No, he's not arguing that, because the Nazi's weren't left wing and I'm not sure why you'd think they were unless you assume because they have socialism in their name that makes them left-wing socialists, but then I guess you think the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a Democratic People's Republic too right?
No it wouldn't, it would just be politically untenable because having thousands of slaves is looked down upon nowadays, even if you do give them JCBs to make it easier.
No idea what they do but I did exactly this for a university project using neural networks. It was some years ago so I can't really remember the details of what exact data we had, I just remember having a dataset of chemical composition data for a good number of wines as a training set.
At the end of the day this is just a straightforward classification problem so any number of statistical classification methods should work just fine.
"Zimbabwe? North Korea? Actually, they're probably worse."
No, that's the thing, even these countries wouldn't be like that, because the ratio of rich to poor is likely closer to 1:10,000 not 1:10.
The only places I could think of it being the case might be some of the tax haven countries like Monaco or Luxembourg, or alternatively perhaps somewhere like Dubai, but I'm not sure that's the case in those places even.
"-no physical media to lose, I cant count the number of games I've lost in moves over the years"
You can lose account details, or even have them hacked (not necessarily on your system) with varying degrees of success in getting them back.
"-also no lost keys to go along with the first one"
Irrelevant. You don't need keys in the first place if you don't have DRM. Or if you do have them anyway it doesn't matter if you lose some random key on the net if you lose yours.
"-no tedious installs, pick all the games you want and let it download/install, when its done everything is ready to go"
No difference. You still have to load up a program/insert a disc and click install then it goes off and does it.
"-no updating, all updates are handled automatically -dlc (if you consider that a benefit, could 50/50 on that one) -a built in online community for every game, direct access to game forums and the like"
No reason you can't have that anyway. You don't need DRM for it.
"-much cheaper prices than physical media, you can get 5-10 games for the price of one physical game if you time it right"
Rarely ever true. Physical copies are often cheaper than digital copies. Steam is usually full RRP on new copies, places like Amazon just about never is. Steam has sales, Amazon et. al. have sales.
But fundamentally my point wasn't really just about physical media vs. online, but simply the point that DRM wasn't necessary then, and isn't necessary now. You could do everything you do now with Steam, minus the DRM.
My point is simply that DRM adds nothing you couldn't have without DRM. For the consumer DRM is always nothing but a net negative.
"Because average wage is a bullshit metric, see my reply above."
No it's not, because:
a) It's across a large sample size than your example. For example, the national average wage in the UK is about £26,000 which is about right despite the fact we have one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world living in London. Your example is what is bullshit, that's the problem. Your example implied 1 in 10 people made 100 times the amount of those on minimum wage and 9 in 10 made minimum wage. I don't think there's a single economy anything like that in the real world.
b) It's still representative of living standards, even in your example if 90% of the population are earning minimum wage then prices will reflect that or those people couldn't even afford to be alive.
"And what about people who currently live in the abject poverty due to not even minimum wages?"
If someone is not getting paid minimum wage then they must take that up with their government and get their employer who is breaking the law to stop breaking the law. That has nothing to do with any other country or the EU beyond the fact that if your government doesn't enforce that you can get the EU to make them enforce it with a European Court of Justice ruling.
"Prices are the same for food and clothing are the same across euroland."
Are they not now backtracking on that to at least some degree even if still imperfect?
So yes, exactly like that.
Microsoft do a lot wrong, but they do tend to react to consumer feedback and it does differ from division to division - their response to Windows 8 has been way too slow, but for example, the Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC teams for example have been relatively quick to respond to feedback and alter their product in response, maybe still not as fast as they could be but as fast as you can expect from most corporate behemoths and some just never respond to customer complaints. Compare the XBox RROD issues for example which they ultimately accepted blame for and offered full replacement and contrast and compare to Sony's YLOD issue where they pretended it wasn't happening, or backwards compat/linux removal issue that they just continued to ignore the customer on.
I hate playing devil's advocate for Microsoft because I feel like I'm defending them way more than they deserve, but I think someone has to else discussion just descends into a pit of bile fuelled hate and out and out FUD and at that point the entire discussion is meaningless and a waste of everyone's time.
I have a PS3 but bought it after Linux was already removed.
Being a PS3 owner and not having had the feature removed from me personally though doesn't mean I magically have to give them a free pass because guess what? I'm not a fanboy.
Removing features from customers is still a fucking shitty move however you cut it and guess what? Microsoft are twats for adding more and more ads to XBL when I already pay them for the service, Nintendo are twats for selling me a turd that never ended up with any compelling games, Apple are twats for being such restrictive power hungry patent trolls, and Google are twats for being such a bunch of tax dodging idiots.
You know, it is possible to hate companies for all piss poor anti-consumer moves. I'm a customer so I don't owe them a thing, I have no vested interest in defending them and I have every interest in calling them all out when they do bad things.
But what makes your post so utterly sad is that what you're basically saying is that you're disappointed that I called Sony out with the implication that I shouldn't have, that I should give them a free pass and focus on just the bad things of other companies. Do you know why you think that? Because you're a fanboy. The very thing you're criticising.
Where do I get this magical discounted version of Steam? Every time I want to buy something from it it's RRP and I have to go to places like Amazon to get it discounted. For example, I just bought Wargame: Airland Battle, £29.99 on Steam, £19.99 on Amazon.
I understand Steam has sales, but so does every retailer and Steam seems to be no different in this respect. It's mostly just end of line or poor selling stuff that's discounted and shops have always done the same.
FWIW you can just as well play current gen console games without an internet connection, in fact, current gen consoles are less restrictive than most modern PC games like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 - these games don't even come on the disc you buy, you have to download them and have to play them online even single player.
So when you say "this is not a feature that consoles seem to offer" I'm guessing you're referring to the current proposals for future consoles? It's certainly not true of any current gen system that are currently less restrictive than a lot of PC DRM which is largely being used as the roadmap for the next gen of consoles.
Why would Sony be loving it? If history is anything to go by then Sony will be at least as worse, the difference is that unlike Microsoft they're just not being open about it. If anything it seems more like Microsoft is testing the waters to see what they can get away with, if there really is just way too much negative feedback they'll likely losen the restrictions somewhat. In contrast Sony's business model is, as always, keep quiet and just dump it on the user saying nothing and hope no one notices.
I don't really like any of it (though at least the ability to share games with family members is a step forward, because that's better than most DRM/unlock codes on existing platforms where you're expected to buy a copy per family member) but pretending Sony is going to be some magical saviour is sad. We saw the Sony fanboys spreading the exact same FUD and doing the exact same thing last console round and look how that ended up. Removed features etc.
Anyone pretending Sony is going to be a saviour right now given that we've not even seen a picture of their fucking device yet let alone had any real concrete information about it is having a laugh, especially when track records are taken into account.
I'm not disagreeing with most of your post, but you've made this point twice now:
"Plus tools used to perform the work (ticketing system, remote access tools?) . Again, you probably have no clue how much that actually costs"
You realise that cost can perfectly well be zero (well, beyond staff time for initial setup/customisation)? This is one of those areas where FOSS provides excellent solutions. This is one of those unnecessary expenditures that's trivially eliminated. Sure buy some flashy expensive proprietary ticket management system if you have more money than you know what to do with, but using a FOSS solution isn't going to cause any measurable detriment to your productivity.
If we were to standardise the minimum wage across Europe based on the nations with the highest wage then the minimum wage would be many times higher than the average wage in some of these countries. If we standardise on the lowest wage then people on minimum wage in say the UK would be forced into abject poverty.
The minimum wage seems fairly uniformly relative to the average wage which in turn will correlate closely with the cost of living. What's the problem exactly?
Well said. Don't be afraid to lie to recruiters because they don't know what the hell they're on about, because it's a dirty messed up industry that pursues borderline illegal (and sometimes outright illegal) practices in the UK at least. It's a skill in itself knowing how to play these guys. There are a few good ones, but they're so very few and far between - you'll know them when you find them though, they're the ones that'll be genuinely honest with you, and you can be honest with. When you do find one of the few good ones, build up a rapport with them and stay in touch. They'll be happy to do this because if you're any good they know that one day it may be you paying them to find you some hires and not just them finding roles for you.
But to highlight AmiMoJo's point, I've had recruiters ask me "Do you know.NET 4?" to which I answer yes, and then they say "What about the.NET framework, do you know that too?" to which you don't even bother wasting your time trying to explain they're the same thing because half of them then think you're trying to blag your way out of not knowing it if you do anything other than say yes/no, so it's easier to actually blag, and just say "Yes". Similarly if they say "Do you know Visual Studio?" or whatever, just say yes, and if they ask what version, just say the highest, because yes, sometimes if you just say "2010 is the highest I've worked with" when 2012 is out then they'll literally filter you out because they don't understand that the difference between versions is so meaningless that it's entirely irrelevant to filtering you in/out for a job. Effectively you just have to tell them what they want to hear, even if that doesn't necessarily make sense or is utterly meaningless in terms of suitability for the job.
I used to think it was okay to bend the truth a little if you had an interview with someone who wanted you to know something that you didn't know that well but knew you could know inside out before you started if you got the job too. I'm not talking lying about SQL when you don't, but if for example they wanted to know if you had experience with a specific subset of it, like say, triggers, and you knew what they were, knew what they did, but didn't know the keywords and so forth off by heart and didn't have commercial experience with that specific small subset. But you know what? It's not worth it - if they want you to out and out have experience in that technology rather than simply recognise you're more than capable of learning it and being effective as anyone in it in short order then it's not the sort of place you want to work anyway so don't even waste your time - there's no point working somewhere that values rubber stamping of buzzwords over real actual ability to learn and do.
It's stupid of them to demand that level of knowledge because no one takes a job where they know everything in the job inside out and can do it with their eyes closed, if they did then they would be getting zero career progression from the role and would be bored within a day. Good employers recognise this explicitly and recruit based on you knowing a decent amount of what they need and being capable of learning the rest fairly easily. Bad ones expect you to know the most pointless minute details off by heart such as rarely used function names in the depths of some massive framework and aren't offering you any career progression so don't even waste your time trying to blag yourself a job with them.
So in summary, don't worry about what you say to recruiters, you'll be less full of shit than they are whatever you say to them, but don't waste time lying to the actual employers, if you feel you have to then you're either going for a job where you'll be genuinely out of your depth (and they'll probably find out shortly after in the interview when they probe you further), or you're going for a job where the employer is shit and has really nothing of value to offer you.
In all the best jobs I've ever had I've been able to be complet
No there isn't, the population still gets to vote.
The fact they vote for the same old two parties rather than something different doesn't absolve them of blame, it just means that most of them are too stupid to know what's good for them.
No but it does at least tell people looking for money that there's money in the field of maths and hence get more people into the field than otherwise would.
It can happen when a publisher goes bankrupt or gets taken over - Valve may then lose the right to distribute that publisher's games.
It means that you don't just have to worry about Valve going bust, or changing hands as a risk for losing some or all of your games, but any games company you buy from - if it goes bust or gets sold you could arbitrarily be cut off from ever downloading or playing them again via Steam.
Of course, they forget to make this clear to you until it actually happens.
"I love steam. It means I can keep my game catalog as I upgrade my machine, switch operating systems, switch platforms... my games are mine. While I can't sell used games, I always try them out non-steam first before I decide I'm going to purchase them. Steam guarantees that I'll have those games available to me no matter what happens to my computer. To me, it's the best DRM out there, and the benefits outweigh my dislike for DRM."
A long time ago, in an age before Steam, we had these things called CDs, DVDs, and Floppy Disks. We could buy games on them and they tended not to come with any DRM, and guess what? We got to do all the things you mention but without the second hand sales restriction you also mention.
Remind me again what the benefit of Steam is? Remind me again why DRM helps you do any of these things at all when they can all be done without DRM? Remind me why the fuck such an obvious point got missed by the moderators who moderated your post up?
Defcon just always kept reverting back to trial mode for me when I bought and played it via Steam and I had to reload it each time until it went into licensed mode.
I've also had games I just couldn't activate for a few days when I tried which was annoying because I always felt there was something distinctly wrong about a third party telling me I couldn't use a product I'd paid for until they got their arse into gear.
I agree 99% of the time it works fine, but fundamentally anything that makes something fail 1% of the time for a legitimate consumer is unacceptable given that it offers absolutely zero benefit to the consumer. If they want to have DRM it needs to work in every customer's circumstances perfectly 100% of the time, or it needs to go. The consumer shouldn't suffer because of publisher's greed to prevent second hand sales.
"Personally I think its great and is just one more example of how now that the consoles are all going to online only DRM boxes that PC gaming is the way to go."
Why do you pretend PC gaming is any different? Console DRM has always followed PC DRM not led it. It's near impossible to find offline games for the PC now, everything on Steam is activated and installed online, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard all force you to be online to activate and to play half the time now.
I'd love it if what you say is true, but it's not, I can't even buy a physical DVD of a game in store now and not have to activate it online for the PC. In fact, Blizzard's games no longer even come with the game, you buy a DVD case with a CD key and a DVD in it that has what, a 2mb installer that downloads the whole thing off the internet? At least with the XBox One/PS4 I wont have to use 16gb or whatever of my monthly cap and wait for a few hours before I can play the damn game I just bought a physical disc for - I'll just be able to stick it in, activate it, and play immediately. This isn't to defend the DRM systems on these consoles, fuck no, I think all DRM is bad and should just die, there's literally no benefit to the consumer of it and it's entirely about subverting people's legal right to second hand sales of products they've bought, but even the PC's most prominent developer Blizzard has worse DRM than any console current or planned.
There are many reasons to prefer PC gaming over consoles (like having a non-retarded set of inputs for MMOs and RTS games for example) but DRM definitely isn't one of them.
Does this offer any benefit at all when you're using a discreet card? or for those of us who always do is it just a complete waste of silicon integrating it in?
You can't really criticise people on other sites when you're doing the exact same thing they do - you're jumping at the guy like a rabid fanboy.
FWIW I was always a PC gamer, I bought a 360 in 2006 and enjoyed a lot of games on it, I had an N64, Gamecube and Wii but never ended up playing them much largely playing PC or 360 instead. I'm back to PC gaming now, mostly Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and Wargame (both versions).
Is it really so hard to realise that all platforms have some decent games and that over time it fluctuates as to which has the most? In say 2008 - 2010 things were a bit quiet on the PC front and there was definitely more choice of higher quality games on the 360, but that's changed now and the more compelling games in the last year or so have been on the PC. Recent years have seen an awesome indie resurgence on all platforms too with things like Minecraft and many others and the PC has been one of the main beneficiaries of that.
Does it always have to be a pissing contest? Your reaction to the guys post highlights the problem exactly, someone dares say something and people like yourself misconstrue what he's saying and feel you need to jump to the defence of the PC as if some mortal sin has been committed.
Ultimately platforms will stand on their own two feet, if they're any good people will buy and play games on them, and games will be developed for them. Digital pissing contests wont make any difference to that, so there's no point starting a fight and raising your blood pressure over it.
The reality there is that at a guess 95% of their staff could get by with something as simple as Wordpad, not that I'm advocating they just use that but certainly to give you an idea of the level of complexity they need in their office suite - i.e. pretty much none.
That's why switching to 2010 struck me as particularly wasteful, there was really nothing in it that I suspect anything other than maybe 2 or 3 out of the 5000 staff they employ would use.
I'll be honest and say I'm not entirely sure why they paid explicitly for Office separately because I was under the impression they'd subscribed to Microsoft's software assurance programme, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply because one person signed up to SA, and the other didn't realise they were signed up to SA and just bought 5000 licenses for Office individually. That's the sort of lack of communication you get there that leads to thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions just being thrown away. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe their SA license didn't cover office for some reason but it was all a little weird.
Of course the other possibility was out and out corruption, the head of IT was very much in the pockets of Microsoft, regularly going down to Reading to go to their parties and not that I'm saying FOSS would've been worthwhile (I'm not a fan of FOSS alternatives) but he didn't even ever consider it as an option during procurement which always seemed to sink - if you don't even attempt to evaluate alternatives then how can you be sure you're getting value for money? I always felt that's kind of important when it's not your money, but the taxpayers. Unfortunately this sort of attitude of actually wanting to give the tax payers a good deal rather than waste their money was generally frowned upon as you being a troublemaker just trying to make life difficult for the old boys club that was just looking for an easy road to early retirement at the age of 55 - 60 and with a hefty pay off to boot.
"Except you would pay someone that wage to come in and deploy to your PCs via an automated method, especially if your current IT has no experience with that product."
One person at £32k is still cheaper than 10 people at £320k and given that they have a lot of computers at different sites they damn well should (and for what it's worth do) have staff trained in remote deployment and the software and infrastructure to do it. They just opted to send people around physically instead.
"For instance: Word 2010 by default uses different paragraph spacing than 2007, you probably want to ensure your Office Programs are saving in your companies default extension (doc or docx) and in the required location (each user may have a mapped "user drive" that you want to be the default save location)."
That's why you have a support team. For when these things don't work.
"And there are reasons to upgrade that improve the user experience (you at least have the ribbon on every product in 2010, not a mix like 2007) and IT Support (2010 DOES have less issues than 2007)."
No reasons large enough to justify the expenditure at a time when they're making cuts axing meaningful jobs that could've otherwise been saved. The staff could just as well have got by on 2007 for a few more years until 2013 came out or the next version again even and 99% of the staff would have never even noticed the difference or seen any change in productivity.
"But don't worry, just keep straw manning to success."
I don't think you understand that fallacy.
I'm not theorising, I worked there myself for some years and still have friends who work there to this day, everything I've said is fact - it was a waste of money based on poor management decisions and nothing else. You can pretend there may have been good reasons all you want but there weren't it is just a real life example of public sector throwing money down the drain.
It almost sounds like your law enforcement can do what they want until it's deemed illegal then?
Here they can't do anything until it's deemed legal. They can't just snoop on private citizens until a law has been passed saying explicitly that they can do that, which means it has to get past the elected representatives first.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he's not arguing that, because the Nazi's weren't left wing and I'm not sure why you'd think they were unless you assume because they have socialism in their name that makes them left-wing socialists, but then I guess you think the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a Democratic People's Republic too right?
No it wouldn't, it would just be politically untenable because having thousands of slaves is looked down upon nowadays, even if you do give them JCBs to make it easier.
No idea what they do but I did exactly this for a university project using neural networks. It was some years ago so I can't really remember the details of what exact data we had, I just remember having a dataset of chemical composition data for a good number of wines as a training set.
At the end of the day this is just a straightforward classification problem so any number of statistical classification methods should work just fine.
"Zimbabwe? North Korea? Actually, they're probably worse."
No, that's the thing, even these countries wouldn't be like that, because the ratio of rich to poor is likely closer to 1:10,000 not 1:10.
The only places I could think of it being the case might be some of the tax haven countries like Monaco or Luxembourg, or alternatively perhaps somewhere like Dubai, but I'm not sure that's the case in those places even.
"-no physical media to lose, I cant count the number of games I've lost in moves over the years"
You can lose account details, or even have them hacked (not necessarily on your system) with varying degrees of success in getting them back.
"-also no lost keys to go along with the first one"
Irrelevant. You don't need keys in the first place if you don't have DRM. Or if you do have them anyway it doesn't matter if you lose some random key on the net if you lose yours.
"-no tedious installs, pick all the games you want and let it download/install, when its done everything is ready to go"
No difference. You still have to load up a program/insert a disc and click install then it goes off and does it.
"-no updating, all updates are handled automatically
-dlc (if you consider that a benefit, could 50/50 on that one)
-a built in online community for every game, direct access to game forums and the like"
No reason you can't have that anyway. You don't need DRM for it.
"-much cheaper prices than physical media, you can get 5-10 games for the price of one physical game if you time it right"
Rarely ever true. Physical copies are often cheaper than digital copies. Steam is usually full RRP on new copies, places like Amazon just about never is. Steam has sales, Amazon et. al. have sales.
But fundamentally my point wasn't really just about physical media vs. online, but simply the point that DRM wasn't necessary then, and isn't necessary now. You could do everything you do now with Steam, minus the DRM.
My point is simply that DRM adds nothing you couldn't have without DRM. For the consumer DRM is always nothing but a net negative.
"Because average wage is a bullshit metric, see my reply above."
No it's not, because:
a) It's across a large sample size than your example. For example, the national average wage in the UK is about £26,000 which is about right despite the fact we have one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world living in London. Your example is what is bullshit, that's the problem. Your example implied 1 in 10 people made 100 times the amount of those on minimum wage and 9 in 10 made minimum wage. I don't think there's a single economy anything like that in the real world.
b) It's still representative of living standards, even in your example if 90% of the population are earning minimum wage then prices will reflect that or those people couldn't even afford to be alive.
"And what about people who currently live in the abject poverty due to not even minimum wages?"
If someone is not getting paid minimum wage then they must take that up with their government and get their employer who is breaking the law to stop breaking the law. That has nothing to do with any other country or the EU beyond the fact that if your government doesn't enforce that you can get the EU to make them enforce it with a European Court of Justice ruling.
"Prices are the same for food and clothing are the same across euroland."
Stop being stupid. Of course they're not.
Are they not now backtracking on that to at least some degree even if still imperfect?
So yes, exactly like that.
Microsoft do a lot wrong, but they do tend to react to consumer feedback and it does differ from division to division - their response to Windows 8 has been way too slow, but for example, the Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC teams for example have been relatively quick to respond to feedback and alter their product in response, maybe still not as fast as they could be but as fast as you can expect from most corporate behemoths and some just never respond to customer complaints. Compare the XBox RROD issues for example which they ultimately accepted blame for and offered full replacement and contrast and compare to Sony's YLOD issue where they pretended it wasn't happening, or backwards compat/linux removal issue that they just continued to ignore the customer on.
I hate playing devil's advocate for Microsoft because I feel like I'm defending them way more than they deserve, but I think someone has to else discussion just descends into a pit of bile fuelled hate and out and out FUD and at that point the entire discussion is meaningless and a waste of everyone's time.
I have a PS3 but bought it after Linux was already removed.
Being a PS3 owner and not having had the feature removed from me personally though doesn't mean I magically have to give them a free pass because guess what? I'm not a fanboy.
Removing features from customers is still a fucking shitty move however you cut it and guess what? Microsoft are twats for adding more and more ads to XBL when I already pay them for the service, Nintendo are twats for selling me a turd that never ended up with any compelling games, Apple are twats for being such restrictive power hungry patent trolls, and Google are twats for being such a bunch of tax dodging idiots.
You know, it is possible to hate companies for all piss poor anti-consumer moves. I'm a customer so I don't owe them a thing, I have no vested interest in defending them and I have every interest in calling them all out when they do bad things.
But what makes your post so utterly sad is that what you're basically saying is that you're disappointed that I called Sony out with the implication that I shouldn't have, that I should give them a free pass and focus on just the bad things of other companies. Do you know why you think that? Because you're a fanboy. The very thing you're criticising.
Does chat roulette have DRM though or can I save it to watch time and time again?
Where do I get this magical discounted version of Steam? Every time I want to buy something from it it's RRP and I have to go to places like Amazon to get it discounted. For example, I just bought Wargame: Airland Battle, £29.99 on Steam, £19.99 on Amazon.
I understand Steam has sales, but so does every retailer and Steam seems to be no different in this respect. It's mostly just end of line or poor selling stuff that's discounted and shops have always done the same.
FWIW you can just as well play current gen console games without an internet connection, in fact, current gen consoles are less restrictive than most modern PC games like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 - these games don't even come on the disc you buy, you have to download them and have to play them online even single player.
So when you say "this is not a feature that consoles seem to offer" I'm guessing you're referring to the current proposals for future consoles? It's certainly not true of any current gen system that are currently less restrictive than a lot of PC DRM which is largely being used as the roadmap for the next gen of consoles.
Why would Sony be loving it? If history is anything to go by then Sony will be at least as worse, the difference is that unlike Microsoft they're just not being open about it. If anything it seems more like Microsoft is testing the waters to see what they can get away with, if there really is just way too much negative feedback they'll likely losen the restrictions somewhat. In contrast Sony's business model is, as always, keep quiet and just dump it on the user saying nothing and hope no one notices.
I don't really like any of it (though at least the ability to share games with family members is a step forward, because that's better than most DRM/unlock codes on existing platforms where you're expected to buy a copy per family member) but pretending Sony is going to be some magical saviour is sad. We saw the Sony fanboys spreading the exact same FUD and doing the exact same thing last console round and look how that ended up. Removed features etc.
Anyone pretending Sony is going to be a saviour right now given that we've not even seen a picture of their fucking device yet let alone had any real concrete information about it is having a laugh, especially when track records are taken into account.
I'm not disagreeing with most of your post, but you've made this point twice now:
"Plus tools used to perform the work (ticketing system, remote access tools?) . Again, you probably have no clue how much that actually costs"
You realise that cost can perfectly well be zero (well, beyond staff time for initial setup/customisation)? This is one of those areas where FOSS provides excellent solutions. This is one of those unnecessary expenditures that's trivially eliminated. Sure buy some flashy expensive proprietary ticket management system if you have more money than you know what to do with, but using a FOSS solution isn't going to cause any measurable detriment to your productivity.
I don't really understand the problem, I compared to this chart of average wages here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_net_average_wage
If we were to standardise the minimum wage across Europe based on the nations with the highest wage then the minimum wage would be many times higher than the average wage in some of these countries. If we standardise on the lowest wage then people on minimum wage in say the UK would be forced into abject poverty.
The minimum wage seems fairly uniformly relative to the average wage which in turn will correlate closely with the cost of living. What's the problem exactly?
Well said. Don't be afraid to lie to recruiters because they don't know what the hell they're on about, because it's a dirty messed up industry that pursues borderline illegal (and sometimes outright illegal) practices in the UK at least. It's a skill in itself knowing how to play these guys. There are a few good ones, but they're so very few and far between - you'll know them when you find them though, they're the ones that'll be genuinely honest with you, and you can be honest with. When you do find one of the few good ones, build up a rapport with them and stay in touch. They'll be happy to do this because if you're any good they know that one day it may be you paying them to find you some hires and not just them finding roles for you.
But to highlight AmiMoJo's point, I've had recruiters ask me "Do you know .NET 4?" to which I answer yes, and then they say "What about the .NET framework, do you know that too?" to which you don't even bother wasting your time trying to explain they're the same thing because half of them then think you're trying to blag your way out of not knowing it if you do anything other than say yes/no, so it's easier to actually blag, and just say "Yes". Similarly if they say "Do you know Visual Studio?" or whatever, just say yes, and if they ask what version, just say the highest, because yes, sometimes if you just say "2010 is the highest I've worked with" when 2012 is out then they'll literally filter you out because they don't understand that the difference between versions is so meaningless that it's entirely irrelevant to filtering you in/out for a job. Effectively you just have to tell them what they want to hear, even if that doesn't necessarily make sense or is utterly meaningless in terms of suitability for the job.
I used to think it was okay to bend the truth a little if you had an interview with someone who wanted you to know something that you didn't know that well but knew you could know inside out before you started if you got the job too. I'm not talking lying about SQL when you don't, but if for example they wanted to know if you had experience with a specific subset of it, like say, triggers, and you knew what they were, knew what they did, but didn't know the keywords and so forth off by heart and didn't have commercial experience with that specific small subset. But you know what? It's not worth it - if they want you to out and out have experience in that technology rather than simply recognise you're more than capable of learning it and being effective as anyone in it in short order then it's not the sort of place you want to work anyway so don't even waste your time - there's no point working somewhere that values rubber stamping of buzzwords over real actual ability to learn and do.
It's stupid of them to demand that level of knowledge because no one takes a job where they know everything in the job inside out and can do it with their eyes closed, if they did then they would be getting zero career progression from the role and would be bored within a day. Good employers recognise this explicitly and recruit based on you knowing a decent amount of what they need and being capable of learning the rest fairly easily. Bad ones expect you to know the most pointless minute details off by heart such as rarely used function names in the depths of some massive framework and aren't offering you any career progression so don't even waste your time trying to blag yourself a job with them.
So in summary, don't worry about what you say to recruiters, you'll be less full of shit than they are whatever you say to them, but don't waste time lying to the actual employers, if you feel you have to then you're either going for a job where you'll be genuinely out of your depth (and they'll probably find out shortly after in the interview when they probe you further), or you're going for a job where the employer is shit and has really nothing of value to offer you.
In all the best jobs I've ever had I've been able to be complet
No there isn't, the population still gets to vote.
The fact they vote for the same old two parties rather than something different doesn't absolve them of blame, it just means that most of them are too stupid to know what's good for them.
No but it does at least tell people looking for money that there's money in the field of maths and hence get more people into the field than otherwise would.
It can happen when a publisher goes bankrupt or gets taken over - Valve may then lose the right to distribute that publisher's games.
It means that you don't just have to worry about Valve going bust, or changing hands as a risk for losing some or all of your games, but any games company you buy from - if it goes bust or gets sold you could arbitrarily be cut off from ever downloading or playing them again via Steam.
Of course, they forget to make this clear to you until it actually happens.
"I love steam. It means I can keep my game catalog as I upgrade my machine, switch operating systems, switch platforms... my games are mine. While I can't sell used games, I always try them out non-steam first before I decide I'm going to purchase them. Steam guarantees that I'll have those games available to me no matter what happens to my computer. To me, it's the best DRM out there, and the benefits outweigh my dislike for DRM."
A long time ago, in an age before Steam, we had these things called CDs, DVDs, and Floppy Disks. We could buy games on them and they tended not to come with any DRM, and guess what? We got to do all the things you mention but without the second hand sales restriction you also mention.
Remind me again what the benefit of Steam is? Remind me again why DRM helps you do any of these things at all when they can all be done without DRM? Remind me why the fuck such an obvious point got missed by the moderators who moderated your post up?
It seems to depend partly on the game.
Defcon just always kept reverting back to trial mode for me when I bought and played it via Steam and I had to reload it each time until it went into licensed mode.
I've also had games I just couldn't activate for a few days when I tried which was annoying because I always felt there was something distinctly wrong about a third party telling me I couldn't use a product I'd paid for until they got their arse into gear.
I agree 99% of the time it works fine, but fundamentally anything that makes something fail 1% of the time for a legitimate consumer is unacceptable given that it offers absolutely zero benefit to the consumer. If they want to have DRM it needs to work in every customer's circumstances perfectly 100% of the time, or it needs to go. The consumer shouldn't suffer because of publisher's greed to prevent second hand sales.
"Personally I think its great and is just one more example of how now that the consoles are all going to online only DRM boxes that PC gaming is the way to go."
Why do you pretend PC gaming is any different? Console DRM has always followed PC DRM not led it. It's near impossible to find offline games for the PC now, everything on Steam is activated and installed online, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard all force you to be online to activate and to play half the time now.
I'd love it if what you say is true, but it's not, I can't even buy a physical DVD of a game in store now and not have to activate it online for the PC. In fact, Blizzard's games no longer even come with the game, you buy a DVD case with a CD key and a DVD in it that has what, a 2mb installer that downloads the whole thing off the internet? At least with the XBox One/PS4 I wont have to use 16gb or whatever of my monthly cap and wait for a few hours before I can play the damn game I just bought a physical disc for - I'll just be able to stick it in, activate it, and play immediately. This isn't to defend the DRM systems on these consoles, fuck no, I think all DRM is bad and should just die, there's literally no benefit to the consumer of it and it's entirely about subverting people's legal right to second hand sales of products they've bought, but even the PC's most prominent developer Blizzard has worse DRM than any console current or planned.
There are many reasons to prefer PC gaming over consoles (like having a non-retarded set of inputs for MMOs and RTS games for example) but DRM definitely isn't one of them.
Does this offer any benefit at all when you're using a discreet card? or for those of us who always do is it just a complete waste of silicon integrating it in?
You can't really criticise people on other sites when you're doing the exact same thing they do - you're jumping at the guy like a rabid fanboy.
FWIW I was always a PC gamer, I bought a 360 in 2006 and enjoyed a lot of games on it, I had an N64, Gamecube and Wii but never ended up playing them much largely playing PC or 360 instead. I'm back to PC gaming now, mostly Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and Wargame (both versions).
Is it really so hard to realise that all platforms have some decent games and that over time it fluctuates as to which has the most? In say 2008 - 2010 things were a bit quiet on the PC front and there was definitely more choice of higher quality games on the 360, but that's changed now and the more compelling games in the last year or so have been on the PC. Recent years have seen an awesome indie resurgence on all platforms too with things like Minecraft and many others and the PC has been one of the main beneficiaries of that.
Does it always have to be a pissing contest? Your reaction to the guys post highlights the problem exactly, someone dares say something and people like yourself misconstrue what he's saying and feel you need to jump to the defence of the PC as if some mortal sin has been committed.
Ultimately platforms will stand on their own two feet, if they're any good people will buy and play games on them, and games will be developed for them. Digital pissing contests wont make any difference to that, so there's no point starting a fight and raising your blood pressure over it.
The reality there is that at a guess 95% of their staff could get by with something as simple as Wordpad, not that I'm advocating they just use that but certainly to give you an idea of the level of complexity they need in their office suite - i.e. pretty much none.
That's why switching to 2010 struck me as particularly wasteful, there was really nothing in it that I suspect anything other than maybe 2 or 3 out of the 5000 staff they employ would use.
I'll be honest and say I'm not entirely sure why they paid explicitly for Office separately because I was under the impression they'd subscribed to Microsoft's software assurance programme, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply because one person signed up to SA, and the other didn't realise they were signed up to SA and just bought 5000 licenses for Office individually. That's the sort of lack of communication you get there that leads to thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions just being thrown away. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe their SA license didn't cover office for some reason but it was all a little weird.
Of course the other possibility was out and out corruption, the head of IT was very much in the pockets of Microsoft, regularly going down to Reading to go to their parties and not that I'm saying FOSS would've been worthwhile (I'm not a fan of FOSS alternatives) but he didn't even ever consider it as an option during procurement which always seemed to sink - if you don't even attempt to evaluate alternatives then how can you be sure you're getting value for money? I always felt that's kind of important when it's not your money, but the taxpayers. Unfortunately this sort of attitude of actually wanting to give the tax payers a good deal rather than waste their money was generally frowned upon as you being a troublemaker just trying to make life difficult for the old boys club that was just looking for an easy road to early retirement at the age of 55 - 60 and with a hefty pay off to boot.
"Except you would pay someone that wage to come in and deploy to your PCs via an automated method, especially if your current IT has no experience with that product."
One person at £32k is still cheaper than 10 people at £320k and given that they have a lot of computers at different sites they damn well should (and for what it's worth do) have staff trained in remote deployment and the software and infrastructure to do it. They just opted to send people around physically instead.
"For instance: Word 2010 by default uses different paragraph spacing than 2007, you probably want to ensure your Office Programs are saving in your companies default extension (doc or docx) and in the required location (each user may have a mapped "user drive" that you want to be the default save location)."
That's why you have a support team. For when these things don't work.
"And there are reasons to upgrade that improve the user experience (you at least have the ribbon on every product in 2010, not a mix like 2007) and IT Support (2010 DOES have less issues than 2007)."
No reasons large enough to justify the expenditure at a time when they're making cuts axing meaningful jobs that could've otherwise been saved. The staff could just as well have got by on 2007 for a few more years until 2013 came out or the next version again even and 99% of the staff would have never even noticed the difference or seen any change in productivity.
"But don't worry, just keep straw manning to success."
I don't think you understand that fallacy.
I'm not theorising, I worked there myself for some years and still have friends who work there to this day, everything I've said is fact - it was a waste of money based on poor management decisions and nothing else. You can pretend there may have been good reasons all you want but there weren't it is just a real life example of public sector throwing money down the drain.
It almost sounds like your law enforcement can do what they want until it's deemed illegal then?
Here they can't do anything until it's deemed legal. They can't just snoop on private citizens until a law has been passed saying explicitly that they can do that, which means it has to get past the elected representatives first.