Re:Not hard to get...
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Unless you have a 64-bit OS, you're limited in how much of that 6 GB of RAM you can actually use. I forget the exact limit, but I think you'll only be using ~3 GB of that due to various legacy hardware issues
There is some lie in your truth, and some truth in your lie. Or something like that.
The upper limit on 32-bit addressing is 2^32 = 4294967296 bytes. Which is, coincidentally, exactly 4 gigabytes. Any 32-bit copy of Windows can support up to that much.
Why, then, do some computers only report 3 GB of RAM available? It's not really lost - it's just a side effect of how Windows handles memory paging. Every program running on Windows is going to be using at least some part of the Windows API, so Windows reserves a portion of RAM for its own system files and locks it. (Why would you swap system libraries used by nearly every application out to disk? Ever?)
Additionally, this RAM gobbled up by Windows is mapped to every process. 512 MB or 1 GB isn't really "missing" - in fact, it's part of the shared memory space of every process, and every process can address it as if it really did own it.
The overlapping memory pages is kinda cool, but your computer actually is using all of that RAM you installed. Discrepancies depend on your motherboard logic, exactly how Windows decides to address that "missing" memory space (I honestly don't know what Windows does sometimes), and the presence or absence of Physical Address Extension hardware. (If your motherboard supports it, the Pentiums and up actually have pins for 36-bit memory addressing, which is why you can see computers in Circuit City running 32-bit Vista and reporting 4 GB (or more) of memory. Cheaper CPUs or motherboards just won't connect the extra pins, and you won't see a "PAE Enabled" or whatever in My Computer->Properties.)
None of that matters if people actually avoid playing your game because of the DRM on it.
Thought experiment: What if the DRM was "perfect?" That is, somehow, through magic, completely unobtrusive. The only thing it did (again, through magic) was keep you from installing the game on computers you didn't own.
Would the situation be the same? That is, if this (non-existing), magic type of DRM existed that hindered only pirates and torrent leeches, would people still be against it? If one really has no problems paying $60 for a game, would anyone protest a protection that you never saw upon paying?
Granted, SecuROM is the exact opposite of my magically unobtrusive DRM - it breaks computers, keeps paying customers from playing the game they purchased, and can be circumvented. But, if the perfect DRM existed that (again, magically!) only stopped piracy with no side effects, would anyone care? Could you justify it on moral grounds?
Depending on how you think through the "thought experiment" (I like misuing big words), it could be argued that developers should work on perfecting DRM. Making it infallible stops piracy, and making it completely unobtrusive maximizes the number willing to pay and able to enjoy it.
And, because dichotomies are fun, if you have "perfect" DRM on one end, you have no DRM on the other. Would "no DRM" offer any benefits to the consumer over the "perfect DRM"? And would it offer any benefits to game developers?
Such a tamper-proof cash register would be prohibitively expensive, wouldn't it? When I worked in food service, they were still using what amounted to overgrown calculators: a one-line numerical display and a tape printer. There were approximately 144 physical buttons, each with 3 functions. (Level2 + Button, Level3 + Button would ring up different items.)
The registers made it a horrible ordeal for the shift manager to reconcile receipts at the end of the night (cash in drawers == cash supposedly received?), and I'd imagine they'd be even harder to audit for tax purposes. But, if existing terminals cost "too much" for where I worked to upgrade, imagine how much more it would be to heap Department of Defense-grade requirements on a printing calculator?
The problem isn't that cash registers are fallible - that's just a symptom of a particular style of tax evasion. And, tax evasion will happen (even in the restaurant industry!) no matter how bulletproof the cash registers are.
If such a requirement were to actually happen, I doubt anyone would be using the new cash registers - it would create a huge secondary market for used registers. The ones at my work were probably the same ones used since the store opened in the '70s - they're pretty durable. Unless we're going to ban all cash registers not up to snuff...
Interesting. The stereotype has it the other way around, though...
But, if I was the one going to another country, I'd want to speak the language first, if only to not promote a few choice stereotypes about Americans... (I speak Spanish more or less fluently, and I know enough Japanese to find the bathroom. Maybe.)
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
Except that they used to literally analyze traffic - if you see a lot of cars in a parking lot overnight, it means people are working late hours and that, presumably, something is happening. If you see triple the usual amount of cars parked outside the Department of Defense, it may be something to phone home about.
McCain's health plan involves taxing the insurance premiums your employer pays for your health insurance, an amount that is currently untaxed. So, McCain is effectively for raising taxes. While you are living in this fictional world where Republicans are "fiscal conservatives", and Democrats "tax and spend", I think I'll take a look at real evidence to the contrary.
Actually, McCain poached that idea from Obama. Both of those candidates think that taxing employer's health-care spending to cover government health-care spending is a good idea.
Now, since you're so fond of "real evidence," I'll point out that the biggest of our "big oil" is #13 on the world stage. You'll need to point fingers elsewhere if you want a scapegoat for the world price of oil.
Mandating ethanol production was another great idea. We simultaneously raised tariffs on imported ethanol (Brazil can make ethanol a lot cheaper from cane sugar than we can from corn) to ensure that the cash grab for "big agriculture" worked.
The price of oil and the price of corn together control the price of everything we buy. Corn is used in livestock feed, meaning raising cattle is more expensive. This also affects the price of soap, which is made from animal fat.
But, for everyone concerned exclusively with the manufacturing sector and the trade debt, a weak dollar is a good thing. Our exports are cheaper, and our imports are costlier. The two together mean more exports, fewer imports, and a leaner trade deficit. (Unless you're living in a fantasy world with a strong dollar and strong exports.)
But, no, you're right - Bush (is his name spelled with a dollar sign? I forget) hit the "make gas expensive" button and at this very moment is reclining in a poofy high-backed chair, stroking a white, long-haired cat, you know, from the Fancy Feast(tm) commercials, laughing at the genious of his evil conspiracy.
On topic,(trolls need food, too, in these hard economic times) if I wanted a programming job outside of America, I wouldn't head to Europe. (There may be very well be software engineering jobs there, but I haven't heard of them.) I know that China sends their ("regular") engineers here to be educated, and then they return home for employment. As the wealth of their population rises, and even more people start buying computers, I can see (with my magic crystal ball) demand for software rising.
So, I'd say "learn Mandarin and go to China," but if you only know English and you're looking for a job now, it's not a language you're going to be able to just "pick up" in a year.
Japan is where a lot of the video game industry is, so it could be fun looking for a programming job there. But, the market for PCs in Japan is shrinking (their cell phones are amazing and replace most uses of a PC) so there's probably not much future in "regular" software over there. And again, you're not going to be able to pick up Japanese very quickly, either, although a lot of people over there speak English. (Besides, I'm told that the Japanese aren't very friendly to foreign workers; that a foreigner taking a Japanese job will always be unwelcome. At least that's what a friend of mine said when he came back this semester, so your mileage may vary. I'd expect younger folk to be more forgiving.)
So... good luck? Spanish is an easy language to learn, but there aren't any programming jobs in Latin America, and Spain is having its own economic crisis. (You think fuel prices are high here? They're even higher there, and they had a trucker's strike not too long ago.) Germany seems to be doing better than most, so if you feel you must leave America, I guess learn German. Or maybe enroll yourself in a study abroad coarse, sate your wanderlust, and come back.
If you plan on working in Europe permanantly, maybe learn more than one European language. It's funny watching people argue over what the target value of the Euro should be when Spain is having inflation problems and Germany is having liquidity problems. No matter what direction interest rates and the value of the Euro move, it's going to be painful for some country's economy, so hop to another one.
This is Slashdot, so my comments won't be popular here:
Get a wife or a girlfriend and be *her* penetration tester. You might find a new joy in bringing your work home!
Since when is "find a fuck buddy to be happy" insightful. Not just on Slashdot, but, well, anywhere? If you're happy with so little in life, good for you; my cats are satisfied with the plastic caps from gallons of 2%.
Now, if you can make a fulfilling career out of either of those, come back and let us know.
The amount of "supply" is irrelevant. As someone else said above, the market for the distribution of information and ideas was obsoleted by the internet, and distribution is the only part concerned with "supply."
It still takes, depending on your musical tastes, some amount of time and talent to create that album you listen to, does it not? Software is worse - it takes what, three, five, ten years to develop a videogame? Even big developers have to look for venture capital nowadays before they can begin.
So, no, there isn't a case to be made for paying the distributors of something with infinite supply. The problem is paying the creator - you think we'll see the same quality (and quantity) of videogames were the creators never paid? You think we'd have as many musicians?
Problem is, the current you pay for that sofware you could have easily pirated for free lulz! is really the only one we have for rewarding people whose product is of the mind.
Just because you ask: I think some of us don't like a 12MB encrypted binary executable file running on our system that nobody except the creators know what it does.
Well, if disk space is an issue, just gzip it or something. But, gosh, for 12MB... You should delete a few things, man.
This sounds like the premise of PlanetSide. It's easy to do in first person shooters, or in other games where there is only Player versus Player stuff present. But, it gets harder to do, say, if you want some kind of linear plot or story? (I know, I know, it's an MMO, but Blizzard is really proud of their lore.)
Deviate from 100% PvP and you have persistence problems again.
The new driver model wasn't "for DRM," but for system stability. Nvdisp is responsible for what percentage of bluescreens again? It's mostly a conceptual extension of Windows XP's user-mode driver framework, and it lets Vista do nifty things like inform you from the system tray that "your display driver has been restarted" rather than bluescreen.
There's no DRM in Vista unless you're playing Blu-Ray discs. Or using iTunes. But then it's more accurate to say that there's DRM on the Blu-Ray discs and in your iTunes library. UAC can be turned off, and it does help security. I work at a help desk, and I've found that whjile most users will click through whatever "this is a virus!" warnings they get, there's also a large minority that freak out when Firefox offers to add an exception for our self-signed security certificate.
Some people say "If I don't know what it is, then maybe I should hit 'cancel' until it goes away." These people are outnumbered by those who hit "OK" until it goes away, but they're the group UAC is aiming to protect. The rest of us are smart enough to know where the "control panel" is.
Not quite sure what you're getting at with a "forcing users to purchase a new printer (or whatever)" to make money. When my dad was going to college, he bought a Windows 3.11 desktop with an HP Deskject 660C (I think that's the model number, anyway.) My Vista rig prints to it just fine - follow Microsoft's guidelines, documentation, and warnings (this is deprecated! this will change! we're not kidding this time! please quit using the 10 year old DirectSound libraries! etc.) and you won't have too much more work to do.
It's not that hard to do in C. My 200-level data structure had a lot of labs along the lines of learn structure x (Lots of trees) and now sort this 50 GB binary file using that algorithm.
Now, if you failed at life, you'd do it the naive way and end up with some O(n^2) sort algorithm. Which works, but it would probably have taken the lab machines more than 12 hours to plough through the file. And, by that time, all the machines would have locked themselves and shut down for the night, killing your work.
Write good C code using the lecture algorithms, and you could sort that file in minutes.
Good thing my laptop runs EWF drivers. Any changes made to the C volume (a solid state drive) made in memory instead. Everything works like you'd expect it to - delete a file and it's gone - until you reboot, that is, and all of your in-memory changes are discarded.
I'd like to see XP Antivirus Pro 2008 thoroughly embed its tendrils... and then survive a restart. No changes are committed unless I manually force it.
Considering that Circuit City will sell you a PC with 6 GB of RAM for $999, I wonder why EWF isn't a standard feature. Probably because somebody would forget that defragging your hard disk would exhaust available RAM and then die, or wonder where that program they just installed went after they rebooted...
Linux has a similar filesystem, I believe it's used for boot CDs. It pairs the read-only volume with a RAM drive, and all writes are cached there and discarded.
You can slow the UI on individual programs - people are free to use whatever poor programming techniques they want - but generally, only an explorer bug will kill your windows explorer shell.
Mouse clicks, keyboard events, and the like are all trapped by Windows. Depending on what window had focus, Windows will generate a "message" and place it in that program's message queue. Whenever a program is scheduled for CPU time, it (in theory) pulls the next message out of its queue and handles or ignores it.
Program UIs lag when that program isn't processing its message queue - this usually happens in single-theaded apps (stupid, stupid, stupid!) when the main thread is working on crunching something else.
If the message queue fills up (you're not processing the events in the queue, but they're still being enerated) Windows marks that program as "not responding" and gives you the option to kill it.
Scheduler is somewhat different; every operating system has a process or task "scheduler" that's responsible for doling out tasks to the hardware.
What I would suggest that you do is get a new virus scanner. AntiVir, ClamAV, and AVG are the one's I've used. (Even Windows Live OneCare has a tiny memory footprint.) If you must use McAfee, disable "on-access scan" from its tray icon. If you're using Norton, just shoot yourself in the face.
OF course, make sure you have the latest versions of both flash and firefox. What I'd try next is running msconfig from the run dialog, going to the startup tab, and unchecking everything that doesn't sound important and rebooting. Make sure the Windows pagefile is a healthy size (I fix its size to 4096 MB) and run a defrag.
If those things don't help, I'd download and run ccleaner; every once in a while it can help with an odd registry issue. Try running the same site in Internet Explorer (I know, I'm sorry to even suggest it) and seeing if that also experiences slowdown.
But, there's no reason XP shouldn't be responsive on an AMD chip. If you still care enough about it to troubleshoot, let me know how it goes.
Not sure where your "functions" are "occulted," so I'll leave that one alone.
And if we're talking simply in terms of APIs, tell me when Linux is going to get a thread based scheduler (Windows had this since 3.1!). Or wireless drivers. (OK, that was a troll ^.^)
But, resources are there to be consumed. If you have 2 GB of memory (and I do!), I expect my system to be using all of it as much as possible. If it would be sitting idle, why not cache the entire disk? Or keep recently-closed programs in memory just a bit longer? Do a top on your nix box and tell me how much memory is used for "buffers" - Linux does most of the same buffering and paging Windows does.
Use plentiful resources to conserve the scarce ones. Disk IO is expensive, so if a program asks for a sector, grab the next few and load them into memory, just in case. (This is also something Linux does.) Trade cheap memory for expensive disk activity; keep as much of your system productive as long as possible. If your process scheduler doesn't do that much, it's borked.
And it's one in the morning right now, so pretend I was coherent.
Yes because we all know, a magazine that makes its payroll off advertisements from the very companies its suppose to be reviewing, makes the best choices in hardware
Sigh. Because, yes, every magazine with advertisements is completely untrustworthy. Like, not one would have separate marketing and editorial staffs. And you would never see an editorial absolutely slam a product, followed by an ad for said product...
Actually, you would. And it's pretty funny when it happens. Besides, a magazine supposedly on the dole from advertisers would be recommending more hardware than you "need," would they not?
But, as you say, it's all a matter of expectations. Knowing that that extra 10% goes towards things like superfetch (instantly launching applications is nice), or file indexing (I think it's pretty cool being able to instantly search music and photos by tag and queue up a playlist from within a naked explorer window), or shiny things like generating proper icons for video clips, or defragging my disk - and not gowing towards "nothing" - is pretty nifty. Also, little things like the new "background" task priority, or that "save" dialog boxes remember the original file name after typing in a path, are pretty cool.
Now, if I wasn't gaming, and I already had XP, I probably wouldn't upgrade just for the UI and some niceties. But my original point is that 2 GB isn't "barely enough" to run Vista; it's enough for "serious" gaming.
I hate to say this (well, not really) but you're wrong about Vista's memory requirements.
I built my gaming rig last summer with 2 GB of RAM. Ran the Crysis demo at low/medium settings in DirectX 10, but I hear the actual game is a lot more optimized. Of course, Word and any other component of Office 2007 load nigh instantly.
I work for the IT department full-time at the college I attend, and we cobbled together a "tech bench" machine we use for offline viruscans and backups. It has integrated intel graphics, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, and a gig of RAM (we had to scrounge a bit to get it up from 768.) Because the school has a few hundred OEM licenses floating around (they use predominately XP and have a site license for Vista anyways) we threw Vista on there - it actually boots faster. It's not like we've run benchmarks, but it runs about the same as it did in XP - tolerably slow, but no worse since the OS upgrade.
Not that it matters anyway - PC Gamer does a low/medium/high end build spec and cost estimate in each issue, and until a few months ago, their "dream system" spec only had 2 GB of RAM. (Checking this month's issue, they bumped it up to 4 GB.) For $1000, Circuit City will sell you a PC with 6 GB, a proper nVidia graphics card, and a 24" monitor.
A long, rambling tirade, sure, but most machines that'll run XP (Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM, integrated graphics) will run Vista SP1 just fine. (Even I will admit Vista was unusable on any system prior to SP1; I was an early adopter.) And by "just fine" I mean the OS will probably take a few seconds longer to boot than XP, will be responsive to mouseclicks, and will run office applications and older games.
While I'm ranting, Aero (not Aero Glass) can actually be faster than the "classic" GUI because it's hardware accelerated. The more you know?!
Make the market efficient enough that the trillion or so spent on the Iraq war comes out of the oil company pockets, instead of adding to them, and I'll agree with you.
Oooh, mad-libs!
Make the market efficient enough that ponies come out of the sky, and I'll agree.
Make the market efficient enough that toner comes out of the trees, and I'll agree.
Is Exxon-Mobil another party in the Iraqi oil profit-sharing arguments? I thought it was mostly a Sunni/Shiite/Kurd thing.
But, you make one good point: There are always market externalities, like pollution. Then, you ruin it: Taxes and tax breaks are a horrible way to account for those externalities. You can, like others have said: A) Just flat-out mandate that "polluting, non-renewable" forms of energy meet certain environmental standards of B) trust Congressmen to hand out money in the form of "tax incentives" in a purely altruistic way.
But, I see you're worried about the budget. For 2008, we have $145.2 billion set aside for the "Global War on Terror." Compare that with "mandatory" spending - Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, etc. - and its $1.527 trillion costs.
What we spend on handouts and checks in one year is less than we've spent on the entire war; yet somehow the war is single-handedly responsible for budget/environmental/nazi/godwin problems, hmm?
Is it Free Will, or was my logic governed by another set of rules that determined I would seek a healthier alternative?
It determines on who "made" the rules. If you "chose" to watch the arterial plaque video, purchasing a salad over a burger is simply the end result of the new "rule" you put put into place.
But, that assumes that whatever "rules" guided you to watch the video in the first place were of your own formulation. Perhaps subliminal rules control our every thought, motive, and behavior, but did we build our rules ourselves, or did they come from "somewhere else"?
Your choices for somehwere else are "society," "your parents," "myself!", or "my genetic makeup." Picking one of those puts our free-will conundrum back within existing psychological/sociological schools of thought.
As others have pointed out, the Hammer editor (it comes with your Steam install) is used for making portal maps. Same tools the devs used, actually.
It's also used for making Team Fortress 2 maps, Half Life maps (and mods), Day of Defeat maps... You can pretty much make maps/mods/characters/weapons/etc for any game based on the source engine. For the most part, it's pretty intuitive, too.
Even middle men provide a service - if bands don't want access to a large, well-advertised and well-capitalized market base then they don't have to sign with one of those "middlemen."
Record labels and all those other middlemen are advertisers that pay you. The real money is in concerts.
Now, if you expect to be making between 99% and 101% on every CD sold, go indie. Nobody's forcing anyone to sign on to a major label-slash-middleman.
Now, to continue a theme in this thread, "FUCK" everyone who uses "I really love the artists and hate oppression" as an excuse for pirating music. If you really want to support the artist, buy the CD and then go see a concert. Buy a t-shirt, even.
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Unless you have a 64-bit OS, you're limited in how much of that 6 GB of RAM you can actually use. I forget the exact limit, but I think you'll only be using ~3 GB of that due to various legacy hardware issues
There is some lie in your truth, and some truth in your lie. Or something like that.
The upper limit on 32-bit addressing is 2^32 = 4294967296 bytes. Which is, coincidentally, exactly 4 gigabytes. Any 32-bit copy of Windows can support up to that much.
Why, then, do some computers only report 3 GB of RAM available? It's not really lost - it's just a side effect of how Windows handles memory paging. Every program running on Windows is going to be using at least some part of the Windows API, so Windows reserves a portion of RAM for its own system files and locks it. (Why would you swap system libraries used by nearly every application out to disk? Ever?)
Additionally, this RAM gobbled up by Windows is mapped to every process. 512 MB or 1 GB isn't really "missing" - in fact, it's part of the shared memory space of every process, and every process can address it as if it really did own it.
The overlapping memory pages is kinda cool, but your computer actually is using all of that RAM you installed. Discrepancies depend on your motherboard logic, exactly how Windows decides to address that "missing" memory space (I honestly don't know what Windows does sometimes), and the presence or absence of Physical Address Extension hardware. (If your motherboard supports it, the Pentiums and up actually have pins for 36-bit memory addressing, which is why you can see computers in Circuit City running 32-bit Vista and reporting 4 GB (or more) of memory. Cheaper CPUs or motherboards just won't connect the extra pins, and you won't see a "PAE Enabled" or whatever in My Computer->Properties.)
Discuss!
Of course - but would you object to DRM on principle if it actually worked as advertised? As in, through "magic", nobody who paid got burned?
I can see Plato and Socrates arguing this.
None of that matters if people actually avoid playing your game because of the DRM on it.
Thought experiment: What if the DRM was "perfect?" That is, somehow, through magic, completely unobtrusive. The only thing it did (again, through magic) was keep you from installing the game on computers you didn't own.
Would the situation be the same? That is, if this (non-existing), magic type of DRM existed that hindered only pirates and torrent leeches, would people still be against it? If one really has no problems paying $60 for a game, would anyone protest a protection that you never saw upon paying?
Granted, SecuROM is the exact opposite of my magically unobtrusive DRM - it breaks computers, keeps paying customers from playing the game they purchased, and can be circumvented. But, if the perfect DRM existed that (again, magically!) only stopped piracy with no side effects, would anyone care? Could you justify it on moral grounds?
Depending on how you think through the "thought experiment" (I like misuing big words), it could be argued that developers should work on perfecting DRM. Making it infallible stops piracy, and making it completely unobtrusive maximizes the number willing to pay and able to enjoy it.
And, because dichotomies are fun, if you have "perfect" DRM on one end, you have no DRM on the other. Would "no DRM" offer any benefits to the consumer over the "perfect DRM"? And would it offer any benefits to game developers?
Discuss!
Such a tamper-proof cash register would be prohibitively expensive, wouldn't it? When I worked in food service, they were still using what amounted to overgrown calculators: a one-line numerical display and a tape printer. There were approximately 144 physical buttons, each with 3 functions. (Level2 + Button, Level3 + Button would ring up different items.)
The registers made it a horrible ordeal for the shift manager to reconcile receipts at the end of the night (cash in drawers == cash supposedly received?), and I'd imagine they'd be even harder to audit for tax purposes. But, if existing terminals cost "too much" for where I worked to upgrade, imagine how much more it would be to heap Department of Defense-grade requirements on a printing calculator?
The problem isn't that cash registers are fallible - that's just a symptom of a particular style of tax evasion. And, tax evasion will happen (even in the restaurant industry!) no matter how bulletproof the cash registers are.
If such a requirement were to actually happen, I doubt anyone would be using the new cash registers - it would create a huge secondary market for used registers. The ones at my work were probably the same ones used since the store opened in the '70s - they're pretty durable. Unless we're going to ban all cash registers not up to snuff...
Interesting. The stereotype has it the other way around, though...
But, if I was the one going to another country, I'd want to speak the language first, if only to not promote a few choice stereotypes about Americans... (I speak Spanish more or less fluently, and I know enough Japanese to find the bathroom. Maybe.)
You are kidding, right ? Didn't some people had issues with the latest versions of MSWord not opening files from old versions ?
No. Maybe you had it backwards: Didn't some people had [sic] issues with the old versions of MSWord not opening files from latest versions ?
But then, it would be: still no.
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
Except that they used to literally analyze traffic - if you see a lot of cars in a parking lot overnight, it means people are working late hours and that, presumably, something is happening. If you see triple the usual amount of cars parked outside the Department of Defense, it may be something to phone home about.
McCain's health plan involves taxing the insurance premiums your employer pays for your health insurance, an amount that is currently untaxed. So, McCain is effectively for raising taxes. While you are living in this fictional world where Republicans are "fiscal conservatives", and Democrats "tax and spend", I think I'll take a look at real evidence to the contrary.
Actually, McCain poached that idea from Obama. Both of those candidates think that taxing employer's health-care spending to cover government health-care spending is a good idea.
Now, since you're so fond of "real evidence," I'll point out that the biggest of our "big oil" is #13 on the world stage. You'll need to point fingers elsewhere if you want a scapegoat for the world price of oil.
Mandating ethanol production was another great idea. We simultaneously raised tariffs on imported ethanol (Brazil can make ethanol a lot cheaper from cane sugar than we can from corn) to ensure that the cash grab for "big agriculture" worked.
The price of oil and the price of corn together control the price of everything we buy. Corn is used in livestock feed, meaning raising cattle is more expensive. This also affects the price of soap, which is made from animal fat.
But, for everyone concerned exclusively with the manufacturing sector and the trade debt, a weak dollar is a good thing. Our exports are cheaper, and our imports are costlier. The two together mean more exports, fewer imports, and a leaner trade deficit. (Unless you're living in a fantasy world with a strong dollar and strong exports.)
But, no, you're right - Bush (is his name spelled with a dollar sign? I forget) hit the "make gas expensive" button and at this very moment is reclining in a poofy high-backed chair, stroking a white, long-haired cat, you know, from the Fancy Feast(tm) commercials, laughing at the genious of his evil conspiracy.
On topic,(trolls need food, too, in these hard economic times) if I wanted a programming job outside of America, I wouldn't head to Europe. (There may be very well be software engineering jobs there, but I haven't heard of them.) I know that China sends their ("regular") engineers here to be educated, and then they return home for employment. As the wealth of their population rises, and even more people start buying computers, I can see (with my magic crystal ball) demand for software rising.
So, I'd say "learn Mandarin and go to China," but if you only know English and you're looking for a job now, it's not a language you're going to be able to just "pick up" in a year.
Japan is where a lot of the video game industry is, so it could be fun looking for a programming job there. But, the market for PCs in Japan is shrinking (their cell phones are amazing and replace most uses of a PC) so there's probably not much future in "regular" software over there. And again, you're not going to be able to pick up Japanese very quickly, either, although a lot of people over there speak English. (Besides, I'm told that the Japanese aren't very friendly to foreign workers; that a foreigner taking a Japanese job will always be unwelcome. At least that's what a friend of mine said when he came back this semester, so your mileage may vary. I'd expect younger folk to be more forgiving.)
So... good luck? Spanish is an easy language to learn, but there aren't any programming jobs in Latin America, and Spain is having its own economic crisis. (You think fuel prices are high here? They're even higher there, and they had a trucker's strike not too long ago.) Germany seems to be doing better than most, so if you feel you must leave America, I guess learn German. Or maybe enroll yourself in a study abroad coarse, sate your wanderlust, and come back.
If you plan on working in Europe permanantly, maybe learn more than one European language. It's funny watching people argue over what the target value of the Euro should be when Spain is having inflation problems and Germany is having liquidity problems. No matter what direction interest rates and the value of the Euro move, it's going to be painful for some country's economy, so hop to another one.
Monoculture is bad? Good thing Internet Explorer offers a different take on W3C standards...
I kid, I kid.
This is Slashdot, so my comments won't be popular here: Get a wife or a girlfriend and be *her* penetration tester. You might find a new joy in bringing your work home!
Since when is "find a fuck buddy to be happy" insightful. Not just on Slashdot, but, well, anywhere? If you're happy with so little in life, good for you; my cats are satisfied with the plastic caps from gallons of 2%.
Now, if you can make a fulfilling career out of either of those, come back and let us know.
The amount of "supply" is irrelevant. As someone else said above, the market for the distribution of information and ideas was obsoleted by the internet, and distribution is the only part concerned with "supply."
It still takes, depending on your musical tastes, some amount of time and talent to create that album you listen to, does it not? Software is worse - it takes what, three, five, ten years to develop a videogame? Even big developers have to look for venture capital nowadays before they can begin.
So, no, there isn't a case to be made for paying the distributors of something with infinite supply. The problem is paying the creator - you think we'll see the same quality (and quantity) of videogames were the creators never paid? You think we'd have as many musicians?
Problem is, the current you pay for that sofware you could have easily pirated for free lulz! is really the only one we have for rewarding people whose product is of the mind.
Just because you ask: I think some of us don't like a 12MB encrypted binary executable file running on our system that nobody except the creators know what it does.
Well, if disk space is an issue, just gzip it or something. But, gosh, for 12MB... You should delete a few things, man.
This sounds like the premise of PlanetSide. It's easy to do in first person shooters, or in other games where there is only Player versus Player stuff present. But, it gets harder to do, say, if you want some kind of linear plot or story? (I know, I know, it's an MMO, but Blizzard is really proud of their lore.)
Deviate from 100% PvP and you have persistence problems again.
The new driver model wasn't "for DRM," but for system stability. Nvdisp is responsible for what percentage of bluescreens again? It's mostly a conceptual extension of Windows XP's user-mode driver framework, and it lets Vista do nifty things like inform you from the system tray that "your display driver has been restarted" rather than bluescreen.
There's no DRM in Vista unless you're playing Blu-Ray discs. Or using iTunes. But then it's more accurate to say that there's DRM on the Blu-Ray discs and in your iTunes library. UAC can be turned off, and it does help security. I work at a help desk, and I've found that whjile most users will click through whatever "this is a virus!" warnings they get, there's also a large minority that freak out when Firefox offers to add an exception for our self-signed security certificate.
Some people say "If I don't know what it is, then maybe I should hit 'cancel' until it goes away." These people are outnumbered by those who hit "OK" until it goes away, but they're the group UAC is aiming to protect. The rest of us are smart enough to know where the "control panel" is.
Not quite sure what you're getting at with a "forcing users to purchase a new printer (or whatever)" to make money. When my dad was going to college, he bought a Windows 3.11 desktop with an HP Deskject 660C (I think that's the model number, anyway.) My Vista rig prints to it just fine - follow Microsoft's guidelines, documentation, and warnings (this is deprecated! this will change! we're not kidding this time! please quit using the 10 year old DirectSound libraries! etc.) and you won't have too much more work to do.
It's not that hard to do in C. My 200-level data structure had a lot of labs along the lines of learn structure x (Lots of trees) and now sort this 50 GB binary file using that algorithm.
Now, if you failed at life, you'd do it the naive way and end up with some O(n^2) sort algorithm. Which works, but it would probably have taken the lab machines more than 12 hours to plough through the file. And, by that time, all the machines would have locked themselves and shut down for the night, killing your work.
Write good C code using the lecture algorithms, and you could sort that file in minutes.
Good thing my laptop runs EWF drivers. Any changes made to the C volume (a solid state drive) made in memory instead. Everything works like you'd expect it to - delete a file and it's gone - until you reboot, that is, and all of your in-memory changes are discarded.
I'd like to see XP Antivirus Pro 2008 thoroughly embed its tendrils... and then survive a restart. No changes are committed unless I manually force it.
Considering that Circuit City will sell you a PC with 6 GB of RAM for $999, I wonder why EWF isn't a standard feature. Probably because somebody would forget that defragging your hard disk would exhaust available RAM and then die, or wonder where that program they just installed went after they rebooted...
Linux has a similar filesystem, I believe it's used for boot CDs. It pairs the read-only volume with a RAM drive, and all writes are cached there and discarded.
You can slow the UI on individual programs - people are free to use whatever poor programming techniques they want - but generally, only an explorer bug will kill your windows explorer shell.
Mouse clicks, keyboard events, and the like are all trapped by Windows. Depending on what window had focus, Windows will generate a "message" and place it in that program's message queue. Whenever a program is scheduled for CPU time, it (in theory) pulls the next message out of its queue and handles or ignores it.
Program UIs lag when that program isn't processing its message queue - this usually happens in single-theaded apps (stupid, stupid, stupid!) when the main thread is working on crunching something else.
If the message queue fills up (you're not processing the events in the queue, but they're still being enerated) Windows marks that program as "not responding" and gives you the option to kill it.
Scheduler is somewhat different; every operating system has a process or task "scheduler" that's responsible for doling out tasks to the hardware.
What I would suggest that you do is get a new virus scanner. AntiVir, ClamAV, and AVG are the one's I've used. (Even Windows Live OneCare has a tiny memory footprint.) If you must use McAfee, disable "on-access scan" from its tray icon. If you're using Norton, just shoot yourself in the face.
OF course, make sure you have the latest versions of both flash and firefox. What I'd try next is running msconfig from the run dialog, going to the startup tab, and unchecking everything that doesn't sound important and rebooting. Make sure the Windows pagefile is a healthy size (I fix its size to 4096 MB) and run a defrag.
If those things don't help, I'd download and run ccleaner; every once in a while it can help with an odd registry issue. Try running the same site in Internet Explorer (I know, I'm sorry to even suggest it) and seeing if that also experiences slowdown.
But, there's no reason XP shouldn't be responsive on an AMD chip. If you still care enough about it to troubleshoot, let me know how it goes.
Not sure where your "functions" are "occulted," so I'll leave that one alone.
And if we're talking simply in terms of APIs, tell me when Linux is going to get a thread based scheduler (Windows had this since 3.1!). Or wireless drivers. (OK, that was a troll ^.^)
But, resources are there to be consumed. If you have 2 GB of memory (and I do!), I expect my system to be using all of it as much as possible. If it would be sitting idle, why not cache the entire disk? Or keep recently-closed programs in memory just a bit longer? Do a top on your nix box and tell me how much memory is used for "buffers" - Linux does most of the same buffering and paging Windows does.
Use plentiful resources to conserve the scarce ones. Disk IO is expensive, so if a program asks for a sector, grab the next few and load them into memory, just in case. (This is also something Linux does.) Trade cheap memory for expensive disk activity; keep as much of your system productive as long as possible. If your process scheduler doesn't do that much, it's borked.
And it's one in the morning right now, so pretend I was coherent.
Yes because we all know, a magazine that makes its payroll off advertisements from the very companies its suppose to be reviewing, makes the best choices in hardware
Sigh. Because, yes, every magazine with advertisements is completely untrustworthy. Like, not one would have separate marketing and editorial staffs. And you would never see an editorial absolutely slam a product, followed by an ad for said product...
Actually, you would. And it's pretty funny when it happens. Besides, a magazine supposedly on the dole from advertisers would be recommending more hardware than you "need," would they not?
But, as you say, it's all a matter of expectations. Knowing that that extra 10% goes towards things like superfetch (instantly launching applications is nice), or file indexing (I think it's pretty cool being able to instantly search music and photos by tag and queue up a playlist from within a naked explorer window), or shiny things like generating proper icons for video clips, or defragging my disk - and not gowing towards "nothing" - is pretty nifty. Also, little things like the new "background" task priority, or that "save" dialog boxes remember the original file name after typing in a path, are pretty cool.
Now, if I wasn't gaming, and I already had XP, I probably wouldn't upgrade just for the UI and some niceties. But my original point is that 2 GB isn't "barely enough" to run Vista; it's enough for "serious" gaming.
I hate to say this (well, not really) but you're wrong about Vista's memory requirements.
I built my gaming rig last summer with 2 GB of RAM. Ran the Crysis demo at low/medium settings in DirectX 10, but I hear the actual game is a lot more optimized. Of course, Word and any other component of Office 2007 load nigh instantly.
I work for the IT department full-time at the college I attend, and we cobbled together a "tech bench" machine we use for offline viruscans and backups. It has integrated intel graphics, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, and a gig of RAM (we had to scrounge a bit to get it up from 768.) Because the school has a few hundred OEM licenses floating around (they use predominately XP and have a site license for Vista anyways) we threw Vista on there - it actually boots faster. It's not like we've run benchmarks, but it runs about the same as it did in XP - tolerably slow, but no worse since the OS upgrade.
Not that it matters anyway - PC Gamer does a low/medium/high end build spec and cost estimate in each issue, and until a few months ago, their "dream system" spec only had 2 GB of RAM. (Checking this month's issue, they bumped it up to 4 GB.) For $1000, Circuit City will sell you a PC with 6 GB, a proper nVidia graphics card, and a 24" monitor.
A long, rambling tirade, sure, but most machines that'll run XP (Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM, integrated graphics) will run Vista SP1 just fine. (Even I will admit Vista was unusable on any system prior to SP1; I was an early adopter.) And by "just fine" I mean the OS will probably take a few seconds longer to boot than XP, will be responsive to mouseclicks, and will run office applications and older games.
While I'm ranting, Aero (not Aero Glass) can actually be faster than the "classic" GUI because it's hardware accelerated. The more you know?!
Make the market efficient enough that the trillion or so spent on the Iraq war comes out of the oil company pockets, instead of adding to them, and I'll agree with you.
Oooh, mad-libs!
Make the market efficient enough that ponies come out of the sky, and I'll agree.
Make the market efficient enough that toner comes out of the trees, and I'll agree.
Is Exxon-Mobil another party in the Iraqi oil profit-sharing arguments? I thought it was mostly a Sunni/Shiite/Kurd thing.
But, you make one good point: There are always market externalities, like pollution. Then, you ruin it: Taxes and tax breaks are a horrible way to account for those externalities. You can, like others have said: A) Just flat-out mandate that "polluting, non-renewable" forms of energy meet certain environmental standards of B) trust Congressmen to hand out money in the form of "tax incentives" in a purely altruistic way.
But, I see you're worried about the budget. For 2008, we have $145.2 billion set aside for the "Global War on Terror." Compare that with "mandatory" spending - Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, etc. - and its $1.527 trillion costs.
What we spend on handouts and checks in one year is less than we've spent on the entire war; yet somehow the war is single-handedly responsible for budget/environmental/nazi/godwin problems, hmm?
Is it Free Will, or was my logic governed by another set of rules that determined I would seek a healthier alternative?
It determines on who "made" the rules. If you "chose" to watch the arterial plaque video, purchasing a salad over a burger is simply the end result of the new "rule" you put put into place.
But, that assumes that whatever "rules" guided you to watch the video in the first place were of your own formulation. Perhaps subliminal rules control our every thought, motive, and behavior, but did we build our rules ourselves, or did they come from "somewhere else"?
Your choices for somehwere else are "society," "your parents," "myself!", or "my genetic makeup." Picking one of those puts our free-will conundrum back within existing psychological/sociological schools of thought.
As others have pointed out, the Hammer editor (it comes with your Steam install) is used for making portal maps. Same tools the devs used, actually.
It's also used for making Team Fortress 2 maps, Half Life maps (and mods), Day of Defeat maps... You can pretty much make maps/mods/characters/weapons/etc for any game based on the source engine. For the most part, it's pretty intuitive, too.
Even middle men provide a service - if bands don't want access to a large, well-advertised and well-capitalized market base then they don't have to sign with one of those "middlemen."
Record labels and all those other middlemen are advertisers that pay you. The real money is in concerts.
Now, if you expect to be making between 99% and 101% on every CD sold, go indie. Nobody's forcing anyone to sign on to a major label-slash-middleman.
Now, to continue a theme in this thread, "FUCK" everyone who uses "I really love the artists and hate oppression" as an excuse for pirating music. If you really want to support the artist, buy the CD and then go see a concert. Buy a t-shirt, even.