Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"?
Not really. Some people don't upgrade as long as their computer is "Good Enough." When something comes along and proves their machine isn't "Good Enough" anymore, they upgrade. It's because the machine is old -- the game is just a catalyst. I had a buddy in college who upgraded his machine for Wing Commander Prophecy and again for Mechwarrier 4 -- compared to that, upgrading to Doom 3 (which will be undoubtedly a social success) doesn't seem like such a big deal.
(Incidentally, my upgrade cycle is based on how dirty my keyboard is. When the keyboard gets so dirty I don't want to touch it, I replace the whole thing. This usually takes about 2 years or so).
Ahem. A Geforce 4 MX is less than $60 and the least powerful card offered on many non-Optiplex Dell setups. Sorry he isn't hand building the machines and thus able to remove the functionality that he, a lowly IT guy, thinks other people shouldn't need.
I guess I should also point out that as of next year and Longhorn, Windows will be pumped through the GPU and thus any machine you order today with a non-GPU graphics card will need an upgrade before it can run Longhorn. And if Avalon is anything like Quartz Extreme, it will make a BIG and NOTICABLE difference in the user interface, even on fast machines. I suppose you may not need fluid graphics or modern technology at the office, but it's also not worth the savings over the life of the machine to skimp on this sort of thing.
Re:Have to be careful here with music tastes
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IT's Musical Habits
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm a Mac user (who also runs gentoo and Win2k). I listen to hip hop and I absolutely love Patsy Cline (my dad has all her records, he dated her once and made a complete ass of himself). I also enjoy opera (prefer German to Italian, which grates a little), own every Megadeth record and have no problem switching between any of these styles of music in the context of a Party Shuffle.
There is only one type of music I won't listen to, and that's lazy, overproduced, low concept pop. If a person doesn't care enough to at least make the best, most interesting music they can regardless of their chosen stylistic patterns, I don't want to hear it.
Incidentally, the reason most hip-hop fans assume their opponents are closed minded is that most people who hate the music hate it solely on the wack bullshit they play on the radio. That boring, unlyrical crunk/pimp crap is not hip-hop, no matter what they tell you -- it's as much hip-hop as Britney is rock and roll, or Avril Lavigne is punk. An opinion based on these input media would be like basing your opinion on pastries on a pop tart, or basing your opinion on the outdoors on some swamp.
Absolutely untrue. MS Word has always been different from Word Perfect, but Word was designed around discovery, not around workflow. You can get more done in any version of Word Perfect faster, and WP had cascading markup well before the days of HTML -- a lot of people prefer this to the Microsoft stylesheets and sections method. Word Perfect -- up until 6.0, which was the first attempt to go beyond workflow into the WYSIWYG paradigm and it was slow as hell -- was a brilliant piece of software with a simple interface. Best of all, if you didn't know how to do something, you could press F3, type the letter of what function you were looking for, and it would tell you how to do it. There was a menu if you wanted, and syntax highlighting if you wanted. Otherwise, it was just you and the text. No distractions. Very productive. Worth the $300.
You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design
Open Source is hardly the model of connectivity. In fact, since the model demands that somebody be willing to do the work they need done, or willing to do the work for somebody else, there are segments of the market -- beginners who are non-programmers with no other computers -- who will never be connected. Furthermore, I've notice many Open Source afficianados are complete dicks. Hard to have 100% pure communication when your success depends on a guy whose answer to every question is "STFU and RTFM, n00b." Heck, those words don't even make SENSE outside of the context of the community.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory.
The one he never made? You know, bringing up points that are provably false doesn't help your argument or your image.
I think you're behind the times, kid. Microsoft hasn't been ruled by "King Gates" in some time...he's moved on to more of an advisory roll and delegated most of the company's decisions to Balmer. Furthermore, there are a number of markets in which Microsoft still has the low price solution...for example, if you want a reliable load balanced database, SQL Server kicks the price pants off of Oracle and DB2. Sybase is languishing and open source doesn't have anything remotely near the feature set of these four (no, we can't all use MySQL).
You're also apparently unaware of some of the options Microsoft was faced with on their way to becoming the "huge, oppressive, evil monopoly" that made my second favorite operating system. Back in the day, you could drop $300+ on a copy of Word Perfect, or get Word for something like $100. Like Open Source today, Word was the inferior solution from a feature set and usability standpoint, but it was cheaper and offered enough functionality that most people didn't care. Later, Office sprung up as a way to further lower costs by offering the most common pieces of software for one low price. This left Lotus and WordPerfect scrambling to put together a package that was similar and/or better for a similarly low price. In the end, Microsoft's suite was better integrated, interoperated better (e.g. AmiPro/WordPro could open MS documents well but not visa versa, leaving MS as the defacto standard) and above all cheaper than its competitors.
Of course, this was well before they were officially a monopoly, back when Lotus and Word Perfect still had a chance to make a decent product, a chance neither of them was capable of. Microsoft won this war because they had better businessmen. The problem is, they didn't change their policies once they won...and you can't play the "exclusive contract" game once you've out-stripped your competeition.
Finally, your government systems analogy is kind of foolish. Hive Societies may be "better" idealistically, but historically have never really worked beyond a certain population level. On the other hand, kingdoms have been quite stable and succesful, especially in parts of the world where individual wealth and education are too concentrated to promote an egalitarian society. In fact, on the micro level almost all systems break down into localized oligarchies, with a single set of localized idea-men and a series of lackeys doing what these men say. A single charismatic ruler will always have better luck at efficiently organizing people and delivering services than a committee in a constant power struggle -- this happens so reliably, I think it is safe to assume that it is a genetic predisposition in the human animal to choose a definite vision when available.
Extrapolating from this, since user education in the computer field will always a bigger issue than price, and most Open Source packages are by definition indefinite, open ended entities, I think we can safely assume Open Source isn't going to revolutionize the proletariat's desktop any time soon.
Re:Semi-serious?
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Game with God
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, Sci-fi can have very deep spiritual (god I hate that term) overtones, sometimes backed up by science, sometimes not. Look at the religious aspects that spring up in Asimov's Foundation saga, and how those aspects change over the course of the hundreds of years that saga portrays -- as science is forgotten, it gives way to religious devotion to the purveyers of knowledge (who themselves worship the progenitor of their system as a prophet). Look at the importance of the Ben Gesserit order in Dune, or the Bejorran religion in Deep Space Nine and the delicate, reverent and earnest way each of these is treated. In the context of the story, there are believers and disbelievers and neither is outright wrong (in fact, in ST:DS9, the detractors are more often wrong...except where church politics have polluted the "true message;" shit, a minor villain of the series is a higher member of the church as are many of the heroes).
In fact, the biggest problem I see with the portrayal of religion in video games is that it's nearly always shown as a sham or a cult. This is just wrong. If you've got powerful gods duking it out in the primary plane of existance, with their hands directly influencing their followers and directly punishing their detractors, what you'd have is a state of immense fear and respect for religions of all kinds. Furthermore, there's a drive, especially among Japanese RPGs, to use scienfic order to explain away magical forces within the text ("magic comes from these blue rocks" or "the gods are just really powerful X and we can kill them with swords"). Also a cop out -- why not have gods that are just undefeatable, and the players have to deal with their lives within that context? Stories work best when properly restricted, and being a pawn in a war you can't affect is serious restriction.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had some interesting "religious" overtones, but they were kind of underdeveloped. Basically, they separated the light side from the dark side mostly on issues of social politics...if you chose the needs of the many over the needs of the few, you'd often lose light side points. Still, basing the outcome of the game (and indeed, the availability of skills and teammates) on moral decisions made for a fun game with lots of replayability.
Of course, I don't really think this is what GamersDad wants. I think the editorial is referring not to a figuritive God, but a literal one. The problem there is that integrating a Chrisitian/Muslim/Judaic/Hindu/Buddhist concept of God into a game effectively alienates the others, thus reducing your game's overall appeal and indeed often relegating it a position as a genre title. It can work -- I seem to recall some positive aspects of Chrisitanity in the old Sierra "Gabriel Knight" series of action games -- but on the whole, potrayals of any real religion, positive or negative, are delicate undertakings.
For many people, space is a much bigger concern than quality of the rip. I have recently decided to bid farewell to archaic desktop technology forever and have made the jump to a laptop. It is nice having everything I need for my computer fit into a single 20 lb bag...but it also means that with MAX hard drive size and MAX iPod size I still only have 120 gig to work with. Most of my collection sits on DVDs organized by genre, which is useful since I rarely want to listen to bluegrass but when I do, I don't want to be fumbling around with a stack of CDs.
I have had to go back to my CDs (which are MY lossless source) a few times in recent months, replacing the albums I ripped in the early days of MP3 before VBR was prevalent and 112 was consider "pretty good." However, AAC is my format for everything going forward. It isn't gonna go away like VQF.
Just because Apple do not themselves support Linux does not mean the iPod will not work on Linux. There are several prominent music export programs for Linux, as well as many good alternatives to iTunes on both Windows and Mac OS. Apple doesn't make iTunes for Linux, but why should they, considering how much money it costs for them to develop, test and support a new platform? There was dissent over whether iTunes for WINDOWS was worth it -- surely creating a solution for the slim number of Linux GUI desktops would be a loss venture. But Apple has been very good about not locking third parties out of their file format...even while they clamp down hard on people bypassing their sharing features. I think it's obvious they're making a distinction between good and bad hacking (from a continuation-of-our-business standpoint, not a moral one).
The DRM is only -- ONLY on files you download from the music store. Don't like DRM? No problem -- don't use the music store. APPLE DOES NOT EVER DRM YOUR FILES. Contrast this with the Windows Media Player, which wraps your files in DRM by default.
The iPod accepts industry standard formats in MP3 and AAC. Both of these having dozens of non-Apple encoders and will have more in the future.
My suggestion? Consider AAC next time you reencode. Since it's part of the MPEG-4 spec (thus having massive industry support as opposed to VQF's "kind of neat" support) and offers a vast improvement in the size to quality ratio (as well as being supported by more portable devices than any other format other than MP3/WAV), it's already the next big thing.
To be completely honest, the 20 gig model they're offering is DIFFERENT from the old 20 gig, anyway. It's not the old "middle" model" bumped down, it's a completely new base model with the same price as the old middle one. Besides the new click wheel (which is a mixed blessing, I *LIKE* the round buttons but the one wheel design is so clean and will make for sturdier accesories), there's also the preeminent Shuffle feature on the main menu. A minor change, but something I would use all the time, since I like to switch between "play this album in context" and "full tilt random" depending on my mood. Right now, this means going back three or four menu levels, surfing to settings, and surfing to Shuffle - Songs. Shuffle on the menu eliminates the need to do this for every switch, and also eliminates one level of searching.
I hope they implement this functionality on the 3G, but since it's a minor enhancement that may sell the new model, I doubt it will find its way back. Shit, it'll sell it to me, soon as that 60 gig is out (my full library is an ever expanding 83 GB, and it's eating 50 gig of my 80 gig laptop drive at any given time).
Furthermore, the dock and carrying case are incentive accessories and are not worth the add on price, anyway. They're not bad, but the case is a little chintzy and the dock no more useful than a straight line cable. They're added to make paying $400 or $500 seem like a better deal. I used my plastic case for about a week before investing in a series of third party accessories, culminating in the excellent iSkin EXO2. I have never seriously used my dock...for a while, it sat on my stereo, but when it did I had no control over the ipod so I switched to a wireless line out (900 MHz, not an FM tuner).
A sysadmin working for a small ISP is NOT a developer. He does not make software for users, he makes software for himself to streamline his own tasks. I should know, as I'm also a sysadmin for a small ISP. I get user calls sometimes (not often, we don't advertise and only take knowledgable customers) -- but I expect to be interrupted thusly, because answering user questions is my job. Performing management tasks is secondary and not as important in terms of driving revenue as keeping customers happy (though certainly, they won't be happy if their backups are corrupt or the mail server is down).
A developer shouldn't have to worry about answering user questions outside of prearranged meeting situations. Customers don't even have my phone number -- when they call with questions, they're forward to our tech support group. Our tech support group is ALSO multitasked to save costs, but it includes members of the QA, product management and sales teams. This frees up development to create the products that drive revenue, but also forces QA, sales and product management to maintain intimate knowledge of the products they are testing/selling/researching.
No, the big attraction of India is that it's popular with big name companies, so all the idiot pretenders can jump on the bandwagon. After all, time at a keyboard is the least important part of creating an effective program. Most of the real work is done in brainstorming sessions with experts and customers. The further insulated your developers and support staff are from the user base, the less effective they become...but right now, "cost savings" is seen as a bigger issue than "effective work," because sales are down and companies are afraid of shareholder lawsuits if they don't cut costs -- costs other than executive salaries, of course.
In about three years, the big names will notice that product quality and sales have dropped dramatically while adjunct costs of outsourcing kept the price per product about the same, and they'll start looking to hire people here to clean things up. Either that, or all the great little startups popping up in this country will steal away their business.
Oh, and maybe we'll get lucky and companies will reverse the process, start hiring Indian executives willing to work for mere hundreds of thousands a year, rather than millions. This will help us effectively extend the slacking-off day.
The really smart users aren't running the same thing everywhere. My dad always said to use the right tool for the right job, and not to, say, hammer things with a big wrench.
I run Gentoo, OSX and Windows 2000 for my server, laptop and workstation, respectively. On the server, I want flexibility, stability and security. On the workstation, I want the ability to run industry standard software packages and perform intensive operations without ever having to muck about with the system's configuration. And on the laptop -- which I use most often -- I want power efficiency, intuitive file management, and a pleasant user experience.
Any time you adapt a tool for a use that's already best met by another tool, you're ignoring the REASON for multiple tools. "Overspecialize and you breed in weakness...it's slow death."
Re:But what about Paul Simon?
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Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Of course he didn't take much flack. If a guy goes out and records an album for the sole purpose of increasing the awareness of an oppressed culture, you don't fault him for breaking the law you invented to inconvenience the opressors. It'd be political suicide.
Please. Every paper is full of shit they just made up. My wife gets interviewed all the time in her line of work, and has never -- not even once -- had her words used in a quote attributed to her. They've actually had her say, on several occasions, things like "I am surprised at what we found." Which is retarded. If she was surprised by it, then why was it in the fucking hypothesis of a double blind experiment?
The Jayson Blair episode only proves that the Times' trust was misplaced. This guy wasn't merely misquoting -- he was flat out lying about doing his job, and this isn't a reflection on the Times' naivete so much as that guy's sleaze. If I were the Times, I'd sued him for his back wages.
To have a paper like the New York Times, who can command advertising rates as high as any paper in the world, bitching and moaning about their web presence and hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company. There is no excuse for it.
Uh, I don't know if you realized this, but newspapers ALSO make a lot -- a LOT -- of money on their archives. In fact, in some areas the only reason the local paper survives is an archival entity, selling their content digitally and on microfilm/fiche to universities and to services like Lexis-Nexus.
There is a big fear in the newspaper industry that opening their archives online will destroy this revenue stream without introducing a comparable new revenue. It is a very realistic fear...I used to work for an online newspaper company, and it was quite common to have customers putting up less than half of their print content after seeing massive drop offs in print sales. Many clients would ask us to clear their archives, so you could only search a month back.
I mean, the Times is a respected paper. Their articles are linked to all over the net despite the required registration, and they can expect every self respecting university to buy the year's microfilm roll. Offering the content for free could ONLY hurt them, so they'd be stupid to do so.
You should point out that this is a generational thing. In Newton's day, you called your prospective model of the universe a law of the universe, implying its infallibility. But many of Newton's "laws" of physics have been proven incomplete...I know his "law" of gravitation, specifically, was missing some numbers.
Because of this, most scientists use the word theory these days, even when they're completely sure of themselves.
This of course confuses people who don't understand what a theory is. Calling something a "theory" only means that it is a possible model of the universe. The word does not give any indication of the probability of the model being valid. I could put forth a theory that the universe is shaped like a lamppost, you could completely disprove it and it would still stand as a theory. Meanwhile, I could put forth that the universe probably has some kind of matter in it somewhere, and it would still be theory.
Think of it this way: if you know, for example, that you will NEVER have a sex life and that you will NEVER go through the traditional dating/marriage male/female dynamic, how does that change you life? For better? For worse?
Well...considering Hawking divorced his wife and married his nurse, I'd have to say that, at the very least, lust is unhindered by lack of fine motor control.
Furthermore, the traditional male/female dynamic is a lie anyhow. Every relationship has hangups about power, sex and love. Disability is only going to expose what's already there.
A pre-announcment means that they haven't started making the product yet, not that it isn't commercially available yet. The Airport Express was done and working when they announced it last month -- but factory delays meant they couldn't ship until now. Counter this with the way most companys operate -- which is announcing a product or displaying a mock up before work on the product has even begun -- and you see where Apple does things a little differently.
Also, you'll notice when Company X announces a new product, their stock price rises. When Apple announces a new product, their stock promptly falls. This is because Apple is actually an anti-company.
I don't know that this is the ONLY reason Apple doesn't preannounce products. After all, they don't pre-announce completely new devices (such as the new Airport Express) or new software packages (iTunes for Windows was almost a surprise).
Besides, what did they pre-announce? I think we all guessed that the iMac would be back and it would have a G5 in it. It's not an announcment, really, until we can see how they've changed the DVD Lamp's looks to match its new guts. I mean, this is Apple after all. No product is announced until there's a Quicktime 3D walkaround for it.
I'm not sure about the British act, but the Americans with Disabilities Act does not mean every website must be accessible -- it means that equal consideration must be made for those who can't view it.
Since many agencies and companys already have telephone hotlines, many of them forward the disabled to these lines rather than bother with the web guidelines. I assume Odeon has such a hotline (any self respecting theatre in the US would).
Incidentally, the web guideliens are not that tough to follow, but they do require some things that are difficult to manage with more dynamic sites (such as requiring alternate descriptions f all images).
Easy. Some people at slashdot are CONTROL FREAKS: they don't trust anybody else to know as much as they do about computers. Linux, and open source in general, attracts control freaks because it offers unlimited choice and expansion. These same people are then shocked to find that technologies like GNOME seek to reduce their choice...which leads to some GNOME technologies backpedalling on the "keep it simple" credo to appease these users, creating an environment which is schizophrenic at times.
Problem is, given unlimited choice and limited knowledge, you are almost certainly going to make choices which do not integrate well. Which means you're better off using a lesser technology with less granularity. A good example is the LAMP development "platform." Swap Postgres for MySQL, BSD for Linux or Python for PHP and you've massively decreased the body of software that will work without a good deal of tweaks.
In the real world (tm), it is almost always better to trade granular control and adherence our way of doing things for a tried and true methodology supported by a low effort interface. Being able to let go is hard, but it is very worthwhile. I have a coworker who refuses to use iTunes because he refuses to accept the usefulness of ID3 tags and wants to keep everything separated out in his own directory hierarchy. It takes him ten to twenty minutes to set up playlists that are almost automatic in iTunes, and so he rarely makes new ones. He has to constrict his choice because he's not willing to sede control to the Apple Way.
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Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"?
Not really. Some people don't upgrade as long as their computer is "Good Enough." When something comes along and proves their machine isn't "Good Enough" anymore, they upgrade. It's because the machine is old -- the game is just a catalyst. I had a buddy in college who upgraded his machine for Wing Commander Prophecy and again for Mechwarrier 4 -- compared to that, upgrading to Doom 3 (which will be undoubtedly a social success) doesn't seem like such a big deal.
(Incidentally, my upgrade cycle is based on how dirty my keyboard is. When the keyboard gets so dirty I don't want to touch it, I replace the whole thing. This usually takes about 2 years or so).
Ahem. A Geforce 4 MX is less than $60 and the least powerful card offered on many non-Optiplex Dell setups. Sorry he isn't hand building the machines and thus able to remove the functionality that he, a lowly IT guy, thinks other people shouldn't need.
I guess I should also point out that as of next year and Longhorn, Windows will be pumped through the GPU and thus any machine you order today with a non-GPU graphics card will need an upgrade before it can run Longhorn. And if Avalon is anything like Quartz Extreme, it will make a BIG and NOTICABLE difference in the user interface, even on fast machines. I suppose you may not need fluid graphics or modern technology at the office, but it's also not worth the savings over the life of the machine to skimp on this sort of thing.
I'm a Mac user (who also runs gentoo and Win2k). I listen to hip hop and I absolutely love Patsy Cline (my dad has all her records, he dated her once and made a complete ass of himself). I also enjoy opera (prefer German to Italian, which grates a little), own every Megadeth record and have no problem switching between any of these styles of music in the context of a Party Shuffle.
There is only one type of music I won't listen to, and that's lazy, overproduced, low concept pop. If a person doesn't care enough to at least make the best, most interesting music they can regardless of their chosen stylistic patterns, I don't want to hear it.
Incidentally, the reason most hip-hop fans assume their opponents are closed minded is that most people who hate the music hate it solely on the wack bullshit they play on the radio. That boring, unlyrical crunk/pimp crap is not hip-hop, no matter what they tell you -- it's as much hip-hop as Britney is rock and roll, or Avril Lavigne is punk. An opinion based on these input media would be like basing your opinion on pastries on a pop tart, or basing your opinion on the outdoors on some swamp.
MS Word has always been better than Wordperfect.
Absolutely untrue. MS Word has always been different from Word Perfect, but Word was designed around discovery, not around workflow. You can get more done in any version of Word Perfect faster, and WP had cascading markup well before the days of HTML -- a lot of people prefer this to the Microsoft stylesheets and sections method. Word Perfect -- up until 6.0, which was the first attempt to go beyond workflow into the WYSIWYG paradigm and it was slow as hell -- was a brilliant piece of software with a simple interface. Best of all, if you didn't know how to do something, you could press F3, type the letter of what function you were looking for, and it would tell you how to do it. There was a menu if you wanted, and syntax highlighting if you wanted. Otherwise, it was just you and the text. No distractions. Very productive. Worth the $300.
You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design
Open Source is hardly the model of connectivity. In fact, since the model demands that somebody be willing to do the work they need done, or willing to do the work for somebody else, there are segments of the market -- beginners who are non-programmers with no other computers -- who will never be connected. Furthermore, I've notice many Open Source afficianados are complete dicks. Hard to have 100% pure communication when your success depends on a guy whose answer to every question is "STFU and RTFM, n00b." Heck, those words don't even make SENSE outside of the context of the community.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory.
The one he never made? You know, bringing up points that are provably false doesn't help your argument or your image.
Do you call everyone kid?
Only children,
I think you're behind the times, kid. Microsoft hasn't been ruled by "King Gates" in some time...he's moved on to more of an advisory roll and delegated most of the company's decisions to Balmer. Furthermore, there are a number of markets in which Microsoft still has the low price solution...for example, if you want a reliable load balanced database, SQL Server kicks the price pants off of Oracle and DB2. Sybase is languishing and open source doesn't have anything remotely near the feature set of these four (no, we can't all use MySQL).
You're also apparently unaware of some of the options Microsoft was faced with on their way to becoming the "huge, oppressive, evil monopoly" that made my second favorite operating system. Back in the day, you could drop $300+ on a copy of Word Perfect, or get Word for something like $100. Like Open Source today, Word was the inferior solution from a feature set and usability standpoint, but it was cheaper and offered enough functionality that most people didn't care. Later, Office sprung up as a way to further lower costs by offering the most common pieces of software for one low price. This left Lotus and WordPerfect scrambling to put together a package that was similar and/or better for a similarly low price. In the end, Microsoft's suite was better integrated, interoperated better (e.g. AmiPro/WordPro could open MS documents well but not visa versa, leaving MS as the defacto standard) and above all cheaper than its competitors.
Of course, this was well before they were officially a monopoly, back when Lotus and Word Perfect still had a chance to make a decent product, a chance neither of them was capable of. Microsoft won this war because they had better businessmen. The problem is, they didn't change their policies once they won...and you can't play the "exclusive contract" game once you've out-stripped your competeition.
Finally, your government systems analogy is kind of foolish. Hive Societies may be "better" idealistically, but historically have never really worked beyond a certain population level. On the other hand, kingdoms have been quite stable and succesful, especially in parts of the world where individual wealth and education are too concentrated to promote an egalitarian society. In fact, on the micro level almost all systems break down into localized oligarchies, with a single set of localized idea-men and a series of lackeys doing what these men say. A single charismatic ruler will always have better luck at efficiently organizing people and delivering services than a committee in a constant power struggle -- this happens so reliably, I think it is safe to assume that it is a genetic predisposition in the human animal to choose a definite vision when available.
Extrapolating from this, since user education in the computer field will always a bigger issue than price, and most Open Source packages are by definition indefinite, open ended entities, I think we can safely assume Open Source isn't going to revolutionize the proletariat's desktop any time soon.
Actually, Sci-fi can have very deep spiritual (god I hate that term) overtones, sometimes backed up by science, sometimes not. Look at the religious aspects that spring up in Asimov's Foundation saga, and how those aspects change over the course of the hundreds of years that saga portrays -- as science is forgotten, it gives way to religious devotion to the purveyers of knowledge (who themselves worship the progenitor of their system as a prophet). Look at the importance of the Ben Gesserit order in Dune, or the Bejorran religion in Deep Space Nine and the delicate, reverent and earnest way each of these is treated. In the context of the story, there are believers and disbelievers and neither is outright wrong (in fact, in ST:DS9, the detractors are more often wrong...except where church politics have polluted the "true message;" shit, a minor villain of the series is a higher member of the church as are many of the heroes).
In fact, the biggest problem I see with the portrayal of religion in video games is that it's nearly always shown as a sham or a cult. This is just wrong. If you've got powerful gods duking it out in the primary plane of existance, with their hands directly influencing their followers and directly punishing their detractors, what you'd have is a state of immense fear and respect for religions of all kinds. Furthermore, there's a drive, especially among Japanese RPGs, to use scienfic order to explain away magical forces within the text ("magic comes from these blue rocks" or "the gods are just really powerful X and we can kill them with swords"). Also a cop out -- why not have gods that are just undefeatable, and the players have to deal with their lives within that context? Stories work best when properly restricted, and being a pawn in a war you can't affect is serious restriction.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had some interesting "religious" overtones, but they were kind of underdeveloped. Basically, they separated the light side from the dark side mostly on issues of social politics...if you chose the needs of the many over the needs of the few, you'd often lose light side points. Still, basing the outcome of the game (and indeed, the availability of skills and teammates) on moral decisions made for a fun game with lots of replayability.
Of course, I don't really think this is what GamersDad wants. I think the editorial is referring not to a figuritive God, but a literal one. The problem there is that integrating a Chrisitian/Muslim/Judaic/Hindu/Buddhist concept of God into a game effectively alienates the others, thus reducing your game's overall appeal and indeed often relegating it a position as a genre title. It can work -- I seem to recall some positive aspects of Chrisitanity in the old Sierra "Gabriel Knight" series of action games -- but on the whole, potrayals of any real religion, positive or negative, are delicate undertakings.
For many people, space is a much bigger concern than quality of the rip. I have recently decided to bid farewell to archaic desktop technology forever and have made the jump to a laptop. It is nice having everything I need for my computer fit into a single 20 lb bag...but it also means that with MAX hard drive size and MAX iPod size I still only have 120 gig to work with. Most of my collection sits on DVDs organized by genre, which is useful since I rarely want to listen to bluegrass but when I do, I don't want to be fumbling around with a stack of CDs.
I have had to go back to my CDs (which are MY lossless source) a few times in recent months, replacing the albums I ripped in the early days of MP3 before VBR was prevalent and 112 was consider "pretty good." However, AAC is my format for everything going forward. It isn't gonna go away like VQF.
Um.
Just because Apple do not themselves support Linux does not mean the iPod will not work on Linux. There are several prominent music export programs for Linux, as well as many good alternatives to iTunes on both Windows and Mac OS. Apple doesn't make iTunes for Linux, but why should they, considering how much money it costs for them to develop, test and support a new platform? There was dissent over whether iTunes for WINDOWS was worth it -- surely creating a solution for the slim number of Linux GUI desktops would be a loss venture. But Apple has been very good about not locking third parties out of their file format...even while they clamp down hard on people bypassing their sharing features. I think it's obvious they're making a distinction between good and bad hacking (from a continuation-of-our-business standpoint, not a moral one).
The DRM is only -- ONLY on files you download from the music store. Don't like DRM? No problem -- don't use the music store. APPLE DOES NOT EVER DRM YOUR FILES. Contrast this with the Windows Media Player, which wraps your files in DRM by default.
The iPod accepts industry standard formats in MP3 and AAC. Both of these having dozens of non-Apple encoders and will have more in the future.
My suggestion? Consider AAC next time you reencode. Since it's part of the MPEG-4 spec (thus having massive industry support as opposed to VQF's "kind of neat" support) and offers a vast improvement in the size to quality ratio (as well as being supported by more portable devices than any other format other than MP3/WAV), it's already the next big thing.
More info at audiocoding.com.
To be completely honest, the 20 gig model they're offering is DIFFERENT from the old 20 gig, anyway. It's not the old "middle" model" bumped down, it's a completely new base model with the same price as the old middle one. Besides the new click wheel (which is a mixed blessing, I *LIKE* the round buttons but the one wheel design is so clean and will make for sturdier accesories), there's also the preeminent Shuffle feature on the main menu. A minor change, but something I would use all the time, since I like to switch between "play this album in context" and "full tilt random" depending on my mood. Right now, this means going back three or four menu levels, surfing to settings, and surfing to Shuffle - Songs. Shuffle on the menu eliminates the need to do this for every switch, and also eliminates one level of searching.
I hope they implement this functionality on the 3G, but since it's a minor enhancement that may sell the new model, I doubt it will find its way back. Shit, it'll sell it to me, soon as that 60 gig is out (my full library is an ever expanding 83 GB, and it's eating 50 gig of my 80 gig laptop drive at any given time).
Furthermore, the dock and carrying case are incentive accessories and are not worth the add on price, anyway. They're not bad, but the case is a little chintzy and the dock no more useful than a straight line cable. They're added to make paying $400 or $500 seem like a better deal. I used my plastic case for about a week before investing in a series of third party accessories, culminating in the excellent iSkin EXO2. I have never seriously used my dock...for a while, it sat on my stereo, but when it did I had no control over the ipod so I switched to a wireless line out (900 MHz, not an FM tuner).
A sysadmin working for a small ISP is NOT a developer. He does not make software for users, he makes software for himself to streamline his own tasks. I should know, as I'm also a sysadmin for a small ISP. I get user calls sometimes (not often, we don't advertise and only take knowledgable customers) -- but I expect to be interrupted thusly, because answering user questions is my job. Performing management tasks is secondary and not as important in terms of driving revenue as keeping customers happy (though certainly, they won't be happy if their backups are corrupt or the mail server is down).
A developer shouldn't have to worry about answering user questions outside of prearranged meeting situations. Customers don't even have my phone number -- when they call with questions, they're forward to our tech support group. Our tech support group is ALSO multitasked to save costs, but it includes members of the QA, product management and sales teams. This frees up development to create the products that drive revenue, but also forces QA, sales and product management to maintain intimate knowledge of the products they are testing/selling/researching.
No, the big attraction of India is that it's popular with big name companies, so all the idiot pretenders can jump on the bandwagon. After all, time at a keyboard is the least important part of creating an effective program. Most of the real work is done in brainstorming sessions with experts and customers. The further insulated your developers and support staff are from the user base, the less effective they become...but right now, "cost savings" is seen as a bigger issue than "effective work," because sales are down and companies are afraid of shareholder lawsuits if they don't cut costs -- costs other than executive salaries, of course.
In about three years, the big names will notice that product quality and sales have dropped dramatically while adjunct costs of outsourcing kept the price per product about the same, and they'll start looking to hire people here to clean things up. Either that, or all the great little startups popping up in this country will steal away their business.
Oh, and maybe we'll get lucky and companies will reverse the process, start hiring Indian executives willing to work for mere hundreds of thousands a year, rather than millions. This will help us effectively extend the slacking-off day.
The really smart users aren't running the same thing everywhere. My dad always said to use the right tool for the right job, and not to, say, hammer things with a big wrench.
I run Gentoo, OSX and Windows 2000 for my server, laptop and workstation, respectively. On the server, I want flexibility, stability and security. On the workstation, I want the ability to run industry standard software packages and perform intensive operations without ever having to muck about with the system's configuration. And on the laptop -- which I use most often -- I want power efficiency, intuitive file management, and a pleasant user experience.
Any time you adapt a tool for a use that's already best met by another tool, you're ignoring the REASON for multiple tools. "Overspecialize and you breed in weakness...it's slow death."
Of course he didn't take much flack. If a guy goes out and records an album for the sole purpose of increasing the awareness of an oppressed culture, you don't fault him for breaking the law you invented to inconvenience the opressors. It'd be political suicide.
I wonder if the Japanese customs agent was clever enough to ask him "Trick or Treat" before slapping on the cuffs.
Please. Every paper is full of shit they just made up. My wife gets interviewed all the time in her line of work, and has never -- not even once -- had her words used in a quote attributed to her. They've actually had her say, on several occasions, things like "I am surprised at what we found." Which is retarded. If she was surprised by it, then why was it in the fucking hypothesis of a double blind experiment?
The Jayson Blair episode only proves that the Times' trust was misplaced. This guy wasn't merely misquoting -- he was flat out lying about doing his job, and this isn't a reflection on the Times' naivete so much as that guy's sleaze. If I were the Times, I'd sued him for his back wages.
To have a paper like the New York Times, who can command advertising rates as high as any paper in the world, bitching and moaning about their web presence and hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company. There is no excuse for it.
Uh, I don't know if you realized this, but newspapers ALSO make a lot -- a LOT -- of money on their archives. In fact, in some areas the only reason the local paper survives is an archival entity, selling their content digitally and on microfilm/fiche to universities and to services like Lexis-Nexus.
There is a big fear in the newspaper industry that opening their archives online will destroy this revenue stream without introducing a comparable new revenue. It is a very realistic fear...I used to work for an online newspaper company, and it was quite common to have customers putting up less than half of their print content after seeing massive drop offs in print sales. Many clients would ask us to clear their archives, so you could only search a month back.
I mean, the Times is a respected paper. Their articles are linked to all over the net despite the required registration, and they can expect every self respecting university to buy the year's microfilm roll. Offering the content for free could ONLY hurt them, so they'd be stupid to do so.
You should point out that this is a generational thing. In Newton's day, you called your prospective model of the universe a law of the universe, implying its infallibility. But many of Newton's "laws" of physics have been proven incomplete...I know his "law" of gravitation, specifically, was missing some numbers.
Because of this, most scientists use the word theory these days, even when they're completely sure of themselves.
This of course confuses people who don't understand what a theory is. Calling something a "theory" only means that it is a possible model of the universe. The word does not give any indication of the probability of the model being valid. I could put forth a theory that the universe is shaped like a lamppost, you could completely disprove it and it would still stand as a theory. Meanwhile, I could put forth that the universe probably has some kind of matter in it somewhere, and it would still be theory.
Think of it this way: if you know, for example, that you will NEVER have a sex life and that you will NEVER go through the traditional dating/marriage male/female dynamic, how does that change you life? For better? For worse?
Well...considering Hawking divorced his wife and married his nurse, I'd have to say that, at the very least, lust is unhindered by lack of fine motor control.
Furthermore, the traditional male/female dynamic is a lie anyhow. Every relationship has hangups about power, sex and love. Disability is only going to expose what's already there.
Of course not. Black Holes run Linux. Why else would they run forever and still suck?
A pre-announcment means that they haven't started making the product yet, not that it isn't commercially available yet. The Airport Express was done and working when they announced it last month -- but factory delays meant they couldn't ship until now. Counter this with the way most companys operate -- which is announcing a product or displaying a mock up before work on the product has even begun -- and you see where Apple does things a little differently.
Also, you'll notice when Company X announces a new product, their stock price rises. When Apple announces a new product, their stock promptly falls. This is because Apple is actually an anti-company.
I don't know that this is the ONLY reason Apple doesn't preannounce products. After all, they don't pre-announce completely new devices (such as the new Airport Express) or new software packages (iTunes for Windows was almost a surprise).
Besides, what did they pre-announce? I think we all guessed that the iMac would be back and it would have a G5 in it. It's not an announcment, really, until we can see how they've changed the DVD Lamp's looks to match its new guts. I mean, this is Apple after all. No product is announced until there's a Quicktime 3D walkaround for it.
I'm not sure about the British act, but the Americans with Disabilities Act does not mean every website must be accessible -- it means that equal consideration must be made for those who can't view it.
Since many agencies and companys already have telephone hotlines, many of them forward the disabled to these lines rather than bother with the web guidelines. I assume Odeon has such a hotline (any self respecting theatre in the US would).
Incidentally, the web guideliens are not that tough to follow, but they do require some things that are difficult to manage with more dynamic sites (such as requiring alternate descriptions f all images).
visually disabled (who do go to movies, believe it or not)
Oh, I believe it. In fact, I've got the sneaking suspicious that many modern films are DIRECTED by the visually disabled.
Easy. Some people at slashdot are CONTROL FREAKS: they don't trust anybody else to know as much as they do about computers. Linux, and open source in general, attracts control freaks because it offers unlimited choice and expansion. These same people are then shocked to find that technologies like GNOME seek to reduce their choice...which leads to some GNOME technologies backpedalling on the "keep it simple" credo to appease these users, creating an environment which is schizophrenic at times.
Problem is, given unlimited choice and limited knowledge, you are almost certainly going to make choices which do not integrate well. Which means you're better off using a lesser technology with less granularity. A good example is the LAMP development "platform." Swap Postgres for MySQL, BSD for Linux or Python for PHP and you've massively decreased the body of software that will work without a good deal of tweaks.
In the real world (tm), it is almost always better to trade granular control and adherence our way of doing things for a tried and true methodology supported by a low effort interface. Being able to let go is hard, but it is very worthwhile. I have a coworker who refuses to use iTunes because he refuses to accept the usefulness of ID3 tags and wants to keep everything separated out in his own directory hierarchy. It takes him ten to twenty minutes to set up playlists that are almost automatic in iTunes, and so he rarely makes new ones. He has to constrict his choice because he's not willing to sede control to the Apple Way.