Yup. My wife is a big fan of adventure games. There's still a steady stream of them coming out...
Big Fish Games seems to have a nearly endless supply of them. I routinely see new stuff from various small developers popping up on Steam. And I think The Adventure Company is still turning stuff out.
FPS titles may be the hot thing going... But that doesn't mean the graphical adventure game is dead.
In 1991 the average wage for a male American worker with a bachelor's degree was 2.5 times that of a high-school drop-out; now the ratio is 3.
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
It isn't so much a widening gap between working and middle-class...
Once upon a time, skilled labor was the middle class. But the middle class is slowly disappearing. We're outsourcing and offshoring everything we can. All the skilled labor jobs are going overseas.
Here in the US we've basically got unskilled labor, and management.
And that gap is widening. We replace more and more labors with machinery. We make individuals more productive with technology. We offshore what we can.
And the laborers become less and less skilled, and more easily replaced. So they can be paid less.
And the managers we actually have left here in the US are those that are harder to replace. So they must be paid more.
And eventually we have just the upper and lower classes.
How does one "suffer" by having to enter in a keycode? It takes all of 5 seconds.
Right now console games are fairly portable. You can bring the disc over to a friend's house and play on their console. Or you can sell the game to somebody else. Or rent it somewhere. This is all possible because the DRM makes sure it's a legitimate disc - but not necessarily that it is unique.
If we're going to start doing keycodes on discs, they're going to become a hell of a lot less portable.
Once you've authenticated that keycode against your console, or your online account, or whatever you won't be able to haul the disc over to a friend's house, or sell it, or rent it.
I haven't seen Playboy in years, either, but as I recall, it doesn't even show snatch, so outside of the Americas (and particularly the US and Canada), it is nothing more than what you see at the beach and on TV already.
Yup.
Many places have topless beaches - and you'll see just as much skin there as you will in Playboy.
And if you've got a completely nude beach you'll probably see even more than you do in Playboy.
But there's more text to the magazine than images.
Here's a question for you, Einstein...
If they took out all the pictures of the "nekkid" ladies, do you think it would sell as many copies?
It's hard to say.
If they suddenly stopped having pictures of naked women their readership would certainly drop. But that's largely because the people reading it right now are expecting certain things out of the magazine.
If it had never had pictures of naked women? Well, there are plenty of magazines out there with similar subject matter, sans-nudity, and they do ok.
Ultimately, the same question could be asked of a publication like Maxim though - which features scantily-clad, rather than nude, women. If they cut out all their eyecandy, would they still sell as many copies? And does that make them pornography?
I've absolutely no problem with images of the female form but a classy wank mag is still just a wank mag.
I don't think I'd really call Playboy "classy"...
And while people may very well wank to it, the same can be said of the Victoria's Secret catalog. Does that make the Victoria's Secret catalog a wank mag?
What about folks who really get off on the medical stuff? Does that make a durable medical goods catalog a wank mag?
If you think Playboy is porn, you really need to get out of the basement. Playboy is to porn what Disneyworld is to authenticity.
I'm curious to hear what your definition of porn is. And with that where you live so I can get an idea of whether your standards are close to your communities standards. As there is no definitive statement as to what constitutes porn that could be applied globally.
Granted, I haven't looked at Playboy in years... So it may have changed dramatically. But last time I looked I would not have called it pornography.
Sure, there's some pictures of naked women in there, and they're sure to titillate your average pubescent male...
But there's more text to the magazine than images. Substantially more text. And most of it is actually decent stuff. Some interesting articles and interviews and whatnot. I suspect that Playboy could actually survive as a magazine even if it didn't have nude photos. Well, maybe not so much these days with the web and all... Any print publication is suffering these days... But you know what I mean.
As for the images themselves, they were far too "tasteful" for my tastes. Plenty of breasts... 3/4 shots... Maybe a glimpse of pubic hair here or there... But that's about it. Your average art gallery has images substantially more pornographic than a Playboy magazine.
If I had to label Playboy, I'd call it "erotica" at best. Certainly not pornography.
Anyone who really thinks Playboy is pornography just needs to visit Google Images or Google Videos with Safe Search turned off to have their horizons dramatically broadened.
I predict that this report will be met with much skepticism on/.
Of course it will. And it should be. Microsoft has a long history of animosity towards open source software. That doesn't mean that they can't fund a genuinely objective study... But there's a good chance that things are going to be biased.
I also predict that I will make the argument that open source really *isn't* always all it's cracked up to be
Software is a tool. Nothing more or less. You need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is open source, sometimes it isn't.
and be shouted down by many, many voices
Probably. Slashdot has a long history of animosity towards closed source software, and Microsoft in specific.
I always love a government that tells me where I can and can't travel, where I can and can't sell my stuff, who I can and can't talk to--then proceeds to bad-mouth everyone else for not being free enough. Even when I was a kid and everyone was chiding the Ruskies with the "Papers please" and "In Russia you can't travel around or say whatever you want without government permission" I was stuck with the hypocrisy. Try telling the next cop who pulls you over that you don't need to show him your papers and see what happens. Try to take a vacation to Cuba sometime and see how free you are to travel anywhere. Try to export your software (or any other goods) to a country the U.S. doesn't like at the moment (i.e. countries who won't play ball) and see who comes knocking on your door.
Yup.
And back then things really were pretty free and open... Look at what we're putting up with today. You don't even need to try to vacation in Cuba to get an invasive search at the airport.
What if the Google guys legitimately believe that the Iranian government is running a peaceful nuclear program and is being unfairly targeted by a hostile U.S. ally (Israel)? Not saying this is the case, but shouldn't they still be able to sell them non-weapon/non-military software if they want to? That's hardly an unreasonable "freedom" in a country that holds itself as a bastion of both personal freedom and glorious capitalism.
At least with Google Earth I can almost see the logic... It could possibly be used for military planning or something...
Chrome... Umm... Maybe it's got some nice encryption for SSL stuff? Or something? I remember there used to be a problem exporting Netscape back in the day.
Picasa... I'm at a loss. What're they going to do, upload pictures of government office buildings or something? I have a hard time envisioning any way to use Picasa for nefarious purposes.
Maybe I would see it differently if the U.S. were actually at *WAR* with Iran. But if the criterion is "any country we don't like today," then exporting any product must be a goddamn nightmare for any international corporation.
I'm sure it is... But that isn't just a problem with the US. Every nation is going to use its exports as a lever to get what they want. And in order to exert that leverage, they're going to make things more complex/difficult for the folks trying to earn a living off those exports.
One of my college classes required us to install and run Linux on our own machines.
The professor didn't offer much guidance aside from suggesting that we might want to back up anything important, and pointing us at a couple distros.
It was up to us to download whatever it took to install Linux. It was up to us to set things up properly for a dual-boot or a virtual machine or whatever. It was up to us to install it, configure a couple users, and complete a few specific tasks.
Then we had to report on our experience and what we'd learned.
Terrific class, and an awesome experience. Learned an awful lot from actually doing it myself.
I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise. I was very eager to see another alien movie with Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger involved. I didn't actually expect much out of it... But I was eager to see what we'd get.
But, let's be realistic here... After those first couple of movies, it's really been downhill.
But this guy is merely a risibly hyperbolic instance of a much broader, more common, and (in alarmingly many circles) respected position: Namely, that the person who reveals wrongdoing is somehow guiltier of that wrongdoing than the person who commits it.
Yup. This is the bit that confuses me...
Granted, some of that stuff probably shouldn't have been leaked. And I'm sure various people broke various laws by leaking it. And there may very well be court cases and punishments and whatever else...
But the scary stuff that this guy is stressing about? Wikileaks didn't do that stuff. The US Government did that stuff. Wikileaks just let you know about the scary stuff.
Replacing the home button with multitouch gestures? So using the device will now require you to use both hands? Great! That should be fun when the people driving around me need to not only divert their attention to controlling their iphone/ipod touch, but now must take BOTH hands off the wheel to operate it.
You don't even have to be driving...
Good luck carrying a coffee while using your phone. Or opening a door... Or writing down notes... Or fumbling for your wallet...
I would be pretty upset if I couldn't use my phone with one hand.
I don't own an iPhone, so it may be better without home button, but I use it quite a lot on my android phone (long hold to change apps).
And would hate to need to hands to copy text out of an email into a search box, or a name from an email into a contact.
or to simply tap out a text and then call someone while web-browsing.
Exactly.
This might work well on an iPad... But I can't see it happening on the iPhone.
You have to be able to use a cell phone one-handed.
I routinely place calls, look up contacts, check my calendar, and check my email one-handed (on an Android phone). It's a little slower, it's a little more cumbersome... But you need to be able to do it. I don't always have two hands free. And I sure as hell can't manage a multitouch gesture one-handed.
300 people are responsible for making 18 million CDs/month. I saw another story about a sleeping bag factory cranking out 20 million bags a year with 500 empoloyees for the whole company. I read somewhere that American manufacturing capacity is the highest it's ever been. What are we going to do with all these people. I keep hearing 'Well, the world needs ditch diggers too'. No, no it doesn not... I guess we can let them starve to death in the streets.
Technology, at its most basic form, is a labor saving device. That's the whole idea behind all of this... Amplify the amount of work that an individual human being can do. And that means you need less human beings to do the work.
Offshoring isn't really helping things either. There may very well be jobs out there for those 300 people... But they're not in the US.
I was in Walmart a month ago looking for two CD's that I wanted to purchase. Neither was particularly obscure, and both were recent (released within the last year). They had neither, and actually I couldn't believe how small their selection was compared to what it used to be.
Walmart is having to compete with somebody bigger than they are - the whole of the Internet. Walmart has to stock things that sell well. They can't waste shelf space on something that isn't going to sell quickly. You can easily get just about any CD you can imagine from an online retailer, usually for a price comparable to Walmart. They can't compete with that kind of selection.
I understand the convenience of downloading via Walmart or Amazon, but what I can't understand is why people wouldn't actually want to have a bit-perfect digital copy on physical medium as a back up.
Most folks don't even contemplate backups. It would never occur to them to make a backup of an MP3.
Many digital download services allow you to re-download your purchases. And prices are generally low enough that a lot of folks wouldn't even balk at re-purchasing something if they lost the file.
Of course, most people wind up copying that MP3 to a portable device of some sort... Which acts as a backup of sorts. If you did delete the file from your computer you could probably copy it back from your phone/iPod/whatever.
Finally, if you really wanted a physical, bit-perfect backup... There's absolutely nothing preventing you from burning your own disc.
Ultimately, what I'm trying to say here, is that the lack of a backup is about the last reason I'd have for buying a physical CD as opposed to a digital download.
Why, yes. You've completely grasped my argument. A mission known to be suicidal is exactly the same thing as one designed with safety in mind and a track record of often, but not always, successful missions.
It is "known to be suicidal" in the same way that life is. The plan isn't to lob somebody up there and have them die after 4 months. The idea is to begin setting up the foundation of a colony. Just because it's one-way doesn't mean it's suicide. They could live to a ripe old age out there on Mars. In theory, at least.
..it looks like the game needs to support this thing for it to work properly, and that's where all these fancy ideas usually fail; it'll get 2-3 games that supports it, but in a year everyone's already forgotten about it and moved on. It'd be different if they went ahead and developed an actual standard API that games could use to display parts of their UI on other devices and that API worked with every manufacturer's devices, it might actually catch on! But.. well, given how short-sighted and greedy companies usually are they will just try to lock people to their own devices and then wonder why it didn't work.
It looks like this is aimed at running PC games... In which case it could probably be handled much like my Nostromo (or just about any decent gaming mouse). Typically you'll have a layer of middleware that makes the device talk to the game correctly. With the Nostromo, I'm able to program a single button on the device to execute a series of keystrokes that the game then responds to. The game doesn't need to know how to talk to my Nostromo, the game needs to know how to respond to a keyboard and mouse.
Look harder next time. Put in your serial number and it'll tell you every part in your system.
Either that web page didn't exist at the time, or the folks at HP didn't know about it.
Those pages have existed for at *least* 7 years, because I recall using them during my fall semester in 2003 while working for the school's computer services group
This would have been roughly 1999/2000ish.
I had a problem with an AGP card under Windows 98 and was hopeful that the upcoming release of Windows 2000 would make it work better.
And it is entirely possible that web page did exist at the time. But I was on dial-up back then, and the Internet was not my first source of information. I did look around HP's website, but didn't find anything terribly useful. I wound up looking up some model number printed on the motherboard itself. The information I found pointed me towards some driver updates... But it was hard to tell which one applied to my motherboard because it was some kind of customized OEM version for HP. So I called HP to see if they could give me any help. The folks I spoke to (there were several) asked for every number we could think of, and none of them were able to tell me what motherboard was in my machine.
It may very well be that I was speaking to idiots. Or maybe they were just giving me the run-around. Or maybe we just happened to look at all the wrong numbers.
Regardless, the end result was that we were completely unable to determine what motherboard was actually installed in my computer. I eventually gave up, returned the video card, and bought PCI version instead.
Porting a program that was written in C without consideration for other architectures to a new architecture is hard, really hard. Seriously, I've done it.
I was under the impression that Microsoft had been maintaining builds of Windows for multiple architectures for a while now, just in case.
True, but you're still going to be relying on the software developer to actually compile and ship an ARM version. Emulation typically slows things down dramatically, it only really works when your emulator is running on hardware MUCH faster than the hardware you're emulating - which isn't the case here.
Didn't Apple throw the emulation into hardware? Threw another chip or two on the motherboard for a year or so while everyone transitioned from the old Motorola chips to PowerPC?
Look harder next time. Put in your serial number and it'll tell you every part in your system.
Either that web page didn't exist at the time, or the folks at HP didn't know about it.
Same thing with Dell. Put in your express service code, then click "Original System Configuration." The information is out there you just need to look.
Yup. Like I said - At least it isn't too hard to figure out which one is right these days.
What about the huge catalogue of win32 applications?
If I was to believe the anti-linux trolling of the last decade or so, that's the major reason people won't ever, ever switch!
On a more serious note, I know.Net stuff stands a good chance of working fine, but there's a hell of a lot of windows stuff people use that isn't.Net and I can't see a translation engine or emulation working that great on ARM stuff.
There's absolutely no reason that Win32 stuff would have any problem with the ARM architecture.
Microsoft will just port their Win32 API over to ARM. The problem with bringing Win32 stuff over to Linux is that there is no Win32 API natively available... And the folks developing WINE don't have Microsoft's inside knowledge... So everything has to be reverse-engineered and hacked-together.
It may not be the easiest thing in the world... But there's absolutely no reason why Microsoft couldn't port Win32 to any architecture they feel like.
Or, if there are truly fundamental problems with getting some bit of code to run on some bit of hardware, just toss some emulation underneath it all.
THEY couldn't even tell me which video card my laptop came with, even after giving them a serial and model number.
I had this problem several years back with an HP I bought...
Was having trouble with the AGP, did some research, and found that there were updated drivers available. But nobody could tell me what was on my motherboard.
I called up HP, gave them every number that was on the machine, and they still couldn't tell me. There were three different motherboards that went into my particular model, and they had absolutely no idea which it might be.
These days I run into the same thing very routinely with Dell machines. Two different machines built to the same specifications might wind up with significantly different hardware inside. If you go to Dell's driver download page they'll just offer all the possibilities. At least it isn't too hard to figure out which one is right these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. My wife is a big fan of adventure games. There's still a steady stream of them coming out...
Big Fish Games seems to have a nearly endless supply of them. I routinely see new stuff from various small developers popping up on Steam. And I think The Adventure Company is still turning stuff out.
FPS titles may be the hot thing going... But that doesn't mean the graphical adventure game is dead.
$37,500 starting salary...
(Stupid new Slashdot layout breaks italics.)
With an engineering degree and experience. Pathetic.
I was making considerably less than that at my last job... So it doesn't sound that bad to me.
Especially considering that he gets to play with LEGO all day long.
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
It isn't so much a widening gap between working and middle-class...
Once upon a time, skilled labor was the middle class. But the middle class is slowly disappearing. We're outsourcing and offshoring everything we can. All the skilled labor jobs are going overseas.
Here in the US we've basically got unskilled labor, and management.
And that gap is widening. We replace more and more labors with machinery. We make individuals more productive with technology. We offshore what we can.
And the laborers become less and less skilled, and more easily replaced. So they can be paid less.
And the managers we actually have left here in the US are those that are harder to replace. So they must be paid more.
And eventually we have just the upper and lower classes.
How does one "suffer" by having to enter in a keycode? It takes all of 5 seconds.
Right now console games are fairly portable. You can bring the disc over to a friend's house and play on their console. Or you can sell the game to somebody else. Or rent it somewhere. This is all possible because the DRM makes sure it's a legitimate disc - but not necessarily that it is unique.
If we're going to start doing keycodes on discs, they're going to become a hell of a lot less portable.
Once you've authenticated that keycode against your console, or your online account, or whatever you won't be able to haul the disc over to a friend's house, or sell it, or rent it.
I haven't seen Playboy in years, either, but as I recall, it doesn't even show snatch, so outside of the Americas (and particularly the US and Canada), it is nothing more than what you see at the beach and on TV already.
Yup.
Many places have topless beaches - and you'll see just as much skin there as you will in Playboy.
And if you've got a completely nude beach you'll probably see even more than you do in Playboy.
But there's more text to the magazine than images.
Here's a question for you, Einstein...
If they took out all the pictures of the "nekkid" ladies, do you think it would sell as many copies?
It's hard to say.
If they suddenly stopped having pictures of naked women their readership would certainly drop. But that's largely because the people reading it right now are expecting certain things out of the magazine.
If it had never had pictures of naked women? Well, there are plenty of magazines out there with similar subject matter, sans-nudity, and they do ok.
Ultimately, the same question could be asked of a publication like Maxim though - which features scantily-clad, rather than nude, women. If they cut out all their eyecandy, would they still sell as many copies? And does that make them pornography?
I've absolutely no problem with images of the female form but a classy wank mag is still just a wank mag.
I don't think I'd really call Playboy "classy"...
And while people may very well wank to it, the same can be said of the Victoria's Secret catalog. Does that make the Victoria's Secret catalog a wank mag?
What about folks who really get off on the medical stuff? Does that make a durable medical goods catalog a wank mag?
If you think Playboy is porn, you really need to get out of the basement. Playboy is to porn what Disneyworld is to authenticity.
I'm curious to hear what your definition of porn is. And with that where you live so I can get an idea of whether your standards are close to your communities standards. As there is no definitive statement as to what constitutes porn that could be applied globally.
Granted, I haven't looked at Playboy in years... So it may have changed dramatically. But last time I looked I would not have called it pornography.
Sure, there's some pictures of naked women in there, and they're sure to titillate your average pubescent male...
But there's more text to the magazine than images. Substantially more text. And most of it is actually decent stuff. Some interesting articles and interviews and whatnot. I suspect that Playboy could actually survive as a magazine even if it didn't have nude photos. Well, maybe not so much these days with the web and all... Any print publication is suffering these days... But you know what I mean.
As for the images themselves, they were far too "tasteful" for my tastes. Plenty of breasts... 3/4 shots... Maybe a glimpse of pubic hair here or there... But that's about it. Your average art gallery has images substantially more pornographic than a Playboy magazine.
If I had to label Playboy, I'd call it "erotica" at best. Certainly not pornography.
Anyone who really thinks Playboy is pornography just needs to visit Google Images or Google Videos with Safe Search turned off to have their horizons dramatically broadened.
I predict that this report will be met with much skepticism on /.
Of course it will. And it should be. Microsoft has a long history of animosity towards open source software. That doesn't mean that they can't fund a genuinely objective study... But there's a good chance that things are going to be biased.
I also predict that I will make the argument that open source really *isn't* always all it's cracked up to be
Software is a tool. Nothing more or less. You need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is open source, sometimes it isn't.
and be shouted down by many, many voices
Probably. Slashdot has a long history of animosity towards closed source software, and Microsoft in specific.
I always love a government that tells me where I can and can't travel, where I can and can't sell my stuff, who I can and can't talk to--then proceeds to bad-mouth everyone else for not being free enough. Even when I was a kid and everyone was chiding the Ruskies with the "Papers please" and "In Russia you can't travel around or say whatever you want without government permission" I was stuck with the hypocrisy. Try telling the next cop who pulls you over that you don't need to show him your papers and see what happens. Try to take a vacation to Cuba sometime and see how free you are to travel anywhere. Try to export your software (or any other goods) to a country the U.S. doesn't like at the moment (i.e. countries who won't play ball) and see who comes knocking on your door.
Yup.
And back then things really were pretty free and open... Look at what we're putting up with today. You don't even need to try to vacation in Cuba to get an invasive search at the airport.
What if the Google guys legitimately believe that the Iranian government is running a peaceful nuclear program and is being unfairly targeted by a hostile U.S. ally (Israel)? Not saying this is the case, but shouldn't they still be able to sell them non-weapon/non-military software if they want to? That's hardly an unreasonable "freedom" in a country that holds itself as a bastion of both personal freedom and glorious capitalism.
At least with Google Earth I can almost see the logic... It could possibly be used for military planning or something...
Chrome... Umm... Maybe it's got some nice encryption for SSL stuff? Or something? I remember there used to be a problem exporting Netscape back in the day.
Picasa... I'm at a loss. What're they going to do, upload pictures of government office buildings or something? I have a hard time envisioning any way to use Picasa for nefarious purposes.
Maybe I would see it differently if the U.S. were actually at *WAR* with Iran. But if the criterion is "any country we don't like today," then exporting any product must be a goddamn nightmare for any international corporation.
I'm sure it is... But that isn't just a problem with the US. Every nation is going to use its exports as a lever to get what they want. And in order to exert that leverage, they're going to make things more complex/difficult for the folks trying to earn a living off those exports.
One of my college classes required us to install and run Linux on our own machines.
The professor didn't offer much guidance aside from suggesting that we might want to back up anything important, and pointing us at a couple distros.
It was up to us to download whatever it took to install Linux. It was up to us to set things up properly for a dual-boot or a virtual machine or whatever. It was up to us to install it, configure a couple users, and complete a few specific tasks.
Then we had to report on our experience and what we'd learned.
Terrific class, and an awesome experience. Learned an awful lot from actually doing it myself.
I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise. I was very eager to see another alien movie with Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger involved. I didn't actually expect much out of it... But I was eager to see what we'd get.
But, let's be realistic here... After those first couple of movies, it's really been downhill.
But this guy is merely a risibly hyperbolic instance of a much broader, more common, and (in alarmingly many circles) respected position: Namely, that the person who reveals wrongdoing is somehow guiltier of that wrongdoing than the person who commits it.
Yup. This is the bit that confuses me...
Granted, some of that stuff probably shouldn't have been leaked. And I'm sure various people broke various laws by leaking it. And there may very well be court cases and punishments and whatever else...
But the scary stuff that this guy is stressing about? Wikileaks didn't do that stuff. The US Government did that stuff. Wikileaks just let you know about the scary stuff.
Replacing the home button with multitouch gestures? So using the device will now require you to use both hands? Great! That should be fun when the people driving around me need to not only divert their attention to controlling their iphone/ipod touch, but now must take BOTH hands off the wheel to operate it.
You don't even have to be driving...
Good luck carrying a coffee while using your phone. Or opening a door... Or writing down notes... Or fumbling for your wallet...
I would be pretty upset if I couldn't use my phone with one hand.
I don't own an iPhone, so it may be better without home button, but I use it quite a lot on my android phone (long hold to change apps).
And would hate to need to hands to copy text out of an email into a search box, or a name from an email into a contact.
or to simply tap out a text and then call someone while web-browsing.
Exactly.
This might work well on an iPad... But I can't see it happening on the iPhone.
You have to be able to use a cell phone one-handed.
I routinely place calls, look up contacts, check my calendar, and check my email one-handed (on an Android phone). It's a little slower, it's a little more cumbersome... But you need to be able to do it. I don't always have two hands free. And I sure as hell can't manage a multitouch gesture one-handed.
300 people are responsible for making 18 million CDs/month. I saw another story about a sleeping bag factory cranking out 20 million bags a year with 500 empoloyees for the whole company. I read somewhere that American manufacturing capacity is the highest it's ever been. What are we going to do with all these people. I keep hearing 'Well, the world needs ditch diggers too'. No, no it doesn not... I guess we can let them starve to death in the streets.
Technology, at its most basic form, is a labor saving device. That's the whole idea behind all of this... Amplify the amount of work that an individual human being can do. And that means you need less human beings to do the work.
Offshoring isn't really helping things either. There may very well be jobs out there for those 300 people... But they're not in the US.
I was in Walmart a month ago looking for two CD's that I wanted to purchase. Neither was particularly obscure, and both were recent (released within the last year). They had neither, and actually I couldn't believe how small their selection was compared to what it used to be.
Walmart is having to compete with somebody bigger than they are - the whole of the Internet. Walmart has to stock things that sell well. They can't waste shelf space on something that isn't going to sell quickly. You can easily get just about any CD you can imagine from an online retailer, usually for a price comparable to Walmart. They can't compete with that kind of selection.
I understand the convenience of downloading via Walmart or Amazon, but what I can't understand is why people wouldn't actually want to have a bit-perfect digital copy on physical medium as a back up.
Most folks don't even contemplate backups. It would never occur to them to make a backup of an MP3.
Many digital download services allow you to re-download your purchases. And prices are generally low enough that a lot of folks wouldn't even balk at re-purchasing something if they lost the file.
Of course, most people wind up copying that MP3 to a portable device of some sort... Which acts as a backup of sorts. If you did delete the file from your computer you could probably copy it back from your phone/iPod/whatever.
Finally, if you really wanted a physical, bit-perfect backup... There's absolutely nothing preventing you from burning your own disc.
Ultimately, what I'm trying to say here, is that the lack of a backup is about the last reason I'd have for buying a physical CD as opposed to a digital download.
Why, yes. You've completely grasped my argument. A mission known to be suicidal is exactly the same thing as one designed with safety in mind and a track record of often, but not always, successful missions.
It is "known to be suicidal" in the same way that life is. The plan isn't to lob somebody up there and have them die after 4 months. The idea is to begin setting up the foundation of a colony. Just because it's one-way doesn't mean it's suicide. They could live to a ripe old age out there on Mars. In theory, at least.
Err... So, by that logic, we should just shut down NASA and never send up another manned mission ever again?
..it looks like the game needs to support this thing for it to work properly, and that's where all these fancy ideas usually fail; it'll get 2-3 games that supports it, but in a year everyone's already forgotten about it and moved on. It'd be different if they went ahead and developed an actual standard API that games could use to display parts of their UI on other devices and that API worked with every manufacturer's devices, it might actually catch on! But.. well, given how short-sighted and greedy companies usually are they will just try to lock people to their own devices and then wonder why it didn't work.
It looks like this is aimed at running PC games... In which case it could probably be handled much like my Nostromo (or just about any decent gaming mouse). Typically you'll have a layer of middleware that makes the device talk to the game correctly. With the Nostromo, I'm able to program a single button on the device to execute a series of keystrokes that the game then responds to. The game doesn't need to know how to talk to my Nostromo, the game needs to know how to respond to a keyboard and mouse.
Look harder next time. Put in your serial number and it'll tell you every part in your system.
Either that web page didn't exist at the time, or the folks at HP didn't know about it.
Those pages have existed for at *least* 7 years, because I recall using them during my fall semester in 2003 while working for the school's computer services group
This would have been roughly 1999/2000ish.
I had a problem with an AGP card under Windows 98 and was hopeful that the upcoming release of Windows 2000 would make it work better.
And it is entirely possible that web page did exist at the time. But I was on dial-up back then, and the Internet was not my first source of information. I did look around HP's website, but didn't find anything terribly useful. I wound up looking up some model number printed on the motherboard itself. The information I found pointed me towards some driver updates... But it was hard to tell which one applied to my motherboard because it was some kind of customized OEM version for HP. So I called HP to see if they could give me any help. The folks I spoke to (there were several) asked for every number we could think of, and none of them were able to tell me what motherboard was in my machine.
It may very well be that I was speaking to idiots. Or maybe they were just giving me the run-around. Or maybe we just happened to look at all the wrong numbers.
Regardless, the end result was that we were completely unable to determine what motherboard was actually installed in my computer. I eventually gave up, returned the video card, and bought PCI version instead.
Porting a program that was written in C without consideration for other architectures to a new architecture is hard, really hard. Seriously, I've done it.
I was under the impression that Microsoft had been maintaining builds of Windows for multiple architectures for a while now, just in case.
True, but you're still going to be relying on the software developer to actually compile and ship an ARM version. Emulation typically slows things down dramatically, it only really works when your emulator is running on hardware MUCH faster than the hardware you're emulating - which isn't the case here.
Didn't Apple throw the emulation into hardware? Threw another chip or two on the motherboard for a year or so while everyone transitioned from the old Motorola chips to PowerPC?
Look harder next time. Put in your serial number and it'll tell you every part in your system.
Either that web page didn't exist at the time, or the folks at HP didn't know about it.
Same thing with Dell. Put in your express service code, then click "Original System Configuration." The information is out there you just need to look.
Yup. Like I said - At least it isn't too hard to figure out which one is right these days.
What about the huge catalogue of win32 applications?
If I was to believe the anti-linux trolling of the last decade or so, that's the major reason people won't ever, ever switch!
On a more serious note, I know .Net stuff stands a good chance of working fine, but there's a hell of a lot of windows stuff people use that isn't .Net and I can't see a translation engine or emulation working that great on ARM stuff.
There's absolutely no reason that Win32 stuff would have any problem with the ARM architecture.
Microsoft will just port their Win32 API over to ARM. The problem with bringing Win32 stuff over to Linux is that there is no Win32 API natively available... And the folks developing WINE don't have Microsoft's inside knowledge... So everything has to be reverse-engineered and hacked-together.
It may not be the easiest thing in the world... But there's absolutely no reason why Microsoft couldn't port Win32 to any architecture they feel like.
Or, if there are truly fundamental problems with getting some bit of code to run on some bit of hardware, just toss some emulation underneath it all.
THEY couldn't even tell me which video card my laptop came with, even after giving them a serial and model number.
I had this problem several years back with an HP I bought...
Was having trouble with the AGP, did some research, and found that there were updated drivers available. But nobody could tell me what was on my motherboard.
I called up HP, gave them every number that was on the machine, and they still couldn't tell me. There were three different motherboards that went into my particular model, and they had absolutely no idea which it might be.
These days I run into the same thing very routinely with Dell machines. Two different machines built to the same specifications might wind up with significantly different hardware inside. If you go to Dell's driver download page they'll just offer all the possibilities. At least it isn't too hard to figure out which one is right these days.