Windows got the market by price, not by opening up new frontiers.. They copied a lot of stuff from the Mac.. Just iimplemented it on a platform that became affordable to more users than the Apple hardware/software.
Then their 'hammering away' wasn't actually technical; they employed marketing campaigns, misinformation, and even error messages in their products to scare people away from competition (c.f. the old messages in windows 3 when you ran it on a competing DOS)..
MS doesn't (historically) play the 'competition' game.. It plays scorched earth tactics. Find a market it wants to play in.. Throw endless money at it, pushing products out for less than a commercial competitor in only that market can afford (c.f. IE vs Netscape, and other similar events in other markets). Wait until said competitor is dead, then lock it in, and perhaps charge more for the product afterwards, or let it stagnate and put no further development in, killing the development of a whole market.
In the iPod battle, it's Apple, not Microsoft, which pushes to new areas (all the functionality of the iPod touch, the ease of use, so on, so forth).. MS had the almost killer app in there with their wireless sharing, but with its limitations, nobody would have been that enthused about it..
So, MS did their usual "throw money at it, and see what sticks", Apple did design work, and targetted their resources and worked out what people would want to see.. There's a point at which you decide to cut your losses and run. MS have been trounced solidly on all fronts on this one. Now that MS seem to actually have to worry about money (wonder how much they lost in the market crashes), seems this loss maker that isn't going anywhere soon would be a good cut, rather than other areas that actually make a profit.
Wars are won (or at least not completely lost) by not fighting on too many fronts, especially ones where you're getting solidly thrashed by overwhelming opposition. Sometimes a ceasefire, or strategic withdrawl can save the whole show, rather than throwing everything you have in every direction.
Everything requires a basis, and assumptions. In Science textbooks, all the stuff presented there is either "wrong, but to all intents and purposes for the level that people studying it at the time are concerned, observably correct", or actually correct to the best understanding at the time of writing (though unless you're studying at the highest level, it may omit large parts of the story that you just don't need to know). Each of these books is available to scrutiny, and if they get it wrong, I can pretty much guarantee that they'll be forced to pull the texts.
So, the science textbooks are 'assumptions that can be made' in the quest to learn more about how things really work. And that was something that my science teachers used to comment on now and then when teaching something.. "This explanation is actually wrong, but it explains things at the level you deal with.. If you take your studies further, it'll all be explained.. If you don't, you don't need to know as observably, it'll make no difference". As a carrot, it worked rather well (a good many of us studied that field for ourselves in spare time, just to get the picture of what it was we were missing, even if our math wasn't good enough at the time to really grok it).
You must have had a bad school if the lateral thinkers were at the bottom of the pile.. My memory has always been atrocious, but I've always been a good reasoner/lateral thinker.. And I've largely been towards the high end of the classes (a little bit of memory, plus the ability to reason around the edges, and match up with other bits of theory that manage to stick). Most of the science (math not included, but hey, its dubious if that's a science or an art.. Or both..) included practicals. And in there, the lateral thinking came to the fore in observations, theorising etc.
The costs of this seem to average out at approximately £18 per query, which is less than the amount that can be charged for a "Freedom of Information Act" request, so the ISPs definitely are not gouging the investigators.
It also definitely does cost the ISPs money to obtain the specific requests, so by any measure, they should be able to charge. If they're suddenly expected to donate their time for free "because of the children", then surely the investigators should be expected to do the same (how would they like their job to be suddenly unpaid)?
This token amount, though small, operates as one of the balances to ensure that investigations are at least slightly sane, otherwise I can see requests flying out on every person they can find, simply because there is no reason not to.
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment. Long may the targetting, rather than scattershot fishing expeditions so favoured by digital enforcement agencies, continue.
Ooops, they shouldn't ask that. Social Security (Or national insurance number in the UK) is a privileged piece of info. It's a great loophole to acquire someone's number given you know their name and address (phone up hospital, give the name and address, and voila, they give you back the person's Social Security number). If you ask for name and date of birth, you can confirm with address. In other words, you're asking for more privileged information than you give back, the combination of all three is sufficient to identify the person. Either that, or you ask for their social security number. It's bad practice to hand back more privileged info than you receive.
Also, patients seeing medical records won't affect accountability one jot. Currently there are several levels of 'intervention' in hospitals. When a doctor notes something, or requests a procedure or medication, the request goes past an intervention group. For medication, this would be a Pharmacy intervention group. They'll check the patient notes to see what's being treated, check the medication requested, make sure the dosage is correct (in case the doc has accidentally requested 10g instead of 10mg, or vice versa), check it doesn't interfere with other drugs, or even query in case it's not a drug that would affect the condition at all. If the doc has got it wrong, they'll log it, and get in touch with the doc quickly to verify the request, and if the doc was wrong, they'll advise the correct dosage/medication for the doc to agree. This happens in a busy hospital, which is why the procedures are in place to catch it. Occasionally, something will slip through all layers (nothing is perfect). In those cases, the absence of notes in the medical records when they are noted as ok'd elsewhere, or queried in intervention is a serious issue, possibly more so than being wrong. Having good and consistent notes gives the hospital a chance to win a case. Absence of notes is always a losing strategy, as in court, the default is to find against the hospital.
Having direct access to records is not always a great idea. For one, most people won't understand what's there (and no, reading up on the internet won't always make you understand either). Having a medical 'fishing trip' would show up.. And some conditions that are quite mild, may present symptoms of something that could also be very dire. And if all that's happening is they're doing tests to discount the dire ones, who would feel comfy being checked for cancer, AIDS, or some other nasty, and seeing that test being carried out, when the real expectation is that it's not, they simply want to PROVE it's not. Ignorance, in many cases, really is bliss. Plus, if you can get at it, I can guarantee others can too, by some route or another. Personally, I don't trust patient accessible records.
Take into account economies of scale. When Fallout was produced, the target market was countable in the thousands, fallout 2 tens or maybe a few hundred thousand. Today, games sell to the mass market. Yes, the production costs are higher, but the target market is FAR wider. Which is why the big games houses these days have millions in the pot, compared to a few thousand that they could make a living with.
Ah, my degreeless friend is quite a prominent musician. However, the other several hundred musicians I knew are struggling. And another degreeless friend is quite a prominent artist.. And the other few hundred I knew are effectively struggling to make ends meet. Another degreeless friend is doing pretty well in IT, however, most of the rest of the ones I know without degrees are finding it hard going at the moment.
Everyone can point to someone they know without a degree doing well. Especially if they get out and start their own company. However, a degree is exceptionally useful for many reasons: Networking (you end up knowing a lot of people in the same field, who you know are competent, or maybe not so competent), surrounding theory (knowing a lot more than just a general application of a language), getting a very wide view of the field, and introductions to various specialities that you may not ever encounter in the 'real world', and not realise are more your calling.. Plus, it's an extra piece of paper that puts a sparkle in the eye of the interviewer. And in the world of the next few years, you'll want all the sparkle you can get.
Japanese games, written primarily for the Japanese culture. If you don't dive into the culture, you'll miss a lot of the relevance of the games (though they're still great entertainment, as a personal opinion).
Well, by that argument, most of the countries in the Middle East and Africa haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of fighting off either the US, Russia or China. By that yard stick, they aren't sovereign either.
One of the reasons we aren't mired in huge amounts of empire building these days is because the major powers are largely bound by international law (which is still young and a little 'edgy'). Sealand makes interesting use of those laws in maintaining its independence (and hey, lots of places are now no longer truly independent, just look at the effects of this global credit crisis to see how far and how deep international trade runs). Should the UK get sufficiently peeved, it will still need sufficient legal backing to annex Sealand (otherwise, it could quite happily decide that it'll expand its borders into, say, France). There is already a lot of jostling and arguing over National boundaries, and has been for some time; it's just all handled in the courts (well, apart from the jostling in the fishermen's boats). Sealand is just using exactly the same laws. I suspect the legal wrangling would be that Sealand was never truly a sovereign nation anyhow, making the whole of the later legal premises void. But that in itself would be an interesting courtroom wrangle.
You can of course say "What the hell" and just shut it down. But that would be against the law.. And the UK has big enough issues at the moment without getting hauled through the international courts.
Longer email threads seem to end up forwarded and brought to the attention of many people you never expected at the outset. Judicious editing of the emails to include only the relevant sections for the replies, giving the context of the emerging thread of conversation means that someone being brought up to speed with that segment of the conversation doesn't need to trawl through masses of irrelevant junk to get at the meat of the issue. I tend to do it as an efficiency gain, rather than taking storage space into account. All comes back to that quote you hear people come out with after sitting through a bad movie "Well, that's an hour of my life I'll never get back". It may only be a few minutes at a time, but they mount up over time. Plus, crafting things to cut to the heart of the matter puts things into sharp perspective, and means people are far less likely to digress, saving even more wasted time.
That is because they've had to clean room reverse engineer the processes involved by watching the behaviour on the network of a notoriously weird protocol. Now, if they could dive into the binary and simply watch that run on a disassembler, the job would have been quicker by far. However doing that would breach copyright, which would get them sued by a company with notoriously deep pockets, and summarily shut down, invalidating their entire project. Obfuscate the code and it'll make no difference. It still has to compile, and the compiler doesn't really obfuscate (it optimizes). Encrypt it, and someone will bust the encryption, and you'll be back at square one (disassembled code, and someone will have it cloned and documented in a short period of time, say a week or two for smallish changes, a few weeks/months for large).
Actually, I hope some marketer is reading your answer.
As another question, just out of curiosity, if you saw two versions that were available on Torrent (one labelled as the "Free demo" and one that was the "Full version", would you actually be tempted to grab the demo version, or would you leap for the pirated full version?
Hear hear. I've been running UNIX and Windows in admin capacity since the early '90s. The biggest problem I've seen at the moment is caused by marketing. Microsoft just refuse to stop advertising Windows servers as being so simple the cat could administer it. With that message on the table, HR departments get the idea that all it then takes to administer servers is one cat and a magic wand. So they create low paid jobs for 'admins' that don't actually know much about administration (as it's so easy, who actually needs skills in it 'eh?). UNIX tends to get better results overall, largely because it's seen as a skilled job. They pay the money, they require that you know what you're doing. Where you get admins that know the detail on Windows to the depth that UNIX gurus know UNIX, comparable results are obtained.
Now, if only Microsoft would stop telling suits that all they need to administer Windows is someone with one finger and half a brain, then the rep. of Windows would increase dramatically. However, there's money to be made today by churning out an MCSE who two weeks ago didn't know what the power cable plugged into. Who cares about the future of the platform when you can advertise tomorrow with a new glossy pamphlet, and make money today? Well, apart from the people who really understand system administration, and hey, what do they know?
Don't equate right wing with freedom unfriendly. Odd as it may sound to those that make that mistake, 10 years ago, pre-Labour, we had a lot more freedom here in the UK than we do now. A LOT more.
With standard Governmental project planning and pork barrel politics, I'd say it would end up with a $2bn deficit, no product, and end up shipping the $200 camera in a painted box to all the people that bought into the project, claiming a "big win" in face recognition.
Sorry, I just don't get your connecting the difficulty of sport and math. Playing in the national league of a sport is nothing like getting your basic degree.. The basic degree says you have a good chance of trying out for your local amateur team. Getting a PHD, and tenure and research post in a good university.. Now that's playing in the national league. And it's also exceedingly hard to achieve. And carries nowhere near the kind of take home pay that a premiere league sportsman has.
There is a pay grade within academics for achievements and time. It's called advancement in the department. However, that pay grade, as previously mentioned is nowhere near the sports personalities' pay.
The time periods for patents were implemented when it took years to get an invention to market, and when you did, because ideas just didn't travel that fast, it took years again for it to saturate a market (in engineering, you'd be lucky to get an advancement in a significant portion of the market within 10 years of getting a patent). Copyright, when it was first created, gave a period of 14 years complete monopoly of the work to an author. That was deemed a fair period in which to recoup the costs, and make it possible to be an author as a job, and make money. That was in 1709, when ideas travelled FAR more slowly. So if, in 14 years, an author could make a living writing in 1709 with a limited audience (literacy was low), why on earth does it take the life of the author PLUS 70 years? Because it's profitable to big business, not the individual academic, who, because they don't have the funds to fight the 'big boys', rarely get to play the patent game (copyright, perhaps, but that's another whole minefield).
Yes, many people put Bill Gates as a nerd genius. Yes, he created a huge company, in much the same way as the Ghengis Khan built a large army. Scorched earth tactics that turned a large part of the software world into a wasteland. That was the problem with his version of 'competition'.. It wasn't a fight to get a share of the market, he fought to kill any corporation he couldn't own. Which was great in the financiers eyes, as it was a glowing paragon of their kind of money making machine. That same money making machine which has just ground to a screeching halt. No, I'm not a rabid anti-Microsoft zealot. Microsoft have come up with great inventions over the years, and MS labs have come up with true innovation.. Just the business side of it has had no honour. It's not what a competitive academic environment would give at all. It's what a cut-throat, predatory, dishonourable number cruncher would come up with as a strategy. Competition is where you come up with the odd trick to win the egg and spoon race (like glueing your egg to the spoon). Bill Gate's 'competition' is shooting everyone else on the track.
Yes, we're fully aware of what's going on. And we're fully aware that we're not going to magically pull the solution to the woes of the world out of thin air. Now, that leaves us two options. Sit in a corner and worry ourselves into gibbering wrecks, or, we can concentrate on something small that's just plain fun. You know, the kind of thing that'll give you a bit of rest and respite from the doom and gloom, so that when we get back out and have to deal with it again, we're that little bit more refreshed and ready to do something if we can.
And anyway, what sport isn't some "fancied up child's game"? Face it, we have to play to get a good social interaction, else we'll be so boring that people around would wish the world would come to an end, just to put a stop to the incessant misery.
Now, you've just told us off for having this nice little distraction for a few minutes, when we obviously have far more serious things to do... So, please, enlighten me.. Exactly what should I be doing at this very moment in time (just gone midnight here in the UK) that will cure America's political issues, and fix the global economy?
Nice troll though, I'll give you that.. Almost as fun to bite on as a cheese sandwich.
From the definition of stealing that says "to take somebody's work and pass it off as your own". I think this fits case fits the definition of stealing quite nicely.
Actually, it's a great idea. You mentioned lots of boundary conditions and "What if" on the negative side. Look at the wins:
What if you manage to complete some work you otherwise wouldn't have been able to by using the last of the battery that was charged by solar. What about the energy you'll save (across the whole user base of the machines). That's significant! What if you're a casual user of the laptop (like my father; he brings it out now and then, and the battery has frequently lost charge from sitting around so long!). It could mean you have a full battery rather than an almost empty one.
Maybe not something to slap into full production from the word go, but certainly worth examining with a pilot project, and maybe a small line release.
A bug in software most frequently arises due to bad, or insufficient logic being applied. I'd say that failing to run because somebody happens to have another (and in this case fully supported by Microsoft) program running in the background. You can see where the suits (and some knee jerk reactions from developers) are looking; If we put that bit in there, we're safe.
However, the cracks that appear ensure that this is not the case. As has been noted many times on/. DRM does not affect the people who grab the cracked versions and have no intention of ever paying. It only affects someone who has already given the company their money. This results in a bad customer experience, lowering the credibility of the games house.
In my eyes, this makes the logic applied by the developers (include this, and we'll be safe, and the world will be a better place, and no customer could ever object to this) is inherently flawed. This flaw makes its way into the design. The design is implemented in the software, which causes an issue with various other applications the end user may wish to run. So, the logic used in the design results in a piece of software not running. Whether the intent was to have this happen or not, the logic is flawed, thus making it a bug.
The world isn't made up of thieves. It's made up of people. Very few of who are thieves. Why do we have DRM again? Oh, that's right. It's so the company can steal the ability to resell the game, despite you being legally allowed to.
I run a business (largely scaled back at the moment, as I wanted to follow an ethical sidestep for a while; debth of honour trumps making lots of money). My father runs a business (different one, very successful). My brother runs a business (doing quite alright for himself). My cousins run companies (more successful than me! And they didn't even do a degree). We're all doing quite alright thank you very much. Most of the successful businessmen I know don't have an MBA, or business degree. As for an MBA or business degree allowing you to do more things than a degree in CS, I'd pass you onto the hon. William Gates, to ask him exactly what an MBA can do that he can't. I think you'll find it's surprisingly few things. Including run a successful business.
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Windows got the market by price, not by opening up new frontiers.. They copied a lot of stuff from the Mac.. Just iimplemented it on a platform that became affordable to more users than the Apple hardware/software.
Then their 'hammering away' wasn't actually technical; they employed marketing campaigns, misinformation, and even error messages in their products to scare people away from competition (c.f. the old messages in windows 3 when you ran it on a competing DOS)..
MS doesn't (historically) play the 'competition' game.. It plays scorched earth tactics. Find a market it wants to play in.. Throw endless money at it, pushing products out for less than a commercial competitor in only that market can afford (c.f. IE vs Netscape, and other similar events in other markets). Wait until said competitor is dead, then lock it in, and perhaps charge more for the product afterwards, or let it stagnate and put no further development in, killing the development of a whole market.
In the iPod battle, it's Apple, not Microsoft, which pushes to new areas (all the functionality of the iPod touch, the ease of use, so on, so forth).. MS had the almost killer app in there with their wireless sharing, but with its limitations, nobody would have been that enthused about it..
So, MS did their usual "throw money at it, and see what sticks", Apple did design work, and targetted their resources and worked out what people would want to see..
There's a point at which you decide to cut your losses and run. MS have been trounced solidly on all fronts on this one. Now that MS seem to actually have to worry about money (wonder how much they lost in the market crashes), seems this loss maker that isn't going anywhere soon would be a good cut, rather than other areas that actually make a profit.
Wars are won (or at least not completely lost) by not fighting on too many fronts, especially ones where you're getting solidly thrashed by overwhelming opposition. Sometimes a ceasefire, or strategic withdrawl can save the whole show, rather than throwing everything you have in every direction.
Everything requires a basis, and assumptions.
In Science textbooks, all the stuff presented there is either "wrong, but to all intents and purposes for the level that people studying it at the time are concerned, observably correct", or actually correct to the best understanding at the time of writing (though unless you're studying at the highest level, it may omit large parts of the story that you just don't need to know).
Each of these books is available to scrutiny, and if they get it wrong, I can pretty much guarantee that they'll be forced to pull the texts.
So, the science textbooks are 'assumptions that can be made' in the quest to learn more about how things really work. And that was something that my science teachers used to comment on now and then when teaching something.. "This explanation is actually wrong, but it explains things at the level you deal with.. If you take your studies further, it'll all be explained.. If you don't, you don't need to know as observably, it'll make no difference".
As a carrot, it worked rather well (a good many of us studied that field for ourselves in spare time, just to get the picture of what it was we were missing, even if our math wasn't good enough at the time to really grok it).
You must have had a bad school if the lateral thinkers were at the bottom of the pile.. My memory has always been atrocious, but I've always been a good reasoner/lateral thinker.. And I've largely been towards the high end of the classes (a little bit of memory, plus the ability to reason around the edges, and match up with other bits of theory that manage to stick). Most of the science (math not included, but hey, its dubious if that's a science or an art.. Or both..) included practicals. And in there, the lateral thinking came to the fore in observations, theorising etc.
The costs of this seem to average out at approximately £18 per query, which is less than the amount that can be charged for a "Freedom of Information Act" request, so the ISPs definitely are not gouging the investigators.
It also definitely does cost the ISPs money to obtain the specific requests, so by any measure, they should be able to charge. If they're suddenly expected to donate their time for free "because of the children", then surely the investigators should be expected to do the same (how would they like their job to be suddenly unpaid)?
This token amount, though small, operates as one of the balances to ensure that investigations are at least slightly sane, otherwise I can see requests flying out on every person they can find, simply because there is no reason not to.
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment. Long may the targetting, rather than scattershot fishing expeditions so favoured by digital enforcement agencies, continue.
Ooops, they shouldn't ask that.
Social Security (Or national insurance number in the UK) is a privileged piece of info. It's a great loophole to acquire someone's number given you know their name and address (phone up hospital, give the name and address, and voila, they give you back the person's Social Security number).
If you ask for name and date of birth, you can confirm with address. In other words, you're asking for more privileged information than you give back, the combination of all three is sufficient to identify the person. Either that, or you ask for their social security number. It's bad practice to hand back more privileged info than you receive.
Also, patients seeing medical records won't affect accountability one jot.
Currently there are several levels of 'intervention' in hospitals. When a doctor notes something, or requests a procedure or medication, the request goes past an intervention group. For medication, this would be a Pharmacy intervention group. They'll check the patient notes to see what's being treated, check the medication requested, make sure the dosage is correct (in case the doc has accidentally requested 10g instead of 10mg, or vice versa), check it doesn't interfere with other drugs, or even query in case it's not a drug that would affect the condition at all.
If the doc has got it wrong, they'll log it, and get in touch with the doc quickly to verify the request, and if the doc was wrong, they'll advise the correct dosage/medication for the doc to agree. This happens in a busy hospital, which is why the procedures are in place to catch it. Occasionally, something will slip through all layers (nothing is perfect). In those cases, the absence of notes in the medical records when they are noted as ok'd elsewhere, or queried in intervention is a serious issue, possibly more so than being wrong.
Having good and consistent notes gives the hospital a chance to win a case. Absence of notes is always a losing strategy, as in court, the default is to find against the hospital.
Having direct access to records is not always a great idea. For one, most people won't understand what's there (and no, reading up on the internet won't always make you understand either).
Having a medical 'fishing trip' would show up.. And some conditions that are quite mild, may present symptoms of something that could also be very dire. And if all that's happening is they're doing tests to discount the dire ones, who would feel comfy being checked for cancer, AIDS, or some other nasty, and seeing that test being carried out, when the real expectation is that it's not, they simply want to PROVE it's not.
Ignorance, in many cases, really is bliss.
Plus, if you can get at it, I can guarantee others can too, by some route or another. Personally, I don't trust patient accessible records.
Take into account economies of scale. When Fallout was produced, the target market was countable in the thousands, fallout 2 tens or maybe a few hundred thousand.
Today, games sell to the mass market. Yes, the production costs are higher, but the target market is FAR wider. Which is why the big games houses these days have millions in the pot, compared to a few thousand that they could make a living with.
Ah, my degreeless friend is quite a prominent musician. However, the other several hundred musicians I knew are struggling.
And another degreeless friend is quite a prominent artist.. And the other few hundred I knew are effectively struggling to make ends meet.
Another degreeless friend is doing pretty well in IT, however, most of the rest of the ones I know without degrees are finding it hard going at the moment.
Everyone can point to someone they know without a degree doing well. Especially if they get out and start their own company.
However, a degree is exceptionally useful for many reasons: Networking (you end up knowing a lot of people in the same field, who you know are competent, or maybe not so competent), surrounding theory (knowing a lot more than just a general application of a language), getting a very wide view of the field, and introductions to various specialities that you may not ever encounter in the 'real world', and not realise are more your calling..
Plus, it's an extra piece of paper that puts a sparkle in the eye of the interviewer. And in the world of the next few years, you'll want all the sparkle you can get.
Japanese games, written primarily for the Japanese culture.
If you don't dive into the culture, you'll miss a lot of the relevance of the games (though they're still great entertainment, as a personal opinion).
Well, by that argument, most of the countries in the Middle East and Africa haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of fighting off either the US, Russia or China. By that yard stick, they aren't sovereign either.
One of the reasons we aren't mired in huge amounts of empire building these days is because the major powers are largely bound by international law (which is still young and a little 'edgy'). Sealand makes interesting use of those laws in maintaining its independence (and hey, lots of places are now no longer truly independent, just look at the effects of this global credit crisis to see how far and how deep international trade runs).
Should the UK get sufficiently peeved, it will still need sufficient legal backing to annex Sealand (otherwise, it could quite happily decide that it'll expand its borders into, say, France).
There is already a lot of jostling and arguing over National boundaries, and has been for some time; it's just all handled in the courts (well, apart from the jostling in the fishermen's boats). Sealand is just using exactly the same laws.
I suspect the legal wrangling would be that Sealand was never truly a sovereign nation anyhow, making the whole of the later legal premises void. But that in itself would be an interesting courtroom wrangle.
You can of course say "What the hell" and just shut it down. But that would be against the law.. And the UK has big enough issues at the moment without getting hauled through the international courts.
Longer email threads seem to end up forwarded and brought to the attention of many people you never expected at the outset.
Judicious editing of the emails to include only the relevant sections for the replies, giving the context of the emerging thread of conversation means that someone being brought up to speed with that segment of the conversation doesn't need to trawl through masses of irrelevant junk to get at the meat of the issue.
I tend to do it as an efficiency gain, rather than taking storage space into account. All comes back to that quote you hear people come out with after sitting through a bad movie "Well, that's an hour of my life I'll never get back". It may only be a few minutes at a time, but they mount up over time. Plus, crafting things to cut to the heart of the matter puts things into sharp perspective, and means people are far less likely to digress, saving even more wasted time.
That is because they've had to clean room reverse engineer the processes involved by watching the behaviour on the network of a notoriously weird protocol.
Now, if they could dive into the binary and simply watch that run on a disassembler, the job would have been quicker by far. However doing that would breach copyright, which would get them sued by a company with notoriously deep pockets, and summarily shut down, invalidating their entire project.
Obfuscate the code and it'll make no difference. It still has to compile, and the compiler doesn't really obfuscate (it optimizes).
Encrypt it, and someone will bust the encryption, and you'll be back at square one (disassembled code, and someone will have it cloned and documented in a short period of time, say a week or two for smallish changes, a few weeks/months for large).
Actually, I hope some marketer is reading your answer.
As another question, just out of curiosity, if you saw two versions that were available on Torrent (one labelled as the "Free demo" and one that was the "Full version", would you actually be tempted to grab the demo version, or would you leap for the pirated full version?
Hear hear. I've been running UNIX and Windows in admin capacity since the early '90s. The biggest problem I've seen at the moment is caused by marketing. Microsoft just refuse to stop advertising Windows servers as being so simple the cat could administer it.
With that message on the table, HR departments get the idea that all it then takes to administer servers is one cat and a magic wand. So they create low paid jobs for 'admins' that don't actually know much about administration (as it's so easy, who actually needs skills in it 'eh?).
UNIX tends to get better results overall, largely because it's seen as a skilled job. They pay the money, they require that you know what you're doing.
Where you get admins that know the detail on Windows to the depth that UNIX gurus know UNIX, comparable results are obtained.
Now, if only Microsoft would stop telling suits that all they need to administer Windows is someone with one finger and half a brain, then the rep. of Windows would increase dramatically. However, there's money to be made today by churning out an MCSE who two weeks ago didn't know what the power cable plugged into. Who cares about the future of the platform when you can advertise tomorrow with a new glossy pamphlet, and make money today? Well, apart from the people who really understand system administration, and hey, what do they know?
Don't equate right wing with freedom unfriendly.
Odd as it may sound to those that make that mistake, 10 years ago, pre-Labour, we had a lot more freedom here in the UK than we do now. A LOT more.
With standard Governmental project planning and pork barrel politics, I'd say it would end up with a $2bn deficit, no product, and end up shipping the $200 camera in a painted box to all the people that bought into the project, claiming a "big win" in face recognition.
Igor Mud as my main one.. I played and coded on a few others, but Igor was the one that really stole my Uni years away... And quite a few since..
Sorry, I just don't get your connecting the difficulty of sport and math.
Playing in the national league of a sport is nothing like getting your basic degree.. The basic degree says you have a good chance of trying out for your local amateur team. Getting a PHD, and tenure and research post in a good university.. Now that's playing in the national league. And it's also exceedingly hard to achieve. And carries nowhere near the kind of take home pay that a premiere league sportsman has.
There is a pay grade within academics for achievements and time. It's called advancement in the department.
However, that pay grade, as previously mentioned is nowhere near the sports personalities' pay.
The time periods for patents were implemented when it took years to get an invention to market, and when you did, because ideas just didn't travel that fast, it took years again for it to saturate a market (in engineering, you'd be lucky to get an advancement in a significant portion of the market within 10 years of getting a patent).
Copyright, when it was first created, gave a period of 14 years complete monopoly of the work to an author. That was deemed a fair period in which to recoup the costs, and make it possible to be an author as a job, and make money.
That was in 1709, when ideas travelled FAR more slowly. So if, in 14 years, an author could make a living writing in 1709 with a limited audience (literacy was low), why on earth does it take the life of the author PLUS 70 years? Because it's profitable to big business, not the individual academic, who, because they don't have the funds to fight the 'big boys', rarely get to play the patent game (copyright, perhaps, but that's another whole minefield).
Yes, many people put Bill Gates as a nerd genius. Yes, he created a huge company, in much the same way as the Ghengis Khan built a large army. Scorched earth tactics that turned a large part of the software world into a wasteland. That was the problem with his version of 'competition'.. It wasn't a fight to get a share of the market, he fought to kill any corporation he couldn't own. Which was great in the financiers eyes, as it was a glowing paragon of their kind of money making machine. That same money making machine which has just ground to a screeching halt.
No, I'm not a rabid anti-Microsoft zealot. Microsoft have come up with great inventions over the years, and MS labs have come up with true innovation.. Just the business side of it has had no honour. It's not what a competitive academic environment would give at all. It's what a cut-throat, predatory, dishonourable number cruncher would come up with as a strategy.
Competition is where you come up with the odd trick to win the egg and spoon race (like glueing your egg to the spoon). Bill Gate's 'competition' is shooting everyone else on the track.
Yes, we're fully aware of what's going on. And we're fully aware that we're not going to magically pull the solution to the woes of the world out of thin air.
Now, that leaves us two options. Sit in a corner and worry ourselves into gibbering wrecks, or, we can concentrate on something small that's just plain fun. You know, the kind of thing that'll give you a bit of rest and respite from the doom and gloom, so that when we get back out and have to deal with it again, we're that little bit more refreshed and ready to do something if we can.
And anyway, what sport isn't some "fancied up child's game"? Face it, we have to play to get a good social interaction, else we'll be so boring that people around would wish the world would come to an end, just to put a stop to the incessant misery.
Now, you've just told us off for having this nice little distraction for a few minutes, when we obviously have far more serious things to do... So, please, enlighten me.. Exactly what should I be doing at this very moment in time (just gone midnight here in the UK) that will cure America's political issues, and fix the global economy?
Nice troll though, I'll give you that.. Almost as fun to bite on as a cheese sandwich.
Hey, I though Slashdot was about growing a big, wide community.. So what say we put the cap at about 10k?
Hopefully you won't be modded Troll. But "Open Source" is a little more than being able to see the source code.
Have a peer at the definition.
Shh.. You just woke us all up!
From the definition of stealing that says "to take somebody's work and pass it off as your own".
I think this fits case fits the definition of stealing quite nicely.
Actually, it's a great idea.
You mentioned lots of boundary conditions and "What if" on the negative side. Look at the wins:
What if you manage to complete some work you otherwise wouldn't have been able to by using the last of the battery that was charged by solar.
What about the energy you'll save (across the whole user base of the machines). That's significant!
What if you're a casual user of the laptop (like my father; he brings it out now and then, and the battery has frequently lost charge from sitting around so long!). It could mean you have a full battery rather than an almost empty one.
Maybe not something to slap into full production from the word go, but certainly worth examining with a pilot project, and maybe a small line release.
A bug in software most frequently arises due to bad, or insufficient logic being applied.
I'd say that failing to run because somebody happens to have another (and in this case fully supported by Microsoft) program running in the background.
You can see where the suits (and some knee jerk reactions from developers) are looking; If we put that bit in there, we're safe.
However, the cracks that appear ensure that this is not the case. As has been noted many times on /. DRM does not affect the people who grab the cracked versions and have no intention of ever paying. It only affects someone who has already given the company their money.
This results in a bad customer experience, lowering the credibility of the games house.
In my eyes, this makes the logic applied by the developers (include this, and we'll be safe, and the world will be a better place, and no customer could ever object to this) is inherently flawed. This flaw makes its way into the design.
The design is implemented in the software, which causes an issue with various other applications the end user may wish to run.
So, the logic used in the design results in a piece of software not running. Whether the intent was to have this happen or not, the logic is flawed, thus making it a bug.
The world isn't made up of thieves. It's made up of people. Very few of who are thieves.
Why do we have DRM again? Oh, that's right. It's so the company can steal the ability to resell the game, despite you being legally allowed to.
I run a business (largely scaled back at the moment, as I wanted to follow an ethical sidestep for a while; debth of honour trumps making lots of money). My father runs a business (different one, very successful). My brother runs a business (doing quite alright for himself). My cousins run companies (more successful than me! And they didn't even do a degree).
We're all doing quite alright thank you very much.
Most of the successful businessmen I know don't have an MBA, or business degree.
As for an MBA or business degree allowing you to do more things than a degree in CS, I'd pass you onto the hon. William Gates, to ask him exactly what an MBA can do that he can't.
I think you'll find it's surprisingly few things.
Including run a successful business.