I am familiar with those types of bags/cases. I think you are making my point for me to some degree by pointing out that what people have used in the past to accomplish that task is different at least to some degree from what dell is offering.
Yes, this is somewhat similar to the system you mentioned. A luggable desktop could have a real audience that would want it now whereas the product you mentioned wasnt that great for the reasons you listed. You could make an argument that just about any product which is considered innovative is similar to a product from the past but it is now more useful/interesting for whatever reason. Lots of people claimed that the ipod was innovative when it came out but it was obviously nothing noone had ever thought of before.
Dont get me wrong, I am not saying this dell is equivalent to inventing the internet or whatever. But I think it is innovative to some small degree, at least enough that it isnt "just" an advertisement.
Personally I really like the new way they are doing keyboard shortcuts. If you push alt keytips appear on all the different tabs/buttons. I got in the habit of doing this and within a few hours I was faster at doing most tasks in 2007 than I was in 2003 or even emacs (apples and oranges, I know). You should try it, I really liked it, it seemed to have a very low learning curve but was fairly powerful.
I think there is a fair bit of difference between those two things. The dell looks like a product specifically designed for LAN gamer types in mind and improves a great deal on the ease of lugging it around compared to what existed before. It looks to me more like a desktop designed to be easy to move around than a traditional laptop. The computer you linked to looks more like an ancient precurser to the laptop than a gamers system that is easy to move around.
I guess you can make the case that a luggable computer you could use the way you would a desktop when its unpacked isnt that hard to think of and therefore not that innovative. But if thats true then why wasnt anyone else making computers like this before them?
I will agree with you that the blurb reads like an ad, but that is true of most "Top 10/20/2^32" lists
I dont know a terrible amount about LAN gamers or their systems so if I am way off please dont flame me too hard. Most of my comments on this system are mostly based on speculation. : )
Well, if you read the article it seems pretty clear they are considering the interface to be innovative. Personally, I tend to agree with them, its miles better than other productivity software I have used in the past. (imho of course, its subjective)
I dont think that using either ODF or MS Open XML (or whatever its called) is very innovative one way or the other. Claiming they arent/are being innovative by choosing one format over another is kind of silly.
Just because you dont like that they arent supporting ODF doesnt mean they arent innovating in other areas.
In 2005 they ranked firefox and gmail the #1 and #2 best products of the year. Neither of those two advertises with PC World. (to my knowledge, correct me if I am wrong)
Could it be that MS Office (#1 on this list) just isnt popular with the slashdot crowd and that is why the first several posts are denouncing PC World as paid Microsoft shills?
fluff story, but its got the letters MIT
on
Top Q&A Sites Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The comparison in the article is kind of silly. It bothers me a little bit that just because something has the letters MIT on it it is perceived as being more interesting or important. If this had been a state school I doubt it ever would have been posted. Even the good engineering state schools dont get much coverage. When was the last time you saw a link to a student newspaper article appear on slashdot from Berkeley, UIUC, or Georgia Tech? Those schools only make it on here when there is "real" news for nerds happening there.
Googles idea of using economic incentive really doesnt seem like a good one to me. I mean look at all the people willing to answer your questions for free on other websites! Adding the dollar amount only limits your user base. I always assumed that this was the primary reason it failed so badly when offerings from other companies flourished.
Why do people want linux to take over the world so badly? Aside from a few corporations most people on here have no vested interest in seeing linux "win".
I run linux on some of my computers, its fun to mess around with as a hobby. But that doesnt make me some evangelist who wants Linux to run on a huge number of computers. Why do other people want that? Why do we even care?
Ive known people who would push linux onto the computers of relatives who were completely technically illeterate. To me this seems like putting the best interests of your relatives below the desire to spread linux everywhere.
Well they already do exactly that. Microsoft has a huge QA department and its a pretty safe bet that the SDETs working in it make a good bit more than 50k a year. They recruit internationally and get people those visas you were talking about since software engineers who dont suck are in short supply these days.
Unless a hacker believes that he can find several big time exploits every year before anyone else does (quite a stretch imho) then it seems like it would be in his financial best interest to work for them already. I have always wondered why people would want to be in the illegal underground in Russia or someplace when they could make more money and have a safe and secure job in the states.
Two stars or something lower. Yeah, it is being conservative with performance, but thats the most logical way to do it. And then they could run their little utility that would tell them that they could jump up a couple of stars by adding ram.
Yes, someone who is technically literate may realize that there are a small number of games out there that he could buy and someone going strictly by the star system would not realize this. So being technically literate still buys you something, but it is no longer an absolute necessity as it is now.
Besides, if someone has such a lopsided system then there is a pretty good chance that they did not get it from a big OEM like dell and would realize all of this.
In most cases for most people this system would work great. And by being conservative with the rankings you would never actually run into the situation where someone bought a game he couldnt play.
I should mention that these specifics of how it works are my assumptions, not actual knowledge. : )
Most of the problems you listed are fairly easy to alleviate.
If 3 stars is defined as having 2 gigs of ram and a video card with 256 megs of memory then:
A system with 4 gigs of ram and a video card with 256 megs of memory gets three stars, A system with 2 gigs of ram and a video card with 512 megs of memory gets three stars, etc.
Just defining X stars as having a certain set of minimum hardware seems simple to me.
You mentioned that users wouldnt be able to know how to move up in stars, but I think it would be pretty simple for whatever utility tells you how many stars you have to also tell you what you need to move up.
The problem you mentioned of publishers putting out star values that arent accurate isnt a problem with the star system. They could just as easily do the same thing with the minimum requirements that they list now. Personally I have always found that if you have the recommended system minimums you are prettymuch good to go.
Sure, someone who is technically savvy will be able to squeeze more performance out of their computer but this seems like a good solution for the average joe to be able to tell what he can play. No, it isnt as simple as buying a game for the PS3 and plugging it in, but you dont need to be technically savvy for this either.
1) They arent (and couldnt even if they wanted to) forcing developers package their software like this as you claim. Developers will only take part if they want to. (and they probably will, its certainly to their advantage) Microsoft has never maintained any control over third party developers, its one of the reasons their operating system became so successful.
2) There is no fee as you claim.
Anyone is free to continue developing games and packaging them the same way they do now. You are just slandering Microsoft.
Not hackers so much as Phishers. (I assume you are familiar with this) Huge amounts of money is lost every year by people who submitted their credit card info or paypal password to authentic looking websites. I (and prettymuch everyone I know) routinely get emails from "paypal administrators" or "bank of america customer service" asking for info.
I have always tried to impress that paranoia you are looking down on onto people I know when it comes to stuff like this. Trusting these spam emails or giving any sensitive information to sites you arent damn sure are legit is prettymuch gauranteed to make you a victim of identity theft in short order. My grandfather was a victim of phishing when he got spyware on his computer and a popup appeared offering to sell him software to get rid of it for $30.
That being said, I am not sure what the ratio is of theft like this versus theft from the waiter at dennys writing everything down on a napkin when he goes to run your card. I think it is a safe assumption that neither is nontrivial however.
If you are telling people who are highly computer illiterate to trust that noone is going to steal from them on the internet and everyone else is just being paranoid then you are doing your friends/family a great disservice.
I know several people who have had their credit card numbers stolen. Its actually fairly common and by far the most common form of identity fraud. Why do you think you see so many ads on TV about protection from having your credit card numbers stolen? Its because that shit happens all the time and smart people care a great deal about being protected from it.
You got modded +5 informative with the claim that this doesnt change the need to read through the required and recommended hardware. But if you RTFA you will see that is EXACTLY what this is intended to change. The primary point of this whole thing is that people can look at how many stars their computer has, look at how many stars are on the box and tell easily whether or not they can play it. Currently most people have no clue if their computer can run a game when they read the bottom of the box, this is intended to alleviate that problem.
MS isnt forcing them to pay a logo fee. This is about simplifying hardware requirements. If you RTFA you will see that this is a system where your pc is given a ranking out of five stars that denotes what its capabilities are. That way when you go to the store you dont have to know anything about how much memory you have, what video card you have, the size of your L2 cache, etc.
This helps game developers a great deal because it means that people can buy games with confidence that they will work. A lot of folks have been turned off to pc games in the past because they got home after shelling out fifty bucks for a game and realized it wasnt playable with only 512 megs of memory or whatever.
Of course slashdotters didnt fail to put a negative spin on this with some lame conspiracy about how they are forcing their brand onto developers. And the conspiracy doesnt even make sense, those boxes ALREADY say that the game requires MS Windows.
Well you made this post didnt you? Pretty sure thats the sort of thing they were talking about.
The right vs wrong of the music sharing debate aside, I really dont see how being able to copy music would give you more of a voice. If anything it would only give the big pop artists that signed with major labels more of a voice since it would increase their distribution.
It seems like person of the year is some kind of endorsement these days. They used to just give it to whoever was the most important person of that year or changed the world the most. In the past this has included people who changed the course of world history like Stalin and Hitler. These days they would never put someone like that up as their person of the year. They seem to be focused on picking a choice which is either feel good patriotic (like the president if it happens to be a year when his approval rating is high) or gimicky (like this) in the past decade or so. It is a great example of how journalists in our society are paranoid of saying anything that could be taken as an endorsment of terrorists or any other axis of evil folks these days.
Of course not all open source coders are jihading commies. Most of the people I know who have worked on open source stuff dont have an irrational hatred of MS. Thats exactly what I was saying, people like this make most other open source coders look that way. Most of the people I know who have worked on open source stuff dont have an irrational hatred of MS. As far as naming these supposed hijackers, I think its pretty clear that one of the people I was referring to wrote the article that was linked in the submission. To say they have hijacked it may be an exaggeration, but I think that they are acting as if they represent a lot of people who are part of open source.
You have never run into a coder who thinks MS vs open source is some kind of holy war or religous struggle? Why dont you try reading this website for a few minutes? Maybe an exaggeration to say holy war, but there are a lot of people here who have clearly taken sides and believe that they have some sort of moral high ground.
Who is you think I am slandering?
What is it you think I am lying about? I contributed small amounts of code to a few projects you probably havent heard of. Its not like I claimed to be Linus Torvalds or anything. If you dont want to believe me thats fine by me, its not like it was some major claim.
I used to contribute to various open source projects a few years ago. I thought it was fun and it helped my skill set as a software engineer. The number one reason I stopped was that I couldnt stand that I was fueling some kind of holy war against virtually all commercial software companies. (mainly MS)
I wish open source development was more about people creating software because they have a passion for it and they can learn from the experience. It seems like its been hijacked by these crazy people who go on these rants. When I say I have contributed to open source projects the LAST thing I want is to be associated with morons like this.
You know the people selling this stuff arent exactly the most ethical folks in the world. Do you think that just maybe they are asking for 30k without any really good exploits to give you for that money?
It isnt smart to assume that there are zero day exploits for Vista available just because some reporter says he heard there is someone who wants to anonymously sell you an exploit he promises is really good. Even if these exploits are real (big if) noone said anything about how big of a security hole we are talking about here.
How about if I tell you that I heard someone offered to sell an Linux exploit of an unknown nature for 50 grand? Should we all run around talking about how Linux is insecure now?
This seems like a journalist trying to come up with something good to write about and slashdot forwarding it on as anti-ms fud.
I think the reason that handle exists is to handle the case where someone slips and falls while mowing up a hill or something. That way he wont have an out of control mower falling after him. It makes good sense for it to be there from a safety standpoint for people who know better than to stick their head in a lawnmower. People slip and fall all the time, especially when trying to manuever a 100 pound piece of equipment over uneven ground.
"The first time a search engine will let users evaluate answers on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through to links and saving time."
Doesnt ask.com give you this functionality already?
The parent even replied and admitted that this is not the case. Why must we desperatly seek out any excuse that will keep google from looking bad? Whenever MS does something bad and it gets posted here people dont make unfounded speculation to try to justify it. (well ok, some do but they are usually modded down)
Slashdot Mirror
By your definition an interface can never be innovative then. It would only be the same functionality as before but "moved around".
I am familiar with those types of bags/cases. I think you are making my point for me to some degree by pointing out that what people have used in the past to accomplish that task is different at least to some degree from what dell is offering.
Yes, this is somewhat similar to the system you mentioned. A luggable desktop could have a real audience that would want it now whereas the product you mentioned wasnt that great for the reasons you listed. You could make an argument that just about any product which is considered innovative is similar to a product from the past but it is now more useful/interesting for whatever reason. Lots of people claimed that the ipod was innovative when it came out but it was obviously nothing noone had ever thought of before.
Dont get me wrong, I am not saying this dell is equivalent to inventing the internet or whatever. But I think it is innovative to some small degree, at least enough that it isnt "just" an advertisement.
Personally I really like the new way they are doing keyboard shortcuts. If you push alt keytips appear on all the different tabs/buttons. I got in the habit of doing this and within a few hours I was faster at doing most tasks in 2007 than I was in 2003 or even emacs (apples and oranges, I know). You should try it, I really liked it, it seemed to have a very low learning curve but was fairly powerful.
I think there is a fair bit of difference between those two things. The dell looks like a product specifically designed for LAN gamer types in mind and improves a great deal on the ease of lugging it around compared to what existed before. It looks to me more like a desktop designed to be easy to move around than a traditional laptop. The computer you linked to looks more like an ancient precurser to the laptop than a gamers system that is easy to move around.
I guess you can make the case that a luggable computer you could use the way you would a desktop when its unpacked isnt that hard to think of and therefore not that innovative. But if thats true then why wasnt anyone else making computers like this before them?
I will agree with you that the blurb reads like an ad, but that is true of most "Top 10/20/2^32" lists
I dont know a terrible amount about LAN gamers or their systems so if I am way off please dont flame me too hard. Most of my comments on this system are mostly based on speculation. : )
Well, if you read the article it seems pretty clear they are considering the interface to be innovative. Personally, I tend to agree with them, its miles better than other productivity software I have used in the past. (imho of course, its subjective)
I dont think that using either ODF or MS Open XML (or whatever its called) is very innovative one way or the other. Claiming they arent/are being innovative by choosing one format over another is kind of silly.
Just because you dont like that they arent supporting ODF doesnt mean they arent innovating in other areas.
In 2005 they ranked firefox and gmail the #1 and #2 best products of the year. Neither of those two advertises with PC World. (to my knowledge, correct me if I am wrong)
Could it be that MS Office (#1 on this list) just isnt popular with the slashdot crowd and that is why the first several posts are denouncing PC World as paid Microsoft shills?
The comparison in the article is kind of silly. It bothers me a little bit that just because something has the letters MIT on it it is perceived as being more interesting or important. If this had been a state school I doubt it ever would have been posted. Even the good engineering state schools dont get much coverage. When was the last time you saw a link to a student newspaper article appear on slashdot from Berkeley, UIUC, or Georgia Tech? Those schools only make it on here when there is "real" news for nerds happening there.
Googles idea of using economic incentive really doesnt seem like a good one to me. I mean look at all the people willing to answer your questions for free on other websites! Adding the dollar amount only limits your user base. I always assumed that this was the primary reason it failed so badly when offerings from other companies flourished.
Why do people want linux to take over the world so badly? Aside from a few corporations most people on here have no vested interest in seeing linux "win".
I run linux on some of my computers, its fun to mess around with as a hobby. But that doesnt make me some evangelist who wants Linux to run on a huge number of computers. Why do other people want that? Why do we even care?
Ive known people who would push linux onto the computers of relatives who were completely technically illeterate. To me this seems like putting the best interests of your relatives below the desire to spread linux everywhere.
Well they already do exactly that. Microsoft has a huge QA department and its a pretty safe bet that the SDETs working in it make a good bit more than 50k a year. They recruit internationally and get people those visas you were talking about since software engineers who dont suck are in short supply these days.
Unless a hacker believes that he can find several big time exploits every year before anyone else does (quite a stretch imho) then it seems like it would be in his financial best interest to work for them already. I have always wondered why people would want to be in the illegal underground in Russia or someplace when they could make more money and have a safe and secure job in the states.
Two stars or something lower. Yeah, it is being conservative with performance, but thats the most logical way to do it. And then they could run their little utility that would tell them that they could jump up a couple of stars by adding ram.
Yes, someone who is technically literate may realize that there are a small number of games out there that he could buy and someone going strictly by the star system would not realize this. So being technically literate still buys you something, but it is no longer an absolute necessity as it is now.
Besides, if someone has such a lopsided system then there is a pretty good chance that they did not get it from a big OEM like dell and would realize all of this.
In most cases for most people this system would work great. And by being conservative with the rankings you would never actually run into the situation where someone bought a game he couldnt play.
I should mention that these specifics of how it works are my assumptions, not actual knowledge. : )
Most of the problems you listed are fairly easy to alleviate.
If 3 stars is defined as having 2 gigs of ram and a video card with 256 megs of memory then:
A system with 4 gigs of ram and a video card with 256 megs of memory gets three stars,
A system with 2 gigs of ram and a video card with 512 megs of memory gets three stars, etc.
Just defining X stars as having a certain set of minimum hardware seems simple to me.
You mentioned that users wouldnt be able to know how to move up in stars, but I think it would be pretty simple for whatever utility tells you how many stars you have to also tell you what you need to move up.
The problem you mentioned of publishers putting out star values that arent accurate isnt a problem with the star system. They could just as easily do the same thing with the minimum requirements that they list now. Personally I have always found that if you have the recommended system minimums you are prettymuch good to go.
Sure, someone who is technically savvy will be able to squeeze more performance out of their computer but this seems like a good solution for the average joe to be able to tell what he can play. No, it isnt as simple as buying a game for the PS3 and plugging it in, but you dont need to be technically savvy for this either.
No, it is not an extortion scheme.
1) They arent (and couldnt even if they wanted to) forcing developers package their software like this as you claim. Developers will only take part if they want to. (and they probably will, its certainly to their advantage) Microsoft has never maintained any control over third party developers, its one of the reasons their operating system became so successful.
2) There is no fee as you claim.
Anyone is free to continue developing games and packaging them the same way they do now. You are just slandering Microsoft.
Not hackers so much as Phishers. (I assume you are familiar with this) Huge amounts of money is lost every year by people who submitted their credit card info or paypal password to authentic looking websites. I (and prettymuch everyone I know) routinely get emails from "paypal administrators" or "bank of america customer service" asking for info.
I have always tried to impress that paranoia you are looking down on onto people I know when it comes to stuff like this. Trusting these spam emails or giving any sensitive information to sites you arent damn sure are legit is prettymuch gauranteed to make you a victim of identity theft in short order. My grandfather was a victim of phishing when he got spyware on his computer and a popup appeared offering to sell him software to get rid of it for $30.
That being said, I am not sure what the ratio is of theft like this versus theft from the waiter at dennys writing everything down on a napkin when he goes to run your card. I think it is a safe assumption that neither is nontrivial however.
If you are telling people who are highly computer illiterate to trust that noone is going to steal from them on the internet and everyone else is just being paranoid then you are doing your friends/family a great disservice.
I know several people who have had their credit card numbers stolen. Its actually fairly common and by far the most common form of identity fraud. Why do you think you see so many ads on TV about protection from having your credit card numbers stolen? Its because that shit happens all the time and smart people care a great deal about being protected from it.
You got modded +5 informative with the claim that this doesnt change the need to read through the required and recommended hardware. But if you RTFA you will see that is EXACTLY what this is intended to change. The primary point of this whole thing is that people can look at how many stars their computer has, look at how many stars are on the box and tell easily whether or not they can play it. Currently most people have no clue if their computer can run a game when they read the bottom of the box, this is intended to alleviate that problem.
You are completely wrong.
MS isnt forcing them to pay a logo fee. This is about simplifying hardware requirements. If you RTFA you will see that this is a system where your pc is given a ranking out of five stars that denotes what its capabilities are. That way when you go to the store you dont have to know anything about how much memory you have, what video card you have, the size of your L2 cache, etc.
This helps game developers a great deal because it means that people can buy games with confidence that they will work. A lot of folks have been turned off to pc games in the past because they got home after shelling out fifty bucks for a game and realized it wasnt playable with only 512 megs of memory or whatever.
Of course slashdotters didnt fail to put a negative spin on this with some lame conspiracy about how they are forcing their brand onto developers. And the conspiracy doesnt even make sense, those boxes ALREADY say that the game requires MS Windows.
Well you made this post didnt you? Pretty sure thats the sort of thing they were talking about.
The right vs wrong of the music sharing debate aside, I really dont see how being able to copy music would give you more of a voice. If anything it would only give the big pop artists that signed with major labels more of a voice since it would increase their distribution.
It seems like person of the year is some kind of endorsement these days. They used to just give it to whoever was the most important person of that year or changed the world the most. In the past this has included people who changed the course of world history like Stalin and Hitler. These days they would never put someone like that up as their person of the year. They seem to be focused on picking a choice which is either feel good patriotic (like the president if it happens to be a year when his approval rating is high) or gimicky (like this) in the past decade or so. It is a great example of how journalists in our society are paranoid of saying anything that could be taken as an endorsment of terrorists or any other axis of evil folks these days.
Of course not all open source coders are jihading commies. Most of the people I know who have worked on open source stuff dont have an irrational hatred of MS. Thats exactly what I was saying, people like this make most other open source coders look that way. Most of the people I know who have worked on open source stuff dont have an irrational hatred of MS. As far as naming these supposed hijackers, I think its pretty clear that one of the people I was referring to wrote the article that was linked in the submission. To say they have hijacked it may be an exaggeration, but I think that they are acting as if they represent a lot of people who are part of open source.
You have never run into a coder who thinks MS vs open source is some kind of holy war or religous struggle? Why dont you try reading this website for a few minutes? Maybe an exaggeration to say holy war, but there are a lot of people here who have clearly taken sides and believe that they have some sort of moral high ground.
Who is you think I am slandering?
What is it you think I am lying about? I contributed small amounts of code to a few projects you probably havent heard of. Its not like I claimed to be Linus Torvalds or anything. If you dont want to believe me thats fine by me, its not like it was some major claim.
I used to contribute to various open source projects a few years ago. I thought it was fun and it helped my skill set as a software engineer. The number one reason I stopped was that I couldnt stand that I was fueling some kind of holy war against virtually all commercial software companies. (mainly MS)
I wish open source development was more about people creating software because they have a passion for it and they can learn from the experience. It seems like its been hijacked by these crazy people who go on these rants. When I say I have contributed to open source projects the LAST thing I want is to be associated with morons like this.
You know the people selling this stuff arent exactly the most ethical folks in the world. Do you think that just maybe they are asking for 30k without any really good exploits to give you for that money?
It isnt smart to assume that there are zero day exploits for Vista available just because some reporter says he heard there is someone who wants to anonymously sell you an exploit he promises is really good. Even if these exploits are real (big if) noone said anything about how big of a security hole we are talking about here.
How about if I tell you that I heard someone offered to sell an Linux exploit of an unknown nature for 50 grand? Should we all run around talking about how Linux is insecure now?
This seems like a journalist trying to come up with something good to write about and slashdot forwarding it on as anti-ms fud.
I think the reason that handle exists is to handle the case where someone slips and falls while mowing up a hill or something. That way he wont have an out of control mower falling after him. It makes good sense for it to be there from a safety standpoint for people who know better than to stick their head in a lawnmower. People slip and fall all the time, especially when trying to manuever a 100 pound piece of equipment over uneven ground.
"The first time a search engine will let users evaluate answers on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through to links and saving time."
Doesnt ask.com give you this functionality already?
The parent even replied and admitted that this is not the case. Why must we desperatly seek out any excuse that will keep google from looking bad? Whenever MS does something bad and it gets posted here people dont make unfounded speculation to try to justify it. (well ok, some do but they are usually modded down)