HP nx9420 17" 1440x900 or 1680x1050 glossy or matte, X1600, FX 1500M, or NVS 510M. Starting at $1229.
Mine is T2500, 2GB(667), 1680x1050 matte, X1600 w/ 256MB, 80GB 7200RPM, DL 8X DVD-R, 3945 a/b/g w/ bluetooth. It's great. Lighter than my old 15". Gets around 3.5 hours battery life playing movies or surfing. It handles Oblivion and HL2 at decent resolution with most of the eye candy on.
It's hard to find a decent laptop w/o a glossy screen. I looked for weeks before I decided on this model. I would have preferred a slightly better video card, but I couldn't pass up the deal I got on this one. I've been trying to find specs/pricing on the NVS 510M. It just showed up as an option and I can't find anything solid on it. My guess is that it's similar to a 7900GS. If so, I might swap out the X1600 one of these days.
"We change out motherboards in our servers all the time."
Who supplies your hardware? I ask so I can make sure to never do business with them. Seriously. Swapping out a server motherboard should be an extremely rare event. If you have to do it "all the time", having to reactivate Windows afterward is the least of your problems.
Microsoft announced this 6 months ago at the same time they pushed out the Windows Genuine Advantage update. The fact that a paper thinks this is newsworthy now suggest they just haven't been paying attention.
I don't think losing taht segment of the server market is that big a deal. There are very few case where you can't get a better price/performance ratio by scaling out instead of up. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is an OLTP database server. Even with that, some recent HP studies indicate that scaling out may be viable in many cases. They pitted a 32-way cluster of blades vs a 32-way superdome server. For some operations the blades got trounced, but in others they defated the superdome handily.
2 socket servers start around $1k. 4 socket servers start around $7k. 8 socket servers start around $20k.
The Oath of Enlistment: "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Enlisted soldiers swear to support and defend the Constitution. They also swear to obey the orders of their superior officers, according to regulations and the UCMJ. The phrase according to regulations and the UCMJ qualifies the oath. An enlisted soldier has no obligation to obey an unlawful order. Further, an enlisted soldier has an obligation to disobey any order that he should reasonably have known to be unlawful. In cases where lawfullness of an order is not apparent, it is the soldiers obligation to ask for clarification, obtain a legal opinion, ensure witnesses are present, or other steps necessary to establish that the soldier make a good faith effort to ascertain the legality of a questionable order before obeying it.
That said, the private is about the only one you are going to get to admit that they think Rummy is an idiot. NCOs and Officers don't like to undermine the chain of command in public. They may well agree, but they are usually going to keep that to themselves.
The 80-core chip is not a CPU. It is strictly for floating point. It could potenially be used for raytracing or scientific calculations that benefit from extreme parallelism.
I would guess that this will first be seen in some type of add-on board with it's own local memory. I don't think FSB speeds are likely to increase enough in the next few years to keep this monster fed otherwise.
PDF is an open format. PDF generation is already included in offerings from other vendors without Adobe receiving any licensing fees. Adobe only has a problem with it because they won't be able to sell their craptastic Distiller software to Office customers anymore. A US judge would tell Adobe to take a hike simply because it is an open format, but the EU is actively hostile to Microsoft and is far more likely to grant an injunction.
If you are doing a real "small" project, PostgreSQL is a great option, but I'd hardly call SQL Server licensing extravagant. SQL Server Express is free and has all of the features you're likely to use on a small project. If you need to use more than 1 CPU or 1GB RAM for your database, $750 for the Workgroup edition seems pretty reasonable. You don't need a 6-figure DBA either. You should have someone that understands the trade-off between normalization vs. performance and knows how to read query execution plans.
You've been missing a vendor whose software is so crappy it's easier to reboot the machine than to terminate and restart the software to recover all the system resources the software has allocated and neglected to release. You also aren't running your VAX as a real-time control system that doesn't have enough physical memory installed to hold all of the data that it needs and/or software that's too stupid to buffer its data in memory before starting the operation.
NTFS needs defragmenting about as much as ext needs defragmenting. Not much. If you do need to defrag ext, you can use ext2fs defrag. Or you could copy the contents of the drive to another location, wipe the drive and copy back.
The fact that you can brute force an account at all is not an indicator that strong passwords are needed. It is an indication that you need to disable an account after a number of unsuccessful attempts. The determining factor for how strong the password needs to be is whether the account is disabled for a few minutes or requires an administrator to unlock it.
If the account requires an adminstrator to unlock it after three failed attempts, nothing is gained from requiring a strong password. Any password that isn't guessable in three attempts will do fine.
If the argument is that a strong password is harder to determine after the attacker has a dump of your password repository, how did the attacker get a dump of your password repository in the first place? That's like putting bars over your windows and leaving the front door open.
Switching to Intel only closed the price on select systems. The new Mac Pro has a competitve price. The MacBook Pro is a different story altogether. The least expensive 17" is $2800. The identical HP machine (nx9420) runs about $1800 for that configuration, but you can get them as low as $1200 without really sacrificing anything.
I keep looking for a reason to switch, but I can't justify paying that much extra.
No, it doesn't have to be a lack of social skills.
If the girl in question happens to be mean-spirited, it's not outside the realm of possibility that she would make an issue out of it. This could be to clear out obstacles in her advancement path, create drama, garner sympathy, or just because she can. If your boss finds it more politically convienient to offer you up to HR instead of championing your case, the best you could hope for is having to take some type of training class to correct your "misbehavior". Even if your boss stands up for you, you'll probably still have to take the class.
Note that the above situation does not have to be mixed gender. We had a case recently where a female employee was reported by another female employee for an "offensive" email. No one who looked at it could identify anything offensive, but the first employee was still required to attend a training class in acccordance with company policy.
An nastier situation can arise when the co-worker doesn't feel harassed, but one or more other people in the office take exception to "fraternization" outside the workplace. I've seen it in both the military and the corporate sector and experienced it personally in the military.
I started dating a girl in another company within my battalion. We were both the same rank so there was no question of coercion or other impropriety. We were always careful to conduct ourselves in a professional manner and maintain a military bearing while in uniform. Eventually word got around as different people saw us together off-duty on various occaisions. That's when it got nasty. Several people in the chain of command had a problem with us dating even though it was permitted by Army regulations. There were orders for us not to associate with each other off-duty, stacks of counseling statements, extra duty nights and weekends and various other attempts to keep us separated. In the end they gave up. There was nothing they could legally do about it. They caused us a lot of problems for two years though. She was worth it but your mileage may vary.
In summation, you have to do a risk analysis and decide if the reward outweighs the risk. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't.
Um, you missed the point. Molyneux hasn't done anything worth my money since Dungeon Keeper. The Movies is the only thing he released since that didn't just flat out suck and someone else at his company designed that. Mind you that I don't think The Movies is a good game or is worth the asking price, I'm just saying that it isn't piss poor like everything else that has come out of Lionhead. Makes you wonder how much of the earlier successes were actually Molyneux.
No. Presumably he's talking about something that requires a bit more setup than simply untarring the archive. Presumably he's talking about the fact that distros use different package managers, put things in different places, and so forth that can make it difficult to distribute such a binary without a book explaining how to configure it or spending of lot of additional developer time building and testing packages for every major distro.
It's not so much about encryption and authentication as it is preventing the circumvention of security on military computers. Allowing only boot images that have been properly blessed makes unauthorized access much more difficult. This is a very good thing.
Your MMO example is fundamentally flawed. MMOs already leave too much up to the client, thereby allowing widespread cheating. You want to push even more of the gameplay mechanics to the client?
The single player RPG idea is more interesting, but doesn't require massive computing resources. What happens out of the players POV probably doesn't require physics processing or extensive AI. In most cases approximations will be more than sufficient.
Depending on where the suit is brought, the defendant may not have the option of self representation. In some courts self representation is simply not allowed.
This is what we call a PEBKAC problem. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. The developers wrote the code before the case-sensitive file system was released. The code therefore doesn't support the case-sensitive file system. Adobe tells you to install the software on a case-insensitive volume. http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/326193.html. So the real problem is that the user is too stupid and/or lazy to follow directions.
Don't like hearing that do ya? Maybe next time you can avoid calling people stupid when they didn't anticipate everything you could possibly do to fuck up the software they've written.
Memory size commonly used in desktop computing has increased around 3 orders of magnitude in the last 15 years. 2MB->2GB. HDD size has increased less than that. 1GB->500GB. I think that expecting a 10 order of magnitude increase in the next 5 years might be a bit optimistic.
With Linux, the time spent after the install just getting things to work right tends to be far greater than it is in Windows. Let me catalog my experiences in this regard.
Most of the recent distributions recognize all my hardware. Some of the hardware just doesn't work with the distribution provided drivers. I've tried Ubuntu, SLED 10, and Gentoo. I'm using Ubuntu now because from my perspective it sucks the least out of the three.
Broadcom 4306 was recognized but completely fails to work with the kernel module. It didn't take me long to get wireless up using ndiswrapper, but it would have been a lot less confusing if I'd have gotten some kind of unknown device error from the start. Then I had to configure wpa_supplicant and write some scripts to start and stop it since it didn't want to load automatically at boot.
I'm not happy with the touchpad. It took an hour or two to track down how to disable the godawful super sensitive tap to click. Option "MaxTapTime" "0" in xorg.conf wasn't sufficient. I also had to disable "TapButton1", "TapButton2" and "TapButton3". Now my touchpad doesn't go wild if my finger pressure changes as I use it, but it doesn't always recognize click and hold. I'll try compiling from source and see if that fixes the problem.
I just got the ATI fglrx driver installed and working last night after spending the last several evenings working on it. There are several HOWTOs covering my card and distribution and they all have different instructions. I finally found the one that has the right instructions. I still haven't gotten Xgl to work, but at least some 3D games work now.
I spent several days getting basic multimedia to work properly. Installing libdvdcss to play DVDs was easy enough. Streaming media was another story entirely. After several days of trying different things, I managed to find a patch for mplayer-1.0pre7 that provides native support for the WMV3 (Windows Media 9) format. I couldn't use the win32 dlls because I'm on amd64. After recompiling mplayer and various libraries, I was able to enjoy streaming media from just about any site.
I've spent well over 40 hours getting it to the point where I think it might be sufficient for day to day activity. That doesn't include the time I spent getting Gentoo installed or mucking about with SLED before running into RPM dependency hell. I don't know how much you value your time, but 40 hours of my time is worth a lot more than the $200 Microsoft charges for a desktop operating system.
download and compile ndiswrapper download 64bit broadcom drivers from ubuntu forums ndiswrapper -i netbc564.inf ndiswrapper -m modprobe ndiswrapper YaST->Network Cards Add a card type:wireless id:wlan0 module:ndiswrapper configure essid and WEP/WPA
Viola. Easy setup and WPA just works. I had problems getting WEP to work, but since WPA was available I didn't care.
OTOH setting up media playback quickly descended into dependency hell. Ubuntu was more of a hassle getting the wireless working but very easy to add the missing media capabilities.
It's not a question of effort. It's a question of time. Most people have far more important things to do with their time than shop around for a web browser or media player. But why stop there? Why not force Microsoft to sell versions of Windows without a file manager or a TCP/IP stack or Disk Management or a CD player or even Freecell?
Here's a free clue. Software will largely become a commodity. Software as goods sold will largely die out. Common applications will be free or subsidized by content producers. This is a good thing. The whole bit about Media Player is just stupid.
Microsoft regularly engages in anti-competitive behavior. The stuff the courts go after isn't what really hurts competition. Nail them for their business practices in regards to OEM licensing, but don't tell them they can't include applications which most people would consider to be basic functionality. You end up lookign like a crackpot when you do.
The last time I spent money in a coin-op arcade, they were still using initials on the high score boards. It's pretty hard to fit an NC-17 vulgarity into 3 letters. Of course, that was back in the day. I don't remember any hidden swear words either. Maybe my memory is just going bad in my old age.
Of course all of that is beside the point. What it boils down to is that parents like ratings. It lets them quickly identify products that they do not consider suitable for their children. Even more than parents like ratings, parents like descriptive ratings. They want to know why the game is rated the way it is so they can make better decisions about what they buy for their kids.
The issue here isn't even the rating itself. The game was already rated MA. The problem is that the nudity was not disclosed to the ratings board and therefore was not listed on the game packaging. The parents that don't want their kids exposed to nudity have every reason to be upset. It has nothing to do with "thinking of the children". Whether nudity is as bad as the violence already present in the game is completely beside the point. The violence was disclosed, the nudity was not.
EQ could have solved it lot easier by upping the drop rates. When highly desirable and/or necessary items have a 5% drop rate off a 3 hour spawn, it guarantees problems with camping. That anyone at Sony actually thought for a second that normal people would do anything other than just buy the damn things from a farmer is truly scary.
Instancing probably wouldn't have been necessary if the drop rates were higher. When you have to kill the same guy 20 or 30 times to get your item and he only spawns every couple hours, that's a recipe for disaster.
The smartest thing EQ did was put themselves in the gold and item market. It will happen regardless. Sony might as well take a cut.
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HP nx9420 17" 1440x900 or 1680x1050 glossy or matte, X1600, FX 1500M, or NVS 510M. Starting at $1229.
Mine is T2500, 2GB(667), 1680x1050 matte, X1600 w/ 256MB, 80GB 7200RPM, DL 8X DVD-R, 3945 a/b/g w/ bluetooth. It's great. Lighter than my old 15". Gets around 3.5 hours battery life playing movies or surfing. It handles Oblivion and HL2 at decent resolution with most of the eye candy on.
It's hard to find a decent laptop w/o a glossy screen. I looked for weeks before I decided on this model. I would have preferred a slightly better video card, but I couldn't pass up the deal I got on this one. I've been trying to find specs/pricing on the NVS 510M. It just showed up as an option and I can't find anything solid on it. My guess is that it's similar to a 7900GS. If so, I might swap out the X1600 one of these days.
"We change out motherboards in our servers all the time."
Who supplies your hardware? I ask so I can make sure to never do business with them. Seriously. Swapping out a server motherboard should be an extremely rare event. If you have to do it "all the time", having to reactivate Windows afterward is the least of your problems.
Microsoft announced this 6 months ago at the same time they pushed out the Windows Genuine Advantage update. The fact that a paper thinks this is newsworthy now suggest they just haven't been paying attention.
I don't think losing taht segment of the server market is that big a deal. There are very few case where you can't get a better price/performance ratio by scaling out instead of up. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is an OLTP database server. Even with that, some recent HP studies indicate that scaling out may be viable in many cases. They pitted a 32-way cluster of blades vs a 32-way superdome server. For some operations the blades got trounced, but in others they defated the superdome handily.
2 socket servers start around $1k. 4 socket servers start around $7k. 8 socket servers start around $20k.
The Oath of Enlistment:
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Enlisted soldiers swear to support and defend the Constitution. They also swear to obey the orders of their superior officers, according to regulations and the UCMJ. The phrase according to regulations and the UCMJ qualifies the oath. An enlisted soldier has no obligation to obey an unlawful order. Further, an enlisted soldier has an obligation to disobey any order that he should reasonably have known to be unlawful. In cases where lawfullness of an order is not apparent, it is the soldiers obligation to ask for clarification, obtain a legal opinion, ensure witnesses are present, or other steps necessary to establish that the soldier make a good faith effort to ascertain the legality of a questionable order before obeying it.
That said, the private is about the only one you are going to get to admit that they think Rummy is an idiot. NCOs and Officers don't like to undermine the chain of command in public. They may well agree, but they are usually going to keep that to themselves.
The 80-core chip is not a CPU. It is strictly for floating point. It could potenially be used for raytracing or scientific calculations that benefit from extreme parallelism.
I would guess that this will first be seen in some type of add-on board with it's own local memory. I don't think FSB speeds are likely to increase enough in the next few years to keep this monster fed otherwise.
PDF is an open format. PDF generation is already included in offerings from other vendors without Adobe receiving any licensing fees. Adobe only has a problem with it because they won't be able to sell their craptastic Distiller software to Office customers anymore. A US judge would tell Adobe to take a hike simply because it is an open format, but the EU is actively hostile to Microsoft and is far more likely to grant an injunction.
If you are doing a real "small" project, PostgreSQL is a great option, but I'd hardly call SQL Server licensing extravagant. SQL Server Express is free and has all of the features you're likely to use on a small project. If you need to use more than 1 CPU or 1GB RAM for your database, $750 for the Workgroup edition seems pretty reasonable. You don't need a 6-figure DBA either. You should have someone that understands the trade-off between normalization vs. performance and knows how to read query execution plans.
You've been missing a vendor whose software is so crappy it's easier to reboot the machine than to terminate and restart the software to recover all the system resources the software has allocated and neglected to release. You also aren't running your VAX as a real-time control system that doesn't have enough physical memory installed to hold all of the data that it needs and/or software that's too stupid to buffer its data in memory before starting the operation.
NTFS needs defragmenting about as much as ext needs defragmenting. Not much. If you do need to defrag ext, you can use ext2fs defrag. Or you could copy the contents of the drive to another location, wipe the drive and copy back.
The fact that you can brute force an account at all is not an indicator that strong passwords are needed. It is an indication that you need to disable an account after a number of unsuccessful attempts. The determining factor for how strong the password needs to be is whether the account is disabled for a few minutes or requires an administrator to unlock it.
If the account requires an adminstrator to unlock it after three failed attempts, nothing is gained from requiring a strong password. Any password that isn't guessable in three attempts will do fine.
If the argument is that a strong password is harder to determine after the attacker has a dump of your password repository, how did the attacker get a dump of your password repository in the first place? That's like putting bars over your windows and leaving the front door open.
Switching to Intel only closed the price on select systems. The new Mac Pro has a competitve price. The MacBook Pro is a different story altogether. The least expensive 17" is $2800. The identical HP machine (nx9420) runs about $1800 for that configuration, but you can get them as low as $1200 without really sacrificing anything.
I keep looking for a reason to switch, but I can't justify paying that much extra.
If you're cheap like I am, the comparison is extremely one-sided the other way. $50 DVD player vs. $500 media PC.
No, it doesn't have to be a lack of social skills.
If the girl in question happens to be mean-spirited, it's not outside the realm of possibility that she would make an issue out of it. This could be to clear out obstacles in her advancement path, create drama, garner sympathy, or just because she can. If your boss finds it more politically convienient to offer you up to HR instead of championing your case, the best you could hope for is having to take some type of training class to correct your "misbehavior". Even if your boss stands up for you, you'll probably still have to take the class.
Note that the above situation does not have to be mixed gender. We had a case recently where a female employee was reported by another female employee for an "offensive" email. No one who looked at it could identify anything offensive, but the first employee was still required to attend a training class in acccordance with company policy.
An nastier situation can arise when the co-worker doesn't feel harassed, but one or more other people in the office take exception to "fraternization" outside the workplace. I've seen it in both the military and the corporate sector and experienced it personally in the military.
I started dating a girl in another company within my battalion. We were both the same rank so there was no question of coercion or other impropriety. We were always careful to conduct ourselves in a professional manner and maintain a military bearing while in uniform. Eventually word got around as different people saw us together off-duty on various occaisions. That's when it got nasty. Several people in the chain of command had a problem with us dating even though it was permitted by Army regulations. There were orders for us not to associate with each other off-duty, stacks of counseling statements, extra duty nights and weekends and various other attempts to keep us separated. In the end they gave up. There was nothing they could legally do about it. They caused us a lot of problems for two years though. She was worth it but your mileage may vary.
In summation, you have to do a risk analysis and decide if the reward outweighs the risk. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't.
Um, you missed the point. Molyneux hasn't done anything worth my money since Dungeon Keeper. The Movies is the only thing he released since that didn't just flat out suck and someone else at his company designed that. Mind you that I don't think The Movies is a good game or is worth the asking price, I'm just saying that it isn't piss poor like everything else that has come out of Lionhead. Makes you wonder how much of the earlier successes were actually Molyneux.
No. Presumably he's talking about something that requires a bit more setup than simply untarring the archive. Presumably he's talking about the fact that distros use different package managers, put things in different places, and so forth that can make it difficult to distribute such a binary without a book explaining how to configure it or spending of lot of additional developer time building and testing packages for every major distro.
It's not so much about encryption and authentication as it is preventing the circumvention of security on military computers. Allowing only boot images that have been properly blessed makes unauthorized access much more difficult. This is a very good thing.
Your MMO example is fundamentally flawed. MMOs already leave too much up to the client, thereby allowing widespread cheating. You want to push even more of the gameplay mechanics to the client?
The single player RPG idea is more interesting, but doesn't require massive computing resources. What happens out of the players POV probably doesn't require physics processing or extensive AI. In most cases approximations will be more than sufficient.
Depending on where the suit is brought, the defendant may not have the option of self representation. In some courts self representation is simply not allowed.
This is what we call a PEBKAC problem. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. The developers wrote the code before the case-sensitive file system was released. The code therefore doesn't support the case-sensitive file system. Adobe tells you to install the software on a case-insensitive volume. http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/326193.html. So the real problem is that the user is too stupid and/or lazy to follow directions.
Don't like hearing that do ya? Maybe next time you can avoid calling people stupid when they didn't anticipate everything you could possibly do to fuck up the software they've written.
Memory size commonly used in desktop computing has increased around 3 orders of magnitude in the last 15 years. 2MB->2GB. HDD size has increased less than that. 1GB->500GB. I think that expecting a 10 order of magnitude increase in the next 5 years might be a bit optimistic.
With Linux, the time spent after the install just getting things to work right tends to be far greater than it is in Windows. Let me catalog my experiences in this regard.
Most of the recent distributions recognize all my hardware. Some of the hardware just doesn't work with the distribution provided drivers. I've tried Ubuntu, SLED 10, and Gentoo. I'm using Ubuntu now because from my perspective it sucks the least out of the three.
Broadcom 4306 was recognized but completely fails to work with the kernel module. It didn't take me long to get wireless up using ndiswrapper, but it would have been a lot less confusing if I'd have gotten some kind of unknown device error from the start. Then I had to configure wpa_supplicant and write some scripts to start and stop it since it didn't want to load automatically at boot.
I'm not happy with the touchpad. It took an hour or two to track down how to disable the godawful super sensitive tap to click. Option "MaxTapTime" "0" in xorg.conf wasn't sufficient. I also had to disable "TapButton1", "TapButton2" and "TapButton3". Now my touchpad doesn't go wild if my finger pressure changes as I use it, but it doesn't always recognize click and hold. I'll try compiling from source and see if that fixes the problem.
I just got the ATI fglrx driver installed and working last night after spending the last several evenings working on it. There are several HOWTOs covering my card and distribution and they all have different instructions. I finally found the one that has the right instructions. I still haven't gotten Xgl to work, but at least some 3D games work now.
I spent several days getting basic multimedia to work properly. Installing libdvdcss to play DVDs was easy enough. Streaming media was another story entirely. After several days of trying different things, I managed to find a patch for mplayer-1.0pre7 that provides native support for the WMV3 (Windows Media 9) format. I couldn't use the win32 dlls because I'm on amd64. After recompiling mplayer and various libraries, I was able to enjoy streaming media from just about any site.
I've spent well over 40 hours getting it to the point where I think it might be sufficient for day to day activity. That doesn't include the time I spent getting Gentoo installed or mucking about with SLED before running into RPM dependency hell. I don't know how much you value your time, but 40 hours of my time is worth a lot more than the $200 Microsoft charges for a desktop operating system.
Broadcom on SLED 10 RC3 (AMD64)
download and compile ndiswrapper
download 64bit broadcom drivers from ubuntu forums
ndiswrapper -i netbc564.inf
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper
YaST->Network Cards
Add a card type:wireless id:wlan0 module:ndiswrapper
configure essid and WEP/WPA
Viola. Easy setup and WPA just works. I had problems getting WEP to work, but since WPA was available I didn't care.
OTOH setting up media playback quickly descended into dependency hell. Ubuntu was more of a hassle getting the wireless working but very easy to add the missing media capabilities.
It's not a question of effort. It's a question of time. Most people have far more important things to do with their time than shop around for a web browser or media player. But why stop there? Why not force Microsoft to sell versions of Windows without a file manager or a TCP/IP stack or Disk Management or a CD player or even Freecell?
Here's a free clue. Software will largely become a commodity. Software as goods sold will largely die out. Common applications will be free or subsidized by content producers. This is a good thing. The whole bit about Media Player is just stupid.
Microsoft regularly engages in anti-competitive behavior. The stuff the courts go after isn't what really hurts competition. Nail them for their business practices in regards to OEM licensing, but don't tell them they can't include applications which most people would consider to be basic functionality. You end up lookign like a crackpot when you do.
The last time I spent money in a coin-op arcade, they were still using initials on the high score boards. It's pretty hard to fit an NC-17 vulgarity into 3 letters. Of course, that was back in the day. I don't remember any hidden swear words either. Maybe my memory is just going bad in my old age.
Of course all of that is beside the point. What it boils down to is that parents like ratings. It lets them quickly identify products that they do not consider suitable for their children. Even more than parents like ratings, parents like descriptive ratings. They want to know why the game is rated the way it is so they can make better decisions about what they buy for their kids.
The issue here isn't even the rating itself. The game was already rated MA. The problem is that the nudity was not disclosed to the ratings board and therefore was not listed on the game packaging. The parents that don't want their kids exposed to nudity have every reason to be upset. It has nothing to do with "thinking of the children". Whether nudity is as bad as the violence already present in the game is completely beside the point. The violence was disclosed, the nudity was not.
That make things clear enough?
EQ could have solved it lot easier by upping the drop rates. When highly desirable and/or necessary items have a 5% drop rate off a 3 hour spawn, it guarantees problems with camping. That anyone at Sony actually thought for a second that normal people would do anything other than just buy the damn things from a farmer is truly scary.
Instancing probably wouldn't have been necessary if the drop rates were higher. When you have to kill the same guy 20 or 30 times to get your item and he only spawns every couple hours, that's a recipe for disaster.
The smartest thing EQ did was put themselves in the gold and item market. It will happen regardless. Sony might as well take a cut.