minority and the company needs another minority group hired to keep in regulations. My impression has always been the online job searching sort of removed the racism factor, and it seems like this nonsense is putting it back in.
Similar to the DRM Virus comments...I can see this happening with a clever virus writer. So the virus writer patents his method for infection, then couples that with a patent on something like "Distributed Marketing" or some equally nonsense thing. Now he could sue the antivirus folks for A. Infringing on his patent by using his code to detect his infections, and B. Damages regarding interfering with his "Distributed Marketing".
Let me point out why you are wrong, and even thinking in that way is wrong. I only have to take one word out of everything you said to do this..."Obvious". If you have ever worked in, with, or around government work you would know how silly "Obvious" really is. If "Obvious" worked for anything related to government work, do you think we would have even a fraction of the issues we have today. Tax codes, voting, science vs religion in regards to government control, laws...any of them, from the trivial to the controversial are almost all FAR more complicated than required. I will now point how much of a horrible person you are for wanting to put all those poor lawyers out of business! If "Obvious" were true think how many lawyers would be having problems feeding their families!
I'm not terribly familiar with the exact history of the beast. Did AOL actually release Mozilla? The bit of history I could find said Netscape did it in 1998, which seems to be the same year they got bought by AOL, but I'm having a hard time finding much specifically about it. The article seems to imply that Mozilla was OS before AOL got involved. But hey, I may just be confused :) It is pretty early.
You know, I think I was mixing history...given that this has gone on so long, in so many places, in so many ways. There was that hemlock drinking fellow, sentanced to death for "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and "of corrupting the youth." Socrates. Still kinda goes along with my point...how exactly is this news? This is actually ancient history.
Honestly I'm not terribly sure on the browser history of AOL. I had always thought that they never completed anything with Netscape. But really being able to tell what browser wouldn't matter for the non-geeks, it is all the same to them. That wouldn't stop the geeks from knowing that AOL uses Mozilla and the resulting outlash against it as being related to AOL. The non-geek user doesn't care about the ideaology behind browsers, they just want "The Internet" to work, its the geek that will raise the call to war on issues like that.
I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?
Well...depending on how you look at it 1 in 64 could be good or bad. 1 in 64 of porn/warez/mp3 now installing spyware seems like a nice decline. 1 in 64 of ALL websites certainly is disheartening. It really all depends on what websites you are including in the sampling. I am sure I can go find well over 64 sites that don't install anything nasty...finding 64 porn/warez/mp3 sites not installing anything nasty would be much more of a challenge methinks.
"I'd prefer to see the squabble of democracy to the efficiency of dictators." --Lawrence Wilkerson
You seemed to have missed the last few years. Blowjob in oval office = impeachment hearings. War = reelection. Personally I have a completely opposing view. I think ANYONE in charge of nuclear weaponry should have someone assigned to them to perform oral sex on a whim to keep them calm and happy. While anyone starting a war needs to be on the ground with the first wave to see what they are really getting us into. $0.02
s/there terms/their terms
So...religious fundamentalists ignore science again and try to use their political clout to silence views opposed to theirs? This has been fairly obvious for a great deal of time... Remember that whole Scopes Monkey Trial thing? Want to go back further, I seem to remember some fairly important intellectuals getting executed for saying that Earth WASN'T the center of the universe! How is this news? What is this, Slashdot?
So this is the sound of the internet crashing? It even comes with a playlist!
Google is a company. As a website owner they will help people find your site for free so you can do business IF you follow there terms. As a web user they help you find the sites that are making use of their free indexing service and following the rules. Search engines are by no means required to list ANY page, and while I certainly wouldn't agree with a search engine that delists on more sheisty terms (for example, delisting Microsoft.com because they are linux users) it is still their right to do that. It's not like BMW is losing a service they paid for, they are losing a free service they abused. So now, BMW of Germany is forced to clean up their act, or move on to traditional marketing to get people to their site, boo freakin hoo. Access to a search engine isn't a right for anyone, its a privlidge.
Many modern games use the same game engines with different graphics and plotlines. To me that just seems efficient, no use reinventing the wheel. My only concern with that as far as ripoffs go is when the engine is copied almost exactly without credit or licensing. To me ripoff has more to do with the stolen idea part, rather than the copying part.
The situation changes a great deal with the type of game involved. A game that you play through the story line is a bit different there are lots more things you can change so its not just a ripoff. A Pacman or Super Mario Bros ripoff is more of a direct competition, copied graphics and all. In more modern complex games I think the ripoff thing has mostly gone away, and it really is just variant games. In the early games it was a bit of a different situation. Imagine if all of the wall textures and enemys looked identical in your two games. Look at Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, both are very similar, but to compare them like the ripoffs in the article would be like Silent Hill having a secret company called Raincoat and they produced a Z virus that turned everyone in Silent Hill into zombies, and the main char would be a member of an elite police team CIRCLES. I don't think it is the same problem to day as it was back then, some of those games are clearly copies done by ripoff artists, not someone elses take on the same game. To me this falls under copyright. I shouldn't be able to take Frank Herbert's Dune to Kinkos and just have them replace a few names and sell it as my own. Sure people would enjoy it, its the same story they enjoyed in Dune, that doesn't mean I have any right to claim it as mine.
Ok...maybe I am a little confused here. Why is there such an outrage and suprised reaction to this? Is it because everyone forgot how Blizzard(Vivendi) acted with the bnetd thing in favor for their latest shiney toy (WoW). What the hell? I thought we established some years ago that Blizzard sold out to a profit mongering monster (Vivendi). Given that homosexual partners (even in game where straight partners can pretend to be gay) are a very small percentage of the population, and homophobic people are the larger percentage...is anyone really surprised that they would defend the larger portion of the fee paying populace? This isn't some grand civil rights movement here, this is a purely profit driven move. Please wake up everyone, go outside, live life, turn off the video game, and if you are really offended by this behavior...for god's sake fight this battle where it means something...IN REAL LIFE...not in some stupid video game. I mean for christ's sake...this is a battle at the highest level of courts in the US with the president trying to ammend the US constitution to ban gay marriages and people are crying foul at a video game? GO OUTSIDE! People wonder why nothing gets done to stop these sorts of things from happening in real life...while so many people spend their time and energy screaming about how their virtual worlds are being oppressed.
I agree with you for the most part, but if you go through the article "ripoff" is a pretty accurate term. There is a difference between similar games and ripoffs. Some of the games mentioned in that article are clearly ripoffs meant to steal profit by producing a nearly identical replica, not on any similarities. Look at the Super Mario Bro vs Great Giana Sisters vs Commander Keen. The sisters game is clearly a ripoff and the Keen games are clearly based on, yet original. Hell the screenshots of half of the games in the articles are pretty damning evidence. Lets not try to cover ripoff artists under a broad blanket of protection with this. There is a difference in your cars argument as well. Compare the Ford Mustang with the Chevy Camaro...two very different designs, yet both based on being a 4 wheeled vehicle...Now compare the Chevy El Camino with the Ford Ranchero... There will always be things based on original works that are indeed original...and there will always be ripoffs trying to copy the success of the original. Lets not mix the two into being the same thing...a ripoff is a ripoff.
I don't really care if anyone looks at this beyond the original parent poster here. That has got to be one of the best ways I have seen this whole marriage nonsense put in a long time. I don't know that it really is about keeping parents together, as much as it is about keeping valued economic entities together, but it certainly is a valid point. I think it has just as much to do with the idea that a "couple" has more economic value when it comes to savings, spendings, and overall participation in the economic machine that must keep moving. To me the claiming of dependents has more to do with the tax incentives of staying together. Ultimately I think that marriage should have NOTHING to do with the government in any way shape or form. Marriage (as the anti gay marriage folks cry) is FAR more tied to the church than the government in the terms of "What is marriage?". I think we should replace all of the government "marriage" nonsense with "civil union" and then let anyone living as a single economic group (roommates, same sex or not as an example) apply for "civil union" status. Marriage should be restricted to the various churches to deal with, "civil union" status should be the governments issue, and the government should deal with it on a strictly economic standpoint and not a moral/religious standpoint. This would be a much better solution using separation of church and state.
That is what irritates me so much about the situation. If I could get PS to run in linux, and be priced competitively I would probably buy it, even for my poor use of its features. If they charged $30 or something I think more people that use it at the hobby level would pay for it. Sure, that means that 20+ people need to buy it vs the 1 person at the $649 price, but you get to tap a much larger market when you aren't charging so much. If I get hooked on it, then I tell a friend "hey, PS is only $30 and is awesome, pick it up"...the market would grow quickly. Look at VMware GSX, previously priced at a disgusting level, now potentially being free...just as a lead in to getting people to buy ESX, and get people to quit using the competitions products...at least someone seems to get the idea. I know if GSX goes free I will download it...and if I ever run into a serious project...I would be shelling out for ESX because I am already familiar with the VMware line instead of someone elses stuff, oh...and because they treated me like a consumer they want to win over vs a criminal they want to lock in.
Honestly to me it still seems relatively trivial. It's like the difference between the original Xbox controllers being made for bigfoot and the later ones being made for normal man. I have seen dozens of controllers, keyboards, interfaces, that ultimately are the same, but I really havn't seen very many companies patenting (they may be there) or enforcing (the part that shows up in the news that exposes the companies patenting) this sort of thing. "Your qwerty is spaced differently!" Hell, if that is the case maybe the respective developers behind qwerty, dvorak, and others should start sueing for infringement on their innovative layouts.
I downloaded a fansubbed version quite some time ago. Amazing movie, incredibly well done. I will buy the DVD as soon as I can just to see it in all its glory. I am sure there are plenty of freeloaders that just downloaded it and don't intend to purchase, but I would guess a very large chunk of the people who downloaded it will still want a copy on DVD.
I am waiting for the next step in this sort of thing beyond the mindstorm kits. I have, however, seen some terribly impressive mindstorm robots. I think my favorite of all time was the rubics cube solving robot. 3 pincher type things and some cameras...it took snapshots of three sides and then proceded to solve the cube with its 3 rotating pinchers. Its rather humbling to see a kids toy solve that thing by itself so quickly when I have seen adults take hours or fail altogether.
I don't think its soley a function of money. However, fabrication of custom parts certainly does require more money. The first *early tech thing* are often built without huge cash expenditures. There is a trade off between intimate knowledge of the subject and cash required. I can build things with legos, but fabricating the lego itself is a considerably more expensive process. Fabricating the legos also takes considerably more engineering knowledge in what pieces you should make as well. Having a bucket of ready parts gives a bit of a jump start to the creativity I think. I would love it if I had the time to dig deeper into electrical engineering, but I don't right now. I just want to be able to tinker with premade things (much like the direction of the mindstorms). Modular robot tinkering goodness.
I have used both, but I'm not much of a graphics guy so I can't really judge that well. I know most of the people I have talked to that are graphics people and do use both say PS is better, but not $649 better, coarse alot of them pick it up for free through work or "other".