and it would end a lot of stupid shit that goes unpunished these days. What it boils down to is accountability and punishment, there is none anymore, and this needs to be dealt with.
That's what came after the... and it's total gibberish. What "stupid shit" are you taking about? People cutting you off on the freeway? Customer service people being snide? Just people generally acting like assholes? I hate to break it to you, but this has ALWAYS been true and will always BE true! There was hever a magical happy time in the past when there were no jerks or assholes or prigs around. The very first fucking caveman was an asshole to the 2nd caveman because he was "first".
And accountability compared to WHAT exactly? Everyone talks shit about lawsuits constantly. It's trivially easy for most individuals to make themselves judgement-proof (just don't own real estate), so if "fear of lawasuits" is keeping you from punching people out you're a moron. This isn't so easy for businesses, so lawsuits provide pretty much the only feasible way for "the little guy" to get restitution from businesses that screw them. Want to go back to the days of exploding Pintos? Be my guest.
Or maybe you're taking about hunting down "the litte guy"? We're a lot better at that too. Computer database tracking combined with biometrics is making it harder and harder for criminals (or debtors, or any other 'undesirables') to hide from authorities. Punishments for crimes, across the board, are getting stiffer every day despite lower crime rates. Some classes of criminals are watched for their entire lives (sex offenders, terrorists, etc.).
As much as you might like to think your simple and petty fantasy might actually change anything, it wouldn't. The systems we have now (police, courts, etc.) developed over a long period of trial and error and though far from perfect, are much better than what you suggest.
And I was talking about installation of the OS! I even said in one of my posts how I installed my NIC from a driver-CD after the OS-installation. I'm well away that W2K supports driver-CD's but NOT DURING THE INSTALLATION OF THE OS. And that was what I said!
This isn't true, BTW. You have to know what you're doing (like assigning drive letter A: to the CD-ROM drive) but you can use CD-ROMS to load those storage drivers. Or if you're doing an install off the network or hard drive you can put them in a special directory (this is typically what I do). You can do the same thing if you build a custom Windows CD.
Considering that this is ONLY during install and only affects odd storage controllers
The "odd storage controller" was the VIA-controller on my consumer-lever motherboard... Hardly anything exotic.
It was indeed odd in 1999. It's a SATA controller which didn't exist then. It's almost certainly supported in XPSP2 and if it's not then it's really, really new. Most manufacturers ship floppys with new motherboards for this reason. If you insist on using bleeding-edge storage hardware and running Win2k, buy yourself a USB floppy drive, $20.
Basically what you're saying is that the Windows installer should do an online check for updated software during the install process. Win2K doesn't do this, WinXP does. Progress.
IIRC I have seen Linux-installers with options for third-party driver-CD's. And in any case, those drivers are usually fetched automatically from the net during the installation.
I haven't, and I've installed a lot of Linux distributions. I've found lots of Linux distributions that will allow you to download "stuff" (rarely proper drivers) from the net during install, which doesn't do you any good if you're installing onto a system without an Internet connection. Actually, this feature has NEVER solved any of the driver problems I've had with Linux installation. Usually if it's not on the install CD/DVD it's not easily available, certainly not through the installer. What if you need a kernel patch? The only exception I've seen is FTP installs of "snapshots" (and Gentoo).
I know it seems like I'm harping on this, but it's just FUD. The installer, in particular the driver support for the installer, is one of the very BEST parts of Windows relative to most Linux installers. The only advantage most Linux installers have is granularity, which is completely unrelated to the issue we're discussing.
I think we're talking past each other, or maybe the question itself is the problem. You're comparing Win2k to MODERN Linux distributions, which I think is a little unfair. Linux has improved since 2000, but so has Windows. Most of your complaints have been addressed in WinXP.
And yes, W2K could accept CD's besides floppies. But for some weird reason it insists on floppies. CD's are out of the question. Would it been really that hard to support driver-CD's besides floppies?
Um, Win2K does indeed support driver CDs. The only exception is that during install if you need a third-party driver for your storage controller you can install it using a floppy, but oddly, only a floppy (technically you can substitute a CD-ROM or a text file, but only if you're clever). This is due to some sort of "lowest common denominator" driver spec by Microsoft (so you can install on systems without CD-ROMs, presumably). Considering that this is ONLY during install and only affects odd storage controllers, it's not the end of the world. It's an improvement over most Linux installers I've seen because at least adding a third-party driver during install is an OPTION. This is EXACTLY why most flavors of Linux I've tried won't install on my home system.
Ok. How much better was Office 2000 compared to (the proprietary) StarOffice 5.2? How much better is Office 2003 compared to OpenOffice.org 2.0? What is the trend here?
As a basic office suite there is not much difference, but the Windows world has moved on. Nowadays all the big Office features are about communication, server integration and document collaboration, all features that are incredibly important in the corporate world and where Office is light years ahead of the competition, and none of them work without a Windows server backend.
And remember that it is (shock! surprise!) the corporate world that drives office suites. MS really doesn't give a fuck what home or academic users want in an office suite, and they shouldn't because such users will barely use most of the functionality anyway.
I installed Windows a while ago. After the installation was finished, I noticed that the resolution was something like 640x480 with 256 colors! Drivers for the vid-card weren't installed at all, so there was ZERO hope for 3D-acceleration. Sound-card wasn't installed either. I had drivers for the NIC on CD (luckily), so I could install it offline so I could afterwards hunt for drivers online. I also had to sloinstall AGP-drivers, chipset-drivers and the like. All that was handled automatically in Linux.
Who made your video card? Ati, Nvidia, S3, Trident, Via, Intel, and most of the other major chipset vendors have downloadable drivers for almost everything on Windows Update, these automatically install if you let the driver wizard do so. Maybe you're using a piece of very new and/or obscure hardware. If so, how is that the fault of Windows?
And if you don't think this isn't a problem on Linux, think again. I've found only ONE recent distribution that will install on my home PC, Gentoo, and that's only through an FTP install. Everything else I've tried (Mandrivia, Redhat, Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, Linspire, Xandros, Suse) pukes during the install because it won't see my RAID array, despite the fact it's a Promise card that has been available WITH LINUX DRIVERS for over 5 years. And god forbid you might want to install using JFS, XFS, or another non-shitty filesystem, all the installers I've seen insist on ext2 (again, except Gentoo).
Well, I can have fully-functioning (with drivers and apps installed) Linux-installation in about 30 minutes, whereas with Windows I need to hunt for drivers and apps, because the post-install system is 100% un-usable. The system also ships with lots of great software, whereas Windows does not (so Linux can be used for actual work right after the installation, whereas Windows cannot).
So now "bundling" is a GOOD thing? Microsoft gets slammed either way.
latest hardware is supported out-of-the-box, whereas W2K does not (I need to feed it driver-FLOPPIES during installation so it will work with my SATA-drive. Since I don't have floppy-drive anymore, that might cause me problems in the future).
Apparently, according to you, Windows should include drivers for products that don't exist yet. Unless you can name me a Linux distribution released in 1999 that had SATA support.
No, it's not. But the people looking after this aren't earning. Put yourself in their shoes. If I was on this project, and I wanted a media player to work, I'd fix it and release it. If however, a media player wasn't an issue to me, why should I fix it? So I can keep everyone who isn't paying my bills happy? Pay for it to be fixed, do it yourself, or accept it as is. You are asking a lot from a project that has cost you nothing.
IOW, a REQUIREMENT for using OSS is the ability to code and install and design every single feature of every single piece of OSS, otherwise you can't complain, make bug reports, etc.
This is crap. The "reward" for the programmer in your example is FAME. He gets to hear people say "thank you" for coding the software. He gets to brag about it to his friends. And (pay close attention to this one) he gets to put it on his resume. If you don't think having a reputation of working on popular and successful open source projects doesn't help you get programming jobs, think again.
Users don't give a rat's ass about the "wonder of OSS", nor should they. If you wish to push OSS as a religion, you had best make it attractive.
The XBOX has had a bad reputation in the Japanese market because the folks at Microsoft have ham-handedly slighted the Japanese at every turn. The crappy controller, the bulk of the console, the poor selection of Japanese games (it's around 60-70% of the US library even now), poor implementation of Live in Japan, etc. If you compare this to the PS2 and the GameCube, both of which have MORE titles than their US counterparts, smaller, PS2 online works much better in Japan, etc. it's a no-brainer for the Japanese.
And apparently Virtual PC can't handle Japanese very well so MS has pretty much blown off backwards compatibility for the 360 in Japan. If the 360 flops in Japan that virtually guarantees the next round of the console wars to the PS3.
But professional sports, one of the big examples in the articles, HAS changed dramatically over the years. And it's changed dramatically for exactly the reason Colayco cited: celebrity. Celebrity factored in the early 20th, but it didn't become a HUGE factor until the players started recieved a much bigger slice of the pie and like all good capitalists used that slice to promote themselves and make even MORE money. Player titans like Michael Jordan really ARE a new thing.
If you read between the lines of Jaffe's complaint, what he's REALLY complaining about is that game developers aren't TREATED like movie directors/sports stars. If they were, game developers would be making mad cash, constantly promoting themselves, and generally acting like assholes.
So, there are limits simply in the sense that displays can only get so large without requiring a massive re-build of the world's residential architecture in order to accomodate huge fifty foot wide theater screens in every home.
Which is exactly what is happening in suburbia. What they're called is "McMansions", very large houses that take up an entire lot swallowing up where the front and rear lawns used to be. Much of that space is taken up with one very large room called a "great room" that can easily accomodate very large screens. "Great rooms" are part of the idea that people are spending more time indoors watching movies and playing video games instead of out cavorting on their lawns.
If you think about it, very large screen TVs (60"+) NOW are pretty impractical in most living rooms, but not in houses with "great rooms".
Addiction is more like a compulsive behaviour: irrationally motivated. It is a complex psychological issue.
Define "rational". Can't do it can you? Maybe playing video games for hours on end is irrational, but maybe it isn't. I think professional sports and the stock market are pretty irrational. The whole concept of "psychological addiction" is crap. People like to do things that they like to do. A lot. "Complex psychological issue" my ass.
Tell that to the guy who died at the internet cafe because he was playing some computer game non-stop for over 24 hours.
It was 50 hours and the guy died of heart failure. 50 hours with no sleep (or "little sleep" as the article said) simply will not kill you. 50 hours of hard physical labor without sleep is unlikely to kill anyone who is reasonably physically fit. This guy had a weak heart, overworked himself, and died. That's it.
[Psychologists] goal is to correct negative mental conditions and the behavior that results from those conditions.
Which is exactly correct. Psychology is attempted behavior modification. The fundamental problem with psychology is that the defintion of "negative" they use is basically totally arbitrary. This is why being gay can be "negative" one day and not the next. Psychology is really nothing more than a tool to FORCE social conventions of the day on people, because you can lock them up or drug them for being "crazy". Nowadays parents like to lock up or drug unruly kids.
Now psycologists will argue that people go to them with "problems", and they are simply trying to find the "root causes" of those "problems" and "correct" them. More honest ones will say that they "know" what behavior patterns are "destructive" and are attempting to "correct" those destructive behavior patterns, basically telling patients how to live (admittedly, they did ASK).
What pisses me off is the notion that this is somehow "scientific" and in ANY WAY different from what priests, philosophers, and other "advice givers" have been doing for milennia.
OTOH, one has to critically analyze those techniques. "Lie detectors", ALL "lie detectors", simply DO NOT WORK. They are a scam based on intimidation. I actually read the article and this is more of the same crap. Here are the key quotes:... passengers don headphones at a console and answer "yes" or "no" into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit... "Some may feel nervous because they have used drugs, while having no intention to smuggle drugs," [Amir Lieberman, CEO of the company making this thing] said....
So it seems that one of the questions you're asked is whether or not you've used "drugs". Makes you wonder what other personal questions it asks? The answer: Lots. The way lie detectors "work" is that the interviewer asks a long series of questions, many of which are personal, and many people are VERY likely to lie about (Have you ever stolen from an employer? for example). The interviewer is now confident that you've lied about SOMETHING in his presence, so he then proceeds to intimidate the subject by CLAIMING that he can tell whether or not he's lying. The idea is to trick the subject into making admissions.
So how does that apply here? The users of the system "know" that EVERYONE who uses the system is "lying" so they have a built in excuse to pull people aside that are "suspicious". Like Arabic people for example. In the context of American airport security it simply provides an excuse to profile people.
If Government starts doing the collecting that will the intial steps towards monitoring of its citizens. And, unlike the private sector, there's really no accountability.
Unless you believe that all US elections are completely rigged (I only think they're MOSTLY rigged), you have a lot more accountability with government than with the private sector. At least in theory. And while it might be illegal to sue the government in many cases, it's also totally impractical to sue large corporations in many cases.
But on the otherhand, i realize its the price one pays to get a reasonable mortgage rate, credit cards on favorable terms, low insurance premiums, and a wide range of services at acceptable prices. Without accurate credit reporting, all businesses would need to increase prices to factor in the risk of loss and the added costs of extracting late payments.
This is simply WRONG. Creditors have been able to provide credit at favorable terms for milennia, "background checks" were irrelevent because the local nature of these economies you could easily talk to everyone a prospective debtor had ever MET. Debt isn't about making REASONABLE loans, what kind of revenue stream is that? You WANT people to never pay off loans because money is made from the interest payments on those loans. And it's absolutely critical that you keep your debtors too poor to pay off the loans.
The reason reason you see more debt being offered is COMPUTERS. In the past is was such a hassle keeping track of all this infomation accurately, AND tracking down debtors, made it pretty easy to simply walk out on debts, assuming no real estate was involved. Which is why loans required "collateral" in real property that couldn't easily run off.
Now with computer database tracking it's much harder for Joe Average to run from debts. It's not about a "good credit rating", that's a scam, it's about hunting you down. They're desperately trying to bring back debtor's prisons so they can buy slaves.
I fear that the government would be utterly incompetent at creating such a system
Becuse you're a right-wing nut and right wing nuts think the government is incompotent at everything. You want to turn the highway system, police, national parks, and the military over to private corporations. Why not have the banks write the laws and do all the enforcement? Oh wait, that's what we're doing NOW! Fuck democracy, ogliarchical corporations are the only way to get ANYTHING done!
You know... I've heard this position a number of times, but I simply don't buy it. It probably is true that such interrogation tactics are more effective in the end. However, the timescale (months) for such tactics might have worked in, say, World War II, but I hardly doubt that it would work today given the nature of the fight. If information is needed about a stolen nuclear weapon, for example, by the time you've warmed up to the prisoner, any information he may have will be useless.
Um, I think you're confused. The goal of modern Western torture techniques, in part, is to disconnect victims from reality and CRITICALLY, their own sense of morality. The goal is to get them to DO anything for their interrorgators. Obviously in such a context they would lie to please their interrorgators, if they even clearly remember what the truth was anymore. The goal is essentialy to get prisoners to "snitch" on other prisoners, who are also being tortured. In then end, you get nothing.
This is an oft-cited critique of torture that I think has misplaced value. Eliminating false information would be trivial. Computer scientists, of all people, should be able to recognize this. All it would require is that you simply compare facts and information gathered from the individual to things verifiably known to be true. Furthermore, one could compile statements and information from a number of subjects to further provide light on the situation. Combining a bit of positive/negative reinforcement based on the validity of these already-known facts, would make obtaining true information very likely.
Torture isn't like it is in the movies or TV. On "24" when Jack Bauer is torturing someone, he is almost always looking for a very specific piece of information, is reasonably certain the victim has the information, and CRITICALLY, has some way of verifying the accuracy of that information. In the real world, none of the above is true. Even if you know you have a "bad guy", you have no idea whay he might know. Any you almost always have no way of corroborating any of it. You torture Tom, Tom fingers Dick, Dick denies it, you torture Dick and he relents and fingers Harry, Harry denies it, etc.
Think long and hard about the kinds of questions you would ask a suspected Al Qaeda detainee:
Do you know any members of Al Qaeda? See above for how this plays out.
Where can I find documents? Any documents the guy HAD they already would have taken, anything he had privy to but they didn't have in custody would have been moved or destroyed.
Establishing any "base facts" and properly ogranizing prisoners so that they are in "known" groups so you cna cross-check their information is much harder than you seem to think. This isn't the cops people, where you hand them your driver's licence with your name on it and then they can hop down to your address and check out your family. The guy you caught HAS no ID, and even if they did, you couldn't check it. The only way you can know if he is really "Bob Smith" is if one of your other prisoners HAPPENS to be able to recogninze him and is willing to finger him for some odd reason, knowning that he won't be rewarded sine you can't verify anything he says.
Also remember this: There is an unspoken threat of death ALWAYS associated with torture in practice. Torture victims are almost always threated with death as part of the process and most victims firmly believe that they WILL be killed no matter what they do. This also happens a lot in practice (see below). This tends to galavanize resistence in those fighting for an abstract cause. Which brings us to...
This is a moot point, because, in inexperienced hands, NEITHER form of interrogation works. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making a statement on the morality of torture. It just seems, however, quite evident that it would work using only a little background in biology, game-theory, and psychology.
In reality, there are ARE no "experienced torturers for information". Thre are no calm and col
"They are also not going to make a hit with dungeons and dragons online, since many players have invested hundreds of dollars in the game. Players would be reluctant to let it all gather dust on a shelf and give up on their favorite gathering places."
I'd just point out that this bit is a little silly. MMORPGs and "pen and paper" RPGs are considerably different experiences (just like "live action" and "pen and paper" are) to the point where they actually appeal to different audiences. I have little interest in MMORPGs because they seem to MOSTLY be about level-grinding and not about plots, interacting with other players and NPCs, politics, etc. Yes, I understand there is some of that in many MMORPGs, but in most of them that stuff tends to be restricted to high-level characters that spend lots of time leveling up. I played lots of text MUDs back in the day and this is what drove me away. The actual GAMEPLAY per se has seemed to advance very little since then.
What I want isn't a MMORPG that emulates the "pen and paper" experience, which is impossible, but a MMORPG that emulates the experience of a computer-style RPG, like Bloodlines or KotOR, where there IS leveling up and fiddling with weapons and gear and whatnot, but it takes a major back seat to advancing the story. In fact, advancing the story is often the key to "leveling up". I'd like a game where EVERY PC was integral to the plot, where every PC affects the world and more importantly, the other PCs. I think this goal is basically incompatible with the "Massive" part of MMORPGs which is why they don't seem poised to replace single-player RPGs.
+1 Insightful? More like -1 Ridiculous! They're in the freakin movie business. The way they make money is by selling movies. They wouldn't release DVDs if pirating were easy? Like they did with VHS? Yeah, not a single movie was released on VHS.
Ever heard of Universal City Studios v. Sony? The movie industry viciously fought the introduction of home video recorders for precisely this reason. They thought that VCRs would damage the box office with absolutely no thought given to the aftermarket revenues that might be gained from tape sales and rentals. They only adopted DVD with the assurance of "strong" encryption in the format. You can bet given the failure of CSS that the next format, whether HD-DVD or BluRay, will have MUCH more intense encryption and restrictions.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
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Pepping Up Windows
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I like Windows. I could use OS X, I could use some variety of Linux, but I prefer using Windows on my desktop and for some server tasks.
Why?
1) Accusations of instability regarding Windows are largely unfounded.
I've personally found WinXP to be considerably more stable than most Linux distributions I've tried. I seem to run into conflicting dependencies and apps the freeze X all the damn time. Many recent Linux distributions wouldn't even install on my home rig.
2) The interface is as good as I want it to be.
Yeah I got WindowBlinds. I can do all kinds of skins and alternative desktops, but I've adapted to the bells and whistles of Windows and I don't see the need to adapt to new bells and whistles. I've used MacOSX and while I think, on balance, I like the interface better I don't like it better ENOUGH to adjust to the changes. (I also basically don't like the Apple hardware.)
3) Windows has a greater variety of software than any other platform
If I want a highly specialized app for some purpose there's almost always something out there for Windows. And I can be reasonably certain it will be be compatible with my system due to the very high compatibility of Windows apps and because of the standardized Windows interfaces I'll be able to figure out how to use it relatively quickly. This is true of Unix to a large extent, but only for COMMAND LINE apps. I love the command line as much as the next guy, I've used CP/M, I've used DOS, I've used SysV, I've moved on.
4) Exchange kicks ass.
Active Directory + Exchange + Outlook + IM stomps all over every other e-mail/groupware system. Lotus sucks, IMNSHO. This alone is enough of a reason to have Windows as part of your organization's lan. MSSQL is also an excellent database if you don't have to do too much heavy lifting, and Windows Media is an excelltent content distribution system.
ITunes is proof that Steve Jobs is both brilliant and a fantastic liar.
See, the Big 5 are deathly afraid of suffering from the "MTV syndrome" when it comes to digital downloads. See, originally music videos were seen as an interesting way to promote and "package" artists which proved incredibly sucessful through the 80's and early 90's through the partnership of the big labels and MTV, which initally was desperate for content for it's PAID service, then they switched to an advertising model with the videos as content, and the station took off. Eventually of course, the MTV people realized that the videos THEMSELVES were advertisements and started charging for airplay (no payola laws for music videos afaik). The labels didn't like being held hostage this way and it's one of the big reasons for the decline of actual music videos on MTV and MTV2.
iTunes was sold to the Big 5 essentially as an experimental system for devoted Mac fans. The software would ONLY run on Macs and the iPod (which would only work with Macs). This was a critical sales point because the Big 5's other major concern was widespread piracy of digital music tracks (not that that wasn't happening already). The Big 5 recognized that Apple is a relatively small player in the PC space so that even if their DRM protection was cracked, if the software/player only worked on Macs there couldn't be THAT much piracy since only a relatively small market used Macs. They also didn't have to worry about the "MTV syndrome" because incompatibility with Windows, Linux, and other big MP3 player vendors (Rio, Creative, etc.) would keep iTunes confined to a niche market.
Okay, so I was wrong about the Power Glove. But the Virtual Boy was an entire SYSTEM that tanked.
One of key issues with the Revolution controller is how easy it will be to ADAPT games to the new controller config that are designed to use "conventional" PS3 and 360 controllers. Just because the same Nintendo engineers that designed it are able to get one game working after many months of effort does NOT mean it will be easy for 3rd parties to port games.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a long-standing truism that add-on peripherials for consoles usually tank, even if really compelling (the Zapper came bundled with the NES). So most developers will assume that they ONLY can use what comes bundled with the system unless they package the peripheral with their product, which raises the cost of their game and probably lowers their margin. This means that many developers are likely to shy away from using any "add-ons" Nintendo comes up with for the controller. That includes the analog stick unless it comes bundled (evidence seems to suggest it does).
In the end, it's really software that ultimately drives the adoption of a console. I was almost going to buy a GameCube for Resident Evil 4, but then I heard it was coming out on the PS2.
If some really compelling exclusive comes out for the Revolution I might buy one, but otherwise I'll probably stick with the more popular PS3 or XBox360, depending on which is more hackable.
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and it would end a lot of stupid shit that goes unpunished these days. What it boils down to is accountability and punishment, there is none anymore, and this needs to be dealt with.
... and it's total gibberish. What "stupid shit" are you taking about? People cutting you off on the freeway? Customer service people being snide? Just people generally acting like assholes? I hate to break it to you, but this has ALWAYS been true and will always BE true! There was hever a magical happy time in the past when there were no jerks or assholes or prigs around. The very first fucking caveman was an asshole to the 2nd caveman because he was "first".
That's what came after the
And accountability compared to WHAT exactly? Everyone talks shit about lawsuits constantly. It's trivially easy for most individuals to make themselves judgement-proof (just don't own real estate), so if "fear of lawasuits" is keeping you from punching people out you're a moron. This isn't so easy for businesses, so lawsuits provide pretty much the only feasible way for "the little guy" to get restitution from businesses that screw them. Want to go back to the days of exploding Pintos? Be my guest.
Or maybe you're taking about hunting down "the litte guy"? We're a lot better at that too. Computer database tracking combined with biometrics is making it harder and harder for criminals (or debtors, or any other 'undesirables') to hide from authorities. Punishments for crimes, across the board, are getting stiffer every day despite lower crime rates. Some classes of criminals are watched for their entire lives (sex offenders, terrorists, etc.).
As much as you might like to think your simple and petty fantasy might actually change anything, it wouldn't. The systems we have now (police, courts, etc.) developed over a long period of trial and error and though far from perfect, are much better than what you suggest.
How did you get a "total infection" within 10 minutes from this?
e /sapphire.html.
Probably becaause he linked to the wrong article. Here's the correct one http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2003/sapphir
While it is not really feasable to implement in any way, I am dead serious...
Hello? This is a contradiction.
Who modded this stupidity up as "Insightful"?
And I was talking about installation of the OS! I even said in one of my posts how I installed my NIC from a driver-CD after the OS-installation. I'm well away that W2K supports driver-CD's but NOT DURING THE INSTALLATION OF THE OS. And that was what I said!
This isn't true, BTW. You have to know what you're doing (like assigning drive letter A: to the CD-ROM drive) but you can use CD-ROMS to load those storage drivers. Or if you're doing an install off the network or hard drive you can put them in a special directory (this is typically what I do). You can do the same thing if you build a custom Windows CD.
Considering that this is ONLY during install and only affects odd storage controllers
The "odd storage controller" was the VIA-controller on my consumer-lever motherboard... Hardly anything exotic.
It was indeed odd in 1999. It's a SATA controller which didn't exist then. It's almost certainly supported in XPSP2 and if it's not then it's really, really new. Most manufacturers ship floppys with new motherboards for this reason. If you insist on using bleeding-edge storage hardware and running Win2k, buy yourself a USB floppy drive, $20.
Basically what you're saying is that the Windows installer should do an online check for updated software during the install process. Win2K doesn't do this, WinXP does. Progress.
IIRC I have seen Linux-installers with options for third-party driver-CD's. And in any case, those drivers are usually fetched automatically from the net during the installation.
I haven't, and I've installed a lot of Linux distributions. I've found lots of Linux distributions that will allow you to download "stuff" (rarely proper drivers) from the net during install, which doesn't do you any good if you're installing onto a system without an Internet connection. Actually, this feature has NEVER solved any of the driver problems I've had with Linux installation. Usually if it's not on the install CD/DVD it's not easily available, certainly not through the installer. What if you need a kernel patch? The only exception I've seen is FTP installs of "snapshots" (and Gentoo).
I know it seems like I'm harping on this, but it's just FUD. The installer, in particular the driver support for the installer, is one of the very BEST parts of Windows relative to most Linux installers. The only advantage most Linux installers have is granularity, which is completely unrelated to the issue we're discussing.
I think we're talking past each other, or maybe the question itself is the problem. You're comparing Win2k to MODERN Linux distributions, which I think is a little unfair. Linux has improved since 2000, but so has Windows. Most of your complaints have been addressed in WinXP.
And yes, W2K could accept CD's besides floppies. But for some weird reason it insists on floppies. CD's are out of the question. Would it been really that hard to support driver-CD's besides floppies?
Um, Win2K does indeed support driver CDs. The only exception is that during install if you need a third-party driver for your storage controller you can install it using a floppy, but oddly, only a floppy (technically you can substitute a CD-ROM or a text file, but only if you're clever). This is due to some sort of "lowest common denominator" driver spec by Microsoft (so you can install on systems without CD-ROMs, presumably). Considering that this is ONLY during install and only affects odd storage controllers, it's not the end of the world. It's an improvement over most Linux installers I've seen because at least adding a third-party driver during install is an OPTION. This is EXACTLY why most flavors of Linux I've tried won't install on my home system.
Ok. How much better was Office 2000 compared to (the proprietary) StarOffice 5.2? How much better is Office 2003 compared to OpenOffice.org 2.0? What is the trend here?
As a basic office suite there is not much difference, but the Windows world has moved on. Nowadays all the big Office features are about communication, server integration and document collaboration, all features that are incredibly important in the corporate world and where Office is light years ahead of the competition, and none of them work without a Windows server backend.
And remember that it is (shock! surprise!) the corporate world that drives office suites. MS really doesn't give a fuck what home or academic users want in an office suite, and they shouldn't because such users will barely use most of the functionality anyway.
I installed Windows a while ago. After the installation was finished, I noticed that the resolution was something like 640x480 with 256 colors! Drivers for the vid-card weren't installed at all, so there was ZERO hope for 3D-acceleration. Sound-card wasn't installed either. I had drivers for the NIC on CD (luckily), so I could install it offline so I could afterwards hunt for drivers online. I also had to sloinstall AGP-drivers, chipset-drivers and the like. All that was handled automatically in Linux.
Who made your video card? Ati, Nvidia, S3, Trident, Via, Intel, and most of the other major chipset vendors have downloadable drivers for almost everything on Windows Update, these automatically install if you let the driver wizard do so. Maybe you're using a piece of very new and/or obscure hardware. If so, how is that the fault of Windows?
And if you don't think this isn't a problem on Linux, think again. I've found only ONE recent distribution that will install on my home PC, Gentoo, and that's only through an FTP install. Everything else I've tried (Mandrivia, Redhat, Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, Linspire, Xandros, Suse) pukes during the install because it won't see my RAID array, despite the fact it's a Promise card that has been available WITH LINUX DRIVERS for over 5 years. And god forbid you might want to install using JFS, XFS, or another non-shitty filesystem, all the installers I've seen insist on ext2 (again, except Gentoo).
Well, I can have fully-functioning (with drivers and apps installed) Linux-installation in about 30 minutes, whereas with Windows I need to hunt for drivers and apps, because the post-install system is 100% un-usable. The system also ships with lots of great software, whereas Windows does not (so Linux can be used for actual work right after the installation, whereas Windows cannot).
So now "bundling" is a GOOD thing? Microsoft gets slammed either way.
latest hardware is supported out-of-the-box, whereas W2K does not (I need to feed it driver-FLOPPIES during installation so it will work with my SATA-drive. Since I don't have floppy-drive anymore, that might cause me problems in the future).
Apparently, according to you, Windows should include drivers for products that don't exist yet. Unless you can name me a Linux distribution released in 1999 that had SATA support.
No, it's not. But the people looking after this aren't earning. Put yourself in their shoes. If I was on this project, and I wanted a media player to work, I'd fix it and release it. If however, a media player wasn't an issue to me, why should I fix it? So I can keep everyone who isn't paying my bills happy? Pay for it to be fixed, do it yourself, or accept it as is. You are asking a lot from a project that has cost you nothing.
IOW, a REQUIREMENT for using OSS is the ability to code and install and design every single feature of every single piece of OSS, otherwise you can't complain, make bug reports, etc.
This is crap. The "reward" for the programmer in your example is FAME. He gets to hear people say "thank you" for coding the software. He gets to brag about it to his friends. And (pay close attention to this one) he gets to put it on his resume. If you don't think having a reputation of working on popular and successful open source projects doesn't help you get programming jobs, think again.
Users don't give a rat's ass about the "wonder of OSS", nor should they. If you wish to push OSS as a religion, you had best make it attractive.
A versioning scheme that is IN NO WAY confusing!
The XBOX has had a bad reputation in the Japanese market because the folks at Microsoft have ham-handedly slighted the Japanese at every turn. The crappy controller, the bulk of the console, the poor selection of Japanese games (it's around 60-70% of the US library even now), poor implementation of Live in Japan, etc. If you compare this to the PS2 and the GameCube, both of which have MORE titles than their US counterparts, smaller, PS2 online works much better in Japan, etc. it's a no-brainer for the Japanese.
And apparently Virtual PC can't handle Japanese very well so MS has pretty much blown off backwards compatibility for the 360 in Japan. If the 360 flops in Japan that virtually guarantees the next round of the console wars to the PS3.
But professional sports, one of the big examples in the articles, HAS changed dramatically over the years. And it's changed dramatically for exactly the reason Colayco cited: celebrity. Celebrity factored in the early 20th, but it didn't become a HUGE factor until the players started recieved a much bigger slice of the pie and like all good capitalists used that slice to promote themselves and make even MORE money. Player titans like Michael Jordan really ARE a new thing.
If you read between the lines of Jaffe's complaint, what he's REALLY complaining about is that game developers aren't TREATED like movie directors/sports stars. If they were, game developers would be making mad cash, constantly promoting themselves, and generally acting like assholes.
So, to summarize: Jaffe wants more money.
So, there are limits simply in the sense that displays can only get so large without requiring a massive re-build of the world's residential architecture in order to accomodate huge fifty foot wide theater screens in every home.
Which is exactly what is happening in suburbia. What they're called is "McMansions", very large houses that take up an entire lot swallowing up where the front and rear lawns used to be. Much of that space is taken up with one very large room called a "great room" that can easily accomodate very large screens. "Great rooms" are part of the idea that people are spending more time indoors watching movies and playing video games instead of out cavorting on their lawns.
If you think about it, very large screen TVs (60"+) NOW are pretty impractical in most living rooms, but not in houses with "great rooms".
A few comments:
Addiction is more like a compulsive behaviour: irrationally motivated. It is a complex psychological issue.
Define "rational". Can't do it can you? Maybe playing video games for hours on end is irrational, but maybe it isn't. I think professional sports and the stock market are pretty irrational. The whole concept of "psychological addiction" is crap. People like to do things that they like to do. A lot. "Complex psychological issue" my ass.
Tell that to the guy who died at the internet cafe because he was playing some computer game non-stop for over 24 hours.
It was 50 hours and the guy died of heart failure. 50 hours with no sleep (or "little sleep" as the article said) simply will not kill you. 50 hours of hard physical labor without sleep is unlikely to kill anyone who is reasonably physically fit. This guy had a weak heart, overworked himself, and died. That's it.
[Psychologists] goal is to correct negative mental conditions and the behavior that results from those conditions.
Which is exactly correct. Psychology is attempted behavior modification. The fundamental problem with psychology is that the defintion of "negative" they use is basically totally arbitrary. This is why being gay can be "negative" one day and not the next. Psychology is really nothing more than a tool to FORCE social conventions of the day on people, because you can lock them up or drug them for being "crazy". Nowadays parents like to lock up or drug unruly kids.
Now psycologists will argue that people go to them with "problems", and they are simply trying to find the "root causes" of those "problems" and "correct" them. More honest ones will say that they "know" what behavior patterns are "destructive" and are attempting to "correct" those destructive behavior patterns, basically telling patients how to live (admittedly, they did ASK).
What pisses me off is the notion that this is somehow "scientific" and in ANY WAY different from what priests, philosophers, and other "advice givers" have been doing for milennia.
OTOH, one has to critically analyze those techniques. "Lie detectors", ALL "lie detectors", simply DO NOT WORK. They are a scam based on intimidation. I actually read the article and this is more of the same crap. Here are the key quotes: ... passengers don headphones at a console and answer "yes" or "no" into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit ... "Some may feel nervous because they have used drugs, while having no intention to smuggle drugs," [Amir Lieberman, CEO of the company making this thing] said. ...
So it seems that one of the questions you're asked is whether or not you've used "drugs". Makes you wonder what other personal questions it asks? The answer: Lots. The way lie detectors "work" is that the interviewer asks a long series of questions, many of which are personal, and many people are VERY likely to lie about (Have you ever stolen from an employer? for example). The interviewer is now confident that you've lied about SOMETHING in his presence, so he then proceeds to intimidate the subject by CLAIMING that he can tell whether or not he's lying. The idea is to trick the subject into making admissions.
So how does that apply here? The users of the system "know" that EVERYONE who uses the system is "lying" so they have a built in excuse to pull people aside that are "suspicious". Like Arabic people for example. In the context of American airport security it simply provides an excuse to profile people.
If Government starts doing the collecting that will the intial steps towards monitoring of its citizens. And, unlike the private sector, there's really no accountability.
Unless you believe that all US elections are completely rigged (I only think they're MOSTLY rigged), you have a lot more accountability with government than with the private sector. At least in theory. And while it might be illegal to sue the government in many cases, it's also totally impractical to sue large corporations in many cases.
But on the otherhand, i realize its the price one pays to get a reasonable mortgage rate, credit cards on favorable terms, low insurance premiums, and a wide range of services at acceptable prices. Without accurate credit reporting, all businesses would need to increase prices to factor in the risk of loss and the added costs of extracting late payments.
This is simply WRONG. Creditors have been able to provide credit at favorable terms for milennia, "background checks" were irrelevent because the local nature of these economies you could easily talk to everyone a prospective debtor had ever MET. Debt isn't about making REASONABLE loans, what kind of revenue stream is that? You WANT people to never pay off loans because money is made from the interest payments on those loans. And it's absolutely critical that you keep your debtors too poor to pay off the loans.
The reason reason you see more debt being offered is COMPUTERS. In the past is was such a hassle keeping track of all this infomation accurately, AND tracking down debtors, made it pretty easy to simply walk out on debts, assuming no real estate was involved. Which is why loans required "collateral" in real property that couldn't easily run off.
Now with computer database tracking it's much harder for Joe Average to run from debts. It's not about a "good credit rating", that's a scam, it's about hunting you down. They're desperately trying to bring back debtor's prisons so they can buy slaves.
I fear that the government would be utterly incompetent at creating such a system
Becuse you're a right-wing nut and right wing nuts think the government is incompotent at everything. You want to turn the highway system, police, national parks, and the military over to private corporations.
Why not have the banks write the laws and do all the enforcement? Oh wait, that's what we're doing NOW! Fuck democracy, ogliarchical corporations are the only way to get ANYTHING done!
Yeah, it's amazing what you can accomplish with a massive source of exploitable labor! Go slavery!
You know... I've heard this position a number of times, but I simply don't buy it. It probably is true that such interrogation tactics are more effective in the end. However, the timescale (months) for such tactics might have worked in, say, World War II, but I hardly doubt that it would work today given the nature of the fight. If information is needed about a stolen nuclear weapon, for example, by the time you've warmed up to the prisoner, any information he may have will be useless.
Um, I think you're confused. The goal of modern Western torture techniques, in part, is to disconnect victims from reality and CRITICALLY, their own sense of morality. The goal is to get them to DO anything for their interrorgators. Obviously in such a context they would lie to please their interrorgators, if they even clearly remember what the truth was anymore. The goal is essentialy to get prisoners to "snitch" on other prisoners, who are also being tortured. In then end, you get nothing.
This is an oft-cited critique of torture that I think has misplaced value. Eliminating false information would be trivial. Computer scientists, of all people, should be able to recognize this. All it would require is that you simply compare facts and information gathered from the individual to things verifiably known to be true. Furthermore, one could compile statements and information from a number of subjects to further provide light on the situation. Combining a bit of positive/negative reinforcement based on the validity of these already-known facts, would make obtaining true information very likely.
Torture isn't like it is in the movies or TV. On "24" when Jack Bauer is torturing someone, he is almost always looking for a very specific piece of information, is reasonably certain the victim has the information, and CRITICALLY, has some way of verifying the accuracy of that information. In the real world, none of the above is true. Even if you know you have a "bad guy", you have no idea whay he might know. Any you almost always have no way of corroborating any of it. You torture Tom, Tom fingers Dick, Dick denies it, you torture Dick and he relents and fingers Harry, Harry denies it, etc.
Think long and hard about the kinds of questions you would ask a suspected Al Qaeda detainee:
Do you know any members of Al Qaeda? See above for how this plays out.
Where can I find documents? Any documents the guy HAD they already would have taken, anything he had privy to but they didn't have in custody would have been moved or destroyed.
Establishing any "base facts" and properly ogranizing prisoners so that they are in "known" groups so you cna cross-check their information is much harder than you seem to think. This isn't the cops people, where you hand them your driver's licence with your name on it and then they can hop down to your address and check out your family. The guy you caught HAS no ID, and even if they did, you couldn't check it. The only way you can know if he is really "Bob Smith" is if one of your other prisoners HAPPENS to be able to recogninze him and is willing to finger him for some odd reason, knowning that he won't be rewarded sine you can't verify anything he says.
Also remember this: There is an unspoken threat of death ALWAYS associated with torture in practice. Torture victims are almost always threated with death as part of the process and most victims firmly believe that they WILL be killed no matter what they do. This also happens a lot in practice (see below). This tends to galavanize resistence in those fighting for an abstract cause. Which brings us to...
This is a moot point, because, in inexperienced hands, NEITHER form of interrogation works. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making a statement on the morality of torture. It just seems, however, quite evident that it would work using only a little background in biology, game-theory, and psychology.
In reality, there are ARE no "experienced torturers for information". Thre are no calm and col
"They are also not going to make a hit with dungeons and dragons online, since many players have invested hundreds of dollars in the game. Players would be reluctant to let it all gather dust on a shelf and give up on their favorite gathering places."
I'd just point out that this bit is a little silly. MMORPGs and "pen and paper" RPGs are considerably different experiences (just like "live action" and "pen and paper" are) to the point where they actually appeal to different audiences. I have little interest in MMORPGs because they seem to MOSTLY be about level-grinding and not about plots, interacting with other players and NPCs, politics, etc. Yes, I understand there is some of that in many MMORPGs, but in most of them that stuff tends to be restricted to high-level characters that spend lots of time leveling up. I played lots of text MUDs back in the day and this is what drove me away. The actual GAMEPLAY per se has seemed to advance very little since then.
What I want isn't a MMORPG that emulates the "pen and paper" experience, which is impossible, but a MMORPG that emulates the experience of a computer-style RPG, like Bloodlines or KotOR, where there IS leveling up and fiddling with weapons and gear and whatnot, but it takes a major back seat to advancing the story. In fact, advancing the story is often the key to "leveling up". I'd like a game where EVERY PC was integral to the plot, where every PC affects the world and more importantly, the other PCs. I think this goal is basically incompatible with the "Massive" part of MMORPGs which is why they don't seem poised to replace single-player RPGs.
In other news:
Oreo cookies are black AND white!
Politicians accept bribes!
The sun rises in the east!
Simple NAShttp://www.trittontechnologies.com/products/TRI NSS001.htm
You can get capacities up to 250GB, but I bought the bare enclosure.
Upsides:
Cheap
Built-in SAMBA server
Built-in FTP server
Works with Linux
Public/Private shares
Downsides:
FAT32
100mb/s
Telnet doesn't work right
No SSH or SFTP
Bought it for $99 at Fry's.
+1 Insightful? More like -1 Ridiculous! They're in the freakin movie business. The way they make money is by selling movies. They wouldn't release DVDs if pirating were easy? Like they did with VHS? Yeah, not a single movie was released on VHS.
Ever heard of Universal City Studios v. Sony? The movie industry viciously fought the introduction of home video recorders for precisely this reason. They thought that VCRs would damage the box office with absolutely no thought given to the aftermarket revenues that might be gained from tape sales and rentals. They only adopted DVD with the assurance of "strong" encryption in the format. You can bet given the failure of CSS that the next format, whether HD-DVD or BluRay, will have MUCH more intense encryption and restrictions.
I like Windows. I could use OS X, I could use some variety of Linux, but I prefer using Windows on my desktop and for some server tasks.
Why?
1) Accusations of instability regarding Windows are largely unfounded.
I've personally found WinXP to be considerably more stable than most Linux distributions I've tried. I seem to run into conflicting dependencies and apps the freeze X all the damn time. Many recent Linux distributions wouldn't even install on my home rig.
2) The interface is as good as I want it to be.
Yeah I got WindowBlinds. I can do all kinds of skins and alternative desktops, but I've adapted to the bells and whistles of Windows and I don't see the need to adapt to new bells and whistles. I've used MacOSX and while I think, on balance, I like the interface better I don't like it better ENOUGH to adjust to the changes. (I also basically don't like the Apple hardware.)
3) Windows has a greater variety of software than any other platform
If I want a highly specialized app for some purpose there's almost always something out there for Windows. And I can be reasonably certain it will be be compatible with my system due to the very high compatibility of Windows apps and because of the standardized Windows interfaces I'll be able to figure out how to use it relatively quickly. This is true of Unix to a large extent, but only for COMMAND LINE apps. I love the command line as much as the next guy, I've used CP/M, I've used DOS, I've used SysV, I've moved on.
4) Exchange kicks ass.
Active Directory + Exchange + Outlook + IM stomps all over every other e-mail/groupware system. Lotus sucks, IMNSHO. This alone is enough of a reason to have Windows as part of your organization's lan. MSSQL is also an excellent database if you don't have to do too much heavy lifting, and Windows Media is an excelltent content distribution system.
5) I play computer games.
This should be self-explanatory.
ITunes is proof that Steve Jobs is both brilliant and a fantastic liar.
See, the Big 5 are deathly afraid of suffering from the "MTV syndrome" when it comes to digital downloads. See, originally music videos were seen as an interesting way to promote and "package" artists which proved incredibly sucessful through the 80's and early 90's through the partnership of the big labels and MTV, which initally was desperate for content for it's PAID service, then they switched to an advertising model with the videos as content, and the station took off. Eventually of course, the MTV people realized that the videos THEMSELVES were advertisements and started charging for airplay (no payola laws for music videos afaik). The labels didn't like being held hostage this way and it's one of the big reasons for the decline of actual music videos on MTV and MTV2.
iTunes was sold to the Big 5 essentially as an experimental system for devoted Mac fans. The software would ONLY run on Macs and the iPod (which would only work with Macs). This was a critical sales point because the Big 5's other major concern was widespread piracy of digital music tracks (not that that wasn't happening already). The Big 5 recognized that Apple is a relatively small player in the PC space so that even if their DRM protection was cracked, if the software/player only worked on Macs there couldn't be THAT much piracy since only a relatively small market used Macs. They also didn't have to worry about the "MTV syndrome" because incompatibility with Windows, Linux, and other big MP3 player vendors (Rio, Creative, etc.) would keep iTunes confined to a niche market.
Hasn't turned out that way has it?
Okay, so I was wrong about the Power Glove. But the Virtual Boy was an entire SYSTEM that tanked.
One of key issues with the Revolution controller is how easy it will be to ADAPT games to the new controller config that are designed to use "conventional" PS3 and 360 controllers. Just because the same Nintendo engineers that designed it are able to get one game working after many months of effort does NOT mean it will be easy for 3rd parties to port games.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a long-standing truism that add-on peripherials for consoles usually tank, even if really compelling (the Zapper came bundled with the NES). So most developers will assume that they ONLY can use what comes bundled with the system unless they package the peripheral with their product, which raises the cost of their game and probably lowers their margin. This means that many developers are likely to shy away from using any "add-ons" Nintendo comes up with for the controller. That includes the analog stick unless it comes bundled (evidence seems to suggest it does).
In the end, it's really software that ultimately drives the adoption of a console. I was almost going to buy a GameCube for Resident Evil 4, but then I heard it was coming out on the PS2.
If some really compelling exclusive comes out for the Revolution I might buy one, but otherwise I'll probably stick with the more popular PS3 or XBox360, depending on which is more hackable.