Exactly. I spend money reluctantly, especially on throwaway purchases like a console. I had an Atari 2600, an NES, a GameBoy, and never bought another console until about 2002. Even then, I only bought one because I got $3 in-store credit per used CD I brought in, which totalled up to about $120 of credit. I traded it in for a used PS/2, a second controller, a memory card, and Simpsons Road Rage. I gave the thing away about a year later. I tried a few other games but frankly they all got old pretty quick. I tried all the "hot titles" at the time in a few different genres and I came in the inescapable conclusion that nothing at all has changed since the last time I plugged in my NES, other than the graphics. Yeah, 3D world. Whoo hoo.
I usually only quote large chunks of somebody else when I'm responding, criticizing, or adding onto the existing body of work. I always include links to the original article, and clearly indicate the quoted section. None of this is out of any duty to academic rigor, I just think it's helpful to my reader (or readers, if anybody besides me reads it), to have the original to view in context. In fact, I get a little miffed when sites to which I link later re-organize or archive the material. Or, even worse, stick it behind a subscription service. That practice may be why so many people cut'n'paste the whole thing.
I don't use any extensions. Not one. No extensions, no themes, nothing. During an 8-hour workday, it will crash at least once, almost every day. It crashes for me on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Mac OS X, although it's far more stable on OS X than the Windows family. I've also all 3 Windows OS's on 3 different pieces of physical hardware, so it's not some faulty memory somewhere. It's by far the most unstable piece of software I have. Same with my home computer. It crashes constantly (by which I mean 1-2 times per 10 hours of use) on my laptop, my AlienWare machine, my wife's Dell laptop. The only platform on which it does not fail regularly is... Linux!
I don't think it's any more reliable or dependable than any other development paradigm. The difference is that instead of paying somebody for unreliable and undependable software, I can get it for free from open source. Firefox crashes more often, on every environment on which I run it (4 different OS's) than any other application I have. The difference is, I didn't have to pay for it.
I vote third party for whatever it's worth. Even that's tough. As somebody smart once observed, the Libertarian philosophy has the right answer to everything except raising children and fighting wars. You can't abandon children to be raised by the free market any more than you can turn them over to government. And the motto, "it's none of our business, we'll jusy stay out of it" has lead to more misery, death, suffering, persecution, pain, and destruction than any other belief outside of religion.
Except the Louisiana state legislature is 64% Democrats in the state House and 61% Democrats in the state Senate and a Democratic governer. Whoops. Oh well. The important thing is to always blame Republicans for restricting people's personal and economic freedom, no matter whose fault it really is. Holding the guilty accountable isn't the point. The point is blasting people we find politically distasteful.
Crusade onward, my good man! Get those Republicans!
We need states to enact this kind of thing. The states, not the federal government. When one state does this, consumers on the borders will flee to adjoining states to buy video games. If it's a truly horrible piece of legislation, the market will bear this out and the retail outlets will raise hell. The feedback loop between a free market and a democracy will show itself one way or another. It could be that the residents of Louisiana overall want exactly this kind of thing, they should have it. This is not a clear violation of free speech, but it's a worthy law to challenge it. What we want now, is a legal challenge to this law. A case will be decided using this law by the lower courts, and we'll get an appelate court decision. At this point, we'll know what this law really means. Don't worry, gamers and liberterians. The passage of these kinds of laws is vital to ensuring that rights are preserved in a common law judisdiction.
Good, I'm glad you agree with my assessment of the GP's misguided assertion that programmers are poor slaves to corporate powers. Sounds like you got an even better deal than what I have, which makes the GP's assertion even sillier.
This was on the AP wire on Monday. I understand that Slashdot isn't a "late breaking news" oriented site but... this story is stale, anybody who'd be interested in it has most likely already heard about it. But, since I don't really understand the criteria for when and what stories are selected for linking on Slashdot, I can't really give any constructive feedback on how to improve the process. So I'm just going to bitch about it.
Or maybe I got you wrong and you meant that developers are like artists: Poor, starving, living for their work and only valued once they are no longer available.
Move away from the coasts. I make $75,000/year working 40 hour weeks. I'm not on-call, have flex hours, get 3 weeks of vacation, and unlimited sick time. Quit working for IT sweat shops. Move somewhere where family time is valued and it's impossible to hire people unless you are willing to give them that flexibility. I've been through four employers in the St. Louis area and been able to land jobs with a deal akin to this one at all four. Developers are "poor"? No. Elementary school teachers are "poor." Starting salary for a developer in a low-watt market is close to $40K without a degree. That's not "poor." That's not starving, and that's not living for their work, unless by "living for their work" you mean that you're expected to show up on time and do your job.
The paint on a commercial airliner weighs thousands of pounds, all of which much be lifted via jet fuel that is costing more and more each day. Yes, removing even a few hundred pounds of cabling from a fleet of a few hundred planes that burn through expensive fossil fuels while making thousands of flights each per year is highly desireable.
Could read either way. On balance, the abuse of the patent system is harmful and needs to be addressed. That should be handled, however, by legislation, not litigation. Allowing the common law to change the patent system may briefly serve the greater good, but it is ultimately a bad thing, m-kay. Sadly, we're sort of left with no other options. Our esteemed reps in Washington are utterly obsessed with winning votes and power so they can... enact policies to further secure their votes and power. One begins to wonder if term limits might have been a good idea after all.
With the exception of there being more "off the shelf software available" I've found that Windows users also flounder if you stick them in front of OSX. Does that mean OSX is difficult to use or immature? Of course not, but it is definitely different than windows and there's a non-trivial learning curve before you start to feel comfortable.
There's a difference between floundering around for a length of time prohibitive to productivity, and floundering around until you can figure out how to launch MS Word. There's the difference. Windows users can get what they are accustomed to out of a Mac - IE, Office, iTunes, and a number of other products. None of that is available on Linux, and a significant number of people are unaware that there are alternatives. Many who do know about alternatives don't realize that those alternatives support Office formats. And frankly, I hate using Open Office because 9 times out of 10, the documents in load in it don't look the same or print the same.
The difference between Windows and Linux isn't just an interface. Granted, the difference between Windows and OS X isn't just an interface either, but the user can be almost completely insulated from the technological and philosophical differences in the OS design. That's just not the case yet with Linux, and the sentiment of the Linux development community seems (to me) to be that the user should never become completely insulated enough. Linux is going to become a victim of its own success. As it is developed to be more widely adopted and to be a serious desktop contender against Windows, it's going to have become more of what we hate about consumer-grade desktop operating systems.
Like all such laws, nobody really understands what the regulations mean/don't mean, and require/don't require until a case is tried and some kind of common law precedence is set. So everybody is going WAY overboard to avoid getting snagged by this on some minor technicality. It's a typical government overreaction to some isolated bad practices. And yes, I work with a company that has to deal with SOX first-hand. Our compliance department makes us take SCREENSHOTS of source code in the repository for SOX compliance. Stupid. It proves nothing.
If you mean "change game mechanics to reduce the need for them," I agree. If you mean "ban them so everybody has to suffer through stupid farming grinds," you're an idiot.
The thing is, I see some pages there that deserve recognition. And I see a lot more who don't, and which appear to have been selected not for any particular contribution to the web, the use of the web, or technology in general, but simply for standing for something noble. I mean, anybody can set up a web site for www.we-really-care-alot-about-the-world-and-its-my riad-problems.com and put a bunch of pictures up telling us how shitty the world is, and we all feel a little less guilty for living in a prosperous industrialized nation, but is that worthy of a reward?
He graduated from an accredited legal program and passed the bar, all of which can be accomplished without demonstrating that one has any ability to think critically and run an ethical lawyering practice.
What he means by "big government" is "omnipotent government." A government that people completely depend upon for their day-to-day needs. When government is "big" enough to give you all that you want, it's big enough to take away all that you need. When a sufficient portion of the citizenry is dependent on the government to that extreme, government then has leverage. The people may disagree with the government, but since they must have it just to get through the day, they dare not attack or it speak out against it. These are the seeds of fascism, and of the downfall of a democracy, and it is indeed a "big" government that can lead to it. Government size measured by budgets tells you nothing. How dependent is the nation on the services of its government to survive? The more dependent it is, the less freedom its people truly have.
And yes, I realize that somebody other than government can restrict freedom (employers, for example). But we're talking about "big" government here and in that regard, you are dead wrong.
"Sweet!" *runs out and buys an eletric car* "With that range, I can charge it overnight and get all my work done without buying an ounce of gas. At $3/gallon and a refill every 5 days, that's saving me $180 a month in gas!"
That stuff comes pre-installed because they make more money by having it there. Until they believe that they will make more money by NOT having there, it stays. That's how a free market works. Clearly, Dell has reached a point after acquiring AlienWare where a major portion of their customers will not get a Dell that they might otherwise purchase or at least consider, specifically because of the pre-installed phatware that comes on the system. Whatever AOL et al are paying for this trash, it's going to be trumped by additional sales to customers who would otherwise not buy a Dell. Further, it's quite likely Dell's business partners who push for having their shit pre-installed on Dell systems have some kind of contract, and unless Dell can lawyerweasel out of it or just wait for it to expire and not renew it, that crap has to stay on there. This is why companies sometimes appear sluggish regarding responses to the market.
"Why don't they just..... blah....?" we ask ourselves constantly. In some cases, there are contracts with hardware suppliers, advertisers, marketing teams, delivery and supply chains, retail outlets, and other behind-the-scenes business partners that must be, at the very least, scanned carefully by Dell's legal staff. More often than not, a renegotiation is necessary to change business practices that may impact those contracted partners. This takes time. And when the negotiations stall, there's no option but to wait it out.
So Dell is going the right thing, and the response here is almost universally negative. Not about the fact that they're doing the right thing by their customers, but that they even had to because they did the wrong thing first. Well I'll tell you what. It's rare that a business "has it right" out of the gate and never looks back. Google is one of those rare companies that has mostly pulled this off. Few businesses do it. They must learn from the market, and shape and mold their business model to maximize profit. Profits are maximized by providing the most people with what they want to buy at a price they'll pay. When the sentiments or demographic composition of that group changes, the company must adjust. Dell has become very successful while bundling garbage on their machines. Clearly the lost revenue from boycotting Slashdotters was made up for by whatever business arrangements they had with AOL and what not. As much as it may pain you to hear it, Slashdot readers make up a tiny minority of the nation's consumer population, and the portion we do make up is a weird niche that is largely disliked by mainstream retailers and traditional businesses.
So, frankly, there's been no reason to pander to the nitpicky anal retentive whims of a bunch of dorks. Until now.
I tolerated this for about three months. After three straight months of being unable to get past Vael, because Blizzard designed a bunch of highly ping-sensitive encounters for their content at the same time that their network couldn't handle the player load, I gave up and cancelled. It was hard to do, because I absolutely loved and adored this game. My wife even misses it, and she hardly ever played it. The other day she said, "I miss hearing about Blackwing Lair. You guys were going so well and you all got so excited about it." But I can't justify paying this money when, month in and month out, the game is unplayable. When it's not lag, it's constant server crashing. I tolerate a LOT of this. A TON. I NEVER complain about server instability. I know what it's like, and having one or two crashes now and then isn't that big of a deal to me. I'm an old MUD admin, my tolerance level is insanely high. But when I arrange my week around my raid schedule, order food, show up, and then sit around for 4 hours waiting for the server to come up, and I do this for 3 months with no end in sight, it's unacceptable. So I called it quits. I hated to do it, but I can't keep paying for nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I spend money reluctantly, especially on throwaway purchases like a console. I had an Atari 2600, an NES, a GameBoy, and never bought another console until about 2002. Even then, I only bought one because I got $3 in-store credit per used CD I brought in, which totalled up to about $120 of credit. I traded it in for a used PS/2, a second controller, a memory card, and Simpsons Road Rage. I gave the thing away about a year later. I tried a few other games but frankly they all got old pretty quick. I tried all the "hot titles" at the time in a few different genres and I came in the inescapable conclusion that nothing at all has changed since the last time I plugged in my NES, other than the graphics. Yeah, 3D world. Whoo hoo.
I usually only quote large chunks of somebody else when I'm responding, criticizing, or adding onto the existing body of work. I always include links to the original article, and clearly indicate the quoted section. None of this is out of any duty to academic rigor, I just think it's helpful to my reader (or readers, if anybody besides me reads it), to have the original to view in context. In fact, I get a little miffed when sites to which I link later re-organize or archive the material. Or, even worse, stick it behind a subscription service. That practice may be why so many people cut'n'paste the whole thing.
I don't use any extensions. Not one. No extensions, no themes, nothing. During an 8-hour workday, it will crash at least once, almost every day. It crashes for me on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Mac OS X, although it's far more stable on OS X than the Windows family. I've also all 3 Windows OS's on 3 different pieces of physical hardware, so it's not some faulty memory somewhere. It's by far the most unstable piece of software I have. Same with my home computer. It crashes constantly (by which I mean 1-2 times per 10 hours of use) on my laptop, my AlienWare machine, my wife's Dell laptop. The only platform on which it does not fail regularly is ... Linux!
I don't think it's any more reliable or dependable than any other development paradigm. The difference is that instead of paying somebody for unreliable and undependable software, I can get it for free from open source. Firefox crashes more often, on every environment on which I run it (4 different OS's) than any other application I have. The difference is, I didn't have to pay for it.
I vote third party for whatever it's worth. Even that's tough. As somebody smart once observed, the Libertarian philosophy has the right answer to everything except raising children and fighting wars. You can't abandon children to be raised by the free market any more than you can turn them over to government. And the motto, "it's none of our business, we'll jusy stay out of it" has lead to more misery, death, suffering, persecution, pain, and destruction than any other belief outside of religion.
Except the Louisiana state legislature is 64% Democrats in the state House and 61% Democrats in the state Senate and a Democratic governer. Whoops. Oh well. The important thing is to always blame Republicans for restricting people's personal and economic freedom, no matter whose fault it really is. Holding the guilty accountable isn't the point. The point is blasting people we find politically distasteful.
Crusade onward, my good man! Get those Republicans!
We need states to enact this kind of thing. The states, not the federal government. When one state does this, consumers on the borders will flee to adjoining states to buy video games. If it's a truly horrible piece of legislation, the market will bear this out and the retail outlets will raise hell. The feedback loop between a free market and a democracy will show itself one way or another. It could be that the residents of Louisiana overall want exactly this kind of thing, they should have it. This is not a clear violation of free speech, but it's a worthy law to challenge it. What we want now, is a legal challenge to this law. A case will be decided using this law by the lower courts, and we'll get an appelate court decision. At this point, we'll know what this law really means. Don't worry, gamers and liberterians. The passage of these kinds of laws is vital to ensuring that rights are preserved in a common law judisdiction.
Good, I'm glad you agree with my assessment of the GP's misguided assertion that programmers are poor slaves to corporate powers. Sounds like you got an even better deal than what I have, which makes the GP's assertion even sillier.
This was on the AP wire on Monday. I understand that Slashdot isn't a "late breaking news" oriented site but ... this story is stale, anybody who'd be interested in it has most likely already heard about it. But, since I don't really understand the criteria for when and what stories are selected for linking on Slashdot, I can't really give any constructive feedback on how to improve the process. So I'm just going to bitch about it.
Move away from the coasts. I make $75,000/year working 40 hour weeks. I'm not on-call, have flex hours, get 3 weeks of vacation, and unlimited sick time. Quit working for IT sweat shops. Move somewhere where family time is valued and it's impossible to hire people unless you are willing to give them that flexibility. I've been through four employers in the St. Louis area and been able to land jobs with a deal akin to this one at all four. Developers are "poor"? No. Elementary school teachers are "poor." Starting salary for a developer in a low-watt market is close to $40K without a degree. That's not "poor." That's not starving, and that's not living for their work, unless by "living for their work" you mean that you're expected to show up on time and do your job.
The paint on a commercial airliner weighs thousands of pounds, all of which much be lifted via jet fuel that is costing more and more each day. Yes, removing even a few hundred pounds of cabling from a fleet of a few hundred planes that burn through expensive fossil fuels while making thousands of flights each per year is highly desireable.
Could read either way. On balance, the abuse of the patent system is harmful and needs to be addressed. That should be handled, however, by legislation, not litigation. Allowing the common law to change the patent system may briefly serve the greater good, but it is ultimately a bad thing, m-kay. Sadly, we're sort of left with no other options. Our esteemed reps in Washington are utterly obsessed with winning votes and power so they can ... enact policies to further secure their votes and power. One begins to wonder if term limits might have been a good idea after all.
Ignorant ridicule to follow.
There's a difference between floundering around for a length of time prohibitive to productivity, and floundering around until you can figure out how to launch MS Word. There's the difference. Windows users can get what they are accustomed to out of a Mac - IE, Office, iTunes, and a number of other products. None of that is available on Linux, and a significant number of people are unaware that there are alternatives. Many who do know about alternatives don't realize that those alternatives support Office formats. And frankly, I hate using Open Office because 9 times out of 10, the documents in load in it don't look the same or print the same.
The difference between Windows and Linux isn't just an interface. Granted, the difference between Windows and OS X isn't just an interface either, but the user can be almost completely insulated from the technological and philosophical differences in the OS design. That's just not the case yet with Linux, and the sentiment of the Linux development community seems (to me) to be that the user should never become completely insulated enough. Linux is going to become a victim of its own success. As it is developed to be more widely adopted and to be a serious desktop contender against Windows, it's going to have become more of what we hate about consumer-grade desktop operating systems.
Like all such laws, nobody really understands what the regulations mean/don't mean, and require/don't require until a case is tried and some kind of common law precedence is set. So everybody is going WAY overboard to avoid getting snagged by this on some minor technicality. It's a typical government overreaction to some isolated bad practices. And yes, I work with a company that has to deal with SOX first-hand. Our compliance department makes us take SCREENSHOTS of source code in the repository for SOX compliance. Stupid. It proves nothing.
If you mean "change game mechanics to reduce the need for them," I agree. If you mean "ban them so everybody has to suffer through stupid farming grinds," you're an idiot.
The thing is, I see some pages there that deserve recognition. And I see a lot more who don't, and which appear to have been selected not for any particular contribution to the web, the use of the web, or technology in general, but simply for standing for something noble. I mean, anybody can set up a web site for www.we-really-care-alot-about-the-world-and-its-my riad-problems.com and put a bunch of pictures up telling us how shitty the world is, and we all feel a little less guilty for living in a prosperous industrialized nation, but is that worthy of a reward?
He graduated from an accredited legal program and passed the bar, all of which can be accomplished without demonstrating that one has any ability to think critically and run an ethical lawyering practice.
And yes, I realize that somebody other than government can restrict freedom (employers, for example). But we're talking about "big" government here and in that regard, you are dead wrong.
And they'll shit a brick when 30 nights of pulling volts in a row lands them a $500 electric bill. Way to save all that gas money.
*electric bill for $400 arrives* Ah fuck.
The agreement that allows the US use of the facilities at Guantanamo Bay predates the embargo.
"Why don't they just ..... blah ....?" we ask ourselves constantly. In some cases, there are contracts with hardware suppliers, advertisers, marketing teams, delivery and supply chains, retail outlets, and other behind-the-scenes business partners that must be, at the very least, scanned carefully by Dell's legal staff. More often than not, a renegotiation is necessary to change business practices that may impact those contracted partners. This takes time. And when the negotiations stall, there's no option but to wait it out.
So Dell is going the right thing, and the response here is almost universally negative. Not about the fact that they're doing the right thing by their customers, but that they even had to because they did the wrong thing first. Well I'll tell you what. It's rare that a business "has it right" out of the gate and never looks back. Google is one of those rare companies that has mostly pulled this off. Few businesses do it. They must learn from the market, and shape and mold their business model to maximize profit. Profits are maximized by providing the most people with what they want to buy at a price they'll pay. When the sentiments or demographic composition of that group changes, the company must adjust. Dell has become very successful while bundling garbage on their machines. Clearly the lost revenue from boycotting Slashdotters was made up for by whatever business arrangements they had with AOL and what not. As much as it may pain you to hear it, Slashdot readers make up a tiny minority of the nation's consumer population, and the portion we do make up is a weird niche that is largely disliked by mainstream retailers and traditional businesses.
So, frankly, there's been no reason to pander to the nitpicky anal retentive whims of a bunch of dorks. Until now.
After all, it can't possibly be that the case against Wal*Mart is weak and easily debunked.
I tolerated this for about three months. After three straight months of being unable to get past Vael, because Blizzard designed a bunch of highly ping-sensitive encounters for their content at the same time that their network couldn't handle the player load, I gave up and cancelled. It was hard to do, because I absolutely loved and adored this game. My wife even misses it, and she hardly ever played it. The other day she said, "I miss hearing about Blackwing Lair. You guys were going so well and you all got so excited about it." But I can't justify paying this money when, month in and month out, the game is unplayable. When it's not lag, it's constant server crashing. I tolerate a LOT of this. A TON. I NEVER complain about server instability. I know what it's like, and having one or two crashes now and then isn't that big of a deal to me. I'm an old MUD admin, my tolerance level is insanely high. But when I arrange my week around my raid schedule, order food, show up, and then sit around for 4 hours waiting for the server to come up, and I do this for 3 months with no end in sight, it's unacceptable. So I called it quits. I hated to do it, but I can't keep paying for nothing.