I think it depends on the definition of "improve". If I took some piece of software that a company spent x millions of dollars developing, and then make a version which uses a different font - is that an improvement? Maybe to people who prefer that font, and they'll buy my version instead of the original. Should I really be entitled to any significant portion of the proceeds from that product? I don't think so.
The thing about mechanical licensing with music is it very strictly only applies if you don't change it.
Then you need better fans. My main box has fans on the CPU, GPU and case, but the only things I can actually hear are the drives (and even then only on seek). It's in an office so I don't really care, but getting my Tivo onto SSD one day would be nice, I don't like the HDD chatter in the living room.
Couple of points. Firstly, the smart but under resourced admin should use this incident as evidence of what happens when management won't cough up for required equipment. A test environment is not a luxury, it's a necessity for a reliable system. Secondly, something like vmware can let you set up and test an environment on whatever hardware you do have lying around - you could even run it on the prod box at a pinch.
I don't really think there's much to be gained in running loss leaders in the PC market. It's not like discount groceries where you're trying to get people into your store and hoping they'll buy more while they're there. I'm sure Dell's margins are razor thin on most low end products, but I'd be surprised if they regularly actually took a loss on a sale - there's just no reason for them to do so.
Whilst you obviously know plenty about C++, you seem to know precious little about Java. For one thing, creating an object in Java is faster than in C++ because it doesn't have to malloc at all. Then there's the rather obvious counter to your example which is that it only works if I know I need a million objects ahead of time, and I know exactly which class they all need to be. What if I'm building them based on events? What if some are different types? That's a more common use case and one which your solution simply doesn't work for (unless you start allocating vast buffers just in case you need it, which is more than a little wasteful!).
I have heard this claim, oh so, many times and have never seen it come to fruition except for exceptionally trivial examples That's probably because few people take the time to write non-trivial apps in both C++ and Java to compare them. That, and benchmarks are useless. So we can't directly compare results, we have to reason about what's going on under the hood by comparing machine code. Fortunatly that isn't just possible, it's been done, and there are plenty of examples out there. But just think about it in the abstract - there's no way that a compile time optimizer could be better than a run time one, given that they both have access to the same selection of possible optimizations. The run time one will have _at least_ as good a chance of choosing the right one, and, in most cases, a considerably better chance.
You also will not be able to use music from your hard drive, unless the game is specifically programed to take advantage of the feature. Unfortunately, no games will be able to take advantage of in-game custom soundtracks when the firmware update goes live. (However, future games and game patches can enable this feature. It depends on whether or not the developer chooses to include it in their game.)
Like I said, it's up to the dev to enable as far as I can tell (everything I've read on a number of sites says it's enabled per-game). I haven't installed 2.41 yet so I can't comment from personal experience.
On the Wii, there are games that allow custom MP3 soundtracks played off the SD card.
I didn't know that - I've not seen such a feature on any games I have. Regardless, wouldn't help me as my music isn't on an SD card it's on my media server.
I'm guessing you have a 360, but not a Wii or PS3? You'd be guessing wrong. But I'm guessing you're a rabid anti-MS fanbot?
It might seem a bit silly for EA to offer a proprietary music download service when all current-gen consoles allow users to create their own custom soundtracks from their already-existing digital music collections Well that's not true. The 360 can do it, sure, but it's not available at all on the Wii and it's optional (for the dev) on the PS3. So I'm gonna guess EA won't be enabling it for their PS3 games from now on:)
Some games come with pretty awful music (I'm looking at you Puzzle Quest!) so the custom soundtrack feature on the 360 is a lifesaver.
I've carried a work BB for a few years now and I don't think it's been a negative thing at all. No one expects me to be checking email at the weekend so they still have to phone if it's urgent. If I'm on vacation the BB loses it's battery and goes in a drawer. However, if I want to check my morning meeting schedule before going to bed it takes 30 seconds (rather than having to fire up the VPN) and if I do get a call at some ungodly hour I can quickly check the mail trail to see what's been going on. I find it very convenient to be able to get to my work email quickly when I choose to, I don't feel under any pressure to do so more than I would do anyway.
One thing I'm very clear about is that I still carry a personal phone. That way, when I'm not on company time I can choose whether to take the BB or not. Clear separation of work and home life is important.
You're assuming that the likelihood of the big company using your code is the same regardless of whether it's BSD or GPL licensed. I can assure you (as an employee of a big company) that is not the case. The benefit you describe only actually occurs when and if the code is used and improved.
I'm not getting into the whole BSD vs GPL argument, I just don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Must me talking about Match and/or Yahoo Personals. Both have lawsuits pending [usatoday.com] which accuse them of padding their membership rolls Just because someone sued them doesn't mean they actually did it. I can only speak from experience of Match.com, but I was a member there for one month, dated 3 girls and ended up married to one of them. Best $10 I ever spent.
It's not a retina scan, it's a simple facial photo (with a $30 logitech webcam). Still annoying and invasive, but just wanted to set the record straight.
It's not the bugfixes. I work in a company which is also fairly conservative regarding the GPL and we already do feed bugfixes back to the community for various things we use (mainly Apache licensed). The concern with the GPL is with the definition of linking and the possibility of having to release stuff which isn't simply a bugfix. In our industry having better internal software than the next guy really is a competitive advantage and it's not one we can risk losing.
I would rather let a criminal steal than commit murder, yes. Does that make me a coward in your eyes? To me a coward is someone who needs a gun with them all the time to feel safe. Someone who would rather shoot someone dead on sight than actually try to understand what's happening and formulate a rational response like an intelligent human being.
Anyway, doesn't matter to me, I have no intention of ever visiting Texas. Feel free to shoot each other.
Why not just get USB cables for all of those and charge from a standard USB charger? The ipod charger is already USB, so just buy the right cable from ebay for the phone, ipaq and camera and you're set. When I travel I take a laptop charger and the tiny iphone charger along with a bunch of (retractable) USB cables for everything else.
I work in a bank, and you'd be amazed at the amount of Windows servers that are run. No, I wouldn't:) When I said "bank" I meant investment banking/brokerage, Wall St has never been a very Windows friendly world. They started on mainframe, slowly moves to Solaris and are now slowly moving to Linux. With the amount of money dependent on reliable technology the pace of change has always been kinda lethargic (hell, Sybase is still the no.1 DB around here). Retail on the other hand is very different (which is where I guess you are from your comment). Whilst I've never been in retail myself I do know that they tend to have what I would consider less mature (and WAY smaller) technology divisions, and as we all know small shops often end up preferring single vendor solutions like MS. My father is a tech consultant for financial institutions of all sizes and I know a lot of the retail places he goes to are all Windows.
[quote]But I'm curious about your company's reasoning for not using Solaris x86. [/quote] To be honest - me too. I have asked and never really gotten a good answer. My guess (and it's only that) is that some of the senior SA community who had us stuck on Solaris/SPARC for so long were replaced with Intel friendly guys, who also happened to be more pro-Linux than Solaris. The other possibility is that of the compute farm which was one of our first Linux projects. It was the success of that which pushed the rest of the firm over, and it may just have been that the decision was made to stick with what was proven to work in our environment.
The move isn't from Windows to Linux but from Solaris to Linux. The desktop is, and will continue to be, Windows - so all those backoffice mega spreadsheets will continue to run fine. We're fighting a constant battle to replace them with real applications though - and whilst Solaris has been the server platform of choice for years it's being very quickly replaced by Linux. When I'm ordering machines for my apps these days all I'm allowed to buy are Linux/Intel servers - just a year ago most purchasing was Solaris/SPARC. We even have a _very_ large distributed compute farm which is all Linux. In my experience banks have never been fans of Windows in the server room and I don't really see that changing except for a few Windows specific apps (Exchange & Sharepoint being the big ones).
And I'm sure different banks have different attitudes but we've been all about O/S for a long time now - we dumped WLS for Tomcat/JBoss years ago for example. The biggest hesitation was with Linux as an OS, and that was mainly due to friction from the SA community IMO. Eventually the cost savings (particularly when you dump SPARC) were just too much to ignore.
Instead of being paid for the amount of work they put in, like everyone else, they want to be paid based on the number of people who end up enjoying the game.
If only the rest of us got that luxury! Maybe barbers would like to be paid based on the number of people who compliment you on your haircut. Maybe auto manufacturers would like to be paid based on the number of trips you take in your car, or the number of passengers you carry, instead of a fixed amount up front. But would it really be worth passing a bunch of laws enforcing those business models?
We do. I don't know about where you work, but at my company if there were no customers there would very quickly be no paycheck. If a barber consistently does a bad job then no-one will visit his shop and he'll go out of business. Likewise, if he does really well and everyone recommends him to their friends he'll get more business, open a bigger shop, buy a nice house and retire in luxury. If I buy a car and it is unreliable, or bad to drive, that company will lose my repeat business. A game company is no different. They design and create a product (car), then they try to sell copies of it (cars). If they made a good game (car) it'll sell lots of copies (cars) and they'll make their investment back plus some profit. If not, they'll not only have trouble breaking even on this deal, they'll probably have lost a lot of future business and it'll be hard to drum up capital for the next one.
You seem to be entirely ignorant of how the economic system works, and how software production really is not different whatsoever from any other manufacturing industry, other than the ease with which the product can be ripped off. Or do you really think a Ferrari costs $200k in raw materials?
And we are still entitled to think that what they're providing isn't worth $10, and find someone else who'll provide it for less - whether that's a used game store or a torrent.
NO. You are entitled to find someone who will provide something of equivalent or greater value to you at a price you're willing to pay. Just because you don't want to pay for something doesn't mean it should be free - that's just not how the system works. If you don't like it feel free to campaign for change, but don't think you can just spew some crap about civil disobedience. Those who really know what that means know that civil disobedience involves getting caught and taking the punishment to publicize a wrong - not hiding in your parent's basement hoping no-one will find your uber-tracker.
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I think it depends on the definition of "improve". If I took some piece of software that a company spent x millions of dollars developing, and then make a version which uses a different font - is that an improvement? Maybe to people who prefer that font, and they'll buy my version instead of the original. Should I really be entitled to any significant portion of the proceeds from that product? I don't think so.
The thing about mechanical licensing with music is it very strictly only applies if you don't change it.
Well I wrote a depth-first search app to brute force a couple of puzzles in Professor Layton - does that count?
Then you need better fans. My main box has fans on the CPU, GPU and case, but the only things I can actually hear are the drives (and even then only on seek). It's in an office so I don't really care, but getting my Tivo onto SSD one day would be nice, I don't like the HDD chatter in the living room.
Couple of points. Firstly, the smart but under resourced admin should use this incident as evidence of what happens when management won't cough up for required equipment. A test environment is not a luxury, it's a necessity for a reliable system. Secondly, something like vmware can let you set up and test an environment on whatever hardware you do have lying around - you could even run it on the prod box at a pinch.
I don't really think there's much to be gained in running loss leaders in the PC market. It's not like discount groceries where you're trying to get people into your store and hoping they'll buy more while they're there. I'm sure Dell's margins are razor thin on most low end products, but I'd be surprised if they regularly actually took a loss on a sale - there's just no reason for them to do so.
Apple isn't in business to make computers that are unprofitable.
Interestingly, neither are Dell or Lenovo.
Whilst you obviously know plenty about C++, you seem to know precious little about Java. For one thing, creating an object in Java is faster than in C++ because it doesn't have to malloc at all. Then there's the rather obvious counter to your example which is that it only works if I know I need a million objects ahead of time, and I know exactly which class they all need to be. What if I'm building them based on events? What if some are different types? That's a more common use case and one which your solution simply doesn't work for (unless you start allocating vast buffers just in case you need it, which is more than a little wasteful!).
A little light reading.
I have heard this claim, oh so, many times and have never seen it come to fruition except for exceptionally trivial examples
That's probably because few people take the time to write non-trivial apps in both C++ and Java to compare them. That, and benchmarks are useless. So we can't directly compare results, we have to reason about what's going on under the hood by comparing machine code. Fortunatly that isn't just possible, it's been done, and there are plenty of examples out there. But just think about it in the abstract - there's no way that a compile time optimizer could be better than a run time one, given that they both have access to the same selection of possible optimizations. The run time one will have _at least_ as good a chance of choosing the right one, and, in most cases, a considerably better chance.
As of the most recent PS3 firmware, you can play any background music you'd like off the console hard drive regardless of what game you're playing.
Not according to ps3fanboy.com:
You also will not be able to use music from your hard drive, unless the game is specifically programed to take advantage of the feature. Unfortunately, no games will be able to take advantage of in-game custom soundtracks when the firmware update goes live. (However, future games and game patches can enable this feature. It depends on whether or not the developer chooses to include it in their game.)
Like I said, it's up to the dev to enable as far as I can tell (everything I've read on a number of sites says it's enabled per-game). I haven't installed 2.41 yet so I can't comment from personal experience.
On the Wii, there are games that allow custom MP3 soundtracks played off the SD card.
I didn't know that - I've not seen such a feature on any games I have. Regardless, wouldn't help me as my music isn't on an SD card it's on my media server.
I'm guessing you have a 360, but not a Wii or PS3?
You'd be guessing wrong. But I'm guessing you're a rabid anti-MS fanbot?
It might seem a bit silly for EA to offer a proprietary music download service when all current-gen consoles allow users to create their own custom soundtracks from their already-existing digital music collections :)
Well that's not true. The 360 can do it, sure, but it's not available at all on the Wii and it's optional (for the dev) on the PS3. So I'm gonna guess EA won't be enabling it for their PS3 games from now on
Some games come with pretty awful music (I'm looking at you Puzzle Quest!) so the custom soundtrack feature on the 360 is a lifesaver.
Well you don't have to look at it.
I've carried a work BB for a few years now and I don't think it's been a negative thing at all. No one expects me to be checking email at the weekend so they still have to phone if it's urgent. If I'm on vacation the BB loses it's battery and goes in a drawer. However, if I want to check my morning meeting schedule before going to bed it takes 30 seconds (rather than having to fire up the VPN) and if I do get a call at some ungodly hour I can quickly check the mail trail to see what's been going on. I find it very convenient to be able to get to my work email quickly when I choose to, I don't feel under any pressure to do so more than I would do anyway.
One thing I'm very clear about is that I still carry a personal phone. That way, when I'm not on company time I can choose whether to take the BB or not. Clear separation of work and home life is important.
You're assuming that the likelihood of the big company using your code is the same regardless of whether it's BSD or GPL licensed. I can assure you (as an employee of a big company) that is not the case. The benefit you describe only actually occurs when and if the code is used and improved.
I'm not getting into the whole BSD vs GPL argument, I just don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Must me talking about Match and/or Yahoo Personals. Both have lawsuits pending [usatoday.com] which accuse them of padding their membership rolls
Just because someone sued them doesn't mean they actually did it. I can only speak from experience of Match.com, but I was a member there for one month, dated 3 girls and ended up married to one of them. Best $10 I ever spent.
It's not a retina scan, it's a simple facial photo (with a $30 logitech webcam). Still annoying and invasive, but just wanted to set the record straight.
It's not the bugfixes. I work in a company which is also fairly conservative regarding the GPL and we already do feed bugfixes back to the community for various things we use (mainly Apache licensed). The concern with the GPL is with the definition of linking and the possibility of having to release stuff which isn't simply a bugfix. In our industry having better internal software than the next guy really is a competitive advantage and it's not one we can risk losing.
Which has exactly what to do with Iraq? (hint: nothing).
But it learns. After a few times of you typing en, moving down to the wikipedia link and selecting it, it will be magically at the top.
I would rather let a criminal steal than commit murder, yes. Does that make me a coward in your eyes? To me a coward is someone who needs a gun with them all the time to feel safe. Someone who would rather shoot someone dead on sight than actually try to understand what's happening and formulate a rational response like an intelligent human being.
Anyway, doesn't matter to me, I have no intention of ever visiting Texas. Feel free to shoot each other.
No shit. That's why I said I take a laptop charger and a USB charger for everything else. Still it reduces the problem from 5 to 2.
Why not just get USB cables for all of those and charge from a standard USB charger? The ipod charger is already USB, so just buy the right cable from ebay for the phone, ipaq and camera and you're set. When I travel I take a laptop charger and the tiny iphone charger along with a bunch of (retractable) USB cables for everything else.
I work in a bank, and you'd be amazed at the amount of Windows servers that are run. :) When I said "bank" I meant investment banking/brokerage, Wall St has never been a very Windows friendly world. They started on mainframe, slowly moves to Solaris and are now slowly moving to Linux. With the amount of money dependent on reliable technology the pace of change has always been kinda lethargic (hell, Sybase is still the no.1 DB around here). Retail on the other hand is very different (which is where I guess you are from your comment). Whilst I've never been in retail myself I do know that they tend to have what I would consider less mature (and WAY smaller) technology divisions, and as we all know small shops often end up preferring single vendor solutions like MS. My father is a tech consultant for financial institutions of all sizes and I know a lot of the retail places he goes to are all Windows.
No, I wouldn't
[quote]But I'm curious about your company's reasoning for not using Solaris x86. [/quote]
To be honest - me too. I have asked and never really gotten a good answer. My guess (and it's only that) is that some of the senior SA community who had us stuck on Solaris/SPARC for so long were replaced with Intel friendly guys, who also happened to be more pro-Linux than Solaris. The other possibility is that of the compute farm which was one of our first Linux projects. It was the success of that which pushed the rest of the firm over, and it may just have been that the decision was made to stick with what was proven to work in our environment.
Hey! As a self proclaimed yuppie I take offence at you equating me to a Hummer driver!
The move isn't from Windows to Linux but from Solaris to Linux. The desktop is, and will continue to be, Windows - so all those backoffice mega spreadsheets will continue to run fine. We're fighting a constant battle to replace them with real applications though - and whilst Solaris has been the server platform of choice for years it's being very quickly replaced by Linux. When I'm ordering machines for my apps these days all I'm allowed to buy are Linux/Intel servers - just a year ago most purchasing was Solaris/SPARC. We even have a _very_ large distributed compute farm which is all Linux. In my experience banks have never been fans of Windows in the server room and I don't really see that changing except for a few Windows specific apps (Exchange & Sharepoint being the big ones).
And I'm sure different banks have different attitudes but we've been all about O/S for a long time now - we dumped WLS for Tomcat/JBoss years ago for example. The biggest hesitation was with Linux as an OS, and that was mainly due to friction from the SA community IMO. Eventually the cost savings (particularly when you dump SPARC) were just too much to ignore.
Take a look at this page showing crash test comparisons between a mini and a truck. I know which I'd rather be in.
Instead of being paid for the amount of work they put in, like everyone else, they want to be paid based on the number of people who end up enjoying the game.
If only the rest of us got that luxury! Maybe barbers would like to be paid based on the number of people who compliment you on your haircut. Maybe auto manufacturers would like to be paid based on the number of trips you take in your car, or the number of passengers you carry, instead of a fixed amount up front. But would it really be worth passing a bunch of laws enforcing those business models?
We do. I don't know about where you work, but at my company if there were no customers there would very quickly be no paycheck. If a barber consistently does a bad job then no-one will visit his shop and he'll go out of business. Likewise, if he does really well and everyone recommends him to their friends he'll get more business, open a bigger shop, buy a nice house and retire in luxury. If I buy a car and it is unreliable, or bad to drive, that company will lose my repeat business. A game company is no different. They design and create a product (car), then they try to sell copies of it (cars). If they made a good game (car) it'll sell lots of copies (cars) and they'll make their investment back plus some profit. If not, they'll not only have trouble breaking even on this deal, they'll probably have lost a lot of future business and it'll be hard to drum up capital for the next one.
You seem to be entirely ignorant of how the economic system works, and how software production really is not different whatsoever from any other manufacturing industry, other than the ease with which the product can be ripped off. Or do you really think a Ferrari costs $200k in raw materials?
And we are still entitled to think that what they're providing isn't worth $10, and find someone else who'll provide it for less - whether that's a used game store or a torrent.
NO. You are entitled to find someone who will provide something of equivalent or greater value to you at a price you're willing to pay. Just because you don't want to pay for something doesn't mean it should be free - that's just not how the system works. If you don't like it feel free to campaign for change, but don't think you can just spew some crap about civil disobedience. Those who really know what that means know that civil disobedience involves getting caught and taking the punishment to publicize a wrong - not hiding in your parent's basement hoping no-one will find your uber-tracker.