T1 are supposed to have more of a guarantee with them. They are reliable and you tend to get your full bandwidth (which esp on cable modems you will not). They are also often packaged with 'business grade' support... though your mileage will vary there.
Considering how they are pulling other RPGs in the 'lets make it more like WoW!' direction, while not revolutionary, it IS bucking the group think that seems to be slowly killing turn-based combat.
For just the meta-data and such, sqlite does just fine. I use it for managing a catalog of around 300,000 tracks including album/artist information on a PII-500 with only 64mb of ram, holds up just find even with all the UI stuff (including X11) loaded. Search time is less then a second for most cases.
The catalog for all that data only comes out to about 100MB, and I would put the total mp3 size (back of the envelope) at around 900GB.
For applications that do not need remote socket connections and can keep the db access to within the app, sqlite will generally handle the situation better back-ends like mysql or postgress.
>The company of today, does not care about you or the American Dream, it cares about the bottom line. If you can get the mindset, you can >work within this paradigm and succeed, but, you have to quit thinking like an 'happy employee for life'.
I think it is less the companies care more about the bottom line then they did in the past, and more the idea of investing in your employees has fallen out of favor. Even in retail, if someone knows their job and has been doing it for a long time, you generally pay them more for their experience because the company benefits from it. Instead you end up with a flock of 1 year drones who don't know anything about the current (much less legacy) product lines, give terrible customer service (since dealing with customers well _IS_ a skillset) and generally makes a worse customer experience,.. not to mention a less efficiently run store.
So they are trading these people who have built up skills and knowledge that the store and customer benefit from for a short term influx of savings.
I think people in tech and management tend to be a little too quick to undervalue customer facing jobs and how they can affect a company's success.
I can not really comment on the other 3, but 'average willingness to injure' is defiantly on the female side. Women can be _vicious_ in a fight and I have generally found them to worry far less about hurting someone. I am almost tempted to say it could be tied into the social idea that since they are 'small and weak they couldn't possibly _really_ hurt someone' idea, but I have yet to meat a woman who actually believes this... generally they have a very good idea of how much damage they can do to another person.
I have heard plenty of women, including victims taking strength back, say similar to the above post.
It should also be noted that males are the victims of violence too, by both males and females (though police still tend to laugh in the face of female->male abuse victims so they are kinda underreported). Rates of males being victims are still higher the female so in some ways males are more at risk (granted when it comes to sexual assaults, female rates are MUCH higher, same with harassment rates, though I have known males who were sexually harassed in the workplace).
And while the previous poster was probably a bit more mocking then could be called for, I am seeing a disturbing amount of 'if you are not riding to this women's defense like a good white knight they you are insensitive!' group think. Which in some ways does more damage to the treatment of women in tech then the harassment. Just another way of looking down on them, treating them as 'lessers' that need protection and sympathy because the poor dears can not take care of themselves and need nice big strong men to protect them from the evil nasty other men.....
Did the blogger overreact? Hard to say. She felt threatened enough that she does not feel safe outside her home. However, if these types of comments are really that common within this community (I have never heard of any of these sites so I can't comment there) and most who receive such slander do not react that way, then it would, by community standards, be an overreaction. It isn't a case of 'thicker skin' but of weighing the realities of risk.
And finally, the statistics bit is a bit of a slippery slope. Ok, women are, statistically, smaller then males. But the same thing could be said of, say, black males to white males. So does that male white males easily victimized and they should feel constantly threatened and vigilant?
As for your acquaintance... each person must cope their own way with trauma, but that really does not sound like a healthy reaction. If she is thinking about that event every time she rolls down her window that is obsessing on a mental injury and is a class of coping that usually does some long term harm. While understandable, dwelling on an assault is NOT a solution...
Heh. Actually I have heard that British English has actually diverged further then American English... so maybe America needs to take English back to England?
I think part of the problem is that the forumla is not, for the most part, putting butts in the seats. These high-action low-content sci-fi movies generally bomb.
Programmers are a dime a dozen in the same way artists that can only do stick figures are a dime a dozen.
For a large scale software project like a complex game you need quite a few skilled/disciplined programmers, tool developers, designers, architects, a build master, a CVS master, project leads, etc.
At the low end, go to any high school or other such environment, do a quick poll, and you will generally find far more amature artists then amature programmers (who are not just webmasters).
For something like a console title, you are going to need good numbers of both.
You would be surprised at how many people pirate specifically to make a statement.
I know plenty of people who could easily afford iTunes or CDs or DVDs or what have you, and who USED to be good customers, but as the RIAA got slimier and slimier they have taken a 'not a penny to the RIAA/MPAA' attitude and have gone to great lengths to buy stuff from outside their control when they can, and pirate when they can't. Such people could be easily brought back into the fold if the politics of all this changed.
Just as a note, the number of hard core gamers is hardly dwindling. It is just that they are making up a smaller percentage of the whole pie. BIG difference, though I've noticed many companies can not figure that out...
Although I have seen numbers drop in some areas where 'hard core' gamers feel that their needs are simply no longer being addressed due to the percentage drop, and thus they actually are exiting the buying pool.
While I agree that they are not 'irrelevant' in the bull sense, both IBM and Nintendo wield a pale shadow of the power they once had.
Both utterly dominated thier respective industries during there high point in ways that Microsoft still doesn't. In a way, both companies have gone from Dictator to Council Member. They play in the industry, but they no longer control it. And in that way they have have become kinda irrelevent.
I will always be amazed when people who have no clue how something is implemented claim that the know how long it should take to change something.
I've worked on quite a few projects that management, marketing, or other programmers have said 'this should be easy! I can't see why it wouldn't take you more then a week!', but given how the code is structured it ends up taking months.
Maybe fairplay is heavily integrated with the server process, maybe the system is set up to only support a single path and thus implementing multiple download types is a complete rearchetecturing. The point is, you don't know.
And just because apple has tons of programmers does not mean that simple numbers will make it a quick project either. There is a law of diminishing returns on any software project as you add people. A project that might take 100 man hours for a single person will rarely take 50+50 man hours for two people...
Hrm. Microsoft server and enviroment, and amazingly enough linux doesn't work well with the microsoft specific services.
*headdesk*
You could easily replace 'Microsoft' and 'Linux' with any two technologies and this would hold. This doesn't mean 'Linux isn't ready for IT', it means 'IT depts running differnt stacks don't talk to eachother', which is nothing new. I can recall countless vendor-locks from the 70s and 80s where you buy company A's solution and amazingly enough it didn't work with company B's software.
Say the total gaming market is 100 people, an whatever you sell with appeal to 50 of those people. People would say how well the game did and marketing calls it a sucess.
Wait a couple years and say the market is 1000 people, the majority of which like some common formula. You release again and get, say, 75 people. Now marketing calls it a failure because it didn't appeal to the _largest_ group, even though the total viewership increased.. it just didn't increase as fast as the full market.
Too many companies end up all aiming for the big demographics rather then targeting the smaller groups where there is less competition. Everyone wants to be the 'best' even if 'third' would result in more profits.
I think that part of this issue is that they want to be the single source of exposure for their artists, so anyone else that helps them out is a potential problem.
A bit like drug dealers actually.... make sure your people are dependent on you, make sure they can't get what they want anywhere else, shoot any other dealers on your turf....
Actually, I am guessing that such a series of events would fall under contract law since if a company is paying good money under a sales contract for copyrighted goods, the copyright holder can't just say 'well, we are not going to send you anymore' and throw away an agreement.
That being said, this is a bit of a stretch. While an agreement between theaters and studios can be enforced by law, this does not really make the policy 'law'. The goverment does not have independent authority to come in and audit if theaters are following the policy. Nor does it stop a studio+threater from writing up a contract that drops that clause.
Why can't there be situations where every option is morally wrong? Lesser of two evils?
Conversly, this would be saying that for conflicts, one side is morally right, while one side is morally wrong. Which sounds nice in a storybook but frankly, in war, both sides are pretty nasty.
People can not seem to deside if programmers are interchangeable cogs incapable of creative or artistic input (I esp see this in game design), or are the single point of failure in an otherwise immaculate company....
You can't have it both ways. Most bad software comes from a mix of sources including the programmers, the designers, management, marketing, customer feedback, etc. Often these poor designs exist because someone _told_ the programmer to make it that way. Or the programmer was given mutually exclusive requirements. But of course, it is never the consumer's fault, or marketing's fault, or management's fault. All of those are 'real' people.
Slashdot Mirror
T1 are supposed to have more of a guarantee with them. They are reliable and you tend to get your full bandwidth (which esp on cable modems you will not). They are also often packaged with 'business grade' support... though your mileage will vary there.
Now, how true this all is....
Considering how they are pulling other RPGs in the 'lets make it more like WoW!' direction, while not revolutionary, it IS bucking the group think that seems to be slowly killing turn-based combat.
For just the meta-data and such, sqlite does just fine. I use it for managing a catalog of around 300,000 tracks including album/artist information on a PII-500 with only 64mb of ram, holds up just find even with all the UI stuff (including X11) loaded. Search time is less then a second for most cases.
The catalog for all that data only comes out to about 100MB, and I would put the total mp3 size (back of the envelope) at around 900GB.
For applications that do not need remote socket connections and can keep the db access to within the app, sqlite will generally handle the situation better back-ends like mysql or postgress.
>The company of today, does not care about you or the American Dream, it cares about the bottom line. If you can get the mindset, you can >work within this paradigm and succeed, but, you have to quit thinking like an 'happy employee for life'.
I think it is less the companies care more about the bottom line then they did in the past, and more the idea of investing in your employees has fallen out of favor. Even in retail, if someone knows their job and has been doing it for a long time, you generally pay them more for their experience because the company benefits from it. Instead you end up with a flock of 1 year drones who don't know anything about the current (much less legacy) product lines, give terrible customer service (since dealing with customers well _IS_ a skillset) and generally makes a worse customer experience,.. not to mention a less efficiently run store.
So they are trading these people who have built up skills and knowledge that the store and customer benefit from for a short term influx of savings.
I think people in tech and management tend to be a little too quick to undervalue customer facing jobs and how they can affect a company's success.
I can not really comment on the other 3, but 'average willingness to injure' is defiantly on the female side. Women can be _vicious_ in a fight and I have generally found them to worry far less about hurting someone. I am almost tempted to say it could be tied into the social idea that since they are 'small and weak they couldn't possibly _really_ hurt someone' idea, but I have yet to meat a woman who actually believes this... generally they have a very good idea of how much damage they can do to another person.
Seriously.
I have heard plenty of women, including victims taking strength back, say similar to the above post.
It should also be noted that males are the victims of violence too, by both males and females (though police still tend to laugh in the face of female->male abuse victims so they are kinda underreported). Rates of males being victims are still higher the female so in some ways males are more at risk (granted when it comes to sexual assaults, female rates are MUCH higher, same with harassment rates, though I have known males who were sexually harassed in the workplace).
And while the previous poster was probably a bit more mocking then could be called for, I am seeing a disturbing amount of 'if you are not riding to this women's defense like a good white knight they you are insensitive!' group think. Which in some ways does more damage to the treatment of women in tech then the harassment. Just another way of looking down on them, treating them as 'lessers' that need protection and sympathy because the poor dears can not take care of themselves and need nice big strong men to protect them from the evil nasty other men.....
Did the blogger overreact? Hard to say. She felt threatened enough that she does not feel safe outside her home. However, if these types of comments are really that common within this community (I have never heard of any of these sites so I can't comment there) and most who receive such slander do not react that way, then it would, by community standards, be an overreaction. It isn't a case of 'thicker skin' but of weighing the realities of risk.
And finally, the statistics bit is a bit of a slippery slope. Ok, women are, statistically, smaller then males. But the same thing could be said of, say, black males to white males. So does that male white males easily victimized and they should feel constantly threatened and vigilant?
As for your acquaintance... each person must cope their own way with trauma, but that really does not sound like a healthy reaction. If she is thinking about that event every time she rolls down her window that is obsessing on a mental injury and is a class of coping that usually does some long term harm. While understandable, dwelling on an assault is NOT a solution...
*awaits the -1 flaimbait*
Heh. Actually I have heard that British English has actually diverged further then American English... so maybe America needs to take English back to England?
slashdot needs a "mod +1 typo"
I think part of the problem is that the forumla is not, for the most part, putting butts in the seats. These high-action low-content sci-fi movies generally bomb.
Programmers are a dime a dozen in the same way artists that can only do stick figures are a dime a dozen.
For a large scale software project like a complex game you need quite a few skilled/disciplined programmers, tool developers, designers, architects, a build master, a CVS master, project leads, etc.
At the low end, go to any high school or other such environment, do a quick poll, and you will generally find far more amature artists then amature programmers (who are not just webmasters).
For something like a console title, you are going to need good numbers of both.
You would be surprised at how many people pirate specifically to make a statement.
I know plenty of people who could easily afford iTunes or CDs or DVDs or what have you, and who USED to be good customers, but as the RIAA got slimier and slimier they have taken a 'not a penny to the RIAA/MPAA' attitude and have gone to great lengths to buy stuff from outside their control when they can, and pirate when they can't. Such people could be easily brought back into the fold if the politics of all this changed.
Just as a note, the number of hard core gamers is hardly dwindling. It is just that they are making up a smaller percentage of the whole pie. BIG difference, though I've noticed many companies can not figure that out...
Although I have seen numbers drop in some areas where 'hard core' gamers feel that their needs are simply no longer being addressed due to the percentage drop, and thus they actually are exiting the buying pool.
While I agree that they are not 'irrelevant' in the bull sense, both IBM and Nintendo wield a pale shadow of the power they once had.
Both utterly dominated thier respective industries during there high point in ways that Microsoft still doesn't.
In a way, both companies have gone from Dictator to Council Member. They play in the industry, but they no longer control it. And in that way they have have become kinda irrelevent.
I will always be amazed when people who have no clue how something is implemented claim that the know how long it should take to change something.
I've worked on quite a few projects that management, marketing, or other programmers have said 'this should be easy! I can't see why it wouldn't take you more then a week!', but given how the code is structured it ends up taking months.
Maybe fairplay is heavily integrated with the server process, maybe the system is set up to only support a single path and thus implementing multiple download types is a complete rearchetecturing. The point is, you don't know.
And just because apple has tons of programmers does not mean that simple numbers will make it a quick project either. There is a law of diminishing returns on any software project as you add people. A project that might take 100 man hours for a single person will rarely take 50+50 man hours for two people...
Bah! use the north pole.
I always wanted to live on a planet shaped like a giant snowman.
Well, if you are talking electronic games and allow for the occilascope Pong, then it is pretty hard to go back any further.....
Hrm. Microsoft server and enviroment, and amazingly enough linux doesn't work well with the microsoft specific services.
*headdesk*
You could easily replace 'Microsoft' and 'Linux' with any two technologies and this would hold. This doesn't mean 'Linux isn't ready for IT', it means 'IT depts running differnt stacks don't talk to eachother', which is nothing new. I can recall countless vendor-locks from the 70s and 80s where you buy company A's solution and amazingly enough it didn't work with company B's software.
One problem I have witnessed a few times,
Say the total gaming market is 100 people, an whatever you sell with appeal to 50 of those people. People would say how well the game did and marketing calls it a sucess.
Wait a couple years and say the market is 1000 people, the majority of which like some common formula. You release again and get, say, 75 people. Now marketing calls it a failure because it didn't appeal to the _largest_ group, even though the total viewership increased.. it just didn't increase as fast as the full market.
Too many companies end up all aiming for the big demographics rather then targeting the smaller groups where there is less competition. Everyone wants to be the 'best' even if 'third' would result in more profits.
Unless they changed thier mind, The 3 play/3 day limit is for all shared music, including mp3s you ripped yourself.
I think that part of this issue is that they want to be the single source of exposure for their artists, so anyone else that helps them out is a potential problem.
A bit like drug dealers actually.... make sure your people are dependent on you, make sure they can't get what they want anywhere else, shoot any other dealers on your turf....
Sounds like someone had way to much to drink before going live.
Either that or someone high up in apple is really jumpy right now and it playing it safe to insane degrees.
*ponders*
Actually, I am guessing that such a series of events would fall under contract law since if a company is paying good money under a sales contract for copyrighted goods, the copyright holder can't just say 'well, we are not going to send you anymore' and throw away an agreement.
That being said, this is a bit of a stretch. While an agreement between theaters and studios can be enforced by law, this does not really make the policy 'law'. The goverment does not have independent authority to come in and audit if theaters are following the policy. Nor does it stop a studio+threater from writing up a contract that drops that clause.
That is not law, that is a theater's policy. A pretty common one though.
When I was a kid, I could walk into any video store and buy/rent R (or unrated) movies pretty easily.
Why can't there be situations where every option is morally wrong? Lesser of two evils?
Conversly, this would be saying that for conflicts, one side is morally right, while one side is morally wrong. Which sounds nice in a storybook but frankly, in war, both sides are pretty nasty.
Oops, rest of the comment was:
I am getting a little tired of this cop-out.
People can not seem to deside if programmers are interchangeable cogs incapable of creative or artistic input (I esp see this in game design), or are the single point of failure in an otherwise immaculate company....
You can't have it both ways. Most bad software comes from a mix of sources including the programmers, the designers, management, marketing, customer feedback, etc. Often these poor designs exist because someone _told_ the programmer to make it that way. Or the programmer was given mutually exclusive requirements. But of course, it is never the consumer's fault, or marketing's fault, or management's fault. All of those are 'real' people.