But lets face it: The vast majority of computer users aren't interested in making even a minimal effort to learn a new operating system or new programs. As the "go-to" person for tech support in my family, I'm not interested in helping them sort it out, either. I'd give it my best shot if someone had a problem, but I'm certainly not going to create new headaches for myself if I can avoid it.
I'm not bashing Linux or OSS; I think the fact that both exist is wonderful. I'm happy for all the people who've switched to Open Office, or Linux, or whatever, and come away pleased with it. At the same time, however, I simply have neither the time nor the energy to learn how another OS or application suite works. Just figuring out the quirks of Vista (and I'm required to do so) has been annoying enough.
These sorts of lists are important for people already using or wanting to use OSS but who aren't sure where to start, but I don't see them bringing anyone into the fold. Even if I found an OSS replacement for every application I use, and even if the OSS programs were, in every case, better than the applications I already use, I'm still not very interested in taking the time to learn an entire new application suite unless the difference between Program A and Program B is absolutely huge. If Program A takes 20s to do a common operation, and Program B takes 5s, then yes, color me interested. Other than that, not so much.
Ahh, yes, the old "dangerous food additives" bit. I was waiting for someone to bring that up.
If food additives are truly that dangerous, why don't we see them listed as a significant cause of death? Yes, there are people who are gluten-intolerant. Yes, there are people who are allergic to MSG, or even aspartame. On the other hand, there are people who are quite allergic to citrus/citric acid, peanuts, shellfish, eggs, sesame, soy, and wheat, all of which are completely natural foods. Obviously someone with an MSG problem shouldn't eat MSG, but someone whose allergic to shellfish shouldn't be eating them either.
I don't buy the concept that we "know what we're doing and we do it well" with regards to genetically modifying food--it's simply too early--but some of these so-called "dangerous" food additives have been used for decades now. High fructose corn syrup may not be very good for you, but I've yet to hear of it killing anyone.
Why is an application bloated if it uses more memory than was considered standard in, say, 1992? Wasn't that the point of system advancement?
I second all the authors who call for effective use of resources. No, don't fill my system up with useless crap, but if sucking down an extra few hundred MB of RAM make a program run more effectively or give me options that I actually want, by all means, do so. That's why I've got 2 GB of RAM, after all.
Admission: I've never used Ubuntu, but I'm surprised to hear this sort of feature is news.
AFAIK, this sort of thing was present in Windows going all the way back to Windows 95. Granted, of course, its gotten *better* since then (and maybe the Ubuntu feature will be quite solid), but I honestly don't see why Linux distros wouldn't have included this as a feature a long time ago. Is this something that's new specifically to Ubuntu, or do most Linux distros force you to command line if the graphics card fails to initialize its drivers properly?
But I agree with their position (if not with blocking FireFox). Ad-blocking destroys the source of revenue that typically pays the bills for sites to survive. I'm no more a fan of highly-intrusive, full-page ads than anyone else is, but some degree of medium needs to exist.
Eliminate advertising as a source of revenue, and you'd probably eliminate a lot of valuable sites. Not every site that uses ads deserves to be targeted as "bad", and blocking all advertising simply because it imposes a minor inconvenience is one way to drive small sites out of business or raise the barrier of entry even higher for startups.
Because you are not God, the Internet is a big place with lots going on, and downloading multiple gigabytes of data is never going to be instantaneous (assuming you intend to save it, rather than simply stream it.)
Don't tell my hard drives that. The array of 6 WD800JB drives I bought in early 2001 are still all going strong without a single failure or need for replacement. Granted, they aren't my primary drives anymore, but I still use them for storage archival, and I tend to read data off one or more of them on a daily basis, since they're media drives.
I think James Madison said it best, when he wrote: If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
He's absolutely right--if all computer products were engineered 100% securely, with no flaws, then we wouldn't need a security industry. The bigger question, however, is whether or not this is even a remotely achievable goal. Even the very best of us, with the very best of intentions, still make mistakes. Now multiply the fact that errors are guaranteed to occur by the millions of lines of code that get written, the reality of deadlines, ship dates, and product launches, and what you get are a guaranteed set of flaws, even under the absolute best of circumstances.
Consider, for just a moment, how many virii, worms, and malware could be avoided if people would simply stop actively loading it onto their own systems. Email is no longer a new phenomenon, and every company I'm aware of has policies and reminders in place telling people not to open suspicious attachments or run unknown programs. Despite these facts, any number of people infect themselves by foolishly doing things they should've learned not to do by now. The fact that we haven't managed to convince people not to follow even the most basic of security protocols ten years after email began to go "mainstream" for your average corporate employee tells me that absolutely yes, we need a security industry, if for no other purpose than to protect us from the unwashed masses.
The resourceful, ethical, technological elite might be a match for the resourceful, unethical, technological elite in a theoretical, free-market arrangement where one side is tasked with building a perfectly secure product and the other is tasked with tearing it apart, but there's simply no way any relatively small group of programmers can compete with the number of stupid people out there using their products.
The fact that Auerbach compares ICANN to the USSR is something I find offensive. The USSR was directly responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against its own citizens in recorded history. Ten million Russians died during WWII--but Stalin executed an estimated 27 million of his own people during his time in power. Other Soviet leaders may have been less barbarous, but the USSR never exactly gained a reputation as "a good place to live."
Regardless of the problems of ICANN, comparing it to the USSR is just as bad as comparing it to Nazi Germany, and should immediately result in the invocation of Godwin's Law.;) Auerbach loses.:P
My money is that you're dead wrong, simply thanks to inertia, replacement, and monopoly. I honestly don't see any points that you've raised now that weren't raised 6 years ago with XP. Even though XP does compete with Vista, reality is that people will continue replacing PCs, the vast, vast, majority of PCs will offer Vista, and Vista will become the de facto standard.
This will, of course, take a few years.
My prediction, for what it's worth, is that somewhere between 3 and 4 years from now, Windows Vista will be the majority (>51% useage). WindowsXP will have fallen into minority status, at somewhere between 25-40%, while Win2K, OSX, and various flavors of Linux make up the rest. For all that some here have said "Win2K forever", fact is, you're now in a distinct minority--I'm not going to claim to have absolute figures, but the various numbers I've seen put current Win 2K useage at somewhere between 4.5% and 8%. All of the points you raise, KingSkippus, will be swept under the rug as people get "used" to Vista, as drivers improve, and as DRM continues to insert itself into our lives.
It's not even so much that I disagree with any of your negative points on Vista--I simply don't see them as really being any different than the negative points people raised over XP (at least, not inherently), and I don't see any magical tipping point occuring where people suddenly jump ship for a different platform. I think OSX will continue to gain some market share, and Linux may pick up some growth in the home area as well, but even if the market share of both Linux and OSX doubled in the next 4 years (which would be stupendous growth), they'd still occupy less than 15% of the total OS market, combined.
Apparently a Season 1 ep that I've not seen concluded that while CD-ROMs spinning in excess of 40X *could* shatter inside of a drive, it's "highly unlikely" and therefore mostly busted.
I wish I still had the CD drive in which I actually saw this occur. Dropped a brand-new burned CD into a mostly-new CD-ROM (52x, as I recall), heard it spin up.....and then an extremely loud *crack*.
The largest piece of the CD-ROM remaining, when I eventually pried the drive open, was maybe 1/10 the total disc area. The rest was fragmented into tiny shards. Needless to say, the drive was a total loss. Granted, I've worked with a lot of CD-ROM drives over the years, and I've only seen that problem occur once--but there's no doubt it could (and does) occasionally happen.
No offense, but this sounds like what you get when you add:
1 cup of Paul Ehrlich
1/2 cup Marxian philosophy
1/4 cup rampant paranoia
2 teaspoons of mysogynistic bass-ackwards chauvinism
and an olive.
Dump all the ingredients into a blender and frappe until mixed.
I pray it doesn't--mostly because I have absolutely zero faith that any replacement system would be, in any way, better. Check the history of revolutionary movements if you don't want to take my word for it, but the vast, vast, vast, majority of fundamental replacement systems only come into being after widespread bloodshed, anarchy, and destruction. If the countries typically referred to as the "West" collapsed in any sort of manner, life in said nations would rapidly be reduced to a Hobbsian state of nature best summarized as nasty, brutish, and short.
You seem quite anxious to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
Right. Copyright is going away. Evidently you think the Western world is going to fundamentally redefine one of the foundational principles that protects intellectual property, in what--the next 5-10 years?
I'm all for copyright reform, especially as it relates to the digital world, and I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as the next guy, but lets not confuse legitimate issues with ridiculous rhetoric. Copyright, as a legal institution, is at *least* 298 years old, stretching back to the British Statute of Anne. You can trace its legal evolution back even farther, if you wish, but as an ingrained law it predates the founding of America and any number of "natural" freedoms citizens of the western world now take for granted as if they have always been recognized as such.
Copyright is and will continue to be part of how intellectual property is recognized and protected in the world, and only a fool would call for its dissolution. The way in which it does so, hopefully, will change--but the fundamental protections and concepts of it will not, and should not.
Can you still realistically buy a non-Winmodem at anything near a decent price? (meaning under $50).
For that matter, can you still buy modems at all?;)
I read posts like this and I honestly wonder what the heck you were trying to do. Maybe it's simply that I've never run across the specific scenarios you describe, but I've been using MS Office (and templates, embedded documents, etc) in one form or another for a decade, without running into these types of issues.
At one point, you stated: I cannot edit our templates. Maybe that's me, maybe it's MS. I can configure cross-site clusters, but I can't edit an MS Word document. I don't think that the deficiency is in my own IT knowledge., but the comparison is flawed and inapplicable due to the incredibly broad nature of what "IT knowledge" can mean. It's entirely possible to be a specialist in a specific IT area, while still knowing nothing about other segments. By your own admission, Windows isn't a big part of your life--but even if it was, being certified on Vista and XP would still say nothing, inherently, about your familiarity with the MS Office software package.
Instead of getting into a vague discussion of file formats and such, I'd hit the basics of MS Office usage and configuration. I've never attempted to write a file template--I've never had to do so--but if I had to write one, I wouldn't assume that a background in networking, Unix, and Linux meant that I knew anything about doing the job correctly.
My problem with RoughlyDrafted (and its author) isn't that he's pro-Apple, it's that many of his "analyses" are so fundamentally flawed. He clearly has no understanding of even the most basic tools of research methods or statistical analysis--or simply chooses to ignore them. I dislike seeing his contributions on Slashdot, not because I'm against his opinions, but because the methodology he demonstrates as "proof" in his various articles is (and remains) so fundamentally broken.
Using Windows doesn't require you to become a security expert. For God's sake, do you really think those of us running XP are just crashing every 30s, or constantly under attack?
Run a router with a firewall. Download security updates as needed. You're fine. Frankly, I find that simply not opening email attachments or visiting certain types of websites keeps a system free of 99% of the potential crap that's out there.
The fact is, there's nothing stopping anyone from personally using the metric system in America. If you want to use metric to discuss issues with scientists from Europe, the most you might have to do is a bit of conversion--and there are many online sites available that'll readily swap one for the other if you don't feel like crunching the data yourself.
Virtually all modern cars display their speeds in km/h as well as mph (even if mph is the preferred method), and many scales can be set to display kilos, rather than lbs. From an individual perspective, society has made a personal metric conversion completely possible. As for America as a whole...
I don't see that it matters. Every nation has specific societal quirks that make it unique, from the relatively small (the uniqueness of Aussie slang, for example), to the relatively large (British countries and former colonies drive on what we consider the "wrong" side of the road). In America, soda from a fountain is always served with ice. In Germany and many other European countries, it isn't. We could argue all day that one is "better" than the other, but such differences are simply a part of culture in specific areas.
Sometimes, yes, culture gets in the way of doing what's scientifically smart or optimal. That, in and of itself, however, does not mean culture should automatically give way to science. Using the old Imperial standard of measurement rarely hurts anyone, and metric conversion is readily available. As far as I'm concerned, keep the inches rolling.
I realize that not all Slashdotted stories are created equal, but for crying out loud, Daniel Eran isn't just a lousy writer--he fills every single one of his "articles" with factually incorrect statements, absurd leaps of logic, and demonstrates a consistent failure to apply proper rules of analysis to his own conclusions. Ever since I saw him blithely carve the concept up "market share" into a pie graph whereupon it was possible for Microsoft to hold 48% of the PC hardware market due to OS shipments, I've been waiting for people to stop giving him traffic.
It's not that he writes articles that challenge other people's pre-conceived notions--it's that he writes articles that demonstrate a profound personal stupidity and a total lack of understanding concerning how data is properly presented and filtered in order to demonstrate a correlative (much less conclusive) relationship. (research methods, in other words).
There are a number of people who've responded to the points Chris makes here without really getting his complaint, IMO. As I see it, the "problem" here is that Chris (and, we'll assume, an fair-size group of people who think like he does) aren't really interested in NWN2 as a game, at all, but want to use it as a content creation engine for their own campaigns, ideas, and storylines.
There has always been a set of tabletop roleplayers interested in using the power of technology to augment (or even tell) their own stories. Unfortunately, most of the software that's been available for "running your own campaign" has failed to deliver the kind of flexibility, ease-of-use, and capability most DM's have wanted.
Even flexible, mod-friendly game engines are ultimately about creating specific, limited types of adventure. In most FPS games, for example, killing an important NPC will either promptly end the game or simply isn't possible. There are a handful of games that might allow you to kill the NPC while finding an alternate route to your goal--but typically ONLY if that goal is short-term. Deus Ex is one of the only games I can think of where the decisions you make really can take your character in some different directions, and even then, you return to the main storyline relatively quickly.
In a D&D campaign, a character might make a serious decision to kill a major NPC, and the NWN tools (if I understand them correctly) allow the DM to both allow the action *and* to create a ripple of aftershocks around it that turn it into a valid play decision. Because the DM *is* the content author, he can decide what the impact of the NPC's death is, and how far it ripples into the game. It's completely possible for a player's decisions to change the plot twists a DM intends to incorporate later down the road. In contrast, when you're playing a mod built by someone with the Source Engine, the impact of your decision to kill an NPC only extends as far as a programmer has decided in advance--typically not very far.
I'd say it's fair for Chris to say he wishes the NWN2 review had addressed these points, given that he basically states NWN is worth purchasing *simply* for the toolsets and capabilities. It's also fair for the reviewer to say this wasn't the focus of his review (though hopefully someone will publish an extensive write-up on these options). What *isn't* accurate or fair is to toss the interests of the roleplaying community out as unimportant, or to imply that all mod-friendly engines are created equal.
All of this, of course, is just my.02.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft patented evil a long time back. Monsanto had better work out the proper IP sharing arrangements.
I'm not bashing Linux or OSS; I think the fact that both exist is wonderful. I'm happy for all the people who've switched to Open Office, or Linux, or whatever, and come away pleased with it. At the same time, however, I simply have neither the time nor the energy to learn how another OS or application suite works. Just figuring out the quirks of Vista (and I'm required to do so) has been annoying enough.
These sorts of lists are important for people already using or wanting to use OSS but who aren't sure where to start, but I don't see them bringing anyone into the fold. Even if I found an OSS replacement for every application I use, and even if the OSS programs were, in every case, better than the applications I already use, I'm still not very interested in taking the time to learn an entire new application suite unless the difference between Program A and Program B is absolutely huge. If Program A takes 20s to do a common operation, and Program B takes 5s, then yes, color me interested. Other than that, not so much.
If food additives are truly that dangerous, why don't we see them listed as a significant cause of death? Yes, there are people who are gluten-intolerant. Yes, there are people who are allergic to MSG, or even aspartame. On the other hand, there are people who are quite allergic to citrus/citric acid, peanuts, shellfish, eggs, sesame, soy, and wheat, all of which are completely natural foods. Obviously someone with an MSG problem shouldn't eat MSG, but someone whose allergic to shellfish shouldn't be eating them either.
I don't buy the concept that we "know what we're doing and we do it well" with regards to genetically modifying food--it's simply too early--but some of these so-called "dangerous" food additives have been used for decades now. High fructose corn syrup may not be very good for you, but I've yet to hear of it killing anyone.
I second all the authors who call for effective use of resources. No, don't fill my system up with useless crap, but if sucking down an extra few hundred MB of RAM make a program run more effectively or give me options that I actually want, by all means, do so. That's why I've got 2 GB of RAM, after all.
AFAIK, this sort of thing was present in Windows going all the way back to Windows 95. Granted, of course, its gotten *better* since then (and maybe the Ubuntu feature will be quite solid), but I honestly don't see why Linux distros wouldn't have included this as a feature a long time ago. Is this something that's new specifically to Ubuntu, or do most Linux distros force you to command line if the graphics card fails to initialize its drivers properly?
Eliminate advertising as a source of revenue, and you'd probably eliminate a lot of valuable sites. Not every site that uses ads deserves to be targeted as "bad", and blocking all advertising simply because it imposes a minor inconvenience is one way to drive small sites out of business or raise the barrier of entry even higher for startups.
A software license shouldn't be a morality tale.
The only thing amazing about FF8 was its mediocrity.
Because you are not God, the Internet is a big place with lots going on, and downloading multiple gigabytes of data is never going to be instantaneous (assuming you intend to save it, rather than simply stream it.)
Don't tell my hard drives that. The array of 6 WD800JB drives I bought in early 2001 are still all going strong without a single failure or need for replacement. Granted, they aren't my primary drives anymore, but I still use them for storage archival, and I tend to read data off one or more of them on a daily basis, since they're media drives.
What the hell did English ever do to you?
He's absolutely right--if all computer products were engineered 100% securely, with no flaws, then we wouldn't need a security industry. The bigger question, however, is whether or not this is even a remotely achievable goal. Even the very best of us, with the very best of intentions, still make mistakes. Now multiply the fact that errors are guaranteed to occur by the millions of lines of code that get written, the reality of deadlines, ship dates, and product launches, and what you get are a guaranteed set of flaws, even under the absolute best of circumstances.
Consider, for just a moment, how many virii, worms, and malware could be avoided if people would simply stop actively loading it onto their own systems. Email is no longer a new phenomenon, and every company I'm aware of has policies and reminders in place telling people not to open suspicious attachments or run unknown programs. Despite these facts, any number of people infect themselves by foolishly doing things they should've learned not to do by now. The fact that we haven't managed to convince people not to follow even the most basic of security protocols ten years after email began to go "mainstream" for your average corporate employee tells me that absolutely yes, we need a security industry, if for no other purpose than to protect us from the unwashed masses.
The resourceful, ethical, technological elite might be a match for the resourceful, unethical, technological elite in a theoretical, free-market arrangement where one side is tasked with building a perfectly secure product and the other is tasked with tearing it apart, but there's simply no way any relatively small group of programmers can compete with the number of stupid people out there using their products.
Regardless of the problems of ICANN, comparing it to the USSR is just as bad as comparing it to Nazi Germany, and should immediately result in the invocation of Godwin's Law. ;) Auerbach loses. :P
My money is that you're dead wrong, simply thanks to inertia, replacement, and monopoly. I honestly don't see any points that you've raised now that weren't raised 6 years ago with XP. Even though XP does compete with Vista, reality is that people will continue replacing PCs, the vast, vast, majority of PCs will offer Vista, and Vista will become the de facto standard. This will, of course, take a few years. My prediction, for what it's worth, is that somewhere between 3 and 4 years from now, Windows Vista will be the majority (>51% useage). WindowsXP will have fallen into minority status, at somewhere between 25-40%, while Win2K, OSX, and various flavors of Linux make up the rest. For all that some here have said "Win2K forever", fact is, you're now in a distinct minority--I'm not going to claim to have absolute figures, but the various numbers I've seen put current Win 2K useage at somewhere between 4.5% and 8%. All of the points you raise, KingSkippus, will be swept under the rug as people get "used" to Vista, as drivers improve, and as DRM continues to insert itself into our lives. It's not even so much that I disagree with any of your negative points on Vista--I simply don't see them as really being any different than the negative points people raised over XP (at least, not inherently), and I don't see any magical tipping point occuring where people suddenly jump ship for a different platform. I think OSX will continue to gain some market share, and Linux may pick up some growth in the home area as well, but even if the market share of both Linux and OSX doubled in the next 4 years (which would be stupendous growth), they'd still occupy less than 15% of the total OS market, combined.
Apparently a Season 1 ep that I've not seen concluded that while CD-ROMs spinning in excess of 40X *could* shatter inside of a drive, it's "highly unlikely" and therefore mostly busted. I wish I still had the CD drive in which I actually saw this occur. Dropped a brand-new burned CD into a mostly-new CD-ROM (52x, as I recall), heard it spin up.....and then an extremely loud *crack*. The largest piece of the CD-ROM remaining, when I eventually pried the drive open, was maybe 1/10 the total disc area. The rest was fragmented into tiny shards. Needless to say, the drive was a total loss. Granted, I've worked with a lot of CD-ROM drives over the years, and I've only seen that problem occur once--but there's no doubt it could (and does) occasionally happen.
No offense, but this sounds like what you get when you add: 1 cup of Paul Ehrlich 1/2 cup Marxian philosophy 1/4 cup rampant paranoia 2 teaspoons of mysogynistic bass-ackwards chauvinism and an olive. Dump all the ingredients into a blender and frappe until mixed.
I pray it doesn't--mostly because I have absolutely zero faith that any replacement system would be, in any way, better. Check the history of revolutionary movements if you don't want to take my word for it, but the vast, vast, vast, majority of fundamental replacement systems only come into being after widespread bloodshed, anarchy, and destruction. If the countries typically referred to as the "West" collapsed in any sort of manner, life in said nations would rapidly be reduced to a Hobbsian state of nature best summarized as nasty, brutish, and short. You seem quite anxious to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
Right. Copyright is going away. Evidently you think the Western world is going to fundamentally redefine one of the foundational principles that protects intellectual property, in what--the next 5-10 years? I'm all for copyright reform, especially as it relates to the digital world, and I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as the next guy, but lets not confuse legitimate issues with ridiculous rhetoric. Copyright, as a legal institution, is at *least* 298 years old, stretching back to the British Statute of Anne. You can trace its legal evolution back even farther, if you wish, but as an ingrained law it predates the founding of America and any number of "natural" freedoms citizens of the western world now take for granted as if they have always been recognized as such. Copyright is and will continue to be part of how intellectual property is recognized and protected in the world, and only a fool would call for its dissolution. The way in which it does so, hopefully, will change--but the fundamental protections and concepts of it will not, and should not.
Can you still realistically buy a non-Winmodem at anything near a decent price? (meaning under $50). For that matter, can you still buy modems at all? ;)
I read posts like this and I honestly wonder what the heck you were trying to do. Maybe it's simply that I've never run across the specific scenarios you describe, but I've been using MS Office (and templates, embedded documents, etc) in one form or another for a decade, without running into these types of issues. At one point, you stated: I cannot edit our templates. Maybe that's me, maybe it's MS. I can configure cross-site clusters, but I can't edit an MS Word document. I don't think that the deficiency is in my own IT knowledge., but the comparison is flawed and inapplicable due to the incredibly broad nature of what "IT knowledge" can mean. It's entirely possible to be a specialist in a specific IT area, while still knowing nothing about other segments. By your own admission, Windows isn't a big part of your life--but even if it was, being certified on Vista and XP would still say nothing, inherently, about your familiarity with the MS Office software package. Instead of getting into a vague discussion of file formats and such, I'd hit the basics of MS Office usage and configuration. I've never attempted to write a file template--I've never had to do so--but if I had to write one, I wouldn't assume that a background in networking, Unix, and Linux meant that I knew anything about doing the job correctly.
My problem with RoughlyDrafted (and its author) isn't that he's pro-Apple, it's that many of his "analyses" are so fundamentally flawed. He clearly has no understanding of even the most basic tools of research methods or statistical analysis--or simply chooses to ignore them. I dislike seeing his contributions on Slashdot, not because I'm against his opinions, but because the methodology he demonstrates as "proof" in his various articles is (and remains) so fundamentally broken.
Using Windows doesn't require you to become a security expert. For God's sake, do you really think those of us running XP are just crashing every 30s, or constantly under attack? Run a router with a firewall. Download security updates as needed. You're fine. Frankly, I find that simply not opening email attachments or visiting certain types of websites keeps a system free of 99% of the potential crap that's out there.
The fact is, there's nothing stopping anyone from personally using the metric system in America. If you want to use metric to discuss issues with scientists from Europe, the most you might have to do is a bit of conversion--and there are many online sites available that'll readily swap one for the other if you don't feel like crunching the data yourself. Virtually all modern cars display their speeds in km/h as well as mph (even if mph is the preferred method), and many scales can be set to display kilos, rather than lbs. From an individual perspective, society has made a personal metric conversion completely possible. As for America as a whole... I don't see that it matters. Every nation has specific societal quirks that make it unique, from the relatively small (the uniqueness of Aussie slang, for example), to the relatively large (British countries and former colonies drive on what we consider the "wrong" side of the road). In America, soda from a fountain is always served with ice. In Germany and many other European countries, it isn't. We could argue all day that one is "better" than the other, but such differences are simply a part of culture in specific areas. Sometimes, yes, culture gets in the way of doing what's scientifically smart or optimal. That, in and of itself, however, does not mean culture should automatically give way to science. Using the old Imperial standard of measurement rarely hurts anyone, and metric conversion is readily available. As far as I'm concerned, keep the inches rolling.
I realize that not all Slashdotted stories are created equal, but for crying out loud, Daniel Eran isn't just a lousy writer--he fills every single one of his "articles" with factually incorrect statements, absurd leaps of logic, and demonstrates a consistent failure to apply proper rules of analysis to his own conclusions. Ever since I saw him blithely carve the concept up "market share" into a pie graph whereupon it was possible for Microsoft to hold 48% of the PC hardware market due to OS shipments, I've been waiting for people to stop giving him traffic. It's not that he writes articles that challenge other people's pre-conceived notions--it's that he writes articles that demonstrate a profound personal stupidity and a total lack of understanding concerning how data is properly presented and filtered in order to demonstrate a correlative (much less conclusive) relationship. (research methods, in other words).
There are a number of people who've responded to the points Chris makes here without really getting his complaint, IMO. As I see it, the "problem" here is that Chris (and, we'll assume, an fair-size group of people who think like he does) aren't really interested in NWN2 as a game, at all, but want to use it as a content creation engine for their own campaigns, ideas, and storylines. There has always been a set of tabletop roleplayers interested in using the power of technology to augment (or even tell) their own stories. Unfortunately, most of the software that's been available for "running your own campaign" has failed to deliver the kind of flexibility, ease-of-use, and capability most DM's have wanted. Even flexible, mod-friendly game engines are ultimately about creating specific, limited types of adventure. In most FPS games, for example, killing an important NPC will either promptly end the game or simply isn't possible. There are a handful of games that might allow you to kill the NPC while finding an alternate route to your goal--but typically ONLY if that goal is short-term. Deus Ex is one of the only games I can think of where the decisions you make really can take your character in some different directions, and even then, you return to the main storyline relatively quickly. In a D&D campaign, a character might make a serious decision to kill a major NPC, and the NWN tools (if I understand them correctly) allow the DM to both allow the action *and* to create a ripple of aftershocks around it that turn it into a valid play decision. Because the DM *is* the content author, he can decide what the impact of the NPC's death is, and how far it ripples into the game. It's completely possible for a player's decisions to change the plot twists a DM intends to incorporate later down the road. In contrast, when you're playing a mod built by someone with the Source Engine, the impact of your decision to kill an NPC only extends as far as a programmer has decided in advance--typically not very far. I'd say it's fair for Chris to say he wishes the NWN2 review had addressed these points, given that he basically states NWN is worth purchasing *simply* for the toolsets and capabilities. It's also fair for the reviewer to say this wasn't the focus of his review (though hopefully someone will publish an extensive write-up on these options). What *isn't* accurate or fair is to toss the interests of the roleplaying community out as unimportant, or to imply that all mod-friendly engines are created equal. All of this, of course, is just my .02.