1. Everything a user would want needs to work out of the box, even if that means bundling proprietary video drivers, Flash, etc.
Shipped? That'd cost money, of which I'm sure there's distributions that either are willing to do that or already do. For mainline distros like *buntu, SuSe, and Fedora it's trivial and usually automatic. Such as popping open Konqueror in Kubuntu automatically tells me that it'd be a good idea to install additional codecs. Don't tell me other OSes come boxed with this short of that ridiculous cost for things like Win 7 Ultimate (or even SHOULD as it'd be outdated software they'd be shipping the second it hits shelves).
2. They need a major retail presence. Red Hat had boxed copies in stores ages ago, but most users aren't comfortable replacing an OS. You need to be able to purchase a computer with Linux preinstalled from major retailers. There have been very minor experiments with this, but most retailers seemed to push customers away from the Linux models. This may change a bit with Chrome on netbooks, but Chrome is largely just a browser.
Why? Didn't seem to do much for the market share before, I don't see why it'd do anything about it now. The last time there were major Linux sales was preinstalled systems like at Wal*Mart and netbooks and we see what MS did to quash that. But really is it THAT important that you see Linux in boxes on shelves? I can't remember the last person I've seen actually get up, head out, and say, "I'm going to buy an OS today!" It generally doesn't happen.
3. Linux names marketing. With fragmentation, this is difficult. Google will add some name recognition, but until the average person develops some trust with the Linux "brand", you won't see massive acceptance.
There will never be "trust" of Linux because people don't even trust Mac or Windows. The first reaction you get if you ask a layman or even a technical person about either of those as a desktop is, "things just work," but ask them more specifically about any common problem (say, Flash vulnerabilities, needing to configure up AV software, being denied the latest games on Mac, so on and so forth for an army of various things) and that armor starts to crack away. I've seen even the most die-hard Windows and Mac fans, when pressed, show distrust in their operating system of choice. They don't like updates, they don't like shelling out more money for something they "just bought," and they fear it "slowing down" or being "insecure" or any number of other things (again, when pressed).
This is because unless you're a technical person already you're a lay person and that means you don't trust computers. Trusting a "brand" or similar nonsense isn't going to change that. Computers, no matter how simple we make the interfaces for will ALWAYS be "unknown scary things" to the vast majority of users. Hell, the only reason people aren't scared of a G1 or an iPhone is because they aren't told it runs an Operating System.
4. Migration needs to be simple. An installer should help you migrate your documents and settings over without too much pain or grief.
Point made, but then anyone interested in actually "going Linux" is already paranoid enough about making backups of what they've got. Seriously, when's the last time you ran into someone who said, "oh noes, I wanted to try Linux and wiped my computer! WHERE ARE MY FILES!!!!ONE!!!11!!" It doesn't happen. People will be most paranoid about their backups prior to a Linux installation.
Until those four points are addressed, don't ever expect Linux on the desktop to be anything but a niche product.
And here I think is part of the problem with the mindset of Linux on the Desktop. Why does it have to be anything but a niche market? It's my pet OS for sure, I even give free tech support for it over IRC and forums, use it on every machine in my
We use FAST at our organization. Verity (or rather the company that owned Verity search) was trying to pull a fast one on us with licensing so we had to drop them for our document indexing and we received FAST as a donation from MS as they, and many other companies, donate quite a few things to us.
We went with FAST as opposed to a Google Search Appliance because at the time the Google box couldn't do one thing we needed desperately without some serious hacking and ill-advisement from Google (I'll give it to Google, they were straight up with us that it was a bad idea at the time with their software. Kudos to them for honesty, makes me want to buy their stuff in the future). We have documents, several thousand, that come in nightly by HTML that need to be indexed complete with search term highlighting by 7am the next morning. The system has approximately three hours to do this job. If it cannot, an essential resource in our business (which shall remain nameless but suffice it to say "lives are at stake") suffers. Google's indexing at the time was somewhat lazy in that it would index things as fast as it could but could not guarantee that 21 hours of intake would be ready to search perfectly 3 hours later. FAST could. Simple as that.
It deeply saddens me that they're dropping the Linux platform as that's how ours was built and even the engineers that came out to build it loved working on it (RHEL for those interested). It's not unexpected, and we'll find another indexer in a few years just like we always have to due to bullcrap like this but I was hoping that once, just freakin once, MS could actually use someone else's work to their advantage WITHOUT slapping their customers. Seriously, is Not Invented Here such a big freakin deal?
But hey, whatever, we all knew it would happen anyway. For what it's worth FAST on Linux is fucking awesome from our experience (and we've got nearly a million non-trivial documents and workload it has to contend with).
Please mod this person up. Bash the move all you like but this is cruft-trimming. Should they open the standards used to communicate so the community could make their own XBox Live Legacy? Yeah, that'd be nice, but as far as "oh ones they're terrible people" I think that's massively overblown. This is a simple case of old infrastructure holding back new features and it's been deprecated ever since they stopped selling the original XBox.
Look, I know it's popular to bash MS for this and all but from what we've seen from them in the past the old XBox Live service model was actually the last thing holding back the 360 Live service. Ever wonder why you can only have 100 friends on your 360 XBL Friends list? No clans? No other "modern" features? Halo 2 was the reason.
From what they said in the past SPECIFICALLY Halo 2 was holding it back because it wouldn't recognize a friends list longer than 100 people or additional features. Yes, this is poor planning for the original infrastructure but the only way to fix it is to kill support for the XBox Live infrastructure.
I thought we were supposed to welcome trimming cruft (OpenGL anyone?). Even if it hurts a little in the short term compare how many people were using the original XBox Live infrastructure to the number of people using the new XBox 360 Live infrastructure.
Personally I think they should've had a legacy server infrastructure set up but that would've meant that you'd have two separate friends lists, two separate sets of features, and again you're not really trimming cruft, just making it such that you have to duplicate a lot of your work when you want to upgrade it. However much as it hurts to drop the original XBox Live I'm looking forward to much higher limits on my friends list, more expansive features of the Live service since the 360 (and its games) was designed with a constantly upgraded infrastructure in mind, and so forth.
Bash 'em all you like but that 100 player limit ALONE in your friends list was a major sticking point for many communities (hello all us Penny-Arcade and Ctrl-Alt-Del fans who want to play with the creators of the strip). At least now we can get that shit out of the way.
Disclaimer: I have all Linux machines in my house, all major consoles, have played games since the Atari 2600 on right about everything from Windows 95 to OpenSolaris, NES to 360. No gaming is around forever, even my beloved System Shock requires some interesting emulation to get it to work, I view this as no different other than the fact MS told you up front it wouldn't be around forever.
Hate to reply to myself but I thought I'd mention that I personally loved Ninja Gaiden, the "it sucked" was in reference to what it was like when you got hit.
But seriously, we want things realistic "enough for the setting." If I'm playing a modern day, realistic shooter then generally yes, I want it to be fairly realistic (Rainbow Six). If I'm playing a sci-fi/fantasy style shooter (Star Trek: Elite Force) or similar then I really don't care as much and I let you bend reality a little more...just not *too* much is all.
The only game I can think of that the author must be talking about is Crackdown and honestly they set it up right in the very beginning that it's not realistic at all, it's a superhero game. I can't think of the last big hit game I played where the "realism" wasn't within the realm of explanation of the universe it's set in, aka not "too" unbelievable. Even Gears of War has it...you get stuck by a nade or chainsawed and you go DOWN.
Apparently this person's never played Call of Duty multiplayer in hardcore mode. Is it realistic? No, but it's a lot closer to what the person apparently wants. You get hit by a single bullet in the foot halfway across the map and you're DOWN. Guess how much fun it is. Nevermind the fact that the.50 cal Sniper Rifle can't do the same thing, but that's another discussion.
But then apparently this person's never played the original Ninja Gaiden either. Fantasy setting, yeah, but that game beat you HORRIBLY if you screwed up even a little bit. Getting hit by demon spawn was a lot like...well, getting hit by demon spawn. It sucked, there was no health regeneration (minus a single, very very slow regenerative item later).
I seem to remember us hearing about "research" like this every six months or so. Hasn't it been done to death? The majority of people buying products of *any* kind, not just games, don't bother reading reviews. It's simply not a significant factor. X-Blades was rated terribly against any other game that came out at that time, yet we got it on Goozex.com once the price came down a bit and have a blast with it. You know why it was panned? Because it wasn't one of the "zomfg big game hype of the yearz!"
This doesn't even get into the fact that most review sites I've seen through metacritic never even bother to really play the titles anymore. I started to notice IGN, 1up, and the other "big time" review sites were starting to complain about odd things...like "no discernable way to change difficulty level in Fallout 3" in I believe IGN's review (might've been TeamXBox, but it was a big site). Right on the MAIN MENU under OPTIONS and even during the game you can at any time click "Options -> Difficulty" and change to suit you. You cannot tell me with a straight face that a professional reviewer of games who's done dozens, if not hundreds of reviews beforehand possibly missed something that simple that's been with us since the PS2 days. There are quite a few other examples where it's clear the reviewer simply did *not* play through the game (like how no reviewers bothered mentioned the utter split-screen FAIL on Borderlands with the menus in-game. Play it and you'll find out *immediately* what I'm talking about, they aren't resized so you can't navigate menus in-game).
People buy what their friends are going to buy, what hype tells them to buy, and what the box art tells them to buy. Just like movies, books, cars, houses, and everything else. Personally I think the whole review system is broken at the moment (working on my own, just need to get off my ass and buy a site for it) but even if it wasn't this just isn't news and hasn't been for some time.
I already love my PCs, all of them, and they're all running Linux of various flavors, devices, and duties (and two of them are dual-booting the Win7 RC...*may* go buy a full copy when it comes out, depends on how much use it gets which currently isn't much). Right about every person I've ever put Linux on a system for says the same thing, if they ever switch back it's because of some necessity (like certain software for truckers for instance).
I don't want to have to "love my PC," I want my PC to love me back. Every time I use Linux (and remotely, sometimes, when I use a Mac) I get an experience that I am not fighting with it, that it wants to work with me and help me do whatever it was that I wanted to do. Every and I mean EVERY single time I use Windows I get the impression it's a system that doesn't like me, doesn't want me to touch it, and I had best follow its rules or else it will make my life absolute hell.
I understand Dell wanting to sell systems since after all that's what they do but seriously that kind of message is not helping.
That's a good point to bring up. From what we've seen this generation it's really a failing of the dev studio, not the console manufacturer as well. Unreal Tournament 3 for PS3 for instance had no problem using a mouse and keyboard but inexplicably Epic decided not to do the same thing for the 360. Anyone with a 360 knows it already accepts a keyboard hookup (I use one myself) and should have no problem accepting mice (or other devices) even, it's in the studio's hands.
To a degree I understand why you'd want to not let people use something other than the gamepad. Part of the benefit of multiplayer games on a console is that every player has the same hardware which creates a sort of balance, none of that Doom 3 "turn off shadow effects to see players hiding in the dark" crap or similar. The same philosophy follows for the input hardware. On the other hand it may not be so bad an idea as long as it's well-advertised with the game and/or recommended for input.
Unfortunately there's no silver bullet [yet] for input. I think we're going to continue to see this sort of issue crop up for quite awhile.
I've also got a 2003 VW Golf TDI, thing's a blast. It's not a barn burner in a straight line but that doesn't mean you can't do that. Down in Holt raceway we had a guy that'd bring out his F-250 diesel and burn straight kerosene. It was a 1/8mi. track and he smoked *everything*. Funniest thing I'd seen.
But yeah, modern diesels are fantastic. Fuel efficient, plenty of punch, stupid amounts of torque, and best of all diesel's extremely durable and simple which makes it ideal for consumer vehicles. My wife's a diesel mechanic (buses mostly) and trust me you can beat the tar out of a diesel and it'll probably still outlive you.
What wrong with me. I can't tell if this was a well meaning response or really good sarcasm.
Probably the fact that it's text on the Internet completely devoid of body language including tone. It tends to make discerning tone difficult and conveying tone in a small paragraph difficult to boot.
But no, not being sarcastic. I personally like hearing from people like Sam. It's hard to have a discussion if one side isn't talking, after all.
Thank you for answering some questions regarding this new development. We, as a community, may be skeptical but we always appreciate hearing from you and your colleagues on these matters.
Personally I hope to hear more of these sorts of developments.
To my understanding Linux would survive just fine. He's our "benevolent dictator" but he hardly makes day-to-day decisions and tells people what they're going to do. Last time I checked most discussions over something getting integrated or not are handled by a group of people who only defer to Linus if nobody can reach a consensus.
Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Why arent you simply saying that Microsoft should not be allowed to make operating systems?
I do, personally. I think they do an incredibly piss-poor job of it and do a much better job at...well, right about everything else, actually.
However, to answer your question to the other poster, he/she/it HAS been listening, and the tone is, "because they abused a monopoly position." It's the part you quietly seem to overlook.
Including a web browser did not create the monopoly. They had one beforehand and then abused it at the time. Had they not possessed a monopoly there would be no complaint.
You're just cringing at the fact that Microsoft did something right, and are looking for any reason to bash them. This is Slashdot however, and everyone is supposed to be a Microsoft cynic.
You're right, we *are* cynics, and after the extremely long and horrible history from the company you'd be a fool to blame anyone for it.
However occasionally they do something right. I hope it's true personally, as when they actually do something right it's usually pretty impressive. My personal favorite recent achievement's the XBox/XBox 360.
Thank you very, very much, mod the parentt up. There's been major paradigm shifts before, there will be again, and the laws of thermodynamics, physics, or other such areas may once again change with new information. The only way to know is to continue to test, which is exactly what happened here.
It's dangerous to just accept "laws" as fact without further testing. ALL science should be open to question and testing...that's part of the whole idea. Taking it as holy writ stops it being science.
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have? Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal".
They are created equally, that does not mean they live equally.
Sure, what he's saying is that they want someone else to make a way for them to sell you TV, your Internet Connection, and your phone, and then keep you hooked on all three. Basically some "game" that you'd say, "Well I thought about changing my phone to T-mobile but then I wouldn't be able to play this game since I wouldn't have all three services! I CAN'T have THAT!"
It's just another way for them to try and stick you with three services. The rep makes no sense because he doesn't understand what he's talking about. People think you can just use this magickal, "game," thingie that seems so popular and suddenly use it to make people buy all your useless shit. It's the same kinda thing that Microsoft tries to pull but really isn't as good at as it claims (witness how well Shadowrun for tie-in worked out).
Don't think too hard about it because they've got no idea how it works either (it comes from not playing any games...seriously, most of these people don't even know what a game IS, and that I say from a lot of experience). When we hear something like, oh I dunno, that you'd be able to plot raid groups in WoW from your phone, watch those same dungeon runs you plotted out on your server on your TV, and even play in them the conventional way with your computer, *then* you can feel free to start puzzling over it again.
If Windows 7 can't significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?"
With its impressive eye candy and new name how could it possibly fail? It's not like last time they gave Windows a new name and desktop effects...wait, hold on, I'm being told they did. Well...shit.
Having The State and The Authorities protect a certain market sector from the activities of all but one trusted supplier is called Feudalism. Has been for centuries.
How about we just call it "bullshit." It's descriptive and has the instant benefit of most of the people being screwed by it knowing what you're talking about.;)
I suspect that 100 years from now, the businesses that are bemoaning the freedom that the Internet provides will be footnotes in our grand children's history books; whereas the advent of the Internet will be regarded as on par with irrigation, the plow, and the printing press.
On the whole I completely agree with your post, however this bit is rather optimistic. Personally I think that in 100 years our grand children will have no books (no new ones anyway) and will be fighting with each other over drinkable water and safe shelter. But then I may be a bit pessimistic today.
Let's face it, if you're driving an electric car, you're really just exporting your smog to the power plant that handles your section of the grid.
Yes, because the smog emissions of an industrial grade power plant, complete with its massive amounts of emissions controls, is just as inefficient as a horrendously inefficient, under-emissions-equipped gasoline motor.
Hey, maybe we should just save ourselves the development costs of *serious* power generation plants and just run cities on car motors! Sorry if it sounds harsh, but this line of thinking is ignorant at best. There's a good reason why power plants are made the way they are and it's not just because it has more power requirements.
Intel doesn't need either AMD or NVIDIA. You look at most notebooks today and they will have all integrated Intel stuff without anything from either of those either companies.
Emphasis mine. I believe *that* is the point attempted to be made. Today they use Intel parts, but what about tomorrow? We all used to run Creative sound cards (well, most of us) and now most people just use onboard sound. We used to have floppy drives, now it's nearly impossible to find one even outside of a computer.
If Intel doesn't have any friends left when there's a shift in the marketplace they're going to get screwed hard. With the speed that the technology marketplace moves there's no telling what may be the next "big thing" that's going to put a previous monolithic giant through some very serious hurt (Vista anyone?).
People in management like a single sign-on system and a well-knit integrated system that works,
So XBox Live, the DMV, and the automated grocery checkout at Ralph's meet those requirements (which are as arbitrary and as loose of a definition, as I've heard in awhile). Those systems must all be enterprise-level?
XBox Live supports millions of users, the DMV does hundreds of transactions per day with thousands of users in large databases, and the grocery checkout handles a *lot* of people's money in a sane fashion...so uh, yeah, actually, those are enterprise-level systems. What is this, a joke?
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1. Everything a user would want needs to work out of the box, even if that means bundling proprietary video drivers, Flash, etc.
Shipped? That'd cost money, of which I'm sure there's distributions that either are willing to do that or already do. For mainline distros like *buntu, SuSe, and Fedora it's trivial and usually automatic. Such as popping open Konqueror in Kubuntu automatically tells me that it'd be a good idea to install additional codecs. Don't tell me other OSes come boxed with this short of that ridiculous cost for things like Win 7 Ultimate (or even SHOULD as it'd be outdated software they'd be shipping the second it hits shelves).
2. They need a major retail presence. Red Hat had boxed copies in stores ages ago, but most users aren't comfortable replacing an OS. You need to be able to purchase a computer with Linux preinstalled from major retailers. There have been very minor experiments with this, but most retailers seemed to push customers away from the Linux models. This may change a bit with Chrome on netbooks, but Chrome is largely just a browser.
Why? Didn't seem to do much for the market share before, I don't see why it'd do anything about it now. The last time there were major Linux sales was preinstalled systems like at Wal*Mart and netbooks and we see what MS did to quash that. But really is it THAT important that you see Linux in boxes on shelves? I can't remember the last person I've seen actually get up, head out, and say, "I'm going to buy an OS today!" It generally doesn't happen.
3. Linux names marketing. With fragmentation, this is difficult. Google will add some name recognition, but until the average person develops some trust with the Linux "brand", you won't see massive acceptance.
There will never be "trust" of Linux because people don't even trust Mac or Windows. The first reaction you get if you ask a layman or even a technical person about either of those as a desktop is, "things just work," but ask them more specifically about any common problem (say, Flash vulnerabilities, needing to configure up AV software, being denied the latest games on Mac, so on and so forth for an army of various things) and that armor starts to crack away. I've seen even the most die-hard Windows and Mac fans, when pressed, show distrust in their operating system of choice. They don't like updates, they don't like shelling out more money for something they "just bought," and they fear it "slowing down" or being "insecure" or any number of other things (again, when pressed).
This is because unless you're a technical person already you're a lay person and that means you don't trust computers. Trusting a "brand" or similar nonsense isn't going to change that. Computers, no matter how simple we make the interfaces for will ALWAYS be "unknown scary things" to the vast majority of users. Hell, the only reason people aren't scared of a G1 or an iPhone is because they aren't told it runs an Operating System.
4. Migration needs to be simple. An installer should help you migrate your documents and settings over without too much pain or grief.
Point made, but then anyone interested in actually "going Linux" is already paranoid enough about making backups of what they've got. Seriously, when's the last time you ran into someone who said, "oh noes, I wanted to try Linux and wiped my computer! WHERE ARE MY FILES!!!!ONE!!!11!!" It doesn't happen. People will be most paranoid about their backups prior to a Linux installation.
Until those four points are addressed, don't ever expect Linux on the desktop to be anything but a niche product.
And here I think is part of the problem with the mindset of Linux on the Desktop. Why does it have to be anything but a niche market? It's my pet OS for sure, I even give free tech support for it over IRC and forums, use it on every machine in my
We use FAST at our organization. Verity (or rather the company that owned Verity search) was trying to pull a fast one on us with licensing so we had to drop them for our document indexing and we received FAST as a donation from MS as they, and many other companies, donate quite a few things to us.
We went with FAST as opposed to a Google Search Appliance because at the time the Google box couldn't do one thing we needed desperately without some serious hacking and ill-advisement from Google (I'll give it to Google, they were straight up with us that it was a bad idea at the time with their software. Kudos to them for honesty, makes me want to buy their stuff in the future). We have documents, several thousand, that come in nightly by HTML that need to be indexed complete with search term highlighting by 7am the next morning. The system has approximately three hours to do this job. If it cannot, an essential resource in our business (which shall remain nameless but suffice it to say "lives are at stake") suffers. Google's indexing at the time was somewhat lazy in that it would index things as fast as it could but could not guarantee that 21 hours of intake would be ready to search perfectly 3 hours later. FAST could. Simple as that.
It deeply saddens me that they're dropping the Linux platform as that's how ours was built and even the engineers that came out to build it loved working on it (RHEL for those interested). It's not unexpected, and we'll find another indexer in a few years just like we always have to due to bullcrap like this but I was hoping that once, just freakin once, MS could actually use someone else's work to their advantage WITHOUT slapping their customers. Seriously, is Not Invented Here such a big freakin deal?
But hey, whatever, we all knew it would happen anyway. For what it's worth FAST on Linux is fucking awesome from our experience (and we've got nearly a million non-trivial documents and workload it has to contend with).
Please mod this person up. Bash the move all you like but this is cruft-trimming. Should they open the standards used to communicate so the community could make their own XBox Live Legacy? Yeah, that'd be nice, but as far as "oh ones they're terrible people" I think that's massively overblown. This is a simple case of old infrastructure holding back new features and it's been deprecated ever since they stopped selling the original XBox.
Look, I know it's popular to bash MS for this and all but from what we've seen from them in the past the old XBox Live service model was actually the last thing holding back the 360 Live service. Ever wonder why you can only have 100 friends on your 360 XBL Friends list? No clans? No other "modern" features? Halo 2 was the reason.
From what they said in the past SPECIFICALLY Halo 2 was holding it back because it wouldn't recognize a friends list longer than 100 people or additional features. Yes, this is poor planning for the original infrastructure but the only way to fix it is to kill support for the XBox Live infrastructure.
I thought we were supposed to welcome trimming cruft (OpenGL anyone?). Even if it hurts a little in the short term compare how many people were using the original XBox Live infrastructure to the number of people using the new XBox 360 Live infrastructure.
Personally I think they should've had a legacy server infrastructure set up but that would've meant that you'd have two separate friends lists, two separate sets of features, and again you're not really trimming cruft, just making it such that you have to duplicate a lot of your work when you want to upgrade it. However much as it hurts to drop the original XBox Live I'm looking forward to much higher limits on my friends list, more expansive features of the Live service since the 360 (and its games) was designed with a constantly upgraded infrastructure in mind, and so forth.
Bash 'em all you like but that 100 player limit ALONE in your friends list was a major sticking point for many communities (hello all us Penny-Arcade and Ctrl-Alt-Del fans who want to play with the creators of the strip). At least now we can get that shit out of the way.
Disclaimer: I have all Linux machines in my house, all major consoles, have played games since the Atari 2600 on right about everything from Windows 95 to OpenSolaris, NES to 360. No gaming is around forever, even my beloved System Shock requires some interesting emulation to get it to work, I view this as no different other than the fact MS told you up front it wouldn't be around forever.
Hate to reply to myself but I thought I'd mention that I personally loved Ninja Gaiden, the "it sucked" was in reference to what it was like when you got hit.
But seriously, we want things realistic "enough for the setting." If I'm playing a modern day, realistic shooter then generally yes, I want it to be fairly realistic (Rainbow Six). If I'm playing a sci-fi/fantasy style shooter (Star Trek: Elite Force) or similar then I really don't care as much and I let you bend reality a little more...just not *too* much is all.
The only game I can think of that the author must be talking about is Crackdown and honestly they set it up right in the very beginning that it's not realistic at all, it's a superhero game. I can't think of the last big hit game I played where the "realism" wasn't within the realm of explanation of the universe it's set in, aka not "too" unbelievable. Even Gears of War has it...you get stuck by a nade or chainsawed and you go DOWN.
It just sounds like bellyaching to me.
Apparently this person's never played Call of Duty multiplayer in hardcore mode. Is it realistic? No, but it's a lot closer to what the person apparently wants. You get hit by a single bullet in the foot halfway across the map and you're DOWN. Guess how much fun it is. Nevermind the fact that the .50 cal Sniper Rifle can't do the same thing, but that's another discussion.
But then apparently this person's never played the original Ninja Gaiden either. Fantasy setting, yeah, but that game beat you HORRIBLY if you screwed up even a little bit. Getting hit by demon spawn was a lot like...well, getting hit by demon spawn. It sucked, there was no health regeneration (minus a single, very very slow regenerative item later).
I seem to remember us hearing about "research" like this every six months or so. Hasn't it been done to death? The majority of people buying products of *any* kind, not just games, don't bother reading reviews. It's simply not a significant factor. X-Blades was rated terribly against any other game that came out at that time, yet we got it on Goozex.com once the price came down a bit and have a blast with it. You know why it was panned? Because it wasn't one of the "zomfg big game hype of the yearz!"
This doesn't even get into the fact that most review sites I've seen through metacritic never even bother to really play the titles anymore. I started to notice IGN, 1up, and the other "big time" review sites were starting to complain about odd things...like "no discernable way to change difficulty level in Fallout 3" in I believe IGN's review (might've been TeamXBox, but it was a big site). Right on the MAIN MENU under OPTIONS and even during the game you can at any time click "Options -> Difficulty" and change to suit you. You cannot tell me with a straight face that a professional reviewer of games who's done dozens, if not hundreds of reviews beforehand possibly missed something that simple that's been with us since the PS2 days. There are quite a few other examples where it's clear the reviewer simply did *not* play through the game (like how no reviewers bothered mentioned the utter split-screen FAIL on Borderlands with the menus in-game. Play it and you'll find out *immediately* what I'm talking about, they aren't resized so you can't navigate menus in-game).
People buy what their friends are going to buy, what hype tells them to buy, and what the box art tells them to buy. Just like movies, books, cars, houses, and everything else. Personally I think the whole review system is broken at the moment (working on my own, just need to get off my ass and buy a site for it) but even if it wasn't this just isn't news and hasn't been for some time.
I already love my PCs, all of them, and they're all running Linux of various flavors, devices, and duties (and two of them are dual-booting the Win7 RC...*may* go buy a full copy when it comes out, depends on how much use it gets which currently isn't much). Right about every person I've ever put Linux on a system for says the same thing, if they ever switch back it's because of some necessity (like certain software for truckers for instance).
I don't want to have to "love my PC," I want my PC to love me back. Every time I use Linux (and remotely, sometimes, when I use a Mac) I get an experience that I am not fighting with it, that it wants to work with me and help me do whatever it was that I wanted to do. Every and I mean EVERY single time I use Windows I get the impression it's a system that doesn't like me, doesn't want me to touch it, and I had best follow its rules or else it will make my life absolute hell.
I understand Dell wanting to sell systems since after all that's what they do but seriously that kind of message is not helping.
That's a good point to bring up. From what we've seen this generation it's really a failing of the dev studio, not the console manufacturer as well. Unreal Tournament 3 for PS3 for instance had no problem using a mouse and keyboard but inexplicably Epic decided not to do the same thing for the 360. Anyone with a 360 knows it already accepts a keyboard hookup (I use one myself) and should have no problem accepting mice (or other devices) even, it's in the studio's hands.
To a degree I understand why you'd want to not let people use something other than the gamepad. Part of the benefit of multiplayer games on a console is that every player has the same hardware which creates a sort of balance, none of that Doom 3 "turn off shadow effects to see players hiding in the dark" crap or similar. The same philosophy follows for the input hardware. On the other hand it may not be so bad an idea as long as it's well-advertised with the game and/or recommended for input.
Unfortunately there's no silver bullet [yet] for input. I think we're going to continue to see this sort of issue crop up for quite awhile.
I've also got a 2003 VW Golf TDI, thing's a blast. It's not a barn burner in a straight line but that doesn't mean you can't do that. Down in Holt raceway we had a guy that'd bring out his F-250 diesel and burn straight kerosene. It was a 1/8mi. track and he smoked *everything*. Funniest thing I'd seen.
But yeah, modern diesels are fantastic. Fuel efficient, plenty of punch, stupid amounts of torque, and best of all diesel's extremely durable and simple which makes it ideal for consumer vehicles. My wife's a diesel mechanic (buses mostly) and trust me you can beat the tar out of a diesel and it'll probably still outlive you.
What wrong with me. I can't tell if this was a well meaning response or really good sarcasm.
Probably the fact that it's text on the Internet completely devoid of body language including tone. It tends to make discerning tone difficult and conveying tone in a small paragraph difficult to boot.
But no, not being sarcastic. I personally like hearing from people like Sam. It's hard to have a discussion if one side isn't talking, after all.
Thank you for answering some questions regarding this new development. We, as a community, may be skeptical but we always appreciate hearing from you and your colleagues on these matters.
Personally I hope to hear more of these sorts of developments.
To my understanding Linux would survive just fine. He's our "benevolent dictator" but he hardly makes day-to-day decisions and tells people what they're going to do. Last time I checked most discussions over something getting integrated or not are handled by a group of people who only defer to Linus if nobody can reach a consensus.
Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
All the life lessons one truly needs can be found in Shadowrun. "Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, EVER, deal with a dragon."
Why arent you simply saying that Microsoft should not be allowed to make operating systems?
I do, personally. I think they do an incredibly piss-poor job of it and do a much better job at...well, right about everything else, actually.
However, to answer your question to the other poster, he/she/it HAS been listening, and the tone is, "because they abused a monopoly position." It's the part you quietly seem to overlook.
Including a web browser did not create the monopoly. They had one beforehand and then abused it at the time. Had they not possessed a monopoly there would be no complaint.
You're just cringing at the fact that Microsoft did something right, and are looking for any reason to bash them. This is Slashdot however, and everyone is supposed to be a Microsoft cynic.
You're right, we *are* cynics, and after the extremely long and horrible history from the company you'd be a fool to blame anyone for it.
However occasionally they do something right. I hope it's true personally, as when they actually do something right it's usually pretty impressive. My personal favorite recent achievement's the XBox/XBox 360.
Thank you very, very much, mod the parentt up. There's been major paradigm shifts before, there will be again, and the laws of thermodynamics, physics, or other such areas may once again change with new information. The only way to know is to continue to test, which is exactly what happened here.
It's dangerous to just accept "laws" as fact without further testing. ALL science should be open to question and testing...that's part of the whole idea. Taking it as holy writ stops it being science.
Assuming the linked article in GP is true:
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have? Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal".
They are created equally, that does not mean they live equally.
Sure, what he's saying is that they want someone else to make a way for them to sell you TV, your Internet Connection, and your phone, and then keep you hooked on all three. Basically some "game" that you'd say, "Well I thought about changing my phone to T-mobile but then I wouldn't be able to play this game since I wouldn't have all three services! I CAN'T have THAT!"
It's just another way for them to try and stick you with three services. The rep makes no sense because he doesn't understand what he's talking about. People think you can just use this magickal, "game," thingie that seems so popular and suddenly use it to make people buy all your useless shit. It's the same kinda thing that Microsoft tries to pull but really isn't as good at as it claims (witness how well Shadowrun for tie-in worked out).
Don't think too hard about it because they've got no idea how it works either (it comes from not playing any games...seriously, most of these people don't even know what a game IS, and that I say from a lot of experience). When we hear something like, oh I dunno, that you'd be able to plot raid groups in WoW from your phone, watch those same dungeon runs you plotted out on your server on your TV, and even play in them the conventional way with your computer, *then* you can feel free to start puzzling over it again.
With its impressive eye candy and new name how could it possibly fail? It's not like last time they gave Windows a new name and desktop effects...wait, hold on, I'm being told they did. Well...shit.
Having The State and The Authorities protect a certain market sector from the activities of all but one trusted supplier is called Feudalism. Has been for centuries.
How about we just call it "bullshit." It's descriptive and has the instant benefit of most of the people being screwed by it knowing what you're talking about. ;)
I suspect that 100 years from now, the businesses that are bemoaning the freedom that the Internet provides will be footnotes in our grand children's history books; whereas the advent of the Internet will be regarded as on par with irrigation, the plow, and the printing press.
On the whole I completely agree with your post, however this bit is rather optimistic. Personally I think that in 100 years our grand children will have no books (no new ones anyway) and will be fighting with each other over drinkable water and safe shelter. But then I may be a bit pessimistic today.
Let's face it, if you're driving an electric car, you're really just exporting your smog to the power plant that handles your section of the grid.
Yes, because the smog emissions of an industrial grade power plant, complete with its massive amounts of emissions controls, is just as inefficient as a horrendously inefficient, under-emissions-equipped gasoline motor.
Hey, maybe we should just save ourselves the development costs of *serious* power generation plants and just run cities on car motors! Sorry if it sounds harsh, but this line of thinking is ignorant at best. There's a good reason why power plants are made the way they are and it's not just because it has more power requirements.
Intel doesn't need either AMD or NVIDIA. You look at most notebooks today and they will have all integrated Intel stuff without anything from either of those either companies.
Emphasis mine. I believe *that* is the point attempted to be made. Today they use Intel parts, but what about tomorrow? We all used to run Creative sound cards (well, most of us) and now most people just use onboard sound. We used to have floppy drives, now it's nearly impossible to find one even outside of a computer.
If Intel doesn't have any friends left when there's a shift in the marketplace they're going to get screwed hard. With the speed that the technology marketplace moves there's no telling what may be the next "big thing" that's going to put a previous monolithic giant through some very serious hurt (Vista anyone?).
So XBox Live, the DMV, and the automated grocery checkout at Ralph's meet those requirements (which are as arbitrary and as loose of a definition, as I've heard in awhile). Those systems must all be enterprise-level?
XBox Live supports millions of users, the DMV does hundreds of transactions per day with thousands of users in large databases, and the grocery checkout handles a *lot* of people's money in a sane fashion...so uh, yeah, actually, those are enterprise-level systems. What is this, a joke?