After 100 years science fiction still hasn't escaped its literary ghetto,
Just because moronic academics who couldn't think of anything USEFUL to learn in college think that retread drama and romance like "War & Peace" and "Gone With the Wind" represent the apex of literature, doesn't make it so.
Simply because these genres (drama, in particular family drama, and romance) do not translate well to video games does not mean video games are not "art".
We block certain website groups (adult, gambling, games, etc) by default and everyone must go through our proxy to the outside world. Web logs are checked throughout the day and those who try 30 different ways to get to boobsgonewild.com are reported.
As other people have pointed out, you really shouldn't do this unless you're a K-12 school (or a library or similar), and that's just for liability reasons. You might block something important, users can get around this, it's a waste of money and time for the filtering software, and your employees WILL find other ways to waste their time. The can surf the web on their iPhones, for example.
Most people have only User permissions so they can't install something and we regularly do sweeps of unapproved software on those people who do have admin privileges.
If you think this prevents people from using "unapproved software" you're incredibly naive. Unless you have a whitelist of applications that you're enforcing through GPO (highly unlikely), they can still EXECUTE any random executable they want. Look at PortableApps.com for a good sense of what they can run.
There will almost certainly be a way to work around this on the PC, mainly because NOBODY is going to use the PITA creation tools on the 360 and PS3. It's almost infinitely easier to do it with a MIDI sequencer.
Annoyingly, it looks like the MIDI songs will only be usable on the PS3, not the 360. It is probably due to their tools being MIDI-to-USB. The PS3 is pure USB so that's why it works on that platform.
This is highly annoying for me, because I was going to get the 360 version and I wanted to import my own MIDI tracks. Looks like I'm going to HAVE to go with the PC version now. Does anybody know if the 360 instruments are the same as the PC instruments?
Just out of curiosity, if you considered Oblivion "bad" what do you consider to be a "good" RPG released in the last 3 years and what makes it better than Oblivion?
During times when I've experienced slowdown on MSNBC.com I've been able to connect at full speed to numerous other sites like CNN.com. So if they're throttling, they're just throttling on MSNBC.com which strikes me as extremely unlikely.
You asked and answered your own question. Punishment. And how does the company come to sign such a contract? Voluntarily? Ho ho ho.
Are you saying that the ONLY contracts in America that have enforcement provisions are labor contracts? That's simply wrong and you know it's wrong. A company sues another for violating it's patents and then works out a licensing agreement with penalties in the contract for violating the agreement. How us this ANY LESS "voluntary" than a labor contract? If you're fired arbitrarily to get the quarter numbers up, is that "voluntary"? And what about executives? THEY get the benefits of these locked-in contracts. Why should executives be the only ones allowed to negotiate their salaries?
If the company doesn't want to sign a labor contract they certainly have options, just like the company trying to license the patent. They can move their factories (as many do when confronted with unionization), or they can attempt to circumvent the union by making a better offer to workers (which does happen occasionally).
Actually, many anti-competitive practices are illegal and considered unethical, whatever 'ism' you want to call it.
But it seems that "free marketeers" only bitch about the unions while they let trade associations, bribing government officials, and monopolies slide. Do you support anti-trust legislation? If not, how is that consistent with your statement above?
How are you even aware of the CHOICE supposedly offered or that Christ ever EXISTED? Because church authorities said so. Why do you regard the Bible as mostly fact, but the Odyseey and the Iiliad (Greek myths) as mostly fiction? Because church authorities said so.
You were not THERE. You do not KNOW. You CANNOT know. There is absolutely no way around this. You have to take the WORD of early church authorities that they were telling the truth and recorded everything accurately.
Now you COULD claim that God is speaking to you directly and verified to you, independently, that every word of the Bible is accurate. If you are, I strongly suggest you contact a psychiatrist and start on medication. If your voices are "real", the medication shouldn't interfere.
Anyone can have direct communication with God. It's your choice whether you choose to engage in that or not.
This is a direct contradiction to orthodox Christianity. You are saying that the teachings of any random man on the street are exactly equivalent to those of Jesus Christ. If so, why aren't you following street preachers? And what about the Mormons? Why isn't Joseph Smith a real prophet?
These are leaders who lead by example, not authority.
Nonsense. You can argue the martyrs "lead by example", but their authority lies in their divine guidance, not that they managed to get themselves killed. You don't seem to grasp that it's Christian AUTHORITIES that determined whether or not X individual was divinely inspired and whether or not their story should be RECORDED. There are lots of martyrs, prophets, etc. whose stories were not recorded by Christian authorities because they were not "orthodox".
Anything else is not true Christianity, but rather some man-made facsimile masquerading under the name.
You don't get to use the "No True Scotsman" fallacy with me. When cornered about the bad behavior of Christians, Protestants ALWAYS say "They weren't REAL Christians." because they want to promote their own little group (when you point out the bad things members of their Protestant sect do, they use it to justify the most recent split).
At least the Catholics don't try this bullshit tactic. They come up with some pretty ridiculous justifications for Christian actions, but not this weaselly tactic.
Just so you know, the communists never killed anyone because Stalin, Mao, etc. weren't "real" communists.
Tell me where you can get a pre-built gaming PC with a top-of-the-line video card ($500) for less than $1200-1500 INCLUDING THE MONITOR AND ALL PERIPHERALS. I've never seen one.
2) You can stream the video to different PCs on your network.
3) More storage, and better use of storage. For example, you can archive the actual Tivo recordings and burn them to DVD. (and yes, you can get them out of the program and edit them as you see fit).
Imgburn is freeware and works well, but it doesn't do menus.
If you want menus... I actually use Nero, mainly because I hate all the other applications I've found for this task, notably Ulead DVD Creator and Roxio Easy Media Creator.
The biggest speed issues on Vista are caused by all of the bundled crapware you'll find on off-the-shelf systems and bad drivers.
The biggest bottleneck in Vista is the exact same issue as XP, MacOS, and Linux. I/O, specifically disk I/O. Modern operating systems do lots of file operations simultaneously and this kills hard drives, even modern SATA drives. Unless you're doing certain scientific computing tasks, I/O is the limit. The only thing most users do that can possibly bottleneck modern CPUs is video encoding.
The best way to improve performance in Vista is to get a nice, expensive, caching hard drive controller and run RAID 10 (or RAID 0 if you don't give a fuck about your data). You'll need 4 drives for RAID 10 add 2 drives for RAID 0.
(If you are watching a NBC video for 15 minutes, comcast deems you to be using "excessive bandwidth" and moves you to the lowest-priority tier behind other users. In effect, disrupting your NBC video stream.)
Where are you located?
I've got Comcast and I've heard this reported by a number of people but I can't replicate it. Based on my understanding of the equipment they're using for throttling this is not possible for numerous reasons. Among them is that their equipment only uses TCP and Windows Media video streaming uses UDP. Ports wont' work because Windows Media uses random ports. They could theoretically be doing some sort of DPI, but that strikes be as both unimaginably expensive and a waste of time (people would just start encrypting their traffic).
I watch NBC.com extensively and I think you're mistaking the frequent slowdowns on NBC's SITE for throttling by Comcast.
I for example want a tower machine. I want something with a consumer-grade desktop CPU - dual or even single core, and just 1 of them - with no monitor strapped onto it, and with a case that has ample drive bays and expansion slots so that I can add storage space and add in a video card as needed.
Anecdotally, I've heard that this has been brought to Jobs and his answer is: "As long as I'm in charge, NEVER."
iMacs are a huge ripoff. The average desktop is upgraded ever 2 years, the average monitor every 5. The iMac is a way for Apple to increase margins by forcing users to upgrade both the desktop and monitor. This is also the reason why Macs have little expansion, to force upgrades. Nobody actually wants an all-in-one PC, it saves exactly 2 cords.
You'll notice this is a dramatic departure from the trend at Apple in the late 90s (before Jobs came back) to make Macs more "PC-like": clones, towers, lots of expansion, etc. Jobs realized that making the Mac more PC-like would hurt Apple's margins as the Mac became more of a commodity item. So he created the iMac, with it's integrated monitor and nonexistent expansion, to head off this issue.
The other major reason is tech support. Apple doesn't want to do (and doesn't do) third-party support of ANYTHING. If you plug it into a Mac and it damages your OSX install you better call the device manufacturer because Apple won't help you. However, they would quickly get a reputation for bad support if, for example, you tried to upgrade you PC's video card and the system didn't boot. The you contacted Apple they told you to fuck off.
What about the users on PowerMacs? Well, they paid a steep premium to get (a LITTLE) help from Apple.
You can't legislate true Christianity, it completely goes against the definition of what Christianity is. (For proof, you need look no further than the Catholic church in history to see what the result is of legislated Christianity.)
You don't seem to understand Christianity. Like it or not, Christianity is based entirely on AUTHORITY. Christians believe that certain individuals have direct or near-direct communication with God and the opinions those individuals have on God are DEFINITIVE due to their special connection. These people are informally called "prophets", but Christianity has lots of people in the role that AREN'T called prophets like the Pope, "Early Church Fathers", etc.
In this context, most Protestant denominations are just making it up as they go along.
Christianity is about choosing the right path (which is never the easy path).
Christianity is completely antithetical to the concept of "choosing the right path". There are multiple paths to choose, but only one of them (the orthodox Christian path) leads to immortality. Everyone else is screwed (HOW they are screwed is a matter of some debate).
If you think IT is bad, try biomedical sciences, medicine, and science academia.
These workers are compensated for the time. Doctors are very well paid and academics have job security. Both get outstanding benefits and retirement. IT workers increasingly are expected to work long hours for very low pay ($10 per hour) with no benefits whatsoever.
Capitalism is what RESULTS in some people being rich, but to claim that the system is good only for the rich is incorrect.
The cornerstone of capitalism is, unsurprisingly, CAPITAL. Or, roughly, the amount of money you have. One of the key features of capitalism is the ability to leverage EXISTING capital. If you have $1,000,000 people will be more likely to loan you money because it would be easier to recover losses against you. That's just one example, there are many, many, many, more.
It's like the old saying "It takes money to make money." In capitalism this is true in an absolute sense, the MORE money you have the EASIER it is to make even more.
So the natural tendency of capitalism, all capitalism, is redistribution of all wealth to the very wealthiest individuals. Inevitably, pure capitalism leads to an aristocracy.
E.g., a labor union that will coerce non-union members into not filling the gap in supply when union workers strike, or have in other ways artificially limited the supply.
How is collective bargaining a "distortion" of capitalism? You don't seem to understand how capitalism works. Labor unions are doing EXACTLY what I describe above, you're aggregating the "capital" of workers (in the form of a labor pool) and using that increased capital as leverage in negotiations to get more money. Corporations do this ALL THE TIME in the form of "trade associations" yet nobody accuses them of "socialism".
And how are contracts "coercion"? A corporation signs a contract saying they'll only hire union workers, if they break the contract they're punished.
And it's not like corporations don't coerce workers. Chiquia has assassinated (murdered in cold blood) hundreds of union and labor organizers in recent years.
A corporation is just a union of investors. I fail to see why labor unions are "socialist" and corporations are not.
Suddenly that $5 "Wizard's Guild" (or Fallout equivalent) looks a lot better when you don't have full-fledged towns created by the community.
Except that they're different markets. I own both a 360 and a gaming PC and I intend to get the PC version mainly because of the possibility of user-created content on that platform. Increasingly, that's a key factor for PC games.
The market is different for the 360 where everything uses a "paid content" model. There ARE no free downloads to compete with.
Does this make the PC version a better deal? Hell yes! It's $10 cheaper too. But you also had to pay $1500 for that gaming PC.
Are you saying that there aren't operating systems other than Windows? I think most of/. would disagree with you.
Most people interpret "monopoly" to mean "overwhelming market share". Apple certainly has an overwhelming share of the media player market.
In part this is due to having a good product and in part this is due to Apple locking competitors out on both sides (the iPod can't use stores other than iTunes, iTunes won't work with other players).
And the control is getting tighter, not looser. The new iPod Touch requires "activation" by iTunes and has encrypted firmware to prevent third-party syncing.
sync directly with an Exchange server without going through a NOC
Which is useless. The idea is to get OVER THE AIR email from your Exchange server. As far as I'm aware, you can't sync directly over the 3G internet, and even if you could it would be a MASSIVE security hole to open your Exchange server to such access (how do you authenticate?).
I'm curious why you say IMAP is fundamentally broken.
The IMAP specification is dramatically more complex than the POP specification. Because of this, making a bug-free implementation of IMAP has proven difficult. Because of differences between implementation in various clients and servers particular combinations may experience major bugs, like your mailboxes eating themselves and mail getting lost. Most major mail servers that use IMAP (like Citadel) have fixed the mailbox eating problems, but they'll still drop mail and you client may still eat the mailboxes. Netscape Communicator notably had this problem.
This is opposed to POP, which will work fine with almost any combination of client-server.
I need to store my mail on my mail server (so I can get to my mail from multiple computers), and I like using a local mail client. I need to consolidate mail from six e-mail addresses into one mailbox, so setting POP to "leave mail on the server" isn't a solution. How would you suggest I do this?
With POP? You can't. It doesn't change the fact the IMAP spec is broken.
The only way I know of would be to set all my other addresses to be forwards instead of full-fledged mailboxes, but that has the undesirable side effect of not allowing me to log in to a particular account's web interface to be able to send mail with the proper return address (I occasionally need to do this).
I'm in exactly the same situation and this is what I do.
Of course the costs are increased if "in studio" techniques are used -- even stereo is synthesized in that case (instruments recorded separately, audio engineer has to figure out placement).
This is exactly the scenario I'm talking about. The audio engineer has to build a 5.1 "soundscape" using the individual instrument tracks. You can technically do this by hand, but it's a major PITA. There is equipment (really, software) to do this automagically, but it's very expensive.
Fallout 3 is based on the same engine as Oblivion. They even use some of the same assets, you can see the same characters and models used in Oblivion in the recent demo videos. There is already a extensive set of tools available for Oblivion, so I assume they would just have to be modified for Fallout 3.
I have this nasty feeling that the devs realize this and they just want to push the tool development effort back onto the gamer community.
Slashdot Mirror
After 100 years science fiction still hasn't escaped its literary ghetto,
Just because moronic academics who couldn't think of anything USEFUL to learn in college think that retread drama and romance like "War & Peace" and "Gone With the Wind" represent the apex of literature, doesn't make it so.
Simply because these genres (drama, in particular family drama, and romance) do not translate well to video games does not mean video games are not "art".
We block certain website groups (adult, gambling, games, etc) by default and everyone must go through our proxy to the outside world. Web logs are checked throughout the day and those who try 30 different ways to get to boobsgonewild.com are reported.
As other people have pointed out, you really shouldn't do this unless you're a K-12 school (or a library or similar), and that's just for liability reasons. You might block something important, users can get around this, it's a waste of money and time for the filtering software, and your employees WILL find other ways to waste their time. The can surf the web on their iPhones, for example.
Most people have only User permissions so they can't install something and we regularly do sweeps of unapproved software on those people who do have admin privileges.
If you think this prevents people from using "unapproved software" you're incredibly naive. Unless you have a whitelist of applications that you're enforcing through GPO (highly unlikely), they can still EXECUTE any random executable they want. Look at PortableApps.com for a good sense of what they can run.
They're just MIDI guitar tracks, widely used with FretsOnFirehttp://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/.
There will almost certainly be a way to work around this on the PC, mainly because NOBODY is going to use the PITA creation tools on the 360 and PS3. It's almost infinitely easier to do it with a MIDI sequencer.
Annoyingly, it looks like the MIDI songs will only be usable on the PS3, not the 360. It is probably due to their tools being MIDI-to-USB. The PS3 is pure USB so that's why it works on that platform.
This is highly annoying for me, because I was going to get the 360 version and I wanted to import my own MIDI tracks. Looks like I'm going to HAVE to go with the PC version now. Does anybody know if the 360 instruments are the same as the PC instruments?
Just out of curiosity, if you considered Oblivion "bad" what do you consider to be a "good" RPG released in the last 3 years and what makes it better than Oblivion?
During times when I've experienced slowdown on MSNBC.com I've been able to connect at full speed to numerous other sites like CNN.com. So if they're throttling, they're just throttling on MSNBC.com which strikes me as extremely unlikely.
You asked and answered your own question. Punishment. And how does the company come to sign such a contract? Voluntarily? Ho ho ho.
Are you saying that the ONLY contracts in America that have enforcement provisions are labor contracts? That's simply wrong and you know it's wrong. A company sues another for violating it's patents and then works out a licensing agreement with penalties in the contract for violating the agreement. How us this ANY LESS "voluntary" than a labor contract? If you're fired arbitrarily to get the quarter numbers up, is that "voluntary"? And what about executives? THEY get the benefits of these locked-in contracts. Why should executives be the only ones allowed to negotiate their salaries?
If the company doesn't want to sign a labor contract they certainly have options, just like the company trying to license the patent. They can move their factories (as many do when confronted with unionization), or they can attempt to circumvent the union by making a better offer to workers (which does happen occasionally).
Actually, many anti-competitive practices are illegal and considered unethical, whatever 'ism' you want to call it.
But it seems that "free marketeers" only bitch about the unions while they let trade associations, bribing government officials, and monopolies slide. Do you support anti-trust legislation? If not, how is that consistent with your statement above?
Yes. That would be God's authority, not man's.
You are simply wrong.
How are you even aware of the CHOICE supposedly offered or that Christ ever EXISTED? Because church authorities said so. Why do you regard the Bible as mostly fact, but the Odyseey and the Iiliad (Greek myths) as mostly fiction? Because church authorities said so.
You were not THERE. You do not KNOW. You CANNOT know. There is absolutely no way around this. You have to take the WORD of early church authorities that they were telling the truth and recorded everything accurately.
Now you COULD claim that God is speaking to you directly and verified to you, independently, that every word of the Bible is accurate. If you are, I strongly suggest you contact a psychiatrist and start on medication. If your voices are "real", the medication shouldn't interfere.
Anyone can have direct communication with God. It's your choice whether you choose to engage in that or not.
This is a direct contradiction to orthodox Christianity. You are saying that the teachings of any random man on the street are exactly equivalent to those of Jesus Christ. If so, why aren't you following street preachers? And what about the Mormons? Why isn't Joseph Smith a real prophet?
These are leaders who lead by example, not authority.
Nonsense. You can argue the martyrs "lead by example", but their authority lies in their divine guidance, not that they managed to get themselves killed. You don't seem to grasp that it's Christian AUTHORITIES that determined whether or not X individual was divinely inspired and whether or not their story should be RECORDED. There are lots of martyrs, prophets, etc. whose stories were not recorded by Christian authorities because they were not "orthodox".
Anything else is not true Christianity, but rather some man-made facsimile masquerading under the name.
You don't get to use the "No True Scotsman" fallacy with me. When cornered about the bad behavior of Christians, Protestants ALWAYS say "They weren't REAL Christians." because they want to promote their own little group (when you point out the bad things members of their Protestant sect do, they use it to justify the most recent split).
At least the Catholics don't try this bullshit tactic. They come up with some pretty ridiculous justifications for Christian actions, but not this weaselly tactic.
Just so you know, the communists never killed anyone because Stalin, Mao, etc. weren't "real" communists.
Looks likes those 30% cells might not be so unrealistic.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/29/1814247
I still think large-scale solar has logistical problems.
Tell me where you can get a pre-built gaming PC with a top-of-the-line video card ($500) for less than $1200-1500 INCLUDING THE MONITOR AND ALL PERIPHERALS. I've never seen one.
Among others:
1) You can have up to 4 tuners in the PC.
2) You can stream the video to different PCs on your network.
3) More storage, and better use of storage. For example, you can archive the actual Tivo recordings and burn them to DVD. (and yes, you can get them out of the program and edit them as you see fit).
Imgburn is freeware and works well, but it doesn't do menus.
If you want menus... I actually use Nero, mainly because I hate all the other applications I've found for this task, notably Ulead DVD Creator and Roxio Easy Media Creator.
The biggest speed issues on Vista are caused by all of the bundled crapware you'll find on off-the-shelf systems and bad drivers.
The biggest bottleneck in Vista is the exact same issue as XP, MacOS, and Linux. I/O, specifically disk I/O. Modern operating systems do lots of file operations simultaneously and this kills hard drives, even modern SATA drives. Unless you're doing certain scientific computing tasks, I/O is the limit. The only thing most users do that can possibly bottleneck modern CPUs is video encoding.
The best way to improve performance in Vista is to get a nice, expensive, caching hard drive controller and run RAID 10 (or RAID 0 if you don't give a fuck about your data). You'll need 4 drives for RAID 10 add 2 drives for RAID 0.
(If you are watching a NBC video for 15 minutes, comcast deems you to be using "excessive bandwidth" and moves you to the lowest-priority tier behind other users. In effect, disrupting your NBC video stream.)
Where are you located?
I've got Comcast and I've heard this reported by a number of people but I can't replicate it. Based on my understanding of the equipment they're using for throttling this is not possible for numerous reasons. Among them is that their equipment only uses TCP and Windows Media video streaming uses UDP. Ports wont' work because Windows Media uses random ports. They could theoretically be doing some sort of DPI, but that strikes be as both unimaginably expensive and a waste of time (people would just start encrypting their traffic).
I watch NBC.com extensively and I think you're mistaking the frequent slowdowns on NBC's SITE for throttling by Comcast.
I for example want a tower machine. I want something with a consumer-grade desktop CPU - dual or even single core, and just 1 of them - with no monitor strapped onto it, and with a case that has ample drive bays and expansion slots so that I can add storage space and add in a video card as needed.
Anecdotally, I've heard that this has been brought to Jobs and his answer is: "As long as I'm in charge, NEVER."
iMacs are a huge ripoff. The average desktop is upgraded ever 2 years, the average monitor every 5. The iMac is a way for Apple to increase margins by forcing users to upgrade both the desktop and monitor. This is also the reason why Macs have little expansion, to force upgrades. Nobody actually wants an all-in-one PC, it saves exactly 2 cords.
You'll notice this is a dramatic departure from the trend at Apple in the late 90s (before Jobs came back) to make Macs more "PC-like": clones, towers, lots of expansion, etc. Jobs realized that making the Mac more PC-like would hurt Apple's margins as the Mac became more of a commodity item. So he created the iMac, with it's integrated monitor and nonexistent expansion, to head off this issue.
The other major reason is tech support. Apple doesn't want to do (and doesn't do) third-party support of ANYTHING. If you plug it into a Mac and it damages your OSX install you better call the device manufacturer because Apple won't help you. However, they would quickly get a reputation for bad support if, for example, you tried to upgrade you PC's video card and the system didn't boot. The you contacted Apple they told you to fuck off.
What about the users on PowerMacs? Well, they paid a steep premium to get (a LITTLE) help from Apple.
You can't legislate true Christianity, it completely goes against the definition of what Christianity is. (For proof, you need look no further than the Catholic church in history to see what the result is of legislated Christianity.)
You don't seem to understand Christianity. Like it or not, Christianity is based entirely on AUTHORITY. Christians believe that certain individuals have direct or near-direct communication with God and the opinions those individuals have on God are DEFINITIVE due to their special connection. These people are informally called "prophets", but Christianity has lots of people in the role that AREN'T called prophets like the Pope, "Early Church Fathers", etc.
In this context, most Protestant denominations are just making it up as they go along.
Christianity is about choosing the right path (which is never the easy path).
Christianity is completely antithetical to the concept of "choosing the right path". There are multiple paths to choose, but only one of them (the orthodox Christian path) leads to immortality. Everyone else is screwed (HOW they are screwed is a matter of some debate).
Like the American Medical Association?
Guilds aren't all bad. Think about the benefits of of a guild that has minimum competency requirements to call yourself a "Unix System Administrator".
If you think IT is bad, try biomedical sciences, medicine, and science academia.
These workers are compensated for the time. Doctors are very well paid and academics have job security. Both get outstanding benefits and retirement. IT workers increasingly are expected to work long hours for very low pay ($10 per hour) with no benefits whatsoever.
Capitalism is what RESULTS in some people being rich, but to claim that the system is good only for the rich is incorrect.
The cornerstone of capitalism is, unsurprisingly, CAPITAL. Or, roughly, the amount of money you have. One of the key features of capitalism is the ability to leverage EXISTING capital. If you have $1,000,000 people will be more likely to loan you money because it would be easier to recover losses against you. That's just one example, there are many, many, many, more.
It's like the old saying "It takes money to make money." In capitalism this is true in an absolute sense, the MORE money you have the EASIER it is to make even more.
So the natural tendency of capitalism, all capitalism, is redistribution of all wealth to the very wealthiest individuals. Inevitably, pure capitalism leads to an aristocracy.
E.g., a labor union that will coerce non-union members into not filling the gap in supply when union workers strike, or have in other ways artificially limited the supply.
How is collective bargaining a "distortion" of capitalism? You don't seem to understand how capitalism works. Labor unions are doing EXACTLY what I describe above, you're aggregating the "capital" of workers (in the form of a labor pool) and using that increased capital as leverage in negotiations to get more money. Corporations do this ALL THE TIME in the form of "trade associations" yet nobody accuses them of "socialism".
And how are contracts "coercion"? A corporation signs a contract saying they'll only hire union workers, if they break the contract they're punished.
And it's not like corporations don't coerce workers. Chiquia has assassinated (murdered in cold blood) hundreds of union and labor organizers in recent years.
A corporation is just a union of investors. I fail to see why labor unions are "socialist" and corporations are not.
Suddenly that $5 "Wizard's Guild" (or Fallout equivalent) looks a lot better when you don't have full-fledged towns created by the community.
Except that they're different markets. I own both a 360 and a gaming PC and I intend to get the PC version mainly because of the possibility of user-created content on that platform. Increasingly, that's a key factor for PC games.
The market is different for the 360 where everything uses a "paid content" model. There ARE no free downloads to compete with.
Does this make the PC version a better deal? Hell yes! It's $10 cheaper too. But you also had to pay $1500 for that gaming PC.
Are you saying that there aren't operating systems other than Windows? I think most of /. would disagree with you.
Most people interpret "monopoly" to mean "overwhelming market share". Apple certainly has an overwhelming share of the media player market.
In part this is due to having a good product and in part this is due to Apple locking competitors out on both sides (the iPod can't use stores other than iTunes, iTunes won't work with other players).
And the control is getting tighter, not looser. The new iPod Touch requires "activation" by iTunes and has encrypted firmware to prevent third-party syncing.
sync directly with an Exchange server without going through a NOC
Which is useless. The idea is to get OVER THE AIR email from your Exchange server. As far as I'm aware, you can't sync directly over the 3G internet, and even if you could it would be a MASSIVE security hole to open your Exchange server to such access (how do you authenticate?).
I'm curious why you say IMAP is fundamentally broken.
The IMAP specification is dramatically more complex than the POP specification. Because of this, making a bug-free implementation of IMAP has proven difficult. Because of differences between implementation in various clients and servers particular combinations may experience major bugs, like your mailboxes eating themselves and mail getting lost. Most major mail servers that use IMAP (like Citadel) have fixed the mailbox eating problems, but they'll still drop mail and you client may still eat the mailboxes. Netscape Communicator notably had this problem.
This is opposed to POP, which will work fine with almost any combination of client-server.
I need to store my mail on my mail server (so I can get to my mail from multiple computers), and I like using a local mail client. I need to consolidate mail from six e-mail addresses into one mailbox, so setting POP to "leave mail on the server" isn't a solution. How would you suggest I do this?
With POP? You can't. It doesn't change the fact the IMAP spec is broken.
The only way I know of would be to set all my other addresses to be forwards instead of full-fledged mailboxes, but that has the undesirable side effect of not allowing me to log in to a particular account's web interface to be able to send mail with the proper return address (I occasionally need to do this).
I'm in exactly the same situation and this is what I do.
I wasn't involved in the migration, but I know they virtualized at the same time.
And you didn't think putting the OS in a VM would affect performance?
a system with 40 users
A stand-alone Exchange server is over the top for 40 users. Use webmail or hosted Exchange.
Of course the costs are increased if "in studio" techniques are used -- even stereo is synthesized in that case (instruments recorded separately, audio engineer has to figure out placement).
This is exactly the scenario I'm talking about. The audio engineer has to build a 5.1 "soundscape" using the individual instrument tracks. You can technically do this by hand, but it's a major PITA. There is equipment (really, software) to do this automagically, but it's very expensive.
Fallout 3 is based on the same engine as Oblivion. They even use some of the same assets, you can see the same characters and models used in Oblivion in the recent demo videos. There is already a extensive set of tools available for Oblivion, so I assume they would just have to be modified for Fallout 3.
I have this nasty feeling that the devs realize this and they just want to push the tool development effort back onto the gamer community.