...And what good would breaking up MS do? What needs to happen is A) Laws allowing you to return bundled software for free for a refund with no hassle B) Enforcing open standards, and open source in government C) requiring that technology education for public high schools be platform independent D) Repeal the DMCA so DRM can be broken
If you take these sane steps, MS will wither, on the other hand breaking up MS is A) Anti-capitalism and B) Won't work to stop its monopoly, only create smaller ones.
What kind of games did you play? Every game has some sort of message. Final Fantasy games are notorious for pushing Eastern Mysticism.
Just because a game references something doesn't mean that it is pushing it. By the same equivalence a game where you are in a graveyard with crosses would be pushing Christianity.
Having played most Final Fantasy games I really haven't seen this "notorious" push towards eastern mysticism. Sure, there are mages, and other "mystic" classes, but its just the setting the world is in.
Take a look at some EU countries. They will ban video games just because they involve WWII.
I wouldn't use the EU as a model for any human rights, and certainly not freedom of speech. They make it illegal to believe certain things, to be part of certain political movements, and seem to be determined to watch your every move.
It's interesting. I didn't think I'd find it so blatant in WoW. However, some of the quests in that game appear to be the basic murder quests.
Well of course. When the best part of the game is the combat, they are naturally going to emphasize that the most. The point of WoW is not to make a moral or political statement, it is to be fun so people pay their monthly fees so Blizzard makes a nice profit.
Um, don't most ad-based companies only pay the site whenever a user clicks on an ad? Most of the time, unless its some really amazing ad (like buy a Core i7 Desktop for $330 from Newegg), most technical users know never to click on the ads. So its really a moot point if they aren't viewing them or not clicking on them.
Plus doesn't this effectively break some ad companies EULAs? Because I know a lot of them forbid you from enticing users to click the ads by saying "Please click the ads" or something.
The escalating violence in society is most definitely due to media, media in all forms, not just video games.
What escalating violence? According to the US Department of Justice "Since 1994, violent crime rates have declined, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in 2005." (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict.htm).
Sure, we get some really creative crazy people that shock us, but crime as a whole has been decreasing.
If nobody informs you that you can; kick people in the head; put glass in food at super markets that other people will eat; or bring your gun to school and shoot people at random, these phenomenon would be less common.
...Or will we just be more shocked? People have wanted to hurt other people since the dawn of time. Just because we have gotten more vigilant and as weapons are no longer needed on a day to day basis to get food or defend us from wild animals and other hazards, people have to resort to different means to killing someone.
I would like some message telling people that doing things depicted in media is wrong - really wrong. Media assumes people know its wrong, most adults know it's wrong, but it's very rarely articulated so that the children and Aspberger types get it.
Many kids roaming the streets are educated by media, thinking that doing the wrong thing is the right thing.
"I don't like you - headshot"
Truly sad.
And we all know there were no murders before the evils of cable news and video games? Stuff like this has been happening for ages. Part of it is the lack of knowledge of guns, a generation or two ago, everyone had shot a gun, seen what it did to animals, etc. They were taught from an early age that a gun is not a toy, today though with hunting and stricter gun control laws, kids don't really know anything about them so they don't really know how to handle them.
The are many smart phones out there, and the iPhone doesn't even have the largest fraction of that market -according to NPD, RIM is by far the dominant player in the US, with three of the top five best-selling smart phone devices.
Sure, but RIM has a lot of phones, on almost every network in the country. On the other hand Apple has one (two if you count the iPhone and iPhone 3G as different phones) phone that works officially on one network, who ties it in with an expensive plan. I would say thats pretty impressive.
Some forms of Xubuntu work great for that, just whatever you do with customized distros Do not update them unless you know what you are doing . Xandros just... sucks. It feels like a crippled version of Ubuntu when I ran it on my EEE 701 (I wiped it and put in eeeXubuntu and after some tweaking worked fine), was actually slower feeling then Xubuntu was (which is odd, because IceWM should be a ton lighter than XFCE), and had little software choice.
But if you aren't much of a Linux person yet and don't want to spend an hour or two configuring, make sure to get one for your specific machine, I tried installing eeeXubuntu onto a friends 901 and it worked great.... Save for the lack of sound (we eventually put Debian on it and did all the driver and stuff manually), but to avoid hassle make sure it is built for your netbook. And above all, do not update unless you want to reboot to find you have no Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and your sound is funky.
Why is there no major Linux vendor, anyways? Aside from repackaging Windows machines with Linux? Why can't somebody do for Linux what Apple does for OSX?
Because most Linux users are geeks, and us geeks enjoy customization. For example, even though I might enjoy using Ubuntu, a KDE user might be appalled that KDE (and all the KDE applications) aren't installed by default. Gentoo users would find it wasn't fast enough, Fedora users would complain at the lack of Yum and it being Debian based, people who use lighter WMs would find GNOME too bulky, users of paid distros wouldn't like the hand installing of certain patented codecs, etc.
Basically, its impossible to find a distro or tactic that works for everyone. For example, I have an EEE PC that had Xandros installed, it seemed like a crippled version of Debian, so I just installed Xubuntu with a custom kernel which I could have done if it came with Windows.
Apple has basically said no to customization throughout their existence, so Apple users aren't used to customization, they like it one consistent way and will stick with it till the day they die. Windows, while it has a lot of GUI customization available via themes, there isn't really a supported way of customizing Windows the way you can Linux. It doesn't take too much work to make a distro of Linux that can fit in 10 MB and have a functional server, userland, etc. Within 50 MB you can have a full desktop distro. When you take Windows to fit in that size you remove some needed parts of the OS.
Re:They've finally perfected male birth control.
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But then if this ever becomes widespread, they would be useless for anyone doing anything illegal. Because it is technically a gift, you can do all sorts of fun with it, false coordinateness, etc.
In fact, I think a netbook in that form factor (flat, screen and keyboard open, AA battery powered) would still be nice.
I agree, but I think there will be more people complaining then not. For example while I prefer things to be powered with batteries that aren't rechargeable (because when I'm traveling, its trivial to buy a pack of AA batteries, while hard to be near a power source for any extended length of time that is the correct voltage) but a lot of people will look at that as a flaw. There isn't going to be a way to make the screen really... work, unless you have it be more like E-ink, glare is just too much of an issue, just look at the Nintendo Game Boy. Then there is the keyboard issue. Its going to be hard to make a lasting keyboard that is A) Cheap B) Doesn't get junk in between the keys and C) Has room for a trackpad. I can see this being a great product, but I can't see it being popular with the masses like the Tandy 100 was.
Vista. It cost MS its reputation. Before then, MS, in the non-tech world was considered pretty decent. Sure, XP was as insecure as heck, froze up randomly, etc. But it was decent enough. Then came Vista. By being totally committed to proprietary designs, MS managed to release a train wreck which cost them customers, their reputation, and many man-hours on the redoing of Vista.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. They took an open source foundation (BSD), added a nice GUI, some compatibility, and they got a pretty decent OS once they worked out a few issues. All this for a much lower cost then developing a new beginning for Mac OS 9 totally in-house.
Because laptops are almost impossible to really build yourself. Sure, you can upgrade RAM, HDs, and even PCI cards, but for everything else you are stuck at pre-bought systems, unless you are a really gifted hardware hacker.
I bought a new Alienware system a few years back (right after Dell purchased them), and it was honestly one of the worst laptops I have ever purchased. The specs were decent for the time (1.5 Ghz Intel M CPU, 512 MB of RAM, good enough graphics, etc), it looked nice, and even the price was not much more than a comparable system from HP or another vendor. But thats where all the nice things ended. So first was the power cord managed to get frayed from about six months of medium usage, so I ordered another one, tech support was actually decent and they sent me one for only about $20 or so. About six months later the motherboard dies, thankfully it was under warranty and they repaired it no questions asked (save for the guy who couldn't speak English who kept on trying to convince me that it was really my power cord when it wasn't). About six months after that, the power cord became unusable again, due to fraying (I don't know what was with early 2000s laptop power cords, but neither my Alienware nor Gateway laptops' power cords ever lasted long) they informed me that even though my machine was under warranty, they discontinued support for my model so they sent me to a third party retailer. Upon buying the cord that they told me to, I plugged it in and it worked decently for about a month. Then the plastic tip started burning. About that time I decided to change laptops and laptop vendors.
Go ask one of your friends that knows nothing about computers except how to turn them on what browser they use, and I bet they'll say IE.
Tried it before. Either they say "I use the Internet" (meaning IE), "What is a browser?", "I use Windows", or some other thing that halfway makes sense but really doesn't. Sure, after a while you can get them to say that they use Internet Explorer, but for the most part they have no clue what a browser really is.
Why do we allow software to get away with such a cowboy attitude when we're more rigorous about other important infrastructure?
Because they were built by humans for known variables. When I write a piece of software, say, in Python, I know it will work on my version of Python, however, the build of Python two weeks from now, or two weeks previously may not run it at all. If its a low level program, I can't be 100% sure that the next version of the kernel will be able to run it.
There are so many variables that it is impossible to test them all. Add that in with patches that need to be hurriedly released to patch certain vulnerabilities, etc. And you have a working program that might not work on hardware/softwarwe different then the type you have.
Or, why are we so up-tight about doctors and civil engineers when they should have the same laissez-faire setup as software engineers?
Because in most cases a program not working, especially a free one, isn't a life or death situation. If the next Halo game doesn't like your graphics card, its not the end of the world. (Granted, with some medical software or robotics it might be, but those are very, very, very, controlled on the hardware that they run).
Doctors are human, they can reason. Medicine has been around a lot longer than programming has. Theres a lot more ways for doctors to collaborate that programs are unable to. If a doctor can't tell what a certain spot is on an X-ray, there are half a dozen other doctors that might be able to. Doctors usually work as a team.
Civil engineers work with known variables. Its easy to know what kind of cars are going to be passing over the bridge in the next 20 years. Easy to know general weather trends. And all this is based on physics which has been observed for centuries longer then computers have.
Sure, but just look at the iPhone, if Jobs didn't want customers tied into a single phone company they wouldn't have made it be exclusive to one company per country.
And the excuse of, well the others wouldn't give Apple enough freedom... Is total crap. If Apple came up with the specs for visual voicemail, published them, went first to the company that would provide it first, made a hit like the iPhone, I can guarantee you that a year or so later every single company would have implemented visual voicemail and had the iPhone, and the iPhone would have dominated.
The average American though has no clue what a browser is. Google can spend some money advertising because Google is loaded. On the other hand, the Firefox project is community driven and really can't spend the resources advertising on TV.
The problem mostly lies with the way that a lot of companies (more than likely Apple included) would sell them. For example, you would get the laptop for cheap, say $500, but then you would be tied in a 2 year contract with AT&T (or some other cell provider) to get "unlimited" data that really isn't unlimited, costs you a fortune, and theres no other way to buy the laptop.
Its been happening to cell phones for ages now, and starting to happen with netbooks.
Yeah, it would be awesome if roads were also private. Then we could pay 100 tolls on our way to work. That would be so much better than the government holding their gun to our head to make us pay for their stupid roads.
Sure, but we would have more benefits.
A) More redundant roads, too much construction on one road? Take a different one.
B) Better speed limits. We all know the roads that have too low of speed limits, where you can safely go 20 over and be in full control, yet they still won't raise the speed limit. Similarly, there are other roads that you have to go much slower in order to avoid running off the road. Private roads could do that.
C) Better maintenance of roads, what if roads competed on the least amount of potholes? Or the safest road, or the fastest road? That could give you a better drive.
If Amtrak was private, fares would have to be much higher, people wouldn't take the train, and the whole network would collapse. There goes another non-car option. But hey, poor people can sit their poor asses at home right?
What are you talking about? More than likely fares would be lower to get more people on the trains. Governments have a tendency to overpay, both in retirement and actual wages. Privatizing it would be much more efficient.
Just look at Japan's railway growth since the late '80s whenever Japan privatized their railways. I'd much rather take a ride on a Shinkansen than an Amtrak train any day
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...And what good would breaking up MS do? What needs to happen is A) Laws allowing you to return bundled software for free for a refund with no hassle B) Enforcing open standards, and open source in government C) requiring that technology education for public high schools be platform independent D) Repeal the DMCA so DRM can be broken
If you take these sane steps, MS will wither, on the other hand breaking up MS is A) Anti-capitalism and B) Won't work to stop its monopoly, only create smaller ones.
The problem wasn't that he was fired, it was that he was charged with a hacking felony for something that wasn't related to hacking.
What kind of games did you play? Every game has some sort of message. Final Fantasy games are notorious for pushing Eastern Mysticism.
Just because a game references something doesn't mean that it is pushing it. By the same equivalence a game where you are in a graveyard with crosses would be pushing Christianity.
Having played most Final Fantasy games I really haven't seen this "notorious" push towards eastern mysticism. Sure, there are mages, and other "mystic" classes, but its just the setting the world is in.
Take a look at some EU countries. They will ban video games just because they involve WWII.
I wouldn't use the EU as a model for any human rights, and certainly not freedom of speech. They make it illegal to believe certain things, to be part of certain political movements, and seem to be determined to watch your every move.
I read the headline as "Adult Website Use at Work Leads to Hacker Convention "
It's interesting. I didn't think I'd find it so blatant in WoW. However, some of the quests in that game appear to be the basic murder quests.
Well of course. When the best part of the game is the combat, they are naturally going to emphasize that the most. The point of WoW is not to make a moral or political statement, it is to be fun so people pay their monthly fees so Blizzard makes a nice profit.
Um, don't most ad-based companies only pay the site whenever a user clicks on an ad? Most of the time, unless its some really amazing ad (like buy a Core i7 Desktop for $330 from Newegg), most technical users know never to click on the ads. So its really a moot point if they aren't viewing them or not clicking on them.
Plus doesn't this effectively break some ad companies EULAs? Because I know a lot of them forbid you from enticing users to click the ads by saying "Please click the ads" or something.
The escalating violence in society is most definitely due to media, media in all forms, not just video games.
What escalating violence? According to the US Department of Justice "Since 1994, violent crime rates have declined, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in 2005." (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict.htm).
Sure, we get some really creative crazy people that shock us, but crime as a whole has been decreasing.
If nobody informs you that you can; kick people in the head; put glass in food at super markets that other people will eat; or bring your gun to school and shoot people at random, these phenomenon would be less common.
I would like some message telling people that doing things depicted in media is wrong - really wrong. Media assumes people know its wrong, most adults know it's wrong, but it's very rarely articulated so that the children and Aspberger types get it. Many kids roaming the streets are educated by media, thinking that doing the wrong thing is the right thing. "I don't like you - headshot" Truly sad.
And we all know there were no murders before the evils of cable news and video games? Stuff like this has been happening for ages. Part of it is the lack of knowledge of guns, a generation or two ago, everyone had shot a gun, seen what it did to animals, etc. They were taught from an early age that a gun is not a toy, today though with hunting and stricter gun control laws, kids don't really know anything about them so they don't really know how to handle them.
The are many smart phones out there, and the iPhone doesn't even have the largest fraction of that market -according to NPD, RIM is by far the dominant player in the US, with three of the top five best-selling smart phone devices.
Sure, but RIM has a lot of phones, on almost every network in the country. On the other hand Apple has one (two if you count the iPhone and iPhone 3G as different phones) phone that works officially on one network, who ties it in with an expensive plan. I would say thats pretty impressive.
Damn Small Linux (http://damnsmalllinux.org/) fits an entire desktop distro within 50 MB. Including browsers, games, a server, media player, etc.
Some forms of Xubuntu work great for that, just whatever you do with customized distros Do not update them unless you know what you are doing . Xandros just... sucks. It feels like a crippled version of Ubuntu when I ran it on my EEE 701 (I wiped it and put in eeeXubuntu and after some tweaking worked fine), was actually slower feeling then Xubuntu was (which is odd, because IceWM should be a ton lighter than XFCE), and had little software choice.
But if you aren't much of a Linux person yet and don't want to spend an hour or two configuring, make sure to get one for your specific machine, I tried installing eeeXubuntu onto a friends 901 and it worked great.... Save for the lack of sound (we eventually put Debian on it and did all the driver and stuff manually), but to avoid hassle make sure it is built for your netbook. And above all, do not update unless you want to reboot to find you have no Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and your sound is funky.
Why is there no major Linux vendor, anyways? Aside from repackaging Windows machines with Linux? Why can't somebody do for Linux what Apple does for OSX?
Because most Linux users are geeks, and us geeks enjoy customization. For example, even though I might enjoy using Ubuntu, a KDE user might be appalled that KDE (and all the KDE applications) aren't installed by default. Gentoo users would find it wasn't fast enough, Fedora users would complain at the lack of Yum and it being Debian based, people who use lighter WMs would find GNOME too bulky, users of paid distros wouldn't like the hand installing of certain patented codecs, etc.
Basically, its impossible to find a distro or tactic that works for everyone. For example, I have an EEE PC that had Xandros installed, it seemed like a crippled version of Debian, so I just installed Xubuntu with a custom kernel which I could have done if it came with Windows.
Apple has basically said no to customization throughout their existence, so Apple users aren't used to customization, they like it one consistent way and will stick with it till the day they die. Windows, while it has a lot of GUI customization available via themes, there isn't really a supported way of customizing Windows the way you can Linux. It doesn't take too much work to make a distro of Linux that can fit in 10 MB and have a functional server, userland, etc. Within 50 MB you can have a full desktop distro. When you take Windows to fit in that size you remove some needed parts of the OS.
I don't think this is a problem for most /.ers
But then if this ever becomes widespread, they would be useless for anyone doing anything illegal. Because it is technically a gift, you can do all sorts of fun with it, false coordinateness, etc.
In fact, I think a netbook in that form factor (flat, screen and keyboard open, AA battery powered) would still be nice.
I agree, but I think there will be more people complaining then not. For example while I prefer things to be powered with batteries that aren't rechargeable (because when I'm traveling, its trivial to buy a pack of AA batteries, while hard to be near a power source for any extended length of time that is the correct voltage) but a lot of people will look at that as a flaw. There isn't going to be a way to make the screen really... work, unless you have it be more like E-ink, glare is just too much of an issue, just look at the Nintendo Game Boy. Then there is the keyboard issue. Its going to be hard to make a lasting keyboard that is A) Cheap B) Doesn't get junk in between the keys and C) Has room for a trackpad. I can see this being a great product, but I can't see it being popular with the masses like the Tandy 100 was.
Yes, but did it cost Microsoft any *money*?
Vista. It cost MS its reputation. Before then, MS, in the non-tech world was considered pretty decent. Sure, XP was as insecure as heck, froze up randomly, etc. But it was decent enough. Then came Vista. By being totally committed to proprietary designs, MS managed to release a train wreck which cost them customers, their reputation, and many man-hours on the redoing of Vista.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. They took an open source foundation (BSD), added a nice GUI, some compatibility, and they got a pretty decent OS once they worked out a few issues. All this for a much lower cost then developing a new beginning for Mac OS 9 totally in-house.
...That sleep mode is the slowest sleep mode I have ever seen boot up....
Because laptops are almost impossible to really build yourself. Sure, you can upgrade RAM, HDs, and even PCI cards, but for everything else you are stuck at pre-bought systems, unless you are a really gifted hardware hacker.
I bought a new Alienware system a few years back (right after Dell purchased them), and it was honestly one of the worst laptops I have ever purchased. The specs were decent for the time (1.5 Ghz Intel M CPU, 512 MB of RAM, good enough graphics, etc), it looked nice, and even the price was not much more than a comparable system from HP or another vendor. But thats where all the nice things ended. So first was the power cord managed to get frayed from about six months of medium usage, so I ordered another one, tech support was actually decent and they sent me one for only about $20 or so. About six months later the motherboard dies, thankfully it was under warranty and they repaired it no questions asked (save for the guy who couldn't speak English who kept on trying to convince me that it was really my power cord when it wasn't). About six months after that, the power cord became unusable again, due to fraying (I don't know what was with early 2000s laptop power cords, but neither my Alienware nor Gateway laptops' power cords ever lasted long) they informed me that even though my machine was under warranty, they discontinued support for my model so they sent me to a third party retailer. Upon buying the cord that they told me to, I plugged it in and it worked decently for about a month. Then the plastic tip started burning. About that time I decided to change laptops and laptop vendors.
Go ask one of your friends that knows nothing about computers except how to turn them on what browser they use, and I bet they'll say IE.
Tried it before. Either they say "I use the Internet" (meaning IE), "What is a browser?", "I use Windows", or some other thing that halfway makes sense but really doesn't. Sure, after a while you can get them to say that they use Internet Explorer, but for the most part they have no clue what a browser really is.
Why do we allow software to get away with such a cowboy attitude when we're more rigorous about other important infrastructure?
Because they were built by humans for known variables. When I write a piece of software, say, in Python, I know it will work on my version of Python, however, the build of Python two weeks from now, or two weeks previously may not run it at all. If its a low level program, I can't be 100% sure that the next version of the kernel will be able to run it.
There are so many variables that it is impossible to test them all. Add that in with patches that need to be hurriedly released to patch certain vulnerabilities, etc. And you have a working program that might not work on hardware/softwarwe different then the type you have.
Or, why are we so up-tight about doctors and civil engineers when they should have the same laissez-faire setup as software engineers?
Because in most cases a program not working, especially a free one, isn't a life or death situation. If the next Halo game doesn't like your graphics card, its not the end of the world. (Granted, with some medical software or robotics it might be, but those are very, very, very, controlled on the hardware that they run).
Doctors are human, they can reason. Medicine has been around a lot longer than programming has. Theres a lot more ways for doctors to collaborate that programs are unable to. If a doctor can't tell what a certain spot is on an X-ray, there are half a dozen other doctors that might be able to. Doctors usually work as a team.
Civil engineers work with known variables. Its easy to know what kind of cars are going to be passing over the bridge in the next 20 years. Easy to know general weather trends. And all this is based on physics which has been observed for centuries longer then computers have.
Sure, but just look at the iPhone, if Jobs didn't want customers tied into a single phone company they wouldn't have made it be exclusive to one company per country.
And the excuse of, well the others wouldn't give Apple enough freedom... Is total crap. If Apple came up with the specs for visual voicemail, published them, went first to the company that would provide it first, made a hit like the iPhone, I can guarantee you that a year or so later every single company would have implemented visual voicemail and had the iPhone, and the iPhone would have dominated.
The average American though has no clue what a browser is. Google can spend some money advertising because Google is loaded. On the other hand, the Firefox project is community driven and really can't spend the resources advertising on TV.
The problem mostly lies with the way that a lot of companies (more than likely Apple included) would sell them. For example, you would get the laptop for cheap, say $500, but then you would be tied in a 2 year contract with AT&T (or some other cell provider) to get "unlimited" data that really isn't unlimited, costs you a fortune, and theres no other way to buy the laptop.
Its been happening to cell phones for ages now, and starting to happen with netbooks.
Yeah, it would be awesome if roads were also private. Then we could pay 100 tolls on our way to work. That would be so much better than the government holding their gun to our head to make us pay for their stupid roads.
Sure, but we would have more benefits.
A) More redundant roads, too much construction on one road? Take a different one.
B) Better speed limits. We all know the roads that have too low of speed limits, where you can safely go 20 over and be in full control, yet they still won't raise the speed limit. Similarly, there are other roads that you have to go much slower in order to avoid running off the road. Private roads could do that.
C) Better maintenance of roads, what if roads competed on the least amount of potholes? Or the safest road, or the fastest road? That could give you a better drive.
If Amtrak was private, fares would have to be much higher, people wouldn't take the train, and the whole network would collapse. There goes another non-car option. But hey, poor people can sit their poor asses at home right?
What are you talking about? More than likely fares would be lower to get more people on the trains. Governments have a tendency to overpay, both in retirement and actual wages. Privatizing it would be much more efficient.
Just look at Japan's railway growth since the late '80s whenever Japan privatized their railways. I'd much rather take a ride on a Shinkansen than an Amtrak train any day