Is there really any scarcity? I can go buy i7 processors from $300 to $1,000 USD at Newegg right now. Only one looks like it's out of stock.
Intel is simulating scarcity. That's my whole point... the high functioning cpu's aren't rarer than the low functioning ones, they don't cost more to make than the low functioning ones. The factors that make the high functioning CPUs cost more are ALL artificial.
The market clearly shows there's a demand for a range of low, mid and high-functionality processors.
Think about it: If low, high, and mid functioning processors were sitting on a shelf at the same price -- which they well could be since they are all actually precisely the same product, how many people would pick the low? or mid?
Zero.
Why does it matter if this differentiation is a result of natural or artificial means so long as market demand at each level is satisfied?
Because Intel is doing it to extract more money from you than it would be able to do in a free market.
Sure, more competition and lower prices overall would be nice, but that's a separate issue, imo. The differentiation allows Intel to recoup R&D, marketing, IP and overall business costs across a range of products and provide more choices to the consumer.
Yes. choices. fake choices. Like going to a bar that makes its own rum and being offered the cheap rum or the premium rum at 2 different prices. That's fine... right?
Once upon a time, the bar made rum, using one process... and 80% of it was graded tier 2, and 20% was graded tier 1. So they sold the teir 2 rum at one price $1/oz, and the teir 1 stuff for triple the price. $3/oz.
Over the years the bar had gotten its quality control down to the point that nearly everything it produced was graded tier 1. 97% was tier 1 rum.
What should happen? The vast majority of patrons will balk at paying $3/oz for rum, but they don't have nearly enough cheap rum to satisfy the market. The bar can clearly afford to sell the good stuff for $1/oz now, but then they'd be giving up the lucrative profit they used to make on the 20% for the good stuff.
So rather than scavenge their high end sales... they pour a bit of hand soap and cat piss in 80% of the barrels to ruin the flavor.
The reason this works is because there aren't any other bars in town. If market was functioning, people would just switch to another bar.
You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor.
No you don't.
You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor.
What makes it $200 functionality? Because intel said it was $200 functionality?
you expect them to give it to you for $200?
I expect the market to set the price. Instead Intel is artitificially creating scarcity and product differentiation where there isn't actually any.
Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available?
Given its the only model they make, and they plan to sell the majority of them for less than $400 clearly if the market set the price it would be less than $400.
Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version
There doesn't need to be more than one die because there is only one product. The existence of additional "products" are purely artificial market manipulation.
In a properly functioning free market, competition would force intel to sell the best product they have at the best price they can set it and still continue to fund production, r&d, and extract sufficient profit to stay motivated to remain in business.
This isn't happening.
Instead they took the product they have and made the fully working version artificially scarce by disabling parts of them to create "lesser products", this serves to let them charge a premium for the original working product.
That DOESN'T happen if you have sufficient competition that you need to deliver the best product you can at the best price you can.
Car turning left, accross 3 lanes of traffic (2 moving 1 parked), traffic was basically grid locked, and the oncoming cars in both oncoming lanes were stopped and couldn't have proceeded through the intersection because it was backed up on the other side.
So the car waiting to turn left enters the intersection. Remember... all 3 oncoming traffic lanes are full of cars (parked or stopped).
Then a cyclist comes ROARING down the parking lanes between the parked cars and the stopped cars, and t-bones the car at 25+ mph. bike breaks in half (one of those carbon deals) driver goes flying....
I gave a witness statement... I never did find out who got found at fault... but I sure hope it was the cyclist. I wonder though, because having an accident making a left turn almost always finds the left-turn driver at fault in my experience.
Especially because the light was green for the cyclist.
But it was reckless... he entered an intersection at full speed, he was not moving with traffic, and he did not control a lane.
If it were me wanting to make a left turn in the same situation... I surely would have in that situation. If all 3 oncoming lanes are stopped, am I really liable to anticipate veicles coming "between the lanes" at full speed...? I've seen motorcyclists do the same thing... move between the cars in the lanes... but they usually aren't going full tilt, and they usually slow down at intersections.
But if you've done it before in another language and have gobs of experience behind you.. you can read that documentation in no time and make sense of it all very quickly and end up with a workable jury-rigged treeview in minutes at worst.
Meh, the documentation is usually glaringly incomplete, and the only way to get any sort of deep knowledge involves playing with it and learning its quirks.
Yes, I agree you can get a "jury rigged" version up in minutes, and I said as much myself in my original post. But maybe "jury rigged" isn't really the goal, and someone who has spent months with the framework looks at your "jury rigged" version and rolls his eyes at it because you did it ass-backwards, reimplemented things the framework did for you that you didn't know about, tied into a generic event for some functionality when an event specific to what you were doing already existed... etc, etc, etc.
Sure yours works... but it still sucks.
They've never been complete showstoppers or prevented me from completing projects or tackling unfamiliar languages and frameworks.
Been There Done That myself. I agree. I also have gone back and looked over those first projects I worked on using a new framework, and cringe at how badly I abused the framework in the ways I outlined above.
A comp-sci lecturer once told me something that I think is very relevant to this discussion: A good programmer never blames his tools.
I'm not blaming the tools. Quite the opposite. I'm simply recognizing the frameworks are very complicated tools that you need to spend time with to learn.
I think what needs to happen is for the software to prominently display a meter of how much power its using, and some at least rough estimate using ip geolocation of what the cost per hour/day/month is.
Your power management solutions aren't a bad idea, but giving people the ability to control for a parameter that they are only dimly aware of isn't really going to solve the problem. You have to KNOW your spending $30 bucks a month per computer supporting @home before you can even start the process of adjusting it to an amount you are happy with.
Ah, you're mixing up programming language and frameworks
He's not really mixing them up. Changing languages usually means changing frameworks too.
You do realize that the type of guys we are talking about have seen frameworks come and go?
Yes.
I am however convinced that someone with the "development way of thinking" who is give correct documentation about the required frameworks
The language spec fits in single book; its procedureal or functional, the keyword list is generally pretty short. Operator precedence rules tend to be pretty standard. Syntax is pretty simple... begin end vs { } ; . or -> or:: for members or whatever. I can pick up a new language and start writing toy programs pretty much immediately.
The frameworks are BEHEMOTHS. The documentation for a winforms TreeView alone could fill a book all by itself. And its full of gotchas. Sure if you've programmed a treeview before you'll be able to whip something basic together that works... but when you start getting into the nitty gritty... dynamically adding leaves as nodes are expanded, changing node icons in response to events, saving and restoring the state accross program sessions, data binding the treeview hierarchy to an arbitrary object model... just because you were an expert at it in Java doesn't mean you won't have to start from practically scratch to figure out how to do it in GTK+ or WinForms...
A lot of what you say is mostly sensible until the last statement...
The last statement underscores the issue. That the cost isn't visible or detectable.
Seriously, of course these projects cost money, that is why they open them to the public...to help save them several billions of dollars of added costs for equipment and utilities.
The public is sold on the idea that the computers are 'just sitting there'. They are happy to provide the loaner equipment, and at no charge to themselves. But they aren't even usually even more than dimly aware of the utility costs that they are providing.
Its sad to think people would rather spend $25 dollars a month to power their facebook interactions then to put that toward solving the problems that could save lives or advance our understanding of the universe.
That's just it. When the PC is idle its power consumption drops right off. Configured half decently the units even sleep/hibernate and the cost of being "almost on" is almost zero. Even the family home servers use a fraction of the power while idling at night. The average family powering a PC for facebook consumes almost no juice. A couple hours of light load a few times a day is NOTHING compared to a slammed at 100% CPU 24x7 for a year.
Its like comparing your daily commute to work with running the car full throttle around the clock. If you think your weekly fuel costs are too high driving to and from work 5 times a week... even if you spend 1.5 hrs commuting EACH way... that's still only 3 hours, and probably mostly at idle. That's still NOTHING compared to doing 150mph+ 24 hours a day.
At least a few people every year die because they go out into the boonies with a GPS and no map. The GPS puts them on some kind of goat trail, they get stuck, and then found a month later, dead.
What would have been different if they had a map instead of or in addition to a gps? They still have seen the goat trail on it, still have gotten stuck, and still found a month later dead.
Really? Because when I played angry birds... I pretty much thought... ooh...a scorched earth puzzle game. And that pretty much covers the game.
You have your trajectory mechanic, different shot types, and you need to hit your targets.
What does it do that scorched earth doesn't? You have your small bombs, your big bombs, your bouncy bombs, your mirv bombs... you destroy the environment to reach your targets, and in doing so affect how you reach your target.
Subsequent iterations added deflector shields, dirt bombs (creating new environment), tank parachutes, wind, napalm, movable tanks, tracers.
What does angry birds add? The bombs are now angry birds?
The environments instead of just being earth you can create or or destroy has some physics elements of its own, allowing them to stacked up and collapsed etc instead of just being created and destroyed? That's a sequel worthy feature at best... every thing has added physics based environments, and even 15 years ago playing scorched earth we often thought it would be oh so cool if the terrain above would collapse if you dug out under an opponent enough. That development was pretty much inevitable.
Beyond that Angry Birds simplified the actual game... they removed the competitive and economic elements and the random elements and made it a static set of puzzles.
Call that innovation if you want.
Angry Birds is fun for what it is, and well polished. But its actually got less going on than scorched earth had 20 years ago. Oh... and Scorched Earth was shareware 20 years ago... with no ads.
From my end, I'm more concerned of being able to find old friends from long long ago. If they're using pseudonyms, how can I find them?
What makes you think they want you to? Perhaps they don't? Perhaps that's precisely why they use a pseudoname online... so that people like you don't bug them.
I just want to socialize with my friends and want all you "long long ago" people looking for me, along with random people at work, a prospective employer, and the nosy neighbors to get bent. So guess what... I tell the people I want to find me my pseudoname, and they find me. Its not that hard.
I don't want YOU to find me.
I don't even want to have to reject your annoying requests to be my friend or join my circles or whatever.
Oh, and I don't want Google or Facebook to have my real name, because they aren't my friends either.
Actually, Google says you can use pseudonyms, as long as other people that you know also know that name.
Clearly false. Many of those recently banned pseudonames on google had added friends etc. That would imply that other people knew who they were.
Trying to relate hours played to cost per unit is a failed argument.
I haven't watched everything on youtube yet either, but that isn't going to stop me from paying to go see a movie I want to see.
The fact that there are games out there that I can play for less money than another game is really a stupid argument.
I mean, you paid $3 on GoG for a game that gave you 10hrs of play? You haven't played every free demo yet, tried every shareware title, played every downloadable rom for MAME, beaten all the downloadable Doom WADs. Played all the free to play games, the browser games, the flash games. Never mind exhausted all the $1 games for ipods!! There are 10s of thousands of horus of entertainment for free... and thousands more available for $1!! And yet you paid $3 bucks for 10 hrs on GoG?! You must be completely retarded!!
I paid for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, New Super Mario Bros Wii, and Fallout 3 because I wanted to play those games. The fact that there are thousands of other games available for less or even free is pretty much irrelevant to me. I play those too... but it would be absurd to suggest that I not buy play Portal 2 which I knew I'd enjoy a LOT simply because there is there is a classic on GoG that I haven't played yet, or a flash tower defense game I haven't played yet... even though I enjoy both of those activities too. (And I have a number of GoG titles myself.)
Entertainment is not gasoline. The "utility" function of entertainment is not solely a function of price.
Sure... if you equate ipad games with nintendo games. But even a 4 year old would rather play the nintendo games. There's a lot more value in "New" Super Mario Bro's DS than in Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies. They just aren't even in the same league.
a) Gizmodo did not steal it. Gizmodo bought it knowing it was problably stolen.
however you slice it, the law in California is very specific about what you can do with something you "find" - you cannot sell it right away, you have to register it as a lost item with the local sheriff's office, and if it goes unclaimed, then you can sell it).
a) Gizmodo didn't find it. They bought it, knowing that it was either fake or stolen. If it was fake, no harm done. If it was stolen, they had every intention of returning it to the original owner... they contacted Apple about it.
b) Gizmodo didn't try and sell it.
c) The reason you register it with the sheriff's office is because you don't know who it belongs to and can't return it. Gizmodo already knew who it belonged to and called them directly, and offered to let Apple pick it up.
Apple hung up on them UNTIL they realized they actually were missing a prototype... and then they sic'd the cops on the very guy who had CONTACTED THEM OFFERING TO RETURN IT.
That is why its being framed as using the cops as personal security. There was no need to involve the cops... Gizmodo had ALREADY approached apple and offered to return it.
If someone finds your wallet on the street, and uses the ID in it to phone you and let you know he has your wallet and invites you to pick it up... do you send the cops to arrest him for theft because he didn't turn it into the sheriff's office? Or do you just go down and pick up your damned wallet?
Apple sent the cops...
The only difference is that gizmodo didn't find the prototype on the street, they paid the guy who was trying to unload it. But that's irrelevant. Going back to the wallet example... some bum on the street finds your dropped wallet and puts it up for sale on his blanket... you see it, buy it, and then see the ID inside... and then call the original onwer.
Meanwhile you write about it on your blog and generate some hits. Should that be illegal? Maybe "you" are Steve Jobs, and the wallet story is kind of a big deal, so it generates a lot of hits. Same difference. Hell... if you noticed the drivers licenses was still in the wallet when you bougth it from the Bum and that's WHY you bought it... to write about it on your blog... as long as your first steps included contacting the owner and try and return it... I still don't see anything even slightly wrong.
On the other hand China makes nothing the US can not produce domestically or import from other emerging countries who can also pay their employees a dollar a day to create cheap products.
And factories just spring out of the ground like magic beanstalks.
Shifting away from China significantly could certainly be done... but it would take a decade or more to do it anywhere nearly as painlessly as you suggest.
It probably wouldn't slow your machine down as much as the other shovelware the put on there that only add bloat.
Probably slow your machine down a lot less actually as it tends to be fairly well written to go dormant when you are using the computer for other stuff.
However the shovelware bloat isn't designed to run your CPU at 100% load on all cores so the actual $ cost of it in electricity is substantially lower.
Am I the only one who thinks programs like this and/or folding@home and/or seti@home should be installed by the manufacture and enabled by default?
Those @home projects cost between roughly $3 and $30/month per unit to run depending on what equipment you are using (celeron laptop vs i7 gaming rig vs ps3 vs old pentium 4 vs SLI GPUs...) , what the electricity rates are, and whether you end up running running air conditioning more to offset the extra heat you are unknowingly generating.
Me... I have 4 computers always on, but I live in a cooler part of Canada where the heat isn't a huge problem and the electricity is pretty cheap... but they are performance oriented hardware and it would still cost me over $25/month to run @home on all 4.
In some American state's and several european countries electricity is triple or quadruple what I pay. And the extra heat would have to be countered by running the air conditioning more in some places. (In others it might let you run the heater less).
But the point is, there is a very real hidden cost to this stuff, and without full disclosure of the actual cost, these projects are a bit offensive to me.
I have no issue with someone running the software with informed consent, but the true value in dollars that is actually being contributed unwittingly on these projects is appalling.
They are often installed by "kids" or "employees" who do not know the cost, and do not pay it. And the cost is passed on to the parent or employer who have little ability to detect it... its not like a line item on their credit card. Its just a higher kwH reading which is pretty inscrutable.
Preinstalled and enabled by the manufacturers would be tantamount to theft. Why not just subscribe them to World of Warcraft and AOL, and then roll the monthly charges into their property taxes lump sum assessement? Its about as honest.
The airlines are not suing the government to stop the TSA, so by implication they are happy with the arrangement.
The fact that I'm not suing you doesn't imply I'm happy with you.
You don't HAVE to fly. There are other means of transportation.
The TSA has already asserted they have the right to screen those as well. Give them time.
When you board an airplane, you trade your constitutional rights away in exchange for the convenience.
If I were FLYING the airplane, maybe. But as a passenger in locked compartment with no access to flight controls? Why exactly is it reasonable to trade away rights for the "convenience" of being a passenger?
You do the same thing when you drive a car, you trade away many constitutional rights when you climb behind the wheel and go out on the public roadway.
Because they are DRIVING the car. The passengers in the back seat don't need special licenses or government approval, nor should they.
Or do you think one should need a national id card, and be prepared to show it at any time for the convenience of being a passenger in the back seat. After all, its just trading away rights for convenience... you don't HAVE to ride in the backseat... you could always get out and walk.
There is no way that the police could do this to you if your were in your own home.
Why not? What's the real difference between a passenger on a plane, and a guy who lives on the 12th floor of a skyskraper? He could be building a bomb in there set to take down the whole building!! You don't know he's not... you better screen him. Its just trading away rights for the convenience of living in a tower in the city... you don't HAVE to live there, there are other places you could live.
a) record breaking sky scrapers don't get built in recessions. b) They don't get built at the beginning of economic booms. c) They don't get built in the middle of economic booms. d) They seem to go up just before the crash... sometimes they don't even get finished before the crash hits.
Its more than just the economy is cyclical, and any event at all that you care to point at happens "before a crash". Building record breaking skyscrapers has a strong correlation with the end of a boom cycle.
There was a real study done, and the theory has some real traction among econmists... as the economic situation that enables skyscrapers (low interest rates, burgeoning growth, space premiums, etc) are what enables record breaking sky scrapers to be economically viable... and are the same conditions that immediately precede a bust cycle.
It zeros out the frame buffer. You know... so you get a completely black screen. And if that's the main render routine... lol... I thought it was quite clever.
And this here is where we part ways, you don't believe in public domain at all.
You misunderstood me entirely.
. The whole point of copyright/licensing is to DENY anything from ever entering public domain through abusing language and the law.
It should enter the public domain when copyright term expires. I agree the term is too long and should be shortened. But I don't think that a 15 year old game should be in public domain yet.
What happens to really old games or abandonware I've purchased?
I'd be more worried about the new ones. Those are the ones that are going to be broken beyond repair in 20 years thanks to their hooks to online systems.
The old ones are being resurrected by sites like GoG.com.
go grab the source from say a library and fix it/update it for modern systems even though *I invested in* and *paid for* the product, its development, etc buy buying it.
You can't have the architect's drawings for a random building you like, or a the authors notes on a book he wrote, or the schematics for your microwave either. Even if you "paid for it" by buying an apartment, book, or microwave respectively.
Rewriting a game to work on modern platforms is no different than translating a book to a foreign language. And yes, the copyright holder has the eclusive right to do that. If he doesn't bother, abandons the book, lets it go out of print... tough. You still can't translate it to Japanese and distribute it. At least until its out of copyright.
And once games come out of copyright, then there will be nothing stopping you from creating your own versions, using the the original artwork etc.
I agree that the duration copyright is too long, but this is not the game companies fault. Few have been around long enough for any titles to even come out of reasonable copyright.
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Is there really any scarcity? I can go buy i7 processors from $300 to $1,000 USD at Newegg right now. Only one looks like it's out of stock.
Intel is simulating scarcity. That's my whole point... the high functioning cpu's aren't rarer than the low functioning ones, they don't cost more to make than the low functioning ones. The factors that make the high functioning CPUs cost more are ALL artificial.
The market clearly shows there's a demand for a range of low, mid and high-functionality processors.
Think about it: If low, high, and mid functioning processors were sitting on a shelf at the same price -- which they well could be since they are all actually precisely the same product, how many people would pick the low? or mid?
Zero.
Why does it matter if this differentiation is a result of natural or artificial means so long as market demand at each level is satisfied?
Because Intel is doing it to extract more money from you than it would be able to do in a free market.
Sure, more competition and lower prices overall would be nice, but that's a separate issue, imo. The differentiation allows Intel to recoup R&D, marketing, IP and overall business costs across a range of products and provide more choices to the consumer.
Yes. choices. fake choices. Like going to a bar that makes its own rum and being offered the cheap rum or the premium rum at 2 different prices. That's fine... right?
Once upon a time, the bar made rum, using one process... and 80% of it was graded tier 2, and 20% was graded tier 1. So they sold the teir 2 rum at one price $1/oz, and the teir 1 stuff for triple the price. $3/oz.
Over the years the bar had gotten its quality control down to the point that nearly everything it produced was graded tier 1. 97% was tier 1 rum.
What should happen? The vast majority of patrons will balk at paying $3/oz for rum, but they don't have nearly enough cheap rum to satisfy the market. The bar can clearly afford to sell the good stuff for $1/oz now, but then they'd be giving up the lucrative profit they used to make on the 20% for the good stuff.
So rather than scavenge their high end sales... they pour a bit of hand soap and cat piss in 80% of the barrels to ruin the flavor.
The reason this works is because there aren't any other bars in town. If market was functioning, people would just switch to another bar.
That is essentially intel's business model.
You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor.
No you don't.
You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor.
What makes it $200 functionality? Because intel said it was $200 functionality?
you expect them to give it to you for $200?
I expect the market to set the price. Instead Intel is artitificially creating scarcity and product differentiation where there isn't actually any.
Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available?
Given its the only model they make, and they plan to sell the majority of them for less than $400 clearly if the market set the price it would be less than $400.
Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version
There doesn't need to be more than one die because there is only one product. The existence of additional "products" are purely artificial market manipulation.
In a properly functioning free market, competition would force intel to sell the best product they have at the best price they can set it and still continue to fund production, r&d, and extract sufficient profit to stay motivated to remain in business.
This isn't happening.
Instead they took the product they have and made the fully working version artificially scarce by disabling parts of them to create "lesser products", this serves to let them charge a premium for the original working product.
That DOESN'T happen if you have sufficient competition that you need to deliver the best product you can at the best price you can.
I saw a classic cyclist accident the other day.
Car turning left, accross 3 lanes of traffic (2 moving 1 parked), traffic was basically grid locked, and the oncoming cars in both oncoming lanes were stopped and couldn't have proceeded through the intersection because it was backed up on the other side.
So the car waiting to turn left enters the intersection. Remember ... all 3 oncoming traffic lanes are full of cars (parked or stopped).
Then a cyclist comes ROARING down the parking lanes between the parked cars and the stopped cars, and t-bones the car at 25+ mph. bike breaks in half (one of those carbon deals) driver goes flying....
I gave a witness statement... I never did find out who got found at fault... but I sure hope it was the cyclist. I wonder though, because having an accident making a left turn almost always finds the left-turn driver at fault in my experience.
Especially because the light was green for the cyclist.
But it was reckless... he entered an intersection at full speed, he was not moving with traffic, and he did not control a lane.
If it were me wanting to make a left turn in the same situation... I surely would have in that situation. If all 3 oncoming lanes are stopped, am I really liable to anticipate veicles coming "between the lanes" at full speed...? I've seen motorcyclists do the same thing... move between the cars in the lanes... but they usually aren't going full tilt, and they usually slow down at intersections.
I agree. But in the real world even crucial regular bridges are being built by for-profit corporations ... for profit.
But if you've done it before in another language and have gobs of experience behind you.. you can read that documentation in no time and make sense of it all very quickly and end up with a workable jury-rigged treeview in minutes at worst.
Meh, the documentation is usually glaringly incomplete, and the only way to get any sort of deep knowledge involves playing with it and learning its quirks.
Yes, I agree you can get a "jury rigged" version up in minutes, and I said as much myself in my original post. But maybe "jury rigged" isn't really the goal, and someone who has spent months with the framework looks at your "jury rigged" version and rolls his eyes at it because you did it ass-backwards, reimplemented things the framework did for you that you didn't know about, tied into a generic event for some functionality when an event specific to what you were doing already existed... etc, etc, etc.
Sure yours works... but it still sucks.
They've never been complete showstoppers or prevented me from completing projects or tackling unfamiliar languages and frameworks.
Been There Done That myself. I agree. I also have gone back and looked over those first projects I worked on using a new framework, and cringe at how badly I abused the framework in the ways I outlined above.
A comp-sci lecturer once told me something that I think is very relevant to this discussion: A good programmer never blames his tools.
I'm not blaming the tools. Quite the opposite. I'm simply recognizing the frameworks are very complicated tools that you need to spend time with to learn.
I think what needs to happen is for the software to prominently display a meter of how much power its using, and some at least rough estimate using ip geolocation of what the cost per hour/day/month is.
Your power management solutions aren't a bad idea, but giving people the ability to control for a parameter that they are only dimly aware of isn't really going to solve the problem. You have to KNOW your spending $30 bucks a month per computer supporting @home before you can even start the process of adjusting it to an amount you are happy with.
Ah, you're mixing up programming language and frameworks
He's not really mixing them up. Changing languages usually means changing frameworks too.
You do realize that the type of guys we are talking about have seen frameworks come and go?
Yes.
I am however convinced that someone with the "development way of thinking" who is give correct documentation about the required frameworks
The language spec fits in single book; its procedureal or functional, the keyword list is generally pretty short. Operator precedence rules tend to be pretty standard. Syntax is pretty simple... begin end vs { } ; . or -> or :: for members or whatever. I can pick up a new language and start writing toy programs pretty much immediately.
The frameworks are BEHEMOTHS. The documentation for a winforms TreeView alone could fill a book all by itself. And its full of gotchas. Sure if you've programmed a treeview before you'll be able to whip something basic together that works... but when you start getting into the nitty gritty... dynamically adding leaves as nodes are expanded, changing node icons in response to events, saving and restoring the state accross program sessions, data binding the treeview hierarchy to an arbitrary object model ... just because you were an expert at it in Java doesn't mean you won't have to start from practically scratch to figure out how to do it in GTK+ or WinForms...
heat -> steam -> turbines -> electricity
its in the bloody summary
A lot of what you say is mostly sensible until the last statement...
The last statement underscores the issue. That the cost isn't visible or detectable.
Seriously, of course these projects cost money, that is why they open them to the public...to help save them several billions of dollars of added costs for equipment and utilities.
The public is sold on the idea that the computers are 'just sitting there'. They are happy to provide the loaner equipment, and at no charge to themselves. But they aren't even usually even more than dimly aware of the utility costs that they are providing.
Its sad to think people would rather spend $25 dollars a month to power their facebook interactions then to put that toward solving the problems that could save lives or advance our understanding of the universe.
That's just it. When the PC is idle its power consumption drops right off. Configured half decently the units even sleep/hibernate and the cost of being "almost on" is almost zero. Even the family home servers use a fraction of the power while idling at night. The average family powering a PC for facebook consumes almost no juice. A couple hours of light load a few times a day is NOTHING compared to a slammed at 100% CPU 24x7 for a year.
Its like comparing your daily commute to work with running the car full throttle around the clock. If you think your weekly fuel costs are too high driving to and from work 5 times a week... even if you spend 1.5 hrs commuting EACH way... that's still only 3 hours, and probably mostly at idle. That's still NOTHING compared to doing 150mph+ 24 hours a day.
At least a few people every year die because they go out into the boonies with a GPS and no map. The GPS puts them on some kind of goat trail, they get stuck, and then found a month later, dead.
What would have been different if they had a map instead of or in addition to a gps? They still have seen the goat trail on it, still have gotten stuck, and still found a month later dead.
This game has little in common with Angry Birds
Really? Because when I played angry birds... I pretty much thought... ooh...a scorched earth puzzle game. And that pretty much covers the game.
You have your trajectory mechanic, different shot types, and you need to hit your targets.
What does it do that scorched earth doesn't? You have your small bombs, your big bombs, your bouncy bombs, your mirv bombs... you destroy the environment to reach your targets, and in doing so affect how you reach your target.
Subsequent iterations added deflector shields, dirt bombs (creating new environment), tank parachutes, wind, napalm, movable tanks, tracers.
What does angry birds add? The bombs are now angry birds?
The environments instead of just being earth you can create or or destroy has some physics elements of its own, allowing them to stacked up and collapsed etc instead of just being created and destroyed? That's a sequel worthy feature at best... every thing has added physics based environments, and even 15 years ago playing scorched earth we often thought it would be oh so cool if the terrain above would collapse if you dug out under an opponent enough. That development was pretty much inevitable.
Beyond that Angry Birds simplified the actual game... they removed the competitive and economic elements and the random elements and made it a static set of puzzles.
Call that innovation if you want.
Angry Birds is fun for what it is, and well polished. But its actually got less going on than scorched earth had 20 years ago. Oh... and Scorched Earth was shareware 20 years ago... with no ads.
From my end, I'm more concerned of being able to find old friends from long long ago. If they're using pseudonyms, how can I find them?
What makes you think they want you to? Perhaps they don't? Perhaps that's precisely why they use a pseudoname online... so that people like you don't bug them.
I just want to socialize with my friends and want all you "long long ago" people looking for me, along with random people at work, a prospective employer, and the nosy neighbors to get bent. So guess what... I tell the people I want to find me my pseudoname, and they find me. Its not that hard.
I don't want YOU to find me.
I don't even want to have to reject your annoying requests to be my friend or join my circles or whatever.
Oh, and I don't want Google or Facebook to have my real name, because they aren't my friends either.
Actually, Google says you can use pseudonyms, as long as other people that you know also know that name.
Clearly false. Many of those recently banned pseudonames on google had added friends etc. That would imply that other people knew who they were.
Trying to relate hours played to cost per unit is a failed argument.
I haven't watched everything on youtube yet either, but that isn't going to stop me from paying to go see a movie I want to see.
The fact that there are games out there that I can play for less money than another game is really a stupid argument.
I mean, you paid $3 on GoG for a game that gave you 10hrs of play? You haven't played every free demo yet, tried every shareware title, played every downloadable rom for MAME, beaten all the downloadable Doom WADs. Played all the free to play games, the browser games, the flash games. Never mind exhausted all the $1 games for ipods!! There are 10s of thousands of horus of entertainment for free... and thousands more available for $1!! And yet you paid $3 bucks for 10 hrs on GoG?! You must be completely retarded!!
I paid for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, New Super Mario Bros Wii, and Fallout 3 because I wanted to play those games. The fact that there are thousands of other games available for less or even free is pretty much irrelevant to me. I play those too... but it would be absurd to suggest that I not buy play Portal 2 which I knew I'd enjoy a LOT simply because there is there is a classic on GoG that I haven't played yet, or a flash tower defense game I haven't played yet... even though I enjoy both of those activities too. (And I have a number of GoG titles myself.)
Entertainment is not gasoline. The "utility" function of entertainment is not solely a function of price.
LMAO.
Sure... if you equate ipad games with nintendo games. But even a 4 year old would rather play the nintendo games. There's a lot more value in "New" Super Mario Bro's DS than in Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies. They just aren't even in the same league.
Slow down cowboy.
a) Gizmodo did not steal it. Gizmodo bought it knowing it was problably stolen.
however you slice it, the law in California is very specific about what you can do with something you "find" - you cannot sell it right away, you have to register it as a lost item with the local sheriff's office, and if it goes unclaimed, then you can sell it).
a) Gizmodo didn't find it. They bought it, knowing that it was either fake or stolen. If it was fake, no harm done. If it was stolen, they had every intention of returning it to the original owner... they contacted Apple about it.
b) Gizmodo didn't try and sell it.
c) The reason you register it with the sheriff's office is because you don't know who it belongs to and can't return it. Gizmodo already knew who it belonged to and called them directly, and offered to let Apple pick it up.
Apple hung up on them UNTIL they realized they actually were missing a prototype... and then they sic'd the cops on the very guy who had CONTACTED THEM OFFERING TO RETURN IT.
That is why its being framed as using the cops as personal security. There was no need to involve the cops... Gizmodo had ALREADY approached apple and offered to return it.
If someone finds your wallet on the street, and uses the ID in it to phone you and let you know he has your wallet and invites you to pick it up... do you send the cops to arrest him for theft because he didn't turn it into the sheriff's office? Or do you just go down and pick up your damned wallet?
Apple sent the cops...
The only difference is that gizmodo didn't find the prototype on the street, they paid the guy who was trying to unload it. But that's irrelevant. Going back to the wallet example... some bum on the street finds your dropped wallet and puts it up for sale on his blanket... you see it, buy it, and then see the ID inside... and then call the original onwer.
Meanwhile you write about it on your blog and generate some hits. Should that be illegal? Maybe "you" are Steve Jobs, and the wallet story is kind of a big deal, so it generates a lot of hits. Same difference. Hell... if you noticed the drivers licenses was still in the wallet when you bougth it from the Bum and that's WHY you bought it ... to write about it on your blog... as long as your first steps included contacting the owner and try and return it ... I still don't see anything even slightly wrong.
On the other hand China makes nothing the US can not produce domestically or import from other emerging countries who can also pay their employees a dollar a day to create cheap products.
And factories just spring out of the ground like magic beanstalks.
Shifting away from China significantly could certainly be done... but it would take a decade or more to do it anywhere nearly as painlessly as you suggest.
It probably wouldn't slow your machine down as much as the other shovelware the put on there that only add bloat.
Probably slow your machine down a lot less actually as it tends to be fairly well written to go dormant when you are using the computer for other stuff.
However the shovelware bloat isn't designed to run your CPU at 100% load on all cores so the actual $ cost of it in electricity is substantially lower.
Am I the only one who thinks programs like this and/or folding@home and/or seti@home should be installed by the manufacture and enabled by default?
Those @home projects cost between roughly $3 and $30/month per unit to run depending on what equipment you are using (celeron laptop vs i7 gaming rig vs ps3 vs old pentium 4 vs SLI GPUs...) , what the electricity rates are, and whether you end up running running air conditioning more to offset the extra heat you are unknowingly generating.
Me... I have 4 computers always on, but I live in a cooler part of Canada where the heat isn't a huge problem and the electricity is pretty cheap... but they are performance oriented hardware and it would still cost me over $25/month to run @home on all 4.
In some American state's and several european countries electricity is triple or quadruple what I pay. And the extra heat would have to be countered by running the air conditioning more in some places. (In others it might let you run the heater less).
But the point is, there is a very real hidden cost to this stuff, and without full disclosure of the actual cost, these projects are a bit offensive to me.
I have no issue with someone running the software with informed consent, but the true value in dollars that is actually being contributed unwittingly on these projects is appalling.
They are often installed by "kids" or "employees" who do not know the cost, and do not pay it. And the cost is passed on to the parent or employer who have little ability to detect it... its not like a line item on their credit card. Its just a higher kwH reading which is pretty inscrutable.
Preinstalled and enabled by the manufacturers would be tantamount to theft. Why not just subscribe them to World of Warcraft and AOL, and then roll the monthly charges into their property taxes lump sum assessement? Its about as honest.
The airlines are not suing the government to stop the TSA, so by implication they are happy with the arrangement.
The fact that I'm not suing you doesn't imply I'm happy with you.
You don't HAVE to fly. There are other means of transportation.
The TSA has already asserted they have the right to screen those as well. Give them time.
When you board an airplane, you trade your constitutional rights away in exchange for the convenience.
If I were FLYING the airplane, maybe. But as a passenger in locked compartment with no access to flight controls? Why exactly is it reasonable to trade away rights for the "convenience" of being a passenger?
You do the same thing when you drive a car, you trade away many constitutional rights when you climb behind the wheel and go out on the public roadway.
Because they are DRIVING the car. The passengers in the back seat don't need special licenses or government approval, nor should they.
Or do you think one should need a national id card, and be prepared to show it at any time for the convenience of being a passenger in the back seat. After all, its just trading away rights for convenience... you don't HAVE to ride in the backseat... you could always get out and walk.
There is no way that the police could do this to you if your were in your own home.
Why not? What's the real difference between a passenger on a plane, and a guy who lives on the 12th floor of a skyskraper? He could be building a bomb in there set to take down the whole building!! You don't know he's not... you better screen him. Its just trading away rights for the convenience of living in a tower in the city... you don't HAVE to live there, there are other places you could live.
S&P's rationale may or may not have some holes in it - but their decision is valid. We suck. We don't deserve credit.
Its valid in a vacuum, its somewhat silly given the US compared to other AAA rated credit holders... all of which have bad deficits.
If you want to argue that AAA should be for economies with a balanced budget... I'll go for that... but then the rule has to be applied universally.
Lol, thanks for hitting me with the clue-stick.
Still, it would have been good if you'd acknowledged the joke before launching into the optimization. :p
We've observed that:
a) record breaking sky scrapers don't get built in recessions.
b) They don't get built at the beginning of economic booms.
c) They don't get built in the middle of economic booms.
d) They seem to go up just before the crash... sometimes they don't even get finished before the crash hits.
Its more than just the economy is cyclical, and any event at all that you care to point at happens "before a crash". Building record breaking skyscrapers has a strong correlation with the end of a boom cycle.
There was a real study done, and the theory has some real traction among econmists... as the economic situation that enables skyscrapers (low interest rates, burgeoning growth, space premiums, etc) are what enables record breaking sky scrapers to be economically viable... and are the same conditions that immediately precede a bust cycle.
look at the line of code...
It zeros out the frame buffer. You know... so you get a completely black screen. And if that's the main render routine... lol... I thought it was quite clever.
And this here is where we part ways, you don't believe in public domain at all.
You misunderstood me entirely.
. The whole point of copyright/licensing is to DENY anything from ever entering public domain through abusing language and the law.
It should enter the public domain when copyright term expires. I agree the term is too long and should be shortened. But I don't think that a 15 year old game should be in public domain yet.
What happens to really old games or abandonware I've purchased?
I'd be more worried about the new ones. Those are the ones that are going to be broken beyond repair in 20 years thanks to their hooks to online systems.
The old ones are being resurrected by sites like GoG.com.
go grab the source from say a library and fix it/update it for modern systems even though *I invested in* and *paid for* the product, its development, etc buy buying it.
You can't have the architect's drawings for a random building you like, or a the authors notes on a book he wrote, or the schematics for your microwave either. Even if you "paid for it" by buying an apartment, book, or microwave respectively.
Rewriting a game to work on modern platforms is no different than translating a book to a foreign language. And yes, the copyright holder has the eclusive right to do that. If he doesn't bother, abandons the book, lets it go out of print... tough. You still can't translate it to Japanese and distribute it. At least until its out of copyright.
And once games come out of copyright, then there will be nothing stopping you from creating your own versions, using the the original artwork etc.
I agree that the duration copyright is too long, but this is not the game companies fault. Few have been around long enough for any titles to even come out of reasonable copyright.