My analogy only used box-cutters for a bad pun. Terrorism is nothing when compared to WWII, the Civil War, or even the cold war.
We need oil to survive, we have the means by which to protect our access to oil, and have a responsibility to exercise this ability.
We don't need oil to survive any more than the Saudis need computers to survive. If you are willing to admit the Saudis have the authority to invade a sovereign country based on their need for a supply of Intel processors, then fine. Oil is a commodity market so it actually makes very little difference as to who "likes us" as to whether we'll get oil. BP will sell it to the highest bidder.
Since Bush took office, there have been no efforts to stifle dissent. The PATRIOT Act has principally been used to ease investigation of traditional crimes.
We only know what the administration tells us w.r.t. how the PATRIOT act is used since there's no judicial oversight to any of the so-called executive orders. We don't know who they investigate, we don't know how we get on no-fly lists nor how to get off (Senator Kennedy was on the no-fly list at one point, google it), and the trials are secret. How do you know whether justice and dissent are not being stifled in a closed system?
So your problem is not with what's being done, but the reason that is given for it being done?
In so far as we can know, I'd like to say the reason for its being done. The only difference between murder and self-defense is the reason for the killing. Just as individuals can be threatened, so can nations. But saying you shot a man to protect yourself when he was unarmed is still murder. My problem is Bush is using automatic weapons and missiles against individuals who attacked him with a box cutter. It's not self-defense any more.
Historically, during times of national emergency the government has taken on additional powers. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and FDR raised taxes to fund WWII (and the Great Depression). The difference between then and now, in my book, is not the acquiring of those powers, but the basis by which they were acquired. Whereas the confederacy (1) actually threatened the stability of the US and (2) had a definite surrender date (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865), Bush & Co are acquiring the same power with the same reasoning but with no comparable foe. Al Qaeda's power pales in comparison to the threat the Nazis posed or to the threat succession posed. Nor can they actually surrender in any meaningful way.
In short, the difference here is taking temporary powers the executive has acquired in the past and extended them to permanent status via creation of an artificial war (the "war" on terror is no more a war than the "war" on drugs) in a 1984-esque fashion.
So there was this guy on trial, he says to the jury "Looks like I have money, you have power, let's talk. We can work something out".
What's wrong with the above? Money is trading hands between private individuals for mutual exchange, but something the public owns (i.e. the judicial system) is getting used not for the greater good of society, but for individuals. It's the same thing with radio. There's a limited amount of bandwidth the public gives away with knowledge that the owner will use it impartially for playing music. If payola is legal, radio stations may as well be owned by the record companies themselves. If Virgin records had a radio station, they'd use it to shamelessly promote their own artists. This isn't so hypothetical since Virgin does in fact own a satellite radio station, but that's OK, since in so doing, they are not using up the limited public bandwidth.
This is a little abstract now that most radio stations are owned by Clear Channel and have no claim to independence, but this was originally meant to allow some separation and moderation between the consumer and the record companies, while allowing new artists and record companies to have low barriers to entry. There's still college radio stations, pacifica radio, and NPR stations, but aside from that, unfortunately non-bias in exchange for public goods does seem to have gone with the times.
By analogy, that would mean there ought to be televisions around that are black and white since the market found those acceptable too. And many systems should still be using atari-like graphics (Atari was a huge hit, market accepted that too).
I think the major point the author is making is that, if asked, we'd believe our productivity to be improved because of the newer technology in these basic operations, but it's not (or so he claims). We just don't see Apple+s any more so we have no standards for comparison; it's always been this speed, just as Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.
I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a game engine and a scene graph, but perhaps you should give Open Scene Graph a try. It's Open Source, well documented, supports import of models from many popular 3D modeling toolkits, and (I believe) recently added shader support. Works great on Windows and Linux (with a relatively even percentage of developers on both platforms who use it) and gives stellar performance. No licensing fee for commercial use either.
While it doesn't provide audio/input support directly, it's a good starting point for graphics (which, in my experience), is the most difficult part of development.
Linus would be completely irrelevant as he only develops a kernel. It would be like if the BSD kernel guys got invited instead of Jobs for Apple. Both Gates and Jobs primarily care about the end user experience which is pretty irrelevant to kernel development.
If Linus makes his own portable music play (call it the "minus"), then invite him. Until then, I'm afraid only someone like Stallman, Parens, or maybe the Ubuntu guy even come close to offering as broad a spectrum of offerings from the open source community. Of course, bazaars have never had leaders (unlike cathedrals) so I suspect the open source community will remain without a central cultish Jobs-like figure.
So you want to you Ajax? Great! So your client is using a web browser written in Perl and an OS written in Java? And the Perl interpreter is written in assembly? Good good.
C will live as long as performance is important in computing, but I suspect it will be THE low level language (i.e. higher than fortran, lower than Python/Perl/Ruby/Java) and that if anything, Fortran/Cobol will/have become irrelevant since (1) C is very popular and (2) C can be seamlessly integrated into C++. C++ will also live forever due to C's popularity (can write complex graphics code and object oriented code in the same code base (i.e. Civ4)).
The Gypsies were persecuted with as much fervor as the Jews. According to Wikipedia, 500k to 1m died. While it's not as large a gross number, proportionately, it's just as high if not higher. Interestingly, the Roma were the original Aryans who had traveled rather than staying in Germany. So the Nazis, in a rare show of coherency, only allowed part-gypsies to be exterminated but allowed full-blood Roma regular status. Later, it was argued that no one could have not become corrupted and the Roma were uniformly exterminated.
If they weren't victimized as systematically, why so much official propaganda and policies on the subject? See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porajmos
I think what makes brain age different than every other game is that the sole focus of the game is self-improvement; it's like an RPG where you are (rather than control the main character). Let me explain.
In most RPGs, you get better primarily by gaining levels or acquiring new equipment. In Zelda, you get a new boomerang or a better sword. What's unique about brain age is that rather than doing better because you got the +10K dagger of Pwnage, your skills actually improve. You become better at adding and lower your "brain age". It's just like an RPG; you gain rated levels based on how you perform, but the focus is on your performing better, rather than giving your character special skills or equipment that allow them to perform better in your stead.
I can't think of too many other games where the focus is on self-improvement rather than avatar-improvement (or just simply a high score).
Collecting items doesn't make for an RPG, but getting getting experience and gaining levels some people might call an RPG. Not in the same way Final Fantasy is, but in the way that Diablo is.
(Is it just me, or does Zelda II just like the newer Castlevanias?)
The Judiciary Committee hearing this testimony included Rick Boucher (VA) and Howard Berman (CA), both recipients of campaign contributions from a PAC funded by 1-Click inventor Jeff Bezos, other Amazon execs, and their families.
The article summary is misleading. Rick Boucher has sponsored both DMCA reform and Net neutrality legislation. (The net neutrality legislation, BTW, comes in spite of the fact one of his #3 largest contributer ($14K) is AT&T). Hell, we even interviewed him on slashdot! Doesn't anyone have a memory? He's one of the "better guys".
And for the record, Amazon isn't wholly evil either. They're heavy users of OSS and favor policies like net neutrality. Maybe, just maybe, they sent him money for that reason? (For the record, the amount was a whopping $2.5K out of $933K in 2006.)
Isn't the fact that Boucher gave us net neutrality, the DMCRA, and was interviewed on slashdot more relevant than a piddly campaign contribution from Amazon?
The GC's main controller innovation IMHO was a first party wireless controller (3rd party ones notoriously sucked in my experience). If that's not influential, both the 360 and PS3 have come to the same conclusion independently.
According to TFA, the maps will just have different routes with a random amount on or off. It's like having a house, locking random rooms, and calling it "randomly generated". While it will provide some variation, the player will memorize the house and then just need to memorize which rooms are on and off on a per game basis.
Unfortunately, playing on fastest is a built-in feature of the ladder system=) I like playing with humans in RTS games since their tactics are unpredictable, adaptive, and they quit when they're losing (killing every last AI building is annoying).
Yeah, I'm in the minority who loved playing smaller maps (mmm...blood bath) on normal speed, but like I said earlier, by reducing unit numbers, interface feature like autocast, and reducing the "standard" speed, WC3 is much more playable on ladder in my experience.
Microsoft Australia's Chief Security Adviser Peter Watson calls UAC a great idea (and wishes everyone had it)
In other news, the Notre Dame football coach thinks his team can win. Local Ford salesman hates Toyotas. Linus Torvalds thinks Linux is great. Christians report having favorable rating for Jesus this year.
MS's Chief Security Adviser is paid to evangelize MS security. This is news?
I loved Warcraft I and II, but I lost interest when Bliz started emphasized the cartoony fantasy elements
Which version of Warcraft 2 are you playing that didn't look cartoony?
The RPG-esque elements of WC3 never appealed to me and the lower unit count drove me nuts.
SC drove me nuts precisely because you had so many units and that interface wasn't built for it. Templars were useless except to turn into archons since with 200 units, you can't even bother to cast spells. Like WC3, you could only select 24 units at a time, despite the possibility of having over 300 units at once (zerglings cost 1/2 food each). Also, most good players who play SC use a cheese strategy, just building one thing, and this works reasonably well. I liked how units complimented one another in WC3, and building only one unit type, was almost certainly suicide.
To each his own. If they do another SC, the only thing I can honestly say I liked better about SC was the more diverse factions (WC3 factions are too similar), human nuke fun, and carriers.
So if I go through a dozen configuration files I might get my game to work worse than on Windows? Gee, I can't wait!
Seriously, most of us have a computer with Windows already or know how to use BitTorrent well enough to get it; price isn't an object. Don't get me wrong; some of use linux every day at work at love it, but would rather spend our evenings gaming or hanging out with people rather than further OS dabbling for a worse result.
Heck, we're almost there already: OS, Office suite, Web browser, Mail client, development environment, games (for those that don't need the latest FPS from Megacorp, anyway).
Logic like this reminds me of people who promote Christian music over "secular" music. "You like Led Zeppelin? Well you shouldn't listen to them, there's satanic references in their music. Creed is almost as good, and they're Christian!".
Some of us prefer quality over ideology; I love FireFox, but I'll play Civ4/Starcraft over FreeCiv/Freecraft (whatever the WC2 clone is) any day. When people do something for its own sake, that's usually when it turns out best.
While 2K is nice and stable running lots of games, one of the best reasons XP was great for gamers is that they could get Win2K stability, but backwards compatibility with Win98 only apps/games. After 7 years, one of the pleasant side effects is that more things are compatible with 2k game-wise, but this wasn't always the case.
My point was that the metrics are important, but the people buying the servers are going to do research regardless of the marketing material. If AMD marketed itself as "better" you'd consider it just as if they marketed themselves as "power-saving". While AMD may gain some traction in the server farm market from the ads, the waste the opportunity to gain traction in any other market by targeting a niche, and in doing so make people who want to buy AMD chips for other reasons think twice -- "You can have an Intel chip or another chip that saves power." "I'll take the regular intel chip"
I think one of the major reasons why AMD did so poorly last quarter was its silly marketing campaign. Towering signs on billboards and large airport ads tout AMD as "smarter choice", since it uses less power.
Marketing a chip as using less power is the same as having Toyota make an exclusive advertising campaign toward wheel-chair bound people: the group you're targeting has few people in it and they're going to research any product they buy. The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.
With this announcement, I'm hoping AMD starts a new slogan touting, say speed. That's what I buy a processor for primarily. AMD's always been fast for the cost and it's high time they market themselves as being faster and better rather than being "as good as" Intel. My new pick for a marketing slogan? "Upgrade to AMD" AMD should position its chips to be slightly more expensive at every pricing tier, but in doing so, blow them away in performance. (In the present economy, businesses have money and will gladly spend more money on products they feel are superior. Ford spends more money on marketing than BMW (but which would you rather own?). AMD should be trying to make Intel look like Ford, rather than being the "Ford alternative".)
AMD is marketing to a minor concern of a niche audience, while they ought to be using their superior performance (at a given price point) to sell hardware. Would you rather be a "power saver" or "upgrade to AMD".
I recall something similar happened with Windows Me where many vendors actually offered machines with Win98SE instead. Is Vista shaping up to be the next Windows Me?
Before I believe any of that I want to see what they define as 'female'
Yup, most slashdotters have a problem defining it. I'll define it as "someone who has different stuff than you between their legs" and leave you to ponder what it possibly might look like;)
It looks to me like it's mostly QA folk. I work at a software company and while software may be "ready", until it's tested, it doesn't go out the door. It's common to pull testers away from other projects to QA a product that should ship sooner. Firaxis talked about the same thing with their last Civ4 expansion; it was done, but couldn't go out the door since the QA folk were working on releasing something else.
I don't think it spells any sort of major problem for Apple or a shifting of net resources away from OS development.
Slashdot Mirror
My analogy only used box-cutters for a bad pun. Terrorism is nothing when compared to WWII, the Civil War, or even the cold war.
We need oil to survive, we have the means by which to protect our access to oil, and have a responsibility to exercise this ability.
We don't need oil to survive any more than the Saudis need computers to survive. If you are willing to admit the Saudis have the authority to invade a sovereign country based on their need for a supply of Intel processors, then fine. Oil is a commodity market so it actually makes very little difference as to who "likes us" as to whether we'll get oil. BP will sell it to the highest bidder.
Since Bush took office, there have been no efforts to stifle dissent. The PATRIOT Act has principally been used to ease investigation of traditional crimes.
We only know what the administration tells us w.r.t. how the PATRIOT act is used since there's no judicial oversight to any of the so-called executive orders. We don't know who they investigate, we don't know how we get on no-fly lists nor how to get off (Senator Kennedy was on the no-fly list at one point, google it), and the trials are secret. How do you know whether justice and dissent are not being stifled in a closed system?
So your problem is not with what's being done, but the reason that is given for it being done?
In so far as we can know, I'd like to say the reason for its being done. The only difference between murder and self-defense is the reason for the killing. Just as individuals can be threatened, so can nations. But saying you shot a man to protect yourself when he was unarmed is still murder. My problem is Bush is using automatic weapons and missiles against individuals who attacked him with a box cutter. It's not self-defense any more.
Historically, during times of national emergency the government has taken on additional powers. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and FDR raised taxes to fund WWII (and the Great Depression). The difference between then and now, in my book, is not the acquiring of those powers, but the basis by which they were acquired. Whereas the confederacy (1) actually threatened the stability of the US and (2) had a definite surrender date (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865), Bush & Co are acquiring the same power with the same reasoning but with no comparable foe. Al Qaeda's power pales in comparison to the threat the Nazis posed or to the threat succession posed. Nor can they actually surrender in any meaningful way.
In short, the difference here is taking temporary powers the executive has acquired in the past and extended them to permanent status via creation of an artificial war (the "war" on terror is no more a war than the "war" on drugs) in a 1984-esque fashion.
So there was this guy on trial, he says to the jury "Looks like I have money, you have power, let's talk. We can work something out".
What's wrong with the above? Money is trading hands between private individuals for mutual exchange, but something the public owns (i.e. the judicial system) is getting used not for the greater good of society, but for individuals. It's the same thing with radio. There's a limited amount of bandwidth the public gives away with knowledge that the owner will use it impartially for playing music. If payola is legal, radio stations may as well be owned by the record companies themselves. If Virgin records had a radio station, they'd use it to shamelessly promote their own artists. This isn't so hypothetical since Virgin does in fact own a satellite radio station, but that's OK, since in so doing, they are not using up the limited public bandwidth.
This is a little abstract now that most radio stations are owned by Clear Channel and have no claim to independence, but this was originally meant to allow some separation and moderation between the consumer and the record companies, while allowing new artists and record companies to have low barriers to entry. There's still college radio stations, pacifica radio, and NPR stations, but aside from that, unfortunately non-bias in exchange for public goods does seem to have gone with the times.
By analogy, that would mean there ought to be televisions around that are black and white since the market found those acceptable too. And many systems should still be using atari-like graphics (Atari was a huge hit, market accepted that too).
I think the major point the author is making is that, if asked, we'd believe our productivity to be improved because of the newer technology in these basic operations, but it's not (or so he claims). We just don't see Apple+s any more so we have no standards for comparison; it's always been this speed, just as Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.
I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a game engine and a scene graph, but perhaps you should give Open Scene Graph a try. It's Open Source, well documented, supports import of models from many popular 3D modeling toolkits, and (I believe) recently added shader support. Works great on Windows and Linux (with a relatively even percentage of developers on both platforms who use it) and gives stellar performance. No licensing fee for commercial use either.
While it doesn't provide audio/input support directly, it's a good starting point for graphics (which, in my experience), is the most difficult part of development.
Linus would be completely irrelevant as he only develops a kernel. It would be like if the BSD kernel guys got invited instead of Jobs for Apple. Both Gates and Jobs primarily care about the end user experience which is pretty irrelevant to kernel development.
If Linus makes his own portable music play (call it the "minus"), then invite him. Until then, I'm afraid only someone like Stallman, Parens, or maybe the Ubuntu guy even come close to offering as broad a spectrum of offerings from the open source community. Of course, bazaars have never had leaders (unlike cathedrals) so I suspect the open source community will remain without a central cultish Jobs-like figure.
So you want to you Ajax? Great! So your client is using a web browser written in Perl and an OS written in Java? And the Perl interpreter is written in assembly? Good good.
C will live as long as performance is important in computing, but I suspect it will be THE low level language (i.e. higher than fortran, lower than Python/Perl/Ruby/Java) and that if anything, Fortran/Cobol will/have become irrelevant since (1) C is very popular and (2) C can be seamlessly integrated into C++. C++ will also live forever due to C's popularity (can write complex graphics code and object oriented code in the same code base (i.e. Civ4)).
The Gypsies were persecuted with as much fervor as the Jews. According to Wikipedia, 500k to 1m died. While it's not as large a gross number, proportionately, it's just as high if not higher. Interestingly, the Roma were the original Aryans who had traveled rather than staying in Germany. So the Nazis, in a rare show of coherency, only allowed part-gypsies to be exterminated but allowed full-blood Roma regular status. Later, it was argued that no one could have not become corrupted and the Roma were uniformly exterminated.
If they weren't victimized as systematically, why so much official propaganda and policies on the subject? See Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porajmos
I think what makes brain age different than every other game is that the sole focus of the game is self-improvement; it's like an RPG where you are (rather than control the main character). Let me explain.
In most RPGs, you get better primarily by gaining levels or acquiring new equipment. In Zelda, you get a new boomerang or a better sword. What's unique about brain age is that rather than doing better because you got the +10K dagger of Pwnage, your skills actually improve. You become better at adding and lower your "brain age". It's just like an RPG; you gain rated levels based on how you perform, but the focus is on your performing better, rather than giving your character special skills or equipment that allow them to perform better in your stead.
I can't think of too many other games where the focus is on self-improvement rather than avatar-improvement (or just simply a high score).
Collecting items doesn't make for an RPG, but getting getting experience and gaining levels some people might call an RPG. Not in the same way Final Fantasy is, but in the way that Diablo is.
(Is it just me, or does Zelda II just like the newer Castlevanias?)
The Judiciary Committee hearing this testimony included Rick Boucher (VA) and Howard Berman (CA), both recipients of campaign contributions from a PAC funded by 1-Click inventor Jeff Bezos, other Amazon execs, and their families.
The article summary is misleading. Rick Boucher has sponsored both DMCA reform and Net neutrality legislation. (The net neutrality legislation, BTW, comes in spite of the fact one of his #3 largest contributer ($14K) is AT&T). Hell, we even interviewed him on slashdot! Doesn't anyone have a memory? He's one of the "better guys".
And for the record, Amazon isn't wholly evil either. They're heavy users of OSS and favor policies like net neutrality. Maybe, just maybe, they sent him money for that reason? (For the record, the amount was a whopping $2.5K out of $933K in 2006.)
Isn't the fact that Boucher gave us net neutrality, the DMCRA, and was interviewed on slashdot more relevant than a piddly campaign contribution from Amazon?
The GC's main controller innovation IMHO was a first party wireless controller (3rd party ones notoriously sucked in my experience). If that's not influential, both the 360 and PS3 have come to the same conclusion independently.
According to TFA, the maps will just have different routes with a random amount on or off. It's like having a house, locking random rooms, and calling it "randomly generated". While it will provide some variation, the player will memorize the house and then just need to memorize which rooms are on and off on a per game basis.
Unfortunately, playing on fastest is a built-in feature of the ladder system=) I like playing with humans in RTS games since their tactics are unpredictable, adaptive, and they quit when they're losing (killing every last AI building is annoying).
Yeah, I'm in the minority who loved playing smaller maps (mmm...blood bath) on normal speed, but like I said earlier, by reducing unit numbers, interface feature like autocast, and reducing the "standard" speed, WC3 is much more playable on ladder in my experience.
Microsoft Australia's Chief Security Adviser Peter Watson calls UAC a great idea (and wishes everyone had it)
In other news, the Notre Dame football coach thinks his team can win. Local Ford salesman hates Toyotas. Linus Torvalds thinks Linux is great. Christians report having favorable rating for Jesus this year.
MS's Chief Security Adviser is paid to evangelize MS security. This is news?
I loved Warcraft I and II, but I lost interest when Bliz started emphasized the cartoony fantasy elements
Which version of Warcraft 2 are you playing that didn't look cartoony?
The RPG-esque elements of WC3 never appealed to me and the lower unit count drove me nuts.
SC drove me nuts precisely because you had so many units and that interface wasn't built for it. Templars were useless except to turn into archons since with 200 units, you can't even bother to cast spells. Like WC3, you could only select 24 units at a time, despite the possibility of having over 300 units at once (zerglings cost 1/2 food each). Also, most good players who play SC use a cheese strategy, just building one thing, and this works reasonably well. I liked how units complimented one another in WC3, and building only one unit type, was almost certainly suicide.
To each his own. If they do another SC, the only thing I can honestly say I liked better about SC was the more diverse factions (WC3 factions are too similar), human nuke fun, and carriers.
So if I go through a dozen configuration files I might get my game to work worse than on Windows? Gee, I can't wait!
Seriously, most of us have a computer with Windows already or know how to use BitTorrent well enough to get it; price isn't an object. Don't get me wrong; some of use linux every day at work at love it, but would rather spend our evenings gaming or hanging out with people rather than further OS dabbling for a worse result.
Heck, we're almost there already: OS, Office suite, Web browser, Mail client, development environment, games (for those that don't need the latest FPS from Megacorp, anyway).
Logic like this reminds me of people who promote Christian music over "secular" music. "You like Led Zeppelin? Well you shouldn't listen to them, there's satanic references in their music. Creed is almost as good, and they're Christian!".
Some of us prefer quality over ideology; I love FireFox, but I'll play Civ4/Starcraft over FreeCiv/Freecraft (whatever the WC2 clone is) any day. When people do something for its own sake, that's usually when it turns out best.
While 2K is nice and stable running lots of games, one of the best reasons XP was great for gamers is that they could get Win2K stability, but backwards compatibility with Win98 only apps/games. After 7 years, one of the pleasant side effects is that more things are compatible with 2k game-wise, but this wasn't always the case.
My point was that the metrics are important, but the people buying the servers are going to do research regardless of the marketing material. If AMD marketed itself as "better" you'd consider it just as if they marketed themselves as "power-saving". While AMD may gain some traction in the server farm market from the ads, the waste the opportunity to gain traction in any other market by targeting a niche, and in doing so make people who want to buy AMD chips for other reasons think twice -- "You can have an Intel chip or another chip that saves power." "I'll take the regular intel chip"
AMD should market to their entire market.
I think one of the major reasons why AMD did so poorly last quarter was its silly marketing campaign. Towering signs on billboards and large airport ads tout AMD as "smarter choice", since it uses less power.
Marketing a chip as using less power is the same as having Toyota make an exclusive advertising campaign toward wheel-chair bound people: the group you're targeting has few people in it and they're going to research any product they buy. The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.
With this announcement, I'm hoping AMD starts a new slogan touting, say speed. That's what I buy a processor for primarily. AMD's always been fast for the cost and it's high time they market themselves as being faster and better rather than being "as good as" Intel. My new pick for a marketing slogan? "Upgrade to AMD" AMD should position its chips to be slightly more expensive at every pricing tier, but in doing so, blow them away in performance. (In the present economy, businesses have money and will gladly spend more money on products they feel are superior. Ford spends more money on marketing than BMW (but which would you rather own?). AMD should be trying to make Intel look like Ford, rather than being the "Ford alternative".)
AMD is marketing to a minor concern of a niche audience, while they ought to be using their superior performance (at a given price point) to sell hardware. Would you rather be a "power saver" or "upgrade to AMD".
I recall something similar happened with Windows Me where many vendors actually offered machines with Win98SE instead. Is Vista shaping up to be the next Windows Me?
Before I believe any of that I want to see what they define as 'female'
Yup, most slashdotters have a problem defining it. I'll define it as "someone who has different stuff than you between their legs" and leave you to ponder what it possibly might look like;)
It looks to me like it's mostly QA folk. I work at a software company and while software may be "ready", until it's tested, it doesn't go out the door. It's common to pull testers away from other projects to QA a product that should ship sooner. Firaxis talked about the same thing with their last Civ4 expansion; it was done, but couldn't go out the door since the QA folk were working on releasing something else.
I don't think it spells any sort of major problem for Apple or a shifting of net resources away from OS development.