You're the third idiot I've seen here today trying to scam people into helping you get a free ipod. We don't want your spam. In fact, if you don't have five real-world friends you can scam, you don't deserve an ipod. Go hawk your multi-level marketing bullshit somewhere else.
Wow. You managed to take an innocent story about internet access and turn it into a political rant. This site is getting to be almost unbearable because of the intellectual midgets who feel the need to share their enlightened political views at every opportunity. I couldn't care less who you herd-following morons are voting for. I'd like to discuss technical articles, if at all possible. I can't wait to see what happens here in late October.
Should I ever regain the ability to moderate, I am going to mod every political post overrated. I don't care who you're supporting. And to make matters as bad as possible, the vast majority of the political posts I see here are from people who feel the meaning of "intellectual discourse" is simply repeating emotional-based partisan drivel. This site is turning into a gigantic political trollfest.
It doesn't even mean connecting at speeds higher than 56k (real connection speed, when shared) anymore.
The term "Broadband" has nothing to do with speed. It's simply a term used to describe a single medium carrying multiple signal types (cable = t.v. + internet, dsl = phone + internet). The term you want is high-speed access, which refers to any fast internet connection. Those lines in Korea are most likely "baseband" (one signal type), so they should not ever be called "broadband". The term is far more diluted than you understand.
To be clear, I never said making money is evil. The fact that makes me angry is that Valve is manipulating the hoard of idiot fanboys who will do anything to get a glimpse of the HL2 engine. If this were a discrete event, I would laugh it off. But given the pre-launch success of HL2, I suspect other companies will try the same stupid shit. The trend here is that a game's success is getting to be far too dependant on the game's pre-sale hype. How much is Valve spending on these stupid marketing campaigns? How much money from a typical project is diverted from the game into stunts like this? Do you think future games will get hyped more and more if HL2 sells millions? Valve has the legal right to do all of this, and I respect that right. But watching the drooling fucktard gamespy crowd get lead around by their noses before the game is actually released is depressing. We would all have better games if we acted like intelligent consumers. Instead, we'll have better marketing campaigns.
Between your latency-inducing router, cycle-whoring firewall and spyware scanner, and disk i/o-happy av program, your machine is running considerably slower than it could be. There's nothing wrong with that if the machine is still fast enough for you. But when you factor in the extra cost, effort, and resource drain, this isn't an option for most people (especially the non tech-saavy). I'd like to see most of these operations shifted to the ISP level, where people pay a few dollars more for access per month, but we have a much safer 'net. I'm probably dreaming, but I get worried that we're too forgiving when it comes to viruses/malware caused by a bunch of unpatched Windows machines. How far will we inconvenience ourselves before people have to start taking responsibility for their computers?
Do not buy Condition Zero. The game is a terrible flop. This entire CS:Source release is just an attempt by Valve to cash in on the pre-game hype surrounding the HL2 launch (hype created, in part, by willful lies [HL2 was going to be released last year] on Valve's part). Last week, after the CS:S beta was announced for Condition Zero owners, Valve's own Steam product starting forcing users to view ads featuring Condition Zero. In a nutshell, the CS:S release is just a pathetic attempt to try and sell Condition Zero (and maybe make up for the insane prices levied to cyber cafes). The CS release is just another shameless money grab by the gaming world's newest corporate monster.
Alright, nothing is confirmed yet, and this gets a little complicated...
First, read this. There will be two common means of purchasing the game: the $50 retail box and the $10 monthly subscription. Valve is making it sound like the retail box will be able to play multiplayer like everyone else, including mods. But the subscription people will have "future expansion" stuff. This doesn't sound so bad at first, but I strongly suspect vavle's motivation is to get everyone on the monthly subscription. I think we'll see the original HL2 community segregated from the subscribers by means of updates and enhancements. I'm being speculative, but given vale's track record with the fans, I don't think I'm wrong. In the end, you'll either be able to purchase HL2 and play a stripped-down version online, or pay the monthly fee to get the real thing. But I could be way off. Though given their track record with cyber cafes, I doubt it.
I agree with you, but I think I understand Valve's motivation here. I'll use me as an example.
I bought Half-Life way back in '99. It's now 7-2004. I've had the game for about five years. I'll round it off and say 60 months. The game originally cost me $55, so I ended up paying less than one dollar per month to use it (although pre-Team Fortress multiplayer was pretty bad and not even worth that dollar).
Now, HL2 with online content will cost $10/mo., according to interviews with Valve's PR flack. If I use this game for 60 months, valve will end up with $600. That doesn't include the add-ons I'm sure they're going to sell (just like Everquest).
So, in closing, I suspect that the Steam system will ultimately fail due to their seeming inability to get the system running under today's comparetively light load. But given their lack of respect for the fans (HL2 release date lies) and tremendous greed (mmo model modified for FPS games), I can understand why they're trying.
Who are you mad at, exactly? A few people who have a basic understanding of economics, or your former employer?
Take a step back and look at the situation. Why did your former employer want to fire you and pick up cheap labor? Is it so he can buy a bigger yacht? Or maybe so he can offer the bank's services at a lower rate? What would happen if your former employer never took these cost cutting measures? Your employer's bank would go out of business. He has to cut costs somewhere to stay competitive, I suspect. Now maybe firing you wasn't the best way to do this; I don't know what your employer's situation was like.
Who is behind this driving need to cut costs? I'll give you all of one hint: your customers. If the bank down the street offers free checking and your employer charges 5 cents/check, you lose a lot of business. Likewise, if your employer offers free checking and the bank down the street pays 1.2% interest on checking account funds, you lose a lot of business. We could apply the same idea to loans, credit cards, whatever. The fact of the matter is that the bank's customers want the best deal they can get. They don't care about a good IT staff, they don't especially care about good tellers, and they aren't concerned with the quality of the bank's empoyee's health care package. The customers want the best possible deal with their money, right now.
But you have to step outside of this and ask yourself an important question: are you any different? Do you shop at places like Albertons and Cub Foods where wages are very low and benefits are non-existant? Or are you in the ~2% that shops at a real store/co-op where people get a fair wage and benefit package for their work? How about home goods? Ever been to Wal-Mart? Target? Same deal; those places pay as little as they can get away with to bring you cheap goods. Your bank is likely being forced into this state of the economy, and you might very well be part of this problem.
So you can spit at republicans, capitalists, the illumunati, and whomever else you don't like, but at the end of the day, the modern push towards bottom-dollar goods and shitty service are what cost you your job. And I suspect you're one of the consumers behind this.
Oh come on, take a look at the surrounding posts. Most of these people grew up on the two-party system, and as far as their little brains are concerned, republicans and democrats are two completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. I agree with your post, but I'd be more shocked if someone on/. actually recognized the vast similarity between the U.S.'s two dominating circus parties. Let's hope these parrots don't reproduce.
I hate to drag out this tired line, but seriously, go re-read what I posted. One of my suggestions was "severly cut the federal tax rate"--this is exactly what you're yelling about. I don't entirely disagree with you, but my point was that we could do a lot of things with the money that we pay to the national debt's interest. Maybe we could even have some real political debates, instead of arguing over which presidential candidate is more patriotic.
People were saying these things and freaking out just like this when Reagan passed his tax cuts and less than ten years later the debt was gone[...]
That's the national defecit, which is the amount of money the gov't spends above its income (roughly speaking). The national debt has existed throughout your lifetime, and will not go anywhere for many years. To give you a rough idea, go look at fy04's spending. If we didn't have national debt, we could institute universal healthcare, or form an real international peacekeeping military force, or severely cut the federal tax rate, or buy everyone guns and suv's, or plant a smiley face pattern of trees in each state, or buy everyone a litter of kittens, or whatever.
According to the national debt clock, the U.S. is $7.2 trillion in debt. Even if you ignore the gov't-purchased "IOU" bonds, we're just about half that in debt. And of course, the entire Social Security system is running headlong into disaster. More budget cuts, please. Cut everybody. Defense, Space, Research, Healthcare, Retirement Benefits, Student Funding, Habitat Development, etc. We can't afford this any more. And to everyone here crying about these cuts: you are the problem.
Yes, I did. There have been a number of instances where overseas "hackers" were awarded job offers after breaking into a firm's network. People think the guy was stupid, but in all honesty, it does happen. Coupled with that fact that V4lvE tries hard to brand itself as a bunch of laid-back gamers that just want to make good gamers, I can see how someone might be duped. Unfortunately for the criminal, he evidently wasn't aware of valve's post-HL transformation into corporate monster. Maybe he should have hacked away Steam first?
I'd be willing to bet your game is another UO/EQ ripoff. The initial box price, the disdain towards "griefers", and the admitted effort at luring in the casual gamer show where your intentions lie. Maybe you'll have original feature x or y or whatever, but I have no real doubt that your game is of the 90%+ mmorpg's that lack substantive originality.
That said, I'm willing to pay $50 a month for a good game. And while I might be in the minority, I know that I'm not alone. But as long as you want to aim for the casual players, your game will turn into another overly newb-friendly carebear romp. I think your post could have been more accurately phrased by letting people know that your entire development effort is simply a shameless money-grab to ride the coattails of the mmorpg wave that started a few years back. Regardless, good luck.
The author wasn't passing judgement on editors here. He wasn't trying to be funny, either. He was baiting the editors by mentioning their names in the hopes of having his idiotic little story posted on Slashdot. Of course, the eds obliged, and now the front page is full of people commenting about this dumbass's flamebait. There's a moral here, kids: you don't need to be able to perform scientific stats analysis or use approved methods when surveying for intelligence. Likewise, you don't need any sort of real sample size, either. Just throw out a few controversial ideas, don't bother backing it up, and mention Slashdot. You'll be a 15-minute star.
I hate marketing drivel like this. Either offer unlimited downloads, or give it a hard cap that everyone can see. I'm tired of these stupid ambiguities that make it sound as though you can use as much as their service as you want. I wonder what their marketing department says when you download a half-dozen cd images in a weekend? These fuckwits don't deserve anyone's business.
If you have older machines that are stable, consider leaving them alone if it will allow you to replace more of the unstable ones.
Yes, this sounds like common sense that everyone should follow. It's not. Those older and more stable machines are accidents waiting to happen. The first critera I use when considering machine replacement is age. There's a mentality among people who haven't been in the position of systems administration that keeps them thinking "well, if it worked for five years, it'll keep going". That's absolutely the wrong way to look at the problem. Now I'm sure plenty of folks here can entertain us with their stories of ten-year-old 386's that ran a critical db while having only six minutes of downtime, or whatever, but those are useless anecdotes. By and large, the single largest factor of likelyhood-to-fail is age. That fact of the matter is that older machines are more prone to substantive failure--not just drives and power supplies. Those old motherboard, ram chips, and even cpu's are waiting for the most inopportune moment to die. Ultimately, yes, you should replace failing computers, but don't gloss over the tired old workhorses. This goes double for post ~'97 or so computers; they probably weren't built to last.
AV companies wouldn't dare classify anything put out by a company with a legal team as a virus. They even let spyware like ISIS and Precision Time through with no problem. The AV companies aren't terribly interested in protecting your computer. As long as the thing still runs, and you have an incentive to renew your license, they're happy. For what it's worth, these same AV companies throw false positives at.mp3s with malformed header/tag info. It's all about perception. They aren't selling safety--they're selling peace of mind.
Sorry, no. That would cause the price of cases to raise by approximately two dollars. People don't want quality. As the story's author has shown, people would rather have pretty windows and lights. (The mylar is a great idea though.)
There are a lot of good books mentioned here, but I'll add one of my favorites to the pile: G. H. Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology". It's a little difficult to describe, but Hardy justifies science in the face of war, shows the importance of humility when confronted with another's brilliance, and gives a tremendous inspiration to anywho who feels he has that rare spark needed to be really good at something. But I don't want to simpify this great book, so I'll copy a few of the book's quotes I found on the web:
"The number of men who can do two things well is negligible."
"There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds."
"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations."
The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, it this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
You're the third idiot I've seen here today trying to scam people into helping you get a free ipod. We don't want your spam. In fact, if you don't have five real-world friends you can scam, you don't deserve an ipod. Go hawk your multi-level marketing bullshit somewhere else.
Not all trends are bad! Remember full-motion video? That sure revolutionized the game industry.
Wow. You managed to take an innocent story about internet access and turn it into a political rant. This site is getting to be almost unbearable because of the intellectual midgets who feel the need to share their enlightened political views at every opportunity. I couldn't care less who you herd-following morons are voting for. I'd like to discuss technical articles, if at all possible. I can't wait to see what happens here in late October.
Should I ever regain the ability to moderate, I am going to mod every political post overrated. I don't care who you're supporting. And to make matters as bad as possible, the vast majority of the political posts I see here are from people who feel the meaning of "intellectual discourse" is simply repeating emotional-based partisan drivel. This site is turning into a gigantic political trollfest.
It doesn't even mean connecting at speeds higher than 56k (real connection speed, when shared) anymore.
The term "Broadband" has nothing to do with speed. It's simply a term used to describe a single medium carrying multiple signal types (cable = t.v. + internet, dsl = phone + internet). The term you want is high-speed access, which refers to any fast internet connection. Those lines in Korea are most likely "baseband" (one signal type), so they should not ever be called "broadband". The term is far more diluted than you understand.
To be clear, I never said making money is evil. The fact that makes me angry is that Valve is manipulating the hoard of idiot fanboys who will do anything to get a glimpse of the HL2 engine. If this were a discrete event, I would laugh it off. But given the pre-launch success of HL2, I suspect other companies will try the same stupid shit. The trend here is that a game's success is getting to be far too dependant on the game's pre-sale hype. How much is Valve spending on these stupid marketing campaigns? How much money from a typical project is diverted from the game into stunts like this? Do you think future games will get hyped more and more if HL2 sells millions? Valve has the legal right to do all of this, and I respect that right. But watching the drooling fucktard gamespy crowd get lead around by their noses before the game is actually released is depressing. We would all have better games if we acted like intelligent consumers. Instead, we'll have better marketing campaigns.
Between your latency-inducing router, cycle-whoring firewall and spyware scanner, and disk i/o-happy av program, your machine is running considerably slower than it could be. There's nothing wrong with that if the machine is still fast enough for you. But when you factor in the extra cost, effort, and resource drain, this isn't an option for most people (especially the non tech-saavy). I'd like to see most of these operations shifted to the ISP level, where people pay a few dollars more for access per month, but we have a much safer 'net. I'm probably dreaming, but I get worried that we're too forgiving when it comes to viruses/malware caused by a bunch of unpatched Windows machines. How far will we inconvenience ourselves before people have to start taking responsibility for their computers?
Do not buy Condition Zero. The game is a terrible flop. This entire CS:Source release is just an attempt by Valve to cash in on the pre-game hype surrounding the HL2 launch (hype created, in part, by willful lies [HL2 was going to be released last year] on Valve's part). Last week, after the CS:S beta was announced for Condition Zero owners, Valve's own Steam product starting forcing users to view ads featuring Condition Zero. In a nutshell, the CS:S release is just a pathetic attempt to try and sell Condition Zero (and maybe make up for the insane prices levied to cyber cafes). The CS release is just another shameless money grab by the gaming world's newest corporate monster.
Alright, nothing is confirmed yet, and this gets a little complicated...
First, read this. There will be two common means of purchasing the game: the $50 retail box and the $10 monthly subscription. Valve is making it sound like the retail box will be able to play multiplayer like everyone else, including mods. But the subscription people will have "future expansion" stuff. This doesn't sound so bad at first, but I strongly suspect vavle's motivation is to get everyone on the monthly subscription. I think we'll see the original HL2 community segregated from the subscribers by means of updates and enhancements. I'm being speculative, but given vale's track record with the fans, I don't think I'm wrong. In the end, you'll either be able to purchase HL2 and play a stripped-down version online, or pay the monthly fee to get the real thing. But I could be way off. Though given their track record with cyber cafes, I doubt it.
I agree with you, but I think I understand Valve's motivation here. I'll use me as an example.
I bought Half-Life way back in '99. It's now 7-2004. I've had the game for about five years. I'll round it off and say 60 months. The game originally cost me $55, so I ended up paying less than one dollar per month to use it (although pre-Team Fortress multiplayer was pretty bad and not even worth that dollar).
Now, HL2 with online content will cost $10/mo., according to interviews with Valve's PR flack. If I use this game for 60 months, valve will end up with $600. That doesn't include the add-ons I'm sure they're going to sell (just like Everquest).
So, in closing, I suspect that the Steam system will ultimately fail due to their seeming inability to get the system running under today's comparetively light load. But given their lack of respect for the fans (HL2 release date lies) and tremendous greed (mmo model modified for FPS games), I can understand why they're trying.
Who are you mad at, exactly? A few people who have a basic understanding of economics, or your former employer?
Take a step back and look at the situation. Why did your former employer want to fire you and pick up cheap labor? Is it so he can buy a bigger yacht? Or maybe so he can offer the bank's services at a lower rate? What would happen if your former employer never took these cost cutting measures? Your employer's bank would go out of business. He has to cut costs somewhere to stay competitive, I suspect. Now maybe firing you wasn't the best way to do this; I don't know what your employer's situation was like.
Who is behind this driving need to cut costs? I'll give you all of one hint: your customers. If the bank down the street offers free checking and your employer charges 5 cents/check, you lose a lot of business. Likewise, if your employer offers free checking and the bank down the street pays 1.2% interest on checking account funds, you lose a lot of business. We could apply the same idea to loans, credit cards, whatever. The fact of the matter is that the bank's customers want the best deal they can get. They don't care about a good IT staff, they don't especially care about good tellers, and they aren't concerned with the quality of the bank's empoyee's health care package. The customers want the best possible deal with their money, right now.
But you have to step outside of this and ask yourself an important question: are you any different? Do you shop at places like Albertons and Cub Foods where wages are very low and benefits are non-existant? Or are you in the ~2% that shops at a real store/co-op where people get a fair wage and benefit package for their work? How about home goods? Ever been to Wal-Mart? Target? Same deal; those places pay as little as they can get away with to bring you cheap goods. Your bank is likely being forced into this state of the economy, and you might very well be part of this problem.
So you can spit at republicans, capitalists, the illumunati, and whomever else you don't like, but at the end of the day, the modern push towards bottom-dollar goods and shitty service are what cost you your job. And I suspect you're one of the consumers behind this.
Oh come on, take a look at the surrounding posts. Most of these people grew up on the two-party system, and as far as their little brains are concerned, republicans and democrats are two completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. I agree with your post, but I'd be more shocked if someone on /. actually recognized the vast similarity between the U.S.'s two dominating circus parties. Let's hope these parrots don't reproduce.
I hate to drag out this tired line, but seriously, go re-read what I posted. One of my suggestions was "severly cut the federal tax rate"--this is exactly what you're yelling about. I don't entirely disagree with you, but my point was that we could do a lot of things with the money that we pay to the national debt's interest. Maybe we could even have some real political debates, instead of arguing over which presidential candidate is more patriotic.
People were saying these things and freaking out just like this when Reagan passed his tax cuts and less than ten years later the debt was gone[...]
That's the national defecit, which is the amount of money the gov't spends above its income (roughly speaking). The national debt has existed throughout your lifetime, and will not go anywhere for many years. To give you a rough idea, go look at fy04's spending. If we didn't have national debt, we could institute universal healthcare, or form an real international peacekeeping military force, or severely cut the federal tax rate, or buy everyone guns and suv's, or plant a smiley face pattern of trees in each state, or buy everyone a litter of kittens, or whatever.
According to the national debt clock, the U.S. is $7.2 trillion in debt. Even if you ignore the gov't-purchased "IOU" bonds, we're just about half that in debt. And of course, the entire Social Security system is running headlong into disaster. More budget cuts, please. Cut everybody. Defense, Space, Research, Healthcare, Retirement Benefits, Student Funding, Habitat Development, etc. We can't afford this any more. And to everyone here crying about these cuts: you are the problem.
Damn, if we only had some more of that money ...
Spoken like a true lawyer.
Yes, I did. There have been a number of instances where overseas "hackers" were awarded job offers after breaking into a firm's network. People think the guy was stupid, but in all honesty, it does happen. Coupled with that fact that V4lvE tries hard to brand itself as a bunch of laid-back gamers that just want to make good gamers, I can see how someone might be duped. Unfortunately for the criminal, he evidently wasn't aware of valve's post-HL transformation into corporate monster. Maybe he should have hacked away Steam first?
I'd be willing to bet your game is another UO/EQ ripoff. The initial box price, the disdain towards "griefers", and the admitted effort at luring in the casual gamer show where your intentions lie. Maybe you'll have original feature x or y or whatever, but I have no real doubt that your game is of the 90%+ mmorpg's that lack substantive originality.
That said, I'm willing to pay $50 a month for a good game. And while I might be in the minority, I know that I'm not alone. But as long as you want to aim for the casual players, your game will turn into another overly newb-friendly carebear romp. I think your post could have been more accurately phrased by letting people know that your entire development effort is simply a shameless money-grab to ride the coattails of the mmorpg wave that started a few years back. Regardless, good luck.
The author wasn't passing judgement on editors here. He wasn't trying to be funny, either. He was baiting the editors by mentioning their names in the hopes of having his idiotic little story posted on Slashdot. Of course, the eds obliged, and now the front page is full of people commenting about this dumbass's flamebait. There's a moral here, kids: you don't need to be able to perform scientific stats analysis or use approved methods when surveying for intelligence. Likewise, you don't need any sort of real sample size, either. Just throw out a few controversial ideas, don't bother backing it up, and mention Slashdot. You'll be a 15-minute star.
30 days unlimited/interactive usage
I hate marketing drivel like this. Either offer unlimited downloads, or give it a hard cap that everyone can see. I'm tired of these stupid ambiguities that make it sound as though you can use as much as their service as you want. I wonder what their marketing department says when you download a half-dozen cd images in a weekend? These fuckwits don't deserve anyone's business.
If you have older machines that are stable, consider leaving them alone if it will allow you to replace more of the unstable ones.
Yes, this sounds like common sense that everyone should follow. It's not. Those older and more stable machines are accidents waiting to happen. The first critera I use when considering machine replacement is age. There's a mentality among people who haven't been in the position of systems administration that keeps them thinking "well, if it worked for five years, it'll keep going". That's absolutely the wrong way to look at the problem. Now I'm sure plenty of folks here can entertain us with their stories of ten-year-old 386's that ran a critical db while having only six minutes of downtime, or whatever, but those are useless anecdotes. By and large, the single largest factor of likelyhood-to-fail is age. That fact of the matter is that older machines are more prone to substantive failure--not just drives and power supplies. Those old motherboard, ram chips, and even cpu's are waiting for the most inopportune moment to die. Ultimately, yes, you should replace failing computers, but don't gloss over the tired old workhorses. This goes double for post ~'97 or so computers; they probably weren't built to last.
AV companies wouldn't dare classify anything put out by a company with a legal team as a virus. They even let spyware like ISIS and Precision Time through with no problem. The AV companies aren't terribly interested in protecting your computer. As long as the thing still runs, and you have an incentive to renew your license, they're happy. For what it's worth, these same AV companies throw false positives at .mp3s with malformed header/tag info. It's all about perception. They aren't selling safety--they're selling peace of mind.
Sorry, no. That would cause the price of cases to raise by approximately two dollars. People don't want quality. As the story's author has shown, people would rather have pretty windows and lights. (The mylar is a great idea though.)
There are a lot of good books mentioned here, but I'll add one of my favorites to the pile: G. H. Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology". It's a little difficult to describe, but Hardy justifies science in the face of war, shows the importance of humility when confronted with another's brilliance, and gives a tremendous inspiration to anywho who feels he has that rare spark needed to be really good at something. But I don't want to simpify this great book, so I'll copy a few of the book's quotes I found on the web:
"The number of men who can do two things well is negligible."
"There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds."
"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations."
The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, it this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.
How is this going to confuse any one?
I imagine the confusion might look something like this:
admin1: Alright, go patch the sun server.
admin2: You mean Solaris...
admin1: Wait, SunOS?
admin2: No, Solaris 9?
admin1: Wait, I thought we had SunOS 2.9?
admin2: version 2?? that's, like, from the 80's
Nope--I can't update machines until I know a patch is out. This sys-admin is covering his ears and humming showtunes until 4 p.m. Lalalalaaala...