Long story made short. It is in Intel's best interest to see more competition in the software space as long as the software all runs on its chips.
This announcement coupled with the recent, exclusive, partnership with Apple makes me think that Intel REALLY wants to get out of bed with Microsoft and the "WinTel" alliance. So what does Microsoft do now? Make their stuff work better on AMD and promote them? Cripple their support on Intel and let the benchmarkers talk about it? Price leverage?
It's interesting that Intel is dancing with others than brung them, and they think they can get away with it. They must have calculated the repercussions MS would impose--but decided they had to support multiple OSes anyway.
Very interesting. The upside is that if it works, both OS X and RH will have Intel-only optimizations, and as those platforms grow, AMD will be marginalized. The downside would be a strong AMD-MS alliance, such that neither OS X nor RH grow and Intel is relegated to being the CPU for "other" OSes but AMD is the best choice for Windows.
One can only surmise that Intel is seeing the alternative OSes reaching critical mass and preparing to break out of their niche markets, and Intel wants to be the favorite when that happens. And there are smart people at Intel that wouldn't make that forecast lightly...
Your argument shows the software developer trying to dictate the behaviour of the customer
And that never happens? You haven't been to any "only works in IE sites" lately, I guess.
I think Apple needs to be very careful with this support--if they bundle a virtualization product, that works well, developers might indeed start having the mentioned conversation. OTOH, having to reboot isn't comfortable for a lot of situations, so might work as a "last-ditch" compatibility mode.
But from a Mac user point of view, have Mac owners really been pining away for the ability to boot into Windows?
Not so much as Windows owners that want to own a Mac--but have too much of a software library to easily make the switch. Let's see, who's a bigger target market for expansion for Apple: current Mac owners, or current Dell/Windows users?
Not that Apple is ready to compete in the $350 range, but I think Dell may come to regret that Alienware purchase.
That's it pretty much exactly. It's not for nothing that email is an OPEN standard, which means that anyone can build their tools to the standard, which makes it ubiquitous. So Exchange/Outlook users can communicate with Mail.app users can communicate with Thunderbird users. Also, it's free.
If a collab vendor wanted to dominate, they would build an open standard, and then not charge for either the clients or the server (so it could be bundled with everything for free). Oh, also they would have to wait for 20 years for the popularity to grow, about how long it took for email to become as popular as it is.
What do these guys expect? Hint: here's why PDF is a popular document interchange: you can download a free reader for about every system known to man; and if your system isn't covered, or if you think you can do a better job, you can build a reader for free and then bundle it with your system eg Preview.app. That's because of the power of PDF being an open standard. And PDF isn't a very good collab tool either.
For a good collab tool, as soon as ONE person you wish to communicate with says they can't use the tool, the entire meeting is broken up. So these vendors need to give away their interchange format, give away the keys to the kingdom. And then release their own clients, for free, and allow others to make their own clients if eg Apple thinks they can do it better. How you make any money off of that model I dunno, but that's not my problem.
By their description I was expecting an encyclopedia of IT knowledge, where you could look up any tool, for instance, to find out its parameters and clever uses. Somewhere that people can post all the cool stuff that you normally have to buy a Tips and Traps book to get to, or be on the development team. Somewhere that I can type in an executable name from my Windows Services window and find out what it does, if it's necessary, and most importantly how to get rid of it. Something with concrete tuning suggestions for each piece of software and hardware.
If you host such a site, I'll contribute the information in my specialty field (Apple hardware and OSes) that I can. Something like this: macos-x-server wiki but multi-platform. I would find such a collection of info especially useful as a collection of Linux best-practices; there are several such sources now, but their problem is exactly that there are several and no single one good one.
They should do a similar study on the ability to recover data off of a hard drive. I know I've said a few prayers as I wait for the unit to spin up. A few requiems, too, actually. Sure seems like it helps, but I'd try anything. Chicken blood and pentagrams if I thought it'd work.
These issues HAVE to be discussed and put into a contract.
That is a wise thing to do, and everyone in this sub-thread is to be commended for thinking about those issues.
However, I'd guess that you all are discussing those issues directly with your partners, rather than playing Diplomacy and talking with one partner while leaving the other out of the loop. Wouldn't on-the-table discussions about what were to happen should any of the partners die, including BillG or SteveB (they could be hit by a truck, pre-deceasing Paul, you know) be more honest and forthright? Even if that conversation was motivated by Paul's sickness?
The secrecy angle is the reprehensible part of this story, not the death contingency.
What will Google and Venter bring to this approach, I wonder? A faster search algorithm? I don't see how it could be more open, but it might be made more accessible--maybe. The genome is a complicated thing, and it probably requires the interpretation of scientific minds to make much of the implications of a particular sequence.
They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run.
Ask a PR/graphic design shop what they think about having the real possibility of their only choice of Mac hardware being not able to run the current version of Adobe's CS2 (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc) in the near future.
Adobe lagged coming to OS X--but it wasn't too bad. Now it's looking like there may be a gap of almost 6-12 months, with no real acceptable transition layer (at least last time you could run Classic apps, which wasn't great but workable. PhotoShop through Rosetta just isn't acceptable.)
To put this article another way: Apple's lack of third party support gives them the freedom to make changes according to Steve's Will. While that's convenient for Steve, I think the lack of third party support is much more detrimental than a benefit, and I wish that Apple had the compatibility problems that Microsoft has, as it would signify a healthy ecosystem of third party support.
If Jobs was a brillant strategist, I would say that he's using iPod revenues to fund the development of a platform (OS X, and now Intel CPUs) that, while losing much of the company's traditional support, will provide a solid framework for future growth. Since Apple has the resources to fund them through this transition, they can afford to basically start over. And once the software and hardware platform have stabilized (API stability promised in 10.4, for example) they can start attracting third parties and be able to provide them an unchanging platform indefinitely. I don't know that Jobs is that forward thinking, but could be.
Clearly something had to be done, so OS X and Intel may be a bet the farm strategy, providing just enough compatibility so that OS X doesn't become irrelevant in the meantime. Once OS X and the hardware is considered "finished" by Apple, are they then going to make a big serious play to gain marketshare, that would have been previously wasted by attracting developers to a moving target of APIs and hardware before? That time may be coming with 10.5--due for unveiling in Aug 06. Before Vista. This could be an interesting 5 years.
Of course, it'd lack the characters, and the dialog would be hard to enforce among the player base, which were two of the most interesting features. But a MMORPG based on smuggling and crime, ala Traveller but with no aliens I think could be real fun.
What I've heard pointed out is that any game based on a license is doomed to fail, simply because the licensing itself costs money that takes away from otherwise building a superior development environment. While it builds in a player base, that base leaves because of lack of content, content that could have been there but for the money having gone to the licensee.
Stands to reason, and it seems to hold up in practice, too. Is there ONE good game that was a license of a brand? Maybe the Harry Potter series of games, but I don't play.
I'm talking about AI. Not basic AI like intelligent enemies, but an "emotion" engine where characters could change their mood and give you different answers, or do different things.
I would suggest human storytellers. The problem with this is scale--how to have so many DMs accessible to the currently logged in online players, but that could be mitigated by "out of the face" intereactions, like going to the vendor, healing downtime, etc. But what would happen if Blizz were to substitute live quest givers for some of their automated ones?
Until a plot line is so smart that it can pass a Turing test, you'll always know that your game environment has boundaries. But with the kind of money that games can make, couldn't they have live people that move the story along and interact with the players in human ways?
hat I'm not able to figure out is what kind of advertising is going to be there on user pages. Yahoo Geocities has a huge advertising pane on the right side of every page. I wonder how google will deal with inserting ads.
I haven't an account, so I'd welcome more informative responses, but I'll speculate:
There will be no ads during beta. The first hit is free.
The ads that do appear will be based on the content of the page, and will be mostly text--ala the ads that you see on everyone's blog. It only makes sense to tie this service to the existing ad delivery mechanism, but since Google will host the site the site owner won't get a kickback, and will be given more powerful tools to draw viewers.
And the alt-tab that only shows *applications* and not windows, so if you want to move from one firefox window to a particular word document, you're stuck with moving from firefox to word, then using that application's own custom keystrokes to navigate between the documents.
Then use expose, which does exactly that (shows all open windows) and can be mapped to a function key combo. And you can use expose to ALSO move between windows of an app, which means you don't have to learn a custom key set per app, just the one for expose.
Finally, if it wasn't clear, you can move focus to the menubar through "ctrl-func-F2". Then tab across and arrow up and down.
Clearly, it is you that has no idea what you're talking about. I have yet to find a pop-up that doesn't work correctly with "return or space bar for alternate selection, tab to move selection", or for a window that doesn't close with cmd-W. Maybe you use different apps than I, but that's the apps fault for not following Apple's HID, and there's little the OS vendor can do about it. Same is true and worse for Windows.
There is absolutely no strong evidence that the Chinese government is behind it. But even then, you're already speculating that the government is involved even when they say the government isn't. Your "they're guilty until proven innocent" is exactly the irresponsible behavior they mean.
My dad - yes yes he does NOT live in China - has an even stronger opinion than I have. He firmly believes that people are getting paid by the US government to bash the Chinese government.
I imagine that he--and you, because you repeat it--have "strong evidence" for that claim. Otherwise, how are the two contentions any different from one another?
Interesting that you live in Europe, btw. What makes you think you have an accurate picture of what the ground truth in China is?
Finally, that is an interesting theory about paid anti-Chinese propaganda. I could believe it. But before I did, I'd want to see better evidence. Otherwise it's just speculation.
I agree, on surface these games don't seem to have any major stories other than go there kill that and come back with his head and you get phat lootz.
I used to try and read the storylines for the quests, but eventually, since the result was the same, I just stopped caring. Once in awhile I'll tune in, esp if the target is harder to find and I need to pay attention to the description to do so. But that's not often the case.
I would actually prefer to have more involvement, but since it doesn't really matter it's hard to drum up the interest. And I think it's probably an insurmountable issue: it would take legions of better writers to have to put thought and subtlety into their quests, whereas now they can just put a grind target number of kills on it and pretty much put in whatever (and the latter is ultimately cheaper to manage).
And, since WoW is an international game, I think the generic kill quests are probably easier to translate both in terms of straight language transposition and also culturally. For instance, the last time I played Final Fantasy frankly it's hard following wtf the (Japanese) characters are on about. I imagine our games are the same to them, and if it required their understanding of our storylines just to play the game they'd lose interest.
Don't be dumb. Just hack his calendar to add appointments, late at night/on weekends/on holidays with another girl. Better, schedule him and her for a weekend away at someplace romantic.
Then publish his calendar to the first girl.
So in this instance, Google needs to pony up and start talking or the ride might end early.
So what? I've never understood why a company would care about it's stock price--that stock has already been sold; they aren't going to see further income from the stock, regardless if the price is high or low. Is it because typically a company will hold some of it's own stock, and then sell that resource as need for funding comes up--so a high price on it's shares means that a company can generate more money/have to sell of less if the need arises? Or is it about the personal wealth levels of the principals?
Can someone tell me why Google's CFO would care if the stock price is $400 or $40, except as a measure of his personal wealth as expressed by his own stock holdings?
This thing will be made or broke by it's handwriting recognition. I assume it'll use the same tech that Tablet XP uses, and I guess I don't know how good that is--i'd be interested to hear from someone with recent experience.
Would I be interested in something that I could handwrite full speed meeting notes on, and have it 99.5% accurate? Yes, because: a) the notes would subsequently be searchable; b) the notes would be easier to transfer/collab to others in my workgroup; c) I could have booklets full in one place; d) they would be backable, which means that a year's worth of notes wouldn't be wiped out by a run through the rain.
While I believe a tablet PC has these advantages, I just couldn't justify it at $2K. $500 is close to worthwhile. Add in the ability to carry 5,000 pages of searchable reference manual and even as a Mac user I might be interested. I don't need to sync my email so much, which is one of the things I'd presume I'd lose.
If TiVo doesn't offer lifetife subscriptions anymore, then it might just suggest that they won't be around for anyone's lifetime.
No, this was more likely a planned shift to a long term model. It would be wise to offer lifetime subs when your company is cash-poor and needs income to keep going in the short term. However, a long term model is benefited by having a consistent revenue stream.
Think of it this way: if Tivo sold 200 million Tivos to every man, woman, and child, but each had a lifetime sub, after the initial purchase Tivo would no longer have an income stream, but would be required to provide service indefinitely. A move to monthly-subs means that those 200 million folks would each be contributing to the ongoing, not the startup costs, of the company.
I predicted this move some time ago, and it concerns me not. In fact, in means that Tivo is less in need of startup revenue than they were previously.
Anyone could easily offer a service where I go on quests for a player in order to gain level (at least I presume so. Don't play MMOs), but nobody would bother because it would be taking away their fun.
This exact service is for sale. That's a statement for how much dedicated effort is required--the highest level the game affords can be acquired in 18-21 days of (presumably) 24/7 play, for a mere $300.
If I were to offer such a service, I just couldn't compete; I can't afford to earn only $300 in three weeks, let alone hiring someone to work the second shift. Yet, there are folks that can offer this at retail; presumably, the folks doing the actual work make substantially less than that.
Can I say that this offer is attractive? I would say that there are dull parts of the game, and fun parts of the game. It is tempting to hire someone to play the dull parts so I can maximize my time playing only the fun parts; it's too bad that the only model Blizz has found is to balance dull/fun to just come in enough on the fun scale that it holds interest, and that it's needed at all to keep accounts subscribed for periods of time.
What is amazing to me is that this could be stopped, but it seems like Blizz only gives it token awareness. Allowing for no more than 14 hrs of play in a 24 hr period would at least slow it down; limiting the ability for characters to transfer gold to each other would be another. And that's not even imposing technological monitoring, like imposing limits on IP ranges for time online/transfer amount. And while you couldn't probably stop it, you could make it less efficient--meaning costs go up, and subsequently fewer players would have access to it or be tempted by it. As it is, on the servers I play on 10gp=$1, or even less than that; that's just insane. 10gp at the levels I play at is a fortune, and it takes me hours to acquire (that I would rather be doing other things in the game).
Not saying there's anything wrong with this, Solaris, FreeBSD, et al are the same, but while SSH may need enabling on a Mac desktop, it does not appear to on a Mac server.
Of course SSH is on by default on a Mac Server--it is designed to run, and be configured from first boot, headless. That would be pretty difficult to do if you had no services. Other default services are Apple Remote Desktop, for GUI control, and the Server Admin Suite; even the Apple Server Admin Tools can be port forwarded through SSH if you prefer.
The assumption is that servers will be managed by those with a clue, whereas desktops will not usually be. Also, no Mac desktops are expected to be configured and maintained headless from first boot, whereas you have to specify a video card for an Xserver for it to be graphical at all. I don't think those are unreasonable assumptions to make.
Personally, I believe that nuclear is the way to go. However, the need for it doesn't obviate the industry of being safe and smart, even when that might cut into their profit margins--and I'm not sure I can trust them to do either. And comments such as these:
It's time for us Americans to fucking get over our mindless, 1960's-era "no nukes, no nukes!" anti-tech knee jerking and start making some realistic choices
give the nuke industry no motivation to be safe and smart either.
Nuclear power is probably the way to go. But I'm not about to write them a blank check, either, and I am not going to be accused of being a radical anti-nuke mouth foamer because I want to put some safeguards in place, including not believing what they say until it's backed up by as many independent regulators as I want.
Fact is, the nuke industry has lied, repeatedly, mostly to save costs. It's no surprise that now they have a tough row to hoe; they dug their own grave. I WISH they were a credible source; and I WISH that they were more willing to accept government and independent oversight to get back into good graces. Instead, they attack people with concerns, and come off as being just as radical, and as credible, as a tree hugger.
Maybe we should just nationlize the whole program and take the profit out of it. But that would be trading the deceptiveness required to maximize profits for the ineptitude of bureaucracy, and that might not be better in the long run.
Maybe we're just not smart enough as a society or economic system to manage nuke power; I guess we'll find out if there's another system that works better, as we'll be able to watch them pass us by.
Slashdot Mirror
Long story made short. It is in Intel's best interest to see more competition in the software space as long as the software all runs on its chips.
This announcement coupled with the recent, exclusive, partnership with Apple makes me think that Intel REALLY wants to get out of bed with Microsoft and the "WinTel" alliance. So what does Microsoft do now? Make their stuff work better on AMD and promote them? Cripple their support on Intel and let the benchmarkers talk about it? Price leverage?
It's interesting that Intel is dancing with others than brung them, and they think they can get away with it. They must have calculated the repercussions MS would impose--but decided they had to support multiple OSes anyway.
Very interesting. The upside is that if it works, both OS X and RH will have Intel-only optimizations, and as those platforms grow, AMD will be marginalized. The downside would be a strong AMD-MS alliance, such that neither OS X nor RH grow and Intel is relegated to being the CPU for "other" OSes but AMD is the best choice for Windows.
One can only surmise that Intel is seeing the alternative OSes reaching critical mass and preparing to break out of their niche markets, and Intel wants to be the favorite when that happens. And there are smart people at Intel that wouldn't make that forecast lightly...
Your argument shows the software developer trying to dictate the behaviour of the customer
And that never happens? You haven't been to any "only works in IE sites" lately, I guess.
I think Apple needs to be very careful with this support--if they bundle a virtualization product, that works well, developers might indeed start having the mentioned conversation. OTOH, having to reboot isn't comfortable for a lot of situations, so might work as a "last-ditch" compatibility mode.
But from a Mac user point of view, have Mac owners really been pining away for the ability to boot into Windows?
Not so much as Windows owners that want to own a Mac--but have too much of a software library to easily make the switch. Let's see, who's a bigger target market for expansion for Apple: current Mac owners, or current Dell/Windows users?
Not that Apple is ready to compete in the $350 range, but I think Dell may come to regret that Alienware purchase.
That's it pretty much exactly. It's not for nothing that email is an OPEN standard, which means that anyone can build their tools to the standard, which makes it ubiquitous. So Exchange/Outlook users can communicate with Mail.app users can communicate with Thunderbird users. Also, it's free.
If a collab vendor wanted to dominate, they would build an open standard, and then not charge for either the clients or the server (so it could be bundled with everything for free). Oh, also they would have to wait for 20 years for the popularity to grow, about how long it took for email to become as popular as it is.
What do these guys expect? Hint: here's why PDF is a popular document interchange: you can download a free reader for about every system known to man; and if your system isn't covered, or if you think you can do a better job, you can build a reader for free and then bundle it with your system eg Preview.app. That's because of the power of PDF being an open standard. And PDF isn't a very good collab tool either.
For a good collab tool, as soon as ONE person you wish to communicate with says they can't use the tool, the entire meeting is broken up. So these vendors need to give away their interchange format, give away the keys to the kingdom. And then release their own clients, for free, and allow others to make their own clients if eg Apple thinks they can do it better. How you make any money off of that model I dunno, but that's not my problem.
By their description I was expecting an encyclopedia of IT knowledge, where you could look up any tool, for instance, to find out its parameters and clever uses. Somewhere that people can post all the cool stuff that you normally have to buy a Tips and Traps book to get to, or be on the development team. Somewhere that I can type in an executable name from my Windows Services window and find out what it does, if it's necessary, and most importantly how to get rid of it. Something with concrete tuning suggestions for each piece of software and hardware.
If you host such a site, I'll contribute the information in my specialty field (Apple hardware and OSes) that I can. Something like this: macos-x-server wiki but multi-platform. I would find such a collection of info especially useful as a collection of Linux best-practices; there are several such sources now, but their problem is exactly that there are several and no single one good one.
They should do a similar study on the ability to recover data off of a hard drive. I know I've said a few prayers as I wait for the unit to spin up. A few requiems, too, actually. Sure seems like it helps, but I'd try anything. Chicken blood and pentagrams if I thought it'd work.
These issues HAVE to be discussed and put into a contract.
That is a wise thing to do, and everyone in this sub-thread is to be commended for thinking about those issues.
However, I'd guess that you all are discussing those issues directly with your partners, rather than playing Diplomacy and talking with one partner while leaving the other out of the loop. Wouldn't on-the-table discussions about what were to happen should any of the partners die, including BillG or SteveB (they could be hit by a truck, pre-deceasing Paul, you know) be more honest and forthright? Even if that conversation was motivated by Paul's sickness?
The secrecy angle is the reprehensible part of this story, not the death contingency.
For those unaware, you can currently browse the genome libraries: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/human/re
You can even do BLAST searches: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/seq/BlastGen/Bl astGen.cgi?taxid=9606
What will Google and Venter bring to this approach, I wonder? A faster search algorithm? I don't see how it could be more open, but it might be made more accessible--maybe. The genome is a complicated thing, and it probably requires the interpretation of scientific minds to make much of the implications of a particular sequence.
They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run.
Ask a PR/graphic design shop what they think about having the real possibility of their only choice of Mac hardware being not able to run the current version of Adobe's CS2 (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc) in the near future.
Adobe lagged coming to OS X--but it wasn't too bad. Now it's looking like there may be a gap of almost 6-12 months, with no real acceptable transition layer (at least last time you could run Classic apps, which wasn't great but workable. PhotoShop through Rosetta just isn't acceptable.)
To put this article another way: Apple's lack of third party support gives them the freedom to make changes according to Steve's Will. While that's convenient for Steve, I think the lack of third party support is much more detrimental than a benefit, and I wish that Apple had the compatibility problems that Microsoft has, as it would signify a healthy ecosystem of third party support.
If Jobs was a brillant strategist, I would say that he's using iPod revenues to fund the development of a platform (OS X, and now Intel CPUs) that, while losing much of the company's traditional support, will provide a solid framework for future growth. Since Apple has the resources to fund them through this transition, they can afford to basically start over. And once the software and hardware platform have stabilized (API stability promised in 10.4, for example) they can start attracting third parties and be able to provide them an unchanging platform indefinitely. I don't know that Jobs is that forward thinking, but could be.
Clearly something had to be done, so OS X and Intel may be a bet the farm strategy, providing just enough compatibility so that OS X doesn't become irrelevant in the meantime. Once OS X and the hardware is considered "finished" by Apple, are they then going to make a big serious play to gain marketshare, that would have been previously wasted by attracting developers to a moving target of APIs and hardware before? That time may be coming with 10.5--due for unveiling in Aug 06. Before Vista. This could be an interesting 5 years.
Mafia saying: behind every great fortune lays a small crime.
Of course, it'd lack the characters, and the dialog would be hard to enforce among the player base, which were two of the most interesting features. But a MMORPG based on smuggling and crime, ala Traveller but with no aliens I think could be real fun.
What I've heard pointed out is that any game based on a license is doomed to fail, simply because the licensing itself costs money that takes away from otherwise building a superior development environment. While it builds in a player base, that base leaves because of lack of content, content that could have been there but for the money having gone to the licensee.
Stands to reason, and it seems to hold up in practice, too. Is there ONE good game that was a license of a brand? Maybe the Harry Potter series of games, but I don't play.
I'm talking about AI. Not basic AI like intelligent enemies, but an "emotion" engine where characters could change their mood and give you different answers, or do different things.
I would suggest human storytellers. The problem with this is scale--how to have so many DMs accessible to the currently logged in online players, but that could be mitigated by "out of the face" intereactions, like going to the vendor, healing downtime, etc. But what would happen if Blizz were to substitute live quest givers for some of their automated ones?
Until a plot line is so smart that it can pass a Turing test, you'll always know that your game environment has boundaries. But with the kind of money that games can make, couldn't they have live people that move the story along and interact with the players in human ways?
hat I'm not able to figure out is what kind of advertising is going to be there on user pages. Yahoo Geocities has a huge advertising pane on the right side of every page. I wonder how google will deal with inserting ads.
I haven't an account, so I'd welcome more informative responses, but I'll speculate:
And the alt-tab that only shows *applications* and not windows, so if you want to move from one firefox window to a particular word document, you're stuck with moving from firefox to word, then using that application's own custom keystrokes to navigate between the documents.
Then use expose, which does exactly that (shows all open windows) and can be mapped to a function key combo. And you can use expose to ALSO move between windows of an app, which means you don't have to learn a custom key set per app, just the one for expose.
Finally, if it wasn't clear, you can move focus to the menubar through "ctrl-func-F2". Then tab across and arrow up and down.
Clearly, it is you that has no idea what you're talking about. I have yet to find a pop-up that doesn't work correctly with "return or space bar for alternate selection, tab to move selection", or for a window that doesn't close with cmd-W. Maybe you use different apps than I, but that's the apps fault for not following Apple's HID, and there's little the OS vendor can do about it. Same is true and worse for Windows.
Single user mode. No boot media required.
If you've disabled single user mode, there's not much that can be done. That's the nature of security.
There is absolutely no strong evidence that the Chinese government is behind it. But even then, you're already speculating that the government is involved even when they say the government isn't. Your "they're guilty until proven innocent" is exactly the irresponsible behavior they mean.
My dad - yes yes he does NOT live in China - has an even stronger opinion than I have. He firmly believes that people are getting paid by the US government to bash the Chinese government.
I imagine that he--and you, because you repeat it--have "strong evidence" for that claim. Otherwise, how are the two contentions any different from one another?
Interesting that you live in Europe, btw. What makes you think you have an accurate picture of what the ground truth in China is?
Finally, that is an interesting theory about paid anti-Chinese propaganda. I could believe it. But before I did, I'd want to see better evidence. Otherwise it's just speculation.
I agree, on surface these games don't seem to have any major stories other than go there kill that and come back with his head and you get phat lootz.
I used to try and read the storylines for the quests, but eventually, since the result was the same, I just stopped caring. Once in awhile I'll tune in, esp if the target is harder to find and I need to pay attention to the description to do so. But that's not often the case.
I would actually prefer to have more involvement, but since it doesn't really matter it's hard to drum up the interest. And I think it's probably an insurmountable issue: it would take legions of better writers to have to put thought and subtlety into their quests, whereas now they can just put a grind target number of kills on it and pretty much put in whatever (and the latter is ultimately cheaper to manage).
And, since WoW is an international game, I think the generic kill quests are probably easier to translate both in terms of straight language transposition and also culturally. For instance, the last time I played Final Fantasy frankly it's hard following wtf the (Japanese) characters are on about. I imagine our games are the same to them, and if it required their understanding of our storylines just to play the game they'd lose interest.
Don't be dumb. Just hack his calendar to add appointments, late at night/on weekends/on holidays with another girl. Better, schedule him and her for a weekend away at someplace romantic. Then publish his calendar to the first girl.
So in this instance, Google needs to pony up and start talking or the ride might end early.
So what? I've never understood why a company would care about it's stock price--that stock has already been sold; they aren't going to see further income from the stock, regardless if the price is high or low. Is it because typically a company will hold some of it's own stock, and then sell that resource as need for funding comes up--so a high price on it's shares means that a company can generate more money/have to sell of less if the need arises? Or is it about the personal wealth levels of the principals?
Can someone tell me why Google's CFO would care if the stock price is $400 or $40, except as a measure of his personal wealth as expressed by his own stock holdings?
This thing will be made or broke by it's handwriting recognition. I assume it'll use the same tech that Tablet XP uses, and I guess I don't know how good that is--i'd be interested to hear from someone with recent experience.
Would I be interested in something that I could handwrite full speed meeting notes on, and have it 99.5% accurate? Yes, because: a) the notes would subsequently be searchable; b) the notes would be easier to transfer/collab to others in my workgroup; c) I could have booklets full in one place; d) they would be backable, which means that a year's worth of notes wouldn't be wiped out by a run through the rain.
While I believe a tablet PC has these advantages, I just couldn't justify it at $2K. $500 is close to worthwhile. Add in the ability to carry 5,000 pages of searchable reference manual and even as a Mac user I might be interested. I don't need to sync my email so much, which is one of the things I'd presume I'd lose.
If TiVo doesn't offer lifetife subscriptions anymore, then it might just suggest that they won't be around for anyone's lifetime.
No, this was more likely a planned shift to a long term model. It would be wise to offer lifetime subs when your company is cash-poor and needs income to keep going in the short term. However, a long term model is benefited by having a consistent revenue stream.
Think of it this way: if Tivo sold 200 million Tivos to every man, woman, and child, but each had a lifetime sub, after the initial purchase Tivo would no longer have an income stream, but would be required to provide service indefinitely. A move to monthly-subs means that those 200 million folks would each be contributing to the ongoing, not the startup costs, of the company.
I predicted this move some time ago, and it concerns me not. In fact, in means that Tivo is less in need of startup revenue than they were previously.
Half Life for the Mac. Goddam Sierra.
I still refuse to buy any of their product, in protest. I'll steal it, but won't buy it. Goddamit.
Anyone could easily offer a service where I go on quests for a player in order to gain level (at least I presume so. Don't play MMOs), but nobody would bother because it would be taking away their fun.
This exact service is for sale. That's a statement for how much dedicated effort is required--the highest level the game affords can be acquired in 18-21 days of (presumably) 24/7 play, for a mere $300.
If I were to offer such a service, I just couldn't compete; I can't afford to earn only $300 in three weeks, let alone hiring someone to work the second shift. Yet, there are folks that can offer this at retail; presumably, the folks doing the actual work make substantially less than that.
Can I say that this offer is attractive? I would say that there are dull parts of the game, and fun parts of the game. It is tempting to hire someone to play the dull parts so I can maximize my time playing only the fun parts; it's too bad that the only model Blizz has found is to balance dull/fun to just come in enough on the fun scale that it holds interest, and that it's needed at all to keep accounts subscribed for periods of time.
What is amazing to me is that this could be stopped, but it seems like Blizz only gives it token awareness. Allowing for no more than 14 hrs of play in a 24 hr period would at least slow it down; limiting the ability for characters to transfer gold to each other would be another. And that's not even imposing technological monitoring, like imposing limits on IP ranges for time online/transfer amount. And while you couldn't probably stop it, you could make it less efficient--meaning costs go up, and subsequently fewer players would have access to it or be tempted by it. As it is, on the servers I play on 10gp=$1, or even less than that; that's just insane. 10gp at the levels I play at is a fortune, and it takes me hours to acquire (that I would rather be doing other things in the game).
Not saying there's anything wrong with this, Solaris, FreeBSD, et al are the same, but while SSH may need enabling on a Mac desktop, it does not appear to on a Mac server.
Of course SSH is on by default on a Mac Server--it is designed to run, and be configured from first boot, headless. That would be pretty difficult to do if you had no services. Other default services are Apple Remote Desktop, for GUI control, and the Server Admin Suite; even the Apple Server Admin Tools can be port forwarded through SSH if you prefer.
The assumption is that servers will be managed by those with a clue, whereas desktops will not usually be. Also, no Mac desktops are expected to be configured and maintained headless from first boot, whereas you have to specify a video card for an Xserver for it to be graphical at all. I don't think those are unreasonable assumptions to make.
Personally, I believe that nuclear is the way to go. However, the need for it doesn't obviate the industry of being safe and smart, even when that might cut into their profit margins--and I'm not sure I can trust them to do either. And comments such as these:
It's time for us Americans to fucking get over our mindless, 1960's-era "no nukes, no nukes!" anti-tech knee jerking and start making some realistic choices
give the nuke industry no motivation to be safe and smart either.
Nuclear power is probably the way to go. But I'm not about to write them a blank check, either, and I am not going to be accused of being a radical anti-nuke mouth foamer because I want to put some safeguards in place, including not believing what they say until it's backed up by as many independent regulators as I want.
Fact is, the nuke industry has lied, repeatedly, mostly to save costs. It's no surprise that now they have a tough row to hoe; they dug their own grave. I WISH they were a credible source; and I WISH that they were more willing to accept government and independent oversight to get back into good graces. Instead, they attack people with concerns, and come off as being just as radical, and as credible, as a tree hugger.
Maybe we should just nationlize the whole program and take the profit out of it. But that would be trading the deceptiveness required to maximize profits for the ineptitude of bureaucracy, and that might not be better in the long run.
Maybe we're just not smart enough as a society or economic system to manage nuke power; I guess we'll find out if there's another system that works better, as we'll be able to watch them pass us by.