> Yes, hard core pc gamers expect the latest 3d > and etc....but not everyone is a hardcore > gamer.
This is disingenuous. People who aren't hard-core gamers still won't pay $45 for a game which looks like it came from a console from five years ago. Sure, they won't know to refer to it with terms like quincunx AA or phong-shaded bump mapping or whatever the currently funny video buzzword is, but let's be frank: if your little sister (the ubiquitous game player whose opinion isn't trusted by self-aggrandized "hardcore gamers") has a playstation 2 and sees two games - one, say, Dance Dance Revolution 6 and the other something that looks like Tobal No.2, which do you expect that she will think is a better game?
Hints: if it looks like it has low production value, that's not a helpful thing.
The problem isn't that gameplay is dying. The problem is that the bar to seeming like an "acceptable" game has been raised so high that most game developers end up having to sacrifice one or the other (mostly when they realize how unrealistic their production plans were; notably, without one of those unrealistic production plans, you won't get published, which is why all games ship late, buggy, and disappointingly), and in order to stay competitive in the marketplace, they have no choice but to make the seperation you're delauding.
I don't chagrin you your standpoint. In fact, I'm sympathetic; I wish I could write a super-nintendo game so that I could focus on the game half, too. But it won't sell, so it won't be published, so you're never going to hear about it.
> Crappy CDs only cost 20 bucks. Crappy games > cost around $50 bucks.
Hear here. This is exactly what I believe the problem to be. Unfortunately, no publisher would ever pick you up for a budget title, except in the PC world, where the market is more saturated than Keith Richards' liver.
Nintendo is my personal bugbear right now. I've already written a number of games which, with some attention from artists (I couldn't draw a stickman with AutoCAD and a team of twelve) could be perfectly reasonable budget titles (in my opinion, many of the big-label titles out there don't qualify as budget titles, though.)
The biggest problem with the AGB is manufacturing cost - they take too much ust to make the goddamn cart. If we could get some $20 staples out there for the AGB crowd, the platform would take off; nobody wants to pay $45 for a super nintendo game. But Nintendo is being so stingy with funding and manufacturing costs that they aren't getting innovative games, and so all they have to offer are their SNES titles, which means they can't downprice them.
It's a catch 22 that essentially guarantees that newbies can't enter the market. This is especially unfortunate because the AGB is nearly an ideal starter platform, and *should* by all rights be Big N's incubator for their next Rares.
The industry is stagnating because there isn't an easy way out. People with that much money don't have the money becuase they're stupid (usually.) If there were an easy way out, it would have been exploited by now.
What the Slashdot crowd doesn't understand is the sheer volume of crap that's out there waiting to be published. The real gems are so difficult to develop on shoestring budget that oftentimes it's virtually impossible to tell them apart from the Bart Simpson NES games.
Don't undervalue the difficulty of the situation. Solvable industrial crises make very rich individuals. The lack of Carnegies and Mellons suggests that the problem is nontrivial.
> It still is. A good programmer and artist team > can build a game for a few hundred dollars.
(wipes tears from face, tries to stop laughing) I take it you've tried?
A few hundred dollars. That's beautiful. That's why so many independant groups, having failed after rounds of investment, years of experience, and knowledge you're pretending to have have succeeded, right?
That's why in the last few articles on this general topic (I've caught three: this, molyneaux, and the investment paper) have only been able to generate half a dozen examples of people who have pulled it off, and a full 50% of those weren't in fact correct (serious sam, red shift, counter strike) ?
That's why you can now name so many groups which have pulled it off in retrospect to shut me up?
This is why the winners of the various independant game development contests keep making it big, year after year?
> VC's don't invest in computer games, despite > the romantic myth of the perfect game start-up.
In my admittedly limited - but at least extant - experience, venture capital and angel investors are generally the *only* way in.
I'd love for you to pretend to have another alternative. Pre-emptive strike: "nuh-uh" and "your plan sucks" aren't worthwhile responses. The only thing that gets you brownie points is a clearly explained plan on how to actually pull it off. Extra points if you can show a way to do it on hundreds of dollars like you claimed.
> PDAs are cheap, increasingly ubiquitous, and > well capable to running games of the complexity > which kept me playing over the last 10 years. > X-Com Enemy Unknown anyone?
And how many stores can you name that carry PDA games? Here's a cluestick: there're dozens of them, many big budget big developer titles, already on the market. Circuit city sells (counts) 0. CompUSA? Zero. Best Buy? Let's see, that rack plus that rack, and maybe those over there?... zero.
> Subsidizing a luxury like video gaming is > hardly the reason people created governments.
That said, promoting the interests of citizens, helping develop economic infrastructure, and meeting the needs of burgeoning businesses is in fact one of the reasons that government exists.
> so that small, idiotic companies with poor > business models can flood the market with every > little stupid idea that springs into their > double mocha cappucino soaked brains.
Here's a project for you. It's important that you do these in the right order.
1) Go to a web page which lists games without their publisher's names. Generate a list of the titles you feel were mediocre, and a second list of those you feel were outright bad. Make note in each case of whether you feel the problem was the initial idea, the execution, or something else.
2) Look at who published those games.
(There's a third step about no longer blaming the little guy, but you can probably create that one on your own once you note where the fault really lies. I guarantee you that the next Brittney Spears game isn't a little house production.)
> buggy, short, unfinished, and dull as Black & > White
You might want to look at other people's opinions of the game. Or, maybe, don't play the game exactly the same way every time if you don't want it to be so short.
I remember the first thing I heard said badly of Civ3, on Apollyton (I think) about a week after the game came out. The guy was ranting about how easy it had been to beat the game, how it didn't offer anything new, how short and shallow it was.
Turns out he hadn't even read the manual and didn't realize that there were a bunch of new approaches to winning the game, and that he had been taking the easy way out (military conquest.) Also, he had been playing on a difficulty level where the military was the most neglected of the AI topics.
Didn't stop him from "informing" everyone how bad at his job Sid Meier was. (For reference, Sid Meier is one of my goddamn heroes.)
Maybe you should consider backing your claims. It's sort of insulting to see one of the most insightful and creative developers in the industry being lambasted by someone who apparently hasn't enough depth of view to even ratify what they say.
> The budget to produce a globally-marketed game > has gone up precisely because the markets (and > the stakes) are larger.
Whereas that's certainly true, there's a larger issue in effect: it's a hell of a lot harder to develop a PS2 game than an NES game. Even before you consider the radical complexity of the newer consoles (well, the PS2, anyway) you need to consider that there's just a hell of a lot more game to Vice City than, say, Bionic Commando.
I could kick Bionic Commando out on my own in a matter of two weeks, art and music resources notwithstanding. Vice City is more code than I expect I could produce in five years, maybe a decade. Whereas a large team used to be two programmers, now a small team is twenty. There are logistic costs that come with management, interrelations, et cetera. Debugging goes wild. It's just a lot worse to make a modern game than an eighties game.
> I beg to differ. Consider that the (arguably) > most popular online multiplayer game (Counter- > Strike) was created in a "small shop" - what > was it, one guy?
More than. Also, counter-strike isn't a game. It's a mod. They added a few rules on top of a game that an established company spent years and millions developing.
> I'll call it, umm, "the bus that couldnt slow > down."
Yeah, because there's something inherently marxist about any scheme for a centralized, tax-funded entity to distribute currency for the purpose of capitalization.
> There is a huge, emerging market for small > games that fit on portable devices (Palms, > cellphones, and even GBA). You don't have to > publish games on the PS2 and X-box to be > successful. They could also join in cooperative > ventures with other small design houses to make > bigger games, if they want. > If they can't find a way to survive, they > deserve to fail.
Horseshit. I've completed three AGB games now, and the market is so saturated that I can't even get my demo carts out to most producers. AGB is probably the most difficult of the closed platforms to enter right now: both Nintendo and Microsoft have large programs for cradling developers for their TV consoles, because PS2 is getting so much more software than they are.
As far as joining other small development houses, 85-90% of the people trying to get into the business don't have what it takes. You can't join forces if you can't trust them not to fail. Software complexity doesn't scale linearly; read The Mythical Man-Month.
Nearly every industry has subsidy. The reason subsidy exists is not to save tanking business. The reason subsidy exists is that there's a start-up cost involved with creating a business. For example, you need about $250,000 to start a city resteraunt: equipment, real estate, adsvertising, staffing, foodstuffs, and enough cash to weather the first few (very bad) months.
The reason Mr. Molyneaux has stepped up is that the cost of creating a video-game company didn't used to be what it is now. Used to be that someone could draw a few NES sprites, write a few thousand lines of code, and that was an acceptable demo ROM. Now, you need huge technology just to get something lackluster out the door.
Frankly, it's a lot harder than you seem to give it credit for. There's a reason there are only a few dozen new game houses every year, even though everyone you know wants to write video games. Take your foot out of your mouth, your thumb out of your ass, and start giving credit to the thousands of very talented people who fail to do what you just pretended was a walk in the park every year.
Sometimes you piss people off talking like that, by the way.
> Try explaining to a non-geek how to use basic > multimedia, dialup or broadband internet or > email in Windows, and you'll very, very quickly > reach the same problems.
We're talking about a college CS program. This is less than germane.
> > However, he expressed his fears that the > > market is stagnating, and a series of poor > > product launches could make it even worse... > > Which seems like a reasonable concern!
It does? "Don't make MMOGs because more bad MMOGs would make the market wary." Yah, but the only people who wouldn't listen are the big companies who think they need an MMOG and therefore turn out some bullshit tripe.
Therefore, all he's doing is scaring away the people who might not suck.
> It's also a way talented people without art or > programming skills can get into games.
This really pisses me off, because I'm a talented person *with* programming skills, have written a number of ocmplete AGB games, and/still/ can't get into the goddamn industry.
Doesn't matter that I have friends on the inside which consistently tell me that the quality of my code is higher than that of the code in the organization; since I don't have a degree, I don't have any way to look good in the face of the 10,000 programmers who took CS because they heard the money was good and then realized they didn't like the industry, and oh, hey, here's a way out.
> There is one downside that makes it less fun, > more tedious, and more like a job then a > vacation - you've got to play the SAME GAME > over and over and over and over and over...
Apparently you've never had a stoner roommate with Grand Theft Auto 3.
> I agree, except for cordless telephones. For > some reason, my cell phone works virtually > anywhere in the world, for days on a charge, > and is usually crystal clear. For the same > price, my cordless phone works only up to about > 20 feet away from the base, can keep a charge > for no more than 1 hour off of the base, and > sounds like shit. Cordless phone technology is > perhaps the worst technology of our time.
Perhaps because your cell phone cost you $200 and your cordless cost you $20? Oh, and by the way, the cell phone sends packets, whereas the cordless, tied to the traditional phone system, keeps a stream open.
Oh, and because you haven't cleaned your battery in a while. Why am I the only person that remembers to absolutely kill the charge every few months?
> Always remember the immortal rule of tech > support: You couldn't do their job, don't > expect them to do yours.
That's the way to talk to make sure that everyone knows you're a horse's ass. You don't get CEO tech support. You don't get accounting tech support. The fact is that connection to the internet is not difficult to establish. My seven year old managed to pull it off, asking only what the phone number was.
If a seven year old can do the job, the above is just whiny crap. We are making excuses for ourselves as a nation. I can see there being room for support for when you get serious technical considerations, or even subtle ones - how hard it is to get a connection through a PBX when people don't even realize they're on one, et cetera - but frankly, if you can't follow on-screen directions involving nothing more complex than next and cancel, you don't deserve your goddamn keyboard.... > where the guy I was with remarked "Heh-heh, > you're gonna love this guy..stupid fool needed > help defragging his HD". > > Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in > physics.
Uh huh. Y'know what? There's a lot that a commercial truck driver can do that you can't. There's a lot that a fry cook can do that you can't. I'd be willing to bet there's even something you'd have to be shown about how a garbage man handles his route.
That doesn't make the task any more difficult. I can see needing help to defragment a hard drive; most people never bother going into the properties tab of a hard drive. Y'know what? They come with instructions. You plop a CD in the drive and it's pretty goddamn automatic.
I can't do the Baskin Robbins official twist on the icing on the cake, but that doesn't mean that it's rocket science. If the cake decorator comes with instructions, then I should be able to use said instructions. If I can't, I shouldn't be decorating cakes.
And if I were on 1-800-help-me-ice, frankly, I'd be just as disgusted with the people who couldn't muster the effort that my seven year old thought was trivial as I am with all of the people who can't pick their ISP from a list.
But, then, I just don't like people who cower instead of trying, and I don't honestly believe that anyone which genuinely tried could possibly fail to make that stuff work.
> It's not that people got stupider, it's that > this was the first time the margin was close > enough that this always-existant problem became > relevant.
A quick review of history will unveil that in fact it is the fourth, and that furthermore this wasn't even the closest.
Most of the hullabaloo, in my opinion, came from that the news networks lied, the state supreme court ruled for a recount and were denied by the federal supreme court (which explicitly does not have the ability to do that), and that the three states (florida, new hampshire, and idaho) where there were issues all have someone close to the family in power.
It would be nice if we could just get rid of the electorate college, too.
Re:How do you know Bill didn't?
on
Windows Rootkits
·
· Score: 1
> > With closed source code, how do you know that > > there isn't a root kit included? > > Because China is getting access to the code, > and if there's one code review team to make > Microsoft trustworthy, it's the Chinese > government.
Subtle hint: if they're deceptive enough to bury backdoors in the most popular used OS in history (illegal), they're not going to show the whole source to China.
Duh.
And besides, if our gov't has been complicit (yah, I don't want to hear it; if you get to be paranoid so do I) what makes you think China would do differently? All they would need was their own set of keys.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, hard core pc gamers expect the latest 3d
> and etc....but not everyone is a hardcore
> gamer.
This is disingenuous. People who aren't hard-core gamers still won't pay $45 for a game which looks like it came from a console from five years ago. Sure, they won't know to refer to it with terms like quincunx AA or phong-shaded bump mapping or whatever the currently funny video buzzword is, but let's be frank: if your little sister (the ubiquitous game player whose opinion isn't trusted by self-aggrandized "hardcore gamers") has a playstation 2 and sees two games - one, say, Dance Dance Revolution 6 and the other something that looks like Tobal No.2, which do you expect that she will think is a better game?
Hints: if it looks like it has low production value, that's not a helpful thing.
The problem isn't that gameplay is dying. The problem is that the bar to seeming like an "acceptable" game has been raised so high that most game developers end up having to sacrifice one or the other (mostly when they realize how unrealistic their production plans were; notably, without one of those unrealistic production plans, you won't get published, which is why all games ship late, buggy, and disappointingly), and in order to stay competitive in the marketplace, they have no choice but to make the seperation you're delauding.
I don't chagrin you your standpoint. In fact, I'm sympathetic; I wish I could write a super-nintendo game so that I could focus on the game half, too. But it won't sell, so it won't be published, so you're never going to hear about it.
> Crappy CDs only cost 20 bucks. Crappy games
> cost around $50 bucks.
Hear here. This is exactly what I believe the problem to be. Unfortunately, no publisher would ever pick you up for a budget title, except in the PC world, where the market is more saturated than Keith Richards' liver.
Nintendo is my personal bugbear right now. I've already written a number of games which, with some attention from artists (I couldn't draw a stickman with AutoCAD and a team of twelve) could be perfectly reasonable budget titles (in my opinion, many of the big-label titles out there don't qualify as budget titles, though.)
The biggest problem with the AGB is manufacturing cost - they take too much ust to make the goddamn cart. If we could get some $20 staples out there for the AGB crowd, the platform would take off; nobody wants to pay $45 for a super nintendo game. But Nintendo is being so stingy with funding and manufacturing costs that they aren't getting innovative games, and so all they have to offer are their SNES titles, which means they can't downprice them.
It's a catch 22 that essentially guarantees that newbies can't enter the market. This is especially unfortunate because the AGB is nearly an ideal starter platform, and *should* by all rights be Big N's incubator for their next Rares.
The industry is stagnating because there isn't an easy way out. People with that much money don't have the money becuase they're stupid (usually.) If there were an easy way out, it would have been exploited by now.
What the Slashdot crowd doesn't understand is the sheer volume of crap that's out there waiting to be published. The real gems are so difficult to develop on shoestring budget that oftentimes it's virtually impossible to tell them apart from the Bart Simpson NES games.
Don't undervalue the difficulty of the situation. Solvable industrial crises make very rich individuals. The lack of Carnegies and Mellons suggests that the problem is nontrivial.
> It still is. A good programmer and artist team
> can build a game for a few hundred dollars.
(wipes tears from face, tries to stop laughing) I take it you've tried?
A few hundred dollars. That's beautiful. That's why so many independant groups, having failed after rounds of investment, years of experience, and knowledge you're pretending to have have succeeded, right?
That's why in the last few articles on this general topic (I've caught three: this, molyneaux, and the investment paper) have only been able to generate half a dozen examples of people who have pulled it off, and a full 50% of those weren't in fact correct (serious sam, red shift, counter strike) ?
That's why you can now name so many groups which have pulled it off in retrospect to shut me up?
This is why the winners of the various independant game development contests keep making it big, year after year?
> VC's don't invest in computer games, despite
> the romantic myth of the perfect game start-up.
In my admittedly limited - but at least extant - experience, venture capital and angel investors are generally the *only* way in.
I'd love for you to pretend to have another alternative. Pre-emptive strike: "nuh-uh" and "your plan sucks" aren't worthwhile responses. The only thing that gets you brownie points is a clearly explained plan on how to actually pull it off. Extra points if you can show a way to do it on hundreds of dollars like you claimed.
> PDAs are cheap, increasingly ubiquitous, and
... zero.
> well capable to running games of the complexity
> which kept me playing over the last 10 years.
> X-Com Enemy Unknown anyone?
And how many stores can you name that carry PDA games? Here's a cluestick: there're dozens of them, many big budget big developer titles, already on the market. Circuit city sells (counts) 0. CompUSA? Zero. Best Buy? Let's see, that rack plus that rack, and maybe those over there?
Radio Shack sells one. Rayman. That's it.
Think that's a market, hm?
> Unreal was ground breaking, but just like quake
> really
*cough*
> Peter nelected to mention the millions and
> millions and millions of pounds this successful
> game will generate in revene.
Which really helps the small startup developer who doesn't have a previous blockbuster funding their current effort.
At least think your criticisms through.
> Subsidizing a luxury like video gaming is
> hardly the reason people created governments.
That said, promoting the interests of citizens, helping develop economic infrastructure, and meeting the needs of burgeoning businesses is in fact one of the reasons that government exists.
You might consider a macroeconomics class.
> so that small, idiotic companies with poor
> business models can flood the market with every
> little stupid idea that springs into their
> double mocha cappucino soaked brains.
Here's a project for you. It's important that you do these in the right order.
1) Go to a web page which lists games without their publisher's names. Generate a list of the titles you feel were mediocre, and a second list of those you feel were outright bad. Make note in each case of whether you feel the problem was the initial idea, the execution, or something else.
2) Look at who published those games.
(There's a third step about no longer blaming the little guy, but you can probably create that one on your own once you note where the fault really lies. I guarantee you that the next Brittney Spears game isn't a little house production.)
> buggy, short, unfinished, and dull as Black &
> White
You might want to look at other people's opinions of the game. Or, maybe, don't play the game exactly the same way every time if you don't want it to be so short.
I remember the first thing I heard said badly of Civ3, on Apollyton (I think) about a week after the game came out. The guy was ranting about how easy it had been to beat the game, how it didn't offer anything new, how short and shallow it was.
Turns out he hadn't even read the manual and didn't realize that there were a bunch of new approaches to winning the game, and that he had been taking the easy way out (military conquest.) Also, he had been playing on a difficulty level where the military was the most neglected of the AI topics.
Didn't stop him from "informing" everyone how bad at his job Sid Meier was. (For reference, Sid Meier is one of my goddamn heroes.)
Maybe you should consider backing your claims. It's sort of insulting to see one of the most insightful and creative developers in the industry being lambasted by someone who apparently hasn't enough depth of view to even ratify what they say.
Oh, but I will give you the "buggy" part.
> The budget to produce a globally-marketed game
> has gone up precisely because the markets (and
> the stakes) are larger.
Whereas that's certainly true, there's a larger issue in effect: it's a hell of a lot harder to develop a PS2 game than an NES game. Even before you consider the radical complexity of the newer consoles (well, the PS2, anyway) you need to consider that there's just a hell of a lot more game to Vice City than, say, Bionic Commando.
I could kick Bionic Commando out on my own in a matter of two weeks, art and music resources notwithstanding. Vice City is more code than I expect I could produce in five years, maybe a decade. Whereas a large team used to be two programmers, now a small team is twenty. There are logistic costs that come with management, interrelations, et cetera. Debugging goes wild. It's just a lot worse to make a modern game than an eighties game.
> I beg to differ. Consider that the (arguably)
> most popular online multiplayer game (Counter-
> Strike) was created in a "small shop" - what
> was it, one guy?
More than. Also, counter-strike isn't a game. It's a mod. They added a few rules on top of a game that an established company spent years and millions developing.
So, bear some witness to the pre-extant effort.
> I'll call it, umm, "the bus that couldnt slow
> down."
Yeah, because there's something inherently marxist about any scheme for a centralized, tax-funded entity to distribute currency for the purpose of capitalization.
Idiot.
> There is a huge, emerging market for small
> games that fit on portable devices (Palms,
> cellphones, and even GBA). You don't have to
> publish games on the PS2 and X-box to be
> successful. They could also join in cooperative
> ventures with other small design houses to make
> bigger games, if they want.
> If they can't find a way to survive, they
> deserve to fail.
Horseshit. I've completed three AGB games now, and the market is so saturated that I can't even get my demo carts out to most producers. AGB is probably the most difficult of the closed platforms to enter right now: both Nintendo and Microsoft have large programs for cradling developers for their TV consoles, because PS2 is getting so much more software than they are.
As far as joining other small development houses, 85-90% of the people trying to get into the business don't have what it takes. You can't join forces if you can't trust them not to fail. Software complexity doesn't scale linearly; read The Mythical Man-Month.
Nearly every industry has subsidy. The reason subsidy exists is not to save tanking business. The reason subsidy exists is that there's a start-up cost involved with creating a business. For example, you need about $250,000 to start a city resteraunt: equipment, real estate, adsvertising, staffing, foodstuffs, and enough cash to weather the first few (very bad) months.
The reason Mr. Molyneaux has stepped up is that the cost of creating a video-game company didn't used to be what it is now. Used to be that someone could draw a few NES sprites, write a few thousand lines of code, and that was an acceptable demo ROM. Now, you need huge technology just to get something lackluster out the door.
Frankly, it's a lot harder than you seem to give it credit for. There's a reason there are only a few dozen new game houses every year, even though everyone you know wants to write video games. Take your foot out of your mouth, your thumb out of your ass, and start giving credit to the thousands of very talented people who fail to do what you just pretended was a walk in the park every year.
Sometimes you piss people off talking like that, by the way.
> Try explaining to a non-geek how to use basic
> multimedia, dialup or broadband internet or
> email in Windows, and you'll very, very quickly
> reach the same problems.
We're talking about a college CS program. This is less than germane.
> > However, he expressed his fears that the
> > market is stagnating, and a series of poor
> > product launches could make it even worse...
>
> Which seems like a reasonable concern!
It does? "Don't make MMOGs because more bad MMOGs would make the market wary." Yah, but the only people who wouldn't listen are the big companies who think they need an MMOG and therefore turn out some bullshit tripe.
Therefore, all he's doing is scaring away the people who might not suck.
> They seem to have overcome all, if not most of
> those barriers and have created a pretty
> flexible, dynamic, enjoyable game.
".. and I base this on no evidence whatsoever."
Jesus, you'd think you were South Park's Surgeon General.
> It's also a way talented people without art or
/still/ can't get into the goddamn industry.
> programming skills can get into games.
This really pisses me off, because I'm a talented person *with* programming skills, have written a number of ocmplete AGB games, and
Doesn't matter that I have friends on the inside which consistently tell me that the quality of my code is higher than that of the code in the organization; since I don't have a degree, I don't have any way to look good in the face of the 10,000 programmers who took CS because they heard the money was good and then realized they didn't like the industry, and oh, hey, here's a way out.
Fuckers.
> There is one downside that makes it less fun,
> more tedious, and more like a job then a
> vacation - you've got to play the SAME GAME
> over and over and over and over and over...
Apparently you've never had a stoner roommate with Grand Theft Auto 3.
What ever happened to Stars!: Supernova Genesis?
Stars! slapped MOO, VGA Planets, and all the rest around without even trying.
> The 8086 was the first x86...
Weeeeellllll, that depends a bit on whether you're willing to include the 8080, which had virtually the same architecture.
> I never notice any lag when I connect and I'm
> about 1500 miles away!
This being surprising based on Borkman's principle, which states that the further you are from a computer the slower it goes?
Help me out here.
> I agree, except for cordless telephones. For
> some reason, my cell phone works virtually
> anywhere in the world, for days on a charge,
> and is usually crystal clear. For the same
> price, my cordless phone works only up to about
> 20 feet away from the base, can keep a charge
> for no more than 1 hour off of the base, and
> sounds like shit. Cordless phone technology is
> perhaps the worst technology of our time.
Perhaps because your cell phone cost you $200 and your cordless cost you $20? Oh, and by the way, the cell phone sends packets, whereas the cordless, tied to the traditional phone system, keeps a stream open.
Oh, and because you haven't cleaned your battery in a while. Why am I the only person that remembers to absolutely kill the charge every few months?
> Always remember the immortal rule of tech
...
> support: You couldn't do their job, don't
> expect them to do yours.
That's the way to talk to make sure that everyone knows you're a horse's ass. You don't get CEO tech support. You don't get accounting tech support. The fact is that connection to the internet is not difficult to establish. My seven year old managed to pull it off, asking only what the phone number was.
If a seven year old can do the job, the above is just whiny crap. We are making excuses for ourselves as a nation. I can see there being room for support for when you get serious technical considerations, or even subtle ones - how hard it is to get a connection through a PBX when people don't even realize they're on one, et cetera - but frankly, if you can't follow on-screen directions involving nothing more complex than next and cancel, you don't deserve your goddamn keyboard.
> where the guy I was with remarked "Heh-heh,
> you're gonna love this guy..stupid fool needed
> help defragging his HD".
>
> Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in
> physics.
Uh huh. Y'know what? There's a lot that a commercial truck driver can do that you can't. There's a lot that a fry cook can do that you can't. I'd be willing to bet there's even something you'd have to be shown about how a garbage man handles his route.
That doesn't make the task any more difficult. I can see needing help to defragment a hard drive; most people never bother going into the properties tab of a hard drive. Y'know what? They come with instructions. You plop a CD in the drive and it's pretty goddamn automatic.
I can't do the Baskin Robbins official twist on the icing on the cake, but that doesn't mean that it's rocket science. If the cake decorator comes with instructions, then I should be able to use said instructions. If I can't, I shouldn't be decorating cakes.
And if I were on 1-800-help-me-ice, frankly, I'd be just as disgusted with the people who couldn't muster the effort that my seven year old thought was trivial as I am with all of the people who can't pick their ISP from a list.
But, then, I just don't like people who cower instead of trying, and I don't honestly believe that anyone which genuinely tried could possibly fail to make that stuff work.
> It's not that people got stupider, it's that
> this was the first time the margin was close
> enough that this always-existant problem became
> relevant.
A quick review of history will unveil that in fact it is the fourth, and that furthermore this wasn't even the closest.
Most of the hullabaloo, in my opinion, came from that the news networks lied, the state supreme court ruled for a recount and were denied by the federal supreme court (which explicitly does not have the ability to do that), and that the three states (florida, new hampshire, and idaho) where there were issues all have someone close to the family in power.
It would be nice if we could just get rid of the electorate college, too.
> > With closed source code, how do you know that
> > there isn't a root kit included?
>
> Because China is getting access to the code,
> and if there's one code review team to make
> Microsoft trustworthy, it's the Chinese
> government.
Subtle hint: if they're deceptive enough to bury backdoors in the most popular used OS in history (illegal), they're not going to show the whole source to China.
Duh.
And besides, if our gov't has been complicit (yah, I don't want to hear it; if you get to be paranoid so do I) what makes you think China would do differently? All they would need was their own set of keys.