If the cost to manufacture a widget in China is $2, and the cost of compliance with U.S. law to manufacture the item in the U.S. is $44 per item (from liability insurance, licencing, inspection fees, defending against frivolous lawsuits, etc.) not including labor, materials, etc., it is just unviable to produce the item in the United States.
What you are really saying is that Chinese manufacturers are willing to borrow $42 from their children to pay for liability, safety, and environmental costs that have already been calculated by more pragmatic interests here in the US. Now if you're saying it's unviable to stop borrowing money, then yeah, we do have a problem.
What you are missing is the fact that colleges aren't "consumers." They're not busy people looking for fast income, they are slow-paced, knowledge-based institutions. Open source offers the chance to both learn and deploy. If a piece of software offers no learning potential then it is basically DOE on a university campus.
Nobody wants to stomp on sports fans for being dorky when they're trying so hard at it. The local barber shop comes to mind...all they talk about is baseball, I don't care, but what are we going to talk about? Computers? Sometimes you have to go to the other person's level.
I had drives named C through I for Win2003. When I reverted to Win2k and put it on I, then drive I became D. Now E became F, then F became G and so on. All my links are broken. I don't think this is solvable.
>So, your argument that oils from farm crops are not viable as fuel because they destroy the soil is flawed.
How about this argument? Fertilizer is made from oil. Tractors run on oil. The trucks that bring the crops to the processing facility run on oil. The facility runs on oil.
The reason why farmed crops aren't viable is because you're taking oil, turning it into soybeans and back into oil again. From a thermodynamics perspective, this is a net loss. If you can produce soybeans organically on a massive scale, then maybe you win. But my understanding is that most farming in the US is an industrial process.
I agree, this whole thing is a joke. Regardless of how people feel about copyright, people coming into the HDTV market are looking for _the best picture_ and HDMI ain't it. It's digital, it's encrypted, it's fragile and expensive.
HDMI may be a blessing because the American worker drone has no concept of being lied to. Shoot a president, bomb a tower, it's all the same to us. But when people realize their TV has been fucked with it may be a day that lives in infamy.
HDMI is scary because five-channel component is still brand new for most people. We're talking about people who may not even care if their previous set was in stereo. Now turn around and these people are getting 8-10 RCA's run up the inside of the wall, which equates to massive bandwidth and professional quality. The industry's reaction? To treat RCA like crack. Imagine sitting on someone's living room floor, crimping RCA cables and trying to explain how the're illegal and won't work. It's embarrassing for everyone.
The replacement HDMI cable is fragile and it falls out of the plug. It costs $50 to $200 and can't be homemade. Thus, nobody wants to touch an HDMI cable. Nobody likes them - the customers, the vendors, the installers. Granted, they're more convenient - IF they don't break. They're like the smelly condoms of the entertainment world.
OT fine, all i'm saying is that Origin had much to offer circa Ultima V/VI but not much else by the time of Ultima VII and clones. By the time VGA was dominant most of the play styles were standardized. I recall Wing Commander well, thanks for bringing it up! I had almost forgotten pseudo-3D and the plot-centric WC3 that brought multi-disc gaming to the fore.
>But I don't understand the people who truly don't see what's immoral about, for example, >running Mac OS X in a way that Apple expressly asks you not to.
OK here's an example. You buy the board game Monopoly. You realize you're in a rush to go out tonight, so for today's Monopoly session you decide that all $1 transactions will be rounded up/down to $5, to speed up the gameplay.
Oh no! You've just violated Mattel's rules of the game! Copyright infringement! Piracy! Theft!
Get off the train whenever you want to. It's obvious to the rest of us that you are headed into a ravine.
Nothing about this post qualifies as "troll." Point me to something this guy said that he knows isn't true. Mac hardware supports two buttons? Han shot second? There should be a school for Slashdot moderators.
>No one is going to pay the "Apple Tax" for hardware when they can build a PC for a few hundred bucks, >or pay a small premium for someone to do it for them.
Yep yep. Anybody well-versed in economics knows that false economies are a bad bet over the long term. It's anyone's guess why you want Apple to subsist on this type of economy.
Yeah, what is the problem with selling a product that would make money? Apple has never offered hardware of general interest. Their hardware pitches have always been along the lines of, "Look, it's 64 bit!" or "Look, it runs without a cooling fan!" When you make product decisions based on how it will impact current product lines, that's the road IBM took towards capitalizing on the PC market (hint: they didn't).
Yeah but TiVo does have a lot of problems at the user level. I have one. I like it, but for the following reasons I'm willing to junk TiVo and build my own box:
1. Subscription model is expensive for what you get, nothing more than TV Guide listings delivered over a digital feed. For $30/year I can actually get TV Guide printed, and the HTML version is free (if I could somehow get it into my tivo...see below).
2. Macintosh-like Cult of TiVo prevents hackers from tackling this problem.
3. Listings are often wrong, which is just sad.
4. User interface is basically the same from when TiVo launched. I was impressed five years ago, now I am bored.
5. Series2 uses cheap hardware that overheats and ruins the audio feed. Since adding a second drive, I've been forced to leave off the cover.
6. Lack of dual tuners has been a problem since inception. In a couple of years when my TiVo bill tops $500 it will become apparent I have been ripped off.
7. Catering to advertisers, as the new CEO intends to do, is just another way of telling customers to go screw. The subscription model is already the biggest impediment to casual purchases, this will only make it worse.
Funny but I wonder what kind of data went into this project in the first place? Obviously a bunch of middle schoolers baking pot brownies and giving them to test subjects would set off alarm bells. Hell, my French teacher was sketched out enough letting us bring in white wine for fondue...in high school.
Speaking of DNA compilers, does this software have one? Does it have one for each of the organisms you would model DNA against?
I find it hard to believe, but I haven't seen much evidence that the biology community has moved beyond the "Jurassic Park" model where you can pick up a piece of DNA and turn it into an organism. In fact, the biology community hasn't even learned the lesson of Jurassic Park where gene splicing produced chaotic results. Cross-species splicing is still a common technique, no? I certainly see evidence of gene splicing when I walk by the oranges at Stop & Shop.
>Then again, Origin was already half-dead. Starting with Ultima 7 they did just what Card lambasted in his article
Yep. I played Ultima V, Ultima VI, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams. Ultima V had crappy graphics but it took 200 hours to beat. Ultima VI was VGA and supported 16-bit sound. Savage Empire was the first to introduce recipes for items (sulphur+saltpeter=gunpowder+bamboo=flintlock). Martian Dreams? Never finished it. The only other RPG I played was Wasteland. And when I look at something like WoW I realize I haven't missed any developments, either:)
I can attest that a CGA adapter on a monochrome screen- 16 shades of green - was actually quite pleasant. But most people never had the experience. I spent most of my childhood rallying for a color monitor, not even realizing that what I had on my portable was rare and actually easier to look at.
Damn great PC portable that was. I beat most of Ultima V at my grandma's house.
Yeah I think we're in a bubble that's going to burst. For one, I hear a lot of stories about famous game makers going bust...Acclaim, Atari's slashdot article this week, RareWare owned by M$ with no upcoming games. Maybe these companies did something to cause their own failure, but it seems the software market is a slippery one where past success buys no guarantees.
Two, while M$ and Sony have made a point to cater to the "older gamer," I have to wonder whether this market segment will persist. I suspect a lot of this market is based on nostalgia as most of these gamers are young enough to remember 8 and 16 bit consoles. I can at least understand my 25-year-old neighbor wanting an X-Box 360. With a new generation of children raised on Mario and FF clones, I don't think this new generation will have any nostalgia at all.
Three, the expense and addiction of MMO's is only fueling the decline in interest. The game makers are targeting a small segment of the audience now (D&D freaks) and this seems like a sign of giving up on the industry as a whole.
The music, film, and TV industries are in a similar bind. G-Unit is marketed exclusively at 15 year olds. What does the industry have to cover their own ass?
Slashdot Mirror
>If you really want globalization, you can't have inequality of environmental laws or national security interests.
Equating global laws and global peace with the word "globalization" would surely bring us into the era of the post- post modern.
If the cost to manufacture a widget in China is $2, and the cost of compliance with U.S. law to manufacture the item in the U.S. is $44 per item (from liability insurance, licencing, inspection fees, defending against frivolous lawsuits, etc.) not including labor, materials, etc., it is just unviable to produce the item in the United States.
What you are really saying is that Chinese manufacturers are willing to borrow $42 from their children to pay for liability, safety, and environmental costs that have already been calculated by more pragmatic interests here in the US. Now if you're saying it's unviable to stop borrowing money, then yeah, we do have a problem.
>Did you see Senator Leahy interview him? Alberto's got the smirk, just like his boss.
Yes and it was hard to watch.
Yeah I meant DOA but AC is IP banned.
What you are missing is the fact that colleges aren't "consumers." They're not busy people looking for fast income, they are slow-paced, knowledge-based institutions. Open source offers the chance to both learn and deploy. If a piece of software offers no learning potential then it is basically DOE on a university campus.
'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,' Abel said.
Isn't the whole point of college the fact that everyone there is looking for work?
Next on Slashdot: Wooden bats doomed in baseball because they require pro athletes to practice.
Nobody wants to stomp on sports fans for being dorky when they're trying so hard at it. The local barber shop comes to mind...all they talk about is baseball, I don't care, but what are we going to talk about? Computers? Sometimes you have to go to the other person's level.
I had drives named C through I for Win2003. When I reverted to Win2k and put it on I, then drive I became D. Now E became F, then F became G and so on. All my links are broken. I don't think this is solvable.
>So, your argument that oils from farm crops are not viable as fuel because they destroy the soil is flawed.
How about this argument? Fertilizer is made from oil. Tractors run on oil. The trucks that bring the crops to the processing facility run on oil. The facility runs on oil.
The reason why farmed crops aren't viable is because you're taking oil, turning it into soybeans and back into oil again. From a thermodynamics perspective, this is a net loss. If you can produce soybeans organically on a massive scale, then maybe you win. But my understanding is that most farming in the US is an industrial process.
I agree, this whole thing is a joke. Regardless of how people feel about copyright, people coming into the HDTV market are looking for _the best picture_ and HDMI ain't it. It's digital, it's encrypted, it's fragile and expensive.
HDMI may be a blessing because the American worker drone has no concept of being lied to. Shoot a president, bomb a tower, it's all the same to us. But when people realize their TV has been fucked with it may be a day that lives in infamy.
HDMI is scary because five-channel component is still brand new for most people. We're talking about people who may not even care if their previous set was in stereo. Now turn around and these people are getting 8-10 RCA's run up the inside of the wall, which equates to massive bandwidth and professional quality. The industry's reaction? To treat RCA like crack. Imagine sitting on someone's living room floor, crimping RCA cables and trying to explain how the're illegal and won't work. It's embarrassing for everyone.
The replacement HDMI cable is fragile and it falls out of the plug. It costs $50 to $200 and can't be homemade. Thus, nobody wants to touch an HDMI cable. Nobody likes them - the customers, the vendors, the installers. Granted, they're more convenient - IF they don't break. They're like the smelly condoms of the entertainment world.
>1. Security, security, security: Windows XP Service Pack 2 patched a lot of holes
I've had no virus/spyware problems on Win2003 or Win2000.
>2. Internet Explorer 7: IE gets a much-needed, Firefox-inspired makeover
How does this affect Mozilla users?
>3. Righteous eye candy: For the first time, Microsoft is building high-end graphics effects into Windows.
Pointless.
>4. Desktop search: Microsoft has been getting its lunch handed to it by Google and Yahoo on the desktop,
>but Vista could change all that.
Not if I keep using Google.
>5. Better updates: Vista does away with using Internet Explorer to access Windows Update
I don't use Windows Update.
>6. More media
Media is the biggest canard ever in the software industry. If you do anything based on the word "media" then you have a lot to learn.
>7. Parental controls
Don't care.
>8. Better backups
Again, don't care. I don't rely on M$ to store my data.
>9. Peer-to-peer collaboration
Huh? Most of my friends don't even use my keyboard. What does collaboration have to do with Windows?
>10. Quick setup...will slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes.
Most Windows installs are designed to run for months. If setup time matters, then by definition your install doesn't.
I would actually be interested in improvements in Windows Vista. For what it's worth.
test only.
OT fine, all i'm saying is that Origin had much to offer circa Ultima V/VI but not much else by the time of Ultima VII and clones. By the time VGA was dominant most of the play styles were standardized. I recall Wing Commander well, thanks for bringing it up! I had almost forgotten pseudo-3D and the plot-centric WC3 that brought multi-disc gaming to the fore.
>But I don't understand the people who truly don't see what's immoral about, for example,
>running Mac OS X in a way that Apple expressly asks you not to.
OK here's an example. You buy the board game Monopoly. You realize you're in a rush to go out tonight, so for today's Monopoly session you decide that all $1 transactions will be rounded up/down to $5, to speed up the gameplay.
Oh no! You've just violated Mattel's rules of the game! Copyright infringement! Piracy! Theft!
Get off the train whenever you want to. It's obvious to the rest of us that you are headed into a ravine.
Nothing about this post qualifies as "troll." Point me to something this guy said that he knows isn't true. Mac hardware supports two buttons? Han shot second? There should be a school for Slashdot moderators.
>No one is going to pay the "Apple Tax" for hardware when they can build a PC for a few hundred bucks,
>or pay a small premium for someone to do it for them.
Yep yep. Anybody well-versed in economics knows that false economies are a bad bet over the long term. It's anyone's guess why you want Apple to subsist on this type of economy.
Yeah, what is the problem with selling a product that would make money? Apple has never offered hardware of general interest. Their hardware pitches have always been along the lines of, "Look, it's 64 bit!" or "Look, it runs without a cooling fan!" When you make product decisions based on how it will impact current product lines, that's the road IBM took towards capitalizing on the PC market (hint: they didn't).
>FUD!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah but TiVo does have a lot of problems at the user level. I have one. I like it, but for the following reasons I'm willing to junk TiVo and build my own box:
1. Subscription model is expensive for what you get, nothing more than TV Guide listings delivered over a digital feed. For $30/year I can actually get TV Guide printed, and the HTML version is free (if I could somehow get it into my tivo...see below).
2. Macintosh-like Cult of TiVo prevents hackers from tackling this problem.
3. Listings are often wrong, which is just sad.
4. User interface is basically the same from when TiVo launched. I was impressed five years ago, now I am bored.
5. Series2 uses cheap hardware that overheats and ruins the audio feed. Since adding a second drive, I've been forced to leave off the cover.
6. Lack of dual tuners has been a problem since inception. In a couple of years when my TiVo bill tops $500 it will become apparent I have been ripped off.
7. Catering to advertisers, as the new CEO intends to do, is just another way of telling customers to go screw. The subscription model is already the biggest impediment to casual purchases, this will only make it worse.
Funny but I wonder what kind of data went into this project in the first place? Obviously a bunch of middle schoolers baking pot brownies and giving them to test subjects would set off alarm bells. Hell, my French teacher was sketched out enough letting us bring in white wine for fondue...in high school.
But then again, I didn't grow up in Santa Cruz.
Speaking of DNA compilers, does this software have one? Does it have one for each of the organisms you would model DNA against?
I find it hard to believe, but I haven't seen much evidence that the biology community has moved beyond the "Jurassic Park" model where you can pick up a piece of DNA and turn it into an organism. In fact, the biology community hasn't even learned the lesson of Jurassic Park where gene splicing produced chaotic results. Cross-species splicing is still a common technique, no? I certainly see evidence of gene splicing when I walk by the oranges at Stop & Shop.
>Then again, Origin was already half-dead. Starting with Ultima 7 they did just what Card lambasted in his article
:)
Yep. I played Ultima V, Ultima VI, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams. Ultima V had crappy graphics but it took 200 hours to beat. Ultima VI was VGA and supported 16-bit sound. Savage Empire was the first to introduce recipes for items (sulphur+saltpeter=gunpowder+bamboo=flintlock). Martian Dreams? Never finished it. The only other RPG I played was Wasteland. And when I look at something like WoW I realize I haven't missed any developments, either
I can attest that a CGA adapter on a monochrome screen- 16 shades of green - was actually quite pleasant. But most people never had the experience. I spent most of my childhood rallying for a color monitor, not even realizing that what I had on my portable was rare and actually easier to look at.
Damn great PC portable that was. I beat most of Ultima V at my grandma's house.
Yeah I think we're in a bubble that's going to burst. For one, I hear a lot of stories about famous game makers going bust...Acclaim, Atari's slashdot article this week, RareWare owned by M$ with no upcoming games. Maybe these companies did something to cause their own failure, but it seems the software market is a slippery one where past success buys no guarantees.
Two, while M$ and Sony have made a point to cater to the "older gamer," I have to wonder whether this market segment will persist. I suspect a lot of this market is based on nostalgia as most of these gamers are young enough to remember 8 and 16 bit consoles. I can at least understand my 25-year-old neighbor wanting an X-Box 360. With a new generation of children raised on Mario and FF clones, I don't think this new generation will have any nostalgia at all.
Three, the expense and addiction of MMO's is only fueling the decline in interest. The game makers are targeting a small segment of the audience now (D&D freaks) and this seems like a sign of giving up on the industry as a whole.
The music, film, and TV industries are in a similar bind. G-Unit is marketed exclusively at 15 year olds. What does the industry have to cover their own ass?
>Seriously. How can you possibly tire of playing first-person shooters? It's just not possible.
I moved on to 3D gaming and never looked back. Seems odd how you and the other fps jerks missed this seminal improvement in computer technology.