a company that refused the "polite requests" would have a very hard time getting their various business forms processed in a timely fashion.
It doesn't have to be that drastic or subtle. They're just out of the running for any government contracts. With Bush leading the Republican charge to spend money faster than the Treasury can print it, no business can afford to lose out on their share of the pie.
I don't need a "M" rating on the box to tell me games like Max Payne and Halo are not for kids - the cover art tells me that. Same with "NC-17" movies. When an "E" rating means it may not be suitable for kids, so I have to preview it anyway, it's worthless to me as a parent.
OK, while we're going down this path, I have a further rant: What's the point of the TV ratings system and the so-called "V chip" if news and ads are not rated? I've seen ads for TV shows I don't want my kids to watch (shows that are on after 9:00 because they are not for kids) running during the so-called "family" hour -- ads complete with violence and sex. But they're ads, so they're not blocked.
Frankly, I'm not interested in any rating system that isn't so finely grained that I can tell the TV to block Jerry Falwell and allow Dr. Ruth. Hell, I'd pay $1000 for a device that insured I'd never have to see Jerry Falwell again!
The point is using a web app is to ensure conformity, and ease of use.
Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. If what you say is true, then web apps would run on any browser and be easy to use; most are neither.
The point of using a web app is simply and almost exclusively to avoid writing / distributing / maintaining a client app. When you're a Fortune 500 company, that's a huge savings. Not to mention the savings from not upgrading your hardware until it dies. A 5 year old 300MHz Pentium II with 128k of RAM, a 4Gig hard drive, and Windows 98 will run a web-based app just as well as the latest top-line PC with XP.
Indeed, forcing those cheap SOBs at GM and Key Bank to buy new Dells (and thus a new copy of Windows) is one of the main reasons Microsoft stopped releasing new versions of MSIE for "old" operating systems. When IT rolls out the new Accounting / Inventory / CRM tool all those losers with Longhorn/MSIE 11 will have to upgrade to Tinkerbell/MSIE 12, which will require a 7.8GHz Pentium 5 and 2.5Gbytes of RAM. But this rant is off-topic, so I'll shut up now.
When I read the story I thought it was about what HP is doing to stop counterfit ink. It never occured to me they would be interested in stopping any other type of counterfiting.
The bad guys keep coming until you hit them hard/often enough, and once they're down they don't get back up again. They don't give up the fight and run away, they fall down and their bodies fade away. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but it sure looks like death to a five-year-old.
The ratings are provided for the purpose of helping the parents make informed decisions about what their kids are playing.
The ratings suck. We own several "E for Everyeone" games that are shockingly violent -- Spider-Man comes to mind (the point of the game is to kill the bad guys). As a parent, I've found I cannot trust the guidelines, and in fact my son uses them against me, saying it's not fair for me to ban the violent games because "it says on the box it's for Everyone." Further, I don't need the rating system to see that the "T" or "M" games are clearly not for a five-year-old. As a parent I can tell you the rating system adds no value for me. I really have to try a game to tell if it's OK for my kids, and suddenly video game rental makes a lot of sense.
Some people fear that this is the camel's nose under the tent flap. What do you think the legislators who pass this will dream up for the next election year? "It's illegal for a minor to buy this game, therefore it should be illegal for a minor to play this game." Forget the legislature, all you need is a DA who feels this way and suddenly it sucks to live in your county.
As for the movie ticket analogy, I have no problem with allowing seven-year-olds to waste their money buying movie tickets they can't use. That would teach them a lesson. Who cares how the kid gets the ticket; any theater that admits a seven-year-old to an NC-17 movie deserves to lose their business license.
This is nothing new. Happens all the time. Usually when someone "updates" the slash code, which means we can now do the usual search for what's been broken (usually the lameness filter). Updates to slash almost never improve Slashdot.
Of course, you realize that you can call it anything you want. "fred.netscape.com"; "getlost.netscape.com"; "html.netscape.com"; or even "netscape.com". "www" is just the common convention, but lotsofsites don't follow it.
Actually, no. When you consider the fact that.NET is a Windows-only platform, then requiring a runtime makes perfect sense. This really is part of their grand conspiracy. To run.NET apps on non-Windows platforms you've got a whole lot more hoops to jump through with the runtime than if they provided a linker (would you like a little Wine with that?).
To what end? The GPL is just the permission slip Linus gives you to use and copy Linux, not ownership of Linux (for example - this applies to all GPL'd code). If the GPL is ruled invalid by a court, all that means is that the license you hold for Linux is invalid. It doesn't invalidate Linus' copyright on the Linux code. Linus would remain free to re-license his code as he sees fit -- this would not grant Microsoft or anyone else the right to use Linus' code without his permission.
I guess I wasn't clear. I would do as you suggest, but I can't find one. Specifically, my early-90's VCR could be programmed from the front panel without the remote and without turning on the TV. It had some other nice features, too, that my next three VCRs all lacked. I can't find one like it today at any price. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but frankly I only shop for VCRs when my current POS has just died, and I end up buying YAPOS because that's all I can find.
We bought a VCR in the early 1990's that cost about $500 and lasted over eight years. We're on our third replacement. Sure, the replacements were less than $200 each, but they have fewer features and I'm frankly getting tired of the damn things failing just when I want to tape something. They never seem to fail on playback, just on record. And on a cost per year basis, the more expensive one was a far better deal. They really don't make them like they used to.
The current unit also has a deep hatred of the Sci-Fi channel. If we tune it to Sci-Fi, it shuts itself off. If we tape a Sci-Fi channel show on another VCR and try to play it on ours, it again shuts itself off. Weird.
What else do you suggest? It's easy to say fighting is a bad idea but it's hard to come up with an alternative. You say "explore the other holiday worlds." To what end? A Myst-ifying Nightmare?
As a NMBC fan my only comment is "why only PS2?" I doubt I'll buy one just for this game.
That's sort of my point. Other than games, what Windows software are you going to run on your Mac that isn't available in a native Mac version? And if you want to play games, you're going to be dissapointed with an emulator. If there's some Windows app you really, really, need I think it will run faster on a $100 used PC than on this emulator within an emulator approach.
For my money, I'd rather just buy a used PC and run Windows on it. Just last month I went shopping for a used video card for my boy's PC so it would run a game he got for Christmas, and they had used midi-tower PCs with power supply, motherboard, and a 400MHz Celeron for $20. $20! Add memory, a moderate (20Gig) hard disk, video card, and keyboard and for around $100 you can have a fairly decent PC. It's used, and a bit of a Frankinstein, but it will run MS Office, and that's what most people want anyway.
No, it won't be a gamer's PC, but then neither will a Mac with Wine and Bochs. If you're interested in games, get an Xbox or PS2.
If MS was to start producing BIOSes, which Im sure they could do, they would have to maintain compatability with the existing BIOSes of the world.
Why? They only need to make sure it works with their latest OS (as in Longhorn; even XP could be locked out of these hypothetical Microsoft BIOS PCs). Indeed, I could easily see a scenario where Longhorn requires the MS BIOS and the MS BIOS will only work with Longhorn. Hell, they could even do an Apple and put key parts of the OS in the BIOS.
There are pleanty of things that are not MS OSs that use the BIOS. Ghost. PXE. DOS before Netware (do they still do this?). Recovery CDs. And of course the OSS OSs.
What on Earth makes you think that Microsoft cares about any of those? Preventing them from working would be, to Microsoft, a big plus.
Bullshit. The Seattle Times won a Pulitzer for a series critical of the Boeing 737 rudder. Theres little love lost between the papers and Paul Allan, too, even after he bought the Seahawks. Biting the hand that feeds you is a Seattle newspaper tradition going way back. I'll bet they bitched about Denny and Yessler and Doc Maynard back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, while we're going down this path, I have a further rant: What's the point of the TV ratings system and the so-called "V chip" if news and ads are not rated? I've seen ads for TV shows I don't want my kids to watch (shows that are on after 9:00 because they are not for kids) running during the so-called "family" hour -- ads complete with violence and sex. But they're ads, so they're not blocked.
Frankly, I'm not interested in any rating system that isn't so finely grained that I can tell the TV to block Jerry Falwell and allow Dr. Ruth. Hell, I'd pay $1000 for a device that insured I'd never have to see Jerry Falwell again!
The point of using a web app is simply and almost exclusively to avoid writing / distributing / maintaining a client app. When you're a Fortune 500 company, that's a huge savings. Not to mention the savings from not upgrading your hardware until it dies. A 5 year old 300MHz Pentium II with 128k of RAM, a 4Gig hard drive, and Windows 98 will run a web-based app just as well as the latest top-line PC with XP.
Indeed, forcing those cheap SOBs at GM and Key Bank to buy new Dells (and thus a new copy of Windows) is one of the main reasons Microsoft stopped releasing new versions of MSIE for "old" operating systems. When IT rolls out the new Accounting / Inventory / CRM tool all those losers with Longhorn/MSIE 11 will have to upgrade to Tinkerbell/MSIE 12, which will require a 7.8GHz Pentium 5 and 2.5Gbytes of RAM. But this rant is off-topic, so I'll shut up now.
When I read the story I thought it was about what HP is doing to stop counterfit ink. It never occured to me they would be interested in stopping any other type of counterfiting.
The bad guys keep coming until you hit them hard/often enough, and once they're down they don't get back up again. They don't give up the fight and run away, they fall down and their bodies fade away. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but it sure looks like death to a five-year-old.
If a parent has to watch the movies and play the games anyway, what's the point of having a rating system? That's the problem.
As for the movie ticket analogy, I have no problem with allowing seven-year-olds to waste their money buying movie tickets they can't use. That would teach them a lesson. Who cares how the kid gets the ticket; any theater that admits a seven-year-old to an NC-17 movie deserves to lose their business license.
This is nothing new. Happens all the time. Usually when someone "updates" the slash code, which means we can now do the usual search for what's been broken (usually the lameness filter). Updates to slash almost never improve Slashdot.
Of course, you realize that you can call it anything you want. "fred.netscape.com"; "getlost.netscape.com"; "html.netscape.com"; or even "netscape.com". "www" is just the common convention, but lots of sites don't follow it.
Could you imagine? "worldwideweb.netscape.org" "worldwideweb.eff.org" "worldwideweb.cnn.com"
Yuck!
Actually, no. When you consider the fact that .NET is a Windows-only platform, then requiring a runtime makes perfect sense. This really is part of their grand conspiracy. To run .NET apps on non-Windows platforms you've got a whole lot more hoops to jump through with the runtime than if they provided a linker (would you like a little Wine with that?).
To what end? The GPL is just the permission slip Linus gives you to use and copy Linux, not ownership of Linux (for example - this applies to all GPL'd code). If the GPL is ruled invalid by a court, all that means is that the license you hold for Linux is invalid. It doesn't invalidate Linus' copyright on the Linux code. Linus would remain free to re-license his code as he sees fit -- this would not grant Microsoft or anyone else the right to use Linus' code without his permission.
I guess I wasn't clear. I would do as you suggest, but I can't find one. Specifically, my early-90's VCR could be programmed from the front panel without the remote and without turning on the TV. It had some other nice features, too, that my next three VCRs all lacked. I can't find one like it today at any price. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but frankly I only shop for VCRs when my current POS has just died, and I end up buying YAPOS because that's all I can find.
And you call yourself a nerd!
The current unit also has a deep hatred of the Sci-Fi channel. If we tune it to Sci-Fi, it shuts itself off. If we tape a Sci-Fi channel show on another VCR and try to play it on ours, it again shuts itself off. Weird.
You remind me of the Groucho Marx line (paraphrasing): "I'd never join a group that wanted me as a member."
As a NMBC fan my only comment is "why only PS2?" I doubt I'll buy one just for this game.
I read "Janet Reno" too. Talk about a Nightmare!
That's sort of my point. Other than games, what Windows software are you going to run on your Mac that isn't available in a native Mac version? And if you want to play games, you're going to be dissapointed with an emulator. If there's some Windows app you really, really, need I think it will run faster on a $100 used PC than on this emulator within an emulator approach.
No, it won't be a gamer's PC, but then neither will a Mac with Wine and Bochs. If you're interested in games, get an Xbox or PS2.
I really wish you had not shared that -- information may want to be free, but some of it should be locked up.
Bullshit. The Seattle Times won a Pulitzer for a series critical of the Boeing 737 rudder. Theres little love lost between the papers and Paul Allan, too, even after he bought the Seahawks. Biting the hand that feeds you is a Seattle newspaper tradition going way back. I'll bet they bitched about Denny and Yessler and Doc Maynard back in the day.