While I understand what you're trying to say to the parent and even, to an extent, agree with you the other side of the argument is that if you don't learn to accept where you are in life then you can never be content. I would imagine the parent is probably referring to having found a place in life that they are happy with. That's kind of an important bit of wisdom since for many people being at the "top" doesn't lead to happiness.

For an example I'm at the top of my game, but not at the top of earnings. Still, I make plenty of money, have no problem paying bills, buy anything I want, and do whatever I want (within reason). I don't let people walk over me but I don't need to walk over them, either. I find most people would be a lot happier if they'd take a few moments to realize that they don't actually want to be at "the top," it's just our media machine that blasts you with that.

Of course I could be wrong, I don't know for certain, none of us do. Maybe the parent's just a slacker.

I second the above. I work at a rather successful game company and on Windows we target, no joke, Win98. We make family friendly games and our target is, as you might have guessed, the entire family. Since most people aren't hardcore their systems are average on years old hardware at best, and while many families have hand-me-down boxes and laptops now those are running *even* older hardware. If our games run like crap on someone's ancient box they won't blame the box, they'll blame us, and then not play our games.

So yeah, we could *totally* make use of "the shiny" but to grow our user base that's just not something we can afford. It's how everything's going...id software's id tech 5 is scalable, Unreal Engine 3 is surprisingly scalable, Unity can target mobile platforms AND desktops, it's everywhere. I'm glad that some companies are dedicated to using "the shiny" but as we've all seen it's gameplay that matters, not graphics, and typically when you pump up one the other suffers.

Really? Tell me, how many people buy Madden every year again? Oh, or the next Call of Duty: Whatever, it's Another One? Let's not even get into the sheer volume of gamers that claim Linux blows for "real" gaming...while they're on Linux dedicated servers. Gamers indeed can be morons.

I work at a game company and we do about once a week, once every 24 hours for hotfixes. We can't really do sooner for several reasons but the foremost is that players want to play our games and they can't do that if we're bringing the servers down. We use some heavy automation (and always getting heavier. Currently transitioning from in-house + bash scripts to bash scripts + git + Puppet) which acts as a force multiplier for your teams.

However, PLEASE be careful when doing automation and sending builds quicker. Not everything has to be automated and many times the issue is not getting the software out fast enough it's instead getting the STABLE software out fast enough. Nobody's gonna die if you take an extra hour to explain to another team what you've done to make sure it all makes sense to everybody (and if you're in a company where that DOES matter I'd recommend leaving it...that level of stress isn't good for your heart). Automating a complex system is a long, arduous, and minefield-laden task that's going to have some screw-ups and rethinks along the way.

My personal opinion is that you should use Puppet/cfengine/chef/whatever-you-like to not only help out with continuous configuration management but *also* as a means of codifying knowledge at various steps in the process. Don't just have one team do your automation, have everyone get in on it and get familiar. From my experience this has been easiest with Puppet due to its syntax and modules (aka I can hand off a module to the programmer team, they can punch it up, then I run it and if I want to know how it works Puppet will tell me everything I want to know). You get everyone speaking the same language, working on the process together this way which works as a sanity check and as a knowledge repository (you know, just in case god forbid your admin gets hit by a bus or your low level grunts win the lottery).

I'm supposing you never played Guild Wars.

Agreed. Only a cynical person would view not working on games as freedom. I absolutely love working on games, playing them, and sharing them.

Wouldn't this be wholly dependent on the distribution channel? I mean if you're going through Spotify and they're not paying you but beans, or iTunes isn't exactly working out, couldn't you...you know...use *another* service? The cost of reproducing the songs is nil given that it's already in a digital format, so it doesn't hurt to shop around. I know they don't have a lot of popular support (last time I checked anyway) but what about services like Ubuntu One and Magnatune? Especially on the latter the payout model's pretty simple and straightforward. You could also say, "fuck it," and just put your stuff out on YouTube/ThePirateBay/Facebook/Google+/Wherever for free, with links to your event calendar for shows and something like Magnatune if they want to support you otherwise, maybe even a Cafepress/similar site for swag. I'm not saying it's all the artists' fault mind you, industry execs are some evil filth, but they're not exactly lacking in options.

You might not have been aware of this but there are entire profitable websites dedicated to fornicating overweight people. Sounds like a dream job for anyone who visits those sites.

I don't have any mod points, but I want to say thank you. Parent should most definitely get modded up insightful.

O RLY? Windows 7 still has a hard limit on network devices (8 by default, 14 maximum) citation. And Office 2010? Fire up Outlook, make a rule that places a copy of every sent message into an archive located in a network drive. Shut down Outlook. Disconnect the network drive. Fire up Outlook. Watch it shit the bed as it doesn't know how to handle not being able to access an archive, even though it can still chat with Exchange.

And those are just two quite common ones right off the top of my head, not even digging into the slew of other embarassments like how Win7 still doesn't support the very concept of a virtual desktop or window edge resistance for manual placement, mysteriously dropping network connections whenever it feels like it, Excel 2010 not supporting multiple open instances of spreadsheets onscreen concurrently (How DARE you want to look at two spreadsheets side-by-side! Go back to LibreOffice!), and a long host of other bullshit.

Win7's a toy and so's Office. When they move past the 90's I'll be happy for them, but "impressed" is something I reserve for Linux and OS X. If it works for some people I'm happy for them, use the tool that works for you, but don't try to say their work is anything better than mediocre.

Really? I'm sure all our wonderful folks killed by roadside bombs, improvised explosives, and guerilla tactics will be very happy to hear that'd never happen. Oh, shit, right...

Something that comes to mind is a line from, "Sin City." Roughly, "it's about lying. Lie a lot, and lie BIG and everyone will start to go along with it," (don't crucify me, it's not exact, haven't watched it in awhile).

At least in America there's another interesting experiment to "prove" this. Walk into a room of your average peers and say, "Americans have the best ," where that something is completely absurd. Such as, "Americans have the best Internet service." Watch as most of the time everyone just sort of nods their head and agrees sagely to whatever moronic bullshit just tumbled out of your mouth.

They, the People, don't feel the government's presence or get pissed off with it because they're lied to on a scale I don't think we've ever seen before. You've got an absolute NEVER ENDING stream of media bombarding the hell out of every last man, woman, and child saying, "America's great! We're doing better than ever! Everyone else sucks! Don't worry, you're not alone, we're all in it together and tomorrow's gonna be amazing!"

But it's just a lie. In the face of such insanity there is no defense. Wrong becomes right, black becomes white, poor becomes rich, and the People are tricked into thinking the same bad decisions they've made before are the best choices they've ever made.

I'd say following this line of thought *all* things created are worthless (after all, if it can be created once it should be able to be done so again). If that's the case then it'd be impossible create any wealth. If that was the case, there'd be no need for money since everyone could have everything.

Much as I'd like to argue against this as a Good Thing (tm) I can't really think of any "good" reason why anyone would actually want to encourage a society where the only motivation is to climb tooth and nail on top of everyone you perceive as worth "less" than you. Of course it'd be complete chaos, but if that was such a problem then it's arguing that instead of people being able to rationally work together that they have to put other people down and clamber over their worthless corpses.

But I dunno, I don't think I'm really trained for that sort of debate. Perhaps someone more enlightened could fill me in.

You're absolutely right, no good will ever come of trying to replicate and eventually surpass closed-source efforts. I'm definitely glad nobody ever decided to reverse-engineer UNIX or even implement his own version of of it. I mean that'd just be craziness!

At least around D.C./Northern VA/Southern MD that's an understatement, not an embellishment.