Those features might go unused by YOU, but there are a lot of people out there that need them and use them.
Especially in a genuine corporate office situation, it's really interesting to see the uses that people put the various MS Office apps to. Those extra features really do come in handy for them.
The macros are a big part of it - lots of office workers aren't programmers, don't have an interest in programming, and possibly don't even have the skills to become a programmer, but with some basic training they can come up with some very handy department-level utilities in Excel, for example.
Citrix is doing fine. MS adding Terminal Server into Windows doesn't remove the market for what Metaframe does.
In the era of DRDOS, I was using an Apple IIe, but I suspect its failure had more to do with it not offering any clear advantage over MSDOS.
Netscape killed themselves by not adding anything significant to their browser for years after they first released Communicator. Communicator was better than IE3, but not IE4, and included a whole bunch of extra junk (like that incredibly bad WYSIWYG HTML editor) that increased the download size for every update to ridiculous amounts for a dialup connection.
Real is even worse than Netscape - their player is mediocre to begin with, but it also tries to assimilate your entire system, is covered with ads, and has a download and install process that tries to trick you into buying premium features.
MS has certainly done some bad things, but I don't think that blaming them for the failures of companies like Netscape is fair. Netscape tried to base an entire corporation on selling what is a basic internet utility that should be included with every OS, just like a text editor or FTP client.
I alledge that this is the reason for the lack of innovation in the past 15 years.
There are plenty of companies making genuinely innovative products - look at Adobe, Alias, Discreet, Cakewalk, Steinberg, or Macromedia. They do well because they make powerful, complex products that fill specific needs. They don't try and fund major businesses by selling a single piece of software that should be included for free when you buy an operating system, then start complaining when someone else *does* give it away for free.
According to this daring young thinker, our whole silly idea of time being a continuum from past thru present onto the future may be bunk.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but even according to respected physicists like Dr. Greene the idea of time as an arrow pointing in one direction is false.
I saw him lecture a few weeks ago and he was excellent, so I ordered both of his books. I haven't had a chance to read them yet, but I am hoping one of them covers a concept from the lecture that really stuck out in my mind.
He mentioned that our perception of time running "forwards" is pretty arbitrary, and that entropy works both ways - it increases into the past as well as the present (from any given moment in time). He said that this is kind of counterintuitive to humans, but didn't seem to have time to go into the details.
flamethrowers shared ammunition with rocket launchers
Why is this a complaint in a game based around nanotechnology? If your weapons have little nano-manufacturing plants inside them, a flamethrower and a rocket launcher could use the same basic matter packs.
I've seen people on this forum scoff at $60,000 a year like it was some kind of pittance.
Where do you live?
I live in Seattle. Here, $60k a year will let you buy a rundown and/or small house in the city limits, or a decent house 30-60 minutes away.
In San Francisco or NYC, I think you'd still be stuck in an apartment, unless you bought a house in the absolute ghetto.
By comparison, my dad was able to support my mom and three kids on his single design engineer's salary (certainly less than $60k, even with inflation) *and buy a big house* twenty-five years ago.
If you can't see the discrepancy, I'm not sure what will convince you.
some dude in Russia CAN do their job just as well
There is nothing that a US citizen can do that someone in a poorer country can't do for less. Do you think *everything* should be outsourced, and US citizens should all get minimum wage service industry jobs as secretaries for manufacturing companies whose assembly lines are all in China, or booking agents for hospitals whose surgeons all practice in India?
Saying that people can perceive more than 30 fps is like saying that people can hear beyond 20 kHz. Sure, you have the occasional freak who MIGHT be able to perceive it, but for the most part it's just people who *think* they can perceive it.
This is a common misconception. Seeing the difference between 30 and 60fps is like hearing the difference between 11KHz and 22KHz digital audio. It's actually something that most people can do.
This article (which discusses the subject in detail) cites an Air Force study that implies that humans can perceive visual changes that last less than 1/200th of a second. I personally don't notice a difference above 60-80fps, but 30 is really pretty low. Just about any gamer should be able to spot that.
Also, as an aside - most young people *can* hear above 20KHz. I could hear well above it when I was in elementary school. It's just age and exposure to loud sounds that degrade it over time.
No kidding. According to some rough calculations I did, it's about five times the mass of Mir. Now that is a spacecraft. I hope they get the funding to build it.
I don't think the Wachowskis tried to hide that they borrowed some of the visual style from Dark City - in fact, the rooftop that Trinity runs over at the beginning of The Matrix was a set *from* Dark City.
The underlying similarity, though, is because both are based on Gnosticism. Neo and John Murdoch are both the gnostic archetype of the person who realizes the true nature of the world, and so is able to control it. In one of the Matrix sequels, there is even a reference to a ship called the Gnosis.
It might be not available where you live, but those extra base stations do exist and they are not even expensive at 4500 Yen
Thanks. I had a feeling they were available in Japan. There's already a battery replacement program for Karma owners over there too, once they finally wear out. Here's the less-than-helpful response I got from their US division though:
"The Rio website does not offer the Docks for the Karmas as of yet, but once they are on the website then they will be avaliable for sell."
I really wish Rio would start selling extra docks for the Karma (which they've been promising since it was released, as far as I can tell).
I would buy a Karma today if they did, because I don't want to have to carry the dock between home and work.
Is it so hard to have their manufacturing team produce a few extra for sale on their website, given that they're already making them for inclusion with the players? It doesn't even have to come with a fancy box, they can put it in a ziploc with "Karma Dock" scrawled on it with a sharpie for all I care.
I would guess the policy exists because of the possible security threat. Notice that a LOT of the newer cell phone models have cameras on them? Think about how this enables corporate espionage or sabotage. How easy would it be for someone with a cell phone/camera to surreptitiously take a picture of a sensitive document and send it to the company's competitor?
This is a pretty shortsighted mindset on the part of the people implementing policies because of it.
I'm sure in a few years, some wristwatches will come with built-in cameras too. In a decade or less, it will be sunglasses, or replacement eyes for the blind.
What are they going to do then, require that no one with any technology on their bodies enter the building?
People are just going to have to get used to the idea that anyone could potentially take a picture at any time. It will definitely be an interesting change. There are certainly privacy concerns, but I would rather that private citizens have this capability than that it be limited to corporations and governments.
Companies don't deal with the whole world; they deal with individual regions around the world.
Not all companies are like that. There is definitely a market for retailers in one country selling to people in other countries.
Think about it, if you want to do business with SuperMegaCorp
What about those of us who *don't* want to do business with SuperMegaCorp?
Yesterday I wanted to order Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs and Tourquoise Days, which hasn't been released in the US and might not be for some time, because I guess most Americans suck and don't know excellent science fiction when they see it (I did the same thing a few weeks ago to get Absolution Gap, which won't be out here until June despite it having been released in Britain last year). If in a hypothetical "linked to geographic location" system I went to a site called thebookplace that automatically linked me to the US division (or company in the US with that name), I wouldn't have been able to order it. Instead I went to thebookplace.co.uk, and got it with no trouble, and actually paid less than it would cost if it were even possible to buy here.
I also order things from Pennangalan Dreams and Vegetarian Shoes, as well as other sites as needed. There are no retailers in the US that provide the same things, so why would I want an ambiguous domain system that redirects me to something here?
Chances are that you want to 1) Prevent a lot of humans from being killed. 2) Prevent a lot humans from suffering badly.
No, I think we should prevent all of ourselves from dying. There is nothing in the world right now apart from a global nuclear war and a large asteroid that can do wipe out the entire human race.
Why not spend that money now to help the dying and the suffering people of the world.
People already are spending money on that. It will never "solve" that problem, because it's one that will always be with us.
sure you won't help all of them but lets face it you may not save all humans when the asteroid is coming either.
If it's a big enough asteroid, either everyone survives, or no one does. Everything we've done since the dawn of civilization would be wiped out. I think that's worth spending money to prevent.
No more so than the "we should feed the entire planet, cure every disease, and end war before we work on anything else" argument that the original post regurgitated.
That argument is a tar baby - it's designed to attract people in and then get them stuck working on things that haven't been resolved for, what, six thousand years of human society?
Obviously all three of those things are noble goals, but as I've said before, putting other things (like asteroid defence, or space exploration in general) aside until they are taken care of is like me saying "I'm going to wait to have kids until I've got a seven-figure salary, three cars, and a mansion." It could happen, but the probability is so low that it's not worth considering. I will probably be dead of old age before that happens, just like the human race will probably be dead by asteroid impact (or other cause) before we resolve the three issues someone always mentions in this type of discussion.
Given the vast number of IT people underemployed and flipping burgers at your local $FAST_FOOD_CHAIN, one suspects you are incorrect.
I keep hearing about these people, and yet for some reason everyone I know with real skills doesn't have trouble finding a job. Washington Mutual, in particular, seems to be happy to pay people *above* market rates.
Well, given that the interviewer admitted that the games worked fine on unmodded Gamecubes and didn't on modded ones, I think there is something to it, even if it isn't the laser calibration.
Don't forget that the $27,000 is just your base bay. On top of that you either live on base for free(including electricity and water), or get a housing allowence which changes depending on where you are and your rank, and family. Plus health and dental on top of that.
That's still not very good. If you add $27,000 to what I pay for housing/electricity/water, you get about what I was making as a help desk phone jockey when I started out in IT four years ago, with no degree.
The military can probably get away with lower-than-industry pay for certain jobs that have a cool factor, like flying a fighter jet or driving a tank, but not for an IT position.
The whole point is so that Americans have more disposible income to buy shit. Then the companies that get the money from the populace are able to hire more workers, and manufacture more goods, hence selling more goods, then hire more workers.
I thought the 80s made it pretty obvious that this sort of scheme doesn't work.
I earn a middle-class salary. The tax cut for me had so insignificant an impact on my paycheck that I didn't even notice it. My spending hasn't increased.
The only people who I see getting a significantly larger amount of money are the rich - who already have enough money to buy pretty much anything they want, and are just going to put the rest in the bank.
It's certainly not going to convince businesses to hire more Americans. Businesses are too concerned with cutting costs and outsourcing to foreign countries in order to maximize shareholder value. They are manufacturing and selling more goods, because the cost to them is cheaper, but the cycle of money is no longer a closed loop inside America - a lot of it is being drained off to China, India, etc.
Back to the original topic - Why should I pay the price if the military is unwilling to give its technical people a decent salary? Why should the money that my employer has invested in my skills be basically stolen when I'm conscripted?
It's totally ludicrous that people like me should be expected to put their lives on hold, their belongings in storage, and give up their home because the government isn't willing to provide proper incentives for employment in the military. If the country were threatened by a foreign power, e.g. Imperial Japan in WWII, I would have some sympathy, but it's not.
Imagine for a second that I started up a company that made Gameboys, compatible 100% with the Nintendo Gameboy.
Something similar was already done in the 80s - several manufacturers made systems or add-ons for their own that were 100% compatible with the Atari 2600.
Atari took at least one of them to court, but it was ruled to be legal.
It wouldn't make much sense to do this now anyway, because there is no profit made on the systems - just the games, which Nintendo still collects the license fees for.
Slashdot Mirror
Those features might go unused by YOU, but there are a lot of people out there that need them and use them.
Especially in a genuine corporate office situation, it's really interesting to see the uses that people put the various MS Office apps to. Those extra features really do come in handy for them.
The macros are a big part of it - lots of office workers aren't programmers, don't have an interest in programming, and possibly don't even have the skills to become a programmer, but with some basic training they can come up with some very handy department-level utilities in Excel, for example.
They have $42 IN CASH!!
Wow, someone must have actually bought a couple of things at their cafepress store.
Link To The Past is NOT on that Zelda disc...
Yeah, I realized after I posted that when I typed "SNES" I meant "N64."
Fortunately LTTP is available as a GBA cartridge.
These should be, like, all on one cartridge.
No kidding.
If I can get All four of the NES and SNES Zelda games on a single Gamecube disc for $20, how can they sell individual NES games for $20 each and keep a straight face?
remember drdos?
remember netscape?
remember stack?
remember Citrix?
remember real?
Citrix is doing fine. MS adding Terminal Server into Windows doesn't remove the market for what Metaframe does.
In the era of DRDOS, I was using an Apple IIe, but I suspect its failure had more to do with it not offering any clear advantage over MSDOS.
Netscape killed themselves by not adding anything significant to their browser for years after they first released Communicator. Communicator was better than IE3, but not IE4, and included a whole bunch of extra junk (like that incredibly bad WYSIWYG HTML editor) that increased the download size for every update to ridiculous amounts for a dialup connection.
Real is even worse than Netscape - their player is mediocre to begin with, but it also tries to assimilate your entire system, is covered with ads, and has a download and install process that tries to trick you into buying premium features.
MS has certainly done some bad things, but I don't think that blaming them for the failures of companies like Netscape is fair. Netscape tried to base an entire corporation on selling what is a basic internet utility that should be included with every OS, just like a text editor or FTP client.
I alledge that this is the reason for the lack of innovation in the past 15 years.
There are plenty of companies making genuinely innovative products - look at Adobe, Alias, Discreet, Cakewalk, Steinberg, or Macromedia. They do well because they make powerful, complex products that fill specific needs. They don't try and fund major businesses by selling a single piece of software that should be included for free when you buy an operating system, then start complaining when someone else *does* give it away for free.
Look at health care in Europe vs. America. Everyone in Europe can afford to have a root canal or an xray should they need one.
On the other hand, if you are convicted of a crime in the UK, then later found innocent and released, you are charged exorbitant fees for your stay in prison.
Britain is also overly concerned with Orwellian surveillance systems that destroy the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
The US certainly fucks up on a lot of things, but Europe doesn't exactly get everything right either.
According to this daring young thinker, our whole silly idea of time being a continuum from past thru present onto the future may be bunk.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but even according to respected physicists like Dr. Greene the idea of time as an arrow pointing in one direction is false.
I saw him lecture a few weeks ago and he was excellent, so I ordered both of his books. I haven't had a chance to read them yet, but I am hoping one of them covers a concept from the lecture that really stuck out in my mind.
He mentioned that our perception of time running "forwards" is pretty arbitrary, and that entropy works both ways - it increases into the past as well as the present (from any given moment in time). He said that this is kind of counterintuitive to humans, but didn't seem to have time to go into the details.
flamethrowers shared ammunition with rocket launchers
Why is this a complaint in a game based around nanotechnology? If your weapons have little nano-manufacturing plants inside them, a flamethrower and a rocket launcher could use the same basic matter packs.
I've seen people on this forum scoff at $60,000 a year like it was some kind of pittance.
Where do you live?
I live in Seattle. Here, $60k a year will let you buy a rundown and/or small house in the city limits, or a decent house 30-60 minutes away.
In San Francisco or NYC, I think you'd still be stuck in an apartment, unless you bought a house in the absolute ghetto.
By comparison, my dad was able to support my mom and three kids on his single design engineer's salary (certainly less than $60k, even with inflation) *and buy a big house* twenty-five years ago.
If you can't see the discrepancy, I'm not sure what will convince you.
some dude in Russia CAN do their job just as well
There is nothing that a US citizen can do that someone in a poorer country can't do for less. Do you think *everything* should be outsourced, and US citizens should all get minimum wage service industry jobs as secretaries for manufacturing companies whose assembly lines are all in China, or booking agents for hospitals whose surgeons all practice in India?
Saying that people can perceive more than 30 fps is like saying that people can hear beyond 20 kHz. Sure, you have the occasional freak who MIGHT be able to perceive it, but for the most part it's just people who *think* they can perceive it.
This is a common misconception. Seeing the difference between 30 and 60fps is like hearing the difference between 11KHz and 22KHz digital audio. It's actually something that most people can do.
This article (which discusses the subject in detail) cites an Air Force study that implies that humans can perceive visual changes that last less than 1/200th of a second. I personally don't notice a difference above 60-80fps, but 30 is really pretty low. Just about any gamer should be able to spot that.
Also, as an aside - most young people *can* hear above 20KHz. I could hear well above it when I was in elementary school. It's just age and exposure to loud sounds that degrade it over time.
660 tons? Wow.
No kidding. According to some rough calculations I did, it's about five times the mass of Mir. Now that is a spacecraft. I hope they get the funding to build it.
What is this...object oriented movie making?
I don't think the Wachowskis tried to hide that they borrowed some of the visual style from Dark City - in fact, the rooftop that Trinity runs over at the beginning of The Matrix was a set *from* Dark City.
The underlying similarity, though, is because both are based on Gnosticism. Neo and John Murdoch are both the gnostic archetype of the person who realizes the true nature of the world, and so is able to control it. In one of the Matrix sequels, there is even a reference to a ship called the Gnosis.
It might be not available where you live, but those extra base stations do exist and they are not even expensive at 4500 Yen
Thanks. I had a feeling they were available in Japan. There's already a battery replacement program for Karma owners over there too, once they finally wear out. Here's the less-than-helpful response I got from their US division though:
"The Rio website does not offer the Docks for the Karmas as of yet, but once they are on the website then they will be avaliable for sell."
If you have the money get a Rio Karma
I really wish Rio would start selling extra docks for the Karma (which they've been promising since it was released, as far as I can tell).
I would buy a Karma today if they did, because I don't want to have to carry the dock between home and work.
Is it so hard to have their manufacturing team produce a few extra for sale on their website, given that they're already making them for inclusion with the players? It doesn't even have to come with a fancy box, they can put it in a ziploc with "Karma Dock" scrawled on it with a sharpie for all I care.
I would guess the policy exists because of the possible security threat. Notice that a LOT of the newer cell phone models have cameras on them? Think about how this enables corporate espionage or sabotage. How easy would it be for someone with a cell phone/camera to surreptitiously take a picture of a sensitive document and send it to the company's competitor?
This is a pretty shortsighted mindset on the part of the people implementing policies because of it.
I'm sure in a few years, some wristwatches will come with built-in cameras too. In a decade or less, it will be sunglasses, or replacement eyes for the blind.
What are they going to do then, require that no one with any technology on their bodies enter the building?
People are just going to have to get used to the idea that anyone could potentially take a picture at any time. It will definitely be an interesting change. There are certainly privacy concerns, but I would rather that private citizens have this capability than that it be limited to corporations and governments.
Companies don't deal with the whole world; they deal with individual regions around the world.
Not all companies are like that. There is definitely a market for retailers in one country selling to people in other countries.
Think about it, if you want to do business with SuperMegaCorp
What about those of us who *don't* want to do business with SuperMegaCorp?
Yesterday I wanted to order Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs and Tourquoise Days, which hasn't been released in the US and might not be for some time, because I guess most Americans suck and don't know excellent science fiction when they see it (I did the same thing a few weeks ago to get Absolution Gap, which won't be out here until June despite it having been released in Britain last year). If in a hypothetical "linked to geographic location" system I went to a site called thebookplace that automatically linked me to the US division (or company in the US with that name), I wouldn't have been able to order it. Instead I went to thebookplace.co.uk, and got it with no trouble, and actually paid less than it would cost if it were even possible to buy here.
I also order things from Pennangalan Dreams and Vegetarian Shoes, as well as other sites as needed. There are no retailers in the US that provide the same things, so why would I want an ambiguous domain system that redirects me to something here?
Chances are that you want to
1) Prevent a lot of humans from being killed.
2) Prevent a lot humans from suffering badly.
No, I think we should prevent all of ourselves from dying. There is nothing in the world right now apart from a global nuclear war and a large asteroid that can do wipe out the entire human race.
Why not spend that money now to help the dying and the suffering people of the world.
People already are spending money on that. It will never "solve" that problem, because it's one that will always be with us.
sure you won't help all of them but lets face it you may not save all humans when the asteroid is coming either.
If it's a big enough asteroid, either everyone survives, or no one does. Everything we've done since the dawn of civilization would be wiped out. I think that's worth spending money to prevent.
This is an idiotic, self-perpetuating argument.
No more so than the "we should feed the entire planet, cure every disease, and end war before we work on anything else" argument that the original post regurgitated.
That argument is a tar baby - it's designed to attract people in and then get them stuck working on things that haven't been resolved for, what, six thousand years of human society?
Obviously all three of those things are noble goals, but as I've said before, putting other things (like asteroid defence, or space exploration in general) aside until they are taken care of is like me saying "I'm going to wait to have kids until I've got a seven-figure salary, three cars, and a mansion." It could happen, but the probability is so low that it's not worth considering. I will probably be dead of old age before that happens, just like the human race will probably be dead by asteroid impact (or other cause) before we resolve the three issues someone always mentions in this type of discussion.
Given the vast number of IT people underemployed and flipping burgers at your local $FAST_FOOD_CHAIN, one suspects you are incorrect.
I keep hearing about these people, and yet for some reason everyone I know with real skills doesn't have trouble finding a job. Washington Mutual, in particular, seems to be happy to pay people *above* market rates.
my take on that: just fake pr.
Well, given that the interviewer admitted that the games worked fine on unmodded Gamecubes and didn't on modded ones, I think there is something to it, even if it isn't the laser calibration.
And what exactly is with the idea of giving something back to the country that makes your way of life possible?
Being forced to join the military isn't "giving something back," it is having something taken from you.
Don't forget that the $27,000 is just your base bay. On top of that you either live on base for free(including electricity and water), or get a housing allowence which changes depending on where you are and your rank, and family. Plus health and dental on top of that.
That's still not very good. If you add $27,000 to what I pay for housing/electricity/water, you get about what I was making as a help desk phone jockey when I started out in IT four years ago, with no degree.
The military can probably get away with lower-than-industry pay for certain jobs that have a cool factor, like flying a fighter jet or driving a tank, but not for an IT position.
The whole point is so that Americans have more disposible income to buy shit. Then the companies that get the money from the populace are able to hire more workers, and manufacture more goods, hence selling more goods, then hire more workers.
I thought the 80s made it pretty obvious that this sort of scheme doesn't work.
I earn a middle-class salary. The tax cut for me had so insignificant an impact on my paycheck that I didn't even notice it. My spending hasn't increased.
The only people who I see getting a significantly larger amount of money are the rich - who already have enough money to buy pretty much anything they want, and are just going to put the rest in the bank.
It's certainly not going to convince businesses to hire more Americans. Businesses are too concerned with cutting costs and outsourcing to foreign countries in order to maximize shareholder value. They are manufacturing and selling more goods, because the cost to them is cheaper, but the cycle of money is no longer a closed loop inside America - a lot of it is being drained off to China, India, etc.
Back to the original topic - Why should I pay the price if the military is unwilling to give its technical people a decent salary? Why should the money that my employer has invested in my skills be basically stolen when I'm conscripted?
It's totally ludicrous that people like me should be expected to put their lives on hold, their belongings in storage, and give up their home because the government isn't willing to provide proper incentives for employment in the military. If the country were threatened by a foreign power, e.g. Imperial Japan in WWII, I would have some sympathy, but it's not.
Nintendo do make a profit on GBAs
Source, please? I would be curious as to just how much.
so they do stand to lose out if someone else makes GBA compatible devices.
Even if they make a profit on the hardware, the main profit is still by far in the game licenses, which they would still be collecting on.
Imagine for a second that I started up a company that made Gameboys, compatible 100% with the Nintendo Gameboy.
Something similar was already done in the 80s - several manufacturers made systems or add-ons for their own that were 100% compatible with the Atari 2600.
Atari took at least one of them to court, but it was ruled to be legal.
It wouldn't make much sense to do this now anyway, because there is no profit made on the systems - just the games, which Nintendo still collects the license fees for.