Why do you think that our cost ratio would be similar to theirs?
We find it less expensive to build a new one only because we've pegged an extremely high cost on the repair mission and we've only pegged such a high cost on the repair mission because of safety issues related to our space shuttle fleet.
Neither China nor India use space shuttles.
I'm not saying they _will_ be able to do it cheaper, I'm saying they _might_ be able to do it cheaper. Why would we be so arrogant as to not even let someone else give it a try if they should express interest in the project?
We were burned badly when a bright, young IT guy recommended we go the the Toshiba Sattelite Pro line instead of the "more expensive" business-optimized Tecras we had been buying. We're back to Tecras and the sanity of our IT department is almost back to normal.
Ghost images: fixed Short warranty: fixed Durability problems: fixed
Now I've known a lot of people who buy consumer-grade notebooks and have no problem. But they treat their notebooks like they payed for them with their own money; our consultants don't.
Business class also works for desktops. Our business-class desktops all have predictable layouts and software and they come with things such as Wake-on-LAN and processor serial numbers turned on. They come with "business sound" which lets us avoid messy speaker setups but also lets our users hear warning tones. They cost a little bit more, but if you've ever tried supporting "the latest and greatest and cheapest" times 400 stations, you'd happily pay the price.
You can see his point though, if the drivers for the Network card don't work, no amount of pandering to the PHB will undo that bad decision.
You have to question the poster though. He's claiming the network card on the Optiplex wont support the current version of Windows. This just plain sounds wrong.
It's kind of the equivilent to saying he bought a Ford and it won't turn left, only right. It's technically possible, but very improbable.
Did he even try Dell's web site for latest driver? If he didn't, I would have fired him myself.
Huh? That's suicidal. How about: until we prove we can live in equilibrium on a planet, we must spread elsewhere.
Ok, so we spread. But wouldn't it be great to avoid screwing ourselves in the process? Here on Earth, when we've done things without knowing all the facts, we've ended up causing all kinds of pain to ourselves.
Are you familiar with the cane toad or the Star Thistle? These species were introduced to new environments with the idea that they'd do a lot of good. Because we didn't understand those environments well enough, Cane Toads have become the bane of Australia and Star Thistle chokes much of Northern California causing all kinds of unpleasantness to recreational hikers and campers. Neither the Cane Toad nor the Star Thistle were even remotely successful at the task they were designed to help.
I'm not saying we should be paralyzed by fear, but if we don't do due diligence we run the very real risk of causing more problems than we solve. Due diligence is not, "No one has proved there are problems, so yet, lets go!" A good scientific understanding of the environment on Mars is so far out of our grasp at the moment that it's folly to seriously consider this kind of proposal. I'm not saying "it's bad," just that neither you, nor anyone else has anywhere near enough knowledge at the moment to say "it's good."
You make an important point. I don't feel comfortable at all charging 12 year-olds, especially disturbed 12-year-olds (you mentioned zoloft) as adults. If they had the full judgement and wisdom of "adults", shouldn't they be allowed to vote?
On the other hand, it's a pretty good judgement call that someone at 17 years and 364 days will have about the same reasoning ability as an 18 year-old, baring individual variability of course. Why should they "get away with murder" because they're under 18?
But there's a difference when someone does something wrong and someone coerces someone into doing something wrong. If I say that you're responsible for what you do, that does not negate that fact that someone may be acting irresponsibly in coercing you to do something.
Here's an example. An executive has sex with his secretary, promotes her, and then gets fired for having sex with her. The secretary continues her employment.
In this case, the boss is considered to have overwhelming career power over the secretary and thus should keep his lust in check. The secretary, however is not in a position to influence the executive's career, so what she has done is not considered to be a fireing offence. Yes, she can giver her consent to sex. She may have even been the agressor leading toward the act. But the executive, since he is both in the posistion of power and should "know better" is expected to just say no.
Moving this to the matter at hand, a 16-year-old girl who is bright and understands the consequeses may indeed give her consent to have sex with a 40-year-old man. She has the body of an adult and, at least in this example, intelligence and wisdom at least of an 18-year-old. However, the 40-year-old man, by virtue of his social position vs. hers, is in a position to have coersive power over the girl. For that reason alone, I would find the act at least as wrong as that between the executive and his secretary and the guy should definately have to pay the piper. No, it's not as bad as him haveing sex with a nine-year-old, but the law wont treat it as bad either.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that yes our society does have a disconect when it comes to judging how responsible a minor should be for the things they do, but it doesn't have as big of a disconnect as it seems when it comes to sex. Yes, many minors know what they're doing and have a desire to have sex. However, the adults still need say a resounding NO if the subject comes up and the law will enforce the issue if they don't. Put another way, 16-year-olds can have sex with other 16-year-olds all day long and the law doesn't care. Keeping, often preditory, adults who probably have vast coersive powers out of the picture is still a very good thing.
If you're arguing that kids should learn about what sex is, where babies come from and the biology of procreation, I certainly hope you don't think that I'm arguing the opposite.
But if you think 9-year-old children can give informed consent to engage in actual sexual activity then you're going to have to come up with a better argument than, "but they get religious training".
I think the point is that parents can teach their children as they wish, but they can't make them engage in activities that society has deemed harmful. You can teach your kid that seat belt laws shouldn't exist and that it's an abuse of the state, but you better still buckle them up before you leave the driveway. You can teach them that alcohol is tasty and fun, but can't give 'em the six-pack to prove it. You can teach them about how God flooded the Earth, but you can't practice the great flood in your swimming pool and only have two of the neighbors puppies walk away from it.
More relevant to the point at hand, please, please, please teach your kids age-appropriate information about sex... but don't have sex with them or let your adult friends have sex with them.
The point of building a new one is that the old one is too expensive to repair.
I think the point of the poster is that we may find if too expensive to repair, but India or China may not. It's just a little bit arrogant to suggest that our repair costs can't are the final answer, just like it's a little arrogant to suggest that you can't get into space twice in a week for only 20 million clams.
There's a term called "informed consent". Even if a child gives their consent, the developmental stage of the child prevents them from fully understanding what it means to give consent and thus negates any consent they may give, even if it's given quite willingly.
Have you ever spent time relating to a nine-year-old child? They dont know what the hell they're doing. If they did, we'd let them vote, drink and buy property, as well as give their consent to engage in sexual activity. But they don't. Thats why we love them and protect them instead of subjecting them to situations that will give them nightmares as their lives progress.
People who believe like you do want it both ways. You want both to be able to manipulate children into doing things they don't understand, and at the same time you want to call it "consent" because they said "ok" when you asked them if they wanted candy and led them away to your house of pain. Or maybe that's not really you, just the guys you're defending... in either case you seriously need to re-examine what it means to hurt another.... and stay to your own kind until you find the right answer.
Well, seeing as the police are using the photos exactly as you suggest, I guess they get a "two thumbs up.', eh?
More specifically, the police were only using the photos to elicit eye-witness evidence of the location of the crime with the hopes that they could then find further evidence of the assault after the location was identified. This is truly a case were everyone wins (with the hopeful exception of the assailant).
If the gaming experience on Linux and Windows were equal, many people would be a lot more willing to ditch Windows for all the other benefits of Linux.
I think this is technically true. However, if you're just getting ports of games then the situation will never become equal.
Look at the Mac. Lots of great games. Some are simal-releases and some are a bit later. But no matter how you slice it it's not anywhere near equal and it never will be as long as the main avenue for games being built for a Mac is to port them from Windows or a console.
But the Mac comparison goes a little deaper than games. Macs are popular with a certain crowd not because they did a good job copying Windows features; they're popular because they did a good job making very different and highly desireable features.
Linuxs strengths need to be like Mac strengths; they need to be unique to Linux. For the features where Linux only trys to "catch up" with Windows or "be equal", they'll only be fighting a losing battle.
The hardware issues make sense. If you wait for gen 1.1 you're likely to get an improved model. But you're price issues don't make any sense. There's no reason at all to expect a quick price drop. The PS2 took a long time to come down by significant dollars and portable devices in general tend to hold onto their release prices very well.
Similarly, your range for prices on the PS2 launch is ridiculous. People were still paying $300 in the store for some time to come. That price didn't come down for a serious while and even then only trickled down slowly. You're right to point out that people paying $1000 on eBay were chumps, but they don't deserve at all to be lumped in with the folk who were simply paying retail prices.
Finally, you seem to have no concept of what things actually cost. you said "The same thing can be had much cheaper now, with better specs." about my daughters ipod and that's simply not the case. iPods are not now dramatically cheaper for dramatically better features. A 40gig iPod runs $399.00 at the apple store as of 10 seconds ago. Good luck finding it much cheaper anywhere else. And "time sensitive" my ass. This device has been this price minus a few gigs of data since it's release years ago.
If you're waiting on a similar price drop on the PSP, be prepared to wait until much later, not sooner, to get it. Since game device manufactures are in it for the long haul with the exact same spec devices, I predict you'll be waiting at least a year to save as little as $50.
What a person might do instead with Steganography is embed encrypted information, so that the set of information is not only hard to detect in a field of dummy files, but that once the encrypted data is found one still has to decode it.
Exactly. Even if you play the record backwards, no one knows exactly what the hell the message means. Satan wants you to something, but you can only really tell if you have the code book.
It's too bad Myst couldn't have been better leveraged. That's the kind of massivly popular game that could help change impressions about Macs today.
If they had 3 or 4 games like Myst(I'm talking popularity-wise here. I didn't really care for the game itself), with their current hardware and OS, I'm sure you'd see a lot more switchers.
It's actually just a matter that we already had the PCs and the Mac didn't have anything unique to add so it was never even considered. I like getting some games soon after release, but that wasn't an overwhelming concern for me.
But that's just my situation. A lot of people care A LOT about being first. It was damn hard to get a PS2 when it was released for just this reason. People routinely pre-order hot games or camp out to be first in line at the CompUsa on zero-day. If Mac or Linux want to be taken seriously as a game platform, they're going to have to find a way to be first with some cool game at least some of the time.
You might stump up a couple of hundred bucks for a console because there's a must-have exclusive game but it's a whole new thing stumping up thousands for a Mac.
I dunno. The mini might change that cost issue somewhat. If only they could get the platform-unique games...
You mentioned Blizzard and WoW. These guys make a lot of games.
Truthfully, I'd be talking out my ass if I said I knew exactly what games took years. I do know that if I walk down the Mac game isle at any computer store I see a bunch of games priced at $50+ that came out on PC years ago. I don't know for a fact _when_ they were released for the Mac, but I do know the $50 price tag suggests they were released relatively recently.
I can further tell you that those games that were simultaneously released on both platforms are generally thought of by the public as "PC platform games." This perception matters. If people were to perceive some of these great games as being "Mac platform games," then you'd see the Mac taking off as a gaming platform.
Even if all the great PC games were released simultaneously on the Mac (most certainly not the case now) the best that would get Apple is that people wouldn't reject them because of gaming. Until there are games or video cards that gaming enthusiasts lust after that get released only on the Mac, they'll never gain market share because of gaming. TW
Great. The Mac has a bunch of games that came out first on the PC, sometimes years before hitting the Mac.
I guess the good news is that I won't have to worry about having the latest graphics card so I'll save a bundle if I use the Mac as my primary gaming platform.
As much as I agree with you in theory, it's a little more complicated than that in reality. Even though both my daughter and I have mid (her) to high (me)-end gaming computers, and even though we have tons of games on the PC that we like, I still bought her a PS2. Why? Because I've never been able to get Dance Dance Revolution on a PC and that's the game she really wanted.
On the other hand, I've never considered buying her a Mac for gaming because all of the good games are just late ports of PC games.
If you want to have people going to Linux for the games, you need more than just late ports of great PC games. You need some great games that come out for Linux FIRST and stay only on that platform for a significant amount of time. No one bought a PC to play Halo, but plenty of people bought Xboxs for it.
I paid $400 for my daughters iPod. No color screen, no optical drive, no Wi-Fi, no dual processors running at a combined nearly 700mhz withought significant heat buildup. The damn thing didnt' even have a removable battery. It's basically just a portable HD with headphones and a cheapo B&W screen.
My buddy recently paid $600 for a PDA that had close to, but not quite the specs of the PSP in screen and processor. It did have expansion ports and Wi-Fi, but no optical drive that'll hold a feature lenght MP4 movie and no significant 3D capability.
Heck, even a full sized PS2 still costs $100 with no minaturization, no screen, no Wi-Fi and you have to buy the memory card, at a massive premium, seperatly. Oh yeah, it doesn't come with a movie either.
Why in the hell are you bitchin' about $250 for this thing when anything remotely close to it's specs costs so much more? If you're thinking of it as just a little bit better GBA then I'm sure you're gonna be disapointed at the price. But if you look at what it's actually giving you then it's one hell of a bargain.
I've had a leadership role in many smallish to mediumish projects
In one of the projects I worked on as both an official and unofficial lead for various pieces we turned 4 NT 4.0 domains and a related Exchange 5.5 infrastructure into a a single ADS domain spanning 6 sites with Exchange 2000 on 4 of them. It included 3 front-end infrastructures and two Exchange clusters by the time all was said and done. 5 states and a foreign contry almost exactly on the other side of the world were involved as well as a Netware eDirectory tree that had to be almost completely restructured to allow for full sync with ADS.
The technical stuff, though certainly not trivial, was definately not the hardest part. Coordinating with several layers of management, the Netware guy, peers at 3 of the US sites and the IT guy on the other side of the world who spoke broken english, on the other hand, was very difficult. That's not even counting 700 users that had to change the way they logged in and a full IT staff that had to learn not only the migration procedure but completely new procedures for almost everything they had done in the past.
Leadership was why this project almost failed at one point and why it ultimately succeeded. I've seen other projects fail and leadership, or lack thereof, was always the issue.
The tech stuff can can always be worked out, but on big projects it cant be worked out by one guy in a room. When you get more than a couple of folks that need to work on a project, all of a sudden leadership trumps everything. Even if all the leader does is allows for an atmosphere where bright people can work togther and come up with solutions, that's far more than many leaders do. On governmental-sized projects though, the layers of leadership will have to do far more than that.
Blaming it on the guys in the trenchs, or the software, or the hardware or anything else is like blaming the failure of your shipping company on bad trucks and drivers. Didn't you buy and hire all of them yourself?
No, they're not going to download Fedora. Do you know how incredibly confusing it is to install an OS?
Two part answer:
1. You're right, they're not goin got download Fedora and install it (history has shown few people do this). They're not going to install it for tons of other reasons including plain old fashioned social fear that someone is going to recommend some great Windows software to them and and they're going to have to look sheepishly at the ground and say, "my computer wont run that."
But those reasons have very little to do with how many distros there are. The "confusion" argument breaks down in the real world. If it's preinstalled (rare, but it happens) the user is going to be happy with what he has, or he'll re-install with something that will make him happy. If he decides to download, real users are not paralized with fear trying to decide which they should download. The number of different distros is just not that much of a factor in whether to use or not use Linux.
2. If you're already made the decision to manualy install an OS, installing Linux is hands down the easist install of any OS in many cases. Red Hat 9 had the easiest install of any OS I've ever installed, at the time I installed it. I did install it on very standar HP/Compaq equipment, but the number of decisions was absolutely minimal and the ones that had to be made were generally not very technical. I would not hesitate to let my teenage daughter install it by herself while I was at the grocery store.
But, with live CDs it's even easier than that. Many non linux users these days have their first experience here without the need to "install" at all. They're given a CD by a friend (once again we see that choosing a distro doesn't really affect their ability to use Linux) and it just runs and they try it out for a little bit and go back to Windows. Yes, they go back to Windows. Almost always. BUT, they have less fear now and the next time they see a PC with Linux installed they jump right in and use it.
But what about getting PC people to switch? Another argument for another day. LOTS of reasons why people prefer to stay with what they have, not the least of which is the notion that their brother in law can easily help them with it when it's broke. I'm just saying the the variety of Linux distros is likely to be only a minor factor here, if at all.
What about getting Mac people to switch? They already did. BSD = Linux for the sake of this argument.
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Why do you think that our cost ratio would be similar to theirs?
We find it less expensive to build a new one only because we've pegged an extremely high cost on the repair mission and we've only pegged such a high cost on the repair mission because of safety issues related to our space shuttle fleet.
Neither China nor India use space shuttles.
I'm not saying they _will_ be able to do it cheaper, I'm saying they _might_ be able to do it cheaper. Why would we be so arrogant as to not even let someone else give it a try if they should express interest in the project?
Right you are, sir!
We were burned badly when a bright, young IT guy recommended we go the the Toshiba Sattelite Pro line instead of the "more expensive" business-optimized Tecras we had been buying. We're back to Tecras and the sanity of our IT department is almost back to normal.
Ghost images: fixed
Short warranty: fixed
Durability problems: fixed
Now I've known a lot of people who buy consumer-grade notebooks and have no problem. But they treat their notebooks like they payed for them with their own money; our consultants don't.
Business class also works for desktops. Our business-class desktops all have predictable layouts and software and they come with things such as Wake-on-LAN and processor serial numbers turned on. They come with "business sound" which lets us avoid messy speaker setups but also lets our users hear warning tones. They cost a little bit more, but if you've ever tried supporting "the latest and greatest and cheapest" times 400 stations, you'd happily pay the price.
TW
You can see his point though, if the drivers for the Network card don't work, no amount of pandering to the PHB will undo that bad decision.
You have to question the poster though. He's claiming the network card on the Optiplex wont support the current version of Windows. This just plain sounds wrong.
It's kind of the equivilent to saying he bought a Ford and it won't turn left, only right. It's technically possible, but very improbable.
Did he even try Dell's web site for latest driver? If he didn't, I would have fired him myself.
TW
Huh? That's suicidal. How about: until we prove we can live in equilibrium on a planet, we must spread elsewhere.
Ok, so we spread. But wouldn't it be great to avoid screwing ourselves in the process? Here on Earth, when we've done things without knowing all the facts, we've ended up causing all kinds of pain to ourselves.
Are you familiar with the cane toad or the Star Thistle? These species were introduced to new environments with the idea that they'd do a lot of good. Because we didn't understand those environments well enough, Cane Toads have become the bane of Australia and Star Thistle chokes much of Northern California causing all kinds of unpleasantness to recreational hikers and campers. Neither the Cane Toad nor the Star Thistle were even remotely successful at the task they were designed to help.
I'm not saying we should be paralyzed by fear, but if we don't do due diligence we run the very real risk of causing more problems than we solve. Due diligence is not, "No one has proved there are problems, so yet, lets go!" A good scientific understanding of the environment on Mars is so far out of our grasp at the moment that it's folly to seriously consider this kind of proposal. I'm not saying "it's bad," just that neither you, nor anyone else has anywhere near enough knowledge at the moment to say "it's good."
TW
You make an important point. I don't feel comfortable at all charging 12 year-olds, especially disturbed 12-year-olds (you mentioned zoloft) as adults. If they had the full judgement and wisdom of "adults", shouldn't they be allowed to vote?
On the other hand, it's a pretty good judgement call that someone at 17 years and 364 days will have about the same reasoning ability as an 18 year-old, baring individual variability of course. Why should they "get away with murder" because they're under 18?
But there's a difference when someone does something wrong and someone coerces someone into doing something wrong. If I say that you're responsible for what you do, that does not negate that fact that someone may be acting irresponsibly in coercing you to do something.
Here's an example. An executive has sex with his secretary, promotes her, and then gets fired for having sex with her. The secretary continues her employment.
In this case, the boss is considered to have overwhelming career power over the secretary and thus should keep his lust in check. The secretary, however is not in a position to influence the executive's career, so what she has done is not considered to be a fireing offence. Yes, she can giver her consent to sex. She may have even been the agressor leading toward the act. But the executive, since he is both in the posistion of power and should "know better" is expected to just say no.
Moving this to the matter at hand, a 16-year-old girl who is bright and understands the consequeses may indeed give her consent to have sex with a 40-year-old man. She has the body of an adult and, at least in this example, intelligence and wisdom at least of an 18-year-old. However, the 40-year-old man, by virtue of his social position vs. hers, is in a position to have coersive power over the girl. For that reason alone, I would find the act at least as wrong as that between the executive and his secretary and the guy should definately have to pay the piper. No, it's not as bad as him haveing sex with a nine-year-old, but the law wont treat it as bad either.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that yes our society does have a disconect when it comes to judging how responsible a minor should be for the things they do, but it doesn't have as big of a disconnect as it seems when it comes to sex. Yes, many minors know what they're doing and have a desire to have sex. However, the adults still need say a resounding NO if the subject comes up and the law will enforce the issue if they don't. Put another way, 16-year-olds can have sex with other 16-year-olds all day long and the law doesn't care. Keeping, often preditory, adults who probably have vast coersive powers out of the picture is still a very good thing.
TW
If you're arguing that kids should learn about what sex is, where babies come from and the biology of procreation, I certainly hope you don't think that I'm arguing the opposite.
But if you think 9-year-old children can give informed consent to engage in actual sexual activity then you're going to have to come up with a better argument than, "but they get religious training".
I think the point is that parents can teach their children as they wish, but they can't make them engage in activities that society has deemed harmful. You can teach your kid that seat belt laws shouldn't exist and that it's an abuse of the state, but you better still buckle them up before you leave the driveway. You can teach them that alcohol is tasty and fun, but can't give 'em the six-pack to prove it. You can teach them about how God flooded the Earth, but you can't practice the great flood in your swimming pool and only have two of the neighbors puppies walk away from it.
More relevant to the point at hand, please, please, please teach your kids age-appropriate information about sex... but don't have sex with them or let your adult friends have sex with them.
TW
The point of building a new one is that the old one is too expensive to repair.
I think the point of the poster is that we may find if too expensive to repair, but India or China may not. It's just a little bit arrogant to suggest that our repair costs can't are the final answer, just like it's a little arrogant to suggest that you can't get into space twice in a week for only 20 million clams.
NASA should get out of the arrogance business.
TW
Interesting... you call it a "joke" yet I'm not laughing. Must be because of some difference between me and you.... hmmmm.
TW
There's a term called "informed consent". Even if a child gives their consent, the developmental stage of the child prevents them from fully understanding what it means to give consent and thus negates any consent they may give, even if it's given quite willingly.
Have you ever spent time relating to a nine-year-old child? They dont know what the hell they're doing. If they did, we'd let them vote, drink and buy property, as well as give their consent to engage in sexual activity. But they don't. Thats why we love them and protect them instead of subjecting them to situations that will give them nightmares as their lives progress.
People who believe like you do want it both ways. You want both to be able to manipulate children into doing things they don't understand, and at the same time you want to call it "consent" because they said "ok" when you asked them if they wanted candy and led them away to your house of pain. Or maybe that's not really you, just the guys you're defending... in either case you seriously need to re-examine what it means to hurt another.... and stay to your own kind until you find the right answer.
TW
Well, seeing as the police are using the photos exactly as you suggest, I guess they get a "two thumbs up.', eh?
More specifically, the police were only using the photos to elicit eye-witness evidence of the location of the crime with the hopes that they could then find further evidence of the assault after the location was identified. This is truly a case were everyone wins (with the hopeful exception of the assailant).
TW
This one was 9 years old. Any witty comments about that?
TW
ok, lead poisoning it was.
If the gaming experience on Linux and Windows were equal, many people would be a lot more willing to ditch Windows for all the other benefits of Linux.
I think this is technically true. However, if you're just getting ports of games then the situation will never become equal.
Look at the Mac. Lots of great games. Some are simal-releases and some are a bit later. But no matter how you slice it it's not anywhere near equal and it never will be as long as the main avenue for games being built for a Mac is to port them from Windows or a console.
But the Mac comparison goes a little deaper than games. Macs are popular with a certain crowd not because they did a good job copying Windows features; they're popular because they did a good job making very different and highly desireable features.
Linuxs strengths need to be like Mac strengths; they need to be unique to Linux. For the features where Linux only trys to "catch up" with Windows or "be equal", they'll only be fighting a losing battle.
TW
The hardware issues make sense. If you wait for gen 1.1 you're likely to get an improved model. But you're price issues don't make any sense. There's no reason at all to expect a quick price drop. The PS2 took a long time to come down by significant dollars and portable devices in general tend to hold onto their release prices very well.
Similarly, your range for prices on the PS2 launch is ridiculous. People were still paying $300 in the store for some time to come. That price didn't come down for a serious while and even then only trickled down slowly. You're right to point out that people paying $1000 on eBay were chumps, but they don't deserve at all to be lumped in with the folk who were simply paying retail prices.
Finally, you seem to have no concept of what things actually cost. you said "The same thing can be had much cheaper now, with better specs." about my daughters ipod and that's simply not the case. iPods are not now dramatically cheaper for dramatically better features. A 40gig iPod runs $399.00 at the apple store as of 10 seconds ago. Good luck finding it much cheaper anywhere else. And "time sensitive" my ass. This device has been this price minus a few gigs of data since it's release years ago.
If you're waiting on a similar price drop on the PSP, be prepared to wait until much later, not sooner, to get it. Since game device manufactures are in it for the long haul with the exact same spec devices, I predict you'll be waiting at least a year to save as little as $50.
TW
What a person might do instead with Steganography is embed encrypted information, so that the set of information is not only hard to detect in a field of dummy files, but that once the encrypted data is found one still has to decode it.
Exactly. Even if you play the record backwards, no one knows exactly what the hell the message means. Satan wants you to something, but you can only really tell if you have the code book.
TW
It's too bad Myst couldn't have been better leveraged. That's the kind of massivly popular game that could help change impressions about Macs today.
If they had 3 or 4 games like Myst(I'm talking popularity-wise here. I didn't really care for the game itself), with their current hardware and OS, I'm sure you'd see a lot more switchers.
TW
It's actually just a matter that we already had the PCs and the Mac didn't have anything unique to add so it was never even considered. I like getting some games soon after release, but that wasn't an overwhelming concern for me.
But that's just my situation. A lot of people care A LOT about being first. It was damn hard to get a PS2 when it was released for just this reason. People routinely pre-order hot games or camp out to be first in line at the CompUsa on zero-day. If Mac or Linux want to be taken seriously as a game platform, they're going to have to find a way to be first with some cool game at least some of the time.
TW
You might stump up a couple of hundred bucks for a console because there's a must-have exclusive game but it's a whole new thing stumping up thousands for a Mac.
I dunno. The mini might change that cost issue somewhat. If only they could get the platform-unique games...
You mentioned Blizzard and WoW. These guys make a lot of games.
Truthfully, I'd be talking out my ass if I said I knew exactly what games took years. I do know that if I walk down the Mac game isle at any computer store I see a bunch of games priced at $50+ that came out on PC years ago. I don't know for a fact _when_ they were released for the Mac, but I do know the $50 price tag suggests they were released relatively recently.
I can further tell you that those games that were simultaneously released on both platforms are generally thought of by the public as "PC platform games." This perception matters. If people were to perceive some of these great games as being "Mac platform games," then you'd see the Mac taking off as a gaming platform.
Even if all the great PC games were released simultaneously on the Mac (most certainly not the case now) the best that would get Apple is that people wouldn't reject them because of gaming. Until there are games or video cards that gaming enthusiasts lust after that get released only on the Mac, they'll never gain market share because of gaming.
TW
Great. The Mac has a bunch of games that came out first on the PC, sometimes years before hitting the Mac.
I guess the good news is that I won't have to worry about having the latest graphics card so I'll save a bundle if I use the Mac as my primary gaming platform.
how'd Doom3 slip in there! Now I'm sad again.
TW
As much as I agree with you in theory, it's a little more complicated than that in reality. Even though both my daughter and I have mid (her) to high (me)-end gaming computers, and even though we have tons of games on the PC that we like, I still bought her a PS2. Why? Because I've never been able to get Dance Dance Revolution on a PC and that's the game she really wanted.
On the other hand, I've never considered buying her a Mac for gaming because all of the good games are just late ports of PC games.
If you want to have people going to Linux for the games, you need more than just late ports of great PC games. You need some great games that come out for Linux FIRST and stay only on that platform for a significant amount of time. No one bought a PC to play Halo, but plenty of people bought Xboxs for it.
TW
I paid $400 for my daughters iPod. No color screen, no optical drive, no Wi-Fi, no dual processors running at a combined nearly 700mhz withought significant heat buildup. The damn thing didnt' even have a removable battery. It's basically just a portable HD with headphones and a cheapo B&W screen.
My buddy recently paid $600 for a PDA that had close to, but not quite the specs of the PSP in screen and processor. It did have expansion ports and Wi-Fi, but no optical drive that'll hold a feature lenght MP4 movie and no significant 3D capability.
Heck, even a full sized PS2 still costs $100 with no minaturization, no screen, no Wi-Fi and you have to buy the memory card, at a massive premium, seperatly. Oh yeah, it doesn't come with a movie either.
Why in the hell are you bitchin' about $250 for this thing when anything remotely close to it's specs costs so much more? If you're thinking of it as just a little bit better GBA then I'm sure you're gonna be disapointed at the price. But if you look at what it's actually giving you then it's one hell of a bargain.
TW
I've had a leadership role in many smallish to mediumish projects
In one of the projects I worked on as both an official and unofficial lead for various pieces we turned 4 NT 4.0 domains and a related Exchange 5.5 infrastructure into a a single ADS domain spanning 6 sites with Exchange 2000 on 4 of them. It included 3 front-end infrastructures and two Exchange clusters by the time all was said and done. 5 states and a foreign contry almost exactly on the other side of the world were involved as well as a Netware eDirectory tree that had to be almost completely restructured to allow for full sync with ADS.
The technical stuff, though certainly not trivial, was definately not the hardest part. Coordinating with several layers of management, the Netware guy, peers at 3 of the US sites and the IT guy on the other side of the world who spoke broken english, on the other hand, was very difficult. That's not even counting 700 users that had to change the way they logged in and a full IT staff that had to learn not only the migration procedure but completely new procedures for almost everything they had done in the past.
Leadership was why this project almost failed at one point and why it ultimately succeeded. I've seen other projects fail and leadership, or lack thereof, was always the issue.
The tech stuff can can always be worked out, but on big projects it cant be worked out by one guy in a room. When you get more than a couple of folks that need to work on a project, all of a sudden leadership trumps everything. Even if all the leader does is allows for an atmosphere where bright people can work togther and come up with solutions, that's far more than many leaders do. On governmental-sized projects though, the layers of leadership will have to do far more than that.
Blaming it on the guys in the trenchs, or the software, or the hardware or anything else is like blaming the failure of your shipping company on bad trucks and drivers. Didn't you buy and hire all of them yourself?
TW
To be in that first Million?
No, they're not going to download Fedora. Do you know how incredibly confusing it is to install an OS?
Two part answer:
1. You're right, they're not goin got download Fedora and install it (history has shown few people do this). They're not going to install it for tons of other reasons including plain old fashioned social fear that someone is going to recommend some great Windows software to them and and they're going to have to look sheepishly at the ground and say, "my computer wont run that."
But those reasons have very little to do with how many distros there are. The "confusion" argument breaks down in the real world. If it's preinstalled (rare, but it happens) the user is going to be happy with what he has, or he'll re-install with something that will make him happy. If he decides to download, real users are not paralized with fear trying to decide which they should download. The number of different distros is just not that much of a factor in whether to use or not use Linux.
2. If you're already made the decision to manualy install an OS, installing Linux is hands down the easist install of any OS in many cases. Red Hat 9 had the easiest install of any OS I've ever installed, at the time I installed it. I did install it on very standar HP/Compaq equipment, but the number of decisions was absolutely minimal and the ones that had to be made were generally not very technical. I would not hesitate to let my teenage daughter install it by herself while I was at the grocery store.
But, with live CDs it's even easier than that. Many non linux users these days have their first experience here without the need to "install" at all. They're given a CD by a friend (once again we see that choosing a distro doesn't really affect their ability to use Linux) and it just runs and they try it out for a little bit and go back to Windows. Yes, they go back to Windows. Almost always. BUT, they have less fear now and the next time they see a PC with Linux installed they jump right in and use it.
But what about getting PC people to switch? Another argument for another day. LOTS of reasons why people prefer to stay with what they have, not the least of which is the notion that their brother in law can easily help them with it when it's broke. I'm just saying the the variety of Linux distros is likely to be only a minor factor here, if at all.
What about getting Mac people to switch? They already did. BSD = Linux for the sake of this argument.
TW