You joke, but what good is the desktop environment to me when I'm playing a game?
I can think of a few... People can still send me IMs... or I can hope into a quick game while I'm waiting for an important email. People can still call me on Skype while I'm gaming (though Windows still wont' cut me a break with minimizing games).
I would very much like my computer to be doing many other things in the background while I game, thank you very much.
The problem is in the batteries. With mass manufacturing and a bit more research we can bring the cost of automobile-quality motors down considerably... but the one cost factor that seemingly is insurmountable is the battery. They wear out quickly, are expensive to manufacture, and even expensive to dispose of. I'm afraid that until we make a MAJOR, miraculous leap in energy storage technology we're just not going to have much luck with electric cars except in niche, short-range applications.
I want to have something happen when I put my foot down.
All the better, an electric motor *starts* at maximum torque, so you're putting down as much power as possible right when you slam your foot down... instead of like an archaic IC engine that takes time to rev up to max torque.
Agreed! I don't know why it has to be so complicated. Canadian ballots are just a list of names with a blank circle next to them. You mark the circle of your candidate, and DONE. Sheesh, don't even know why you have these doodads where you have to insert your ballot, poke a hole through this and that... ugh...
It may not compete with the Halo's of the world, but it is absolutely not a niche product.
Oh come on, that's splitting hairs. Sins was not niche as in "sold out of the developers' trunks at dive bars", but you can't seriously say that a turn-based sci-fi strategy game is not niche. Even Civilization 4 was relatively niche despite its big budget - it appealed largely to an existing (and rabidly loyal) fanbase as its core, and did remarkably well for it. Sins appeals to a small demographic, but it's one that has a profound respect for the work the developer does, and hence you don't see the rampant piracy you see in mainstream games. Us turn-based gamers know that developers in our genre are dropping off the map, and anything we can do to keep them around we do.
Piracy has always been rampant, yet it's only the last couple years that people started thinking a DRM-free business plan wasn't viable
Hrm, I would argue that some level of DRM is required, though nothing to the draconian level of Spore et al. At the very least a CD check (or call-home if you would like to play CD-less) should be implemented. Like most people correctly state: DRM only stops the amateurs, people with enough savvy to BitTorrent will never be stopped in any meaningful way. So I say stop with the draconian, invasive DRM, and just go for traditional disk-verification tech. You'd stop the casual "hey burn me a copy" pirates, which is really the only demographic you have a serious hope of stopping anyways.
I used to actually be an avid modder back in the Half-Life 1 days. The prevalence of artists, I think, is a bit misleading - the vast majority of mod "teams" cannot find any (just like in FOSS), and most of the ones who are out there are not capable at all.
I would argue that it's just as easy to find an artist for a mod as you would an artist for a FOSS game - which is to say, very difficult.
Sadly, the model that has worked for Stardock won't work for mainstream games. Sins is a success, and Stardock's lack of DRM is working because they appeal to a hardcore gamer niche market that is keenly aware of the issues around piracy; mostly, anyways.
Move this model out into the mainstream market, where little kids with Pokemon, boozed up frat boys with Halo, or just immature idiots with too much bandwidth, and that whole thing falls apart.
If your market is small, has a traditionally tight-knit community that has existing rapport with the major developers in that field (Stardock is one), keeping people honest is a lot easier than if you're dealing with a market with a much lower moral standard. Expecting the average Joe to go by the honor system is a little much.
That's like complaining about the grocery store being too far, and not catering to the minority who don't have cars. Seriously, staying on dialup is a personal choice, and you have to accept the consequences of it - i.e. not being able to participate in the increasingly media-heavy internet.
Digital distribution is a great development in the industry, and is a step forward in giving more margin to the developers who actually bring you the games, instead of the traditional publisher-takes-all model. Valve has come up with a system that strikes a pretty good balance between the needs of the consumer and the needs of the producer. Kudos to them for that.
If you go to a movie theater and didn't like the movie, are you entitled to a refund? Does that entitle you to sneak into the theater, because the movie probably would've sucked anyway? Your argument is weak and juvenile. If you wanted to play the game, you pay for it, or buy used, or go through the many legitimate channels to play it. If you don't like the rules they've imposed on you - DON'T PLAY THE GAME. I don't. There are lots of games I would like to check out, but I feel aren't worth the price of entry... and you know what? I simply don't play them, and I haven't lost any sleep over it.
The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.
Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.
Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.
Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?
Well... your data certainly isn't safe... if your coworker sets up a large antenna in his next-door office, and you painstakingly make sure that your keyboard is the only possible EM source in your office.
Seriously, this isn't anywhere close to something that can happen in real life. In real life you'd be hooked onto DC power (oops, noise!), have a monitor (oops, noise!), have a cell phone (noise!), land line (noise!), ethernet (noise!)... need I go on? To get any intelliglbe signal out of that soup would require more skill and dedication than your keystrokes are worth. So unless you are a secret agent of some sort, you shouldn't be losing sleep over this.
Now, that said, this story is nothing more than another hand out to anti-Apple concern trolls.
The problem I have is that many low-end PC laptops have Firewire... so there's really not much of an excuse for Apple not to have it. Being a Mac user myself, I have no problem paying more for a comprehensive feature set, even if I wont' always use it (Bluetooth, 802.11n, etc.)... but this is the first time that even paying the Apple premium still doesn't get me all the trimmings.
Not so perplexing... Apple has always used the inferior material quality of the MacBooks as a market differentiator. Now that all the laptops have the sexy unibody construction Apple needed SOME way to segment the market and convince people to buy the Pro.
I don't buy it either. Has Apple seen an HDMI port? It's downright tiny AND carries audio data (would work great if you want to put a movie on your TV!)... DisplayPort might be the new hotness, but HDMI is well-established, with lots of hardware and software support, and is small enough that Apple really wouldn't miss the room.
On Apple laptops you do:) My MacBook Pro has had a failed hard drive (barely a year old), and out of the other Mac users I know there have been at least 5 other HDD failures. I don't know what causes it, maybe Apple uses shoddy parts, maybe it's bad thermal design... But Apple HDDs seem to die more often than the rest.
That's the difference between Windows and OS X. On Windows (XP anyways, not too sure about the new graphics architecture in Vista) all GUI drawing is handled directly by the CPU. So switching the GPU would just entail having to redraw everything all over again, something that the OS can push through fairly easily.
On MacOS X though, every single window, every little widget you see is directly tied into OpenGL (hence the purty animations without killing your CPU)... it's a bit more involved, since each app is now holding onto oodles of resources tied *directly* to the hardware. Switching your GPU becomes a lot more difficult then, and it looks like Apple has taken the route of simply shutting off your graphics subsystem and rebooting it on a new device.
(I'm also curious how you manage to save 1/2 a million in just five years just by not having cable etc?)
I don't even make $100K a year after taxes, WTF. Expecting the average American to save $500K in their *lifetime* is difficult enough, let alone 5 years.
One more advantage of public health care is that the government can focus on preventative medicine. No private insurer wants to pick up the tab to make sure the population is healthy enough not to need expensive care once they ARE sick. So in the end health care ends up costing more, people are not as healthy, and everything sucks in general. Here in Canada government agencies spend a *lot* of time educating disease prevention, accident prevention, workplace safety, etc etc, and while I have no numbers, there must be some impact in reducing the *overall* cost of health care.
I don't understand how this problem even exists. Every single company I've interviewed with in the US (I'm Canadian) has offered to fly me down for second-round interviews, face to face with the dev team. How is it even possible to hire someone unknowingly unless you didn't even take the TINY bit of due diligence to meet the person face to face?
but who's to say that I would get a better candidate from another country?
You will. There are millions of highly qualified engineers (who speak half-decent English to boot!) that are dying to ditch their backwater native countries for the good life in America. If you have trouble finding qualified candidates States-side I guarantee you'll find someone internationally - the pool is just that much bigger.
Besides, if u keep hiring candidates from outside, then how will the non-experienced people that are in the US get the experience they need?
The same way the candidates in these foreign countries gained *their* experience. As a non-American who will soon be heading to the US on a TN visa, I got my experience by interning at small-time software companies, and a *lot* of hacking on my own time. I pitch in to open source projects to keep my skills sharp, and when I need to learn a new toolkit/language I often tackle little bugs in open source projects that use it just to familiarize myself.
I can counter your anecdote with my own: I have met many H-1Bs while I was working at a major corporation in Washington state that shall remain unnamed. All are incredibly talented, many have masters or PhD degrees from reputable schools in the US, and all really, really, really know their shit. The company in question never seems to import idiots, and pays them all well above the average wage for a code monkey - a direct reflection of their skill level.
Blame the company. I really doubt these guys hoodwinked HR, unless your HR is beyond incompetent. Odds are management made a deliberate decision to bring in shitty, but cheap labour, under some mistaken notion of "one coder is as good as another".
Absolutely agreed. Companies know that they own H-1Bs until they get their green card, and this leads to abuse. If the employee can move companies (perhaps at some sort of slight penalty to discourage rampant job-hopping) freely, then this problem goes away, and companies will lose any incentive to pay people significantly below the "prevailing wage".
But you are free. You are free to get on a plane and fly back home anytime you want to.
Of course we are. But conditions back home are far worse than being treated like cattle in the US. Really, the *true* losers in the H-1B situation are Americans. Many H-1Bs will gladly be worked like a dog and be paid a pittance in exchange for the opportunity of raising their family in America... to them it's merely a price to be paid for opportunity.
This, of course, depresses wages, and results in worse working environments for domestic workers. But instead of being xenophobic idiots, there's a better way to solve this situation: make a direct-to-residence immigration track designed to import talent into the US. People who desire opportunity are now no longer chained to a single company for 4-5 years, and employers have more incentive to treat their foreign workers with some respect and dignity.
Or... we can just get rid of the H-1B program and let the USA sink into obscurity. Do you even know *how* many insanely smart people China is graduating every year? Do you comprehend how dire of a situation the US is in with regards to global competitiveness? The survival and continued prosperity of the US *hinges* upon the mass importation of talent, not only to bolster its own strength, but to weaken its competitors.
There's no shortage of domestic labor, so why should they bother?
But there is. But even assuming that there isn't, the US is in a precarious position in the world right now. It is in genuine danger of being overshadowed by the likes of China and a reborn Russia. In order for the US to remain competitive in the long term, it is imperative that they steal all available talent from other countries. Would you rather have the smart coders working for you or for China?
I've seen the numbers before. The H-1B program does suffer a lot of abuse. About half of the people are paid below their American counterparts, and are imported by a handful of Indian companies (no discrimination intended, this is simply what the numbers say). I say we ban the H-1B privileges of such companies. I have worked with some VERY smart H-1Bs, who are getting paid very, very well, and treated like valued talent instead of cattle. This is the way the H-1B program should be.
And this is where the USA is reaping what is sows. By making the first-step a non-resident visa the government is simply encouraging companies to abuse their position as H-1B employers. As a soon-to-be H1-B (if all goes to plan) I dread the thought that my employer will be able to lord this over my head for 4-5 years before I get a Green Card and am "free".
The American government needs to offer a direct-to-PR track for skilled immigrants. While my employer seems to treat H-1Bs no differently than domestic employees, I know many companies that will work the employee like a dog while they can.
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You joke, but what good is the desktop environment to me when I'm playing a game?
I can think of a few... People can still send me IMs... or I can hope into a quick game while I'm waiting for an important email. People can still call me on Skype while I'm gaming (though Windows still wont' cut me a break with minimizing games).
I would very much like my computer to be doing many other things in the background while I game, thank you very much.
The problem is in the batteries. With mass manufacturing and a bit more research we can bring the cost of automobile-quality motors down considerably... but the one cost factor that seemingly is insurmountable is the battery. They wear out quickly, are expensive to manufacture, and even expensive to dispose of. I'm afraid that until we make a MAJOR, miraculous leap in energy storage technology we're just not going to have much luck with electric cars except in niche, short-range applications.
I want to have something happen when I put my foot down.
All the better, an electric motor *starts* at maximum torque, so you're putting down as much power as possible right when you slam your foot down... instead of like an archaic IC engine that takes time to rev up to max torque.
Hint: They get their electricity from carbon fuels.
We also get most of our power from carbon fuels...
Not to mention that there are plenty of extremely low-power computers that have respectable performance numbers...
Agreed! I don't know why it has to be so complicated. Canadian ballots are just a list of names with a blank circle next to them. You mark the circle of your candidate, and DONE. Sheesh, don't even know why you have these doodads where you have to insert your ballot, poke a hole through this and that... ugh...
It may not compete with the Halo's of the world, but it is absolutely not a niche product.
Oh come on, that's splitting hairs. Sins was not niche as in "sold out of the developers' trunks at dive bars", but you can't seriously say that a turn-based sci-fi strategy game is not niche. Even Civilization 4 was relatively niche despite its big budget - it appealed largely to an existing (and rabidly loyal) fanbase as its core, and did remarkably well for it. Sins appeals to a small demographic, but it's one that has a profound respect for the work the developer does, and hence you don't see the rampant piracy you see in mainstream games. Us turn-based gamers know that developers in our genre are dropping off the map, and anything we can do to keep them around we do.
Piracy has always been rampant, yet it's only the last couple years that people started thinking a DRM-free business plan wasn't viable
Hrm, I would argue that some level of DRM is required, though nothing to the draconian level of Spore et al. At the very least a CD check (or call-home if you would like to play CD-less) should be implemented. Like most people correctly state: DRM only stops the amateurs, people with enough savvy to BitTorrent will never be stopped in any meaningful way. So I say stop with the draconian, invasive DRM, and just go for traditional disk-verification tech. You'd stop the casual "hey burn me a copy" pirates, which is really the only demographic you have a serious hope of stopping anyways.
I used to actually be an avid modder back in the Half-Life 1 days. The prevalence of artists, I think, is a bit misleading - the vast majority of mod "teams" cannot find any (just like in FOSS), and most of the ones who are out there are not capable at all.
I would argue that it's just as easy to find an artist for a mod as you would an artist for a FOSS game - which is to say, very difficult.
Sadly, the model that has worked for Stardock won't work for mainstream games. Sins is a success, and Stardock's lack of DRM is working because they appeal to a hardcore gamer niche market that is keenly aware of the issues around piracy; mostly, anyways.
Move this model out into the mainstream market, where little kids with Pokemon, boozed up frat boys with Halo, or just immature idiots with too much bandwidth, and that whole thing falls apart.
If your market is small, has a traditionally tight-knit community that has existing rapport with the major developers in that field (Stardock is one), keeping people honest is a lot easier than if you're dealing with a market with a much lower moral standard. Expecting the average Joe to go by the honor system is a little much.
That's like complaining about the grocery store being too far, and not catering to the minority who don't have cars. Seriously, staying on dialup is a personal choice, and you have to accept the consequences of it - i.e. not being able to participate in the increasingly media-heavy internet.
Digital distribution is a great development in the industry, and is a step forward in giving more margin to the developers who actually bring you the games, instead of the traditional publisher-takes-all model. Valve has come up with a system that strikes a pretty good balance between the needs of the consumer and the needs of the producer. Kudos to them for that.
If you go to a movie theater and didn't like the movie, are you entitled to a refund? Does that entitle you to sneak into the theater, because the movie probably would've sucked anyway? Your argument is weak and juvenile. If you wanted to play the game, you pay for it, or buy used, or go through the many legitimate channels to play it. If you don't like the rules they've imposed on you - DON'T PLAY THE GAME. I don't. There are lots of games I would like to check out, but I feel aren't worth the price of entry... and you know what? I simply don't play them, and I haven't lost any sleep over it.
The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.
Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.
Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.
Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?
Well... your data certainly isn't safe... if your coworker sets up a large antenna in his next-door office, and you painstakingly make sure that your keyboard is the only possible EM source in your office.
Seriously, this isn't anywhere close to something that can happen in real life. In real life you'd be hooked onto DC power (oops, noise!), have a monitor (oops, noise!), have a cell phone (noise!), land line (noise!), ethernet (noise!)... need I go on? To get any intelliglbe signal out of that soup would require more skill and dedication than your keystrokes are worth. So unless you are a secret agent of some sort, you shouldn't be losing sleep over this.
Now, that said, this story is nothing more than another hand out to anti-Apple concern trolls.
The problem I have is that many low-end PC laptops have Firewire... so there's really not much of an excuse for Apple not to have it. Being a Mac user myself, I have no problem paying more for a comprehensive feature set, even if I wont' always use it (Bluetooth, 802.11n, etc.)... but this is the first time that even paying the Apple premium still doesn't get me all the trimmings.
Not so perplexing... Apple has always used the inferior material quality of the MacBooks as a market differentiator. Now that all the laptops have the sexy unibody construction Apple needed SOME way to segment the market and convince people to buy the Pro.
I don't buy it either. Has Apple seen an HDMI port? It's downright tiny AND carries audio data (would work great if you want to put a movie on your TV!)... DisplayPort might be the new hotness, but HDMI is well-established, with lots of hardware and software support, and is small enough that Apple really wouldn't miss the room.
On Apple laptops you do :) My MacBook Pro has had a failed hard drive (barely a year old), and out of the other Mac users I know there have been at least 5 other HDD failures. I don't know what causes it, maybe Apple uses shoddy parts, maybe it's bad thermal design... But Apple HDDs seem to die more often than the rest.
That's the difference between Windows and OS X. On Windows (XP anyways, not too sure about the new graphics architecture in Vista) all GUI drawing is handled directly by the CPU. So switching the GPU would just entail having to redraw everything all over again, something that the OS can push through fairly easily.
On MacOS X though, every single window, every little widget you see is directly tied into OpenGL (hence the purty animations without killing your CPU)... it's a bit more involved, since each app is now holding onto oodles of resources tied *directly* to the hardware. Switching your GPU becomes a lot more difficult then, and it looks like Apple has taken the route of simply shutting off your graphics subsystem and rebooting it on a new device.
(I'm also curious how you manage to save 1/2 a million in just five years just by not having cable etc?)
I don't even make $100K a year after taxes, WTF. Expecting the average American to save $500K in their *lifetime* is difficult enough, let alone 5 years.
One more advantage of public health care is that the government can focus on preventative medicine. No private insurer wants to pick up the tab to make sure the population is healthy enough not to need expensive care once they ARE sick. So in the end health care ends up costing more, people are not as healthy, and everything sucks in general. Here in Canada government agencies spend a *lot* of time educating disease prevention, accident prevention, workplace safety, etc etc, and while I have no numbers, there must be some impact in reducing the *overall* cost of health care.
I don't understand how this problem even exists. Every single company I've interviewed with in the US (I'm Canadian) has offered to fly me down for second-round interviews, face to face with the dev team. How is it even possible to hire someone unknowingly unless you didn't even take the TINY bit of due diligence to meet the person face to face?
but who's to say that I would get a better candidate from another country?
You will. There are millions of highly qualified engineers (who speak half-decent English to boot!) that are dying to ditch their backwater native countries for the good life in America. If you have trouble finding qualified candidates States-side I guarantee you'll find someone internationally - the pool is just that much bigger.
Besides, if u keep hiring candidates from outside, then how will the non-experienced people that are in the US get the experience they need?
The same way the candidates in these foreign countries gained *their* experience. As a non-American who will soon be heading to the US on a TN visa, I got my experience by interning at small-time software companies, and a *lot* of hacking on my own time. I pitch in to open source projects to keep my skills sharp, and when I need to learn a new toolkit/language I often tackle little bugs in open source projects that use it just to familiarize myself.
I can counter your anecdote with my own: I have met many H-1Bs while I was working at a major corporation in Washington state that shall remain unnamed. All are incredibly talented, many have masters or PhD degrees from reputable schools in the US, and all really, really, really know their shit. The company in question never seems to import idiots, and pays them all well above the average wage for a code monkey - a direct reflection of their skill level.
Blame the company. I really doubt these guys hoodwinked HR, unless your HR is beyond incompetent. Odds are management made a deliberate decision to bring in shitty, but cheap labour, under some mistaken notion of "one coder is as good as another".
Absolutely agreed. Companies know that they own H-1Bs until they get their green card, and this leads to abuse. If the employee can move companies (perhaps at some sort of slight penalty to discourage rampant job-hopping) freely, then this problem goes away, and companies will lose any incentive to pay people significantly below the "prevailing wage".
But you are free. You are free to get on a plane and fly back home anytime you want to.
Of course we are. But conditions back home are far worse than being treated like cattle in the US. Really, the *true* losers in the H-1B situation are Americans. Many H-1Bs will gladly be worked like a dog and be paid a pittance in exchange for the opportunity of raising their family in America... to them it's merely a price to be paid for opportunity.
This, of course, depresses wages, and results in worse working environments for domestic workers. But instead of being xenophobic idiots, there's a better way to solve this situation: make a direct-to-residence immigration track designed to import talent into the US. People who desire opportunity are now no longer chained to a single company for 4-5 years, and employers have more incentive to treat their foreign workers with some respect and dignity.
Or... we can just get rid of the H-1B program and let the USA sink into obscurity. Do you even know *how* many insanely smart people China is graduating every year? Do you comprehend how dire of a situation the US is in with regards to global competitiveness? The survival and continued prosperity of the US *hinges* upon the mass importation of talent, not only to bolster its own strength, but to weaken its competitors.
There's no shortage of domestic labor, so why should they bother?
But there is. But even assuming that there isn't, the US is in a precarious position in the world right now. It is in genuine danger of being overshadowed by the likes of China and a reborn Russia. In order for the US to remain competitive in the long term, it is imperative that they steal all available talent from other countries. Would you rather have the smart coders working for you or for China?
I've seen the numbers before. The H-1B program does suffer a lot of abuse. About half of the people are paid below their American counterparts, and are imported by a handful of Indian companies (no discrimination intended, this is simply what the numbers say). I say we ban the H-1B privileges of such companies. I have worked with some VERY smart H-1Bs, who are getting paid very, very well, and treated like valued talent instead of cattle. This is the way the H-1B program should be.
And this is where the USA is reaping what is sows. By making the first-step a non-resident visa the government is simply encouraging companies to abuse their position as H-1B employers. As a soon-to-be H1-B (if all goes to plan) I dread the thought that my employer will be able to lord this over my head for 4-5 years before I get a Green Card and am "free".
The American government needs to offer a direct-to-PR track for skilled immigrants. While my employer seems to treat H-1Bs no differently than domestic employees, I know many companies that will work the employee like a dog while they can.
As a Canadian and Office Space fan... no thanks, I don't want you fuckin' up my life too.