It's not a matter of whether pretending to be a Power Ranger leads to increased acts of violence. The issue is that this kind of role-playing helps form the basis of the child's values. If you disagree, ask yourself if you'd want your kids playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists instead of Cowboys and Indians.
The point of this type of play is to reinforce societies values. Children want to be the Hero so they emulate the qualities of the Hero. In many modern video games the protagonist is an Anti-Hero. GTA is a perfect example. I won't buy it for my kids because I don't think that a game that rewards players for theft, blackmail, racketeering, murder and selling drugs is appropriate.
Now I recognize that the current rating system places far more emphasis on sex and violence than the actual subject matter, but fortunately most developers that think anti-social behavior is cool also think graphic violence is cool. This means that most of the games I would object to get rated as Mature. There are some that get rated as Mature that I don't object to, but then I can buy them for my kids if I choose to do so.
The line that gets parroted a lot is that it's the parent's responsibility to keep their kids from buying these games. That's a bunch of crap. It's not unreasonable for a 13 year old to spend a Saturday afternoon with his friends playing stickball in the abandoned lot or watching a matinee at the cinema. You know what else isn't unreasonable? It isn't unreasonable to expect salespeople not to sell an M rated game to a bunch of kids that decided to pool their money and buy Grand Theft Auto 27 instead of going to the theatre.
I find the idea that allowing children to play amongst themselves for a few hours without parents hovering over their every move or sending them to convenience store for some milk is somehow shirking parental responsibilities to be ludicrous. Part of rearing a child is teaching them independence. That requires doing things on their own without a parent present. It is the responsibility of other adults to step in and moderate unsafe behavior when children are out of the immediate supervision of their parents.
We shouldn't need a law to make it clear that it might be a bad idea to sell a product that is clearly marked "Mature 17+" to children that are obviously under 17. The mere fact that it even has such a label might indicate that there may be a substantial number of parents that may object to the sale of said product to their child. Unfortunately since many people either can't grasp such a simple concept or just don't care, legislation may be the only answer.
If self-enforcement actually works, then we don't need legislation. I don't call children being able to purchase age inappropriate material 42% of the time working.
I don't have a problem with my children playing violent games. I can have a problem with my children playing games where the protagonist is an anti-hero, place the protagonist in morally ambiguous situations, or otherwise reward anti-social behavior. Medal of Honor is fine, but GTA 3 isn't. Games like KOTOR where the of choice of being evil is presented as being without repercussion, depend on the maturity level of the child. In other words, it's the subject matter that is the problem, not the violence.
I make an exception for games where acting out the game can easily lead to tragedy. Pretending to asphyxiate someone with a plastic bag or beat them with a baseball bat is much more likely to send someone to the hospital than shooting them with a toy gun.
Your history is little off. Corporate America went from WFW 3.11 (to NT 3.51) to NT 4 to 2K and basically stayed there. XP is the April Fools joke that was best ignored, but unfortunately extended 2K support will probably run out before anyone is entirely comfortable doing large scale Vista deployments.
If those same machines could actually run applications or games in XP, you'd have a point. A Dell with 512MB of RAM can barely run anything in XP with all the bloatware they pre-install. There's only 384MB left after the integrated graphics takes it's chunk, about 300MB is actually in use just sitting at the desktop without anything running, and XP starts aggressively paging in that configuration at around 290MB. Anything you run will be horribly slow since the disk will thrash non-stop. The integrated graphics adapter reports that it is fully compliant with DirectX 9.0 even though it can't actually do 3D resulting in any application or game that requires 3D hardware to either crash back to the desktop or BSOD.
I'd say they're just as capable of running Vista as they are of running XP: not very. The fact that you aren't complaining about the abyssmal performance of those same boxes under XP tells me you're looking to make something out of nothing. Hell, if anything they're more honest about Vista than XP. Then again, maybe the problem is that you can't fool yourself into thinking you got a great deal?
Right. So aside from maintaining a separate frame buffer for each window, providing a toolkit that allows resolution independant user interfaces, forcing developers to stop assuming that only one user is logged on at a time and that that user is an administrator, moving most of the device drivers out into user space where they can't crash the rest of the system, improved scheduling on multiple cores, improved memory management, non-destructive re-partitioning, a version of DirectX where vendors can't claim their hardware is compliant when it really isn't, full disk encryption, 3rd party credential providers that don't replace system libraries, Media Center, and a desktop that doesn't look like ass, what does Vista actually offer?
Maybe it doesn't offer you anything. That's fine. Don't assume that's the case for everyone else.
someone at Microsoft is smoking crack. They get the edge over Sony and then they step on their crank with this crap.
The pricing virtually eliminates premium sales. No one is going to pay $400 for the premium w/ 20GB instead of $480 for the elite w/ 120GB when the 120GB drive is sold separately for $200. Now there's actually a choice for the consumer at the $500 price point. Do I buy the 360 with the larger hard drive or buy the 20GB PS3 and have a Blu-Ray player?
Leave it to Microsoft to make the $600 PS3 look like a good deal. $480 + $100 WiFi + $200 HD-DVD = $780.
If HP sold the computer without an operating system, and the warranty specified that it would be void if you did not use HP OS289 (sold separately), that would be a prohibited tie-in (if HP had not previously obtained a waiver to the tie-in clause from the FTC). It does not apply in this case as HP provided an operating system with the computer.
The warranty does specifically state that they can require a specified configuration prior to providing warranty service. This is not a tie-in provision because they are not requiring you to buy an additional product.
HP is saying that before they provide warranty service, they want to test their product without any aftermarket modifications to see if the defect is actually in their product. They don't have prove that a different operating system can damage their computer because they aren't invalidating the warranty if you ever use a different operating system. However, if you refuse to return your computer to a supported configuration, you are the one that has to prove that the defect could not be a result of your modifications.
No, they made the mistake of tying it to the release of Team Fortress 2. The HL guys will probably have Ep2 running on DX12 by the time TF2 is actually ready to go.
It's a legal requirement, not a security requirement. If a company falls under SOX and they allow their employees to communicate electronically at work without recording and storing those communications, the company is breaking the law.
It's a whole lot easier and less expensive to just block access to external email or IM than it is to monitor and record them.
Black and White was not a bad game, but it was nowhere near the hype, and it hurt the experience.
No, Black and White really was a bad game. The creature was about the only thing that didn't completely suck and there were some real problems with the creature.
The biggest problem with the creature was that to encourage or discourage some types of behavior you had to reward or punish the creature while he was thinking about doing it, but before he actually did it, with no way of reading the creature's thoughts. An example of this is that if you punish a creature after he poos someplace you don't want him to poo, he doesn't learn not to poo there, he learns not to poo at all.
Another problem was that the value system was severely skewed. My creature spent all his time healing injured villagers, planting trees, watering crops, carrying things to the village stores, and playing with the villagers. When he got hungry, he'd go eat some fish, and then return to helping the villagers. He ended up pure evil because eating meat outweighed all his other actions. Meanwhile my deity got all his miracle power from sacrificing babies, but ended up pure good because he always cast good miracles. Go figure.
It was a really interesting proof of concept but a really horrible game.
If you're using UAC and a program modifies files under the Program Files directory, file access may be redirected to shadow copies in your profile.
It's a decent idea and mostly it works well, but some apps have problems with it. Disabling UAC solved almost every problem I had with any applications. I probably could have worked around most of them, but I have one app that I absolutely need and absolutely will not work with UAC enabled.
The original plan was to pick up a Wii for Christmas and get a 360 whenever the price dropped. Since we still can't find a Wii, we ended up getting a 360 on sale. The 360 has a decent library of games and has the added bonus of acting as a Media Center Extender so that we can stream video from our computers. We're probably going to skip HD-DVD/Blu-Ray entirely. The upscaling DVD player is quite as good, but it should be good enough to last until digital delivery becomes a compelling alternative.
I suspect your problem was that Vista was installed by Dell. I've been running Vista betas on my HP laptop since September and it's been rock solid. Dell always installs all kinds of crap and a lot of it may not be compatible with Vista.
The only hardware Vista didn't recognize were the quick launch buttons, the fingerprint scanner, and the smart card reader. The XP drivers for those worked fine.
Some third party applications that weren't updated for Vista had some problems with User Account Control transparently redirecting parts of the filesystem or Session 0 being non-interactive so that services can not interact directly with the user, but there were workarounds.
Do a clean install without Dell's bloatware and see if it's better.
I have a better idea. Have the garbage man pick the stuff up and put it in a bin in his truck to be dropped off at the recycling center. Having to make special trips to a recycling center to drop off common items is just asinine.
Your cost of management goes down. Your hardware cost goes up. The thin clients cost the same as the PC but do a lot less. That means you probably need more servers. Which means more floor space, electricity, etc. Your network traffic probably goes up. That means additional cable runs, more switches, higher bandwidth connections to other sites, etc.
The numbers usually don't work out in favor of terminals.
H2: There should have been only one. Mulcahy himself hated it so much that he walked out of the premiere and tried to have his screen credit changed to Alan Smithee. The only thought it provoked was "I can't believe I actually spent money to watch that.
"Wherever science fiction fans gather, in decades and generations to come, this film will be remembered in hushed tones as one of the immortal low points of the genre." - Robert Ebert
The trick is to never buy their consumer machines. The business machines tend to give a lot more bang for the buck and tend to be much better supported. Just make sure to replace the crap memory they ship with something better.
One of the requirements is to use DoD CAC cards for authentication. There are some substanial differences in the way smart cards are handled across versions of Windows or even across Service Packs. Most DoD computers run some version of Windows. It's understandable that they are more concerned with which versions of Windows are supported than other operating systems.
Many offices don't have high bandwidth connections. Business travel may prevent access to secure high bandwidth connections. Soldiers in the field probably have a secure connection, but it definately isn't high bandwidth.
A certain amount of decentralization is necessary to allow fault tolerance. Wars don't stop because the network is down. Small units leaders carrying some sensitive information encrypted on an electronic device is greatly preferable to having the same information printed in plain text on pieces of paper.
Well database guy, you need to get some more experience before you make such sweeping pronouncements.
Databases can easily be CPU bound with a large number of users working with a relatively small dataset. Ever hear of OLTP or multi-dimensional OLAP? Web servers serving dynamic content can easily be CPU bound. And the idea that operations used in CAD apply only to CAD? Wow.
Going over 4GB of memory on a desktop or 2GB on a notebook tends to be hideously expensive. Until that changes, 64-bit is pointless for most people. When 64-bit becomes practical for more people, then AMD has the advantage if Intel hasn't improved in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a matter of whether pretending to be a Power Ranger leads to increased acts of violence. The issue is that this kind of role-playing helps form the basis of the child's values. If you disagree, ask yourself if you'd want your kids playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists instead of Cowboys and Indians.
The point of this type of play is to reinforce societies values. Children want to be the Hero so they emulate the qualities of the Hero. In many modern video games the protagonist is an Anti-Hero. GTA is a perfect example. I won't buy it for my kids because I don't think that a game that rewards players for theft, blackmail, racketeering, murder and selling drugs is appropriate.
Now I recognize that the current rating system places far more emphasis on sex and violence than the actual subject matter, but fortunately most developers that think anti-social behavior is cool also think graphic violence is cool. This means that most of the games I would object to get rated as Mature. There are some that get rated as Mature that I don't object to, but then I can buy them for my kids if I choose to do so.
The line that gets parroted a lot is that it's the parent's responsibility to keep their kids from buying these games. That's a bunch of crap. It's not unreasonable for a 13 year old to spend a Saturday afternoon with his friends playing stickball in the abandoned lot or watching a matinee at the cinema. You know what else isn't unreasonable? It isn't unreasonable to expect salespeople not to sell an M rated game to a bunch of kids that decided to pool their money and buy Grand Theft Auto 27 instead of going to the theatre.
I find the idea that allowing children to play amongst themselves for a few hours without parents hovering over their every move or sending them to convenience store for some milk is somehow shirking parental responsibilities to be ludicrous. Part of rearing a child is teaching them independence. That requires doing things on their own without a parent present. It is the responsibility of other adults to step in and moderate unsafe behavior when children are out of the immediate supervision of their parents.
We shouldn't need a law to make it clear that it might be a bad idea to sell a product that is clearly marked "Mature 17+" to children that are obviously under 17. The mere fact that it even has such a label might indicate that there may be a substantial number of parents that may object to the sale of said product to their child. Unfortunately since many people either can't grasp such a simple concept or just don't care, legislation may be the only answer.
If self-enforcement actually works, then we don't need legislation. I don't call children being able to purchase age inappropriate material 42% of the time working.
Transcode360 will take care of your transcoding needs.
I don't have a problem with my children playing violent games. I can have a problem with my children playing games where the protagonist is an anti-hero, place the protagonist in morally ambiguous situations, or otherwise reward anti-social behavior. Medal of Honor is fine, but GTA 3 isn't. Games like KOTOR where the of choice of being evil is presented as being without repercussion, depend on the maturity level of the child. In other words, it's the subject matter that is the problem, not the violence.
I make an exception for games where acting out the game can easily lead to tragedy. Pretending to asphyxiate someone with a plastic bag or beat them with a baseball bat is much more likely to send someone to the hospital than shooting them with a toy gun.
Media Center isn't a compelling reason for regular users?
Your history is little off. Corporate America went from WFW 3.11 (to NT 3.51) to NT 4 to 2K and basically stayed there. XP is the April Fools joke that was best ignored, but unfortunately extended 2K support will probably run out before anyone is entirely comfortable doing large scale Vista deployments.
If those same machines could actually run applications or games in XP, you'd have a point. A Dell with 512MB of RAM can barely run anything in XP with all the bloatware they pre-install. There's only 384MB left after the integrated graphics takes it's chunk, about 300MB is actually in use just sitting at the desktop without anything running, and XP starts aggressively paging in that configuration at around 290MB. Anything you run will be horribly slow since the disk will thrash non-stop. The integrated graphics adapter reports that it is fully compliant with DirectX 9.0 even though it can't actually do 3D resulting in any application or game that requires 3D hardware to either crash back to the desktop or BSOD.
I'd say they're just as capable of running Vista as they are of running XP: not very. The fact that you aren't complaining about the abyssmal performance of those same boxes under XP tells me you're looking to make something out of nothing. Hell, if anything they're more honest about Vista than XP. Then again, maybe the problem is that you can't fool yourself into thinking you got a great deal?
Right. So aside from maintaining a separate frame buffer for each window, providing a toolkit that allows resolution independant user interfaces, forcing developers to stop assuming that only one user is logged on at a time and that that user is an administrator, moving most of the device drivers out into user space where they can't crash the rest of the system, improved scheduling on multiple cores, improved memory management, non-destructive re-partitioning, a version of DirectX where vendors can't claim their hardware is compliant when it really isn't, full disk encryption, 3rd party credential providers that don't replace system libraries, Media Center, and a desktop that doesn't look like ass, what does Vista actually offer?
Maybe it doesn't offer you anything. That's fine. Don't assume that's the case for everyone else.
someone at Microsoft is smoking crack. They get the edge over Sony and then they step on their crank with this crap.
The pricing virtually eliminates premium sales. No one is going to pay $400 for the premium w/ 20GB instead of $480 for the elite w/ 120GB when the 120GB drive is sold separately for $200. Now there's actually a choice for the consumer at the $500 price point. Do I buy the 360 with the larger hard drive or buy the 20GB PS3 and have a Blu-Ray player?
Leave it to Microsoft to make the $600 PS3 look like a good deal. $480 + $100 WiFi + $200 HD-DVD = $780.
You have misunderstood Magnuson-Moss.
If HP sold the computer without an operating system, and the warranty specified that it would be void if you did not use HP OS289 (sold separately), that would be a prohibited tie-in (if HP had not previously obtained a waiver to the tie-in clause from the FTC). It does not apply in this case as HP provided an operating system with the computer.
The warranty does specifically state that they can require a specified configuration prior to providing warranty service. This is not a tie-in provision because they are not requiring you to buy an additional product.
HP is saying that before they provide warranty service, they want to test their product without any aftermarket modifications to see if the defect is actually in their product. They don't have prove that a different operating system can damage their computer because they aren't invalidating the warranty if you ever use a different operating system. However, if you refuse to return your computer to a supported configuration, you are the one that has to prove that the defect could not be a result of your modifications.
No, they made the mistake of tying it to the release of Team Fortress 2. The HL guys will probably have Ep2 running on DX12 by the time TF2 is actually ready to go.
It's a legal requirement, not a security requirement. If a company falls under SOX and they allow their employees to communicate electronically at work without recording and storing those communications, the company is breaking the law.
It's a whole lot easier and less expensive to just block access to external email or IM than it is to monitor and record them.
Black and White was not a bad game, but it was nowhere near the hype, and it hurt the experience.
No, Black and White really was a bad game. The creature was about the only thing that didn't completely suck and there were some real problems with the creature.
The biggest problem with the creature was that to encourage or discourage some types of behavior you had to reward or punish the creature while he was thinking about doing it, but before he actually did it, with no way of reading the creature's thoughts. An example of this is that if you punish a creature after he poos someplace you don't want him to poo, he doesn't learn not to poo there, he learns not to poo at all.
Another problem was that the value system was severely skewed. My creature spent all his time healing injured villagers, planting trees, watering crops, carrying things to the village stores, and playing with the villagers. When he got hungry, he'd go eat some fish, and then return to helping the villagers. He ended up pure evil because eating meat outweighed all his other actions. Meanwhile my deity got all his miracle power from sacrificing babies, but ended up pure good because he always cast good miracles. Go figure.
It was a really interesting proof of concept but a really horrible game.
If you're using UAC and a program modifies files under the Program Files directory, file access may be redirected to shadow copies in your profile.
It's a decent idea and mostly it works well, but some apps have problems with it. Disabling UAC solved almost every problem I had with any applications. I probably could have worked around most of them, but I have one app that I absolutely need and absolutely will not work with UAC enabled.
The original plan was to pick up a Wii for Christmas and get a 360 whenever the price dropped. Since we still can't find a Wii, we ended up getting a 360 on sale. The 360 has a decent library of games and has the added bonus of acting as a Media Center Extender so that we can stream video from our computers. We're probably going to skip HD-DVD/Blu-Ray entirely. The upscaling DVD player is quite as good, but it should be good enough to last until digital delivery becomes a compelling alternative.
I suspect your problem was that Vista was installed by Dell. I've been running Vista betas on my HP laptop since September and it's been rock solid. Dell always installs all kinds of crap and a lot of it may not be compatible with Vista.
The only hardware Vista didn't recognize were the quick launch buttons, the fingerprint scanner, and the smart card reader. The XP drivers for those worked fine.
Some third party applications that weren't updated for Vista had some problems with User Account Control transparently redirecting parts of the filesystem or Session 0 being non-interactive so that services can not interact directly with the user, but there were workarounds.
Do a clean install without Dell's bloatware and see if it's better.
I have a better idea. Have the garbage man pick the stuff up and put it in a bin in his truck to be dropped off at the recycling center. Having to make special trips to a recycling center to drop off common items is just asinine.
Your cost of management goes down. Your hardware cost goes up. The thin clients cost the same as the PC but do a lot less. That means you probably need more servers. Which means more floor space, electricity, etc. Your network traffic probably goes up. That means additional cable runs, more switches, higher bandwidth connections to other sites, etc.
The numbers usually don't work out in favor of terminals.
H2: There should have been only one. Mulcahy himself hated it so much that he walked out of the premiere and tried to have his screen credit changed to Alan Smithee. The only thought it provoked was "I can't believe I actually spent money to watch that.
"Wherever science fiction fans gather, in decades and generations to come, this film will be remembered in hushed tones as one of the immortal low points of the genre." - Robert Ebert
The trick is to never buy their consumer machines. The business machines tend to give a lot more bang for the buck and tend to be much better supported. Just make sure to replace the crap memory they ship with something better.
One of the requirements is to use DoD CAC cards for authentication. There are some substanial differences in the way smart cards are handled across versions of Windows or even across Service Packs. Most DoD computers run some version of Windows. It's understandable that they are more concerned with which versions of Windows are supported than other operating systems.
Many offices don't have high bandwidth connections. Business travel may prevent access to secure high bandwidth connections. Soldiers in the field probably have a secure connection, but it definately isn't high bandwidth.
A certain amount of decentralization is necessary to allow fault tolerance. Wars don't stop because the network is down. Small units leaders carrying some sensitive information encrypted on an electronic device is greatly preferable to having the same information printed in plain text on pieces of paper.
Well database guy, you need to get some more experience before you make such sweeping pronouncements.
Databases can easily be CPU bound with a large number of users working with a relatively small dataset. Ever hear of OLTP or multi-dimensional OLAP? Web servers serving dynamic content can easily be CPU bound. And the idea that operations used in CAD apply only to CAD? Wow.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Going over 4GB of memory on a desktop or 2GB on a notebook tends to be hideously expensive. Until that changes, 64-bit is pointless for most people. When 64-bit becomes practical for more people, then AMD has the advantage if Intel hasn't improved in the meantime.
As far as I'm aware, they only come with glossy screens. That's the main reason I went elsewhere.