I also would be much more willing to buy Windows at $100. I want to agree with you. I really do.
BUT, there's always going to be a group of people who will take advantage and try to get it for free. Microsoft no doubt knows that they're just flushing the money and losing the arms race, but I'm sure they see no other option. Their honest customers are stuck paying full price and most of the rest will never pay anyway.
Actually, I've seen it quite a bit. Usually what happens is a non-techy person will ask the neighbor kid to fix their computer. The neighbor kid puts on a pirated version because of laziness, anti-MS feelings, lack of a product key, etc. The non-techy person doesn't know the difference and never does manual updates, so they don't find out until WGA tells them.
That's not really looking at the big picture though... Public Transportation over most of Europe is equally as excellent as here in Germany (not QUITE in some places, but still far better than other parts of the world I've lived in). Taking in Europe as a whole, the size of the place isn't nearly as much of an argument anymore - if the US states ran public transportation like European countries do, it'd work much better.
How do you figure that size isn't an argument? Europe has well more than twice the population of the USA in roughly the same land area.
Europe: 731,000,000 people in 10,180,000 sq. km (71.8 people per sq. km) USA: 306,374,000 people in 9,826,630 sq. km (31.2 people per sq. km)
Adjust for the 'clumping' factor and the cost/viability of your system tanks. Adding up the population of the 10 largest US cities, I only get 25 million people. Add in maybe another 15 million for smaller cities, and you've still got over 265 million people who live in an area not well served by any commonly used type of mass transit system.
My home town, which was actually several small towns next to each other, was a 15 minute drive from the nearest reasonable 'city,' with adequate stores for shopping, etc. We had a grocery store and a few small shops, but that was it. It was a 40 minute drive to anything I'd really consider a city (Albany, NY). Industry was mostly located around Albany, but was spread out among all of the smaller towns which surrounded it. The most sensible system I've come up with, cost-wise, would be roughly centralized station-to-station buses between towns. So, I'd have to take a minimum 40 minute bus ride from my home town to Albany, another bus to the appropriate town there (15 minutes), then another bus to my final destination (10 minutes). Assuming perfect timing all around (yeah, right) and a 5ish minute wait for each. You're looking at a 1.5 hour trip to work. Worse, it would only take a handful of buses to accommodate the commuters from my hometown, which means they can't run those buses all day. So we're left with a minimum 1.5 hour commute and a bunch of workers who can only move during designated 'commute' hours.
So really, it certainly would be desirable to have good mass transit in the US, and there might be a feasible way to do it, but nobody's figured it out yet (outside of major urban centers).
People seemed to come in clumps making public transportation easier.
I'll definitely grant you that. Something I can never quite fathom when I visit the US is how hard it is to really be "in the middle of nowhere" (which, by my definition, means no people around).
Not to sound like I'm blindly contradicting everything you've said, but...
It's certainly possible to be away from people in the USA. If you had trouble, then you weren't in the right places. Probably your issue there is that 'middle of nowhere' in Germany is much, much closer (geographically) to 'city' than in the USA. We tend to have much more of a gray area in between.
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
True, commercial nuclear engineers in the USA are more uncommon than they were, but they do exist. Not to mention there are tons of very competent navy-trained engineers and operators that will need work when their time in the service is up. On top of THAT, it's not much of a leap to turn a trained engineer (ie. mechanical, etc) into a nuclear engineer. The principles aren't all that difficult and any good, experienced engineer is used to learning/adapting like that. Even with all of that aside, how'd we do it the first time? The difference now is that the technology is already there. We don't have to build it from scratch this time, just fill in a couple of gaps.
You may be right about your 50 years, but it's the bureaucratic/environmental wacko BS that will hold things up, not the technical stuff.
If the recent stories about caps are all true, Time Warner wants to punish all its customers equally. Hopefully they're learning from that backlash, but it's more likely they're just going to come up with a quieter way to cut costs.
Now, I'm not saying TWC is the devil, but I have seen their service visibly decline as people transitioned from dialup. Years ago, I was very happy with my Time Warner service. I thought it was overpriced, but the service itself was good. That was back when they were still only offering 2 Mbps. The service stayed good through their 'free' upgrade to 5 Mbps, right up until 10 Mbps (their current standard offering). It's not terrible now, but pings have suffered a good bit and it's inconsistent. I don't live in a heavily populated area. It shouldn't be so oversold that the service degrades as much as it does.
Someone with your intelligence (assuming you're honest about that, which I am) should be able to manipulate the social situation so that everyone likes them, and go off and do your own extended study in your spare time just for yourself.
While I agree that school is at least partly about learning to deal with social situations, I don't think it's as black and white as you're making it. While it's the socially accepted thing to try to get everyone to like you, it's not necessary and can be counterproductive.
It's nice to get along with people, but think about how slowly things progress when people don't disagree with each other. Disagreements are what help society advance. For example, when a company has a monopoly on something, they tend not to introduce new products or change things very quickly, but they'll respond instantly when an innovative competitor comes along.
Certainly, it's not necessary to make a scene (which could be worse), but one shouldn't roll over and agree simply because it will make them unpopular.
He probably could have shown SOMETHING about how he solved the problem, but doing it their way just because of the social factor is counterproductive. It will slow down his progress by making him learn an alternative method (assuming his was technically valid) and will serve no purpose but to appease a teacher/administration that apparently can't adjust to a student's (different, but potentially superior) abilities (remember what I said about competition?).
I don't know about everyone else, but there's a decent chance I'd stop using AIM if the two merged. I can't stand MSN/Windows Messenger. I use Pidgin anyway, but if I had to jump through any hoops at all during the transition, I'd just give up altogether.
Agreed, though I have heard of cases where people were able to get more performance for their money with two budget cards and SLI than with high-end cards. It all depends on the deal you get when you're shopping.
I don't really do any coding these days, but when I did, it was much more about my state of mind and lack of distractions. Specifically where I was didn't matter as much.
Basically: Quiet, no people, no excessive noise. I had to be well fed so I'm not hungry and thinking about food. And if you want really GOOD code, I need to not have 50 other problems to worry about. Once those are met, it doesn't matter if I'm in my office, on the couch, or wherever.
Of course, I draw the line at bed. That's reserved for things much more fun than coding.
I realise the Wii is still highly defended on slashdot, since we like to defy the norm here but having been an owner of a 360, PS3 and a Wii in the past 12 months, I can assure you that if you're a 'traditional' gamer rather than a party or social gamer, that little white box is a nasty, overhyped little fad and I look forward to it going where it belongs and what it's being sold as.
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
Maybe you don't like it, but it's hardly as black and white as you try to make it sound. A lot of people enjoy it, and not just grandma. I can definitely be included in the 'traditional gamer' category and my Wii gets plenty of use. There's more of a market than you give it credit for.
I would say it's not so much about size as it is about access. US Americans can't easily travel to other countries. That means your average Joe off the street has no need for a foreign language in his daily life and his exposure to foreign cultures will be extremely limited. It's unfortunate, but there's not much that can be done about it.
That said, the US has developed distinct cultures within its borders that are likely not obvious to the rest of the world. Though they all speak (more or less) the same language, their values and priorities can be as different as any two countries in Europe or Asia.
Whether you buy what I said or not, I would hardly call it suffering. It's just different from what you know.
It's much more feasible for them to run cable in Japan because of the population density. They get a lot more people out of those 1000 ft of cable than most of the US. Only our biggest cities can come close to that value, and most people in the US don't live in them. All that open space means a lot of digging to get people connected, even in relatively dense suburbs.
The problem with that, though, is that not everyone has the ability to be a professional, be it tennis, chess, or videogames. Think of all the college athletes who were the star in high school, did well in college, then fell into a job selling cars or whatever. As Vintermann said, there are only so many slots open for professional players. It's fine to practice and be good at things, but not to the detriment of other aspects of your life.
Also, keep in mind that games are much more accessible than the others. If I pick up any relatively modern/popular game, I can play all hours of the day or night without any real difficulty. It'd be much harder to find a challenging opponent to play tennis or chess with for that many hours a day. In that way, those are self-regulating.
Certainly, there are more female gamers now than before, but keep in mind that it will vary depending on the type of game. This is purely what I've seen and is not to be taken as fact, but I generally see a smaller percentage of female players in the games I play (one's an old FPS, and the others are strategy games).
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but I think we should take into account variations between game genres.
I really wish I had mod points for you. I think this hits the nail on the head. I used to use games to hide from my problems, so I do have an idea what it's like. Now that I have my life together, it's not such an issue.
Everyone I've known who's had an addiction had some sort of stress that led them to it. We need to address those original problems first, then deal with the games. Though, I suspect a good number of those people will work it out naturally with the outside stress under control.
I don't know for sure if it's correct, but others have pointed out that ISPs pay for their bandwidth by the total amount downloaded, not the speed. Their other costs would be fixed, so it does make some sense from the ISP's side to set a cap.
Or you could have a set cap with a high speed. When you hit your cap, they limit your speed to some minimal number for email and web browsing. I've heard of that system before, I believe in Australia and/or New Zealand.
Of course, I'd rather they upgrade their network, but there are other options...
This might just be my paranoid/pessimistic side talking, but I don't think I'd be surprised if they did all this to get the public worked up. When they do finally implement the caps, they can give us lower prices/higher rates than what they just showed us and still pocket a nice chunk of change.
A good chunk of the outcry (at least what I've read) is more about how much they're charging per gigabyte, not just that they want to cap.
I couldn't find the article with a quick search, but Time Warner is expensive compared to their competitors (ie. ~$5-6 per gigabyte for the lower-tier plans). In places where there's no competition, that's not very good.
I'm wasting energy by responding to trolls, but...
Just because you can't easily quantify something doesn't mean you should just ignore it. You can't honestly be trying to say that spam doesn't waste energy. When up to 94% of email is spam and entire companies are kept running just trying to block it, I'd say that's significant.
While I agree that it's probably a self-serving study with questionable numbers, they're not wrong in saying that spam wastes energy. Think about the billions of spam emails flying around. Each computer wastes a little bit of power sending and receiving each message.
Maybe the problem isn't as big as they say, but I would not be at all surprised if spam has a significant impact on the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I also would be much more willing to buy Windows at $100. I want to agree with you. I really do.
BUT, there's always going to be a group of people who will take advantage and try to get it for free. Microsoft no doubt knows that they're just flushing the money and losing the arms race, but I'm sure they see no other option. Their honest customers are stuck paying full price and most of the rest will never pay anyway.
It sucks all the way around.
Actually, I've seen it quite a bit. Usually what happens is a non-techy person will ask the neighbor kid to fix their computer. The neighbor kid puts on a pirated version because of laziness, anti-MS feelings, lack of a product key, etc. The non-techy person doesn't know the difference and never does manual updates, so they don't find out until WGA tells them.
That's not really looking at the big picture though... Public Transportation over most of Europe is equally as excellent as here in Germany (not QUITE in some places, but still far better than other parts of the world I've lived in). Taking in Europe as a whole, the size of the place isn't nearly as much of an argument anymore - if the US states ran public transportation like European countries do, it'd work much better.
How do you figure that size isn't an argument? Europe has well more than twice the population of the USA in roughly the same land area.
Europe: 731,000,000 people in 10,180,000 sq. km (71.8 people per sq. km)
USA: 306,374,000 people in 9,826,630 sq. km (31.2 people per sq. km)
Adjust for the 'clumping' factor and the cost/viability of your system tanks. Adding up the population of the 10 largest US cities, I only get 25 million people. Add in maybe another 15 million for smaller cities, and you've still got over 265 million people who live in an area not well served by any commonly used type of mass transit system.
My home town, which was actually several small towns next to each other, was a 15 minute drive from the nearest reasonable 'city,' with adequate stores for shopping, etc. We had a grocery store and a few small shops, but that was it. It was a 40 minute drive to anything I'd really consider a city (Albany, NY). Industry was mostly located around Albany, but was spread out among all of the smaller towns which surrounded it. The most sensible system I've come up with, cost-wise, would be roughly centralized station-to-station buses between towns. So, I'd have to take a minimum 40 minute bus ride from my home town to Albany, another bus to the appropriate town there (15 minutes), then another bus to my final destination (10 minutes). Assuming perfect timing all around (yeah, right) and a 5ish minute wait for each. You're looking at a 1.5 hour trip to work. Worse, it would only take a handful of buses to accommodate the commuters from my hometown, which means they can't run those buses all day. So we're left with a minimum 1.5 hour commute and a bunch of workers who can only move during designated 'commute' hours.
So really, it certainly would be desirable to have good mass transit in the US, and there might be a feasible way to do it, but nobody's figured it out yet (outside of major urban centers).
People seemed to come in clumps making public transportation easier.
I'll definitely grant you that. Something I can never quite fathom when I visit the US is how hard it is to really be "in the middle of nowhere" (which, by my definition, means no people around).
Not to sound like I'm blindly contradicting everything you've said, but...
It's certainly possible to be away from people in the USA. If you had trouble, then you weren't in the right places. Probably your issue there is that 'middle of nowhere' in Germany is much, much closer (geographically) to 'city' than in the USA. We tend to have much more of a gray area in between.
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
True, commercial nuclear engineers in the USA are more uncommon than they were, but they do exist. Not to mention there are tons of very competent navy-trained engineers and operators that will need work when their time in the service is up. On top of THAT, it's not much of a leap to turn a trained engineer (ie. mechanical, etc) into a nuclear engineer. The principles aren't all that difficult and any good, experienced engineer is used to learning/adapting like that. Even with all of that aside, how'd we do it the first time? The difference now is that the technology is already there. We don't have to build it from scratch this time, just fill in a couple of gaps.
You may be right about your 50 years, but it's the bureaucratic/environmental wacko BS that will hold things up, not the technical stuff.
If the recent stories about caps are all true, Time Warner wants to punish all its customers equally. Hopefully they're learning from that backlash, but it's more likely they're just going to come up with a quieter way to cut costs.
Now, I'm not saying TWC is the devil, but I have seen their service visibly decline as people transitioned from dialup. Years ago, I was very happy with my Time Warner service. I thought it was overpriced, but the service itself was good. That was back when they were still only offering 2 Mbps. The service stayed good through their 'free' upgrade to 5 Mbps, right up until 10 Mbps (their current standard offering). It's not terrible now, but pings have suffered a good bit and it's inconsistent. I don't live in a heavily populated area. It shouldn't be so oversold that the service degrades as much as it does.
Someone with your intelligence (assuming you're honest about that, which I am) should be able to manipulate the social situation so that everyone likes them, and go off and do your own extended study in your spare time just for yourself.
While I agree that school is at least partly about learning to deal with social situations, I don't think it's as black and white as you're making it. While it's the socially accepted thing to try to get everyone to like you, it's not necessary and can be counterproductive.
It's nice to get along with people, but think about how slowly things progress when people don't disagree with each other. Disagreements are what help society advance. For example, when a company has a monopoly on something, they tend not to introduce new products or change things very quickly, but they'll respond instantly when an innovative competitor comes along.
Certainly, it's not necessary to make a scene (which could be worse), but one shouldn't roll over and agree simply because it will make them unpopular.
He probably could have shown SOMETHING about how he solved the problem, but doing it their way just because of the social factor is counterproductive. It will slow down his progress by making him learn an alternative method (assuming his was technically valid) and will serve no purpose but to appease a teacher/administration that apparently can't adjust to a student's (different, but potentially superior) abilities (remember what I said about competition?).
I don't know about everyone else, but there's a decent chance I'd stop using AIM if the two merged. I can't stand MSN/Windows Messenger. I use Pidgin anyway, but if I had to jump through any hoops at all during the transition, I'd just give up altogether.
Agreed, though I have heard of cases where people were able to get more performance for their money with two budget cards and SLI than with high-end cards. It all depends on the deal you get when you're shopping.
In my opinion, this is more due to the fact that few people make flight/space sims these days. There's just not much need for joysticks anymore.
I don't really do any coding these days, but when I did, it was much more about my state of mind and lack of distractions. Specifically where I was didn't matter as much.
Basically:
Quiet, no people, no excessive noise. I had to be well fed so I'm not hungry and thinking about food. And if you want really GOOD code, I need to not have 50 other problems to worry about. Once those are met, it doesn't matter if I'm in my office, on the couch, or wherever.
Of course, I draw the line at bed. That's reserved for things much more fun than coding.
HEV Suit >> Lab Coat
That's why I'm building one in my mom's basement. Now I'll finally be able to get girls.
they make up money on the games anyhow.
So you claim above that nobody but grandma and little Billy play it, but now you claim they're making money on games. Which is it?
I realise the Wii is still highly defended on slashdot, since we like to defy the norm here but having been an owner of a 360, PS3 and a Wii in the past 12 months, I can assure you that if you're a 'traditional' gamer rather than a party or social gamer, that little white box is a nasty, overhyped little fad and I look forward to it going where it belongs and what it's being sold as.
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
Maybe you don't like it, but it's hardly as black and white as you try to make it sound. A lot of people enjoy it, and not just grandma. I can definitely be included in the 'traditional gamer' category and my Wii gets plenty of use. There's more of a market than you give it credit for.
Not only that, but few people other than the 400 Linux users would have heard anything about the Microsoft-Linux stuff.
I would say it's not so much about size as it is about access. US Americans can't easily travel to other countries. That means your average Joe off the street has no need for a foreign language in his daily life and his exposure to foreign cultures will be extremely limited. It's unfortunate, but there's not much that can be done about it.
That said, the US has developed distinct cultures within its borders that are likely not obvious to the rest of the world. Though they all speak (more or less) the same language, their values and priorities can be as different as any two countries in Europe or Asia.
Whether you buy what I said or not, I would hardly call it suffering. It's just different from what you know.
It's much more feasible for them to run cable in Japan because of the population density. They get a lot more people out of those 1000 ft of cable than most of the US. Only our biggest cities can come close to that value, and most people in the US don't live in them. All that open space means a lot of digging to get people connected, even in relatively dense suburbs.
The problem with that, though, is that not everyone has the ability to be a professional, be it tennis, chess, or videogames. Think of all the college athletes who were the star in high school, did well in college, then fell into a job selling cars or whatever. As Vintermann said, there are only so many slots open for professional players. It's fine to practice and be good at things, but not to the detriment of other aspects of your life.
Also, keep in mind that games are much more accessible than the others. If I pick up any relatively modern/popular game, I can play all hours of the day or night without any real difficulty. It'd be much harder to find a challenging opponent to play tennis or chess with for that many hours a day. In that way, those are self-regulating.
Certainly, there are more female gamers now than before, but keep in mind that it will vary depending on the type of game. This is purely what I've seen and is not to be taken as fact, but I generally see a smaller percentage of female players in the games I play (one's an old FPS, and the others are strategy games).
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but I think we should take into account variations between game genres.
I really wish I had mod points for you. I think this hits the nail on the head. I used to use games to hide from my problems, so I do have an idea what it's like. Now that I have my life together, it's not such an issue.
Everyone I've known who's had an addiction had some sort of stress that led them to it. We need to address those original problems first, then deal with the games. Though, I suspect a good number of those people will work it out naturally with the outside stress under control.
I don't know for sure if it's correct, but others have pointed out that ISPs pay for their bandwidth by the total amount downloaded, not the speed. Their other costs would be fixed, so it does make some sense from the ISP's side to set a cap.
Or you could have a set cap with a high speed. When you hit your cap, they limit your speed to some minimal number for email and web browsing. I've heard of that system before, I believe in Australia and/or New Zealand.
Of course, I'd rather they upgrade their network, but there are other options...
This might just be my paranoid/pessimistic side talking, but I don't think I'd be surprised if they did all this to get the public worked up. When they do finally implement the caps, they can give us lower prices/higher rates than what they just showed us and still pocket a nice chunk of change.
Anyone dealt with a salesman before?
A good chunk of the outcry (at least what I've read) is more about how much they're charging per gigabyte, not just that they want to cap.
I couldn't find the article with a quick search, but Time Warner is expensive compared to their competitors (ie. ~$5-6 per gigabyte for the lower-tier plans). In places where there's no competition, that's not very good.
I'm wasting energy by responding to trolls, but...
Just because you can't easily quantify something doesn't mean you should just ignore it. You can't honestly be trying to say that spam doesn't waste energy. When up to 94% of email is spam and entire companies are kept running just trying to block it, I'd say that's significant.
While I agree that it's probably a self-serving study with questionable numbers, they're not wrong in saying that spam wastes energy. Think about the billions of spam emails flying around. Each computer wastes a little bit of power sending and receiving each message.
Maybe the problem isn't as big as they say, but I would not be at all surprised if spam has a significant impact on the environment.