Except more and more people installed Windows and forgot, or never learned, how to use DOS. The market for DOS games shrank. Also, playing games on Windows offered a much greater gaming experience.
On the other hand, unless Linux not only catches up with, but REPLACES Windows, and offers a greater gaming experience, then there is no incentive to write games for Linux.
That's ridiculous, why the hell do you have to put search. before the address? Google is useful because it's simple and straightfoward, so the first idea Microsoft get when trying to better them is to make a double-barrel address? Christ almighty, don't they know anything about marketing or usability?
The first thing a user thinks when going to a site called 'msn' is 'msn.com', not 'search.msn.com'. Rather than bother with either putting up with all the crap on the main msn page, or going the extra length to go to msn.search.com, most people would just go to google.
I don't know why Microsoft put the search engine with their MSN site, surely they can afford a new domain name for it? Or can they not even think of a new name for it? This makes it look like an after-thought search engine tacked onto a lame website.
So you're saying that the people of Iraq should have been left to live under a brutal murdering dictator so that coddled Americans living in a free democracy can have a toy to look at pretty stars?
I think that's the definition of an 'I'm alright Jack' attitude.
Yeah, I see what you mean about modern TV, putting out dozens of crap episodes with no thought gone in to them, just to get ratings. Wait a minute, are we talking about reality TV or Star Trek Enterprise?
Fourth season? A good TV program is good in its FIRST EPISODE. Look at Fawlty Towers, 12 episodes in total and all of them classics. Father Ted had four seasons, and every episode was fantastic. Blackadder finished after the fourth season and is a classic. Enterprise has had four seasons and only now is becoming good?
This is disgraceful. If it's that dire, why has it dragged on so long before being cancelled? If they couldn't even make the first few episodes decent, why did they keep churning out even more episodes? Why didn't they concentrate on making a few good ones rather than four series of crap? Money? In that case they may has well have made a reality TV series.
You should be grateful that your school invests in sports facilities, especially with the increasing obesity epidemic. If your school was in the UK, the football field would have been sold off for housing development, and sports banned in case someone gets hurt or gets upset if they lose.
It wasn't quite the same with me. I started learning programming around 12/13, started with basic, moved onto C, but didn't get too far. I tried C++ and java but never understood them. Eventually I got to a point where no matter how much I read I just wasn't learning anymore, I'd been writing C for years but still wasn't good enough to put a simple program together. I didn't understand even basic concepts, and making a program compile generally involved putting *s in random places around pointer names until it compiled. Then they just segfaulted.
I went to university to do computers, but I just couldn't do it. I didn't even understand the basic maths, nor any of the theory about algorithms etc, I just spend my time on internet sites when I should have been working. After a short time I dropped out and now I work in a factory.
I don't even like programming as an outside interest any more. If you can't do it, it's not fun to do. Programming isn't a hobby like sports or cooking where even if you're not very good at it you can still enjoy it. With computer programming, if you're not good at it, then you can't even make small programs that work, so there's absolutely nothing you can do with it, so there's no point in bothering at all. Plus the fact that programming isn't something you can do now and again in your spare time, writing a proper application could take months or years, just luck at firefox and that has loads of people working on it.
Some of the less well off employees will be resentful. These are your "lower class" employees who will never amount to anything. Once they get resentful, they are easy to identify, and you can get rid of them in one way or another (or make them so resentful they quit on their own). If you only want the best and brightest, and are willing to pay for it, this is a positive thing.
You're assuming that the more well-rewarded employees are the better employees. This is obviously false. Bonuses are given out based on who you know, or what project you were involved with, however fleetingly. Also the 'best and brightest' are often the most egotistical and proud, and so WILL be resentful of others. People who want to 'learn from' people are generally suckups with little ability who leech off others and make connections to get promotions/bonuses. These people are of no use to a company.
>>To a consumer-user Linux is not free, they would want to get it in a >>nice supported package, not a download form some obscure place on the >>internet. So they'd be paying for a box in a shop. > >At least they get upgrades forever.
Or at least, until the distro-vendor goes bust, or stops supporting their version, or the upgrade program becomes obsolete, or the size of the upgrade is too massive for their internet connection, either because of speed or quotas.
You click on it and there is a list of hundreds of pieces of software. Each software has a description along side it. SOme have pictures too. Most are free, some you have to pay for.
Hundreds? There are more pieces of software than that. What are the chances of this Xandros having all the programs that run on it in the world in one place? The odds are 0. Also this doesn't account for software that comes on CD, or only in source, or a newer version has been released but isn't in the Xandros depository. What if you don't have a direct link to the Internet, but can download to one computer and move it to another via disk/keydrive, can this be done as easily as moving a.zip around?
Also how easily does it download? If the download is broken can it be resumed? Does it happen automatically? What if the software is already on your computer, can you install it without even knowing that a command line exists?
No dependencies? So the libraries are statically linked, i.e. massive downloads and massive memory usage? Or are all the dependencies that have ever been made, and ever will be made, already on the system?
What happens when your depository is down? Can you not install software anymore? When you download a software from a third-party site, does it install easily?
There are a lot of questions regarding software installation, and there is no magic solution, least of all one which depends on single source for all your software.
So, what exactly is the difference between trading stocks and investing in stocks? Doesn't investing involve buying things and selling them for higher prices? Doesn't buying and selling mean trading?
I think the main difference between MSN and Google is that Google has a massive market share, and is trusted a lot more than Microsoft. Microsoft have benefited hugely in the past from 'already being there', and now they will find out that Google is 'already there', and people won't generally see the need to switch to another search engine, least of all the Microsoft one, unless there's a massive benefit to switching. Offering fewer sites and giving biased search results don't really count as a benefits.
As for R&D, I'm not convinced that's too important in search engines. Most people don't care one jot about search engine algorithms, they just go to the search engine they always go to, whether a rival site might be more optimised or might give slightly more relevent results. The main things Microsoft can spend their money on are: 1) Marketing. 2) Marketing. 3) Marketing.
You might bitch and moan about how they should be concentrating on features and result-relevency, but in the real (business) world, the main concern is success, and success comes from market-share, and market-share comes from mind-share, and mind-share comes from marketing and brand-recognition, or plain old-fashioned monopolistic tricks.
Well, I think this demonstrates that in order to be successful you don't need to be the first to do something, but the first to do it successfully. They might not have come up with a lot of their leading products, but in the end they came up with something that beat the competition in the market, i.e.:
Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.
Direct3D: Might have been behind OpenGL, but they took the qualities of OpenGL and made a product that at least matches it on features and blows it out of the water in regards to market share.
Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold.
Office products? Yes they may have been created by other companies, but Microsoft took them, and all 'Clippy' jokes aside, they turned it into a very decent product and it's dominated the market, and the 'other companies' are languishing on the sidelines.
You may like to bash Microsoft for taking on other people's ideas, but what company only sells things they've entirely invented from scratch? Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them.
In the real world, if you invent something, unless you patent it or implement it successfully, no-one cares that you invented it.
Depression is like stubbing your toe on a doorframe. The pain is telling you something. In the case of a busted toe it means don't do that again. In the case of depression it means do something.
That raises the question, do what?
What do you do when you have a job you hate, and all the better jobs are taken by people better than you? Where do you go when you don't have the skills or the intelligence to do anything better than degrading soul-destroying grunt-work for minimum wage?
And even if you did have some skills, it's not much use if you need to jump through a million hoops and two million interviews just to be turned down for a job at a dot-com on the verge of collapse.
There are very few decent employers in the world, very very few. And because they're decent employers they can get the best workers, therefore if you're not working there you've no chance of getting in. And even if you do get in, you get to work alongside people who through bonuses are millionaires whilst you live in a shitty little apartment with no hot water, and you get to work amongst people who are twice as clever as you and are worth twice as much to the company as you.
2. Management wants to forge good relationships with their workers. Happy workers stay at their jobs
But how can there be a good relationship when the workers are being made to do tricks like seals balancing balls just to get a job? Why would anyone with any self-respect go through that? It must be why google goes after younger workers, the older more experienced ones wouldn't put up with that sort of awful treatment.
Personally I can't see why so many people want to work for google. I mean, they're a search engine. So what? Do they pay massive wages? Do you get to work 2 hours a week? It must be all the kids fresh out of school who see them as a 'big name' website so they all want to go and work for them. Then google make themselves look like everyone wants to work for them by putting prospective employees through dozens of interviews. It's the same system they have with gmail, restrict supply and increase demand, even though the result is just another webmail service, or another programming job.
The result of this is that they'll end up with loads of over-educated, inexperienced workers who've been conditioned into thinking that google is the 'greatest company ever', so they'll put in 80 hour weeks and never complain about conditions lest they risk losing their job at such an amazing place. Of course all the best programmers won't be seen dead crawling on their belly serving the google overlords, so they'll all work somewhere else whilst google's bubble bursts.
After all it can't be sustainable having all those phds without getting something from them. Google's income comes from things like advertising, and that's a pretty simple thing really, you don't need a million degrees to sell advertising space, just market-share. Other than that, what does google really do? They have that gmail thing, but even with all those 'geniuses' working for them it's still not out of beta, and even then it's just another webmail account, what is there to make it better, or more importantly, massively profitable?
Don't be jealous. Simply use the same tactics they use, but do it with your better skills and product. Networking is reality of the business world, and to just get pissed off at people who do it better than you gets you nowhere.
Then may I ask, what is the whole point in having a bonus scheme with the intent of rewarding and encouraging results, when the bonuses are given out based on who you know and which project-of-the-week catches the short attention spans of the management? You may as well just give each manager a budget each month and tell him to deal it out to his friends as 'bonuses'.
Do you know what I do when I'm around people who have a lot more than me? I listen to them. I make friends. I work very well with them. I learn what makes them tick, and I use that information to better myself. You can hang around the "haves" and become one of them, or you can be an idiot, stewing in your resentment, and then wonder why you're still a "have not" for the rest of your life.
You're missing the point. You can argue all day whether the less well off employees should be resentful towards the more successful ones, it doesn't change anything. The FACT is that they WILL be resentful, whether they should be or not, and it will damage the company.
Believe it or not there is such a thing as bad management, and doing something that creates resentment and bitterness in the workplace is very bad management. Google is in a bubble at the minute so they can get away with a lot, but it won't last forever.
-- Gmail invites for completed Free Ipod referrals [freeipods.com].
So let me get this straight, I jump through hoops and sign up for some things which I don't want and would cause me a load of work, you get an ipod worth hundreds of pounds, and I get a FREE webmail account? I can't help thinking that this is a very one-sided deal.
I have an idea for something fairer: If you come round and clean my house and mow the lawn, I'll give you a slashdot account.
BTW, the average person in North American can become a millionair by simply saving $100 per month and investing in a diversified stock fund or ETF for 30+ years.
The average person would probably LOSE money in investing. $100 a month for 30 years is $36,000. To make a million out of that you'd need a 27.8 times return on investment. Actually it would be more than that if you take taxes and inflation into account. The average person investing in stocks loses money, that's why everyone doesn't do it. Therefore I very much doubt your claims.
So $12 million was divided amongst roughly 24 people, or half a million each. That's not enough to retire on.
No, but it's enough to not have to work for a long time. Half a million divided by 15k per year equals 33 years of not working. After that you could go back to work again, but to have decades of your life free to live rather than to work 40 hours a week as a corporate drone would make a fucking massive difference.
Wow. I wish I could even convey my disbelief. Let me hit you with the clue stick a couple times: In Family Guy, Peter is an idiot. In fact, the entire show centers around this. Same with Fry. Who are the intelligent, assertive characters that typically point out their counterparts' idiocy? Peg and Leela.
I maybe agree with you on Futurama, but in Family Guy, Peter is not the sort of emasculated male you see on standard American sitcoms, he doesn't make his life revolve around pandering to his wife, and he's incredibly politically incorrect, unlike for instance the male characters on 'friends'.
Using your computer to replace all your home's entertainment devices is a difficult task. You need to:
Spend huge amounts of money on components to put in your computer.
Hope you can fit them all in one box.
Hope they're all compatible with your OS, and every OS you need to use on that computer.
Hope there are no conflicts between devices meaning the whole thing freezes during the climax of the film you're watching.
Set up all the drivers and software to make them all work together.
Set up a remote control that can operate all your devices with full functionality.
Then even if you get it all working, you get to see the whole thing fall apart when one person is watching TV/DVD and another is using the PC, and a PC application crashes the computer. Or when one person uses a program that uses up the whole processor so the DVD playback stutters.
There are huge benefits to devices being independent of each other rather than fighting for space on the same computer. Just because Bill Gates says something is a good idea doesn't mean it is.
But that elinks isn't any good for us slackware users. It has debs and rpms for download, but no tgz packages, and no source code unless you have cvs set up. That seems very unreasonable, even the simplest of programs these days come with a simple source download or a non-distro-specific binary download.
I think it's a shame that writers of Linux apps generally assume that if you're not using Redhat/Mandrake then you want to compile the program from source.
The way I see, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who are willing to work to make things better, and people who expect other people to make things better for them. Open Source is a reality because of the first kind of people; Slashdot seems to be full of the second kind of people at this point.
I'm not ever. I don't care about Freeciv, I don't care if the entire project is flushed down the toilet. I don't need or care for an open-source alternative to Civilisation, so I don't care how bad it is.
Just don't go into a discussion about Civilisation claiming your game is as good or better, without having the substance to back it up. Remember, you open source people barged into this discussion, not the other way round.
Slashdot Mirror
Except more and more people installed Windows and forgot, or never learned, how to use DOS. The market for DOS games shrank. Also, playing games on Windows offered a much greater gaming experience.
On the other hand, unless Linux not only catches up with, but REPLACES Windows, and offers a greater gaming experience, then there is no incentive to write games for Linux.
That's ridiculous, why the hell do you have to put search. before the address? Google is useful because it's simple and straightfoward, so the first idea Microsoft get when trying to better them is to make a double-barrel address? Christ almighty, don't they know anything about marketing or usability?
The first thing a user thinks when going to a site called 'msn' is 'msn.com', not 'search.msn.com'. Rather than bother with either putting up with all the crap on the main msn page, or going the extra length to go to msn.search.com, most people would just go to google.
I don't know why Microsoft put the search engine with their MSN site, surely they can afford a new domain name for it? Or can they not even think of a new name for it? This makes it look like an after-thought search engine tacked onto a lame website.
Welcome to America, where your employer controls your entire life 24/7. "Land of the free" indeed.
So you're saying that the people of Iraq should have been left to live under a brutal murdering dictator so that coddled Americans living in a free democracy can have a toy to look at pretty stars?
I think that's the definition of an 'I'm alright Jack' attitude.
Yeah, I see what you mean about modern TV, putting out dozens of crap episodes with no thought gone in to them, just to get ratings. Wait a minute, are we talking about reality TV or Star Trek Enterprise?
1. It IS getting good in its fourth season
Fourth season? A good TV program is good in its FIRST EPISODE. Look at Fawlty Towers, 12 episodes in total and all of them classics. Father Ted had four seasons, and every episode was fantastic. Blackadder finished after the fourth season and is a classic. Enterprise has had four seasons and only now is becoming good?
This is disgraceful. If it's that dire, why has it dragged on so long before being cancelled? If they couldn't even make the first few episodes decent, why did they keep churning out even more episodes? Why didn't they concentrate on making a few good ones rather than four series of crap? Money? In that case they may has well have made a reality TV series.
You should be grateful that your school invests in sports facilities, especially with the increasing obesity epidemic. If your school was in the UK, the football field would have been sold off for housing development, and sports banned in case someone gets hurt or gets upset if they lose.
It wasn't quite the same with me. I started learning programming around 12/13, started with basic, moved onto C, but didn't get too far. I tried C++ and java but never understood them. Eventually I got to a point where no matter how much I read I just wasn't learning anymore, I'd been writing C for years but still wasn't good enough to put a simple program together. I didn't understand even basic concepts, and making a program compile generally involved putting *s in random places around pointer names until it compiled. Then they just segfaulted.
I went to university to do computers, but I just couldn't do it. I didn't even understand the basic maths, nor any of the theory about algorithms etc, I just spend my time on internet sites when I should have been working. After a short time I dropped out and now I work in a factory.
I don't even like programming as an outside interest any more. If you can't do it, it's not fun to do. Programming isn't a hobby like sports or cooking where even if you're not very good at it you can still enjoy it. With computer programming, if you're not good at it, then you can't even make small programs that work, so there's absolutely nothing you can do with it, so there's no point in bothering at all. Plus the fact that programming isn't something you can do now and again in your spare time, writing a proper application could take months or years, just luck at firefox and that has loads of people working on it.
Some of the less well off employees will be resentful. These are your "lower class" employees who will never amount to anything. Once they get resentful, they are easy to identify, and you can get rid of them in one way or another (or make them so resentful they quit on their own). If you only want the best and brightest, and are willing to pay for it, this is a positive thing.
You're assuming that the more well-rewarded employees are the better employees. This is obviously false. Bonuses are given out based on who you know, or what project you were involved with, however fleetingly. Also the 'best and brightest' are often the most egotistical and proud, and so WILL be resentful of others. People who want to 'learn from' people are generally suckups with little ability who leech off others and make connections to get promotions/bonuses. These people are of no use to a company.
>>To a consumer-user Linux is not free, they would want to get it in a
>>nice supported package, not a download form some obscure place on the
>>internet. So they'd be paying for a box in a shop.
>
>At least they get upgrades forever.
Or at least, until the distro-vendor goes bust, or stops supporting their version, or the upgrade program becomes obsolete, or the size of the upgrade is too massive for their internet connection, either because of speed or quotas.
You click on it and there is a list of hundreds of pieces of software. Each software has a description along side it. SOme have pictures too. Most are free, some you have to pay for.
.zip around?
Hundreds? There are more pieces of software than that. What are the chances of this Xandros having all the programs that run on it in the world in one place? The odds are 0. Also this doesn't account for software that comes on CD, or only in source, or a newer version has been released but isn't in the Xandros depository. What if you don't have a direct link to the Internet, but can download to one computer and move it to another via disk/keydrive, can this be done as easily as moving a
Also how easily does it download? If the download is broken can it be resumed? Does it happen automatically? What if the software is already on your computer, can you install it without even knowing that a command line exists?
No dependencies? So the libraries are statically linked, i.e. massive downloads and massive memory usage? Or are all the dependencies that have ever been made, and ever will be made, already on the system?
What happens when your depository is down? Can you not install software anymore? When you download a software from a third-party site, does it install easily?
There are a lot of questions regarding software installation, and there is no magic solution, least of all one which depends on single source for all your software.
So, what exactly is the difference between trading stocks and investing in stocks? Doesn't investing involve buying things and selling them for higher prices? Doesn't buying and selling mean trading?
I think the main difference between MSN and Google is that Google has a massive market share, and is trusted a lot more than Microsoft. Microsoft have benefited hugely in the past from 'already being there', and now they will find out that Google is 'already there', and people won't generally see the need to switch to another search engine, least of all the Microsoft one, unless there's a massive benefit to switching. Offering fewer sites and giving biased search results don't really count as a benefits.
As for R&D, I'm not convinced that's too important in search engines. Most people don't care one jot about search engine algorithms, they just go to the search engine they always go to, whether a rival site might be more optimised or might give slightly more relevent results. The main things Microsoft can spend their money on are:
1) Marketing.
2) Marketing.
3) Marketing.
You might bitch and moan about how they should be concentrating on features and result-relevency, but in the real (business) world, the main concern is success, and success comes from market-share, and market-share comes from mind-share, and mind-share comes from marketing and brand-recognition, or plain old-fashioned monopolistic tricks.
Well, I think this demonstrates that in order to be successful you don't need to be the first to do something, but the first to do it successfully. They might not have come up with a lot of their leading products, but in the end they came up with something that beat the competition in the market, i.e.:
Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.
Direct3D: Might have been behind OpenGL, but they took the qualities of OpenGL and made a product that at least matches it on features and blows it out of the water in regards to market share.
Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold.
Office products? Yes they may have been created by other companies, but Microsoft took them, and all 'Clippy' jokes aside, they turned it into a very decent product and it's dominated the market, and the 'other companies' are languishing on the sidelines.
You may like to bash Microsoft for taking on other people's ideas, but what company only sells things they've entirely invented from scratch? Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them.
In the real world, if you invent something, unless you patent it or implement it successfully, no-one cares that you invented it.
Depression is like stubbing your toe on a doorframe. The pain is telling you something. In the case of a busted toe it means don't do that again. In the case of depression it means do something.
That raises the question, do what?
What do you do when you have a job you hate, and all the better jobs are taken by people better than you? Where do you go when you don't have the skills or the intelligence to do anything better than degrading soul-destroying grunt-work for minimum wage?
And even if you did have some skills, it's not much use if you need to jump through a million hoops and two million interviews just to be turned down for a job at a dot-com on the verge of collapse.
There are very few decent employers in the world, very very few. And because they're decent employers they can get the best workers, therefore if you're not working there you've no chance of getting in. And even if you do get in, you get to work alongside people who through bonuses are millionaires whilst you live in a shitty little apartment with no hot water, and you get to work amongst people who are twice as clever as you and are worth twice as much to the company as you.
There are no ways out.
2. Management wants to forge good relationships with their workers. Happy workers stay at their jobs
But how can there be a good relationship when the workers are being made to do tricks like seals balancing balls just to get a job? Why would anyone with any self-respect go through that? It must be why google goes after younger workers, the older more experienced ones wouldn't put up with that sort of awful treatment.
Personally I can't see why so many people want to work for google. I mean, they're a search engine. So what? Do they pay massive wages? Do you get to work 2 hours a week? It must be all the kids fresh out of school who see them as a 'big name' website so they all want to go and work for them. Then google make themselves look like everyone wants to work for them by putting prospective employees through dozens of interviews. It's the same system they have with gmail, restrict supply and increase demand, even though the result is just another webmail service, or another programming job.
The result of this is that they'll end up with loads of over-educated, inexperienced workers who've been conditioned into thinking that google is the 'greatest company ever', so they'll put in 80 hour weeks and never complain about conditions lest they risk losing their job at such an amazing place. Of course all the best programmers won't be seen dead crawling on their belly serving the google overlords, so they'll all work somewhere else whilst google's bubble bursts.
After all it can't be sustainable having all those phds without getting something from them. Google's income comes from things like advertising, and that's a pretty simple thing really, you don't need a million degrees to sell advertising space, just market-share. Other than that, what does google really do? They have that gmail thing, but even with all those 'geniuses' working for them it's still not out of beta, and even then it's just another webmail account, what is there to make it better, or more importantly, massively profitable?
Don't be jealous. Simply use the same tactics they use, but do it with your better skills and product. Networking is reality of the business world, and to just get pissed off at people who do it better than you gets you nowhere.
Then may I ask, what is the whole point in having a bonus scheme with the intent of rewarding and encouraging results, when the bonuses are given out based on who you know and which project-of-the-week catches the short attention spans of the management? You may as well just give each manager a budget each month and tell him to deal it out to his friends as 'bonuses'.
Do you know what I do when I'm around people who have a lot more than me? I listen to them. I make friends. I work very well with them. I learn what makes them tick, and I use that information to better myself.
You can hang around the "haves" and become one of them, or you can be an idiot, stewing in your resentment, and then wonder why you're still a "have not" for the rest of your life.
You're missing the point. You can argue all day whether the less well off employees should be resentful towards the more successful ones, it doesn't change anything. The FACT is that they WILL be resentful, whether they should be or not, and it will damage the company.
Believe it or not there is such a thing as bad management, and doing something that creates resentment and bitterness in the workplace is very bad management. Google is in a bubble at the minute so they can get away with a lot, but it won't last forever.
--
Gmail invites for completed Free Ipod referrals [freeipods.com].
So let me get this straight, I jump through hoops and sign up for some things which I don't want and would cause me a load of work, you get an ipod worth hundreds of pounds, and I get a FREE webmail account? I can't help thinking that this is a very one-sided deal.
I have an idea for something fairer: If you come round and clean my house and mow the lawn, I'll give you a slashdot account.
BTW, the average person in North American can become a millionair by simply saving $100 per month and investing in a diversified stock fund or ETF for 30+ years.
The average person would probably LOSE money in investing. $100 a month for 30 years is $36,000. To make a million out of that you'd need a 27.8 times return on investment. Actually it would be more than that if you take taxes and inflation into account. The average person investing in stocks loses money, that's why everyone doesn't do it. Therefore I very much doubt your claims.
So $12 million was divided amongst roughly 24 people, or half a million each. That's not enough to retire on.
No, but it's enough to not have to work for a long time. Half a million divided by 15k per year equals 33 years of not working. After that you could go back to work again, but to have decades of your life free to live rather than to work 40 hours a week as a corporate drone would make a fucking massive difference.
Wow. I wish I could even convey my disbelief. Let me hit you with the clue stick a couple times: In Family Guy, Peter is an idiot. In fact, the entire show centers around this. Same with Fry. Who are the intelligent, assertive characters that typically point out their counterparts' idiocy? Peg and Leela.
I maybe agree with you on Futurama, but in Family Guy, Peter is not the sort of emasculated male you see on standard American sitcoms, he doesn't make his life revolve around pandering to his wife, and he's incredibly politically incorrect, unlike for instance the male characters on 'friends'.
Spend huge amounts of money on components to put in your computer.
Hope you can fit them all in one box.
Hope they're all compatible with your OS, and every OS you need to use on that computer.
Hope there are no conflicts between devices meaning the whole thing freezes during the climax of the film you're watching.
Set up all the drivers and software to make them all work together.
Set up a remote control that can operate all your devices with full functionality.
Then even if you get it all working, you get to see the whole thing fall apart when one person is watching TV/DVD and another is using the PC, and a PC application crashes the computer. Or when one person uses a program that uses up the whole processor so the DVD playback stutters.
There are huge benefits to devices being independent of each other rather than fighting for space on the same computer. Just because Bill Gates says something is a good idea doesn't mean it is.
But that elinks isn't any good for us slackware users. It has debs and rpms for download, but no tgz packages, and no source code unless you have cvs set up. That seems very unreasonable, even the simplest of programs these days come with a simple source download or a non-distro-specific binary download.
I think it's a shame that writers of Linux apps generally assume that if you're not using Redhat/Mandrake then you want to compile the program from source.
The way I see, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who are willing to work to make things better, and people who expect other people to make things better for them. Open Source is a reality because of the first kind of people; Slashdot seems to be full of the second kind of people at this point.
I'm not ever. I don't care about Freeciv, I don't care if the entire project is flushed down the toilet. I don't need or care for an open-source alternative to Civilisation, so I don't care how bad it is.
Just don't go into a discussion about Civilisation claiming your game is as good or better, without having the substance to back it up. Remember, you open source people barged into this discussion, not the other way round.