> But it's getting more and more difficult to come here expecting anything intelligent, when there are so many more mature, interesting webboards out there
IMO, Kuro5hin is lame. I keep the K5 Slashbox up, and still read the titles semi-regularly. Most of them are drivel. Now and then an interesting one comes up, but if I decide to drop by I almost always find that the discussion is drivel too.
Sure, there's lots of trolls and clubies on Slashdot. And lots of martyrs like you, who pretend to be a tiny minority with penetrating insight, whereas in fact you're a large plurality who pretty much conform to the caricature you accuse others of.
But if you browse at 1 most of the time, and mentally tune out the remaining drek, you can still actually learn a lot on Slashdot. A lot about technology, and a lot about what's going on in the social world too.
And sometimes you'll hear opinions that you don't agree with, and people will bring you around to their side if you participate in the discussion intelligently.
Forgive my rant; I just get tired of all the self-righteous bashers of Linux and Slashdot. If you don't like an article, don't read it. If you don't like Linux, don't use it. But don't pretend to be a clearsighted sage who rises above the ambient bullshit, when you're just bitching the same bitch that dozens of other morons post in response to every fuckin' article we get here.
> 1.Linux users will have to overcome their desire for Open-Source. Gamers probably don't have this problem, but it bears mentioning. See also #3. > 3.Linux users will have to get used to the idea of paying for software. If the games are ripped off left and right, then there will be no money for the people producing the games. And then there will be no games.
You are assuming that "success" is defined by how many units can be sold. What if we defined it by "being able to play lots of nifty games under Linux"? In that case, "Open Source" and "free" might be advantages rather than disadvantages.
Take Freeciv as an example. It's open source, and it's successful in the senses that it has lots of dedicated players and it is still getting attention from programmers even after 5 years "on the market". It has also started moving away from being just a clone toward being an innovator.
How many commercial games still get bug fixes and enhancements after 5 years? In the commercial world, bugs get fixed exactly when businessmen think the fixes will contribute to the bottom line, which is rare indeed. Indeed, a steady stream of bug fixes might be seen as a conflict of interest with getting people to buy the next shoddy product.
Also, your favorite genre is at the mercy of a handful of businessmen. What if you love FPSs, and they decide this year that FPSs are declassé, and move on to the next big thing? You're screwed. No new titles, no bugfixes for the old ones. It has happened before, and it will happen again. With OS games, it's not a risk at all, because it only takes a handful of volunteers to keep a game evolving.
OK, so I named Freeciv. Granted, that's not much. But remember, Linux still has a very small share of the desktop market, and even a smaller share of the gaming market. As those shares grow, mindshare will grow too, and you'll see more games of Freeciv quality popping up.
Remember too that the PC world had a thriving shareware market long before Linux was born. The itch and the will to scratch has always been there. What happens as more and more of the shareware author type become aware of Linux and the joys of OS programming?
My brother used to tinker with shareware games, but he was stuck with QBASIC because he didn't have money for development suites, and of course it takes years for one person to develop a nice game if he can only work on it a few hours a week. But suppose he installs Linux on his system? He suddenly has more development tools than he knows what to do with. And between OS licensing and the internet, he can suddenly round up a handful of like-minded comrades to help make his game become a reality.
I think we are headed for an OS revolution in gaming just as we are in desktops, and just as we have already experienced in servers and supercomputing clusters.
We may even experience a catastropic collapse of the game production sector. Game programmers already work deathmarches for low pay, with a low probability of producing a hit. Any substantial spread of OS gaming is going to put pressure on a system that is already ill. (Did I say already ill? Look at the release-day pricetag of games that are coming out now, and compare that to what they sold for five years ago.)
As for scratching the itch... I quit buying games altogether. I bought a few for Linux, but every time I play one I find myself asking "Why should I play this, and deal with the bugs and screwball features, when I could write my own game, or take Freeciv and tweak it to suit my own tastes?"
If only 1000 people develop the same attitude, OS games will start popping up everywhere. And the more that pop up, the more mindshare they attract.
No, I don't think the desire for open source and the unwillingness to pay for certain kinds of software is going to hurt the "success" of Linux gaming at all. No more than they hurt the success of OS operating systems. The same factors still apply.
And I dispute number 2 as well. Version compatibility problems under Linux are dwarfed by the DLL Hell problem under Windows. And that problem hasn't exactly killed off gaming under Windows -- not by a long shot.
> Is this a desperate move by Microsoft to increase revenues from one area that they are expecting to lose in another year?
It's almost certainly a money grab; for the past year they have been announcing a continual stream of "reorganized" licensing plans, and in every case that I've heard of, the customer pays more for the same product or service, or pays the same and gets less, or pays more and gets less.
As a WAG, I would say the money grab has more to do with a cash flow problem than with pillaging a province that they think is about to be pillaged by barbarians anyway. There are multiple signs that MS isn't generating the kind of cash they need to from software sales. Reports of an (illegal?) "cookie-jar" scheme have been rife for over a year now. More recent reports claim that they made more money last quarter by selling off assets than by selling software. Moreover, the vaunted W2K "Unix Killer" has ended up instead playing Little Dutch Boy, vainly trying to stem the flow of Linux into the serverspace market that MS thought Manifest Destiny was going to drop into their own hands. Nor has W2K been a big seller in its own right: after a reported $1,000,000,000 in development costs and another whopping $500,000,000 in the initial marketing blitz, it's not exactly cropping up on every street corner.
For Microsoft, there's not much more to be had by increasing market share. The part of the world that can afford computers is practically saturated, and there's not much competition left for Microsoft to seize pre-saturated turf from. They find themselves stymied in serverspace, and on the desktop they have already reduced their most visible competitor to the status of a conquered client. So their cash flow is almost entirely dependent on the upgrade cycle, or ventures into entirely new fields (can you say "X-box"?).
And then there's the valuation of MSFT. From around 120 in late '99, it dropped to around 55 in mid '00. That was before the current landslide in tech stocks got started. MSFT did pull up somewhat from the 55 and stabilize for a while before the landslide started, but now it has been caught up in it and `fallen into the 40's. The outlook for their next quarterly report is bleak indeed.
And make no mistake: Microsoft isn't "about" software. Microsoft isn't really even about making money. Micorsoft is about the share price of MSFT. Cash flow and software design are both subordinate to that higher goal.
So I would guess that this and all other attempts to squeeze cash from its installed base is all about making the books look good so MSFT will soar again. (I wouldn't bank on it -- in fact I told a friend 18 months ago to get out of MSFT -- but Microsoft will keep trying to pump it back up as long as they have a customer left to squeeze or penny left in the bank.)
The interesting part of your question is, will that squeezing make customers turn elsewhere? Linux has been making inroads already, and by some accounts is already used on more desktops than the Mac is. It's certain that the world won't switch to Linux overnight. But the world could look vastly different in 12 months. If MSFT continues to fall, Microsoft will continue to squeeze. As Linux continues to make inroads into server space, more powerusers will be exposed to it and adopt it for their own desktops. As more people adopt it for server or desktop, more companies will port their commercial products to it. (There has already been a notable shift in that direction over the past year or two.) With I2O supported in Linux 2.4, the possibility suddenly arises that the latest newfangled peripherals will suddenly start working on Linux the same day they work on Windows.
The net result is that Microsoft not only doesn't have anywhere to expand, but it suddenly finds even its upgrade market shrinking, if only by a little. But when upgrades are your primary source of revenue, even a small shrinkage puts a real squeeze on your desire to look "way profitable".
You can think of Microsoft's market share as a leaky innertube. There is already a minor flow out toward Linux. Squeezing the tube can't help matters, and at some level of pressure will make the difference between a slightly accelerated leak and a loud pop.
Microsoft can't keep going the way they have been for the past 20 years. I think the X-box is a sign that they know it. Even if the courts veto a breakup, you can bet that they will have a radically different position in the market before long, probably within a couple of years. That won't be entirely or even primarily due to Linux, though Linux is playing a role in it. It's one factor among many.
> Companies are not going to dump Microsoft over something as trivial as a minor change in license fees.
In general, yes. At least so long as the fees don't get too expensive.
But think of it probabalistically: some companies that were wavering for other reasons may now switch due to this "straw". Put another way, it shifts the center of gravity of "desire space" a small increment away from Windows.
> They have a huge investment in existing software and training for Windows. They would have to dump Office and their custom apps, buy and install new software, retrain employees, and incur other costs.
Of course, they are already incurring these costs everytime Redmond comes out with a new version of its OS, or office suite, or anything else. Shipping your employees off to a week-long training class is every bit as much a part of the upgrade treadmill that paying again is.
A farsighted manager would interpret that as being his cutover to Linux already being partly paid for -- it's in the budget anyway.
> When I said "command line", I got the same reaction as if I had said "radioactive waste". And you want these people to use UNIX?
As you well know, the CL isn't the only way to interact with *n*x. I'm certainly not using it to read and reply to your post.
Even if it were the only UI... I used to work in a VAX shop where everything was CL-and-menu based, and the people who worked there didn't have the least problem with it. Old farts, new hires, engineers, forklift drivers, you name it. People aren't as stupid as BG wants them to think they are.
And of course, that shop didn't have their staff wasting 3-5 hours a day playing Solitaire, Minesweeper, or more complex games that they brought from home and loaded on their workstations. I've worked in shops where exactly that happened. How many people at your PoE turn their screens where they can be seen by someone walking in the door, eh? I suspect this factor in the Windows TCO absolutely dwarfs all the other factors together. In the VAX shop I mentioned, this problem was completely absent.
If you think you work for a.com right now, you should probably assume that you don't have a job anymore either, and just haven't found out about it yet.
> I think the story has the purpose wrong. I think they were trying to build a Faraday shield around the building to block out external radio interference, and possibly to block anything from being transmitted out as well.
Alas, they were merely trying stop the staff from stealing the little squares of carpet.
> I still don't admittedly know much about them and if I did odds are I wouldn't be allowed to tell anybody.
REUTERS January 6, 2001
Authorities are still investigating the sudden disappearence of thousands of computer geeks worldwide yesterday. It appears that the common thread linking them is that they all read the geek news site Slashdot on Friday afternoon. An anonymous source at MI5 speculates that they learned something that they were not supposed to know, and are now being debriefed en masse at a top secret spy station disguised as an observatory.
> What good is it to have tiny nukes if we have no ability to deliver them to other planets, where hostile alien races are sure to be setting up a similar attack on us?
It shouldn't take a new Solomon to figure this one out. Look at the names. Clearly, Americium was made for use in America, and Neptunium was made for use on Neptune. So use the one for nukes, and the other for spaceships.
> A sodacan sized Americium nuke can open the barricaded door in seconds, and allow heavily armored policemen inside, while the pipe is still being inhaled.
Or at the very least, you'll have silhouettes of the victims^w criminals burned into the walls, revealing exactly what they were up to when the can popped.
> The web is no longer JUST a vehicle for transmitting information. It is also a tool for entertaining and marketing.
If you want to market to me, the same still applies: "Just the facts, ma'am." If I have to wait 10 seconds for some fancy graphics/animation/whatever to download, I'm more likely to click "back" than to patiently wait to be spoonfed a commercial that substitutes flash for content.
It is not uncommon for me to go to sites specifically looking for product information and leave without that information because I don't feel like waiting for the dog'n'pony show to finish. Those vendors lose my business.
Same think with other kinds of site. ABC news used to have a decent site, but they "upgraded" it to make it more commercial friendly at the expense of making it hard to skim the headlines. I haven't been back since the "upgrade", so now I don't see any of their commercials.
There are languages, and libraries for other languages, out there that build in buffer bounding without you having to trust your programmers to handcode a check every time they make an I/O call.
When are developers going to wise up? Or do we still have a world full of developers who've never heard of the concept "buffer overflow", and thus don't know they should be taking precautions.
I know there are subtleties of security that won't be cured by a silver bullet, but BOs are discovered almost daily, and unless you're a hermit that never hears about any of those discoveries, there's not much excuse for publishing a program with a BO in it.
[Writer crosses fingers hoping not to be the next person to publish one!]
> In Clarke and Kubrick's films, as well as Clarke's books, the monoliths' measurements were in the ratio of 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three positive integers, presumably as a sign that the creator was aware of the universality of mathematics as a way of communicating between evolved species.
Ape #7: Gee, guys. It's half an ape-cubit thick, half an ape-fathom wide, and two apes high.
Ape #3: Apes are the measure of all things!
[Two million years pass...]
Controller #7: Burn in three... two... one... go!
Controller #3: Roger, there's our delta of three cubits per heartbeat.
[Two days pass...]
Lander #7: Slam!
Controller #3: Damn!
[In an observation station orbiting Jupiter...]
Higher Intelligence #7: Damn!
Higher Intelligence #3: I told you we should have made it a cube. Oh-oh. Just got word that the Yggrsngl are going to try again in Seattle. Wonder what kind of 1337 f0015 they expect to produce at this late date?
The funny thing is, the original wasn't really supposed to put the apes on the road to technological civilization. What they saw was just the screensaver; they read their own message in to it.
Slashdot Mirror
> But it's getting more and more difficult to come here expecting anything intelligent, when there are so many more mature, interesting webboards out there
IMO, Kuro5hin is lame. I keep the K5 Slashbox up, and still read the titles semi-regularly. Most of them are drivel. Now and then an interesting one comes up, but if I decide to drop by I almost always find that the discussion is drivel too.
Sure, there's lots of trolls and clubies on Slashdot. And lots of martyrs like you, who pretend to be a tiny minority with penetrating insight, whereas in fact you're a large plurality who pretty much conform to the caricature you accuse others of.
But if you browse at 1 most of the time, and mentally tune out the remaining drek, you can still actually learn a lot on Slashdot. A lot about technology, and a lot about what's going on in the social world too.
And sometimes you'll hear opinions that you don't agree with, and people will bring you around to their side if you participate in the discussion intelligently.
Forgive my rant; I just get tired of all the self-righteous bashers of Linux and Slashdot. If you don't like an article, don't read it. If you don't like Linux, don't use it. But don't pretend to be a clearsighted sage who rises above the ambient bullshit, when you're just bitching the same bitch that dozens of other morons post in response to every fuckin' article we get here.
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> 1.Linux users will have to overcome their desire for Open-Source. Gamers probably don't have this problem, but it bears mentioning. See also #3.
> 3.Linux users will have to get used to the idea of paying for software. If the games are ripped off left and right, then there will be no money for the people producing the games. And then there will be no games.
You are assuming that "success" is defined by how many units can be sold. What if we defined it by "being able to play lots of nifty games under Linux"? In that case, "Open Source" and "free" might be advantages rather than disadvantages.
Take Freeciv as an example. It's open source, and it's successful in the senses that it has lots of dedicated players and it is still getting attention from programmers even after 5 years "on the market". It has also started moving away from being just a clone toward being an innovator.
How many commercial games still get bug fixes and enhancements after 5 years? In the commercial world, bugs get fixed exactly when businessmen think the fixes will contribute to the bottom line, which is rare indeed. Indeed, a steady stream of bug fixes might be seen as a conflict of interest with getting people to buy the next shoddy product.
Also, your favorite genre is at the mercy of a handful of businessmen. What if you love FPSs, and they decide this year that FPSs are declassé, and move on to the next big thing? You're screwed. No new titles, no bugfixes for the old ones. It has happened before, and it will happen again. With OS games, it's not a risk at all, because it only takes a handful of volunteers to keep a game evolving.
OK, so I named Freeciv. Granted, that's not much. But remember, Linux still has a very small share of the desktop market, and even a smaller share of the gaming market. As those shares grow, mindshare will grow too, and you'll see more games of Freeciv quality popping up.
Remember too that the PC world had a thriving shareware market long before Linux was born. The itch and the will to scratch has always been there. What happens as more and more of the shareware author type become aware of Linux and the joys of OS programming?
My brother used to tinker with shareware games, but he was stuck with QBASIC because he didn't have money for development suites, and of course it takes years for one person to develop a nice game if he can only work on it a few hours a week. But suppose he installs Linux on his system? He suddenly has more development tools than he knows what to do with. And between OS licensing and the internet, he can suddenly round up a handful of like-minded comrades to help make his game become a reality.
I think we are headed for an OS revolution in gaming just as we are in desktops, and just as we have already experienced in servers and supercomputing clusters.
We may even experience a catastropic collapse of the game production sector. Game programmers already work deathmarches for low pay, with a low probability of producing a hit. Any substantial spread of OS gaming is going to put pressure on a system that is already ill. (Did I say already ill? Look at the release-day pricetag of games that are coming out now, and compare that to what they sold for five years ago.)
As for scratching the itch... I quit buying games altogether. I bought a few for Linux, but every time I play one I find myself asking "Why should I play this, and deal with the bugs and screwball features, when I could write my own game, or take Freeciv and tweak it to suit my own tastes?"
If only 1000 people develop the same attitude, OS games will start popping up everywhere. And the more that pop up, the more mindshare they attract.
No, I don't think the desire for open source and the unwillingness to pay for certain kinds of software is going to hurt the "success" of Linux gaming at all. No more than they hurt the success of OS operating systems. The same factors still apply.
--
> MS has always bet on the future and made smart moves to be in the right place at the right time.
Yeah, that's why Bill spent so much time talking up the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead.
The internet was blindsiding him even as he wrote. MS still doesn't completely "get" the internet.
--
> Micrsoft has rolled out many other bold and world-changing innovations.
Name three.
--
> DLL Hell doesn't really apply to games, which have largely relied on DirectX/openGL for years now.
Actually, I've had Windows game installations queer my system. I even had the Install Wizard render my system unbootable when I removed a game.
That kind of nonsense is one of the reasons I run Linux on my desktop now.
> With SFP in W2K, DLL hell is near 100% myth - it's not possible unless you disable SFP.
I'm sure lots of consumers run out and buy W2K so they can play games.
--
> Linux gaming on the retail scale is a joke.
And it didn't exist at all two years ago.
For the purposes of fortunetelling, it might be better to look at trends rather than a snapshot.
--
> I don't necessarily agree with points 1 and 3.
And I dispute number 2 as well. Version compatibility problems under Linux are dwarfed by the DLL Hell problem under Windows. And that problem hasn't exactly killed off gaming under Windows -- not by a long shot.
--
> Is this a desperate move by Microsoft to increase revenues from one area that they are expecting to lose in another year?
It's almost certainly a money grab; for the past year they have been announcing a continual stream of "reorganized" licensing plans, and in every case that I've heard of, the customer pays more for the same product or service, or pays the same and gets less, or pays more and gets less.
As a WAG, I would say the money grab has more to do with a cash flow problem than with pillaging a province that they think is about to be pillaged by barbarians anyway. There are multiple signs that MS isn't generating the kind of cash they need to from software sales. Reports of an (illegal?) "cookie-jar" scheme have been rife for over a year now. More recent reports claim that they made more money last quarter by selling off assets than by selling software. Moreover, the vaunted W2K "Unix Killer" has ended up instead playing Little Dutch Boy, vainly trying to stem the flow of Linux into the serverspace market that MS thought Manifest Destiny was going to drop into their own hands. Nor has W2K been a big seller in its own right: after a reported $1,000,000,000 in development costs and another whopping $500,000,000 in the initial marketing blitz, it's not exactly cropping up on every street corner.
For Microsoft, there's not much more to be had by increasing market share. The part of the world that can afford computers is practically saturated, and there's not much competition left for Microsoft to seize pre-saturated turf from. They find themselves stymied in serverspace, and on the desktop they have already reduced their most visible competitor to the status of a conquered client. So their cash flow is almost entirely dependent on the upgrade cycle, or ventures into entirely new fields (can you say "X-box"?).
And then there's the valuation of MSFT. From around 120 in late '99, it dropped to around 55 in mid '00. That was before the current landslide in tech stocks got started. MSFT did pull up somewhat from the 55 and stabilize for a while before the landslide started, but now it has been caught up in it and `fallen into the 40's. The outlook for their next quarterly report is bleak indeed.
And make no mistake: Microsoft isn't "about" software. Microsoft isn't really even about making money. Micorsoft is about the share price of MSFT. Cash flow and software design are both subordinate to that higher goal.
So I would guess that this and all other attempts to squeeze cash from its installed base is all about making the books look good so MSFT will soar again. (I wouldn't bank on it -- in fact I told a friend 18 months ago to get out of MSFT -- but Microsoft will keep trying to pump it back up as long as they have a customer left to squeeze or penny left in the bank.)
The interesting part of your question is, will that squeezing make customers turn elsewhere? Linux has been making inroads already, and by some accounts is already used on more desktops than the Mac is. It's certain that the world won't switch to Linux overnight. But the world could look vastly different in 12 months. If MSFT continues to fall, Microsoft will continue to squeeze. As Linux continues to make inroads into server space, more powerusers will be exposed to it and adopt it for their own desktops. As more people adopt it for server or desktop, more companies will port their commercial products to it. (There has already been a notable shift in that direction over the past year or two.) With I2O supported in Linux 2.4, the possibility suddenly arises that the latest newfangled peripherals will suddenly start working on Linux the same day they work on Windows.
The net result is that Microsoft not only doesn't have anywhere to expand, but it suddenly finds even its upgrade market shrinking, if only by a little. But when upgrades are your primary source of revenue, even a small shrinkage puts a real squeeze on your desire to look "way profitable".
You can think of Microsoft's market share as a leaky innertube. There is already a minor flow out toward Linux. Squeezing the tube can't help matters, and at some level of pressure will make the difference between a slightly accelerated leak and a loud pop.
Microsoft can't keep going the way they have been for the past 20 years. I think the X-box is a sign that they know it. Even if the courts veto a breakup, you can bet that they will have a radically different position in the market before long, probably within a couple of years. That won't be entirely or even primarily due to Linux, though Linux is playing a role in it. It's one factor among many.
--
In general, yes. At least so long as the fees don't get too expensive.
But think of it probabalistically: some companies that were wavering for other reasons may now switch due to this "straw". Put another way, it shifts the center of gravity of "desire space" a small increment away from Windows.
> They have a huge investment in existing software and training for Windows. They would have to dump Office and their custom apps, buy and install new software, retrain employees, and incur other costs.
Of course, they are already incurring these costs everytime Redmond comes out with a new version of its OS, or office suite, or anything else. Shipping your employees off to a week-long training class is every bit as much a part of the upgrade treadmill that paying again is.
A farsighted manager would interpret that as being his cutover to Linux already being partly paid for -- it's in the budget anyway.
> When I said "command line", I got the same reaction as if I had said "radioactive waste". And you want these people to use UNIX?
And of course, that shop didn't have their staff wasting 3-5 hours a day playing Solitaire, Minesweeper, or more complex games that they brought from home and loaded on their workstations. I've worked in shops where exactly that happened. How many people at your PoE turn their screens where they can be seen by someone walking in the door, eh? I suspect this factor in the Windows TCO absolutely dwarfs all the other factors together. In the VAX shop I mentioned, this problem was completely absent.
--
If you think you work for a .com right now, you should probably assume that you don't have a job anymore either, and just haven't found out about it yet.
--
> I think the story has the purpose wrong. I think they were trying to build a Faraday shield around the building to block out external radio interference, and possibly to block anything from being transmitted out as well.
Alas, they were merely trying stop the staff from stealing the little squares of carpet.
--
--
> What good is it to have tiny nukes if we have no ability to deliver them to other planets, where hostile alien races are sure to be setting up a similar attack on us?
It shouldn't take a new Solomon to figure this one out. Look at the names. Clearly, Americium was made for use in America, and Neptunium was made for use on Neptune. So use the one for nukes, and the other for spaceships.
--
> A sodacan sized Americium nuke can open the barricaded door in seconds, and allow heavily armored policemen inside, while the pipe is still being inhaled.
Or at the very least, you'll have silhouettes of the victims^w criminals burned into the walls, revealing exactly what they were up to when the can popped.
--
> > At 150,000 mph, we're traveling approxiately 2,500 miles per second.
> Math isn't your strong suite, is it?
It's OK, he works for NASA.
--
> I guess space travel has come a long way since I went to sleep last night!
Timothy Leary pioneered interplanar travel back in the '60s. NASA just now found a legal way to do it.
--
\subject... just FYI.
--
> i can't help but worry that 2.4 is just as far from BugFree(TM)
Heh heh heh. The Freshmeat sidebox is already showing a 2.4.0ac1 kernel. Go, Alan, Go!
> Unless I see a feature in 2.4 that I absolutely need, I'm sticking with 2.2...
Only sensible. "Because it's there" isn't any reason to upgrade the kernel, or anything else.
OTOH, the more people test it on non-critical machines, the sooner it hits the stable point you're waiting for.
--
When will 2.6 be out? I'm tired of waiting.
--
> The web is no longer JUST a vehicle for transmitting information. It is also a tool for entertaining and marketing.
If you want to market to me, the same still applies: "Just the facts, ma'am." If I have to wait 10 seconds for some fancy graphics/animation/whatever to download, I'm more likely to click "back" than to patiently wait to be spoonfed a commercial that substitutes flash for content.
It is not uncommon for me to go to sites specifically looking for product information and leave without that information because I don't feel like waiting for the dog'n'pony show to finish. Those vendors lose my business.
Same think with other kinds of site. ABC news used to have a decent site, but they "upgraded" it to make it more commercial friendly at the expense of making it hard to skim the headlines. I haven't been back since the "upgrade", so now I don't see any of their commercials.
--
There are languages, and libraries for other languages, out there that build in buffer bounding without you having to trust your programmers to handcode a check every time they make an I/O call.
When are developers going to wise up? Or do we still have a world full of developers who've never heard of the concept "buffer overflow", and thus don't know they should be taking precautions.
I know there are subtleties of security that won't be cured by a silver bullet, but BOs are discovered almost daily, and unless you're a hermit that never hears about any of those discoveries, there's not much excuse for publishing a program with a BO in it.
[Writer crosses fingers hoping not to be the next person to publish one!]
--
> I wish people would realize that it's not JUST the "theme from 2001," it's a piece of music called "Also Sprach Zarathrusta" by Richard Strauss.
It's also the soundtrack to about 32,000 commercials I've seen in the last 32 years.
--
> In Clarke and Kubrick's films, as well as Clarke's books, the monoliths' measurements were in the ratio of 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three positive integers, presumably as a sign that the creator was aware of the universality of mathematics as a way of communicating between evolved species.
Ape #7: Gee, guys. It's half an ape-cubit thick, half an ape-fathom wide, and two apes high.
Ape #3: Apes are the measure of all things!
[Two million years pass...]
Controller #7: Burn in three... two... one... go!
Controller #3: Roger, there's our delta of three cubits per heartbeat.
[Two days pass...]
Lander #7: Slam!
Controller #3: Damn!
[In an observation station orbiting Jupiter...]
Higher Intelligence #7: Damn!
Higher Intelligence #3: I told you we should have made it a cube. Oh-oh. Just got word that the Yggrsngl are going to try again in Seattle. Wonder what kind of 1337 f0015 they expect to produce at this late date?
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The funny thing is, the original wasn't really supposed to put the apes on the road to technological civilization. What they saw was just the screensaver; they read their own message in to it.
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> Jeez, that's pretty anti-climatic, to have this mysterious monolith appear and have it all be a promotion for some dumb cafe.
Well, in the movie it turned out to be just a promotion for an intergalactic hotel.
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