You left out the fact that sooner or later, the rest of the world will stop accepting dollars and then we're screwed. The only reason that we can successfully print dollars is because the rest of the world has to buy dollars in order to buy oil. Once China, Russia and the Middle East agree on a basket of currencies to buy oil with, we're screwed.
Google is... scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.
Perhaps my perception is skewed because I rarely use Google for searches any subject beyond technical research, but they have been going downhill lately. A couple of years ago I could input just about any error message or problem description and get relevant results. These days I'll be lucky to get two pages worth of one question that is kind of relevant to mine, repeated in eighteen different formats. The recent trend seems to be to leverage Usenet, or social.microsoft... and whatever "relevant" subject matter is there. Their search results have been gamed for the worse and they do not seem to have a solution to it. I have gone back to doing what I did before Google came around, going to the vendor's websites and support forums in search of answers. It is not completely Google's fault. It was only a matter of time before people figured out how to game the algorithm for profit.
I suppose that is the inevitable conclusion of trying to monetize something. It creates the incentive to game the system. My most recent non technical search was for bellini (the champagne cocktail). The first result was a children's furniture store. The second was a Wikipedia page. It wouldn't surprise me if the first result was paid for.
Many of the high profile failures seem to stem from OO-only thinking.
I saw this first hand during a system implementation that eventually failed spectacularly (to the point where the team responsible for the project got fired). There were simply too many instances where the answer was, "We're waiting for the vendor to update the library / dll." Eventually someone in senior management said, "You are supposed to be programmers. Why is this entire project stalled waiting for someone else to write code?"
If all a person knows are libraries and frameworks, they are setting themselves up for failure. Sooner or later they will hit a wall that they have to climb over themselves. Without a solid foundation in a real language, they will be worthless when that time comes.
I've found people head down two paths when they start out in IT. The first group has a real curiosity about everything related to computers and usual end up being the techies that keep IT departments working. The second group are people who an interest and a bit of attitude but quickly get overwhelmed by the day to day demands of IT work. They usually end up getting out of the pure technical roles and move towards more management type roles within a few years.
Have you been doing IT for very long? I've been at it for fifteen years at this point and I have always enjoyed the technical side of the profession. After a while, the newness and the gee whiz factor fades. In my case it had to do with being expected to be interested and engaged five plus days a week, on someone else's schedule and time line. Tech is great and fun when it is a hobby. Once you've been doing it as a profession for a while, the rate of change can wear you down. In case it is not that I got overwhelmed, I simply lost interest in being out there on the cutting edge and dealing with all of the headaches that come along with it. I took a realistic look at where I was and asked myself, "Do I want to be the guy dealing with the bugs of the latest.01 incremental release for the rest of my life?" In my case, the answer was no.
Once you've been through a few technology refreshes, your attitude shifts from, "Cool, new toys!" to "Here we go again..." I've seen people who tend toward two poles. They are either very helpful and enjoy helping others be better. Or they are arrogant, and derive self gratification from being the "smartest person in the room" and their ability to fix other people's "stupid mistakes".
At this point in my career I am enjoying mentoring people who are still excited about the technology, but who in most cases are such tech heads that they either do not see, or do not care about the bigger organizational picture. Being a pure tech employee is a path to high stress and always dealing with someone younger, who has less distractions (no family yet, etc).
I like the middle ground, where I understand the tech well enough to architect solutions to business problems, and then manage the implementation. I'm on my third iteration of that right now. Get hired, spend a few years getting everything dialed in and running smoothly, rest on the laurels for a little bit, get bored and move on to some place else where they pay more. Rinse and repeat. It has worked out well for my employers because the salary of someone who can maintain a system is less than someone who can build it from the ground up and/or identify and remedy major structural problems.
If you come out with solid math and science skills you do fine. Programming is very easy, but requires math and logic skills.
That is certainly one (popular) route to take into programming. A strong background in linguistics also provides a solid mental foundation for programming. The important ability to cultivate is structured, organized thinking.
In other news, Ferrari still hand builds their engines and chassies. Apple on the other hand uses the same CPUs, RAM and other internal bits as all of the other "Fords" in the computing world.
They are hemorraging assets left and right. By this time next year I doubt there will be any employees left at "Nortel". It's too bad because they were a major player for so long. That NT-1 switch is a real work horse.
Inflation has been going crazy. Google IPO'd before the market crashed and the government printed hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is Groupon's IPO worth in Google IPO era dollars?
This article reminds me of the dumb metric that comes out every holiday seasons. "Shoppers spent more this season than they did last season." No shit Sherlock?! Everything was more expensive this season than last season. They might as well say, "Shoppers spent more money on gas getting to the mall this holiday season than they did last year."
From the content of the article I was left with the impression that Carmack IS NOT writing DirectX code. At the end of the article he explicitly states that DirectX does not offer enough benefits to make it worth rewriting his development tools and code base to leverage it.
Did you read the article? The gist that I took away from it is that despite the headline claiming that Carmack prefers DX, he does not prefer it enough to redesign the entire codebase to leverage it. Despite all of the improvements in DX, DX is not better enough than OpenGL at this point to make it worth the transition.
I heard the same thing about MoH. I'm not completely convinced, but I can't be unbiased about it either. Once someone says there are hackers playing, you start seeing it whether or not it is really going on. But yeah, I've seen some questionable players who either have VERY fast connections, or have some sort of auto-aim.
What do you think about dealing with hackers / cheaters (ie. aimbots, wall hacks, etc)? I started playing PC games on a 286 when Microprose simulators (Gunship, etc) were cutting edge. I've been playing FPS games "online" since Quake on the LAN. I've never once used an aimbot, wallhack or any other cheat program (not even "trainers" for single player games). About two years ago I got fed up with playing against hackers and bought a PS3. In my experience, it seems like the "war" against hackers is unwinable. As long as the end user has control of the platform like they do with the PC, there will be ways to circumvent any anti-hack measure a developer can come up with. Do you agree?
And they were the ONLY ones to allow aimbot and wallhack code to run neatly alongside the game code. Since the user controls the PC, they also circumvent any anti-hack measures that are implemented. Wheeeee, PC gaming rocks!/sarcasm
I will turn your question around: What benefits does a console offer that a PC doesn't? This is anecdotal, but everyone I know that has a console is someone who has some difficulty in maintaining a computer. If you have a PC you don't need a console.
I'm not getting headshot every time I spawn on a console. I get a hack free experience on the console. The "superior" interface / graphics / etc of the PC are worthless when the game is unplayable because of hackers.
As a geek, the appeal to me is the locked down nature of the hardware and more importantly, the OS. I've spent the last decade and a half being frustrated by hackers in FPS games. On a console, I don't have that problem. I don't have to worry about drivers or any of the nonsense that I've been dealing with since the days of manually adjusting sound card settings in the config.sys file. I plug in the cables, put in the disc and play the game I want to play. That is the attraction of the console. When you do IT for a living, sometimes you want shit that just works and doesn't need to be fucked with. Or in my case, I like the knowledge that the developer (in my case it's Sony with the PS3) is making it a royal PITA for anyone else to screw with the environment. Sure, I feel a little bit bad for people who want to run Linux on the PS3, but fuck it... you can run Linux on anything... go find a 386 if you want to tinker with Linux on some random platform.
You're right. I was a PC elitist for the longest time. I grew up playing FPS games on the PC. I eventually got tired of playing against hackers with their damn aimbots and wallhacks. I bought a PS3 and haven't looked back. The only game I play on the PC now is WoW. Everything else I do on the PS3. Like others have said, when everyone else is using the same interface as you are, it doesn't matter that you don't have a keyboard or mouse. I'm 30+ years old and it took me about a week to build the synapses to be good with the PS3 controller. I'm sure it would take a teenager all of a couple hours to make the transition.
You forgot the key aspect of the PC. The aimbot and the wallhack. I don't care how fast your mouse skills are, the cheaters will beat you 80% of the time. That's why I only play FPS on the console now. Sure, the interface might not be as good, but at least everyone is playing on an even playing field.
Hurt's society, and the economy? You're nuts. SMS could evaporate right now and society would be fine. It is an unnecessary luxury. We are not talking about the cost of food here.
The cost is reasonable. I doubt you can find more than one (if you can even find one) cellular telco that does not offer an affordable, unlimited texting plan. I think I pay $5 per month for unlimited text. I bet Verizon pays more than that to power the cell towers that I send my texts through.
You can send a text message when the voice channel is down. You cannot make a voice call when the text (control) channel is down.
It is like crying about the cost per gigabyte of a fiber channel, RAID1/0 SAN LUN compared to the cheap Western Digital drive you bought at Best Buy. SMS is ridiculously expensive because the underlying infrastructure is expensive. Unlike the SAN analogy, the SMS infrastructure does not need to be as robust as it. Yet rather than build out another infrastructure, they send SMS across the control channel.
The telcos have zero incentive to move SMS off of the control channel. They get around the consumer backlash by offering unlimited text plans. If a customer does not like the cost, they can get an unlimited plan. Most carriers charge about $5 per month for unlimited text. Any customer who is going to whine and complain about $5 a month is not a customer you want to have. You're better off without their business.
Are you and your wife physically active? Do you like going for bike rides, going to the park, swimming, etc (on a regular basis)? Kids learn most of their behaviors through modeling.
The lawyers in this case are not really practicing law. They are reviewing documents. During e-Discovery, you can easily end up with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents (mostly email, but a few Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, etc). Only a very small percentage of those are relevant to the matter at hand. To make a real world analogy, if the police get a search warrant to search a residence for drugs, they will find some drugs, but they will also find a lot of things that are not drugs (clothes, food, furniture, electronics, etc). It's fairly easy to determine what does and does not fit the "drug" category. With e-Discovery, you need to study the information a bit more closely.
In the past, lawyers had to sort through the emails and other information to find the gems that are relevant to the case. Now, the software does all of the sorting and correlating and conceptualizing. What has happened is that instead of rooms full of staff attorneys going over documents, you now have a computer system that a few people access. An entire step in the process has been automated. That's great news for the clients who do not have to pay all of those lawyers. It is bad news for the lawyers.
You're way off base with your analysis on this. The analytics packages that are referenced in the article (Clearwell, et al) are seriously complex analytics. The Enron document set that they train these applications one results in some really interesting correlations. The software groups similar documents together and puts them in context. One of the more interesting demos that I saw showed how one particular Enron employee had a penchant for flirting with various women around the office (via email). Out of thousands of emails, the software managed to find all of the flirty emails and group them into a single category. There was not a single mention of sex, or hooking up, or even "flirting" in any of the emails, but the software was able to conceptualize it all together.
As for your premise that "it requires more technicians on staff to keep the thing tottering along ( like a drunk at marty gras! ) than it does to do the job the application was designed to take over." You are completely wrong. I manage a few e-Discovery applications for close to 1000 users. The law firms that we are working with are doing exactly what the article talks about. The applications allow a few senior partners to define the search scopes and conditions, and then it only takes a few junior partners to analyze the tens or hundreds of thousands of documents. The software does most of the conceptualization and analysis. The low paid attorneys aren't really thinking about the content anymore. The software does that for them. The lawyers simply validate the assumptions made by the software.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the fact that sooner or later, the rest of the world will stop accepting dollars and then we're screwed. The only reason that we can successfully print dollars is because the rest of the world has to buy dollars in order to buy oil. Once China, Russia and the Middle East agree on a basket of currencies to buy oil with, we're screwed.
Google is ... scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.
Perhaps my perception is skewed because I rarely use Google for searches any subject beyond technical research, but they have been going downhill lately. A couple of years ago I could input just about any error message or problem description and get relevant results. These days I'll be lucky to get two pages worth of one question that is kind of relevant to mine, repeated in eighteen different formats. The recent trend seems to be to leverage Usenet, or social.microsoft... and whatever "relevant" subject matter is there. Their search results have been gamed for the worse and they do not seem to have a solution to it. I have gone back to doing what I did before Google came around, going to the vendor's websites and support forums in search of answers. It is not completely Google's fault. It was only a matter of time before people figured out how to game the algorithm for profit.
I suppose that is the inevitable conclusion of trying to monetize something. It creates the incentive to game the system. My most recent non technical search was for bellini (the champagne cocktail). The first result was a children's furniture store. The second was a Wikipedia page. It wouldn't surprise me if the first result was paid for.
Many of the high profile failures seem to stem from OO-only thinking.
I saw this first hand during a system implementation that eventually failed spectacularly (to the point where the team responsible for the project got fired). There were simply too many instances where the answer was, "We're waiting for the vendor to update the library / dll." Eventually someone in senior management said, "You are supposed to be programmers. Why is this entire project stalled waiting for someone else to write code?"
If all a person knows are libraries and frameworks, they are setting themselves up for failure. Sooner or later they will hit a wall that they have to climb over themselves. Without a solid foundation in a real language, they will be worthless when that time comes.
I've found people head down two paths when they start out in IT. The first group has a real curiosity about everything related to computers and usual end up being the techies that keep IT departments working. The second group are people who an interest and a bit of attitude but quickly get overwhelmed by the day to day demands of IT work. They usually end up getting out of the pure technical roles and move towards more management type roles within a few years.
Have you been doing IT for very long? I've been at it for fifteen years at this point and I have always enjoyed the technical side of the profession. After a while, the newness and the gee whiz factor fades. In my case it had to do with being expected to be interested and engaged five plus days a week, on someone else's schedule and time line. Tech is great and fun when it is a hobby. Once you've been doing it as a profession for a while, the rate of change can wear you down. In case it is not that I got overwhelmed, I simply lost interest in being out there on the cutting edge and dealing with all of the headaches that come along with it. I took a realistic look at where I was and asked myself, "Do I want to be the guy dealing with the bugs of the latest .01 incremental release for the rest of my life?" In my case, the answer was no.
Once you've been through a few technology refreshes, your attitude shifts from, "Cool, new toys!" to "Here we go again..." I've seen people who tend toward two poles. They are either very helpful and enjoy helping others be better. Or they are arrogant, and derive self gratification from being the "smartest person in the room" and their ability to fix other people's "stupid mistakes".
At this point in my career I am enjoying mentoring people who are still excited about the technology, but who in most cases are such tech heads that they either do not see, or do not care about the bigger organizational picture. Being a pure tech employee is a path to high stress and always dealing with someone younger, who has less distractions (no family yet, etc).
I like the middle ground, where I understand the tech well enough to architect solutions to business problems, and then manage the implementation. I'm on my third iteration of that right now. Get hired, spend a few years getting everything dialed in and running smoothly, rest on the laurels for a little bit, get bored and move on to some place else where they pay more. Rinse and repeat. It has worked out well for my employers because the salary of someone who can maintain a system is less than someone who can build it from the ground up and/or identify and remedy major structural problems.
If you come out with solid math and science skills you do fine. Programming is very easy, but requires math and logic skills.
That is certainly one (popular) route to take into programming. A strong background in linguistics also provides a solid mental foundation for programming. The important ability to cultivate is structured, organized thinking.
In other news, Ferrari still hand builds their engines and chassies. Apple on the other hand uses the same CPUs, RAM and other internal bits as all of the other "Fords" in the computing world.
They are hemorraging assets left and right. By this time next year I doubt there will be any employees left at "Nortel". It's too bad because they were a major player for so long. That NT-1 switch is a real work horse.
I don't even want to think about the storm the tech who has to go reboot the satellite cusses up.
Inflation has been going crazy. Google IPO'd before the market crashed and the government printed hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is Groupon's IPO worth in Google IPO era dollars?
This article reminds me of the dumb metric that comes out every holiday seasons. "Shoppers spent more this season than they did last season." No shit Sherlock?! Everything was more expensive this season than last season. They might as well say, "Shoppers spent more money on gas getting to the mall this holiday season than they did last year."
carmack is only writing for directx because ...
From the content of the article I was left with the impression that Carmack IS NOT writing DirectX code. At the end of the article he explicitly states that DirectX does not offer enough benefits to make it worth rewriting his development tools and code base to leverage it.
Did you read the article? The gist that I took away from it is that despite the headline claiming that Carmack prefers DX, he does not prefer it enough to redesign the entire codebase to leverage it. Despite all of the improvements in DX, DX is not better enough than OpenGL at this point to make it worth the transition.
I heard the same thing about MoH. I'm not completely convinced, but I can't be unbiased about it either. Once someone says there are hackers playing, you start seeing it whether or not it is really going on. But yeah, I've seen some questionable players who either have VERY fast connections, or have some sort of auto-aim.
What do you think about dealing with hackers / cheaters (ie. aimbots, wall hacks, etc)? I started playing PC games on a 286 when Microprose simulators (Gunship, etc) were cutting edge. I've been playing FPS games "online" since Quake on the LAN. I've never once used an aimbot, wallhack or any other cheat program (not even "trainers" for single player games). About two years ago I got fed up with playing against hackers and bought a PS3. In my experience, it seems like the "war" against hackers is unwinable. As long as the end user has control of the platform like they do with the PC, there will be ways to circumvent any anti-hack measure a developer can come up with. Do you agree?
And they were the ONLY ones to allow aimbot and wallhack code to run neatly alongside the game code. Since the user controls the PC, they also circumvent any anti-hack measures that are implemented. Wheeeee, PC gaming rocks! /sarcasm
I will turn your question around: What benefits does a console offer that a PC doesn't? This is anecdotal, but everyone I know that has a console is someone who has some difficulty in maintaining a computer. If you have a PC you don't need a console.
I'm not getting headshot every time I spawn on a console. I get a hack free experience on the console. The "superior" interface / graphics / etc of the PC are worthless when the game is unplayable because of hackers.
As a geek, the appeal to me is the locked down nature of the hardware and more importantly, the OS. I've spent the last decade and a half being frustrated by hackers in FPS games. On a console, I don't have that problem. I don't have to worry about drivers or any of the nonsense that I've been dealing with since the days of manually adjusting sound card settings in the config.sys file. I plug in the cables, put in the disc and play the game I want to play. That is the attraction of the console. When you do IT for a living, sometimes you want shit that just works and doesn't need to be fucked with. Or in my case, I like the knowledge that the developer (in my case it's Sony with the PS3) is making it a royal PITA for anyone else to screw with the environment. Sure, I feel a little bit bad for people who want to run Linux on the PS3, but fuck it... you can run Linux on anything... go find a 386 if you want to tinker with Linux on some random platform.
You're right. I was a PC elitist for the longest time. I grew up playing FPS games on the PC. I eventually got tired of playing against hackers with their damn aimbots and wallhacks. I bought a PS3 and haven't looked back. The only game I play on the PC now is WoW. Everything else I do on the PS3. Like others have said, when everyone else is using the same interface as you are, it doesn't matter that you don't have a keyboard or mouse. I'm 30+ years old and it took me about a week to build the synapses to be good with the PS3 controller. I'm sure it would take a teenager all of a couple hours to make the transition.
You can adjust the sensitivity on the aimer. It have it cranked up pretty high on MoH.
You forgot the key aspect of the PC. The aimbot and the wallhack. I don't care how fast your mouse skills are, the cheaters will beat you 80% of the time. That's why I only play FPS on the console now. Sure, the interface might not be as good, but at least everyone is playing on an even playing field.
Hurt's society, and the economy? You're nuts. SMS could evaporate right now and society would be fine. It is an unnecessary luxury. We are not talking about the cost of food here.
The cost is reasonable. I doubt you can find more than one (if you can even find one) cellular telco that does not offer an affordable, unlimited texting plan. I think I pay $5 per month for unlimited text. I bet Verizon pays more than that to power the cell towers that I send my texts through.
You can send a text message when the voice channel is down. You cannot make a voice call when the text (control) channel is down.
It is like crying about the cost per gigabyte of a fiber channel, RAID1/0 SAN LUN compared to the cheap Western Digital drive you bought at Best Buy. SMS is ridiculously expensive because the underlying infrastructure is expensive. Unlike the SAN analogy, the SMS infrastructure does not need to be as robust as it. Yet rather than build out another infrastructure, they send SMS across the control channel.
The telcos have zero incentive to move SMS off of the control channel. They get around the consumer backlash by offering unlimited text plans. If a customer does not like the cost, they can get an unlimited plan. Most carriers charge about $5 per month for unlimited text. Any customer who is going to whine and complain about $5 a month is not a customer you want to have. You're better off without their business.
Are you and your wife physically active? Do you like going for bike rides, going to the park, swimming, etc (on a regular basis)? Kids learn most of their behaviors through modeling.
The lawyers in this case are not really practicing law. They are reviewing documents. During e-Discovery, you can easily end up with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents (mostly email, but a few Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, etc). Only a very small percentage of those are relevant to the matter at hand. To make a real world analogy, if the police get a search warrant to search a residence for drugs, they will find some drugs, but they will also find a lot of things that are not drugs (clothes, food, furniture, electronics, etc). It's fairly easy to determine what does and does not fit the "drug" category. With e-Discovery, you need to study the information a bit more closely.
In the past, lawyers had to sort through the emails and other information to find the gems that are relevant to the case. Now, the software does all of the sorting and correlating and conceptualizing. What has happened is that instead of rooms full of staff attorneys going over documents, you now have a computer system that a few people access. An entire step in the process has been automated. That's great news for the clients who do not have to pay all of those lawyers. It is bad news for the lawyers.
You're way off base with your analysis on this. The analytics packages that are referenced in the article (Clearwell, et al) are seriously complex analytics. The Enron document set that they train these applications one results in some really interesting correlations. The software groups similar documents together and puts them in context. One of the more interesting demos that I saw showed how one particular Enron employee had a penchant for flirting with various women around the office (via email). Out of thousands of emails, the software managed to find all of the flirty emails and group them into a single category. There was not a single mention of sex, or hooking up, or even "flirting" in any of the emails, but the software was able to conceptualize it all together.
As for your premise that "it requires more technicians on staff to keep the thing tottering along ( like a drunk at marty gras! ) than it does to do the job the application was designed to take over." You are completely wrong. I manage a few e-Discovery applications for close to 1000 users. The law firms that we are working with are doing exactly what the article talks about. The applications allow a few senior partners to define the search scopes and conditions, and then it only takes a few junior partners to analyze the tens or hundreds of thousands of documents. The software does most of the conceptualization and analysis. The low paid attorneys aren't really thinking about the content anymore. The software does that for them. The lawyers simply validate the assumptions made by the software.