You could also make a case that the new "free-to-play" games are essentially the "demos" of old, but they're just a lot sneakier about the conversion to the "paid" version. I'd bet the conversion rate is probably similar. Also, you're exactly correct in your assumptions about the revenue breakdown. The last company I was at made MMOs, and there's a lot of research/marketing data showing how free to pay games tend to make a killing off a fairly small number of players that end up playing a LOT.
I'm not sure my own little startup will ever get involved in the mobile market. If I do, I'd like to say away from "free" versions and instead engage fewer users who are willing to pay for a slightly more premium product. I think I can probably get away with that, as my overhead is pretty low, but we'll see.
Someone on the MS Office team (if I recall correctly) was once asked why Microsoft doesn't release a Word "lite" that stripped out a lot of the "unnecessary features", or "bloat", as you call it. As it turns out, it's very hard to pin down what features should actually be stripped from a "lite" version, because everyone has their own favorite features. Beyond the primary features that nearly everyone uses, the use pattern for the rest of the features tends to be a very long, shallow tail.
You talk about 'advanced features that some people need have been added', but that's one of the reasons for Office's popularity - whatever people need it to do, there's a good chance it can do it. No one uses *all* of those advanced features, but nearly everyone uses *some* of them. That's entirely the point. People mistakenly call the features they don't happen to use "bloat", but your bloat is someone else's "critical feature".
A lot of modern software is like that. What you call bloat I call feature-rich. Go back to 80s or 90s software that was expensive, hard-to-use, and much more limited in capabilities? Once you take off the rose-colored glasses, I suspect you'd discover a whole lot of annoyances and limitations in software of that era that you completely forgot about.
Hmm, not sure why my post was cut off. It previewed correctly... ah well. Here's the conclusion as best I can remember:...staffed by US workers? Companies are realizing that annoying their customers with bad customer service when they're already frustrated is bad for business as well (i.e. hard-to-understand accents, etc).
Ultimately, outsourcing is subject to the same project management triangle (fast, cheap, good - pick two) as any other endeavor.
For a time people feared all IT work would be outsourced to other countries. It's certainly not happening in my industry (videogame development) to any significant extent. It turns out it's hard to do any sort of creative problem-solving or collaborative type work outsourced. A number of companies I know who've tried it have either given up or scaled way back on that because of quality issues. I'd be interested to hear if others have seen the same thing in other industries.
You'd think that more game companies would be outsourcing cheap programmers from other countries. Likewise, there are fine artists all over the world, right? Couldn't that be outsourced for much cheaper? I've seen/heard-of companies try to outsource game programming and art, and in every example I heard about, the savings in cost and time were largely offset by the disastrous quality of what was produced, forcing the in-house employees to either significantly touch-up or even completely re-do the work from scratch.
The simple fact remains that it's extremely difficult to guarantee high-quality work when you're trying to find cheap labor, and you end up spending an enormous amount of time in a feedback / QA loop, which tends to be worsened by differences in time-zones, so iteration can take days or even weeks. Additionally, there may be communication barriers, with English being a second language for the contract workers, or perhaps even translated by a third-party. Sometimes an interactive face-to-face meeting is the best way to hammer out design or technical challenges, but it's not an option.
Have you noticed how some American companies are now even advertising that their staffed helplines are staffed i
The prevalence of the passwords requiring uppercase, lowercase, punctuation etc is ridiculous as more and more sites and servers I use are requiring it.
I'm going to make an assumption here and I bet I'm I'm right. (I have NO idea!) The VAST majority of security breaches are due to poorly patched software / bugs / social engineering / angry staff etc. I'd wager very very few password hacks are due to people having the password "momspajamas2212" instead of "M0mspaJAMas22!2"
I will say I'm finding the only way to still remember my passwords on sites now is to start using pattern based passwords, example "$RFV%TGB4rfv5tgb" (try typing that) - it's not ideal but I can remember the bastard thing. (I hope this helps someone else out, I gave it out to someone recently and they adopted something similar pretty much instantly and yes, I know you could add patterns to the dictionary)
Honestly, I've found that a password manager is really the only sane way to use cryptographically secure (and completely different) passwords on every site without worrying about losing those passwords. I use Lastpass, since it syncs between machines automatically and has a plugin which automatically fills in the username and password for you, and will detect when you change existing passwords or create new ones. There are a bunch of other good ones too if you don't like the idea of your encrypted password database being store online (note: it's encrypted locally, so Lastpass never sees anything but a binary blob).
Salt doesn't necessarily solve the breached hash problem if you're using simple dictionary words. It forces a per-hash computation, so they can't use a rainbow table of pre-computed hashes, but dictionary words will still be the second thing criminals will try (the first thing is a quick-list of top password offenders). Sure, it significantly slows the process down, but once the database is offline, there's plenty of CPU horsepower available to do that sort of thing.
So, let's assume a worst case of a billion hashes a second, which I don't think is out of line for today's top-of-the-line video cards, easily within financial reach of your typical internet low-life. We'll use a dictionary of perhaps 20,000 of the most common English works, and let's say we'll throw in enough combinations to round it up to a million hashes that we'll try per user (capitalization + common numeric suffixes). That means that even something like "Pencil92" isn't safe. Let's also assume that we've got a million user hashes to check in total. Total calculation time for a first-pass dictionary attack on every entry in the database? About 1000 seconds. That means we've got plenty of time to try even more complex combinations of passwords after the simple first-pass check.
Ultimately, the best defense is password complexity, since no amount of hardware can possibly cover all the combinations of a very long and complex password, since length + variation = a combinatorial explosion of possibilities.
Also, sorry to hear about the storm mess. Never fun to clean up after stuff like that.
The only reason plain C isn't typically as opaque as C++ is that there isn't much to try. The IOCCC is proof enough that the problem wasn't created by C++.
The primary thing the IOCCC proves is that C doesn't restrict you from doing crazy things with macros and variable names, and that it doesn't care about whitespace. There's certainly a lot of clever coding represented in that contest, but a good deal of the obfuscation is simply related to formatting (i.e. making ASCII art from the source code, etc).
Those passwords suck, and I hate you for even suggesting them.
Better idea, simple passwords. "Pencil".
Then lock the account after a reasonable number of attempts - like 50. How many tries to brute force a single word password? More than 50.
Yikes, that's horrible, horrible advice.
You need to stay away far, far from single dictionary word passwords. If the hashed password database is compromised, you need a password that will at least withstand a basic dictionary attack, since obviously it's beyond locking because of failed attempts at that point. If there's any significant amount of time between when the breach occurs and when it's discovered, your only defense is a password long and complex enough to withstand any brute-force attempt within a reasonable period of time.
Incidentally, if everyone took your advice (and many seem to, unfortunately), a significant number of people would still get hacked just because the bad guys happened to guess the correct dictionary word they used. All they have to do is try the first 50 most used words and phrases for every account, and with millions of users, they're bound to guess a few thousand correctly.
My advice: install LastPass or some other password manager, and then have it generate absolutely random noise passwords - you can even set parameters for sites that don't allow symbols or have length restrictions, etc. Those are automatically filled in when you visit the site. Either your browser will remember them in it's password manager, or a plugin, like LastPass uses will fill them in for you. There's very little reason for a typical user to change a password when it's randomly generated gibberish.
Indeed, but it's not only you that needs to be disciplined and consistent - it's everyone in the team that's working on the project. I had a nightmare of a time working with C++ code (CERN's Root package) that obviously had been people with a very different idea of sensible programming practice. It was a lot quicker, easier and more reliable to ignore it all and write mostly outside it, even if it meant reinventing the wheel a lot.
Yep, very true. I've seen both extreme cases - in one place I worked, the code was rather a mess, with poor design choices and a lot of hard-coded nonsense throughout the code. At the last place I worked, the very large codebase was exceptionally clean and well written, even though using largely C++ 98-compliant features and styles (that tends to be the case for most older projects). The coding standards were well documented and adhered to rather strictly.
In fairness, nearly any large project can turn into a mess, no matter what language is used. I don't think that's necessarily unique to C or C++, but those two languages tend to be used on many of the largest and most complex projects. Still, bad or inexperienced programmers can certainly exacerbate the problem with unwieldy and unnecessary inheritance chains and horribly over-stuffed "kitchen sink" type classes, and those can be extremely hard to untangle.
Plain C isn't nearly as opaque and unpredictable as C++ can be, but then I write mostly in Fortran these days (90 or later) which I suspect doesn't appear too high on lists of most used languages.
In my view, the C++ language itself isn't really opaque or unpredictable at all - just about anything you do has a highly predictable run-time cost and effect, which is one reason why game developers tend to use it. C and C++ are somewhat unique in sticking to a zero-overhead principle as part of the core language design. That is, you shouldn't pay for language features you don't want to use, and designed language features should have a well understood and predictable run-time cost. That certainly doesn't mean it's necessarily *easy* to understand, but it is largely predictable.
Well, isn't it what we wanted pretty much - "right tool for the job" and all that?
I think it is a good sign!
"The right tool for the job" is exactly what I was going to say. Good for diversity - nothing wrong with healthy competition among languages. As a game programmer, my bread and butter language is C++, but I've also deeply invested in C# for tools, and I know some Lua, which is used heavily for scripting by many companies. Beyond that, I'm looking to add IronPython as an extension language for the tools.
BTW, if programmers hate C++, I wonder if they haven't yet benefited from the full feature set of C++ 11. A lot of C++ projects are pretty long-lived, and so predate these language features. I recently started a new game company, and was able to take full advantage of the language in my codebase from the ground up. With the ubiquitous use of now-standardized smart pointers with STL containers, plus the improved move semantics (meaning you don't always have to sacrifice readability for efficiency now), C++ feels a lot like using a managed language like C++, where you don't have to worry quite as much about carefully managing your allocations or worrying about raw buffer memory overwrites / memory stomps. Instead, you concentrate on ownership with solid RAII principles and let objects clean themselves up naturally, thanks to solid encapsulation.
C++ (as well as C) is certainly one of those languages that can come back to bite you in the ass unless you're extremely disciplined in its use. Those languages have a unique philosophy of letting the programmer do nearly anything they want, including very stupid and dangerous things. As such, less experienced or less disciplined programmers, when they run into a design wall (or prematurely optimize their code), often try to do "clever" things that end up causing issues down the road. And despite the improvements in recent years, C++ has still got its share of sharp corners - a lot of which come from backward compatibility with C, and some others simply bad decision decisions. It's definitely a language that's somewhat tailored for experts, and certainly would not be my go-to language for every project. However, for videogames, which are both complex and large in scope but extremely demanding in terms of required runtime performance and predictability, C++ seems to fit the bill.
if all the other vehicles on the road were similarly sized.
Isn't that particular condition about as realistic as asking for force-fields and inertial dampers?
Besides, we already have tiny cars, motorcycles, and mopeds available for purchase. I'd postulate that most people don't buy them because they still need a full sized vehicle for the occasional long-haul trip hauling a bunch of stuff or a group of people. So, it has to be your *second* vehicle. That tends to negate potential cost savings in gas or purchase price. As an added bonus, since everyone else out there is still driving normal-sized vehicles, you're likely to get killed in the first serious accident you get into.
I still can't believe people are so intent on declaring both game consoles and PCs as "dying" platforms. They're not dying, but they're very likely moving into more of a niche role, or else will be merging functionality so as to make themselves more relevant (like consoles acting as media centers). The reason hand held console games won't completely die is because they're vastly better gaming platforms than phones or tablets for a large number of genre types - typically anything that requires a lot of fast action via a thumbstick and button presses. It's the same reason that PCs and game consoles won't die because of smartphones and tablets - because they're vastly superior at certain things that people still very much want or need to do and are willing to pay a premium price for it.
The expansion of one market doesn't necessarily mean the death or complete collapse of the old, but it may mean a significant market shift. A new technology will only tend to kill off the old of the new technology completely replaces all the old functionality and does so better. We don't use cassette/VHS tapes because digital (CD, DVD, DVR, MP3, Blu-ray, digital streaming) supplanted it and is arguably superior in nearly every way. However, TV didn't completely kill off radio because there were some places radio still made the most sense (like in the car), but it definitely took over as the leader in home entertainment for the last half of last century. Smartphones and tablets will probably be the ubiquitous computing platform of choice for the masses, so of course that's going to be a big market. But let's face it, while they're the ultimate do-it-all portable device, they're decidedly sub-par for certain tasks, so we'll still have our PCs, handheld gaming devices, game consoles, big screen TVs with in-home theater systems, and yes, even our old-school AM/FM radios.
Don't underestimate how much people are willing to pay for a premium entertainment experience. And for portable gaming, the premium experience will always be a dedicated gaming machine. We'll see if I'm wrong in five or ten years, but I bet we'll still see portable game machines out there. It could be that they take the form of nvidia's shield device, essentially an android gaming machine built around an Xbox-style controller. In any case, it should be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
4k isn't just about pixel count. It is also about expanded color gamut, which some people (myself included) think is more important than the resolution increase. Then there is also high dynamic range which is sort of tagging along with 4k, stuff like Dolby Vision.
Interesting article, thanks. The fact that I had no clue probably speaks further to my point. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see better resolution, color gamut, and dynamic range, but I'm certainly not going to replace my TV anytime in the next decade if I can help it (I just bought a 60" LED last year).
After reading the article you linked to, as far as I can tell there's nothing about high dynamic range that's specific to 4K, as you indicated. It sounds like LED is moving closer to plasma in picture quality, as you would expect to happen given enough time and research. Eventually this will probably make it back to mainstream TVs, 1080p resolution TVs included.
Yep, I was the same way. Taking notes distracted me from concentrating on the lecture at hand. The textbooks and handouts were always there to review the material if I wanted, but I discovered that I had a very high retention rate of the information presented when I simply listened and concentrated on what I was being said.
The whole "you must take notes as you listen to the lecture" mentality is horrible advice for people like me who can't multi-task. It was only very late in my schooling that I finally figure this out.
Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that if a learning process worked for them, then it surely must work equally well for everyone. Granted, I'd bet that taking notes works pretty good for most students, but I guess people like us are outliers.
I predict that 4K is going to be a niche for a very long time still - probably until 70+ inch screens are so incredibly cheap (say, a few hundred dollars) that you might as well increase the resolution as well.
DVD was a significant increase in the quality and reliability of stored movies, so of course it caught on big (similar to CDs, the first big jump to digital media for audio). Blu-ray, while a definitely visual improvement over DVD if you have a pretty big screen is both extremely expensive to purchase (still often several times the cost of a DVD after all these years) and very buggy due to all the DRM and other technical complexities. The newest generation of game consoles can barely even output native 1080p. Internally, many games are upscaling from lower resolution buffers. And since on-demand streaming is on the rise and bandwidth is getting tight, 4K streaming en mass is not likely to happen for some time either. For many people, streaming video means far lower quality than BD due to the much higher compression (or occasionally, lower resolution), and it seems like they're fine with it.
Now, given this as the current picture of video technology for the masses, what percentage of customers are going to rush to purchase 4K TVs at many times the cost of a 1080 def TV. I can't imagine you'd ever see much of an improvement in visual quality unless you're talking about something well over 70 or 80 inches in size, and how many people have screens that huge? Will anyone other than videophiles notice the difference?
Who knows... maybe I'll be wrong, but given how many people don't even see a significant visual improvement from DVD to Blu-ray, I just don't see 4K catching on. Or perhaps what's more relevant is even if they see the improvement, will they care enough to support a whole new standard and buy new equipment? I seriously doubt it.
And that's just the desktop. On phones, OpenGL wins all. On tablets, OpenGL wins all. On consoles, DirectX is only relevant for the Xbox, the rest runs OpenGL.
The sphere of influence Microsoft has on the computing industry as a whole has been shrinking with each passing year for at least a decade now. The diminishing relevance of DirectX is yet another proof of this.
Speaking as a game dev, I don't really burn a lot of brain cycles on the DirectX vs OpenGL debate that seems to enthrall some people. Any well-written game engine has abstraction layers for the graphics renderer anyhow, and if you're porting to multiple platforms, you're going to need platforms-specific renderers.
On Windows and Xbox, developers use DirectX. Some developers support OpenGL on Windows as well, but very few do so exclusively. For everything else, developers use OpenGL, or perhaps a proprietary version of OpenGL (like on the consoles), which is optimized for the platform, because that's what's available. DirectX is not becoming any less relevant for the Windows and Xbox platforms. I'm not quite sure how you can make that claim. Microsoft's sphere of influence has actually grown in the last 13 years or so, with the successful launch of three gaming consoles. They're still completely dominant in the desktop OS market, despite minor inroads by other platforms. They're not a significant player in the mobile market, so that may be what you're referring to.
Believe it or not, at least in my experience, most game developers I know tend to be somewhat agnostic about platforms. That is, they're interested in making games, and simply choose the platforms that are the best supported, along with the libraries / APIs best suited to those platforms. DirectX is a stable, well-supported, well-documented choice for Windows, which comprises about 90% of the desktop market share. As such, it makes sense that most games would support it. If the devs want to release multi-platform, then they'll probably just add an OpenGL renderer in addition to the DirectX one.
With Linux and open source in general, if a library is changed and a feature deprecated or removed, you tweak your source and rebuild. Though not everyone wants to or can for that matter, build or tweak source. So distros provide binary packages of common software and libraries for the sake of being user friendly. But that hampers closed source developers who want to protect their IP. I don't blame them but they have to adjust to the ever evolving world of open source libraries and API's. This is the same reason video card drivers on Linux are a huge headache. Instead of providing binary drivers they have to provide a whole obfuscated build environment to pull in the necessary libs and kernel headers for your distro and compile the driver against them. If the video card developers released the source, distros could provide drivers downstream tailored for their distro.
Its a totally different eco system for the game devs and they have to adjust.
Yep, you nailed some of the problems on Linux, which largely come from different philosophies about backward compatibility. Open source means that you can simply recompile at any time, so binary compatibility is deemed less important. On the other hand, Windows has gone through unbelievable efforts to maintain binary compatibility with previous versions.
However, I'd take slight issue with your last line, indicating the "game devs have to adjust". As a game dev, I'm sort of wondering how I'm supposed to "adjust", exactly?
The game development tools, documentation, and source examples for Windows are superior to those I could find for Linux. Linux has a 1% market share among likely gamers (according to the Steam hardware/software survey), and that 1% is splintered across dozens of distros, many of which have compatibility issues with each other. And of course, the Linux platform and development team itself tends to be at best agnostic and at worst outright hostile to closed-source commercial application. All of this can add up to create a lot of development and support overhead for a platform with already tiny profit margins.
Honestly, is anyone really surprised that game developers look at Linux and say "no thank you"?
Please, don't get me wrong. I'd love to support Linux, but damn, you're asking a lot for a 1% market share. I'm planning a Mac port after the initial Windows version of my game is released, and a Linux port may *hopefully* come after that. I have to prioritize according to market share, since I'll be relying on the revenue of the first game to continue development of the other platforms.
I'm not going to suggest that Linux will or even should change their culture, which is and always has been based around free and open source. But I think it's probably best to be realistic about what tradeoffs the platform is making with those priorities. Some of the major issues can be worked around. For instance, most commercial Linux programs (like games) statically link all their libraries, and so avoid weird platform-specific library compatibility issues. And fortunately, most Linux distros use one of a few standardized distribution package formats, so you can at least hit the majority of distros, or perhaps just pick the most popular distros to target and still cover most of the market.
But really, saying that "devs must adjust"? Or what? Or they'll simply not support Linux, like they've always done. How does that hurt anyone other than Linux supporters and enthusiasts?
Well said, but the danger of a lack of privacy is, should be, self-evident: If I've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to see.
I heard a couple of great privacy-related quotes after the NSA think broke a while back - don't remember where it's from though. The thoughtful version:
I've got nothing to hide from those I trust
Or the slightly funnier version:
I'm not doing anything wrong in the bathroom either, but I'd still like some privacy there
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
There's also a matter of sheer inertia in terms of consumer software availability. That's less of a concern with, say, internet infrastructure. Like it or not, DOS captured a large portion of the home and business market early, and Windows leveraged that success and built up a massive amount of inertia among home users. There was a critical period where commercial operating systems, for all their technical shortcomings, were vastly simpler to use than Linux was. I remember experimenting with Linux around '95 or so, and remembering it didn't compare all that favorably to Windows 95. To me, it seemed like it was really only a benefit for people who already knew and were comfortable with Unix, and wanted that environment for their PCs.
Modern Linux desktops are pretty solid (better than Windows 8, certainly), but I'm not certain the real problem is usability. Windows runs nearly all computer games, most business software, and a massive assortment of other commercial products. For people who don't have particular Windows compatibility needs, they can choose the premium Mac hardware/software package, and it provides nearly everything a typical home user would want to start with, and is generally a bit friendlier to use than both Windows and Linux.
That leaves Linux in an uncomfortably position on the desktop, which is unfortunate, because it's come so far and has a lot to offer. It just never got critical mass like DOS/Windows, or had the financial backing of companies like Apple to push it as an alternative OS with it's own ecosystem. At this point, for the average user, Linux really has little to offer them, other than being free and more secure.
An OS's only real purpose in life is to run software. If the software you want to run is only available on Windows, then it's really only a question of whether the price is enough to drive users to another market (assuming no ideological reasons), and for a few hundred dollars spent every five years or so, the answer is pretty obvious. I think the reason for Linux's lackluster desktop adoption is probably as simple as that. And of course, the fact that its already small share is splintered into dozens of distros probably isn't doing it's overall adoption any favors, even if it's great for the enthusiasts.
...in that most of userland was already available freely for him to use, and BSD's free release was delayed by court cases.
Fortunate, yes, but not "merely" fortunate. Nearly every success story also has a component of being in the right place at the right time, but unless you're talking about lottery winners, there's typically far more "work" than "luck" involved.
Not unless your circle of good friends intersects with the circle of walking Facebook-feeds, they want to check in and tag and tweet and instagram everything that's their choice, that I don't is my choice and we're trying to meet somewhere in the middle. Practically that means I have a Facebook account, the privacy settings are basically dialed back to an empty page so I can respond to events, messages and such but when we're together they have a pretty damn good shadow profile of me anyway. Particularly with face recognition I'm sure they can tag meg in pictures from the friend list whether my friends do it or not, so I've stopped bothering there as well as long as my timeline is empty. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up with Google Glass, but there I might draw the line.
Yeah, that's a good point. Trying to keep your privacy while actually using Facebook is sort of like trying to "stay safe" while juggling chainsaws. It's completely at odds with the basic premise of the activity. Fortunately, my friends and family don't rely on Facebook to that extent - or at least, will simply e-mail, text, or call me.
I RTFAed but I didn't find any examples of rudeness.
All I can think of, is that maybe some people consider Facebook unfriending to be rude. Has that become true? Or was it some other act (e.g. asking people to help collect gift cards, maybe)?
No, it was the part where she literally states "I acted rudely" twice in the article. Did you miss it? That, and the fact that she apparently called them out and questioned why they contacted her on Facebook. I can only infer based on what she said, but it sounded like she wasn't exactly polite about doing that either.
Facebook unfriending is, from what I understand, removing someone's permission to post in your personal zone (depending on your settings, I'd guess). Considering this was her immediate response to a relative who was just trying to be nice and wish her well... yeah, it sounds pretty rude to me.
Wouldn't a reasonable response be to simply remove the post, then contact them immediately and explain the situation more clearly, asking them not to do it again? I'd think most people would simply apologize for the mistake and no hard feelings would be had. But hey, that wouldn't make for very interesting reading now, would it?
No, I didn't miss that point, but I'm probably communicating my own position somewhat unclearly.
You may be surprised that, in fact, I actually consider myself to be something of a privacy advocate, although probably not nearly as extreme as some. I guess I still see the good that the advertising revenue has done for the web as well as the bad, so I guess I've been taking a somewhat contrary position to balance the debate. Keep in mind that I view "advertisement" and "intrusive personal data mining" as distinct issues as well, although it would be naive to dismiss the relationship, of course.
It's certainly the aggregation of all that data and how it can potentially be used, as you state, that's a bit scary. At the moment, we simply have to trust that it's not being abused, but that probably isn't good enough. These companies are very quiet about what data they know and how much they know. When Congress asks them, they answer "none of your beeswax", and that doesn't seem to be a good sign. Ultimately, we're probably going to need some "complete opt-out" legislation, perhaps similar to the "do not call" list for telemarketers. Most industries have a pretty poor track record of regulating themselves without the threat of more stringent government regulation hanging over their heads, so unless they willingly provide some better tools for managing privacy (and I don't see that happening), it will probably come down to the government enforcing that on our behalf.
I assume you're asking about free as in "freedom"? Honestly, I think that's a bad way to couch the debate. Yes, we still have freedom on the internet, because government (assuming you live in a reasonably free first-world country) no one is curtailing your behavior, except in regards to lawbreaking activities. A more relevant question is: "do we have any online privacy?", and unfortunately, the answer is "probably not". What is the danger of a lack of privacy, aside from being worthwhile in itself? The collected data could potentially be used to actually curtail freedom instead of simply passively eroding privacy - the temptation to do so is huge. So, yeah, I do believe it's a real concern, and it's going to be a huge issue in the next decade or so as we figure out how to balance all of this realistically.
All that being said, I still think you're pining for an internet which basically few people actually used except a handful of academics and enthusiasts (sort of like Linux fifteen years ago, I guess). I was there, I saw it, and it was pretty damn uninteresting and far less practical than the internet we have today.
And that fact is largely to blame for most of the problems I have with the internet.
The internet used to be a labor of love: if you loved something, you had a site. It wasn't about making a buck off of people. Call me whatever name you like, but I'd rather 300 baud of people who love what they're hosting than 1Gbps of adware.
Do you use Google for searching? Ever enjoy a youtube video? How about looking up news articles online? Listen to a webcast from the Twit network? Even Slashdot, which I *know* you use at least. Every one of them free for you and paid for partially or entirely with ad revenue. If you truly can't abide seeing any advertisements, for heaven's sake, just use adblock.
It's obviously not a good fit for every service or site, but it makes a lot of sense for many of them. There are still plenty of wonderful, ad-free sites. Wikipedia would be the prime example, but there are many other smaller sites, completely ad free, just like there used to be. And anyone is free to rent a bit of space and put whatever the heck they want out there.
If I had to call you a name, I'd just go with "overly nostalgic". I was around when there was very little on the web (well before actually - I had a 300 baud modem myself, thank you), and honestly, I vastly prefer today's internet. Even with all its problems, there's also a lot more benefits as well.
You can get those discount cards and not attach any personal information to it. If you then pay with cash, the store still has no idea who you are. Every half year or so, just say you lost your card and ask for a new one. They always try to get you to attach it to you personal information, like you phone number, but you can simply decline to do so. It's not like they're NOT going to give you the card.
Honestly, I don't care enough about it to go quite that far (that is, I still pay with a CC), so they still probably know who I am, and that I buy bananas more often than oranges, and occasionally grab a plate from the sushi bar. Ah well.
Slashdot Mirror
You could also make a case that the new "free-to-play" games are essentially the "demos" of old, but they're just a lot sneakier about the conversion to the "paid" version. I'd bet the conversion rate is probably similar. Also, you're exactly correct in your assumptions about the revenue breakdown. The last company I was at made MMOs, and there's a lot of research/marketing data showing how free to pay games tend to make a killing off a fairly small number of players that end up playing a LOT.
I'm not sure my own little startup will ever get involved in the mobile market. If I do, I'd like to say away from "free" versions and instead engage fewer users who are willing to pay for a slightly more premium product. I think I can probably get away with that, as my overhead is pretty low, but we'll see.
Someone on the MS Office team (if I recall correctly) was once asked why Microsoft doesn't release a Word "lite" that stripped out a lot of the "unnecessary features", or "bloat", as you call it. As it turns out, it's very hard to pin down what features should actually be stripped from a "lite" version, because everyone has their own favorite features. Beyond the primary features that nearly everyone uses, the use pattern for the rest of the features tends to be a very long, shallow tail.
You talk about 'advanced features that some people need have been added', but that's one of the reasons for Office's popularity - whatever people need it to do, there's a good chance it can do it. No one uses *all* of those advanced features, but nearly everyone uses *some* of them. That's entirely the point. People mistakenly call the features they don't happen to use "bloat", but your bloat is someone else's "critical feature".
A lot of modern software is like that. What you call bloat I call feature-rich. Go back to 80s or 90s software that was expensive, hard-to-use, and much more limited in capabilities? Once you take off the rose-colored glasses, I suspect you'd discover a whole lot of annoyances and limitations in software of that era that you completely forgot about.
Hmm, not sure why my post was cut off. It previewed correctly... ah well. Here's the conclusion as best I can remember: ...staffed by US workers? Companies are realizing that annoying their customers with bad customer service when they're already frustrated is bad for business as well (i.e. hard-to-understand accents, etc).
Ultimately, outsourcing is subject to the same project management triangle (fast, cheap, good - pick two) as any other endeavor.
For a time people feared all IT work would be outsourced to other countries. It's certainly not happening in my industry (videogame development) to any significant extent. It turns out it's hard to do any sort of creative problem-solving or collaborative type work outsourced. A number of companies I know who've tried it have either given up or scaled way back on that because of quality issues. I'd be interested to hear if others have seen the same thing in other industries.
You'd think that more game companies would be outsourcing cheap programmers from other countries. Likewise, there are fine artists all over the world, right? Couldn't that be outsourced for much cheaper? I've seen/heard-of companies try to outsource game programming and art, and in every example I heard about, the savings in cost and time were largely offset by the disastrous quality of what was produced, forcing the in-house employees to either significantly touch-up or even completely re-do the work from scratch.
The simple fact remains that it's extremely difficult to guarantee high-quality work when you're trying to find cheap labor, and you end up spending an enormous amount of time in a feedback / QA loop, which tends to be worsened by differences in time-zones, so iteration can take days or even weeks. Additionally, there may be communication barriers, with English being a second language for the contract workers, or perhaps even translated by a third-party. Sometimes an interactive face-to-face meeting is the best way to hammer out design or technical challenges, but it's not an option.
Have you noticed how some American companies are now even advertising that their staffed helplines are staffed i
The prevalence of the passwords requiring uppercase, lowercase, punctuation etc is ridiculous as more and more sites and servers I use are requiring it.
I'm going to make an assumption here and I bet I'm I'm right. (I have NO idea!)
The VAST majority of security breaches are due to poorly patched software / bugs / social engineering / angry staff etc.
I'd wager very very few password hacks are due to people having the password
"momspajamas2212" instead of "M0mspaJAMas22!2"
I will say I'm finding the only way to still remember my passwords on sites now is to start using pattern based passwords, example "$RFV%TGB4rfv5tgb" (try typing that) - it's not ideal but I can remember the bastard thing. (I hope this helps someone else out, I gave it out to someone recently and they adopted something similar pretty much instantly and yes, I know you could add patterns to the dictionary)
If you look at those who have analyzed cracked databases to see what passwords people actually used, you'll find that people get hacked because they're using passwords like "password", "123456", "monkey", and so on.
Honestly, I've found that a password manager is really the only sane way to use cryptographically secure (and completely different) passwords on every site without worrying about losing those passwords. I use Lastpass, since it syncs between machines automatically and has a plugin which automatically fills in the username and password for you, and will detect when you change existing passwords or create new ones. There are a bunch of other good ones too if you don't like the idea of your encrypted password database being store online (note: it's encrypted locally, so Lastpass never sees anything but a binary blob).
Salt doesn't necessarily solve the breached hash problem if you're using simple dictionary words. It forces a per-hash computation, so they can't use a rainbow table of pre-computed hashes, but dictionary words will still be the second thing criminals will try (the first thing is a quick-list of top password offenders). Sure, it significantly slows the process down, but once the database is offline, there's plenty of CPU horsepower available to do that sort of thing.
Actually, it may be more accurate to say that there's plenty of GPU power available for that, as cracking software often makes use of banks of high-end videocard GPUs to perform massive amounts of hash calculations per second. GPUs are optimal for this task because of the massive number of parallel processing cores in each card. The only real way to thwart this sort of decoding effort is to use memory-hard hashing algorithms, but I don't think those are in wide-spread use yet.
So, let's assume a worst case of a billion hashes a second, which I don't think is out of line for today's top-of-the-line video cards, easily within financial reach of your typical internet low-life. We'll use a dictionary of perhaps 20,000 of the most common English works, and let's say we'll throw in enough combinations to round it up to a million hashes that we'll try per user (capitalization + common numeric suffixes). That means that even something like "Pencil92" isn't safe. Let's also assume that we've got a million user hashes to check in total. Total calculation time for a first-pass dictionary attack on every entry in the database? About 1000 seconds. That means we've got plenty of time to try even more complex combinations of passwords after the simple first-pass check.
Ultimately, the best defense is password complexity, since no amount of hardware can possibly cover all the combinations of a very long and complex password, since length + variation = a combinatorial explosion of possibilities.
Also, sorry to hear about the storm mess. Never fun to clean up after stuff like that.
The only reason plain C isn't typically as opaque as C++ is that there isn't much to try. The IOCCC is proof enough that the problem wasn't created by C++.
The primary thing the IOCCC proves is that C doesn't restrict you from doing crazy things with macros and variable names, and that it doesn't care about whitespace. There's certainly a lot of clever coding represented in that contest, but a good deal of the obfuscation is simply related to formatting (i.e. making ASCII art from the source code, etc).
Those passwords suck, and I hate you for even suggesting them.
Better idea, simple passwords. "Pencil".
Then lock the account after a reasonable number of attempts - like 50. How many tries to brute force a single word password? More than 50.
Yikes, that's horrible, horrible advice.
You need to stay away far, far from single dictionary word passwords. If the hashed password database is compromised, you need a password that will at least withstand a basic dictionary attack, since obviously it's beyond locking because of failed attempts at that point. If there's any significant amount of time between when the breach occurs and when it's discovered, your only defense is a password long and complex enough to withstand any brute-force attempt within a reasonable period of time.
Incidentally, if everyone took your advice (and many seem to, unfortunately), a significant number of people would still get hacked just because the bad guys happened to guess the correct dictionary word they used. All they have to do is try the first 50 most used words and phrases for every account, and with millions of users, they're bound to guess a few thousand correctly.
My advice: install LastPass or some other password manager, and then have it generate absolutely random noise passwords - you can even set parameters for sites that don't allow symbols or have length restrictions, etc. Those are automatically filled in when you visit the site. Either your browser will remember them in it's password manager, or a plugin, like LastPass uses will fill them in for you. There's very little reason for a typical user to change a password when it's randomly generated gibberish.
Indeed, but it's not only you that needs to be disciplined and consistent - it's everyone in the team that's working on the project. I had a nightmare of a time working with C++ code (CERN's Root package) that obviously had been people with a very different idea of sensible programming practice. It was a lot quicker, easier and more reliable to ignore it all and write mostly outside it, even if it meant reinventing the wheel a lot.
Yep, very true. I've seen both extreme cases - in one place I worked, the code was rather a mess, with poor design choices and a lot of hard-coded nonsense throughout the code. At the last place I worked, the very large codebase was exceptionally clean and well written, even though using largely C++ 98-compliant features and styles (that tends to be the case for most older projects). The coding standards were well documented and adhered to rather strictly.
In fairness, nearly any large project can turn into a mess, no matter what language is used. I don't think that's necessarily unique to C or C++, but those two languages tend to be used on many of the largest and most complex projects. Still, bad or inexperienced programmers can certainly exacerbate the problem with unwieldy and unnecessary inheritance chains and horribly over-stuffed "kitchen sink" type classes, and those can be extremely hard to untangle.
Plain C isn't nearly as opaque and unpredictable as C++ can be, but then I write mostly in Fortran these days (90 or later) which I suspect doesn't appear too high on lists of most used languages.
In my view, the C++ language itself isn't really opaque or unpredictable at all - just about anything you do has a highly predictable run-time cost and effect, which is one reason why game developers tend to use it. C and C++ are somewhat unique in sticking to a zero-overhead principle as part of the core language design. That is, you shouldn't pay for language features you don't want to use, and designed language features should have a well understood and predictable run-time cost. That certainly doesn't mean it's necessarily *easy* to understand, but it is largely predictable.
Well, isn't it what we wanted pretty much - "right tool for the job" and all that?
I think it is a good sign!
"The right tool for the job" is exactly what I was going to say. Good for diversity - nothing wrong with healthy competition among languages. As a game programmer, my bread and butter language is C++, but I've also deeply invested in C# for tools, and I know some Lua, which is used heavily for scripting by many companies. Beyond that, I'm looking to add IronPython as an extension language for the tools.
BTW, if programmers hate C++, I wonder if they haven't yet benefited from the full feature set of C++ 11. A lot of C++ projects are pretty long-lived, and so predate these language features. I recently started a new game company, and was able to take full advantage of the language in my codebase from the ground up. With the ubiquitous use of now-standardized smart pointers with STL containers, plus the improved move semantics (meaning you don't always have to sacrifice readability for efficiency now), C++ feels a lot like using a managed language like C++, where you don't have to worry quite as much about carefully managing your allocations or worrying about raw buffer memory overwrites / memory stomps. Instead, you concentrate on ownership with solid RAII principles and let objects clean themselves up naturally, thanks to solid encapsulation.
C++ (as well as C) is certainly one of those languages that can come back to bite you in the ass unless you're extremely disciplined in its use. Those languages have a unique philosophy of letting the programmer do nearly anything they want, including very stupid and dangerous things. As such, less experienced or less disciplined programmers, when they run into a design wall (or prematurely optimize their code), often try to do "clever" things that end up causing issues down the road. And despite the improvements in recent years, C++ has still got its share of sharp corners - a lot of which come from backward compatibility with C, and some others simply bad decision decisions. It's definitely a language that's somewhat tailored for experts, and certainly would not be my go-to language for every project. However, for videogames, which are both complex and large in scope but extremely demanding in terms of required runtime performance and predictability, C++ seems to fit the bill.
if all the other vehicles on the road were similarly sized.
Isn't that particular condition about as realistic as asking for force-fields and inertial dampers?
Besides, we already have tiny cars, motorcycles, and mopeds available for purchase. I'd postulate that most people don't buy them because they still need a full sized vehicle for the occasional long-haul trip hauling a bunch of stuff or a group of people. So, it has to be your *second* vehicle. That tends to negate potential cost savings in gas or purchase price. As an added bonus, since everyone else out there is still driving normal-sized vehicles, you're likely to get killed in the first serious accident you get into.
Good, the hand held gaming console is dead...
I still can't believe people are so intent on declaring both game consoles and PCs as "dying" platforms. They're not dying, but they're very likely moving into more of a niche role, or else will be merging functionality so as to make themselves more relevant (like consoles acting as media centers). The reason hand held console games won't completely die is because they're vastly better gaming platforms than phones or tablets for a large number of genre types - typically anything that requires a lot of fast action via a thumbstick and button presses. It's the same reason that PCs and game consoles won't die because of smartphones and tablets - because they're vastly superior at certain things that people still very much want or need to do and are willing to pay a premium price for it.
The expansion of one market doesn't necessarily mean the death or complete collapse of the old, but it may mean a significant market shift. A new technology will only tend to kill off the old of the new technology completely replaces all the old functionality and does so better. We don't use cassette/VHS tapes because digital (CD, DVD, DVR, MP3, Blu-ray, digital streaming) supplanted it and is arguably superior in nearly every way. However, TV didn't completely kill off radio because there were some places radio still made the most sense (like in the car), but it definitely took over as the leader in home entertainment for the last half of last century. Smartphones and tablets will probably be the ubiquitous computing platform of choice for the masses, so of course that's going to be a big market. But let's face it, while they're the ultimate do-it-all portable device, they're decidedly sub-par for certain tasks, so we'll still have our PCs, handheld gaming devices, game consoles, big screen TVs with in-home theater systems, and yes, even our old-school AM/FM radios.
Don't underestimate how much people are willing to pay for a premium entertainment experience. And for portable gaming, the premium experience will always be a dedicated gaming machine. We'll see if I'm wrong in five or ten years, but I bet we'll still see portable game machines out there. It could be that they take the form of nvidia's shield device, essentially an android gaming machine built around an Xbox-style controller. In any case, it should be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
4k isn't just about pixel count. It is also about expanded color gamut, which some people (myself included) think is more important than the resolution increase. Then there is also high dynamic range which is sort of tagging along with 4k, stuff like Dolby Vision.
Interesting article, thanks. The fact that I had no clue probably speaks further to my point. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see better resolution, color gamut, and dynamic range, but I'm certainly not going to replace my TV anytime in the next decade if I can help it (I just bought a 60" LED last year).
After reading the article you linked to, as far as I can tell there's nothing about high dynamic range that's specific to 4K, as you indicated. It sounds like LED is moving closer to plasma in picture quality, as you would expect to happen given enough time and research. Eventually this will probably make it back to mainstream TVs, 1080p resolution TVs included.
Yep, I was the same way. Taking notes distracted me from concentrating on the lecture at hand. The textbooks and handouts were always there to review the material if I wanted, but I discovered that I had a very high retention rate of the information presented when I simply listened and concentrated on what I was being said.
The whole "you must take notes as you listen to the lecture" mentality is horrible advice for people like me who can't multi-task. It was only very late in my schooling that I finally figure this out.
Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that if a learning process worked for them, then it surely must work equally well for everyone. Granted, I'd bet that taking notes works pretty good for most students, but I guess people like us are outliers.
I predict that 4K is going to be a niche for a very long time still - probably until 70+ inch screens are so incredibly cheap (say, a few hundred dollars) that you might as well increase the resolution as well.
DVD was a significant increase in the quality and reliability of stored movies, so of course it caught on big (similar to CDs, the first big jump to digital media for audio). Blu-ray, while a definitely visual improvement over DVD if you have a pretty big screen is both extremely expensive to purchase (still often several times the cost of a DVD after all these years) and very buggy due to all the DRM and other technical complexities. The newest generation of game consoles can barely even output native 1080p. Internally, many games are upscaling from lower resolution buffers. And since on-demand streaming is on the rise and bandwidth is getting tight, 4K streaming en mass is not likely to happen for some time either. For many people, streaming video means far lower quality than BD due to the much higher compression (or occasionally, lower resolution), and it seems like they're fine with it.
Now, given this as the current picture of video technology for the masses, what percentage of customers are going to rush to purchase 4K TVs at many times the cost of a 1080 def TV. I can't imagine you'd ever see much of an improvement in visual quality unless you're talking about something well over 70 or 80 inches in size, and how many people have screens that huge? Will anyone other than videophiles notice the difference?
Who knows... maybe I'll be wrong, but given how many people don't even see a significant visual improvement from DVD to Blu-ray, I just don't see 4K catching on. Or perhaps what's more relevant is even if they see the improvement, will they care enough to support a whole new standard and buy new equipment? I seriously doubt it.
And that's just the desktop. On phones, OpenGL wins all. On tablets, OpenGL wins all. On consoles, DirectX is only relevant for the Xbox, the rest runs OpenGL.
The sphere of influence Microsoft has on the computing industry as a whole has been shrinking with each passing year for at least a decade now. The diminishing relevance of DirectX is yet another proof of this.
Speaking as a game dev, I don't really burn a lot of brain cycles on the DirectX vs OpenGL debate that seems to enthrall some people. Any well-written game engine has abstraction layers for the graphics renderer anyhow, and if you're porting to multiple platforms, you're going to need platforms-specific renderers.
On Windows and Xbox, developers use DirectX. Some developers support OpenGL on Windows as well, but very few do so exclusively. For everything else, developers use OpenGL, or perhaps a proprietary version of OpenGL (like on the consoles), which is optimized for the platform, because that's what's available. DirectX is not becoming any less relevant for the Windows and Xbox platforms. I'm not quite sure how you can make that claim. Microsoft's sphere of influence has actually grown in the last 13 years or so, with the successful launch of three gaming consoles. They're still completely dominant in the desktop OS market, despite minor inroads by other platforms. They're not a significant player in the mobile market, so that may be what you're referring to.
Believe it or not, at least in my experience, most game developers I know tend to be somewhat agnostic about platforms. That is, they're interested in making games, and simply choose the platforms that are the best supported, along with the libraries / APIs best suited to those platforms. DirectX is a stable, well-supported, well-documented choice for Windows, which comprises about 90% of the desktop market share. As such, it makes sense that most games would support it. If the devs want to release multi-platform, then they'll probably just add an OpenGL renderer in addition to the DirectX one.
With Linux and open source in general, if a library is changed and a feature deprecated or removed, you tweak your source and rebuild. Though not everyone wants to or can for that matter, build or tweak source. So distros provide binary packages of common software and libraries for the sake of being user friendly. But that hampers closed source developers who want to protect their IP. I don't blame them but they have to adjust to the ever evolving world of open source libraries and API's. This is the same reason video card drivers on Linux are a huge headache. Instead of providing binary drivers they have to provide a whole obfuscated build environment to pull in the necessary libs and kernel headers for your distro and compile the driver against them. If the video card developers released the source, distros could provide drivers downstream tailored for their distro.
Its a totally different eco system for the game devs and they have to adjust.
Yep, you nailed some of the problems on Linux, which largely come from different philosophies about backward compatibility. Open source means that you can simply recompile at any time, so binary compatibility is deemed less important. On the other hand, Windows has gone through unbelievable efforts to maintain binary compatibility with previous versions.
However, I'd take slight issue with your last line, indicating the "game devs have to adjust". As a game dev, I'm sort of wondering how I'm supposed to "adjust", exactly?
The game development tools, documentation, and source examples for Windows are superior to those I could find for Linux. Linux has a 1% market share among likely gamers (according to the Steam hardware/software survey), and that 1% is splintered across dozens of distros, many of which have compatibility issues with each other. And of course, the Linux platform and development team itself tends to be at best agnostic and at worst outright hostile to closed-source commercial application. All of this can add up to create a lot of development and support overhead for a platform with already tiny profit margins.
Honestly, is anyone really surprised that game developers look at Linux and say "no thank you"?
Please, don't get me wrong. I'd love to support Linux, but damn, you're asking a lot for a 1% market share. I'm planning a Mac port after the initial Windows version of my game is released, and a Linux port may *hopefully* come after that. I have to prioritize according to market share, since I'll be relying on the revenue of the first game to continue development of the other platforms.
I'm not going to suggest that Linux will or even should change their culture, which is and always has been based around free and open source. But I think it's probably best to be realistic about what tradeoffs the platform is making with those priorities. Some of the major issues can be worked around. For instance, most commercial Linux programs (like games) statically link all their libraries, and so avoid weird platform-specific library compatibility issues. And fortunately, most Linux distros use one of a few standardized distribution package formats, so you can at least hit the majority of distros, or perhaps just pick the most popular distros to target and still cover most of the market.
But really, saying that "devs must adjust"? Or what? Or they'll simply not support Linux, like they've always done. How does that hurt anyone other than Linux supporters and enthusiasts?
Well said, but the danger of a lack of privacy is, should be, self-evident: If I've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to see.
I heard a couple of great privacy-related quotes after the NSA think broke a while back - don't remember where it's from though. The thoughtful version:
I've got nothing to hide from those I trust
Or the slightly funnier version:
I'm not doing anything wrong in the bathroom either, but I'd still like some privacy there
just far less visibility.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
There's also a matter of sheer inertia in terms of consumer software availability. That's less of a concern with, say, internet infrastructure. Like it or not, DOS captured a large portion of the home and business market early, and Windows leveraged that success and built up a massive amount of inertia among home users. There was a critical period where commercial operating systems, for all their technical shortcomings, were vastly simpler to use than Linux was. I remember experimenting with Linux around '95 or so, and remembering it didn't compare all that favorably to Windows 95. To me, it seemed like it was really only a benefit for people who already knew and were comfortable with Unix, and wanted that environment for their PCs.
Modern Linux desktops are pretty solid (better than Windows 8, certainly), but I'm not certain the real problem is usability. Windows runs nearly all computer games, most business software, and a massive assortment of other commercial products. For people who don't have particular Windows compatibility needs, they can choose the premium Mac hardware/software package, and it provides nearly everything a typical home user would want to start with, and is generally a bit friendlier to use than both Windows and Linux.
That leaves Linux in an uncomfortably position on the desktop, which is unfortunate, because it's come so far and has a lot to offer. It just never got critical mass like DOS/Windows, or had the financial backing of companies like Apple to push it as an alternative OS with it's own ecosystem. At this point, for the average user, Linux really has little to offer them, other than being free and more secure.
An OS's only real purpose in life is to run software. If the software you want to run is only available on Windows, then it's really only a question of whether the price is enough to drive users to another market (assuming no ideological reasons), and for a few hundred dollars spent every five years or so, the answer is pretty obvious. I think the reason for Linux's lackluster desktop adoption is probably as simple as that. And of course, the fact that its already small share is splintered into dozens of distros probably isn't doing it's overall adoption any favors, even if it's great for the enthusiasts.
...in that most of userland was already available freely for him to use, and BSD's free release was delayed by court cases.
Fortunate, yes, but not "merely" fortunate. Nearly every success story also has a component of being in the right place at the right time, but unless you're talking about lottery winners, there's typically far more "work" than "luck" involved.
Not unless your circle of good friends intersects with the circle of walking Facebook-feeds, they want to check in and tag and tweet and instagram everything that's their choice, that I don't is my choice and we're trying to meet somewhere in the middle. Practically that means I have a Facebook account, the privacy settings are basically dialed back to an empty page so I can respond to events, messages and such but when we're together they have a pretty damn good shadow profile of me anyway. Particularly with face recognition I'm sure they can tag meg in pictures from the friend list whether my friends do it or not, so I've stopped bothering there as well as long as my timeline is empty. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up with Google Glass, but there I might draw the line.
Yeah, that's a good point. Trying to keep your privacy while actually using Facebook is sort of like trying to "stay safe" while juggling chainsaws. It's completely at odds with the basic premise of the activity. Fortunately, my friends and family don't rely on Facebook to that extent - or at least, will simply e-mail, text, or call me.
I RTFAed but I didn't find any examples of rudeness.
All I can think of, is that maybe some people consider Facebook unfriending to be rude. Has that become true? Or was it some other act (e.g. asking people to help collect gift cards, maybe)?
No, it was the part where she literally states "I acted rudely" twice in the article. Did you miss it? That, and the fact that she apparently called them out and questioned why they contacted her on Facebook. I can only infer based on what she said, but it sounded like she wasn't exactly polite about doing that either.
Facebook unfriending is, from what I understand, removing someone's permission to post in your personal zone (depending on your settings, I'd guess). Considering this was her immediate response to a relative who was just trying to be nice and wish her well... yeah, it sounds pretty rude to me.
Wouldn't a reasonable response be to simply remove the post, then contact them immediately and explain the situation more clearly, asking them not to do it again? I'd think most people would simply apologize for the mistake and no hard feelings would be had. But hey, that wouldn't make for very interesting reading now, would it?
No, I didn't miss that point, but I'm probably communicating my own position somewhat unclearly.
You may be surprised that, in fact, I actually consider myself to be something of a privacy advocate, although probably not nearly as extreme as some. I guess I still see the good that the advertising revenue has done for the web as well as the bad, so I guess I've been taking a somewhat contrary position to balance the debate. Keep in mind that I view "advertisement" and "intrusive personal data mining" as distinct issues as well, although it would be naive to dismiss the relationship, of course.
It's certainly the aggregation of all that data and how it can potentially be used, as you state, that's a bit scary. At the moment, we simply have to trust that it's not being abused, but that probably isn't good enough. These companies are very quiet about what data they know and how much they know. When Congress asks them, they answer "none of your beeswax", and that doesn't seem to be a good sign. Ultimately, we're probably going to need some "complete opt-out" legislation, perhaps similar to the "do not call" list for telemarketers. Most industries have a pretty poor track record of regulating themselves without the threat of more stringent government regulation hanging over their heads, so unless they willingly provide some better tools for managing privacy (and I don't see that happening), it will probably come down to the government enforcing that on our behalf.
I assume you're asking about free as in "freedom"? Honestly, I think that's a bad way to couch the debate. Yes, we still have freedom on the internet, because government (assuming you live in a reasonably free first-world country) no one is curtailing your behavior, except in regards to lawbreaking activities. A more relevant question is: "do we have any online privacy?", and unfortunately, the answer is "probably not". What is the danger of a lack of privacy, aside from being worthwhile in itself? The collected data could potentially be used to actually curtail freedom instead of simply passively eroding privacy - the temptation to do so is huge. So, yeah, I do believe it's a real concern, and it's going to be a huge issue in the next decade or so as we figure out how to balance all of this realistically.
All that being said, I still think you're pining for an internet which basically few people actually used except a handful of academics and enthusiasts (sort of like Linux fifteen years ago, I guess). I was there, I saw it, and it was pretty damn uninteresting and far less practical than the internet we have today.
The web is largely funded by advertisement.
And that fact is largely to blame for most of the problems I have with the internet.
The internet used to be a labor of love: if you loved something, you had a site. It wasn't about making a buck off of people. Call me whatever name you like, but I'd rather 300 baud of people who love what they're hosting than 1Gbps of adware.
Do you use Google for searching? Ever enjoy a youtube video? How about looking up news articles online? Listen to a webcast from the Twit network? Even Slashdot, which I *know* you use at least. Every one of them free for you and paid for partially or entirely with ad revenue. If you truly can't abide seeing any advertisements, for heaven's sake, just use adblock.
It's obviously not a good fit for every service or site, but it makes a lot of sense for many of them. There are still plenty of wonderful, ad-free sites. Wikipedia would be the prime example, but there are many other smaller sites, completely ad free, just like there used to be. And anyone is free to rent a bit of space and put whatever the heck they want out there.
If I had to call you a name, I'd just go with "overly nostalgic". I was around when there was very little on the web (well before actually - I had a 300 baud modem myself, thank you), and honestly, I vastly prefer today's internet. Even with all its problems, there's also a lot more benefits as well.
You can get those discount cards and not attach any personal information to it. If you then pay with cash, the store still has no idea who you are. Every half year or so, just say you lost your card and ask for a new one. They always try to get you to attach it to you personal information, like you phone number, but you can simply decline to do so. It's not like they're NOT going to give you the card.
Honestly, I don't care enough about it to go quite that far (that is, I still pay with a CC), so they still probably know who I am, and that I buy bananas more often than oranges, and occasionally grab a plate from the sushi bar. Ah well.