Wizball (C64) is the very first game I thought of. There were times I loaded it and turned the monitor (read: television) off just to enjoy the music as I read, went to sleep, or did other stuff. Easily my favorite 8-bit music. I still whistle the Bard's Tale I/II/III bard tunes every now and then, too, but those are merely good melodies. Wizball is the whole cake.
Anyone who thinks Youtube commentary is relevant, useful, or not headache-inducing hasn't read any.
I get forwarded stuff on youtube all the time from friends, and then pass them along in turn. I have never once registered an account to leave comments, because the stuff in Youtube comments is so unbearably bad. If something is trying to be funny and isn't, it'll have a thousand comments along the lines of "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESUM MAN". If something succeeds at being funny, it'll have two thousand comments along the lines of "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESOM MAN", fifteen spams for sex sites, two literate posts, and fifty posts flaming the two literate ones.
Then you get VIDEO responses! Because actually recording you saying "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESOM MAN, LOVD UR VIDOE" makes otherwise insipid drivel the very next thing to film-making!
So why is it a surprise that the the cranks can get an audience? It's practically built for that. Don't worry though, if they weren't forwarding each other Youtube links about the secret conspiracy to sell marijuana killing lightbulbs, they'd be forwarding each other e-mails about the latest homeopathic "cure".
Youtube is a giant festering polluted sea of festering pollution. If you know how to find them, there are pearls of wit, comedy, and art to be found. Watch out for the floating beer cans, though, because pulling stuff out at random is going to be risky.
This would be the target demographic of the malware antivirus attack, where a site does a browser hijack, slows your computer to a crawl, then starts bombarding you with ads for its "solution" to the problem its own malware caused.
There is no single answer here. Affordable (or free) antivirus software that actually works would be a start, providing it isn't on the McAfee/Norton bandwagon of getting you to pay for a subscription and using up a fair amount of resources when running. There are good community-governed host file lists which can be a real help on many different levels - adware, phishing, malware, viruses, and some of the more onerous types of advertising. User education about basic practices is key - I'd like to see some Public Service Announcements on this, in the style of some of the American Lung Foundation's 1970's PSAs.
I have to tell people over and over: "It doesn't matter if you trust Jackie not to send you a bad file. You also have to trust that Jackie is vigilant about computer security, and that she knows a lot about the subject. You also have to trust that her computer hasn't been compromised, or that her e-mail isn't a spoof, which requires you to understand a lot about message headers at the very least. Is an animated stripper dancing on your start bar really worth the risk?"
The problem that the EU identified is not the problem (bundling). If MS wants to include a free competitor product to other vendor's offerings, that doesn't really bother me. Include IE? Absolutely, it's good to have a backup plan if Firefox ever gets wonky. And it's easier to download Firefox if you've got a browser included already. Include Windows Media Player? I won't use it, but many will, throw it in. Hell, throw in any kind of application you want, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on ideas anyway.
The real problems are the ones the EU didn't address as effectively. Particularly, in my opinion, predatory marketing with OEM lock-ins which make including Windows either a requirement, or actually cheaper than not doing so, making any non-MS offerings just as expensive (or more), even though the OS alone is more expensive.
It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to use it to engage in price-fixing.
You pay a couple hundred dollars per client. You pay several times that per server. Then you have to buy CALs to let the clients and servers actually communicate. It's getting ridiculous, and it reminds me of when it was Novell's game to lose: the difference between the $500 server package and the $5000 server package was a license file with a different number in it. It's not as if Microsoft isn't covering its profit margin by the price of the OS alone, is it?
I'm not suggesting MS is doing anything wrong by, god forbid, charging for their software, but this sort of expensive buy-in is pretty much the opposite of the rampant piracy which pretty much ensured MS a place in the OS game to begin with.
CALs in particular annoy me, as do arbitrary price differences between versions.
Before anyone says it, I'm not a "linux on the desktop FFE" guy, I'm a "choose the OS for the applications you want to run" guy. Which means for a lot of server applciations, you've got some real choices, and for user applicaions, you've either got two and a half choices, or in some cases, only one.
CDs started out pretty expensive. I think my first CD was about $30 or so. In the early 90s, new CD prices were going down on a regular basis, to the point where they were making it harder for the used CD shops to stay in business. A lot of large and medium sized labels were able to get their releases out for $9, which made buying a new release a lot easier to swallow than deciding to wait a few weeks for it to show up at the used shops for $6-8.
After a lot of the better used markets started to dry up, what I noticed is that new CD prices kept creeping back toward $20, and some of the shops that used to exclusively sell new CDs started selling used CDs as well... for $12-15.
The Harmony House chain used to be a big deal in southeastern Michigan. As the industry changed, they stopped expanding locations. Eventually, they started closing a few stores, then collapsed to one store for classical and one for everything else. Then they just went to one location. I started making a regular trip to start buying some previously expensive niche label stuff that used to be well over $20 - Mille Plateaux, Forcetracks, Mute, etc. because now they were dumping everything at half price or less.
When I read the articles covering Harmony House's woes, the company spokesmen blamed it on the internet. While there's some validity to that, it wasn't the internet that kept most people away. It was the fact that their stock was regularly overpriced. If CD priced had continued to go down from their low, they should have reached the $5 mark by now.
In retrospect, I wonder how much piracy $5 CDs would have avoided, because I know my purchasing habits started to change from the most expensive releases before reaching the less expensive. Maybe it would have gotten to the point it is today anyway, but I doubt you'd see the level of wholescale consumer rebellion the labels are dealing with now.
During the heyday of Ultima Online (I think in 2000), as a Seer (rpg volunteer), we had an event based on a group who worshipped an ancestor named Zog, which if I recall correctly, was the name of the first human in the Ultima mythos. It was a minor plot point at best.
This group of characters (the Zog Cabal) and their storyline was created by Origin GMs, and acted and fleshed out by GMs and Seers.
We never saw where the end of this story went (and it was one of the few that was actually successful, in my tenure), because one day, the GMs received a letter from Gamespot outlining some "concerns" players had had about the "Zog Cabal" actually being a veiled reference to Z.O.G. (Zionist Occupied Government), which is a slanderous name anti-semitic and/or white power groups give to whatever governments they oppose (generally, the US, which they believe is controlled by "Jewish interests").
It was utterly preposterous. Richard Garriot may be many things, but a racist or anti-semite he isn't. Most of his games have been highly derivative of Tolkien and Tolkien-inspired knockoffs, and having mysterious characters with funny names is a STAPLE of science fiction and fantasy, and X and Z being pretty popular letters to add a sense of "exoticness" to newly-minted names. Xenu anyone?
What was leaked to us by other sources in EA and in Gamespot was that the "players" whose concerns the Gamespot editor had addressed were actually other Gamespot writers: essentially, they were trying to make news instead of reporting it, by inserting themselves into the story.
While this isn't related to the current row, it lessens my ability to be shocked and horrified by the idea of editorial sleaze by the Gamespot staff.
You missed that part of my point because I made it poorly. I apologize.
A big part of the problem isn't _just_ that employees aren't as effective (and let's be honest here, it does take discipline), but that there is a management culture that considers presence as being a very important determiner of effectiveness. Management culture which isn't ready for this sort of change is going to be especially poor at judging how (or if) it works.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the employees are just as (or more) effective telecommuting than not:
Managing takes skill, and managing a telecommuting workforce takes different skills. I would argue that it also takes more skill, because you have to get a lot of old notions out of your head, and you have to understand work differently than the management mindset of 20 years ago. If your managers aren't willing to embrace that, they're also probably a lot more likely to assume the worst of you despite what effective output you have, because you know as well as I do that in some work environments, effectiveness is measured poorly by people who think that a passing familiarity with Excel and Powerpoint is more than enough to whip up some statistics, usually getting the basic assumptions wrong.
That doesn't make management right in this case, but it does mean that there's a lot of corporate inertia to get beyond. Think of the companies who have really led the charge here - software, marketing for print and television, design work. The larger and less creative an organization is, the more inertia there is to get past when it comes to embracing a different way of understanding the work environment......and when I think of a "larger and less creative organization", AT&T is definitely in the top hundred.
Most employees aren't responsible enough to be as effective at home as they are at work.
Most managers aren't skilled at and don't have the tools for monitoring effectiveness, particularly in offices where "effectiveness" is often measured by whether or not you can drop everything the second your boss gets a new idea for you to work on.
The problem really isn't that the internet and phone network aren't cutting it, but that the people aren't cutting it.
I'm reminded of the late 90s tech boom stories out of California where people get to put "KUNG FU NINJA" on their business cards instead of their functional job titles, wear Birkenstocks and torn jean shorts on Fridays (and then every day) and otherwise show up for work looking as if their daily agenda consisted of checking the mail and eating cookies while watching television. The problem isn't "casual Fridays" or a looser dress code, the problem is how far people push it.
Face it, if you have to deal with customers (particular those of us who have to deal with them at their offices and not ours), it's hard to instill any degree of confidence when you're dressed like a chump who doesn't own anything nicer than a t-shirt. Similarly, it's hard to instill any degree of confidence in your supervisors when you're not around.
Did you miss that call because you were on another one, or because you were still sleeping? Did you neglect that email because you're busy making serious progress on another matter, or because you're playing WoW? Did you log 4 hours in 8 because your internet was being flaky, or because you disconnected and went to do some shopping? Did you fail at a particular task despite your high level of effort or because of the lack thereof? Your presence is your case: if you're not around to make it, rest assured, someone else will make it for you, and assume the worst. And you'll push the issue yourself because there's no longer any separation between work space and home/play space. Most people don't have the discipline for it.
They're getting pretty shrill on Slashdot, as if the fact that Apple's product was locked into AT&T's service was a big surprise foisted on consumers after the fact, or something.
I hate lock-ins as much as most of you, but you know about it going in, and you can choose another option. Of course, the best solution is to stop all forms of telco lock-ins, and the one glaring lock-in is the contract for wireless service on almost all providers that substantially penalize the customer for discontinuing service "early".
As a consumer, if I'm dissatisfied with my service or I can get better service elsewhere, there's no such thing as early discontinuation of service. It's more like "right on time". Lock-in contracts, unlike the iPhone dramas, affect nearly everyone with "post-pay" service. (The alternative phrase was "non-prepay" which sounds nutty.)
And until you include it with the console, it will not be supported in most games, and most people will not consider it a core peripheral, and developers will be wary to write any game that requires it, and until games require it, support for it will be a moot point for most players. Even if it is a standard USB keyboard.
Yes, a USB standard keyboard and mouse are the best solution. So include one in the goddamn box so there's no question as to whether you actually need the thing. If you ship it in the box, developers will assume its use, and players will use it. Right now, there's no motivation to hook it up if the game works with the wonky console controller.
It's this need for console designers to keep hacking at the same broken controller design that is the block. A console controller may be the best thing for a lot of arcade platformers, but there is a world of experience that says a mouse is the best thing available for FPS games. Quit making it an "option", include it, and require it for things it makes sense to require it for. Of course, a keyboard isn't the most conducive thing for playing games in your recliner in front of the TV, but there are any number of one-handed keyboard style devices one could use, or at the very least, a one-handed controller, wii style, for the non-mouse hand.
But again, if it's not in the box when Johnny opens it up Christmas Morning, developers won't want to risk losing sales by requiring a controller most people don't have. Don't underestimate the novice factor - there's a world of difference between usb mouse/keyboard compatibility and having it in the box when shipped - you'd be shocked how many novice users are using RCA video out instead of s-video or better.
Until a console ships with a keyboard and a mouse, most users of that console will not have one.
This has been proven over and over in the marketplace - keyboard addons for consoles have never met with success. The only way to ensure adoption is to force the issue on every model, even (especially!) on the low-end, or else the console keyboard and mouse will continue to be a niche product that most people aren't even aware exists, much less want to buy.
The first time a group of fairly talented console players meet up with a group of fairly talented PC players in a first-person shooter, the limitations of a console controller versus the flexibility of a mouse are going to become painfully obvious.
When I played Halo on an Xbox (not a lengthy play session, admittedly), it felt like I was playing wearing mittens.
There's something to be said about having your mouse set almost fast enough for the cursor to register your pulse - because in an FPS, being able to do a quick 360 in midair in a fraction of a second is the difference between getting a kill and being a kill.
This could lead players to assume that the PC is the platform to be on, much to the detriment of console game sales and rentals.
I don't have a use for consoles - I dislike the limitations and the controllers have been horrendous since the days of the Atari 2600 and don't care much for the kind of games that consoles do better than PCs, so while I admit I might be short-changing the console side a little, that's my take.
Off topic suggestion - Directory Opus (gpsoft.com.au) is an extremely functional and customizable explorer replacement. I feel like I'm explorerizing with mittens on when I'm on systems without it. It may or may not resolve your Explorer issues, but it's worth a close look in any event.
Mass Vista upgrades will occur when the problems of supporting Vista are eclipsed by the problems of supporting XP.
Right now, the main problem with supporting XP is making sure you can actually get it on new OEM hardware.
The main problem with supporting Vista is user resistance to UI changes, a very pushy security system without enough tangible benefits to justify it, increased memory footprint (as with every Windows upgrade) and drivers, drivers, drivers.
I suspect there will be a few legacy XP machines at a lot of offices that move to Vista, simply because there's a lot of office hardware that's fairly expensive, and whose manufacturers don't consider it a priority to update drivers for - specialty printers (wide format, high throughput small format) come to mind. If you've got a $7K-35K printer, odds are keeping it running in XP is a more attractive option than buying a new one merely because the manufacturer won't write a Vista driver for an eight year old machine that's still working like a champ.
In the 8-bit "underground" BBS community, or at least the Commodore-centric portion of it I was most familiar, our convention was the very similar:
<g>
On those venues, smilies were non-existent in my experience. I first came across the smiley, personally, in some documentation for a popular Amiga anti-virus software documentation. I kept on assuming the preponderance of;) was some sort of strange end of line translation error or an issue related to character sets (kind of like how not converting PETSCII to ASCII would result in flipped lowercase/uppercase), similar to the whole windows/unix difference of writing linefeeds.
Then I slowly turned my head as it dawned on me, and saw what was really going on: someone had invented a device to take the 'dry' out of 'dry humor'. Also, it took the 'humor' out of 'dry humor', and somewhere, a seahorse cried. &'
Slashdot Mirror
no body
Wizball (C64) is the very first game I thought of. There were times I loaded it and turned the monitor (read: television) off just to enjoy the music as I read, went to sleep, or did other stuff. Easily my favorite 8-bit music. I still whistle the Bard's Tale I/II/III bard tunes every now and then, too, but those are merely good melodies. Wizball is the whole cake.
Anyone who thinks Youtube commentary is relevant, useful, or not headache-inducing hasn't read any.
I get forwarded stuff on youtube all the time from friends, and then pass them along in turn. I have never once registered an account to leave comments, because the stuff in Youtube comments is so unbearably bad. If something is trying to be funny and isn't, it'll have a thousand comments along the lines of "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESUM MAN". If something succeeds at being funny, it'll have two thousand comments along the lines of "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESOM MAN", fifteen spams for sex sites, two literate posts, and fifty posts flaming the two literate ones.
Then you get VIDEO responses! Because actually recording you saying "LOLOL HAHAHA AHAHA AWESOM MAN, LOVD UR VIDOE" makes otherwise insipid drivel the very next thing to film-making!
So why is it a surprise that the the cranks can get an audience? It's practically built for that. Don't worry though, if they weren't forwarding each other Youtube links about the secret conspiracy to sell marijuana killing lightbulbs, they'd be forwarding each other e-mails about the latest homeopathic "cure".
Youtube is a giant festering polluted sea of festering pollution. If you know how to find them, there are pearls of wit, comedy, and art to be found. Watch out for the floating beer cans, though, because pulling stuff out at random is going to be risky.
May I be excused? My brain is full.
This would be the target demographic of the malware antivirus attack, where a site does a browser hijack, slows your computer to a crawl, then starts bombarding you with ads for its "solution" to the problem its own malware caused.
There is no single answer here. Affordable (or free) antivirus software that actually works would be a start, providing it isn't on the McAfee/Norton bandwagon of getting you to pay for a subscription and using up a fair amount of resources when running. There are good community-governed host file lists which can be a real help on many different levels - adware, phishing, malware, viruses, and some of the more onerous types of advertising. User education about basic practices is key - I'd like to see some Public Service Announcements on this, in the style of some of the American Lung Foundation's 1970's PSAs.
I have to tell people over and over: "It doesn't matter if you trust Jackie not to send you a bad file. You also have to trust that Jackie is vigilant about computer security, and that she knows a lot about the subject. You also have to trust that her computer hasn't been compromised, or that her e-mail isn't a spoof, which requires you to understand a lot about message headers at the very least. Is an animated stripper dancing on your start bar really worth the risk?"
"Verbing weirds language."
I'm of mixed minds on the EU anti-trust issue.
The problem that the EU identified is not the problem (bundling). If MS wants to include a free competitor product to other vendor's offerings, that doesn't really bother me. Include IE? Absolutely, it's good to have a backup plan if Firefox ever gets wonky. And it's easier to download Firefox if you've got a browser included already. Include Windows Media Player? I won't use it, but many will, throw it in. Hell, throw in any kind of application you want, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on ideas anyway.
The real problems are the ones the EU didn't address as effectively. Particularly, in my opinion, predatory marketing with OEM lock-ins which make including Windows either a requirement, or actually cheaper than not doing so, making any non-MS offerings just as expensive (or more), even though the OS alone is more expensive.
It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to use it to engage in price-fixing.
You pay a couple hundred dollars per client. You pay several times that per server. Then you have to buy CALs to let the clients and servers actually communicate. It's getting ridiculous, and it reminds me of when it was Novell's game to lose: the difference between the $500 server package and the $5000 server package was a license file with a different number in it. It's not as if Microsoft isn't covering its profit margin by the price of the OS alone, is it?
I'm not suggesting MS is doing anything wrong by, god forbid, charging for their software, but this sort of expensive buy-in is pretty much the opposite of the rampant piracy which pretty much ensured MS a place in the OS game to begin with.
CALs in particular annoy me, as do arbitrary price differences between versions.
Before anyone says it, I'm not a "linux on the desktop FFE" guy, I'm a "choose the OS for the applications you want to run" guy. Which means for a lot of server applciations, you've got some real choices, and for user applicaions, you've either got two and a half choices, or in some cases, only one.
Fear it.
CDs started out pretty expensive. I think my first CD was about $30 or so. In the early 90s, new CD prices were going down on a regular basis, to the point where they were making it harder for the used CD shops to stay in business. A lot of large and medium sized labels were able to get their releases out for $9, which made buying a new release a lot easier to swallow than deciding to wait a few weeks for it to show up at the used shops for $6-8.
After a lot of the better used markets started to dry up, what I noticed is that new CD prices kept creeping back toward $20, and some of the shops that used to exclusively sell new CDs started selling used CDs as well... for $12-15.
The Harmony House chain used to be a big deal in southeastern Michigan. As the industry changed, they stopped expanding locations. Eventually, they started closing a few stores, then collapsed to one store for classical and one for everything else. Then they just went to one location. I started making a regular trip to start buying some previously expensive niche label stuff that used to be well over $20 - Mille Plateaux, Forcetracks, Mute, etc. because now they were dumping everything at half price or less.
When I read the articles covering Harmony House's woes, the company spokesmen blamed it on the internet. While there's some validity to that, it wasn't the internet that kept most people away. It was the fact that their stock was regularly overpriced. If CD priced had continued to go down from their low, they should have reached the $5 mark by now.
In retrospect, I wonder how much piracy $5 CDs would have avoided, because I know my purchasing habits started to change from the most expensive releases before reaching the less expensive. Maybe it would have gotten to the point it is today anyway, but I doubt you'd see the level of wholescale consumer rebellion the labels are dealing with now.
You can get pre-made accounts for this kind of web idiocy at www.bugmenot.com
During the heyday of Ultima Online (I think in 2000), as a Seer (rpg volunteer), we had an event based on a group who worshipped an ancestor named Zog, which if I recall correctly, was the name of the first human in the Ultima mythos. It was a minor plot point at best.
This group of characters (the Zog Cabal) and their storyline was created by Origin GMs, and acted and fleshed out by GMs and Seers.
We never saw where the end of this story went (and it was one of the few that was actually successful, in my tenure), because one day, the GMs received a letter from Gamespot outlining some "concerns" players had had about the "Zog Cabal" actually being a veiled reference to Z.O.G. (Zionist Occupied Government), which is a slanderous name anti-semitic and/or white power groups give to whatever governments they oppose (generally, the US, which they believe is controlled by "Jewish interests").
It was utterly preposterous. Richard Garriot may be many things, but a racist or anti-semite he isn't. Most of his games have been highly derivative of Tolkien and Tolkien-inspired knockoffs, and having mysterious characters with funny names is a STAPLE of science fiction and fantasy, and X and Z being pretty popular letters to add a sense of "exoticness" to newly-minted names. Xenu anyone?
What was leaked to us by other sources in EA and in Gamespot was that the "players" whose concerns the Gamespot editor had addressed were actually other Gamespot writers: essentially, they were trying to make news instead of reporting it, by inserting themselves into the story.
While this isn't related to the current row, it lessens my ability to be shocked and horrified by the idea of editorial sleaze by the Gamespot staff.
You missed that part of my point because I made it poorly. I apologize.
...and when I think of a "larger and less creative organization", AT&T is definitely in the top hundred.
A big part of the problem isn't _just_ that employees aren't as effective (and let's be honest here, it does take discipline), but that there is a management culture that considers presence as being a very important determiner of effectiveness. Management culture which isn't ready for this sort of change is going to be especially poor at judging how (or if) it works.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the employees are just as (or more) effective telecommuting than not:
Managing takes skill, and managing a telecommuting workforce takes different skills. I would argue that it also takes more skill, because you have to get a lot of old notions out of your head, and you have to understand work differently than the management mindset of 20 years ago. If your managers aren't willing to embrace that, they're also probably a lot more likely to assume the worst of you despite what effective output you have, because you know as well as I do that in some work environments, effectiveness is measured poorly by people who think that a passing familiarity with Excel and Powerpoint is more than enough to whip up some statistics, usually getting the basic assumptions wrong.
That doesn't make management right in this case, but it does mean that there's a lot of corporate inertia to get beyond. Think of the companies who have really led the charge here - software, marketing for print and television, design work. The larger and less creative an organization is, the more inertia there is to get past when it comes to embracing a different way of understanding the work environment...
Most employees aren't responsible enough to be as effective at home as they are at work.
Most managers aren't skilled at and don't have the tools for monitoring effectiveness, particularly in offices where "effectiveness" is often measured by whether or not you can drop everything the second your boss gets a new idea for you to work on.
The problem really isn't that the internet and phone network aren't cutting it, but that the people aren't cutting it.
I'm reminded of the late 90s tech boom stories out of California where people get to put "KUNG FU NINJA" on their business cards instead of their functional job titles, wear Birkenstocks and torn jean shorts on Fridays (and then every day) and otherwise show up for work looking as if their daily agenda consisted of checking the mail and eating cookies while watching television. The problem isn't "casual Fridays" or a looser dress code, the problem is how far people push it.
Face it, if you have to deal with customers (particular those of us who have to deal with them at their offices and not ours), it's hard to instill any degree of confidence when you're dressed like a chump who doesn't own anything nicer than a t-shirt. Similarly, it's hard to instill any degree of confidence in your supervisors when you're not around.
Did you miss that call because you were on another one, or because you were still sleeping? Did you neglect that email because you're busy making serious progress on another matter, or because you're playing WoW? Did you log 4 hours in 8 because your internet was being flaky, or because you disconnected and went to do some shopping? Did you fail at a particular task despite your high level of effort or because of the lack thereof? Your presence is your case: if you're not around to make it, rest assured, someone else will make it for you, and assume the worst. And you'll push the issue yourself because there's no longer any separation between work space and home/play space. Most people don't have the discipline for it.
"Of course it's work-related. I'm farming Primals for my supervisor."
of commentary and stories about bricked iPhones?
They're getting pretty shrill on Slashdot, as if the fact that Apple's product was locked into AT&T's service was a big surprise foisted on consumers after the fact, or something.
I hate lock-ins as much as most of you, but you know about it going in, and you can choose another option. Of course, the best solution is to stop all forms of telco lock-ins, and the one glaring lock-in is the contract for wireless service on almost all providers that substantially penalize the customer for discontinuing service "early".
As a consumer, if I'm dissatisfied with my service or I can get better service elsewhere, there's no such thing as early discontinuation of service. It's more like "right on time". Lock-in contracts, unlike the iPhone dramas, affect nearly everyone with "post-pay" service. (The alternative phrase was "non-prepay" which sounds nutty.)
The Lisa II.
And until you include it with the console, it will not be supported in most games, and most people will not consider it a core peripheral, and developers will be wary to write any game that requires it, and until games require it, support for it will be a moot point for most players. Even if it is a standard USB keyboard.
Yes, a USB standard keyboard and mouse are the best solution. So include one in the goddamn box so there's no question as to whether you actually need the thing. If you ship it in the box, developers will assume its use, and players will use it. Right now, there's no motivation to hook it up if the game works with the wonky console controller.
It's this need for console designers to keep hacking at the same broken controller design that is the block. A console controller may be the best thing for a lot of arcade platformers, but there is a world of experience that says a mouse is the best thing available for FPS games. Quit making it an "option", include it, and require it for things it makes sense to require it for. Of course, a keyboard isn't the most conducive thing for playing games in your recliner in front of the TV, but there are any number of one-handed keyboard style devices one could use, or at the very least, a one-handed controller, wii style, for the non-mouse hand.
But again, if it's not in the box when Johnny opens it up Christmas Morning, developers won't want to risk losing sales by requiring a controller most people don't have. Don't underestimate the novice factor - there's a world of difference between usb mouse/keyboard compatibility and having it in the box when shipped - you'd be shocked how many novice users are using RCA video out instead of s-video or better.
Until a console ships with a keyboard and a mouse, most users of that console will not have one.
This has been proven over and over in the marketplace - keyboard addons for consoles have never met with success. The only way to ensure adoption is to force the issue on every model, even (especially!) on the low-end, or else the console keyboard and mouse will continue to be a niche product that most people aren't even aware exists, much less want to buy.
The first time a group of fairly talented console players meet up with a group of fairly talented PC players in a first-person shooter, the limitations of a console controller versus the flexibility of a mouse are going to become painfully obvious.
When I played Halo on an Xbox (not a lengthy play session, admittedly), it felt like I was playing wearing mittens.
There's something to be said about having your mouse set almost fast enough for the cursor to register your pulse - because in an FPS, being able to do a quick 360 in midair in a fraction of a second is the difference between getting a kill and being a kill.
This could lead players to assume that the PC is the platform to be on, much to the detriment of console game sales and rentals.
I don't have a use for consoles - I dislike the limitations and the controllers have been horrendous since the days of the Atari 2600 and don't care much for the kind of games that consoles do better than PCs, so while I admit I might be short-changing the console side a little, that's my take.
...string theory.
Did I mention Windows Explorer sucked?
Off topic suggestion - Directory Opus (gpsoft.com.au) is an extremely functional and customizable explorer replacement. I feel like I'm explorerizing with mittens on when I'm on systems without it. It may or may not resolve your Explorer issues, but it's worth a close look in any event.
(Just a DOpus fanboi, not a GPSoft employee.)
Mass Vista upgrades will occur when the problems of supporting Vista are eclipsed by the problems of supporting XP.
Right now, the main problem with supporting XP is making sure you can actually get it on new OEM hardware.
The main problem with supporting Vista is user resistance to UI changes, a very pushy security system without enough tangible benefits to justify it, increased memory footprint (as with every Windows upgrade) and drivers, drivers, drivers.
I suspect there will be a few legacy XP machines at a lot of offices that move to Vista, simply because there's a lot of office hardware that's fairly expensive, and whose manufacturers don't consider it a priority to update drivers for - specialty printers (wide format, high throughput small format) come to mind. If you've got a $7K-35K printer, odds are keeping it running in XP is a more attractive option than buying a new one merely because the manufacturer won't write a Vista driver for an eight year old machine that's still working like a champ.
In the 8-bit "underground" BBS community, or at least the Commodore-centric portion of it I was most familiar, our convention was the very similar:
;) was some sort of strange end of line translation error or an issue related to character sets (kind of like how not converting PETSCII to ASCII would result in flipped lowercase/uppercase), similar to the whole windows/unix difference of writing linefeeds.
<g>
On those venues, smilies were non-existent in my experience. I first came across the smiley, personally, in some documentation for a popular Amiga anti-virus software documentation. I kept on assuming the preponderance of
Then I slowly turned my head as it dawned on me, and saw what was really going on: someone had invented a device to take the 'dry' out of 'dry humor'. Also, it took the 'humor' out of 'dry humor', and somewhere, a seahorse cried. &'
...here comes FluTube!