*shrug* the radio shack down the street from me still sells electronic parts. No problems there.
I do not think this 'general purpose computing is going away!' hysteria is justified. All we are seeing is an adjustment of the market. In the past if you wanted XYZ covered, you had to get a general purpose computer because specialized devices were harder to come by, so people bought tools that served them poorly. Now we have more variety, tasks that never needed a general purpose computer in the first place can be completed with something more specialized, and tasks that honestly DID lend themselves to general purpose computers will still be filled by such machines.
All we are seeing here is now people have more choice and are getting things that do the jobs they need done better, but there are plenty of jobs that still do and probably always will work best with a computer as we prefer it, and that will continue to be a rich market in the future. In fact they will probably continue to get cheaper, faster, and more flexible.
Much of this almost feels like 'how dare people find value in something that doesn't do what I want, they should use what I use and bask in my superior usage!'
Sadly a lot of people like to think that their task is the top of the pyramid, thus all uses and their tools should aspire to be like them.. anyone else must be stupid.. and by proxy, if someone seems smart and happy that might mean 'they' are right, and thus the speaker must be 'wrong and stupid', thus it becomes important to their ego to explain why the person is actually wrong and can not be as happy as they seem.. that something must be wrong with them or something.
There is a reason publisherless games tend to be smaller and have fan-driven niche-markets. Notice how the kickstarter game market is already starting to loose steam.. there is only so much room for fan driven content that reaches any significant scale.
People tend to underestimate just how much a publisher does since it does not seem to benefit them. To be honest, the 'kickstarter success' cases have not been all that honest about what it took to get them there... they had massive social networks and a built in fanbase to pay for things, they were stars or got metapeers to spread the word for them.. in other words they were sufficiently well positioned to be able to their their advertizing themselves and small enough to handle their distribution themselves. For most developers though, they can not depend on being high profile enough to get customers to pay up front like that, it takes the resources of a publisher getting the word out, setting up the channels, making sure all those boring details that developers do not think are important happen smoothly. It is a lot of work,.... but beyond that it is not work that respected, it is not work that is sexy, but it can be very make or break.
I am also not sure I would say publishers do not 'care', but they do have their own set of priorities.. specifically the food on the plates of THEIR staff. They are not charities.. they will invest time and effort in a studio they think will make a good partnership, but they are not going to drag along one they do not think will pan out well. It sucks when a studio we as customers love goes under because publishers stop helping them, but the publishers do not sit down and go 'hey, this studio is doing fine, lets destroy them!'.. they look at the studio and go 'well yeah, they have a loyal following, but not enough people want their stuff to justify the investment', they stop, then they spend those resources on other studios.
No, it isn't perfect.. there is a lot of corruption and such in the works.. and I completely agree alternate paths need to be developed since some studios are going to be able to survive and sell their goods through other channels... but if we want to change things we need to acknowledge why things are they way they are and what benefits the current systems have, rather then dismissing them completely. Otherwise we will just make all new mistakes and a lot of studios that would have a chance will shut down because they did not take advantage of resources they could have. Purity is bad when you want to stay employed or when you have people working for you.
People tend to underestimate what it takes not only to develop such a title, but get it to market and get through all the compromises in the process. Companies do not set out to produce a multi-million dollar bad game, the the people doing it are not idiots... but things go wrong, stuff happens, and all that work and planning can still produce a lemon.
Things are so much easier when one is just a customer and has the luxury of sitting around complaining about how they would have done it, without having to actually worry or even think about all the details.
For me at least, it is not that I find anything actually 'bad' about Win7 (outside me not being able to find a lot of things since they moved around the control panel again)... I just find it doesn't do anything new over WinXP to justify the higher hardware requirements. Thus it is only 'bad' in that it is more expensive to run, which of course is nullified if one is talking about new purchases.
Actually, the profits are close to zero even after the up front costs are taken care of. Vaccine production is not a very profitable business, with many producers taking losses some years. They mostly continue to exist because large institutional buyers promise to grab certain amounts in order to keep them in production. Most of the companies that make vaccines would be happy if the entire division got shut down so they could focus on more profitable things. Often governments have to pressure drug companies to keep the divisions open with threats (or promises) around other things.
Considering that populations that have the vaccine have seen a 95% drop in hep-B infections in children, so apparently it matters quite a bit to a number of people.
There are all sorts of ways to get hep-b, including a dormant version passing from mother to child and then becoming active in the kid.
I am not sure where you got your numbers, but I am seeing US infection rates near the million range. It is possible that what you are seeing are the numbers AFTER vaccination, meaning they are low because the vaccine is working as intended.
No irony there. I do not know where the poster is from, but that is a perfectly valid construct in several regional dialects of American English.
People tend to forget that the internet contains more then their regional bubble, and that English is a whole family of languages with much less standardization then people like to think.
Ah, blaming the victim because they were 'asking for it'. Even when one takes a risk, it is still the fault of the party that acted poorly. In this case the TSA and Delta are the ones that behaved badly... the guy did something risky yes, but risky well within his legal rights.
This is the same class of argument as those people who claim rape victims are not actually victims because they wore a short skirt or went home with someone they didn't know.. yeah it is a risk, but it is still the rapist in the wrong.... and telling people they should live in fear and avoid things because bad people will get them does not help, it just shames the behavior and normalizes the bad behavior.
Well, yes and no. It was the Delta employees who kicked them off the plane, but it was the TSA employees who were the ones actually causing all the inconvenience. They did a pragmatic thing for their other customers, but for the family it is being a victim twice.. once by the TSA, and a second time by Delta who, instead of going 'hey TSA, leave our paying customer alone' said 'well TSA, you are harassing one of our customers, and that harassment is impacting the rest of our customers, so we will punish the person you don't like so you will leave us alone'.
I would wager it actually IS tape. I am surprised it is even news, actually. Off-site tape backup centers managed by a 3rd party are nothing new. Generally bandwidth is not that big of an issue for such setups, one is not doing backups of large amounts of data at a time, but instead fairly small amount (like customer records, payroll, etc) done over and over so they can role back to any particular date easily.
Though ideally, one does not use such a service to replace local tape backups, but instead to add an extra layer... the 'in case your building burns down' type protection.
It still might be a tape robot, with the wait time being their best guess regarding how active the system will be and thus how long the robot's queue is. A robotic system indeed is quite quick, when you are the only user.
Well, as you say, 'for us'. Having an offsite server to back up to is indeed a similar solution, in fact that is basically what this is... only someone else maintains the server and worries about maintenance. Anyone can set up an extra server in their closet at home for pretty cheap, but this isn't intended for that type of ad-hoc solution. I suspect services like this also make a company's insurance carrier happier.
What they probably mean is they provide a web interface for interacting with the system rather then providing a locally installed application, then downloaded strait through the browser.
Lawsuits only make up about 1-2% of the health care costs. They have made a wonderful scapegoat but that is about all they are. They play well into the 'US is such a litigious' nation trip people have been fed.. which is little more then a recast of the old American 'victims should know their place' attitude... which is always amusing since our laws were specifically written so that many laws are not enforced by the DoJ and thus a lawsuit is the only way to activate them.. thus if someone tries to actually get protection under the law they can be branded 'sue happy' and slurred for it. The handicapped are a common victim of this.
I am talking about organized Christian Lobbying groups, not the population. I would say they are pretty out of step with the actual wishes and desires of the population, but they have the time and resources to get a disproportionate amount of attention. In other words.... they do not actually represent Christians as a whole.
As for the persecution complex.. naturally it varies by church and denomination, but you do not have to look far to see it at work at the political level.. just look at all the 'war on Christmas' and 'secular war on Christians' rhetoric that compares any decrease in special privilege as persecution. Again, not the bulk of the population, but the well organized groups.
Because the Christian Lobby (both political and economic) is really powerful in the US and has a serious persecution complex, while minority religions can not do much to impact your business.
I have seen this happen a couple times.. some group notices that a site has support for non-christian values and throws a hissy fit, then the site does the math and decides it is less trouble to get rid of what the people do not like... mostly because these groups claim to speak for 'Christians' even though their outrage tends to only represent a small percent of the community.. still, the company is often not willing to take the chance.
I think what they really do not understand, or do not want to understand, is that corporations and governments are, de facto, not fundamentally different, and thus if you weaken the elected government all you do is make the private states more powerful, who will then exercise government like power over people.
Individual cases of assault, when tolerated within a culture, add up to a culture of sexual harassment. There are a few somewhat extreme examples like the one sited, but the background noise is the issue at hand, and that is something geek culture in general is still pretty bad about, with the more 'hard core' or 'edgy' the subculture being, the worse they tend to be about it.
I would say even with programming jobs where you do not need to actually write the math from scratch, knowing the math can go a long way towards using the libraries well. It is hard to optimize or do things elegantly when you do understand the underlying concepts.. you just end up doing something slightly more sophisticated then cargo cult programming, but not by much.
Actually, that is exactly how the game industry is set up. In public they might complain about how used sales are stealing their profits and fantasize about, how if used sales went away, they could charge the same price and no one would notice... but when you actually talk to marketing or other stakeholders in setting prices they are quite aware of the used market and price accordingly. Any publisher that doesn't take into account how used sales will effect how many units they ship vs cost to produce is pretty amateur and will learn a harsh lesson pretty quickly.
So in a very real way it is already working and has been for quite some time. But just like movie studios, record labels, and book publishers, they still like throwing a public hissy fit and trying to stamp out something they see as profiting off them.... but behind closed doors cooler heads usually prevail, esp when you bring in executives who actually look at the full economic ecosystem of their industry.
I think one of the problems here is the industry insiders we generally here ranting about this are generally not the ones who have much of a background in business but have been promoted (self or not) into a position where they have to address such issues, but have not adjusted their worldview to take into account things that are not immediately on their ledger.
Even with that markups, the majority of the time it is still cheaper to buy a mass produced item then to print it yourself. So for the forseable future companies will still have the edge in production cost even taking into account their overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering it worked for the phone network, I would say it has a reasonable chance of working.
*shrug* the radio shack down the street from me still sells electronic parts. No problems there.
I do not think this 'general purpose computing is going away!' hysteria is justified. All we are seeing is an adjustment of the market. In the past if you wanted XYZ covered, you had to get a general purpose computer because specialized devices were harder to come by, so people bought tools that served them poorly. Now we have more variety, tasks that never needed a general purpose computer in the first place can be completed with something more specialized, and tasks that honestly DID lend themselves to general purpose computers will still be filled by such machines.
All we are seeing here is now people have more choice and are getting things that do the jobs they need done better, but there are plenty of jobs that still do and probably always will work best with a computer as we prefer it, and that will continue to be a rich market in the future. In fact they will probably continue to get cheaper, faster, and more flexible.
Much of this almost feels like 'how dare people find value in something that doesn't do what I want, they should use what I use and bask in my superior usage!'
Sadly a lot of people like to think that their task is the top of the pyramid, thus all uses and their tools should aspire to be like them.. anyone else must be stupid.. and by proxy, if someone seems smart and happy that might mean 'they' are right, and thus the speaker must be 'wrong and stupid', thus it becomes important to their ego to explain why the person is actually wrong and can not be as happy as they seem.. that something must be wrong with them or something.
There is a reason publisherless games tend to be smaller and have fan-driven niche-markets. Notice how the kickstarter game market is already starting to loose steam.. there is only so much room for fan driven content that reaches any significant scale.
People tend to underestimate just how much a publisher does since it does not seem to benefit them. To be honest, the 'kickstarter success' cases have not been all that honest about what it took to get them there... they had massive social networks and a built in fanbase to pay for things, they were stars or got metapeers to spread the word for them.. in other words they were sufficiently well positioned to be able to their their advertizing themselves and small enough to handle their distribution themselves. For most developers though, they can not depend on being high profile enough to get customers to pay up front like that, it takes the resources of a publisher getting the word out, setting up the channels, making sure all those boring details that developers do not think are important happen smoothly. It is a lot of work,.... but beyond that it is not work that respected, it is not work that is sexy, but it can be very make or break.
I am also not sure I would say publishers do not 'care', but they do have their own set of priorities.. specifically the food on the plates of THEIR staff. They are not charities.. they will invest time and effort in a studio they think will make a good partnership, but they are not going to drag along one they do not think will pan out well. It sucks when a studio we as customers love goes under because publishers stop helping them, but the publishers do not sit down and go 'hey, this studio is doing fine, lets destroy them!'.. they look at the studio and go 'well yeah, they have a loyal following, but not enough people want their stuff to justify the investment', they stop, then they spend those resources on other studios.
No, it isn't perfect.. there is a lot of corruption and such in the works.. and I completely agree alternate paths need to be developed since some studios are going to be able to survive and sell their goods through other channels... but if we want to change things we need to acknowledge why things are they way they are and what benefits the current systems have, rather then dismissing them completely. Otherwise we will just make all new mistakes and a lot of studios that would have a chance will shut down because they did not take advantage of resources they could have. Purity is bad when you want to stay employed or when you have people working for you.
Pity I do not have mod points.
People tend to underestimate what it takes not only to develop such a title, but get it to market and get through all the compromises in the process. Companies do not set out to produce a multi-million dollar bad game, the the people doing it are not idiots... but things go wrong, stuff happens, and all that work and planning can still produce a lemon.
Things are so much easier when one is just a customer and has the luxury of sitting around complaining about how they would have done it, without having to actually worry or even think about all the details.
For me at least, it is not that I find anything actually 'bad' about Win7 (outside me not being able to find a lot of things since they moved around the control panel again)... I just find it doesn't do anything new over WinXP to justify the higher hardware requirements. Thus it is only 'bad' in that it is more expensive to run, which of course is nullified if one is talking about new purchases.
Actually, the profits are close to zero even after the up front costs are taken care of. Vaccine production is not a very profitable business, with many producers taking losses some years. They mostly continue to exist because large institutional buyers promise to grab certain amounts in order to keep them in production. Most of the companies that make vaccines would be happy if the entire division got shut down so they could focus on more profitable things. Often governments have to pressure drug companies to keep the divisions open with threats (or promises) around other things.
Considering that populations that have the vaccine have seen a 95% drop in hep-B infections in children, so apparently it matters quite a bit to a number of people.
There are all sorts of ways to get hep-b, including a dormant version passing from mother to child and then becoming active in the kid.
I am not sure where you got your numbers, but I am seeing US infection rates near the million range. It is possible that what you are seeing are the numbers AFTER vaccination, meaning they are low because the vaccine is working as intended.
No irony there. I do not know where the poster is from, but that is a perfectly valid construct in several regional dialects of American English.
People tend to forget that the internet contains more then their regional bubble, and that English is a whole family of languages with much less standardization then people like to think.
Ah, blaming the victim because they were 'asking for it'. Even when one takes a risk, it is still the fault of the party that acted poorly. In this case the TSA and Delta are the ones that behaved badly... the guy did something risky yes, but risky well within his legal rights.
This is the same class of argument as those people who claim rape victims are not actually victims because they wore a short skirt or went home with someone they didn't know.. yeah it is a risk, but it is still the rapist in the wrong.... and telling people they should live in fear and avoid things because bad people will get them does not help, it just shames the behavior and normalizes the bad behavior.
Well, yes and no. It was the Delta employees who kicked them off the plane, but it was the TSA employees who were the ones actually causing all the inconvenience. They did a pragmatic thing for their other customers, but for the family it is being a victim twice.. once by the TSA, and a second time by Delta who, instead of going 'hey TSA, leave our paying customer alone' said 'well TSA, you are harassing one of our customers, and that harassment is impacting the rest of our customers, so we will punish the person you don't like so you will leave us alone'.
Which is, in its own way, pretty crummy.
I would wager it actually IS tape. I am surprised it is even news, actually. Off-site tape backup centers managed by a 3rd party are nothing new. Generally bandwidth is not that big of an issue for such setups, one is not doing backups of large amounts of data at a time, but instead fairly small amount (like customer records, payroll, etc) done over and over so they can role back to any particular date easily.
Though ideally, one does not use such a service to replace local tape backups, but instead to add an extra layer... the 'in case your building burns down' type protection.
It still might be a tape robot, with the wait time being their best guess regarding how active the system will be and thus how long the robot's queue is. A robotic system indeed is quite quick, when you are the only user.
Well, as you say, 'for us'. Having an offsite server to back up to is indeed a similar solution, in fact that is basically what this is... only someone else maintains the server and worries about maintenance. Anyone can set up an extra server in their closet at home for pretty cheap, but this isn't intended for that type of ad-hoc solution. I suspect services like this also make a company's insurance carrier happier.
Connections over port 80?
What they probably mean is they provide a web interface for interacting with the system rather then providing a locally installed application, then downloaded strait through the browser.
Lawsuits only make up about 1-2% of the health care costs. They have made a wonderful scapegoat but that is about all they are. They play well into the 'US is such a litigious' nation trip people have been fed.. which is little more then a recast of the old American 'victims should know their place' attitude... which is always amusing since our laws were specifically written so that many laws are not enforced by the DoJ and thus a lawsuit is the only way to activate them.. thus if someone tries to actually get protection under the law they can be branded 'sue happy' and slurred for it. The handicapped are a common victim of this.
I am talking about organized Christian Lobbying groups, not the population. I would say they are pretty out of step with the actual wishes and desires of the population, but they have the time and resources to get a disproportionate amount of attention. In other words.... they do not actually represent Christians as a whole.
As for the persecution complex.. naturally it varies by church and denomination, but you do not have to look far to see it at work at the political level.. just look at all the 'war on Christmas' and 'secular war on Christians' rhetoric that compares any decrease in special privilege as persecution. Again, not the bulk of the population, but the well organized groups.
Because the Christian Lobby (both political and economic) is really powerful in the US and has a serious persecution complex, while minority religions can not do much to impact your business.
I have seen this happen a couple times.. some group notices that a site has support for non-christian values and throws a hissy fit, then the site does the math and decides it is less trouble to get rid of what the people do not like... mostly because these groups claim to speak for 'Christians' even though their outrage tends to only represent a small percent of the community.. still, the company is often not willing to take the chance.
There are limits to what a company can do, esp when it has agreed to provide a service and already received payment, which is the case here.
I think what they really do not understand, or do not want to understand, is that corporations and governments are, de facto, not fundamentally different, and thus if you weaken the elected government all you do is make the private states more powerful, who will then exercise government like power over people.
Individual cases of assault, when tolerated within a culture, add up to a culture of sexual harassment. There are a few somewhat extreme examples like the one sited, but the background noise is the issue at hand, and that is something geek culture in general is still pretty bad about, with the more 'hard core' or 'edgy' the subculture being, the worse they tend to be about it.
ah, you mean the strawmen that do not actually exist in any significant number? Always an easy way to trivialize a problem....
I would say even with programming jobs where you do not need to actually write the math from scratch, knowing the math can go a long way towards using the libraries well. It is hard to optimize or do things elegantly when you do understand the underlying concepts.. you just end up doing something slightly more sophisticated then cargo cult programming, but not by much.
Actually, that is exactly how the game industry is set up. In public they might complain about how used sales are stealing their profits and fantasize about, how if used sales went away, they could charge the same price and no one would notice... but when you actually talk to marketing or other stakeholders in setting prices they are quite aware of the used market and price accordingly. Any publisher that doesn't take into account how used sales will effect how many units they ship vs cost to produce is pretty amateur and will learn a harsh lesson pretty quickly.
So in a very real way it is already working and has been for quite some time. But just like movie studios, record labels, and book publishers, they still like throwing a public hissy fit and trying to stamp out something they see as profiting off them.... but behind closed doors cooler heads usually prevail, esp when you bring in executives who actually look at the full economic ecosystem of their industry.
I think one of the problems here is the industry insiders we generally here ranting about this are generally not the ones who have much of a background in business but have been promoted (self or not) into a position where they have to address such issues, but have not adjusted their worldview to take into account things that are not immediately on their ledger.
Even with that markups, the majority of the time it is still cheaper to buy a mass produced item then to print it yourself. So for the forseable future companies will still have the edge in production cost even taking into account their overhead.