I wanted to let this rest a bit such that we did not get into any sort of flame war. The AC was not me for what it's worth.
My major point is that you are offering your opinions as to how the market will eventually look. And I'm not trying to hate on your forecast but it's still just opinions. In 5 years if your wrong you'll be no different than the person at RIM/Apple/MS/Palm who wrote their own set of opinions about what will happen.
I've got my own set of opinions about what will happen. Backed up by a lot of good data, history, and personal knowledge. That does not mean that it's automatically going to become fact. Hence why I cited a lot of things that 5 years ago a lot of pundants said would be fact yet never came to be. What makes you any different than them? They also wrote a bunch of stuff that supported their argument but here we are now and dammit if PC gaming is not dead yet. (You cherry picked one example that I listed but you kinda missed the point. It's not that I'm arguing for or against any of those things rather that history is full of things that never happened even after even really smart people said that they would.)
Even if SOME of those platforms have more current devices in the wild, it doesn't matter - the writing is on the wall unless they seriously update, and in the end they'll all probably be using Android.
Says who and why?
I'm sorry but this is pure speculation that could easily be replaced with such things like, "2010 the writing is on the wall for Windows, Linux (sic) will be on the desktop!" Or predictions about how cloud computing will takeover. Or, my personal fav, how the PC game market will die. (Again.)
He gave me a smile. And a good tip too iirc heh. He was clearly in the mood for just a night out with some good food. Even thou it was a college town so our market was small for our level of dining it was fun to provide it for the few people who knew how to appreciate such a service.
I agree, I did kinda leave out just plain stupid (and or lazy) from my list. As you said it's kinda a combo but really the person has their own set of rational for their lies. And they could know better but just for whatever reason don't.
As a side note I waited on David Ogden Stiers one time while I was doing fine dining in college. I was a huge fan of M.A.S.H., his character in particular, and he was a very nice guy. As I said it was high end dining so since he never brought up who he was I could not say anything but at the end of his meal I could not resist saying, "And here is your check Doctor."
I've also noticed that the Quicktime picture viewer at one point kept asking me to associate all my media files as being opened with the Quicktime picture viewer. Even thou I had said no. And that I did not want it to ask again.
I never use it but sure enough when I opened it up right now it's still doing the same damn thing. (Likely it's the same version as I don't think there has been an update to it lately.) I suppose were I not the skeptical type I could just write it off as a bug. Such as it is...
That salespeople lie either deliberately or unintentionally is no news. But why they lie is always the interesting bit.
- Self interest: Here the liar is lying because it will net them some gain. Be it them keeping their job or making more money at the job or whatever. Or even, say when someone like Bill Gates lies, the results of the lie might not be any sort of immediate gain but rather part of a larger plan. (But we can't remove IE from Windows...because...because...)
- Ignorance: The person does not know the answer and is just making shit up. Saying, "I don't know," on the sales floor never looks good.
- Bad training: The person honestly believes what they are saying is true because their training was wrong, be it by design or honest mistake.
- Dissatisfaction: This is a rare occurrence but it is worthy of note. Sometimes there will be a person in a sales job who knows exactly what is going on but out of spite for their employer or some such motivation they are out to mess with people. ('Short timer' sales persons often can do things like this.)
Also keep in mind that none of these reasons are mutually exclusive. So when you get the ignorant salesperson who is highly motivated to keep their job you can really get some whoppers.
Well I think, and this is very much an opinion here, that often times the connections part of what I was saying takes precedence. While the idea that businesses are still just a collection of people working together may seem obvious I think all the nuance of what it means gets lost. You still are going to have cliques, personal likes/dislikes, affairs, under the table type deals, etc going on.
And in school it's all about the theory and practice of managing and making money and very little of the social aspect while doing it. So take all of those factors and how a good manager needs to not only be good/knowledgeable of what they are doing but socially skilled to handle everyone too it is hard to get a 'good' manager then. Especially since it's hard to quantify the social aspect of a person.
I've not seen the n900's but if they are anything like my n810 no argument from me as to the size/weight issue. I love my n810 for what it is but it's kinda a beast. Relatively speaking vs a modern even smart cell phone.
In fact I bought it with the idea that I'd keep my phone dumb and just lug my tablet around for a portable ebook, wifi net browsing, small game distraction type playing, kinda thing. But it ended up being far too clunky of an arrangement.
Smartphone for the road, I've got myself a new BB which is pretty solid, and then the tablet for when I'm on the couch is the way to go.
There is a fair amount to be said about the idea of copyright and copyright law. I'd like to take a moment to think about the idea of copyright and something that I always think about when dealing with the idea.
There are works in the public domain that nobody can claim copyright on. And some of them are still very popular today. I'll submit that they are popular not only because they are free as in beer but because they have stood the test of time and are just that good. And because of all of this that our society is a better place for it.
However imagine for a moment if all works were under a perpetual copyright type setup. A system that the **AA's wish. Would our society be better because of such a system? I seriously doubt it.
It's hard to quantify such ideas and as such the **AA's have had a pretty easy time in pushing their addenda. Being that it's easy to show that if Micky Mouse is released into the public domain that $X will be lost, or some such nonsense.
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal.
The pic, here, with the foil on the microscope made me smile. The whole damn thing is cool but that there is foil too I felt like if I just could get a glimpse of some duct tape somewhere we could even show this to non-geeks and make them smile too.
While XP x64 is dated I'm not sure I understand all the hate I see for it. I mean beyond the normal MS hate. (Oh and I hate MS too, got my card stamped at last weeks meeting. Hail brothers!)
As far as it goes thou on my Win desktop that I have I've been running XP x64 for a while now and it does just fine. Including games. And as a kicker it does it all with no swap file. Never even bitches about it unless the OS actually starts to run out of memory. Which I think has happened a grand total of once when I had like 4x Firefoxes open as well as a number of other things.
Until Win7 is polished I going to stick with XP x64 for my Windows machine.
Eh, I don't really want to speak to the state of WoW currently. I played 1.x and 2.x but have skipped, save for fooling around for the free week they gave me, 3.x I've kept up a bit in reading the forums as it's a decent way as any to kill time but felt I needed some MMO downtime.
Rather my point was about what you can achieve in a PC game vs a console game. A non-MMO example would be Mass Effect. I personally loved the game but even playing it on my PC I could tell it was made for consoles 1st. And as such it's level of complexity suffered for it. It still was a lot of fun but often when playing it I would think, "If only they had made this as a PC game 1st..."
Slashdot: There has been some talk that the streamlining of commands has been moving the focus away from actions per minute [APM]. How important is APM as a metric for you and will we see a decline in the importance of this metric? Dustin Browder: That type of feedback is incredibly important for us. We want players making smart decisions all the time and we want a lot of skill required to play this game at the highest levels.
Reading the answer here left me a bit amazed at the hubris that Blizz has. Don't get me wrong SC was a great game for it's day but do they honestly think that RTS games did not evolve past it? RON's feature set alone when dealing with buildings and units blows SC's very very dated method away. And RON is even pretty dated at this point. (Sadly I've yet to find a decent replacement for it however as the RTS genre seems to have been watered down quite a bit, but that's another rant.)
Slashdot: How about a console version for WoW? J. Allen Brack: Console is one of those things that we probably talk about once every six months. I have probably met with Microsoft two or three times to discuss what it would be like to have WoW on the console. Where we are today, and I can't say we'll always be here, but right now WoW is very much designed for the mouse and keyboard interface, and doing another type of control scheme would be very challenging. I think it will be done, and if we had started WoW with the idea that we would move to console, I think it would be a much different game and the control scheme would support that.
That last sentence is a bit of a puzzle. He seems to say that at some point WoW will be ported to a console? Gah?
Bluntly, consoles are where games get dumbed down. There are a number of reasons why they need to be dumbed down and it's ok. There is room in the market for dumbed down console games and more complex PC games. But to expect people who want the more complex PC type games to be ok with the dumbed down console games is to ignore a proven market.
If anything WoW has proven that there is a significant market for people who enjoy, and will pay for, complex PC games. For a company as smart as Blizzard has been over the years I sure hope they see that screwing with that market segment would be a bad idea. (Queue bi-yearly/. post about how PC gaming is dying and we should expect to game only on consoles soon.)
Fair enough. If I could amend my comment then I think maybe it was more in reference to him saying something along the lines of it being hard to adapt the HHGTTG to something beyond what could be done with just the written word. (Yes I played the old Infocom games too. The HHGTTG one was a classic.)
The main idea being that going from just text or speech to video does not always work 1:1. I often think of one of my favorite series that I'd love to see put into some sort of video, be it animated or live action, Harry Harrison's SSR series. However I also can see why trying to do something like that would be pretty damn hard even in the best of circumstances.
We humans can do such a great job connecting ideas in our mind when just reading or listening to something. But when you add video you remove that need for our mind to make such connections. And, I think, that part of the magic that some writers have is knowing how to make those connections seem funny, sad, exciting, etc.
That is not to say that video is bad. I love a lot of video that paints a story that is great even without me having my own paint my own picture. What I'm saying is that some ideas just don't translate back and forth that well. I'm pretty sure that Adams knew that himself and that he even said as much at one point. And even if he never said that exactly well I'm saying it now dammit! So long and thanks for all the fish!
Correct me if I'm wrong here but I also remember Adams saying that he never thought the HHGTTG could really work in anything but print. And because of a lack of trying on his part either. Just that whenever he worked at trying to make the whole idea behind HHGTTG in another medium even he thought it was lacking.
Even when I was watching the movie I tried to keep an open mind because I knew it could not be the same as the book(s). But even with me trying to accept it on that different format and what I thought was a honest effort on the part of the movie it just fell flat for me. (And most everyone else.)
There are just some things you can't change very much without having it lose what was special.
Of course proper managment of ones finances is key to having a good credit score. That was not really my point.
Rather that, at least at some point, that having a land line or not would effect it. And that if that still does happen it needs to be regulated imo to catch up to current phone tech.
You've never noticed the people that just HAVE to get home to watch their favorite tv show? Talk about it incessantly? Miss other social engagements to watch it if they aren't able to record it and it won't be available online until *gasp* TOMORROW (and they can't bear to be the last person on earth to see the latest drama)?
One of the things that I've noticed as a 'gamer' is that when I'm around 'normal' people I can feel like an outcast at times. Simply because I don't know what is going on with the latest offerings on prime time TV.
And it's not like I go around looking for people to discuss gamer related things with. If I meet someone who knows about such things then bonus! But instead if I can't discuss who's on 'Dancing with the Stars' or some such drivel then I must be the weird one.
One thing I've not seen mentioned, it might be buried in a lower score comment thou, is the impact that having/not having a 'land line' has on your credit score.
Now I'm pretty fuzzy on the details of how exactly it works. Especially given that I'm sure each of the big three credit reporting companies have their own rules. But at one point I remember that if you did not have some sort of land line that your credit score took a hit on that fact alone.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to let this rest a bit such that we did not get into any sort of flame war. The AC was not me for what it's worth.
My major point is that you are offering your opinions as to how the market will eventually look. And I'm not trying to hate on your forecast but it's still just opinions. In 5 years if your wrong you'll be no different than the person at RIM/Apple/MS/Palm who wrote their own set of opinions about what will happen.
I've got my own set of opinions about what will happen. Backed up by a lot of good data, history, and personal knowledge. That does not mean that it's automatically going to become fact. Hence why I cited a lot of things that 5 years ago a lot of pundants said would be fact yet never came to be. What makes you any different than them? They also wrote a bunch of stuff that supported their argument but here we are now and dammit if PC gaming is not dead yet. (You cherry picked one example that I listed but you kinda missed the point. It's not that I'm arguing for or against any of those things rather that history is full of things that never happened even after even really smart people said that they would.)
Even if SOME of those platforms have more current devices in the wild, it doesn't matter - the writing is on the wall unless they seriously update, and in the end they'll all probably be using Android.
Says who and why?
I'm sorry but this is pure speculation that could easily be replaced with such things like, "2010 the writing is on the wall for Windows, Linux (sic) will be on the desktop!" Or predictions about how cloud computing will takeover. Or, my personal fav, how the PC game market will die. (Again.)
He gave me a smile. And a good tip too iirc heh. He was clearly in the mood for just a night out with some good food. Even thou it was a college town so our market was small for our level of dining it was fun to provide it for the few people who knew how to appreciate such a service.
I agree, I did kinda leave out just plain stupid (and or lazy) from my list. As you said it's kinda a combo but really the person has their own set of rational for their lies. And they could know better but just for whatever reason don't.
As a side note I waited on David Ogden Stiers one time while I was doing fine dining in college. I was a huge fan of M.A.S.H., his character in particular, and he was a very nice guy. As I said it was high end dining so since he never brought up who he was I could not say anything but at the end of his meal I could not resist saying, "And here is your check Doctor."
I've also noticed that the Quicktime picture viewer at one point kept asking me to associate all my media files as being opened with the Quicktime picture viewer. Even thou I had said no. And that I did not want it to ask again.
I never use it but sure enough when I opened it up right now it's still doing the same damn thing. (Likely it's the same version as I don't think there has been an update to it lately.) I suppose were I not the skeptical type I could just write it off as a bug. Such as it is...
That salespeople lie either deliberately or unintentionally is no news. But why they lie is always the interesting bit.
- Self interest: Here the liar is lying because it will net them some gain. Be it them keeping their job or making more money at the job or whatever. Or even, say when someone like Bill Gates lies, the results of the lie might not be any sort of immediate gain but rather part of a larger plan. (But we can't remove IE from Windows...because...because...)
- Ignorance: The person does not know the answer and is just making shit up. Saying, "I don't know," on the sales floor never looks good.
- Bad training: The person honestly believes what they are saying is true because their training was wrong, be it by design or honest mistake.
- Dissatisfaction: This is a rare occurrence but it is worthy of note. Sometimes there will be a person in a sales job who knows exactly what is going on but out of spite for their employer or some such motivation they are out to mess with people. ('Short timer' sales persons often can do things like this.)
Also keep in mind that none of these reasons are mutually exclusive. So when you get the ignorant salesperson who is highly motivated to keep their job you can really get some whoppers.
When you have a democracy and your government failed, you failed.
The problem is I'm living in a representative democracy. Makes things a bit more problematic than your quip implies.
Well I think, and this is very much an opinion here, that often times the connections part of what I was saying takes precedence. While the idea that businesses are still just a collection of people working together may seem obvious I think all the nuance of what it means gets lost. You still are going to have cliques, personal likes/dislikes, affairs, under the table type deals, etc going on.
And in school it's all about the theory and practice of managing and making money and very little of the social aspect while doing it. So take all of those factors and how a good manager needs to not only be good/knowledgeable of what they are doing but socially skilled to handle everyone too it is hard to get a 'good' manager then. Especially since it's hard to quantify the social aspect of a person.
The problem is that takes good managers. Not just someone with an MBA and the right connections to get an upper level managment job.
Sadly the latter is a whole lot more prevelent than the former.
I've not seen the n900's but if they are anything like my n810 no argument from me as to the size/weight issue. I love my n810 for what it is but it's kinda a beast. Relatively speaking vs a modern even smart cell phone.
In fact I bought it with the idea that I'd keep my phone dumb and just lug my tablet around for a portable ebook, wifi net browsing, small game distraction type playing, kinda thing. But it ended up being far too clunky of an arrangement.
Smartphone for the road, I've got myself a new BB which is pretty solid, and then the tablet for when I'm on the couch is the way to go.
As others have pointed out the Maemo platform is about as open as can be. And is finally going to be available on more than just a tablet.
For those interested I'm sure the hackers over on the Maemo forums can give a good breakdown as to what to expect from the n900.
Also of note are of course the Symban, WinMo, (old) Palm OS, and Blackberry platforms. With each of their own set of pro's and con's.
When the facts are against you hyperbole is the next option. Accompanied by feigned outrage when countered by the actual facts.
It's better than outright lying...but not by much in my book.
There is a fair amount to be said about the idea of copyright and copyright law. I'd like to take a moment to think about the idea of copyright and something that I always think about when dealing with the idea.
There are works in the public domain that nobody can claim copyright on. And some of them are still very popular today. I'll submit that they are popular not only because they are free as in beer but because they have stood the test of time and are just that good. And because of all of this that our society is a better place for it.
However imagine for a moment if all works were under a perpetual copyright type setup. A system that the **AA's wish. Would our society be better because of such a system? I seriously doubt it.
It's hard to quantify such ideas and as such the **AA's have had a pretty easy time in pushing their addenda. Being that it's easy to show that if Micky Mouse is released into the public domain that $X will be lost, or some such nonsense.
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal.
Bullshit.
The pic, here, with the foil on the microscope made me smile. The whole damn thing is cool but that there is foil too I felt like if I just could get a glimpse of some duct tape somewhere we could even show this to non-geeks and make them smile too.
While XP x64 is dated I'm not sure I understand all the hate I see for it. I mean beyond the normal MS hate. (Oh and I hate MS too, got my card stamped at last weeks meeting. Hail brothers!)
As far as it goes thou on my Win desktop that I have I've been running XP x64 for a while now and it does just fine. Including games. And as a kicker it does it all with no swap file. Never even bitches about it unless the OS actually starts to run out of memory. Which I think has happened a grand total of once when I had like 4x Firefoxes open as well as a number of other things.
Until Win7 is polished I going to stick with XP x64 for my Windows machine.
It's not the shiny buttons it's me trying to multitask!
Eh, I don't really want to speak to the state of WoW currently. I played 1.x and 2.x but have skipped, save for fooling around for the free week they gave me, 3.x I've kept up a bit in reading the forums as it's a decent way as any to kill time but felt I needed some MMO downtime.
Rather my point was about what you can achieve in a PC game vs a console game. A non-MMO example would be Mass Effect. I personally loved the game but even playing it on my PC I could tell it was made for consoles 1st. And as such it's level of complexity suffered for it. It still was a lot of fun but often when playing it I would think, "If only they had made this as a PC game 1st..."
Slashdot: There has been some talk that the streamlining of commands has been moving the focus away from actions per minute [APM]. How important is APM as a metric for you and will we see a decline in the importance of this metric?
Dustin Browder: That type of feedback is incredibly important for us. We want players making smart decisions all the time and we want a lot of skill required to play this game at the highest levels.
Reading the answer here left me a bit amazed at the hubris that Blizz has. Don't get me wrong SC was a great game for it's day but do they honestly think that RTS games did not evolve past it? RON's feature set alone when dealing with buildings and units blows SC's very very dated method away. And RON is even pretty dated at this point. (Sadly I've yet to find a decent replacement for it however as the RTS genre seems to have been watered down quite a bit, but that's another rant.)
Slashdot: How about a console version for WoW?
J. Allen Brack: Console is one of those things that we probably talk about once every six months. I have probably met with Microsoft two or three times to discuss what it would be like to have WoW on the console. Where we are today, and I can't say we'll always be here, but right now WoW is very much designed for the mouse and keyboard interface, and doing another type of control scheme would be very challenging. I think it will be done, and if we had started WoW with the idea that we would move to console, I think it would be a much different game and the control scheme would support that.
That last sentence is a bit of a puzzle. He seems to say that at some point WoW will be ported to a console? Gah?
Bluntly, consoles are where games get dumbed down. There are a number of reasons why they need to be dumbed down and it's ok. There is room in the market for dumbed down console games and more complex PC games. But to expect people who want the more complex PC type games to be ok with the dumbed down console games is to ignore a proven market.
If anything WoW has proven that there is a significant market for people who enjoy, and will pay for, complex PC games. For a company as smart as Blizzard has been over the years I sure hope they see that screwing with that market segment would be a bad idea. (Queue bi-yearly /. post about how PC gaming is dying and we should expect to game only on consoles soon.)
And may the twisting nether have mercy on any new alliance warlocks trying to do their quest in the Barrens.
They normally give up on that quest anyway vs having to face Barrens chat.
Fair enough. If I could amend my comment then I think maybe it was more in reference to him saying something along the lines of it being hard to adapt the HHGTTG to something beyond what could be done with just the written word. (Yes I played the old Infocom games too. The HHGTTG one was a classic.)
The main idea being that going from just text or speech to video does not always work 1:1. I often think of one of my favorite series that I'd love to see put into some sort of video, be it animated or live action, Harry Harrison's SSR series. However I also can see why trying to do something like that would be pretty damn hard even in the best of circumstances.
We humans can do such a great job connecting ideas in our mind when just reading or listening to something. But when you add video you remove that need for our mind to make such connections. And, I think, that part of the magic that some writers have is knowing how to make those connections seem funny, sad, exciting, etc.
That is not to say that video is bad. I love a lot of video that paints a story that is great even without me having my own paint my own picture. What I'm saying is that some ideas just don't translate back and forth that well. I'm pretty sure that Adams knew that himself and that he even said as much at one point. And even if he never said that exactly well I'm saying it now dammit! So long and thanks for all the fish!
Correct me if I'm wrong here but I also remember Adams saying that he never thought the HHGTTG could really work in anything but print. And because of a lack of trying on his part either. Just that whenever he worked at trying to make the whole idea behind HHGTTG in another medium even he thought it was lacking.
Even when I was watching the movie I tried to keep an open mind because I knew it could not be the same as the book(s). But even with me trying to accept it on that different format and what I thought was a honest effort on the part of the movie it just fell flat for me. (And most everyone else.)
There are just some things you can't change very much without having it lose what was special.
Of course proper managment of ones finances is key to having a good credit score. That was not really my point.
Rather that, at least at some point, that having a land line or not would effect it. And that if that still does happen it needs to be regulated imo to catch up to current phone tech.
You've never noticed the people that just HAVE to get home to watch their favorite tv show? Talk about it incessantly? Miss other social engagements to watch it if they aren't able to record it and it won't be available online until *gasp* TOMORROW (and they can't bear to be the last person on earth to see the latest drama)?
One of the things that I've noticed as a 'gamer' is that when I'm around 'normal' people I can feel like an outcast at times. Simply because I don't know what is going on with the latest offerings on prime time TV.
And it's not like I go around looking for people to discuss gamer related things with. If I meet someone who knows about such things then bonus! But instead if I can't discuss who's on 'Dancing with the Stars' or some such drivel then I must be the weird one.
One thing I've not seen mentioned, it might be buried in a lower score comment thou, is the impact that having/not having a 'land line' has on your credit score.
Now I'm pretty fuzzy on the details of how exactly it works. Especially given that I'm sure each of the big three credit reporting companies have their own rules. But at one point I remember that if you did not have some sort of land line that your credit score took a hit on that fact alone.