No discernable, qualitative economical difference exists between a console and a personal computer. Both consist of computer hardware and software and the marketshare of both is largely (if not entirely) a function of the available add-on titles. For each exception to this rule (the no qualitative difference rule) that exists on side of the equation, an equivalent exception exists on the other side.
The differences between consoles and personal computers is almost entirely functional, not economical. Consoles are typically single function devices (one plays games on them) while personal computers are typically general pupose machines (one plays games, does the taxes, writes codes, etc.).
Even this difference is fading. Consoles are quickly becoming general purpose devices. For example, Sony's PS 2 also plays movies and browses the web. We are entering the dreaded buzz word era: digital convergence.
Consider the new PDA's such as the iPaq. These are "computer appliances" and as such are close cousins to the gaming console. But wait, they are quickly becoming general purpose machines as well.
No developer is going to risk their ass to produce an Idrema-specific game. This would be gross financial irresponsibility;
No developer needs to develop Indrema only games in order for Indrema to be successful. Rather, enough developers need to also support Indrema with their titles. Evidently, you have not read Gildred's other interviews linked at the top of this article. Gildred already addressed his market plan. It is the market plan of a console, not of a general purpose computer.
Now, whether Indrema has done enough research into their target market (Linux Power Gamers) to make the venture more than a 1 in a million crap shoot is another question altogether.
Consoles are about marketing, not technology.
This is the first sensible thing you've said and it is quite correct. The success of Linux in the market is entirely due to grass roots marketing, not, as many people like to believe, its alleged technological superiority over Windows. Linux may or may not be superior to its competitors (it is higly likely that the grass roots marketing behind Linux is because of actual superiority, but this is not necessarily the case). In fact, whether Linux is superior or not doesn't matter. What does matter is that Linux is grabbing developer and data center mindshare at a phenomenal rate. Indrema is gambling that grass roots marketing will make for a profitable console . It will be interesting to see if Indrema's gamble pays off...
In your interview with womengamers.com you mention that your marketing strategy will not be to go head to head with the big console makers (sony/nintendo/sega/xbox) but rather to focus on the linux power gamer. Given, that commerical Linux game sales seem to be somewhat lackluster[1], what market research have you done (if any) to point that points to the linux power gamer market being large enough and lucrative enough to be worth developing a product like the Indrema?
[1] This may be due to many Linux gamers buying the Windows version which often includes a license for the Linux version and/or Linux titles typically coming to market weeks or months after the Windows version and/or the release of multi-platform disks that get counted as "Windows" sales. AFAIK, no one has yet sought to do a serious enough analysis of the situation to say one way or the other.
My wife is disabled and has only partial use of one arm. Her biggest challenge to using Linux is the lack of stable, intuitive, feature rich sticky keys. On Windows, she runs sticky keys and selects which keys she wants to be sticky (typically, shift, alt and cntl). She hits the key once to make only the next letter she types affected by the sticky key or twice to make all characters affected until she hits the sticky key again.
The best Xfree86 program I've found will do one or the other of the above but not both (you can configure the program to react one way or the other but not both ways depending on how you hit the sticky key).
Sticky keys, keyboard free input, speech recognition and voice synthesis are IMHO the most important areas that need to be improved under Linux (and the BSDs).
What good is a revolution if we leave people out by design?
Find 10 people who saw Episode 1 fewer than 3 times. Ask each of them to tell you what the plot was... No more than 2 people (if that many) will be anywhere close.
Of course, neither did I think it that good. It certainly didn't suck, but was simply mediocre. And having only seen it once, I followed the plot quite well. But to be honest, I waited until it came out on video, my local library purchased it and it made it out to my local library branch AND (this is likely why I followed the plot so well) I watched it with close captioning enabled.
Having a hearing impairment, I can't follow dialogue worth squat unless I turn the volume up loud enough to shake the house to its foundations.
I didn't find Jar Jar all that annoying either, but my guess is seeing his patois spelled out was less offensive to the asthete in me then hearing him speak.
Anyway, Phantom Menace was pretty predictable and George Lucas likes to hit people over the head with foreshadowing. I managed to pick the exact point in the film when things stopped going bad and got wrapped up for the 'feel good' ending. Not that this was a great accomplishment on my part, the ending was almost identical to the ending of Return of the Jedi.
However, taken for what it is, I rate the movie as being better written than the Matrix even though I found the Matrix much more enjoyable. The Phantom Menace at least captured my attention enough that I wouldn't mind a second viewing. I had fun watching the Matrix, but once was enough.
I was wondering why Sony's Clie sports a jog dial....
Silly me, I didn't think of the game issue.
the way story submission works at k5
on
Kuro5hin Returns
·
· Score: 4
Every user can look over the submissions queue. Every user gets one vote per story. The vote is either (1) post it, (0) don't care, or (-1) don't post it.
Stories that reach a critical number which is a percentage of the total number of users get put on the front page. Stories can be commented on while still in the queue, regardless of whether they ever make the front page or not. Comments can be one of two types: (1) editorial, suggesting changes to the story in spelling, style, grammar; or (2) topical, pertaining to a discussion. The editorial comments do not survive if the story makes the front page.
All in all it works fairly well.
The best thing about k5 was the people there. The breadth of k5 was much wider than/. Discussions of everything from gun control to how to secure a linux box have made the front page.
What the hell are you talking about? No Christian will ever tell you that the human body, God's creation, is inheritly sinful.
Well, I'm sure that the Pope had some sort of inetllectual justification for having clothes and/or fig leaves painted over certain parts of the naked human bodies that Michaelangelo painted all over the Sistine Chapel. I can't imagine that his justification was anything short of the naked portrayal of the human body being sinful.
Then, of course, many Christian movements teach the doctrine of Original Sin (or worse, the sects that are theological descendents of John Calvin believe that some folks are born simply to burn forever in hell). The doctrine of original sin says pretty much that we all are born evil.
Of course some sects (especially liberal Protestant ones, don't believe in the doctrine of Original Sin, and others (such as the Orthdox Church) have a view of sin that is quite different from the western view. So as always, your milage may vary...
Evolution is the ultimate god when
you get right down to it.
This is one of the more fightening assertions I have seen on/.
Evolution might very well be natural (but so are cannabalism, incest, rape, unnecessary violence, and many other things that many people don't think are 'good'), but I for one do not think it is 'good,' let alone the 'ultimate good.'
My opinion is that evolution, like most processes of nature, has no bearing to ethics.
Children are people. All of you seem to have forgotten this. The parents in all of your scenarios are irritional sheep.
We are not forgetting that children are people, nor are we assuming that parents are all sheep. We are asserting that parents (or legal guardians) bear the primary responsibility for raising and educating children. And because parents and legal guardians bear this responsibility, they ought to (1) have say in what children are or are not exposed to and (2) bear the brunt of the consequences of the children's behavior.
In other words, if a child goes down to the library to surf porn, the parent and only the parent is responsible for the actions of the child. The library should not be held liable for what a child looks at and neither should the ISP. If the parent wants to sue somebody because he or she didn't want his or her child to see pictures of naked people, the only person deserving of the law suit is the person who raised the child to look at dirty pictures (the parent).
Why should a child (or any person)
be forced to follow an irrational sheeps supervision?
Because its the best of bad situation. As bad a s some parents are (and certainly not all parents are bad) it would be far worse to give the right for some other body the right to rescind the responsibilities and rights of parenthood (with exceptions for exceptional situations like incidents involving child abuse). I'd rather have the current load of bad parents anyday then live in a society that can take children away from parents at will.
There's a reason why the bible refers to christians as sheep. It's not because they're brilliant and individuals.
BZZT. Wrong answer. And intentionally inflamatory to boot. The above reason might very well be why Marxists refer to Christians as sheep, but it certainly isn't why Jesus refered to his followers as sheep.
And contrary to popular opinion (of both Christians and non-Christians), the teachings of Jesus do encourage a person to think for his or her self. In most (unfortunately no all) variants of Christianity, the ability to think for one's self is the basis on which doctrines surrounding the existence of an individual's conscience are based.
It is only the twisted teachings of people in power that wish to stay in power more than they want to preach the truth that teach their followers otherwise.
Between efforts such as Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and countless other sites that provide resources not previously available to most libraries, it is fairly evident that internet access greatly enhances the purpose of the public library.
Another situation is finding which books to look up. Your average Librarian will be clueless when asked which of the 50 books on C++ is best for a beginner, but searching on google for the C++ faq will provide several good answers almost immediately.
Spend time with your kids. Teach them right from wrong. Watch over them. Don't expect software, daycare, and babysitters (especially technological
babysitters) to do those things for you.
Right on! If I give my children a 'moral' upbringing only by sheltering them from 'imorality,' I can only protect them to the point that I can control their environment.
But if I spend time to help my children understand right and wrong and what makes something right and what makes something wrong, I will give my child the ability to protect themselves.
The key is encouraging children to develop deep understanding. I cringe when I ask my daughter why something is wrong and she says 'because you said so, Dad.' That tells me that she doesn't understand and is only complying with my wishes. I'd much prefer her to think something is right that I think is wrong and have her be able to defend her opinion then simply do what I want her to.
the US forces code was never cracked by the germans or the japanese.
The Navajo code talkers had to start making up new code words for words like airplane, aircraft carrier, etc. toward the end of the world because the Japanese could understand very much of the 'code.'
Regardless, your point still stands, it would take a phenominal code to survive a machine like Deep Crack that was built specifically to crack a given code.
Personally I'd word the policy something like this:
"Minors may only use the Internet with explicit permission of his or her parent or legal guardian. If a parent or legal guardian grants permission for a minor to access the internet, the parent or legal guardian assumes complete and total responsibility for exposing the minor to any internet content viewed by the minor."
have a day,
-l
hmm, review didn't mention the cryptomnicon
on
Technoromanticism
·
· Score: 2
Oops, the book is about technoromanticism, not technomancery.
Unless they are going to create new drivers, copying this is as easy as running it in a sandbox and intercepting the input to the sound card drivers.
Why not just create a device driver for the Windows sound API that plays its 'output' to a file in.mp3,.wav or whatever? Then making a duplicate is as easy as choosing the driver as the playback device in Windows and playing your SDMI tunes with your 'authorized' software.
I've lost track of the project quite a while ago, but I dimly recall a group that was going to engineer a clone of the Gravis Ultrasound when Gravis announced the decision to stop making consumer sound cards.
I couldn't connect to google for some reason and alta vista's advanced search didn't find what I was looking for. Does anyone else know what happened to this intrepid group of open hardware hackers?
I'm glad you and I see eye to eye on much (like/. has way to many flamebait topics).
Nonetheless, the front page of Slashdot is a scarce, valuable resource and it seems to me it should have a higher threshold than "vaguely interesting
tidbit of information".
Personally, I think if a topic is even only vaguely interesting, its good enough for/. I'm sure that others disagree. And that's fine with me. Others don't have to read the article if they don't want. Every day, the majority of stories on/. I don't even bother to read because they don't interest me in the slightest. And sometimes when bored I read them anyway because some rather interesting off-topic discussions have a tendency to pop up.
With a community the size of/. I'd rather see more stories than less. When K5 was going, the sheer number of stories was detrimental because of the small size of the community and having that many stories dilluted the number of discussions of substance. OTOH,/. has surpassed that threshold years ago. I'd wager that/. could chunk through close to a hundred stories a day and still have good discussion threads (and possibly better since *in theory* the trolls would be dilluted).
Anyway, I know that you weren't trying to be mean, but the number of "WTF is this doing here?" posts were getting on my nerves and yours had the misfortune (?) of being one of the earlier ones, so it was the one I responded to.
Here are some my random thoughts on management and software production. First two disclaimers...
(1) I'm spoiled. I work in a shop with some excellent managers.
(2) I also work in a somewhat atypical shop with thousands of programmers on the same project. While not exactly unheard of, projects of the size of mine are not exactly the most common.
If it weren't for our managers of excellent quality, little of what we need to get done would get done in an efficient manner. Our managers help prioritize hours to be spent working on defects, new features, enhancement requests, etc. They work with developers to come up with reasonable and workable deadlines. They do a whole lot of logistics so we lazy programmers can just kick back and code.
Now, in the past I have worked with some bad managers. Some of the managers of projects I've been on have been so bad that they would have been better with no management at all.
Good management is an essential part of the software development process. It doesn't necessarily take someone with the title of manager. But it does take someone that can manage the project well. Some few programmers (especially the high profile open source ones like ESR, Linus, and Miguel) also happen to be fairly competent as managers of their respective projects.
However, given that out of all people that do programming tasks relatively few are what I would consider 'competent' and given that out of all the people that do management tasks relatively few are what I would consider competent, the union between competent programmers and competent managers is certain to be pretty small.
And I don't even the remotest desire to ship anything to Russia.
The defining point of a nerd is a thirst for knowledge. Discussions such as this broaden my understanding of the world.
And to be hones, I'd rather see questions such as this than 3/4 of the.mp3/napster or kde vs. gnome stories that have posted almost daily for the past three months. Its amazing how the exact same flame wars erupt with each one.
Slashdot Mirror
No discernable, qualitative economical difference exists between a console and a personal computer. Both consist of computer hardware and software and the marketshare of both is largely (if not entirely) a function of the available add-on titles. For each exception to this rule (the no qualitative difference rule) that exists on side of the equation, an equivalent exception exists on the other side.
The differences between consoles and personal computers is almost entirely functional, not economical. Consoles are typically single function devices (one plays games on them) while personal computers are typically general pupose machines (one plays games, does the taxes, writes codes, etc.).
Even this difference is fading. Consoles are quickly becoming general purpose devices. For example, Sony's PS 2 also plays movies and browses the web. We are entering the dreaded buzz word era: digital convergence.
Consider the new PDA's such as the iPaq. These are "computer appliances" and as such are close cousins to the gaming console. But wait, they are quickly becoming general purpose machines as well.
No developer needs to develop Indrema only games in order for Indrema to be successful. Rather, enough developers need to also support Indrema with their titles. Evidently, you have not read Gildred's other interviews linked at the top of this article. Gildred already addressed his market plan. It is the market plan of a console, not of a general purpose computer.
Now, whether Indrema has done enough research into their target market (Linux Power Gamers) to make the venture more than a 1 in a million crap shoot is another question altogether.
This is the first sensible thing you've said and it is quite correct. The success of Linux in the market is entirely due to grass roots marketing, not, as many people like to believe, its alleged technological superiority over Windows. Linux may or may not be superior to its competitors (it is higly likely that the grass roots marketing behind Linux is because of actual superiority, but this is not necessarily the case). In fact, whether Linux is superior or not doesn't matter. What does matter is that Linux is grabbing developer and data center mindshare at a phenomenal rate. Indrema is gambling that grass roots marketing will make for a profitable console . It will be interesting to see if Indrema's gamble pays off...
[1] This may be due to many Linux gamers buying the Windows version which often includes a license for the Linux version and/or Linux titles typically coming to market weeks or months after the Windows version and/or the release of multi-platform disks that get counted as "Windows" sales. AFAIK, no one has yet sought to do a serious enough analysis of the situation to say one way or the other.
Well, London was colonized by the Romans. So let's compare London to any of the places colonized by the Brits.
My wife is disabled and has only partial use of one arm. Her biggest challenge to using Linux is the lack of stable, intuitive, feature rich sticky keys. On Windows, she runs sticky keys and selects which keys she wants to be sticky (typically, shift, alt and cntl). She hits the key once to make only the next letter she types affected by the sticky key or twice to make all characters affected until she hits the sticky key again.
The best Xfree86 program I've found will do one or the other of the above but not both (you can configure the program to react one way or the other but not both ways depending on how you hit the sticky key).
Sticky keys, keyboard free input, speech recognition and voice synthesis are IMHO the most important areas that need to be improved under Linux (and the BSDs).
What good is a revolution if we leave people out by design?
regards,
-l
Of course, neither did I think it that good. It certainly didn't suck, but was simply mediocre. And having only seen it once, I followed the plot quite well. But to be honest, I waited until it came out on video, my local library purchased it and it made it out to my local library branch AND (this is likely why I followed the plot so well) I watched it with close captioning enabled.
Having a hearing impairment, I can't follow dialogue worth squat unless I turn the volume up loud enough to shake the house to its foundations.
I didn't find Jar Jar all that annoying either, but my guess is seeing his patois spelled out was less offensive to the asthete in me then hearing him speak.
Anyway, Phantom Menace was pretty predictable and George Lucas likes to hit people over the head with foreshadowing. I managed to pick the exact point in the film when things stopped going bad and got wrapped up for the 'feel good' ending. Not that this was a great accomplishment on my part, the ending was almost identical to the ending of Return of the Jedi.
However, taken for what it is, I rate the movie as being better written than the Matrix even though I found the Matrix much more enjoyable. The Phantom Menace at least captured my attention enough that I wouldn't mind a second viewing. I had fun watching the Matrix, but once was enough.
I was wondering why Sony's Clie sports a jog dial....
Silly me, I didn't think of the game issue.
Every user can look over the submissions queue. Every user gets one vote per story. The vote is either (1) post it, (0) don't care, or (-1) don't post it.
Stories that reach a critical number which is a percentage of the total number of users get put on the front page. Stories can be commented on while still in the queue, regardless of whether they ever make the front page or not. Comments can be one of two types: (1) editorial, suggesting changes to the story in spelling, style, grammar; or (2) topical, pertaining to a discussion. The editorial comments do not survive if the story makes the front page.
All in all it works fairly well.
The best thing about k5 was the people there. The breadth of k5 was much wider than /. Discussions of everything from gun control to how to secure a linux box have made the front page.
Well, I'm sure that the Pope had some sort of inetllectual justification for having clothes and/or fig leaves painted over certain parts of the naked human bodies that Michaelangelo painted all over the Sistine Chapel. I can't imagine that his justification was anything short of the naked portrayal of the human body being sinful.
Then, of course, many Christian movements teach the doctrine of Original Sin (or worse, the sects that are theological descendents of John Calvin believe that some folks are born simply to burn forever in hell). The doctrine of original sin says pretty much that we all are born evil.
Of course some sects (especially liberal Protestant ones, don't believe in the doctrine of Original Sin, and others (such as the Orthdox Church) have a view of sin that is quite different from the western view. So as always, your milage may vary...
This is one of the more fightening assertions I have seen on /.
Evolution might very well be natural (but so are cannabalism, incest, rape, unnecessary violence, and many other things that many people don't think are 'good'), but I for one do not think it is 'good,' let alone the 'ultimate good.'
My opinion is that evolution, like most processes of nature, has no bearing to ethics.
We are not forgetting that children are people, nor are we assuming that parents are all sheep. We are asserting that parents (or legal guardians) bear the primary responsibility for raising and educating children. And because parents and legal guardians bear this responsibility, they ought to (1) have say in what children are or are not exposed to and (2) bear the brunt of the consequences of the children's behavior.
In other words, if a child goes down to the library to surf porn, the parent and only the parent is responsible for the actions of the child. The library should not be held liable for what a child looks at and neither should the ISP. If the parent wants to sue somebody because he or she didn't want his or her child to see pictures of naked people, the only person deserving of the law suit is the person who raised the child to look at dirty pictures (the parent).
Because its the best of bad situation. As bad a s some parents are (and certainly not all parents are bad) it would be far worse to give the right for some other body the right to rescind the responsibilities and rights of parenthood (with exceptions for exceptional situations like incidents involving child abuse). I'd rather have the current load of bad parents anyday then live in a society that can take children away from parents at will.
BZZT. Wrong answer. And intentionally inflamatory to boot. The above reason might very well be why Marxists refer to Christians as sheep, but it certainly isn't why Jesus refered to his followers as sheep.
And contrary to popular opinion (of both Christians and non-Christians), the teachings of Jesus do encourage a person to think for his or her self. In most (unfortunately no all) variants of Christianity, the ability to think for one's self is the basis on which doctrines surrounding the existence of an individual's conscience are based.
It is only the twisted teachings of people in power that wish to stay in power more than they want to preach the truth that teach their followers otherwise.
have a day,
-l
I'd rather not. I think the greens are currently the only hope in the US political landscape.
Now, if it were open season on the demopublicans, I might actually start eating meat again...
Between efforts such as Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and countless other sites that provide resources not previously available to most libraries, it is fairly evident that internet access greatly enhances the purpose of the public library.
Another situation is finding which books to look up. Your average Librarian will be clueless when asked which of the 50 books on C++ is best for a beginner, but searching on google for the C++ faq will provide several good answers almost immediately.
The other questions do merit thought.
Right on! If I give my children a 'moral' upbringing only by sheltering them from 'imorality,' I can only protect them to the point that I can control their environment.
But if I spend time to help my children understand right and wrong and what makes something right and what makes something wrong, I will give my child the ability to protect themselves.
The key is encouraging children to develop deep understanding. I cringe when I ask my daughter why something is wrong and she says 'because you said so, Dad.' That tells me that she doesn't understand and is only complying with my wishes. I'd much prefer her to think something is right that I think is wrong and have her be able to defend her opinion then simply do what I want her to.
regards,
-l
I bow to your greater insight.
The vast majority of people I know still have machines with Windows 95. Aside from that, folks will just go to their friends that run Linux or Mac.
The Navajo code talkers had to start making up new code words for words like airplane, aircraft carrier, etc. toward the end of the world because the Japanese could understand very much of the 'code.'
Regardless, your point still stands, it would take a phenominal code to survive a machine like Deep Crack that was built specifically to crack a given code.
Personally I'd word the policy something like this:
have a day,
-l
Oops, the book is about technoromanticism, not technomancery.
I'd rather see a review about technomancery.
Why not just create a device driver for the Windows sound API that plays its 'output' to a file in .mp3, .wav or whatever? Then making a duplicate is as easy as choosing the driver as the playback device in Windows and playing your SDMI tunes with your 'authorized' software.
I've lost track of the project quite a while ago, but I dimly recall a group that was going to engineer a clone of the Gravis Ultrasound when Gravis announced the decision to stop making consumer sound cards.
I couldn't connect to google for some reason and alta vista's advanced search didn't find what I was looking for. Does anyone else know what happened to this intrepid group of open hardware hackers?
Crud!
Uh, yes.
Thanks for the pedantry.
-l
foo,
-l
Hello update()
I'm glad you and I see eye to eye on much (like /. has way to many flamebait topics).
Personally, I think if a topic is even only vaguely interesting, its good enough for /. I'm sure that others disagree. And that's fine with me. Others don't have to read the article if they don't want. Every day, the majority of stories on /. I don't even bother to read because they don't interest me in the slightest. And sometimes when bored I read them anyway because some rather interesting off-topic discussions have a tendency to pop up.
With a community the size of /. I'd rather see more stories than less. When K5 was going, the sheer number of stories was detrimental because of the small size of the community and having that many stories dilluted the number of discussions of substance. OTOH, /. has surpassed that threshold years ago. I'd wager that /. could chunk through close to a hundred stories a day and still have good discussion threads (and possibly better since *in theory* the trolls would be dilluted).
Anyway, I know that you weren't trying to be mean, but the number of "WTF is this doing here?" posts were getting on my nerves and yours had the misfortune (?) of being one of the earlier ones, so it was the one I responded to.
have a day,
-l
Here are some my random thoughts on management and software production. First two disclaimers...
(1) I'm spoiled. I work in a shop with some excellent managers.
(2) I also work in a somewhat atypical shop with thousands of programmers on the same project. While not exactly unheard of, projects of the size of mine are not exactly the most common.
If it weren't for our managers of excellent quality, little of what we need to get done would get done in an efficient manner. Our managers help prioritize hours to be spent working on defects, new features, enhancement requests, etc. They work with developers to come up with reasonable and workable deadlines. They do a whole lot of logistics so we lazy programmers can just kick back and code.
Now, in the past I have worked with some bad managers. Some of the managers of projects I've been on have been so bad that they would have been better with no management at all.
Good management is an essential part of the software development process. It doesn't necessarily take someone with the title of manager. But it does take someone that can manage the project well. Some few programmers (especially the high profile open source ones like ESR, Linus, and Miguel) also happen to be fairly competent as managers of their respective projects.
However, given that out of all people that do programming tasks relatively few are what I would consider 'competent' and given that out of all the people that do management tasks relatively few are what I would consider competent, the union between competent programmers and competent managers is certain to be pretty small.
have a day....
-l
And I don't even the remotest desire to ship anything to Russia.
The defining point of a nerd is a thirst for knowledge. Discussions such as this broaden my understanding of the world.
And to be hones, I'd rather see questions such as this than 3/4 of the .mp3/napster or kde vs. gnome stories that have posted almost daily for the past three months. Its amazing how the exact same flame wars erupt with each one.
of course, YMMV...