I didn't have anything except a cell phone when I signed up for FiOS. Granted, I signed up for FiOS TV + Internet, but I could have just as easily left the TV off and they would have connected it. My neighbor has that setup, and I've been thinking about dropping the TV myself.
As someone who has no particular love for Python, I'm not encouraging you to use it. Still, of the possible criticisms of the language, the whole "using indentation to delimit blocks" is probably the worst. It just works, people. I went into it skeptical too, but Python's parser is smart enough to handle just about any style of indentation you throw at it, so long as you're at least somewhat consistent in its usage.
If you want "Python without mandatory indentation", Ruby is probably about as close as you'll get, though they're significantly different. Still, if that's your gripe about Python, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try before you write it off.
If you're not going to go get the degree, you have to compensate for it by being more competent than you otherwise would have to be to get the same job. When I walk into a job interview people look at my resume, and bang, strike one. I have to make up for that by being better than their other candidates by enough to overcome the bias. You say you're an enthusiast, but almost everybody trying to get an entry level position at any decent company in this industry is to some extent. The question becomes, are you better than most enthusiasts with degrees?
If I had it to do over again, I'd just get a degree. With the economy in the crapper, now's the perfect time to do it. If I didn't love my job and have a mortgage to pay I'd probably do it myself.
By the way, there's always the tech support route. It's real easy to get a tech support job without a degree. Sure, the work sucks, but you get your foot in the door somewhere. If you're good, you can move out of there into a "real" job. The flip side to that is that a resume with nothing but tech support on it might actually be worse than no resume at all. There have been "Ask Slashdots" about that before.
Give them an HD Content for a month and they'll quickly learn however.
Not bloody likely. My parents have a 50" LCD that does 1080p with FiOS and all the networks in regular and HD. They often watch the standard def versions. They couldn't really tell the difference between DVD and VHS, either. They're in their 50's, decent eyesight. It just doesn't make a difference to them.
They also have a nice 5.1 setup and had their receiver locked in mono for about 6 months. Couldn't tell.
Yes, non-compete agreements have been difficult to enforce in IT because it's hard, as an IT worker, to get another IT job that doesn't violate the non-compete in some way. They're not going to let the companies take your livelihood away based on a non-compete. That said, if you quit your job and go implement something which is pretty obviously the *same* product, they'll have no problem getting you for that.
Get a lawyer, since it's stupid to ask slashdot for legal advice, and maybe he'll tell you something different. Don't be surprised when he tells you to (*ahem*) not quit your day job, though.
We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used
Sure you do. That copy of the game came from somewhere. You want to sell games in boxes like physical goods, you should be ready to have them treated like physical goods. Toro doesn't make any money off the sale of a used lawn mower, either. That's not something that needs fixing.
I think a little bit of it is education so people realise that the reason there's no PC market right now is piracy. I mean, Crytek just put out some numbers saying the ratio was 20:1 on Crysis, for pirated to non-pirated use. So guess what? That's why there's no Gears of War 2 on PC, because there's no market, because copying killed it - and that's gruesome to a company like ours that's been in the PC market for so long.
Go tell Activision there's no PC market.
Sure, piracy is a problem, but you can pirate console games too (http://thepiratebay.org/browse/404). The barrier to entry is slightly higher, but still pretty low. The problem for Epic -- and Crytek, since both companies basically make the same game -- is that the post-apocalyptic-13-year-old-wankfest shooter has been done to death on the PC already, and that's all they know how to do.
Besides, why buy an Epic shooter when you can buy a Valve shooter? They're doing fine in the PC market, too. Of course, part of that might have to do with them actually making good games instead of just tech demos for their engine (all Unreal games basically). Kudos on making a game with an actual story for once, but "humanity's home planet gets attacked by hostile aliens and an unlikely hero must shoot his way through all of them" was more fun when it was called Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, or even Halo.
I think we're a long way from losing the impulse buy when you walk into the mall or the game store and decide to pick something up.
Not really. Brick and mortar game stores are painful places to go nowadays. No, I don't want to preorder title-that-isn't-coming-out-for-6-months. Everybody I know buys everything they can through Steam, and preorders their console games and everything else they can from Amazon. I don't think I even know where the nearest Gamestop is anymore. Even if I did, if I really wanted to pick up a game in person, Wal-Mart or Best Buy usually have much more stock of any games I actually want.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the sales figures. I'm sure Gamestop does a brisk business of grandmas going to the "game store" to pick up a present, and I know the console market in general is a lot bigger than the PC market. Still, I can't imagine this guy actually plays videogames. I get the complete opposite impression when I read interviews with, say, Gabe Newell or Mike Morhaime.
Git vs. SVN is more of a philosophical argument than a technical one. Git encourages disconnected operation and independent work more, while SVN tends to pay off the most if you're working regularly in lockstep with your team and everybody has a clear picture of what everybody else is doing. Not that you can't work on one kind of project with the other software, but it's more painful.
There are bona fide technical issues you'll probably encounter no matter which one you pick, but those issues are trivial compared to the productivity you'll gain/lose by choosing the right one for your project and your (team's?) way of working.
For you specifically, since you work with Rails, use Git. Everybody else is now, so it'll make dealing with other Rails developers easier. Most of the junior Rails folks we looked at recently (and haven't hired) are familiar with Git but not SVN.
For everybody else, if you're a solo/freelance developer working by yourself, the choice doesn't matter at all. You don't really run into the major differences between the two until you start collaborating with other people.
If I'm looking for software to do a task I'm pretty familiar with (which is likely if the software is expensive, as yours appears to be), I'd be more concerned with non-1.0 software I hadn't heard of before. Yeah, new apps can be buggy, but old apps that come out of nowhere when you do a Google search or get a sales call are probably just bad. 1.0 says to me, "Hey, this is probably new (unless it's open source, then 1.0 means it's 25 years old), maybe it has some new ideas about how to do [task] better." 5.0 of something I've never heard of before says to me, "Why haven't I heard of this before? What's wrong with it?"
Earn your reputation the right way. Starting above 1.0 isn't going to do you any good.
Because getting someone else's credit card info, or even opening whole new credit cards in someone else's name, is clearly very difficult for someone willing to break the law. I wish the guy who opened three credit cards and a checking account "for" me using nothing more than my name and SSN thought more like you. I might not still be dealing with the fallout a year and a half later.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
He picks on Gmail specifically. Gmail has actually opened their system up more since they started, providing first POP and now IMAP access. I'm perfectly free to load up fetchmail, grab all my data, and go somewhere else if I think they're trying to lock me in. Or I can just forward a copy of all my mail to a box I own, the option is there in their settings.
Privacy is a separate issue, but just like security it's a trade off between trustworthiness and convenience/features. You can't really let Google make your mail searchable without letting them "read" it on some level. Is it worth it to you? It's worth it to me, because the ability to find what I'm looking for among the dozens/hundreds of legitimate mails I've received every day for the last 15 years is a pretty big deal compared to my fears that something in those emails is going to get in front of the wrong person.
On the other hand, am I going to go handing my medical records over to some hypothetical service so it can send me an e-card when it's time for a colonoscopy? Nah, that's probably not worth it to me. Draw the line wherever you want, but it seems like you'd have to be kind of a kook to disqualify "cloud computing" altogether based solely on privacy concerns. Not all your information is that sensitive. If it is, I hope you don't have a mailbox, use public trash services, or use a credit card... anywhere.
Do the forward thing. It's trivial to have Gmail use your "real" non-Gmail address for the From line, just check the options. nearlyfreespeech.net will take care of the actual forwarding for ~$7/yr if you want to get rid of responsibility for handling SMTP entirely. Those guys are great, by the way, so toss them some cash. I did it for years.
If you have other gripes about Gmail, maybe Yahoo or Hotmail can do it. The only thing the webmail provider has to support specifically is handling the From line. The rest has nothing to do with them.
If you want a "serious" setup, Rackspace does a nice managed Exchange service with all of the trimmings: mobile messaging and whatnot. I'd never use it again, and it's way overkill for one guy (they charge per-user, but there might be a minimum that's >1), but there's a for-pay recommendation if you need one. I hate Exchange with a passion because it's so far from everything I'm used to, but I moved a few clients who were married to Exchange to it so I wouldn't have to answer Windows email questions anymore. They don't have problems.
I don't mind demonstrating my knowledge to a potential employer. There's nothing degrading or embarrassing about taking a test. Besides, good IT people tend to shine under pressure, a quality shared by good test takers. One more chance for me to separate myself from the pack of applicants.
Eh, privacy nuts get on Google about things like crazy nowadays. I seriously doubt either company is up to some nefarious plot to stealz mah dataz through my web browser, but I don't mind some of the more paranoid folks keeping them honest. If they have to explain to an angry person every time they collect a piece of info, I figure they'll be less likely to try and pull a fast one.
a) It was massively imbalanced. Pick up the right combination of feats (Master Flurry, Master Speed, Master Two Weapon Fighting) and you could drop even Malak in one round. Pick up the wrong set of feats (a caster build without Force Breach, for example) and you could breeze through the entire game and then get completely fucked on the boss fights at the end.
b) Half of the mechanics in the game were useless. There was no reason to be a techie or a stealth class because while both had gimmicky moments where they could do something cool, the game was chock full of full-on frontal assaults you couldn't avoid. The gimmicks never paid off as well as going head on anyway. Besides, you could never be as good at those things as the droid, because in the end you had to make your character combat able as well.
c) Ranged combat was horrible. You could abuse the hell out of force powers and plink away at mobs that were permanently stunned with your pistols, but in and of themselves blasters weren't a decent weapon choice.
d) Levelling was fucked up. By allowing you to bank levels until you switched to your jedi class, you could completely break the difficulty of the game. Staying level 2 until the first planet was completely made the first planet way too hard, but having an extra 4-5 jedi levels made the rest of the game way too easy.
e) You could cheese half the fights in the game with grenades and shields. That's how you get to being a jedi at level 2, but it works just as well for the rest of the game. There are very few fights that shield spam and grenades can't win.
KotOR is one of my favorite games of all time. The story is great, there's tons of stuff you can do off the beaten path, and it has a ton of replay value. The actual gameplay is subpar, though. KotOR 2 is one of my biggest disappointments of all time because it fixed the gameplay of KotOR but was so buggy and had so much cut content you couldn't actually enjoy it. A bastard child hybrid of the two might be the best game never made.
Traveling between the major cities in the northeastern US by rail is already fast and easy. It's the rest of the country that fucking sucks in that regard.
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I didn't have anything except a cell phone when I signed up for FiOS. Granted, I signed up for FiOS TV + Internet, but I could have just as easily left the TV off and they would have connected it. My neighbor has that setup, and I've been thinking about dropping the TV myself.
As someone who has no particular love for Python, I'm not encouraging you to use it. Still, of the possible criticisms of the language, the whole "using indentation to delimit blocks" is probably the worst. It just works, people. I went into it skeptical too, but Python's parser is smart enough to handle just about any style of indentation you throw at it, so long as you're at least somewhat consistent in its usage.
If you want "Python without mandatory indentation", Ruby is probably about as close as you'll get, though they're significantly different. Still, if that's your gripe about Python, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try before you write it off.
... with sexy results.
The trick to avoid going out of business because your code is good is to sell support for shitty code.
MySQL figured this out years ago.
Good point. This is why the ultimate cost saver is to switch from commercial software to pirated commercial software.
If you're not going to go get the degree, you have to compensate for it by being more competent than you otherwise would have to be to get the same job. When I walk into a job interview people look at my resume, and bang, strike one. I have to make up for that by being better than their other candidates by enough to overcome the bias. You say you're an enthusiast, but almost everybody trying to get an entry level position at any decent company in this industry is to some extent. The question becomes, are you better than most enthusiasts with degrees?
If I had it to do over again, I'd just get a degree. With the economy in the crapper, now's the perfect time to do it. If I didn't love my job and have a mortgage to pay I'd probably do it myself.
By the way, there's always the tech support route. It's real easy to get a tech support job without a degree. Sure, the work sucks, but you get your foot in the door somewhere. If you're good, you can move out of there into a "real" job. The flip side to that is that a resume with nothing but tech support on it might actually be worse than no resume at all. There have been "Ask Slashdots" about that before.
I don't know if you've ever been to the northeastern US. I'm pretty sure I paid about $100 in tolls between Maryland and Long Island.
Not bloody likely. My parents have a 50" LCD that does 1080p with FiOS and all the networks in regular and HD. They often watch the standard def versions. They couldn't really tell the difference between DVD and VHS, either. They're in their 50's, decent eyesight. It just doesn't make a difference to them.
They also have a nice 5.1 setup and had their receiver locked in mono for about 6 months. Couldn't tell.
Yes, non-compete agreements have been difficult to enforce in IT because it's hard, as an IT worker, to get another IT job that doesn't violate the non-compete in some way. They're not going to let the companies take your livelihood away based on a non-compete. That said, if you quit your job and go implement something which is pretty obviously the *same* product, they'll have no problem getting you for that.
Get a lawyer, since it's stupid to ask slashdot for legal advice, and maybe he'll tell you something different. Don't be surprised when he tells you to (*ahem*) not quit your day job, though.
Sure you do. That copy of the game came from somewhere. You want to sell games in boxes like physical goods, you should be ready to have them treated like physical goods. Toro doesn't make any money off the sale of a used lawn mower, either. That's not something that needs fixing.
Go tell Activision there's no PC market.
Sure, piracy is a problem, but you can pirate console games too (http://thepiratebay.org/browse/404). The barrier to entry is slightly higher, but still pretty low. The problem for Epic -- and Crytek, since both companies basically make the same game -- is that the post-apocalyptic-13-year-old-wankfest shooter has been done to death on the PC already, and that's all they know how to do.
Besides, why buy an Epic shooter when you can buy a Valve shooter? They're doing fine in the PC market, too. Of course, part of that might have to do with them actually making good games instead of just tech demos for their engine (all Unreal games basically). Kudos on making a game with an actual story for once, but "humanity's home planet gets attacked by hostile aliens and an unlikely hero must shoot his way through all of them" was more fun when it was called Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, or even Halo.
Not really. Brick and mortar game stores are painful places to go nowadays. No, I don't want to preorder title-that-isn't-coming-out-for-6-months. Everybody I know buys everything they can through Steam, and preorders their console games and everything else they can from Amazon. I don't think I even know where the nearest Gamestop is anymore. Even if I did, if I really wanted to pick up a game in person, Wal-Mart or Best Buy usually have much more stock of any games I actually want.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the sales figures. I'm sure Gamestop does a brisk business of grandmas going to the "game store" to pick up a present, and I know the console market in general is a lot bigger than the PC market. Still, I can't imagine this guy actually plays videogames. I get the complete opposite impression when I read interviews with, say, Gabe Newell or Mike Morhaime.
The guy's picture has kind of a Rick Astley vibe.
Git vs. SVN is more of a philosophical argument than a technical one. Git encourages disconnected operation and independent work more, while SVN tends to pay off the most if you're working regularly in lockstep with your team and everybody has a clear picture of what everybody else is doing. Not that you can't work on one kind of project with the other software, but it's more painful.
There are bona fide technical issues you'll probably encounter no matter which one you pick, but those issues are trivial compared to the productivity you'll gain/lose by choosing the right one for your project and your (team's?) way of working.
For you specifically, since you work with Rails, use Git. Everybody else is now, so it'll make dealing with other Rails developers easier. Most of the junior Rails folks we looked at recently (and haven't hired) are familiar with Git but not SVN.
For everybody else, if you're a solo/freelance developer working by yourself, the choice doesn't matter at all. You don't really run into the major differences between the two until you start collaborating with other people.
If I'm looking for software to do a task I'm pretty familiar with (which is likely if the software is expensive, as yours appears to be), I'd be more concerned with non-1.0 software I hadn't heard of before. Yeah, new apps can be buggy, but old apps that come out of nowhere when you do a Google search or get a sales call are probably just bad. 1.0 says to me, "Hey, this is probably new (unless it's open source, then 1.0 means it's 25 years old), maybe it has some new ideas about how to do [task] better." 5.0 of something I've never heard of before says to me, "Why haven't I heard of this before? What's wrong with it?"
Earn your reputation the right way. Starting above 1.0 isn't going to do you any good.
Because getting someone else's credit card info, or even opening whole new credit cards in someone else's name, is clearly very difficult for someone willing to break the law. I wish the guy who opened three credit cards and a checking account "for" me using nothing more than my name and SSN thought more like you. I might not still be dealing with the fallout a year and a half later.
He picks on Gmail specifically. Gmail has actually opened their system up more since they started, providing first POP and now IMAP access. I'm perfectly free to load up fetchmail, grab all my data, and go somewhere else if I think they're trying to lock me in. Or I can just forward a copy of all my mail to a box I own, the option is there in their settings.
Privacy is a separate issue, but just like security it's a trade off between trustworthiness and convenience/features. You can't really let Google make your mail searchable without letting them "read" it on some level. Is it worth it to you? It's worth it to me, because the ability to find what I'm looking for among the dozens/hundreds of legitimate mails I've received every day for the last 15 years is a pretty big deal compared to my fears that something in those emails is going to get in front of the wrong person.
On the other hand, am I going to go handing my medical records over to some hypothetical service so it can send me an e-card when it's time for a colonoscopy? Nah, that's probably not worth it to me. Draw the line wherever you want, but it seems like you'd have to be kind of a kook to disqualify "cloud computing" altogether based solely on privacy concerns. Not all your information is that sensitive. If it is, I hope you don't have a mailbox, use public trash services, or use a credit card... anywhere.
Do the forward thing. It's trivial to have Gmail use your "real" non-Gmail address for the From line, just check the options. nearlyfreespeech.net will take care of the actual forwarding for ~$7/yr if you want to get rid of responsibility for handling SMTP entirely. Those guys are great, by the way, so toss them some cash. I did it for years.
If you have other gripes about Gmail, maybe Yahoo or Hotmail can do it. The only thing the webmail provider has to support specifically is handling the From line. The rest has nothing to do with them.
If you want a "serious" setup, Rackspace does a nice managed Exchange service with all of the trimmings: mobile messaging and whatnot. I'd never use it again, and it's way overkill for one guy (they charge per-user, but there might be a minimum that's >1), but there's a for-pay recommendation if you need one. I hate Exchange with a passion because it's so far from everything I'm used to, but I moved a few clients who were married to Exchange to it so I wouldn't have to answer Windows email questions anymore. They don't have problems.
It said, "Vote Democrat, pussy!"
Because that's what every other day is. You just didn't know because, well, ninjas aren't very good at publicity.
I don't mind demonstrating my knowledge to a potential employer. There's nothing degrading or embarrassing about taking a test. Besides, good IT people tend to shine under pressure, a quality shared by good test takers. One more chance for me to separate myself from the pack of applicants.
Eh, privacy nuts get on Google about things like crazy nowadays. I seriously doubt either company is up to some nefarious plot to stealz mah dataz through my web browser, but I don't mind some of the more paranoid folks keeping them honest. If they have to explain to an angry person every time they collect a piece of info, I figure they'll be less likely to try and pull a fast one.
Can we get confirmation on this? I'm pretty sure nothing has fewer users than IPv6.
KotOR's gameplay was bad because:
a) It was massively imbalanced. Pick up the right combination of feats (Master Flurry, Master Speed, Master Two Weapon Fighting) and you could drop even Malak in one round. Pick up the wrong set of feats (a caster build without Force Breach, for example) and you could breeze through the entire game and then get completely fucked on the boss fights at the end.
b) Half of the mechanics in the game were useless. There was no reason to be a techie or a stealth class because while both had gimmicky moments where they could do something cool, the game was chock full of full-on frontal assaults you couldn't avoid. The gimmicks never paid off as well as going head on anyway. Besides, you could never be as good at those things as the droid, because in the end you had to make your character combat able as well.
c) Ranged combat was horrible. You could abuse the hell out of force powers and plink away at mobs that were permanently stunned with your pistols, but in and of themselves blasters weren't a decent weapon choice.
d) Levelling was fucked up. By allowing you to bank levels until you switched to your jedi class, you could completely break the difficulty of the game. Staying level 2 until the first planet was completely made the first planet way too hard, but having an extra 4-5 jedi levels made the rest of the game way too easy.
e) You could cheese half the fights in the game with grenades and shields. That's how you get to being a jedi at level 2, but it works just as well for the rest of the game. There are very few fights that shield spam and grenades can't win.
KotOR is one of my favorite games of all time. The story is great, there's tons of stuff you can do off the beaten path, and it has a ton of replay value. The actual gameplay is subpar, though. KotOR 2 is one of my biggest disappointments of all time because it fixed the gameplay of KotOR but was so buggy and had so much cut content you couldn't actually enjoy it. A bastard child hybrid of the two might be the best game never made.
I'm sure, like all monkeys, Verizon phone monkeys play with themselves all the time. You know, in between grooming each other and flinging poo.
There's probably no way to tell the difference between one acting natural and one having phone sex. Unless you can communicate with them somehow...
Are we? How can you be sure? Get the physicists on it ASAP!
Traveling between the major cities in the northeastern US by rail is already fast and easy. It's the rest of the country that fucking sucks in that regard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_corridor