It's not that Sony has anything new to say. It's that articles like "emacs sucks", "Linux sucks", or "the DS sucks", no matter how stupid, redundant, and uninformative, are absolutely certain to generate comments (which will be similarly stupid, redundant, and uninformative).
What this means is that the Slashdot editors couldn't find a single story of more content among every submission from all the Slashdot readers.
Why do I see so many articles on Slashdot about "Google being like Microsoft"?
They aren't -- sure, maybe they'll wind up that way, but they aren't at the moment. The only people that I've really seen full of hate for Google are "SEO" (spam) people -- I'm wondering if those are the people who keep submitting anti-Google articles.
Drugs? It's a hard problem. We figured out how to make a pretty reasonably functioning society as long as people keep some values within a certain range. People go to work and produce goods for society, and they get a share of all the goods everyone else produced. They don't break the system, because most things that do that are illegal and we've made doing illegal things come with a risk of unpleasant punishment.
Now, if you get someone addicted to something, and they want it badly enough, then their values deviate from that comfortable normal level, and they're harder to put in their box and keep a productive member of society. They might even hurt society. So we do what we can to keep people from getting addicted to things.
Turns out that there are a lot of potential drug users, and that it's easier to target a smaller number of drug providers, and their sources. So, because a construction worker in New Jersey might be less productive if she was using drugs, we arrange to firebomb crops of poor folks in Central American countries. It's a heck of a twisted path to follow, but at each step, we don't have any really great alternatives.
Oh, and because those drug pushers and users in jail represent a big chunk of votes, we keep convicted felons from voting. Helps ensure the stability of the system.
What would you propose be done differently, though? Just let everyone do whatever drugs they wanted? You have to deal with people going through an expensive-to-society upbringing and then not being productive as an adult -- universalize that, and you're looking at potential trouble. What about, for addictive drugs, someone who is out of money and can't afford to buy any more -- maybe he normally wouldn't steal something to purchase more drugs, but he's got a very strong motivation to obtain more money quickly. Target only drug sellers, not drug users, or visa versa? Probably not going to improve effectiveness at all.
There just aren't any great, fix-everything-at-once solutions. I mean, yes, the War on Drugs sucks. Everyone can identify that fact pretty quickly. The problem is that recognizing that does not mean that you should advocate that we get rid of it -- there's a problem that has to be solved, and the question becomes how to solve it.
Not that Google is evil now, but their ability to get *really* evil if they ever go evil has been steadily increasing...
One notable hole in Google's research lineup has been privacy. If all Google wants is aggregate data, why no clever solutions to provide the individual with guarantees that Google can't get useful individual data but can get useful aggregate data?
On the other hand, I'd say that given many common social/economic/technological factors, that there probably *are* a number of general statements that can be made that apply to a majority of each population.
For example, I, as probably most other folk, doubt that there is anything inherently genetically flawed in black people. I don't think that a black guy can't become a really good engineer, nor do I think that there's anything in the genes that's going to really stand in the way.
Yet if you sit down and read through your US census, you'll discover that, sure enough, blacks are well behind whites and Asians in getting advanced technical jobs.
So why is this? We assume, for the sake of discussion, that it's not genes. So it must be something from society. Perhaps the generally lower economic status of blacks stemming from their commonly slave status in the US a hundred and fifty years ago has something to do with it. Perhaps it's simply social phenomena that affect people along racial lines (I can identify with character X in the mass media because he appears like me.) Who knows? All I can say is that there certainly is a difference.
There is a *far* larger difference in the society that a Chinese student will grow up in versus an American student than there is between a black American student and a white American student. In addition, an H1B or immigration status itself acts as a filter. If you view working in America (or learning English and doing business with people overseas) as being an arduous but career-building step, there is a natural filter to bring in people with drive and ambition -- maybe that means more brown-nosers, maybe that means more enthusiastic people. It's certainly not unreasonable to do breakdowns based on country of origin (and hence society). It may not be feasible to do it based on such a small population size, but I don't think that the very practice can be condemned. In addition, most people on here seem to have had similar observations.
I haven't worked with Chinese H1B folks, but I have with H1B and outsourced Indians, and I agree that my general perception has been similar to what the other posters have said -- exceptional drive and a lack of complaining, but often sub-par technical ability, and a willingness to misrepresent facts. Doesn't mean that this is true of all Indians, but may well be true of a very ambitious group that rapidly started conducting business in a new country to build careers. [shrug] I've found the same snappiness mentioned by others here in the Russian immigrants that I've worked with, but also the same strong technical ability. The Indians tend to work closely in teams, the Russians lone wolf (as in, they are on a team, but they rarely seek advice or ask questions of others). Could be coincidence, I don't know. But it does line up with the other things said here.
As for the comment about Indians interacting differently among each other, I hardly think that this is a stretch. If you know your native tongue better than a foreign one, you may well interact more and act differently when talking with people with whom you can converse in the same tongue.
There aren't many Wal-Mart-shelf style open source games out there for a couple of reasons:
1) Most of the effort in developing such games comes from producing content (audio, artwork, models, etc). There aren't lots of people producing this in the OSS world.
2) Most current closed source games have very minimal replay value -- a good deal of the enjoyment comes from one-off events, like watching animations in the game, or plot twists. People that write open source software almost universally are writing something that they themselves can use. Since game elements that only work once or a few times (animations, etc) don't enhance their enjoyment of the game much, they don't happen.
As a result, you find many games in the "a lifetime to master" sort of class. Most of these have minimal graphics and art content, gameplay that either relies on randomly-generated gameplay/levels or human competition (to keep the game fun for the authors as well).
If you look at some of the open source games that diverge from the conventional closed-source world, you will find games of a sort that you cannot find elsewhere, and in many ways are much stronger than their closed-source brethren.
*) Text-based interactive fiction. TADS or one of the many other interactive fiction systems provide years of plotlines that are deeper, richer, and better-written than commercial games out there. There is a learning curve to get into text-based interactive fiction -- once you're over it, you have a vast, excellent library of games available to you.
*) Rogue/Moria/Angband/Nethack games. There is a whole genre of "dungeon crawler" games like this. They traditionally have limited graphics or just text (though there are exceptions, such as Falcon's Eye and Egoboo). If you have played Diablo or the console versions of the Baldur's Gate games, you've played a game inspired by these (but with far more simplistic gameplay, if more graphics). Dungeon crawlers involve you moving a character deeper and deeper into increasingly dangerous dungeons underground. Most levels are randomly generated, so that each play is different. In general, there are two families of dungeon crawlers -- Nethack, which is in the "sit down and play a quick game" category, and Moria, which is in the "a single game may last for a week and you probably still won't win" category. Nethack, which has many years of people hacking on and improving and extending the game code, is mostly oriented towards figuring out the staggering number of interactions between game elements. A few examples: if it's a full moon outside in real life, werecreatures in the game will be affected. And then there's the Kosiak example:
"Eat a floating eye corpse and you'll get ESP, which will allow you to see enemies anywhere on the map, but only while blinded. To take advantage of it, you may want to drink a potion of blindness, or preferably, find and wear a blindfold. Of course, while blindfolded, even with ESP you won't be able to see inanimate objects on the floor--when you find piles of items, your character will have to "feel" for them. Oh, and you won't be able to read scrolls. Whoops! In that pile of items you just felt is a cockatrice corpse--fortunately you were wearing gloves, otherwise you would've been turned to stone just by touching it. But now, blind and protected, you can pick up the cockatrice corpse and use it to attack monsters--now your enemies will turn to stone when you strike them! Unfortunately, their inventory turns to stone as well. Hey, no problem--you've
The current state of network file systems is just sad. I should be able to flip a switch (i.e. "deployment" instaneous and does not require a network admin) somewhere on any system and easily "share" files with other systems. I should have good performance, the protocol should be open, there should be no potential for data loss, and my connection should be secure (or at least reasonably secureable).
None of the major contenders fill this role
Aggravating the situation is the fact that NFSes are prime candidates for user-space client implementations -- performance is unlikely to be CPU-bound, and security and complexity is more of an issue. Neither LUFS nor FUSE has made it into the mainstream kernel last I checked.
I hope people realize that you can be a Microsoft Windows users and still use most, if not all, of the open-source software mentioned here.
While this is true, I have found that Windows releases of cross platform open source packages are almost always slower, often less stable, and sometimes less featureful than their Linux-based counterparts, where often the bulk of the developers live.
I like dia, but I found the cygwin release of dia to be unstable, for instance.
While I'm foolishly ranting on a open source haven website, let me remind you that most open source projects are still listed as BETA and hardely ever reach their finished state(Check out the games section of freshmeat sometime).
You do realize that there are a huge number of closed-source games that die a stillbirth in development as well? You just don't hear much about them (aside from maybe a product announcement somewhere that's never followed up on -- look at Gamespot's database of games, which includes announced games, and see how many were ever completed). The difference is that in the open source world, you have access to the stuff while it's still being developed.
Second of all, the concept of "done" is a lot more hazy. In the closed source world, you have to put out a "product" that nobody can modify. You have to "freeze". This has some pluses and some minuses, and we've learned to live with most of the drawbacks. The open source world doesn't really have this. For example, take grub, the Linux bootloader (well, technically it's a generic bootloader, but it probably spends most cycles booting Linux). The version I have on my system is.95. Now, it is a highly stable piece of software, and heavily tested everywhere. The perception of its authors is that it is not a "complete" work yet, so they have not tagged it 1.0 yet. However, I have no problem trusting production machines to it whatsoever, nor do hordes of other open source users out there.
Yeah, alright! I'm sure I can install open source project stuff on my granny's Linux PC. After all, if it doesn't work you simply have to recompile, write some more drivers, patch my kernel, check service version dependancies, etc...
Recompilation/kernel patching is essentially a relic of a bygone time, when kernels were not modular. This is not the case for any of the mainstream desktop distros -- it might be for some specialized embedded systems, but those are not running in your granny's house at all, unless it's on her VCR. Dependencies are auto-handled in all distros these days that I'm aware of by auto-downloading, installing, and auto-updating any required software, which is beyond what Windows can do.
While I'm foolishly ranting on a open source haven website, let me remind you that most open source projects are still listed as BETA and hardely ever reach their finished state(Check out the games section of freshmeat sometime).
For most game genres, open source does *not* work that well. The bulk of effort in developing a "modern" game (where modern == the sort of thing that you'd find on a Wal-Mart shelf) is not in code, but in audio and artwork, not the sort of thing that most programmers specialize in. Even so, there are some good open source games out there (Battle for Wesnoth is a favorite), and if you can stretch your tastes to some quite non-traditional games (TADS, Tales of Middle Earth), you can discover some games with an incredible amount more code than a traditional commercial game, and much more sophisticated gameplay, but limited graphics. Honestly, if your primary use for your operating system is to provide a platform to run games, Linux may well not be a good choice. It simply does not have a large commercial game library.
One other interesting possibility that Microsoft might be aiming for. Traditionally, Microsoft has used funded studies a good deal in their marketing. Presumably, they use the most favorable portions of those studies; they'd hardly take the least favorable results.
The open source community very rarely quotes studies; the people who use open source software generally are technical people who have used both, have very good reasons based on personal experience for using open source, and really are not very interested in a study somewhere about the benefits of something that they've already made a decision on. (Note that this may not be true of IBM/Novell -- not sure about them.)
It might simply be that Microsoft feels that even if both sides wind up quoting the favorable bits of such a study, that their greater marketing coverage might provide more of a benefit for them. I don't think I've *ever* pointed to a study when arguing that we should or should not use Linux -- I provide technical justifications. No salespeople from a Linux-selling company have ever dropped by the place where I work, as far as I know -- I just suggest using Linux where it makes more sense to do so. My understanding of (and limited experience with) the side of sales is that they prefer to cite studies much more -- to stick bar graphs demonstrating how much money their product will save over not buying their product. If this study is executed but primarily quoted by Microsoft, then it will primarily benefit Microsoft -- even if each side cherry-picks the favorable bits for quotation equally and the study is conducted absolutely fairly.
Unfortunately if OSDL turn them down, Microsoft will make out that they're scared to compare Linux with Windows properly.
...mmm...maybe. But I don't think that would be that impressive -- "OSDL declines to work with Microsoft"? Maybe. I'm not sure that I'd be that convinced, though, if Microsoft was trying to sell me product and presented that statement.
And what do they hope for if they succeed? Clearly, Microsoft wants to gain *something*. It's possible that they feel that Windows is being unfairly treated, of course, and everything is on the up-and-up, but I'm more than a little dubious, given Microsoft's marketing history; this would be a hell of a 180 for them. Their former "honest comparisons", focusing on Linux as a server, have been pretty heavily biased.
One possibility is that they want to identify areas of Linux that are weaker than Windows but improving more rapidly than Windows *now*, before it becomes too late.
For example, Linux has a number of weaknesses as a general desktop environment, but has been rapidly improving, and each month, Linux becomes a more suitable desktop environment. The earlier that Microsoft can establish conceptions about the suitability of Linux, the more it benefits them -- they can build a perception of "studies have shown that Linux is twice as expensive to operate as an email client platform", for example, even if this ceases to be true in the future.
Another possibility is that they feel that if they spend enough money, they can get OSDL management to sell their reputation. This is hardly some nasty Microsoft-specific tactic. Many companies that have gone to the trouble of earning themselves a good reputation are willing to sell that reputation for a significant amount of money -- for example, if they produce a high-quality version of something, a large company may purchase them and sell a lower-quality version of their product, but still enjoy increased sales for quite some time due to the higher-than-normal perception of the product that has permeated the public. OSDL, by virtue of the employees it has, has a good community perception. It's possible that someone at OSDL may be willing to sell that reputation, to make not-entirely-accurate studies and provide a source for Microsoft to say "the organization that best represents the competition feels that Windows is superior".
Another possibility is that Microsoft feels that they can outmanuver OSDL at the negotiating table -- to manage to push through tests which will represent their product extremely well without OSDL being capable of realizing that there might be objections.
And of course, it comes back to "but it might be on the up-and-up".
My question, though, if this is legitimate, is why Microsoft is doing this in closed talks with a single organization. If they really, honestly, and legitimately have a concern that there are no fair comparisons being done, there is a very fair way to conduct them. Let them propose their tests to the *public* and let the whole open source community dissect and analyze them. OSDL can run the tests with Microsoft, if that's what they want. I don't believe that Microsoft can slip something past the entire tech community -- stick their proposed test on a blog, let Slashdot and technocrat.net and so forth link to them, and see if any legitimate objections are raised. Then the only weaknesses become whether Microsoft could manage to successfully buy people at OSDL (with the eyes of the world on them, dubious) or whether the tests might only consist of traditional Windows strongholds where Linux is rapidly improving.
Microsoft doesn't do anything without an expectation of return on it (just like IBM, HP, etc). The question is just what their expected return is here -- a legitimate study, or hopes of biased results to use in marketing.
All in all, learning emacs and LaTeX let me write better looking documents (and code) with less effort. It just takes a bit of initial learning and the willingness to change your mindset.
Oh, don't lie. Learning emacs and LaTeX may well let you produce better looking documents. However, "a bit of initial learning" is extremely misleading . Both of these software packages are wildly powerful and versatile, but in the time it takes to become an emacs guru alone, you could have become a Photoshop guru five times over.
I'd say that knowing LaTeX will let you produce documents that look better than your Word-knowing colleagues, yes. But it will still take work (I *often* spend a great deal of time poking through documentation to try to figure out how to do something complex in LaTeX), and the initial learning cost is not even remotely "a bit". I am perhaps an intermediate emacs user. I can't really code useful elisp code from scratch without a reference, but I can modify existing stuff, know many of the default keybindings, and so forth. I have been using emacs/xemacs heavily for coding, text-writing, LaTeX processing, and just about everything else (even had a stint with emacs as my mail client) for years, am rabid about learning things that I'm not familiar with that I run into, and I haven't even looked at huge chunks of the program.
I felt the same way. I went back and played some old games, and they actually weren't as good as I remembered. I think that a lot of it was nostalgia, and some of it the fact that *we* change as we age. It's hard to get me excited and enthusiastic about a game now.
I don't think I could stand playing most NES-era games now -- too repetitive.
There are a few good games out there, but so many pretenders and entire genres have all but disappeared. What happened to the {something} quest adventure games? or the clever puzzle games?
They evolved into new genres. I enjoyed the graphical adventure games as well, but honestly, the genre had its share of flaws. A good deal of the gameplay consisted of clicking on just about everything in sight, or trying objects that might be remotely related -- there often wasn't a strong rational correlation between a problem and the solution. It was also possible to get stuck. Sure, funny stories made the games enjoyable, but honestly, I'm not going to kid myself that the core gameplay in Lucasarts' old games was that astounding -- it was the funny story and animations, doled out over time.
What ever happened to manuals with jokes in them?
I've found that game manuals themselves are a dying breed. The newer the game, the smaller the manual -- a new PS2 game may have only a few pages in its tiny manual. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to read a lengthy instruction manual -- he wants to play the game he just bought.
There are exceptions (sims, some strategy games), but in general, manuals were something more suitable for the more literate "geek" audience that used to play video games, and less suitable for a mass market. Plus, there was a time when box and manual art was the best sort of visual appeal that was going to go into the game because of system limitations, and that's just no longer true.
Games now have generally evolved to not need a manual -- they have been architected to have a very shallow learning curve, which usually lasts over the life of the game, and is assisted by in-game mini-tutorials.
I haven't played a video game recently that has quite the subtle, dry, educated wittiness that I remember in some older, independent games. Simple slapstick seems to be more predominant -- but if you look at television, it seems to do the same thing. And it was never *all* games that did this.
If you want excellent writing, you can still get it in the form of text adventures (most independently made and freely distributable).
And why do people keep buying 'the sims'? It's a "real life" simulator with 4x the frustration and none of the "chance for passing on your genes"
I'd say that there are two reasons.
First, it is a "creative tool". It falls into the same category as Legos, building blocks, or a painting set -- it allows exploring a very wide range of ideas and strategies. You have a good deal of replayability because the user can create a great number of variations; this contrasts, say, a simple vertical shmup, where the number of things that the user can do are pretty limited.
Second, I've a theory (but little hard evidence to support it) as to why the Sims did well, particularly among the "non-gaming" audience. Today's "gamers" have generally been playing games for years. Today's game designers, programmers, and artists have been playing games for years. They have all undergone, to some extent, a standard canon of work. They were all influenced by past eras in games, and they have a common body of knowledge to rely upon.
For example, take the "break every crate" phenomenon. In many video games, the player can acquire items hidden in crates or other containers, but to do so, needs to break them open.
Now, back in the day, video game worlds were generally small and fairly static. Allowing the user to change the world (such as by breaking or moving objects) produced a good deal of interest. A good way to show
No. This door attempts to minimize the space, which means that if it, say, tries to maintain a two-inch margin, it must detect and accelerate out of the way with almost no warning.
A regular automatic door attempts to not occupy the space that you might potentially use as soon as you are within several feet of the door. That's a *much* bigger margin to allow response time than this door has.
There are other issues:
(a) This door doesn't sound particularly strong. That means that people that buy it may need to also purchase an additional "night door" for locking purposes. Currently, my supermarket does not do this.
(b) Unless the door is extremely lightweight (unlikely, if the point is to keep air conditioned air in, which means it probably contains double-plated glass), to deal with the higher rate of acceleration than a traditional sliding door, the motors to accelerate the door will probably have to be significantly more powerful than the traditional motors. This means more noise and energy consumption.
(c) This door will probably cost quite a bit, at least at first. Doors are commodity items. Unless it helps bring people in with the oooh-aaah factor, it may not present itself as a good buy.
One place where I could see it being very useful is in environments where the speed of something is known and fixed, but the shape still differs. Baggage conveyor belts at airports currenly have heavy slit rubber sheets instead of "doors", but this rubber will slide over the packages. At places that use conveyor belts to move people (such as at some airports or malls), it might be possible to put such doors in place, if there was a desire to section off the mall. (Hmm...malls seem to usually be architected in a very open fashion, so perhaps this wouldn't be a good idea.)
See, the funny thing about this is that the games from the "classic" days were the ones that generally didn't *have* much of a development staff of authors and artists -- just programmers, some of whom might wear multiple hats.
It seems that your evidence directly contradicts your argument.
Yah, enough of proving my dorky love of text based worlds.
There is no shortage of free MUDs out there, as well as extremely-well written and free games in the mature text-based interactive fiction genre.
Try downloading TADS, and taking a shot at one of the vast library of games for it. Works on just about every platform ever, and has enough hours of gameplay represented in free games to keep you entertained for the rest of your life.
I'm rather partial to Babel, if you're looking for a nice game to start with. Not the easiest game out there, but I love the mood.
Games today are subject to the same problem that's ruined contemporary movies: Special effects. For some reason they (the developers) think that a game is better just because it looks good. Sure: They can be a nice touch - but they don't make the game (in fact, too many details ruins your ability to imagine what's going on the way you could in old text based games).
They don't make the game for a certain class of people.
If you're into dedicated game-playing, then replayability and gameplay and whatnot may indeed be most important.
If Joe Sixpack is just buying a game to spend a short amount of time with it, ooh-ing and aaah-ing at pretty visuals may be what he wants to do with it.
Also, visuals sell copies. If you have to sell someone on a game, it might be based on a couple minutes playing the game at, say, a friend's house. They aren't going to get bored with a game that has boring final levels in that time, but if the graphics don't pull them in, they won't be interested.
As for text-based games...while I like playing them too, consider that most of America doesn't even *read books*, watching television instead. If you consider how bad most television is, yet still gets watched, it'll give you an idea as to how well text-based games are going to do with that audience.
You really sure that you want to be a game tester?
Think about it, first.
You don't make *that* much money.
Part of what makes video games fun is that you *can* do them -- that you don't *have* to play them. That isn't the case here.
You don't get to do things that are the most fun. If it looks like there's a bug involving walking around a translucent pillar in a game, you may be walking around the thing and modifying the environment slightly each time for hours. When you finally find the bug, you get to write up a report on it and figure out how to reproduce it.
It's not quite the same thing as just dropping into a fragfest with your friends.
The other problem with game design -- a lot of people think "I love playing game series Foo, so I'd love to work *on* game series Foo". That doesn't necessarily hold; as a matter of fact, if I really liked playing a game, I'd deliberately want to avoid working on the team that makes it. Why? Most games have finite replay value, and if you work on the game, you know the whole game in advance. All you've done is ruined your favorite game series for yourself; you can't play it.
Game development takes place on a tight timeline, and can be high-stress and demanding of hours.
There isn't much job security, as game development houses don't have a very long life expectancy.
For all I know, you may like game testing, but you shouldn't be walking into the thing under a bunch of illusions...
Slashdot Mirror
The Amish.
It's not that Sony has anything new to say. It's that articles like "emacs sucks", "Linux sucks", or "the DS sucks", no matter how stupid, redundant, and uninformative, are absolutely certain to generate comments (which will be similarly stupid, redundant, and uninformative).
What this means is that the Slashdot editors couldn't find a single story of more content among every submission from all the Slashdot readers.
Why do I see so many articles on Slashdot about "Google being like Microsoft"?
They aren't -- sure, maybe they'll wind up that way, but they aren't at the moment. The only people that I've really seen full of hate for Google are "SEO" (spam) people -- I'm wondering if those are the people who keep submitting anti-Google articles.
Acne medicine requires a prescription?
Drugs? It's a hard problem. We figured out how to make a pretty reasonably functioning society as long as people keep some values within a certain range. People go to work and produce goods for society, and they get a share of all the goods everyone else produced. They don't break the system, because most things that do that are illegal and we've made doing illegal things come with a risk of unpleasant punishment.
Now, if you get someone addicted to something, and they want it badly enough, then their values deviate from that comfortable normal level, and they're harder to put in their box and keep a productive member of society. They might even hurt society. So we do what we can to keep people from getting addicted to things.
Turns out that there are a lot of potential drug users, and that it's easier to target a smaller number of drug providers, and their sources. So, because a construction worker in New Jersey might be less productive if she was using drugs, we arrange to firebomb crops of poor folks in Central American countries. It's a heck of a twisted path to follow, but at each step, we don't have any really great alternatives.
Oh, and because those drug pushers and users in jail represent a big chunk of votes, we keep convicted felons from voting. Helps ensure the stability of the system.
What would you propose be done differently, though? Just let everyone do whatever drugs they wanted? You have to deal with people going through an expensive-to-society upbringing and then not being productive as an adult -- universalize that, and you're looking at potential trouble. What about, for addictive drugs, someone who is out of money and can't afford to buy any more -- maybe he normally wouldn't steal something to purchase more drugs, but he's got a very strong motivation to obtain more money quickly. Target only drug sellers, not drug users, or visa versa? Probably not going to improve effectiveness at all.
There just aren't any great, fix-everything-at-once solutions. I mean, yes, the War on Drugs sucks. Everyone can identify that fact pretty quickly. The problem is that recognizing that does not mean that you should advocate that we get rid of it -- there's a problem that has to be solved, and the question becomes how to solve it.
Can anyone else figure out why doctors, who are trained mostly to follow the money, are the gatekeepers on otherwise illegal drug trafficking?
It's okay -- that's what the legal system is for. If the doctors fall through, we have the lawyers to act as gatekeepers.
Not that Google is evil now, but their ability to get *really* evil if they ever go evil has been steadily increasing...
One notable hole in Google's research lineup has been privacy. If all Google wants is aggregate data, why no clever solutions to provide the individual with guarantees that Google can't get useful individual data but can get useful aggregate data?
I agree that he's extrapolating excessively.
On the other hand, I'd say that given many common social/economic/technological factors, that there probably *are* a number of general statements that can be made that apply to a majority of each population.
For example, I, as probably most other folk, doubt that there is anything inherently genetically flawed in black people. I don't think that a black guy can't become a really good engineer, nor do I think that there's anything in the genes that's going to really stand in the way.
Yet if you sit down and read through your US census, you'll discover that, sure enough, blacks are well behind whites and Asians in getting advanced technical jobs.
So why is this? We assume, for the sake of discussion, that it's not genes. So it must be something from society. Perhaps the generally lower economic status of blacks stemming from their commonly slave status in the US a hundred and fifty years ago has something to do with it. Perhaps it's simply social phenomena that affect people along racial lines (I can identify with character X in the mass media because he appears like me.) Who knows? All I can say is that there certainly is a difference.
There is a *far* larger difference in the society that a Chinese student will grow up in versus an American student than there is between a black American student and a white American student. In addition, an H1B or immigration status itself acts as a filter. If you view working in America (or learning English and doing business with people overseas) as being an arduous but career-building step, there is a natural filter to bring in people with drive and ambition -- maybe that means more brown-nosers, maybe that means more enthusiastic people. It's certainly not unreasonable to do breakdowns based on country of origin (and hence society). It may not be feasible to do it based on such a small population size, but I don't think that the very practice can be condemned. In addition, most people on here seem to have had similar observations.
I haven't worked with Chinese H1B folks, but I have with H1B and outsourced Indians, and I agree that my general perception has been similar to what the other posters have said -- exceptional drive and a lack of complaining, but often sub-par technical ability, and a willingness to misrepresent facts. Doesn't mean that this is true of all Indians, but may well be true of a very ambitious group that rapidly started conducting business in a new country to build careers. [shrug] I've found the same snappiness mentioned by others here in the Russian immigrants that I've worked with, but also the same strong technical ability. The Indians tend to work closely in teams, the Russians lone wolf (as in, they are on a team, but they rarely seek advice or ask questions of others). Could be coincidence, I don't know. But it does line up with the other things said here.
As for the comment about Indians interacting differently among each other, I hardly think that this is a stretch. If you know your native tongue better than a foreign one, you may well interact more and act differently when talking with people with whom you can converse in the same tongue.
There aren't many Wal-Mart-shelf style open source games out there for a couple of reasons:
1) Most of the effort in developing such games comes from producing content (audio, artwork, models, etc). There aren't lots of people producing this in the OSS world.
2) Most current closed source games have very minimal replay value -- a good deal of the enjoyment comes from one-off events, like watching animations in the game, or plot twists. People that write open source software almost universally are writing something that they themselves can use. Since game elements that only work once or a few times (animations, etc) don't enhance their enjoyment of the game much, they don't happen.
As a result, you find many games in the "a lifetime to master" sort of class. Most of these have minimal graphics and art content, gameplay that either relies on randomly-generated gameplay/levels or human competition (to keep the game fun for the authors as well).
If you look at some of the open source games that diverge from the conventional closed-source world, you will find games of a sort that you cannot find elsewhere, and in many ways are much stronger than their closed-source brethren.
*) Text-based interactive fiction. TADS or one of the many other interactive fiction systems provide years of plotlines that are deeper, richer, and better-written than commercial games out there. There is a learning curve to get into text-based interactive fiction -- once you're over it, you have a vast, excellent library of games available to you.
*) Rogue/Moria/Angband/Nethack games. There is a whole genre of "dungeon crawler" games like this. They traditionally have limited graphics or just text (though there are exceptions, such as Falcon's Eye and Egoboo). If you have played Diablo or the console versions of the Baldur's Gate games, you've played a game inspired by these (but with far more simplistic gameplay, if more graphics). Dungeon crawlers involve you moving a character deeper and deeper into increasingly dangerous dungeons underground. Most levels are randomly generated, so that each play is different. In general, there are two families of dungeon crawlers -- Nethack, which is in the "sit down and play a quick game" category, and Moria, which is in the "a single game may last for a week and you probably still won't win" category. Nethack, which has many years of people hacking on and improving and extending the game code, is mostly oriented towards figuring out the staggering number of interactions between game elements. A few examples: if it's a full moon outside in real life, werecreatures in the game will be affected. And then there's the Kosiak example:
"Eat a floating eye corpse and you'll get ESP, which will allow you to see enemies anywhere on the map, but only while blinded. To take advantage of it, you may want to drink a potion of blindness, or preferably, find and wear a blindfold. Of course, while blindfolded, even with ESP you won't be able to see inanimate objects on the floor--when you find piles of items, your character will have to "feel" for them. Oh, and you won't be able to read scrolls. Whoops! In that pile of items you just felt is a cockatrice corpse--fortunately you were wearing gloves, otherwise you would've been turned to stone just by touching it. But now, blind and protected, you can pick up the cockatrice corpse and use it to attack monsters--now your enemies will turn to stone when you strike them! Unfortunately, their inventory turns to stone as well. Hey, no problem--you've
The current state of network file systems is just sad. I should be able to flip a switch (i.e. "deployment" instaneous and does not require a network admin) somewhere on any system and easily "share" files with other systems. I should have good performance, the protocol should be open, there should be no potential for data loss, and my connection should be secure (or at least reasonably secureable).
None of the major contenders fill this role
Aggravating the situation is the fact that NFSes are prime candidates for user-space client implementations -- performance is unlikely to be CPU-bound, and security and complexity is more of an issue. Neither LUFS nor FUSE has made it into the mainstream kernel last I checked.
"Hey dude, who cares? I don't go inside the stereo anyway." is the likely response...
But many other people *do*, and tend to fix the same things that irritate you, because those things irritate *them*.
Open Source licences are a good charm to ward off companies "being evil".
And the users' reaction to all this? "If it's not GPL, it's not safe" seems to be one of the most practical ways to evaluate 'free' software...
This may be true, and I do use GNU software like mad...but honestly, that is a really sad state of affairs.
I hope people realize that you can be a Microsoft Windows users and still use most, if not all, of the open-source software mentioned here.
While this is true, I have found that Windows releases of cross platform open source packages are almost always slower, often less stable, and sometimes less featureful than their Linux-based counterparts, where often the bulk of the developers live.
I like dia, but I found the cygwin release of dia to be unstable, for instance.
While I'm foolishly ranting on a open source haven website, let me remind you that most open source projects are still listed as BETA and hardely ever reach their finished state(Check out the games section of freshmeat sometime).
.95. Now, it is a highly stable piece of software, and heavily tested everywhere. The perception of its authors is that it is not a "complete" work yet, so they have not tagged it 1.0 yet. However, I have no problem trusting production machines to it whatsoever, nor do hordes of other open source users out there.
You do realize that there are a huge number of closed-source games that die a stillbirth in development as well? You just don't hear much about them (aside from maybe a product announcement somewhere that's never followed up on -- look at Gamespot's database of games, which includes announced games, and see how many were ever completed). The difference is that in the open source world, you have access to the stuff while it's still being developed.
Second of all, the concept of "done" is a lot more hazy. In the closed source world, you have to put out a "product" that nobody can modify. You have to "freeze". This has some pluses and some minuses, and we've learned to live with most of the drawbacks. The open source world doesn't really have this. For example, take grub, the Linux bootloader (well, technically it's a generic bootloader, but it probably spends most cycles booting Linux). The version I have on my system is
Yeah, alright! I'm sure I can install open source project stuff on my granny's Linux PC. After all, if it doesn't work you simply have to recompile, write some more drivers, patch my kernel, check service version dependancies, etc...
Recompilation/kernel patching is essentially a relic of a bygone time, when kernels were not modular. This is not the case for any of the mainstream desktop distros -- it might be for some specialized embedded systems, but those are not running in your granny's house at all, unless it's on her VCR. Dependencies are auto-handled in all distros these days that I'm aware of by auto-downloading, installing, and auto-updating any required software, which is beyond what Windows can do.
While I'm foolishly ranting on a open source haven website, let me remind you that most open source projects are still listed as BETA and hardely ever reach their finished state(Check out the games section of freshmeat sometime).
For most game genres, open source does *not* work that well. The bulk of effort in developing a "modern" game (where modern == the sort of thing that you'd find on a Wal-Mart shelf) is not in code, but in audio and artwork, not the sort of thing that most programmers specialize in. Even so, there are some good open source games out there (Battle for Wesnoth is a favorite), and if you can stretch your tastes to some quite non-traditional games (TADS, Tales of Middle Earth), you can discover some games with an incredible amount more code than a traditional commercial game, and much more sophisticated gameplay, but limited graphics. Honestly, if your primary use for your operating system is to provide a platform to run games, Linux may well not be a good choice. It simply does not have a large commercial game library.
One other interesting possibility that Microsoft might be aiming for. Traditionally, Microsoft has used funded studies a good deal in their marketing. Presumably, they use the most favorable portions of those studies; they'd hardly take the least favorable results.
The open source community very rarely quotes studies; the people who use open source software generally are technical people who have used both, have very good reasons based on personal experience for using open source, and really are not very interested in a study somewhere about the benefits of something that they've already made a decision on. (Note that this may not be true of IBM/Novell -- not sure about them.)
It might simply be that Microsoft feels that even if both sides wind up quoting the favorable bits of such a study, that their greater marketing coverage might provide more of a benefit for them. I don't think I've *ever* pointed to a study when arguing that we should or should not use Linux -- I provide technical justifications. No salespeople from a Linux-selling company have ever dropped by the place where I work, as far as I know -- I just suggest using Linux where it makes more sense to do so. My understanding of (and limited experience with) the side of sales is that they prefer to cite studies much more -- to stick bar graphs demonstrating how much money their product will save over not buying their product. If this study is executed but primarily quoted by Microsoft, then it will primarily benefit Microsoft -- even if each side cherry-picks the favorable bits for quotation equally and the study is conducted absolutely fairly.
And what do they hope for if they succeed? Clearly, Microsoft wants to gain *something*. It's possible that they feel that Windows is being unfairly treated, of course, and everything is on the up-and-up, but I'm more than a little dubious, given Microsoft's marketing history; this would be a hell of a 180 for them. Their former "honest comparisons", focusing on Linux as a server, have been pretty heavily biased.
One possibility is that they want to identify areas of Linux that are weaker than Windows but improving more rapidly than Windows *now*, before it becomes too late.
For example, Linux has a number of weaknesses as a general desktop environment, but has been rapidly improving, and each month, Linux becomes a more suitable desktop environment. The earlier that Microsoft can establish conceptions about the suitability of Linux, the more it benefits them -- they can build a perception of "studies have shown that Linux is twice as expensive to operate as an email client platform", for example, even if this ceases to be true in the future.
Another possibility is that they feel that if they spend enough money, they can get OSDL management to sell their reputation. This is hardly some nasty Microsoft-specific tactic. Many companies that have gone to the trouble of earning themselves a good reputation are willing to sell that reputation for a significant amount of money -- for example, if they produce a high-quality version of something, a large company may purchase them and sell a lower-quality version of their product, but still enjoy increased sales for quite some time due to the higher-than-normal perception of the product that has permeated the public. OSDL, by virtue of the employees it has, has a good community perception. It's possible that someone at OSDL may be willing to sell that reputation, to make not-entirely-accurate studies and provide a source for Microsoft to say "the organization that best represents the competition feels that Windows is superior".
Another possibility is that Microsoft feels that they can outmanuver OSDL at the negotiating table -- to manage to push through tests which will represent their product extremely well without OSDL being capable of realizing that there might be objections.
And of course, it comes back to "but it might be on the up-and-up".
My question, though, if this is legitimate, is why Microsoft is doing this in closed talks with a single organization. If they really, honestly, and legitimately have a concern that there are no fair comparisons being done, there is a very fair way to conduct them. Let them propose their tests to the *public* and let the whole open source community dissect and analyze them. OSDL can run the tests with Microsoft, if that's what they want. I don't believe that Microsoft can slip something past the entire tech community -- stick their proposed test on a blog, let Slashdot and technocrat.net and so forth link to them, and see if any legitimate objections are raised. Then the only weaknesses become whether Microsoft could manage to successfully buy people at OSDL (with the eyes of the world on them, dubious) or whether the tests might only consist of traditional Windows strongholds where Linux is rapidly improving.
Microsoft doesn't do anything without an expectation of return on it (just like IBM, HP, etc). The question is just what their expected return is here -- a legitimate study, or hopes of biased results to use in marketing.
All in all, learning emacs and LaTeX let me write better looking documents (and code) with less effort. It just takes a bit of initial learning and the willingness to change your mindset.
Oh, don't lie. Learning emacs and LaTeX may well let you produce better looking documents. However, "a bit of initial learning" is extremely misleading . Both of these software packages are wildly powerful and versatile, but in the time it takes to become an emacs guru alone, you could have become a Photoshop guru five times over.
I'd say that knowing LaTeX will let you produce documents that look better than your Word-knowing colleagues, yes. But it will still take work (I *often* spend a great deal of time poking through documentation to try to figure out how to do something complex in LaTeX), and the initial learning cost is not even remotely "a bit". I am perhaps an intermediate emacs user. I can't really code useful elisp code from scratch without a reference, but I can modify existing stuff, know many of the default keybindings, and so forth. I have been using emacs/xemacs heavily for coding, text-writing, LaTeX processing, and just about everything else (even had a stint with emacs as my mail client) for years, am rabid about learning things that I'm not familiar with that I run into, and I haven't even looked at huge chunks of the program.
Now everything seems so bland.
I felt the same way. I went back and played some old games, and they actually weren't as good as I remembered. I think that a lot of it was nostalgia, and some of it the fact that *we* change as we age. It's hard to get me excited and enthusiastic about a game now.
I don't think I could stand playing most NES-era games now -- too repetitive.
There are a few good games out there, but so many pretenders and entire genres have all but disappeared. What happened to the {something} quest adventure games? or the clever puzzle games?
They evolved into new genres. I enjoyed the graphical adventure games as well, but honestly, the genre had its share of flaws. A good deal of the gameplay consisted of clicking on just about everything in sight, or trying objects that might be remotely related -- there often wasn't a strong rational correlation between a problem and the solution. It was also possible to get stuck. Sure, funny stories made the games enjoyable, but honestly, I'm not going to kid myself that the core gameplay in Lucasarts' old games was that astounding -- it was the funny story and animations, doled out over time.
What ever happened to manuals with jokes in them?
I've found that game manuals themselves are a dying breed. The newer the game, the smaller the manual -- a new PS2 game may have only a few pages in its tiny manual. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to read a lengthy instruction manual -- he wants to play the game he just bought.
There are exceptions (sims, some strategy games), but in general, manuals were something more suitable for the more literate "geek" audience that used to play video games, and less suitable for a mass market. Plus, there was a time when box and manual art was the best sort of visual appeal that was going to go into the game because of system limitations, and that's just no longer true.
Games now have generally evolved to not need a manual -- they have been architected to have a very shallow learning curve, which usually lasts over the life of the game, and is assisted by in-game mini-tutorials.
I haven't played a video game recently that has quite the subtle, dry, educated wittiness that I remember in some older, independent games. Simple slapstick seems to be more predominant -- but if you look at television, it seems to do the same thing. And it was never *all* games that did this.
If you want excellent writing, you can still get it in the form of text adventures (most independently made and freely distributable).
And why do people keep buying 'the sims'? It's a "real life" simulator with 4x the frustration and none of the "chance for passing on your genes"
I'd say that there are two reasons.
First, it is a "creative tool". It falls into the same category as Legos, building blocks, or a painting set -- it allows exploring a very wide range of ideas and strategies. You have a good deal of replayability because the user can create a great number of variations; this contrasts, say, a simple vertical shmup, where the number of things that the user can do are pretty limited.
Second, I've a theory (but little hard evidence to support it) as to why the Sims did well, particularly among the "non-gaming" audience. Today's "gamers" have generally been playing games for years. Today's game designers, programmers, and artists have been playing games for years. They have all undergone, to some extent, a standard canon of work. They were all influenced by past eras in games, and they have a common body of knowledge to rely upon.
For example, take the "break every crate" phenomenon. In many video games, the player can acquire items hidden in crates or other containers, but to do so, needs to break them open.
Now, back in the day, video game worlds were generally small and fairly static. Allowing the user to change the world (such as by breaking or moving objects) produced a good deal of interest. A good way to show
No. This door attempts to minimize the space, which means that if it, say, tries to maintain a two-inch margin, it must detect and accelerate out of the way with almost no warning.
A regular automatic door attempts to not occupy the space that you might potentially use as soon as you are within several feet of the door. That's a *much* bigger margin to allow response time than this door has.
There are other issues:
(a) This door doesn't sound particularly strong. That means that people that buy it may need to also purchase an additional "night door" for locking purposes. Currently, my supermarket does not do this.
(b) Unless the door is extremely lightweight (unlikely, if the point is to keep air conditioned air in, which means it probably contains double-plated glass), to deal with the higher rate of acceleration than a traditional sliding door, the motors to accelerate the door will probably have to be significantly more powerful than the traditional motors. This means more noise and energy consumption.
(c) This door will probably cost quite a bit, at least at first. Doors are commodity items. Unless it helps bring people in with the oooh-aaah factor, it may not present itself as a good buy.
One place where I could see it being very useful is in environments where the speed of something is known and fixed, but the shape still differs. Baggage conveyor belts at airports currenly have heavy slit rubber sheets instead of "doors", but this rubber will slide over the packages. At places that use conveyor belts to move people (such as at some airports or malls), it might be possible to put such doors in place, if there was a desire to section off the mall. (Hmm...malls seem to usually be architected in a very open fashion, so perhaps this wouldn't be a good idea.)
I suspect any claustrophobic Japanese died off long ago.
See, the funny thing about this is that the games from the "classic" days were the ones that generally didn't *have* much of a development staff of authors and artists -- just programmers, some of whom might wear multiple hats.
It seems that your evidence directly contradicts your argument.
Yah, enough of proving my dorky love of text based worlds.
There is no shortage of free MUDs out there, as well as extremely-well written and free games in the mature text-based interactive fiction genre.
Try downloading TADS, and taking a shot at one of the vast library of games for it. Works on just about every platform ever, and has enough hours of gameplay represented in free games to keep you entertained for the rest of your life.
I'm rather partial to Babel, if you're looking for a nice game to start with. Not the easiest game out there, but I love the mood.
Games today are subject to the same problem that's ruined contemporary movies: Special effects. For some reason they (the developers) think that a game is better just because it looks good. Sure: They can be a nice touch - but they don't make the game (in fact, too many details ruins your ability to imagine what's going on the way you could in old text based games).
They don't make the game for a certain class of people.
If you're into dedicated game-playing, then replayability and gameplay and whatnot may indeed be most important.
If Joe Sixpack is just buying a game to spend a short amount of time with it, ooh-ing and aaah-ing at pretty visuals may be what he wants to do with it.
Also, visuals sell copies. If you have to sell someone on a game, it might be based on a couple minutes playing the game at, say, a friend's house. They aren't going to get bored with a game that has boring final levels in that time, but if the graphics don't pull them in, they won't be interested.
As for text-based games...while I like playing them too, consider that most of America doesn't even *read books*, watching television instead. If you consider how bad most television is, yet still gets watched, it'll give you an idea as to how well text-based games are going to do with that audience.
You really sure that you want to be a game tester?
Think about it, first.
You don't make *that* much money.
Part of what makes video games fun is that you *can* do them -- that you don't *have* to play them. That isn't the case here.
You don't get to do things that are the most fun. If it looks like there's a bug involving walking around a translucent pillar in a game, you may be walking around the thing and modifying the environment slightly each time for hours. When you finally find the bug, you get to write up a report on it and figure out how to reproduce it.
It's not quite the same thing as just dropping into a fragfest with your friends.
The other problem with game design -- a lot of people think "I love playing game series Foo, so I'd love to work *on* game series Foo". That doesn't necessarily hold; as a matter of fact, if I really liked playing a game, I'd deliberately want to avoid working on the team that makes it. Why? Most games have finite replay value, and if you work on the game, you know the whole game in advance. All you've done is ruined your favorite game series for yourself; you can't play it.
Game development takes place on a tight timeline, and can be high-stress and demanding of hours.
There isn't much job security, as game development houses don't have a very long life expectancy.
For all I know, you may like game testing, but you shouldn't be walking into the thing under a bunch of illusions...
It's a useful reference for people who have graphics cards that are a year or two or more old
If people *do* care about older ones, the chart in the article is is incomplete (for example, it lists the Radeon 7500 but not the Radeon 7250).
This link contains both a more comprehensive set of graphics cards and more extensive information on each.
And it isn't covered in ads, as the one in the article is.