"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give a man a $100 laptop with an aquarium screen-saver and he'll stare at it all day and forget that he's hungry."
Agreed. I get basic cable for $13/month, and unlimited free rentals from Hollywood Video for $15/month. Since the video store is only 1/2 mile away, I can get a LOT of videos and even get some exercise taking them back and forth (since you can check out 3 at a time).
I've often wondered if many of the bible stories weren't originally made up as entertainment while people were waiting for TV and the internet to be invented.
Don't buy it. I still pay $13/month for dialup, and did an entire Gentoo installation through it a couple years ago (just left it going all night for a few nights!). Sometimes, I'll do a large download at work and stick it on a USB drive or CD.
I'm hoping that community wireless becomes available before I finally get fed up enough to pay the price for DSL.
Would it really cost 'millions upon millions' of dollars to create, say, a "Day of the Tentacle 2" using a slightly updated engine from the original? I think the real problem isn't that such a game wouldn't be profitable, but that it wouldn't make enough of a profit for a company the size of LucasArts.
Speaking from personal experience: When looking for work about 3 years ago, I applied at MS, got a phone interview with one of their recruiters, and was told I passed the simple C++ quiz she gave me. A week later, she told me that she'd passed my resume to the appropriate managers, but that nobody was interested.
Oh well. Soon thereafter, I got my current job, where I get to work all day writing software on a Linux box.
Not necessarily. The person from Backwater may have worked hard to get there, showing a lot of initiative, while the Harvard non-grad could be a rich kid who never manages to finish anything.
Religion/mythology is pretty interesting if you chuck the dogma.
True. Religion, to me, is like believing that Star Trek, Middle Earth, the Force, or Oz are real. And, that people who don't believe the same are evil, or at least, deluded.
I always find it weird when I read that an office can't switch to a more stable or less-expensive alternative to MS Office because people "don't want to". I wonder if the employees get Porsches for their business travel because they "dont want to" drive Toyotas.
That's true, and it works the same today: 1. Peasants pay taxes. 2. Some of the money is used to pay soldiers. 3. Soldiers make sure peasants continue to pay taxes.
The situation can remain stable for quite some time.
Exactly. If everyone's in the same boat, a typical engineer can convince himself that he's lucky to have a good-paying job and to be part of a good team. But when he sees the managers buying themselves Porsches while he's trying to keep his old Toyota running, he realizes that he's getting the short end of the stick.
Wellll... Suppose the light bulbs were incandescent (highly inefficient). When you go out to buy new light bulbs, you buy compact-flourescents instead. Within a year, you've saved more money then you lost when you broke your old bulbs.
Plus, walking to the store makes you realize that you've been sitting around the house too much. So you start exercising more. You start to feel more energetic; and your boss notices that you're getting more productive at work, and gives you a promotion.
Yeah, a pretty accepted software business model is: 1) Create software that people want 2) Trade that software for money.
That's perfectly reasonable, and I make my living from a company that does just that. The problem is when companies add some additional steps that they might not tell you about: 3) Leave hidden flaws in your code. 4) Make customers pay for updates that fix those flaws (but perhaps add new flaws) 5) Purposely make your product incompatible with similar ones, so your customers are locked in.
Yes, it's low... unless you happen to buy food, or a house, or you get sick, or you go to college, or you heat/cool your house, or you drive a car, or take the bus, or...
Or did you mean 'wage inflation'. True, there isn't much of that, unless you happen to be a CEO or one of his friends.
Uh... for the past 15 years, I've always built my own machines, usually for installing Linux, or, way back, OS/2. This time, I wanted a Windows machine for my wife, and I didn't want to have to mess around with Windows installation; ie, I wanted something that just works out-of-the-box. At first, I looked at the HP's because they had all the features I wanted... except for the upgradability. (And you're right about sales people rolling their eyes when you ask about PCI-E)
We ended up with a Gateway, which does have the expansion slot (and a very nice, quiet case, too).
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"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give a man a $100 laptop with an aquarium screen-saver and he'll stare at it all day and forget that he's hungry."
Besides... if we male technical types dressed better, the women would be all over us, and we wouldn't get any coding done.
Maybe some sexual opportunities too.
They're math/science PhDs, and I'd assume most end up teaching. The ones in Asia have a lot more people to teach!
That does seem to be the reason my wife and I buy DVD's. And sometimes they don't even get watched once.
Agreed. I get basic cable for $13/month, and unlimited free rentals from Hollywood Video for $15/month. Since the video store is only 1/2 mile away, I can get a LOT of videos and even get some exercise taking them back and forth (since you can check out 3 at a time).
I've often wondered if many of the bible stories weren't originally made up as entertainment while people were waiting for TV and the internet to be invented.
How many of these highly-paid CEO's started the companies they work for? How many took the real risk that you're suggesting?
Isn't this a commercial product? It's hard to see how any Linux distribution could be based on this.
Don't buy it. I still pay $13/month for dialup, and did an entire Gentoo installation through it a couple years ago (just left it going all night for a few nights!). Sometimes, I'll do a large download at work and stick it on a USB drive or CD.
I'm hoping that community wireless becomes available before I finally get fed up enough to pay the price for DSL.
I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't have more immunity than most mammals, because we live in much more crowded conditions.
That's great if you can get it, but I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning.
If I buy a hammer from Home Depot, should they charge me $500 because that's how much I'll save over having to bang in nails with a rock?
Would it really cost 'millions upon millions' of dollars to create, say, a "Day of the Tentacle 2" using a slightly updated engine from the original? I think the real problem isn't that such a game wouldn't be profitable, but that it wouldn't make enough of a profit for a company the size of LucasArts.
Speaking from personal experience: When looking for work about 3 years ago, I applied at MS, got a phone interview with one of their recruiters, and was told I passed the simple C++ quiz she gave me. A week later, she told me that she'd passed my resume to the appropriate managers, but that nobody was interested.
Oh well. Soon thereafter, I got my current job, where I get to work all day writing software on a Linux box.
Not necessarily. The person from Backwater may have worked hard to get there, showing a lot of initiative, while the Harvard non-grad could be a rich kid who never manages to finish anything.
Er, no. It's: "Grandma, type 'emerge gaim'...
"Come back in a few hours and you'll be ready to go."
Heh. If you read the book "Ozma of Oz", you can see evidence that Oz is somewhere around your "Oz".
Religion/mythology is pretty interesting if you chuck the dogma.
True. Religion, to me, is like believing that Star Trek, Middle Earth, the Force, or Oz are real. And, that people who don't believe the same are evil, or at least, deluded.
I always find it weird when I read that an office can't switch to a more stable or less-expensive alternative to MS Office because people "don't want to". I wonder if the employees get Porsches for their business travel because they "dont want to" drive Toyotas.
That's true, and it works the same today:
1. Peasants pay taxes.
2. Some of the money is used to pay soldiers.
3. Soldiers make sure peasants continue to pay taxes.
The situation can remain stable for quite some time.
Exactly. If everyone's in the same boat, a typical engineer can convince himself that he's lucky to have a good-paying job and to be part of a good team. But when he sees the managers buying themselves Porsches while he's trying to keep his old Toyota running, he realizes that he's getting the short end of the stick.
Wellll... Suppose the light bulbs were incandescent (highly inefficient). When you go out to buy new light bulbs, you buy compact-flourescents instead. Within a year, you've saved more money then you lost when you broke your old bulbs.
Plus, walking to the store makes you realize that you've been sitting around the house too much. So you start exercising more. You start to feel more energetic; and your boss notices that you're getting more productive at work, and gives you a promotion.
1) Create software that people want
2) Trade that software for money.
That's perfectly reasonable, and I make my living from a company that does just that. The problem is when companies add some additional steps that they might not tell you about:
3) Leave hidden flaws in your code.
4) Make customers pay for updates that fix those flaws (but perhaps add new flaws)
5) Purposely make your product incompatible with similar ones, so your customers are locked in.
Yes, it's low... unless you happen to buy food, or a house, or you get sick, or you go to college, or you heat/cool your house, or you drive a car, or take the bus, or...
Or did you mean 'wage inflation'. True, there isn't much of that, unless you happen to be a CEO or one of his friends.
Uh... for the past 15 years, I've always built my own machines, usually for installing Linux, or, way back, OS/2. This time, I wanted a Windows machine for my wife, and I didn't want to have to mess around with Windows installation; ie, I wanted something that just works out-of-the-box. At first, I looked at the HP's because they had all the features I wanted... except for the upgradability. (And you're right about sales people rolling their eyes when you ask about PCI-E)
We ended up with a Gateway, which does have the expansion slot (and a very nice, quiet case, too).