As a veteran gamer and leader of a large organization in WoW and formerly EQ, AC and UO...
I've got members of my guild that purchase items with RL cash - it is a matter of what your time is worth.
For example, I've purchased gold from http://www.mysupersales.com/ and http://www.playerauctions.com/ myself. The reasoning behind this is that I spend some of my free time doing side work for $50 an hour, that said the time it takes me to earn $50 is far less than it takes me to earn 500 Gold in WoW. Time vs Investment.
A friend of mine spent RL Money on a very nice mace, the mace it's self would have gone for the better part of 2500 gold, the seller was originally asking for gold, but readily gave up his PayPal account information when my friend offered another form of compensation for the virtual item.
Saddly this is a case where the consumers vote with their wallets - and consumers are often uneducated when it comes to shopping online.
The only reason pop-up adds still exist is because they are making money hand over fist. If the consumers were educated to see that these adds aren't from the vendor they are looking at - and specifically how unethical the Malware/Spyware/Addware companies are - then perhaps... naaaaah, they'd still buy their bigger dangling participles.
When XP First came out and had Messenger installed and I used it, loved it, no adds, full functionality, etc. I paid full boat retail for XP on three machines, I enjoyed having that service without the adds...
Then MS Changed the structure, they gimpified the Windows messenger, and basically force you to use the add driven version if you wanted the full features. Now this wouldn't have torqed my nips so bad if they had added features to MSN Messenger that they didn't to windows, but they stripped down the version I was using!
Hence, Trillian. No Adds, and now I can connect to my friends who use AIM and Y! as well as fire up my OLD ICQ account! (Old: 1568668, and no, I'm not missing any digits... ya, I know folks with lower numbers, but I'm still pretty low!)
Ok, now THAT pisses me off. And I'm a middle class American white boy. Maybe get off yer high horse of stopping prison rape and start worrying about about racism along with it?
So your saying, you stole the software, and because they are taking measures to stop your theft, you won't buy their product...
Good riddance.
Not to come off sounding like a goody two shoes, I've pirated software in the past, however as I matured, I realized that it was indeed, theft. Using software without paying for it, is simply that.
The bnetd server WAS allowing players to steal Blizzards software. They are right in every aspect of shutting this down.
For those who say they wont ever buy another Blizzard product over this, I'd wager many never have BOUGHT a Blizzard product. If you use a product, you should pay for it. Code doesn't write it's self.
Every time someone trys to create a product to work with an M$ Product M$ modifies something to break it...
Gee pah, they used yer own gun to blow yer tires out...
I find it amusing that M$ frantically trys scrubbing themselves clean of soot to call the kettle black on this one.
Any way it goes, they ARE right finally...
Zanthor
A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually pound out Shakespear. 10 Monkeys, 5 typewriters - Windows98, 1 Monkey and a ball of Dung - Windows 2000.
Each and every one of us has our own desires and needs for entertainment. I personally get a kick out of wheeling around a corner and railing my best friends and gloating just long enough for them to do it to me... It's what makes us tick. What makes you tick may be something different entirely, it may be the thrill of bluffing that flush with your pair of twos... it may be shuffleboard (I'm not even sure how that's played)... but it's what trips your trigger.
Don't blame todays world on games, don't blame violence in schools on games. Lets place the blame where it belongs, the parents that dont feel they need to raise their children but can plant them in front of a box full of chips and bits and let it raise them.
If I had ever been caught with a gun as a child I'd pray for a life sentence because my mother and step father would beat my ass so bad... it wouldn't really be all that but in my mind it was. I knew that if I did wrong I'd be punished. I watch every day as parents ignore the blatent signs their children are having trouble and do nothing about it.
So keep in mind that it's what makes some of us tick, and remember when RPG's came out, people blamed them for deaths... there have been more shootings over games of monopoly than there have been suicides over RPG's.
I actually get so many of this sort of SPAM I can useually just PASTE this link because it was still in my clipboard...
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
Any time I get one of these messages I hit REPLY ALL and send that link... amazingly enough the quantity has started to go down... slowly but some people read it =)
Just the other day, right after the mass media attempted to blame the violence in Colorado and the problems with todays youth I recieved a concerned e-mail from my mother.
The fact that this concerned her, the world at large and the fact that people are trying to blame games; get real, games are but a form of entertainment.
There are some people who don't know how to draw the line between game and reality, there are also people who can't draw a line between reality and anything. These people need help no matter what, but don't start ostracizing people for thier choice of entertainment.
I've played games for as long as I can remember, I think we all have, it's part of growing up. No matter what game I've played there has always been some form of violence involved, from cowboys and indians as a young child to Q3A today, the violence is there. From watching Bugs Bunney run Wile E Coyote into a brick wall to controling a virutal avatar smacking the crap out of an unknown opponent with a rocket. It's all violence. Violence is unavoidable as it is part of life and the way we live.
The perception is what matters. Some percieve the violence as an extension of the persons true belief; some percieve it as part of a game. It is the latter. When I'm playing Quake, I'm blowing the snot outta people that I may or may not know IRL. Either way it doesnt matter, they are simply opponents in a virtual combat. The fact that there is a real person on the other end of the keyboard doesn't mean I'm going to go to work and kill everyone, it doesn't mean I'm going to assemble a bomb and deliver it to the local gym. It simply means I'm enjoying myself.
The problem is NOT GAMES, the problem is NOT VIOLENCE. The problem is the way we raise and disciplin and educate our children today. (Here I am talking about education and horribly misspelling things, but I don't claim to be perfect, just human.)
When I was growing up, I learned the difference between right and wrong, I learned that you don't just know in every situation and that sometimes you will make mistakes. The job of parents is to guide their children into life on their own, to give their children the tools that they will need to cope with the real world, to deal with every day life.
To deposit your child in front of a computer and leave them unattended is as bad as handing them a weapon without teaching them that the dangerous bit goes away from them. I get calls on a regular basis of parents wanting "control" software and my recommendation on how to keep their kids out of the nasty bits on the internet. It soon becomes apparent that these parents are simply looking to let their child surf, play games and never look at them again.
This mentality is the cause of todays problems, granted, it's not the only cause, but it's a cause, part of a large multifaceted problem.
Games however, are not. Games like Quake, Ultima Online and Everquest, these are not the issue. The fact that after years of a games release a kid has a web site dedicated to it is odd, but lets get realistic, DOOM has been voted as one of the TOP 100 games of all times over and over, DOOM is a flagship product, a defining product in an industry and a damn good game.
What I'm trying to say here, and I may be rambling (probably), is that it's not the games, it's not the clothes the kids wear, it's not the fact that they know more about finding info on the internet than you, it's what their parents have shown them, it's how they have learned what right and wrong is. These things are all part of growing up, and all too often in todays society the children are left to grow up by sitting them in front of a small box with silicon inside it and a softly glowing CRT near by.
I play games, I play RPG's, I blow things up with rockets and tripmines and I enjoy watching the bloody kibbles bounce down the hallway after doing so. I also work a normal job, have good friends and know right from wrong. Don't try to pin the blame on the game; the game is no more at fault than the gunpowder.
I just downloaded this PRC and installed it on my palm III - I succeeded in hotsyncing and at the end of the hotsync recieved a "FATAL ERROR" and a button labeled "RESET".
A reset gets you the PALM splash screen and nothing else, you cannot turn your palm off, it's zombied. At this point I executed a HARD reset nuking my schedule that hadn't been hotsynced yet (DOH!) and tried again with just the ROM portion of PALM OS installed, no upgrade performed... Same results.
Just wanted to STOP you guys before you ended up in Hard reset ville with me...
IMHO this is a case of poor taste if it is a April Fool's joke. I understand the joy of the day, the joy of making a good time out of it, I also understand the seriousness that we of the net take our freedome of speach.
Implying than any company is doing this even without making direct reference to a specific company can have major backlash and I don't think that's the sort of publicity any of them want. True, the timing implies that it was a huge setup for an even larger April Fools joke, but then again, it could just be bad timing of the courts.
We won't know til at least tommorow... Til then try not to get too hot under the collar, and for crist sake, stop the script kiddies from doin anything stupid if you can...
Further software support will draw users to a more robust stable environment.... however MS can start with good support then slowly draw it back to their home ground causing some users who were using Linux to migrate to Windows.... however I think that few would do that.
What I think would happen if that was tried is the sheeple would migrate to Linux and as MS support for linux floundered would migrate back to MS... while the users who see the power and stability of Linux but were never introduced to it before due to lack of software support would stay with Linux and find another office solution.
Personally I have MS on my machine for one reason and one reason only - GAMES. And as more and more games get ported, I dedicate less and less HD to MS Crap and more and more to Linux!
MS won't support Linux unless they are really getting desperate.... so maybe they are gonna....
what your getting with Lynx, you know no java's gonna work, you know no plugins, grafix and such are gonna work, you just know you get text and that's it.
My experience with IE4 and NS4 (And the version 3 of both) is that neither fully supports all websites and I must have both installed to surf everwhere I want to go. This is mostly MS's fault IMHO, MS created Jscript which attempts to be Javascript but causes apps like the NetObjects Fusion BBS to break without some special coding. They also come out with their own version of every standard (Can we say ActiveX?) causing great pain and suffering for netusers all around the world.
Above and beyond the browser war, lets take a look at what MS has done for WYSIWYG HTML writing programs such as Frontpage and the crap exporters they've put into almost all the new products. Frontpage extensions just plain suck. We were running an NT server with IIS and put the Frontpage server extensions on it, wala *CRASH*. That was the point we nuked the NT Server and installed Linux with Apache and dropped support for the Frontpage extensions.
Hell, if MS can't make a product that works well with the world and wants to extend the standards into MSStandards we should all quit using their products.
The focus here is all wrong. The linux community is whole heartedly behind Linux and push it for all it's strengths. However it's biggest strength for the server environment is it's largest weakness in the desktop arena. The average computer user has a hard time groking that they have two mouse buttons that do two different things, they aren't ready to edit any config files, let alone dip into some source code and debug it...
Where linux shines, and shines well is the Server environment. The company I work for used to have 2 novell servers and 2 NT servers. We currently have one NT server left and it is slated to be nuked and Linuxed soon. We left NT due to it's high cost, poor reliability and poor performance.
Jesse is right in one aspect, Betting on Linux to kill MS is not going to happen, MS is doing that themselves, I think that Linux is simply going to step forth and shine like it can, right into the shoes NT was trying to fill (and failing as NT was).
I personally threw together a webserver box in a little less than an hour, I had no problems getting this done and only had to re-boot once, all these little factors show and the IT Proffessionals will (have) see (seen) this and Linux will prosper.
Zanthor http://www.tibbs.net (Don't bother, it's empty, I still gotta put SOME content there...)
\ From the point of criminalize unsolicited phone calls... They are criminalized in most states. You have the 3 strikes rule and if you can document that you requested to not be solicited again those three times you can have legal action initiated.
I don't mind someone calling once, or e-mailing once... if they do it a second time and it's accidental, I don't mind either... but I'm fraggin tired of being told I can quit my job and make 400K per day simply spamming people if I buy this magical CD of e-mail addresses... The e-mails have no way to remove yourself from the list, they have no real reply address, the headers are spoofed or sent from an account that was dropped (wisely) by their ISP in a matter of days (Hours?). The contact information is rarely accurate and the spam to the best of my knowledge does nothing but suck bandwidth that I could be using to whoop yer arse in Q2:)
\
one might as well criminalize unsolicited phone calls, unsolicited postal mail, unsolicited pages, as well as the communication of any other content that someone might not want to receive.
Ok, It's fine, it's dandy, it's not even seen the silicon yet.... this thing is 100% vapor, nothing more than a set of design goals really.
I'd like to see some hardware manufacturers quit talking about the far and wide and start talking about the here and now. Give us new high performance hardware that will be on the market soon, it is nice to see what's coming up, but c'mon, nice concept, lets see if it works when we build it... That just doesn't work for me.
MS isn't evil, they are a necessity of modern computing, they give us a very good example of what NOT to do.
Things of "old" computers that did matter: The Apple ][ actually got me started in this industry, then I got my Amiga and it STILL multitasks better than my Windoze PC (and it hasn't even got a hard drive!).
As for Evil and Good, that's all opinion, I think that M$ makes a cruddy OS and Linux is a nice solution, personally though BeOS looks better and is MUCH easier to install! Game support is starting to creap into the alternate OS Scene... that means soon I can NUKE the space that now occupies the BSOD Generator and get on with some REAL gaming!
Slashdot Mirror
Tech
Those who can't...
Manage.
As a veteran gamer and leader of a large organization in WoW and formerly EQ, AC and UO...
I've got members of my guild that purchase items with RL cash - it is a matter of what your time is worth.
For example, I've purchased gold from http://www.mysupersales.com/ and http://www.playerauctions.com/ myself. The reasoning behind this is that I spend some of my free time doing side work for $50 an hour, that said the time it takes me to earn $50 is far less than it takes me to earn 500 Gold in WoW. Time vs Investment.
A friend of mine spent RL Money on a very nice mace, the mace it's self would have gone for the better part of 2500 gold, the seller was originally asking for gold, but readily gave up his PayPal account information when my friend offered another form of compensation for the virtual item.
Saddly this is a case where the consumers vote with their wallets - and consumers are often uneducated when it comes to shopping online.
The only reason pop-up adds still exist is because they are making money hand over fist. If the consumers were educated to see that these adds aren't from the vendor they are looking at - and specifically how unethical the Malware/Spyware/Addware companies are - then perhaps... naaaaah, they'd still buy their bigger dangling participles.
Um...
And I quote...
"Humans like you ruined your lands, you won't ruin mine!"
And then you are attacked... How much more racist can it get?
We both have an uncontrolable desire to poke it with a stick.
Now we KNOW there's places a stick shouldn't poke... but we have to poke the places we know won't hurt us.
But doesn't everything come from Greece?
Sorry, had to be said!
When XP First came out and had Messenger installed and I used it, loved it, no adds, full functionality, etc. I paid full boat retail for XP on three machines, I enjoyed having that service without the adds...
Then MS Changed the structure, they gimpified the Windows messenger, and basically force you to use the add driven version if you wanted the full features. Now this wouldn't have torqed my nips so bad if they had added features to MSN Messenger that they didn't to windows, but they stripped down the version I was using!
Hence, Trillian. No Adds, and now I can connect to my friends who use AIM and Y! as well as fire up my OLD ICQ account! (Old: 1568668, and no, I'm not missing any digits... ya, I know folks with lower numbers, but I'm still pretty low!)
Ok, now THAT pisses me off. And I'm a middle class American white boy. Maybe get off yer high horse of stopping prison rape and start worrying about about racism along with it?
I'm happy! I'm happy! I'm happy! I'm happy!
/. and still functioning!
My site's on
Crazy!
So your saying, you stole the software, and because they are taking measures to stop your theft, you won't buy their product...
Good riddance.
Not to come off sounding like a goody two shoes, I've pirated software in the past, however as I matured, I realized that it was indeed, theft. Using software without paying for it, is simply that.
The bnetd server WAS allowing players to steal Blizzards software. They are right in every aspect of shutting this down.
For those who say they wont ever buy another Blizzard product over this, I'd wager many never have BOUGHT a Blizzard product. If you use a product, you should pay for it. Code doesn't write it's self.
Every time someone trys to create a product to work with an M$ Product M$ modifies something to break it...
Gee pah, they used yer own gun to blow yer tires out...
I find it amusing that M$ frantically trys scrubbing themselves clean of soot to call the kettle black on this one.
Any way it goes, they ARE right finally...
Zanthor
A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually pound out Shakespear. 10 Monkeys, 5 typewriters - Windows98, 1 Monkey and a ball of Dung - Windows 2000.
Do you like a good steak? Why?
Do you like playing poker? Why?
Do you like going to the beach? Why?
Each and every one of us has our own desires and needs for entertainment. I personally get a kick out of wheeling around a corner and railing my best friends and gloating just long enough for them to do it to me... It's what makes us tick. What makes you tick may be something different entirely, it may be the thrill of bluffing that flush with your pair of twos... it may be shuffleboard (I'm not even sure how that's played)... but it's what trips your trigger.
Don't blame todays world on games, don't blame violence in schools on games. Lets place the blame where it belongs, the parents that dont feel they need to raise their children but can plant them in front of a box full of chips and bits and let it raise them.
If I had ever been caught with a gun as a child I'd pray for a life sentence because my mother and step father would beat my ass so bad... it wouldn't really be all that but in my mind it was. I knew that if I did wrong I'd be punished. I watch every day as parents ignore the blatent signs their children are having trouble and do nothing about it.
So keep in mind that it's what makes some of us tick, and remember when RPG's came out, people blamed them for deaths... there have been more shootings over games of monopoly than there have been suicides over RPG's.
I actually get so many of this sort of SPAM I can useually just PASTE this link because it was still in my clipboard...
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
Any time I get one of these messages I hit REPLY ALL and send that link... amazingly enough the quantity has started to go down... slowly but some people read it =)
Just the other day, right after the mass media attempted to blame the violence in Colorado and the problems with todays youth I recieved a concerned e-mail from my mother.
The fact that this concerned her, the world at large and the fact that people are trying to blame games; get real, games are but a form of entertainment.
There are some people who don't know how to draw the line between game and reality, there are also people who can't draw a line between reality and anything. These people need help no matter what, but don't start ostracizing people for thier choice of entertainment.
I've played games for as long as I can remember, I think we all have, it's part of growing up. No matter what game I've played there has always been some form of violence involved, from cowboys and indians as a young child to Q3A today, the violence is there. From watching Bugs Bunney run Wile E Coyote into a brick wall to controling a virutal avatar smacking the crap out of an unknown opponent with a rocket. It's all violence. Violence is unavoidable as it is part of life and the way we live.
The perception is what matters. Some percieve the violence as an extension of the persons true belief; some percieve it as part of a game. It is the latter. When I'm playing Quake, I'm blowing the snot outta people that I may or may not know IRL. Either way it doesnt matter, they are simply opponents in a virtual combat. The fact that there is a real person on the other end of the keyboard doesn't mean I'm going to go to work and kill everyone, it doesn't mean I'm going to assemble a bomb and deliver it to the local gym. It simply means I'm enjoying myself.
The problem is NOT GAMES, the problem is NOT VIOLENCE. The problem is the way we raise and disciplin and educate our children today. (Here I am talking about education and horribly misspelling things, but I don't claim to be perfect, just human.)
When I was growing up, I learned the difference between right and wrong, I learned that you don't just know in every situation and that sometimes you will make mistakes. The job of parents is to guide their children into life on their own, to give their children the tools that they will need to cope with the real world, to deal with every day life.
To deposit your child in front of a computer and leave them unattended is as bad as handing them a weapon without teaching them that the dangerous bit goes away from them. I get calls on a regular basis of parents wanting "control" software and my recommendation on how to keep their kids out of the nasty bits on the internet. It soon becomes apparent that these parents are simply looking to let their child surf, play games and never look at them again.
This mentality is the cause of todays problems, granted, it's not the only cause, but it's a cause, part of a large multifaceted problem.
Games however, are not. Games like Quake, Ultima Online and Everquest, these are not the issue. The fact that after years of a games release a kid has a web site dedicated to it is odd, but lets get realistic, DOOM has been voted as one of the TOP 100 games of all times over and over, DOOM is a flagship product, a defining product in an industry and a damn good game.
What I'm trying to say here, and I may be rambling (probably), is that it's not the games, it's not the clothes the kids wear, it's not the fact that they know more about finding info on the internet than you, it's what their parents have shown them, it's how they have learned what right and wrong is. These things are all part of growing up, and all too often in todays society the children are left to grow up by sitting them in front of a small box with silicon inside it and a softly glowing CRT near by.
I play games, I play RPG's, I blow things up with rockets and tripmines and I enjoy watching the bloody kibbles bounce down the hallway after doing so. I also work a normal job, have good friends and know right from wrong. Don't try to pin the blame on the game; the game is no more at fault than the gunpowder.
Zanthor
Can't be a conflict unless it's with the pilot in it's "Post Hard Reset" state.
I have tried several times since having to reset (No data to worry about now =) and have gotten the same results.
Anyone with any suggestions?
I just downloaded this PRC and installed it on my palm III - I succeeded in hotsyncing and at the end of the hotsync recieved a "FATAL ERROR" and a button labeled "RESET".
A reset gets you the PALM splash screen and nothing else, you cannot turn your palm off, it's zombied. At this point I executed a HARD reset nuking my schedule that hadn't been hotsynced yet (DOH!) and tried again with just the ROM portion of PALM OS installed, no upgrade performed... Same results.
Just wanted to STOP you guys before you ended up in Hard reset ville with me...
IMHO this is a case of poor taste if it is a April Fool's joke. I understand the joy of the day, the joy of making a good time out of it, I also understand the seriousness that we of the net take our freedome of speach.
Implying than any company is doing this even without making direct reference to a specific company can have major backlash and I don't think that's the sort of publicity any of them want. True, the timing implies that it was a huge setup for an even larger April Fools joke, but then again, it could just be bad timing of the courts.
We won't know til at least tommorow... Til then try not to get too hot under the collar, and for crist sake, stop the script kiddies from doin anything stupid if you can...
Zanthor
Further software support will draw users to a more robust stable environment.... however MS can start with good support then slowly draw it back to their home ground causing some users who were using Linux to migrate to Windows.... however I think that few would do that.
What I think would happen if that was tried is the sheeple would migrate to Linux and as MS support for linux floundered would migrate back to MS... while the users who see the power and stability of Linux but were never introduced to it before due to lack of software support would stay with Linux and find another office solution.
Personally I have MS on my machine for one reason and one reason only - GAMES. And as more and more games get ported, I dedicate less and less HD to MS Crap and more and more to Linux!
MS won't support Linux unless they are really getting desperate.... so maybe they are gonna....
what your getting with Lynx, you know no java's gonna work, you know no plugins, grafix and such are gonna work, you just know you get text and that's it.
My experience with IE4 and NS4 (And the version 3 of both) is that neither fully supports all websites and I must have both installed to surf everwhere I want to go. This is mostly MS's fault IMHO, MS created Jscript which attempts to be Javascript but causes apps like the NetObjects Fusion BBS to break without some special coding. They also come out with their own version of every standard (Can we say ActiveX?) causing great pain and suffering for netusers all around the world.
Above and beyond the browser war, lets take a look at what MS has done for WYSIWYG HTML writing programs such as Frontpage and the crap exporters they've put into almost all the new products. Frontpage extensions just plain suck. We were running an NT server with IIS and put the Frontpage server extensions on it, wala *CRASH*. That was the point we nuked the NT Server and installed Linux with Apache and dropped support for the Frontpage extensions.
Hell, if MS can't make a product that works well with the world and wants to extend the standards into MSStandards we should all quit using their products.
The focus here is all wrong. The linux community is whole heartedly behind Linux and push it for all it's strengths. However it's biggest strength for the server environment is it's largest weakness in the desktop arena. The average computer user has a hard time groking that they have two mouse buttons that do two different things, they aren't ready to edit any config files, let alone dip into some source code and debug it...
Where linux shines, and shines well is the Server environment. The company I work for used to have 2 novell servers and 2 NT servers. We currently have one NT server left and it is slated to be nuked and Linuxed soon. We left NT due to it's high cost, poor reliability and poor performance.
Jesse is right in one aspect, Betting on Linux to kill MS is not going to happen, MS is doing that themselves, I think that Linux is simply going to step forth and shine like it can, right into the shoes NT was trying to fill (and failing as NT was).
I personally threw together a webserver box in a little less than an hour, I had no problems getting this done and only had to re-boot once, all these little factors show and the IT Proffessionals will (have) see (seen) this and Linux will prosper.
Zanthor
http://www.tibbs.net (Don't bother, it's empty, I still gotta put SOME content there...)
\
:)
From the point of criminalize unsolicited phone calls... They are criminalized in most states. You have the 3 strikes rule and if you can document that you requested to not be solicited again those three times you can have legal action initiated.
I don't mind someone calling once, or e-mailing once... if they do it a second time and it's accidental, I don't mind either... but I'm fraggin tired of being told I can quit my job and make 400K per day simply spamming people if I buy this magical CD of e-mail addresses... The e-mails have no way to remove yourself from the list, they have no real reply address, the headers are spoofed or sent from an account that was dropped (wisely) by their ISP in a matter of days (Hours?). The contact information is rarely accurate and the spam to the best of my knowledge does nothing but suck bandwidth that I could be using to whoop yer arse in Q2
\
one might as well criminalize unsolicited phone calls, unsolicited postal mail, unsolicited pages, as well as the communication of any other content that someone might not want to receive.
Ok, It's fine, it's dandy, it's not even seen the silicon yet.... this thing is 100% vapor, nothing more than a set of design goals really.
I'd like to see some hardware manufacturers quit talking about the far and wide and start talking about the here and now. Give us new high performance hardware that will be on the market soon, it is nice to see what's coming up, but c'mon, nice concept, lets see if it works when we build it... That just doesn't work for me.
MS isn't evil, they are a necessity of modern computing, they give us a very good example of what NOT to do.
Things of "old" computers that did matter: The Apple ][ actually got me started in this industry, then I got my Amiga and it STILL multitasks better than my Windoze PC (and it hasn't even got a hard drive!).
As for Evil and Good, that's all opinion, I think that M$ makes a cruddy OS and Linux is a nice solution, personally though BeOS looks better and is MUCH easier to install! Game support is starting to creap into the alternate OS Scene... that means soon I can NUKE the space that now occupies the BSOD Generator and get on with some REAL gaming!
Wow, Your right, I fragged that one...
*bows to superior knowledge*
Uh, oops?
This is the sorta coverage Linux needs... and we just keep getting more and more of it!
Zanthor - Tibbs