Hearing impaired people would buy it. I've gone through WAY more of the alternatives than I care to think of and Media Center has the best out-of-the-box experience with closed captions for the hearing impaired. A couple of the alternatives have some sort of half-way support or tacked on support, but none of them worked for me even minimally.
On the Linux side, I did get captions to work with MythTV, but it would mysteriously crash, and I gave up trying to get it to work consistently. I'm sure I could have gotten it to work, but I just didn't have enough free time (or interest) to pursue it.
I use Vista Home Premium 32-bit on my media pc and it works fine. It came preconfigured on the refurb compaq I picked up at Fry's. We've played some Orange Box games on it and lots of Gametap games.
My primary system, on the other hand, was a nightmare that I downgraded to XP MCE. I tried Vista Home Premium 64-bit on it. Yikes. I gave it about 5 or 6 months before I cursed and cursed and cursed and downgraded... Gametap didn't work with it well at all and Half-life 2/CounterStrike ran like DOGS on it. And I mean "Michael Vick didn't approve of your performance" dogs...
The system had XP MCE previously and everything ran fine. Now they run fine again...
I would have put more effort into Linux if weren't for the games. I like to play games more than I like to fiddle around trying to get games to work. Games are really the only reason I haven't gone Linux for more than a dual boot...
We are old and founded a company that requires an old language no one learns any more. This makes it hard for us to find cheap labor. We are angry at universities for not teaching that language. Companies that use Java can hire kids directly out of college (or better yet from 3rd world countries) for very low pay. You kids get off our lawn.
I would say that the opposite is true. If we find it offensive to make jokes at the expense of someone related to computer science, then we should stop making jokes at anyone's expense.
If you laugh at gallows humor when it targets someone you don't identify with, then you shouldn't object when it targets someone with whom you do identify.
ALL humans deserve equal respect, not just the ones with whom we identify.
It is a CYA case. If you are a manager who picks software that turns up to have a problem and you can't point your finger at someone else, then the buck stops with YOU. That means your butt is in the sling, not some vendor's. Whether or not you will ever need the support is not the issue. Protecting yourself from blame IS the issue. Does that suck? Of course. Is it going to change? Nope.
I don't want this to come off sounding snarky, but most young people (I do not know if you or he are 18 or 80) don't think about the future. You will eventually retire (if you live long enough) and you will cease to have an income. You will be living on what you have saved and invested while you were working. Making more money does not have to mean enjoying greater luxuries now. It can mean that he lives exactly as he is currently living and socks the difference away towards retirement (or saving for college for his children should he have them).
The trend I'm seeing among the people who respond on the "take the perl job" side seems to be that as long as he breaks even and he enjoys what he is doing, everything is great. That is true for the immediate future, but it implies that there is no value in saving and investing.
I am not near retirement age myself, but I work for a company where many of my co-workers are. I am seeing first hand what they are facing. They have doggedly stuck to COBOL and the mainframe and have done well for themselves until now. Now our company is moving away from the mainframe, and they are all in a very scary situation.
Managing a programming career today is a bit like surfing. You have to keep scanning for the next wave or you will get stuck. There are lots of waves, but some will take your farther and faster than others. You have to decide for yourself which wave to ride.
There are very valid reasons to choose either the perl job or the.Net job, but no one can tell you which set of reasons will work for you.
I guess you could pretty well summarize them like this:
The Perl Job: 1) Original Poster expressed the feeling that he would prefer developing in Perl 2) Smaller company usually means greater personal responsibility 3) Playful environment 4) Lower pay 5) Fewer companies hiring this skillset.
The.Net Job: 1) OP doesn't feel coding in.Net is as much fun for him 2) Larger company means less personal responsibility, but can also mean more free time and less stress 3) More business focused environment 5) Higher pay 6) More companies hiring this skillset
I do find it annoying that XNA only supports ONE type of game pad... the XBox 360 controller.
There are workarounds, but the 360 controller is the only first class citizen... It looks like a nice controller, but come on! DirectInput is nice because of how easy it is to abstract the input devices. For XNA to be viable for PC games, it really has to support legacy hardware...
I also haven't been impressed with graphics speed. I'm just getting started with XNA, so I'm really making the graphics statement based on the SpaceWar starter kit. It is probably not the best example, but it is the only one I've looked at in depth.
Another option for bedroom programmers (who came up with THAT name???), is Phrogram. It was called Kids Programming Language, but my how it has grown. The new commercial version (which I think runs about $60) can compile MSIL code, so it can run in the.Net JIT CLR. I've seen better samples from Phrogram than XNA, but that could change since XNA is still in beta.
I think it would be great to lower the development bar so that a greater number of creative people could get involved. Think of how many great mods there are for existing games. The best games aren't always made by the best programmers...
"
No, it would be entirely unmanageable without killing Wikipedia; Wikipedia is bigger than most encyclopedias and adding new material at a rate that no practical review process would ever catch up. There's plenty of professionally edited general encyclopedias, both in dead tree versions and online. Wikipedias unique value is in not being like them."
I do not disagree with you at all. My point was that doing so would be difficult to the point of being unlikely. I do not think that anyone would undertake such without a profitable business model, and you are absolutely correct that at that point you have just another encyclopedia company.
Your point that Wikipedia's value is that it is not like the professional encyclopedia companies is correct. You and I may differ in our opinions of what its "unique value" is. I personally use it frequently for personal reference. For that use, informal reference, it is exceedingly valuable as long as the reader is at least somewhat skilled in reading critically. If I read in an entry that South Africa is populated entirely by leprechauns, I am capable of discerning that I am most likely looking at a vandalized page, and would look at the revision history. A third grader, perhaps, might not. If I read the article on leptons and read "There are three known flavors of lepton: the electron, the muon and the gluon." I would not know that a vandal had replaced "tau" with "gluon". I know just enough about particle physics to know the word "gluon" but not enough to know that it is wrong in this case.
Another poster pointed out that you could cite a revision number with Wikipedia, so I stand corrected on that point. Last time I wrote a research paper, citing online references was not an option because there were very few of them and almost no one had access to them. I have to smile at how quaint microfilm and microfiche seem now... If I remember correctly general encyclopedias were allowed as sources in elementary school. I could be wrong since it has been a very, very long time since I wrote a research paper myself and my children are not yet old enough to have been required to write one. My point here is that if we agree that certainly ONLY elementary students might be able to use it as a reference, it would be a dubious source since they have probably not learned enough critical thinking skills to weed out the bad information. Of course there is no better way to learn critical thinking skills than a string of "F" papers with increasingly harsh rephrasings of "This is obviously a vandalized entry, moron" written on them in blood-red ink...
One last thought, and I'll move along quietly... I have been watching with interest the One Laptop Per Child project. The gist is $100 laptops to go to developing countries for each school child TO REPLACE TEXTBOOKS among other things. One of the highly touted ideas is to include a copy of the Wikipedia so the students have access to a wealth of information. Think about that for a second. Imagine that the Wikipedia is quite possibly YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF INFO about practically everything in the world. You could literally have a generation of children in Thailand who grow up convinced that South Africa is populated by leprechauns. Yikes. That is an extreme example that would probably be caught by the teachers, but what about my lepton example? Not that specific case, but imagine how many SUBTLY vandalized pages or politically spun pages would exist in any copy of the Wikipedia that might serve as a whole nation of children's only source of info. Scary.
I think we agree that the Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool when taken for what it is. You just have to understand its nature and use it appropriately.
I suspect the best organization structure would be an editorial board.
This would parallel FOSS pretty well since you have a group of people who have commit rights. The trick would be making the group large enough to handle the throughput. Finding a balance between academics and non-academics would be a challenge. Kind of like getting lions and hyenas to work together on a project: they just don't like each other... Each has great arguments why the other is unsuitable, but a balance of the two would be crucial to the success of such a project.
Forking the TEXT of Wikipedia would be no problem, but the IMAGES are another matter. I kicked around the idea of putting together a mobile device package for education and including the Wikipedia but ran into two problems: 1) the images are all submitted with their own rights and licenses (text is covered by one licence) and 2) nothing makes parents/teachers/other adults unhappy like finding out that the handy encyclopedia they either bought or downloaded for free for their child has buried within it information that is sexually explicit, hate filled, or just plain wrong.
Look at it this way, practically anyone can vandalize the Wikipedia, but over time it tends to "self heal". Great. But that means that on any given day a certain percentage of it is in need of "healing". Someone could say that Christopher Columbus was a dirty <insert hate category> who had a tiny <insert sexual reference> and who definitively proved that the earth was <flat|cubic|made of marshmallow cream>. It is all well and good that someone will repair that, but if Johnny writes his paper based on what it said when he last looked at it, then Johnny's going to repeat 5th grade (and possibly land in counciling).
Another benefit of "versioning" the info is citability. If I were a teacher I would not allow a student to use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper. Why? Let's say little Johnny cited the Wikipedia in his Columbus the Dirty <hate category> paper. When I go to check the little nimrod's reference, it doesn't say that any more. Great it got cleaned up, but how can you cite a reference to a moving target?
Now if there were a versioning system and Johnny had cited "Wikipedia 2.7", and I could go back to that version to check his references, then I could accept his paper. Also the fact that the version would be fact checked and edited before versioning would make it a much more valuable reference work. The "healing" process would occur before publication.
Of course this implies that some group of people with the interest and ability to do so would actually get involved. The task of editing all of Wikipedia would be gargantuan. But even if a new "version" were made every 2-3 years, it would be a very valuable "people's encyclopedia".
The "silver bullet" approach makes perfect sense if you imagine for a moment that you are a manager trying to deal with software development. There is a 99% chance that you have a management background, not a technical one. There are exceptions, but even managers who had a technical background are unlikely to have an understanding of the current technical ecosystem.
As a manager you are tasked with developing software quickly and cheaply. I liken it to being a farmer. You can till the soil, plant the seeds, and pull the weeds, but you have no control over the basic requirements for success. You can not make the sun shine or the rain fall. You are at the mercy of forces outside your control, yet your survival depends upon the outcome. The farmer prays for rain or does an elaborate rain dance totally naked while smeared with mud of different colors (FYI farmers in the US gave up on the primitive practice of irrigation years ago in favor of the mud-smeared-naked-rain-dance).
As a manager you desperately look for something that will improve the odds of your survival. Since you cannot develop the software yourself, you try as hard as you can to find that silver bullet...
"enters and exits the body through preexisting orifices"
Here's hoping this means you swallow it and it exits through the other end and NOT that it enters said other end and claws its way up to exit from your mouth.
"would you really devote 20+hrs to Wolfenstien3D again these days?"
I would if it were Return To Castle Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory... I haven't played in a while but that was all I played for about 2 years. Great multiplayer game that was totally free. Enough depth via the various classes/skills/weapons to be interesting.
I made a C64 game that used the "Random Dungeon Generation" tables at the back of the 1st Ed. Dungeon Master's Guide to cobble together a dungeon crawl on the fly.
No graphics, but since when did D&D need graphics?
VERY dungeon crawl, but pretty fun since no one besides me would EVER be DM. No geopolitical intrigue or interpersonal drama, but a TON of "what's behind door number 1", see the monster, kill the monster, collect the treasure and xp. In other words a fun side diversion.
Here's a crazy thought. How about allowing each user to choose which way they want to see it. Slashdot could jump to the forefront of web-technology and market this ability as something totally new and original and come up with a new name for it like "skins" or "themes". They already have a "preferences" page.
I'm not sure the world is ready for such customizability, but slashdot should boldly step into the late '90s world of customization!
Another huge difference is that it allows them to produce three times as many laptops. Like anything else there are economies of scale that make things become less expensive as you produce more of them. In essence by buying three you make the entire lot less expensive per piece.
This is why they have stated that they won't produce any until they have orders for at least one million units.
"Windows is an automatic, Linux is a stick-shift beater Mustang (takes a little work to get going, but has a lot of potential)"
I'd agree with that. Now think of how many people want that beater Mustang vs. how many people want a new car that doesn't have the same potential, but works well enough out of the lot without any tinkering.
Neither group is better than the other, but they do have different objectives and viewpoints. I've known people who take the beater Mustang approach and spend all their time tweaking it out to get every RPM, BUT I've never heard any of them express the opinion that ALL car owners should do the same. They take great pride in their abilities and accomplishments, but revel in the fact that most people CANNOT do what they do. They KNOW that most people would never be willing to take the time to learn to do what they do, much less actually do it. They may derive feelings of superiority, but they do not feel the need to "convert the unbeliever".
To further flesh out the OS-as-car metaphor, Linux is like a car with a diesel engine , 8-track tape quadraphonic sound system and a CB radio. I don't mean that the technology is antiquated (which it is not), but rather that it isn't mainstream. You can't fill up a diesel engine at every gas station. You can't buy 8-track tapes in most places. More people communicate via cell phones than CB radios these days. You can't play a CD or MP3 through an 8-track player (at least not without modification).
As I said, I'm not trying to imply that Linux is antiquated, but rather that it a) is blocked from many mainstream file types and b) requires extra effort IN SOME AREAS for MOST PEOPLE than Windows.
Yes, most people can learn Linux and would be happy with it, IF 90% of the people they know and most of the content they care about weren't exclusively using another system.
Linux can be a great system for someone willing to put in the effort and time to learn it and tweak it, but most people are not willing to do so. Nor do I foresee that changing. The point has been made elsewhere in this discussion thread that the average user wants their computer to be an appliance that requires no more education or effort to use than the TV. To me, that is not a realistic expectation, but I am not an average user. Whether or not I want the average user to become interested in computers is irrelevant. My doctor may wish I would learn more about medicine, or my accountant might wish I would "keep records" or "follow accepted accounting principles", but it's just not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent Post wishes to ask if "you mean the almost-constant nag screens?".
Allow or Deny?
Hearing impaired people would buy it. I've gone through WAY more of the alternatives than I care to think of and Media Center has the best out-of-the-box experience with closed captions for the hearing impaired. A couple of the alternatives have some sort of half-way support or tacked on support, but none of them worked for me even minimally.
On the Linux side, I did get captions to work with MythTV, but it would mysteriously crash, and I gave up trying to get it to work consistently. I'm sure I could have gotten it to work, but I just didn't have enough free time (or interest) to pursue it.
I use Vista Home Premium 32-bit on my media pc and it works fine. It came preconfigured on the refurb compaq I picked up at Fry's. We've played some Orange Box games on it and lots of Gametap games.
My primary system, on the other hand, was a nightmare that I downgraded to XP MCE. I tried Vista Home Premium 64-bit on it. Yikes. I gave it about 5 or 6 months before I cursed and cursed and cursed and downgraded... Gametap didn't work with it well at all and Half-life 2/CounterStrike ran like DOGS on it. And I mean "Michael Vick didn't approve of your performance" dogs...
The system had XP MCE previously and everything ran fine. Now they run fine again...
I would have put more effort into Linux if weren't for the games. I like to play games more than I like to fiddle around trying to get games to work. Games are really the only reason I haven't gone Linux for more than a dual boot...
Summary of article:
We are old and founded a company that requires an old language no one learns any more. This makes it hard for us to find cheap labor. We are angry at universities for not teaching that language. Companies that use Java can hire kids directly out of college (or better yet from 3rd world countries) for very low pay. You kids get off our lawn.
Here's the punchline...
The vast majority of CS graduates will spend most of their time making new webpages that do 90% the same thing as other webpages...
Yes, Sparky, porn will become very important to you, the early adopter of the Hideous Headgear (R) as no woman alive will come within 15 feet of you.
Let's review:
iPod: chicks dig it
Linux based PMP with tricked out headgear: geeks digg it.
Where have all the slashdotters gone?
LOOK how long it took someone to welcome our new VR overlords!
Me, I can't help but think of one thing: imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!!
Your mama don't game, and your daddy don't Nintendo...
I would say that the opposite is true. If we find it offensive to make jokes at the expense of someone related to computer science, then we should stop making jokes at anyone's expense.
If you laugh at gallows humor when it targets someone you don't identify with, then you shouldn't object when it targets someone with whom you do identify.
ALL humans deserve equal respect, not just the ones with whom we identify.
Windows is cheaper than the free OS. That makes sense.
Here's how I would play:
Find 3 or more players close together.
Run into the middle of them.
Detonate grenades killing everyone around (including myself).
1) I lose $1.
2) I gain $4.
3) Profit!!
*NOTE* Shouting "Leroy Jenkins" is an optional embellishment.
It is a CYA case. If you are a manager who picks software that turns up to have a problem and you can't point your finger at someone else, then the buck stops with YOU. That means your butt is in the sling, not some vendor's. Whether or not you will ever need the support is not the issue. Protecting yourself from blame IS the issue. Does that suck? Of course. Is it going to change? Nope.
I don't want this to come off sounding snarky, but most young people (I do not know if you or he are 18 or 80) don't think about the future. You will eventually retire (if you live long enough) and you will cease to have an income. You will be living on what you have saved and invested while you were working. Making more money does not have to mean enjoying greater luxuries now. It can mean that he lives exactly as he is currently living and socks the difference away towards retirement (or saving for college for his children should he have them).
.Net job, but no one can tell you which set of reasons will work for you.
.Net Job: .Net is as much fun for him
The trend I'm seeing among the people who respond on the "take the perl job" side seems to be that as long as he breaks even and he enjoys what he is doing, everything is great. That is true for the immediate future, but it implies that there is no value in saving and investing.
I am not near retirement age myself, but I work for a company where many of my co-workers are. I am seeing first hand what they are facing. They have doggedly stuck to COBOL and the mainframe and have done well for themselves until now. Now our company is moving away from the mainframe, and they are all in a very scary situation.
Managing a programming career today is a bit like surfing. You have to keep scanning for the next wave or you will get stuck. There are lots of waves, but some will take your farther and faster than others. You have to decide for yourself which wave to ride.
There are very valid reasons to choose either the perl job or the
I guess you could pretty well summarize them like this:
The Perl Job:
1) Original Poster expressed the feeling that he would prefer developing in Perl
2) Smaller company usually means greater personal responsibility
3) Playful environment
4) Lower pay
5) Fewer companies hiring this skillset.
The
1) OP doesn't feel coding in
2) Larger company means less personal responsibility, but can also mean more free time and less stress
3) More business focused environment
5) Higher pay
6) More companies hiring this skillset
There are workarounds, but the 360 controller is the only first class citizen... It looks like a nice controller, but come on! DirectInput is nice because of how easy it is to abstract the input devices. For XNA to be viable for PC games, it really has to support legacy hardware...
I also haven't been impressed with graphics speed. I'm just getting started with XNA, so I'm really making the graphics statement based on the SpaceWar starter kit. It is probably not the best example, but it is the only one I've looked at in depth.
Another option for bedroom programmers (who came up with THAT name???), is Phrogram. It was called Kids Programming Language, but my how it has grown. The new commercial version (which I think runs about $60) can compile MSIL code, so it can run in the .Net JIT CLR. I've seen better samples from Phrogram than XNA, but that could change since XNA is still in beta.
I think it would be great to lower the development bar so that a greater number of creative people could get involved. Think of how many great mods there are for existing games. The best games aren't always made by the best programmers...
I stand corrected.
I do not disagree with you at all. My point was that doing so would be difficult to the point of being unlikely. I do not think that anyone would undertake such without a profitable business model, and you are absolutely correct that at that point you have just another encyclopedia company.
Your point that Wikipedia's value is that it is not like the professional encyclopedia companies is correct. You and I may differ in our opinions of what its "unique value" is. I personally use it frequently for personal reference. For that use, informal reference, it is exceedingly valuable as long as the reader is at least somewhat skilled in reading critically. If I read in an entry that South Africa is populated entirely by leprechauns, I am capable of discerning that I am most likely looking at a vandalized page, and would look at the revision history. A third grader, perhaps, might not. If I read the article on leptons and read "There are three known flavors of lepton: the electron, the muon and the gluon." I would not know that a vandal had replaced "tau" with "gluon". I know just enough about particle physics to know the word "gluon" but not enough to know that it is wrong in this case.
Another poster pointed out that you could cite a revision number with Wikipedia, so I stand corrected on that point. Last time I wrote a research paper, citing online references was not an option because there were very few of them and almost no one had access to them. I have to smile at how quaint microfilm and microfiche seem now... If I remember correctly general encyclopedias were allowed as sources in elementary school. I could be wrong since it has been a very, very long time since I wrote a research paper myself and my children are not yet old enough to have been required to write one. My point here is that if we agree that certainly ONLY elementary students might be able to use it as a reference, it would be a dubious source since they have probably not learned enough critical thinking skills to weed out the bad information. Of course there is no better way to learn critical thinking skills than a string of "F" papers with increasingly harsh rephrasings of "This is obviously a vandalized entry, moron" written on them in blood-red ink...
One last thought, and I'll move along quietly... I have been watching with interest the One Laptop Per Child project. The gist is $100 laptops to go to developing countries for each school child TO REPLACE TEXTBOOKS among other things. One of the highly touted ideas is to include a copy of the Wikipedia so the students have access to a wealth of information. Think about that for a second. Imagine that the Wikipedia is quite possibly YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF INFO about practically everything in the world. You could literally have a generation of children in Thailand who grow up convinced that South Africa is populated by leprechauns. Yikes. That is an extreme example that would probably be caught by the teachers, but what about my lepton example? Not that specific case, but imagine how many SUBTLY vandalized pages or politically spun pages would exist in any copy of the Wikipedia that might serve as a whole nation of children's only source of info. Scary.
I think we agree that the Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool when taken for what it is. You just have to understand its nature and use it appropriately.
This would parallel FOSS pretty well since you have a group of people who have commit rights. The trick would be making the group large enough to handle the throughput. Finding a balance between academics and non-academics would be a challenge. Kind of like getting lions and hyenas to work together on a project: they just don't like each other... Each has great arguments why the other is unsuitable, but a balance of the two would be crucial to the success of such a project.
Forking the TEXT of Wikipedia would be no problem, but the IMAGES are another matter. I kicked around the idea of putting together a mobile device package for education and including the Wikipedia but ran into two problems: 1) the images are all submitted with their own rights and licenses (text is covered by one licence) and 2) nothing makes parents/teachers/other adults unhappy like finding out that the handy encyclopedia they either bought or downloaded for free for their child has buried within it information that is sexually explicit, hate filled, or just plain wrong.
Look at it this way, practically anyone can vandalize the Wikipedia, but over time it tends to "self heal". Great. But that means that on any given day a certain percentage of it is in need of "healing". Someone could say that Christopher Columbus was a dirty <insert hate category> who had a tiny <insert sexual reference> and who definitively proved that the earth was <flat|cubic|made of marshmallow cream>. It is all well and good that someone will repair that, but if Johnny writes his paper based on what it said when he last looked at it, then Johnny's going to repeat 5th grade (and possibly land in counciling).
Another benefit of "versioning" the info is citability. If I were a teacher I would not allow a student to use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper. Why? Let's say little Johnny cited the Wikipedia in his Columbus the Dirty <hate category> paper. When I go to check the little nimrod's reference, it doesn't say that any more. Great it got cleaned up, but how can you cite a reference to a moving target?
Now if there were a versioning system and Johnny had cited "Wikipedia 2.7", and I could go back to that version to check his references, then I could accept his paper. Also the fact that the version would be fact checked and edited before versioning would make it a much more valuable reference work. The "healing" process would occur before publication.
Of course this implies that some group of people with the interest and ability to do so would actually get involved. The task of editing all of Wikipedia would be gargantuan. But even if a new "version" were made every 2-3 years, it would be a very valuable "people's encyclopedia".
As a manager you are tasked with developing software quickly and cheaply. I liken it to being a farmer. You can till the soil, plant the seeds, and pull the weeds, but you have no control over the basic requirements for success. You can not make the sun shine or the rain fall. You are at the mercy of forces outside your control, yet your survival depends upon the outcome. The farmer prays for rain or does an elaborate rain dance totally naked while smeared with mud of different colors (FYI farmers in the US gave up on the primitive practice of irrigation years ago in favor of the mud-smeared-naked-rain-dance).
As a manager you desperately look for something that will improve the odds of your survival. Since you cannot develop the software yourself, you try as hard as you can to find that silver bullet...
In a tragic side-note, Tony Cripps was gunned down in an apparent drive by shooting by Billy Bloods...
Damn it, I warned you it was a bad joke.
Here's hoping this means you swallow it and it exits through the other end and NOT that it enters said other end and claws its way up to exit from your mouth.
I would if it were Return To Castle Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory... I haven't played in a while but that was all I played for about 2 years. Great multiplayer game that was totally free. Enough depth via the various classes/skills/weapons to be interesting.
No graphics, but since when did D&D need graphics?
VERY dungeon crawl, but pretty fun since no one besides me would EVER be DM. No geopolitical intrigue or interpersonal drama, but a TON of "what's behind door number 1", see the monster, kill the monster, collect the treasure and xp. In other words a fun side diversion.
Muwahahaha... All your idea are belong to us!
I'm not sure the world is ready for such customizability, but slashdot should boldly step into the late '90s world of customization!
This is why they have stated that they won't produce any until they have orders for at least one million units.
I'd agree with that. Now think of how many people want that beater Mustang vs. how many people want a new car that doesn't have the same potential, but works well enough out of the lot without any tinkering.
Neither group is better than the other, but they do have different objectives and viewpoints. I've known people who take the beater Mustang approach and spend all their time tweaking it out to get every RPM, BUT I've never heard any of them express the opinion that ALL car owners should do the same. They take great pride in their abilities and accomplishments, but revel in the fact that most people CANNOT do what they do. They KNOW that most people would never be willing to take the time to learn to do what they do, much less actually do it. They may derive feelings of superiority, but they do not feel the need to "convert the unbeliever".
To further flesh out the OS-as-car metaphor, Linux is like a car with a diesel engine , 8-track tape quadraphonic sound system and a CB radio. I don't mean that the technology is antiquated (which it is not), but rather that it isn't mainstream. You can't fill up a diesel engine at every gas station. You can't buy 8-track tapes in most places. More people communicate via cell phones than CB radios these days. You can't play a CD or MP3 through an 8-track player (at least not without modification).
As I said, I'm not trying to imply that Linux is antiquated, but rather that it a) is blocked from many mainstream file types and b) requires extra effort IN SOME AREAS for MOST PEOPLE than Windows.
Yes, most people can learn Linux and would be happy with it, IF 90% of the people they know and most of the content they care about weren't exclusively using another system.
Linux can be a great system for someone willing to put in the effort and time to learn it and tweak it, but most people are not willing to do so. Nor do I foresee that changing. The point has been made elsewhere in this discussion thread that the average user wants their computer to be an appliance that requires no more education or effort to use than the TV. To me, that is not a realistic expectation, but I am not an average user. Whether or not I want the average user to become interested in computers is irrelevant. My doctor may wish I would learn more about medicine, or my accountant might wish I would "keep records" or "follow accepted accounting principles", but it's just not going to happen.