Me too. I'm still on 2000 for my Windows machine, but my newest two computers have both been Powerbooks. *shrug* The exodus has begun, the only question is how large it will end up being. Just a few of us holdouts, or larger, perhaps?
I didn't miss it, I ignored it because it's not reasonable. It's not something my grandma would ever do. Even if I coached her on what she needed to ask for, she still wouldn't do it. It's inconvenient and frustrating.
For that matter, I wouldn't either. I would call and say "Listen, I don't want to have to call you whenever I want to play with a new protocol. So you will open up every damn port for me right now, or I will terminate my account." Please note that this is assuming the ISP has a 24/7 staff on the phones. Which is extremely unlikely. Waiting for business hours is an absolutely ridiculous proposition.
Most people will not even bother to install a piece of software to get a task done, such as viewing a video, if it's not included in the OS or browser good luck. What makes you think that people will phone their ISP whenever they want to do something new? People developing such apps/videos/products/whatever will certainly not assume that they will, so they will have no incentive to create whatever it is they would otherwise have created. You're adding a small barrier to entry for anything besides http/email. A small barrier to entry is all it takes to kill something.
Thanks for the ad hominem, by the way, it really added a lot to your argument. In my opinion, it's people like you who belong in management. The bottom line, the end result, is all that matters to you. You want to end spam and internet-borne viruses, and you don't care what it takes to get there or what collateral damage is inflicted in the process.
Nice double-standard there, O King of the Internet. "I want to run my servers without having them spammed" -- fair. "I think that we should do so by preventing the rest of you from having proper Internet access because my servers are more important than you unwashed masses" -- not fair.
The Internet is used for more than web and email. Do you think that all those 'random ports' were invented just because "hey we need a new way for viruses to propagate!!!" Do you think that the Internet should be locked down into a stagnant wasteland devoid of anything interesting besides webpages? Because that's what it will become when you start locking down ports. Streaming music? Forget it. VoIP? No. Games? No. Something new? Ha, why would you even bother developing something when 95% of people have their ports locked off and won't be able to use it and will *blame you* for the problem, rather than the ISP.
Viewsonic. Unless their monitors have gone way downhill in the last year or two. I had a PF790 19" which was beeeeeauuutiful. I now have two P95f+, one black and one beige (hooray for surplus stores!) and they're truly excellent 19" monitors as well. The brand-spanking new IBM and HP 21" monitors they used to buy at work couldn't compare.
It's not unusable. It's slow. There's a difference. I'm still using my 1st Gen 12" PowerBook, with 256MB RAM. It came with Jaguar, upgraded to Panther, and eventually Tiger. All three worked just fine. You get used to the spinny pinwheel while waiting for Expose or Dashboard to pop up. Switching apps is fast enough and they show up quickly, although it often takes several seconds for a swapped out app to become responsive to input, but once it swaps back in it runs perfectly fine. Even games run fine. It just needs to swap everything else and get the active app into memory, then it sails along just fine. It's how swap works, it's unpleasant but it gets the job done as best as possible, and it's certainly USABLE.
The only thing that constantly gets on my nerves is waiting 15 seconds for the CD eject to take effect. Gimme my CD damnit!
You clearly have no idea how a) power supplies work and b) how marijuana growing works.
a) 580watt is it's rated maximum power output, on all three voltage rails combined. There are individual maximums for each voltage rail, so you would have to be exactly at each of those to be drawing the full 580 watts at any given time. You never max them all out, you max one out, typically the 5v. Point number two: 580 watts is its maximum power output. After that it may very well burn out or catch fire or whatever. Realistically if you're drawing anywhere near 580 watts you're going to be getting a very unstable system, because at that kind of output it cannot keep a reliable stream of power coming out. For a good power supply, you never want to exceed two thirds of its rated output. For a cheap powersupply, cut the rated output in half, or even to a third. You don't want a maximum sustained load above that. Third point: In all realistic use, PC powersupplies only approach their maximum at startup, when everything (hard drives, fans) is spinning up and all the capacitors are filling, etc.
b) Even modestly sized marijuana grow-ops (disclaimer: I am not one, I don't even smoke pot, so take this with a grain of salt) use absolutely ridiculous amounts of electricity. The grow-lights alone they use are typically 1 or 2 KILOwatts each, and if you think they're using only one or two lights you're crazy. The temperature control also uses a hell of a lot of electricity for hydroponics. I have 7 computers in my house, two of them very hefty servers, and all of them with at least 340watt power supplies. My power usage on my last bill was 671 kilowatt-hours for a month. A grow-op will use that much in a week, or even days.
All that stuff definitely won't help, but it will have very little to do with whether a World War 3 ever breaks out. If it ever happens, I think it's much more likely that the trigger will be something in the other hemisphere of the world. We've got the middle east, with countries like Israel/Syria/Palestine/Lebanon/Iran/Iraq. Israel almost certainly has nukes, Iran could theoretically have some soon also if they felt the need to. Not far from there we've also got Pakistan and India, both heavily militarized and relatively poor nations with nuclear weapons and an ongoing border conflict. Then we can arch around through the various breakaway countries that Russia feels still belong to them, and then peek into China - the world's largest developing economy, tremendous natural resources, and the world's largest military too. Both Japan and Taiwan seem to be alternately getting on China's nerves and having their toes stepped on by China right now. And last but certainly not least we'll complete our eastern hemisphere tour with North Korea.
I don't really like Bowling, but I don't hate it either. I'm actually pretty ambivalent on it.
But I have to ask, what exactly is your point? You know, Emeril can probably cook way better than most professional athletes. That makes him an athlete too right? I bet I can program better than professional athletes, does that make me a professional athlete? Conversely, do you suspect that bowlers can play a game of football and win against a seasoned team of footballers?
Or were you simply trying to suggest that since they can do something most other people can't do as well, it somehow innately makes them worthy of respect? In a very small, very limited way perhaps. It is not carte blanche. If they want to be egomaniacs and call themselves superheroes, then I would laugh at them regardless of whatever respect they deserve for doing what they do. The original poster apparently has a lower threshhold and laughs at them for calling themselves professional athletes. It has nothing to do with whether they're skilled or not, it's about whether they deserve to be called athletes.
Don't forget, Canada is socialist too. You just wait until we get our war machine rolling, then you'll pay!
P.S. Socialism is an economic paradigm, it has little to do with government besides the fact that government decides which direction they decide to develop the economy into. As another poster correctly pointed out, you're looking for the word 'fascism'. It is possible to be both socialist and fascist at the same time. Mussolini and Hitler were both. Stalin, however, most certainly wasn't and to suggest that he was is simply embarassingly ignorant.
The fundamental reason is because the government is (assuming that it is truly representative and for the people) by definition not-for-profit, because any profit is simply returned to the people somehow. This means that in theory they have zero incentive to fleece you, and therefore they will sell the service for a fair price (ie, within a reasonable margin of what it actually costs to provide it). Many people believe that essential services, especially where there is little to no competition available, are not an area where profiteering should be allowed. And since for-profit companies are obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders, a lot of people feel it is not ethical to give them a de-facto regional monopoly on services where it is unfeasable for another provider to maintain their own completely seperate network.
While your first thought might be to have a non-profit corporation do it, note that this has drawbacks as well. Non-profit corporations are not immune to having a board of directors that is completely batshit fucking insane (see: ICANN), and unlike the government they are completely unaccountable. Well, technically one of those government granted monopolies should be accountable to the government who gave them their monopoly, but in truth the government is toothless in that regard, since they know it would be risky and cause too much upheaval to suddenly give the monopoly to someone else who can't possibly be prepared to take over without substantial reworking.
So, when it all boils down, many people trust the government more than they trust public corporations, because they feel that at least because they have a vote, they have some influence. Even having a share of a public company doesn't have that feel of influence, because unlike governmental elections, in corporations it generally comes down to the decision of the one guy who has the 20 million shares. There's no single person with more than a single vote in governmental elections, and that's an important emotional distinction.
Having played HL2 on my PC, let me be the first to say: Thank god. No, don't bother trying to change my opinion. That game was a dog, and I cannot even begin to understand what people see in it. It was mildly enjoyable at best, I got about as much entertainment out of it as a typical hollywood 'popcorn flick'. And that's being generous. It certainly wasn't worth $70 CAD.
If you had complained that Morrowind, or Sid Meier's Pirates weren't available on Mac, then I'd agree with you, it's a tragedy. But I just can't bring myself to feel any sort of loss at not having Half-life 2 available.
Of course they do. Most major games at least have a seperate box for the Mac version available. Blizzard is notable because every piece of software they've ever created (including World of Warcraft) has a Mac version -- in fact, WoW in particular even comes on hybrid discs, so even if you bought the "Windows" version, you can install it on Mac just fine too. Shadowbane and probably other MMORPGs do this as well. Bioware is typically fairly Mac friendly, although there was a lot of grumbling that they never released the NWN toolset for Mac. Many of the smaller-run games don't have ports, but anything major will very likely run on Mac. And don't discount the Mac-developed games either. X-Plane is a fantastic flight sim that puts Microsoft's to shame. EV Nova is a remarkably deep and enjoyable game. Chromatron is a great little quickie puzzle game to play (beware, addictive!) although it gets not-so-quick and in fact quite boggling at the higher levels. And hell, if you're really stuck for games, there are emulators for just about every console you can imagine. In a most of them, they even run as fast or faster than an equivalently priced PC since the re aren't any byte-order headaches to deal with.
No, the Mac isn't as great for games as a PC, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. There's less selection, but just as much quality in my opinion. If you want to bring all your current PC games across, you're gonna be in trouble, but if you just want to buy a Mac and have lots of great games available to play, you'll do okay.
Please god, don't *ever* duplicate Livejournal's setup. It's a horrible, nasty hack and anyone who uses Livejournal will tell you that it doesn't work very well either. Although it's gotten better in the last year or so. But that's way, way, way more computing power than they should need to run that site. It's mostly a sign of a system that expanded without any real future-proof planning at all, which isn't really their fault, but if you have the opportunity to think it over and actually plan things, please do it better. You'll thank yourself later.
Did wolfstien have CTF, Team Fortress, and other team multiplayer games that are the mainstay of the current generation? The Wolf3d enviroment can barely even be considered 3D, the levels were completely flat. Current generation has complex multi-floor indoor arenas that seemlessly blend with large outdoor zones. What about physics models? Hell, what about jumping?!?
However, if you merely substitute 'Quake' (which was released in May 1996) in place of 'Wolfenstein', you'll notice that all your statements don't apply anymore. In fact I believe that it's hard to argue there are really any *funamental* differences between the original Quake and today's FPS games. That's still 9 years without any meaningful advancements in the gameplay. I'm sorry, but dynamically loaded maps and pixel shaders, as nice as they may be, do not add anything 'fun' to a game. They don't change how you play it.
That reminds me, did anybody else ever get the millennium virus in the early 90's? Supposedly the virus would cause your hard drive to get wiped out or something on January 1, 2000.
Thankfully, many systems worked around this virus by skipping right from 1999 to 19100.
Sorry, what do 90% of businesses use Microsoft Office for? Hmmmm, running some stupid PPT presentations that could have been authored by any high school or college student. Why won't they use Linux or OpenOffice? Because their files won't be totally compatable and they don't want the headache. It is a big deal.
Well... okay, yes I did miss that. Guilty as charged.
I don't think that is really one of the real reasons though. If it is, it's relatively small. I have to imagine they are being fed the same sort of dumbed down arguments we get over here though and I suspect that the "culture" arguments might fall into that category.
Sorry if I come across like a know-it-all, I really know just enough about the situation to know that I barely know anything. However I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to post on Slashdot unless you come across as a know-it-all, so that's how it goes I guess.
If I'm not mistaken, some people used an airplane as a bomb because of (among other reasons) what you are describing above. This type of "culture exportation" is what is driving fundamentalist thinking in the Muslim world.
You're mistaken. They don't hate freedom, and they don't hate McDonalds. They hate the U.S. specifically, and to a slightly lesser extent the rest of the "Western" countries that support or at least do not stop them.
Why? Well, they hate the U.S. because of what they perceive to be U.S. support of Israel in their occupation of Palestine. They hate the U.S. because the widespread meddling in foreign policy in the middle-east for their own gain. But certainly, don't let myself or the pundits deceive you, the roots of today's terrorist violence go way way back into history. It started long before the Gulf war, long before the Iranian revolution, long before the Anglo-Iranian Oil company came to be, even before the Crusades. It's an extremely complex situation, and there's no easy way to dumb it down while still keeping it fair. Unfortunately, since most people (myself included) aren't professors of middle-eastern studies, or even students, it ends up getting dumbed down to things like "The terrorists hate freedom" which give people the impression that they kinda understand what's going on when the truth is they really don't even realize how deep it goes.
Well, that's a nice thought, but it's not all batteries, only some of the LG ones. I bought my PB 15" a month ago, and my battery's serial number is W7515XXXXXXXXX nothing near the range of serials they're replacing.
Conversing with other characters in the game is much more interactive. Bethesda took a page out of Fable's book by adding the ability to persuade NPCs to make them like you more through a host of methods including jokes, compliments, bribes, and intimidation.
This is not a page from Fable's book. This was in previous Elder Scroll games as well, specifically Morrowind. In fact it was a pretty crucial part of the game for many quests (provided you weren't playing as a psychopathic mass murderer)
Absolutely! Also, I love how you can click on the right half of the article to move to the next page, or left side to move back... it's completely contrary to web standards but it's so useful that I just love it anyway. The whole website's entirely Firefox compatable, has no shitty floating javascript toolbars or other garbage
I regularly point to it as an example of excellent corporate webdesign, but I don't think it gets NEARLY enough credit. It's a fantastic website.
Slashdot Mirror
To be even more pedantic, an M&M has a sugar coated shell, not a chocolate shell. But I suspect that was what you meant to say.
Me too. I'm still on 2000 for my Windows machine, but my newest two computers have both been Powerbooks. *shrug* The exodus has begun, the only question is how large it will end up being. Just a few of us holdouts, or larger, perhaps?
I didn't miss it, I ignored it because it's not reasonable. It's not something my grandma would ever do. Even if I coached her on what she needed to ask for, she still wouldn't do it. It's inconvenient and frustrating.
For that matter, I wouldn't either. I would call and say "Listen, I don't want to have to call you whenever I want to play with a new protocol. So you will open up every damn port for me right now, or I will terminate my account." Please note that this is assuming the ISP has a 24/7 staff on the phones. Which is extremely unlikely. Waiting for business hours is an absolutely ridiculous proposition.
Most people will not even bother to install a piece of software to get a task done, such as viewing a video, if it's not included in the OS or browser good luck. What makes you think that people will phone their ISP whenever they want to do something new? People developing such apps/videos/products/whatever will certainly not assume that they will, so they will have no incentive to create whatever it is they would otherwise have created. You're adding a small barrier to entry for anything besides http/email. A small barrier to entry is all it takes to kill something.
Thanks for the ad hominem, by the way, it really added a lot to your argument. In my opinion, it's people like you who belong in management. The bottom line, the end result, is all that matters to you. You want to end spam and internet-borne viruses, and you don't care what it takes to get there or what collateral damage is inflicted in the process.
Nice double-standard there, O King of the Internet. "I want to run my servers without having them spammed" -- fair. "I think that we should do so by preventing the rest of you from having proper Internet access because my servers are more important than you unwashed masses" -- not fair.
The Internet is used for more than web and email. Do you think that all those 'random ports' were invented just because "hey we need a new way for viruses to propagate!!!" Do you think that the Internet should be locked down into a stagnant wasteland devoid of anything interesting besides webpages? Because that's what it will become when you start locking down ports. Streaming music? Forget it. VoIP? No. Games? No. Something new? Ha, why would you even bother developing something when 95% of people have their ports locked off and won't be able to use it and will *blame you* for the problem, rather than the ISP.
Viewsonic. Unless their monitors have gone way downhill in the last year or two. I had a PF790 19" which was beeeeeauuutiful. I now have two P95f+, one black and one beige (hooray for surplus stores!) and they're truly excellent 19" monitors as well. The brand-spanking new IBM and HP 21" monitors they used to buy at work couldn't compare.
That's awesome. A clever road-DJ like that could become something of a legend and/or celebrity among the 8-5 folks.
It's not unusable. It's slow. There's a difference. I'm still using my 1st Gen 12" PowerBook, with 256MB RAM. It came with Jaguar, upgraded to Panther, and eventually Tiger. All three worked just fine. You get used to the spinny pinwheel while waiting for Expose or Dashboard to pop up. Switching apps is fast enough and they show up quickly, although it often takes several seconds for a swapped out app to become responsive to input, but once it swaps back in it runs perfectly fine. Even games run fine. It just needs to swap everything else and get the active app into memory, then it sails along just fine. It's how swap works, it's unpleasant but it gets the job done as best as possible, and it's certainly USABLE.
The only thing that constantly gets on my nerves is waiting 15 seconds for the CD eject to take effect. Gimme my CD damnit!
You clearly have no idea how a) power supplies work and b) how marijuana growing works.
a) 580watt is it's rated maximum power output, on all three voltage rails combined. There are individual maximums for each voltage rail, so you would have to be exactly at each of those to be drawing the full 580 watts at any given time. You never max them all out, you max one out, typically the 5v. Point number two: 580 watts is its maximum power output. After that it may very well burn out or catch fire or whatever. Realistically if you're drawing anywhere near 580 watts you're going to be getting a very unstable system, because at that kind of output it cannot keep a reliable stream of power coming out. For a good power supply, you never want to exceed two thirds of its rated output. For a cheap powersupply, cut the rated output in half, or even to a third. You don't want a maximum sustained load above that. Third point: In all realistic use, PC powersupplies only approach their maximum at startup, when everything (hard drives, fans) is spinning up and all the capacitors are filling, etc.
b) Even modestly sized marijuana grow-ops (disclaimer: I am not one, I don't even smoke pot, so take this with a grain of salt) use absolutely ridiculous amounts of electricity. The grow-lights alone they use are typically 1 or 2 KILOwatts each, and if you think they're using only one or two lights you're crazy. The temperature control also uses a hell of a lot of electricity for hydroponics. I have 7 computers in my house, two of them very hefty servers, and all of them with at least 340watt power supplies. My power usage on my last bill was 671 kilowatt-hours for a month. A grow-op will use that much in a week, or even days.
All that stuff definitely won't help, but it will have very little to do with whether a World War 3 ever breaks out. If it ever happens, I think it's much more likely that the trigger will be something in the other hemisphere of the world. We've got the middle east, with countries like Israel/Syria/Palestine/Lebanon/Iran/Iraq. Israel almost certainly has nukes, Iran could theoretically have some soon also if they felt the need to. Not far from there we've also got Pakistan and India, both heavily militarized and relatively poor nations with nuclear weapons and an ongoing border conflict. Then we can arch around through the various breakaway countries that Russia feels still belong to them, and then peek into China - the world's largest developing economy, tremendous natural resources, and the world's largest military too. Both Japan and Taiwan seem to be alternately getting on China's nerves and having their toes stepped on by China right now. And last but certainly not least we'll complete our eastern hemisphere tour with North Korea.
I don't really like Bowling, but I don't hate it either. I'm actually pretty ambivalent on it.
But I have to ask, what exactly is your point? You know, Emeril can probably cook way better than most professional athletes. That makes him an athlete too right? I bet I can program better than professional athletes, does that make me a professional athlete? Conversely, do you suspect that bowlers can play a game of football and win against a seasoned team of footballers?
Or were you simply trying to suggest that since they can do something most other people can't do as well, it somehow innately makes them worthy of respect? In a very small, very limited way perhaps. It is not carte blanche. If they want to be egomaniacs and call themselves superheroes, then I would laugh at them regardless of whatever respect they deserve for doing what they do. The original poster apparently has a lower threshhold and laughs at them for calling themselves professional athletes. It has nothing to do with whether they're skilled or not, it's about whether they deserve to be called athletes.
Don't forget, Canada is socialist too. You just wait until we get our war machine rolling, then you'll pay!
P.S. Socialism is an economic paradigm, it has little to do with government besides the fact that government decides which direction they decide to develop the economy into. As another poster correctly pointed out, you're looking for the word 'fascism'. It is possible to be both socialist and fascist at the same time. Mussolini and Hitler were both. Stalin, however, most certainly wasn't and to suggest that he was is simply embarassingly ignorant.
The fundamental reason is because the government is (assuming that it is truly representative and for the people) by definition not-for-profit, because any profit is simply returned to the people somehow. This means that in theory they have zero incentive to fleece you, and therefore they will sell the service for a fair price (ie, within a reasonable margin of what it actually costs to provide it). Many people believe that essential services, especially where there is little to no competition available, are not an area where profiteering should be allowed. And since for-profit companies are obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders, a lot of people feel it is not ethical to give them a de-facto regional monopoly on services where it is unfeasable for another provider to maintain their own completely seperate network.
While your first thought might be to have a non-profit corporation do it, note that this has drawbacks as well. Non-profit corporations are not immune to having a board of directors that is completely batshit fucking insane (see: ICANN), and unlike the government they are completely unaccountable. Well, technically one of those government granted monopolies should be accountable to the government who gave them their monopoly, but in truth the government is toothless in that regard, since they know it would be risky and cause too much upheaval to suddenly give the monopoly to someone else who can't possibly be prepared to take over without substantial reworking.
So, when it all boils down, many people trust the government more than they trust public corporations, because they feel that at least because they have a vote, they have some influence. Even having a share of a public company doesn't have that feel of influence, because unlike governmental elections, in corporations it generally comes down to the decision of the one guy who has the 20 million shares. There's no single person with more than a single vote in governmental elections, and that's an important emotional distinction.
Having played HL2 on my PC, let me be the first to say: Thank god. No, don't bother trying to change my opinion. That game was a dog, and I cannot even begin to understand what people see in it. It was mildly enjoyable at best, I got about as much entertainment out of it as a typical hollywood 'popcorn flick'. And that's being generous. It certainly wasn't worth $70 CAD.
If you had complained that Morrowind, or Sid Meier's Pirates weren't available on Mac, then I'd agree with you, it's a tragedy. But I just can't bring myself to feel any sort of loss at not having Half-life 2 available.
Of course they do. Most major games at least have a seperate box for the Mac version available. Blizzard is notable because every piece of software they've ever created (including World of Warcraft) has a Mac version -- in fact, WoW in particular even comes on hybrid discs, so even if you bought the "Windows" version, you can install it on Mac just fine too. Shadowbane and probably other MMORPGs do this as well. Bioware is typically fairly Mac friendly, although there was a lot of grumbling that they never released the NWN toolset for Mac. Many of the smaller-run games don't have ports, but anything major will very likely run on Mac. And don't discount the Mac-developed games either. X-Plane is a fantastic flight sim that puts Microsoft's to shame. EV Nova is a remarkably deep and enjoyable game. Chromatron is a great little quickie puzzle game to play (beware, addictive!) although it gets not-so-quick and in fact quite boggling at the higher levels. And hell, if you're really stuck for games, there are emulators for just about every console you can imagine. In a most of them, they even run as fast or faster than an equivalently priced PC since the re aren't any byte-order headaches to deal with.
No, the Mac isn't as great for games as a PC, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. There's less selection, but just as much quality in my opinion. If you want to bring all your current PC games across, you're gonna be in trouble, but if you just want to buy a Mac and have lots of great games available to play, you'll do okay.
Please god, don't *ever* duplicate Livejournal's setup. It's a horrible, nasty hack and anyone who uses Livejournal will tell you that it doesn't work very well either. Although it's gotten better in the last year or so. But that's way, way, way more computing power than they should need to run that site. It's mostly a sign of a system that expanded without any real future-proof planning at all, which isn't really their fault, but if you have the opportunity to think it over and actually plan things, please do it better. You'll thank yourself later.
We've covered this before, but now it seems they are getting "more Sirius," or something.
CowboyNeal, I love you.
Did wolfstien have CTF, Team Fortress, and other team multiplayer games that are the mainstay of the current generation? The Wolf3d enviroment can barely even be considered 3D, the levels were completely flat. Current generation has complex multi-floor indoor arenas that seemlessly blend with large outdoor zones. What about physics models? Hell, what about jumping?!?
However, if you merely substitute 'Quake' (which was released in May 1996) in place of 'Wolfenstein', you'll notice that all your statements don't apply anymore. In fact I believe that it's hard to argue there are really any *funamental* differences between the original Quake and today's FPS games. That's still 9 years without any meaningful advancements in the gameplay. I'm sorry, but dynamically loaded maps and pixel shaders, as nice as they may be, do not add anything 'fun' to a game. They don't change how you play it.
That reminds me, did anybody else ever get the millennium virus in the early 90's? Supposedly the virus would cause your hard drive to get wiped out or something on January 1, 2000.
Thankfully, many systems worked around this virus by skipping right from 1999 to 19100.
Sorry, what do 90% of businesses use Microsoft Office for? Hmmmm, running some stupid PPT presentations that could have been authored by any high school or college student. Why won't they use Linux or OpenOffice? Because their files won't be totally compatable and they don't want the headache. It is a big deal.
And Tales of Symphonia/Phantasy Star for the RPG crowd (me). GameCube is the winnar. I couldn't live without mine, sorry.
Well... okay, yes I did miss that. Guilty as charged.
I don't think that is really one of the real reasons though. If it is, it's relatively small. I have to imagine they are being fed the same sort of dumbed down arguments we get over here though and I suspect that the "culture" arguments might fall into that category.
Sorry if I come across like a know-it-all, I really know just enough about the situation to know that I barely know anything. However I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to post on Slashdot unless you come across as a know-it-all, so that's how it goes I guess.
If I'm not mistaken, some people used an airplane as a bomb because of (among other reasons) what you are describing above. This type of "culture exportation" is what is driving fundamentalist thinking in the Muslim world.
You're mistaken. They don't hate freedom, and they don't hate McDonalds. They hate the U.S. specifically, and to a slightly lesser extent the rest of the "Western" countries that support or at least do not stop them.
Why? Well, they hate the U.S. because of what they perceive to be U.S. support of Israel in their occupation of Palestine. They hate the U.S. because the widespread meddling in foreign policy in the middle-east for their own gain. But certainly, don't let myself or the pundits deceive you, the roots of today's terrorist violence go way way back into history. It started long before the Gulf war, long before the Iranian revolution, long before the Anglo-Iranian Oil company came to be, even before the Crusades. It's an extremely complex situation, and there's no easy way to dumb it down while still keeping it fair. Unfortunately, since most people (myself included) aren't professors of middle-eastern studies, or even students, it ends up getting dumbed down to things like "The terrorists hate freedom" which give people the impression that they kinda understand what's going on when the truth is they really don't even realize how deep it goes.
Well, that's a nice thought, but it's not all batteries, only some of the LG ones. I bought my PB 15" a month ago, and my battery's serial number is W7515XXXXXXXXX nothing near the range of serials they're replacing.
Conversing with other characters in the game is much more interactive. Bethesda took a page out of Fable's book by adding the ability to persuade NPCs to make them like you more through a host of methods including jokes, compliments, bribes, and intimidation.
This is not a page from Fable's book. This was in previous Elder Scroll games as well, specifically Morrowind. In fact it was a pretty crucial part of the game for many quests (provided you weren't playing as a psychopathic mass murderer)
Absolutely! Also, I love how you can click on the right half of the article to move to the next page, or left side to move back... it's completely contrary to web standards but it's so useful that I just love it anyway. The whole website's entirely Firefox compatable, has no shitty floating javascript toolbars or other garbage
I regularly point to it as an example of excellent corporate webdesign, but I don't think it gets NEARLY enough credit. It's a fantastic website.