They should give concerts and sell t-shirts!

Actually, selling t-shirts isn't a bad idea. Works for xkcd and smbc, I think, and it doesn't look like they sell them already.

I worked on freelancer.com for a few weeks, before getting a job at an investment bank.

During that time, I got a few jobs coming through, and found a regular client.

My approach was:
- don't put the lowest bid: actually people will assume that the low bids are from inexperienced people. Put a reasonable sounding bid, and write a concise bid text, in fluent English, that shows you know about the subject and have read the client's requirements. Ask them questions to clarify points, again showing you read the original text the client wrote
- pick some very narrow field you're really interested in, and that there seems to be a market for, and be really good at that, and market yourself as a specialist in that field. There will be fewer potential jobs arriving, but the chances of being picked for one are I feel much higher, and it's much more satisfying to just submit a handful of bids and get a job, than spend a whole day spraying bids everywhere, and getting nothing.

/me wipes coffee off the keyboard.

If you want the highest salary, learn the most expensive tools; and it looks like Java is heading down this road.

Most companies spending on developers is by and large proportional to their spending on hardware and software.

If you work for companies that pay $$$$ for Visual Studio, or for Oracle contracts, your salary will be tend to be larger than if you work for one where you get an ancient amortized machine and a single monitor.

Not always. But often.

I think it sounds reasonable, given the laws today.

I think better would be if pirating games would be prosecuted like speeding, and you paid a small, but not outlandish, fine.

However, the games companies don't have this option today, and they have to live in the real world today, and try to make money somehow.

DRM-free, and if the fines^h^h^h^h^h^h settlements are reasonable - let's say 100-200 dollars I guess, 4-5 times the cost of the game? Then I think that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

I spent some time looking at a few just in case, on the basis that it's probably much easier to learn now, whilst younger, rather than in 10 or 20 years, or whenever they happen to become important.

Haskell monads seem to me to be pretty tricky to get one's head around.

I suspect that if and when fp becomes mainstream, in the way that Java and C# are right now for example, they will be much easier to understand; but I imagine many of the concepts from Haskell et al will stay the same.

Note that a whole bunch of fps use only a single core for now. eg Erlang uses only a single-core out of the box at the moment, unless something has changed since I last checked. Lots of threads sure, but they all run on the same core...

> If they were suing for the actual damage done, maybe tripled, I'd be much more sympathetic. But it's clear from their "f' 'em all" quote that they're going for blood. F' 'em right back.

Well, sueing is an expensive business, for everyone.

Perhaps it might be better if it was prosecuted more along the lines of receiving a parking ticket, or a speeding fine? Easier all round, and no insane fines which seem to me, and to you, insanely out of proportion to the actions taken and the damage one might consider to have been done.

Missing a comma and stuff:

None of those are in my opinion reasons to obtain property that someone else created, by distribution means that the creators don't agree with.

I agree with the gp, who as far as I can tell is not trolling but genuinely expressing his true opinion, which I happen to also agree with.

Which doesn't mean I think they should all get sued for insane amounts of money, but maybe something in the region of receiving a speeding ticket or two might be appropriate?

Right now, people pirate because they can. Not because it's right, but because they can get away with it, and it makes their lives easier, and it saves them money. None of those are in my opinion reasons to obtain property that someone else created by means that they don't agree with.

Wow, I feel like I'm the only person here who is actually positively excited by this move by Blizzard to cut down on multiplayer cheating.

So, maybe I am wrong. I've been wrong before...

Still, my immediate reaction was positive excitement. It's not fun to play multiplayer games when there are lots of people cheating, or even when you're not sure whether the other person is cheating. Maphack is pretty much impossible to detect. Did that person hack their way to your expansion, or did they just walk all over you by superior intuition, by watching which way your units were going in the brief times they saw them? I know I have guessed where someone was sending their command center to, after reapering them out of their earlier base.

Also, personally I spent a *lot* of time getting a Kerrigan portrait, and I'd prefer that people seeing it know it was earned legitimately and not just hacked somehow.

I imagine I will get karma-trashed for this...

Personally, I think the future of pc gaming is a Microsoft app store, where we buy *everything* through Microsoft, much like the iPhone app store. I know that might make many of us go "Ewww", but it is I feel the Windows version of the apt-get repositories, only with a credit card involved.

A few advantages of a Microsoft app store:
- trivial to obtain the latest copy of any software one wants
- implicit whitelist, so no more viruses on our various friends' / relatives' pcs

I know I'm risking karma on this... :-O

I played Starcraft 1 with my gf yesterday. She complained that the graphics are rubbish and made her eyes hurt, compared to Warcraft 3 and so on. Games rarely last more than about fifteen years anyway... so if Steam does shut down, just get some newer game instead perhaps?

I mean, I do still play Populous 1 with her occasionally, but a game that old, I'd imagine someone would have worked out a way around any drm by that time anyway, or just rewritten it from scratch, eg Total Annihilation has been rewritten approximately as http://springrts.com/ .

Yeah, I agree that I find the zone-restrictions, ie europe vs usa vs asia, annoying personally. There again, other people like the great ping times.

If you buy the SE Asia copy, you can use it for both SEA and the States I think. If you buy the european copy, you're out of luck :-(

So, just to be clear, once I've bought a game from gog.com, I can download it, whenever I want, forever? Or just the once?

Download whenever I want, as many times as I want, is possible for example Starcraft 2, and I really like that. I no longer have to worry about keeping the game copy safe, on cd or dvd or hard-drive, can just download whenever I want and play.

Gog could be interesting to me if I can download a game as many times as I like, forever.

Personally I don't mind drm, or paying for a game, I just want convenience. There are only about 5 games I play regularly anyway. The cost of those over ten years is trivial...

Personally I really like how Starcraft 2 works. I no longer need to carry dvds/cds or a dvd-player. I don't need to worry about using 'other methods' for obtaining a game I've bought before. I just need an account, a password, maybe a battle net authenticator, and I'm good to go! Can play anywhere. And I feel warm and comfortable.

So, key parts of SC-2 security I guess:
- the client is freely downloadable, in full, as many times as you like
- since multiplayer is a major part of how it works, that takes care of the drm
- we have an account, that we can use anywhere we like, on any computer

Of course, the campaign bit isn't really secured by this method, so there are still some pieces missing from the puzzle for that, but for multiplayer games, which is I feel the most interesting to me, there doesn't seem to be a major issue?