Everybody has to have the psycho bitch experience so that we know what to look out for next time. Just like spending years and years in front of a computer enables you to deal with the most off the wall random errors, spending years and years dealing with women enables you to quickly put their psycho bitch behaviors in check and/or kick their asses to the curb at the appropriate time.
Anything that "deflavorizes" Linux is a good thing for those who want to see a Linux desktop become standard. Right now there are simply too many different ways to install software depending on what flavor of the OS you happen to be using. The big thing that keeps the Windows monopoly chugging merrily along is the fact that when software is "Compatible with Windows 2000/XP", the consumer knows that they are getting a program that will work with their OS. Linux really needs to offer that same functionality if the OS is ever going to be considered by OEMs. An OS is worthless without applications.
..A world where every VP becomes an IT expert. I have worked in corporate IT for a little over a decade and I've seen the same scenario repeated again and again. Some department head somewhere will get a bug up his ass about the "system not doing what he needs it to do." and then he'll go develop some amateur application in Access or the like that "does what he needs it to." Life will chunk along great for a little while, then all of a sudden his application will blow up and he won't know why. It will fall on the shoulders of IT to fix his cluster fuck for him.
There is a reason that companies have an IT department. There is a reason that they hire computer experts. The simple fact of the matter is that every Tom Dick and Harry doesn't have the necessary skill set to develop and MAINTAIN their own applications. Companies need to ensure that they have data integrity and ensure that everyone is working with the same dataset. When you start giving users control over something as mission critical as data applications you are looking for a headache. At the end of the day, you are going to have a bunch of pissed off users and a bunch of pissed off IT guys. The users are going to be pissed because their applications break. The IT guys are going to be pissed because they are expected to support applications that they didn't even develop in the first place.
If you need to give users access to data, give them a copy of Crystal Reports and send them off to class to learn how to use it. I haven't come across a single situation where a non-technical person needed data out of any system that couldn't be presented to them with Crystal Reports.
That Microsoft needs to engage in counter-propaganda is already suspicious:
What is their alternative? Should they let others spew incorrect FUD all day long?
...and trust for tyranny.
What is this trust you are talking about? If anything I'd say that Microsoft is one of the least trusted entities out there. They are so mistrusted that someone can spew FUD about their DRM schemes and people swallow it hook line and sinker.
I saw something like this on TV a few years ago. There were some security contractors in Iraq who had a similar device that determined range and vector to gunshots. I don't remember it having the laser designator, but other than that, it was pretty much the exact same thing.
Having read your comment I agree that we are talking about different scopes here. When you talk about someone turning out 3-7 games a year I picture someone writing Flash games for websites. When I think of "Indie" developer, I think of the guys at www.shadowrun-online.com.
Again I say, so what. If your game has any chance of success, you should be able to attract venture capital. A client of mine has a fund that invests in Korea game companies that turn out some pretty serious crap. If those guys can get funding, any "indie" game targetted at a viable market should be able to come up with $3000. Hell, if $3000 is the only thing standing in the way of the "next great thing" in "indie" video games, I'll give them the freakin three grand in exchange for ten percent of the profit.
According to the article summary the cost of ESRB certification is three thousand dollars. If you can't come up with three grand are you really all that serious about making money developing computer games?
Thanks for the replies guys. It does make sense that they'd have some sort of stabilization system to compensate for the roll of the ship. It seems like the bigger problem may be getting all of the fins and laser/gps guidance electronics onto the projectiles.
Personally I think they should just scrap the ship concept all together and mount them on BattleMechs. Unfortunately, they'd probably have to pay WizKids some royalties on that so it's a non-starter.
Even if the pharmaceutical companies do turn it down, and even if they do turn it down on the basis of no profit, it just means that the researches will have to do more presentation to find funding.
Maybe they should go peddle their wares to the Gates Foundation. =)
Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term - costs of ownership of the software products.
When I read "costs of ownership" I focus on ownership and then consider that ownership implies the responsibility for development and upkeep of the source code. In other words, the people who own a software product are the people who develop the product. For example, Intuit is the company that owns Quickbooks. The thousands of offices that use QuickBooks don't own the software. If you don't believe me, just read the license agreement. They are granted the right to use the software.
I will not for one second argue that developing applications in FLOSS might be less expensive in the long term than developing similar applications using Visual Studio or whatever other proprietary applications are still out there (is PowerBuilder still alive?). The main reason I wouldn't argue in favor of MS et al is because I've seen how Microsoft comes out with a new version of something all of a sudden the API doesn't work the way it used to and you have to rewrite code that worked just fine. Once you've gone through that once or two, you've racked up some pretty substantial costs. So from that perspective, the perspective of the developer, I can see how FLOSS has a lower TCO.
What about the TCO of people who just use the software? What about those people who are still running QuickBooks 2000 because it gets the job done? People who are still running Windows 2000 on Pentium III desktops because they still work just fine. People who aren't modifying the source code and simply want an off the shelf product that offers all of the functionality that they need? Is FLOSS really less expensive for them?
My perception as someone who has been reading both sides but not actively developing the software is that FLOSS is great if you have programmers on hand and you have a dedicated Development department as part of your IT organization. FLOSS is great if you're out there on the cutting edge of technology and getting requirements from management along the lines of, "We want to share this data with our vendor in (insert random country here). Make it work and don't spend too much money on it."
The downside that I perceive is FLOSS lock in which in many cases is worse than vendor lock in. If you're locked into Microsoft, at the very least you can ask just about any "computer guy" (even a FLOSS, Linux zealot) to make your MS stuff work and they can make it work. On the other hand, what happens if someone codes you some great FLOSS accounting package and then disappears? What if that person didn't bother to comment their source code? What does the business owner do when he has to compete with the rest of the market place to find a decent programmer to maintain reams of custom code? I think in that perspective, it is a lot less expensive to just run PeachTree than it is to run, "Uber Accounting 1.0.23 developed by Tim Thorton and four guys in India with some help from Dimitri Haxalotanov."
The other downside that I see a lot is that there seems to be a pretty big section of the FLOSS community reinventing the wheel simply for the sake of doing it. There seems to be a running joke on/. about FLOSS POS systems. The POS systems are a niche market, but there are hundreds of niche markets that are pretty much dominated by Microsoft. In those arenas, FLOSS is playing catch up. If FLOSS and Linux are ever going to replace Microsoft they need to get into all of those niches, but I see the barrier to entry being pretty high. Most Small and Medium Business owners want to deal with a known quantity. They will talk to their peers and ask them how they are doing business, and their peers are going to say they are using Microsoft. They are using PeachTree or QuickBooks. They are using Office (even if it's Office 97 or 2000). Beyond their peers, their vendors are going to say the same thing. T
Disclaimer: This tale is completely anecdotal so please refrain from your impulses to respond with how that's not how it works on your computer. Also try to refrain from calling me a moron or anything like that.
I've been using Firefox 2.0 since beta and before IE7 came out. Like a diligent/. reader I've been keeping up on the arguments from both sides. The one that stuck out in my mind was that Firefox has a pretty bad memory leak. At the time I read it, I didn't pay much attention to it because I never noticed any slowdown or stability problems when using Firefox. That was until a few weeks ago.
I started playing WoW a while ago and have recently been using Thotbott. I will have WoW open in one window (Full screen) and Thotbott running in Firefox in the background. After a while, WoW started chunking big time. I eventually figured out that if I closed Firefox, the chunk went away. On my system (P4 3.0ghz, 1GB RAM, XP SP2), IE7 doesn't cause WoW to chunk. I can leave Thotbott open in the background all day long.
Although I do use Firefox for most my browsing, it isn't the IE killer that it often gets made out to be.
How are they going to deal with the fact that they are trying to mount these things on ships that are floating in the middle of the ocean and are subject to the rise and fall of the waves? I have to imagine that the angle of the barrel in relation to the horizon has to be changing by a pretty significant amount of degrees.
One of my clients runs an application that was developed in Fujitsu COBOL.Net and let me tell you that I hate supporting it. I don't know much about COBOL other than my dad programmed in COBOL back in the 1970s. But from having to deal with the black box that is the application my client uses, COBOL.Net seems to be really network unfriendly. In my case the client has about 30 workstations running this one application. The one application opens the same set of about 10-15 files once for every user the logged on. Running a report grinds the entire system to a halt because the application has to copy the entire data file to the workstation (about 50-100 megs of data) do the index, sort, etc functions and then print the results. The database (and I use the term very lightly) indexes get corrupted at least two to three times a month. The application developer's response is, "The server locked a file, reboot the server." When asked why the server locked a file, the response is always, "Well, there is something wrong with the network." Keep in mind the server is a relatively new Proliant ML370 G4 and the network is running 3com 4400 series switches that I have been all over with Network Manager to ensure that there aren't any collisions, CRC errors, or any of those other things that you sometimes see.
Going back to the language itself, all of the data is kept in comma delimited flat table files. Whenever the indexes get really screwed up the developer has to run a bunch of cleanup utilities that take a good six hours or so to run.
Perhaps needless to say, I'm looking around for some sort of SQL based alternative. =) But of course the client is cheap as hell and they'd rather pay for the downtime than finance the cost of developing a replacement application for a pretty niche market (waste management).
Does anybody think that by watching "Scarface", you are approving of the lifestyle of cocaine trafficing? That by watching "Pirates of the Carribean" you're approving of piracy? etc.
Good job on saying what you wanted to say instead of actually replying to the point that I was making.
I also think you're being a bit naive here. Is San Andreas going to be kids only, or even primary, exposure to the gangster lifestyle?
Although it certainly might not be the primary exposure, it could very well be the most explicitly detailed exposure that they will ever have. The sheer reality of that game, from the dialogue, to the stereotypical racial dynamics (blacks vs blacks, blacks vs latinos), to the crossing out of tags, to the being able to identify the street pushers based on what kind of clothes they wear, etc. was taken straight out of the way things really work.
Of course you can talk about how they see the same things in music videos, and hear about it in songs. To that I'd reply that the level of immersion offered in a video game is completely different. It comes at the kids slower. It is more all encompassing. Once a kid has been playing a video game for a few minutes, it isn't all that hard to sneak up on them because their 7 +/- 2 strains of focus have been focused into the game world and away from everything else. And to return full circle to the point I was making that you either intentionally or unintentionally skipped past in your effort to make your own point... When kids are playing games, they are in effect, mentally doing what their characters in the game are doing. They are also accepting as okay the actions that they are doing. To use San Andreas as an example... A kid could listen to some gangster rap and think, "Gee, that lifestyle sounds kind of cool." They can see the videos on MTV and think, "Gee, that lifestyle looks pretty cool." Then they go play San Andreas and think, "Gee, this lifestyle really is cool."
And you might say, "Well video games and reality are different. I've played X number of video games about Y and yet I've never done Y." I'm not talking about direct cause and effect. In this case, in the particular case of GTA, the video games create a level of acceptance for what is portrayed in the video game. Although the kid might not grab a can of spray paint, go cross out the first tag he comes across and then proceed to beat on whoever has a problem with him doing that, the kid very well might see someone else doing that and start to think (subconsciously), "Okay. I know what that guy is doing. There isn't anything wrong with that. It's just like what I saw in the video game that my parents implicitly told me was okay by letting me play." Or he might see a bunch of tags on the walls and think, "I wonder where the gangsters are. They'd be pretty cool to kick it with."
We have no problem selling R-rated movies in plain sight, with content just as "bad" as any M-rated game. I don't see the difference.
Consider this... In an R-rated movie, a child simply has access to watching someone else perform acts that you wouldn't want the child doing (killing people, rape, etc). In a videogame, the child in effect becomes the perpetrator of the acts. The difference is between simply seeing the acts versus committing the acts, albeit in a virtual world.
When I played GTA San Andreas I remember thinking to myself, "This isn't the kind of game I'd want my kids playing." For me, it hit a little bit too close home. Having grown up in Long Beach, and seen gang life first hand, the game was uncomfortably realistic. As an adult, I could see it for the entertainment and escapism that it was. However I think that when you expose kids to that kind of content, you are in effect saying, "I approve." and I don't think that it is right to tell your children that you approve of the lifestyle being presented in a game like GTA:San Andreas.
Uh huh. So rather than owning one's own small business, being a successful entrepreneur, the new American dream is to work for a national franchise, so that you can get health insurance. How incredibly fscking sad is that?
I think what he was saying is that Starbucks offers incentives that the local mom and pop spot doesn't. Sad, sure... but I think the average Starbucks employee is a bit ahead of the local mom and pop employee (in terms of wages and benefits).
In reference to the article, the guy was trying to take an HP consumer desktop and turn it into a file server. What the hell did he expect? He was doing it with Windows XP as the host OS too? What a jackhole. Then he whined about the whole experience?
If he wanted a whitebox file server then he should have built it himself. Bagging on HP is kind of stupid given that you can easily install a few different flavors of Linux on a Proliant with full driver support.
In short, the guy wasn't using the right tools for the job and he got bit in the butt by it. If he had planned ahead instead of just assuming that everything would work right then he could have avoided the problems that he ran into.
Granted, Ubuntu worked for him better than the Windows options that he had so chalk it up as a "win" for Ubuntu.
My conclusion: Both Slackware and Windows are very difficult systems to build from scratch. If people had to install Windows themselves they would be as smart as Linux geeks.
This is the most insightful thing that I've read on/. in a long while. I completely agree. The sort of operations that computer geeks take for granted like installing software and configuring all of the various services are completely foreign to most non-computer users. If you've ever had to work with a curious user, or even better a child who likes to ask, "Why are you doing that?" then you'll quickly realize how many things you do automatically without thought... things that someone who has never done it before would need to pause to read the manual to figure out.
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Everybody has to have the psycho bitch experience so that we know what to look out for next time. Just like spending years and years in front of a computer enables you to deal with the most off the wall random errors, spending years and years dealing with women enables you to quickly put their psycho bitch behaviors in check and/or kick their asses to the curb at the appropriate time.
Anything that "deflavorizes" Linux is a good thing for those who want to see a Linux desktop become standard. Right now there are simply too many different ways to install software depending on what flavor of the OS you happen to be using. The big thing that keeps the Windows monopoly chugging merrily along is the fact that when software is "Compatible with Windows 2000/XP", the consumer knows that they are getting a program that will work with their OS. Linux really needs to offer that same functionality if the OS is ever going to be considered by OEMs. An OS is worthless without applications.
There is a reason that companies have an IT department. There is a reason that they hire computer experts. The simple fact of the matter is that every Tom Dick and Harry doesn't have the necessary skill set to develop and MAINTAIN their own applications. Companies need to ensure that they have data integrity and ensure that everyone is working with the same dataset. When you start giving users control over something as mission critical as data applications you are looking for a headache. At the end of the day, you are going to have a bunch of pissed off users and a bunch of pissed off IT guys. The users are going to be pissed because their applications break. The IT guys are going to be pissed because they are expected to support applications that they didn't even develop in the first place.
If you need to give users access to data, give them a copy of Crystal Reports and send them off to class to learn how to use it. I haven't come across a single situation where a non-technical person needed data out of any system that couldn't be presented to them with Crystal Reports.
What is their alternative? Should they let others spew incorrect FUD all day long?
What is this trust you are talking about? If anything I'd say that Microsoft is one of the least trusted entities out there. They are so mistrusted that someone can spew FUD about their DRM schemes and people swallow it hook line and sinker.
Some granola, ground flax seed, trailmix and soy yogurt.
Yup, that's the one. It's pretty cool that the system can differentiate between incoming and outgoing fire.
I saw something like this on TV a few years ago. There were some security contractors in Iraq who had a similar device that determined range and vector to gunshots. I don't remember it having the laser designator, but other than that, it was pretty much the exact same thing.
Having read your comment I agree that we are talking about different scopes here. When you talk about someone turning out 3-7 games a year I picture someone writing Flash games for websites. When I think of "Indie" developer, I think of the guys at www.shadowrun-online.com.
Again I say, so what. If your game has any chance of success, you should be able to attract venture capital. A client of mine has a fund that invests in Korea game companies that turn out some pretty serious crap. If those guys can get funding, any "indie" game targetted at a viable market should be able to come up with $3000. Hell, if $3000 is the only thing standing in the way of the "next great thing" in "indie" video games, I'll give them the freakin three grand in exchange for ten percent of the profit.
According to the article summary the cost of ESRB certification is three thousand dollars. If you can't come up with three grand are you really all that serious about making money developing computer games?
Personally I think they should just scrap the ship concept all together and mount them on BattleMechs. Unfortunately, they'd probably have to pay WizKids some royalties on that so it's a non-starter.
Maybe they should go peddle their wares to the Gates Foundation. =)
When I read "costs of ownership" I focus on ownership and then consider that ownership implies the responsibility for development and upkeep of the source code. In other words, the people who own a software product are the people who develop the product. For example, Intuit is the company that owns Quickbooks. The thousands of offices that use QuickBooks don't own the software. If you don't believe me, just read the license agreement. They are granted the right to use the software.
I will not for one second argue that developing applications in FLOSS might be less expensive in the long term than developing similar applications using Visual Studio or whatever other proprietary applications are still out there (is PowerBuilder still alive?). The main reason I wouldn't argue in favor of MS et al is because I've seen how Microsoft comes out with a new version of something all of a sudden the API doesn't work the way it used to and you have to rewrite code that worked just fine. Once you've gone through that once or two, you've racked up some pretty substantial costs. So from that perspective, the perspective of the developer, I can see how FLOSS has a lower TCO.
What about the TCO of people who just use the software? What about those people who are still running QuickBooks 2000 because it gets the job done? People who are still running Windows 2000 on Pentium III desktops because they still work just fine. People who aren't modifying the source code and simply want an off the shelf product that offers all of the functionality that they need? Is FLOSS really less expensive for them?
My perception as someone who has been reading both sides but not actively developing the software is that FLOSS is great if you have programmers on hand and you have a dedicated Development department as part of your IT organization. FLOSS is great if you're out there on the cutting edge of technology and getting requirements from management along the lines of, "We want to share this data with our vendor in (insert random country here). Make it work and don't spend too much money on it."
The downside that I perceive is FLOSS lock in which in many cases is worse than vendor lock in. If you're locked into Microsoft, at the very least you can ask just about any "computer guy" (even a FLOSS, Linux zealot) to make your MS stuff work and they can make it work. On the other hand, what happens if someone codes you some great FLOSS accounting package and then disappears? What if that person didn't bother to comment their source code? What does the business owner do when he has to compete with the rest of the market place to find a decent programmer to maintain reams of custom code? I think in that perspective, it is a lot less expensive to just run PeachTree than it is to run, "Uber Accounting 1.0.23 developed by Tim Thorton and four guys in India with some help from Dimitri Haxalotanov."
The other downside that I see a lot is that there seems to be a pretty big section of the FLOSS community reinventing the wheel simply for the sake of doing it. There seems to be a running joke on /. about FLOSS POS systems. The POS systems are a niche market, but there are hundreds of niche markets that are pretty much dominated by Microsoft. In those arenas, FLOSS is playing catch up. If FLOSS and Linux are ever going to replace Microsoft they need to get into all of those niches, but I see the barrier to entry being pretty high. Most Small and Medium Business owners want to deal with a known quantity. They will talk to their peers and ask them how they are doing business, and their peers are going to say they are using Microsoft. They are using PeachTree or QuickBooks. They are using Office (even if it's Office 97 or 2000). Beyond their peers, their vendors are going to say the same thing. T
I've been using Firefox 2.0 since beta and before IE7 came out. Like a diligent /. reader I've been keeping up on the arguments from both sides. The one that stuck out in my mind was that Firefox has a pretty bad memory leak. At the time I read it, I didn't pay much attention to it because I never noticed any slowdown or stability problems when using Firefox. That was until a few weeks ago.
I started playing WoW a while ago and have recently been using Thotbott. I will have WoW open in one window (Full screen) and Thotbott running in Firefox in the background. After a while, WoW started chunking big time. I eventually figured out that if I closed Firefox, the chunk went away. On my system (P4 3.0ghz, 1GB RAM, XP SP2), IE7 doesn't cause WoW to chunk. I can leave Thotbott open in the background all day long.
Although I do use Firefox for most my browsing, it isn't the IE killer that it often gets made out to be.
Unfortunately since Bullfrog was purchased by EA, I'm pretty sure that franchise is deader than a doornail. =(
How are they going to deal with the fact that they are trying to mount these things on ships that are floating in the middle of the ocean and are subject to the rise and fall of the waves? I have to imagine that the angle of the barrel in relation to the horizon has to be changing by a pretty significant amount of degrees.
Is Apple going to follow Microsoft's lead into more restrictive DRM? =)
"There is no sin greater than not knowing when you have enough."
Going back to the language itself, all of the data is kept in comma delimited flat table files. Whenever the indexes get really screwed up the developer has to run a bunch of cleanup utilities that take a good six hours or so to run.
Perhaps needless to say, I'm looking around for some sort of SQL based alternative. =) But of course the client is cheap as hell and they'd rather pay for the downtime than finance the cost of developing a replacement application for a pretty niche market (waste management).
Good job on saying what you wanted to say instead of actually replying to the point that I was making.
I also think you're being a bit naive here. Is San Andreas going to be kids only, or even primary, exposure to the gangster lifestyle?
Although it certainly might not be the primary exposure, it could very well be the most explicitly detailed exposure that they will ever have. The sheer reality of that game, from the dialogue, to the stereotypical racial dynamics (blacks vs blacks, blacks vs latinos), to the crossing out of tags, to the being able to identify the street pushers based on what kind of clothes they wear, etc. was taken straight out of the way things really work.
Of course you can talk about how they see the same things in music videos, and hear about it in songs. To that I'd reply that the level of immersion offered in a video game is completely different. It comes at the kids slower. It is more all encompassing. Once a kid has been playing a video game for a few minutes, it isn't all that hard to sneak up on them because their 7 +/- 2 strains of focus have been focused into the game world and away from everything else. And to return full circle to the point I was making that you either intentionally or unintentionally skipped past in your effort to make your own point... When kids are playing games, they are in effect, mentally doing what their characters in the game are doing. They are also accepting as okay the actions that they are doing. To use San Andreas as an example... A kid could listen to some gangster rap and think, "Gee, that lifestyle sounds kind of cool." They can see the videos on MTV and think, "Gee, that lifestyle looks pretty cool." Then they go play San Andreas and think, "Gee, this lifestyle really is cool."
And you might say, "Well video games and reality are different. I've played X number of video games about Y and yet I've never done Y." I'm not talking about direct cause and effect. In this case, in the particular case of GTA, the video games create a level of acceptance for what is portrayed in the video game. Although the kid might not grab a can of spray paint, go cross out the first tag he comes across and then proceed to beat on whoever has a problem with him doing that, the kid very well might see someone else doing that and start to think (subconsciously), "Okay. I know what that guy is doing. There isn't anything wrong with that. It's just like what I saw in the video game that my parents implicitly told me was okay by letting me play." Or he might see a bunch of tags on the walls and think, "I wonder where the gangsters are. They'd be pretty cool to kick it with."
Consider this... In an R-rated movie, a child simply has access to watching someone else perform acts that you wouldn't want the child doing (killing people, rape, etc). In a videogame, the child in effect becomes the perpetrator of the acts. The difference is between simply seeing the acts versus committing the acts, albeit in a virtual world.
When I played GTA San Andreas I remember thinking to myself, "This isn't the kind of game I'd want my kids playing." For me, it hit a little bit too close home. Having grown up in Long Beach, and seen gang life first hand, the game was uncomfortably realistic. As an adult, I could see it for the entertainment and escapism that it was. However I think that when you expose kids to that kind of content, you are in effect saying, "I approve." and I don't think that it is right to tell your children that you approve of the lifestyle being presented in a game like GTA:San Andreas.
I have yet to come across any sort of "proprietary" POS system that doesn't dump data to CSV at a very bare minimum.
I think what he was saying is that Starbucks offers incentives that the local mom and pop spot doesn't. Sad, sure... but I think the average Starbucks employee is a bit ahead of the local mom and pop employee (in terms of wages and benefits).
If he wanted a whitebox file server then he should have built it himself. Bagging on HP is kind of stupid given that you can easily install a few different flavors of Linux on a Proliant with full driver support.
In short, the guy wasn't using the right tools for the job and he got bit in the butt by it. If he had planned ahead instead of just assuming that everything would work right then he could have avoided the problems that he ran into.
Granted, Ubuntu worked for him better than the Windows options that he had so chalk it up as a "win" for Ubuntu.
This is the most insightful thing that I've read on /. in a long while. I completely agree. The sort of operations that computer geeks take for granted like installing software and configuring all of the various services are completely foreign to most non-computer users. If you've ever had to work with a curious user, or even better a child who likes to ask, "Why are you doing that?" then you'll quickly realize how many things you do automatically without thought... things that someone who has never done it before would need to pause to read the manual to figure out.