Money lauched the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, not tourism.
The fallacy in that statement is that there was no tourism during that period. Of course they didn't launch to "sight see" because there was no such thing and thus no money in it.
There is now. There's a potentially huge amount. How much money does the human race spend on "entertainment" now? And how much of that is spent just on trips to go see places you haven't been to yet? Look at Alaskan or Antarctic cruises (the latter is probably far more comparable; the Antarctic "cruise lines" are generally re-purposed Russian ice breakers instead of luxury cruise ships). Look at high-altitude mountain climbing (e.g. -- K2 or Mt Everest). There are a lot of people spending money on that kind of thing now.
Certainly space tourism isn't the only potential revenue stream. If you can get a cheap orbital launch craft then you can also break into the LEO satellite business, which is potentially monsterous. You could eventually aim for geosynch, which is even more money. But the "space tourism" gig will get you headlines (free advertising!) and could certainly pay the bills until you can realistically look at some of the other endeavors.
Yeah, the Renaissance-era European explorers did it to search for trade routes and trade goods. But Carnival cruise lines plies the same waters nowadays, and their entire business is tourism.
you would see Microsoft telling EVERYONE why they needed HD-DVD
Er, they are saying that. The future Xbox360s are supposed to ship with an HD DVD drive. I wasn't aware until just now that the initial versions wouldn't have it -- that is lame.
One is that it will cement it as the standard for HD-DVD
Doubt it. That war will be fought and won or lost long before the PS3 ships. And exceptionally few people use their console as a video player anyway, so even though Sony can try to use it as a marketing chit in Blu-ray's favor, most CE companies and studios will discount that. The war will be won or lost by the standalone players and by studio contracts.
The difference between 9GB and 54GB will be significant in this case.
I was presuming an Xbox360 with an HD DVD player, which MS has said would happen (and I mistakenly assumed was in the release). Not having one is a huge drawback. Potentially fatal. And unless MS is going to upgrade the original X360 for free/minimal cost then developers won't be able to rely on having the HD-DVD drive in the future.
As for capacity, if you bring HD-DVD into the picture it's much better, although BD-ROM still has the advantage (in your example it's 30 GB vs 50 GB; not 54 GB).
by all accounts it has been a failure
I guess that depends on whose accounts you're listening to. Certainly they've been losing money hand over fist on it, but they've also managed to become seriously considered as a contender. That's not exactly failure. Their sales figures in the US and Europe haven't been horrid, but they certainly haven't been great either.
And it's hardly like they're the only company that does this. You'd be hard pressed to find a press release from Nintendo, Sony, Samsung, or any other major consumer electronics company that says "well yeah, that just fucking tanked". To single out MS here isn't exactly fair... but it's not surprising either.
q[Both companies will still go on profitting well enough to continue existing for a very long time, look at Pepsi and Coca Cola (and all the other generic Cola makes).]q
Oh, I didn't know that it cost Coke a cool billion plus to make a new drink, or even reformulate one of their current ones. Taste testing isn't exactly the same thing as multi-tiered drug testing with controls. If Coke's scientists guess wrong, people end up with a bad taste in their mouth. If a drug company's scientists guess wrong people can end up dead. Coke doesn't really have to worry about interactions with other foods (not even pop rocks, since that's an urban legend). Drug companies most certainly do have to worry about potential interactions with other medications that may be taken at the same time.
Is there a large amount of overhead in the FDA drug testing process? Sure. But there's also a huge risk here, especially as we get more and more advanced medications. The countries that don't have their own drug testing get away with it because they rely upon the US/Canada, Western Europe, etc. who do extensive testing.
And, frankly, I don't want people self-diagnosing and treating. I don't want people to be buying things like antibiotics OTC. All it will lead to is a sharp increase in the AB-resistant infections -- and those are already becoming a problem under the current system.
What we have now may not be perfect, but it's a helluva lot better than the anarchy that many people here are suggesting.
Well we hate Blue-Ray because it is what Sony picked and we are going to do everything we can to piss all over it.
Or, if you have a clue:
We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents.
There's no clear indication that Blu-ray will give Sony a "significant advantage" as you claim. Yes, Blu-ray has more storage, but it's not clear that any game is going to make use of anywhere close to even HD-DVD's "mere" 20GB+ storage capabilities in the near future.
How few XBOX 360's need to be sold this year (shipped to customers not stores), before you consider it to be a failure?
Uh, that's not even a question. That's a leading statement. Unless you meant for it to be similar to "So how long have you known that you are brain damaged?"
Which I think you did.
Oh, and no, I have no intention of buying an Xbox360. Or a PS3. Or a Revolution. The only consoles I've owned so far were a PS and PS2, but neither of them get enough use for me to seriously consider another console.
how Blizzard is dealing with the problem of servers and user load?
Uh, they pseudo-officially "returned" the GotY award several weeks ago (see here), and the servers have been stable for months now -- or at least they were stable several months ago when I quit playing.
PA even has several official guilds on the Dark Iron server, specifically to battle the official PvPguild(s).
I like that you tried to post something pithy, and yet merely showed that you know absolutely nothing about either WoW or Penny Arcade. Grats!
Why do MMORPG developers and publishers think this is an acceptable practice?
Because if they don't charge money for the client then they can't get space on retail shelves (e.g. -- EB Games, Best Buy, etc.), which is how the vast majority of games are sold.
Until the majority of games aren't sold through publishers and standard retail channels this won't change.
How the heck do they remain anonymous and get paid?
There are a number of foreign banks that will happily accept large transactions and ensure complete anonymity to everyone involved. The classic example of this used to be the Swiss banking system, although it's not quite as popular now that they finally relented on the WW2 account issue.
AFAIK, the current favorites are Central American countries, the Bahamas, and other countries in the Gulf of Mexico area. Highly anonymized banking, a pretty corrupt government that will look the other way, and lots and lots of tourist traffic, much of it on the upper end of the payscale (which is less important now with electronic funds transfer, but presumably you want the cash at some point).
Of course, there's a price to pay for anonymity. You generally have a bit of a holding period on any deposits. Withdraw in under a year (or maybe more, I really dunno) and you're looking at bank fees in the 20-40% range. And if you really want to be safe then you'll probably want to move the money between several different banks in different countries. That means anyone trying to trace the money will have to convince (bribe) many different government and bank officials.
Note, all of this is based on reading. My paltry savings are sure as hell not worth this kind of trouble. And I suspect this entire area has gotten a lot tighter and harder to deal with since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent banking laws passed in the US -- if the law enforcement officials claim that terrorist funds are being moved through your system then all (?) the Western countries will place holds on any funds moving in or out of your banking system, which makes it difficult to do business.
q[During the 60's, a Soviet astronaut had problems getting back into the capsule and shutting the hatch, due to the pressuration in his suit.]q
To be fair that was during the first space walk. Ever. The Russians didn't let the rest of the world know about the problems encountered though -- including that he had to drop the suit pressure below the minimum safety level in order to get back in.
It's only been since the fall of the Soviet Union that a lot of the problems of the Soviet space program have come to light.
Now, start off with the the general cruddiness of the x86... the general lower reliability and quality
Lower reliability and quality? Based on what? Percentage-wise, I suspect that fewer x86 systems fail than just about any other microprocessor. Yes, far more fail in quantity but only because the quantity is so high to start with.
Intel has long been known to be the best in the business of microprocessor fabrication. Nobody beats them. And yes, I've worked in the industry. For a competitor. Intel's fab process is envied.
little-endian
Which matters because.... ? Little endian is more machine readable, big endian is more human readable. Human readability only matters when you're looking at a hex dump. And neither one is faster than the other nowadays.
segmented memory addressing, the 1MB limit and the hoops you have to jump through to access any more
Those are BIOS hoops BTW, not ISA hoops. In protected mode it's all flat. There's legacy junk in the BIOS, but frankly it's of no hinderance at all on modern systems.
the very existence of real mode
Which your system is in for, what, maybe 5 seconds during bootup before the OS switches you into protected mode? Wow, what a horrible, horrible thing.
And precisely how much assembly programming do you do anymore? On any platform? Unless it's embedded I'm guessing it's right around zero. My current company writes extremely performance oriented code and we don't muck with assembly -- sure, it'd probably help in some areas, but supporting it on 6-7 different platforms with 1-3 assembly languages on each would be far more cost than its worth.
So yeah, some of us actually HAVE been exposed to, and DO care, about these sorts of things.
Whoop de do. Some of us have also realized that there is more to a computer than the assembly language or purist concepts that you learn in EE/CmpE classes. Sure, I was aghast at the x86 ISA and thought the PPC ISA was so much more elegant back when I was in school. And I thought that the upcoming architectures would end up beating the crap out of Intel's x86 line and that Intel's upcoming EPIC architecture would be revolutionary and so much better and faster.
And know what? Over a decade later it's become clear that x86 is still the future and that all the other chips (including Itanium) utterly failed to knock it off for various reasons. Chief amongst them is the redesigns of the x86 architecture -- it may look crufty on the outside, but all the crappy x86 instructions are translated into a sleek, highly optimized real ISA internal to the chip. And Intel has poured more money into optimizing those cores than all the other CPU vendors combined -- because they can easily afford to do so, despite the minor fact that their margins per processor are so much lower. Sell a few billion chips at $10 profit and you're still a helluva lot better off than selling a few thousand at $100 profit.
Would I want to program x86 in assembler? No thanks. But I wouldn't really want to program any other mainstream CPU in assembler either -- the compilers will do a far better job on average than I will and higher level languages mean I can do more in less time. All the fretting about RISC vs CISC, ISAs, number of registers, etc. winds up being meaningless in the long run.
Oh, and for reference -- those platforms I mentioned above? None of them are x86. But we do make our code compile on Windows, simply because the debuggers are so much better than under any of the Unix flavors we support. All real performance testing is done under Unix though -- our desktops generally have vastly more CPU power, but the servers have vastly more IO power and our app (like most enterprise level apps) is extremely IO intensive.
Really, if you want to bash on the "Intel" architecture, complain about the cruddy IO systems, not about the CPUs that are vastly faster (and cheaper) than everything else.
q[ I'd be happy if firefox can just fix the CPU hammering/memory leak with Flash by 2.0.]q
Given that the issue in question also occurs in IE, Safari, and any other browser with a flash plugin regardless of OS I'd guess that this is not a browser bug.
My guess is that it's a race condition inside the Flash code itself. It doesn't appear on all systems, even if they are running the same OS/browser/flash revision (and viewing the same content).
At least with Firefox you can install Flashblock and not be annoyed by CPU gobbling flash unless you really want it.
We should not have been forced to move to a different format at our own expense and then have to subsidize others that can't afford the move!
Ok, first off the argument about doing it at "our own expense" is invalid. How else would you have it be done? Have the government subsidize everyone to buy new TVs? Allocate yet more spectrum to broadcast TV and just let the two coexist forever? That's just silly.
And so far we aren't subsidizing anyone (kinda) -- the proposals for set-top box subsidies are stalled. It's questionable if they'll ever get passed. The only federal monies that have gone to subsidy the switch to digital broadcasting has been for exactly that -- digital broadcasting by PBS stations. And in most markets they were the first ones to turn on their second antenna.
What's going to happen when they open the spectrum up?
It's nice to see that you've formed your opinions without reading the slightest bit on all of this. Unsurprising here, but still. If you're going to harp on a subject, become educated on it.
Yes, they're going to sell off a lot of it, just as has been done with a lot of the other spectra. The broadcast frequencies are a limited commodity after all, and it so happens that analog TV is occupying a particularly useful chunk (which is why it was put there in the first place). I think they're smoking crack when it comes to the revenue estimates (they were initally formed before the.com bust, and don't appear to have been revised substantially since), but it'll still be in the billions of dollars.
More importantly, however, some of the spectrum will be reserved for public and semi-public use. Namely emergency response channels, which are desperately needed. Go read up on it if you'd like.
Oh, and the sale of the spectrum will go, in part, to offset the taxpayer expense of any subsidies as well as to offset things like all the other freaking programs the government has. In fact, the sale has been worked into forward looking budget estimates for the past 10 years. So your arguments about having to fund all of this ring even more hollow.
I'd prefer that it be held hostage the way it is rather than by some corporation that has no plans to do anything with it except hold on to it to make sure no one else can have it.
What on earth are you talking about? This is not how the FCC rules work on spectrum use. First, it's a gross misunderstanding of how the analog TV spectrum works today -- who do you think "owns" it? Do you think that your local ABC/CBS/NBC/etc affiliate is publicly owned? Do you think they won't complain -- loudly -- if someone interferes with their allocated frequencies?
As for "holding on to it", sorry, doesn't work that way. Use it or lose it. The FCC can revoke your license at any time for any number of reasons -- including failure to use. And you might not even get your money back. How do you think the FCC is empowered to regulate broadcast television and radio (and yet not cable... at least not yet)? Because they are the ones who grant the license. Break the rules and you can face fines. Keep breaking it and they can simply revoke your licenses, as well as the licenses of affiliates that you don't even own.
A CD (if it'll fit in your pocket) is open to scratches, bending,
And the floppy is open to magnetic fields, dust/dirt/debris getting inside the jacket, bending of the metal jacket, etc.
And, most importantly, it has crap for storage and is insanely slow.
Stick it in a case to protect it and it just becomes laughable big for 'portable' media
An adequate "case" to protect it from most issues is a simple paper sleeve (nylon is better, but the difference for most purposes is pretty minor). At that point it's about as safe from scratches as the floppy is from dust and dirt. If you have a problem with the additional 1 mm created by the sleeve then you need bigger pants.
But MiniCDs are too small capacity-wise
As compared to a floppy? Now you're just making up BS arguments to try and defend your original point. Come on.
Yes, some systems have problems with mini-CDs, but they're rare and generally have problems with floppies as well -- like not having a floppy drive.
Frankly there's simply no purpose to a floppy anymore. The data storage is too small and easily replaced by sending files by email. The transfer rate is so slow that it's just as fast to burn a CD as it is to format and copy files to a floppy.
And if you need rewriteable storage then get a USB keychain. You can easily find 128MB ones for $0-10 which are up to 25x faster than a floppy. And that's on USB 1.1.
Removable mass media isn't dead. It's just changed.
q[With open source, you know exactly what you get.]q
Which, in this case, is really crappy performance.
There's really only one reason to use Intel's compiler -- for performance. It's well known that Intel's compiler generates code that vastly outperforms everything else for the same platform (namely Microsoft Visual C++ 6/7 and gcc -- everyone else (Watcomm, Borland) has long since been relegated to "also ran" status).
We're talking about a rather significant performance difference too -- 20% or more typically. Even more if you compare to gcc (x86 may be one of the most optimized target platforms for gcc/g++, but it's still got a long, long way to go comparatively; even to MSVC).
Intel also has one of the better C++ compliance records as I recall, although MSVC++ 7.0 pretty much eliminated that gap (gcc was far better than MSVC 6, they're roughly equal now), so that's another reason to use them.
But really it's all about the performance. If you have a product targeted for x86 and performance is one of your top criteria, then you'd be foolish to not consider using Intel's compiler for your builds. The reason not everyone does so is because it's expensive and the UI isn't as good as MSVC, particularly for debugging.
All of that said, the allegations are still damning. Yes, Intel has the right to tune the compiler for their CPUs. But if the alternate paths are coded stupidly or intentionally bad-case (worst case is not required) then they could be found to be engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Even if those code paths affect Intel processors as well -- it just has to affect only old Intel processors (hello upgrade!).
Additionally, you might be able to make a (weak) argument that using the "heavily optimized" path only on your own CPUs after having been informed that it works just fine on other CPUs is also anti-competitive. As stated, it's a very weak argument though, since if you do so you'd then have to test any changes you made in that particular heavily optimized code path on the other systems -- which you don't have as much knowledge on.
Of course, the question is why hasn't AMD come out with their own compiler? They should be dedicating resources in this direction instead of (or as well as) litigating Intel. If they don't want to build their own compiler, that's fine -- simply dedicate some time to helping gcc improve its low level compilation performance. I'd be surprised if the gcc x86 team wouldn't welcome any real support of that nature (and by that I mean an employee assigned to actually writing code, or at least a very direct line to AMD engineers that could help an existing gcc coder).
I believe Tribes2 had a similar history of bad patches, rollbacks, and so forth. Certainly it's a Bad Thing though.
I suspect I'll end up having to reinstall once the new patch comes out, but as long as there are still ranked servers running 1.01 then I will be as well. The server browser simply isn't quite as flaky as the 1.0 one is, and I just haven't had any real problems playing on 1.01 servers (no more than on the 1.0 ones IMO).
As of last night there were still >400 ranked servers that met my filters and I could get on one w/ good ping. The number has been slowly dropping though. We'll see.
Sigh. Grym got it wrong on several levels -- as others have pointed out, the official advice from EA is to reinstall -- which does involve uninstalling and installing again. I agree, this is silly -- EA should've come out with a de-patcher.
But that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story.
Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies.
This bug exists in the 1.0 release and is not due to the patch. I've seen it myself prior to the patch being released. It appears to be random and isn't persistant -- once you die (or the teammate dies) their name may be back to normal.
The game became unplayable because of the patch.
And yet it plays just fine on my PC (Ath64 3000, 1 GB, GF6800 GT). I slightly prefer the 1.01 patch to 1.0 because the server browser is slightly better. The other issues it alleged to resolve were never problems for me, and the memory leak hasn't been a huge issue either (close the game and the client side leak is gone; the servers still suffer, but I haven't had severe problems except for the first day of the patch).
Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update.
Actually last Friday's news update, no longer the latest one. And most of what he wrote he got wrong too. Excepting the memory leak every issue he listed was in the 1.0 release -- medic revive issues (which are mostly user error and/or a misunderstanding of how things work), the server browser problems (were much, much worse for me in 1.0 than 1.01), etc.
Hopefully this won't get/.'d, but BattleWiki has a lot of good info, not only on how to play but also on known bugs.
Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion.
Which isn't really EA/Dice's fault, but those sites.
When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
Agreed here, but come on. What did you expect? BF1942 and BF:V were buggy as hell when they were released too. The demo was buggy (although perhaps less buggy with respect to netcode at least) too. That the release was going to be buggy was hardly a surprise to anyone who'd been following the game.
I'm not quite sure what you're looking for here -- a new vector has size 0 so it doesn't have any "values" to initialize (it does have memory reserved for values, but that's different).
If you use the resize() function to explicitly give it a size then the optional second parameter allows you to initialize all the new values to a set value. That's standard, portable, and it works -- even on VC++ 6.0.
Does it say anywhere whether they are doing a concurrent Linux/Windows release?
id Software has repeatedly stated that the Linux, Mac, and Windows executables will all be on the same CD/DVD.
Will there be a nice free demo, as is ID's habit?
Nope. Not this time. At least, none prior to release. Which is deeply disappointing on several levels -- particularly since a lot of people would like to figure out if they need to upgrade their video card, memory, entire system, etc. prior to purchasing the game.
Of course, if you're in doubt, wait a day or two for the reviews and benchmarks to hit the 'net. It won't kill you.
If you compare the same content delivered over the air to that delievered via cable, it is all the same digital signal, not marginal quality
Er... well... actually...
The OTA signal may be a better signal than whatever the cable company sends out. Cable companies (and the sat companies) are reknowned for bit filtering to reduce the bitrate of both SD and HD signals. That way they can fit more onto the feed. Depending on how they do it, it may also mean that the source feed from the network was converted to analog and back to digital, further reducing the quality.
The only way your cable HDTV feed would look better than an OTA feed is if you have marginal signal quality in the first place or have an older settop box that didn't do a great job with signal acquisition. Or you're doing something really stupid like not using component/DVI/HDMI/firewire to connect the box to your set.
The one question most people want to know is what manufacturer/models are compatible, where to buy them, and what drivers to use.
Tell me about it.
I just got a lightly used LinuxCertified 2210 laptop. Nice little laptop, no wifi card though (it's an option, but not one the original buyer purchased), so I needed to figure out what WiFi card to use. We had a WPC11 v4 card laying around, but on searching for info on it and Linux/Fedora the drivers are... poor (and probably wouldn't work w/ FC2 anyway) and require absurd things like hardcoding the SSID and WEP encryption key in the source.
So I decide to purchase a new one. Fine... which one, and what local store will happily overcharge me for it so that I can have it tonight?
The answer to that question is difficult. It seems that most newer cards (e.g. - the ones you can actually find in stores) do not have support because they use unsupported or semi-supported chipsets. I was fortunate enough to discover that CompUSA carries not only the WPC11 v4 (see above), but the WPC11 v3 (which is very nicely supported).
Of course, there are still problems. Fedora's Kudzu hardware analyzer keeps thinking that the wireless card no longer exists, wants to remove it, and then immediately realizes that it does exist and wants to add it back in. I've beaten it into submission, but not before it added the WiFi card in twice. But that's ok, because it helps fix the next problem -- that it appears to be difficult to setup multiple profiles for different SSIDs/WEP keys so you can roam between different networks. Because of the above screwup I've configured one network interface for my home network and another interface for my work network. Dunno what I'll do if I actually go roaming with the laptop, but hopefully I'll have it figured out by then. And, even so, I'm going to have to setup various scripts to enable one profile or the other. It'd be nice if the drivers would do this automagically -- detect what SSID they're talking to (already done) and lookup the appropriate key (if any) and network settings (dhcp or static, dns info, etc). I believe that most Windows drivers already do this. And maybe it's do-able in Linux too... but it's certainly inobvious if so. I'll admit that I have a lot more to learn and figure out, but it's stuff like this that keeps people sticking to other platforms.
Even if you could reprogram the radio to use frequencies way out of the ISM band, your antenna would be massively detuned for such frequencies.
Fine. But I can still tell the card to broadcast at a much, much higher power level than is allowed by the FCC (or whatever regulatory body is appropriate). The FCC has, point blank, told the hardware manufacturers that they cannot release the specs in such a case.
And even a low power broadcast in some bands could be disruptive, even if the antenna isn't optimized for that band.
The hardware was designed to be cheap and flexible. That doesn't coincide well with allowing anyone to do anything they want with it, at least not in a structured society (and if you'd like anarchy, I refer you to Niven's Cloak of Anarchy short).
And yes, I say this having chafed under it... trying to find a well supported 802.11b pcmcia card for Linux is a major PITA. Yeah, I found one, but only after much searching and a good bit of luck -- I honestly didn't expect CompUSA to carry both v3 and v4 Linksys cards. Oh, sure, if I had time I could've had my pick off the net, but I needed a card that night.
Seems counter-intuitive that they'd want you to use LESS
They want YOU to use less so THEY can sell more to other power companies. Home power rates are pretty heavily regulated (in the US), but selling power to another company is pure market forces.
Industrial power usage is also more profitable and less regulated, so there's that as well.
Tell me where to get dimmable FL bulbs to screw into my canlights
They're available -- I've seen them at both Home Depot and Lowes recently -- but they're roughly 7x the cost of standard CFLs (when I checked) and have the usual problem of being slightly longer than normal incandescents as well. If your current can lights have the bulbs flush to the fixture then the CFLs will stick out. That won't go over well with the wife either.
However, dimmed incandescents already reduce power usage. You won't gain as much by moving to dimmed CFLs.
Yeah, I ran into that problem too. Fortunately (hah!) for me, my house was built in 1982 with 1975 sensibilities. The light fixtures need to be replaced anyway because they're so godawful ugly.
Whenever I've replace a fixture I make sure the new one will accept some 60W CFL twist bulbs or is flourescent itself. The hallway fixtures, for example, were replaced by fixtures that take 2 14W (60W equivalent) bulbs... since they had 75W bulbs in them, that's over a 50% power savings with a rather significant increase in light level.
There are a few places I haven't put CFLs in though -- the foyer light/chandelier has 5 incandescent bulbs. The CFLs were but ugly in it. They make CFLs that have a cover to make them look more like a chandelier bulb now, so that may not be a problem anymore either. Anywhere I have dimmer switches also have incandescent. Yes, there are CFLs that are dimmer compatible now, but they're close to 7x as expensive as normal CFLs. And if you're using an incandescent light at less than full brightness then you're saving power anyway, so the advantage of a CFL is pretty drastically reduced anyway.
You're right in that PDFs are not ideal when a document requires editing. But it is pretty ideal for distribution of a final version.
Great, so you have half a solution there. But if my coworkers can't edit the documents then it's as good as no solution at all -- even though I'm in a small company we do collaborative work, and I damn well don't want to be the only person who can edit a document.
And, in my experience, OpenOffice isn't quite good enough in it's import/export to be used as a replacement for Word, so it's a non-solution as well.
Office productivity apps keep causing problems for Linux adoption in the workplace. If you're willing to move the entire office over, and don't need to do things like send editable documents to business partners, then Linux desktops running OpenOffice or StarOffice is a perfectly reasonable solution. But if that's not viable then you're going to get bitten sooner or later by incompatibilities. And in the real world having a crappy looking doc looks really, really amateurish nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
Money lauched the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, not tourism.
The fallacy in that statement is that there was no tourism during that period. Of course they didn't launch to "sight see" because there was no such thing and thus no money in it.
There is now. There's a potentially huge amount. How much money does the human race spend on "entertainment" now? And how much of that is spent just on trips to go see places you haven't been to yet? Look at Alaskan or Antarctic cruises (the latter is probably far more comparable; the Antarctic "cruise lines" are generally re-purposed Russian ice breakers instead of luxury cruise ships). Look at high-altitude mountain climbing (e.g. -- K2 or Mt Everest). There are a lot of people spending money on that kind of thing now.
Certainly space tourism isn't the only potential revenue stream. If you can get a cheap orbital launch craft then you can also break into the LEO satellite business, which is potentially monsterous. You could eventually aim for geosynch, which is even more money. But the "space tourism" gig will get you headlines (free advertising!) and could certainly pay the bills until you can realistically look at some of the other endeavors.
Yeah, the Renaissance-era European explorers did it to search for trade routes and trade goods. But Carnival cruise lines plies the same waters nowadays, and their entire business is tourism.
you would see Microsoft telling EVERYONE why they needed HD-DVD
Er, they are saying that. The future Xbox360s are supposed to ship with an HD DVD drive. I wasn't aware until just now that the initial versions wouldn't have it -- that is lame.
One is that it will cement it as the standard for HD-DVD
Doubt it. That war will be fought and won or lost long before the PS3 ships. And exceptionally few people use their console as a video player anyway, so even though Sony can try to use it as a marketing chit in Blu-ray's favor, most CE companies and studios will discount that. The war will be won or lost by the standalone players and by studio contracts.
The difference between 9GB and 54GB will be significant in this case.
I was presuming an Xbox360 with an HD DVD player, which MS has said would happen (and I mistakenly assumed was in the release). Not having one is a huge drawback. Potentially fatal. And unless MS is going to upgrade the original X360 for free/minimal cost then developers won't be able to rely on having the HD-DVD drive in the future.
As for capacity, if you bring HD-DVD into the picture it's much better, although BD-ROM still has the advantage (in your example it's 30 GB vs 50 GB; not 54 GB).
by all accounts it has been a failure
I guess that depends on whose accounts you're listening to. Certainly they've been losing money hand over fist on it, but they've also managed to become seriously considered as a contender. That's not exactly failure. Their sales figures in the US and Europe haven't been horrid, but they certainly haven't been great either.
And it's hardly like they're the only company that does this. You'd be hard pressed to find a press release from Nintendo, Sony, Samsung, or any other major consumer electronics company that says "well yeah, that just fucking tanked". To single out MS here isn't exactly fair... but it's not surprising either.
Still have no intention of buying either console.
q[Both companies will still go on profitting well enough to continue existing for a very long time, look at Pepsi and Coca Cola (and all the other generic Cola makes).]q
Oh, I didn't know that it cost Coke a cool billion plus to make a new drink, or even reformulate one of their current ones. Taste testing isn't exactly the same thing as multi-tiered drug testing with controls. If Coke's scientists guess wrong, people end up with a bad taste in their mouth. If a drug company's scientists guess wrong people can end up dead. Coke doesn't really have to worry about interactions with other foods (not even pop rocks, since that's an urban legend). Drug companies most certainly do have to worry about potential interactions with other medications that may be taken at the same time.
Is there a large amount of overhead in the FDA drug testing process? Sure. But there's also a huge risk here, especially as we get more and more advanced medications. The countries that don't have their own drug testing get away with it because they rely upon the US/Canada, Western Europe, etc. who do extensive testing.
And, frankly, I don't want people self-diagnosing and treating. I don't want people to be buying things like antibiotics OTC. All it will lead to is a sharp increase in the AB-resistant infections -- and those are already becoming a problem under the current system.
What we have now may not be perfect, but it's a helluva lot better than the anarchy that many people here are suggesting.
Well we hate Blue-Ray because it is what Sony picked and we are going to do everything we can to piss all over it.
Or, if you have a clue:
We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents.
There's no clear indication that Blu-ray will give Sony a "significant advantage" as you claim. Yes, Blu-ray has more storage, but it's not clear that any game is going to make use of anywhere close to even HD-DVD's "mere" 20GB+ storage capabilities in the near future.
How few XBOX 360's need to be sold this year (shipped to customers not stores), before you consider it to be a failure?
Uh, that's not even a question. That's a leading statement. Unless you meant for it to be similar to "So how long have you known that you are brain damaged?"
Which I think you did.
Oh, and no, I have no intention of buying an Xbox360. Or a PS3. Or a Revolution. The only consoles I've owned so far were a PS and PS2, but neither of them get enough use for me to seriously consider another console.
how Blizzard is dealing with the problem of servers and user load?
Uh, they pseudo-officially "returned" the GotY award several weeks ago (see here), and the servers have been stable for months now -- or at least they were stable several months ago when I quit playing.
PA even has several official guilds on the Dark Iron server, specifically to battle the official PvP guild(s).
I like that you tried to post something pithy, and yet merely showed that you know absolutely nothing about either WoW or Penny Arcade. Grats!
Why do MMORPG developers and publishers think this is an acceptable practice?
Because if they don't charge money for the client then they can't get space on retail shelves (e.g. -- EB Games, Best Buy, etc.), which is how the vast majority of games are sold.
Until the majority of games aren't sold through publishers and standard retail channels this won't change.
You neglect to mention the minor issue that a judge has halted this program.
3 0laptop.html
1 3evolution.html
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cobb/0705/
Or that another judge forced Cobb county to remove those inane stickers on the textbooks:
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cobb/0105/
Now if we could just beat the concept of "scientific theory" into their heads.
How the heck do they remain anonymous and get paid?
There are a number of foreign banks that will happily accept large transactions and ensure complete anonymity to everyone involved. The classic example of this used to be the Swiss banking system, although it's not quite as popular now that they finally relented on the WW2 account issue.
AFAIK, the current favorites are Central American countries, the Bahamas, and other countries in the Gulf of Mexico area. Highly anonymized banking, a pretty corrupt government that will look the other way, and lots and lots of tourist traffic, much of it on the upper end of the payscale (which is less important now with electronic funds transfer, but presumably you want the cash at some point).
Of course, there's a price to pay for anonymity. You generally have a bit of a holding period on any deposits. Withdraw in under a year (or maybe more, I really dunno) and you're looking at bank fees in the 20-40% range. And if you really want to be safe then you'll probably want to move the money between several different banks in different countries. That means anyone trying to trace the money will have to convince (bribe) many different government and bank officials.
Note, all of this is based on reading. My paltry savings are sure as hell not worth this kind of trouble. And I suspect this entire area has gotten a lot tighter and harder to deal with since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent banking laws passed in the US -- if the law enforcement officials claim that terrorist funds are being moved through your system then all (?) the Western countries will place holds on any funds moving in or out of your banking system, which makes it difficult to do business.
q[During the 60's, a Soviet astronaut had problems getting back into the capsule and shutting the hatch, due to the pressuration in his suit.]q
To be fair that was during the first space walk. Ever. The Russians didn't let the rest of the world know about the problems encountered though -- including that he had to drop the suit pressure below the minimum safety level in order to get back in.
It's only been since the fall of the Soviet Union that a lot of the problems of the Soviet space program have come to light.
Now, start off with the the general cruddiness of the x86... the general lower reliability and quality
Lower reliability and quality? Based on what? Percentage-wise, I suspect that fewer x86 systems fail than just about any other microprocessor. Yes, far more fail in quantity but only because the quantity is so high to start with.
Intel has long been known to be the best in the business of microprocessor fabrication. Nobody beats them. And yes, I've worked in the industry. For a competitor. Intel's fab process is envied.
little-endian
Which matters because.... ? Little endian is more machine readable, big endian is more human readable. Human readability only matters when you're looking at a hex dump. And neither one is faster than the other nowadays.
segmented memory addressing, the 1MB limit and the hoops you have to jump through to access any more
Those are BIOS hoops BTW, not ISA hoops. In protected mode it's all flat. There's legacy junk in the BIOS, but frankly it's of no hinderance at all on modern systems.
the very existence of real mode
Which your system is in for, what, maybe 5 seconds during bootup before the OS switches you into protected mode? Wow, what a horrible, horrible thing.
And precisely how much assembly programming do you do anymore? On any platform? Unless it's embedded I'm guessing it's right around zero. My current company writes extremely performance oriented code and we don't muck with assembly -- sure, it'd probably help in some areas, but supporting it on 6-7 different platforms with 1-3 assembly languages on each would be far more cost than its worth.
So yeah, some of us actually HAVE been exposed to, and DO care, about these sorts of things.
Whoop de do. Some of us have also realized that there is more to a computer than the assembly language or purist concepts that you learn in EE/CmpE classes. Sure, I was aghast at the x86 ISA and thought the PPC ISA was so much more elegant back when I was in school. And I thought that the upcoming architectures would end up beating the crap out of Intel's x86 line and that Intel's upcoming EPIC architecture would be revolutionary and so much better and faster.
And know what? Over a decade later it's become clear that x86 is still the future and that all the other chips (including Itanium) utterly failed to knock it off for various reasons. Chief amongst them is the redesigns of the x86 architecture -- it may look crufty on the outside, but all the crappy x86 instructions are translated into a sleek, highly optimized real ISA internal to the chip. And Intel has poured more money into optimizing those cores than all the other CPU vendors combined -- because they can easily afford to do so, despite the minor fact that their margins per processor are so much lower. Sell a few billion chips at $10 profit and you're still a helluva lot better off than selling a few thousand at $100 profit.
Would I want to program x86 in assembler? No thanks. But I wouldn't really want to program any other mainstream CPU in assembler either -- the compilers will do a far better job on average than I will and higher level languages mean I can do more in less time. All the fretting about RISC vs CISC, ISAs, number of registers, etc. winds up being meaningless in the long run.
Oh, and for reference -- those platforms I mentioned above? None of them are x86. But we do make our code compile on Windows, simply because the debuggers are so much better than under any of the Unix flavors we support. All real performance testing is done under Unix though -- our desktops generally have vastly more CPU power, but the servers have vastly more IO power and our app (like most enterprise level apps) is extremely IO intensive.
Really, if you want to bash on the "Intel" architecture, complain about the cruddy IO systems, not about the CPUs that are vastly faster (and cheaper) than everything else.
q[ I'd be happy if firefox can just fix the CPU hammering/memory leak with Flash by 2.0.]q
Given that the issue in question also occurs in IE, Safari, and any other browser with a flash plugin regardless of OS I'd guess that this is not a browser bug.
My guess is that it's a race condition inside the Flash code itself. It doesn't appear on all systems, even if they are running the same OS/browser/flash revision (and viewing the same content).
At least with Firefox you can install Flashblock and not be annoyed by CPU gobbling flash unless you really want it.
We should not have been forced to move to a different format at our own expense and then have to subsidize others that can't afford the move!
.com bust, and don't appear to have been revised substantially since), but it'll still be in the billions of dollars.
Ok, first off the argument about doing it at "our own expense" is invalid. How else would you have it be done? Have the government subsidize everyone to buy new TVs? Allocate yet more spectrum to broadcast TV and just let the two coexist forever? That's just silly.
And so far we aren't subsidizing anyone (kinda) -- the proposals for set-top box subsidies are stalled. It's questionable if they'll ever get passed. The only federal monies that have gone to subsidy the switch to digital broadcasting has been for exactly that -- digital broadcasting by PBS stations. And in most markets they were the first ones to turn on their second antenna.
What's going to happen when they open the spectrum up?
It's nice to see that you've formed your opinions without reading the slightest bit on all of this. Unsurprising here, but still. If you're going to harp on a subject, become educated on it.
Yes, they're going to sell off a lot of it, just as has been done with a lot of the other spectra. The broadcast frequencies are a limited commodity after all, and it so happens that analog TV is occupying a particularly useful chunk (which is why it was put there in the first place). I think they're smoking crack when it comes to the revenue estimates (they were initally formed before the
More importantly, however, some of the spectrum will be reserved for public and semi-public use. Namely emergency response channels, which are desperately needed. Go read up on it if you'd like.
Oh, and the sale of the spectrum will go, in part, to offset the taxpayer expense of any subsidies as well as to offset things like all the other freaking programs the government has. In fact, the sale has been worked into forward looking budget estimates for the past 10 years. So your arguments about having to fund all of this ring even more hollow.
I'd prefer that it be held hostage the way it is rather than by some corporation that has no plans to do anything with it except hold on to it to make sure no one else can have it.
What on earth are you talking about? This is not how the FCC rules work on spectrum use. First, it's a gross misunderstanding of how the analog TV spectrum works today -- who do you think "owns" it? Do you think that your local ABC/CBS/NBC/etc affiliate is publicly owned? Do you think they won't complain -- loudly -- if someone interferes with their allocated frequencies?
As for "holding on to it", sorry, doesn't work that way. Use it or lose it. The FCC can revoke your license at any time for any number of reasons -- including failure to use. And you might not even get your money back. How do you think the FCC is empowered to regulate broadcast television and radio (and yet not cable... at least not yet)? Because they are the ones who grant the license. Break the rules and you can face fines. Keep breaking it and they can simply revoke your licenses, as well as the licenses of affiliates that you don't even own.
A CD (if it'll fit in your pocket) is open to scratches, bending,
And the floppy is open to magnetic fields, dust/dirt/debris getting inside the jacket, bending of the metal jacket, etc.
And, most importantly, it has crap for storage and is insanely slow.
Stick it in a case to protect it and it just becomes laughable big for 'portable' media
An adequate "case" to protect it from most issues is a simple paper sleeve (nylon is better, but the difference for most purposes is pretty minor). At that point it's about as safe from scratches as the floppy is from dust and dirt. If you have a problem with the additional 1 mm created by the sleeve then you need bigger pants.
But MiniCDs are too small capacity-wise
As compared to a floppy? Now you're just making up BS arguments to try and defend your original point. Come on.
Yes, some systems have problems with mini-CDs, but they're rare and generally have problems with floppies as well -- like not having a floppy drive.
Frankly there's simply no purpose to a floppy anymore. The data storage is too small and easily replaced by sending files by email. The transfer rate is so slow that it's just as fast to burn a CD as it is to format and copy files to a floppy.
And if you need rewriteable storage then get a USB keychain. You can easily find 128MB ones for $0-10 which are up to 25x faster than a floppy. And that's on USB 1.1.
Removable mass media isn't dead. It's just changed.
q[With open source, you know exactly what you get.]q
Which, in this case, is really crappy performance.
There's really only one reason to use Intel's compiler -- for performance. It's well known that Intel's compiler generates code that vastly outperforms everything else for the same platform (namely Microsoft Visual C++ 6/7 and gcc -- everyone else (Watcomm, Borland) has long since been relegated to "also ran" status).
We're talking about a rather significant performance difference too -- 20% or more typically. Even more if you compare to gcc (x86 may be one of the most optimized target platforms for gcc/g++, but it's still got a long, long way to go comparatively; even to MSVC).
Intel also has one of the better C++ compliance records as I recall, although MSVC++ 7.0 pretty much eliminated that gap (gcc was far better than MSVC 6, they're roughly equal now), so that's another reason to use them.
But really it's all about the performance. If you have a product targeted for x86 and performance is one of your top criteria, then you'd be foolish to not consider using Intel's compiler for your builds. The reason not everyone does so is because it's expensive and the UI isn't as good as MSVC, particularly for debugging.
All of that said, the allegations are still damning. Yes, Intel has the right to tune the compiler for their CPUs. But if the alternate paths are coded stupidly or intentionally bad-case (worst case is not required) then they could be found to be engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Even if those code paths affect Intel processors as well -- it just has to affect only old Intel processors (hello upgrade!).
Additionally, you might be able to make a (weak) argument that using the "heavily optimized" path only on your own CPUs after having been informed that it works just fine on other CPUs is also anti-competitive. As stated, it's a very weak argument though, since if you do so you'd then have to test any changes you made in that particular heavily optimized code path on the other systems -- which you don't have as much knowledge on.
Of course, the question is why hasn't AMD come out with their own compiler? They should be dedicating resources in this direction instead of (or as well as) litigating Intel. If they don't want to build their own compiler, that's fine -- simply dedicate some time to helping gcc improve its low level compilation performance. I'd be surprised if the gcc x86 team wouldn't welcome any real support of that nature (and by that I mean an employee assigned to actually writing code, or at least a very direct line to AMD engineers that could help an existing gcc coder).
I believe Tribes2 had a similar history of bad patches, rollbacks, and so forth. Certainly it's a Bad Thing though.
I suspect I'll end up having to reinstall once the new patch comes out, but as long as there are still ranked servers running 1.01 then I will be as well. The server browser simply isn't quite as flaky as the 1.0 one is, and I just haven't had any real problems playing on 1.01 servers (no more than on the 1.0 ones IMO).
As of last night there were still >400 ranked servers that met my filters and I could get on one w/ good ping. The number has been slowly dropping though. We'll see.
Sigh. Grym got it wrong on several levels -- as others have pointed out, the official advice from EA is to reinstall -- which does involve uninstalling and installing again. I agree, this is silly -- EA should've come out with a de-patcher.
/.'d, but BattleWiki has a lot of good info, not only on how to play but also on known bugs.
But that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story.
Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies.
This bug exists in the 1.0 release and is not due to the patch. I've seen it myself prior to the patch being released. It appears to be random and isn't persistant -- once you die (or the teammate dies) their name may be back to normal.
The game became unplayable because of the patch.
And yet it plays just fine on my PC (Ath64 3000, 1 GB, GF6800 GT). I slightly prefer the 1.01 patch to 1.0 because the server browser is slightly better. The other issues it alleged to resolve were never problems for me, and the memory leak hasn't been a huge issue either (close the game and the client side leak is gone; the servers still suffer, but I haven't had severe problems except for the first day of the patch).
Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update.
Actually last Friday's news update, no longer the latest one. And most of what he wrote he got wrong too. Excepting the memory leak every issue he listed was in the 1.0 release -- medic revive issues (which are mostly user error and/or a misunderstanding of how things work), the server browser problems (were much, much worse for me in 1.0 than 1.01), etc.
Hopefully this won't get
Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion.
Which isn't really EA/Dice's fault, but those sites.
When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
Agreed here, but come on. What did you expect? BF1942 and BF:V were buggy as hell when they were released too. The demo was buggy (although perhaps less buggy with respect to netcode at least) too. That the release was going to be buggy was hardly a surprise to anyone who'd been following the game.
I'm not quite sure what you're looking for here -- a new vector has size 0 so it doesn't have any "values" to initialize (it does have memory reserved for values, but that's different).
If you use the resize() function to explicitly give it a size then the optional second parameter allows you to initialize all the new values to a set value. That's standard, portable, and it works -- even on VC++ 6.0.
Does it say anywhere whether they are doing a concurrent Linux/Windows release?
id Software has repeatedly stated that the Linux, Mac, and Windows executables will all be on the same CD/DVD.
Will there be a nice free demo, as is ID's habit?
Nope. Not this time. At least, none prior to release. Which is deeply disappointing on several levels -- particularly since a lot of people would like to figure out if they need to upgrade their video card, memory, entire system, etc. prior to purchasing the game.
Of course, if you're in doubt, wait a day or two for the reviews and benchmarks to hit the 'net. It won't kill you.
If you compare the same content delivered over the air to that delievered via cable, it is all the same digital signal, not marginal quality
Er... well... actually...
The OTA signal may be a better signal than whatever the cable company sends out. Cable companies (and the sat companies) are reknowned for bit filtering to reduce the bitrate of both SD and HD signals. That way they can fit more onto the feed. Depending on how they do it, it may also mean that the source feed from the network was converted to analog and back to digital, further reducing the quality.
The only way your cable HDTV feed would look better than an OTA feed is if you have marginal signal quality in the first place or have an older settop box that didn't do a great job with signal acquisition. Or you're doing something really stupid like not using component/DVI/HDMI/firewire to connect the box to your set.
The one question most people want to know is what manufacturer/models are compatible, where to buy them, and what drivers to use.
Tell me about it.
I just got a lightly used LinuxCertified 2210 laptop. Nice little laptop, no wifi card though (it's an option, but not one the original buyer purchased), so I needed to figure out what WiFi card to use. We had a WPC11 v4 card laying around, but on searching for info on it and Linux/Fedora the drivers are... poor (and probably wouldn't work w/ FC2 anyway) and require absurd things like hardcoding the SSID and WEP encryption key in the source.
So I decide to purchase a new one. Fine... which one, and what local store will happily overcharge me for it so that I can have it tonight?
The answer to that question is difficult. It seems that most newer cards (e.g. - the ones you can actually find in stores) do not have support because they use unsupported or semi-supported chipsets. I was fortunate enough to discover that CompUSA carries not only the WPC11 v4 (see above), but the WPC11 v3 (which is very nicely supported).
Of course, there are still problems. Fedora's Kudzu hardware analyzer keeps thinking that the wireless card no longer exists, wants to remove it, and then immediately realizes that it does exist and wants to add it back in. I've beaten it into submission, but not before it added the WiFi card in twice. But that's ok, because it helps fix the next problem -- that it appears to be difficult to setup multiple profiles for different SSIDs/WEP keys so you can roam between different networks. Because of the above screwup I've configured one network interface for my home network and another interface for my work network. Dunno what I'll do if I actually go roaming with the laptop, but hopefully I'll have it figured out by then. And, even so, I'm going to have to setup various scripts to enable one profile or the other. It'd be nice if the drivers would do this automagically -- detect what SSID they're talking to (already done) and lookup the appropriate key (if any) and network settings (dhcp or static, dns info, etc). I believe that most Windows drivers already do this. And maybe it's do-able in Linux too... but it's certainly inobvious if so. I'll admit that I have a lot more to learn and figure out, but it's stuff like this that keeps people sticking to other platforms.
Even if you could reprogram the radio to use frequencies way out of the ISM band, your antenna would be massively detuned for such frequencies.
Fine. But I can still tell the card to broadcast at a much, much higher power level than is allowed by the FCC (or whatever regulatory body is appropriate). The FCC has, point blank, told the hardware manufacturers that they cannot release the specs in such a case.
And even a low power broadcast in some bands could be disruptive, even if the antenna isn't optimized for that band.
The hardware was designed to be cheap and flexible. That doesn't coincide well with allowing anyone to do anything they want with it, at least not in a structured society (and if you'd like anarchy, I refer you to Niven's Cloak of Anarchy short).
And yes, I say this having chafed under it... trying to find a well supported 802.11b pcmcia card for Linux is a major PITA. Yeah, I found one, but only after much searching and a good bit of luck -- I honestly didn't expect CompUSA to carry both v3 and v4 Linksys cards. Oh, sure, if I had time I could've had my pick off the net, but I needed a card that night.
Seems counter-intuitive that they'd want you to use LESS
They want YOU to use less so THEY can sell more to other power companies. Home power rates are pretty heavily regulated (in the US), but selling power to another company is pure market forces.
Industrial power usage is also more profitable and less regulated, so there's that as well.
Tell me where to get dimmable FL bulbs to screw into my canlights
They're available -- I've seen them at both Home Depot and Lowes recently -- but they're roughly 7x the cost of standard CFLs (when I checked) and have the usual problem of being slightly longer than normal incandescents as well. If your current can lights have the bulbs flush to the fixture then the CFLs will stick out. That won't go over well with the wife either.
However, dimmed incandescents already reduce power usage. You won't gain as much by moving to dimmed CFLs.
Yeah, I ran into that problem too. Fortunately (hah!) for me, my house was built in 1982 with 1975 sensibilities. The light fixtures need to be replaced anyway because they're so godawful ugly.
Whenever I've replace a fixture I make sure the new one will accept some 60W CFL twist bulbs or is flourescent itself. The hallway fixtures, for example, were replaced by fixtures that take 2 14W (60W equivalent) bulbs... since they had 75W bulbs in them, that's over a 50% power savings with a rather significant increase in light level.
There are a few places I haven't put CFLs in though -- the foyer light/chandelier has 5 incandescent bulbs. The CFLs were but ugly in it. They make CFLs that have a cover to make them look more like a chandelier bulb now, so that may not be a problem anymore either. Anywhere I have dimmer switches also have incandescent. Yes, there are CFLs that are dimmer compatible now, but they're close to 7x as expensive as normal CFLs. And if you're using an incandescent light at less than full brightness then you're saving power anyway, so the advantage of a CFL is pretty drastically reduced anyway.
You're right in that PDFs are not ideal when a document requires editing. But it is pretty ideal for distribution of a final version.
Great, so you have half a solution there. But if my coworkers can't edit the documents then it's as good as no solution at all -- even though I'm in a small company we do collaborative work, and I damn well don't want to be the only person who can edit a document.
And, in my experience, OpenOffice isn't quite good enough in it's import/export to be used as a replacement for Word, so it's a non-solution as well.
Office productivity apps keep causing problems for Linux adoption in the workplace. If you're willing to move the entire office over, and don't need to do things like send editable documents to business partners, then Linux desktops running OpenOffice or StarOffice is a perfectly reasonable solution. But if that's not viable then you're going to get bitten sooner or later by incompatibilities. And in the real world having a crappy looking doc looks really, really amateurish nowadays.