I work in tech support for six different schools and dozens of people for whom I do private jobs.
Your comment is just not true. I get calls EVERY week with someone wanting me to clean their computers (all of them XPSP2 at least). The problem is that the first thing that sort of junk does is stop Automatic Updates from working for everything from Windows to Antivirus to even targetting AdAware etc., so from then on even if the user "cleans" their machine, they aren't getting the updates they need (even though sometimes it looks like they are) and thus they are open to every future problem too (including those fixed in patches like this one).
People are still dumb, they still click, they still don't learn, no matter what it ends up costing them. Most of them are extremely casual about all this "Oh, yes, I got a virus/spyware/malware a few months back but so long as I don't do X, I don't notice", "Yeah, I've been getting these random popups for the past few months, if you have a minute could you have a look at them sometime?", etc. Personally, I'd be doing damage control the second I spotted one of these on my own personal computers but it's just tolerated by the average joe. They can literally put up with it for months.
I'm ALWAYS being told that "machines slow down when they get older", don't they? Makes sense to them but to me I'm just thinking "Yeah, only if they are slowly filling with junk". And that's how people work. They keep using it until it gets to the point of being unusable (which for people who used to run older PC's is actually totally unbearable). Then they might casually bring it up in conversation with me, not do anything for several weeks, then try to book my time to clean it up etc.
Come on, a few days ago there was a major news story about the head of Microsoft itself not being able to clean his friend's PC of spyware. I work with people who can't drag-and-drop, you really think they stand a CHANCE of even seeing that they've been infected, cleaning it themselves etc.? And with the growing spate of targetted spyware/viruses, I can't even rely on putting on a nice automated cleaning system (like Adaware/Spybot/AVG scripted to auto-update and then full scan) onto their systems.
The reason I don't hear about it any more? I raise my prices depending on how bad it seems when I hear about it. Can't get on the net at all? That's an extra £10/hour. Can't load any program? Another £10/hour. Antivirus isn't functioning properly cos something's interfering? Another £10/hour. Haven't GOT antivirus/firewall/updates? Another £10/hour.
Got up-to-date antivirus, a good firewall, an "alternative" web browser, scheduled anti-spyware, no visible signs of infection prior and somehow STILL got something nasty? (even if you accidentally clicked a link you didn't mean to, so long as you TELL me you did that) The price drops dramatically to the point where people don't say... "Uh, ok, I'll er... call you sometime." but instead say "Yes, please, if you could."
Users aren't getting educated, they're getting ignorant. They KNOW it's a virus/spyware and they choose to ignore it and continue with their work (which, incidentally, is not only usually private and confidential but usually vital to the running of the school they work for). When you're telling headteachers that X got on the system because supplier Y didn't issue an update, they just carry on regardless. They don't stop to consider what MIGHT have happened to the data (in complete breach of Data Protection laws I might add) or where it might currently be floating, even when informed.
The best customers in the world are the ones who KNOW NOTHING but ADMIT to knowing nothing and look to you for advice. They're the ones that you can TEACH how to use a computer safely. Everyone else nods along and then loads IE behind your back because they "know better" (for instance, they installed an anti-spyware thing "to keep IE safe" from a pop-up on their desktop just to give you
First off, I hate wireless in all shapes of forms (Bluetooth is turned off on my phone, my laptop's wireless is permanently disabled and the only 802.11b AP that I own is for purely educational purposes). However, with that in mind, I regularly cater for small suburban schools in the Boroughs of Greater London. To give you an idea, we talking about a 10-classroom school backing onto suburban terraced houses in some quite nice areas. Lovely big fields and play-areas, main roads etc. but also a few dozen small residential buildings within a 100m radius of the school property.
The current fad (after interactive whiteboards and laptops themselves) is to have wireless "trolleys", sixteen laptops in a steel trolley that charge overnight and then access the network over a double-AP 802.11g wireless connection. Bear in mind that this costs about £20,000 all-in for a school and allows a **single** class to access websites/local cached content/their network files.
It's a nightmare. It generates something like 50% of my support calls alone for the entire school. The laptops don't get connections. Little fingers turn off the wireless switches (fixed by stapling their fingers to... I mean removing the switches). Interference from nearby house's networks (kismet is fun when run against a small suburban school's neighbourhood) and things like 2.4GHz video senders. Interference from building structure. Interference from passers-by and visitors with anything running on the 2.4GHz frequencies. Just plain damn not wanting to get a connection. Bios updates, firmware updates, driver updates, all of which interfere with the ability to get a signal. Literally having to instruct the teachers to place the AP's HERE and HERE, tweak the aerial to point THIS way and have the kids clustered HERE or you won't get a connection. Regularly having one or two machines out of the 16 that just won't hold a connection at all. The other 14/15 machines will allow you to do stuff like simple web browsing but access a single small 300x200 MPEG4 video (even from cached content) and the wireless network starts to die, kicking off machines at random.
This isn't just one school - this is at least three seperated by several miles. And what can we do about it? Zip. We've had engineers in from every company involved and there's nothing that can be done. We spent two years with the hardware trying to get somewhere (incorporating free upgrades from our supplier, rigourous control over connection procedures etc.) and never managed to make it any better. Yes, we can spend £X,000 on the new wireless kit but there are no guarantees that it will work any better at all. We can update firmware to version X on the PC's or the AP's but nothing ever IMPROVES.
And the schools are pushing and pushing to introduce more and more kit like this... one trolley works on the whole, so let's just buy another to make up for the shortcomings. So you have another 16 clients over another 2 AP's which people want to all use in the same room. Ha. Yeah, right. We couldn't get 16 working on two AP's, let alone 32 fighting for the only 3 channels you can use simultaneously spread over 4 AP's all within about 10 metres of each other.
Yeah, on a good day you can literally stick a laptop at one end of the school, the trolley with it's AP's at the other end and get a near-full bandwidth connection (in fact, they use this arrangement regularly to do assemblies in the morning, streaming video from the local cached content). But the second you introduce more clients, it dies quickly. I've never actually witnessed all 16 working simultaneously (even for just login and websites, and the network is used for auth and for internet only, applications are local) and I'm their primary technician.
Minor local interference in a suburban area can kill the network stone dead, I'd hate to think about trying this in the middle of a busy city centre full of offices, internet cafes etc. I have heard of a school in the exact same area where th
Level balancing is certainly an issue here. Things like Driver, which required you to complete a (quite difficult) intro course before you were allowed anywhere near the missions - you know what, I just want to play the game. I'll learn the controls in my own time as and when I need to.
I know at least three children (not mine) that played the game and gave up before they even got to the first mission - they ended up just playing the free play mode all the time. I could complete 90% of the missions without having to even look at the manual, learn the controls or anything else - the other 10% I would learn how to get past when I needed to - don't make me have to perfect every maneouvure before I can play Mission 1 - Get from A to B.
"Unlocking" isn't a bad thing, unless it's done badly. To follow with the same example, once you'd completed that Driver training course, the next 5 or so missions were trivial to complete. The rest provided minor challenges to help you improve. However, the last mission was utterly impossible and totally out of proportion to the rest of the game. I gave up on the last mission after 50 or 60 attempts without even coming close, yet had walked the rest of the game.
Stuff that's "unlocked" by convoluted means (i.e. completing the training course on Driver, finding a secret area, etc.) should NEVER be required to complete the game. You should be able to play front-to-back without having to find a single secret - Doom, Quake, Mario Bros., all the classics follow this pattern. A secret should be just that - something there for someone's who's looking that's not going to hinder someone who's not. Bonus points, extra lives, new worlds are rewards for finding a secret - they will make it easier or more fun to play and replay the game but should NEVER be required to get to the end.
Games designers are not in it to "kill" the player at every opportunity, it's too easy. Players also get bored if they are doing simple, repetitive tasks over and over again. Provide challenge but alway show a glimpse that it's do-able. You can make that jump if you had used THAT platform, you can see the key on the other side but how do you get there, if you'd found that secret power-up that hard bit wouldn't be quite so hard.
Balance is the HARDEST thing in any game to get right. Examples of some that "got it wrong" would include:
Driver
Black & White (let's make a big fuss about having a creature and how to use him and then take him away from the player almost immediately).
Serious Sam (point, shoot, wait for things to die)
Ah, I've seen this coming for ages. The PC games market is bouyed up by those who stay on the cutting edge only - your average Joe doesn't stand a chance of having a PC that you could run a modern game on... take a random family with a PC and a random game from the full-price shelves and see how much fun it is to get it working at a decent speed.
I'm getting away from MS as much as I can because of crap like this. My computer, my rules... you wanna force rules on me, you don't come onto my computer. I just can't be bothered to play about with MS-based computers any more just to get a poxy game to run.
I don't care whether or not it offers new features or is given away free in cereal or everyone else in the world uses it, I'm keeping MS stuff strictly away from my own machines. I didn't want DirectX but numerous upgrades were forced on me by the games I wanted to play, and many of the upgrades killed performance or broke the install.
Each time, I still ended up with a game that performed better under OpenGL (almost any Quake/Half-Life based game for instance) or could EASILY have been replicated without using any sort of acceleration library satisfactorily (Age of Empires II springs to mind - nothing in it that NEEDS DirectX and still a massive performance slog through any sort of WINE or similar program and for what? A 2D RTS that shouldn't need ANY fancy stuff to do it's job - hell, DOS versions of Command & Conquer on an old Pentium 133 did the same stuff in similar resolutions without coming NEAR the CPU time used for AOE just to draw a screen on a 1GHz)
I work with MS systems all day long, spending half my time working around stupid quirks and things that should have been in the OS since day one. I get paid to do it there so I tolerate it and almost nothing uses DirectX, even though I work in primary schools. I don't tolerate the amount of setup needed to get a game running at home any more. Those machines that I have reserved as Windows "consoles" are treated as if they are plastered with strict disclaimers:
- Games only. Do not use for serious work. - And old games at that, unless you feel like upgrading everything to get there and spend hours chasing patches, upgrades, updates, firewalls, drivers and controller setups just to play a crap game that you'll uninstall within a week. - And even if you do that, there's no guarantee that tomorrow the game won't work because of an update, a new requirement, or something else killing performance to the point where it's unplayable.
In computing terms I'm now firmly considering myself an old fogie and haven't bought a game in a shop for years (unless you count a 50p copy of Warcraft in a local bargain bin), certainly not one I enjoyed playing.
I recently sold off about 75% of my back-catalogue on eBay because I realised I would NEVER play them again - some still had the wrappers on, a surprising amount had been played once and then uninstalled (Black & White, for instance, which I bought based on hype, played through until my creature was taken away from me and then promptly uninstalled... my brother did the exact same when I lent it to him afterwards). I'm sticking with my favourites and re-living some of the classics. Emulators, DosBox and remakes all the way.
If I want anything else, anything newer, I will buy a console. An old one at that. Secondhand with so many games bundled in that I could play forever, all for the price of a single full-price new PC game. If I can't afford a modern console and one game, I won't be able to afford the money for a PC that could run a modern game well enough, or the time to get it working, certainly not when you take into account how much I'd use it for because it WOULD be JUST a console in a fancy wrapper.
I decided a few years ago to not chase the latest and greatest and to stick to what's fun. Counterstrike is the only thing I can't really do on any other OS (My Linux PC's are just too slow to run it even under WINE but, strangely enough, more
An interesting fact-ette: The UK has no law which guarantees free speech and yet we don't get half as much rubbish like this. Legally speaking, the UK doesn't have half the "guarantees" like free speech that the US has.
The nearest we have is European Human Rights (which are a relatively modern addition that the courts are still coming to terms with and are EU law rather than British, which means we are *suppposed* to follow them because we signed up to them but instead we just tend to argue that they don't apply to us), which generally have a bad name. Mention "Human Rights" to someone in the UK and you might as well be saying "Health & Safety" - it's treated with the same contempt. The EU don't have a good reputation among the British since they said our bananas were too bendy to be bananas and we couldn't buy brazil nuts in their shells any more (a very traditional Christmas-sy treat).
In the UK, schools also has a slightly different meaning - I believe US "school" is approximately equal to our schools/colleges combined (in the UK if you were 17 or over and in full-time education you'd be in a college/"sixth-form" or, later on, university in all of which you are treated with as much respect as any other adult).
A 17-year-old is basically treated like an adult. They may not be 18 (the legal age for legally-binding contracts, buying a house, getting a credit card, being legally/financially independent of your parents but not, strangely, having sex, drinking or smoking which happen at 16, or driving a car which happens at 17... no I don't know why either). A 17-year-old posting on a blog would be pretty much completely out of reach of any "school" they attended unless they were doing something libellous or otherwise illegal, in which case they would go to court. If not, the European Court Of Human Rights would end up getting involved at some point, no doubt. (BTW: If you ever hear of a UK legal case going to the European Court of Human Rights, it means a British judge has already told them to sod off).
Additionally, although there isn't half as much "freedom" on paper as the US has, come to Britain and you'll notice that people say what they want without fear.
The only case that comes to mind of a restriction of free speech is when a former MI5 agent tried to reveal that there was some "dodgy dealing" going down among MI5 (something which is no doubt national-security terrority anyway). He had to go into hiding in a foreign country for a while but even appeared, bold as brass, on a BBC TV satire quiz show (Have I Got News For You) via satellite link which went out on air without any problems at all. I don't see that happening in the US.
I'm British, my girlfriend too as is her father. We went to America to visit him when he lived over there - believe it or not his American friends were SHOCKED by how she and her father communicated because they genuinely believed that they hated each other by the way they spoke to each other. Calling someone a bugger, or referring to them as a toerag or a rat, was so unheard of that the US friends could not grasp it.
Poking fun at someone's size (even affectionately) was unheard of. Now saying such things to the general public I can see a problem with ("Oi Fatty!" isn't going to get you arrested but it's not a nice thing to say and if you harassed a workmate in that way, there's a case for dismissal), however two family members can say what they like to each other in the UK without anyone blinking an eyelid.
In the US, he ended up making most of his friends dislike him for his behaviour (until my girlfriend stepped in and explained that nothing even slightly insulting was being said between the two of them).
For years he ended up insulting people without even realising it because of the way he expressed his opinions, something which any Brit would take in their stride and see as harmless banter. The Americans referred to him as "that extremely rude Englishman". It's much easier to say something offensive to
For a time, I ran a laptop as a dial-up/dial-in router for my local network (the clients were UPS-protected for up to 30mins). It worked fine but there are obviously considerations:
1) Heat 2) Movement 3) Upgradeability/Physical Space
Laptops get hot. Make sure yours runs sufficiently cool if you're going to leave it unattended for any length of time. Also, as other posters have mentioned, check the fans regularly or make it run fanless. Mini-ITX is a good idea if you can afford the extra power as it will ensure the computer is designed for the constant heat you want it to generate.
Laptops don't like moving parts - don't have it serving CD's or running off of the hard disk a lot - keep it simple, maybe even something like a Flash key/CF disk as the main drive and/or caching everything in RAM. Mini-ITX is good here because it can use standard drives etc.
You won't be able to use the parts you would normally use. RAID is out of the window unless you want to get into external storage and powering THAT as well - pointless, you may as well just use a PC with a UPS. Additionally, things like network ports etc. are normally not that prevelant, although you could make up for that with wireless etc. Mini-ITX is again a good substitute because it's completely upgradeable.
I used to run a two-modem dial-up/dial-in router for my local network from a laptop (an ancient IBM Thinkpad - something like a P133 with 16MB RAM) - that used the internal network port, the internal modem port, a PCMCIA modem port (check for non-winmodems if you're using Linux, they do exist) and a PCMCIA network port.
The software loaded all from a single floppy disc (a "Freesco" router), detected all the PCMCIA hardware and modems and performed the job admirably. The hard disk could easily be removed as it did nothing but storage in my setup. The screen was always switched off and it survived several power outages (for much longer than the client PC's). At least it meant that it KNEW it was going down and could inform people without losing their work, cutting their downloads/uploads, and allowed me to check websites about the power outage!
If nothing else, having the "server" go down last is always more comforting than it going while the clients are still running.
It's amazing how often power goes but ordinary phone lines are left enabled - I've surfed at 10Mbps over ADSL when the entire town has been in a blackout (streetlights, houses, the local train station, etc.).
My laptop router still functioned as dial-up/dial-in for several hours after the power had gone off without any special preparation (although putting it on an ordinary UPS too may have kept it going all day long!). If I had needed to, I could have sent/recieved email, browsed websites, allowed others to connect to my machine, connect to other machines, played games online etc. for many, many hours in the pitch-black.
It's not a daft idea but DON'T DO IT FOR SERIOUS STUFF. Plus, for someone setting up from scratch, it's much, much cheaper to do things properly with real UPS etc.
Okay... I'm not desperate to understand the fuss around this (I can accept that some people are seeing things that just aren't there) but I did *SPECIFICALLY* read these posts, consider them carefully and then re-watch the entire thing again with this in mind. I was sure that I must be missing something that other people are somehow seeing.
And you know what, it's rubbish. The first 7 minutes of the film DO NOT tie in with the theory you have linked too, not at all, most especially the dialogue just does not fit in with this.
I'm not saying that it's not what the creators had in mind for the plot but if it is, it's not something that the audience is ever expected to pick up on. Even on the final scene, it seems to only apply for that scene.
If this is "the plot", it's a very, very shaky one that raises more questions that it answers, for example why does Emo interact with the birds which are perching on the cables, for instance? Are they supposed to be "real" birds that Proog is imagining as something else? Still incredibly shaky and unclear as far as I'm concerned. The theory I posited in my post above explains just as much as this "plot".
I have a friend who is an absolute EXPERT on movie interpretation - a semi-autistic man who has studied film since he was a child, who can easily find deep meaning within a "arty" film consisting entirely of a blue screen (I kid you not, he sat through several hours of it and thought it was the best thing he'd ever seen), a person who can tell you every film any actor's ever been in and draw parallels between films which are decades and genres apart. I'm gonna show him this and see what he sees. It will be an interesting experiment in the name of movie art.
Well... yes, the graphics were quite impressive, however the animation looks very clunky at times. Although the static and slow-moving graphics looked fine, the walking motion and some of the fast action looked very bad (I actually checked to see if my player was skipping frames).
The audio wasn't fantastic - a little jingle of music, a few sound effects and Emo has a very strange accent (and, BTW, what is the Colossus of Row-Des, I thought it was Rhodes, as in "roads"... maybe that's just me being on the right side of the pond). There's little emotion or character in his voice, either.
The "plot" is just plain weird but we'll excuse that on the basis that there isn't supposed to be any plot (read into the plot what you like but it's not present so you can say that anything "represents" anything you like... I hereby declare that the plot could be about Emo the technophobe not wanting to use the clunky old tech that his father used, in the same way I use CD's where my dad used vinyl).
By making the plot weird and the animation clunky, they've actually achieved the opposite of what they wanted - they relied on DVD pre-orders and grants to get this off the ground and, now people have seen the result, they won't be getting many of those for their future projects. Plus, when people next say "we want to use Blender to make X", everyone's going to remember this.
I can't see this being something that people will share around to go "wow" at with their friends (unlike that short about the little robot who wakes up in a room on a spaceship (Blue?), anyone remember how much that cost to make?) so very few people are going to realise this even exists. If they do, they are going to be one of the people here just disappointed with what's been produced after they've spent a lot of money on a DVD pre-order.
The arty-farty types will adore this film if for no other reason than nobody else can understand it and it's been called art.
And like any such plaintext algorithm, suitable wrappers exist and should ALWAYS be used.
UltraVNC incorporates custom extensions that implement a Microsoft encryption DLL on Windows machines (also works flawlessly through Wine). Coupled with UltraVNC SC, you can create a single executable that anyone can download from your website and run and it will connect, fully encrypted, back through whatever firewall they have to your machine which (if it is running a suitable client) will take it over as normal.
Or you can just do it the old fashioned way, via SSH, or even better - NOT LEAVE PLAINTEXT-PROTOCOL SERVERS RUNNING ON INTERNET-CONNECTED PC'S. You wouldn't run telnet on your parent's machine, don't run VNC without some sort of encryption.
Okay, pretend this isn't about computers but, for instance, car (automobile) repair. You'll have to substitute the relevant vocabulary for your locality.
You are supplying cars for a living. That's what you do, deliver cars to customers who are then opening the bonnet (hood) of THEIR car and asking you why it's making a funny sound. If you want to help them, that's fine. More likely in the car analogy, a car delivery person would have a quick look (as someone who knows a lot more about cars than they do) and then say "you need to take it to a garage", "it just needs an oil change", "read your owner's manual" etc.
That's what YOU do. Tell them to take it to PCWorld, search Google, tell them what they need to do. And that's only if you are feeling generous. DO NOT DO IT FOR THEM or they will just get dependent... "Oh, but you did it for me last time".
Think what would happen in the car scenario. You WOULD NOT expect someone, even a friend, who delivers cars for a living to, in the middle of the working day, start taking your engine apart FOR FREE just because you asked them to. You would also not expect them to come back once their round has finished and do it for you. You would not expect them to devote hours to changing your gearbox because you were so stupid as to put it in reverse at seventy miles an hour.
By the same token, these people should not be expecting you to spend time fixing stuff that THEY shouldn't have broken, that is their responsibility, that is not trivial. They should be paying to take their poor, broken computers to a garage, not get a free ride from yourself, no matter how good a friend they are. If they are agreeing to pay you lots of money/equivalent favours, you have the time available AND you actually WANT to do it, then do it, but don't let them EXPECT you to do it and get mad at you if you don't. That's their attitude problem.
My father was a car/lorry mechanic and I'm an IT Technician. It's quite amazing the analogy between the two professions and we often relay similar stories from both our fields, whether it's the customer who brought their car in with no gearbox attached, or the person who brought their PC to me without an operating system and asked why it didn't work like their friend's one.
My dad got roped into no-end of repairs for friends etc. until people started taking the piss, where he then stopped it for everyone but his oldest, most grateful friends (the ones who paid him when he didn't even ask, the ones who REFUSED to let him do the work without some sort of reward, the ones who showered him with cups of tea and biscuits while he worked, the ones who paid for WHATEVER he said they needed to repair it safely, the ones who took ALL of his advice, the ones who STILL had their vehicle regularly serviced at a garage and only asked him when they were REALLY stuck and not forgetting the ones who sent him and his wife a present EVERY birthday/Christmas and also gave both his sons a small gift when they went to University).
Don't be a doormat. You have a life and that's inifintely more important than these people's computers, just because they see you as a free-ride to a working machine. Friends should ALWAYS feel a little guilty about asking favours, if they don't they are not friends. A PC is for life, not just for Christmas and they should realise that they have to maintain it, learn how to use it and have it regularly checked over by a qualified expert. That's doesn't mean YOU, unless you WANT to (which you obviously don't).
As to how to go about it, just tell them you're busy. It's quite easy. "Can you do this?" "No, I'm sorry, I'm busy." "What about later?" "No, I'm sorry, I'm busy, I won't be able to look at it."
Working in many different schools, with dozens of staff across them, not to mention private jobs, friends, family etc. I get this *all* the time. I switched to a Linux desktop myself to stop all the never-ending problems and yet they want me to repair all their unmaintained Windows mac
"A lot of people enjoy clippy (or one of the other office assistants) and keep them on all the time on purpose."
To state my credentials, I work in half a dozen schools in the UK. Firstly, clippy only ever gets used by the children and those staff who don't know how to turn him off. Occasionally, the children will load him up (they are asked to turn him off at each login) but never to DO anything with him, just to move him about the screen or wait for him to talk.
Secondly, I have NEVER, repeat NEVER, seen any student, staff, visitor or admin worker ever USE Clippy (as in give him a question, click anything he suggests other than to turn him off or use him to load up wizards etc.). Similarly for F1, the Help menu, or indeed any sort of non-paper-based manual. Nobody use help nowadays, probably because of the horrible mess that early Windows help files made of simple tasks. Nobody uses Clippy because he just gets in the way and asks stupid questions when you DON'T want him to.
Mail-merge is TAUGHT from person to person or out of books. Nobody is ever taught to use help or do anything BUT disable clippy and his friends (in the UK, RM supply most of the computers to schools and have a similar Peedy pop-up on their most common applications. He is similarly disabled. Children as young as 6 know to turn him off because he just gets in the way and is no help to them at all).
Enjoying Clippy is not the same as USING Clippy which few people do. Experienced people find things out for themselves, beginners are just misled by him into doing stuff they don't want to do until they get disillusioned and turn him off. I know long-standing admin staff who have christmas falling snow desktops - not because they USE it but because they like the look of it. Clippy's going the same way.
[SARCASM]Strange that. When I went on a DIY forum and wanted to put asbestos in every ceiling, they had the same attitude.[/SARCASM]
Or is this post one of the sort of things that the article is talking about?:-)
Seriously, people don't want you to set up telnet for a good reason - they don't want YOUR system to be broken into. They were helping him by steering him towards a secure, similarly implemented system that doesn't have this problem.
Sure, the attitude may have been there but they were trying to help him in a roundabout way.
"That's easy. In the US, philosopher has (almost exclusively) the connotation of an individual like Socrates; a thinker and academe (see the US English definition). In the UK..."
It the UK it means EXACTLY THE SAME. No more, no less. There is no way on Earth that any fluent English-speaking person would read any sort of "magical" connotation into the word philosopher (but see below for where the confusion arises). Go check the Oxford English Dictionary (THE definitive source for what is British English and what is not).
"philosophy
noun (pl. philosophies) 1 the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. 2 the theories of a particular philosopher. 3 a theory or attitude that guides ones behaviour. 4 the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of knowledge or experience."
i.e. nothing to do with any sort of magic, wizard, sorceror, conjuror or card-sharp whatsoever.
"Sorcerer is much more clear to the US audience,"
So the stories had to be rewritten so that the US could understand them but not the UK, which were perfectly happy with the original? Isn't that my point?
"and much more in line with the original intent of the author."
The author IS British. She used the words Philosopher's Stone because is an ancient myth - the Philosopher's Stone was the name given to the stone that would aid the alchemists. Now alchemists != magic... they were very misguided "scientists" (primitive chemists in fact). Either way, she MEANT Philosopher's Stone as that is the name given to the object in every story/myth/legend that mentions it. It's like renaming the Great Pyramids to the Fantastic Pyramids in a book about Egypt.
"Remember the intended audience of the book. While most adults will pick up the nuance of 'alchemical investigator' attached to philosopher, a young teen who picks up a dictionary to check the meaning of the unknown word will likely find the definition listed above."
And again, my point would be: why would British teenagers understand this but US teenagers not? I've just shown you that the definitive UK dictionary definition of philosopher/philosophy has absolutely no mention of alchemy or magic of any kind. Why would a US kid be confused where a UK kid would not? Unless, of course, people were unnecessarily dumbing down for them.
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the intelligence of any nation - I reckon a kid from either side of the pond would be equally happy with either title. I'm just pointing out that the US does insist on making changes to the difficulty of text,games, videos and TV shows that other similarly developed countries do not.
Yeah... and they were. And no bugger used them until they were. So when OGP gets anywhere NEAR a decent £40 card that I can buy anywhere AND is open, they'll be swamped with orders. The trouble is the millions of projects which people said were doomed which were - those you now never hear about. That's what I fear OGP is headed for.
OGP seems a brilliant idea but without significant financial backing from a major player (nVidia, ATI, IBM, someone like that), it's basically just a hobby project. Who is going to back a piece of electronics on which they have no IP and which ANYONE, even say nVidia or ATI or some bloke on eBay, could copy and sell?
I hate IP issues as much as the next slashdotter but I really can't see this taking off.
LinuxBIOS has taken off in a TINY way because it allows large Linux-dependent companies to boot their machines faster for a tiny piece of free code that they can stick on a £5 flash chip themselves with a £100 device.
OpenCores and the like haven't because the designs are fantastic but to actually put them into hardware in any bulk way costs an awful lot of money.
OGP is basically a large OpenCore project that relies on being able to manufacture cards that are built with some VERY expensive components, for a final price which may be way more than any average graphics card on the market but yet can't outperform that average card. And there's no way to reduce that cost even if you were to assemble it yourself (in fact, it would probably cost more).
And then you have, say, 10,000 units of these cards that you sell at just over cost (literally, because any more and people would laugh at the price tag). The profit you would make would be nowhere near enough to justify the effort, to secure the next batch or to convince some investor to plant millions into the scheme.
And in the end you get a few thousand people who are happy running an open system that costs them much, much more in terms of time, effort and money than **any** card on the market.
It's not going to change the world and it's REALLY NOT going to be available anytime soon in any shop (even the ones who stock every obscure component known to man etc.) for anyone to even notice it exists. By the time it gets there, it's going to be obsolete. By the time the new, improved model is released, it will also be obsolete.
Then you have legal problems like what if nVidia decides it hold a patent on something (hardware patents are much easier to enforce than software)? What if the cards explode in someone's machine? The disclaimers are all well and good but the slightest bad press will kill the entire project stone dead.
And in the end a graphics card is just a graphics card. Those that need the fancy 3D are gamers (who don't care about binaries) or 3D professionals (who wouldn't touch stuff like OGP with no warranties, no performance advantage, etc.).
In the UK, for at least a year or so (probably more - my memory is flaky - there was a massive advertisement campaign from the government telling people how it was going to work for MONTHS on end, months before it became "law"), it's been illegal to operate any phone while driving - that means that the ONLY legal way to make/take a phone call in a car is with a hands-free kit that DOES NOT require the driver to push any buttons etc. to dial/recieve a call (i.e. voice activated dialling/answering with a hands-free earpiece / car stereo integration) and even that is greatly discouraged by the police.
Needless to say, there's always someone who will wedge it between their shoulder and their ear but THAT'S always been illegal in the UK as far as I know (usually charged as dangerous driving - like the woman who was booked for doing her lipstick as she drove). However, now it's a specific "rule" that it's an offence to even USE the phone in the car unless you can do so 100% without removing your hands from the full control of the wheel (i.e. without touching the phone or any hands-free component (e.g. buttons, switches, wires, etc.))
It's only common sense - look at the number of people who near-miss you every day on the roads and then count how many of them were on the phone / playing with their laptop on the passenger seat etc.
It's more to do with marketing that anything, I believe. If it's simpler, they can sell it to more ages of consumer. It's not unusual for other games to be "dumbed down" for an American audience. It's the American publishers that usually change it. It's also not limited to just games... films and books are also culprits.
Harry Potter and the ***Philosopher's*** Stone
Apparently the US doesn't consider itself bright enough to know what a Philosopher is.
There are countless examples of this happening. Just an example:
I have a published children's author in the family and (aside from the changing of words that American children just would not understand because of culture differences), there is also a way to "write" for an American audience that incorporates these sorts of things. Publishers and editors will frequently remove bits that they believe are "too hard" for US kids to understand.
As someone who owns several original versions of each of Half life, Opposing Force, Counterstrike, Blue Shift, Team Fortress, Gunman Chronicles and Condition Zero (as well as Half-life 2, CS:Source as Steam purchases) my reasons would include:
A P233 with a Voodoo card could run all of the HL1-based games at a very decent speed when they first came out. Even now my 1GHz laptop can still perform more than good enough TODAY on all the above HL1 games without needing a brute of an AGP/PCI-Express card. CS:Source kills it stone dead, as does HL2.
Each HL1 game provided many hours of play and something completely different each time (even CZ was quite different to CS). Most were designed for offline play for the most part and therefore the single player game was the primary focus. In a time when the Internet WAS 56K modems or less this was a big plus.
Mods were very prevelant and didn't require extreme 3D graphic skills to get a basic mod running. For HL2 serious physics, enormous maps, complicated AI, professional-level 3D graphics and level design all mean that a casual mod will be next-to-impossible for the average small team to produce on their own.
That page shows you that I'm not on my own with this. The sum total of all source-based games doesn't come NEAR the sum total of all HL based games. CS alone has 4 times the number of player-minutes compared to CS:S. Then include the fact that even the serious competitions are skipping CS:Source completely because it's been dumbed down.
Unless those evil competitors also trade in the EU, then the EU commission really don't care and actually CANNOT take it into account. This is about competition in Europe, not anywhere else. If their competitors DO trade in the EU as well, then bring it before the EU court and ask to see the relevant records. Chances are, if they haven't already done it and it's relevant to the case, the EU will let you have what you need straight away, to the full extent of EU law.
But, as someone else points out, the EU have already told Microsoft to Go Fish and this was just about MS trying to bring in home interests/friends/law into a foreign case.
This has NOTHING to do with price or what the consumer *could* do if they were knowledgable enough. Don't forget - we still have warnings on packets of nuts that say "may contain nuts". This has everything to do with competition law and monopolisation.
MS bundled apps of a certain type *unnecessary and extraneous to the operating system* which has destroyed/limited/damaged the business actions of companies in a seperate part of the industry. This is a complete misuse of monopolistic power (using your monopoly in the OS market to enforce monopolies in other computer software markets).
The browser issue destroyed Netscape, not because IE was technically superior, not because IE was cheaper, not because IE was "chosen" by more people but purely on the fact that it was put into Windows as the default and *people reasonably assumed that it was the only/best browser to work on Windows*.
Windows Media Player similarly seriously injured places like Real Networks, Quicktime etc.
It isn't about what a consumer *could* do, it's about how easy it is to do it and whether MS gets an unfair advantage from having a monopoly in the OS market - it does. With Microsoft bundling antispyware now, this will have damaged the sales of companies that were not competing with MS and now, instantaneously, cannot compete fairly because MS can push antispyware automatically onto millions of PC's worldwide.
Monopoly is bad on many scales - on the scale of the little people who "have to" use IE because they have it already and it would take (to them) enormous effort/skill to install other software that does exactly the same tasks. On the scale of small business which, overnight, can lose their entire business because MS "owns" several millions PC's and the people who use them. On the scale of large businesses who see massive losses based not on MS's innovation but on the power of their existing installed base IN ANOTHER PART OF THE INDUSTRY. On the scale of governments and nations who watch all their computer industry fade and die and their IT costs rise because a foreign company has made it impractical to use ANYTHING but their software.
Monopoly is not good for anyone but the monopolist. Unchecked, they just get more and more powerful until you're buying Microsoft Barney Cereal to go into your Microsoft Breakfast Bowl with your Cowsoft (a subsidiary of Microsoft) Milk. Or until your local Microsoft Law Enforcement Officer comes to knock on your Microsoft Door.
Monopoly stifles innovation (you can invent the best browser in the world but 90% of people will never even SEE it in an unfair market, let alone install it or use it in preference to their browser), destroys competition (what's the point in fighting for the 5% of the market you *can* get when you could just let yourself get taken over by MS or sell the product to them instead?), limits new business startup (where do you even BEGIN to break into a monopolists global industry if they can do all that they can to stop you even starting up?), raises prices (MS can pretty much charge what they like because you "have to have" MS) and continues to reinforce the monopolists position.
I work in a primary school (ages 5-10) - the kids call any word processor software Word or Microsoft Word. They only ever look for a "blue e" to get on the Internet. Changing the icon blows their mind. Unfortunately they do this because THE TEACHER HAS TAUGHT THIS. Every teacher in my area teaches like this and every adult who works in a primary school works the same way and gets similarly confused (I've met one person who knew what Opera was and one who used OpenOffice out of approx 200 adult staff?).
As far as they are concerned, Word is the only wordprocessor, Excel the only spreadsheet, Outlook the only email program (apart from Hotmail). I tell them I don't run Windows at home and they are absolutely dumbfounded as to what other options there are! Some don't even understand what I mean by that because Windows *is* computers in their mind.
Can you not see just how dangerous that is, from a social, economic or teaching our future kids viewpoint?
Well... as someone who ONLY gets work through word of mouth from head teachers at London schools and therefore relies on "customer service" in order to ensure a future meal, I'd have to disagree.
1) CentOS doesn't necessarily even HAVE customers, so there is no customer relations necessary. Customers would be people who PAID CentOS for the privilege of them licensing/supporting the software. This person was NOT a customer of theirs, if they even considered themselves to **have** customers. How would you react if I demanded that you professionally repair my garage door out of your own pocket just because you were the one who bought it and had it installed in a property you left five years ago?
2) If someone is talking crap and hasn't researched the topic at all, a polite correction is usually in order. If they persist, there's a point beyond which you cannot help them at all and therefore give up.
Personally, I would ensure that the boss of the person who was annoying me with such trivia was informed and would expect them to explain the situation to all concerned, even if that means telling them to back off because they don't know as much as me, **the person they are PAYING to know about stuff**. I have done this several times professionally and every time it's been well recieved and cured the problem for me.
However, when the annoyance if from someone who runs a city, there's nobody to complain *to* and, again, despite the fact that my livelihood would depend on dealing with such people politely, there is a limit beyond which I will not entertain garbage. For a developer of a free operating system not being paid for support, I don't EXPECT anything. It would be **nice** if they were polite at first, even it were "I'm sorry but you are mistaken. Contact your technical support team." but they aren't required to do anything, politely or not.
3) We don't know the context or the number of emails/calls. If may just be a badly worded comment that was supposed to sound genuine (something like "I'm sorry that your city is experiencing problems...") or it may just be taken completely out of context.
Personally, I find I get MORE work by talking honestly. If a company tells a client something which is complete garbage in a meeting where I am supposed to be the technical contact, I will have no problems about pulling them up on it. That's my job - to advise and I have done exactly that before now.
If someone is talking crap, I will tell them that (politely at first) and anyone else who asks. I have done that. If that person keeps bringing up the same INCORRECT or MISLEADING detail/quote/whatever, I will pull them up time and time again until they learn to correct it and each time my patience will wane... At this point they will be under no illusions as to what I think of what they are saying.
If I hear that a client has been given totally ludicrous advise, I make that clear in my response ("They said ***WHAT***?! And you're PAYING these people?").
Now considering that I have to be infinitely politer to these people because they ARE my clients, they are paying me and I only earn money from that single task, this episode isn't a million miles away from how I would respond to such incompetence if I were pushed enough. Now factor in that the guy isn't a customer, that you don't HAVE customers, isn't paying you for your time and didn't even bother to start off politely and the comments from CentOS (possibly taken out of context) are very mild in comparison.
Oh, and it's more than I would have done to have helped the bloke as much as they did. Fortunately, though, the saga has gone so public that the guy has only humiliated himself. Were it me, it wouldn't have got far enough for that to happen and instead I'd actually INVITE the FBI or whatever local authority he had threatened to use against me to tell him to shut up.
First, I've never heard this so I'd have to see the sources, but most importantly:
If this is true and the UK has been stung, does that mean that it should be stung again? No. It means that NEXT time it demands code up-front to be sure there is no possibility of a repeat. US and UK may well be Allies but they are only Allies as long as both of them co-operate with each other. They both still have things they'd much rather the other didn't have control of and things that they would prefer NOT to have control of / be responsible for.
Er... that doesn't really show it as fake. I assume you mean that the edge of the picture is "overlapping" the case? It's a picture of brightly lit screen taken with a cheap cell phone - it's called colour bleed.
I'm sure at least some of these games just aren't programming their graphics correctly. I'm able to play virtually any game without any sort of sickness at all, have been for years but there are are tiny minority of games that make me feel ill the second I start moving around in them.
The first one I ever noticed was Duke Nukem 3D and to this day, playing that game gives me motion sickness even though I can play countless other games on the same day and not feel sick at all.
Obviously trolling but WRONG. TV licenses are paid in order to be able to legally operate a TV in your household (which has always included owning any piece of TV equipment, including PC TV Cards, and is now starting to include things such as watching TV through your mobile phone). They make no secret of that fact.
However, a portion of the UK TV Licensing fee goes direct to the BBC who offer their own channels (or at least those that the UK government *requires* them to offer) without adverts of any kind. But even the BBC has commercial channels that it runs that don't get any TV License funding but which have adverts (UKTV Gold for example).
The rest of the British terrestrial/satellite/cable channels ALL carry adverts.
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I work in tech support for six different schools and dozens of people for whom I do private jobs.
Your comment is just not true. I get calls EVERY week with someone wanting me to clean their computers (all of them XPSP2 at least). The problem is that the first thing that sort of junk does is stop Automatic Updates from working for everything from Windows to Antivirus to even targetting AdAware etc., so from then on even if the user "cleans" their machine, they aren't getting the updates they need (even though sometimes it looks like they are) and thus they are open to every future problem too (including those fixed in patches like this one).
People are still dumb, they still click, they still don't learn, no matter what it ends up costing them. Most of them are extremely casual about all this "Oh, yes, I got a virus/spyware/malware a few months back but so long as I don't do X, I don't notice", "Yeah, I've been getting these random popups for the past few months, if you have a minute could you have a look at them sometime?", etc. Personally, I'd be doing damage control the second I spotted one of these on my own personal computers but it's just tolerated by the average joe. They can literally put up with it for months.
I'm ALWAYS being told that "machines slow down when they get older", don't they? Makes sense to them but to me I'm just thinking "Yeah, only if they are slowly filling with junk". And that's how people work. They keep using it until it gets to the point of being unusable (which for people who used to run older PC's is actually totally unbearable). Then they might casually bring it up in conversation with me, not do anything for several weeks, then try to book my time to clean it up etc.
Come on, a few days ago there was a major news story about the head of Microsoft itself not being able to clean his friend's PC of spyware. I work with people who can't drag-and-drop, you really think they stand a CHANCE of even seeing that they've been infected, cleaning it themselves etc.? And with the growing spate of targetted spyware/viruses, I can't even rely on putting on a nice automated cleaning system (like Adaware/Spybot/AVG scripted to auto-update and then full scan) onto their systems.
The reason I don't hear about it any more? I raise my prices depending on how bad it seems when I hear about it. Can't get on the net at all? That's an extra £10/hour. Can't load any program? Another £10/hour. Antivirus isn't functioning properly cos something's interfering? Another £10/hour. Haven't GOT antivirus/firewall/updates? Another £10/hour.
Got up-to-date antivirus, a good firewall, an "alternative" web browser, scheduled anti-spyware, no visible signs of infection prior and somehow STILL got something nasty? (even if you accidentally clicked a link you didn't mean to, so long as you TELL me you did that) The price drops dramatically to the point where people don't say... "Uh, ok, I'll er... call you sometime." but instead say "Yes, please, if you could."
Users aren't getting educated, they're getting ignorant. They KNOW it's a virus/spyware and they choose to ignore it and continue with their work (which, incidentally, is not only usually private and confidential but usually vital to the running of the school they work for). When you're telling headteachers that X got on the system because supplier Y didn't issue an update, they just carry on regardless. They don't stop to consider what MIGHT have happened to the data (in complete breach of Data Protection laws I might add) or where it might currently be floating, even when informed.
The best customers in the world are the ones who KNOW NOTHING but ADMIT to knowing nothing and look to you for advice. They're the ones that you can TEACH how to use a computer safely. Everyone else nods along and then loads IE behind your back because they "know better" (for instance, they installed an anti-spyware thing "to keep IE safe" from a pop-up on their desktop just to give you
First off, I hate wireless in all shapes of forms (Bluetooth is turned off on my phone, my laptop's wireless is permanently disabled and the only 802.11b AP that I own is for purely educational purposes). However, with that in mind, I regularly cater for small suburban schools in the Boroughs of Greater London. To give you an idea, we talking about a 10-classroom school backing onto suburban terraced houses in some quite nice areas. Lovely big fields and play-areas, main roads etc. but also a few dozen small residential buildings within a 100m radius of the school property.
The current fad (after interactive whiteboards and laptops themselves) is to have wireless "trolleys", sixteen laptops in a steel trolley that charge overnight and then access the network over a double-AP 802.11g wireless connection. Bear in mind that this costs about £20,000 all-in for a school and allows a **single** class to access websites/local cached content/their network files.
It's a nightmare. It generates something like 50% of my support calls alone for the entire school. The laptops don't get connections. Little fingers turn off the wireless switches (fixed by stapling their fingers to... I mean removing the switches). Interference from nearby house's networks (kismet is fun when run against a small suburban school's neighbourhood) and things like 2.4GHz video senders. Interference from building structure. Interference from passers-by and visitors with anything running on the 2.4GHz frequencies. Just plain damn not wanting to get a connection. Bios updates, firmware updates, driver updates, all of which interfere with the ability to get a signal. Literally having to instruct the teachers to place the AP's HERE and HERE, tweak the aerial to point THIS way and have the kids clustered HERE or you won't get a connection. Regularly having one or two machines out of the 16 that just won't hold a connection at all. The other 14/15 machines will allow you to do stuff like simple web browsing but access a single small 300x200 MPEG4 video (even from cached content) and the wireless network starts to die, kicking off machines at random.
This isn't just one school - this is at least three seperated by several miles. And what can we do about it? Zip. We've had engineers in from every company involved and there's nothing that can be done. We spent two years with the hardware trying to get somewhere (incorporating free upgrades from our supplier, rigourous control over connection procedures etc.) and never managed to make it any better. Yes, we can spend £X,000 on the new wireless kit but there are no guarantees that it will work any better at all. We can update firmware to version X on the PC's or the AP's but nothing ever IMPROVES.
And the schools are pushing and pushing to introduce more and more kit like this... one trolley works on the whole, so let's just buy another to make up for the shortcomings. So you have another 16 clients over another 2 AP's which people want to all use in the same room. Ha. Yeah, right. We couldn't get 16 working on two AP's, let alone 32 fighting for the only 3 channels you can use simultaneously spread over 4 AP's all within about 10 metres of each other.
Yeah, on a good day you can literally stick a laptop at one end of the school, the trolley with it's AP's at the other end and get a near-full bandwidth connection (in fact, they use this arrangement regularly to do assemblies in the morning, streaming video from the local cached content). But the second you introduce more clients, it dies quickly. I've never actually witnessed all 16 working simultaneously (even for just login and websites, and the network is used for auth and for internet only, applications are local) and I'm their primary technician.
Minor local interference in a suburban area can kill the network stone dead, I'd hate to think about trying this in the middle of a busy city centre full of offices, internet cafes etc. I have heard of a school in the exact same area where th
Level balancing is certainly an issue here. Things like Driver, which required you to complete a (quite difficult) intro course before you were allowed anywhere near the missions - you know what, I just want to play the game. I'll learn the controls in my own time as and when I need to.
I know at least three children (not mine) that played the game and gave up before they even got to the first mission - they ended up just playing the free play mode all the time. I could complete 90% of the missions without having to even look at the manual, learn the controls or anything else - the other 10% I would learn how to get past when I needed to - don't make me have to perfect every maneouvure before I can play Mission 1 - Get from A to B.
"Unlocking" isn't a bad thing, unless it's done badly. To follow with the same example, once you'd completed that Driver training course, the next 5 or so missions were trivial to complete. The rest provided minor challenges to help you improve. However, the last mission was utterly impossible and totally out of proportion to the rest of the game. I gave up on the last mission after 50 or 60 attempts without even coming close, yet had walked the rest of the game.
Stuff that's "unlocked" by convoluted means (i.e. completing the training course on Driver, finding a secret area, etc.) should NEVER be required to complete the game. You should be able to play front-to-back without having to find a single secret - Doom, Quake, Mario Bros., all the classics follow this pattern. A secret should be just that - something there for someone's who's looking that's not going to hinder someone who's not. Bonus points, extra lives, new worlds are rewards for finding a secret - they will make it easier or more fun to play and replay the game but should NEVER be required to get to the end.
Games designers are not in it to "kill" the player at every opportunity, it's too easy. Players also get bored if they are doing simple, repetitive tasks over and over again. Provide challenge but alway show a glimpse that it's do-able. You can make that jump if you had used THAT platform, you can see the key on the other side but how do you get there, if you'd found that secret power-up that hard bit wouldn't be quite so hard.
Balance is the HARDEST thing in any game to get right. Examples of some that "got it wrong" would include:
Driver
Black & White (let's make a big fuss about having a creature and how to use him and then take him away from the player almost immediately).
Serious Sam (point, shoot, wait for things to die)
Incoming (See Serious Sam)
Ah, I've seen this coming for ages. The PC games market is bouyed up by those who stay on the cutting edge only - your average Joe doesn't stand a chance of having a PC that you could run a modern game on... take a random family with a PC and a random game from the full-price shelves and see how much fun it is to get it working at a decent speed.
I'm getting away from MS as much as I can because of crap like this. My computer, my rules... you wanna force rules on me, you don't come onto my computer. I just can't be bothered to play about with MS-based computers any more just to get a poxy game to run.
I don't care whether or not it offers new features or is given away free in cereal or everyone else in the world uses it, I'm keeping MS stuff strictly away from my own machines. I didn't want DirectX but numerous upgrades were forced on me by the games I wanted to play, and many of the upgrades killed performance or broke the install.
Each time, I still ended up with a game that performed better under OpenGL (almost any Quake/Half-Life based game for instance) or could EASILY have been replicated without using any sort of acceleration library satisfactorily (Age of Empires II springs to mind - nothing in it that NEEDS DirectX and still a massive performance slog through any sort of WINE or similar program and for what? A 2D RTS that shouldn't need ANY fancy stuff to do it's job - hell, DOS versions of Command & Conquer on an old Pentium 133 did the same stuff in similar resolutions without coming NEAR the CPU time used for AOE just to draw a screen on a 1GHz)
I work with MS systems all day long, spending half my time working around stupid quirks and things that should have been in the OS since day one. I get paid to do it there so I tolerate it and almost nothing uses DirectX, even though I work in primary schools. I don't tolerate the amount of setup needed to get a game running at home any more. Those machines that I have reserved as Windows "consoles" are treated as if they are plastered with strict disclaimers:
- Games only. Do not use for serious work.
- And old games at that, unless you feel like upgrading everything to get there and spend hours chasing patches, upgrades, updates, firewalls, drivers and controller setups just to play a crap game that you'll uninstall within a week.
- And even if you do that, there's no guarantee that tomorrow the game won't work because of an update, a new requirement, or something else killing performance to the point where it's unplayable.
In computing terms I'm now firmly considering myself an old fogie and haven't bought a game in a shop for years (unless you count a 50p copy of Warcraft in a local bargain bin), certainly not one I enjoyed playing.
I recently sold off about 75% of my back-catalogue on eBay because I realised I would NEVER play them again - some still had the wrappers on, a surprising amount had been played once and then uninstalled (Black & White, for instance, which I bought based on hype, played through until my creature was taken away from me and then promptly uninstalled... my brother did the exact same when I lent it to him afterwards). I'm sticking with my favourites and re-living some of the classics. Emulators, DosBox and remakes all the way.
If I want anything else, anything newer, I will buy a console. An old one at that. Secondhand with so many games bundled in that I could play forever, all for the price of a single full-price new PC game. If I can't afford a modern console and one game, I won't be able to afford the money for a PC that could run a modern game well enough, or the time to get it working, certainly not when you take into account how much I'd use it for because it WOULD be JUST a console in a fancy wrapper.
I decided a few years ago to not chase the latest and greatest and to stick to what's fun. Counterstrike is the only thing I can't really do on any other OS (My Linux PC's are just too slow to run it even under WINE but, strangely enough, more
An interesting fact-ette: The UK has no law which guarantees free speech and yet we don't get half as much rubbish like this. Legally speaking, the UK doesn't have half the "guarantees" like free speech that the US has.
The nearest we have is European Human Rights (which are a relatively modern addition that the courts are still coming to terms with and are EU law rather than British, which means we are *suppposed* to follow them because we signed up to them but instead we just tend to argue that they don't apply to us), which generally have a bad name. Mention "Human Rights" to someone in the UK and you might as well be saying "Health & Safety" - it's treated with the same contempt. The EU don't have a good reputation among the British since they said our bananas were too bendy to be bananas and we couldn't buy brazil nuts in their shells any more (a very traditional Christmas-sy treat).
In the UK, schools also has a slightly different meaning - I believe US "school" is approximately equal to our schools/colleges combined (in the UK if you were 17 or over and in full-time education you'd be in a college/"sixth-form" or, later on, university in all of which you are treated with as much respect as any other adult).
A 17-year-old is basically treated like an adult. They may not be 18 (the legal age for legally-binding contracts, buying a house, getting a credit card, being legally/financially independent of your parents but not, strangely, having sex, drinking or smoking which happen at 16, or driving a car which happens at 17... no I don't know why either). A 17-year-old posting on a blog would be pretty much completely out of reach of any "school" they attended unless they were doing something libellous or otherwise illegal, in which case they would go to court. If not, the European Court Of Human Rights would end up getting involved at some point, no doubt. (BTW: If you ever hear of a UK legal case going to the European Court of Human Rights, it means a British judge has already told them to sod off).
Additionally, although there isn't half as much "freedom" on paper as the US has, come to Britain and you'll notice that people say what they want without fear.
The only case that comes to mind of a restriction of free speech is when a former MI5 agent tried to reveal that there was some "dodgy dealing" going down among MI5 (something which is no doubt national-security terrority anyway). He had to go into hiding in a foreign country for a while but even appeared, bold as brass, on a BBC TV satire quiz show (Have I Got News For You) via satellite link which went out on air without any problems at all. I don't see that happening in the US.
I'm British, my girlfriend too as is her father. We went to America to visit him when he lived over there - believe it or not his American friends were SHOCKED by how she and her father communicated because they genuinely believed that they hated each other by the way they spoke to each other. Calling someone a bugger, or referring to them as a toerag or a rat, was so unheard of that the US friends could not grasp it.
Poking fun at someone's size (even affectionately) was unheard of. Now saying such things to the general public I can see a problem with ("Oi Fatty!" isn't going to get you arrested but it's not a nice thing to say and if you harassed a workmate in that way, there's a case for dismissal), however two family members can say what they like to each other in the UK without anyone blinking an eyelid.
In the US, he ended up making most of his friends dislike him for his behaviour (until my girlfriend stepped in and explained that nothing even slightly insulting was being said between the two of them).
For years he ended up insulting people without even realising it because of the way he expressed his opinions, something which any Brit would take in their stride and see as harmless banter. The Americans referred to him as "that extremely rude Englishman". It's much easier to say something offensive to
For a time, I ran a laptop as a dial-up/dial-in router for my local network (the clients were UPS-protected for up to 30mins). It worked fine but there are obviously considerations:
1) Heat
2) Movement
3) Upgradeability/Physical Space
Laptops get hot. Make sure yours runs sufficiently cool if you're going to leave it unattended for any length of time. Also, as other posters have mentioned, check the fans regularly or make it run fanless. Mini-ITX is a good idea if you can afford the extra power as it will ensure the computer is designed for the constant heat you want it to generate.
Laptops don't like moving parts - don't have it serving CD's or running off of the hard disk a lot - keep it simple, maybe even something like a Flash key/CF disk as the main drive and/or caching everything in RAM. Mini-ITX is good here because it can use standard drives etc.
You won't be able to use the parts you would normally use. RAID is out of the window unless you want to get into external storage and powering THAT as well - pointless, you may as well just use a PC with a UPS. Additionally, things like network ports etc. are normally not that prevelant, although you could make up for that with wireless etc. Mini-ITX is again a good substitute because it's completely upgradeable.
I used to run a two-modem dial-up/dial-in router for my local network from a laptop (an ancient IBM Thinkpad - something like a P133 with 16MB RAM) - that used the internal network port, the internal modem port, a PCMCIA modem port (check for non-winmodems if you're using Linux, they do exist) and a PCMCIA network port.
The software loaded all from a single floppy disc (a "Freesco" router), detected all the PCMCIA hardware and modems and performed the job admirably. The hard disk could easily be removed as it did nothing but storage in my setup. The screen was always switched off and it survived several power outages (for much longer than the client PC's). At least it meant that it KNEW it was going down and could inform people without losing their work, cutting their downloads/uploads, and allowed me to check websites about the power outage!
If nothing else, having the "server" go down last is always more comforting than it going while the clients are still running.
It's amazing how often power goes but ordinary phone lines are left enabled - I've surfed at 10Mbps over ADSL when the entire town has been in a blackout (streetlights, houses, the local train station, etc.).
My laptop router still functioned as dial-up/dial-in for several hours after the power had gone off without any special preparation (although putting it on an ordinary UPS too may have kept it going all day long!). If I had needed to, I could have sent/recieved email, browsed websites, allowed others to connect to my machine, connect to other machines, played games online etc. for many, many hours in the pitch-black.
It's not a daft idea but DON'T DO IT FOR SERIOUS STUFF. Plus, for someone setting up from scratch, it's much, much cheaper to do things properly with real UPS etc.
Okay... I'm not desperate to understand the fuss around this (I can accept that some people are seeing things that just aren't there) but I did *SPECIFICALLY* read these posts, consider them carefully and then re-watch the entire thing again with this in mind. I was sure that I must be missing something that other people are somehow seeing.
And you know what, it's rubbish. The first 7 minutes of the film DO NOT tie in with the theory you have linked too, not at all, most especially the dialogue just does not fit in with this.
I'm not saying that it's not what the creators had in mind for the plot but if it is, it's not something that the audience is ever expected to pick up on. Even on the final scene, it seems to only apply for that scene.
If this is "the plot", it's a very, very shaky one that raises more questions that it answers, for example why does Emo interact with the birds which are perching on the cables, for instance? Are they supposed to be "real" birds that Proog is imagining as something else? Still incredibly shaky and unclear as far as I'm concerned. The theory I posited in my post above explains just as much as this "plot".
I have a friend who is an absolute EXPERT on movie interpretation - a semi-autistic man who has studied film since he was a child, who can easily find deep meaning within a "arty" film consisting entirely of a blue screen (I kid you not, he sat through several hours of it and thought it was the best thing he'd ever seen), a person who can tell you every film any actor's ever been in and draw parallels between films which are decades and genres apart. I'm gonna show him this and see what he sees. It will be an interesting experiment in the name of movie art.
Well... yes, the graphics were quite impressive, however the animation looks very clunky at times. Although the static and slow-moving graphics looked fine, the walking motion and some of the fast action looked very bad (I actually checked to see if my player was skipping frames).
The audio wasn't fantastic - a little jingle of music, a few sound effects and Emo has a very strange accent (and, BTW, what is the Colossus of Row-Des, I thought it was Rhodes, as in "roads"... maybe that's just me being on the right side of the pond). There's little emotion or character in his voice, either.
The "plot" is just plain weird but we'll excuse that on the basis that there isn't supposed to be any plot (read into the plot what you like but it's not present so you can say that anything "represents" anything you like... I hereby declare that the plot could be about Emo the technophobe not wanting to use the clunky old tech that his father used, in the same way I use CD's where my dad used vinyl).
By making the plot weird and the animation clunky, they've actually achieved the opposite of what they wanted - they relied on DVD pre-orders and grants to get this off the ground and, now people have seen the result, they won't be getting many of those for their future projects. Plus, when people next say "we want to use Blender to make X", everyone's going to remember this.
I can't see this being something that people will share around to go "wow" at with their friends (unlike that short about the little robot who wakes up in a room on a spaceship (Blue?), anyone remember how much that cost to make?) so very few people are going to realise this even exists. If they do, they are going to be one of the people here just disappointed with what's been produced after they've spent a lot of money on a DVD pre-order.
The arty-farty types will adore this film if for no other reason than nobody else can understand it and it's been called art.
And like any such plaintext algorithm, suitable wrappers exist and should ALWAYS be used.
UltraVNC incorporates custom extensions that implement a Microsoft encryption DLL on Windows machines (also works flawlessly through Wine). Coupled with UltraVNC SC, you can create a single executable that anyone can download from your website and run and it will connect, fully encrypted, back through whatever firewall they have to your machine which (if it is running a suitable client) will take it over as normal.
Or you can just do it the old fashioned way, via SSH, or even better - NOT LEAVE PLAINTEXT-PROTOCOL SERVERS RUNNING ON INTERNET-CONNECTED PC'S. You wouldn't run telnet on your parent's machine, don't run VNC without some sort of encryption.
Okay, pretend this isn't about computers but, for instance, car (automobile) repair. You'll have to substitute the relevant vocabulary for your locality.
You are supplying cars for a living. That's what you do, deliver cars to customers who are then opening the bonnet (hood) of THEIR car and asking you why it's making a funny sound. If you want to help them, that's fine. More likely in the car analogy, a car delivery person would have a quick look (as someone who knows a lot more about cars than they do) and then say "you need to take it to a garage", "it just needs an oil change", "read your owner's manual" etc.
That's what YOU do. Tell them to take it to PCWorld, search Google, tell them what they need to do. And that's only if you are feeling generous. DO NOT DO IT FOR THEM or they will just get dependent... "Oh, but you did it for me last time".
Think what would happen in the car scenario. You WOULD NOT expect someone, even a friend, who delivers cars for a living to, in the middle of the working day, start taking your engine apart FOR FREE just because you asked them to. You would also not expect them to come back once their round has finished and do it for you. You would not expect them to devote hours to changing your gearbox because you were so stupid as to put it in reverse at seventy miles an hour.
By the same token, these people should not be expecting you to spend time fixing stuff that THEY shouldn't have broken, that is their responsibility, that is not trivial. They should be paying to take their poor, broken computers to a garage, not get a free ride from yourself, no matter how good a friend they are. If they are agreeing to pay you lots of money/equivalent favours, you have the time available AND you actually WANT to do it, then do it, but don't let them EXPECT you to do it and get mad at you if you don't. That's their attitude problem.
My father was a car/lorry mechanic and I'm an IT Technician. It's quite amazing the analogy between the two professions and we often relay similar stories from both our fields, whether it's the customer who brought their car in with no gearbox attached, or the person who brought their PC to me without an operating system and asked why it didn't work like their friend's one.
My dad got roped into no-end of repairs for friends etc. until people started taking the piss, where he then stopped it for everyone but his oldest, most grateful friends (the ones who paid him when he didn't even ask, the ones who REFUSED to let him do the work without some sort of reward, the ones who showered him with cups of tea and biscuits while he worked, the ones who paid for WHATEVER he said they needed to repair it safely, the ones who took ALL of his advice, the ones who STILL had their vehicle regularly serviced at a garage and only asked him when they were REALLY stuck and not forgetting the ones who sent him and his wife a present EVERY birthday/Christmas and also gave both his sons a small gift when they went to University).
Don't be a doormat. You have a life and that's inifintely more important than these people's computers, just because they see you as a free-ride to a working machine. Friends should ALWAYS feel a little guilty about asking favours, if they don't they are not friends. A PC is for life, not just for Christmas and they should realise that they have to maintain it, learn how to use it and have it regularly checked over by a qualified expert. That's doesn't mean YOU, unless you WANT to (which you obviously don't).
As to how to go about it, just tell them you're busy. It's quite easy. "Can you do this?" "No, I'm sorry, I'm busy." "What about later?" "No, I'm sorry, I'm busy, I won't be able to look at it."
Working in many different schools, with dozens of staff across them, not to mention private jobs, friends, family etc. I get this *all* the time. I switched to a Linux desktop myself to stop all the never-ending problems and yet they want me to repair all their unmaintained Windows mac
"A lot of people enjoy clippy (or one of the other office assistants) and keep them on all the time on purpose."
To state my credentials, I work in half a dozen schools in the UK. Firstly, clippy only ever gets used by the children and those staff who don't know how to turn him off. Occasionally, the children will load him up (they are asked to turn him off at each login) but never to DO anything with him, just to move him about the screen or wait for him to talk.
Secondly, I have NEVER, repeat NEVER, seen any student, staff, visitor or admin worker ever USE Clippy (as in give him a question, click anything he suggests other than to turn him off or use him to load up wizards etc.). Similarly for F1, the Help menu, or indeed any sort of non-paper-based manual. Nobody use help nowadays, probably because of the horrible mess that early Windows help files made of simple tasks. Nobody uses Clippy because he just gets in the way and asks stupid questions when you DON'T want him to.
Mail-merge is TAUGHT from person to person or out of books. Nobody is ever taught to use help or do anything BUT disable clippy and his friends (in the UK, RM supply most of the computers to schools and have a similar Peedy pop-up on their most common applications. He is similarly disabled. Children as young as 6 know to turn him off because he just gets in the way and is no help to them at all).
Enjoying Clippy is not the same as USING Clippy which few people do. Experienced people find things out for themselves, beginners are just misled by him into doing stuff they don't want to do until they get disillusioned and turn him off. I know long-standing admin staff who have christmas falling snow desktops - not because they USE it but because they like the look of it. Clippy's going the same way.
[SARCASM]Strange that. When I went on a DIY forum and wanted to put asbestos in every ceiling, they had the same attitude.[/SARCASM]
:-)
Or is this post one of the sort of things that the article is talking about?
Seriously, people don't want you to set up telnet for a good reason - they don't want YOUR system to be broken into. They were helping him by steering him towards a secure, similarly implemented system that doesn't have this problem.
Sure, the attitude may have been there but they were trying to help him in a roundabout way.
Thanks for proving my point.
"That's easy. In the US, philosopher has (almost exclusively) the connotation of an individual like Socrates; a thinker and academe (see the US English definition). In the UK..."
It the UK it means EXACTLY THE SAME. No more, no less. There is no way on Earth that any fluent English-speaking person would read any sort of "magical" connotation into the word philosopher (but see below for where the confusion arises). Go check the Oxford English Dictionary (THE definitive source for what is British English and what is not).
"philosophy
noun (pl. philosophies) 1 the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. 2 the theories of a particular philosopher. 3 a theory or attitude that guides ones behaviour. 4 the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of knowledge or experience."
i.e. nothing to do with any sort of magic, wizard, sorceror, conjuror or card-sharp whatsoever.
"Sorcerer is much more clear to the US audience,"
So the stories had to be rewritten so that the US could understand them but not the UK, which were perfectly happy with the original? Isn't that my point?
"and much more in line with the original intent of the author."
The author IS British. She used the words Philosopher's Stone because is an ancient myth - the Philosopher's Stone was the name given to the stone that would aid the alchemists. Now alchemists != magic... they were very misguided "scientists" (primitive chemists in fact). Either way, she MEANT Philosopher's Stone as that is the name given to the object in every story/myth/legend that mentions it. It's like renaming the Great Pyramids to the Fantastic Pyramids in a book about Egypt.
"Remember the intended audience of the book. While most adults will pick up the nuance of 'alchemical investigator' attached to philosopher, a young teen who picks up a dictionary to check the meaning of the unknown word will likely find the definition listed above."
And again, my point would be: why would British teenagers understand this but US teenagers not? I've just shown you that the definitive UK dictionary definition of philosopher/philosophy has absolutely no mention of alchemy or magic of any kind. Why would a US kid be confused where a UK kid would not? Unless, of course, people were unnecessarily dumbing down for them.
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the intelligence of any nation - I reckon a kid from either side of the pond would be equally happy with either title. I'm just pointing out that the US does insist on making changes to the difficulty of text,games, videos and TV shows that other similarly developed countries do not.
Yeah... and they were. And no bugger used them until they were. So when OGP gets anywhere NEAR a decent £40 card that I can buy anywhere AND is open, they'll be swamped with orders. The trouble is the millions of projects which people said were doomed which were - those you now never hear about. That's what I fear OGP is headed for.
OGP seems a brilliant idea but without significant financial backing from a major player (nVidia, ATI, IBM, someone like that), it's basically just a hobby project. Who is going to back a piece of electronics on which they have no IP and which ANYONE, even say nVidia or ATI or some bloke on eBay, could copy and sell?
I hate IP issues as much as the next slashdotter but I really can't see this taking off.
LinuxBIOS has taken off in a TINY way because it allows large Linux-dependent companies to boot their machines faster for a tiny piece of free code that they can stick on a £5 flash chip themselves with a £100 device.
OpenCores and the like haven't because the designs are fantastic but to actually put them into hardware in any bulk way costs an awful lot of money.
OGP is basically a large OpenCore project that relies on being able to manufacture cards that are built with some VERY expensive components, for a final price which may be way more than any average graphics card on the market but yet can't outperform that average card. And there's no way to reduce that cost even if you were to assemble it yourself (in fact, it would probably cost more).
And then you have, say, 10,000 units of these cards that you sell at just over cost (literally, because any more and people would laugh at the price tag). The profit you would make would be nowhere near enough to justify the effort, to secure the next batch or to convince some investor to plant millions into the scheme.
And in the end you get a few thousand people who are happy running an open system that costs them much, much more in terms of time, effort and money than **any** card on the market.
It's not going to change the world and it's REALLY NOT going to be available anytime soon in any shop (even the ones who stock every obscure component known to man etc.) for anyone to even notice it exists. By the time it gets there, it's going to be obsolete. By the time the new, improved model is released, it will also be obsolete.
Then you have legal problems like what if nVidia decides it hold a patent on something (hardware patents are much easier to enforce than software)? What if the cards explode in someone's machine? The disclaimers are all well and good but the slightest bad press will kill the entire project stone dead.
And in the end a graphics card is just a graphics card. Those that need the fancy 3D are gamers (who don't care about binaries) or 3D professionals (who wouldn't touch stuff like OGP with no warranties, no performance advantage, etc.).
The US sounds a bit behind with this one.
In the UK, for at least a year or so (probably more - my memory is flaky - there was a massive advertisement campaign from the government telling people how it was going to work for MONTHS on end, months before it became "law"), it's been illegal to operate any phone while driving - that means that the ONLY legal way to make/take a phone call in a car is with a hands-free kit that DOES NOT require the driver to push any buttons etc. to dial/recieve a call (i.e. voice activated dialling/answering with a hands-free earpiece / car stereo integration) and even that is greatly discouraged by the police.
Needless to say, there's always someone who will wedge it between their shoulder and their ear but THAT'S always been illegal in the UK as far as I know (usually charged as dangerous driving - like the woman who was booked for doing her lipstick as she drove). However, now it's a specific "rule" that it's an offence to even USE the phone in the car unless you can do so 100% without removing your hands from the full control of the wheel (i.e. without touching the phone or any hands-free component (e.g. buttons, switches, wires, etc.))
It's only common sense - look at the number of people who near-miss you every day on the roads and then count how many of them were on the phone / playing with their laptop on the passenger seat etc.
It's more to do with marketing that anything, I believe. If it's simpler, they can sell it to more ages of consumer. It's not unusual for other games to be "dumbed down" for an American audience. It's the American publishers that usually change it. It's also not limited to just games... films and books are also culprits.
e r_toned_down/
Harry Potter and the ***Philosopher's*** Stone
Apparently the US doesn't consider itself bright enough to know what a Philosopher is.
There are countless examples of this happening. Just an example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/10/tomb_raid
I have a published children's author in the family and (aside from the changing of words that American children just would not understand because of culture differences), there is also a way to "write" for an American audience that incorporates these sorts of things. Publishers and editors will frequently remove bits that they believe are "too hard" for US kids to understand.
As someone who owns several original versions of each of Half life, Opposing Force, Counterstrike, Blue Shift, Team Fortress, Gunman Chronicles and Condition Zero (as well as Half-life 2, CS:Source as Steam purchases) my reasons would include:
A P233 with a Voodoo card could run all of the HL1-based games at a very decent speed when they first came out. Even now my 1GHz laptop can still perform more than good enough TODAY on all the above HL1 games without needing a brute of an AGP/PCI-Express card. CS:Source kills it stone dead, as does HL2.
Each HL1 game provided many hours of play and something completely different each time (even CZ was quite different to CS). Most were designed for offline play for the most part and therefore the single player game was the primary focus. In a time when the Internet WAS 56K modems or less this was a big plus.
Mods were very prevelant and didn't require extreme 3D graphic skills to get a basic mod running. For HL2 serious physics, enormous maps, complicated AI, professional-level 3D graphics and level design all mean that a casual mod will be next-to-impossible for the average small team to produce on their own.
http://steampowered.com/status/game_stats.html
That page shows you that I'm not on my own with this. The sum total of all source-based games doesn't come NEAR the sum total of all HL based games. CS alone has 4 times the number of player-minutes compared to CS:S. Then include the fact that even the serious competitions are skipping CS:Source completely because it's been dumbed down.
Unless those evil competitors also trade in the EU, then the EU commission really don't care and actually CANNOT take it into account. This is about competition in Europe, not anywhere else. If their competitors DO trade in the EU as well, then bring it before the EU court and ask to see the relevant records. Chances are, if they haven't already done it and it's relevant to the case, the EU will let you have what you need straight away, to the full extent of EU law.
But, as someone else points out, the EU have already told Microsoft to Go Fish and this was just about MS trying to bring in home interests/friends/law into a foreign case.
Trolling to one side for a moment...
This has NOTHING to do with price or what the consumer *could* do if they were knowledgable enough. Don't forget - we still have warnings on packets of nuts that say "may contain nuts". This has everything to do with competition law and monopolisation.
MS bundled apps of a certain type *unnecessary and extraneous to the operating system* which has destroyed/limited/damaged the business actions of companies in a seperate part of the industry. This is a complete misuse of monopolistic power (using your monopoly in the OS market to enforce monopolies in other computer software markets).
The browser issue destroyed Netscape, not because IE was technically superior, not because IE was cheaper, not because IE was "chosen" by more people but purely on the fact that it was put into Windows as the default and *people reasonably assumed that it was the only/best browser to work on Windows*.
Windows Media Player similarly seriously injured places like Real Networks, Quicktime etc.
It isn't about what a consumer *could* do, it's about how easy it is to do it and whether MS gets an unfair advantage from having a monopoly in the OS market - it does. With Microsoft bundling antispyware now, this will have damaged the sales of companies that were not competing with MS and now, instantaneously, cannot compete fairly because MS can push antispyware automatically onto millions of PC's worldwide.
Monopoly is bad on many scales - on the scale of the little people who "have to" use IE because they have it already and it would take (to them) enormous effort/skill to install other software that does exactly the same tasks. On the scale of small business which, overnight, can lose their entire business because MS "owns" several millions PC's and the people who use them. On the scale of large businesses who see massive losses based not on MS's innovation but on the power of their existing installed base IN ANOTHER PART OF THE INDUSTRY. On the scale of governments and nations who watch all their computer industry fade and die and their IT costs rise because a foreign company has made it impractical to use ANYTHING but their software.
Monopoly is not good for anyone but the monopolist. Unchecked, they just get more and more powerful until you're buying Microsoft Barney Cereal to go into your Microsoft Breakfast Bowl with your Cowsoft (a subsidiary of Microsoft) Milk. Or until your local Microsoft Law Enforcement Officer comes to knock on your Microsoft Door.
Monopoly stifles innovation (you can invent the best browser in the world but 90% of people will never even SEE it in an unfair market, let alone install it or use it in preference to their browser), destroys competition (what's the point in fighting for the 5% of the market you *can* get when you could just let yourself get taken over by MS or sell the product to them instead?), limits new business startup (where do you even BEGIN to break into a monopolists global industry if they can do all that they can to stop you even starting up?), raises prices (MS can pretty much charge what they like because you "have to have" MS) and continues to reinforce the monopolists position.
I work in a primary school (ages 5-10) - the kids call any word processor software Word or Microsoft Word. They only ever look for a "blue e" to get on the Internet. Changing the icon blows their mind. Unfortunately they do this because THE TEACHER HAS TAUGHT THIS. Every teacher in my area teaches like this and every adult who works in a primary school works the same way and gets similarly confused (I've met one person who knew what Opera was and one who used OpenOffice out of approx 200 adult staff?).
As far as they are concerned, Word is the only wordprocessor, Excel the only spreadsheet, Outlook the only email program (apart from Hotmail). I tell them I don't run Windows at home and they are absolutely dumbfounded as to what other options there are! Some don't even understand what I mean by that because Windows *is* computers in their mind.
Can you not see just how dangerous that is, from a social, economic or teaching our future kids viewpoint?
Well... as someone who ONLY gets work through word of mouth from head teachers at London schools and therefore relies on "customer service" in order to ensure a future meal, I'd have to disagree.
1) CentOS doesn't necessarily even HAVE customers, so there is no customer relations necessary. Customers would be people who PAID CentOS for the privilege of them licensing/supporting the software. This person was NOT a customer of theirs, if they even considered themselves to **have** customers. How would you react if I demanded that you professionally repair my garage door out of your own pocket just because you were the one who bought it and had it installed in a property you left five years ago?
2) If someone is talking crap and hasn't researched the topic at all, a polite correction is usually in order. If they persist, there's a point beyond which you cannot help them at all and therefore give up.
Personally, I would ensure that the boss of the person who was annoying me with such trivia was informed and would expect them to explain the situation to all concerned, even if that means telling them to back off because they don't know as much as me, **the person they are PAYING to know about stuff**. I have done this several times professionally and every time it's been well recieved and cured the problem for me.
However, when the annoyance if from someone who runs a city, there's nobody to complain *to* and, again, despite the fact that my livelihood would depend on dealing with such people politely, there is a limit beyond which I will not entertain garbage. For a developer of a free operating system not being paid for support, I don't EXPECT anything. It would be **nice** if they were polite at first, even it were "I'm sorry but you are mistaken. Contact your technical support team." but they aren't required to do anything, politely or not.
3) We don't know the context or the number of emails/calls. If may just be a badly worded comment that was supposed to sound genuine (something like "I'm sorry that your city is experiencing problems...") or it may just be taken completely out of context.
Personally, I find I get MORE work by talking honestly. If a company tells a client something which is complete garbage in a meeting where I am supposed to be the technical contact, I will have no problems about pulling them up on it. That's my job - to advise and I have done exactly that before now.
If someone is talking crap, I will tell them that (politely at first) and anyone else who asks. I have done that. If that person keeps bringing up the same INCORRECT or MISLEADING detail/quote/whatever, I will pull them up time and time again until they learn to correct it and each time my patience will wane... At this point they will be under no illusions as to what I think of what they are saying.
If I hear that a client has been given totally ludicrous advise, I make that clear in my response ("They said ***WHAT***?! And you're PAYING these people?").
Now considering that I have to be infinitely politer to these people because they ARE my clients, they are paying me and I only earn money from that single task, this episode isn't a million miles away from how I would respond to such incompetence if I were pushed enough. Now factor in that the guy isn't a customer, that you don't HAVE customers, isn't paying you for your time and didn't even bother to start off politely and the comments from CentOS (possibly taken out of context) are very mild in comparison.
Oh, and it's more than I would have done to have helped the bloke as much as they did. Fortunately, though, the saga has gone so public that the guy has only humiliated himself. Were it me, it wouldn't have got far enough for that to happen and instead I'd actually INVITE the FBI or whatever local authority he had threatened to use against me to tell him to shut up.
First, I've never heard this so I'd have to see the sources, but most importantly:
If this is true and the UK has been stung, does that mean that it should be stung again? No. It means that NEXT time it demands code up-front to be sure there is no possibility of a repeat. US and UK may well be Allies but they are only Allies as long as both of them co-operate with each other. They both still have things they'd much rather the other didn't have control of and things that they would prefer NOT to have control of / be responsible for.
Er... that doesn't really show it as fake. I assume you mean that the edge of the picture is "overlapping" the case? It's a picture of brightly lit screen taken with a cheap cell phone - it's called colour bleed.
I'm sure at least some of these games just aren't programming their graphics correctly. I'm able to play virtually any game without any sort of sickness at all, have been for years but there are are tiny minority of games that make me feel ill the second I start moving around in them.
The first one I ever noticed was Duke Nukem 3D and to this day, playing that game gives me motion sickness even though I can play countless other games on the same day and not feel sick at all.
EEEEHHHH-EEEHHHH
Obviously trolling but WRONG. TV licenses are paid in order to be able to legally operate a TV in your household (which has always included owning any piece of TV equipment, including PC TV Cards, and is now starting to include things such as watching TV through your mobile phone). They make no secret of that fact.
However, a portion of the UK TV Licensing fee goes direct to the BBC who offer their own channels (or at least those that the UK government *requires* them to offer) without adverts of any kind. But even the BBC has commercial channels that it runs that don't get any TV License funding but which have adverts (UKTV Gold for example).
The rest of the British terrestrial/satellite/cable channels ALL carry adverts.