Hasn't NIN been under Trent's label Broken Records for some time now? Or was there still some kind of contractual agreement with the recording industry that wasn't renewed?
Every expansion will mean less new players because the investment required to 'catch up' to the rest of the game is growing at a rapid pace. Slowly the rate of old players losing interest will outpace the rate of new players. As the server populations drop, the effect will become even more drastic, since the less people that are playing, the less fun the game becomes for the leftover population (less people in guild, tougher to find people for pick up groups, tougher to find quality replacements for quitting guild members).
I give WoW another one or two expansions before work begins on a new MMO incarnation. Whether it be WoW II or otherwise.
I grabbed Azureus Vuze when it first came out. I'd like to try it but it finished downloading about 12 days ago and has been loading ever since.
Wireshark, however, is a very nice application and I have used it countless times to troubleshoot network issues and it even as a visual aid to help people understand basic networking.
Not sure how they are even close to comparable.
Kidding aside, an application whose function is to implement a simple file transfer protocol should not be 50 megs, especially when you open it and wonder where the file transfer interface is.
1. Replace the ancient and retarded POSIX filesystem.
This means a filesystem with organized folder hierarchy.
Jesus this is something that has been sorely missed for ages. If I install Firefox, the files installed by the package are strewn all over my system. Wheres the config file for that application I just installed? Is it in/etc? No./etc/appname? No./opt? No./opt/appname? No... locate appname.conf, hmm nothing.. What about the actual application itself? Is it in/bin?/sbin?/usr/bin?/usr/sbin?/opt?/opt/appname?/usr/local/bin? What about docs? What about all the other crap that came with it, do I have any chance of finding these files?
How about/applications/appname, always. Wheres the config files for Appname? In/applications/appname/config of course! What about docs, in/applications/appname/docs of course! Want to remove appname? rm -r/applications/appname, tada! How do I know what is installed? ls/applications . What about that app that says it needs whatever library, you can't have the system searching through all those app folders for shared libraries right?
Right, so lets use these fancy little things called symbolic links, and link them in a shared library directory, but keep the files themselves in the/applications/appname/libraries directory where they belong, but an easy list can be checked with ls/applications/libraries .
By golly Holmes, this means that all those man hours spent on fancy packages and management thereof were a total waste when all you needed was a person with a brain setting up the folder hierarchy?
Indeed, Watson, indeed... and I'll go you one further, this setup works no matter the distribution, because blimey, they ALL support folders! Who knew?!
2. Init
Lets face it, init needs a major rework. It is slow, clunky, and annoying to manage.
3. XWindows
I don't think much is needed to be said here that hasn't been beaten to death already, XWindows needs to be more than graphics slapped on top of unix to be a viable candidate for GUI management.
4. Standardized GUI config tools.
This means that Fedora control center looks like Ubuntu control center looks like every other control center so if someone needs to find something, it is always in the same spot and configurable. Pretty much every single conf file I've seen is an easy GUI conversion, varname=(true/false) -> checkbox/dropdown, varname=(one of a few available values) -> dropdown, varname=(some string) -> input box, and so on. Define sections as tabs instead, and bam you have organization.
--
The bottom line is this, this is the 21st century, you've put thousands of coats of paint on your 1974 Unixmobile to make it look new, but on the inside it is still running the same decades old technology it has always run.
This whole post assumes Linux even wants desktop share, if it doesn't then by all means keep working on getting 10 more points on Bullshitmark 2007.
This is most certainly the situation for any intelligent individual who was unfortunate enough to end up in a public school. The reason: schools are giving more and more credit for simply doing work, and giving less and less for clear demonstration of knowledge.
Anyone who has attended high school within the last 10 years probably noticed this. Test weights plummeting and homework weights skyrocketing. I can't count the number of times I've had a class, aced every single test, and got a B in the class because I didn't want to waste endless hours plowing through hundreds of practice problems when I already know how to do them all, which the A on my test SHOULD demonstrate.
But instead, I am given a B in the class.
Now consider what happens on the other side. Some kid who gets a C on the test, but takes the time to plow through 500 practice problems, most of which are done incorrectly, is given the same grade I am.
Now fast forward a couple years in time as the effect of this permeates. My calculus class is now full of students who got D's and C's on the tests in the prerequisite classes, so they are now doing even worse on the tests in this class. Test averages plummet, so what is done? You got it, give more weight to homework! Now, the students who actually know the material and can clearly demonstrate their knowledge are forced to spend even more time plowing through useless practice problems in order to even get a C in the class. Additionally, instructors spend more and more time re-explaining past material to get these people who shouldn't have even passed the previous class in the first place up to speed with those that did deserve it.
As a result of falling test grades, not only will mere 'hard work' get you by with a better and better grade, but classes will also be made easier. The 'hard chapters' will be cut from the curriculum or given its own class even.
Let us consider the effect of all of this upon a gifted individual beginning high school after the effects of this idiocy is taking hold.
Because of the increased weight on homework, he/she now is forced to commit a significant amount of time to very tedious busy work to maintain a good grade in the class. Because the difficulty of the class is lessened, and more time is spent on recapping past material, he/she learning much less than he/she normally would. As a result he/she is forced to expend more semesters learning what used to take two semesters, but now takes three or four.
The total effect here is a frustrated, undergraded, individual who, despite his/her abilities, is forced into step with everyone else. It is akin to your feeling when you are in a hurry to get somewhere and there are a hundred people in your way slowly trodding along, stopping to talk with other people, et cetera. You just get more and more frustrated until you just accept your fate and move at the speed of the crowd.
Except: ABC, CBS, and NBC are not broadcasting HBO's content without their consent. If they were, something tells me HBO would have something to say about that.
And radio is an extremely poor substitute for a CD, they both fill completely different needs. If I want to listen to song/band X, I put on the CD and I can listen to it immediately and at my leisure. With radio, I am subjected to mass advertisements and the station's choice of music which may or may not be something I want to listen to.
The ability to listen to what you want, when you want has tremendous value to a large number of consumers, and that is why tapes, CDs, etc have done so well in the past.
Now, the exact same service (what you want, when you want) is being offered at zero cost, vs >0 cost. Here, the value of the zero cost item is so close to that of the >0 cost item that the zero cost item wins every time. Add in the value placed on getting the content DRM-free, and the value of the item is now even greater than the >0 cost item.
So the real goal for the music industry should be creating value for their products with a lesser focus on using legal clout to diminish the value of the free alternative (a losing battle). How can this be done? iTunes has picked up on a couple of the items--namely DRM-free (lessens the disparity), convenience (nice searchable shop, easy to move to iPod, reasonable price), selection (should be at least as good as a retail store if not much better).. the list goes on.
Obviously, for some consumers, the price of free just cannot be beat no matter how much value is added, but their numbers fall as the value of the paid alternative rises.
Entities that have information that could identify a criminal have been getting subpoenaed for quite some time. This has nothing to do with any fault of the entity being subpoenaed. This is why they are not bringing suit against the site itself for the user's actions, only formally requesting they deliver information to the court via subpoena.
Reset the hardcore people and give them another unattainable goal to strive for while the coders are hard at work on the next expansion.
Meanwhile the softcore players who haven't completed all the endgame stuff in the last expansion are given a chance to attain items of comparable power with a small commitment (new expansion green in AH for 10g that shows up last expansion epics).
This effectively allows the casual player to begin tackling higher content without having to raid for mass hours and gives the hardcore people uber items to strive for. The success of this strategy is dependent on balancing a few key items:
1. Timing, hardcores can't get bored at the top but need time at top to feel good about their achievements. 2. Commitment shift, new players need to be able to 'catch up' with where the majority of players are with a lesser commitment. Forcing new players through mass grinding in order to win the privilege to play with their friends is not a good way to keep them. 3. Balance of focus, ideally you would move the raiders up to the new raiding tier of content and make the old raiding content accessible to the casuals.
Think about it. If all the time and energy spent trying to emulate the MS libraries was instead spent on improving virtualization performance. This way people can run like a OS abstraction layer kernel that houses the 'real' OS kernels.
Imagine being able to tab between operating systems instead of only applications. This is where attention should be focused. Want to use some Windows only app? Meta-tab into Windows. Done? Meta-tab back to Linux/FreeBSD/whatever. Don't want Windows taking up that memory anymore, tab over and shut it down.
Someday it'll happen and the application lock-in will disintegrate and finally free us all. How come this isn't a huge focus? It seems like the current desktop class system would be able to handle this with ease. Perhaps not hardcore gaming yet, but we'll get there.
Us intelligent design theorists were so close to getting tenure providing untestable theories for the last 8 years.
Everyone knows that everything in the real world is already figured out anyway, it is time for my kind to provide people who can't (or chose not to) understand all those quarks and photonamajiggers something to believe in.
Besides, who doesn't like envisioning their enemies burning for all eternity in a lake of fire? Eh? Eh? Come on you know you want some of that.
Seriously, how many home users actually bought Vista to run under VMWare? I'd be willing to bet most had no clue about Vista's VMWare policy. Currently, the major interest in virtualization is in the corporate sector.
Slow home user adoption is due to the shaky hardware and software support. This will only change when enough pressure is put on these manufacturers to support it. Thus the only thing that will fix Vista's problems is... adoption of Vista. In the previous generation, the deep-seated OS was Win98, and it was such garbage that XP looked like a godsend. Now, XP is the deep-seated OS, and it is nowhere near as terrible as 98 was. So what will MS do to move consumers?
It will irk me to no end that while I look down on the lowly 'walking' class that there will be some guy in a chairbot looking down on my now-lowly 'standing' class.
Perhaps I can skip a tier and wait for the la-z-bot?
I remember a while ago I went on vacation and lost the lease on my IP back when I had Comcast. I came home and booted up the router, it leased a new IP, business as usual.
That night I look over at my modem and the send/receive lights are flashing like crazy. I check my firewall logs and see mass connection attempts on some port I wasn't aware was associated with anything. I do some Google searching and come to find out it's that peer-to-peer edonkey crap.
I thought "Whatever, surely the client will stop making connection attempts after it times out for a few days." But no sir, it went on for literally months until I received a new IP lease (with a little intervention on my part). Granted the traffic was not enough to affect my connection all that much but if 'legitimate' usage generates such a high volume of traffic I can see how abuse could become a concern.
Who writes these clients anyway, connection/ping timeout for a month and the IP is not put on some sort of exclude list?
Well if you look at the difference between Diablo and Diablo 2 you will see pretty much the same thing: Slight update in graphics, new classes, items, dungeons, tweaked spell system. Was it some revolutionary improvement upon the original? No. But it was immensely successful.
>>Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
No.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
NO.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
NO!
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
HOW ABOUT DIE!
>>Answer "yes" entered, is this correct?
No.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is this correct?
AJKFLSJFKSLFJSDKFDJSKSFDJK
>>Thank you for participating in our survey, goodbye.
Slashdot Mirror
Hasn't NIN been under Trent's label Broken Records for some time now? Or was there still some kind of contractual agreement with the recording industry that wasn't renewed?
Every expansion will mean less new players because the investment required to 'catch up' to the rest of the game is growing at a rapid pace. Slowly the rate of old players losing interest will outpace the rate of new players. As the server populations drop, the effect will become even more drastic, since the less people that are playing, the less fun the game becomes for the leftover population (less people in guild, tougher to find people for pick up groups, tougher to find quality replacements for quitting guild members).
I give WoW another one or two expansions before work begins on a new MMO incarnation. Whether it be WoW II or otherwise.
I grabbed Azureus Vuze when it first came out. I'd like to try it but it finished downloading about 12 days ago and has been loading ever since.
Wireshark, however, is a very nice application and I have used it countless times to troubleshoot network issues and it even as a visual aid to help people understand basic networking.
Not sure how they are even close to comparable.
Kidding aside, an application whose function is to implement a simple file transfer protocol should not be 50 megs, especially when you open it and wonder where the file transfer interface is.
Sweet! Now I can finally find out what my villagers have been saying all this time.
Whoa, load average in the hundreds? That is impressive in itself.
1. Replace the ancient and retarded POSIX filesystem.
/etc? No. /etc/appname? No. /opt? No. /opt/appname? No... locate appname.conf, hmm nothing.. What about the actual application itself? Is it in /bin? /sbin? /usr/bin? /usr/sbin? /opt? /opt/appname? /usr/local/bin? What about docs? What about all the other crap that came with it, do I have any chance of finding these files?
/applications/appname, always. Wheres the config files for Appname? In /applications/appname/config of course! What about docs, in /applications/appname/docs of course! Want to remove appname? rm -r /applications/appname, tada! How do I know what is installed? ls /applications . What about that app that says it needs whatever library, you can't have the system searching through all those app folders for shared libraries right?
/applications/appname/libraries directory where they belong, but an easy list can be checked with ls /applications/libraries .
This means a filesystem with organized folder hierarchy.
Jesus this is something that has been sorely missed for ages. If I install Firefox, the files installed by the package are strewn all over my system. Wheres the config file for that application I just installed? Is it in
How about
Right, so lets use these fancy little things called symbolic links, and link them in a shared library directory, but keep the files themselves in the
By golly Holmes, this means that all those man hours spent on fancy packages and management thereof were a total waste when all you needed was a person with a brain setting up the folder hierarchy?
Indeed, Watson, indeed... and I'll go you one further, this setup works no matter the distribution, because blimey, they ALL support folders! Who knew?!
2. Init
Lets face it, init needs a major rework. It is slow, clunky, and annoying to manage.
3. XWindows
I don't think much is needed to be said here that hasn't been beaten to death already, XWindows needs to be more than graphics slapped on top of unix to be a viable candidate for GUI management.
4. Standardized GUI config tools.
This means that Fedora control center looks like Ubuntu control center looks like every other control center so if someone needs to find something, it is always in the same spot and configurable. Pretty much every single conf file I've seen is an easy GUI conversion, varname=(true/false) -> checkbox/dropdown, varname=(one of a few available values) -> dropdown, varname=(some string) -> input box, and so on. Define sections as tabs instead, and bam you have organization.
--
The bottom line is this, this is the 21st century, you've put thousands of coats of paint on your 1974 Unixmobile to make it look new, but on the inside it is still running the same decades old technology it has always run.
This whole post assumes Linux even wants desktop share, if it doesn't then by all means keep working on getting 10 more points on Bullshitmark 2007.
Seconded.
This is most certainly the situation for any intelligent individual who was unfortunate enough to end up in a public school. The reason: schools are giving more and more credit for simply doing work, and giving less and less for clear demonstration of knowledge.
Anyone who has attended high school within the last 10 years probably noticed this. Test weights plummeting and homework weights skyrocketing. I can't count the number of times I've had a class, aced every single test, and got a B in the class because I didn't want to waste endless hours plowing through hundreds of practice problems when I already know how to do them all, which the A on my test SHOULD demonstrate.
But instead, I am given a B in the class.
Now consider what happens on the other side. Some kid who gets a C on the test, but takes the time to plow through 500 practice problems, most of which are done incorrectly, is given the same grade I am.
Now fast forward a couple years in time as the effect of this permeates. My calculus class is now full of students who got D's and C's on the tests in the prerequisite classes, so they are now doing even worse on the tests in this class. Test averages plummet, so what is done? You got it, give more weight to homework! Now, the students who actually know the material and can clearly demonstrate their knowledge are forced to spend even more time plowing through useless practice problems in order to even get a C in the class. Additionally, instructors spend more and more time re-explaining past material to get these people who shouldn't have even passed the previous class in the first place up to speed with those that did deserve it.
As a result of falling test grades, not only will mere 'hard work' get you by with a better and better grade, but classes will also be made easier. The 'hard chapters' will be cut from the curriculum or given its own class even.
Let us consider the effect of all of this upon a gifted individual beginning high school after the effects of this idiocy is taking hold.
Because of the increased weight on homework, he/she now is forced to commit a significant amount of time to very tedious busy work to maintain a good grade in the class.
Because the difficulty of the class is lessened, and more time is spent on recapping past material, he/she learning much less than he/she normally would. As a result he/she is forced to expend more semesters learning what used to take two semesters, but now takes three or four.
The total effect here is a frustrated, undergraded, individual who, despite his/her abilities, is forced into step with everyone else. It is akin to your feeling when you are in a hurry to get somewhere and there are a hundred people in your way slowly trodding along, stopping to talk with other people, et cetera. You just get more and more frustrated until you just accept your fate and move at the speed of the crowd.
-MLS
Sort of like when celebrities speak about, well, anything.
Except: ABC, CBS, and NBC are not broadcasting HBO's content without their consent. If they were, something tells me HBO would have something to say about that.
And radio is an extremely poor substitute for a CD, they both fill completely different needs. If I want to listen to song/band X, I put on the CD and I can listen to it immediately and at my leisure. With radio, I am subjected to mass advertisements and the station's choice of music which may or may not be something I want to listen to.
The ability to listen to what you want, when you want has tremendous value to a large number of consumers, and that is why tapes, CDs, etc have done so well in the past.
Now, the exact same service (what you want, when you want) is being offered at zero cost, vs >0 cost. Here, the value of the zero cost item is so close to that of the >0 cost item that the zero cost item wins every time. Add in the value placed on getting the content DRM-free, and the value of the item is now even greater than the >0 cost item.
So the real goal for the music industry should be creating value for their products with a lesser focus on using legal clout to diminish the value of the free alternative (a losing battle). How can this be done? iTunes has picked up on a couple of the items--namely DRM-free (lessens the disparity), convenience (nice searchable shop, easy to move to iPod, reasonable price), selection (should be at least as good as a retail store if not much better).. the list goes on.
Obviously, for some consumers, the price of free just cannot be beat no matter how much value is added, but their numbers fall as the value of the paid alternative rises.
-MLS
Entities that have information that could identify a criminal have been getting subpoenaed for quite some time. This has nothing to do with any fault of the entity being subpoenaed. This is why they are not bringing suit against the site itself for the user's actions, only formally requesting they deliver information to the court via subpoena.
MLS
I think that is kind of what they're aiming for:
Reset the hardcore people and give them another unattainable goal to strive for while the coders are hard at work on the next expansion.
Meanwhile the softcore players who haven't completed all the endgame stuff in the last expansion are given a chance to attain items of comparable power with a small commitment (new expansion green in AH for 10g that shows up last expansion epics).
This effectively allows the casual player to begin tackling higher content without having to raid for mass hours and gives the hardcore people uber items to strive for. The success of this strategy is dependent on balancing a few key items:
1. Timing, hardcores can't get bored at the top but need time at top to feel good about their achievements.
2. Commitment shift, new players need to be able to 'catch up' with where the majority of players are with a lesser commitment. Forcing new players through mass grinding in order to win the privilege to play with their friends is not a good way to keep them.
3. Balance of focus, ideally you would move the raiders up to the new raiding tier of content and make the old raiding content accessible to the casuals.
MLS, WoW refugee since 1.10
Think about it. If all the time and energy spent trying to emulate the MS libraries was instead spent on improving virtualization performance. This way people can run like a OS abstraction layer kernel that houses the 'real' OS kernels.
Imagine being able to tab between operating systems instead of only applications. This is where attention should be focused. Want to use some Windows only app? Meta-tab into Windows. Done? Meta-tab back to Linux/FreeBSD/whatever. Don't want Windows taking up that memory anymore, tab over and shut it down.
Someday it'll happen and the application lock-in will disintegrate and finally free us all. How come this isn't a huge focus? It seems like the current desktop class system would be able to handle this with ease. Perhaps not hardcore gaming yet, but we'll get there.
Give me OS abstraction!
Why can't the unit be hooked up to an altimeter and report that information as well? Am I missing something? /MLS
Us intelligent design theorists were so close to getting tenure providing untestable theories for the last 8 years.
Everyone knows that everything in the real world is already figured out anyway, it is time for my kind to provide people who can't (or chose not to) understand all those quarks and photonamajiggers something to believe in.
Besides, who doesn't like envisioning their enemies burning for all eternity in a lake of fire? Eh? Eh? Come on you know you want some of that.
Seriously, how many home users actually bought Vista to run under VMWare? I'd be willing to bet most had no clue about Vista's VMWare policy. Currently, the major interest in virtualization is in the corporate sector.
Slow home user adoption is due to the shaky hardware and software support. This will only change when enough pressure is put on these manufacturers to support it. Thus the only thing that will fix Vista's problems is... adoption of Vista.
In the previous generation, the deep-seated OS was Win98, and it was such garbage that XP looked like a godsend. Now, XP is the deep-seated OS, and it is nowhere near as terrible as 98 was. So what will MS do to move consumers?
Interesting times.
It will irk me to no end that while I look down on the lowly 'walking' class that there will be some guy in a chairbot looking down on my now-lowly 'standing' class. Perhaps I can skip a tier and wait for the la-z-bot?
A journaled filesystem. No, softupdates does not count.
I remember a while ago I went on vacation and lost the lease on my IP back when I had Comcast. I came home and booted up the router, it leased a new IP, business as usual.
That night I look over at my modem and the send/receive lights are flashing like crazy. I check my firewall logs and see mass connection attempts on some port I wasn't aware was associated with anything. I do some Google searching and come to find out it's that peer-to-peer edonkey crap.
I thought "Whatever, surely the client will stop making connection attempts after it times out for a few days." But no sir, it went on for literally months until I received a new IP lease (with a little intervention on my part). Granted the traffic was not enough to affect my connection all that much but if 'legitimate' usage generates such a high volume of traffic I can see how abuse could become a concern.
Who writes these clients anyway, connection/ping timeout for a month and the IP is not put on some sort of exclude list?
...is not the year of Linux on the Racetrack.
0 you then!
Don't give up hope, maybe McAfee runs under Wine!
Well if you look at the difference between Diablo and Diablo 2 you will see pretty much the same thing: Slight update in graphics, new classes, items, dungeons, tweaked spell system. Was it some revolutionary improvement upon the original? No. But it was immensely successful.
/MLS
>>Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
No.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
NO.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
NO!
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is speech recognition 'good enough'?
HOW ABOUT DIE!
>>Answer "yes" entered, is this correct?
No.
>>I'm sorry I did not understand your selection. Is this correct?
AJKFLSJFKSLFJSDKFDJSKSFDJK
>>Thank you for participating in our survey, goodbye.
I suppose a couple ways that this could play out is either:
/MLS
1. FF7 style where you are pressed to make decisions quickly with the time system but still technically turn based.
2. Legend of Dragoon style where when you attack you have to hit buttons at the proper times to get the full effect of your attack.
Or perhaps a combination of both?