In reality, most of us have spent years and years learning to type on a standard keyboard. It's a specialized skill.
I have to disagree with you there; it only took me a month or two of practicing touch typing to learn the entire keyboard, and I absolutely insist that it is easier than everyone makes it out to be. Provided that people put forth the right effort, anyone can learn to do it. It is true that some people will be fast and some will be slow (I was one of the speedy ones), but touch typing is simply something your brain absorbs naturally, and it absolutely should not take "years and years" to learn, though it may take a bit of time to reach your best speeds.
Is this an obsolete skill? With handwriting and voice recognition technologies, is using a QWERTY keyboard with nine out of ten fingers something worth knowing anymore?
As a computer enthusiast, programmer, system administrator, and someone who also uses the computer for simple, every-day applications that most everyone else does, I find the skill of touch typing to be invaluable.
I started on the computer very young, and for many years my mother bugged me to learn to touch type. I finally hunkered down and took a class in high school, and it would not at all be unfair to say that it changed my life.
Having many years of QWERTY familiarty under my belt, I learned in what seemed like no time, and by the time I had finished the month or two long course I was easily doing 70 words a minute.
It's a skill that I certainly use every day, and lately I had been testing myself with a fantastic program called gtypist, and my speeds have ranged from 100 to 141 words per minute (141 when pushing for speed, ~100 when dealing with words/characters/symbols that I was not very familiar with or something that is particularly difficult to type).
Not only was it a useful skill, but my success in typing inspired me to pursue other things, such as playing the guitar, a first rate hobby of mine now. Also, it impresses a lot of people.;-)
Whether we like it or not, we all have to type somewhere and somehow, so it's a skill that most everyone who has to use a computer is much better off knowing. Also, considering how little of an investment it requires and how great the returns are, it's a great mystery to me why more people aren't doing it.
I realize that not everyone can type so fast, but at school I run across people every day who show great potential. Whenever I see a classmate screaming along using only two or three fingers, I have to stop and tell them how much faster I think they could go if they actually bothered to do it correctly.
Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed by the idea that the skill of typing has or could become obsolete. I think that it is here to stay, and I know that I will be doing it for as long as I can; I will never write as fast as I type, and I will never be willing to use voice recognition systems [ever].
That is a good question! I shall try to answer i to the best of my ability.
Diamonds actually do have practical uses; you can cut other diamonds with them.;) In all seriousness, though, the things have interesting properties. However, you are right in that we put high value on them initially because we just liked them; they are pretty, shiny, and amusing to look at. Diamonds, however, are difficult to come by; a lot of labor is expended in finding and extracting them, among other things, and that labor needs to be compensated in some way. We cannot simply wave our hands and magically fabricate diamonds--such is the nature of virtual objects. Anyone with administrative power could theoretically go into the system and change whatever he or she likes. Unfortunately, we are not Gods in this universe (not be default).
Fancy clothing might help protect us from the elements or save us from acting on baser instincts, but the "fancy" stuff serves less of a purpose. More labor is wasted here than is necessary, and I don't particularly care for that market. To some extent, the "fancy" factor may be considered "purely social."
Art is another thing--true enough, it's significance only exists in our minds. I can be more easily reproducable at times, though art must be treated differently because I pesonally believe that it serves to activate a broader range of response than mere entertainment, and it surely plays a productive role in society.
To make my evaluation of the situation more easily understood, I will draw up an anology: suppose two children with good imaginations have their own role-playing game in the yard. After a long, devoted, and comically strict game of make-believe, the two children come upon an event where one steals the other's "magic staff". There is no real staff, however, but, due to the rigidity of the game, the boy is unable to fabricate a new one for himself, and is crushed after having to go through a lengthy process to have attained it in the first place. Running to his mother in tears, the little boy begs her to make the other child give him his "magic staff" back. The mother, however, is in the middle of engaging in an important activity that will ultimately determine the financial status of her family, and, regretfully, she chooses not to aide her son. Had she even attempted to coerce the other boy into bending the rules, he might refuse, causing her to really be wasting her time should she choose to engage in an imaginary power struggle regarding parameters of a child's game.
While this drama is playing out, it is easy to see how silly and melodramatic the boy's behavior to us. The mother means well, and wishes to comfort him, but it is shameful of him to put this issue upon her, placing aditional strain on a mechanism that is working to support him in other, more important ways.
No matter how tempting it is, I think that it would be in the best interests of everyone involved to denounce the mere notion of enforced "virtual property" rights.
The significance that virtual objects hold are purely social, and, due to the fact that they do not actually exist, they serve no other function than be a drain on the economy. Without any physical form or function, a virtual object--some thing purely imaginary--cannot be made useful for directly (ie in a non-social way) aiding means and satisfying ends that might result in real human productivity and sustenance.
It is easy to get caught up in materialism, and, while anyone can admit the evils of materialism while not necessarily being inclined to forgo it, one can see clearly that whatever functional benefits that materialism might also provide are completely removed when the attitude is applied towards an object that is inherently immaterial.
In the case of games (which this post mainly refers to), we can agree that games serve no purpose other than to entertain us. Entertainment is only good for the moment; a game is entertaining while you are playing it, and it is therefore counterintuitive to place value on objects "held" in the game that would lose value outside of play (unless you are experiencing loss of sanity). While one might argue that the objects might enhance gameplay and pleasure derived from it, this can only be carried so far; being an experienced gamer myself, it is a long-proven fact that having more goodies in the game does not truly make it more fun to play. If these objects give the player a competetitive edge, they even decrease the value of gameplay (unless one is willing to derive pleasure solely from dominating social interaction--ie "owning" other people).
In summary, "so what"? You wasted time and money engaging in an activity designed to motivate others to waste more of their time and money in order to show you up in a market-stimulated contest to waste more time and money than anyone else (and therefore be the king of wasting time and money). Wasting on what? Oh--nothing. But it was fun, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
No, this behavior doesn't need to be insured, rewarded, or compensated in any way by the state. Am I saying that it's wrong or counterproductive? Not necessarily--I would not be so quick to deny that there are no possible real benefits, but in the end the affair is so trifling that it does not warrant the expenditure of more resources in order to be actively preserved by authoritative social institutions (ie the government). That would be counterproductive.
The best policy a government can adopt is no policy; the whole issue needs to be ignored. It is no place for the government to manage this sort of thing (and, being a bit of a leftist, I have a more liberal opinion on what government ought to manage). Whoever provides the virtual world makes the laws in it, and the management of virtual objects falls under their jurisdiction. If you get screwed, so be it--go cry. Just don't ask for society to make any adjustments on your behalf because you lost what meager virtual reward you got from expending resources engaging in virtual activity in a virtual world.
Yes, I know what it's like to lose something that I devoted a lot of time and effort to. It hurts a lot, but we have to be more discerning about what we devote ourselves to.
There need not be anything necessarily real about a virtual monopoly, and what other merits must a virtual object possess but appearance? iPods are very dominant as a social factor, and their status as the archetypal MP3 player give it a much greater perceived market presence than it might actually hold, and any situation considered to be real becomes real in its consequences. Factors such as price and accessibility might prevent the company from gaining enough market share to have a real monopoly, but they are still the number one company to be competing with because of a monopoly in theory; if Dell did not perceive the iPod as the biggest threat to its desired business model, the campaign wouldn't exist.
Dell's marketing shows a desire to usurp a position held by the iPod; they are seeking to replace one cultural phenomenon with another. If successful, it would be a hugely powerful asset towards expanding their own market presence if they were able to properly stimulate consumption. If push came to shove, Apple would be inclined to further respond to industry shifts, as they have already done so in the past when they introduced the iPod-mini.
The competition in question here is for a specific niche, not the entire spectrum of portable MP3 players everywhere.
This has the potential to be a real kick in the pants for Apple if it actually works out, and I'm sure that Steve Jobs isn't happy about this.
The result is win-win for the consumer because, assuming the Dell players are nice in their own merit, owners of older iPods are receiving a good deal on a nice upgrade while at the same time helping to wrest the industry from a virtual monopoly. If Apple is scared enough, it will respond as best it can by making appropriate adjustments to product/service price/quality in order to get everybody a better deal. Therefore, whether your loyalty is held with Dell or Apple, this is a move that would seem improve the standing of both companies' clients.
I don't doubt for a moment that BSD adoption is growing, and to me it just seems like a matter of course; the development of the system, the machines people are putting them on, and shifts in the market just seems to point in that direction.
Consider this: computers are getting more and more popular; they are being integrated into more aspects of our lives than they ever were before, and now it's standard for people to own them. Another interesting combination is that personal computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Of course, none of this is a new development; people could have and were saying these sorts of things over a decade ago, but the good thing is that it's still true.
What's newer is the fact that open source seems to have escalated since then; every day it keeps becoming a bigger and bigger deal. More large companies are working with it than ever before, development has increased, and code maturity levels are always rising. A linux system installed today is something really different than what I started out using only three years ago.
Okay, so what does this all mean, and what does it have to do with BSD? Well, nobody will deny that linux is the big thing, and, while linux gets most of the press, BSD has always been around, and BSD is always being further developed and improved upon at a rate not at all unlike linux. What's good for one open source software product is good for another, and it seems that BSD is chugging right along with the rest of them.
I don't have data like Netcraft does, and it's a mistake to make hard conclusions based on pseronal experience, but I've spent a bit of time on the #freebsd channel on freenode, and from that alone I see FreeBSD adoption/development taking place. Any time I go in there (the channel is a little crowded), there is always somebody there who has questions about FreeBSD; some of them are curious about it, some are trying to install it for the first time, some are new to their systems and need help getting started with a particular task, and some are a little bit more experienced but are still pressing forward with something new. These people are always there. Talking to some of them, you'd find that most were people who had been using linux and started using FreeBSD after hearing good things about it or simply developing an interest in something new.
When people aren't talking about learning FreeBSD, they are talking about projected development, new features, etc. And this is all very apt because new developments in this modern operating system have proliferated (just look at all the changes in the FreeBSD new technology release).
I can imagine how people might consider BSD to be something traditionally "old-fashioned", but to me it's about as shiny and new as linux, and I regard both systems with equal fervor.
I administrate FreeBSD machines, and by default the wheel group decided who can and cannot run the "su" command at all, and that is with the root password. In order to su successfully, a wheel member must also have the root password; other users aren't allowed to even attempt it. I am sure that this can be changed to match the passwordless authentication that you have mentioned, but I actually prefer the current model I have been using. The security implications are complicated, but, password or no, if a person has root access, they can divulge the information no matter what. The biggest benefit to keeping the root password secret to all admins, however, is that they can't do direct logins as the root user; you will have good records of who did what from which admin's account.
Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers
Yeah, but I was thinking the same thing twelve years ago, and what a surprise I was in for...
Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic
I'm not too sure on this one either. My gut instinct is telling me that they will just find ways; look at what happened to word processors! Anyway, games like Mortal Kombat used to look super photo-realistic, but take a look at it now...
As for the systems not being at that level, it is anyone's guess. I think I will have to agree with you that the projected stats probably won't be the standard, but I think that these machines being described will exist at the high end. So, it will most likely come down to who exactly is going to buy these things. As you have mentioned, people don't really need them in a practical way, and I'll wager that most won't be able to afford them. If Microsoft tries to pull a forced upgrade then it might be a deadly blow to the company.
My best bet is that the requirements for Longhorn will not really be this high (Microsoft might change their minds or lie), or, if they are, then it will be targetted to a more specialized market and exist alongside other Microsoft operating systems.
When I first started playing the guitar, my first musical endeavor, I did quite a bit of shopping around. I compared prices from various vendors, and after a while I started finding that musiciansfriend.com/Guitar Center always had the lowest prices on the item I was looking for.
Now, when I want to buy some piece of musical equipment for my playing the guitar, I really don't take the time to look around; I've got enough built up confidence in musiciansfriend that I know I can just go straight to them and get the best price (for now, at least). Also, they carry a variety of other instruments and equipment that on might find in mainstream music. (if you're in the market for rarer, more specialized instruments then I suggest larkinthemorning.com, though I can't vouch for how competetitive their pricing is).
Also, if you're in the market for a new guitar or amplifiers, recommending carvin.com goes without saying. Their instruments and equipment are generally known as having the highest quality as well as some of the lowest prices. You won't be disappointed.
It's actually quite surprising how support for old DOS games has been difficult to manage. With all of the information available on the subject, one would think that it's more simplistic and straightforward. After all, the hardware that these games was designed to work with was extremely limited, and there just wasn't enough plurality to suggest that a game required a feature of functionality that was so uncommon.
Granted, there probably were strange things that need to be addressed, but you'd figure that it shouldn't take *that* much to work out. And, of course, there is no doubt that they will eventually.
DOSBox is a great program, and it has worked wonders for me with regards to some of the more ancient games, but you can forget about using it to play the most recent DOS games. I have only used the Windows port of it, but the VM just wasn't fast enough to handle some of the fancier games, which was too bad. Even then, some older games don't work. Support is just across the board.
I approach DOS emulation with the same attitude that I approach WINE with; if your program works, then that's awesome! It will undoubtedly work well and you'll have a blast. Of course, there is a good chance that your program won't actually work (at least, not right away). Too bad for you.
In the end, there is just no substitute for the original machines available today. Maybe tomorrow.
I was born during a time when the text-based adventure had immediately been superceded by graphical adventure games a la Sierra Online for the personal computer. I had grown up without playing any, but developed an interest some years later. My experience is very limited, but I have played all of the Zork games, not having beaten any.
One particularly funny story I would like to relate was my mastering of the adventure game included with GNU emacs (yes, there is one among other things). I managed to make very reasonable progress on my own, but was eventually stumped in a room which required the use of a password-locked terminal to progress. I couldn't figure out the password for the life of me. However, being a true hacker, I realized where I was; I was playing a game that was written in elisp and running in emacs. Realizing that I had all of the tools I needed readily available, I pulled up the source code and did some poking around. Eventually I learned to manipulated many aspects of the game via assigning values to the appropriate variables, and in this manner was able to progress further.
Sure, it's cheating, but it's cheating with style! B-)
As I'm sure has been mentioned earlier (and if it hasn't, then I can be the first), numbers are significant because they have values that are extremely easy to process and contain very precise meanings. Numbers do not explain why a game is likeable, but they do describe whether or not a person actually did, and to what degree.
The beauty of this is that the job of sorting out a huge variety of games (and other things) can be handed right over to a computer, which can access huge databases of this information and collect meaningful results. As of yet, computers cannot read reviews and understand what elements of a game might make it good if it were described in writing.
What good does this do? Well, it saves the prospective game buyer a lot of time and effort; he can easily pull up a game that has a general reputation to be good. Even without a computer to examine the values for him, he can even find this information out at a single glance. Delving further, if a game looks good then he will take more into consideration.
As was said, you really do need to have an in-depth review if you are going to make a final decision, but a number allows a person to get to that stage quickly and painlessly without suffering the tedium of sifting through a big pile of titles whose quality he has no clue about--not even an arbitrary clue. Numbers may be more arbitrary, but they're enough of a clue to use as a jumping-off point.
There are holes in this way of working; people might potentially miss out on a game that they would actually love, even if the reviewer didn't like it that much. The pros outweigh the cons, however, and personal experience has shown me that many of the best games I have played were indeed widely reputed as good (and therefore scored as such more often). This saves me time, and as long as I can find a few good games to keep me happy I don't have to worry about the others that slip by, even if they are super fantastic.
The only thing that keeps the number system from being perfect is that different people have different ideas on what good game is. If we all fealt the same way about all of them then there would be no titles "slipping by". So, in order to make the number system more reliable, one has to be personally matched to a specific reviewer. If you can find a like-minded person who will rate games in a manner that you would, then you'll have infinitely more seccuss than with any random critic.
We might not have the time to personally try every game in existence, but we do have time check out games that are reputed to be good, find reviewers and scorers that tend to think the same way we do, and even try a few random games "just for the heck of it" (just in case we might find one of those elusive masterpieces). This is what people do in the real world, and when you look at the system there doesn't really leave that much to be desired; all of the bases are adequately covered. Granted, they aren't perfectly, but to a degree that is satisfactory for everyone.
Taking all of this into account, the number system serves as one of the basises for a larger system in place that has not failed for me yet, and I'm probably not missing out on much because of it. If I am, it's only to a negligible degree.;)
As many people have mentioned earlier, DOS worked almost exactly in this manner. To a certain extent, Windows works like this to this very day, though it does deviate from the model. Despite this, Windows is still a lot closer to that model than linux, and there is a reason for this.
Linux has always been geared towards creating a system that is very much like Unix. It's done a very good job as well. However, as we all know, Unix works a certain way--there are lots of design philosphies that dictate how Unix is supposed to work, and linux so far has been following these fairly well, even if it is a little bit different.
Here lies the contradiction, though; the point of linux is to be like Unix, but in order to make linux "good for desktop users" as the article claims, you essentially have to make it "not Unix." But wait--isn't the point of linux to be like Unix? This is where you run into a problem; you have a split in design philosphy.
While there are definitely ways to form a marriage between the two, as this piece of software suggests, there will still be problems. Linux as a whole hasn't been very good about following a largely structured design philosphy, or, at least, it hasn't to the same degrees as, say, MacOS. This is not just in reference to the system itself, but also the software that runs on top of it.
So, it'll just be one more thing to throw into the mix--another alternative way of doing the same thing, a fracture whose nature linux contains in thousands of. It's good to have choice and freedom, but it's just too much for the desktop user--they need less choice and more unity, something that will allow what little knowledge they can gain from using their system to be applied everywhere else.
Linux can work on the desktop, sure! But can it work with the average desktop user? To those with enough skill and knowledge, linux on the desktop is very manageable. In fact, it works great in that environment, but not everyone can make it do that. Because of the nature of how linux works, it will take an exceedingly large amount of time and effort to make it 100% manageable by Joe, whereas other, more focused operating systems, have acheived this goal in just a few short years of development.
Linux will suffer from having to work against itself in order to become "user friendly", and since this is a bit awkward and unnatural for a system of its kind and method of development, it will just have a natural tendency to not want to be that way. People are going to continue to be very frustrated in trying to make it.
You know, I remember when the first Gateway store opened around here, and it was a big event! People flocked from miles around to gape at the amazingly fast new home computers running Windows 98. They even had a real cow outside of the store to comemorate it--no really! People thought Gateway was cool back then, but now...well, maybe it's for the best!
After reading the question, I was prepared to write a response that was very similar. So similar, in fact, that you've pretty much summed up everything that I would have said.
Reading through the many responses, it is obvious that the vast majority of posters are seriously preoccupied with guns. While many games have guns in them, many do not, and, setting all that aside, this is hardly important at all.
What many people fail to realize is that what people really gain from playing games is much more abstract. The things you learn to do don't really have anything to do with actual firearms (or cars, or anything else mentioned). As you have put it, they teach modes of behaivor and ways of thinking.
There are other benefits that deal with general knowledge; that is, you can learned raw facts from a game, but usually this is not the case.
I'm sorry, but your claims don't quite stack up. What you have found is a workaround to the cencorship, obviously something that was not intended for you to do.
I was a bit skeptical myself, so, in order to prove that they were specifically blocking "XFree86" and categorizing it as being pornographic, I did a few experiments. Here are the results:
86FreeX - passed
FreeX86 - passed
X86Free - passed
XFree96 - passed
XFree69 - passed
Free69X - passed
Based on these tests performed *by hand* and by yours truly, we find that the exact string "XFree86" is being purposefully blocked and categorized as pornographic. The other strings I used passed fine, even the *blatantly* pornographic "Free69X".
It is obvious that the filter in question is not scanning the string for objectionable componants but forming an exact match as a whole.
Well, seeing as regular old perl is a bit populated for some poor folks, I say that the language gets forked; the sophisticated-but-harder-to-understand-and-code-in variant will continue to go on living as perl, and a more lightweight and simplistic cousin can be born. What shall we call it?
merl
That's right. merl. You see, 'n' is the first consonant that preceeds 'p', but "nerl" sounds stupid, so we move on to the next reasonable choice (nobody likes the letter 'n' anyway). "merl" sounds more like the name of a cute girl, and since merl would be easier to understand, more forgiving, and less demanding, she would become quite popular among young bachelors churning out code late into the night.
I'm not making fun of anyone here, and I seriously would like to know; I've always been hearing about Amiga this and Amiga that here on Slashdot every once in a while, and doing a little sniffing around on the web there appears to be a pretty active Amiga community. Also, they're still developing the operating system, so there still must be Amigas, right? Right?
Well, that's what I was hoping, but after doing some heavy searching on google I haven't been able to turn up a single machine. All of the suspect web sites like Amiga's corporate site and other places don't give any information other than "Contact your local Amiga dealer." Great. Where am I supposed to find one of those? After a little searching about that, nothing good really came up. Most of the sites I found either a) didn't exist anymore or b) didn't really have any Amiga stuff.
Okay, maybe I am just looking in all of the wrong places, but if somebody could point me out to some good resources then that would be great; I always love to try different and unusual systems, and I'm really interested in this AmigaOS. I just don't have anything to run it on.
I fail to see the relevence of this story or article at all; having read it, there is really no useful information to gleam. Really, it's only a half page of some very generic and arbitrary arguments that don't come to any full conclusion and do not provide any real evidence to support what it's claiming anyway.
The NewsFactor article it links to is a little bit more informative, but still falls along the same lines. It would be nice if we could *see* the results of these studies that they keep mentioning and were really able to get out the vague performance details they keep alluding to. Where is the real information?
I remember playing some of the old Bard's Tale games back in the day, and for the time those games were quite awesome. I have a feeling that a lot of fans are going to be put off if this game does not live up to the series.
I don't have real intimate knowledge of startup scripts, but I get along with them well enough (having written a few myself), and I just don't see what the huge fuss is about. After all, your system boots once, and once it's up then it's up. Being nice and flexible as *nix is, you can tweak system services to your heart's content while the thing is live; you wouldn't have to reboot for anything save kernel changes. Just make sure your system is configured to boot the way you want it most of the time and if you are in the mood for something different for whatever reason do it by hand after the fact (or write your own script to do the job if it has to be done often enough).
Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned with the "do-it-yourself" mentality, but I shy away from too much automation.
Slashdot Mirror
I started on the computer very young, and for many years my mother bugged me to learn to touch type. I finally hunkered down and took a class in high school, and it would not at all be unfair to say that it changed my life.
Having many years of QWERTY familiarty under my belt, I learned in what seemed like no time, and by the time I had finished the month or two long course I was easily doing 70 words a minute.
It's a skill that I certainly use every day, and lately I had been testing myself with a fantastic program called gtypist, and my speeds have ranged from 100 to 141 words per minute (141 when pushing for speed, ~100 when dealing with words/characters/symbols that I was not very familiar with or something that is particularly difficult to type).
Not only was it a useful skill, but my success in typing inspired me to pursue other things, such as playing the guitar, a first rate hobby of mine now. Also, it impresses a lot of people. ;-)
Whether we like it or not, we all have to type somewhere and somehow, so it's a skill that most everyone who has to use a computer is much better off knowing. Also, considering how little of an investment it requires and how great the returns are, it's a great mystery to me why more people aren't doing it.
I realize that not everyone can type so fast, but at school I run across people every day who show great potential. Whenever I see a classmate screaming along using only two or three fingers, I have to stop and tell them how much faster I think they could go if they actually bothered to do it correctly.
Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed by the idea that the skill of typing has or could become obsolete. I think that it is here to stay, and I know that I will be doing it for as long as I can; I will never write as fast as I type, and I will never be willing to use voice recognition systems [ever].
Diamonds actually do have practical uses; you can cut other diamonds with them. ;) In all seriousness, though, the things have interesting properties. However, you are right in that we put high value on them initially because we just liked them; they are pretty, shiny, and amusing to look at. Diamonds, however, are difficult to come by; a lot of labor is expended in finding and extracting them, among other things, and that labor needs to be compensated in some way. We cannot simply wave our hands and magically fabricate diamonds--such is the nature of virtual objects. Anyone with administrative power could theoretically go into the system and change whatever he or she likes. Unfortunately, we are not Gods in this universe (not be default).
Fancy clothing might help protect us from the elements or save us from acting on baser instincts, but the "fancy" stuff serves less of a purpose. More labor is wasted here than is necessary, and I don't particularly care for that market. To some extent, the "fancy" factor may be considered "purely social."
Art is another thing--true enough, it's significance only exists in our minds. I can be more easily reproducable at times, though art must be treated differently because I pesonally believe that it serves to activate a broader range of response than mere entertainment, and it surely plays a productive role in society.
To make my evaluation of the situation more easily understood, I will draw up an anology: suppose two children with good imaginations have their own role-playing game in the yard. After a long, devoted, and comically strict game of make-believe, the two children come upon an event where one steals the other's "magic staff". There is no real staff, however, but, due to the rigidity of the game, the boy is unable to fabricate a new one for himself, and is crushed after having to go through a lengthy process to have attained it in the first place. Running to his mother in tears, the little boy begs her to make the other child give him his "magic staff" back. The mother, however, is in the middle of engaging in an important activity that will ultimately determine the financial status of her family, and, regretfully, she chooses not to aide her son. Had she even attempted to coerce the other boy into bending the rules, he might refuse, causing her to really be wasting her time should she choose to engage in an imaginary power struggle regarding parameters of a child's game.
While this drama is playing out, it is easy to see how silly and melodramatic the boy's behavior to us. The mother means well, and wishes to comfort him, but it is shameful of him to put this issue upon her, placing aditional strain on a mechanism that is working to support him in other, more important ways.
The significance that virtual objects hold are purely social, and, due to the fact that they do not actually exist, they serve no other function than be a drain on the economy. Without any physical form or function, a virtual object--some thing purely imaginary--cannot be made useful for directly (ie in a non-social way) aiding means and satisfying ends that might result in real human productivity and sustenance.
It is easy to get caught up in materialism, and, while anyone can admit the evils of materialism while not necessarily being inclined to forgo it, one can see clearly that whatever functional benefits that materialism might also provide are completely removed when the attitude is applied towards an object that is inherently immaterial.
In the case of games (which this post mainly refers to), we can agree that games serve no purpose other than to entertain us. Entertainment is only good for the moment; a game is entertaining while you are playing it, and it is therefore counterintuitive to place value on objects "held" in the game that would lose value outside of play (unless you are experiencing loss of sanity). While one might argue that the objects might enhance gameplay and pleasure derived from it, this can only be carried so far; being an experienced gamer myself, it is a long-proven fact that having more goodies in the game does not truly make it more fun to play. If these objects give the player a competetitive edge, they even decrease the value of gameplay (unless one is willing to derive pleasure solely from dominating social interaction--ie "owning" other people).
In summary, "so what"? You wasted time and money engaging in an activity designed to motivate others to waste more of their time and money in order to show you up in a market-stimulated contest to waste more time and money than anyone else (and therefore be the king of wasting time and money). Wasting on what? Oh--nothing. But it was fun, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
No, this behavior doesn't need to be insured, rewarded, or compensated in any way by the state. Am I saying that it's wrong or counterproductive? Not necessarily--I would not be so quick to deny that there are no possible real benefits, but in the end the affair is so trifling that it does not warrant the expenditure of more resources in order to be actively preserved by authoritative social institutions (ie the government). That would be counterproductive.
The best policy a government can adopt is no policy; the whole issue needs to be ignored. It is no place for the government to manage this sort of thing (and, being a bit of a leftist, I have a more liberal opinion on what government ought to manage). Whoever provides the virtual world makes the laws in it, and the management of virtual objects falls under their jurisdiction. If you get screwed, so be it--go cry. Just don't ask for society to make any adjustments on your behalf because you lost what meager virtual reward you got from expending resources engaging in virtual activity in a virtual world.
Yes, I know what it's like to lose something that I devoted a lot of time and effort to. It hurts a lot, but we have to be more discerning about what we devote ourselves to.
Dell's marketing shows a desire to usurp a position held by the iPod; they are seeking to replace one cultural phenomenon with another. If successful, it would be a hugely powerful asset towards expanding their own market presence if they were able to properly stimulate consumption. If push came to shove, Apple would be inclined to further respond to industry shifts, as they have already done so in the past when they introduced the iPod-mini.
The competition in question here is for a specific niche, not the entire spectrum of portable MP3 players everywhere.
The result is win-win for the consumer because, assuming the Dell players are nice in their own merit, owners of older iPods are receiving a good deal on a nice upgrade while at the same time helping to wrest the industry from a virtual monopoly. If Apple is scared enough, it will respond as best it can by making appropriate adjustments to product/service price/quality in order to get everybody a better deal. Therefore, whether your loyalty is held with Dell or Apple, this is a move that would seem improve the standing of both companies' clients.
Hey, there's always VMS! =)
Consider this: computers are getting more and more popular; they are being integrated into more aspects of our lives than they ever were before, and now it's standard for people to own them. Another interesting combination is that personal computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Of course, none of this is a new development; people could have and were saying these sorts of things over a decade ago, but the good thing is that it's still true.
What's newer is the fact that open source seems to have escalated since then; every day it keeps becoming a bigger and bigger deal. More large companies are working with it than ever before, development has increased, and code maturity levels are always rising. A linux system installed today is something really different than what I started out using only three years ago.
Okay, so what does this all mean, and what does it have to do with BSD? Well, nobody will deny that linux is the big thing, and, while linux gets most of the press, BSD has always been around, and BSD is always being further developed and improved upon at a rate not at all unlike linux. What's good for one open source software product is good for another, and it seems that BSD is chugging right along with the rest of them.
I don't have data like Netcraft does, and it's a mistake to make hard conclusions based on pseronal experience, but I've spent a bit of time on the #freebsd channel on freenode, and from that alone I see FreeBSD adoption/development taking place. Any time I go in there (the channel is a little crowded), there is always somebody there who has questions about FreeBSD; some of them are curious about it, some are trying to install it for the first time, some are new to their systems and need help getting started with a particular task, and some are a little bit more experienced but are still pressing forward with something new. These people are always there. Talking to some of them, you'd find that most were people who had been using linux and started using FreeBSD after hearing good things about it or simply developing an interest in something new.
When people aren't talking about learning FreeBSD, they are talking about projected development, new features, etc. And this is all very apt because new developments in this modern operating system have proliferated (just look at all the changes in the FreeBSD new technology release).
I can imagine how people might consider BSD to be something traditionally "old-fashioned", but to me it's about as shiny and new as linux, and I regard both systems with equal fervor.
And just why is it so important for BSD to have a VDR? The idea just seems dumb to me.
I administrate FreeBSD machines, and by default the wheel group decided who can and cannot run the "su" command at all, and that is with the root password. In order to su successfully, a wheel member must also have the root password; other users aren't allowed to even attempt it. I am sure that this can be changed to match the passwordless authentication that you have mentioned, but I actually prefer the current model I have been using. The security implications are complicated, but, password or no, if a person has root access, they can divulge the information no matter what. The biggest benefit to keeping the root password secret to all admins, however, is that they can't do direct logins as the root user; you will have good records of who did what from which admin's account.
Yeah, but I was thinking the same thing twelve years ago, and what a surprise I was in for...
I'm not too sure on this one either. My gut instinct is telling me that they will just find ways; look at what happened to word processors! Anyway, games like Mortal Kombat used to look super photo-realistic, but take a look at it now...
As for the systems not being at that level, it is anyone's guess. I think I will have to agree with you that the projected stats probably won't be the standard, but I think that these machines being described will exist at the high end. So, it will most likely come down to who exactly is going to buy these things. As you have mentioned, people don't really need them in a practical way, and I'll wager that most won't be able to afford them. If Microsoft tries to pull a forced upgrade then it might be a deadly blow to the company.
My best bet is that the requirements for Longhorn will not really be this high (Microsoft might change their minds or lie), or, if they are, then it will be targetted to a more specialized market and exist alongside other Microsoft operating systems.
Now, when I want to buy some piece of musical equipment for my playing the guitar, I really don't take the time to look around; I've got enough built up confidence in musiciansfriend that I know I can just go straight to them and get the best price (for now, at least). Also, they carry a variety of other instruments and equipment that on might find in mainstream music. (if you're in the market for rarer, more specialized instruments then I suggest larkinthemorning.com, though I can't vouch for how competetitive their pricing is).
Also, if you're in the market for a new guitar or amplifiers, recommending carvin.com goes without saying. Their instruments and equipment are generally known as having the highest quality as well as some of the lowest prices. You won't be disappointed.
I would have understood.
Granted, there probably were strange things that need to be addressed, but you'd figure that it shouldn't take *that* much to work out. And, of course, there is no doubt that they will eventually.
DOSBox is a great program, and it has worked wonders for me with regards to some of the more ancient games, but you can forget about using it to play the most recent DOS games. I have only used the Windows port of it, but the VM just wasn't fast enough to handle some of the fancier games, which was too bad. Even then, some older games don't work. Support is just across the board.
I approach DOS emulation with the same attitude that I approach WINE with; if your program works, then that's awesome! It will undoubtedly work well and you'll have a blast. Of course, there is a good chance that your program won't actually work (at least, not right away). Too bad for you.
In the end, there is just no substitute for the original machines available today. Maybe tomorrow.
One particularly funny story I would like to relate was my mastering of the adventure game included with GNU emacs (yes, there is one among other things). I managed to make very reasonable progress on my own, but was eventually stumped in a room which required the use of a password-locked terminal to progress. I couldn't figure out the password for the life of me. However, being a true hacker, I realized where I was; I was playing a game that was written in elisp and running in emacs. Realizing that I had all of the tools I needed readily available, I pulled up the source code and did some poking around. Eventually I learned to manipulated many aspects of the game via assigning values to the appropriate variables, and in this manner was able to progress further.
Sure, it's cheating, but it's cheating with style! B-)
The beauty of this is that the job of sorting out a huge variety of games (and other things) can be handed right over to a computer, which can access huge databases of this information and collect meaningful results. As of yet, computers cannot read reviews and understand what elements of a game might make it good if it were described in writing.
What good does this do? Well, it saves the prospective game buyer a lot of time and effort; he can easily pull up a game that has a general reputation to be good. Even without a computer to examine the values for him, he can even find this information out at a single glance. Delving further, if a game looks good then he will take more into consideration.
As was said, you really do need to have an in-depth review if you are going to make a final decision, but a number allows a person to get to that stage quickly and painlessly without suffering the tedium of sifting through a big pile of titles whose quality he has no clue about--not even an arbitrary clue. Numbers may be more arbitrary, but they're enough of a clue to use as a jumping-off point.
There are holes in this way of working; people might potentially miss out on a game that they would actually love, even if the reviewer didn't like it that much. The pros outweigh the cons, however, and personal experience has shown me that many of the best games I have played were indeed widely reputed as good (and therefore scored as such more often). This saves me time, and as long as I can find a few good games to keep me happy I don't have to worry about the others that slip by, even if they are super fantastic.
The only thing that keeps the number system from being perfect is that different people have different ideas on what good game is. If we all fealt the same way about all of them then there would be no titles "slipping by". So, in order to make the number system more reliable, one has to be personally matched to a specific reviewer. If you can find a like-minded person who will rate games in a manner that you would, then you'll have infinitely more seccuss than with any random critic.
We might not have the time to personally try every game in existence, but we do have time check out games that are reputed to be good, find reviewers and scorers that tend to think the same way we do, and even try a few random games "just for the heck of it" (just in case we might find one of those elusive masterpieces). This is what people do in the real world, and when you look at the system there doesn't really leave that much to be desired; all of the bases are adequately covered. Granted, they aren't perfectly, but to a degree that is satisfactory for everyone.
Taking all of this into account, the number system serves as one of the basises for a larger system in place that has not failed for me yet, and I'm probably not missing out on much because of it. If I am, it's only to a negligible degree. ;)
Linux has always been geared towards creating a system that is very much like Unix. It's done a very good job as well. However, as we all know, Unix works a certain way--there are lots of design philosphies that dictate how Unix is supposed to work, and linux so far has been following these fairly well, even if it is a little bit different.
Here lies the contradiction, though; the point of linux is to be like Unix, but in order to make linux "good for desktop users" as the article claims, you essentially have to make it "not Unix." But wait--isn't the point of linux to be like Unix? This is where you run into a problem; you have a split in design philosphy.
While there are definitely ways to form a marriage between the two, as this piece of software suggests, there will still be problems. Linux as a whole hasn't been very good about following a largely structured design philosphy, or, at least, it hasn't to the same degrees as, say, MacOS. This is not just in reference to the system itself, but also the software that runs on top of it.
So, it'll just be one more thing to throw into the mix--another alternative way of doing the same thing, a fracture whose nature linux contains in thousands of. It's good to have choice and freedom, but it's just too much for the desktop user--they need less choice and more unity, something that will allow what little knowledge they can gain from using their system to be applied everywhere else.
Linux can work on the desktop, sure! But can it work with the average desktop user? To those with enough skill and knowledge, linux on the desktop is very manageable. In fact, it works great in that environment, but not everyone can make it do that. Because of the nature of how linux works, it will take an exceedingly large amount of time and effort to make it 100% manageable by Joe, whereas other, more focused operating systems, have acheived this goal in just a few short years of development.
Linux will suffer from having to work against itself in order to become "user friendly", and since this is a bit awkward and unnatural for a system of its kind and method of development, it will just have a natural tendency to not want to be that way. People are going to continue to be very frustrated in trying to make it.
You know, I remember when the first Gateway store opened around here, and it was a big event! People flocked from miles around to gape at the amazingly fast new home computers running Windows 98. They even had a real cow outside of the store to comemorate it--no really! People thought Gateway was cool back then, but now...well, maybe it's for the best!
After reading the question, I was prepared to write a response that was very similar. So similar, in fact, that you've pretty much summed up everything that I would have said.
Reading through the many responses, it is obvious that the vast majority of posters are seriously preoccupied with guns. While many games have guns in them, many do not, and, setting all that aside, this is hardly important at all.
What many people fail to realize is that what people really gain from playing games is much more abstract. The things you learn to do don't really have anything to do with actual firearms (or cars, or anything else mentioned). As you have put it, they teach modes of behaivor and ways of thinking.
There are other benefits that deal with general knowledge; that is, you can learned raw facts from a game, but usually this is not the case.
I was a bit skeptical myself, so, in order to prove that they were specifically blocking "XFree86" and categorizing it as being pornographic, I did a few experiments. Here are the results:
86FreeX - passed
FreeX86 - passed
X86Free - passed
XFree96 - passed
XFree69 - passed
Free69X - passed
Based on these tests performed *by hand* and by yours truly, we find that the exact string "XFree86" is being purposefully blocked and categorized as pornographic. The other strings I used passed fine, even the *blatantly* pornographic "Free69X".
It is obvious that the filter in question is not scanning the string for objectionable componants but forming an exact match as a whole.
So much for your defense.
merl
That's right. merl. You see, 'n' is the first consonant that preceeds 'p', but "nerl" sounds stupid, so we move on to the next reasonable choice (nobody likes the letter 'n' anyway). "merl" sounds more like the name of a cute girl, and since merl would be easier to understand, more forgiving, and less demanding, she would become quite popular among young bachelors churning out code late into the night.
I'm not making fun of anyone here, and I seriously would like to know; I've always been hearing about Amiga this and Amiga that here on Slashdot every once in a while, and doing a little sniffing around on the web there appears to be a pretty active Amiga community. Also, they're still developing the operating system, so there still must be Amigas, right? Right?
Well, that's what I was hoping, but after doing some heavy searching on google I haven't been able to turn up a single machine. All of the suspect web sites like Amiga's corporate site and other places don't give any information other than "Contact your local Amiga dealer." Great. Where am I supposed to find one of those? After a little searching about that, nothing good really came up. Most of the sites I found either a) didn't exist anymore or b) didn't really have any Amiga stuff.
Okay, maybe I am just looking in all of the wrong places, but if somebody could point me out to some good resources then that would be great; I always love to try different and unusual systems, and I'm really interested in this AmigaOS. I just don't have anything to run it on.
The NewsFactor article it links to is a little bit more informative, but still falls along the same lines. It would be nice if we could *see* the results of these studies that they keep mentioning and were really able to get out the vague performance details they keep alluding to. Where is the real information?
I remember playing some of the old Bard's Tale games back in the day, and for the time those games were quite awesome. I have a feeling that a lot of fans are going to be put off if this game does not live up to the series.
Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned with the "do-it-yourself" mentality, but I shy away from too much automation.