Agreed. The very first thing I noticed about the Columbine thing was that the kids were building bombs in their garage. There's no way in Hell that my Dad wouldn't have put a stop to that quickly when I was a kid. And there's no way he wouldn't have known, either.
Conversely, the lack of personal responsibility is a mechanism that permits the poor to blame the rich for their predicament.
In truth, though, the missing element of personal responsibility has allowed everyone to blame everyone else for their predicament.
And your shooting analogy is off base. The shooter is clearly not taking responsibility for his actions - not the other way around. If your understanding of personal responsibility is indicative of the general populace, we're in deeper trouble than I though.
Agreed. I just designed a web site for one of my clients (my main function is network consulting - web designing is just a side thing I do 'cause it's fun). I used PNGs for most of the graphic files. Mostly due to the fact that they're better looking than GIFs and maintain transparency. Of course, I had to design two completely seperate versions of the site, one with transparent PNGs for the "normal" browsers out there and one with the transparent areas converted to the background color for IE. What a pain. And even with the alternate versions, sometimes the background colored areas of the PNGs don't exactly match the actual background color even though they have the exact same color designation. Would have been a ton easier if IE had just fricking supported PNGs the way they are supposed to be supported.
No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.
FFXI was fun until I hit around level 63. After that I realized that I had as much XP left to get to level 75 as it took me to get to level 63. And I had over 70 rl DAYS invested already. That's a LOT of time and it just ended up being a level grind that I was no longer willing to devote that much time grinding out levels. It really was fun up until that point, though. Good luck in your travails through Vana'diel.:)
I think a reasonable response to the SP2 answer would have been, "What about the hundreds of thousands of customers out there that don't yet run XP, much less XP SP2?" I think that's a fair question considering that many, many businesses don't often upgrade to the latest, "greatest" OS the second it's released.
I also would have liked a follow-up to the FUD question that asked about the statements by Bill Gates (or Steve Ballmer, I forget which) about Open Source being communistic and basically, anti-american. But that's just me.:)
And, when, after many dozens of hours, Microsoft's support guys are unable to find a real solution to your problem, they'll advise you to reboot whenever the problem rears its ugly head. Like when our Exchange 5 server kept locking up at least once a day (just the Exchange services, everything else was kosher).
OR
When, after many dozens of hours, Microsoft's support guys are unable to find a real solution to your problem and by some miracle, you end up finding a solution, they, much like the above situation, charge you for the support time.
It's crazy that the company I worked for when those two situations transpired had to pay (what is it, $125 an hour?) for support when in the first instance, MS couldn't supply a reasonable solution (we eventually just downgraded to the previous version) and in the second instance, WE actually supplied MS with the solution.
That's exactly why I quit FFXI as well. When I quit I was a level 63 Monk/Samurai. I had a blast getting to that point, but realized that I had a huge grind ahead of me and it really started taking its toll on my free time. The level grind in FFXI is ridiculous. And there really wasn't much of a way to just hop on for a couple of hours and have some fun at that level. I miss all the friends I made, especially my Linkshell buddies (Wolfpack - Carbuncle server), but RL finally won out over FFXI.
It's a shame that they waited so long to make all these changes, too. I might have stuck around a bit longer if Squenix had decided to address the gil farmers early on.
Talking to salesperson at a specialty TV store to get information and recommendation and then buying the same TV at Walmart because it's cheaper since they don't employ qualified salespeople, THAT I'll agree is kind of cheap.
Actually, there's no reason to do that anyway. Best Buy, Circuit City, and most big box retailers have a price match guarantee. If you can show tha Wal-Mart has the same exact model of TV for $20 less, do so and the big box store will match that price (they used to go a certain percentage lower, but I'm not sure if they do that anymore). I used to sell electronics at a department store and the problem with this scenario comes when you realize that the manufacturers seldom sell the exact same model in the specialty stores that they do at discount stores like Wal-Mart.
But you're totally dead on about people that don't shop around being stupid. There's nothing at all admirable about the practice of going to one store, talking to one salesperson, and buying after this single experience. There are TONS of salespeople out there that dream about living in such a world.
The car example is the best. Many car companies make models of car that compete with other companies' cars. Say I'm interested in a sports car. I may go to the Toyota dealership and drive an MR-S, but suppose there's another car that I'd like better if I drove it instead? Should I be penalized because I chose to go to the Toyota dealership first instead of say, the Mazda dealership? If so, how am I supposed to know that the RX-8 would be a better car for me if I don't go test one out first?
The grandmother in question sounds like one of those seniors that's just begging to get taken by a phone scam or unscrupulous sales people.
Seriously, though, the drive for the next, best, fastest thing, while having some downsides, does move humanity forward. Think of how much progress would have been lost if we didn't have that drive. Theoretically, we could all do just fine with horses, for instance. And microwaves aren't really all that necessary. Space? No real reason to go there. This is just a microcosm of that mindset that has allowed man to reach the stars.
I played Final Fantasy XI for a total of 79 RL days. I recently quit the game because it was taking up too much mindshare and RL time. The Chinese "sweat shops" were also a factor in my quitting.
The selling of accounts in and of itself causes certain issues in-game. While other posts have noted that it's a time-saving measure for some, that is a problem. Those of us who managed to build up a character to a high level through the tedious level grind and crafting learned the nuances of our jobs. Someone that buys a level 50 character, on the other hand, has saved all that time but doesn't know those finer points of playing the job. Thus, you get parties with schmucks that don't know what the hell they're doing. No one gains from this. The new player gets embarassed, the seasoned players get killed and lose experience, causing them to spend even MORE time in game.
There's also the problem of the sellers that rush through levels trying to build up a saleable character. They also don't know their jobs and really don't care that they don't know how to play. So, yet again, you get seasoned players that get killed due to the ineptness of the sellers.
Even more of a problem were the Chinese gil sellers. These people would lock down an area and "steal" as many mobs as they could that dropped certain, high gil items. They would corner the market on these items and raise the prices to astronomical levels. One example for a piece of equipment that was highly prized for my main class (Monk) was the Ochiudo's Kote. They went for nearly a million gil on the auction house. Try selling them to an NPC and the going rate was three thousand gil. Sure, they would be more than the NPC price naturally, but they wouldn't have been nearly as much if it weren't for the gil sellers. The gil sellers, and most players eventually came to know who they were, they used similar names and were on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, became a serious problem and contributed to my quitting the game.
Another side effect of the gil sellers were the steps taken by Squenix to try to thwart them. They instituted game changes like the likelihood of catching certain fish going down considerably after being in a particular zone for a certain length of time. Sure, this had an effect on the fish botting players and gil sellers, but it also became a pain in the ass for the honest players. And after the fishing nerf, they did the same thing to logging, mining, and excavating. I can't blame Squenix for trying to slow down the gil sellers, but the steps they took ended up screwing everyone, not just the people they were going after.
Of course, there are soultions to a lot of these problems. But Squenix was never all that receptive to the obvious solutions.
Near the end of my play time I tried to organize some things to cause the gil sellers some grief. I could never get enough people together to make an impact. Partly because a lot of the people that I recruited considered what I proposed griefing, which would have put their accounts in jeopardy. I didn't think it was, but that was the perception. In essence, the people that I was playing with were FAR more moral and decent than the gil sellers and that was a stumbling block in getting the players involved in an effort to take a stand against the gil sellers.
At any rate, this IS a problem and it's one that won't go away until people quit supplying the gil selling companies with cash by buying accounts or in-game money. And just for shits and grins, I decided to see what my account would bring in when I decided to quit the game. Based on other accounts with similar or lower stats/equipment, one could expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars for my account. The amount I was offered was a whopping $47.00. So, when you're thinking of how much these guys must be paying the "sweat shop" workers, take that huge profit margin into account.
Final Fantasy XI has limited storage space, too. It was irritating as hell. The problem with limited storage is that, say I want to level a Samurai after I've got my Monk to a certain level (actually, this is exactly what I wanted to do so that I could use my Samurai as a subjob to my Monk). It just so happens that a lot of the early level (30 and under) gear for Monk also works for Samurai. Well, since I have limited space on my main character, I was driven to purchase a second character to serve as a "mule." Eventually, I had FIVE mules. One in each city and a second in one of the cities. Essentially, I expanded my storage space by spending an extra $5 a month.
Limiting storage doesn't drive people to give away gear to newbs. It drives people to activate additional accounts. Which I'm sure breaks the heart of the publishers. And money wasn't an issue in FFXI after you had a character up over a certain level, either. My level 61 Monk retired with almost 1.5 million gil. In part, due to the fact that I had mules on which to sell goods. I was selling goods on five characters on a single account.
I tried this out a couple of weeks ago. In short, it's utterly unusable and brings nothing of worth to the table. You basically map static images of your current windows onto a virtual "sphere." Manuvering around inside the sphere to find your windows is a pain. It's an ugly hack that I can't see ever being all that useful even if all the kinks get worked out.
X-Box 2 WILL be more powerful than the current machine. But, while I agree that the article uses terrible logic, there is still a big question mark with regard to backwards compatibility.
X-Box 2 will use a PowerPC derivative for its CPU. X-Box uses a Pentium. X-Box 2 will use ATI graphics, X-Box uses nVidia. While there may be some backwards compatibility built in using some form of emulation, I highly doubt that it will be 100% accurate or 100% reliable. I don't actually expect the next X-Box to be backwards compatible at all. I don't see it being powerful enough to emulate the previous box at full speed. Oh, and there may not be a hard drive in the X-Box 2. That'll be a huge hit for compatibility.
D'oh! My bad. I sort of perused the pages without looking that hard. The screenies for Automater didn't look all that different than the ones for Dashboard. Still, if they can manage to make scripting trivial, it's still the killer app of the ones mentioned.
Catwoman comes to mind. There have been others recently, but I don't have the wherewithall to look 'em up right now. My point was that, without the pressure exherted by the other sports franchises, Sega/ESPN in particular, how long before EA lets their sports games deteriorate to the craptacular level of the drivel that they've started pouring out lately?
Of the apps listed in the FA, Automater appears to be the only one that's really interesting. The Widget thing is already available with Konfabulator and Desktop search is also available from a number of sources. This isn't to say that Apple won't make each of these better. However, I think the breakthrough, killer app is Automater. Sure, you can script events to some extent or another either with the limited capabilities of operating systems or to a greater extent with 3rd party apps, but the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.
"We don't anticipating changing anything significantly from what we are currently doing," Larry Probst, chairman and chief executive of EA, said in an interview.
And there is EA's CEO admitting as much. This is horrible for the industry. EA has cranked out some crap this year, but the pressure from Sega has been keeping the Sports line programmers on their toes. Now with no competition, they're free to churn out crappy sports games, too. Sigh.
Until there's a drop-in, OSS replacement for Exchange Server, with all of the functionality (more would be nice), Microsoft will continue to own the groupware arena. OpenMail was shaping up nicely before HP dropped it (I think Samsung(?) picked it up, but they haven't done anything public with it AFAIK, and it sure as hell ain't free). Why is the OSS world so averse to creating a drop-in replacement for Exchange? Almost everything else in the business world has been tackled. Exchange is the last big target.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus, The Phil Hendrie Show. :)
...water is wet.
Agreed. The very first thing I noticed about the Columbine thing was that the kids were building bombs in their garage. There's no way in Hell that my Dad wouldn't have put a stop to that quickly when I was a kid. And there's no way he wouldn't have known, either.
She ended up getting less than $10,000 (far less, iirc) after appeals. Shouldn't have gotten anything, but the 2.9 mil didn't stand, at least.
Conversely, the lack of personal responsibility is a mechanism that permits the poor to blame the rich for their predicament.
In truth, though, the missing element of personal responsibility has allowed everyone to blame everyone else for their predicament.
And your shooting analogy is off base. The shooter is clearly not taking responsibility for his actions - not the other way around. If your understanding of personal responsibility is indicative of the general populace, we're in deeper trouble than I though.
Agreed. I just designed a web site for one of my clients (my main function is network consulting - web designing is just a side thing I do 'cause it's fun). I used PNGs for most of the graphic files. Mostly due to the fact that they're better looking than GIFs and maintain transparency. Of course, I had to design two completely seperate versions of the site, one with transparent PNGs for the "normal" browsers out there and one with the transparent areas converted to the background color for IE. What a pain. And even with the alternate versions, sometimes the background colored areas of the PNGs don't exactly match the actual background color even though they have the exact same color designation. Would have been a ton easier if IE had just fricking supported PNGs the way they are supposed to be supported.
No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.
:)
AmigaOS will and always has.
FFXI was fun until I hit around level 63. After that I realized that I had as much XP left to get to level 75 as it took me to get to level 63. And I had over 70 rl DAYS invested already. That's a LOT of time and it just ended up being a level grind that I was no longer willing to devote that much time grinding out levels. It really was fun up until that point, though. Good luck in your travails through Vana'diel. :)
I think a reasonable response to the SP2 answer would have been, "What about the hundreds of thousands of customers out there that don't yet run XP, much less XP SP2?" I think that's a fair question considering that many, many businesses don't often upgrade to the latest, "greatest" OS the second it's released.
:)
I also would have liked a follow-up to the FUD question that asked about the statements by Bill Gates (or Steve Ballmer, I forget which) about Open Source being communistic and basically, anti-american. But that's just me.
And, when, after many dozens of hours, Microsoft's support guys are unable to find a real solution to your problem, they'll advise you to reboot whenever the problem rears its ugly head. Like when our Exchange 5 server kept locking up at least once a day (just the Exchange services, everything else was kosher).
OR
When, after many dozens of hours, Microsoft's support guys are unable to find a real solution to your problem and by some miracle, you end up finding a solution, they, much like the above situation, charge you for the support time.
It's crazy that the company I worked for when those two situations transpired had to pay (what is it, $125 an hour?) for support when in the first instance, MS couldn't supply a reasonable solution (we eventually just downgraded to the previous version) and in the second instance, WE actually supplied MS with the solution.
That's exactly why I quit FFXI as well. When I quit I was a level 63 Monk/Samurai. I had a blast getting to that point, but realized that I had a huge grind ahead of me and it really started taking its toll on my free time. The level grind in FFXI is ridiculous. And there really wasn't much of a way to just hop on for a couple of hours and have some fun at that level. I miss all the friends I made, especially my Linkshell buddies (Wolfpack - Carbuncle server), but RL finally won out over FFXI.
It's a shame that they waited so long to make all these changes, too. I might have stuck around a bit longer if Squenix had decided to address the gil farmers early on.
...spending all this money trying to find the leak internally than sueing journalists.
Talking to salesperson at a specialty TV store to get information and recommendation and then buying the same TV at Walmart because it's cheaper since they don't employ qualified salespeople, THAT I'll agree is kind of cheap.
Actually, there's no reason to do that anyway. Best Buy, Circuit City, and most big box retailers have a price match guarantee. If you can show tha Wal-Mart has the same exact model of TV for $20 less, do so and the big box store will match that price (they used to go a certain percentage lower, but I'm not sure if they do that anymore). I used to sell electronics at a department store and the problem with this scenario comes when you realize that the manufacturers seldom sell the exact same model in the specialty stores that they do at discount stores like Wal-Mart.
But you're totally dead on about people that don't shop around being stupid. There's nothing at all admirable about the practice of going to one store, talking to one salesperson, and buying after this single experience. There are TONS of salespeople out there that dream about living in such a world.
The car example is the best. Many car companies make models of car that compete with other companies' cars. Say I'm interested in a sports car. I may go to the Toyota dealership and drive an MR-S, but suppose there's another car that I'd like better if I drove it instead? Should I be penalized because I chose to go to the Toyota dealership first instead of say, the Mazda dealership? If so, how am I supposed to know that the RX-8 would be a better car for me if I don't go test one out first?
The grandmother in question sounds like one of those seniors that's just begging to get taken by a phone scam or unscrupulous sales people.
And that's what'll keep the US on top. :)
Seriously, though, the drive for the next, best, fastest thing, while having some downsides, does move humanity forward. Think of how much progress would have been lost if we didn't have that drive. Theoretically, we could all do just fine with horses, for instance. And microwaves aren't really all that necessary. Space? No real reason to go there. This is just a microcosm of that mindset that has allowed man to reach the stars.
effects.
I played Final Fantasy XI for a total of 79 RL days. I recently quit the game because it was taking up too much mindshare and RL time. The Chinese "sweat shops" were also a factor in my quitting.
The selling of accounts in and of itself causes certain issues in-game. While other posts have noted that it's a time-saving measure for some, that is a problem. Those of us who managed to build up a character to a high level through the tedious level grind and crafting learned the nuances of our jobs. Someone that buys a level 50 character, on the other hand, has saved all that time but doesn't know those finer points of playing the job. Thus, you get parties with schmucks that don't know what the hell they're doing. No one gains from this. The new player gets embarassed, the seasoned players get killed and lose experience, causing them to spend even MORE time in game.
There's also the problem of the sellers that rush through levels trying to build up a saleable character. They also don't know their jobs and really don't care that they don't know how to play. So, yet again, you get seasoned players that get killed due to the ineptness of the sellers.
Even more of a problem were the Chinese gil sellers. These people would lock down an area and "steal" as many mobs as they could that dropped certain, high gil items. They would corner the market on these items and raise the prices to astronomical levels. One example for a piece of equipment that was highly prized for my main class (Monk) was the Ochiudo's Kote. They went for nearly a million gil on the auction house. Try selling them to an NPC and the going rate was three thousand gil. Sure, they would be more than the NPC price naturally, but they wouldn't have been nearly as much if it weren't for the gil sellers. The gil sellers, and most players eventually came to know who they were, they used similar names and were on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, became a serious problem and contributed to my quitting the game.
Another side effect of the gil sellers were the steps taken by Squenix to try to thwart them. They instituted game changes like the likelihood of catching certain fish going down considerably after being in a particular zone for a certain length of time. Sure, this had an effect on the fish botting players and gil sellers, but it also became a pain in the ass for the honest players. And after the fishing nerf, they did the same thing to logging, mining, and excavating. I can't blame Squenix for trying to slow down the gil sellers, but the steps they took ended up screwing everyone, not just the people they were going after.
Of course, there are soultions to a lot of these problems. But Squenix was never all that receptive to the obvious solutions.
Near the end of my play time I tried to organize some things to cause the gil sellers some grief. I could never get enough people together to make an impact. Partly because a lot of the people that I recruited considered what I proposed griefing, which would have put their accounts in jeopardy. I didn't think it was, but that was the perception. In essence, the people that I was playing with were FAR more moral and decent than the gil sellers and that was a stumbling block in getting the players involved in an effort to take a stand against the gil sellers.
At any rate, this IS a problem and it's one that won't go away until people quit supplying the gil selling companies with cash by buying accounts or in-game money. And just for shits and grins, I decided to see what my account would bring in when I decided to quit the game. Based on other accounts with similar or lower stats/equipment, one could expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars for my account. The amount I was offered was a whopping $47.00. So, when you're thinking of how much these guys must be paying the "sweat shop" workers, take that huge profit margin into account.
Final Fantasy XI has limited storage space, too. It was irritating as hell. The problem with limited storage is that, say I want to level a Samurai after I've got my Monk to a certain level (actually, this is exactly what I wanted to do so that I could use my Samurai as a subjob to my Monk). It just so happens that a lot of the early level (30 and under) gear for Monk also works for Samurai. Well, since I have limited space on my main character, I was driven to purchase a second character to serve as a "mule." Eventually, I had FIVE mules. One in each city and a second in one of the cities. Essentially, I expanded my storage space by spending an extra $5 a month.
Limiting storage doesn't drive people to give away gear to newbs. It drives people to activate additional accounts. Which I'm sure breaks the heart of the publishers. And money wasn't an issue in FFXI after you had a character up over a certain level, either. My level 61 Monk retired with almost 1.5 million gil. In part, due to the fact that I had mules on which to sell goods. I was selling goods on five characters on a single account.
I tried this out a couple of weeks ago. In short, it's utterly unusable and brings nothing of worth to the table. You basically map static images of your current windows onto a virtual "sphere." Manuvering around inside the sphere to find your windows is a pain. It's an ugly hack that I can't see ever being all that useful even if all the kinks get worked out.
Amen! My Commodore 64 and my first Amiga both came with big fat manuals that included schematics. I kinda miss those days.
X-Box 2 WILL be more powerful than the current machine. But, while I agree that the article uses terrible logic, there is still a big question mark with regard to backwards compatibility.
X-Box 2 will use a PowerPC derivative for its CPU. X-Box uses a Pentium. X-Box 2 will use ATI graphics, X-Box uses nVidia. While there may be some backwards compatibility built in using some form of emulation, I highly doubt that it will be 100% accurate or 100% reliable. I don't actually expect the next X-Box to be backwards compatible at all. I don't see it being powerful enough to emulate the previous box at full speed. Oh, and there may not be a hard drive in the X-Box 2. That'll be a huge hit for compatibility.
...I thought books had already been abandoned as teaching tools.
D'oh! My bad. I sort of perused the pages without looking that hard. The screenies for Automater didn't look all that different than the ones for Dashboard. Still, if they can manage to make scripting trivial, it's still the killer app of the ones mentioned.
Catwoman comes to mind. There have been others recently, but I don't have the wherewithall to look 'em up right now. My point was that, without the pressure exherted by the other sports franchises, Sega/ESPN in particular, how long before EA lets their sports games deteriorate to the craptacular level of the drivel that they've started pouring out lately?
Of the apps listed in the FA, Automater appears to be the only one that's really interesting. The Widget thing is already available with Konfabulator and Desktop search is also available from a number of sources. This isn't to say that Apple won't make each of these better. However, I think the breakthrough, killer app is Automater. Sure, you can script events to some extent or another either with the limited capabilities of operating systems or to a greater extent with 3rd party apps, but the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.
And there is EA's CEO admitting as much. This is horrible for the industry. EA has cranked out some crap this year, but the pressure from Sega has been keeping the Sports line programmers on their toes. Now with no competition, they're free to churn out crappy sports games, too. Sigh.
Until there's a drop-in, OSS replacement for Exchange Server, with all of the functionality (more would be nice), Microsoft will continue to own the groupware arena. OpenMail was shaping up nicely before HP dropped it (I think Samsung(?) picked it up, but they haven't done anything public with it AFAIK, and it sure as hell ain't free). Why is the OSS world so averse to creating a drop-in replacement for Exchange? Almost everything else in the business world has been tackled. Exchange is the last big target.