Oh, please. "Wasting cycles"? You might as well encrypt ALL your data that travels over the Internet. It's free. It's easy. And, let's be honest, SCP is simpler to deal with than FTP in almost every way. The only catch is that Windows users will need to download an SCP client like WinSCP. Which, incidentally, does FTP, too.
And I don't want to hear the "but everyone already has an FTP client". Well, yeah, technically. But on Windows, you have either command-line FTP, which is too hard to use for most people, or the built-in FTP of Internet Explorer, which doesn't work worth a shit.
Yes, a PC does more than a game console. But a PC that can play MODERN GAMES is pretty expensive. And here's the thing: You can buy a cheap PC for $400 that does EVERYTHING really well, except play games. Then you can buy a console for another $400 - $500 that plays games MUCH BETTER than that $400 PC, and in fact plays games better than an $800 PC. So, you get the best of both worlds for approximately the price of a mediocre "gaming PC".
All of the above ties into the "compatibility problems". It's not so much that games are hard to get running on a PC, it's more that very few people have a PC that actually meets the requirements of modern games. If you are a serious PC gamer, you know that you need a video card made in the last year, and 2GB of RAM, and dual-core CPU to play newly released games. But the average PC owner doesn't know any of that stuff. They go buy Call of Duty 4 to play on their PC, because their friend with an Xbox 360 has it, and if they can play it on their PC, they don't need to buy an Xbox 360! Of course, their 4-month-old eMachine has integrated graphics, and only has 512MB of RAM (for Vista, no less), and just flat-out isn't going to work.
THAT is the problem with PC gaming. It's too confusing for the masses, and the "technology advantage" over consoles is mostly gone, AND you get more functionality for less money by buying a console for games and buying a cheap PC for everything else. We won't even talk about the game development/publishing side of things, where consoles are the ONLY logical platform to develop for, if you want to make money.
So that's why Linux gaming will probably NEVER take off. Gaming on PCs is dying a quick death.
I wouldn't say Vista is a *disaster*, but it's obviously a work in progress. There are so many obvious improvements to be made, and so many little bugs to be fixed.
Much like Windows 2000 was what NT4 should've been, I expect "Windows 7" to be what Vista should've been. Of course, an argument could be made that even what Vista "should've been" isn't what we actually WANT. Personally, I think MS should bite-the-bullet and just abandon backwards compatibility as part of the "base" operating system. Just run everything in a VM, much like Apple did with the Classic MacOS.
According to the article, the Church of Scientology basically has no legal leg to stand on. Of course, who is going to take them to court? eBay surely doesn't care. And what about the people who are trying to buy used "e-meters"? Well, they are almost surely *Scientologists*! And we all know how the CoS feels about members that get out-of-line. I imagine that if the CoS *ever* caught one of their members buying a used e-meter, they'd make their lives hell.
I see what you are saying, but the problem IS software patents. Not that the Patent Office is bad at granting patents on software.
Patents are supposed to cover a *specific implementation* of an idea. Which is fine, but in software, there are ALWAYS multiple ways to do things. So should a software patent cover the *functionality* of the software, or the the *implementation* (which would amount to the source code, and maybe some of non-standard elements of the interface).
I say they should only be able to patent the source code/interface. Which, of course, they wouldn't/can't do, since it's already covered by copyright laws.
So, no, Google shouldn't be allowed to patent their PageRank system.
The "Clone Wars" are boring, and we know how they end.
Jedi are boring.
Anakin is boring even for a Jedi.
Lucas has a major hard-on for Jedi, but they are just incredibly limited as characters in a story. What we need is a "Star Wars" show based on a young Han Solo.
I mean, the slow copying speed when copying LARGE amounts of data sucks, but the WORST part of Vista is the slow copying speed when copying/moving small files. I mean, moving a file to the Recycle Bin takes 2 seconds! Copying a shortcut from one folder to another on the same drive takes 2 seconds! Those things should happen instantly, and DID happen instantly on XP, and every version of Windows before that.
That's where the performance problems really piss people off. A %9 improvement doesn't do squat.
Remember that a giant antenna is a great *receiver* as well as a great *transmitter*. An enormous UHF TV antenna is going to be able to pick up some very weak signals.
Besides, how do you think your cell phone works? You have a tiny little phone, but it can talk to towers that are many miles away without issue.
See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that. If they aren't in a major metropolitan area, it can cost *50* times that.
Bandwidth is expensive. That's why ALL bandwidth is "shared" and "oversubscribed". There simply isn't any way to provide everyone with gobs and gobs of dedicated bandwidth. That's not how it works.
So, don't blame the cable or DSL providers. Blame the huge telcos that keep the price of bandwidth artificially high.
Oh, it works. A WRT54G with DD-WRT probably can't handle it, but if you buy a Packeteer or even a Fortigate unit, they can definitely identify P2P traffic and block it.
However...
If the packets are encrypted, then all bets are off. There's no way to inspect encrypted packets. At least, not easily. The only way I can imagine it could be done is to have the "filtering device" actually have special versions various P2P clients installed, and then continuously make connections, and then BLOCK the connections that it makes. Obviously, that's a really messy proposition.
Basically, if AT&T starts blocking stuff, then all of those programs will simply start *requiring* clients to use encryption. And then AT&T is back where it started.
Yes, but the problem is, if ALL employers are equally awful, then simply "finding a new job" doesn't do you any good. That is the case in much of the U.S.
Now, there are some really good employers. They are few and far between. The VAST majority of corporations are more than happy to screw their employers at every opportunity. That's what unions are for. Yes, many unions are corrupt and greedy and irrational. But so are many corporations. You NEED a union as a check on the power of the company/employers. Period.
Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.
For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.
It's easy to forget that most of Africa's problems stem from the fact that the culture places very little value on human life.
You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.
The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things.
Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.
Nah, it's a terrible idea. Sega just isn't good at hardware. They got lucky with the Genesis.
Their real strength is software. Sega makes really cool, really weird games. Or at least they used to. Now all they do is churn out crappy 3D versions of Sonic (and really GOOD 2D versions of Sonic if you have a GBA or DS).
Why SHOULDN'T Wikipedia contain the "entire subject" (assuming copyright allows it)? I can't honestly think of a good reason. Why should information be hard to find?
I think that there is a certain segment of the academic population that LIKES the fact that a large percentage of higher-education is about digging up already existing data. That's not education, that's archaeology. Stupid.
Make the data easy to get. We don't need more librarians, we need more people who can expand on the store of knowledge we already have with new ideas.
You're right, the C64 had a certain something that no other computer had. The Amiga had it too, but the Amiga was similar enough to modern computers that it hasn't aged as well. You know what I mean? The C64 feels like something from a different, simpler era. It's like driving a Model T. It's so different that it has it's own appeal.
The Amiga, as great as it was, just feels like a really low-rent version of a modern PC these days.
"It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user."
That's pretty cool.
"Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology."
Okay, that's fucking stupid.
Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. We just don't live in a world where everyone can be connected to the internet all of the time. And even when that day comes, most people would like to have their apps run locally, just in case.
The whole idea of "hosted desktop apps" is dubious (and I'm not even considering the inevitable "rental fees", which is a whole 'nuther scam). It might work for little "one-time use" stuff, but no one would ever rely on them for day-to-day work.
The problem is, WoW pretty much owns the market for MMORPGs. No one else comes close, and it's likely no one ever will. The only competition for WoW will be "WoW 2", which will likely let you import your WoW character.
It's similar to the situation with Counter-Strike. After 8 years, no other FPS has the same number o of players. People want to play what everyone else is playing, when it comes to multiplayer games (even Xbox Live! suffers from this. Ever tried to play a multiplayer game that wasn't Halo? There's hardly anyone playing anything else). Which means the popular games only get MORE popular at the expense of other games.
If they really wanted people to pay for this, they'd put up the late-70s through late-80s stuff. That was the PEAK of Marvel, as far as writing/storylines goes. Before that...eh. There was some good stuff, but not all that much. And pretty much ALL of the good stuff from the early days is widely available in "compilations" that are dirt cheap. As in, clearance-bin cheap, most of the time.
Seriously, does ANYONE think the Dock is good? It's an unholy combination of the "Launcher" from the old days, and the Windows taskbar. It does neither job very well.
The weird thing about OS X is that in most ways, the GUI isn't as good as MacOS 9. I mean, the only real problems with the "classic" Mac GUI were that there wasn't a easily visible way to keep track of/switch between running programs, and the Finder was a pain to work with. Well, and the lack of right-click context menus.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
Apple just bugs me. They have neat products, but they could be GREAT. They aren't bound by compatibility like MS is, or even Linux. They could do whatever they want. The best of everything. But instead they keep refusing to improve the obvious things.
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Oh, please. "Wasting cycles"? You might as well encrypt ALL your data that travels over the Internet. It's free. It's easy. And, let's be honest, SCP is simpler to deal with than FTP in almost every way. The only catch is that Windows users will need to download an SCP client like WinSCP. Which, incidentally, does FTP, too.
And I don't want to hear the "but everyone already has an FTP client". Well, yeah, technically. But on Windows, you have either command-line FTP, which is too hard to use for most people, or the built-in FTP of Internet Explorer, which doesn't work worth a shit.
Oh, come on. You're ignoring the obvious, here.
Yes, a PC does more than a game console. But a PC that can play MODERN GAMES is pretty expensive. And here's the thing: You can buy a cheap PC for $400 that does EVERYTHING really well, except play games. Then you can buy a console for another $400 - $500 that plays games MUCH BETTER than that $400 PC, and in fact plays games better than an $800 PC. So, you get the best of both worlds for approximately the price of a mediocre "gaming PC".
All of the above ties into the "compatibility problems". It's not so much that games are hard to get running on a PC, it's more that very few people have a PC that actually meets the requirements of modern games. If you are a serious PC gamer, you know that you need a video card made in the last year, and 2GB of RAM, and dual-core CPU to play newly released games. But the average PC owner doesn't know any of that stuff. They go buy Call of Duty 4 to play on their PC, because their friend with an Xbox 360 has it, and if they can play it on their PC, they don't need to buy an Xbox 360! Of course, their 4-month-old eMachine has integrated graphics, and only has 512MB of RAM (for Vista, no less), and just flat-out isn't going to work.
THAT is the problem with PC gaming. It's too confusing for the masses, and the "technology advantage" over consoles is mostly gone, AND you get more functionality for less money by buying a console for games and buying a cheap PC for everything else. We won't even talk about the game development/publishing side of things, where consoles are the ONLY logical platform to develop for, if you want to make money.
So that's why Linux gaming will probably NEVER take off. Gaming on PCs is dying a quick death.
I wouldn't say Vista is a *disaster*, but it's obviously a work in progress. There are so many obvious improvements to be made, and so many little bugs to be fixed.
Much like Windows 2000 was what NT4 should've been, I expect "Windows 7" to be what Vista should've been. Of course, an argument could be made that even what Vista "should've been" isn't what we actually WANT. Personally, I think MS should bite-the-bullet and just abandon backwards compatibility as part of the "base" operating system. Just run everything in a VM, much like Apple did with the Classic MacOS.
According to the article, the Church of Scientology basically has no legal leg to stand on. Of course, who is going to take them to court? eBay surely doesn't care. And what about the people who are trying to buy used "e-meters"? Well, they are almost surely *Scientologists*! And we all know how the CoS feels about members that get out-of-line. I imagine that if the CoS *ever* caught one of their members buying a used e-meter, they'd make their lives hell.
. So, really, no harm done all-around, I say.
ALL "conventions", no matter what industry/hobby they are about, are run by thieves and liars. Seriously.
I see what you are saying, but the problem IS software patents. Not that the Patent Office is bad at granting patents on software.
Patents are supposed to cover a *specific implementation* of an idea. Which is fine, but in software, there are ALWAYS multiple ways to do things. So should a software patent cover the *functionality* of the software, or the the *implementation* (which would amount to the source code, and maybe some of non-standard elements of the interface).
I say they should only be able to patent the source code/interface. Which, of course, they wouldn't/can't do, since it's already covered by copyright laws.
So, no, Google shouldn't be allowed to patent their PageRank system.
The "Clone Wars" are boring, and we know how they end.
Jedi are boring.
Anakin is boring even for a Jedi.
Lucas has a major hard-on for Jedi, but they are just incredibly limited as characters in a story. What we need is a "Star Wars" show based on a young Han Solo.
Exactly.
I mean, the slow copying speed when copying LARGE amounts of data sucks, but the WORST part of Vista is the slow copying speed when copying/moving small files. I mean, moving a file to the Recycle Bin takes 2 seconds! Copying a shortcut from one folder to another on the same drive takes 2 seconds! Those things should happen instantly, and DID happen instantly on XP, and every version of Windows before that.
That's where the performance problems really piss people off. A %9 improvement doesn't do squat.
Remember that a giant antenna is a great *receiver* as well as a great *transmitter*. An enormous UHF TV antenna is going to be able to pick up some very weak signals.
Besides, how do you think your cell phone works? You have a tiny little phone, but it can talk to towers that are many miles away without issue.
See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that. If they aren't in a major metropolitan area, it can cost *50* times that.
Bandwidth is expensive. That's why ALL bandwidth is "shared" and "oversubscribed". There simply isn't any way to provide everyone with gobs and gobs of dedicated bandwidth. That's not how it works.
So, don't blame the cable or DSL providers. Blame the huge telcos that keep the price of bandwidth artificially high.
Oh, it works. A WRT54G with DD-WRT probably can't handle it, but if you buy a Packeteer or even a Fortigate unit, they can definitely identify P2P traffic and block it.
However...
If the packets are encrypted, then all bets are off. There's no way to inspect encrypted packets. At least, not easily. The only way I can imagine it could be done is to have the "filtering device" actually have special versions various P2P clients installed, and then continuously make connections, and then BLOCK the connections that it makes. Obviously, that's a really messy proposition.
Basically, if AT&T starts blocking stuff, then all of those programs will simply start *requiring* clients to use encryption. And then AT&T is back where it started.
Yes, but the problem is, if ALL employers are equally awful, then simply "finding a new job" doesn't do you any good. That is the case in much of the U.S.
Now, there are some really good employers. They are few and far between. The VAST majority of corporations are more than happy to screw their employers at every opportunity. That's what unions are for. Yes, many unions are corrupt and greedy and irrational. But so are many corporations. You NEED a union as a check on the power of the company/employers. Period.
Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.
For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.
It's easy to forget that most of Africa's problems stem from the fact that the culture places very little value on human life.
You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.
The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things.
"...given some stores, especially those in urban neighborhoods, the feel of a community center ..."
It's true. It's a great place to hang out. I know lots of guys that met their boyfriends at the Apple Store.
Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.
Nah, it's a terrible idea. Sega just isn't good at hardware. They got lucky with the Genesis.
Their real strength is software. Sega makes really cool, really weird games. Or at least they used to. Now all they do is churn out crappy 3D versions of Sonic (and really GOOD 2D versions of Sonic if you have a GBA or DS).
I disagree.
Why SHOULDN'T Wikipedia contain the "entire subject" (assuming copyright allows it)? I can't honestly think of a good reason. Why should information be hard to find?
I think that there is a certain segment of the academic population that LIKES the fact that a large percentage of higher-education is about digging up already existing data. That's not education, that's archaeology. Stupid.
Make the data easy to get. We don't need more librarians, we need more people who can expand on the store of knowledge we already have with new ideas.
You're right, the C64 had a certain something that no other computer had. The Amiga had it too, but the Amiga was similar enough to modern computers that it hasn't aged as well. You know what I mean? The C64 feels like something from a different, simpler era. It's like driving a Model T. It's so different that it has it's own appeal.
The Amiga, as great as it was, just feels like a really low-rent version of a modern PC these days.
"It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user."
That's pretty cool.
"Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology."
Okay, that's fucking stupid.
Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. We just don't live in a world where everyone can be connected to the internet all of the time. And even when that day comes, most people would like to have their apps run locally, just in case.
The whole idea of "hosted desktop apps" is dubious (and I'm not even considering the inevitable "rental fees", which is a whole 'nuther scam). It might work for little "one-time use" stuff, but no one would ever rely on them for day-to-day work.
You don't. You just issue a press release.
The problem is, WoW pretty much owns the market for MMORPGs. No one else comes close, and it's likely no one ever will. The only competition for WoW will be "WoW 2", which will likely let you import your WoW character.
It's similar to the situation with Counter-Strike. After 8 years, no other FPS has the same number o of players. People want to play what everyone else is playing, when it comes to multiplayer games (even Xbox Live! suffers from this. Ever tried to play a multiplayer game that wasn't Halo? There's hardly anyone playing anything else). Which means the popular games only get MORE popular at the expense of other games.
If they really wanted people to pay for this, they'd put up the late-70s through late-80s stuff. That was the PEAK of Marvel, as far as writing/storylines goes. Before that...eh. There was some good stuff, but not all that much. And pretty much ALL of the good stuff from the early days is widely available in "compilations" that are dirt cheap. As in, clearance-bin cheap, most of the time.
Seriously, does ANYONE think the Dock is good? It's an unholy combination of the "Launcher" from the old days, and the Windows taskbar. It does neither job very well.
The weird thing about OS X is that in most ways, the GUI isn't as good as MacOS 9. I mean, the only real problems with the "classic" Mac GUI were that there wasn't a easily visible way to keep track of/switch between running programs, and the Finder was a pain to work with. Well, and the lack of right-click context menus.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
Apple just bugs me. They have neat products, but they could be GREAT. They aren't bound by compatibility like MS is, or even Linux. They could do whatever they want. The best of everything. But instead they keep refusing to improve the obvious things.
Audiophiles are the only people on the planet that wish Macs were MORE expensive.