So, what's the deal with the gaming industry? Are they unwilling to sell to the loyal customers that have put the industry where it currently is now - the geeks?
It would seem to me that the following scenario might emmerge:
- gamers are being abandoned by game companies for the mass-produced consumer markets - gamers will no longer have games that meet their interests - new, innovative home-brew companies will pop up to meet the need, producing more fun games
THis might not be possible, due to the current situation with games where the development process is quite involved, but I still see it as possible. I personally hope it is, as I can't see myself playing many of the games made in the last few years...
"Especially in the open source world"? No, I don't think so.
Aside from The GIMP, I can't think of a single featureful piece of (GUI) open source software (let alone commonly used pieces) that is "difficult to use" compared to many, many windows applications. Nero comes to mind, as does mIRC. I'm sure there are others, but I've not really been using Windows for years, and these are simply observations I've made by seeing others use their computers.
Both open source and closed source have their best-of-breed, and I'd say that the useability of Open Source apps is at least on par with that of closed source for this category. The lesser-known projects of open source would be, I'd recon, many times better than those of closed source. Many horribly designed, yet popular, projects on downloads.com come to mind.
If this arguement is made on the basis of console application useability, someone simply needs to shut the fuck up. It's not even a functional paradigm comparison. GUI tools serve an entirely different functionality type than console tools.
I think this might have something to do with the fact that Nokia had shitty, old-generation phones on the market as 'freebies' (with sign-up) for a couple years longer than other brands - which had irritatingly pitched ringtones. I, personally, got a Kyocera a year and a half ago when I switched providers, at a cost of an extra $20, simply because the Nokia ringtones were beyond irritating.
Now people are sold on the Sprint (et al.) picture phones.
Ever notice how when people say their system 'evolved' instead of being designed, they're just trying to make it sound neat that they didn't plan ahead thoroughly?
Signing the top game developers (or as the case may be, buying them out) is precisely what MS has been doing with the Xbox, and undoubtably have planned for xb2.
I'd like to second this sentiment. Most of these ideas would rock for many people - but not for me. Some would be nice for me as well, but not for others. I certainly don't want the bloat of all that unused stuff.
Thus: I conclude that anything non-essential should be an extension. This seems to be the rough policy already, to some degree, at least in implimentation.
I'd very much like to have customizeable mouse buttons.
Specifically, I'd like to be able to have the default behavior for left click to be to open a link in a new tab - only if it's a link to an external site. Otherwise, it would open the link in the current tab.
2. Create a full-text index in real-time of every page that has been browsed. When the user visits any web page, display a sidebar of "Related previously-viewed pages."
Yes, yes, yes! I've been interested in something like this for a long time.
To 'tune' the idea to more of what I've had in mind, the full-text index would have tuning capabilities. The user should be able to cache all data in given categories for later reading and retrieval, as well as be able to 'highlight' specific data as they go along. I imagine the highlighting would be slimilar to a bookmark, but be linked to the data topic itself, not the page.
This way a person could build a database of topical information on things that are of interest to them. Into homeopathy? Physics? Breast feeding? (Pr0n?:P) Have the indexing agent categorize the data as you go throughout the web.
I imagine this would take a 'significant' amount of disk space, but in the 2+ years that it would take to develop such an application to useability, there's little doubt that storage and processing power wouldn't be much of an issue.
The thing is, it would be a linear progression from a single point - TOS's timeline. From that point forward, the history can be changed by altering the past. If there were another TOS, it wouldn't be the same timeline - it would be yet another level of chronological divergence.
I'm not sure if that makes sense or not, but it works in my brain.
I think that, in this scenario, there really hasnt been any harm to the consumer.
ARM has produced solid products for years and years. They're widely accepted in the "industry" as powerful processors for application-specific tasks that consume low amounts of power, on a relatively small budget.
What's more, they're a kind of standard. If you're hiring a microcontroller programmer, or an embedded programmer, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that they at least have some exposure to working with ARM hardware, as opposed to something more obscure.
All this combined decreases the cost of development for the companies, and results in more products coming to market.
How would they make the movie so that nobody saw the face of a Romulan throughout the war? Simple:
- the Romulans don't have a video-based comm. - the Romulan warriors have decorative/concealing battle armor for their heads - have a mystique throughout the film that paints the Romulans as a powerful, mysterious race, somewhat along the lines of what was done with the Borg, thus increasing the level of suspense.
All this would be feasable, as we don't know much about pre-Enterprise romulans.
Oh, and as far as timeline continuity is concerned: there was a physicist (I don't remember wich one) that said that the time-space continuity is more like a deck of stacked cards than a linear stream. If you were to move a card in that deck to a place lower in the deck, it would no longer be the same deck, and would change the position of each of the other cards after it.
If that were the case, you could say that the altering of the time-space continuum by reptilians in Enterprise is a direct result of the war with the transdimensional creatures in the future, as they then went back and had those races (can't think of what they called themselves) conspire against Earth. Likewise, that would potentially alter any interactions with the Romulans.
IBM should sue anyone that uses GIF, simply on principle of it being an old, tired format. What's the benefit of GIF? Only thing I can think of is low-color strobing ads. Yeah, great benefit.
Instead of do anything with the patent, IBM should make note of the patent, and then tell people that PNG is better... or something like that.
I'm sorry, but how is abuse when I'm simply taking advantage of the stipulations which they provided in the small print of my purchase? They're they ones that wrote the book, and as a logical person, I weigh the advantage of buying the item with the inclusion of these clauses.
People don't shop at Best Buy for the out-front prices or the friendly customer support, you know.
This would be valid, if it were a proper compairison. It's not.
Tell me, what specifically does the movie/recording industry lose when I copy a song/mp3? Is there anything that's quantifiably lost?
Did they lose a CD from a store? No. Did they lose the cost of producing the media? No. Did they lose a potential sale of CD/DVD? No*. Did they lose profit, either directly or indirectly? No.
Truth be told, the only thing they've lost is my mindshare. It's no different than me watchign the film at a friend's, borrowing the DVD, or watching a rental with a large group of friends.
It's not proletariat to industry types, it's "citizens". Seriously. There've been many instances of hollywood types calling us commoners "citizens" on talk shows, etc.
If we're the citizens, what's that make them? Royalty, in my mind. At least as close to royalty gets in the US: get off easy on nearly all crimes, are immune to most law, and as a group (ie, "royalty") are able to shape and change the law of the land much more easily than any citizen lobby group.
Hah! I've beaten that. Well, an employee's machine I administered has.
1800-some infections. Re-fucking-diculous. The machine was obscenely slow - it acted like it might have been a 233MHz with 128Mb (it was a win2k machine w/ a 900MHz cpu and 512Mb). Surfing porn and gambling sites during work hours. Needless to say, the person was Let Go.
$10 says that when they considered MacOS X and Linux distributions they included bug and security releases for all the packages that are available for the distribution, not just for the core OS/core set of functionality.
I'm fairly certain that there've not been 30+ kernel exploits in a year for Linux, ever.
Windows XP offers a significantly small subset of what a Linux distro offers. What's combined in Linux all depends on what the task of the server is.
This problem was roughly the equivilant of an 'rm -rf *' in ~, but in Windows - and not truly the fault of the user, but more of a design bug.
I set up samba as a PDC on my file server, and added a new account on my win2k machine, as the old one's USER.DAT was getting a bit large and bloated. I set up the new account to be a domain account, and moved all the files I had in my old account into the new one on the workstaiton - probably roughly 40Gb, half of it ripped video from my dvcam, and probably a good 3G of edited video.
I reboot the system, and log into the new account. It takes a while longer than I expected - and then it gives me an error about how a temporary account will be used, as the one on disk (or the server? I don't recall/use windows too often) wasn't available. Uh oh.
Turns out that the combination of not having roaming profiles set up on a samba (or, I assume, windows) PDC in combination with the win2k (winxp? haven't tested) machine's account to be set as a roaming profile results in everything in the roaming profile being axed if the server doesn't have the appriate profile share and configuration. So, Windows thought: hey, there's nothing on the server, all this data in the local profile must be erronous! And deletes it.
So, I'm curious - what exactly did you write in the report, then?:P
I had a similar situation recently with work. New file server in a small office, placed in the corner of a conference room under an endtable. Had a sign on it, "Do not touch this computer! It is the office file server!" in big red lettering. It was the only place for the machine at the time, and was temporary to boot.
I'd driven two hours to the location to spend the day doing some various service, setting the server up, testing it, and then returned home - another 2 hour drive.
The next day, at home, I ssh'd in to do some last-minute things that weren't terribly important, and didn't require on-site access. I was able to connect to the office gateway, but not to that specific internal server. All other connectivity was fine. DNS was fine. The machine simply wasn't there. This was about when I received a phone call, "The file server is down!" much anger in the boss's voice. So I ended up driving back to take a look.
Turns out that the machine was unplugged from its ethernet jack by someone needing the meeting room that morning, despite the sign. Idiot.
Also another scenario at this office: set up a CUPS print server. Test it out, print some shit from the windows workstations, it works well. Double-test things, have the boss test it for himself (print something), document that it works, and go on my way. I'd had some previous scenarios with the office where they blamed me for not fixing things properly, where it was a case of users fucking around where they shouldn't have, so I made sure to cover my ass.
I get there, and what had happened? A user had removed the HP laserjet 4mv (beautiful steadfast machine that it is) from the new cups server and reattached it to the previous machine (workstation) that it was attached to, which was now off the network. He wasn't able ot print because he was trying to print to the old printer (\\machinename\printer) instead of to the new-and-currently-only-and-default printer, \\print-server\hplj4mv. I got paid for my time, but there's no doubt that the frustration made them get more than their fair share of support for what they paid.
However: I did drop my cell phone outdoors last winter into the snow (while climbing out of the car), and didn't notice it for several hours. Phone didn't work properly after that: LCD was fogged indefinately, speaker was crackly and barely even worked most of the time. So I took it all appart.
Wiped things dry, as well as the speaker and earpiece assembly. The earpiece had accumulated lint over the months from being in my pocket, and must've adhered to the thin-membrane speaker when getting wet. It's worked like a charm since then.
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So, what's the deal with the gaming industry? Are they unwilling to sell to the loyal customers that have put the industry where it currently is now - the geeks?
It would seem to me that the following scenario might emmerge:
- gamers are being abandoned by game companies for the mass-produced consumer markets
- gamers will no longer have games that meet their interests
- new, innovative home-brew companies will pop up to meet the need, producing more fun games
THis might not be possible, due to the current situation with games where the development process is quite involved, but I still see it as possible. I personally hope it is, as I can't see myself playing many of the games made in the last few years...
"Especially in the open source world"? No, I don't think so.
Aside from The GIMP, I can't think of a single featureful piece of (GUI) open source software (let alone commonly used pieces) that is "difficult to use" compared to many, many windows applications. Nero comes to mind, as does mIRC. I'm sure there are others, but I've not really been using Windows for years, and these are simply observations I've made by seeing others use their computers.
Both open source and closed source have their best-of-breed, and I'd say that the useability of Open Source apps is at least on par with that of closed source for this category. The lesser-known projects of open source would be, I'd recon, many times better than those of closed source. Many horribly designed, yet popular, projects on downloads.com come to mind.
If this arguement is made on the basis of console application useability, someone simply needs to shut the fuck up. It's not even a functional paradigm comparison. GUI tools serve an entirely different functionality type than console tools.
I think this might have something to do with the fact that Nokia had shitty, old-generation phones on the market as 'freebies' (with sign-up) for a couple years longer than other brands - which had irritatingly pitched ringtones. I, personally, got a Kyocera a year and a half ago when I switched providers, at a cost of an extra $20, simply because the Nokia ringtones were beyond irritating.
Now people are sold on the Sprint (et al.) picture phones.
Ever notice how when people say their system 'evolved' instead of being designed, they're just trying to make it sound neat that they didn't plan ahead thoroughly?
how about golf? Or is that not considered a sport?
or how about fishing? That's a fun one, where everyone thinks it takes special talents to pick the right lure.
How exactly is this a warning for MS? Sounds more like a "do whatever the fuck you want, we won't hold anyone responsible" message, to me.
Signing the top game developers (or as the case may be, buying them out) is precisely what MS has been doing with the Xbox, and undoubtably have planned for xb2.
I'd like to second this sentiment. Most of these ideas would rock for many people - but not for me. Some would be nice for me as well, but not for others. I certainly don't want the bloat of all that unused stuff.
Thus: I conclude that anything non-essential should be an extension. This seems to be the rough policy already, to some degree, at least in implimentation.
I'd very much like to have customizeable mouse buttons.
Specifically, I'd like to be able to have the default behavior for left click to be to open a link in a new tab - only if it's a link to an external site. Otherwise, it would open the link in the current tab.
2. Create a full-text index in real-time of every page that has been browsed. When the user visits any web page, display a sidebar of "Related previously-viewed pages."
Yes, yes, yes! I've been interested in something like this for a long time.
To 'tune' the idea to more of what I've had in mind, the full-text index would have tuning capabilities. The user should be able to cache all data in given categories for later reading and retrieval, as well as be able to 'highlight' specific data as they go along. I imagine the highlighting would be slimilar to a bookmark, but be linked to the data topic itself, not the page.
This way a person could build a database of topical information on things that are of interest to them. Into homeopathy? Physics? Breast feeding? (Pr0n?
I imagine this would take a 'significant' amount of disk space, but in the 2+ years that it would take to develop such an application to useability, there's little doubt that storage and processing power wouldn't be much of an issue.
That is my idea of a killer ap.
Not necessarily, but it would be possible.
The thing is, it would be a linear progression from a single point - TOS's timeline. From that point forward, the history can be changed by altering the past. If there were another TOS, it wouldn't be the same timeline - it would be yet another level of chronological divergence.
I'm not sure if that makes sense or not, but it works in my brain.
I think that, in this scenario, there really hasnt been any harm to the consumer.
ARM has produced solid products for years and years. They're widely accepted in the "industry" as powerful processors for application-specific tasks that consume low amounts of power, on a relatively small budget.
What's more, they're a kind of standard. If you're hiring a microcontroller programmer, or an embedded programmer, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that they at least have some exposure to working with ARM hardware, as opposed to something more obscure.
All this combined decreases the cost of development for the companies, and results in more products coming to market.
Hrm. Yes. It might be both. I'll have to watch 12 Monkeys again to confirm, damn it.h
How would they make the movie so that nobody saw the face of a Romulan throughout the war? Simple:
- the Romulans don't have a video-based comm.
- the Romulan warriors have decorative/concealing battle armor for their heads
- have a mystique throughout the film that paints the Romulans as a powerful, mysterious race, somewhat along the lines of what was done with the Borg, thus increasing the level of suspense.
All this would be feasable, as we don't know much about pre-Enterprise romulans.
Oh, and as far as timeline continuity is concerned: there was a physicist (I don't remember wich one) that said that the time-space continuity is more like a deck of stacked cards than a linear stream. If you were to move a card in that deck to a place lower in the deck, it would no longer be the same deck, and would change the position of each of the other cards after it.
If that were the case, you could say that the altering of the time-space continuum by reptilians in Enterprise is a direct result of the war with the transdimensional creatures in the future, as they then went back and had those races (can't think of what they called themselves) conspire against Earth. Likewise, that would potentially alter any interactions with the Romulans.
... 12 Monkeys quote butchering? "Now we see the violence inherent in the system!" I don't remember the rest.
IBM should sue anyone that uses GIF, simply on principle of it being an old, tired format. What's the benefit of GIF? Only thing I can think of is low-color strobing ads. Yeah, great benefit.
Instead of do anything with the patent, IBM should make note of the patent, and then tell people that PNG is better... or something like that.
The point being, the celebs demonstrate an attitude of being seemingly above the title of 'citizen'.
I'm sorry, but how is abuse when I'm simply taking advantage of the stipulations which they provided in the small print of my purchase? They're they ones that wrote the book, and as a logical person, I weigh the advantage of buying the item with the inclusion of these clauses.
People don't shop at Best Buy for the out-front prices or the friendly customer support, you know.
This would be valid, if it were a proper compairison. It's not.
Tell me, what specifically does the movie/recording industry lose when I copy a song/mp3? Is there anything that's quantifiably lost?
Did they lose a CD from a store? No.
Did they lose the cost of producing the media? No.
Did they lose a potential sale of CD/DVD? No*.
Did they lose profit, either directly or indirectly? No.
Truth be told, the only thing they've lost is my mindshare. It's no different than me watchign the film at a friend's, borrowing the DVD, or watching a rental with a large group of friends.
It's not proletariat to industry types, it's "citizens". Seriously. There've been many instances of hollywood types calling us commoners "citizens" on talk shows, etc.
If we're the citizens, what's that make them? Royalty, in my mind. At least as close to royalty gets in the US: get off easy on nearly all crimes, are immune to most law, and as a group (ie, "royalty") are able to shape and change the law of the land much more easily than any citizen lobby group.
Hah! I've beaten that. Well, an employee's machine I administered has.
1800-some infections. Re-fucking-diculous. The machine was obscenely slow - it acted like it might have been a 233MHz with 128Mb (it was a win2k machine w/ a 900MHz cpu and 512Mb). Surfing porn and gambling sites during work hours. Needless to say, the person was Let Go.
$10 says that when they considered MacOS X and Linux distributions they included bug and security releases for all the packages that are available for the distribution, not just for the core OS/core set of functionality.
I'm fairly certain that there've not been 30+ kernel exploits in a year for Linux, ever.
Windows XP offers a significantly small subset of what a Linux distro offers. What's combined in Linux all depends on what the task of the server is.
This problem was roughly the equivilant of an 'rm -rf *' in ~, but in Windows - and not truly the fault of the user, but more of a design bug.
I set up samba as a PDC on my file server, and added a new account on my win2k machine, as the old one's USER.DAT was getting a bit large and bloated. I set up the new account to be a domain account, and moved all the files I had in my old account into the new one on the workstaiton - probably roughly 40Gb, half of it ripped video from my dvcam, and probably a good 3G of edited video.
I reboot the system, and log into the new account. It takes a while longer than I expected - and then it gives me an error about how a temporary account will be used, as the one on disk (or the server? I don't recall/use windows too often) wasn't available. Uh oh.
Turns out that the combination of not having roaming profiles set up on a samba (or, I assume, windows) PDC in combination with the win2k (winxp? haven't tested) machine's account to be set as a roaming profile results in everything in the roaming profile being axed if the server doesn't have the appriate profile share and configuration. So, Windows thought: hey, there's nothing on the server, all this data in the local profile must be erronous! And deletes it.
I was quite pissed.
So, I'm curious - what exactly did you write in the report, then? :P
I had a similar situation recently with work. New file server in a small office, placed in the corner of a conference room under an endtable. Had a sign on it, "Do not touch this computer! It is the office file server!" in big red lettering. It was the only place for the machine at the time, and was temporary to boot.
I'd driven two hours to the location to spend the day doing some various service, setting the server up, testing it, and then returned home - another 2 hour drive.
The next day, at home, I ssh'd in to do some last-minute things that weren't terribly important, and didn't require on-site access. I was able to connect to the office gateway, but not to that specific internal server. All other connectivity was fine. DNS was fine. The machine simply wasn't there. This was about when I received a phone call, "The file server is down!" much anger in the boss's voice. So I ended up driving back to take a look.
Turns out that the machine was unplugged from its ethernet jack by someone needing the meeting room that morning, despite the sign. Idiot.
Also another scenario at this office: set up a CUPS print server. Test it out, print some shit from the windows workstations, it works well. Double-test things, have the boss test it for himself (print something), document that it works, and go on my way. I'd had some previous scenarios with the office where they blamed me for not fixing things properly, where it was a case of users fucking around where they shouldn't have, so I made sure to cover my ass.
I get there, and what had happened? A user had removed the HP laserjet 4mv (beautiful steadfast machine that it is) from the new cups server and reattached it to the previous machine (workstation) that it was attached to, which was now off the network. He wasn't able ot print because he was trying to print to the old printer (\\machinename\printer) instead of to the new-and-currently-only-and-default printer, \\print-server\hplj4mv. I got paid for my time, but there's no doubt that the frustration made them get more than their fair share of support for what they paid.
Hrm. No, not quite that absent-minded.
However: I did drop my cell phone outdoors last winter into the snow (while climbing out of the car), and didn't notice it for several hours. Phone didn't work properly after that: LCD was fogged indefinately, speaker was crackly and barely even worked most of the time. So I took it all appart.
Wiped things dry, as well as the speaker and earpiece assembly. The earpiece had accumulated lint over the months from being in my pocket, and must've adhered to the thin-membrane speaker when getting wet. It's worked like a charm since then.