The problem isn't that they pandered to the homebrew crowd, the problem is that they did such a bad job of it that it turned out to be counter-productive. Then they gave up on it and turned the whole thing off instead of fixing it properly.
Contrast Sony's OtherOS with Microsoft's XNA.
Like pretty much everything else this console generation, Microsoft got it right and Sony screwed the pooch.
I work for a company that likes to put on an environmental facade-- we have tons of employees who put that stupid "save the forests, don't print this email" footer on every message (as if deforestation has anything to do with paper production!), we have "biking to work day" twice a year, etc.
I try to explain to some of the managers that taking a single international flight, even if you divide the fuel up among the passengers, releases more carbon than 5 years' worth me commuting 30 minutes to work. And they fly cross-country 15+ times a year, I'm not exaggerating.
People still haven't gotten the message: if you're serious about reducing carbon emissions, you have to stay grounded. Otherwise, you're just being a huge hypocrite... bugs the hell out of me.
So your mom paid the tuition, paid for your transportation, bought you an expensive computer you could use to write QBASIC programs on... and you're arguing that it doesn't take resources to do it?
Here's a shocker for you, you might want to sit down for this one: many people are poor.
Unless your philosophy is "fuck the poor", maybe you should be sitting this thread out, k?
Because it's not about expanding a student's mind and teaching them new skills, it's all about THEY'RE STEALING OUR JERBS!!!
Nah, that's harsh on your post, but it does bug me how whenever these topics come up, the topic always turns towards "we don't want our jobs to lose value!"
Well, you know what, tough shit-- I'm sure the thousands of employees made redundant by computers in the first place felt the same way. In fact, I'd go as far to say it's extremely hypocritical for a computer programmer to argue in favor of artificially increasing their worth.
(And, seriously, if your company hires people based solely on degrees-- then you have a *lot* of incompetent programmers. And accountants. And managers. Because that's rock-stupid.)
It's ok for the Orchestra to do it, but not the CS program?
I don't understand what I'm supposed to be getting from his analogy. "Music programs do X all the time, it's well-established and there's no debate about it. Which is why CS programs should under no circumstances do X." Huh?
PS3 and Xbox 360 play different types of games from Wii. So different, it's almost a different market altogether. You couldn't replace an PS3 gaming environment on a Wii... but you could get awful close with an Xbox 360,
(For non-game features, though, like Netflix, this could be a boon to Nintendo as it is to Microsoft.)
These kids don't seem to realize that Microsoft has a much richer history of evil than Sony does.
Microsoft was evil 20 years ago, and pretty neutral now. Sony's evil this instant, and has been insistently evil for the last 5 years. Nobody who regularly plays a PS3 remembers IE4 vs. Netscape, or that Stacker thing, or the look-and-feel lawsuit with Apple. That stuff's ancient history. Their experience of Microsoft is Windows 2000 and up, generally ok products executed in a non-evil way. (Only the geekiest of geeks have heard of, or care about, the ODF thing, that's the only "evil" thing I can think of MS doing recently. That pales in comparison to Adobe, or even to Apple.)
Yes, but Steam doesn't let people *buy* games while offline, which is what Capcom is rightly angry about right now. If Steam went down for 3 weeks, you bet your ass game developers would be as angry at Valve as they are at Sony now.
Being able to play games offline is a total non-sequitur. Both PSN and Xbox Live Arcade let you do that-- *once you've purchased the game*.
Believe it or not, our date format was chosen at a time when there didn't exist machines that could alphabetize lists of dates automatically. I know it's shocking, you might want to sit down for awhile.
If the two gauges are sufficiently different, you can make "compatible" track by simply laying two rails on one side. It's still not trivial at switches, but it's not too bad, and has been done many times at many places in the past.
The problem here is that there were converting to a gauge which was really close to the original gauge. Close enough that two sets of tracks wouldn't fit that close together and still allow enough clearance for the wheel. They pretty much had to pull-up and replace a rail.
As for adjusting the track for each train... are you high? That's hugely difficult... probably possible, maybe even possible with 19th century technology and logistics, but it's a really stupid way to solve the problem. The significantly, significantly easier way is to switch-out the bogies on the rail cars. Shockingly, this is the solution that's actually used on trains that need to cross to a different gauge.
I'm no expert, but I do remember that during the Enron brown-outs in Southern California, states just to the north with plentiful energy supplies couldn't sell power to California because the power line capacity didn't exist to carry it... instead, California had to buy power from Mexico. (Which, you know, isn't a big deal, but it's a little embarrassing.)
Of course, learning later on that the whole thing was basically fabricated, maybe that story was fabricated as well.
Ironically, one of the reasons passenger rail isn't taking off in the US is because it consistently gets bumped by freight rail.
Our little Sounder commuter train from Seattle to Everett is constantly pre-empted for freight traffic-- usually mile-long trains hauling nothing but smelly garbage-- and its reliability is so bad, I finally just gave up and moved back to the bus. Considering the train runs 2/3rds empty every day, I'm not the only one.
I tried to post a correction to the Seattle PI when they picked up this bullshit story, and they didn't publish it. Then Neatorama picked up the same bullshit story, but at least there I could leave a comment saying it was bullshit. (Actually, I just checked back-- looked like Neatorama pulled it. So there's one success story, I guess.)
Is there anybody in news who fact-checks before republishing? This is just embarrassing, for the Atlantic, the Seattle PI, and every other paper that's copy-and-pasted this non-story.
Backstabbing and underhanded happens rarely in Engineering, and not usually by Engineers. Rather, its the people that don't have the brains to hack it, and/or don't understand the feeling of reward that comes from building something.
Really? What's the purpose of that? Some kind of half-assed based-on-human-psychology load balancing?
My servers are in us-east-1d as well, and they didn't go down, but maybe that's just dumb luck as my 1d is your 1b.
I can't do a really redundant setup, though, because I need a MS SQL instance and we don't have the budget for a second one to mirror to, so... if the zone with our MS SQL instance goes down, or app is sunk regardless of how distributed the web servers are.
It looks like in this case, only one zone in one data center was affected-- that's bad, but that's not "end-of-the-world" bad. If sites are going down, they should have been more careful to distribute redundant servers in different zones.
(Where this is a problem is if you're a small shop with a single DB server, and the zone holding your DB server goes down-- in that case you're kind of SOL.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the whole "Skype is working just fine" angle we can use to call this article crap.
The problem isn't that they pandered to the homebrew crowd, the problem is that they did such a bad job of it that it turned out to be counter-productive. Then they gave up on it and turned the whole thing off instead of fixing it properly.
Contrast Sony's OtherOS with Microsoft's XNA.
Like pretty much everything else this console generation, Microsoft got it right and Sony screwed the pooch.
I work for a company that likes to put on an environmental facade-- we have tons of employees who put that stupid "save the forests, don't print this email" footer on every message (as if deforestation has anything to do with paper production!), we have "biking to work day" twice a year, etc.
I try to explain to some of the managers that taking a single international flight, even if you divide the fuel up among the passengers, releases more carbon than 5 years' worth me commuting 30 minutes to work. And they fly cross-country 15+ times a year, I'm not exaggerating.
People still haven't gotten the message: if you're serious about reducing carbon emissions, you have to stay grounded. Otherwise, you're just being a huge hypocrite... bugs the hell out of me.
So your mom paid the tuition, paid for your transportation, bought you an expensive computer you could use to write QBASIC programs on... and you're arguing that it doesn't take resources to do it?
Here's a shocker for you, you might want to sit down for this one: many people are poor.
Unless your philosophy is "fuck the poor", maybe you should be sitting this thread out, k?
Because it's not about expanding a student's mind and teaching them new skills, it's all about THEY'RE STEALING OUR JERBS!!!
Nah, that's harsh on your post, but it does bug me how whenever these topics come up, the topic always turns towards "we don't want our jobs to lose value!"
Well, you know what, tough shit-- I'm sure the thousands of employees made redundant by computers in the first place felt the same way. In fact, I'd go as far to say it's extremely hypocritical for a computer programmer to argue in favor of artificially increasing their worth.
(And, seriously, if your company hires people based solely on degrees-- then you have a *lot* of incompetent programmers. And accountants. And managers. Because that's rock-stupid.)
It's ok for the Orchestra to do it, but not the CS program?
I don't understand what I'm supposed to be getting from his analogy. "Music programs do X all the time, it's well-established and there's no debate about it. Which is why CS programs should under no circumstances do X." Huh?
The Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers development model.
I was thinking the same thing:
unless they're billing Terry Childs for the City's own failure to set up division of responsibility and standby emergency access procedures?
Wasn't that HIS JOB?
I know Slashdot loves this guy, but the contortions you're going through to make him look like an innocent victim... just ain't convincing me.
The Bush tax cuts (penned in a very very different financial climate) were supposed to expire in 2010. They were renewed.
Even when it takes effort to renew a law, it still happens 100% of the time.
The bill in Texas is also doing its damnedest. You can kill a program (or make it toothless) with a thousand papercuts, it just takes longer.
I do too, but the Slashdot collective considers that "evil", and it's pretty well-known, so I just put it down as an example.
PS3 and Xbox 360 play different types of games from Wii. So different, it's almost a different market altogether. You couldn't replace an PS3 gaming environment on a Wii... but you could get awful close with an Xbox 360,
(For non-game features, though, like Netflix, this could be a boon to Nintendo as it is to Microsoft.)
These kids don't seem to realize that Microsoft has a much richer history of evil than Sony does.
Microsoft was evil 20 years ago, and pretty neutral now. Sony's evil this instant, and has been insistently evil for the last 5 years. Nobody who regularly plays a PS3 remembers IE4 vs. Netscape, or that Stacker thing, or the look-and-feel lawsuit with Apple. That stuff's ancient history. Their experience of Microsoft is Windows 2000 and up, generally ok products executed in a non-evil way. (Only the geekiest of geeks have heard of, or care about, the ODF thing, that's the only "evil" thing I can think of MS doing recently. That pales in comparison to Adobe, or even to Apple.)
Yes, but Steam doesn't let people *buy* games while offline, which is what Capcom is rightly angry about right now. If Steam went down for 3 weeks, you bet your ass game developers would be as angry at Valve as they are at Sony now.
Being able to play games offline is a total non-sequitur. Both PSN and Xbox Live Arcade let you do that-- *once you've purchased the game*.
Not on Mac. I was playing Warcraft II over TCP/IP via AOL when it first came out-- no waiting for the "Silver Edition" for us.
Isn't that pretty much the premise of Quark?
Thanks to contributing to the discussion by repeating my point and adding nothing.
Believe it or not, our date format was chosen at a time when there didn't exist machines that could alphabetize lists of dates automatically. I know it's shocking, you might want to sit down for awhile.
If the two gauges are sufficiently different, you can make "compatible" track by simply laying two rails on one side. It's still not trivial at switches, but it's not too bad, and has been done many times at many places in the past.
The problem here is that there were converting to a gauge which was really close to the original gauge. Close enough that two sets of tracks wouldn't fit that close together and still allow enough clearance for the wheel. They pretty much had to pull-up and replace a rail.
As for adjusting the track for each train... are you high? That's hugely difficult... probably possible, maybe even possible with 19th century technology and logistics, but it's a really stupid way to solve the problem. The significantly, significantly easier way is to switch-out the bogies on the rail cars. Shockingly, this is the solution that's actually used on trains that need to cross to a different gauge.
I'm no expert, but I do remember that during the Enron brown-outs in Southern California, states just to the north with plentiful energy supplies couldn't sell power to California because the power line capacity didn't exist to carry it... instead, California had to buy power from Mexico. (Which, you know, isn't a big deal, but it's a little embarrassing.)
Of course, learning later on that the whole thing was basically fabricated, maybe that story was fabricated as well.
Ironically, one of the reasons passenger rail isn't taking off in the US is because it consistently gets bumped by freight rail.
Our little Sounder commuter train from Seattle to Everett is constantly pre-empted for freight traffic-- usually mile-long trains hauling nothing but smelly garbage-- and its reliability is so bad, I finally just gave up and moved back to the bus. Considering the train runs 2/3rds empty every day, I'm not the only one.
I read the first couple paragraphs, and I've actually decided it's worth $100 for me to NOT read the article.
Does this guy even work for Facebook? He doesn't seem to be in any position to actually implement the idea... so what's the point? Brainwanking?
I tried to post a correction to the Seattle PI when they picked up this bullshit story, and they didn't publish it. Then Neatorama picked up the same bullshit story, but at least there I could leave a comment saying it was bullshit. (Actually, I just checked back-- looked like Neatorama pulled it. So there's one success story, I guess.)
Is there anybody in news who fact-checks before republishing? This is just embarrassing, for the Atlantic, the Seattle PI, and every other paper that's copy-and-pasted this non-story.
Backstabbing and underhanded happens rarely in Engineering, and not usually by Engineers. Rather, its the people that don't have the brains to hack it, and/or don't understand the feeling of reward that comes from building something.
No true Scotsman!
Really? What's the purpose of that? Some kind of half-assed based-on-human-psychology load balancing?
My servers are in us-east-1d as well, and they didn't go down, but maybe that's just dumb luck as my 1d is your 1b.
I can't do a really redundant setup, though, because I need a MS SQL instance and we don't have the budget for a second one to mirror to, so ... if the zone with our MS SQL instance goes down, or app is sunk regardless of how distributed the web servers are.
Each data center also has independent zones.
It looks like in this case, only one zone in one data center was affected-- that's bad, but that's not "end-of-the-world" bad. If sites are going down, they should have been more careful to distribute redundant servers in different zones.
(Where this is a problem is if you're a small shop with a single DB server, and the zone holding your DB server goes down-- in that case you're kind of SOL.)