Even if we disregard the problems you note, the fact remains that one never knows when one will need to use the office for a night. If the staff is on a death march, they might have to work late; some staff might want to get in early.
If everyone in the world were altruistic, the kind of sharing proposed by the grandparent might work. Unfortunately, the more likely situation is a Tragedy of the Commons ordeal, because those who don't directly pay for a resource tend to a) overuse it (see the problems with health insurance and socialized medicine) and b) value it less.
So I am going to tell the grandparent that his or her idea is impossible, because that's the way human nature works.
Exactly. The point of general interest magazines like The Economist, and even The Atlantic, are to present information for the reader who wants to know and understand the world, even if he or she can't become an expert on every subject. Since the fundamental problems of the world -- like what makes a good government, religious tolerance or lack thereof, exploitation of the weak, how resources should be distributed, the work/leisure tradeoff, etc. -- have been more or less the same for centuries, and just flare in different forms, one can understand what is happening without an overwhelming investment of time.
The value of The Economist is that the magazine does an excellent job of culling important world events (i.e., an incident of terrorism, foreign leaders visiting, a summit) and linking them to larger trends, as well reporting individual stories on those larger trends. So, for example, The Economist picked up on issues of intellectual property and software patents before most mainstream publications had anything more to say than "Napster exists? Woah."
The Mac forum at Ars Technica has a long, continuing post about Altivec optimizations and how they should be used. The thread started more than two years ago and still gets relevent points and questions added to it. It's an amazing resource if you're interested in starting.
It's not like Apple has only just now discovered how to build great products. Apple has always been building great stuff, with the possible exception of the "beleagered" late 90's. The current frenzy around Apple, then, can only be partially explained by the greatness of their current crop of merchandise. Much of their success has to be attributed to fashion and sheer hype, which may evaporate as rapidly as it has come. It may only take one guy in a garage working on something we don't know about yet.
From the time I became intereested in computers in 1995 until about two years ago, Apple didn't make any good products. They had an inferior operating system until OS X 10.2. In '95 they were around System 7, IIRC, which was abysmal even when compared Windows 95, which left much to be desired. At that time they had a bewildering array of overpriced models whose benefit wasn't clear, to add to their general malaise. Things didn't really improve, and once they released OS X in 2001 at least they had an OS that showed promise. Unfortunately, the hardware at that time wasn't fast enough to run the software well. I don't think all their machines were acceptable for OS X until the iBooks moved to G4s, and perhaps not even then until every machine shipped with a 1 Ghz+ processor. Jaguar improved things, but not enough, because for a long time during the G4 tower era the hardware simply wasn't competitive with PC hardware given the price. That was finally remedied with the release of the G5s and the further clockspeed increases on the G4s. Only with the release of Panther have things become really, really good.
So good that I'm typing this on a PowerBook. From 1995 - 2001, I would have sworn I would never, ever type those words. Strange how things work out: The Apple computer that I wrote off as dead and probably should have died for incompetance is reborn; the one-time enemy of free computer users during the 80s becomes a champion of FOSS in the 00s; AMD takes the speed crown from Intel for an extended period of time. What a world...
Assuming this isn't just a troll of some kind, I'll answer honestly: yes, as another poster said, you can. If you're interested in programming, try http://developer.apple.com.
+1 Informative? This post has nothing to do with the topic (On-line games), makes a bunch of unsubstanciated accusations and is filled with generalizations that have nothing to do with anything.
For example, corporations pollute a river and kill the fish and the fishermen go out of business, so some of the former fishermen end up working in a sweatshop. Or they use their money to cut off or otherwise influence the distribution channels of the small farmer, and the farmer can't find anybody to truck his tomatoes to market. Or they buy up lots of land and drive up the land values so the young adult can't start his/her own small farm with a couple of cows and chicken coops.
Interesting as that may be, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the main story, which concerns MMORPGs. I didn't see any mention of river pollution or driving fishermen out of business in TFA.
Not every part of every game can be mind-blowing, incredible fun, because part of experiencing the highs of something also requires knowing the lows. So a level 20 character in a game might enjoy herself, but she looks at the level 50 character and says "That's where I'd like to be, with all that cool gear and access to high level content."
Now, maybe the intervening levels are fun, but the goal is the higher level stuff. Maybe I chose the word "boring" poorly, because the point I was trying to make was that there are some parts of the game that are less exciting than others, and that the $30 might be well-spent to cut 10 of those hours out.
I already addressed part of the "MS better fear Apple" idea in this post. You may want to read the post and replies.
I don't think MS is worried about Apple overtaking Windows and Office, which are still the crown jewels. Keep in mind that we're talking about a company that just posted $10B in profits last quarter. Reread that statement: $10B in profit, not revenue. Wow.
MS should be worried about the present media file format wars, which it could very well lose. Overall, I think the number of Windows customers MS stands to lose to Apple is probably negligible. I'd like to see a more open, multi-platform world -- I type this from a PowerBook -- but the realist in me sees predictions of MS's demise as premature.
To those of you who have posted "OMGWTFBBQ why would people pay for virtual goods?", I can only say that time has a value that varies from person to person. So a network admin, for example, who makes $50 per hour, and wants an item that would take him four hours to pop, might put a $200 value on that item. Even $200 seems a bit excessive, but that admin might say "fuck it" and spring for the $20, especially if that item allows him to access content that he would rather spend his time enjoying. In the same way, people who like MMORPGs but have limited time to play them might pay real money for in-game money because that money will help them get through the "clear the rat den levels." If their time is worth $50 per hour, and they spend $30 on gold that saves them 10 in-game hours of leveling boredom, that's a cost effective purchase. As long as this remains true, a market for MMORPG items will exist.
Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
Some MMORPGs recognize that this is bad for their game and take steps to prevent it. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, will "bind" some items to whoever picks them up. Technical solutions do exist, but as long as the economic conditions described in my first paragraph exist, I expect people will have a power incentive to get around the restrictions.
Adobe isn't the nicest company to deal with either but they are a hell of a lot better than MS.
That's like saying "I don't like the hooligans who spit in my eye, but at least they're better than the ones who beat the shit ouf of me with a tire iron."
I've got an old eMachine P3 500Mhz happily running Linux and I believe this box is still capable of doing real work. Sadly, the mindset we all seem to share is that that old box is too, well, old and too slow. So corporate environments buy newer and bigger machines. Why? So our little automation tasks can running a little faster?
For most corporations, it's easier to spend $300 - $1000 on a new machine than it is to pay someone to diagnose a problem with an old machine, order a part for it, wait for the part to arrive, install the part, make sure the part works properly, make sure nothing else breaks and make sure the OS recognizes it -- all for a machine that might be worth $50. In the meantime, that computer's user is out of luck and the company has to keep paying the support guy. It's easier to have the support guy wheel in another computer with the standard OS image (whether that image be Windows or Linux), plug it in, and go.
Part of TCO is recognizing cost effectiveness. Although I'm sure your PIII continues to serve you well, that doesn't mean corporations should have a hodge-podge of hardware and software that's a mess to support and hard to maintain.
1) The breadth of hardware and software combinations that must be supported; 2) the current state of programming and programming tools, which are fundamentally very, very hard to learn and master; 3) Windows is encumbered with legacy cruft that's necessary, but also makes it bloated.
Still, I think the most important reason Windows still sucks is that no strong incentive exists to improve Windows and no obvious definition of what "better" means. To some people it means faster, while to others it means more features. To some it means easier-to-use and to some it means more secure (and yes, there is at least some trade-off here). To some a computer means a magic box, while to some it means raw access to the machine and coding capability.
I also suspect that Windows is good enough and cheap enough for most people, and that, combined with its extremely strong network effect, makes it hard to give MS a strong incentive to make it better.
No one is going to get sick because of a lack of Internet access, unlike waste disposal or water service. People are not going to hurt themselves, which they may without street lights.
In the future, if Internet access -- which is different from "access to information" -- becomes more a necessity that can't be provided by private or semi-public companies, then maybe wireless Internet access will be useful.
In the meantime, I think libraries provide a useful resource: most public libraries offer Internet access, as well as access to books and such.
Without having to worry about Britain and the rest of western Europe, Hitler may well have been able to anniliate the Sovet Union. The American push for war would only have been able to come from Africa -- which lacked, among other things, sufficient industrialized and geographic proximity to the fight, to make it an effective place for America to base its entire effort. Although I don't think Hitler would have ultimately won, it could have been a much longer and more painful process.
Still, even during 1941, Hitler lacked a sufficiently large number of troop transports to even consider an invasion of Britain, so even without the amazingly stupid invasion of the Soviet Union, it's unclear how soon Germany would have been able to invade. With lend-lease, for all we know, Britain could have held out as late as 1944 or longer.
That's the point of alternative histories I suppose: to make it easy to nitpick at other alternate histories.
Apple overcame Compaq/HP/IBM (for a while) and was at the 50% of all computers sold for a certain period of time and far greater % in education.
Do you have a citation for this? My understanding is that Apple had 30% - 40% of the desktop computer market when they had the Apple ][, and that they quickly squandered that lead by 1985 because of their refusal to have any interoperability between the early machines and the Macintosh. MS understood the importance of backwards compatibility in their DOS -> Windows transition and their Windows upgrades, but Apple didn't.
Exactly. Economics is not a zero sum game, and as other countries increase in economic wealth and power, so too will the United States and other Western countries.
Sometimes I think econ 101 would be a helpful prerequisite to/. posters.
Arguably, Apple took even longer, since it was looking at next-generation operating systems before Copland development actually started. In addition, NeXT began (IIRC) in 1986.
Also, not only did OS X take a long time to develop, it took an even longer time to become usable. The first desktop version, 10.0, was released in Mar. 2001, and it sucked. Actually, it worse than sucked, it was closer to a beta than a release. I consider it more of a developer's preview. The next version, 10.1, released in Sept or Oct 2001, was usable but still too slow, particularly for the hardware at that time. The first version I would call good, and good enough for the casual user, was Jaguar, 10.2.
Most estimates of the cost of developing OS X in its present are around $1 billion. (Cost of acquiring NeXT was $420M, plus all the development time and money. I think part of the Copland money was counted in there too.) That's a whole lot of development time, money and effort to throw out for a hypothetical, potential and probably minor speed increase. Given the further elaboration above, I agree with the parent's implied answer.
Still, one could argue that much of the time the parent and I count as "working" on OS X didn't really count (i.e. Copland, which failed, and NeXT, much of which didn't make it into OS X), but these timelines were still important in making today's OS X what it is.
Sun is afraid of the PR consequences of their relationship with Microsoft, that's why they are trying to downplay it.
No, Sun is afraid of the technical and hence business consequences of their relationship with Microsoft. The latter has a three step process of dealing with "partners:"
1) Steal their technology
2) Make a rival product
3) Destroy partner, and possibly purchase the dry husk that remains of a once-lush company for a song.
The most significant consequence of Sun's agreement will probably be Microsoft gaining more ground in server-land on one side of Sun, while Linux gains more ground on the other. These trends were already apparent before the agreement, so I chalk up the agreement to Sun thrashing around in an attempt to find some direction that might keep them in business.
Problem is that Microsoft's vastly more likely to eat Sun's lunch than vice-versa. The most probable outcome from all this is that MS gets more headway at the top of the market while Sun collapses into a White Dwarf. Since Microsoft is the monopolist/. justifiably loves to hate, that would be a Bad Thing.
Lovely, except that Evolution doesn't run on Windows or OS X. That limits its use for the vast majority of the computing population.
(Not that there's anything wrong with creating a program for a particular platform, but it's a bit disingenuous to suggest an alternative to a Windows program that doesn't run on Windows.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, IBM, which provided the stone (Linus brought the pot), is going to put that stone to an even better purpose -- SCO's head.
If everyone in the world were altruistic, the kind of sharing proposed by the grandparent might work. Unfortunately, the more likely situation is a Tragedy of the Commons ordeal, because those who don't directly pay for a resource tend to a) overuse it (see the problems with health insurance and socialized medicine) and b) value it less.
So I am going to tell the grandparent that his or her idea is impossible, because that's the way human nature works.
The value of The Economist is that the magazine does an excellent job of culling important world events (i.e., an incident of terrorism, foreign leaders visiting, a summit) and linking them to larger trends, as well reporting individual stories on those larger trends. So, for example, The Economist picked up on issues of intellectual property and software patents before most mainstream publications had anything more to say than "Napster exists? Woah."
The Mac forum at Ars Technica has a long, continuing post about Altivec optimizations and how they should be used. The thread started more than two years ago and still gets relevent points and questions added to it. It's an amazing resource if you're interested in starting.
I don't think Usenet appreciates you insulting it like that. Usenet has long been the seamy underbelly.
Kazaa is more like the pile of excrement after everything useful has already been digested and absorbed.
From the time I became intereested in computers in 1995 until about two years ago, Apple didn't make any good products. They had an inferior operating system until OS X 10.2. In '95 they were around System 7, IIRC, which was abysmal even when compared Windows 95, which left much to be desired. At that time they had a bewildering array of overpriced models whose benefit wasn't clear, to add to their general malaise. Things didn't really improve, and once they released OS X in 2001 at least they had an OS that showed promise. Unfortunately, the hardware at that time wasn't fast enough to run the software well. I don't think all their machines were acceptable for OS X until the iBooks moved to G4s, and perhaps not even then until every machine shipped with a 1 Ghz+ processor. Jaguar improved things, but not enough, because for a long time during the G4 tower era the hardware simply wasn't competitive with PC hardware given the price. That was finally remedied with the release of the G5s and the further clockspeed increases on the G4s. Only with the release of Panther have things become really, really good.
So good that I'm typing this on a PowerBook. From 1995 - 2001, I would have sworn I would never, ever type those words. Strange how things work out: The Apple computer that I wrote off as dead and probably should have died for incompetance is reborn; the one-time enemy of free computer users during the 80s becomes a champion of FOSS in the 00s; AMD takes the speed crown from Intel for an extended period of time. What a world...
Assuming this isn't just a troll of some kind, I'll answer honestly: yes, as another poster said, you can. If you're interested in programming, try http://developer.apple.com.
For example, corporations pollute a river and kill the fish and the fishermen go out of business, so some of the former fishermen end up working in a sweatshop. Or they use their money to cut off or otherwise influence the distribution channels of the small farmer, and the farmer can't find anybody to truck his tomatoes to market. Or they buy up lots of land and drive up the land values so the young adult can't start his/her own small farm with a couple of cows and chicken coops.
Interesting as that may be, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the main story, which concerns MMORPGs. I didn't see any mention of river pollution or driving fishermen out of business in TFA.
Now, maybe the intervening levels are fun, but the goal is the higher level stuff. Maybe I chose the word "boring" poorly, because the point I was trying to make was that there are some parts of the game that are less exciting than others, and that the $30 might be well-spent to cut 10 of those hours out.
I don't think MS is worried about Apple overtaking Windows and Office, which are still the crown jewels. Keep in mind that we're talking about a company that just posted $10B in profits last quarter. Reread that statement: $10B in profit, not revenue. Wow.
MS should be worried about the present media file format wars, which it could very well lose. Overall, I think the number of Windows customers MS stands to lose to Apple is probably negligible. I'd like to see a more open, multi-platform world -- I type this from a PowerBook -- but the realist in me sees predictions of MS's demise as premature.
Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
Some MMORPGs recognize that this is bad for their game and take steps to prevent it. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, will "bind" some items to whoever picks them up. Technical solutions do exist, but as long as the economic conditions described in my first paragraph exist, I expect people will have a power incentive to get around the restrictions.
That's like saying "I don't like the hooligans who spit in my eye, but at least they're better than the ones who beat the shit ouf of me with a tire iron."
For most corporations, it's easier to spend $300 - $1000 on a new machine than it is to pay someone to diagnose a problem with an old machine, order a part for it, wait for the part to arrive, install the part, make sure the part works properly, make sure nothing else breaks and make sure the OS recognizes it -- all for a machine that might be worth $50. In the meantime, that computer's user is out of luck and the company has to keep paying the support guy. It's easier to have the support guy wheel in another computer with the standard OS image (whether that image be Windows or Linux), plug it in, and go.
Part of TCO is recognizing cost effectiveness. Although I'm sure your PIII continues to serve you well, that doesn't mean corporations should have a hodge-podge of hardware and software that's a mess to support and hard to maintain.
My university actually encouraged people not to use Windows machines because those usually meant more work for the IT department.
Still, I think the most important reason Windows still sucks is that no strong incentive exists to improve Windows and no obvious definition of what "better" means. To some people it means faster, while to others it means more features. To some it means easier-to-use and to some it means more secure (and yes, there is at least some trade-off here). To some a computer means a magic box, while to some it means raw access to the machine and coding capability.
I also suspect that Windows is good enough and cheap enough for most people, and that, combined with its extremely strong network effect, makes it hard to give MS a strong incentive to make it better.
In the future, if Internet access -- which is different from "access to information" -- becomes more a necessity that can't be provided by private or semi-public companies, then maybe wireless Internet access will be useful.
In the meantime, I think libraries provide a useful resource: most public libraries offer Internet access, as well as access to books and such.
Without having to worry about Britain and the rest of western Europe, Hitler may well have been able to anniliate the Sovet Union. The American push for war would only have been able to come from Africa -- which lacked, among other things, sufficient industrialized and geographic proximity to the fight, to make it an effective place for America to base its entire effort. Although I don't think Hitler would have ultimately won, it could have been a much longer and more painful process.
Still, even during 1941, Hitler lacked a sufficiently large number of troop transports to even consider an invasion of Britain, so even without the amazingly stupid invasion of the Soviet Union, it's unclear how soon Germany would have been able to invade. With lend-lease, for all we know, Britain could have held out as late as 1944 or longer.
That's the point of alternative histories I suppose: to make it easy to nitpick at other alternate histories.
Do you have a citation for this? My understanding is that Apple had 30% - 40% of the desktop computer market when they had the Apple ][, and that they quickly squandered that lead by 1985 because of their refusal to have any interoperability between the early machines and the Macintosh. MS understood the importance of backwards compatibility in their DOS -> Windows transition and their Windows upgrades, but Apple didn't.
Sometimes I think econ 101 would be a helpful prerequisite to /. posters.
Or maybe modern art is a big joke, like some recent literary criticism.
I'm sure he would, if you will reconsider your use of the contraction "you're."
Also, not only did OS X take a long time to develop, it took an even longer time to become usable. The first desktop version, 10.0, was released in Mar. 2001, and it sucked. Actually, it worse than sucked, it was closer to a beta than a release. I consider it more of a developer's preview. The next version, 10.1, released in Sept or Oct 2001, was usable but still too slow, particularly for the hardware at that time. The first version I would call good, and good enough for the casual user, was Jaguar, 10.2.
Most estimates of the cost of developing OS X in its present are around $1 billion. (Cost of acquiring NeXT was $420M, plus all the development time and money. I think part of the Copland money was counted in there too.) That's a whole lot of development time, money and effort to throw out for a hypothetical, potential and probably minor speed increase. Given the further elaboration above, I agree with the parent's implied answer.
Still, one could argue that much of the time the parent and I count as "working" on OS X didn't really count (i.e. Copland, which failed, and NeXT, much of which didn't make it into OS X), but these timelines were still important in making today's OS X what it is.
No, Sun is afraid of the technical and hence business consequences of their relationship with Microsoft. The latter has a three step process of dealing with "partners:"
1) Steal their technology
2) Make a rival product
3) Destroy partner, and possibly purchase the dry husk that remains of a once-lush company for a song.
The most significant consequence of Sun's agreement will probably be Microsoft gaining more ground in server-land on one side of Sun, while Linux gains more ground on the other. These trends were already apparent before the agreement, so I chalk up the agreement to Sun thrashing around in an attempt to find some direction that might keep them in business.
Sorry, the astronomy metaphors are too easy...
(Not that there's anything wrong with creating a program for a particular platform, but it's a bit disingenuous to suggest an alternative to a Windows program that doesn't run on Windows.)