"That's a good price for a comic book that the police department would end up just giving away to kids. If it's really a quality piece of work, the guy should charge more than a dollar and less than $5."
It's this attitude that keeps prices artificially high. If only a few people would break that stereotype, buyers would start to realize that price != quality every time. What you are proposing is using the price of a product as part of its advertising, which is just as bad as using micropayments as "a publicity stunt to try to aquire [an audience]".
"Sluggy, RealLife and Sinfest are all huge and don't charge a cent. They have other ways to make money."
Yes, and most of those ways are selling advertising. Selling advertising sucks. It's an unpredictable source of income and in some cases irritating to your readers. Alternately, some of them sell merchandise. That's a little better, but what it comes down to is that as an artist I want to sell my content, not spinoffs from my content. I don't think I'm alone in this. People like to read my comics? Great, that's what I should charge them for. I shouldn't have to rely on the super-fans that love my product enough to buy t-shirts. I shouldn't have to prove to an advertising executive that my site is worthy of hosting their ads.
It sounds to me like you have a grudge against this whole concept that goes beyond the arguments you've listed here. I don't know if this is going to work or not, but at I'm going to wait and see what happens before I cast judgment. After all, this is the first time anyone has even come close. It's an experiment that will either succeed or fail. Why do you want it to fail?
Your premises are: Dell is a decent vendor You prefer building your own PC to buying Dell You don't want to be told that Macs are superior Mac users have a superiority complex
Your conclusion: "DoItYourSelf can be just as good as a of the shelf Mac if not better."
The subject of this thread isn't whether or not you need the extra power a G5 has to offer. The question was whether or not you could get a comparable X86 system for less. To be comparable, you need to match it feature for feature, or at least as close as possible.
First of all, this isn't a comic strip that he's selling, it's more like a comic book. When all three installments are finished, it will be longer than an average comic book. To read the whole thing will cost you 75 cents. That's a good price for a comic book.
Second, you seem to have a lot of ideas about what "people" and "most people" want. Perhaps we should give this model a try before we dismiss it, hmm?
Third, you obviously didn't read the BitPass site very carefully. There are no extra fees for the buyer. A $10 account costs you $10. A $3 account costs you $3. You are correct that it is something like buying "disney dollars." At the moment, there aren't many goods or services you can buy with these payments, but I was willing to invest $3 up front to support a system that I want to succeed. Hopefully, there will soon be many other artists offering their work through this system, and with the size of the payments it will still probably take me a while to spend it all.
Third, you demand that people sell in bulk instead of messing around with new ways of selling. The fact of the matter is, selling in bulk just doesn't work for most online comics. How many artists do you know that are making their livings by selling subscriptions? Well, there's you, and...um...sluggy...and.... You get the idea. The only thing that comes close to working for most online comics is the type of site that gathers a bunch of comics together for one price. Not to mention that some people don't have "bulk" to sell. They may spend months creating a beautifully written and drawn comic book that they want to sell online. They can charge $1 or more for it, and sell a handful of copies, they can give it away for free and have the whole world see it but go broke and be unable to continue hosting it, or they can charge a small fee for it and get a nice compromise. They can't afford to wait until they've made three more comic books and charge $2 for three months of viewing. It's just not practical. Not everyone is running a store. Some people are just trying to sell their art, and the less they can charge, the better exposure they will get.
There has been no innovation in the word processor market since the introduction of Microsoft Word. "You type words, you format them, and you print them," says a disgruntled former Microsoft employee. "It's pathetic."
Okay, so maybe it's true. Maybe there haven't been a lot of earth-shaking developments in the web browser (or word processor) market. But so what? Does it do what we need it to do? Is Mozilla superior to IE? Are more and more people seeking alternative browsers for their unique features? If the answer to all of these questions is "yes," I don't see a problem. You can't force innovation; it has to happen naturally. In the meantime, slow but steady improvement is enough for me.
Vegas is a video editing package, not audio, so I'm not sure why you are considering that.
Vegas started out as an audio editor, and it was only a few years ago that they added video support. It is still a good audio editing program, but it's price is probably higher now that it is being marketed as a video tool.
Interestingly enough, I recently worked with some video editing professionals who said that Vegas is really pretty unsophisticated for video editing, but if you want to edit the soundtrack of your video, it works great.
I am a graphic guy (just graduated from Purdue University in Computer Graphics), and I can confirm that it is easy to use up all of your RAM doing graphics work. When working in 3D, a scene of any complexity will soon slow down your system if you have insufficient RAM. The normal solution to this is to make your scenes less complex. That's good practice, but additional RAM sure helps a lot.
Example: When Pixar was making Toy Story 2, they ran into problems with a scene at an airport terminal? Why? Because it was the most complex scene in the movie, but their hardware at the time could not support any more than 1GB of RAM. The solution? Reduce the complexity of the scene. A couple of years later, when they made Monsters, Inc., they treated us to amazingly complex scenes that would have been impossible before.
Other programs that use a lot of RAM are 2D compositing programs like After Effects or higher end programs like Shake. If you've ever built a really complex Photoshop file, you know that heavy use of layers will slow your computer down in a hurry. With compositing, you can multiply the effect by the number of frames in your footage (not literally, but the effect is noticeable).
I don't generally get too much into the hardware side of things, but the other time-consuming part of CG is rendering. I know that processor speed is the most important part of rendering, but can anyone tell me what role RAM plays in rendering either 2D or 3D graphics?
You make a good point. The way the big-time music scene goes these days, you must release an album every year and a half to two years or so or sink into obscurity. It doesn't take too long before people start asking "I wonder what ever happened to..." even when that artist is in the studio preparing their next album.
However, as a previous poster pointed out, Jewel (and some other artists) is a good example of releasing one "single" every couple of months through the radio and MTV, which would in turn rejuvenate sales for the album. Suppose now that a similar strategy was available for smaller bands that didn't depend on the album as a whole to express their artistic vision.
Without waiting to gather the overhead required to produce an album, the group could release a song every two months and thus stay in the public consciousness. Right now, artists get this: "Did you buy the new XYZ album?" "Yep! It's great! I can't wait for their next one!" (six months later: "I wonder what ever happened to XYZ?") Instead, they could have this: "Did you buy the latest track from ZYX?" "Yeah, and I hear that the one they're releasing next month is even better!" (six months later: "Man, ZYX just keeps getting better and better!")
Morse code is an excellent example. Another is calligraphy. Whenever some once-common practice starts to fade from everyday use, people start to bemoan "the loss of the art of X", with X being handwriting, knitting, cooking, shoe polishing, or what have you. From what I can tell, most "arts" that really deserve to be preserved will be continued by enthusiasts, as you say. Skills that are no longer practical don't need to be practiced by everybody.
Your point is valid, but the conclusion should be that VOD will cause the decline of movie rental stores, not the DVD format. For ownership purposes, people still crave physical media.
Purdue University has been doing this in their PC labs for years. For a long time, it took about a minute to log onto a machine, but it took two or three minutes for the computer to log someone off and restart itself. When they switched to XP over the summer, the wait became ridiculous. You could enter a computer lab, watch somebody click "log off," take their seat immediately, and you still wouldn't be able to log on for at least five minutes. Over Christmas break (I believe, I'm not sure exactly when they made the change), they implemented Roxio GoBack as a faster way to restore the systems to default upon shutdown. The speed is pretty much back to where it was before the XP upgrade now.
You're missing the point. This idea isn't for people who want to look at porn, it's for people who don't want to look at porn but have a lot of trouble resisting (I have personal experience with this). As with any addiction, peer accountability is the best way to break out of the cycle.
By the way, you seem to be rationalizing any and all behavior in your argument. You seem to suggest that feeling shame for something is no reason to stop it. Well I must disagree and say that sometimes the best way to stop feeling guilty or ashamed about something you're doing is not to fight off the guilt, it's to stop the activity.
Even though I also have issues with the original poster, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Tolkien repeatedly and explicitly stated that LOTR was not an allegory of anything and furthermore said that he hated allegory in any form.
Hell, I'd think even if it were nothing but elitists, it'd balance out ratings more as the current crop of ratings seems to only account for complete morons with no brains.
Yep, they're called "average television viewers."
Basically, media companies can't put all of their marketing power behind products for all types of viewers, so they prioritize. Unfortunately, rather than actually take the time and effort that it would take to divy up their expenditures in a fair way (i.e. Largest audience gets most money, second largest gets slightly less, etc.), they dump all of their funds into the top two or three audiences according to their data. They can't appeal to the mean or median viewer, so they have to go for the mode. The mode is mostly sheep, a.k.a. idiots. That's the way it goes. *sigh*
Re:This will interfere with the Black Helicopters
on
Droning On
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· Score: 1
Shouldn't be too much of a problem. Many/. readers haven't had intercourse for years anyway.
I'm surprised that more people haven't pointed this out, but isn't I, Robot a collection of short stories, some of which are set decades apart from one another? I can't imagine this being a good thing(TM) for the book's reputation, since anyone reading the book because of the movie will be surprised to find that the two are nothing alike. I just hope that they leave Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles alone. Someone produced a terrible miniseries from it years ago, and I can only imagine how bad a condensed, 2-hour version would be.
Not to mention that Roots was aired during one of the worst blizzards that the east coast and midwest had seen in many years. Thousands of people were unable or unwilling to leave their homes for days. That factor, combined with the fact that most people were still watching one of the big three networks at any given time, made Roots enormously successful.
Now more than ever it is difficult to make a miniseries succeed because there is so much other television to choose from. Doubly so on a cable station like Sci-Fi which isn't offered in all cable service plans or even all areas.
Not that I totally disagree with what you're trying to say here, but I have a problem with the concept that "touch math" isn't real math and memorization is. With the multiplication tables, you aren't teaching kids how to multiply, you're teaching them the results of multiplication that somebody already did for them. I prefer a combined method in which you first teach kids multiplication in terms of "3x3 is 3+3+3", and then being drilling them on the tables once they understand that it's a royal pain to use that method once you get up to the eights and nines. If you learn that way, you have a backup plan when your memory fails you (I remember that 9x7 always gave me trouble for some reason), you aren't dead in the water like the girl who couldn't comprehend 9+0. It might take longer to solve the problem, but it will get solved.
I installed Mandrake 8.2 just three weeks ago. It was harder than installing Windows 2000 on the same machine. I'll grant that Linux did a generally better job of autodetecting my hardware, which impressed me. However, getting the system actually up and running to do anything useful was a big pain.
As for SuSE, I wanted to give it a try but I couldn't decode the installation instructions on their website. Perhaps if I'd purchased a CD it would have been easy, but with no ISO versions available, it was difficult to figure out how to get the OS installed off of the internet. So I gave up and found a disto that had ISOs. Installing off of a CD is comfortable and familiar for most people I know.
I suppose my real beef is not purely with the installation but with the entire setup. To get Windows installed, up to date, and configured with all of my favorite software including browser plugins takes several hours. To do the same in Linux takes...well...like I said, I installed Mandrake 3 weeks ago and I still don't have it the way I want it. I tried installing the Mozilla personal security manager after installing Mozilla. As it turns out, if you don't have exactly the right version number down to the third decimal place, it won't install. You can't download the latest version of anything and expect that it will neatly replace the old version. 9 times out of 10 you have to find the updated libraries too, often matching the exact nightly build number of whatever version you've managed to find.
I apologize for saying that you were out of touch, it wasn't meant to be a personal attack. It's just that you haven't been a non-linux-user in a long time, and it's difficult for someone who is comfortable with the system to relate to a newbie who simply doesn't understand how things work. Just pretend that the newbie is a foreigner that doesn't speak English very well yet. It's best to use smaller words, repeat them often, and most importantly give us plenty of time to translate them.
And there will never be a printed replacement for the "next-door-neighbor's-son." A reference guide can not answer your questions even when you don't know how to ask them properly. A human knows how to get to the root of your question. Indexes are worthless if you don't know the terminology. Until we get some really sophisticated AI built into software manuals, the masses of the world will continue to rely on a handful of experts who happen to be personal acquaintances.
I'd appreciate some valid documentation on how MUCH faster the x86 is than PPC. Which one is truly faster is an age-old debate, but few people have the guts to say that one is MUCH faster than the other. What are your sources?
Unfortunately I don't know a Win32 version, but SameGnome is really just a clone of another game. I don't know which is the original, but I was introduced to it as "HMaki" on PalmOS. I've also seen it as "SameGame" on Linux. I haven't found a Win32 version, but that's because I haven't been looking. If you have a Palm, HMaki is a very good adaptation of the game.
I don't know about you, but if I saw one of these things comming[sic] at me, I'd run for the hills!
The hills? You fool! That's where they are designed to operate!
Besides, I don't think you'd need to run. Judging from the movies of these bad boys in action, a casual stroll for the hills would probably do the trick.
Baloney! A clean install of Windows is easy and not even terribly intimidating to most users. 1.)Insert CD 2.)Restart Computer 3.)Click "Continue" half a dozen times 4.)You're done
Windows installations come with nearly all of the drivers you'll need, and the rest will be included with your hardware since Windows is the standard. "Aunt Bertha" doesn't have to know anything about drivers, she just knows that when she bought her new mouse, it came with an installation CD that magically makes it work when you double-click the installer.
On the other hand, I'm a intermediate computer hobbyist and a Linux installation, even for a "user friendly" flavor like Mandrake, makes me break out in a cold sweat. I finally got it running and I was loving it, then several days later something crashed, and when I restarted my machine it couldn't boot X. Without X, I'm blind, deaf, and dumb in Linux. Now who do I turn to? The proverbial "next-door-neighbor's son" that knows everything about computers only knows Windows. I certainly don't have any official tech support unless I paid for my distribution. Supposing I'm a fairly inexperienced computer user, I wouldn't have the first clue about how to use a news group.
Face it: installing Windows is EASY, installing Linux is DARNED INTIMIDATING. If you don't believe me, then you are pretty out of touch.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's a good price for a comic book that the police department would end up just giving away to kids. If it's really a quality piece of work, the guy should charge more than a dollar and less than $5."
It's this attitude that keeps prices artificially high. If only a few people would break that stereotype, buyers would start to realize that price != quality every time. What you are proposing is using the price of a product as part of its advertising, which is just as bad as using micropayments as "a publicity stunt to try to aquire [an audience]".
"Sluggy, RealLife and Sinfest are all huge and don't charge a cent. They have other ways to make money."
Yes, and most of those ways are selling advertising. Selling advertising sucks. It's an unpredictable source of income and in some cases irritating to your readers. Alternately, some of them sell merchandise. That's a little better, but what it comes down to is that as an artist I want to sell my content, not spinoffs from my content. I don't think I'm alone in this. People like to read my comics? Great, that's what I should charge them for. I shouldn't have to rely on the super-fans that love my product enough to buy t-shirts. I shouldn't have to prove to an advertising executive that my site is worthy of hosting their ads.
It sounds to me like you have a grudge against this whole concept that goes beyond the arguments you've listed here. I don't know if this is going to work or not, but at I'm going to wait and see what happens before I cast judgment. After all, this is the first time anyone has even come close. It's an experiment that will either succeed or fail. Why do you want it to fail?
Okay, let me get this straight:
Your premises are:
Dell is a decent vendor
You prefer building your own PC to buying Dell
You don't want to be told that Macs are superior
Mac users have a superiority complex
Your conclusion:
"DoItYourSelf can be just as good as a of the shelf Mac if not better."
Did you even make an argument here?
The subject of this thread isn't whether or not you need the extra power a G5 has to offer. The question was whether or not you could get a comparable X86 system for less. To be comparable, you need to match it feature for feature, or at least as close as possible.
First of all, this isn't a comic strip that he's selling, it's more like a comic book. When all three installments are finished, it will be longer than an average comic book. To read the whole thing will cost you 75 cents. That's a good price for a comic book.
Second, you seem to have a lot of ideas about what "people" and "most people" want. Perhaps we should give this model a try before we dismiss it, hmm?
Third, you obviously didn't read the BitPass site very carefully. There are no extra fees for the buyer. A $10 account costs you $10. A $3 account costs you $3. You are correct that it is something like buying "disney dollars." At the moment, there aren't many goods or services you can buy with these payments, but I was willing to invest $3 up front to support a system that I want to succeed. Hopefully, there will soon be many other artists offering their work through this system, and with the size of the payments it will still probably take me a while to spend it all.
Third, you demand that people sell in bulk instead of messing around with new ways of selling. The fact of the matter is, selling in bulk just doesn't work for most online comics. How many artists do you know that are making their livings by selling subscriptions? Well, there's you, and...um...sluggy...and.... You get the idea. The only thing that comes close to working for most online comics is the type of site that gathers a bunch of comics together for one price. Not to mention that some people don't have "bulk" to sell. They may spend months creating a beautifully written and drawn comic book that they want to sell online. They can charge $1 or more for it, and sell a handful of copies, they can give it away for free and have the whole world see it but go broke and be unable to continue hosting it, or they can charge a small fee for it and get a nice compromise. They can't afford to wait until they've made three more comic books and charge $2 for three months of viewing. It's just not practical. Not everyone is running a store. Some people are just trying to sell their art, and the less they can charge, the better exposure they will get.
Okay, so maybe it's true. Maybe there haven't been a lot of earth-shaking developments in the web browser (or word processor) market. But so what? Does it do what we need it to do? Is Mozilla superior to IE? Are more and more people seeking alternative browsers for their unique features? If the answer to all of these questions is "yes," I don't see a problem. You can't force innovation; it has to happen naturally. In the meantime, slow but steady improvement is enough for me.
Vegas is a video editing package, not audio, so I'm not sure why you are considering that.
Vegas started out as an audio editor, and it was only a few years ago that they added video support. It is still a good audio editing program, but it's price is probably higher now that it is being marketed as a video tool.
Interestingly enough, I recently worked with some video editing professionals who said that Vegas is really pretty unsophisticated for video editing, but if you want to edit the soundtrack of your video, it works great.
I am a graphic guy (just graduated from Purdue University in Computer Graphics), and I can confirm that it is easy to use up all of your RAM doing graphics work. When working in 3D, a scene of any complexity will soon slow down your system if you have insufficient RAM. The normal solution to this is to make your scenes less complex. That's good practice, but additional RAM sure helps a lot.
Example: When Pixar was making Toy Story 2, they ran into problems with a scene at an airport terminal? Why? Because it was the most complex scene in the movie, but their hardware at the time could not support any more than 1GB of RAM. The solution? Reduce the complexity of the scene. A couple of years later, when they made Monsters, Inc., they treated us to amazingly complex scenes that would have been impossible before.
Other programs that use a lot of RAM are 2D compositing programs like After Effects or higher end programs like Shake. If you've ever built a really complex Photoshop file, you know that heavy use of layers will slow your computer down in a hurry. With compositing, you can multiply the effect by the number of frames in your footage (not literally, but the effect is noticeable).
I don't generally get too much into the hardware side of things, but the other time-consuming part of CG is rendering. I know that processor speed is the most important part of rendering, but can anyone tell me what role RAM plays in rendering either 2D or 3D graphics?
I don't see where anyone is comparing Sun Servers to OSX anyway. Reread the parent post.
You make a good point. The way the big-time music scene goes these days, you must release an album every year and a half to two years or so or sink into obscurity. It doesn't take too long before people start asking "I wonder what ever happened to..." even when that artist is in the studio preparing their next album.
However, as a previous poster pointed out, Jewel (and some other artists) is a good example of releasing one "single" every couple of months through the radio and MTV, which would in turn rejuvenate sales for the album. Suppose now that a similar strategy was available for smaller bands that didn't depend on the album as a whole to express their artistic vision.
Without waiting to gather the overhead required to produce an album, the group could release a song every two months and thus stay in the public consciousness. Right now, artists get this: "Did you buy the new XYZ album?" "Yep! It's great! I can't wait for their next one!" (six months later: "I wonder what ever happened to XYZ?") Instead, they could have this: "Did you buy the latest track from ZYX?" "Yeah, and I hear that the one they're releasing next month is even better!" (six months later: "Man, ZYX just keeps getting better and better!")
Morse code is an excellent example. Another is calligraphy. Whenever some once-common practice starts to fade from everyday use, people start to bemoan "the loss of the art of X", with X being handwriting, knitting, cooking, shoe polishing, or what have you. From what I can tell, most "arts" that really deserve to be preserved will be continued by enthusiasts, as you say. Skills that are no longer practical don't need to be practiced by everybody.
Your point is valid, but the conclusion should be that VOD will cause the decline of movie rental stores, not the DVD format. For ownership purposes, people still crave physical media.
Purdue University has been doing this in their PC labs for years. For a long time, it took about a minute to log onto a machine, but it took two or three minutes for the computer to log someone off and restart itself. When they switched to XP over the summer, the wait became ridiculous. You could enter a computer lab, watch somebody click "log off," take their seat immediately, and you still wouldn't be able to log on for at least five minutes. Over Christmas break (I believe, I'm not sure exactly when they made the change), they implemented Roxio GoBack as a faster way to restore the systems to default upon shutdown. The speed is pretty much back to where it was before the XP upgrade now.
You're missing the point. This idea isn't for people who want to look at porn, it's for people who don't want to look at porn but have a lot of trouble resisting (I have personal experience with this). As with any addiction, peer accountability is the best way to break out of the cycle.
By the way, you seem to be rationalizing any and all behavior in your argument. You seem to suggest that feeling shame for something is no reason to stop it. Well I must disagree and say that sometimes the best way to stop feeling guilty or ashamed about something you're doing is not to fight off the guilt, it's to stop the activity.
If someone ever designs a computer that can steal my girlfriend, I will certainly give that computer a little lesson in the laws of physics...
If someone designs a computer that can steal my girlfriend, I will give that designer a physics lesson.
Even though I also have issues with the original poster, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Tolkien repeatedly and explicitly stated that LOTR was not an allegory of anything and furthermore said that he hated allegory in any form.
Hell, I'd think even if it were nothing but elitists, it'd balance out ratings more as the current crop of ratings seems to only account for complete morons with no brains.
Yep, they're called "average television viewers."
Basically, media companies can't put all of their marketing power behind products for all types of viewers, so they prioritize. Unfortunately, rather than actually take the time and effort that it would take to divy up their expenditures in a fair way (i.e. Largest audience gets most money, second largest gets slightly less, etc.), they dump all of their funds into the top two or three audiences according to their data. They can't appeal to the mean or median viewer, so they have to go for the mode. The mode is mostly sheep, a.k.a. idiots. That's the way it goes. *sigh*
Shouldn't be too much of a problem. Many /. readers haven't had intercourse for years anyway.
I'm surprised that more people haven't pointed this out, but isn't I, Robot a collection of short stories, some of which are set decades apart from one another? I can't imagine this being a good thing(TM) for the book's reputation, since anyone reading the book because of the movie will be surprised to find that the two are nothing alike. I just hope that they leave Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles alone. Someone produced a terrible miniseries from it years ago, and I can only imagine how bad a condensed, 2-hour version would be.
Now more than ever it is difficult to make a miniseries succeed because there is so much other television to choose from. Doubly so on a cable station like Sci-Fi which isn't offered in all cable service plans or even all areas.
Not that I totally disagree with what you're trying to say here, but I have a problem with the concept that "touch math" isn't real math and memorization is. With the multiplication tables, you aren't teaching kids how to multiply, you're teaching them the results of multiplication that somebody already did for them. I prefer a combined method in which you first teach kids multiplication in terms of "3x3 is 3+3+3", and then being drilling them on the tables once they understand that it's a royal pain to use that method once you get up to the eights and nines. If you learn that way, you have a backup plan when your memory fails you (I remember that 9x7 always gave me trouble for some reason), you aren't dead in the water like the girl who couldn't comprehend 9+0. It might take longer to solve the problem, but it will get solved.
I installed Mandrake 8.2 just three weeks ago. It was harder than installing Windows 2000 on the same machine. I'll grant that Linux did a generally better job of autodetecting my hardware, which impressed me. However, getting the system actually up and running to do anything useful was a big pain.
As for SuSE, I wanted to give it a try but I couldn't decode the installation instructions on their website. Perhaps if I'd purchased a CD it would have been easy, but with no ISO versions available, it was difficult to figure out how to get the OS installed off of the internet. So I gave up and found a disto that had ISOs. Installing off of a CD is comfortable and familiar for most people I know.
I suppose my real beef is not purely with the installation but with the entire setup. To get Windows installed, up to date, and configured with all of my favorite software including browser plugins takes several hours. To do the same in Linux takes...well...like I said, I installed Mandrake 3 weeks ago and I still don't have it the way I want it. I tried installing the Mozilla personal security manager after installing Mozilla. As it turns out, if you don't have exactly the right version number down to the third decimal place, it won't install. You can't download the latest version of anything and expect that it will neatly replace the old version. 9 times out of 10 you have to find the updated libraries too, often matching the exact nightly build number of whatever version you've managed to find.
I apologize for saying that you were out of touch, it wasn't meant to be a personal attack. It's just that you haven't been a non-linux-user in a long time, and it's difficult for someone who is comfortable with the system to relate to a newbie who simply doesn't understand how things work. Just pretend that the newbie is a foreigner that doesn't speak English very well yet. It's best to use smaller words, repeat them often, and most importantly give us plenty of time to translate them.
And there will never be a printed replacement for the "next-door-neighbor's-son." A reference guide can not answer your questions even when you don't know how to ask them properly. A human knows how to get to the root of your question. Indexes are worthless if you don't know the terminology. Until we get some really sophisticated AI built into software manuals, the masses of the world will continue to rely on a handful of experts who happen to be personal acquaintances.
I'd appreciate some valid documentation on how MUCH faster the x86 is than PPC. Which one is truly faster is an age-old debate, but few people have the guts to say that one is MUCH faster than the other. What are your sources?
Unfortunately I don't know a Win32 version, but SameGnome is really just a clone of another game. I don't know which is the original, but I was introduced to it as "HMaki" on PalmOS. I've also seen it as "SameGame" on Linux. I haven't found a Win32 version, but that's because I haven't been looking. If you have a Palm, HMaki is a very good adaptation of the game.
The hills? You fool! That's where they are designed to operate!
Besides, I don't think you'd need to run. Judging from the movies of these bad boys in action, a casual stroll for the hills would probably do the trick.
Baloney! A clean install of Windows is easy and not even terribly intimidating to most users.
1.)Insert CD
2.)Restart Computer
3.)Click "Continue" half a dozen times
4.)You're done
Windows installations come with nearly all of the drivers you'll need, and the rest will be included with your hardware since Windows is the standard. "Aunt Bertha" doesn't have to know anything about drivers, she just knows that when she bought her new mouse, it came with an installation CD that magically makes it work when you double-click the installer.
On the other hand, I'm a intermediate computer hobbyist and a Linux installation, even for a "user friendly" flavor like Mandrake, makes me break out in a cold sweat. I finally got it running and I was loving it, then several days later something crashed, and when I restarted my machine it couldn't boot X. Without X, I'm blind, deaf, and dumb in Linux. Now who do I turn to? The proverbial "next-door-neighbor's son" that knows everything about computers only knows Windows. I certainly don't have any official tech support unless I paid for my distribution. Supposing I'm a fairly inexperienced computer user, I wouldn't have the first clue about how to use a news group.
Face it: installing Windows is EASY, installing Linux is DARNED INTIMIDATING. If you don't believe me, then you are pretty out of touch.