TFA says it's not the value of the software but rather the service and content that matters. I'd tend to agree with that statement. But a little part of me can't help but dislike and be paranoid about all these web services. Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine? G-mail bothers me like that -- even though I pretty much use it exclusively for e-mail now.
Well then don't use online services if they bother you. You have it totally within your power to use local programs over remote services. I believe Gmail even offers POP access as well?
I think it will be interesting to see how the public accepts the idea of using such online services but it's a far cry from, "...making all the desktops in the World into dumb terminals."
Its yet another C&C clone that just cant seem to get anything right.
I hate to break it to you but if your idea of an RTS is C&C then you shouldn't really be throwing stones at anyone. The genre has moved onward though numerous vastly superior games, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Age of Kings, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, just to name a few and continues to do so.
While it has it's place in history, C&C has not been a part of any serious RTS players library for a long time now.
But that said, none will post here because Blizzard can be pretty draconian with its devs, and they fire people for smaller stuff than that.
Assuming that is true then who actually is in charge of WoW's game play/mechanics/balancing? If the devs are basically just a bunch of code monkeys who do the bidding of some more powerful group who exactly are they?
While I'll agree that 50 years is a long time no matter how you slice it, all the more so for computers, but I think it's pretty safe to say that since computers and all the related tech have moved beyond the "brand new" phases of develoment that it's possable to make some generlaizations regarding their future.
Unix itself has shown to stand the test of time so far and with the continuance of Microsofts monopoly (and what amounts to the goverments near approval of it) monopoly the shape of things to come is not as foggy as say in the 70's or 80's.
It seems every 6 months like clockwork someone has to write about the demise of PC gaming. Almost as if they write about it enough times it will come true...but I'll save the tin foil hat stuff for 6 months from now.
First of all as has been noted there are games that don't adapt well at all to console gaming: RTS, MMO, any game that requires a keyboard. Heck even true "gamers", IE FPS players, look down their nose when console players talk about how great Halo is. (Nor do I really blame them.)
Second, I'm a pretty big gamer imo who's main computer spends more time crunching numbers for polygons than it does for spreadsheets but guess what? The video card that's in it cost me $150...nearly 3 years ago! Yeah it's getting dated and I want a new one but there is no way I'm spending $400 for a new one. I'll most likely try to pick one up for $100-$150 and it will work just fine for my purposes.
It seems these journalists, and I use that term loosely these days, are stuck on the idea that if it's not bleeding edge it's not there. They only focus on the idea that the highest priced best rated video card/console/whatever is the only option that people are going to buy when reality is far different from that.
Now I suppose when your "in the industry" such as they are and your checks are being paid by people who are pushing said bleeding edge gear it can be somewhat understandable. However only the gullible and ignorant will ever fall for these advertisements posing as journalism.
Real ID doesn't worry me. I'd be more concerned with the US becoming like the UK, a country burying itself in surveillance cameras (and soon, audio devices). That's the real Big Brother scenario to me, when it becomes possible to track and records one's every movement and every public utterance.
Much like the frog in the water theory what your glossing over is the fact that every point that you make brings us one step closer to Big Brother.
If we don't fight all the time they ever try to bring us there then before you know it we will be there.
While I tend to install Firefox on end users computers because it's free I myself use Opera.
As has been noted by others in this thread once you have Opera installed your pretty much done save for configuring it the way you like it. With Firefox you have to install a number of plugins to get that same level of functionality and hope that they will run with the current version of Firefox.
But the real point I want to make here is that while Opera does not have a native ad blocker in place I have always simply used my hosts file as a universal ad blocking mechanism. Dan Pollock maintains a great one on his site and I've yet to find a false positive in it.
The best part about going this route is that all programs on your machine get the benefit of blocking these ad servers or whatever else you care to put in the file. So if you ever have to, , use IE on a website that refuses to work with anything else you are still protected.
Automobiles are much less complicated, but we don't try to hide that complexity; we assume that people must be trained in their proper use. Why not computers?
Because unless you decide to pick up a computer and brain someone with it they are not a lethal weapon.
"There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of these times," said Perens.
I'm no kernel developer so I have no clue as to if Linus is "[being] a real idiot". However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. I can see press release from MS now, "And even Linus' colleagues wonder about his decision making process, going so far as to call them idiotic." Does that statement reflect what was originally intended? Of course not but this is the era of the spin and you can bet that they will use it in whatever way they can.
Even without reading anything I know Brin wins hands down.
Keep in mind that Brin is an actual scientist turned writer whereas Crichton is a doctor turned writer.
Now I'm not saying that there arn't doctors who are scientists however there has never been anything in Crichton's bio to suggest that he was. Whereas Brin is a fellow at JPL just for starters.
Crichton can spin a pretty good tail but even his fiction is no match for Brin when it comes to science.
Mostly because marketing droids and MBAs have trouble dealing with the concept of people being able to master the use of more than one computer. The idea that people are out there who hack their TiVos, run Linux on the desktop, or even have all their appliances with clocks not flashing 12:00 scares the living daylights out of them.
It's a much more comforting thought to them to picture Joe Six Pack and Sally Housewife sitting happily in front of their shiny new Mac while the camera zooms out to show a Dell in the trash with flys buzzing around it.
I hate to sound like RMS but you do realize that when most people say Linux they mean more than just the kernel?
All of the software is open. You can go look at the code for ls or the Gimp or whatever you want. Yes only a few hardcore geeks will care about the internals of kernel code but your missing the point.
With all of the software being open you can always look at what is going on. You can always change whatever you want. You can always verify that your code is free of spyware/trojans/whatever.
Having access to the code is not just one thing it's a lot of things and I don't think you really get it.
While it's always good to see some games from genres other than FPS come up when Linux gaming is discussed there is still a huge gap there.
Of the 10 games I have installed on my Win32 machine right now only 2 of them fall into the FPS genre. That leaves 80% of the games that I normally would expect to play out of what most people would think of in terms of Linux gaming.
I'll grant that some of the the games could be run in WINE and even one of them, good ol NWN, is directly supported. However if gaming on Linux is to become the reality I think that it should not be so one sided as to expect that people will switch just because of FPS games.
Apple was never really the "friend" of independents. Macs are designed to be closed systems, not particularly open toward user-implemented modifications.
Apple actually was around before the Mac and they made quite an impact on the computer industry with their// series. Those machines were built for hacking and had many many many independent people who did all sorts of things with them. (Think AppleCat.)
They still never did want their main system cloned and were quite upset when Franklen was able to make one.
As they grew they realized that if they wanted to really keep their monopoly on hardware they would have to really lock things down which is exactly what they did. They took it a little too far imo because they pushed themselves right into such a niche market that they lost out big time.
Right now I would have to say they are trying to balance the Apple Good Cool image with the MBA suits who you could pull out of an Apple office and stick into a MS office and hardly notice the difference. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Every time a thread like this comes up I see a lot of insightful, well thought out reasons on what happened in the past and why what is happening now is good/bad.
This is why most people here are clearly overqualified to ever be a TV executive.
Well while the actual search page is bearable the portal still is most defiantly that, a portal. (The latter is the one/. linked for some reason rather than the search page)
It loads up with a big smiling image of Billy boy with, "A Letter from Bill Gates". And even he is pushing the portal over the search page:
Input from millions of our customers - including me - was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be. If you have not already tried it, I encourage you to visit www.msn.com and type in your question. We'd love to hear what you think, and I promise that we will continue to improve MSN based on your feedback.
I'll be sticking with a search page that does not have an ulterior motive to try and get me over to their portal. Before Google it was nearly accepted that to search you had to deal with some portal page. Now having used Google for so long I won't accept anything less.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA says it's not the value of the software but rather the service and content that matters. I'd tend to agree with that statement. But a little part of me can't help but dislike and be paranoid about all these web services. Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine? G-mail bothers me like that -- even though I pretty much use it exclusively for e-mail now.
Well then don't use online services if they bother you. You have it totally within your power to use local programs over remote services. I believe Gmail even offers POP access as well?
I think it will be interesting to see how the public accepts the idea of using such online services but it's a far cry from, "...making all the desktops in the World into dumb terminals."
Its yet another C&C clone that just cant seem to get anything right.
I hate to break it to you but if your idea of an RTS is C&C then you shouldn't really be throwing stones at anyone. The genre has moved onward though numerous vastly superior games, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Age of Kings, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, just to name a few and continues to do so.
While it has it's place in history, C&C has not been a part of any serious RTS players library for a long time now.
But that said, none will post here because Blizzard can be pretty draconian with its devs, and they fire people for smaller stuff than that. Assuming that is true then who actually is in charge of WoW's game play/mechanics/balancing? If the devs are basically just a bunch of code monkeys who do the bidding of some more powerful group who exactly are they?
While I'll agree that 50 years is a long time no matter how you slice it, all the more so for computers, but I think it's pretty safe to say that since computers and all the related tech have moved beyond the "brand new" phases of develoment that it's possable to make some generlaizations regarding their future.
Unix itself has shown to stand the test of time so far and with the continuance of Microsofts monopoly (and what amounts to the goverments near approval of it) monopoly the shape of things to come is not as foggy as say in the 70's or 80's.
I'm having a hard time understanding why email is being compared to instant messaging. That would be like comparing snail mail to the telephone.
It seems every 6 months like clockwork someone has to write about the demise of PC gaming. Almost as if they write about it enough times it will come true...but I'll save the tin foil hat stuff for 6 months from now.
First of all as has been noted there are games that don't adapt well at all to console gaming: RTS, MMO, any game that requires a keyboard. Heck even true "gamers", IE FPS players, look down their nose when console players talk about how great Halo is. (Nor do I really blame them.)
Second, I'm a pretty big gamer imo who's main computer spends more time crunching numbers for polygons than it does for spreadsheets but guess what? The video card that's in it cost me $150...nearly 3 years ago! Yeah it's getting dated and I want a new one but there is no way I'm spending $400 for a new one. I'll most likely try to pick one up for $100-$150 and it will work just fine for my purposes.
It seems these journalists, and I use that term loosely these days, are stuck on the idea that if it's not bleeding edge it's not there. They only focus on the idea that the highest priced best rated video card/console/whatever is the only option that people are going to buy when reality is far different from that.
Now I suppose when your "in the industry" such as they are and your checks are being paid by people who are pushing said bleeding edge gear it can be somewhat understandable. However only the gullible and ignorant will ever fall for these advertisements posing as journalism.
Real ID doesn't worry me. I'd be more concerned with the US becoming like the UK, a country burying itself in surveillance cameras (and soon, audio devices). That's the real Big Brother scenario to me, when it becomes possible to track and records one's every movement and every public utterance.
Much like the frog in the water theory what your glossing over is the fact that every point that you make brings us one step closer to Big Brother.
If we don't fight all the time they ever try to bring us there then before you know it we will be there.
Freedom, liberty! These are things a Jedi seeks.
Who is stealing from who? When in doubt, make it dark.
Carmak: Doom III
Lucas: Star Wars Ep III
AOL sucks.
While I tend to install Firefox on end users computers because it's free I myself use Opera.
As has been noted by others in this thread once you have Opera installed your pretty much done save for configuring it the way you like it. With Firefox you have to install a number of plugins to get that same level of functionality and hope that they will run with the current version of Firefox.
But the real point I want to make here is that while Opera does not have a native ad blocker in place I have always simply used my hosts file as a universal ad blocking mechanism. Dan Pollock maintains a great one on his site and I've yet to find a false positive in it.
The best part about going this route is that all programs on your machine get the benefit of blocking these ad servers or whatever else you care to put in the file. So if you ever have to, , use IE on a website that refuses to work with anything else you are still protected.
There is a huge difference between mission critical software and end user systems.
I have never, and will never I'm quite sure, see any deaths related to some end users Dell system kill them because Outlook Express crashed on them.
Once again, your comparing apples and oranges.
Automobiles are much less complicated, but we don't try to hide that complexity; we assume that people must be trained in their proper use. Why not computers?
Because unless you decide to pick up a computer and brain someone with it they are not a lethal weapon.
Apples and oranges my friend.
Lets see as little as 2 years ago we had the highest incarceration rate in the world, we have put to death innocent people, and if you look you can find more ugly stories about the failed war on drugs than you can shake a stick at.
And after all this I'm supposed to care about a few prisoners who make websites? Ooookkkk.
Oh, and all you right wing guys feel free to start flaming me............now.
"There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of these times," said Perens.
I'm no kernel developer so I have no clue as to if Linus is "[being] a real idiot". However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. I can see press release from MS now, "And even Linus' colleagues wonder about his decision making process, going so far as to call them idiotic." Does that statement reflect what was originally intended? Of course not but this is the era of the spin and you can bet that they will use it in whatever way they can.
Even without reading anything I know Brin wins hands down.
Keep in mind that Brin is an actual scientist turned writer whereas Crichton is a doctor turned writer.
Now I'm not saying that there arn't doctors who are scientists however there has never been anything in Crichton's bio to suggest that he was. Whereas Brin is a fellow at JPL just for starters.
Crichton can spin a pretty good tail but even his fiction is no match for Brin when it comes to science.
I'm not trying to start a flame war here but I find it interesting that this thread really has no Sony/PSP defenders in it.
Just yesterday all of the fanboys were out in force talking about how great the PSP was and defending even the slightest knock on the system.
So what's the deal here? Fair weather fanboys?
Mostly because marketing droids and MBAs have trouble dealing with the concept of people being able to master the use of more than one computer. The idea that people are out there who hack their TiVos, run Linux on the desktop, or even have all their appliances with clocks not flashing 12:00 scares the living daylights out of them.
It's a much more comforting thought to them to picture Joe Six Pack and Sally Housewife sitting happily in front of their shiny new Mac while the camera zooms out to show a Dell in the trash with flys buzzing around it.
Bill Gates may be a British knight, but he is not yet emperor of Europe.
Please someone in the UK tell me that you did not knight Bill Gates.
I hate to sound like RMS but you do realize that when most people say Linux they mean more than just the kernel?
All of the software is open. You can go look at the code for ls or the Gimp or whatever you want. Yes only a few hardcore geeks will care about the internals of kernel code but your missing the point.
With all of the software being open you can always look at what is going on. You can always change whatever you want. You can always verify that your code is free of spyware/trojans/whatever.
Having access to the code is not just one thing it's a lot of things and I don't think you really get it.
While it's always good to see some games from genres other than FPS come up when Linux gaming is discussed there is still a huge gap there.
Of the 10 games I have installed on my Win32 machine right now only 2 of them fall into the FPS genre. That leaves 80% of the games that I normally would expect to play out of what most people would think of in terms of Linux gaming.
I'll grant that some of the the games could be run in WINE and even one of them, good ol NWN, is directly supported. However if gaming on Linux is to become the reality I think that it should not be so one sided as to expect that people will switch just because of FPS games.
Apple was never really the "friend" of independents. Macs are designed to be closed systems, not particularly open toward user-implemented modifications.
// series. Those machines were built for hacking and had many many many independent people who did all sorts of things with them. (Think AppleCat.)
Apple actually was around before the Mac and they made quite an impact on the computer industry with their
They still never did want their main system cloned and were quite upset when Franklen was able to make one.
As they grew they realized that if they wanted to really keep their monopoly on hardware they would have to really lock things down which is exactly what they did. They took it a little too far imo because they pushed themselves right into such a niche market that they lost out big time.
Right now I would have to say they are trying to balance the Apple Good Cool image with the MBA suits who you could pull out of an Apple office and stick into a MS office and hardly notice the difference. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Last time I checked there was still:
...and even:
Yahoo!
Altavista
a9
Ask Jeeves
Lycos
Teoma
MSN
Have a reality check; Google is far from a monopoly. They may be the most popular but that's quite different than being a 2 time convicted monopolist.
Every time a thread like this comes up I see a lot of insightful, well thought out reasons on what happened in the past and why what is happening now is good/bad.
This is why most people here are clearly overqualified to ever be a TV executive.
A chance to flame both Stream and the "PC Gamorz are dead d00d!" crowd.
Well while the actual search page is bearable the portal still is most defiantly that, a portal. (The latter is the one /. linked for some reason rather than the search page)
It loads up with a big smiling image of Billy boy with, "A Letter from Bill Gates". And even he is pushing the portal over the search page:
Input from millions of our customers - including me - was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be. If you have not already tried it, I encourage you to visit www.msn.com and type in your question. We'd love to hear what you think, and I promise that we will continue to improve MSN based on your feedback.
I'll be sticking with a search page that does not have an ulterior motive to try and get me over to their portal. Before Google it was nearly accepted that to search you had to deal with some portal page. Now having used Google for so long I won't accept anything less.