Just like in real life you can never have enough money in these games. People sometimes buy gold to avoid the "boring" part of the game, but in actual fact gathering gold could be an activity as fun and rewarding as sex and people would STILL buy gold. Because even though they love the Hell out of the process of earning it for themselves, they still want more than they have time to earn. Gold buying, like most cheating, isn't (mostly) about "skipping the boring stuff" it's about having an (unfair) advantage over the other players so you look like you have a bigger e-peen, or occasionally about a person who really doesn't have time to play the game as much as they'd like trying to keep up with friends or family who play more.
Except that there have been a fairly steady number of homosexuals throughout history. Which argues for either a recessive gene that passes through non-homosexual parents, non-genetic causes of homosexuality, and/or a spectrum of sexuality that allows some homosexuals to breed because they "swing both ways". Most likely some combination of these factors. Oh yeah, and you're a dumbass. If homosexuality was going to be bred out of existence it would have happened centuries ago.
Most modern science would be impossible without the technology engendered by earlier science becoming engineering. We wouldn't (and couldn't) have a fraction of the knowledge we do about astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry if we didn't have telescopes, microscopes, computers, spacecraft, airplanes, or a host of other products of "applied science". Hell, even most higher mathematics, an absolute necessity for modeling nearly all modern science, is an application of earlier scientific discoveries. In other words your position makes no sense. Theoretical science beyond: "When I drop this it falls every time" requires the tools produced by applied science.
He's using the new Beta OS. A2DP is supposed to fully supported in that, which is what he's saying. And if Multiple SMS was added in a 1.x release than t0 most 3G owners it would in fact seem as though it "always" worked, since the 3Gs shipped with 2.0. Idon't think we was deliberately making crap up.
You had a three sentence post. One of those sentences said "Many people still think they [income taxes] are unconstitutional." I responded to that sentence. How can a three sentence post have a "minor point"? There were only three points:
1) The founding fathers did not envision taxes. 2) They were probably unconstitutional when first implemented. 3) Many people still think they are.
They all received pretty close to the same amount of time. Your first two points are completely valid and largely unarguable. I was curious as to how you justify the third, given the facts. Or if you personally are not one of the people who believe the third; perhaps you know how the people who do believe it justify their belief.
Except you know, they amended the Constitution to make them not unconstitutional. That's why the whole "amendment" procedure was included in the first place. How precisely can something be unconstitutional when a legally passed Amendment to the Constitution explicitly allows it?
Of course it will, it's a general purpose computer. Of course the port may take quite a while to turn out in punch cards... And you might need to worry more about "Pixels per Minute" than "Frames per Second"
Submitter was willing to accept a pure Windows solution in a pinch (read the last line), I'm thinking a developer support WINE version would be acceptable for him.
New iPhone OS will allow MMS (and copy/paste thank fricken' Gods) not sure about multiple SMS though. Which doesn't help you now of course, but they're saying June/July time frame which isn't to far in the future. I know you can display spreadsheet/word procession documents, but I've never had a great need or desire to edit them on my phone, so I can't speak to that.
I'm sorry. I like the idea of the phone as much as the next person. For a while, when I was in Iraq, I seriously considered getting one of the dev versions. How cool is a phone that I can analyze all the specs on, and run any OS I want, blah, blah, blah. In the end though calling a phone (and it is, by all claims from its manufacturer, a "phone", not a "portable device") that cannot reliably make or receive phone calls a "wonderful device" is just disingenuous. I might be "cool", or "interesting", or any of a dozen other adjective, but any device that cannot reliably perform its stated purpose is not "wonderful"
The fact that it performs well as a somewhat under-powered PDA doesn't change the fact that it was never able to do the primary thing that "phones" are supposed to do: make and receive calls. It seems to me (and maybe I'm just silly) that when designing a new Open Phone the checklist should have read:
1) Is able to actually call people 2) Is able to be called 3) Whatever other cool shit we'd like to be able to do 4)... 5) Profit
I apologize for the overused meme, but in this case it's perfect. As evidenced from the vast numbers of shitty smart-phones out there that sold at least a decent number of units, people will buy a phone with a crappy UI, buggy software, and a crash prone OS. What they won't buy is a phone that can't (reliably) call people.
But WHAT is the evolution. I see this argument all the time: "Dude, it's digital! It's copyable! Companies need to evolve to deal with the "new reality" that everything is going to be free!" OK, so what motivates people to create content in the new reality? You mention two services by name that "work fine in the face of Piracy". One actually uses DRM (Steam), the other is attached to the famously litigious music industry which has scared at least a significant percentage of people into not "sharing" its products. If the RIAA made an announcement tomorrow that it was giving up lawsuits and music was all to be released DRM free I think iTunes would have a harder time.
What is the new way to create content in such a way that people will pay money for it when they don't have to? I've asked this question before and not received any realistic answer: Must all content creation become a hobby? Can people not make money from art (or artisanship, games are closer to that than art)?
I don't know what the answer is. I'm no more a fan of the RIAA or MPAA's tactics than anyone else. I can totally understand the "I can't afford this {book, movie, music}, and wouldn't be buying it normally, it hurts nothing if I download it" attitude. Especially among people who legitimately can't afford the stuff. I'm as annoyed as anyone when talentless hacks make a fortune selling the same song to people across 5 or 6 albums and seem to care nothing for the fans that make them their money. On the other hand, lots of content CAN'T be made without significant capital investment, and even the stuff that can be shouldn't require that the artists making it starve (or keep a second job to actually pay bills). I like books, and some TV, and some movies, etc. I don't want to see these industries fail even if I would like to see of their behaviors modified.
A well designed RAID in a robust SAN can survive not just the death of a drive but often the death of an entire enclosure (10-16 drives depending on age and enclosure design). Most of the time a small enterprise class SAN has 8-12 enclosures worth of drives. Big ones can span half a dozen or more racks. I don't think this article is talking about a couple drives thrown into a box with a hardware RAID controller here. When a player like Microsoft starts talking about "storage" they are talking 100 TB or more. Last place I worked had ONLY 25 TB of storage, made up of older storage tech that only gave us 300 GB FC drives. We had 8x14 disk enclosures and could loose and entire enclosure without data loss. The disks were striped in such a way as to ensure that none of our RIAD5s had more than one disk in any one enclosure, and 4 spares made sure that up to 4 disks could die before we even had a chance of any long term performance issues. If you're really paranoid you can build a RAID5+1 to make sure that up to two drives per RAID could die without data loss. I've heard of, but not seen companies so paranoid that they use RAID5+2.
The storage system at my current place is even fancier and dynamically handles the RAIDs. We've got about 100TB spread across two racks worth of enclosures and any 20 or so disks could die at one time before we lost data.
Speaking as someone who's had this problem before, it's rarely that easy. Lots of dialog boxes like this are a fixed size. That's not to say that his problem is impossible (you can tab down to the "apply" button and hit enter, but it's a PITA because you have to guess how many tabs you need), but that's not the point. I could fix his problem in 2 minutes. Worse case scenario I could manually edit XF86Config for him. Piece of cake. I do this stuff for a living, he obviously does not. Most of the people that Linux advocates blithely tell to switch OSes do not. If these advocates hope to have these people actually switch OSes, or more to the point, actually stay with the new OS this kind of stuff has to be fixed. Not just the dialog box either. The attitude that surrounds things like this complaint. He has a legitimate problem, but on most Linux boards his post asking for help would probably get 50% replies giving somewhat reasonable advice in a snide or insulting tone (Like yours), 25% replies telling him to just edit XF86Config like a REAL man, 15% replies from people even less knowledgeable than he is contributing nothing useful at all (or saying "Me too!"), and maybe 10% legitimate helpful replies trying to give him a hand.
Some usability studies would go a long way toward helping Linux on the desktop. Some people understanding that users are users, and not system administrators or programmers would go even further. A real killer app, something that people really want and that Linux does unambiguously better than Windows, would be the final ingredient.
We had to downgrade to Tiger on our government classified Mac, because some required security toolkit hadn't been vetted on Leopard yet. Hardly the same thing, but it's the the only time I can think of someone downgrading a new Mac.
In a thread full of people making unreasonable claims and "points", this is a VERY reasonable point. They're literally ending mainstream support on a product they are still actively selling.
The vast majority of people buy Windows as an OEM part of their new £300 system. If you're paying full price for the OS, it's highly unlikely you're buying a new computer and vice-versa. And unless you've bought your hardware specifically for Linux (Unlikely if you're migrating from XP)it's at least fairly likely that you'll have to replace some of it when you migrate due to lack of, or partial support.
None of which invalidates your argument completely, it is still very likely to be cheaper to migrate to Linux than upgrade to Vista, but not by anywhere the margins you're talking. Probably more like £100-250 difference. Which then begs the question from a complete Linux neophyte who would have to learn it all from scratch, "What is my time worth?".
For a lot of people it may be worth £750, but not a more reasonable £150. If you get really unlucky in the hardware lottery (say your wireless card AND your Printer AND your scanner won't work with Linux) it might even cost you MORE to migrate. Unlikely I'll grant you but hardly impossible. It's never quite as simple as "Use Linux! It's free!"
And again I feel compelled to mention that the President and AG during the this whole process were Republicans. Christ. This is the second brain dead: "The Dems trumped up charges to hurt a real conservative" post I've seen that totally ignores the fact that a Republican government did this. What did Obama go back in time and setup a "Shadow-DOJ" to do his bidding a year or more before his actual election?
Yeah, um, you might not have noticed, but the President at the time, was a Republican as was his Attorney General. How did the Democrats manage this feat of bi-partisanship? This seems much more likely to have been a case of incompetence and overzealous prosecution than deliberate political sabotage. Why would the Bush DOJ want Stevens to lose for political reason?
-Another plant in the south had an adjacent, "smoking room," in someone's office, so the fans were sucking in both slaughterhouse smell and nicotine. Lovely.
This is not my story, but a former coworker who'd been in the industry for longer than I. When I was a System Support Engineer (SSE) for SGI I often worked with a guy from out Florida office who'd been doing hardware and software support for various high end computer companies for most of 30 years. Apparently he'd worked for HP early on doing the equivalent of SSE (no idea what they called it then) work. His office had the support contract for one of the big Winston-Salem offices. In those days W-S apparently strongly supported smoking among its employees; you got free packs of cigs when you came in, and smoking was not prohibited ANYWHERE in the building, including the server rooms. The company was absolutely opposed to to any policy that might imply in any way that smoking was dangerous to anything. HP actually charged them three times the normal support rate, and according to my coworker they were probably still losing money. The canister disks failed so regularly that he practically had scheduled weekly visit to replace them.
If you'd ever taken a suicide prevention class (ah, the fun things you get to do in the military), you'd know that most people who either attempt or commit suicide told someone they were going to. Very few people wake up one morning, decide the world is a bleak place and off themselves without a word. Whether or not the suicide attempt itself is a cry for help, or the result of a legitimate desire to end one's life, most people DO "cry for help" before they ever do it. We're hardwired not to want to die, and even when our conscious mind decides it wants to we usually try to find loopholes.
Nothing is EVER removed from the Linux Kernel. You can choose to compile it as a module, or not compile it at all, but it's probably there to be compiled if you want it. Have you ever looked at all the possible kernel compile options? I swear you can still compile in options to support punch card readers if you look around long enough.
(Note: I'm joking a bit here, I don't know whether stuff is actually removed from the kernel source or whether you can compile in punch card support, thank you. But man there's a lot of option to support old stuff in there.)
Just like in real life you can never have enough money in these games. People sometimes buy gold to avoid the "boring" part of the game, but in actual fact gathering gold could be an activity as fun and rewarding as sex and people would STILL buy gold. Because even though they love the Hell out of the process of earning it for themselves, they still want more than they have time to earn. Gold buying, like most cheating, isn't (mostly) about "skipping the boring stuff" it's about having an (unfair) advantage over the other players so you look like you have a bigger e-peen, or occasionally about a person who really doesn't have time to play the game as much as they'd like trying to keep up with friends or family who play more.
Except that there have been a fairly steady number of homosexuals throughout history. Which argues for either a recessive gene that passes through non-homosexual parents, non-genetic causes of homosexuality, and/or a spectrum of sexuality that allows some homosexuals to breed because they "swing both ways". Most likely some combination of these factors. Oh yeah, and you're a dumbass. If homosexuality was going to be bred out of existence it would have happened centuries ago.
Most modern science would be impossible without the technology engendered by earlier science becoming engineering. We wouldn't (and couldn't) have a fraction of the knowledge we do about astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry if we didn't have telescopes, microscopes, computers, spacecraft, airplanes, or a host of other products of "applied science". Hell, even most higher mathematics, an absolute necessity for modeling nearly all modern science, is an application of earlier scientific discoveries. In other words your position makes no sense. Theoretical science beyond: "When I drop this it falls every time" requires the tools produced by applied science.
He's using the new Beta OS. A2DP is supposed to fully supported in that, which is what he's saying. And if Multiple SMS was added in a 1.x release than t0 most 3G owners it would in fact seem as though it "always" worked, since the 3Gs shipped with 2.0. Idon't think we was deliberately making crap up.
You had a three sentence post. One of those sentences said "Many people still think they [income taxes] are unconstitutional." I responded to that sentence. How can a three sentence post have a "minor point"? There were only three points:
1) The founding fathers did not envision taxes.
2) They were probably unconstitutional when first implemented.
3) Many people still think they are.
They all received pretty close to the same amount of time. Your first two points are completely valid and largely unarguable. I was curious as to how you justify the third, given the facts. Or if you personally are not one of the people who believe the third; perhaps you know how the people who do believe it justify their belief.
Except you know, they amended the Constitution to make them not unconstitutional. That's why the whole "amendment" procedure was included in the first place. How precisely can something be unconstitutional when a legally passed Amendment to the Constitution explicitly allows it?
The effective equivalent of an industrial heater, at a significantly higher costs and with orders of magnitude greater power consumption?
Of course it will, it's a general purpose computer. Of course the port may take quite a while to turn out in punch cards... And you might need to worry more about "Pixels per Minute" than "Frames per Second"
Do you know if MMS is going to work on the first gen hardware? I've heard both ways.
Submitter was willing to accept a pure Windows solution in a pinch (read the last line), I'm thinking a developer support WINE version would be acceptable for him.
New iPhone OS will allow MMS (and copy/paste thank fricken' Gods) not sure about multiple SMS though. Which doesn't help you now of course, but they're saying June/July time frame which isn't to far in the future. I know you can display spreadsheet/word procession documents, but I've never had a great need or desire to edit them on my phone, so I can't speak to that.
I'm sorry. I like the idea of the phone as much as the next person. For a while, when I was in Iraq, I seriously considered getting one of the dev versions. How cool is a phone that I can analyze all the specs on, and run any OS I want, blah, blah, blah. In the end though calling a phone (and it is, by all claims from its manufacturer, a "phone", not a "portable device") that cannot reliably make or receive phone calls a "wonderful device" is just disingenuous. I might be "cool", or "interesting", or any of a dozen other adjective, but any device that cannot reliably perform its stated purpose is not "wonderful"
The fact that it performs well as a somewhat under-powered PDA doesn't change the fact that it was never able to do the primary thing that "phones" are supposed to do: make and receive calls. It seems to me (and maybe I'm just silly) that when designing a new Open Phone the checklist should have read:
1) Is able to actually call people ...
2) Is able to be called
3) Whatever other cool shit we'd like to be able to do
4)
5) Profit
I apologize for the overused meme, but in this case it's perfect. As evidenced from the vast numbers of shitty smart-phones out there that sold at least a decent number of units, people will buy a phone with a crappy UI, buggy software, and a crash prone OS. What they won't buy is a phone that can't (reliably) call people.
Didn't they strictly speaking release Freerunner as a "product"?
But WHAT is the evolution. I see this argument all the time: "Dude, it's digital! It's copyable! Companies need to evolve to deal with the "new reality" that everything is going to be free!" OK, so what motivates people to create content in the new reality? You mention two services by name that "work fine in the face of Piracy". One actually uses DRM (Steam), the other is attached to the famously litigious music industry which has scared at least a significant percentage of people into not "sharing" its products. If the RIAA made an announcement tomorrow that it was giving up lawsuits and music was all to be released DRM free I think iTunes would have a harder time.
What is the new way to create content in such a way that people will pay money for it when they don't have to? I've asked this question before and not received any realistic answer: Must all content creation become a hobby? Can people not make money from art (or artisanship, games are closer to that than art)?
I don't know what the answer is. I'm no more a fan of the RIAA or MPAA's tactics than anyone else. I can totally understand the "I can't afford this {book, movie, music}, and wouldn't be buying it normally, it hurts nothing if I download it" attitude. Especially among people who legitimately can't afford the stuff. I'm as annoyed as anyone when talentless hacks make a fortune selling the same song to people across 5 or 6 albums and seem to care nothing for the fans that make them their money. On the other hand, lots of content CAN'T be made without significant capital investment, and even the stuff that can be shouldn't require that the artists making it starve (or keep a second job to actually pay bills). I like books, and some TV, and some movies, etc. I don't want to see these industries fail even if I would like to see of their behaviors modified.
A well designed RAID in a robust SAN can survive not just the death of a drive but often the death of an entire enclosure (10-16 drives depending on age and enclosure design). Most of the time a small enterprise class SAN has 8-12 enclosures worth of drives. Big ones can span half a dozen or more racks. I don't think this article is talking about a couple drives thrown into a box with a hardware RAID controller here. When a player like Microsoft starts talking about "storage" they are talking 100 TB or more. Last place I worked had ONLY 25 TB of storage, made up of older storage tech that only gave us 300 GB FC drives. We had 8x14 disk enclosures and could loose and entire enclosure without data loss. The disks were striped in such a way as to ensure that none of our RIAD5s had more than one disk in any one enclosure, and 4 spares made sure that up to 4 disks could die before we even had a chance of any long term performance issues. If you're really paranoid you can build a RAID5+1 to make sure that up to two drives per RAID could die without data loss. I've heard of, but not seen companies so paranoid that they use RAID5+2.
The storage system at my current place is even fancier and dynamically handles the RAIDs. We've got about 100TB spread across two racks worth of enclosures and any 20 or so disks could die at one time before we lost data.
Speaking as someone who's had this problem before, it's rarely that easy. Lots of dialog boxes like this are a fixed size. That's not to say that his problem is impossible (you can tab down to the "apply" button and hit enter, but it's a PITA because you have to guess how many tabs you need), but that's not the point. I could fix his problem in 2 minutes. Worse case scenario I could manually edit XF86Config for him. Piece of cake. I do this stuff for a living, he obviously does not. Most of the people that Linux advocates blithely tell to switch OSes do not. If these advocates hope to have these people actually switch OSes, or more to the point, actually stay with the new OS this kind of stuff has to be fixed. Not just the dialog box either. The attitude that surrounds things like this complaint. He has a legitimate problem, but on most Linux boards his post asking for help would probably get 50% replies giving somewhat reasonable advice in a snide or insulting tone (Like yours), 25% replies telling him to just edit XF86Config like a REAL man, 15% replies from people even less knowledgeable than he is contributing nothing useful at all (or saying "Me too!"), and maybe 10% legitimate helpful replies trying to give him a hand.
Some usability studies would go a long way toward helping Linux on the desktop. Some people understanding that users are users, and not system administrators or programmers would go even further. A real killer app, something that people really want and that Linux does unambiguously better than Windows, would be the final ingredient.
We had to downgrade to Tiger on our government classified Mac, because some required security toolkit hadn't been vetted on Leopard yet. Hardly the same thing, but it's the the only time I can think of someone downgrading a new Mac.
In a thread full of people making unreasonable claims and "points", this is a VERY reasonable point. They're literally ending mainstream support on a product they are still actively selling.
The vast majority of people buy Windows as an OEM part of their new £300 system. If you're paying full price for the OS, it's highly unlikely you're buying a new computer and vice-versa. And unless you've bought your hardware specifically for Linux (Unlikely if you're migrating from XP)it's at least fairly likely that you'll have to replace some of it when you migrate due to lack of, or partial support.
None of which invalidates your argument completely, it is still very likely to be cheaper to migrate to Linux than upgrade to Vista, but not by anywhere the margins you're talking. Probably more like £100-250 difference. Which then begs the question from a complete Linux neophyte who would have to learn it all from scratch, "What is my time worth?".
For a lot of people it may be worth £750, but not a more reasonable £150. If you get really unlucky in the hardware lottery (say your wireless card AND your Printer AND your scanner won't work with Linux) it might even cost you MORE to migrate. Unlikely I'll grant you but hardly impossible. It's never quite as simple as "Use Linux! It's free!"
And again I feel compelled to mention that the President and AG during the this whole process were Republicans. Christ. This is the second brain dead: "The Dems trumped up charges to hurt a real conservative" post I've seen that totally ignores the fact that a Republican government did this. What did Obama go back in time and setup a "Shadow-DOJ" to do his bidding a year or more before his actual election?
Yeah, um, you might not have noticed, but the President at the time, was a Republican as was his Attorney General. How did the Democrats manage this feat of bi-partisanship? This seems much more likely to have been a case of incompetence and overzealous prosecution than deliberate political sabotage. Why would the Bush DOJ want Stevens to lose for political reason?
Again.
-Another plant in the south had an adjacent, "smoking room," in someone's office, so the fans were sucking in both slaughterhouse smell and nicotine. Lovely.
This is not my story, but a former coworker who'd been in the industry for longer than I. When I was a System Support Engineer (SSE) for SGI I often worked with a guy from out Florida office who'd been doing hardware and software support for various high end computer companies for most of 30 years. Apparently he'd worked for HP early on doing the equivalent of SSE (no idea what they called it then) work. His office had the support contract for one of the big Winston-Salem offices. In those days W-S apparently strongly supported smoking among its employees; you got free packs of cigs when you came in, and smoking was not prohibited ANYWHERE in the building, including the server rooms. The company was absolutely opposed to to any policy that might imply in any way that smoking was dangerous to anything. HP actually charged them three times the normal support rate, and according to my coworker they were probably still losing money. The canister disks failed so regularly that he practically had scheduled weekly visit to replace them.
If you'd ever taken a suicide prevention class (ah, the fun things you get to do in the military), you'd know that most people who either attempt or commit suicide told someone they were going to. Very few people wake up one morning, decide the world is a bleak place and off themselves without a word. Whether or not the suicide attempt itself is a cry for help, or the result of a legitimate desire to end one's life, most people DO "cry for help" before they ever do it. We're hardwired not to want to die, and even when our conscious mind decides it wants to we usually try to find loopholes.
Nothing is EVER removed from the Linux Kernel. You can choose to compile it as a module, or not compile it at all, but it's probably there to be compiled if you want it. Have you ever looked at all the possible kernel compile options? I swear you can still compile in options to support punch card readers if you look around long enough.
(Note: I'm joking a bit here, I don't know whether stuff is actually removed from the kernel source or whether you can compile in punch card support, thank you. But man there's a lot of option to support old stuff in there.)