Inexpensive or not isn't the point. What you are missing is that EVERY car has a $2000 physical cost associated with it. Each car costs additional money to make while each copy of the software essentially costs nothing (assuming you distribute over the internet and already have bandwidth to spare).
I am constantly shocked by the logical fallacies that get made over and over by chauvinists everywhere.
I also am very shocked which is why I posted my comment. There is no solid evidence of a correlation between violent games and movies and violent behavior in people. In my own life and the lives of the people I am close to I have never seen any correlation and I know that many other people would agree with me. Therefore, wheras the anti-violence community assumes a correlation without evidence I never assume anything.
I do believe, however, that the next generation will be more tolerant of violence and sex in movies and games. They will have the experience of growing up with it and knowing that it hasn't affected them. Hopefully then maybe we can start getting to the root of the problem and stop trying to find scapegoats.
This being said, violent media is still proven to have a VERY SERIOUS affect on many children and young teens. My mother is a behaviour specialist in the local school district and through her personal experiences has found most of these studies to be accurate.
I would be very interested in seeing some of those studies. I have a feeling that they are seriously flawed in how they are formed. What happens is they take a violent child and then break down why he is violent. They almost always come down to violent media because this is the answer they want.
There are two problens with that. One is that you have to measure every other factor in the childs life also - his home life, his school life, etc. Also there are a lot of children who are exposed to violent media and most of them never have a problem. But how do you measure that. Do you ask every good kid if he has ever seen a violent movie?
In summary, there can never be a reliable study since you could never truly encompass all of the contributing factors. There are so many factors involved that placing the blame on violent media is avoiding the real problem and is actually destructive. I personally would love to find a study that actually says that exposing kids to sex and violence at a young age makes them more able to handle the real world (which is inherently violent).
Why do you have to protect kids from digitized boobs or ass crack? Do you really think that his seeing an ass crack is going to change his life? Oh no! He saw an ass - now he is going to rape women and kill his classmates.
Another battle has been fought over this age old discussion of the effects of violence in games and movies on young children and in my opinion it was a victory for reason and logic.
There is always some new study that comes out that tries to link violence in movies to violence in real life and immediately afterwords there is another study that debunks the first. In my opinion we only need look at history for a reasonable answer.
I think we will all agree that we are far from living in the most violent time in history. The Dark Ages weren't just dark because of lack of innovation but because of the death, violence, and disease that dominated society. And yet as far as I can tell they didn't have movies or arcade games. Someone else here has already used the Hitler example and there are countless others that I could make.
The point is - violence has NOT increased in our society since the advent of movies and games. Even with the recent acts of terrorism here and abroad and the violence in the Middle East we are still living in one of the mostly peaceful times in history. Even the violence that is occuring is based on age old wars. The Middle East has been a hotbed for war for thousands of years.
Some people might say - what about the kids killing other kids in schools. Surely that has increased. There is no doubt that that has increased but did games or movies make those kids kill? I don't think so. They may have given them ideas on HOW to kill their classmates but it didn't encourage them to kill. The problem is much more deeply seeded and blaming movies or games is an absolute cop-out by parents and teachers. In many of these cases parents, friends, teachers, or counselors had an inkling that there was something wrong with the killer children but either didn't know what to do or thought it was just a phase. This is why I believe that parents should be held criminally liable for the actions of their minor children.
I would like to close with my own life story to bore you all. I grew up like many kids playing AD&D in the early 80's. I remember so many news stories about kids killing each other with swords and how it was all AD&D's fault. And yet I never wanted to kill anybody. None of my friends did either. As a matter of fact - the vast majority of people who played AD&D NEVER had seriously contemplated killing somebody. To this day I play many games that might be considered violent by some and yet I can't watch the surgeries on the health channel.
I also remember viewing porn and having adult magazines as far back as 12-13 and yet I am not a sexual deviant. I don't have any less respect for women because of it.
In summary, don't worry about what your kids watch and play. Instead worry about teaching them right from wrong and reality from fiction. Listen to your kids. Find out what troubles them. Talk to their teachers and counselors. Meet their friends' parents. Help them with their homework. Watch their ballgames, recitals, concerts, etc. Be a part of your child's life and all the porn and violence in the world won't make them be deviant or violent.
There will always be ways to circumvent technology like this. As long as the company makes a reasonable effort to comply with local laws then most law enforcement agencies will be satisfied.
The only time when this wouldn't be true is when circumvention becomes the norm as in the Napster case. Napster blocked certain names and users just renamed their files to use similar mispellings. At that point some other step must be taken.
First, am I am supposed to be scared by your lower number. You assuming that the number actually means when I first started on Slashdot and not when this name and id was created. Either way - being a long time member of slashdot doesn't make you any more wise or intelligent. I am actually starting to believe the contrary.
Second, you didn't even address my post. You instead reacted (in typical slashdot fashion) to only what you had an answer for.
Third, I assumed you were American because I am American and I see the close-minded ethnocentrism everyday from my colleagues.
Finally, to clarify my post. Languages and countries are not artificial boundaries. They truly exist. Wouldn't it be nice if I lived in Germany that I could view a website automatically in German; either translated by the company or with a link to a babelfish translation? It would be even nicer if I didn't get bombarded with ads for companies that don't even exist in my country.
If we truly want to share information without boundaries then we must eliminate the biggest boundary of them all - language. Now granted you can do like a lot of international companies do and ask you up front what country you are coming from and then send you to the respective home page but wouldn't it be nice if all that happened immediately. Obviously there are limits since there are thousands of languages and dialects throughout the world but it would at least be a step in the right direction.
How are country (and the related language) borders artificial? Are you so ethnocentric to believe that everything should be done in American English and other languages and countries be damned?
Not to sound like I'm jumping on the Microsoft bandwagon but there was a 64 bit Windows 2000 and there is a 64 bit Windows XP. Considering how in-bed Microsoft and Intel are I am sure they have been working on this for a lot longer than we will ever know.
That's a good point. I spent a couple seconds clicking on Darth Vader in Galactic Battlegrounds hoping he would get pissed off and say something funny. Or click on Luke and have him say that his daddy can kick my daddy's butt.
Not sure why more games don't have fun stuff like this.
Disclaimer -> Just got started this morning and I don't feel like reading 400 comments so I may be repeating somebody else thoughts.
Lindows had this planned from the beginning. They knew that by using a deceptively similar name they would get sued and receive tons of free publicity.
What they should focus on instead is providing a quality product and use regular marketing channels. No Linux distributor should ever sink to this level. It makes them no better than Microsoft. There are plenty of creative names out there that they could use. LinuXacross - bridging the gap between Windows(r) and Linux.
On another note -> I want so badly for the Linux community to get off of the friggin' Microsoft kick and start focusing on marketing Linux. Linux should not be about how it is better than Windows but how it is a great open operating system on its own with millions (optimistic) of people around the world contributing applications, drivers, support, etc. all for free. Every time you bash Microsoft to an end user they are going to think - "Man. He needs to get a life."
You have my whole hearted agreement on that. I am a big "no drug" person. The only time I take anything is when I have a headache and that is because I am a wimp. My girlfriend also read a book about how dehydration is the cause of many problems and that just by drinking water we could solve problems that medicine only covers (like indigestion).
a) What if we are God? What if God is only the collective unconcious of all mankind?
b) Chaos theory implies that ANYTHING on earth affects the Earth. You know, the butterfly flapping its wings thing.
c) We have no technology to "wipe out" the Earth. We could very easily wipe ourselves off the earth but the very large mass that is Earth will keep on ticking (and probably heal very nicely without us).
This nature vs nurture debate is as old as the hills. In the end it is a little bit of both that has an impact. For example, by father eats nothing but red meat and potatoes and yet he is healthy as a horse - including healthily low cholesterol and blood pressure. There's got to be something hard coded in there to make that possible.
See. That I accept and understand. I didn't mean to pull it out like that but it is important to always be concise and precise with your arguments otherwise people will find holes and discount your entire argument. I personally use Linux (Slackware and Suse) and Windows (2000 and XP) but I have one os per machine.
That's absolutely the point. You rejected a whole line of OS's because of problems you installing it on a particular computer with 3 other OS's alreay installed!
I remember NT4 being bad with multiple OS's. I seem to remember installing NT4 first and then letting everything else sort itself out. That is hardly a typical users dilemma though and I remember 95 being just as bad with the partitions.
By the way, NT4 didn't support FAT32 (except maybe in a later service pack - never used FAT32 so I don't remember).
"along with the crappy interface that cannot be tailored to the way you work"
Damn, I better go get rid of my macros, custom tool bars, etc. becuase this guy says they can't be tailored.
"no business should EVER be using spreadsheets for day-to-day information gathering, storage, and retrieval, especially if they share that data!"
I'm not even sure what to say to this bullshit. I've worked with Finance departments in small companies all the way to Fortune 500 (including where I am now) and every one of them uses a spreadsheet application (mostly Excel) to organize data extracted from Financial Applications (General Ledgers, etc.) for presentation to senior management. We've often talked about a super system that does everything that a financial analyst would do (including adding commentary, calculating forecasts and estimates, etc.) but we realize that this is just not feasible.
Somebody mod him down. He's obviously started a little early with the eggnog.
I love these half-hour stories. Well, what packages did you install. I mean Suse comes on 7 disks. There is quite a bit of room there for variety. And in either case, are you comparing on equal machines. Is your friend installing XP on a 600mhz celeron and you are installing linux on a Althon XP 1800. Provide more details instead of just throwing out some numbers.
I installed Suse the other night on a Dell GX1 -400 Mhz - 128MB. I installed the base packaged, most of the networking package, all of the games package, all of the KDE package (something like that at least). It took probably close to an hour from first putting the disk in to getting to a final working KDE desktop. XP on the same machine took about an hour and a half with a good amount of that being NTFS formatting on the 6GB hard drive.
So it is faster? Absolutely. Did I have a ton more options in Suse? Definitely. Does most of this matter to Joe User who just wants a machine with a fully working OS on it? No.
"Windows on the other hand, was a constant install, reinstall, defrag, tweak QEMM's memory manager to improve Win32's VM performance, and that took up to 15 hours a week -- an order of magnitude more than Linux."
Does anybody evey compare to Windows 2000 or XP? Sure you have a bad experience with 9x. It's a piece of crap and everybody knows it. You should have switch to NT4 back in the day.
The article is pretty good (except for the bullshit XP price - Joe User already has some version of Windows on their machine and would pay the $99 upgrade). I did however do a clean install using SUSE (Pro version was $80 with books, 7CD's and 1 DVD) and it went flawlessly. Of course, including starting KDE it takes just as long to boot as XP did on the same machine and both were about equal in performace.
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Inexpensive or not isn't the point. What you are missing is that EVERY car has a $2000 physical cost associated with it. Each car costs additional money to make while each copy of the software essentially costs nothing (assuming you distribute over the internet and already have bandwidth to spare).
I am constantly shocked by the logical fallacies that get made over and over by chauvinists everywhere.
I also am very shocked which is why I posted my comment. There is no solid evidence of a correlation between violent games and movies and violent behavior in people. In my own life and the lives of the people I am close to I have never seen any correlation and I know that many other people would agree with me. Therefore, wheras the anti-violence community assumes a correlation without evidence I never assume anything.
I do believe, however, that the next generation will be more tolerant of violence and sex in movies and games. They will have the experience of growing up with it and knowing that it hasn't affected them. Hopefully then maybe we can start getting to the root of the problem and stop trying to find scapegoats.
This being said, violent media is still proven to have a VERY SERIOUS affect on many children and young teens. My mother is a behaviour specialist in the local school district and through her personal experiences has found most of these studies to be accurate.
I would be very interested in seeing some of those studies. I have a feeling that they are seriously flawed in how they are formed. What happens is they take a violent child and then break down why he is violent. They almost always come down to violent media because this is the answer they want.
There are two problens with that. One is that you have to measure every other factor in the childs life also - his home life, his school life, etc. Also there are a lot of children who are exposed to violent media and most of them never have a problem. But how do you measure that. Do you ask every good kid if he has ever seen a violent movie?
In summary, there can never be a reliable study since you could never truly encompass all of the contributing factors. There are so many factors involved that placing the blame on violent media is avoiding the real problem and is actually destructive. I personally would love to find a study that actually says that exposing kids to sex and violence at a young age makes them more able to handle the real world (which is inherently violent).
Why do you have to protect kids from digitized boobs or ass crack? Do you really think that his seeing an ass crack is going to change his life? Oh no! He saw an ass - now he is going to rape women and kill his classmates.
Another battle has been fought over this age old discussion of the effects of violence in games and movies on young children and in my opinion it was a victory for reason and logic.
There is always some new study that comes out that tries to link violence in movies to violence in real life and immediately afterwords there is another study that debunks the first. In my opinion we only need look at history for a reasonable answer.
I think we will all agree that we are far from living in the most violent time in history. The Dark Ages weren't just dark because of lack of innovation but because of the death, violence, and disease that dominated society. And yet as far as I can tell they didn't have movies or arcade games. Someone else here has already used the Hitler example and there are countless others that I could make.
The point is - violence has NOT increased in our society since the advent of movies and games. Even with the recent acts of terrorism here and abroad and the violence in the Middle East we are still living in one of the mostly peaceful times in history. Even the violence that is occuring is based on age old wars. The Middle East has been a hotbed for war for thousands of years.
Some people might say - what about the kids killing other kids in schools. Surely that has increased. There is no doubt that that has increased but did games or movies make those kids kill? I don't think so. They may have given them ideas on HOW to kill their classmates but it didn't encourage them to kill. The problem is much more deeply seeded and blaming movies or games is an absolute cop-out by parents and teachers. In many of these cases parents, friends, teachers, or counselors had an inkling that there was something wrong with the killer children but either didn't know what to do or thought it was just a phase. This is why I believe that parents should be held criminally liable for the actions of their minor children.
I would like to close with my own life story to bore you all. I grew up like many kids playing AD&D in the early 80's. I remember so many news stories about kids killing each other with swords and how it was all AD&D's fault. And yet I never wanted to kill anybody. None of my friends did either. As a matter of fact - the vast majority of people who played AD&D NEVER had seriously contemplated killing somebody. To this day I play many games that might be considered violent by some and yet I can't watch the surgeries on the health channel.
I also remember viewing porn and having adult magazines as far back as 12-13 and yet I am not a sexual deviant. I don't have any less respect for women because of it.
In summary, don't worry about what your kids watch and play. Instead worry about teaching them right from wrong and reality from fiction. Listen to your kids. Find out what troubles them. Talk to their teachers and counselors. Meet their friends' parents. Help them with their homework. Watch their ballgames, recitals, concerts, etc. Be a part of your child's life and all the porn and violence in the world won't make them be deviant or violent.
There will always be ways to circumvent technology like this. As long as the company makes a reasonable effort to comply with local laws then most law enforcement agencies will be satisfied.
The only time when this wouldn't be true is when circumvention becomes the norm as in the Napster case. Napster blocked certain names and users just renamed their files to use similar mispellings. At that point some other step must be taken.
First, am I am supposed to be scared by your lower number. You assuming that the number actually means when I first started on Slashdot and not when this name and id was created. Either way - being a long time member of slashdot doesn't make you any more wise or intelligent. I am actually starting to believe the contrary.
Second, you didn't even address my post. You instead reacted (in typical slashdot fashion) to only what you had an answer for.
Third, I assumed you were American because I am American and I see the close-minded ethnocentrism everyday from my colleagues.
Finally, to clarify my post. Languages and countries are not artificial boundaries. They truly exist. Wouldn't it be nice if I lived in Germany that I could view a website automatically in German; either translated by the company or with a link to a babelfish translation? It would be even nicer if I didn't get bombarded with ads for companies that don't even exist in my country.
share information *without* any boundaries
If we truly want to share information without boundaries then we must eliminate the biggest boundary of them all - language. Now granted you can do like a lot of international companies do and ask you up front what country you are coming from and then send you to the respective home page but wouldn't it be nice if all that happened immediately. Obviously there are limits since there are thousands of languages and dialects throughout the world but it would at least be a step in the right direction.
"artificially segregate their market"
How are country (and the related language) borders artificial? Are you so ethnocentric to believe that everything should be done in American English and other languages and countries be damned?
Take a look at Class Trash PC. I'm not sure if they have your specific games but they have a lot of classic games available.
Not to sound like I'm jumping on the Microsoft bandwagon but there was a 64 bit Windows 2000 and there is a 64 bit Windows XP. Considering how in-bed Microsoft and Intel are I am sure they have been working on this for a lot longer than we will ever know.
That's a good point. I spent a couple seconds clicking on Darth Vader in Galactic Battlegrounds hoping he would get pissed off and say something funny. Or click on Luke and have him say that his daddy can kick my daddy's butt.
Not sure why more games don't have fun stuff like this.
Disclaimer -> Just got started this morning and I don't feel like reading 400 comments so I may be repeating somebody else thoughts.
Lindows had this planned from the beginning. They knew that by using a deceptively similar name they would get sued and receive tons of free publicity.
What they should focus on instead is providing a quality product and use regular marketing channels. No Linux distributor should ever sink to this level. It makes them no better than Microsoft. There are plenty of creative names out there that they could use. LinuXacross - bridging the gap between Windows(r) and Linux.
On another note -> I want so badly for the Linux community to get off of the friggin' Microsoft kick and start focusing on marketing Linux. Linux should not be about how it is better than Windows but how it is a great open operating system on its own with millions (optimistic) of people around the world contributing applications, drivers, support, etc. all for free. Every time you bash Microsoft to an end user they are going to think - "Man. He needs to get a life."
You have my whole hearted agreement on that. I am a big "no drug" person. The only time I take anything is when I have a headache and that is because I am a wimp. My girlfriend also read a book about how dehydration is the cause of many problems and that just by drinking water we could solve problems that medicine only covers (like indigestion).
Never heard of it. They are many religions that believe that we are all part God. The collective unconcious thing is Jung.
a) What if we are God? What if God is only the collective unconcious of all mankind?
b) Chaos theory implies that ANYTHING on earth affects the Earth. You know, the butterfly flapping its wings thing.
c) We have no technology to "wipe out" the Earth. We could very easily wipe ourselves off the earth but the very large mass that is Earth will keep on ticking (and probably heal very nicely without us).
This nature vs nurture debate is as old as the hills. In the end it is a little bit of both that has an impact. For example, by father eats nothing but red meat and potatoes and yet he is healthy as a horse - including healthily low cholesterol and blood pressure. There's got to be something hard coded in there to make that possible.
See. That I accept and understand. I didn't mean to pull it out like that but it is important to always be concise and precise with your arguments otherwise people will find holes and discount your entire argument. I personally use Linux (Slackware and Suse) and Windows (2000 and XP) but I have one os per machine.
That's absolutely the point. You rejected a whole line of OS's because of problems you installing it on a particular computer with 3 other OS's alreay installed!
That's interesting. Microsoft didn't seem to think so.
FAT32 - Access is available only through Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, and Windows 2000.
I also seem to remember that NT doesn't use fdisk (a dos app) but uses its own partition manager. You story is getting thinner and thinner.
I remember NT4 being bad with multiple OS's. I seem to remember installing NT4 first and then letting everything else sort itself out. That is hardly a typical users dilemma though and I remember 95 being just as bad with the partitions.
By the way, NT4 didn't support FAT32 (except maybe in a later service pack - never used FAT32 so I don't remember).
"along with the crappy interface that cannot be tailored to the way you work"
Damn, I better go get rid of my macros, custom tool bars, etc. becuase this guy says they can't be tailored.
"no business should EVER be using spreadsheets for day-to-day information gathering, storage, and retrieval, especially if they share that data!"
I'm not even sure what to say to this bullshit. I've worked with Finance departments in small companies all the way to Fortune 500 (including where I am now) and every one of them uses a spreadsheet application (mostly Excel) to organize data extracted from Financial Applications (General Ledgers, etc.) for presentation to senior management. We've often talked about a super system that does everything that a financial analyst would do (including adding commentary, calculating forecasts and estimates, etc.) but we realize that this is just not feasible.
Somebody mod him down. He's obviously started a little early with the eggnog.
I love these half-hour stories. Well, what packages did you install. I mean Suse comes on 7 disks. There is quite a bit of room there for variety. And in either case, are you comparing on equal machines. Is your friend installing XP on a 600mhz celeron and you are installing linux on a Althon XP 1800. Provide more details instead of just throwing out some numbers.
I installed Suse the other night on a Dell GX1 -400 Mhz - 128MB. I installed the base packaged, most of the networking package, all of the games package, all of the KDE package (something like that at least). It took probably close to an hour from first putting the disk in to getting to a final working KDE desktop. XP on the same machine took about an hour and a half with a good amount of that being NTFS formatting on the 6GB hard drive.
So it is faster? Absolutely. Did I have a ton more options in Suse? Definitely. Does most of this matter to Joe User who just wants a machine with a fully working OS on it? No.
"Windows on the other hand, was a constant install, reinstall, defrag, tweak QEMM's memory manager to improve Win32's VM performance, and that took up to 15 hours a week -- an order of magnitude more than Linux." Does anybody evey compare to Windows 2000 or XP? Sure you have a bad experience with 9x. It's a piece of crap and everybody knows it. You should have switch to NT4 back in the day.
The article is pretty good (except for the bullshit XP price - Joe User already has some version of Windows on their machine and would pay the $99 upgrade). I did however do a clean install using SUSE (Pro version was $80 with books, 7CD's and 1 DVD) and it went flawlessly. Of course, including starting KDE it takes just as long to boot as XP did on the same machine and both were about equal in performace.