I live in the States, if that's what you mean by market. When I bought my kit, I found it off a link from http://playstation2-linux.com/ at the time... hmm, looks like it's sold out again. It cost $99 at the time I got it, and included an HD, keyboard, mouse, installation DVD, network adaptor, and VGA dongle.
I do have to qualify my statement though - I'm NOT saying there's a sizable PS2 linux homebrew movement, or that it'll pick up more steam over time or whatnot. For that matter, new slimline PS2's don't even have a hard drive bay.
But, the PS2 linux kit is serious in one light: it's a look 'under the hood' of a console machine (as opposed to the Xbox, which is functionally a PC). Hence, the reason I got more enjoyment out of the PDF hardware manuals than the actual OS instance on the machine. If you're hoping to get a job in the console game industry (which I hoped for prior to the irresistable sysadmin job I took), developing a game or demo which runs on the PS2 linux kit counts quite a bit more than developing something which runs on a regular PC. Particularly if you use assembler and emotion engine code, interface with the peripherals, etc, all of which the kit provided access to.
In short, while not worth taking seriously for most peoples' applications, it was very serious for a limited scope of them.
Actually, they did a second run of PS2 linux kits in '04 or so, which was when I bought one. The main reason to buy it though, is the several 400-page PDFs which geek out extensively on the way the DMA system works, the texture engines, etc. I swear, it feels like reading one of the old Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manuals. You know, the huge ones the size of an encyclopedia. Man, those were the days...
Bear in mind that sysadmins are more frequently armed than the average geek. I'd actually kinda enjoy the scenario you just mentioned, it'd give me a chance to try out my Desert Eagle 50cal on human flesh, guilt-free... *grin*
Ah, I run into this myself sometimes. Consider: sometimes, the requestor is NOT the most important person on the big long list'o'people who want something done at that particular moment. Their fix may be obvious, but there's a lot of more important things to do first (of course, slashdot is not one of them).
Clearly, if you think sysadmins are thin-skinned, you haven't seen a developer with seniority. No matter where I've worked, they're always prima donnas. Heaven help you if their start date was pre-IPO.
Dude, if they just learned how to use control-alt-delete, then they're windoze admins. Windoze admins go to brainwashing camps for three years, not higher education centers.
Personally, I find that the suits LOVE it if you adopt a policy whereby "reason-for-outage" (RFO) essays are expected when things like that happen.
Anything YOU do, can generally avoid notice and you won't have to write many RFOs yourself.
However, the joy of pulling a developer into a life-sucking RFO witch-hunt meeting for a few hours can only be compared with the joy of seeing him required to sign what amounts to a writeup for his incompetence.
Best of all, it's suit-friendly and can improve your political future at the developer's expense. What's not to love?
I suggest you consider that market rate for salaries is a variable concept, and in this case I'm specifically discussing the variable of geography where it pertains to the market rate.
There's no good reason to be in La Jolla, and limited reasons for the bay area. If your company isn't connecting to Mae West, it shouldn't be in the bay. The market rate for employees in these areas is much higher than the market rate in, say, Arizona. Or if one must be in SoCal, get off the coast. Hit Vista, or Santee.
Also, bear in mind the classic equation of supply and demand. Companies do not like having to pay market rate, and would very much like to drive down the market rate in CS.
Therefore, they agitate and insist that there's a huge shortage, so they have to pay too much. While 'too much' is frequently just bare survival wages in the areas they were stupid enough to locate their companies in.
Thankfully, companies are starting to get a clue and relocate offices out of the high-priced regions. Capital One, for example, is relocating their San Diego office to Plano, TX.
This trend needs to accelerate. The housing prices in the areas which CS positions tend to cluster in, are far out of reach of the salaries that CS companies want to pay their employees.
Uh, I live in a trailer park. Over-the-air antenna usage is available, as is subsidized and cheap (but filled with static and noise) cable TV.
There are satellite dishes ALL OVER the place. The park USED to be an age-restricted community, but they screwed up their paperwork a while back and now it's become cheap, available housing. At any rate, you'd be surprised how many dilapidated mobile homes, owned by little old folks, have sattelite dishes.
Point is, old folks on fixed incomes still manage to fork out the $70/mo for Dish Network when cable TV is bad.
I, on the other hand, am 28, gainfully employed, and make do with the crappy cable because frankly, for the price difference I'd rather have netflix+gamefly+cable than just dish network.
Hate to point out the obvious here, but show me where the History Channel is broadcast over the air waves. It's true that there's plenty of educational channels on cable TV, sattelite, etc. However, I must point out that those aren't OTA channels.
OTA carries mostly three-letter networks, mixed with a few local channels carrying syndicated content. Not a lot of educational stuff there.
Besides, right now HDTV is expensive because it's an upgrade and retailers can charge a lot extra for it. When analog TVs are useless, HDTV will be the standard, and the prices will drop considerably. This isn't to say it won't be an inconvenience, I just don't expect purchasing a compliant set to be as big of an expense at adoption-time as it is now.
Besides, if you folks are all that much up in arms about it, start a charity collecting contributions to buy HD receivers / TVs for the economically disadvantaged. It probably wouldn't be hard to get some manufacturers on board providing discounts, and it'd help them obtain good PR rather than "look at all these greedy folks who're making the poor people pay for new TVs!"
In my experience:
Most DVDs disable the menu button during previews.
Many DVDs disable the next-chapter button.
Some DVDs disable the fast-forward button as well.
That having been said, a DVD player which does not completely adhere to the spec may choose to ignore the instruction to disable fast forward / chapter skip.
Right... and of course, when you set up your fake server, you're circumventing DMCA restrictions and the MPAA can have all kinds of fun with you from that point on.
Ah, but I don't drink beer. And as for housework, you've clearly never seen what happens when food falls on the kitchen floor in front in front of a dog.:)
I'm pretty un-demanding though. "C'mere", "Stay", "Take care of those crumbs on the floor" and "Chew off that person's face, please" make up most of the orders I really want out of an animal. Beyond that, I'm happy as long as the dog makes a good footwarmer in the winter.
Side note, I DID once have a dog smart enough to tell a few screwdrivers and tools apart, and fetch the appropriate one when verbally ordered to do so. No, there wasn't any Francis the Talking Mule stuff going on; this was tested with my back turned. That having been said, Cocoa was an exceptionally bright dog and this was well past the mid-point of her life. She was half-Shepherd and half-retriever (we were never sure which type of retriever).
This is why you do your best to discourage dogs from gratuitous licking behaviour in the first place.
That having been said, most dogs I've owned don't eat crap. Which is considerably better than cats, which seem to be continually preoccupied with licking their own butts.:)
Actually, I got the $15 (incorrectly) from the promo where you pay a quarter in advance.
As for rental vs subscription-to-Cedega... you're not understanding my point.
With Gamefly, assuming you don't buy any games and just keep renting it - $21/mo, every month as a flat fee; no additional software costs.
With Cedega... $5/mo (I'd thought $15/mo by mis-reading earlier) + price-of-windoze-games. The math isn't as scary as I'd originally read it to be, but the price-of-windoze-games could prove fairly high.
I suspect that I spend less money per month with my Gamefly service, than with the new doors which Cedega would open. Currently, I run only Linux at home (with the exception of my PS2, which also has the linux kit) and keep my gaming costs contained to my monthly rental fee.
By going to Cedega, I'd be tempted to buy Starcraft and Alien vs Predator (the most recent Windoze games I actually enjoyed - yes, they're in the cheap bin now), and add in Farcry and Halflife 2, etc. I'd probably wind up spending roughly the same per month as my friends who game on Windoze, which is considerably more than I spend presently. To me, Cedega and re-opening the flood gates of purchasing games would probably prove to be a greater wallet-peril than a rental service.
Actually, puppies will frequently practice coprophaghy as well. In rabbits, it's common due to them waiting for the bacteria in their gut to render digestable what they couldn't assimilate the first time around. Captive rabbits provided with a generous supply of food, will rarely ingest pellets.
That having been said, baby iguanas eat the feces of adult iguanas in order to acquire the symbiotic bacteria which enable them to digest their food.
As uncommon as it is to find coprophagic bacteria in carnivores and omnivores, it's very common among herbivores.
Ok, that's been my essay on animals which eat their own crap. Dogs - yeah, I don't know why they do that. Dogs will frequently ingest CAT crap with giddy abandon. I don't have any idea if that's a nutritional thing or what.
That having been said, I'd rather deal with a crap-eating dog which will take orders, than an aloof cat which just stares at me blankly. I've already got an iguana, which will basically just do whatever it wants to anyway - and it's a lot cooler to look at than a cat.
Hmm. Gamefly charges me $21 or so for a Netflix-style "two out at a time" rental of console games.
For me, I'll stick with Gamefly. I found that once subscribing to Gamefly, I stopped spending money on buying more games, hence spending much less per month.
Were I go to Cegeda... great, save $5 on the monthly rate, but gain the ability to spend more money on buying games. That's a type of game-crack I'd rather not start smoking.
I desire to keep the monthly game-crack bill small and manageable, thanks.:)
Bah! You don't have to give people free time! That's what we have online shopping for, so you can consume like a good little consumer without ever leaving your office!
At night, you go home, sleep as briefly as possible, and go back to work again the next morning. But then, the weekends - oh, the weekends! When you get to go home and enjoy all the wonderful stuff you've accrued during your week of work! Yay for weekends!
Response to question 2: I think he's talking about duration of experience more than anything else. I used to tweak about with assembler and machine language on 8-bit 6502's. That helps me understand certain concepts behind java's virtual machine language much better than some folks who've only ever done Java. This is mostly useless in general, but 'old school' knowledge is invaluable in IT work, and that I believe is what the guy's getting at.
Analogy 3: What's a kunta kinte? Never heard that one myself.
Analogy 5: I keep saying, America needs to do that, India needs to do that... everywhere needs to do that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That can work, unless your company's decided that its prospects are grim enough not to give raises to anyone.
Wait, that's both the companies I've worked at over the past three years. *grumble*
As anyone at Michael Robertson's previous company knows, he had Dano on the payroll.
I live in the States, if that's what you mean by market. When I bought my kit, I found it off a link from http://playstation2-linux.com/ at the time... hmm, looks like it's sold out again. It cost $99 at the time I got it, and included an HD, keyboard, mouse, installation DVD, network adaptor, and VGA dongle.
I do have to qualify my statement though - I'm NOT saying there's a sizable PS2 linux homebrew movement, or that it'll pick up more steam over time or whatnot. For that matter, new slimline PS2's don't even have a hard drive bay.
But, the PS2 linux kit is serious in one light: it's a look 'under the hood' of a console machine (as opposed to the Xbox, which is functionally a PC). Hence, the reason I got more enjoyment out of the PDF hardware manuals than the actual OS instance on the machine. If you're hoping to get a job in the console game industry (which I hoped for prior to the irresistable sysadmin job I took), developing a game or demo which runs on the PS2 linux kit counts quite a bit more than developing something which runs on a regular PC. Particularly if you use assembler and emotion engine code, interface with the peripherals, etc, all of which the kit provided access to.
In short, while not worth taking seriously for most peoples' applications, it was very serious for a limited scope of them.
Actually, they did a second run of PS2 linux kits in '04 or so, which was when I bought one. The main reason to buy it though, is the several 400-page PDFs which geek out extensively on the way the DMA system works, the texture engines, etc. I swear, it feels like reading one of the old Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manuals. You know, the huge ones the size of an encyclopedia. Man, those were the days...
Bear in mind that sysadmins are more frequently armed than the average geek. I'd actually kinda enjoy the scenario you just mentioned, it'd give me a chance to try out my Desert Eagle 50cal on human flesh, guilt-free... *grin*
"They were coming RIGHT AT ME!"
Ah, I run into this myself sometimes. Consider: sometimes, the requestor is NOT the most important person on the big long list'o'people who want something done at that particular moment. Their fix may be obvious, but there's a lot of more important things to do first (of course, slashdot is not one of them).
Clearly, if you think sysadmins are thin-skinned, you haven't seen a developer with seniority. No matter where I've worked, they're always prima donnas. Heaven help you if their start date was pre-IPO.
Dude, if they just learned how to use control-alt-delete, then they're windoze admins. Windoze admins go to brainwashing camps for three years, not higher education centers.
Personally, I find that the suits LOVE it if you adopt a policy whereby "reason-for-outage" (RFO) essays are expected when things like that happen.
Anything YOU do, can generally avoid notice and you won't have to write many RFOs yourself.
However, the joy of pulling a developer into a life-sucking RFO witch-hunt meeting for a few hours can only be compared with the joy of seeing him required to sign what amounts to a writeup for his incompetence.
Best of all, it's suit-friendly and can improve your political future at the developer's expense. What's not to love?
Wasn't that the premise of "Cherry 2000"? Just as long as you don't do it on a wet kitchen floor, you're ok.
I suggest you consider that market rate for salaries is a variable concept, and in this case I'm specifically discussing the variable of geography where it pertains to the market rate.
There's no good reason to be in La Jolla, and limited reasons for the bay area. If your company isn't connecting to Mae West, it shouldn't be in the bay. The market rate for employees in these areas is much higher than the market rate in, say, Arizona. Or if one must be in SoCal, get off the coast. Hit Vista, or Santee.
Perhaps he spent the time studying instead of posting on slashdot? :)
Also, bear in mind the classic equation of supply and demand. Companies do not like having to pay market rate, and would very much like to drive down the market rate in CS.
Therefore, they agitate and insist that there's a huge shortage, so they have to pay too much. While 'too much' is frequently just bare survival wages in the areas they were stupid enough to locate their companies in.
Thankfully, companies are starting to get a clue and relocate offices out of the high-priced regions. Capital One, for example, is relocating their San Diego office to Plano, TX.
This trend needs to accelerate. The housing prices in the areas which CS positions tend to cluster in, are far out of reach of the salaries that CS companies want to pay their employees.
Uh, I live in a trailer park. Over-the-air antenna usage is available, as is subsidized and cheap (but filled with static and noise) cable TV.
There are satellite dishes ALL OVER the place. The park USED to be an age-restricted community, but they screwed up their paperwork a while back and now it's become cheap, available housing. At any rate, you'd be surprised how many dilapidated mobile homes, owned by little old folks, have sattelite dishes.
Point is, old folks on fixed incomes still manage to fork out the $70/mo for Dish Network when cable TV is bad.
I, on the other hand, am 28, gainfully employed, and make do with the crappy cable because frankly, for the price difference I'd rather have netflix+gamefly+cable than just dish network.
Hate to point out the obvious here, but show me where the History Channel is broadcast over the air waves. It's true that there's plenty of educational channels on cable TV, sattelite, etc. However, I must point out that those aren't OTA channels.
OTA carries mostly three-letter networks, mixed with a few local channels carrying syndicated content. Not a lot of educational stuff there.
Besides, right now HDTV is expensive because it's an upgrade and retailers can charge a lot extra for it. When analog TVs are useless, HDTV will be the standard, and the prices will drop considerably. This isn't to say it won't be an inconvenience, I just don't expect purchasing a compliant set to be as big of an expense at adoption-time as it is now.
Besides, if you folks are all that much up in arms about it, start a charity collecting contributions to buy HD receivers / TVs for the economically disadvantaged. It probably wouldn't be hard to get some manufacturers on board providing discounts, and it'd help them obtain good PR rather than "look at all these greedy folks who're making the poor people pay for new TVs!"
In my experience:
Most DVDs disable the menu button during previews.
Many DVDs disable the next-chapter button.
Some DVDs disable the fast-forward button as well.
That having been said, a DVD player which does not completely adhere to the spec may choose to ignore the instruction to disable fast forward / chapter skip.
Right... and of course, when you set up your fake server, you're circumventing DMCA restrictions and the MPAA can have all kinds of fun with you from that point on.
Ah, but I don't drink beer. And as for housework, you've clearly never seen what happens when food falls on the kitchen floor in front in front of a dog. :)
I'm pretty un-demanding though. "C'mere", "Stay", "Take care of those crumbs on the floor" and "Chew off that person's face, please" make up most of the orders I really want out of an animal. Beyond that, I'm happy as long as the dog makes a good footwarmer in the winter.
Side note, I DID once have a dog smart enough to tell a few screwdrivers and tools apart, and fetch the appropriate one when verbally ordered to do so. No, there wasn't any Francis the Talking Mule stuff going on; this was tested with my back turned. That having been said, Cocoa was an exceptionally bright dog and this was well past the mid-point of her life. She was half-Shepherd and half-retriever (we were never sure which type of retriever).
For a second there, I thought you were just quoting Steve Ballmer again.
This is why you do your best to discourage dogs from gratuitous licking behaviour in the first place.
:)
That having been said, most dogs I've owned don't eat crap. Which is considerably better than cats, which seem to be continually preoccupied with licking their own butts.
Actually, I got the $15 (incorrectly) from the promo where you pay a quarter in advance.
As for rental vs subscription-to-Cedega... you're not understanding my point.
With Gamefly, assuming you don't buy any games and just keep renting it - $21/mo, every month as a flat fee; no additional software costs.
With Cedega... $5/mo (I'd thought $15/mo by mis-reading earlier) + price-of-windoze-games. The math isn't as scary as I'd originally read it to be, but the price-of-windoze-games could prove fairly high.
I suspect that I spend less money per month with my Gamefly service, than with the new doors which Cedega would open. Currently, I run only Linux at home (with the exception of my PS2, which also has the linux kit) and keep my gaming costs contained to my monthly rental fee.
By going to Cedega, I'd be tempted to buy Starcraft and Alien vs Predator (the most recent Windoze games I actually enjoyed - yes, they're in the cheap bin now), and add in Farcry and Halflife 2, etc. I'd probably wind up spending roughly the same per month as my friends who game on Windoze, which is considerably more than I spend presently. To me, Cedega and re-opening the flood gates of purchasing games would probably prove to be a greater wallet-peril than a rental service.
Yes, I'm a cheapskate.
Actually, puppies will frequently practice coprophaghy as well. In rabbits, it's common due to them waiting for the bacteria in their gut to render digestable what they couldn't assimilate the first time around. Captive rabbits provided with a generous supply of food, will rarely ingest pellets.
That having been said, baby iguanas eat the feces of adult iguanas in order to acquire the symbiotic bacteria which enable them to digest their food.
As uncommon as it is to find coprophagic bacteria in carnivores and omnivores, it's very common among herbivores.
Ok, that's been my essay on animals which eat their own crap. Dogs - yeah, I don't know why they do that. Dogs will frequently ingest CAT crap with giddy abandon. I don't have any idea if that's a nutritional thing or what.
That having been said, I'd rather deal with a crap-eating dog which will take orders, than an aloof cat which just stares at me blankly. I've already got an iguana, which will basically just do whatever it wants to anyway - and it's a lot cooler to look at than a cat.
Hmm. Gamefly charges me $21 or so for a Netflix-style "two out at a time" rental of console games.
:)
For me, I'll stick with Gamefly. I found that once subscribing to Gamefly, I stopped spending money on buying more games, hence spending much less per month.
Were I go to Cegeda... great, save $5 on the monthly rate, but gain the ability to spend more money on buying games. That's a type of game-crack I'd rather not start smoking.
I desire to keep the monthly game-crack bill small and manageable, thanks.
Bah! You don't have to give people free time! That's what we have online shopping for, so you can consume like a good little consumer without ever leaving your office!
At night, you go home, sleep as briefly as possible, and go back to work again the next morning. But then, the weekends - oh, the weekends! When you get to go home and enjoy all the wonderful stuff you've accrued during your week of work! Yay for weekends!
I'm not the guy who posted that, but:
:)
Response to question 2: I think he's talking about duration of experience more than anything else. I used to tweak about with assembler and machine language on 8-bit 6502's. That helps me understand certain concepts behind java's virtual machine language much better than some folks who've only ever done Java. This is mostly useless in general, but 'old school' knowledge is invaluable in IT work, and that I believe is what the guy's getting at.
Analogy 3: What's a kunta kinte? Never heard that one myself.
Analogy 5: I keep saying, America needs to do that, India needs to do that... everywhere needs to do that.