Depends on what kind of Texan you're dealing with. Most Texans that have iPods are the hippie flower-waving types (which there are plenty of in Texas).
Now pretty much any adult male you might want to mess with? I'd be careful. I lived in Texas for four years, and while I agree, it's stupid to claim that all Texans are gun-toting cowboys, there are enough of them out there that you ought to consider confronting anyone if you're deathly afraid of getting a gun or a fist waved in your face. There are a whole lot of people there who grew up in small towns where getting into fights just got you a stern talking to, not arrested.
Yeah, the vast majority of Texans are extremely nice people, but don't be stupid enough to deny that Texas has a reputation for a reason. I would imagine the vast majority of people living in Los Angeles are nice, decent people, but that doesn't mean I go waltzing my pasty white ass gaily through Compton telling the people selling drugs on the street that you really shouldn't be doing that 'cause it's against the law.
I think the last time I bought a music CD was about a year ago. The last time I bought a music CD from anywhere but a used CD store, I can't remember.
Boycott the RIAA? Who needs to? I've simply and effectively removed the RIAA from my life by just not buying music. If they want to play hardball, they can play all they want. I just won't play the game.
And before I get irate comments about me stealing music, I don't download any music from any of the big name file sharing networks. The free stuff at MP3.com (well, what used to be free, haven't been there in awhile) from independent artists in the kind of music I listen to is more than enough for me. If you want Charley Pride or Metallica or whatever, go on right ahead. I've ceased to care.
Exactly what planet are you on where Apple markets to people who give a damn one way or the other whether they have an ATA/100 instead of an ATA/66 hard drive.
Apple I'm sure mind geeks buying their machines, and they've made a few overtures, but Apple, and Jobs in particular, wants people on it's terms. If those terms don't appeal to you, smile brightly and wave and wish you good luck with whatever else you use.
And adding cost to a machine is the last thing Apple wants to do with everyone screaming 'till kingdom come about how Apple's hardware is overpriced, etc. Whatever margin Apple has, those few bucks per machine that Apple would pay for an ATA/100 controller would not be absorbed by that margin, and the "overpriced" hardware would only increased in cost for the end consumer. I'm sure there's a shitload of little improvements that could be made to the hardware, but it adds up, and you've got to draw the line somewhere.
And if you want SCSI, you can special order your G4 with SCSI drives. Yeah, it costs, but SCSI costs as you yourself admit. The normal everyday user that buys a Mac for the home does not need SCSI. I don't care how fast it is. They just don't need it. Office workers don't need SCSI. They just don't need it. The speed doesn't matter for what they do. Hence, the cheaper machines use a cheaper alternative.
Problem is actually getting to the interview stage.
Now I'm the first to admit that I'm not the greatest shakes in the field I was in (a field that I like, and that I'd probably go back to again) but I had real experience doing real things well for real companies, and alot of real references to back me up.
I sent resumes every day, every week, to literally every job opening I could find that I was remotely qualified for. Tech support jobs even. I got called in for _one_ interview in the last 6 months of unemployment. That one interview went really well, and while I didn't get the job, the people I interviewed seemed genuinely sorry that they couldn't offer me the job. No foul there.
Now I don't presume to know the exact reasons why. Possibly my lack of a bachelor's degree. Possibly my age. Possibly (and probably very likely) I'm sending resumes to places where people incomparably more qualified than me are sending their resumes as well. It's an employers market, and despite my best efforts while I was in the dot.boom.bust I apparently am not an attractive commodity for the same kind of big IT jobs I was being looked at for a year or two ago.
Now I won't argue that it's "my fault" or what not. The world turns, you know? How low the mighty have fallen. So now I'm completely ditching what I was doing and going on to something else. My father does IT consulting for small businesses that can't afford their own in house IT guy. He only deals with Macs, even, and he has to turn away business daily because he just can't handle it all. So at the end of the month, I'm moving back "home" and forming a new company with my dad so I can help him out, and expand his business to Windows/Linux. I'll get to help real people get their computers working so they can actually accomplish things and make money doing it. Certainly a refreshing relief from the "real" IT world I lived in for the past 3 years, where you spend 2/3 of your time in meetings wearing uncomfortable clothes, sitting in expensively uncomfortable chairs, arguing about the pointless beauracratic minutiae about who controls the project you're working on, which the company has no need of, and none of their employees would ever use even if it were usable after all the hoops you need to jump through to implement it.
"My Internet is broken," is in the end, a much easier and satisfying problem to deal with.
Re:For what it's worth, I bought a Loki game today
on
Last Word on Loki
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· Score: 1
You know what it's worth?
Jack squat.
Re:Why am I not surp.. -- Why it did not work
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 1
Another thing to keep in mind is that most mac users could not dual boot to play the new PC/Win game that they just purchased the week it came out. If I had a Mac -- I had to wait until the Mac version came out if I wanted to play. (Much different that dual booting on the same machine.) I think Loki would have survived if 3 things were in place:
My point is that in order to promote any system, any support you give to a direct competitor works against you. I could easily have not bought a new Mac and instead gone over to DOS/Windows. People were upgrading their computers at least as fast as they do now. Gamers often upgrade their machines to be able to use the latest and greatest. It certainly was a hell of alot cheaper to go with DOS and get games than stick with the much more expensive Mac hardware. The point is we wanted to promote the Mac, therefore we avoided Windows games, and made a necessary sacrifice to do that. Linux users will have to make simmilar sacrifices to accomplish the same thing.
A...If dual booters were really hardcore linux fans -- and refused to dual boot (even for games) -- Sales go up 50% for Loki -- because people would not have already purchased the "windows version".
Which is what I was saying. If Linux "zealots" didn't do their house of cards impression when they see all the glittery stuff they can play with on Windows, Loki would have done alot better. Read my post, please.
B...If Loki were able to offer Linux games closer to the time they were released for the other platforms....(nothing like getting a "new" Linux game 12 months after the windows version had hit the cut out boxes for $9.99. -- Sales go up 25%.
Until the Linux user makes the sacrifice, and takes the time and effort to lobby the game companies to allow ports to Linux sooner, the companies aren't gonna care. And why should they? The Linux user obviously doesn't care.
C...If they had been able to port the games that people wanted to buy...The Starcrafts, Warcrafts, C&C, Red Alert, Diablo...Sales go up 75%
Herein lie the sacrifices you must be willing to make if you want change. Create a Loki-type company that works with companies before a game gets released so that there can be simultaneous development. Sometimes, however, you w9ill run into several companies who will refuse to let a Loki port their game. In these cases, if Linux gaming is your concern, you must be willing to bite the bullet and not buy the Windows version (and not buy Windows, but that's a part of the argument we don't need to go into right now). If you don't, you obviously don't care that much. All these companies need to say is that they're not going to release it, and you just whine about it.
...that people are complaining about being told not to buy the games they want to play. I swore that I'd never use this phrase, but in this case it's the only one appropriate.
Read for content, people.
We are talking about people who's primary complaint is there are no games for Linux and they want to change that. Those of you who want to play the latest and greatest games SHOULD NOT CARE about the platform you're playing it on. The people who will need to make the sacrifices spoken of are the people that want to promote a particular platform. In this case Linux. If someone wants more games for Linux, buying them for another platform is counterproductive. These people need to excercise their power and not buy games that aren't for Linux.
This is _exactly_ the situation that the Mac platform was in 10 years ago. The way people got games made for the Mac was buy not buying DOS/Windows games, and at the same time flooding game companies with requests for Mac ports. And when good games were released for the Mac, even if they were "old" they BOUGHT THEM because they were GOOD GAMES. You couldn't find the ported over Mac games on the store shelves because the only copies that they had were sold out! I can go to my local half price books and find stacks of Loki's ports of any of their games (except the latest ones...I guess game stores stopped putting them on their shelves because NO ONE WAS BUYING THEM, DUH) for less than half price, because all the local game stores threw them in with all the rest of the never-to-be-sold crap that was cluttering their shelves. Say what you want about Blizzard, but they were one of the first producers of major games to take a chance on the Mac market, and it obviously has paid off big time for them. I bought Warcraft 1 the second it came out fo the Mac, because it was a good game for the Mac, and I wanted to support people who took serious financial risks to produce good games for a platform I wanted to promote. I didn't care if it was old, it was better than anything else I could play on my Mac at the time, and playing games on my Mac was what I wanted. Obviously, more than just I were doing the same thing, because Blizzard has so far released every one of it's games for the Mac. Diablo 2 for the Mac, IIRC, came out only a week after the Windows version was released. The Lord of Destruction expansion was released on a hybrid CD from the beginning. The Diablo 2 Battle Chest is all hybrid Windows/Mac CDs. Warcraft 3 will be released for the Mac. Why? Because Mac enthusiasts stuck to their guns, made painful sacrifices, and when someone took a chance they rewarded those people for taking that chance. If the Linux community is unwilling to do the same, the next Loki will find the same fate waiting for it.
Excuse me, but what the hell do you mean by "so much in space"? Have you looked at NASA's budget recently (as probablythe best funded space angecy in the world)? It's pathetic. The government spends MUCH more than NASA's budget on medical research already. Please find a clue somewhere.
I do seem to remember a story a ways back about Yahoo switching to Google for it's search engine.
However, this stuff probably isn't stuff you could find in a normal Google search. I imagine this would have direct access to various newspaper and other archives. People who's job is research (not like scientific research, like think tanks and "research" companies...or when your boss says "I need to find out everything you know about by Tuesday") use engines like that where they need reliable quick access to the relevant information online as opposed to sifting through the piles of dross you get with a normal search. I believe Northern Light was built around something like this as it's base model originally, but I don't personally know as I never really used it.
Well, if they go for Linux and set up a support infrastructure, they'd have nothing to blame but themselves. No windows to blame it on. And everyone blames everything on the ISP. (and last I checked, the vast majority of people who use AOL have AOL directly as their ISP, so that part of your argument falls flat as well)
I've bought a fair amount of stuff on eBay. Mostly movies and other media. Most of which I could've found at stores around here. However, the thing with eBay is that you have to be strong enough to give yourself a limit. The sane limit should be 90% of the retail price INCLUDING SHIPPING if you can find it around you. If not, don't pay more than retail. (I've bought stuff on eBay for retail because I'm personally boycotting this or that store which is the only place I know where I can get whatever it is.)
Most people go crazy that they get a great deal, and end up paying alot more with the exorbinant shipping people on eBay seem to charge. Anyone who's buying things online for retail price not including shipping is robbing themselves, unless they simply cannot find it near them. For many people, it's the only option and a blessing 'cause they're not near stuff, but for most people, they really shouldn't.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I loaded XP on this machine to give it a shot, and I didn't notice any speed problems. Of course, I have 384MB RAM on this machine and a 1Ghz Athlon with a 64MB graphics card (geForce 2 MX at the time). And the bootup speed was faster than Win98. Gods, did it boot up fast. Seductively fast.
However, I've issues with alot of the stuff that's in XP and the whole activation situation, so I wiped it. Running 98 now for games, but probably will move to 2000 as my Windows partition. More stable than 98 and doesn't have all the nasty crap MS is foisting on the world with XP. And most of my games will run on it.
Maybe I'm cynical about the whole IT thing, but my 3 years of professional experience tells me that if your boss' boss wants you out, it's better to work your hardest to get out before the hammer falls.
IT is what I love to do, but even in better times, this industry is filled with cutthroat bastards. You're almost 20, wife and kid on the way, and you might lose your job. Well, I hate to break it to you kid, but life is a bitch most of the time, not some of the time. Learn from this experience, whatever you do. The main lesson should be, no one in this business cares about you except you. NOT ONE PERSON. Friendships stop at the edge of a pinkslip more often than not. If you can't deal with that, you really need to find something else to do with your life, because you're going to be going through this many more times over, for a variety of reasons, not just your age.
I don't think the statement that video games are art can be really argued against. There is a hallaeious about of visual art and other non-scientific crafting that goes into making games.
Whether video games are "fine art" is a better question. I personally don't think they qualify for that as such. The medium just hasn't been around long enough. Hasn't been refined and reshaped nearly as often as the fine arts have. Eventually, yes, I believe video games will eventually reach such a lofty status, but they aren't there yet by a long shot.
Actually, if you read the blurb on every CD I've looked at, you are specificly prohibited from "unauthorized lending". IE, I am committing a crime if I lend the Matrix soundtrack to my friend for the weekend.
You might have picked a better game to use as an example. Diablo 2 is out for MacOS. Hell, the latest versions come on hybrid CDs for both Windows and MacOS.
So merely because it's 1) on the web 2) undermines big business 3) promotes a book 4) and because for some reason you think this "spiffy" "bullet" scheme you've devised makes your information look more official and correct, we're supposed to believe you?
"by the way, the license agreement for Windows Media Player now allows Microsoft to disable any software on your computer - you do read those license agreements, don't you?"
OK, I cry bullshit here. I just downloaded Windows Media Player for the express purpose of checking this claim out and I didn't find ANYTHING in any text in the entire installation that corroborates this statement.
If you're going to bitch about Microsoft, at least give references to things that actually exist so you don't come off looking like just as much of an ass as Microsoft.
...is Microsoft's real response to this. They know they're on shaky legal ground with this whole thing, and the only way to get off it and onto something solid is to not sell any licenses. And the only way to stay in business after they stop selling licenses doing that would be to sell subscriptions to use their software.
After this changeover happens (when/if it happens) they'll probably provide freely downloadable thin clients for Word, Excel, etc, and you'll have to pay whatever they determine the market will bear (because even Microsoft has to consider what the market will bear, whether they are correct or not is another topic) per month, per product you want to use.
In this situation there's no tranferrable license you need to worry about because you give away the only software you distribute to anyone for free, as it's useless to those who don't subscribe. You control the only software with any functionality and no one other than yourself will possess that software. Anyone else running a server that allows people to use Word that you haven't specifically allowed couldn't have bought it anywhere because you don't sell it, then you're well within your rights to throw them in jail for theft.
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Depends on what kind of Texan you're dealing with. Most Texans that have iPods are the hippie flower-waving types (which there are plenty of in Texas).
Now pretty much any adult male you might want to mess with? I'd be careful. I lived in Texas for four years, and while I agree, it's stupid to claim that all Texans are gun-toting cowboys, there are enough of them out there that you ought to consider confronting anyone if you're deathly afraid of getting a gun or a fist waved in your face. There are a whole lot of people there who grew up in small towns where getting into fights just got you a stern talking to, not arrested.
Yeah, the vast majority of Texans are extremely nice people, but don't be stupid enough to deny that Texas has a reputation for a reason. I would imagine the vast majority of people living in Los Angeles are nice, decent people, but that doesn't mean I go waltzing my pasty white ass gaily through Compton telling the people selling drugs on the street that you really shouldn't be doing that 'cause it's against the law.
I think the last time I bought a music CD was about a year ago. The last time I bought a music CD from anywhere but a used CD store, I can't remember.
Boycott the RIAA? Who needs to? I've simply and effectively removed the RIAA from my life by just not buying music. If they want to play hardball, they can play all they want. I just won't play the game.
And before I get irate comments about me stealing music, I don't download any music from any of the big name file sharing networks. The free stuff at MP3.com (well, what used to be free, haven't been there in awhile) from independent artists in the kind of music I listen to is more than enough for me. If you want Charley Pride or Metallica or whatever, go on right ahead. I've ceased to care.
Marketing value?
Exactly what planet are you on where Apple markets to people who give a damn one way or the other whether they have an ATA/100 instead of an ATA/66 hard drive.
Apple I'm sure mind geeks buying their machines, and they've made a few overtures, but Apple, and Jobs in particular, wants people on it's terms. If those terms don't appeal to you, smile brightly and wave and wish you good luck with whatever else you use.
And adding cost to a machine is the last thing Apple wants to do with everyone screaming 'till kingdom come about how Apple's hardware is overpriced, etc. Whatever margin Apple has, those few bucks per machine that Apple would pay for an ATA/100 controller would not be absorbed by that margin, and the "overpriced" hardware would only increased in cost for the end consumer. I'm sure there's a shitload of little improvements that could be made to the hardware, but it adds up, and you've got to draw the line somewhere.
And if you want SCSI, you can special order your G4 with SCSI drives. Yeah, it costs, but SCSI costs as you yourself admit. The normal everyday user that buys a Mac for the home does not need SCSI. I don't care how fast it is. They just don't need it. Office workers don't need SCSI. They just don't need it. The speed doesn't matter for what they do. Hence, the cheaper machines use a cheaper alternative.
Now I don't have to deal with people talking about it constantly anymore. About bloody time.
Problem is actually getting to the interview stage.
Now I'm the first to admit that I'm not the greatest shakes in the field I was in (a field that I like, and that I'd probably go back to again) but I had real experience doing real things well for real companies, and alot of real references to back me up.
I sent resumes every day, every week, to literally every job opening I could find that I was remotely qualified for. Tech support jobs even. I got called in for _one_ interview in the last 6 months of unemployment. That one interview went really well, and while I didn't get the job, the people I interviewed seemed genuinely sorry that they couldn't offer me the job. No foul there.
Now I don't presume to know the exact reasons why. Possibly my lack of a bachelor's degree. Possibly my age. Possibly (and probably very likely) I'm sending resumes to places where people incomparably more qualified than me are sending their resumes as well. It's an employers market, and despite my best efforts while I was in the dot.boom.bust I apparently am not an attractive commodity for the same kind of big IT jobs I was being looked at for a year or two ago.
Now I won't argue that it's "my fault" or what not. The world turns, you know? How low the mighty have fallen. So now I'm completely ditching what I was doing and going on to something else. My father does IT consulting for small businesses that can't afford their own in house IT guy. He only deals with Macs, even, and he has to turn away business daily because he just can't handle it all. So at the end of the month, I'm moving back "home" and forming a new company with my dad so I can help him out, and expand his business to Windows/Linux. I'll get to help real people get their computers working so they can actually accomplish things and make money doing it. Certainly a refreshing relief from the "real" IT world I lived in for the past 3 years, where you spend 2/3 of your time in meetings wearing uncomfortable clothes, sitting in expensively uncomfortable chairs, arguing about the pointless beauracratic minutiae about who controls the project you're working on, which the company has no need of, and none of their employees would ever use even if it were usable after all the hoops you need to jump through to implement it.
"My Internet is broken," is in the end, a much easier and satisfying problem to deal with.
You know what it's worth?
Jack squat.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most mac users could not dual boot to play the new PC/Win game that they just purchased the week it came out. If I had a Mac -- I had to wait until the Mac version came out if I wanted to play. (Much different that dual booting on the same machine.) I think Loki would have survived if 3 things were in place:
My point is that in order to promote any system, any support you give to a direct competitor works against you. I could easily have not bought a new Mac and instead gone over to DOS/Windows. People were upgrading their computers at least as fast as they do now. Gamers often upgrade their machines to be able to use the latest and greatest. It certainly was a hell of alot cheaper to go with DOS and get games than stick with the much more expensive Mac hardware. The point is we wanted to promote the Mac, therefore we avoided Windows games, and made a necessary sacrifice to do that. Linux users will have to make simmilar sacrifices to accomplish the same thing.
A...If dual booters were really hardcore linux fans -- and refused to dual boot (even for games) -- Sales go up 50% for Loki -- because people would not have already purchased the "windows version".
Which is what I was saying. If Linux "zealots" didn't do their house of cards impression when they see all the glittery stuff they can play with on Windows, Loki would have done alot better. Read my post, please.
B...If Loki were able to offer Linux games closer to the time they were released for the other platforms....(nothing like getting a "new" Linux game 12 months after the windows version had hit the cut out boxes for $9.99. -- Sales go up 25%.
Until the Linux user makes the sacrifice, and takes the time and effort to lobby the game companies to allow ports to Linux sooner, the companies aren't gonna care. And why should they? The Linux user obviously doesn't care.
C...If they had been able to port the games that people wanted to buy...The Starcrafts, Warcrafts, C&C, Red Alert, Diablo...Sales go up 75%
Herein lie the sacrifices you must be willing to make if you want change. Create a Loki-type company that works with companies before a game gets released so that there can be simultaneous development. Sometimes, however, you w9ill run into several companies who will refuse to let a Loki port their game. In these cases, if Linux gaming is your concern, you must be willing to bite the bullet and not buy the Windows version (and not buy Windows, but that's a part of the argument we don't need to go into right now). If you don't, you obviously don't care that much. All these companies need to say is that they're not going to release it, and you just whine about it.
Bioware is releasing Neverwinter Nights for Linux as well as Windows and MacOS.
...that people are complaining about being told not to buy the games they want to play. I swore that I'd never use this phrase, but in this case it's the only one appropriate.
Read for content, people.
We are talking about people who's primary complaint is there are no games for Linux and they want to change that. Those of you who want to play the latest and greatest games SHOULD NOT CARE about the platform you're playing it on. The people who will need to make the sacrifices spoken of are the people that want to promote a particular platform. In this case Linux. If someone wants more games for Linux, buying them for another platform is counterproductive. These people need to excercise their power and not buy games that aren't for Linux.
This is _exactly_ the situation that the Mac platform was in 10 years ago. The way people got games made for the Mac was buy not buying DOS/Windows games, and at the same time flooding game companies with requests for Mac ports. And when good games were released for the Mac, even if they were "old" they BOUGHT THEM because they were GOOD GAMES. You couldn't find the ported over Mac games on the store shelves because the only copies that they had were sold out! I can go to my local half price books and find stacks of Loki's ports of any of their games (except the latest ones...I guess game stores stopped putting them on their shelves because NO ONE WAS BUYING THEM, DUH) for less than half price, because all the local game stores threw them in with all the rest of the never-to-be-sold crap that was cluttering their shelves. Say what you want about Blizzard, but they were one of the first producers of major games to take a chance on the Mac market, and it obviously has paid off big time for them. I bought Warcraft 1 the second it came out fo the Mac, because it was a good game for the Mac, and I wanted to support people who took serious financial risks to produce good games for a platform I wanted to promote. I didn't care if it was old, it was better than anything else I could play on my Mac at the time, and playing games on my Mac was what I wanted. Obviously, more than just I were doing the same thing, because Blizzard has so far released every one of it's games for the Mac. Diablo 2 for the Mac, IIRC, came out only a week after the Windows version was released. The Lord of Destruction expansion was released on a hybrid CD from the beginning. The Diablo 2 Battle Chest is all hybrid Windows/Mac CDs. Warcraft 3 will be released for the Mac. Why? Because Mac enthusiasts stuck to their guns, made painful sacrifices, and when someone took a chance they rewarded those people for taking that chance. If the Linux community is unwilling to do the same, the next Loki will find the same fate waiting for it.
Excuse me, but what the hell do you mean by "so much in space"? Have you looked at NASA's budget recently (as probablythe best funded space angecy in the world)? It's pathetic. The government spends MUCH more than NASA's budget on medical research already. Please find a clue somewhere.
I do seem to remember a story a ways back about Yahoo switching to Google for it's search engine.
However, this stuff probably isn't stuff you could find in a normal Google search. I imagine this would have direct access to various newspaper and other archives. People who's job is research (not like scientific research, like think tanks and "research" companies...or when your boss says "I need to find out everything you know about by Tuesday") use engines like that where they need reliable quick access to the relevant information online as opposed to sifting through the piles of dross you get with a normal search. I believe Northern Light was built around something like this as it's base model originally, but I don't personally know as I never really used it.
Well, if they go for Linux and set up a support infrastructure, they'd have nothing to blame but themselves. No windows to blame it on. And everyone blames everything on the ISP. (and last I checked, the vast majority of people who use AOL have AOL directly as their ISP, so that part of your argument falls flat as well)
I've bought a fair amount of stuff on eBay. Mostly movies and other media. Most of which I could've found at stores around here. However, the thing with eBay is that you have to be strong enough to give yourself a limit. The sane limit should be 90% of the retail price INCLUDING SHIPPING if you can find it around you. If not, don't pay more than retail. (I've bought stuff on eBay for retail because I'm personally boycotting this or that store which is the only place I know where I can get whatever it is.)
Most people go crazy that they get a great deal, and end up paying alot more with the exorbinant shipping people on eBay seem to charge. Anyone who's buying things online for retail price not including shipping is robbing themselves, unless they simply cannot find it near them. For many people, it's the only option and a blessing 'cause they're not near stuff, but for most people, they really shouldn't.
The Great Wall of China didn't perform very well. As a wall that only went so far, the Mongols just went around it.
You read the article, you wasted those five minutes of your life, not those who posted it.
Unless you are unable to make decisions for yourself. Get a grip.
Apologies to the topicality gods, this kind of crap just gets my goat.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I loaded XP on this machine to give it a shot, and I didn't notice any speed problems. Of course, I have 384MB RAM on this machine and a 1Ghz Athlon with a 64MB graphics card (geForce 2 MX at the time). And the bootup speed was faster than Win98. Gods, did it boot up fast. Seductively fast.
However, I've issues with alot of the stuff that's in XP and the whole activation situation, so I wiped it. Running 98 now for games, but probably will move to 2000 as my Windows partition. More stable than 98 and doesn't have all the nasty crap MS is foisting on the world with XP. And most of my games will run on it.
But it did go fast...that much I'll give it.
See also, the Clerks animated series debacle, which was promoted to hell and back to during the Super Bowl, but was pulled after three episodes aired.
TV's messed up that way.
Maybe I'm cynical about the whole IT thing, but my 3 years of professional experience tells me that if your boss' boss wants you out, it's better to work your hardest to get out before the hammer falls.
IT is what I love to do, but even in better times, this industry is filled with cutthroat bastards. You're almost 20, wife and kid on the way, and you might lose your job. Well, I hate to break it to you kid, but life is a bitch most of the time, not some of the time. Learn from this experience, whatever you do. The main lesson should be, no one in this business cares about you except you. NOT ONE PERSON. Friendships stop at the edge of a pinkslip more often than not. If you can't deal with that, you really need to find something else to do with your life, because you're going to be going through this many more times over, for a variety of reasons, not just your age.
I don't think the statement that video games are art can be really argued against. There is a hallaeious about of visual art and other non-scientific crafting that goes into making games.
Whether video games are "fine art" is a better question. I personally don't think they qualify for that as such. The medium just hasn't been around long enough. Hasn't been refined and reshaped nearly as often as the fine arts have. Eventually, yes, I believe video games will eventually reach such a lofty status, but they aren't there yet by a long shot.
Actually, if you read the blurb on every CD I've looked at, you are specificly prohibited from "unauthorized lending". IE, I am committing a crime if I lend the Matrix soundtrack to my friend for the weekend.
"not legally binding" only has any effect if you've paid your lawyer enough.
Godzilla may not have the legal right to trash Tokyo, but exactly what can you do to stop him?
You might have picked a better game to use as an example. Diablo 2 is out for MacOS. Hell, the latest versions come on hybrid CDs for both Windows and MacOS.
So merely because it's 1) on the web 2) undermines big business 3) promotes a book 4) and because for some reason you think this "spiffy" "bullet" scheme you've devised makes your information look more official and correct, we're supposed to believe you?
Pardon me while I chuckle heartily.
"by the way, the license agreement for Windows Media Player now allows Microsoft to disable any software on your computer - you do read those license agreements, don't you?"
OK, I cry bullshit here. I just downloaded Windows Media Player for the express purpose of checking this claim out and I didn't find ANYTHING in any text in the entire installation that corroborates this statement.
If you're going to bitch about Microsoft, at least give references to things that actually exist so you don't come off looking like just as much of an ass as Microsoft.
Morons.
...is Microsoft's real response to this. They know they're on shaky legal ground with this whole thing, and the only way to get off it and onto something solid is to not sell any licenses. And the only way to stay in business after they stop selling licenses doing that would be to sell subscriptions to use their software.
After this changeover happens (when/if it happens) they'll probably provide freely downloadable thin clients for Word, Excel, etc, and you'll have to pay whatever they determine the market will bear (because even Microsoft has to consider what the market will bear, whether they are correct or not is another topic) per month, per product you want to use.
In this situation there's no tranferrable license you need to worry about because you give away the only software you distribute to anyone for free, as it's useless to those who don't subscribe. You control the only software with any functionality and no one other than yourself will possess that software. Anyone else running a server that allows people to use Word that you haven't specifically allowed couldn't have bought it anywhere because you don't sell it, then you're well within your rights to throw them in jail for theft.