I'd also consider some of the older games that have reached the "Classics" or bargian shelves:
Some that come to mind are:
Dark Forces II
Rogue Squadron
Doom (Final Doom Boxed set)
Sim City 3000
Flight Simulator Classic (or 2000 now that a new version is out)
For older retro gamers. besides a MAME complaition (already mentioned in another post), there are:
Atari Arcade Classics - Silver Aniv. Edition
MS Arcade, Return and Revenge of Arcade
There are a lot of great games that are a few years old - they may not have the mind blowing graphics of today's games, but what they lack in graphics they often make up for in game play. You can get quite a few presents without blowing a budget.
Finally, there's always setting up some emulators (NES/SNES/Sega Master System) and a few ROM sets - there were some great console games, such as Yoshi's Story, the original Zeldas, Sonic, as well as arcade hits such as Dig Dug for those machines - why not turn someone on to a whole new gaming experience? You can even pick up carts cheap at used game stores, to keep your ROM images "legal (sort-of)".
Second, you lose the ability to cycle through pictures on the fly.
Well, you could put the pictures in page protectors, and then assemble a set in a three ring binder. Tape the binder to the wall, put all the pages at the top, and you'll cycle through the pictures. Adjusting the friction with some tape allows you to adjust the cycle speed. Benefits;
1. No external electrical power requirements
2. Puting pictures back to back in the page protectors allows 2 pics to be viewed at once.
3. When a picture of your ex scrolls throw that you forgot to pull, you can throw a dart at it w/o worrying about breaking an expensive LCD screen.
If you include external costs, alternative energy gets more expensive as well. For example:
Wind - includes the cost of protecting birds from the blades, and prevent protected ones, such as eagles, from any encounters. If you want to get technical, there's a visual pollution impact as well, especially in the NW where tribal vision quests would be negatively impacted.
Solar - add in the environmental cost of covering large tracts of land needed to produce significant power, as well as the toxic byproducts of panel production.
Wood - air pollution cleanup costs (look at the impact of wood stoves in the NW) and CO2 impact of deforestation.
Unfortunately, external cost is not easy to calculate, and something many environmentalist forget when they talk about "green" power, whose true cost also includes environmental effects. Creating the energy needed for a modern civilization is neitehr a trivial nor easy task. It always involves trade-offs. We need to develop alternatives, but they need to be affordable alternatives.
One cause is companies, despite security policies, routinely violate them themselves. You may say that a receptionist/guard/etc. is to challenge all vistors and ask for ID, but the first time they do that to a senior executive or VIP from out of town and get smacked down for it, they'll never question anyone again.
OTOH, I worked for an organization that took security seriously. You were to challenge anyone without a badge, and escort them to sercurity if tehy didn't have one. I challenged teh CEO once - he pulled out his badge, showed it to me, and clipped it to his collar, where it should have been. No "don't you know who I am?", no nasty note to my boss; just a simple "thanks" and doing what he expects everyone else to do. Of course, that also takes a leader, not a manager.
Hmm... Surely it's just a different kind of accessibility. In the US a good education is available to those who have the money to pay for it. In Europe those who want to study in the best universities need the brains and motivation to get in, not the money.
Actually, US universities are real good at price discrimination, they call it student aid. They know what you have available to pay for tuition, and tailor aid to get as much money as is possible for tuition. A poor, but smart student, can get a free ride while a richer one shells out for it.
Come to think of it, it's rather the same in Europe - the gov't knows what you make, and takes what they feel is appropriate. If you're richer, your education costs more.
Heh _ I can't wait until th efirst Senator or Congressman/woman is caught with someone not their spousal unit. Heck, you could even program the machine to recognize both - wanna bet the Enquirer would buy them.
In 1987, I saw an Apple video (taking place in the future, intended to be a nostalgic review of Apple's past) where Woz wore a paper of MacGlasses, complete with tiny disks that inserted into the side of the frame (shades of the MMC/SD crads) - pretty cool, too bad it didn't happen. (The video also had a newsacst where IBM announced their latest main frames were compatible with teh Apple 3000 series mainframe.
According to their specs, it goes from Replay box to Replay box. They could include some sort of distrobution limitation that prevents shows gotten from another Replay from being redistributed, or they could erase the show from Box A once it's in Box B. Either way, it's not much different from me sending a tape to someone.
Of ocurse, tehre are other things that limit sharing as well - first is the cost of the box - it's not exactly soemthing your average consumer buys on a whim, and even with high speed access the bandwidth limitations would prevent massive show swapping.
Yep. In "Blackhawk Down" they talk about this, and the fact that hundreds of RPGs went flying in the air before they got a lucky hit. That was an urban setting, there's cover there, there isn't out in the bush. Ever hear Blackhawks or Apaches flying past? You can't tell what direction they are coming from in the daytime or at night. In Somolia there were Tangos sitting there with radios telling the fellas downtown when the UH-60s and OH-6s were taking off from the American compound, it's not going to be the same in Afghanistan.
Well, lucky or not, they brought down 2, damaged a third with an RPG and downed another with small arms fire.
And while Afghanistan is certainly not urban, rugged mountains are not much better. There's cover there as well.
You're really left with two choices - hover nearby or drop troops and let them hump the hills to the target.
If you come in close, you got to figure the bad guys will be waiting. They, after all, have to know where you have to go to hit your target. An RPG has what, a 1500 foot or so effective range, which makes for some pretty big circles for a hovering helicopter.
If you're doing an overland assualt, you've got to fight it out with an enemy who knows the terrain, and can pick and chose his fight.
The apparent lack of hard intel could also be problematic - it would make sense to leak info on potential targets to setup ambushes.
I don't doubt it can be done, but I don't think it will be easy, nor do I believe technological superiority will offer much advantage.
We'll be taking on an enemy, that has been fighting off and on for over twenty years; on his home turf in a guerilla war. This won't be Desert Storm, which was basically a conventional war.
The British attempted to take Afghanistan over 100 years ago, and you can not compare an army before aviation, remote sensing and mechnization to a modern army.
The problem is you're not fighting a modern war. In Iraq, for example, we could use imagery to determine the Iraqi's OOB (Order of Battle - what they got and where they got it.) Our weapons are very effective against tanks, bridges, Command/Control/Communications (C3) infrastructure and other modern weapons of war.
In addition, the Iraqi's made the fatal mistake of thinking we would fight the same way the Iranians did - massive assults on fixed positions. Iraq simply had no clue what we could bring to bear nor the tactics we would use.
But in Afghanistan, we won't face a conventianla enemy. We get great imagery, alright - of huts and fields and caves. You won't know who or where your enemy is, and there's virtually no C3 infrastructure to destroy. It also means you can't listen in to get an idea of what your opponent is doing.
Modern weaponary is great, but close in fighting has a way of evening the odds - look what an RPG did to a BlackHawk in Somalia. The idea of fighting a motivated enemy in his own back yard should give one pause.
Look at it this way - the British ahve been in Nortehr Ireland for how long? They are a motivated, well equiped and trained army, in familar terrian. They speak the language, have a network of agents to gather intelligence, and yet they still haven't wiped out the IRA. DO you really think we can be more successful in Afghanistan?
On the other hand, we can track money (although they appear to use techniques designed to circumvent normal warnings), build coalitions with countries who know the area as well as the players, learn who realy runs the show and how the operate, and strike when and where we want.
Micheal should look to the SAS's exploits in Iraq in '91 and the Desert Rats in '40-'41 for examples of what a small cadre of highly trained and motivated fighters can do againt increadable odds.
No one is doubting our forces motivation or bravery - but "a small cadre of highly trained and motivated fighters" sounds a lot like what we'll be facing, and "increadable odds" sounds a lot like what they'll be facing.
It isn't about how Office integrates its programs, but how Office's approach to documents impacts the user. XML is a step in the right direction.
If all you're going to do is move simple bulleted lists from Word to PP, then yea, it does that reasonably well, but that's not my point.
First of all, I shouldn't have to stick anything from Word to PP - instead of the text becoming a Word object in PP, you'd use style sheets to control what part of the document is used and how it's viewed. For example, a section of text might be a header in a document, the title of a presentation page, and not be viewed at all in a spreadsheet. Similarly, text in a specific column in a document would become the text within Visio elements on a diagram. And it wouldn't matter where you first created the data - since it just data with different sytles attached. I realize that much of this can be done in Office today by embeding parts of documents into others, but it is neither easy nor intuative.
Something as simple as embedding a spreadsheet into PP can be frustrating as you try to adjust column widths and font point size. Or copying a PP slide from one presentation to another w/o losing all the attributes of the original master template. In fact, when it comes to integrating and displaying data across Office programs, Office sucks.
Copying a bad example of how to treat data is not good for Linux, because you provide no compelling reason for people to switch from Office. A Linux Office suite will be viewed as little more than a knock off of Office, and people's unwillingness to change will limit its adoption. However, if you have a better way, that clearly makes it easier for people to do what they want, then you've got a good reason for them to change.
The problem is not whether Office is a bloated collection of tools, but the whole approach towards documents taken by office suites.
We should look at it from a single document standpoint, rather piecing together a Frankenstein's monster of a document from component parts. for example:
Look at the differences in document handling between Word and Powerpoint - each has different formating abilities and styles, even though both basicly do the same thing - layout text and graphics. Which means turning a Word document into a Powerpoint presentation is a nightmare (not to mention trying to go the other way.) What IO'm saying is we shouldn't even have the words document and presentation as seperate terms in our lexicon. I should be able to define document characteristics and then chose how and when to display them. One file, multiple views, so to speak. Ideally, you could send someone the document and, depending on what they wanted to do, use it as a presentation or document.
That gets rid of all the formating quirks that Office has and provides a consistent set of editing options across the document - whether your creating a srpeadsheet, table, presentation, flow chart or document.
Finally, since the document contains the info needed for displaying it in different manners, you could have portability between diffrent devices - such as a desktop, PDA or phone. Create once, view many (with apologies to Java).
Following MS lead and trying to develop similar products is a long term losing proposition - primarily because of MS overwhelming dominance on the desktop, which makes them the "safe" choice.
The trouble is too many people burn out their clutches trying to do a paradigm shift.
It isn't Wal-Mart that destroys local businesses - its the local people make the choice to shop there that do.
That's bullshit and you know it. May small businesses - whole communities of 'mom & pop' businesses - often have surived for years on fairly low profits. If they loose, say, a quarter of their customers to a big superstore, then that can destroy them. So a minority of people changing their buying habits can screw these businesses, screw the local community, screw the spirit of a small town. This isn't helped by the fact that some of these big stores deliberately go out of their way to close down small businesses.
The fact of the matter is that these stores can really badly affect small towns, very often to the great detrement of local people - and whatever 'free market is good for consumers' argument you have doesn't change that.
Let's see:
Wal-Mart opens -> some locals decide to shop there -> amrginal businesses go under -> smart ones survive and thrive
I missed Wal-Mart's secret mass hypnosis plot to destroy the town.
It's still local citizens making choices that impact their lives. I assume they're smart enough to know what shopping at Wal-Mart means for local stores, but have decided the economic benefits outweigh the social costs.
When the government makes that decision for them via laws and regulations, all it results in is protecting marginal businesses and raising prices.
Which is my point -> laws and regulations protect the regulated, not the consumer despite claims to the contrary.
The impact of big box stores on local econmoies is another discussion.
The problem I have with the European viewpoint is that government intervention generally acts not in the interests of consumers but of business. For example, when I lived in Switzerland, store hours were set by law, which protects the small mom-and pops from being driven out of business by big stores that can offer more convient shopping hours.
You wrote:
I am confused as to why you think this is the interests of business. It is clearly not.
Of course it is - it limits competition which clearly benefits small businesses that are less efficient. They don't have to become more efficient because the laws and rules protect them.
All it does for consumers is limit their choices and keep prices high.
This may come as a shock to American's, but there is more to life than paying the minimum for everything you buy and having stores that are open for 24 hour a day.
Sure, there's such things as choices and free markets.
In many European countries, applications to build big 'Walmart-type' stores near small towns are turned down. Why? Because they distroy all the local businesses. This is bad not because we feel sorry for all those little business men (although some of us do), but because it is bad for the community, bad for the culture, and bad for the heritage of a small town for this to happen. Most people here would rather pay a bit more and keep their local shops.
If Europeans *really* wanted to save their small shops and are willing to pay more, then there would be no reason to deny the Wal-Marts of the world permits. They'd open up stores that would remain empty because the local citizens so love their small town culture that they refuse to shop there. Germany's experience, however, shows that European consumers do want lower prices, decent servcie, and convience. But laws are used to prevent that, which benefits the incumbent businesses and hurts consumers. All it does it take away their choice - they could, after all, still pay more - why not give them the choice?
It isn't Wal-Mart that destroys local businesses - its the local people make the choice to shop there that do.
ME:
Companies also set the "right price" which could not be discounted - which protected mom and pops, as well as big companies because they didn't have to worry about competing on price.
You:
This doesn't just benefit the mom and pops, it benefits consumers -- albeit indirectly.
I'm sorry , but I don't agree with the idea than a consumer benefits by paying higher prices. If you truely believe that, then you might as well do away with anti-trust laws and let companies setup cartels.
You won't run into a situation where Some Big Box Store(Wal Mart?) comes into town, cuts prices below whatever anyone else in town is charging until all others in town are out of business, then jacks the prices above the point they were to begin with.
Except it doesn't work that way, primarily becasue even if you do run everyone out of business, as soon as you jack up prices, new competitors will open stores. As a result, you have to keep prices so low to keep competitors out, until you either go bankrupt or get tired of tiny returns on your investment. In fact, Wal-Mart has a policy of pricing at the prevailing prices in an area - they avoid starting price wars with major competitors. While there may be some areas where there are no K-Marts/Targets/Ames/Meijer/Albertsions et.al and just a lone Wal-Mart, I bet most have major competitors within their territory. They may drive some local business out, but overall they lower prices in an area - which benefits consumers.
In addition, companies can compete on more than price - service is one area where they have an advantage. Of course, this means the same people that complain about Wal-mart driving local stores out of business need to be willing to vote with their pocket book and pay more for goods. For example, I buy my N64/GBA stuff at a small local retailer, even if he is more expensive (which he generally isn't). Why? Because I know he will get me the hot games (such as a PS2 at list price when *nobody* else had them, if I wanted) and help me avoid bad ones. If he gets a used game in he knows I want, he saves it for me. Try that at Wal-Mart.
'm afraid that you American's need to wake up to the fact that you have a very abusive corporate mentality, which is not in the interests of
anyone but the company. Many of you seem to think that Europeans are a bunch of 'socialist losers' (going by the postings on Slashdot),because we generally approve of goverment intervention to prevent abusive business practices in the free market, and most of our companies are not as aggressive as yours, as this Lego case demonstrates. However, we see it not as being losers, but as being more civilized.
The problem I have with the European viewpoint is that government intervention generally acts not in the interests of consumers but of business. For example, when I lived in Switzerland, store hours were set by law, which protects the small mom-and pops from being driven out of business by big stores that can offer more convient shopping hours.
Companies also set the "right price" which could not be discounted - which protected mom and pops, as well as big companies because they didn't have to worry about competing on price. They simply divided up the market based on location. The manufactures didn't have to worry about big companies demanding price breaks, since the manufaturers set prices at suitably high margins.
Companies are not aggressive because governments have established a set of legal and regulatory protections that benefits all the incumbent companies, so there is no reason to upset the applecart. Look at the reaction from companies when somebody tries - such as poor Sabena, where an upstart low fare competitor had the nerve to advertise they were cheaper than Sabena. They sure showed they had the interests of more than Sabena at heart when they sued to get the competitor to stop comparing fares.
In the end, the average consumer in Europe is worse off than those in the US. (Where most of us have enough common sense to accept responsibility for our own actions.)
It's a great stand by LEGO to embrace the hacktivist community, and like it's been posted it's probably due, at least partly, to that factthat they blew away sales projections. Shouldn't others pick up on this business model? Not give away their products or IP items, but to allow/encourage their users to extend the original concepts in ways they hadn't thought of.
It's actually not that new of an idea. Even befor e users created mods for games, we had the automotive industry and drag racers / customizers / low riders / road racers/etc - and Detroit not only supported them, but used their ideas to improve their products.
I build model rockets, and built many copies of kits and designs put out by Estes / CMR / Centuri. These companies even sold the oddball parts and decals I needed to make exact copies of their kits - beacuse they knew their money was in hardware and generating interest in the product/hobby.
Just as every generation feels they were the first ones to discover sex, they feel they also have found some new and novel business plan.
Roller coaster tycoon
Flight Sim 2000
Pipe dream (an old water puzzle game where you built plumbing to see how many pieces you could use.)
Have you looked at any of the old text adventures: Activision has a CD with a number of old Infocom games such as Zork, which while they do have fighting (Sometimes), it's all text and not very graphic. Great puzzle solving games. Frotz, a free interpreter for text adventure games, has a pretty good following, with a number of games available.
Christ you people really need to get a fucking life. You're worse than those fat-ass couch potatoes who sit around on Sunday watching football commenting on it as if they were Tom Landry.
As opposed to those buff love machines that comment on/. on Sunday nights.
How important is improving quality to you rcustomers? If the current method produces the results they need, then you'd be wasting time and money building a higher quality product. Unless your customers are telling you they don't like the work you've done or are having numerous problems (I assume you survey your customers), then I wouldn't worry alot about making it "better." in fact, you may find they aren't willing to pay more for a better product that takes longer to deliver.
Which is the ultimate free market economic solution:
1)if too few people want something, then those who make it go out of business and it goes away;
2)if enough people want it, more is produced and some will get rich.
Of course, the problem is to many people, upon seeing what they don't like end up being being option 2, try to find other ways to eliminate that choice.
Now if we could GPL sex...; wait - that's what we tried in the 60's. Dang, I gnu we were on to something there...
The Apple ][ ahd a game called Robot War from MUSE Software (of Castle Wolfenstein / Return to CW fame) where you programmed a bot with simple instructions - move, look, shoot; and then put bots together in an arena to see who won. Crude graphics, simple programming, very addictive.
To me , the real issue here is whether this trojan will have much of an impact on Linux boxes, but its impact on people's perceptions of Linux.
If the popular media picks up a story that "LINUX USERS FACE DEADLY TROJAN (film at 11)", it will help create a perception of vulnerability, and its a small step to go to "and since Linux is freely distributed, who knows what can lurk in that copy you download..." While techies familar with Linux will have a reasonable grasp of the true threat and how to overcome it, what about the deciosn makers who are deciding what to implement at their companies? The ones that set budgets and decide what IT will implement (and IT may not have much of a say in the decision) will remmebr "Linux - oh yeh, that's the system that got hit with that DEADLY TROJAN."
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also consider some of the older games that have reached the "Classics" or bargian shelves:
Some that come to mind are:
Dark Forces II
Rogue Squadron
Doom (Final Doom Boxed set)
Sim City 3000
Flight Simulator Classic (or 2000 now that a new version is out)
For older retro gamers. besides a MAME complaition (already mentioned in another post), there are:
Atari Arcade Classics - Silver Aniv. Edition
MS Arcade, Return and Revenge of Arcade
There are a lot of great games that are a few years old - they may not have the mind blowing graphics of today's games, but what they lack in graphics they often make up for in game play. You can get quite a few presents without blowing a budget.
Finally, there's always setting up some emulators (NES/SNES/Sega Master System) and a few ROM sets - there were some great console games, such as Yoshi's Story, the original Zeldas, Sonic, as well as arcade hits such as Dig Dug for those machines - why not turn someone on to a whole new gaming experience? You can even pick up carts cheap at used game stores, to keep your ROM images "legal (sort-of)".
Second, you lose the ability to cycle through pictures on the fly.
Well, you could put the pictures in page protectors, and then assemble a set in a three ring binder. Tape the binder to the wall, put all the pages at the top, and you'll cycle through the pictures. Adjusting the friction with some tape allows you to adjust the cycle speed. Benefits;
1. No external electrical power requirements
2. Puting pictures back to back in the page protectors allows 2 pics to be viewed at once.
3. When a picture of your ex scrolls throw that you forgot to pull, you can throw a dart at it w/o worrying about breaking an expensive LCD screen.
If you include external costs, alternative energy gets more expensive as well. For example:
Wind - includes the cost of protecting birds from the blades, and prevent protected ones, such as eagles, from any encounters. If you want to get technical, there's a visual pollution impact as well, especially in the NW where tribal vision quests would be negatively impacted.
Solar - add in the environmental cost of covering large tracts of land needed to produce significant power, as well as the toxic byproducts of panel production.
Wood - air pollution cleanup costs (look at the impact of wood stoves in the NW) and CO2 impact of deforestation.
Unfortunately, external cost is not easy to calculate, and something many environmentalist forget when they talk about "green" power, whose true cost also includes environmental effects. Creating the energy needed for a modern civilization is neitehr a trivial nor easy task. It always involves trade-offs. We need to develop alternatives, but they need to be affordable alternatives.
Probably $200 an hour.
I'm not surprised that it's this easy.
One cause is companies, despite security policies, routinely violate them themselves. You may say that a receptionist/guard/etc. is to challenge all vistors and ask for ID, but the first time they do that to a senior executive or VIP from out of town and get smacked down for it, they'll never question anyone again.
OTOH, I worked for an organization that took security seriously. You were to challenge anyone without a badge, and escort them to sercurity if tehy didn't have one. I challenged teh CEO once - he pulled out his badge, showed it to me, and clipped it to his collar, where it should have been. No "don't you know who I am?", no nasty note to my boss; just a simple "thanks" and doing what he expects everyone else to do. Of course, that also takes a leader, not a manager.
Hmm... Surely it's just a different kind of accessibility. In the US a good education is available to those who have the money to pay for it. In Europe those who want to study in the best universities need the brains and motivation to get in, not the money.
Actually, US universities are real good at price discrimination, they call it student aid. They know what you have available to pay for tuition, and tailor aid to get as much money as is possible for tuition. A poor, but smart student, can get a free ride while a richer one shells out for it.
Come to think of it, it's rather the same in Europe - the gov't knows what you make, and takes what they feel is appropriate. If you're richer, your education costs more.
Heh _ I can't wait until th efirst Senator or Congressman/woman is caught with someone not their spousal unit. Heck, you could even program the machine to recognize both - wanna bet the Enquirer would buy them.
Technology - it's all in how you use it.
In 1987, I saw an Apple video (taking place in the future, intended to be a nostalgic review of Apple's past) where Woz wore a paper of MacGlasses, complete with tiny disks that inserted into the side of the frame (shades of the MMC/SD crads) - pretty cool, too bad it didn't happen. (The video also had a newsacst where IBM announced their latest main frames were compatible with teh Apple 3000 series mainframe.
are not new. The US has had a holographic franked envelope as well as holographic stamps on a recent space set, AIR.
According to their specs, it goes from Replay box to Replay box. They could include some sort of distrobution limitation that prevents shows gotten from another Replay from being redistributed, or they could erase the show from Box A once it's in Box B. Either way, it's not much different from me sending a tape to someone.
Of ocurse, tehre are other things that limit sharing as well - first is the cost of the box - it's not exactly soemthing your average consumer buys on a whim, and even with high speed access the bandwidth limitations would prevent massive show swapping.
Yep. In "Blackhawk Down" they talk about this, and the fact that hundreds of RPGs went flying in the air before they got a lucky hit. That was an urban setting, there's cover there, there isn't out in the bush. Ever hear Blackhawks or Apaches flying past? You can't tell what direction they are coming from in the daytime or at night. In Somolia there were Tangos sitting there with radios telling the fellas downtown when the UH-60s and OH-6s were taking off from the American compound, it's not going to be the same in Afghanistan.
Well, lucky or not, they brought down 2, damaged a third with an RPG and downed another with small arms fire.
And while Afghanistan is certainly not urban, rugged mountains are not much better. There's cover there as well.
You're really left with two choices - hover nearby or drop troops and let them hump the hills to the target.
If you come in close, you got to figure the bad guys will be waiting. They, after all, have to know where you have to go to hit your target. An RPG has what, a 1500 foot or so effective range, which makes for some pretty big circles for a hovering helicopter.
If you're doing an overland assualt, you've got to fight it out with an enemy who knows the terrain, and can pick and chose his fight.
The apparent lack of hard intel could also be problematic - it would make sense to leak info on potential targets to setup ambushes.
I don't doubt it can be done, but I don't think it will be easy, nor do I believe technological superiority will offer much advantage.
We'll be taking on an enemy, that has been fighting off and on for over twenty years; on his home turf in a guerilla war. This won't be Desert Storm, which was basically a conventional war.
The British attempted to take Afghanistan over 100 years ago, and you can not compare an army before aviation, remote sensing and mechnization to a modern army.
The problem is you're not fighting a modern war. In Iraq, for example, we could use imagery to determine the Iraqi's OOB (Order of Battle - what they got and where they got it.) Our weapons are very effective against tanks, bridges, Command/Control/Communications (C3) infrastructure and other modern weapons of war.
In addition, the Iraqi's made the fatal mistake of thinking we would fight the same way the Iranians did - massive assults on fixed positions. Iraq simply had no clue what we could bring to bear nor the tactics we would use.
But in Afghanistan, we won't face a conventianla enemy. We get great imagery, alright - of huts and fields and caves. You won't know who or where your enemy is, and there's virtually no C3 infrastructure to destroy. It also means you can't listen in to get an idea of what your opponent is doing.
Modern weaponary is great, but close in fighting has a way of evening the odds - look what an RPG did to a BlackHawk in Somalia. The idea of fighting a motivated enemy in his own back yard should give one pause.
Look at it this way - the British ahve been in Nortehr Ireland for how long? They are a motivated, well equiped and trained army, in familar terrian. They speak the language, have a network of agents to gather intelligence, and yet they still haven't wiped out the IRA. DO you really think we can be more successful in Afghanistan?
On the other hand, we can track money (although they appear to use techniques designed to circumvent normal warnings), build coalitions with countries who know the area as well as the players, learn who realy runs the show and how the operate, and strike when and where we want.
Micheal should look to the SAS's exploits in Iraq in '91 and the Desert Rats in '40-'41 for examples of what a small cadre of highly trained and motivated fighters can do againt increadable odds.
No one is doubting our forces motivation or bravery - but "a small cadre of highly trained and motivated fighters" sounds a lot like what we'll be facing, and "increadable odds" sounds a lot like what they'll be facing.
It isn't about how Office integrates its programs, but how Office's approach to documents impacts the user. XML is a step in the right direction.
If all you're going to do is move simple bulleted lists from Word to PP, then yea, it does that reasonably well, but that's not my point.
First of all, I shouldn't have to stick anything from Word to PP - instead of the text becoming a Word object in PP, you'd use style sheets to control what part of the document is used and how it's viewed. For example, a section of text might be a header in a document, the title of a presentation page, and not be viewed at all in a spreadsheet. Similarly, text in a specific column in a document would become the text within Visio elements on a diagram. And it wouldn't matter where you first created the data - since it just data with different sytles attached. I realize that much of this can be done in Office today by embeding parts of documents into others, but it is neither easy nor intuative.
Something as simple as embedding a spreadsheet into PP can be frustrating as you try to adjust column widths and font point size. Or copying a PP slide from one presentation to another w/o losing all the attributes of the original master template. In fact, when it comes to integrating and displaying data across Office programs, Office sucks.
Copying a bad example of how to treat data is not good for Linux, because you provide no compelling reason for people to switch from Office. A Linux Office suite will be viewed as little more than a knock off of Office, and people's unwillingness to change will limit its adoption. However, if you have a better way, that clearly makes it easier for people to do what they want, then you've got a good reason for them to change.
The problem is not whether Office is a bloated collection of tools, but the whole approach towards documents taken by office suites.
We should look at it from a single document standpoint, rather piecing together a Frankenstein's monster of a document from component parts. for example:
Look at the differences in document handling between Word and Powerpoint - each has different formating abilities and styles, even though both basicly do the same thing - layout text and graphics. Which means turning a Word document into a Powerpoint presentation is a nightmare (not to mention trying to go the other way.) What IO'm saying is we shouldn't even have the words document and presentation as seperate terms in our lexicon. I should be able to define document characteristics and then chose how and when to display them. One file, multiple views, so to speak. Ideally, you could send someone the document and, depending on what they wanted to do, use it as a presentation or document.
That gets rid of all the formating quirks that Office has and provides a consistent set of editing options across the document - whether your creating a srpeadsheet, table, presentation, flow chart or document.
Finally, since the document contains the info needed for displaying it in different manners, you could have portability between diffrent devices - such as a desktop, PDA or phone. Create once, view many (with apologies to Java).
Following MS lead and trying to develop similar products is a long term losing proposition - primarily because of MS overwhelming dominance on the desktop, which makes them the "safe" choice.
The trouble is too many people burn out their clutches trying to do a paradigm shift.
It isn't Wal-Mart that destroys local businesses - its the local people make the choice to shop there that do.
That's bullshit and you know it. May small businesses - whole communities of 'mom & pop' businesses - often have surived for years on fairly low profits. If they loose, say, a quarter of their customers to a big superstore, then that can destroy them. So a minority of people changing their buying habits can screw these businesses, screw the local community, screw the spirit of a small town. This isn't helped by the fact that some of these big stores deliberately go out of their way to close down small businesses.
The fact of the matter is that these stores can really badly affect small towns, very often to the great detrement of local people - and whatever 'free market is good for consumers' argument you have doesn't change that.
Let's see:
Wal-Mart opens -> some locals decide to shop there -> amrginal businesses go under -> smart ones survive and thrive
I missed Wal-Mart's secret mass hypnosis plot to destroy the town.
It's still local citizens making choices that impact their lives. I assume they're smart enough to know what shopping at Wal-Mart means for local stores, but have decided the economic benefits outweigh the social costs.
When the government makes that decision for them via laws and regulations, all it results in is protecting marginal businesses and raising prices.
Which is my point -> laws and regulations protect the regulated, not the consumer despite claims to the contrary.
The impact of big box stores on local econmoies is another discussion.
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In response to:
The problem I have with the European viewpoint is that government intervention generally acts not in the interests of consumers but of business. For example, when I lived in Switzerland, store hours were set by law, which protects the small mom-and pops from being driven out of business by big stores that can offer more convient shopping hours.
You wrote:
I am confused as to why you think this is the interests of business. It is clearly not.
Of course it is - it limits competition which clearly benefits small businesses that are less efficient. They don't have to become more efficient because the laws and rules protect them.
All it does for consumers is limit their choices and keep prices high.
This may come as a shock to American's, but there is more to life than paying the minimum for everything you buy and having stores that are open for 24 hour a day.
Sure, there's such things as choices and free markets.
In many European countries, applications to build big 'Walmart-type' stores near small towns are turned down. Why? Because they distroy all the local businesses. This is bad not because we feel sorry for all those little business men (although some of us do), but because it is bad for the community, bad for the culture, and bad for the heritage of a small town for this to happen. Most people here would rather pay a bit more and keep their local shops.
If Europeans *really* wanted to save their small shops and are willing to pay more, then there would be no reason to deny the Wal-Marts of the world permits. They'd open up stores that would remain empty because the local citizens so love their small town culture that they refuse to shop there. Germany's experience, however, shows that European consumers do want lower prices, decent servcie, and convience. But laws are used to prevent that, which benefits the incumbent businesses and hurts consumers. All it does it take away their choice - they could, after all, still pay more - why not give them the choice?
It isn't Wal-Mart that destroys local businesses - its the local people make the choice to shop there that do.
ME:
Companies also set the "right price" which could not be discounted - which protected mom and pops, as well as big companies because they didn't have to worry about competing on price.
You:
This doesn't just benefit the mom and pops, it benefits consumers -- albeit indirectly.
I'm sorry , but I don't agree with the idea than a consumer benefits by paying higher prices. If you truely believe that, then you might as well do away with anti-trust laws and let companies setup cartels.
You won't run into a situation where Some Big Box Store(Wal Mart?) comes into town, cuts prices below whatever anyone else in town is charging until all others in town are out of business, then jacks the prices above the point they were to begin with.
Except it doesn't work that way, primarily becasue even if you do run everyone out of business, as soon as you jack up prices, new competitors will open stores. As a result, you have to keep prices so low to keep competitors out, until you either go bankrupt or get tired of tiny returns on your investment. In fact, Wal-Mart has a policy of pricing at the prevailing prices in an area - they avoid starting price wars with major competitors. While there may be some areas where there are no K-Marts/Targets/Ames/Meijer/Albertsions et.al and just a lone Wal-Mart, I bet most have major competitors within their territory. They may drive some local business out, but overall they lower prices in an area - which benefits consumers.
In addition, companies can compete on more than price - service is one area where they have an advantage. Of course, this means the same people that complain about Wal-mart driving local stores out of business need to be willing to vote with their pocket book and pay more for goods. For example, I buy my N64/GBA stuff at a small local retailer, even if he is more expensive (which he generally isn't). Why? Because I know he will get me the hot games (such as a PS2 at list price when *nobody* else had them, if I wanted) and help me avoid bad ones. If he gets a used game in he knows I want, he saves it for me. Try that at Wal-Mart.
'm afraid that you American's need to wake up to the fact that you have a very abusive corporate mentality, which is not in the interests of
anyone but the company. Many of you seem to think that Europeans are a bunch of 'socialist losers' (going by the postings on Slashdot),because we generally approve of goverment intervention to prevent abusive business practices in the free market, and most of our companies are not as aggressive as yours, as this Lego case demonstrates. However, we see it not as being losers, but as being more civilized.
The problem I have with the European viewpoint is that government intervention generally acts not in the interests of consumers but of business. For example, when I lived in Switzerland, store hours were set by law, which protects the small mom-and pops from being driven out of business by big stores that can offer more convient shopping hours.
Companies also set the "right price" which could not be discounted - which protected mom and pops, as well as big companies because they didn't have to worry about competing on price. They simply divided up the market based on location. The manufactures didn't have to worry about big companies demanding price breaks, since the manufaturers set prices at suitably high margins.
Companies are not aggressive because governments have established a set of legal and regulatory protections that benefits all the incumbent companies, so there is no reason to upset the applecart. Look at the reaction from companies when somebody tries - such as poor Sabena, where an upstart low fare competitor had the nerve to advertise they were cheaper than Sabena. They sure showed they had the interests of more than Sabena at heart when they sued to get the competitor to stop comparing fares.
In the end, the average consumer in Europe is worse off than those in the US. (Where most of us have enough common sense to accept responsibility for our own actions.)
It's a great stand by LEGO to embrace the hacktivist community, and like it's been posted it's probably due, at least partly, to that factthat they blew away sales projections. Shouldn't others pick up on this business model? Not give away their products or IP items, but to allow/encourage their users to extend the original concepts in ways they hadn't thought of.
It's actually not that new of an idea. Even befor e users created mods for games, we had the automotive industry and drag racers / customizers / low riders / road racers/etc - and Detroit not only supported them, but used their ideas to improve their products.
I build model rockets, and built many copies of kits and designs put out by Estes / CMR / Centuri. These companies even sold the oddball parts and decals I needed to make exact copies of their kits - beacuse they knew their money was in hardware and generating interest in the product/hobby.
Just as every generation feels they were the first ones to discover sex, they feel they also have found some new and novel business plan.
Some good ones:
Roller coaster tycoon
Flight Sim 2000
Pipe dream (an old water puzzle game where you built plumbing to see how many pieces you could use.)
Have you looked at any of the old text adventures: Activision has a CD with a number of old Infocom games such as Zork, which while they do have fighting (Sometimes), it's all text and not very graphic. Great puzzle solving games. Frotz, a free interpreter for text adventure games, has a pretty good following, with a number of games available.
Finally, have you considered plain old Legos?
Christ you people really need to get a fucking life. You're worse than those fat-ass couch potatoes who sit around on Sunday watching football commenting on it as if they were Tom Landry.
/. on Sunday nights.
As opposed to those buff love machines that comment on
Hre's another way of looking at it?
How important is improving quality to you rcustomers? If the current method produces the results they need, then you'd be wasting time and money building a higher quality product. Unless your customers are telling you they don't like the work you've done or are having numerous problems (I assume you survey your customers), then I wouldn't worry alot about making it "better." in fact, you may find they aren't willing to pay more for a better product that takes longer to deliver.
Which is the ultimate free market economic solution:
1)if too few people want something, then those who make it go out of business and it goes away;
2)if enough people want it, more is produced and some will get rich.
Of course, the problem is to many people, upon seeing what they don't like end up being being option 2, try to find other ways to eliminate that choice.
Now if we could GPL sex...; wait - that's what we tried in the 60's. Dang, I gnu we were on to something there...
The Apple ][ ahd a game called Robot War from MUSE Software (of Castle Wolfenstein / Return to CW fame) where you programmed a bot with simple instructions - move, look, shoot; and then put bots together in an arena to see who won. Crude graphics, simple programming, very addictive.
To me , the real issue here is whether this trojan will have much of an impact on Linux boxes, but its impact on people's perceptions of Linux.
If the popular media picks up a story that "LINUX USERS FACE DEADLY TROJAN (film at 11)", it will help create a perception of vulnerability, and its a small step to go to "and since Linux is freely distributed, who knows what can lurk in that copy you download..." While techies familar with Linux will have a reasonable grasp of the true threat and how to overcome it, what about the deciosn makers who are deciding what to implement at their companies? The ones that set budgets and decide what IT will implement (and IT may not have much of a say in the decision) will remmebr "Linux - oh yeh, that's the system that got hit with that DEADLY TROJAN."