I'm sure Microsoft has planned this to 'encourage' people to upgrade after they've had Vista out a while.
The thing is, there are over a billion 32-bit not-Vista ready machines out there, and Microsoft is going to not have a supported OS that will run on any of them in the near future. There will be a bunch of really nice hardware out there that will be pretty much worthless as far as a lot of mainstream computer users are concerned. That is, unless they'll let a knowledgeable friend help them rehabilitate that machine into a Linux system. That, or Linux fans will have inexpensive access to a lot of hardware at a really low cost, if you can keep them from going through the Dell recycling program or equivalent. I could build a computer lab for about the cost of the new monitors that I'd invest in.
They could be using XP to access mainframes or Terminal Services servers. I'm not saying that's how they do it, but it is possible to use XP in enterprise environments without saving data on the hard drive.
One aspect of marketing is figuring out how many of your product to make. Production is a part of marketing, since it is the marketing department who basically determines how many units you need. I mean, you wouldn't let production make 100 million of an item if marketing only saw demand for 20 million, right? Companies shouldn't really have CEOs picking a number out of air about how many he'd like to sell and producing that amount, the marketing department is supposed to figure out what demand is so the company can make the right amount, and then try to generate new business when the company has excess capacity. Likewise, if marketing thinks their is demand for 20 million, but you can only produce 5 or 10 million, they kind of need to communicate that to the customer, or you'll have 10 million fans screaming, "OMG, what is wrong with Nintendo!?? When will I be able to buy a Wii!?" more than we currently do.
I went with the Good Housekeeping reviews when we bought our vacuum. We got a Hoover Saavy, which I think can be used bagged or bagless, may depend on the specific model. Good Housekeeping said it was the best performing at any price, and we got it for $180 (after a gift card rebate we were given at the checkout counter at Target), less than half the price of most Dyson models. My wife is quite pleased with it.
Christianity teaches that Jesus is the God-man. That is, his mother was human, his conception caused by the Holy Spirit, so that the mix of his divinity (Godness) and humanity has cured our humanity from some of its brokenness, and his death was the death of sin, and his rising from the third day was the defeat of our mortality that gives us a chance at eternal life. If he had a human father, that's not the case, Jesus wasn't God, and his death would not be sufficient to redeem humanity from sin. Some individuals who claim to be Christian would disagree, but probably 1.5 billion of the 1.6 billion Christians would agree. The Muslims and Jews disagree.
I know we're off topic. I've played Wesnoth, but it started to wear on me. I'll look into Spring though. Thanks for the info. I also have played Tremulous, but it seems to be dying a bit.
I can copy 2 GB of data from one SATA drive to another on my 2 year old Debian box in 1 minute. This and the slow network stack have always been two of my biggest complaints against Windows. Glad I kicked that habit. I do miss running new games, but I've got NWN 1, XCOM on running on DOSBOX, and UQM and hopefully those will tide me over until I find a Wii.
MSN, the default home page of many has been pushing Vista. My father-in-law has asked about Vista, because he thought it was the next big thing because he saw it on MSN, so he figured it was a big deal. I nearly had a heart attack when I walked into the kitchen and saw my wife looking at a large Vista ad on the MSN site because MSN didn't like our computer, Iceweasel on Debian, and redirected her from her selected video link to an ad recommending she buy Vista.
How long till we see 8 year olds with their own car. And every parent with close to enough money to not think about it will buy one for their kid so they don't have to ride the bus, and the parents don't have to drive their kids to school. Expensive private grade schools will have a student parking lot. The parents will strap their kid in the car, and their will be buckle attendant at the lot to help the kids out of the car and set it to park themselves, and then load the kids in the car when they're ready to return home. You'll think the car is empty, but it will be full with a half dozen 10 year old girls headed to the mall 20 miles away.
Symantec doesn't need to receive a check from Microsoft. If every copy of Windows was replaced by OS X or Linux over night, Symantec's software would be worth about 1/10 of what it currently is, because they are entrenched in Windows, and they're like a leach attached to the underside of a cow. If the cow dies in the middle of nowhere, the leach will died soon after. Symantec may not be on the best of terms with Windows, but they're like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, they are convinced of their own self worth and they want to remind everybody else of it, but if Linux and OS X suddenly saw the same market share that Firefox enjoys, Symantec would sink almost as fast as Microsoft.
It could be that things are flattening out. Do those numbers take in iTunes sales? I saw somewhere (Ars maybe?) that said Apple sold twice as many tracks as CDs were sold in the first quarter. If a typical CD has 10 songs, then Apple is now selling 20% of the music, money that 5 years ago was buying CDs, and this be a huge step toward digital only music sales.
It almost seems like the two biggest free ad networks that they had in the past 20 years have stopped working for them, MTV (which needs to drop the M for something more accurate) and P2P. Maybe the RIAA needs to start an Internet video network to advertise their artists with music videos to improve sales. When I was in college, I would watch MTV 10 hours a week, and I had a decent idea who artists were, now I have no idea. I never went to a concert, and never bought more than 3 dozen CDs, but I imagine people that do spend money on music feel a similar apathy.
Further, if they want me to pay for anything they're selling, they can start acting like the proverbial mom-and-pop running their store who are happy to have my business instead of the offended matre'd at the country club who wants to keep out the riffraff.
Of course, the real problem is copyright. Sure we don't like DRM, but if copyright limits were much more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this problem. Current artists would have to produce something better than what was being produced 20 years ago, otherwise, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or XYZ Music Distributors could offer low-cost-DRM-free media from 20 years ago as an competitor to the stuff that's available today. Media companies would then have to try to find fresher IP than Star Trek "Every clip ever aired" DVD collection (only $3000!!!), Survivor Season 99, or Yet Another Hackfest Movie, or Rehash Mashup Remade from Last Year Song by "Diva you don't want to stand within 100 feet of for fear of catching an airborne STD".;) It's crazy that A-list actors make more money making one movie than 90% of us will make in our whole life. If movie companies would spend less on actors, they would have a lot more money to spend making more movies.
Because the man that uses porn is more likely to look at women like objects or a piece of meat instead of as people or equals as they deserve. Not every man does it, but its a pretty significant percentage of men that indulge in a pornography habit.
I think the Timothy Zahn Cobra series that did a great job of explaining it. One of the areas he explored was how the original organics of the body won't take well to the modification and stress they go under when performing extraordinary feats of athleticism, and you'll end up with a bunch of broken down 40 year olds that hobble around because of tissue damage, pretty similar to the situation the NFL is trying to deal with in a lot of their middle aged retirees. His characters also had to deal with being weapons for the rest of their life even after they were discharged. Good set of books.
Abolitionists in the 1850s considered slavery "morally reprehensible" while slave holders didn't. In the end, the US government recognized that slaves were people that deserve the full protection of the law that white people had. Likewise, the pro-life (anti-abortion) groups of today think that unborn babies have just as much right to be protected by the law as the African slaves that earned those same protections 145 years ago.
Part of the reason there is so much venom in federal politics today is because the Courts took the law out of the states hands when they overturned every state legislation restricting abortion. If Row vs Wade is overturned, there will still be states that have legal abortion, but other states that could outlaw the procedure within their boundaries if they wished. Abortion would cease to be an issue at the national level, and then the Christian right would stop giving 100% of their support to the Republicans, which would flip American politics on its head and give a lot of other issues (environmentalism, immigration, etc.) a chance to be dealt with as primary issues.
Actually, it takes time because after the check is given to the bank, it has to clear the bank that the check is written against.
If your bank allowed you to have full access to the funds before they had received the funds from the other bank, it would be a simple matter to have a buddy (or yourself) setup 2 fake accounts that cost a $50 deposit for each, and then write a check for $5000 from one account to the other, which you then take to the bank, deposit and instantly withdraw the $5000. By the time your bank forwards the check and finds out the account doesn't have the funds to clear the check, you've made off with a $4900 profit, and the banks have to track you down with as much to go on as a bank robber except you've got a 2 day head start.
If your bank is nice, and you've had an account for a while, they might let you overdraw your previous balance by a small fraction of the deposit amount, but that depends on how good of a customer they consider you.
Maybe it's already built in and they'll just activate it with another firmware upgrade?? Nope, they'll make you pony up the big bucks for 2 new controllers to replace the two you already have (assuming you have two of course).
I wonder how much of their hand wringing/whining is due to number portability. Now that people can change more easily from one carrier to another, is this a result of them trying to retain the customers they now have to compete for, but don't want to.
I'm torn, as a non-cell phone user about the way that the government allows large conglomerates to bid up the price of the spectrum with two ill effects. One, it prohibits small carriers from competing well with larger ones, and it keeps the prices of plans up, since the carriers have to charge a high enough price to get back the money they've paid to the government, which basically works as a large, expensive tax on cell phone users. Too bad there isn't another way to go about allocating bandwidth that the government didn't decide to earn billions of dollars on.
It seems to me that the party representatives present at each polling location are present to prevent fraud at the polling location. That should be true whether the voting is being done electronically or manually.
If you want to preserve anonymity, you can't let someone have any method of verifying their own vote, or someone could force them to turn over that ability to check their vote. Could you imagine the results of someone wanting to sway the vote, and being able to verify that the people they sent into the polls voted the way they were told to? If someone orders me to go vote for candidate X or he'll do something nasty to me, how can he currently prove that I didn't? He can't. But if I have a proven way to verify my vote after the election, anybody could threaten me that they want me to vote a certain way and turn over my proof of vote as a "Don't get the snot kicked out of you" card, with failure to do so being seen as a failure to comply. The ability to verify your vote has to end for you personally when you walk out the door to protect your right to vote free of coercion.
The only reason you need competitors is to make the merged company try to please the subscriber. Considering their user base could grow if they improve their service, I think there is plenty of competition in the form of local radio and podcasts. (I wish car companies would include a SD slot, as opposed to CD/tape, for users to plug in downloaded or ripped content.) If they want more people's money, then they'll have to do better than those two alternatives. Heck, once someone goes to the effort of buying and installing a satellite radio in their car, there isn't much the company has to do to keep their business, as long as they don't really mess things up by axing favorite content or adding commercials when the subscriber won't stand for it, so they basically have a monopoly on that owner, because they aren't likely to pay for another radio and installation. Once someone signs up for the service, for all intents and purpose, competition don't benefit the subscriber much, until the satellites chose to stop pursuing new customers.
The point of the controller was that it would be easy to master and immerse you in the game so that you could forget about the control mechanism. I'd say that if it's easy to master, then the wiimote is working perfectly.
A real life sport isn't fun because it's hard to master, it fun because of the exhilaration of making the occasional great play, comradery of playing with friends, and the learning how to apply previously developed skills to new situations, and snap decision making skills as well as developing analytical thinking in how to win in the moments between plays.
It sounds like you're more complaining about the length of games, or you haven't found something that will hold your attention.
This is really only the belief of a subset of Christianity known as Fundamentalism. One of the fundamentals of Fundamentalism is that every word of the bible is literally true, especially the account of God creating the world in the first chapter of Genesis.
Unfortunately for Fundamentalists, the second Chapter gives a second account of the creation story that conflicts with the first. The first says that humanity was created on the 6th day, after everything else (the animals and other creatures were created on days 4 and 5 I think). In the second account, God made Adam (Hebrew for man), then wanted to create a companion for him, so then created all of the animals, and when none were sufficient, created Eve (Hebrew for woman). So how do they reconcile this in Fundamentalism? I assume they must think when God created Adam on day six, he brought to him the animals created on earlier days, then made Eve, which doesn't fit the text, but does allow them to ignore that their fundamentals are broken. The reason that the Hebrews had two accounts of creation were that each explained something important about humanity. The first said that we are the pinnacle of God's creative act. The second, that men and women are complementary parts of a whole, made to be together.
To bad we all have to live with the results of bad Fundamentalist theology.
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The thing is, there are over a billion 32-bit not-Vista ready machines out there, and Microsoft is going to not have a supported OS that will run on any of them in the near future. There will be a bunch of really nice hardware out there that will be pretty much worthless as far as a lot of mainstream computer users are concerned. That is, unless they'll let a knowledgeable friend help them rehabilitate that machine into a Linux system. That, or Linux fans will have inexpensive access to a lot of hardware at a really low cost, if you can keep them from going through the Dell recycling program or equivalent. I could build a computer lab for about the cost of the new monitors that I'd invest in.
They could be using XP to access mainframes or Terminal Services servers. I'm not saying that's how they do it, but it is possible to use XP in enterprise environments without saving data on the hard drive.
One aspect of marketing is figuring out how many of your product to make. Production is a part of marketing, since it is the marketing department who basically determines how many units you need. I mean, you wouldn't let production make 100 million of an item if marketing only saw demand for 20 million, right? Companies shouldn't really have CEOs picking a number out of air about how many he'd like to sell and producing that amount, the marketing department is supposed to figure out what demand is so the company can make the right amount, and then try to generate new business when the company has excess capacity. Likewise, if marketing thinks their is demand for 20 million, but you can only produce 5 or 10 million, they kind of need to communicate that to the customer, or you'll have 10 million fans screaming, "OMG, what is wrong with Nintendo!?? When will I be able to buy a Wii!?" more than we currently do.
I went with the Good Housekeeping reviews when we bought our vacuum. We got a Hoover Saavy, which I think can be used bagged or bagless, may depend on the specific model. Good Housekeeping said it was the best performing at any price, and we got it for $180 (after a gift card rebate we were given at the checkout counter at Target), less than half the price of most Dyson models. My wife is quite pleased with it.
Christianity teaches that Jesus is the God-man. That is, his mother was human, his conception caused by the Holy Spirit, so that the mix of his divinity (Godness) and humanity has cured our humanity from some of its brokenness, and his death was the death of sin, and his rising from the third day was the defeat of our mortality that gives us a chance at eternal life. If he had a human father, that's not the case, Jesus wasn't God, and his death would not be sufficient to redeem humanity from sin. Some individuals who claim to be Christian would disagree, but probably 1.5 billion of the 1.6 billion Christians would agree. The Muslims and Jews disagree.
I have it running on Debian Etch. The UQM game engine is in contrib. The data files are in non-free.
I know we're off topic. I've played Wesnoth, but it started to wear on me. I'll look into Spring though. Thanks for the info. I also have played Tremulous, but it seems to be dying a bit.
I can copy 2 GB of data from one SATA drive to another on my 2 year old Debian box in 1 minute. This and the slow network stack have always been two of my biggest complaints against Windows. Glad I kicked that habit. I do miss running new games, but I've got NWN 1, XCOM on running on DOSBOX, and UQM and hopefully those will tide me over until I find a Wii.
MSN, the default home page of many has been pushing Vista. My father-in-law has asked about Vista, because he thought it was the next big thing because he saw it on MSN, so he figured it was a big deal. I nearly had a heart attack when I walked into the kitchen and saw my wife looking at a large Vista ad on the MSN site because MSN didn't like our computer, Iceweasel on Debian, and redirected her from her selected video link to an ad recommending she buy Vista.
How long till we see 8 year olds with their own car. And every parent with close to enough money to not think about it will buy one for their kid so they don't have to ride the bus, and the parents don't have to drive their kids to school. Expensive private grade schools will have a student parking lot. The parents will strap their kid in the car, and their will be buckle attendant at the lot to help the kids out of the car and set it to park themselves, and then load the kids in the car when they're ready to return home. You'll think the car is empty, but it will be full with a half dozen 10 year old girls headed to the mall 20 miles away.
Symantec doesn't need to receive a check from Microsoft. If every copy of Windows was replaced by OS X or Linux over night, Symantec's software would be worth about 1/10 of what it currently is, because they are entrenched in Windows, and they're like a leach attached to the underside of a cow. If the cow dies in the middle of nowhere, the leach will died soon after. Symantec may not be on the best of terms with Windows, but they're like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, they are convinced of their own self worth and they want to remind everybody else of it, but if Linux and OS X suddenly saw the same market share that Firefox enjoys, Symantec would sink almost as fast as Microsoft.
It could be that things are flattening out. Do those numbers take in iTunes sales? I saw somewhere (Ars maybe?) that said Apple sold twice as many tracks as CDs were sold in the first quarter. If a typical CD has 10 songs, then Apple is now selling 20% of the music, money that 5 years ago was buying CDs, and this be a huge step toward digital only music sales.
It almost seems like the two biggest free ad networks that they had in the past 20 years have stopped working for them, MTV (which needs to drop the M for something more accurate) and P2P. Maybe the RIAA needs to start an Internet video network to advertise their artists with music videos to improve sales. When I was in college, I would watch MTV 10 hours a week, and I had a decent idea who artists were, now I have no idea. I never went to a concert, and never bought more than 3 dozen CDs, but I imagine people that do spend money on music feel a similar apathy.
;) It's crazy that A-list actors make more money making one movie than 90% of us will make in our whole life. If movie companies would spend less on actors, they would have a lot more money to spend making more movies.
Further, if they want me to pay for anything they're selling, they can start acting like the proverbial mom-and-pop running their store who are happy to have my business instead of the offended matre'd at the country club who wants to keep out the riffraff.
Of course, the real problem is copyright. Sure we don't like DRM, but if copyright limits were much more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this problem. Current artists would have to produce something better than what was being produced 20 years ago, otherwise, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or XYZ Music Distributors could offer low-cost-DRM-free media from 20 years ago as an competitor to the stuff that's available today. Media companies would then have to try to find fresher IP than Star Trek "Every clip ever aired" DVD collection (only $3000!!!), Survivor Season 99, or Yet Another Hackfest Movie, or Rehash Mashup Remade from Last Year Song by "Diva you don't want to stand within 100 feet of for fear of catching an airborne STD".
Because the man that uses porn is more likely to look at women like objects or a piece of meat instead of as people or equals as they deserve. Not every man does it, but its a pretty significant percentage of men that indulge in a pornography habit.
They get 10% of whatever they keep out of the hands of the artists.
I think the Timothy Zahn Cobra series that did a great job of explaining it. One of the areas he explored was how the original organics of the body won't take well to the modification and stress they go under when performing extraordinary feats of athleticism, and you'll end up with a bunch of broken down 40 year olds that hobble around because of tissue damage, pretty similar to the situation the NFL is trying to deal with in a lot of their middle aged retirees. His characters also had to deal with being weapons for the rest of their life even after they were discharged. Good set of books.
Will it randomly select somebody from Craig's List personals and automatically dial them up? Scary.
Abolitionists in the 1850s considered slavery "morally reprehensible" while slave holders didn't. In the end, the US government recognized that slaves were people that deserve the full protection of the law that white people had. Likewise, the pro-life (anti-abortion) groups of today think that unborn babies have just as much right to be protected by the law as the African slaves that earned those same protections 145 years ago.
Part of the reason there is so much venom in federal politics today is because the Courts took the law out of the states hands when they overturned every state legislation restricting abortion. If Row vs Wade is overturned, there will still be states that have legal abortion, but other states that could outlaw the procedure within their boundaries if they wished. Abortion would cease to be an issue at the national level, and then the Christian right would stop giving 100% of their support to the Republicans, which would flip American politics on its head and give a lot of other issues (environmentalism, immigration, etc.) a chance to be dealt with as primary issues.
Actually, it takes time because after the check is given to the bank, it has to clear the bank that the check is written against. If your bank allowed you to have full access to the funds before they had received the funds from the other bank, it would be a simple matter to have a buddy (or yourself) setup 2 fake accounts that cost a $50 deposit for each, and then write a check for $5000 from one account to the other, which you then take to the bank, deposit and instantly withdraw the $5000. By the time your bank forwards the check and finds out the account doesn't have the funds to clear the check, you've made off with a $4900 profit, and the banks have to track you down with as much to go on as a bank robber except you've got a 2 day head start. If your bank is nice, and you've had an account for a while, they might let you overdraw your previous balance by a small fraction of the deposit amount, but that depends on how good of a customer they consider you.
Maybe it's already built in and they'll just activate it with another firmware upgrade?? Nope, they'll make you pony up the big bucks for 2 new controllers to replace the two you already have (assuming you have two of course).
I wonder how much of their hand wringing/whining is due to number portability. Now that people can change more easily from one carrier to another, is this a result of them trying to retain the customers they now have to compete for, but don't want to.
I'm torn, as a non-cell phone user about the way that the government allows large conglomerates to bid up the price of the spectrum with two ill effects. One, it prohibits small carriers from competing well with larger ones, and it keeps the prices of plans up, since the carriers have to charge a high enough price to get back the money they've paid to the government, which basically works as a large, expensive tax on cell phone users. Too bad there isn't another way to go about allocating bandwidth that the government didn't decide to earn billions of dollars on.
It seems to me that the party representatives present at each polling location are present to prevent fraud at the polling location. That should be true whether the voting is being done electronically or manually.
If you want to preserve anonymity, you can't let someone have any method of verifying their own vote, or someone could force them to turn over that ability to check their vote. Could you imagine the results of someone wanting to sway the vote, and being able to verify that the people they sent into the polls voted the way they were told to? If someone orders me to go vote for candidate X or he'll do something nasty to me, how can he currently prove that I didn't? He can't. But if I have a proven way to verify my vote after the election, anybody could threaten me that they want me to vote a certain way and turn over my proof of vote as a "Don't get the snot kicked out of you" card, with failure to do so being seen as a failure to comply. The ability to verify your vote has to end for you personally when you walk out the door to protect your right to vote free of coercion.
The only reason you need competitors is to make the merged company try to please the subscriber. Considering their user base could grow if they improve their service, I think there is plenty of competition in the form of local radio and podcasts. (I wish car companies would include a SD slot, as opposed to CD/tape, for users to plug in downloaded or ripped content.) If they want more people's money, then they'll have to do better than those two alternatives. Heck, once someone goes to the effort of buying and installing a satellite radio in their car, there isn't much the company has to do to keep their business, as long as they don't really mess things up by axing favorite content or adding commercials when the subscriber won't stand for it, so they basically have a monopoly on that owner, because they aren't likely to pay for another radio and installation. Once someone signs up for the service, for all intents and purpose, competition don't benefit the subscriber much, until the satellites chose to stop pursuing new customers.
A real life sport isn't fun because it's hard to master, it fun because of the exhilaration of making the occasional great play, comradery of playing with friends, and the learning how to apply previously developed skills to new situations, and snap decision making skills as well as developing analytical thinking in how to win in the moments between plays.
It sounds like you're more complaining about the length of games, or you haven't found something that will hold your attention.
Unfortunately for Fundamentalists, the second Chapter gives a second account of the creation story that conflicts with the first. The first says that humanity was created on the 6th day, after everything else (the animals and other creatures were created on days 4 and 5 I think). In the second account, God made Adam (Hebrew for man), then wanted to create a companion for him, so then created all of the animals, and when none were sufficient, created Eve (Hebrew for woman). So how do they reconcile this in Fundamentalism? I assume they must think when God created Adam on day six, he brought to him the animals created on earlier days, then made Eve, which doesn't fit the text, but does allow them to ignore that their fundamentals are broken. The reason that the Hebrews had two accounts of creation were that each explained something important about humanity. The first said that we are the pinnacle of God's creative act. The second, that men and women are complementary parts of a whole, made to be together.
To bad we all have to live with the results of bad Fundamentalist theology.