I suspect that what all this really means is that they'll no longer carry *Windows* software that isn't designed to run with Windows XP.
Do you know how irritating it is to get something home that says it's 'for Windows' and then discover that it won't even come *close* to working on XP? And a lot of times, the software makers just say, "Well, screw you." (Older stuff is very susceptible to this. It doesn't matter if there's a fix available--that's still the answer.)
I doubt they're going to stop carrying Mac products or Red Hat or whatever because of this; they're probably just tired of dealing with, "Why won't Program X run on my computer? It says it works with Windows!" It's been long enough now that software makers ought to be actually catching up and writing their Win software for XP, not for ME/98SE/whatever.
Most of the areas, I couldn't care less. That one could nearly make me cry.
They trot out 'The Longest Journey' as an example of not-dead-yet... and while it *was* a fabulous game, it's not a very good example. The game set up completely for a sequel, which the company then decided wasn't going to happen. It can't have sold very well.
The question, then, is what are all of us adventure gamers to do? I started out as a little kid on the text adventures, then moved up to Sierra's lovely things... I can remember hours and hours on Gold Rush, for example, and it's quite possibly the only reason I actually know Psalm 23.
It's heartbreaking, in no small amount because it's been largely killed by this whole 'everything must be 3d' idea. Some games were just better in 2d. Some games--gasp--didn't *need* to be 3d. The first Gabriel Knight game was terrific, done completely in 2d. The second, done with actual people, was a little weird, but the storyline itself wasn't bad. The graphics on the third looked so terrible that I'm afraid to even borrow it.
So why, really, couldn't they have just kept polishing those 2d graphics? I'm still blaming the people who thought that games like FF7 were the pinnacle of perfection graphically, and never mind that their characters would have looked better built of Lego.
So, in the meantime, I keep hoping that Funcom will change their minds about a sequel to The Longest Journey, and that Sierra will come back and start making good games again, and that it'll be like the good old days.
On the other hand, if people would just suck it in and not gripe so much, I wonder how many of them get just how easy it *is* to carry around a fair-sized laptop provided the carrying case is constructed well.
My Toshiba is not precisely the lightest laptop in existance. I carry it with me everywhere, along with power cord and mouse and usually more than a few CD cases... and my entire day's worth of textbooks. Has it killed me yet? Nope.
With the amount that people seem willing to sacrifice for 'lightweight', you'd think they'd just get a PDA and get it over with. Except that they probably already *have* a PDA, and only want the laptop in addition for its gadget value.
There are a lot of ways of ranking pages, though--of determining which bits of the web are relevant for a certain search term. Every engine has a different way of doing it. This is the area where patents are beneficial; if a place wants to use Google's work, they can pay for it, or else they can come up with their own (perhaps better) method of ranking.
This is as opposed to the patents for things which are either (a) blindingly obvious, or (b) were invented and used long before the patenting company actually got around to it, like trying to patent using a web page to sell something. That's just dumb.
I mean, some people don't like the patent system in general, and that's fine. But at least this one isn't completely mind-numbingly idiotic.
Part of innovation is taking what works from past technology and then improving it. And both sides do this--and ought to. If one person came up with a very nice way of doing interfaces, it's really dumb to reinvent the wheel when you could, in fact, be refining the wheel and making it work *better*.
Obviously, nothing should be 'taken' to the point of intellectual property violation, but I think if *more* of this so-called 'theft' happened in software development, it'd result in much better software in general. Take what the other people did, fix the problems in it, make it better. Then maybe they'll take what you did, fix it even more, make it better.
And in the end you've got products on all sides that're more useable, more stable, and so on and so forth. I don't know how anyone can say there's something wrong with that. Building a better mousetrap doesn't necessarily mean you have to build it completely unlike every mousetrap ever made in the past.
...the average person does not have $400 a month to spend on internet service, even if they share it with their neighbors. The average person, for that matter, probably doesn't have neighbors who've even heard of 802.11b or 'wireless networking' or any of that, or who need anything more than dialup to meet their needs. (Presuming they have home internet access at all.)
I'm sure there are a lot of broadband subscribers who *wish* they could have an arrangement like that, but I don't think it's practical for most of us just yet.
It's not a matter of designing them so they *don't* do that. It's a matter of people knowing what they do when they have to.
Like, oh, those large labels on said hairdriers?
Your example, not mine.
Re:Laws should *NOT* be accessable to common peopl
on
Democracy in the Dark?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem is that working in a building and being governed by it are not the same thing.
A good example is copyright law. It applies to everyone. Do you know how many people in the United States have absolutely no idea what *is* and *is not* okay according to copyright law? (Forget ethics, morality, whatever, we're just talking about the law itself.)
One author who I used to be fond of has taken to sending C&D letters to young teenagers who happen to run 'adopt-a-pet' websites loosely based on her work. She, of course, has the lawyers. They don't.
IF A LAW APPLIES TO A PERSON, THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND IT.
It's that simple. There should be no question in the mind of whether X, Y, or Z is covered as 'fair use'. There should be no question of whether it's okay to play your stereo outside--as I've heard people discuss lately, due to vaguely-worded noise statues. There should be no question of what the legal manner of passing on a highway is. (I've never yet seen anyone do it, but last I checked, Ohio had circumstances in which you're legally required to honk your horn first.)
You can't get in trouble for not knowing the mechanics of how a bridge works. (Well, you know, usually.) You *can* get in trouble for not understanding how your laws work.
With Hotmail at this point, I think they can just *use* gibberish and usually get through to someone.
Oh, but it not being in English...
on
Pyromaniac Cosplay
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...just makes it more fun for those of us not really interested in the subject matter, because then you can imagine that the site says whatever you want it to say.:)
This is the first I've heard of this, and it does raise some troubling questions. The Iraqi leadership has always been painted as fundamentally uncaring about their people--and yet, they've taken the time to develop a system specifically to make sure that everyone is fed, something we can't even do here?
At the very least, it explains why the people support Saddam Hussein--if we come in and take over, I somehow doubt we're going to be nearly as concerned with making sure that people have food and other basic necessities.
Things *can* happen besides just lack of good sense. I.e., you make a purchase on your credit card... and then lose your job. Or a member of your family could suddenly fall ill and leave you without enough money to pay your bills *and* their medical expenses. Or your spouse could run your cards up just prior to a divorce. And so on, and so forth.
Some people may dismiss this. Oh, how stupid. Of course they didn't collect it, right? They didn't have to.
That's assuming that there's any rationality to sales tax.
My father had a home business for awhile. It failed--most small businesses do. During the time he operated, he made not one sale within our state. It happens, when you're making so few sales that you don't even actually have to file income tax.
The state of Ohio now claims he owes them something along the lines of $20,000 in sales tax.
But they don't phrase it as 'we think you made enough sales that you now owe us in taxes, which we estimate to be $20,000', no. They say 'you owe us $20k, pay up'.
And there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
For a large retailer? This could be a *significant* fear. Assessmants for hundreds of thousands--hell, even millions--in taxes that you didn't collect. Or... changing your policies to start collecting them ASAP.
How many of you could really say you'd choose the nameless, faceless consumers over your own business?
And I've noticed one thing about a lot of people at my (large, public) University.
1. We're allowed to drop classes up until almost mid-semester. Guess what? A lot of people will stay in, fail the first two tests, then drop. They don't get a failing grade because they aren't there, in the end, to *get* an overall grade.
2. I see plenty of people getting C's. Maybe not necessarily plenty with D's and F's--see the above, most of the ones who can't do it end up dropping--but C's are common, at least from where I'm standing.
3. Our instructors, anyway, always set the grading scale in the syllabus. It's usually pretty normal. Sometimes a little skewed to give people a little more room to pass with a C, but some of them require a full 95% or better to get a full A. If people do 'too well', it's the material that's the problem, not the grading itself.
4. People who are C or lesser students do not necessarily stay in college, period, much less in one class. They also generally are not going to Duke. (We're excepting sports players, here, as a general thing. I won't even go into that.) You see a lot of them in the low-level classes, but if you're looking at an Honors English Composition class like I had last semester, no, it's *not* going to be a proper curve by a long shot. The people who are there are there because they're good.
It's a matter of money. When you're paying for school, no, you're *not* going to be happy to get a D or an F. The solution among my classmates is to either not *take* the courses they don't think they can manage well in... or to drop so that, if they still have to pay, at least they aren't destroying their GPA over it, which can lead to getting kicked out of their program entirely.
At a place like Duke, does it even occur to this guy that he's not *getting* the students who really are complete academic failures? That he doesn't *see* the ones who are completely incapable of writing a comprehensible paper, the ones who can't find a standard deviation in statistics even when handed a calculator that does it for them?
I suspect if he saw some of the work *I've* seen from the classmates who later drop, he'd start understanding it more. Maybe they're lackluster in terms of attendance and participation, but I suspect *his* students are, overall, intelligent and competant.
As far as tech vs. everyone else? I don't know why things would be different. It may have more to do with job-market competition than anything else. If you start looking at humanities majors who're looking to go to the doctoral level and want to get into good grad schools, you start to see the same level of perfectionism, I bet....says the girl who almost threw a fit last semester over her one A-.
Although I wish this would happen in more *public schools*.
Instead of going with decent free software, it seems like the majority of public schools are so Windows-dependent that they'd rather keep Windows 95 until the end of time than switch. And that's just dumb. Sure, if the school system has enough to keep upgrading, it might be a little easier... but they never do.
The primary reason usually lies somewhere along the lines of 'but we have this database and our database guy doesn't know how to do anything but Access!' Sigh.
Windows has its merits. Continuing to use it when the only merits left are 'we're lazy and our tech people are ignorant'... that's not good.
Okay, okay, I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but with today's laptops being relatively lightweight and inexpensive, I don't see the point of these little doohickeys.
Give me my *real* computer, with 256mb of DDR SDRAM, 40gig hard drive, and DVD/CDRW. I can play The Sims while I'm waiting for classes to start, take notes on a keyboard large enough for serious typing, listen to as many MP3s as I can rip onto my hard drive... and keep my schedule and appointments and everything else close at hand, too.
How much of the population with weblogs/web journals do they really think comes from Silicon Valley?
I'm in Ohio. I have a web journal. (No, you may not have the address.) I am not employed; I/am/ a freshman at a public university, and so my 3.936 GPA is of more importance than employment.
None of which has anything to do with why I journal. I write there to avoid ranting to my friends, to talk about local news and personal happenings and all that junk. A few people I know read it periodically. I mostly just use it to vent.
I do not live or work in Silicon Valley. I never have. I hope to god I never will. (I'm *not* a coder or sysem administrator or any of that. Not by any stretch of the imagination.) I'm not alone in this. The first people I knew with LiveJournals were high-school aged girls. (Actually, most of them started out at Diaryland. LJ is marginally better.)
Among 'serious' bloggers, the ones I read are the ones who comment on politics and current events. Most of them, I suspect, are also not former tech-field workers.
So unless we're correlating these things like the correlation between sunspot activity and skirt length--thank you, Mr. Heinlein--I don't see how they're getting this information. There's certainly no *causation* involved, that I can see.
It's about the speed I get with my cable modem. And *my* wireless--admittedly using a cheapo home deal--starts choking when I go to the other end of the next room.:)
...based on keywords that the advertiser chooses, I believe. I think they check them to make sure they're relevant, in a basic way, but not much beyond that.
Basically, you give them possible words, they tell you approximately how many hits those words get, you pick the ones you want to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that what all this really means is that they'll no longer carry *Windows* software that isn't designed to run with Windows XP.
Do you know how irritating it is to get something home that says it's 'for Windows' and then discover that it won't even come *close* to working on XP? And a lot of times, the software makers just say, "Well, screw you." (Older stuff is very susceptible to this. It doesn't matter if there's a fix available--that's still the answer.)
I doubt they're going to stop carrying Mac products or Red Hat or whatever because of this; they're probably just tired of dealing with, "Why won't Program X run on my computer? It says it works with Windows!" It's been long enough now that software makers ought to be actually catching up and writing their Win software for XP, not for ME/98SE/whatever.
Most of the areas, I couldn't care less. That one could nearly make me cry.
They trot out 'The Longest Journey' as an example of not-dead-yet... and while it *was* a fabulous game, it's not a very good example. The game set up completely for a sequel, which the company then decided wasn't going to happen. It can't have sold very well.
The question, then, is what are all of us adventure gamers to do? I started out as a little kid on the text adventures, then moved up to Sierra's lovely things... I can remember hours and hours on Gold Rush, for example, and it's quite possibly the only reason I actually know Psalm 23.
It's heartbreaking, in no small amount because it's been largely killed by this whole 'everything must be 3d' idea. Some games were just better in 2d. Some games--gasp--didn't *need* to be 3d. The first Gabriel Knight game was terrific, done completely in 2d. The second, done with actual people, was a little weird, but the storyline itself wasn't bad. The graphics on the third looked so terrible that I'm afraid to even borrow it.
So why, really, couldn't they have just kept polishing those 2d graphics? I'm still blaming the people who thought that games like FF7 were the pinnacle of perfection graphically, and never mind that their characters would have looked better built of Lego.
So, in the meantime, I keep hoping that Funcom will change their minds about a sequel to The Longest Journey, and that Sierra will come back and start making good games again, and that it'll be like the good old days.
But I'm not really holding my breath.
On the other hand, if people would just suck it in and not gripe so much, I wonder how many of them get just how easy it *is* to carry around a fair-sized laptop provided the carrying case is constructed well.
My Toshiba is not precisely the lightest laptop in existance. I carry it with me everywhere, along with power cord and mouse and usually more than a few CD cases... and my entire day's worth of textbooks. Has it killed me yet? Nope.
With the amount that people seem willing to sacrifice for 'lightweight', you'd think they'd just get a PDA and get it over with. Except that they probably already *have* a PDA, and only want the laptop in addition for its gadget value.
Pfeh.
There are a lot of ways of ranking pages, though--of determining which bits of the web are relevant for a certain search term. Every engine has a different way of doing it. This is the area where patents are beneficial; if a place wants to use Google's work, they can pay for it, or else they can come up with their own (perhaps better) method of ranking.
This is as opposed to the patents for things which are either (a) blindingly obvious, or (b) were invented and used long before the patenting company actually got around to it, like trying to patent using a web page to sell something. That's just dumb.
I mean, some people don't like the patent system in general, and that's fine. But at least this one isn't completely mind-numbingly idiotic.
How on earth can someone mod a post 'informative' when it contains a phrase like 'best ass shot'?
Part of innovation is taking what works from past technology and then improving it. And both sides do this--and ought to. If one person came up with a very nice way of doing interfaces, it's really dumb to reinvent the wheel when you could, in fact, be refining the wheel and making it work *better*.
Obviously, nothing should be 'taken' to the point of intellectual property violation, but I think if *more* of this so-called 'theft' happened in software development, it'd result in much better software in general. Take what the other people did, fix the problems in it, make it better. Then maybe they'll take what you did, fix it even more, make it better.
And in the end you've got products on all sides that're more useable, more stable, and so on and so forth. I don't know how anyone can say there's something wrong with that. Building a better mousetrap doesn't necessarily mean you have to build it completely unlike every mousetrap ever made in the past.
...the average person does not have $400 a month to spend on internet service, even if they share it with their neighbors. The average person, for that matter, probably doesn't have neighbors who've even heard of 802.11b or 'wireless networking' or any of that, or who need anything more than dialup to meet their needs. (Presuming they have home internet access at all.)
I'm sure there are a lot of broadband subscribers who *wish* they could have an arrangement like that, but I don't think it's practical for most of us just yet.
It's not a matter of designing them so they *don't* do that. It's a matter of people knowing what they do when they have to.
Like, oh, those large labels on said hairdriers?
Your example, not mine.
The problem is that working in a building and being governed by it are not the same thing.
A good example is copyright law. It applies to everyone. Do you know how many people in the United States have absolutely no idea what *is* and *is not* okay according to copyright law? (Forget ethics, morality, whatever, we're just talking about the law itself.)
One author who I used to be fond of has taken to sending C&D letters to young teenagers who happen to run 'adopt-a-pet' websites loosely based on her work. She, of course, has the lawyers. They don't.
IF A LAW APPLIES TO A PERSON, THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND IT.
It's that simple. There should be no question in the mind of whether X, Y, or Z is covered as 'fair use'. There should be no question of whether it's okay to play your stereo outside--as I've heard people discuss lately, due to vaguely-worded noise statues. There should be no question of what the legal manner of passing on a highway is. (I've never yet seen anyone do it, but last I checked, Ohio had circumstances in which you're legally required to honk your horn first.)
You can't get in trouble for not knowing the mechanics of how a bridge works. (Well, you know, usually.) You *can* get in trouble for not understanding how your laws work.
...but I can't be the only girl who'd rather get hardware than flowers or chocolate.
Can I?
With Hotmail at this point, I think they can just *use* gibberish and usually get through to someone.
...just makes it more fun for those of us not really interested in the subject matter, because then you can imagine that the site says whatever you want it to say. :)
This is the first I've heard of this, and it does raise some troubling questions. The Iraqi leadership has always been painted as fundamentally uncaring about their people--and yet, they've taken the time to develop a system specifically to make sure that everyone is fed, something we can't even do here?
At the very least, it explains why the people support Saddam Hussein--if we come in and take over, I somehow doubt we're going to be nearly as concerned with making sure that people have food and other basic necessities.
Things *can* happen besides just lack of good sense. I.e., you make a purchase on your credit card... and then lose your job. Or a member of your family could suddenly fall ill and leave you without enough money to pay your bills *and* their medical expenses. Or your spouse could run your cards up just prior to a divorce. And so on, and so forth.
Some people may dismiss this. Oh, how stupid. Of course they didn't collect it, right? They didn't have to.
That's assuming that there's any rationality to sales tax.
My father had a home business for awhile. It failed--most small businesses do. During the time he operated, he made not one sale within our state. It happens, when you're making so few sales that you don't even actually have to file income tax.
The state of Ohio now claims he owes them something along the lines of $20,000 in sales tax.
But they don't phrase it as 'we think you made enough sales that you now owe us in taxes, which we estimate to be $20,000', no. They say 'you owe us $20k, pay up'.
And there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
For a large retailer? This could be a *significant* fear. Assessmants for hundreds of thousands--hell, even millions--in taxes that you didn't collect. Or... changing your policies to start collecting them ASAP.
How many of you could really say you'd choose the nameless, faceless consumers over your own business?
That's not one thing. That's four things.
I had a 7:45 class this morning and had to leave at 6:30 because the driving was bad. Lack of sleep makes me somewhat less coherent.
And I've noticed one thing about a lot of people at my (large, public) University.
...says the girl who almost threw a fit last semester over her one A-.
1. We're allowed to drop classes up until almost mid-semester. Guess what? A lot of people will stay in, fail the first two tests, then drop. They don't get a failing grade because they aren't there, in the end, to *get* an overall grade.
2. I see plenty of people getting C's. Maybe not necessarily plenty with D's and F's--see the above, most of the ones who can't do it end up dropping--but C's are common, at least from where I'm standing.
3. Our instructors, anyway, always set the grading scale in the syllabus. It's usually pretty normal. Sometimes a little skewed to give people a little more room to pass with a C, but some of them require a full 95% or better to get a full A. If people do 'too well', it's the material that's the problem, not the grading itself.
4. People who are C or lesser students do not necessarily stay in college, period, much less in one class. They also generally are not going to Duke. (We're excepting sports players, here, as a general thing. I won't even go into that.) You see a lot of them in the low-level classes, but if you're looking at an Honors English Composition class like I had last semester, no, it's *not* going to be a proper curve by a long shot. The people who are there are there because they're good.
It's a matter of money. When you're paying for school, no, you're *not* going to be happy to get a D or an F. The solution among my classmates is to either not *take* the courses they don't think they can manage well in... or to drop so that, if they still have to pay, at least they aren't destroying their GPA over it, which can lead to getting kicked out of their program entirely.
At a place like Duke, does it even occur to this guy that he's not *getting* the students who really are complete academic failures? That he doesn't *see* the ones who are completely incapable of writing a comprehensible paper, the ones who can't find a standard deviation in statistics even when handed a calculator that does it for them?
I suspect if he saw some of the work *I've* seen from the classmates who later drop, he'd start understanding it more. Maybe they're lackluster in terms of attendance and participation, but I suspect *his* students are, overall, intelligent and competant.
As far as tech vs. everyone else? I don't know why things would be different. It may have more to do with job-market competition than anything else. If you start looking at humanities majors who're looking to go to the doctoral level and want to get into good grad schools, you start to see the same level of perfectionism, I bet.
You're doing better than some people, then.
Although I wish this would happen in more *public schools*.
Instead of going with decent free software, it seems like the majority of public schools are so Windows-dependent that they'd rather keep Windows 95 until the end of time than switch. And that's just dumb. Sure, if the school system has enough to keep upgrading, it might be a little easier... but they never do.
The primary reason usually lies somewhere along the lines of 'but we have this database and our database guy doesn't know how to do anything but Access!' Sigh.
Windows has its merits. Continuing to use it when the only merits left are 'we're lazy and our tech people are ignorant'... that's not good.
I hadn't thought of that.
:)
*eyes the pack of Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade*
Well, I'm late, I'm sure, but... why not? So... happy new year to the European folks out there, and to everyone else when it gets to them.
...is never overkill.
Okay, okay, I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but with today's laptops being relatively lightweight and inexpensive, I don't see the point of these little doohickeys.
Give me my *real* computer, with 256mb of DDR SDRAM, 40gig hard drive, and DVD/CDRW. I can play The Sims while I'm waiting for classes to start, take notes on a keyboard large enough for serious typing, listen to as many MP3s as I can rip onto my hard drive... and keep my schedule and appointments and everything else close at hand, too.
Give me that over a $700 PDA any day.
How much of the population with weblogs/web journals do they really think comes from Silicon Valley?
/am/ a freshman at a public university, and so my 3.936 GPA is of more importance than employment.
I'm in Ohio. I have a web journal. (No, you may not have the address.) I am not employed; I
None of which has anything to do with why I journal. I write there to avoid ranting to my friends, to talk about local news and personal happenings and all that junk. A few people I know read it periodically. I mostly just use it to vent.
I do not live or work in Silicon Valley. I never have. I hope to god I never will. (I'm *not* a coder or sysem administrator or any of that. Not by any stretch of the imagination.) I'm not alone in this. The first people I knew with LiveJournals were high-school aged girls. (Actually, most of them started out at Diaryland. LJ is marginally better.)
Among 'serious' bloggers, the ones I read are the ones who comment on politics and current events. Most of them, I suspect, are also not former tech-field workers.
So unless we're correlating these things like the correlation between sunspot activity and skirt length--thank you, Mr. Heinlein--I don't see how they're getting this information. There's certainly no *causation* involved, that I can see.
It's about the speed I get with my cable modem. And *my* wireless--admittedly using a cheapo home deal--starts choking when I go to the other end of the next room. :)
It says that even non-members can 'take advantage' of the opt-out email list.
So... any bets on how many of those non-members actually swipe the emails?
They say they only provide the companies with the lists so that they can remove them, but how exactly do they go about *checking*?
...based on keywords that the advertiser chooses, I believe. I think they check them to make sure they're relevant, in a basic way, but not much beyond that.
Basically, you give them possible words, they tell you approximately how many hits those words get, you pick the ones you want to buy.