Macs are designed for "application orientated" desktop users - if you just want a desktop machine for normal day-to-day usage without worrying about the underlying OS, then a Mac is probably for you. And good luck to you.
Furthermore, you've obviously not used Linux that much because if you had, you'd be aware of distributions like Gentoo, for example, where package management issues are pretty rare these days with tools like "emerge" - yep, they happen but, even then, as an experienced user, I don't ever recall spending much time sorting those issues out because there are also some good forums to read where someone else has probably experienced the same problem.
Likewise, most other Linux distros have pretty good package management (YAST on SuSE for example) but can't say more than that because I don't use them.
So, by all means, enjoy your Mac and stay away from the shell prompt - but please don't then offer opinions on such when it's quite clear that you're badly informed.
Do you mean to tell me that if you walked into a computer store and there were two identically priced iBOOKs side-by-side, one was a horrid cream coloured aluminium case bearing no logo while the other was a cute, white box with a silver apple on the lid, you'd choose the former? Please...
I'll accept Apple ownership is partly about not wanting to care too much about the underlying OS but please do *NOT* try to convince me that there's not some elitist "pose value" in there also...
I'm impressed you were playing video games at 59. It gives me one more thing to look forward to when I get old.
You *should* be impressed - after all, this man appears to be w4RcRaFt l33T hAx0r!!! And how do I know this?
1. Cleverly using the "Warcraft Street-speak Common Tongue" of his clique little band to miss out the word "level" before "60" to make you believe he was referring to his age.
2. I'm led to believe that *level 60* is the highest measure of expertise a character can get in WoW. Therefore, you are being addressed by *THE BEST OF THE BEST*!!!
3. And when he *GOT* to this highest accolade, this *MERE GAME* no longer amused his *MIGHTY INTELLECT* to which end he banished himself from this fantasy world in order to, no doubt, become a mere mortal in some other world.
...let's all just get on with our lives, having babies, drinking alcohol, etc. and *when the game comes out*, we can start all the arguments about how good/bad it is.
Personally, I have far too much interesting going on in my *own* life without feeling the need to go worrying about whether one particular game to be released sometime soon will be good or not. Yep, I may end up buying it and suffering severe sleep deprivation as a result of being unable to put it down - but for the moment, I've got walls to paint, reports to write and beer to drink.
Please be proper little Capitalists and keep a tight hold of that nice green roll of cash in your pocket. And only when the "dancing of the corporate monkey-boys" have truly amused you with a brand new CD, movie or game, do you pat them on the head, say thanks, hand over some cash and tell them to bugger off and not bother you until they've made something else for your amusement.
I'm a vocal pro-market advocate, and I don't see any problems with DRM. If you have something you want to keep out of prying eyes, you should be free to protect it in any way possible -- including making it ultra-proprietary.
I agree with you totally - provided that when DRM is applied to "things people can buy", all advertising, marketing and hype that masks that DRM from the potential customer is removed.
When applied to CDs, DVDs, etc., DRM removes my fair use of that product. But as long as the product is clearly labelled as a DRM product, then I can choose to buy or not to buy that product as an informed consumer.
DRM is not in itself evil - it's the advertising and marketing people that mask its presence who are.
I'm an avid Linux user but do I care about when the next kernel release is? No, not particularly. If I've chosen my PC hardware sensibly, then I'm probably not waiting for a better device driver, for example...
Sure, I care about the next release of OpenOffice or Firefox because it's the features in these applications that interest me in my day-to-day usage but the core OS is pretty much transparent to me.
I also use XP (to a lesser extent). It seems pretty stable and once I got rid of the appalling "nursery school" default GUI and got it looking like Windows 2000 again, I'm pretty content using it. Yep, it's got big security holes but I avoid Outlook and IE, run the occasional virus check/anti-spyware application and avoid installing and uninstalling too much software - as a result, it stays pretty clean and works well. I've got drivers for all my hardware, stick all my important files on a Linux SAMBA share and I can search and index every file I have with Linux command-line tools.
If you're an application developer, it's pretty important to know what the next version of your OS will have in terms of libraries, APIs, etc. But why do the 99% of *mere desktop users* care about the OS? Isn't it better to stick with an OS that's a few years old, has been patched and service packed to run much better than when it first came out rather than trade it all in for a new OS that will have new bugs and problems?
I don't use Apple machines and think much about being an Apple user is about image - but to give them their credit, they do seem to care less about the OS and more about the applications they can run on their machines which, to me, is the only thing a normal desktop user should care about.
I'm in my 40s and I've been a fantasy/sci-fi/gaming geek for as long as I can remember. Go back 10-15 years and I was a "paper and dice" roleplayer and, at it's peak, I was roleplaying for anything up to four times a week, occasionally in a club environment but mainly with a specific group of friends who took it in turn to GM games - in a single week, therefore, I might have been playing a D&D and Star Trek game and running a Call Of Cthulhu one, for example.
Step forward ten years, and that same group of friends are still my closest ones; although they've moved on to Warhammer tabletop gaming and WoW, I tend to see them these days only socially - occasionally for a LAN party but more often than not at the pub, to see a movie or at a party at someone's house. Added to that, I have other groups of friends I meet up with for rock gigs (I'm a big live music fan), in language clubs (I'm learning Spanish with my girlfriend) or with my neighbours in Spain (we have a holiday home there).
I don't regret spending all those hours roleplaying - I did it for as long as I enjoyed it but since I gave it up, I've got into a very happy long-term relationship and opened up a whole heap of new interests. And whilst I enjoy (to a degree) hearing about my buddies' exploits in WoW (they constantly invite me to join in with them), I'm not prepared to devote the necessary time to do well in it at the expense of everything else. (Incidentally, my buddies play WoW for about an evening a week, a couple of them have kids now and they all have full-time jobs so even they aren't "addicted" players.)
The point I'm really making here is that online games, for me, are missing something. When I'm LAN partying Unreal Tounament or Counter-strike with a bunch of friends, or gathered around a single Gamecube playing Monkeyball with 3 friends after a few beers, there's something special about doing those things with people you've known for a long time throwing friendly abuse at each other - no different to what we did 15 years ago with dice and paper.
The problem with online gaming is "anonymity". How many WoW, for example, have made social friends whilst playing it, like I did through traditional roleplaying games? How many WoW players have met "friends" they've online gamed with and done something else with them? Geographic limitations aside, I imagine it's very few.
Online gaming is entertainment, just like listening to a CD or reading a book and good luck to those people who enjoy it - but it definitely isn't about social interaction. Meet someone face-to-face for long enough and you'll eventually understand that person pretty much fully - but hidden behind anonymity online, you only get to see what that person wants you to see and that's why it lacks something special.
I must admit that I tried "Master Of Defence" from that site as a demo recently and that *IS* a simple little strategy game where 3D graphics *DO* actually work quite well. It's just unfortunate that, for a price tag of $19.99, it's somewhat expensive for a game you can finish in 3 hours and doesn't have a little more depth.
Otherwise, I'm keeping an eye on that game because if it gets cheaper or has a few more levels added, I might well go buy it.
It's a shame you don't spend as much energy keeping yourself well informed as you do throwing abuse and trolling.
Sometime around 2001/2, Sierra released Counter-strike in a separate boxed version (at least they did here in the UK) and Counter-strike was also in the Half-Life: Generation pack (along with Opposing Force & Blue Shift). I have both of these and neither require the use of Steam to play Counter-strike.
So crawl back grumpily to your dark little under-stair cupboard now...
I really cannot remember the last time I actually bought a newly released game at full price within days or even weeks of its release. Why should I?
For starters, I don't read many reviews any more because I don't buy computer magazines any more. In the UK, most computer magazines seem to "magically" have the same cover price of around £6.00 - on the basis of mounting a cover CD or DVD that holds demos & patches that I can download myself; not that I ever play demos anyway because otherwise I'd be deinstalling as quickly as I'm installing and screwing up Windows XP in the process. I regularly read Gamespot reviews for PC and Gamecube games but when I look through their "All Time Best Games" tables for both formats, modern games rarely appear in those tables.
Going on from that, because I care more about gameplay than graphics, I buy PC budget games and visit eBay or the local games shop to buy used Gamecube titles - simply because I am not paying full price for a game that throws pretty in game animations at me but little gameplay. Now I can pick up more than enough good games for either format for around £5 apiece, I'm happy waiting for a year or two - especially with PC games where they've been patched enough after that time to actually be playable.
Furthermore, the games industry is obsessed with 3D graphics to the point where some excellent titles have become unplayable dross when transferred from sprites to 3D graphics. Heroes Of Might & Magic is an excellent example of this - a superb strategy game up until HOMM3, then came 3D graphics in HOMM4 and the interface started to feel slow and cumbersome, now in HOMM5 the 3D graphics are fully in there (yes, you can even step into each battle you fight) but it's appalingly bloated. The same has been true for C&C/Red Alert and whilst I love Warcraft II & Starcraft, I've never been near Warcraft III.
As for FPS games, Half-Life is probably the best game I've ever played but I've never touched Half-Life 2 because I'm not giving Valve the honour of installing their Steam spyware on my PC - I don't care how good the game is. Besides, Counterstrike & Unreal Tournament 2004 have given me hundreds of hours of fun and still continue to do so.
So, all-in-all, I've a large *totally legal* games collection that I'm still working my way through on the PC and Gamecube plus I can also emulate Amigas, Megadrives & N64s on my PC so I can also have fun with retrogaming and mess around with a whole heap of free games in Windows or Linux also - so why would I *want* to go back into the endless hardware upgrade loop just to play a few new games that each cost £30-£40?
Nope, I'm no Microsoft fan & Gates is practically angelic when put alongside Ballmer.
Unfortunately, the same "cancer" (to use an MS "Linux" term) that has affected MS has spread across the entire IT & service industry - namely, a complete redifinition (for the worse) of what is good customer service and what are good products.
It's because of hype, over-advertising & the gullibilities of the general populace that MS and its ilk can utilise the user community for "live testing" their software after that same community has already paid for it, that Hollywood can make profits from poor quality sequel movies, & that talentless plastic "musicians" (I use the term loosely) can be catapulted to chart success on the basis of a formulaic, manufactured ballad.
Added to this, customer service used to be about just *asking* your customers whether they were happy with what you did for them and listening to them when they weren't happy - now it's about graphs showing that "95% of all customer calls were answered within 10 seconds" with no mention of the fact that the caller and the agent probably do not share the same native language. But because *EVERYBODY* has done this (banks, utility companies, corporations, etc), everybody now offers lower quality statistical-dependent customer service and the poor customer suffers as a result.
I'd like to think that the reason for MS's worse fortunes over the past few years was due to we customers becoming more discerning - but then I look at the hideous amount of advertising and hype I'm pumped with every day and realise that if advertising didn't do its job, companies would *decrease* spending on it rather than increasing it...
No, it's nothing more than the capitalist bubble getting near to popping - Microsoft and all the others have to get greedier & greedier to consume larger and larger profits each year by creating products so fast that they have no time to test them properly before releasing them. In other words, their greed for money, not for serving the customer, is destroying themselves.
I like living in a capitalist society but capitalism only works when the customer-base exhibits self-control and intelligence before handing money over for any goods or service - unfortunately, 95% of the populace are brainless cattle...
One day, I'd like one of these brain-dead, endlessly masturbating "Anonymous Cowards" to find enough courage within his spineless, sweaty cadaver to actually write this kind of comment under a proper account name...
At least then, we'll have the opportunity of finding his parents' house, going up to his teenage bedroom and finding him sat there in front of his PC with one hand on his keyboard and the other on his miniscule shrivelled pecker - and hitting him across the face with a big shovel...
Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...
In my experience, especially in corporate IT departments, there are as many, if not more, pro-Windows & pro-MS evangelists as there are the UNIX & OSS ones - if anything, the OSS crowd has usually had a lot of Windows experience but the MS techs haven't done much with Linux or OSS and actually fear it as something that will put them out of a job; so they never even get to the point where they just *try* OSS software out...
Personally, I don't take the Netcraft results too seriously, whether Apache or IIS is winning - it's not *just* about which one of the two runs best but also about what you do with them, who develops on them & how much either one ultimately costs you to deploy.
But I do think it is important for people to keep banging home the message that allying yourself with software/hardware vendors that use closed standards might not be good for all of us in the long run - this is particularly true of web publishing where it's possible to alienate certain elements of your potential audience from publicly available documents purely because they don't use (possibly cannot afford to use) a proprietary operating system/browser. This creates a dangerous precedent where access to public information becomes an issue of how much you can afford.
What private corporations do with web servers is of no interest to me but I would *definitely* go a stage further and *force* all government and public organisations to adhere strictly to HTTP/CSS/etc. web standards whenever they publish any information to the public - so that if they use IIS then they *cannot* use Microsoft's proprietary extensions, ActiveX, etc.
Aren't there enough topics on here to let you sound off on shit you actually know about?
I don't play WoW personally BUT I HAVE A GROUP OF 4 FRIENDS WHO DO!!! And since I meet up with them for a beer about once a week, I hear from them the numerous slow-down problems and server crashes. Yes, they complain to Blizzard about it also, before you ask.
Now, the problem in this specific example, is if you buy the racing game only to play with your buddies.
The Monkey Ball games on the Gamecube are an absolute classic example of your statement. Personally, I'm not interested in working through all the games within Monkey Ball as a single player in order to accumulate enough points to unlock the additional games - but the multiplayer games are *truly wonderful* when there's 3 or 4 of you (generally slightly drunk) clustered around the TV playing Monkey Golf, Monkey Fight or Monkey Glider. Unfortunately, additional games like the Monkey Pool game are locked out to multiplayer games until you've made up the points.
Remember, as a kid, you used to go to the park with your mates for a game of football (soccer to you Yanks). The two best footballers in the group would be the team "captains" and the rest of you would stand in line as the two captains picked their players, one-by-one and alternately, from the lines of kids. Invariably, being slightly rotund and crap at football, I was one of the last kids to be picked, usually after the 4-stone one-legged kid with asthma. However, being crap at football, my true mates sometimes let me take a penalty, just so I could go home and boast to my parents how I'd scored a goal. And sometimes, if I missed the goal from the penalty, my mates would say "Never mind, have another go", put the ball back on the penalty spot and move one of the jumpers to make the goal a bit wider so there was no chance of me *not* scoring. (Of course, by this stage we were 15-0 down so my single goal had no effect on the overall game result).
Step forward a quarter of a century and I still play computer games but being middle-aged, my reflexes are much slower. My 14 year old nephew can sit in front of his Playstation for hours, trying and re-trying one tiny part of a particular game until he succeeds at it. But me, on my Gamecube, within 5 minutes I've lost patience re-trying a specific bit and have a need to empty my shrivelled bladder or polish my walking stick.
Therefore, rather than a full "cheat" of invulnerability or "every weapon with maximum clips", I've often thought how nice it would be just to have an option of switching in a "jumpers for goal-posts" mode. You start the game by inputting your age and then, at certain points, the game is able to "nudge" you through a difficult bit because it's seen you've had 59 goes at it and that your grip is tightening on the controller as you lose patience (and possibly bladder control).
For example, in Metroid Prime:
"Player 1, you have now had 324 attempts at rolling Samus Aran into a ball & trying to jump through that little hole that's 4 foot off the ground... here's a miraculous gust of wind that coincidentally lifts you off the ground and carries you gracefully through the hole. Now please save the game and re-dress those bunions on your feet."
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Macs are designed for "application orientated" desktop users - if you just want a desktop machine for normal day-to-day usage without worrying about the underlying OS, then a Mac is probably for you. And good luck to you.
Furthermore, you've obviously not used Linux that much because if you had, you'd be aware of distributions like Gentoo, for example, where package management issues are pretty rare these days with tools like "emerge" - yep, they happen but, even then, as an experienced user, I don't ever recall spending much time sorting those issues out because there are also some good forums to read where someone else has probably experienced the same problem.
Likewise, most other Linux distros have pretty good package management (YAST on SuSE for example) but can't say more than that because I don't use them.
So, by all means, enjoy your Mac and stay away from the shell prompt - but please don't then offer opinions on such when it's quite clear that you're badly informed.
[NOTE: Meanwhile, for non-British, non-George Formby fans, here is the potter's wheel...]
When you consider the average age of Jessica Simpson's pre-pubescent female fans, I doubt any of them would know how to copy an MP3 anyway...
"Euro-hell" - British food, German humour, French technology.
And there was me thinking that her dad Homer's barbershop quartet LP was much better...
But keep it to yourself...
Do you mean to tell me that if you walked into a computer store and there were two identically priced iBOOKs side-by-side, one was a horrid cream coloured aluminium case bearing no logo while the other was a cute, white box with a silver apple on the lid, you'd choose the former? Please...
I'll accept Apple ownership is partly about not wanting to care too much about the underlying OS but please do *NOT* try to convince me that there's not some elitist "pose value" in there also...
You *should* be impressed - after all, this man appears to be w4RcRaFt l33T hAx0r!!! And how do I know this?
1. Cleverly using the "Warcraft Street-speak Common Tongue" of his clique little band to miss out the word "level" before "60" to make you believe he was referring to his age.
2. I'm led to believe that *level 60* is the highest measure of expertise a character can get in WoW. Therefore, you are being addressed by *THE BEST OF THE BEST*!!!
3. And when he *GOT* to this highest accolade, this *MERE GAME* no longer amused his *MIGHTY INTELLECT* to which end he banished himself from this fantasy world in order to, no doubt, become a mere mortal in some other world.
So, please, show MORE RESPECT!!!
Personally, I have far too much interesting going on in my *own* life without feeling the need to go worrying about whether one particular game to be released sometime soon will be good or not. Yep, I may end up buying it and suffering severe sleep deprivation as a result of being unable to put it down - but for the moment, I've got walls to paint, reports to write and beer to drink.
Please be proper little Capitalists and keep a tight hold of that nice green roll of cash in your pocket. And only when the "dancing of the corporate monkey-boys" have truly amused you with a brand new CD, movie or game, do you pat them on the head, say thanks, hand over some cash and tell them to bugger off and not bother you until they've made something else for your amusement.
I agree with you totally - provided that when DRM is applied to "things people can buy", all advertising, marketing and hype that masks that DRM from the potential customer is removed.
When applied to CDs, DVDs, etc., DRM removes my fair use of that product. But as long as the product is clearly labelled as a DRM product, then I can choose to buy or not to buy that product as an informed consumer.
DRM is not in itself evil - it's the advertising and marketing people that mask its presence who are.
Sure, I care about the next release of OpenOffice or Firefox because it's the features in these applications that interest me in my day-to-day usage but the core OS is pretty much transparent to me.
I also use XP (to a lesser extent). It seems pretty stable and once I got rid of the appalling "nursery school" default GUI and got it looking like Windows 2000 again, I'm pretty content using it. Yep, it's got big security holes but I avoid Outlook and IE, run the occasional virus check/anti-spyware application and avoid installing and uninstalling too much software - as a result, it stays pretty clean and works well. I've got drivers for all my hardware, stick all my important files on a Linux SAMBA share and I can search and index every file I have with Linux command-line tools.
If you're an application developer, it's pretty important to know what the next version of your OS will have in terms of libraries, APIs, etc. But why do the 99% of *mere desktop users* care about the OS? Isn't it better to stick with an OS that's a few years old, has been patched and service packed to run much better than when it first came out rather than trade it all in for a new OS that will have new bugs and problems?
I don't use Apple machines and think much about being an Apple user is about image - but to give them their credit, they do seem to care less about the OS and more about the applications they can run on their machines which, to me, is the only thing a normal desktop user should care about.
I'm in my 40s and I've been a fantasy/sci-fi/gaming geek for as long as I can remember. Go back 10-15 years and I was a "paper and dice" roleplayer and, at it's peak, I was roleplaying for anything up to four times a week, occasionally in a club environment but mainly with a specific group of friends who took it in turn to GM games - in a single week, therefore, I might have been playing a D&D and Star Trek game and running a Call Of Cthulhu one, for example.
Step forward ten years, and that same group of friends are still my closest ones; although they've moved on to Warhammer tabletop gaming and WoW, I tend to see them these days only socially - occasionally for a LAN party but more often than not at the pub, to see a movie or at a party at someone's house. Added to that, I have other groups of friends I meet up with for rock gigs (I'm a big live music fan), in language clubs (I'm learning Spanish with my girlfriend) or with my neighbours in Spain (we have a holiday home there).
I don't regret spending all those hours roleplaying - I did it for as long as I enjoyed it but since I gave it up, I've got into a very happy long-term relationship and opened up a whole heap of new interests. And whilst I enjoy (to a degree) hearing about my buddies' exploits in WoW (they constantly invite me to join in with them), I'm not prepared to devote the necessary time to do well in it at the expense of everything else. (Incidentally, my buddies play WoW for about an evening a week, a couple of them have kids now and they all have full-time jobs so even they aren't "addicted" players.)
The point I'm really making here is that online games, for me, are missing something. When I'm LAN partying Unreal Tounament or Counter-strike with a bunch of friends, or gathered around a single Gamecube playing Monkeyball with 3 friends after a few beers, there's something special about doing those things with people you've known for a long time throwing friendly abuse at each other - no different to what we did 15 years ago with dice and paper.
The problem with online gaming is "anonymity". How many WoW, for example, have made social friends whilst playing it, like I did through traditional roleplaying games? How many WoW players have met "friends" they've online gamed with and done something else with them? Geographic limitations aside, I imagine it's very few.
Online gaming is entertainment, just like listening to a CD or reading a book and good luck to those people who enjoy it - but it definitely isn't about social interaction. Meet someone face-to-face for long enough and you'll eventually understand that person pretty much fully - but hidden behind anonymity online, you only get to see what that person wants you to see and that's why it lacks something special.
Otherwise, I'm keeping an eye on that game because if it gets cheaper or has a few more levels added, I might well go buy it.
Sometime around 2001/2, Sierra released Counter-strike in a separate boxed version (at least they did here in the UK) and Counter-strike was also in the Half-Life: Generation pack (along with Opposing Force & Blue Shift). I have both of these and neither require the use of Steam to play Counter-strike.
So crawl back grumpily to your dark little under-stair cupboard now...
For starters, I don't read many reviews any more because I don't buy computer magazines any more. In the UK, most computer magazines seem to "magically" have the same cover price of around £6.00 - on the basis of mounting a cover CD or DVD that holds demos & patches that I can download myself; not that I ever play demos anyway because otherwise I'd be deinstalling as quickly as I'm installing and screwing up Windows XP in the process. I regularly read Gamespot reviews for PC and Gamecube games but when I look through their "All Time Best Games" tables for both formats, modern games rarely appear in those tables.
Going on from that, because I care more about gameplay than graphics, I buy PC budget games and visit eBay or the local games shop to buy used Gamecube titles - simply because I am not paying full price for a game that throws pretty in game animations at me but little gameplay. Now I can pick up more than enough good games for either format for around £5 apiece, I'm happy waiting for a year or two - especially with PC games where they've been patched enough after that time to actually be playable.
Furthermore, the games industry is obsessed with 3D graphics to the point where some excellent titles have become unplayable dross when transferred from sprites to 3D graphics. Heroes Of Might & Magic is an excellent example of this - a superb strategy game up until HOMM3, then came 3D graphics in HOMM4 and the interface started to feel slow and cumbersome, now in HOMM5 the 3D graphics are fully in there (yes, you can even step into each battle you fight) but it's appalingly bloated. The same has been true for C&C
As for FPS games, Half-Life is probably the best game I've ever played but I've never touched Half-Life 2 because I'm not giving Valve the honour of installing their Steam spyware on my PC - I don't care how good the game is. Besides, Counterstrike & Unreal Tournament 2004 have given me hundreds of hours of fun and still continue to do so.
So, all-in-all, I've a large *totally legal* games collection that I'm still working my way through on the PC and Gamecube plus I can also emulate Amigas, Megadrives & N64s on my PC so I can also have fun with retrogaming and mess around with a whole heap of free games in Windows or Linux also - so why would I *want* to go back into the endless hardware upgrade loop just to play a few new games that each cost £30-£40?
Unfortunately, the same "cancer" (to use an MS "Linux" term) that has affected MS has spread across the entire IT & service industry - namely, a complete redifinition (for the worse) of what is good customer service and what are good products.
It's because of hype, over-advertising & the gullibilities of the general populace that MS and its ilk can utilise the user community for "live testing" their software after that same community has already paid for it, that Hollywood can make profits from poor quality sequel movies, & that talentless plastic "musicians" (I use the term loosely) can be catapulted to chart success on the basis of a formulaic, manufactured ballad.
Added to this, customer service used to be about just *asking* your customers whether they were happy with what you did for them and listening to them when they weren't happy - now it's about graphs showing that "95% of all customer calls were answered within 10 seconds" with no mention of the fact that the caller and the agent probably do not share the same native language. But because *EVERYBODY* has done this (banks, utility companies, corporations, etc), everybody now offers lower quality statistical-dependent customer service and the poor customer suffers as a result.
I'd like to think that the reason for MS's worse fortunes over the past few years was due to we customers becoming more discerning - but then I look at the hideous amount of advertising and hype I'm pumped with every day and realise that if advertising didn't do its job, companies would *decrease* spending on it rather than increasing it...
No, it's nothing more than the capitalist bubble getting near to popping - Microsoft and all the others have to get greedier & greedier to consume larger and larger profits each year by creating products so fast that they have no time to test them properly before releasing them. In other words, their greed for money, not for serving the customer, is destroying themselves.
I like living in a capitalist society but capitalism only works when the customer-base exhibits self-control and intelligence before handing money over for any goods or service - unfortunately, 95% of the populace are brainless cattle...
And presumably you are in this bad mood because your father's penis tastes funny due to it being your sister's time of the month?
Go one! Throw it a peanut! But don't get too close to the bars or it might reach into it's bottom & throw poo at you!
At least then, we'll have the opportunity of finding his parents' house, going up to his teenage bedroom and finding him sat there in front of his PC with one hand on his keyboard and the other on his miniscule shrivelled pecker - and hitting him across the face with a big shovel...
In my experience, especially in corporate IT departments, there are as many, if not more, pro-Windows & pro-MS evangelists as there are the UNIX & OSS ones - if anything, the OSS crowd has usually had a lot of Windows experience but the MS techs haven't done much with Linux or OSS and actually fear it as something that will put them out of a job; so they never even get to the point where they just *try* OSS software out...
Personally, I don't take the Netcraft results too seriously, whether Apache or IIS is winning - it's not *just* about which one of the two runs best but also about what you do with them, who develops on them & how much either one ultimately costs you to deploy.
But I do think it is important for people to keep banging home the message that allying yourself with software/hardware vendors that use closed standards might not be good for all of us in the long run - this is particularly true of web publishing where it's possible to alienate certain elements of your potential audience from publicly available documents purely because they don't use (possibly cannot afford to use) a proprietary operating system/browser. This creates a dangerous precedent where access to public information becomes an issue of how much you can afford.
What private corporations do with web servers is of no interest to me but I would *definitely* go a stage further and *force* all government and public organisations to adhere strictly to HTTP/CSS/etc. web standards whenever they publish any information to the public - so that if they use IIS then they *cannot* use Microsoft's proprietary extensions, ActiveX, etc.
"Bot" is a shortening of "bottom".
"Up who's bot would a wormbot climb if a wormbot could climb bots."
I don't play WoW personally BUT I HAVE A GROUP OF 4 FRIENDS WHO DO!!! And since I meet up with them for a beer about once a week, I hear from them the numerous slow-down problems and server crashes. Yes, they complain to Blizzard about it also, before you ask.
So chill out and don't take it so personally...
The Monkey Ball games on the Gamecube are an absolute classic example of your statement. Personally, I'm not interested in working through all the games within Monkey Ball as a single player in order to accumulate enough points to unlock the additional games - but the multiplayer games are *truly wonderful* when there's 3 or 4 of you (generally slightly drunk) clustered around the TV playing Monkey Golf, Monkey Fight or Monkey Glider. Unfortunately, additional games like the Monkey Pool game are locked out to multiplayer games until you've made up the points.
Step forward a quarter of a century and I still play computer games but being middle-aged, my reflexes are much slower. My 14 year old nephew can sit in front of his Playstation for hours, trying and re-trying one tiny part of a particular game until he succeeds at it. But me, on my Gamecube, within 5 minutes I've lost patience re-trying a specific bit and have a need to empty my shrivelled bladder or polish my walking stick.
Therefore, rather than a full "cheat" of invulnerability or "every weapon with maximum clips", I've often thought how nice it would be just to have an option of switching in a "jumpers for goal-posts" mode. You start the game by inputting your age and then, at certain points, the game is able to "nudge" you through a difficult bit because it's seen you've had 59 goes at it and that your grip is tightening on the controller as you lose patience (and possibly bladder control).
For example, in Metroid Prime:
"Player 1, you have now had 324 attempts at rolling Samus Aran into a ball & trying to jump through that little hole that's 4 foot off the ground... here's a miraculous gust of wind that coincidentally lifts you off the ground and carries you gracefully through the hole. Now please save the game and re-dress those bunions on your feet."