Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "
Maybe for businesses, but not for the home users. The vast majority of them could care less about what file format things save in, assuming they even understand the concept of a file format in the first place - and really, why should they care about it?
The way things stand right now, 99% of the people common user's going to send files to is going to have Office available.
Do you still have to micromanage your sim's bathroom habits?
I wish I had to! Just started playing Sims 1 again, and my current little guy is freaking addicted to taking baths, to the point where he spends more time in the tub than watching TV or eating:P
I'm sorry any video card at $400 is not a great deal. That's starting to be 1/3 the price of a computer.
Depends what you're buying, it can be even worse - just ordered parts today to replace everything (cpu, motherboard, RAM, video card, PS, and case) except the sound card and hard drives in my fiancee's box, and came out to $392 (shipping included).
Sorry. As I said above, maybe I should have qualified my initial statement a bit more. At any rate, take a look at the NPD charts and decide for yourself.
Microsoft or not, it's fucking great
I'm not saying I agree with you, but where did I say it wasn't? All I was disputing was the original poster's assertion that the XBox is "royally kicking Nintendo's ass", which it's not. They are still quite close in terms of total sales.
you can mod the unit (as most know) and do a hell of a lot of shit with it.
If you're smart enough, you can have it mod'd and still use Xbox live too (mod off of course)
Uh, yes, this is pretty much common knowledge in geek circles by now.
Hey, late-2002 called, they want their sales figures back.:D
Uh...No? Assuming is a silly thing to do.
(And selling a whopping half million Gamecube consoles in Japan this year is not a good defense either, unless perhaps you live in Japan or only play Japanese-region games.)
And the XBox has sold only ~25,000. I would call that significant, unless you're claiming that Japan's sales doesn't matter, which is silly.
And you know what? None of this console sales numbers garbage should matter! Console sales numbers have nothing to do with how fun its games are, so to defend Gamecube as still selling close to (or even above!) the Xbox in the US is just ridiculous. It is about the games! I mean christ, the original poster (now modded as flamebait) you are attacking was talking about how much they love Nintendo's games and hope they start selling better again - shouldn't you be agreeing instead of spewing old console sales myths?
Maybe you should take your own advice.
It is especially silly with how cheap the consoles are now getting. A Gamecube is what, the price of two games? Most gamers in the US can afford at least two consoles now,
What's your point? I own a Cube, a PS2, and will probably buy an XBox sometime soon.
You don't need to win market share at the expense of another console right now!
Microsoft doesn't need anyone's help for that, recent reports have their XBox division not exactly making a profit. Not going to be healthy in the long run unless something changes.
(And please don't complain about biased sources, though some of the PR does make me gag too.:)
Easy to tell me not to complain when the biased sites support you, isn't it?:)
am not going to spend several hours finding perfectly unbiased webpages just because you can't follow basic console news.;p
I'm sure you can find more if you actually bother to look - that took me about 5 minutes with Google, and the figures below about 5 more with a calculator.
Looking at the August data, and excluding the GBA sales, approzimate figures are:
PS2: 58.6% XBOX: 22.8% GC: 18.5%
If you include the GBA:
PS2: 37.9% GBA: 35.2% XBOX:14.7% GC: 11.9%
So, as I said, the XBox and GC are running quite close together, especially when you consider how much of a gap with the PS2 and GBA sales there is.
Perhaps I should have qualified my initial statement a bit better- the GC has been (at times) both neck-and-neck and slightly ahead of the XBox in monthly sales, and is still neck-and-neck with it in total sales.
If I was wrong, so be it, but there's the full data so you can look at it for yourself outside of a Microsoft press release.
I'm thinking of pretty much anywhere i've been in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, DC, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
I don't claim to know how every city in the country has set their limits. From what I know, too, California is not exactly the most sane state in the union:):P
Problem with many people is they're lazy and they want to take all their crap all over the place with them.
I would think the bigger problem would be that speed limitation - even in small towns, the lowest the speed limit normally gets outside school zones is 30-35 mph.
First, there are some nasty sharks in the water this xmas season in the console game market. San Andreas, Halo 2, GT4... While it's not direct competition, people only have so much time and money to spend, and DS isn't first on anyone's list (except the hard-core nintendrones).
So you're basically assuming that everyone will want to play the latest violent 3d shooter/adventure games, and leave the DS on the shelves? I think you may end up being suprised.
This kind of "OMG, Nintendo is doomed" stuff has been posted endlessly ever since the Cube came out, and it has yet to come true.
Oh, and if you're actually trying to be serious instead of trolling, drop the "nintendrones" comment.
PS/2 and XBox are royally kicking Nintendo's ass at the sport that Nintendo once ruled.
If I had a nickel for every time i've heard this...Look up the sales figures.
The PS2 is slaughtering the other two, but in the US, figures put the GC and XBox running either neck-and-neck in 2nd place or with the GC slightly ahead. And that's to say nothing of Japan, where the GC is beating the XBox by something like 20:1 in total sales atm.
If you truly think that way, then good for you. Sadly, the advocates that just want to make Linux (or Mac) the One OS instead of Windows seem to be the most vocal, at least in a lot of public discussion i've seen.
The ultimate idea is to teach them generally about computers so they are better prepared for whatever new systems they might encounter later.
I agree with that attitude 100% - I was commenting to that specific poster, not the whole community. Far better to do things that way, than to go on about how MS is blinding kids to alternatives...And then turn around and have your solution be to exclusively use something else, as long as it's not MS.
It is very human to want to be in association with a group of people like yourself. People who don't have to go out of their way to communicate with you.
What you are arguing is that the Deaf are to be faulted for being human.
Not at all. What i'm arguing is that if there's a frustration at the ignorance of their culture, then it seems that the deaf need to share that culture with the rest of us in daily life, not stay clustered by themselves constantly. If you have a way for people to really understand deaf culture without actually interacting with the deaf, i'd love to hear it, seriously. My personal experience is that things like online chat rooms and such can help immensely in breaking the ice.
At any rate, there's probably a fine line to walk there somewhere, but i'm not an expert, so i'll leave that to people like you and your wife.
Not everywhere is as utopian as New York state
I wouldn't exactly call NY state "utopian", but at any rate, that is why I asked:)
First of all, I attend RIT (but am not deaf myself), with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf right there on campus, so I have interacted with actual deaf people, and do so on a daily basis in one way or another. I did IT work at NTID last summer with a deaf co-worker, and he was one of the most fun people to be around that i've met in a long time.
That said:
Man, I'm truly amazed at the amount of freakin' ignorance there is about the Deaf and Deaf culture.
Then the deaf need to get out and educate the rest of the world, and interact with the rest of us that can hear. Many (but by no means all) deaf people i've seen tend to stick to themselves and not communicate much with the hearing in their daily lives.
One good example would be in many classes where i've had group projects, the deaf/hard-of-hearing students will almost always (unless the professor forces them to split up) stick together instead of dealing with the hassle of communicating with the non-deaf classmates.
because the children were Deaf (which DOESN'T make them stupid!)
I've not run into someone with this attitude for a long, long time, even before I started attending RIT. I'd be interested to hear you expand on where this has been a problem for you.
I don't think that that is the point. What you're suggesting is fixing a Microsoft problem with a 3rd party solution. That is not good enough, especially when Microsoft make overstated claims about the security of SP2.
But whether you like it or not, the fact still remains that you can make Windows fairly secure with little effort w/those 3rd party products.
That doesn't seem to stop the (bad kind of) Linux zealots from screaming about how horrible and impossible to secure Windows is, though. In my experience, it's almost like some people don't even try to follow good practices on Windows, just so they have something to rant about.
I doubt many residents want to live in the area, but we cannot afford expensive "trendy" inner city homes.
Knowing the inner-city conditions and living costs of most major cities i've been to, i'm continually amazed anyone wants to live there. More crime, more pollution, less open space, and so on. Somehow being closer to shopping makes it all worthwhile to some people, but for many others, it's not.
And the developers seem stuck in a rut -- they just churn out more sprawl each year.
So are these all going empty, or what?
I don't get where the angst at having to drive your car short distances is coming from...If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better, or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
I'm guessing you don't/didn't want to do that, and at the price of having to drive your car a bit more, probably have more living space and financial resources available to spend. Such is life.
(I leave my PC on 24/7 and only discovered this when I would return home and my PC was magically back at a fresh reboot state. For a while I thought I had a hardware problem because if Windows had crashed I would've seen a blue screen halt, right?)
One personal anecdote deserves another, so i'll just say that I use XP Pro, leave my PC on 24/7 as well, and have never had my PC mysteriously reboot except after a power outage.
I can count the number of actual bluescreens i've seen on one hand(happened while playing Starcraft due to wonky SoundBlaster drivers), and they stopped when I updated said drivers.
Granted, the worst offender is the non-FF title (Chrono Trigger), and the loading times may be shorter on the PS2 (does anybody know?)
It's still not quite as snappy as the SNES version, but the fast loading does help a bit. I'd already played through completely and gotten all the endings and extras by the time I bought a PS2, though, so I haven't tested it much.
FF4, on the other hand, has no loading speed problems whatsoever, even on a PS1. The music and sound effects are a bit off from the original, but on the whole it's not too bad.
It worries me to see so many people on/. that only reboot "due to power failure"
I won't say it'll never happen, but i've never had any problems with any of my hardware due to them being on when the power went out during a storm or something.
For god's sake people, buy a friggin UPS. They are only like $50... you'll appreciate it when your harddisks stop failing on you due to power surges.
I do have all my equipment hooked up to a decent non-$10-cheapo-at-Walmart surge protector, but I think a UPS is a bit overkill, considering i'm not running any servers or anything.
But when XP runs that long without reboot, it REALLY becomes unstable. He showed me and I had never seen so much unstability. Every progs crash. That was terrible.
I'd be very interested to know what your friend is running, personally. My XP box has been up for over a month now, has run hundreds of instances of various programs, and does not have "Every progs crash". I can't honestly remember the last time I had to reboot that wasn't due to a power failure....I know it's been over a year since the last time I saw a BSOD (due to crappy sound card drivers), at least.
If it's that easy to tell the difference between hostile and benign content, then the differentiation should be done in the application in the first place. If programmers aren't up to doing this, what chance does Joe average user have?
It is easy, though, it's just not something that can be done by a computer (yet). If you (for example) get a short message from someone you know, but with a completely different writing style and an attachment you didn't ask for...Maybe you should be careful and not open it?
That difference is really what it comes down to most times...It boggles the mind how people can get emails that look completely different from anything else the sender has written, and yet still have total trust in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "
Maybe for businesses, but not for the home users. The vast majority of them could care less about what file format things save in, assuming they even understand the concept of a file format in the first place - and really, why should they care about it?
The way things stand right now, 99% of the people common user's going to send files to is going to have Office available.
Do you still have to micromanage your sim's bathroom habits?
:P
I wish I had to! Just started playing Sims 1 again, and my current little guy is freaking addicted to taking baths, to the point where he spends more time in the tub than watching TV or eating
I'm sorry any video card at $400 is not a great deal. That's starting to be 1/3 the price of a computer.
Depends what you're buying, it can be even worse - just ordered parts today to replace everything (cpu, motherboard, RAM, video card, PS, and case) except the sound card and hard drives in my fiancee's box, and came out to $392 (shipping included).
That might be what you're meant to do, but it's not what generally happens in reality.
You're quoting old facts
Sorry. As I said above, maybe I should have qualified my initial statement a bit more. At any rate, take a look at the NPD charts and decide for yourself.
Microsoft or not, it's fucking great
I'm not saying I agree with you, but where did I say it wasn't? All I was disputing was the original poster's assertion that the XBox is "royally kicking Nintendo's ass", which it's not. They are still quite close in terms of total sales.
you can mod the unit (as most know) and do a hell of a lot of shit with it.
If you're smart enough, you can have it mod'd and still use Xbox live too (mod off of course)
Uh, yes, this is pretty much common knowledge in geek circles by now.
Hey, late-2002 called, they want their sales figures back. :D
:)
:)
;p
Uh...No? Assuming is a silly thing to do.
(And selling a whopping half million Gamecube consoles in Japan this year is not a good defense either, unless perhaps you live in Japan or only play Japanese-region games.)
And the XBox has sold only ~25,000. I would call that significant, unless you're claiming that Japan's sales doesn't matter, which is silly.
And you know what? None of this console sales numbers garbage should matter! Console sales numbers have nothing to do with how fun its games are, so to defend Gamecube as still selling close to (or even above!) the Xbox in the US is just ridiculous. It is about the games! I mean christ, the original poster (now modded as flamebait) you are attacking was talking about how much they love Nintendo's games and hope they start selling better again - shouldn't you be agreeing instead of spewing old console sales myths?
Maybe you should take your own advice.
It is especially silly with how cheap the consoles are now getting. A Gamecube is what, the price of two games? Most gamers in the US can afford at least two consoles now,
What's your point? I own a Cube, a PS2, and will probably buy an XBox sometime soon.
You don't need to win market share at the expense of another console right now!
Microsoft doesn't need anyone's help for that, recent reports have their XBox division not exactly making a profit. Not going to be healthy in the long run unless something changes.
(And please don't complain about biased sources, though some of the PR does make me gag too.
Easy to tell me not to complain when the biased sites support you, isn't it?
am not going to spend several hours finding perfectly unbiased webpages just because you can't follow basic console news.
Awww, poor you. Here, i'll help:
August NPD chart
July NPD chart
June NPD chart
I'm sure you can find more if you actually bother to look - that took me about 5 minutes with Google, and the figures below about 5 more with a calculator.
Looking at the August data, and excluding the GBA sales, approzimate figures are:
PS2: 58.6%
XBOX: 22.8%
GC: 18.5%
If you include the GBA:
PS2: 37.9%
GBA: 35.2%
XBOX:14.7%
GC: 11.9%
So, as I said, the XBox and GC are running quite close together, especially when you consider how much of a gap with the PS2 and GBA sales there is.
Perhaps I should have qualified my initial statement a bit better- the GC has been (at times) both neck-and-neck and slightly ahead of the XBox in monthly sales, and is still neck-and-neck with it in total sales.
If I was wrong, so be it, but there's the full data so you can look at it for yourself outside of a Microsoft press release.
I'm thinking of pretty much anywhere i've been in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, DC, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
:):P
I don't claim to know how every city in the country has set their limits. From what I know, too, California is not exactly the most sane state in the union
They could easily average 25 mph
Problem with many people is they're lazy and they want to take all their crap all over the place with them.
I would think the bigger problem would be that speed limitation - even in small towns, the lowest the speed limit normally gets outside school zones is 30-35 mph.
First, there are some nasty sharks in the water this xmas season in the console game market. San Andreas, Halo 2, GT4... While it's not direct competition, people only have so much time and money to spend, and DS isn't first on anyone's list (except the hard-core nintendrones).
So you're basically assuming that everyone will want to play the latest violent 3d shooter/adventure games, and leave the DS on the shelves? I think you may end up being suprised.
This kind of "OMG, Nintendo is doomed" stuff has been posted endlessly ever since the Cube came out, and it has yet to come true.
Oh, and if you're actually trying to be serious instead of trolling, drop the "nintendrones" comment.
Think again. I didn't see (for example) the Lynx, Game Gear, TurboExpress, WonderSwan, or N-Gage do too much damage to their market share.
PS/2 and XBox are royally kicking Nintendo's ass at the sport that Nintendo once ruled.
If I had a nickel for every time i've heard this...Look up the sales figures.
The PS2 is slaughtering the other two, but in the US, figures put the GC and XBox running either neck-and-neck in 2nd place or with the GC slightly ahead. And that's to say nothing of Japan, where the GC is beating the XBox by something like 20:1 in total sales atm.
If you truly think that way, then good for you. Sadly, the advocates that just want to make Linux (or Mac) the One OS instead of Windows seem to be the most vocal, at least in a lot of public discussion i've seen.
The ultimate idea is to teach them generally about computers so they are better prepared for whatever new systems they might encounter later.
I agree with that attitude 100% - I was commenting to that specific poster, not the whole community. Far better to do things that way, than to go on about how MS is blinding kids to alternatives...And then turn around and have your solution be to exclusively use something else, as long as it's not MS.
It is very human to want to be in association with a group of people like yourself. People who don't have to go out of their way to communicate with you.
:)
What you are arguing is that the Deaf are to be faulted for being human.
Not at all. What i'm arguing is that if there's a frustration at the ignorance of their culture, then it seems that the deaf need to share that culture with the rest of us in daily life, not stay clustered by themselves constantly. If you have a way for people to really understand deaf culture without actually interacting with the deaf, i'd love to hear it, seriously. My personal experience is that things like online chat rooms and such can help immensely in breaking the ice.
At any rate, there's probably a fine line to walk there somewhere, but i'm not an expert, so i'll leave that to people like you and your wife.
Not everywhere is as utopian as New York state
I wouldn't exactly call NY state "utopian", but at any rate, that is why I asked
First of all, I attend RIT (but am not deaf myself), with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf right there on campus, so I have interacted with actual deaf people, and do so on a daily basis in one way or another. I did IT work at NTID last summer with a deaf co-worker, and he was one of the most fun people to be around that i've met in a long time.
That said:
Man, I'm truly amazed at the amount of freakin' ignorance there is about the Deaf and Deaf culture.
Then the deaf need to get out and educate the rest of the world, and interact with the rest of us that can hear. Many (but by no means all) deaf people i've seen tend to stick to themselves and not communicate much with the hearing in their daily lives.
One good example would be in many classes where i've had group projects, the deaf/hard-of-hearing students will almost always (unless the professor forces them to split up) stick together instead of dealing with the hassle of communicating with the non-deaf classmates.
because the children were Deaf (which DOESN'T make them stupid!)
I've not run into someone with this attitude for a long, long time, even before I started attending RIT. I'd be interested to hear you expand on where this has been a problem for you.
I'd be happy if they were Mac labs even, just something other than MS. Kids need to be non-polarized.
No, you just want them to be polarized towards something other than MS. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but don't kid yourself.
I don't think that that is the point. What you're suggesting is fixing a Microsoft problem with a 3rd party solution. That is not good enough, especially when Microsoft make overstated claims about the security of SP2.
But whether you like it or not, the fact still remains that you can make Windows fairly secure with little effort w/those 3rd party products.
That doesn't seem to stop the (bad kind of) Linux zealots from screaming about how horrible and impossible to secure Windows is, though. In my experience, it's almost like some people don't even try to follow good practices on Windows, just so they have something to rant about.
I doubt many residents want to live in the area, but we cannot afford expensive "trendy" inner city homes.
Knowing the inner-city conditions and living costs of most major cities i've been to, i'm continually amazed anyone wants to live there. More crime, more pollution, less open space, and so on. Somehow being closer to shopping makes it all worthwhile to some people, but for many others, it's not.
And the developers seem stuck in a rut -- they just churn out more sprawl each year.
So are these all going empty, or what?
I don't get where the angst at having to drive your car short distances is coming from...If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better, or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
I'm guessing you don't/didn't want to do that, and at the price of having to drive your car a bit more, probably have more living space and financial resources available to spend. Such is life.
(I leave my PC on 24/7 and only discovered this when I would return home and my PC was magically back at a fresh reboot state. For a while I thought I had a hardware problem because if Windows had crashed I would've seen a blue screen halt, right?)
One personal anecdote deserves another, so i'll just say that I use XP Pro, leave my PC on 24/7 as well, and have never had my PC mysteriously reboot except after a power outage.
I can count the number of actual bluescreens i've seen on one hand(happened while playing Starcraft due to wonky SoundBlaster drivers), and they stopped when I updated said drivers.
You're thinking of a different game, yes. I believe it's part of the same series/in the same vein as the SaGa Frontier games.
Granted, the worst offender is the non-FF title (Chrono Trigger), and the loading times may be shorter on the PS2 (does anybody know?)
It's still not quite as snappy as the SNES version, but the fast loading does help a bit. I'd already played through completely and gotten all the endings and extras by the time I bought a PS2, though, so I haven't tested it much.
FF4, on the other hand, has no loading speed problems whatsoever, even on a PS1. The music and sound effects are a bit off from the original, but on the whole it's not too bad.
It worries me to see so many people on /. that only reboot "due to power failure"
I won't say it'll never happen, but i've never had any problems with any of my hardware due to them being on when the power went out during a storm or something.
For god's sake people, buy a friggin UPS. They are only like $50... you'll appreciate it when your harddisks stop failing on you due to power surges.
I do have all my equipment hooked up to a decent non-$10-cheapo-at-Walmart surge protector, but I think a UPS is a bit overkill, considering i'm not running any servers or anything.
But when XP runs that long without reboot, it REALLY becomes unstable.
He showed me and I had never seen so much unstability. Every progs crash. That was terrible.
I'd be very interested to know what your friend is running, personally. My XP box has been up for over a month now, has run hundreds of instances of various programs, and does not have "Every progs crash". I can't honestly remember the last time I had to reboot that wasn't due to a power failure....I know it's been over a year since the last time I saw a BSOD (due to crappy sound card drivers), at least.
Right now it's _terrible_ - just as bad as Windows XP.
:)
GNOME/KDE are slower and heavier than WinXP.
Which is it? Either it's bad or it's not
If it's that easy to tell the difference between hostile and benign content, then the differentiation should be done in the application in the first place. If programmers aren't up to doing this, what chance does Joe average user have?
It is easy, though, it's just not something that can be done by a computer (yet). If you (for example) get a short message from someone you know, but with a completely different writing style and an attachment you didn't ask for...Maybe you should be careful and not open it?
That difference is really what it comes down to most times...It boggles the mind how people can get emails that look completely different from anything else the sender has written, and yet still have total trust in it.