Was it just the skin color? Was it two avatars in the same suit, just different skin tones or was one a black rastafarian and the other a white office worker?
That puts it at far more then simple racism. If I avoid the black drug-dealer on the corner but happily sit next to the white nun you could say I am judging on race but that ain't really the case. I would also avoid the WHITE drug-dealer and sit next to the BLACK nun.
In the series frazier there is a character called Ken Winston or something. What do you first think when you see him. 'Snob', 'brit' or 'black'? I didn't even realize he was black until someone commented that this was the only black character to appear on the show repeatedly. His dark skin tone alone was not enough to trigger the 'black' response in me, because he is whiter then Niles.
Same in real life, do we judge people of other races purely on their skin color OR on behaviors that we have come to associate with negative experiences with people in the past?
I do know racism exist, but do you know where I find it strongest, among so called minorities themselves. Was on a job with an older turkish man and we were in and out of the car constantly, I asked if he shouldn't lock it. He said, no need, there are no morocans around. A white person would have been in serious trouble for saying that but a turk had no problem saying it.
There is plenty of scientific evidence to back it up. Turks are, in holland, less likely to commit crime then other immigrant groups. Turkish men have a rep of being a bit slow/stupid mostly because their language skills tend to be poor but on the whole trustworthy. Men that look 'turkish' get no overly negative response. Turks tend be slightly heavier and hairier. Morocans on the other hand are lighter, often thin and less facial hair. They got a bad rep in holland, not entirely undeserved as a group.
The odd effect is that I seen a morocan guy with a high education but who physical appearance is associated with trouble youth get badly treated while the turkish guy is treated friendly but as a retard.
Of course, that was if I stood WELL to the back. Because invariably if people got a choice between a white guy, a turk and a morocan, they talk to the white guy. The killer? I ain't white, just pale but my genetics come from the same corner of the world.
So I wonder, did this experiment PURELY test skin color or where the avatars behaving differently as well and what does it ultimately show? That we use past experience to judge our reaction to new situations.
I am convinced that if a person never had any reason to associate race X/group Y with a negative experience before, they wouldn't react to it.
The proof? Do you react negativly to say an american indian as a european? No, you never dealt with them, never heard negative stories about them, didn't see them hanging on street corners, so you start the encounter with a blank slate.
Do another experiment, this time use a green-skinned avatar. Then you know wether it is about skin color OR the association we make based on visual signals about what type of person we are dealing with. I am convinced that as soon as you add other signals that this person belongs to a group you can trust, the skin color quickly disappears.
The revised zune has taken the mp3 market by storm has it? Taken a chunk out of iPod sales? Oh wait, it hasn't.
MS worsed enemy isn't Apple or Linux, it is MS. MS wasn't loosing Vista sales to Apple or anyother OS company/provider, it was loosing Vista sales to XP, its own product.
That is REALLY REALLY scary for a company, after all, yes they COULD copy more of Apple or whatever other product but you can't make a copy of your own product without people wondering, if it is the same, why should I buy a new one?
Vista, as many predicted, turned into Windows ME and people just didn't upgrade and then slowly just stayed with what they had and decided to wait for the next version. MS can't have that, forget the home user, it means billions in lost sales if industry decides not to upgrade. Sure sure, they get Vista with each new PC, but MS has been counting on upgrade sales that now just ain't coming. Worse, MS had this offer where you could suscribe to upgrades. One of the reasons Vista launched earlier for business is that they needed to have a new product out to allow all those companies that had subscribed to actually update just ONCE.
Do you think that in future companies would be less willing to believe MS on a similar upgrade program? That is a lot of lost sales.
And now MS has to fund the development of a new windows, that is promised for 2010 but lets face it, when has MS ever launched on time? Worse, what if it again is a dud? Sure sure they promise lot of new stuff, but they always do that and never once have been able to deliver.
MS still is very rich, but the cracks are showing, it is no longer the darling of the stock market, it has had to pay dividend because its increase in price was no longer enough to keep shareholders happy. MS got a lot of money and a lot of money coming in but it is also bleeding money like mad. The 360 finally managed to beat Sony only for Nintendo to popup again out of nowhere. So MS will have to fight yet another round that might NOT turn a profit straightaway on that market. The Zune still ain't doing well. There is no Microsoft music store that anybody uses. Its office suite is under near constant attack. Netbooks can't run Vista but can do Linux. Apples market share is constantly increasing. Vista can be as easily pirated now as all previous MS software.
The real problem that MS has? That they got far to many problems to list. But the biggest is simply that they are to big to really feel the effect of their failures. Billy boy and dragged out into the streets for Vista or Zune or MSNBC or live search etc etc. MS bleeds some money but the company survives easily and that means they never adapt, never learn from their mistakes. What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But what is also true, that which doesn't hurt us, doesn't force us to change.
Apple on the other hand has felt the bite of failure and has changed because of it. That is what created the iPod and OS-X, because they screwed up before and felt it, so they learned from their mistakes and improved on it. Yes Apple is heavy-handed with its customers and denies problems, that is because so far that attitude hasn't hurt it. Its customers tend to forgiving in that department.
Pay more taxes so teachers can have better salaries, small classes and less time spend on paperwork and more on teaching.
Oops, you voted for the guy promising you a tax cut before any money has actually been cut and instead of saving what little money there is for a rainy day spend it all and more on tax cut only to then find himself involved in a war with no end.
Good teachers get burned out by the system created by voters who can't see anything but that 300 dollar tax refund.
The problem is that western MMORPG's do PvP wrong, they do open world PvP and that just doesn't belong in a level based game. Warhammer does things different, far closer to Guild Wars. Wether it will work is anybodies guess, but PvP done well with no ganking could easily attract a large enough userbase to make the game succesfull.
Anyway, it is not like the industry needs another PvE MMORPG.
WoW has got 10 million with the mac and just google for 'wow wine' to see just how active a subject it is.
Blizzard apparently cares enough to have reversed its stance on Wine as being a hacker tool earlier. If the market is so small they could have simply kept it banned but they didn't. Explain please if they don't care about linux users.
Wow that is some creative number crunching, you turn 3 billion people into six billion eyes to be sold to advertisers. Are africans related to cameleons and can focus their eyes on two different ads at the same time?
You say at the end the examples from history about product X trying to stop product Y from replacing it and seem to think this applies to the music industry.
You are wrong, for that to work in media it would have to be theather trying to stop movies, movies trying to stop TV. That indeed does not work.
But what is really the case is that the music industry is not being replaced. There is nothing to take over, it still is the same model that existed since recordable music was invented, X performs for Y who records it who sells it to Z who listens to it. As long as X and Y expect payment from Z, the industry will remain roughly the same. Yes, with advances in tech some X can cut out Y, but this has always been the case. Lots of musicians have in the past created their own labels, in fact most labels were started by musicians out of dissatisfaction by the existing labels, until they became big themselves.
For Z having every X be his own seller is also messy, you don't buy books from writers do you? Hell, you don't even buy them from publishers mostly, you buy them from bookstores. Would you really be comfortable giving your credit card details to every artist asking for 10 cents for their latest album? Not that that would work, the credit card companies want bigger fees. Sure there are some small sites that try to be the go between but there you go already, that site is going to want payment, exactly the same as the labels, and the more they advertise their new sign-ups, the more risks they take, the more they want paid on each song they manage to sell.
The entire problem lies in the recording. In theory, this allows a musician to earn an infinite amount of money from a finite and fixed amount of work, this never works. Play around in virtual economies such as found in games for a while to see why not. Usually, the more you want to earn, the more you got to invest. Imagine a simple chart, X is amount of money invested in a concert, Y is the money earned from tickets. Obviously if you want Y to increase you first need to invest in X by renting a bigger arena.
But with recorded music, this doesn't work, the cost of recording a song is relatively straightforward, rental of studio, salery for techies, but the potential earnings can be anything really. With a piece of recorded music, with every tech advance you are getting closer to a product that has an infinite supply for a finite cost. For, lets say 3000 dollars I can get a song, that I could potentially sell an infinite amount of times and with copyright as it is I got a century to do it in.
This is of course very tempting but it only works if I am the sole supplier of that song. If everybody who has a copy can share that, then all I can count on is to sell 1 copy and at 3000 dollars, finding that first punter is going to be tricky.
The music industry can make enormous profits THANKS to the fact that its product is in infinite supply BUT it can only make those profits if it somehow makes that infinite supply finite.
Live music isn't the answer, is a concert ticket really worth 100 dollars or more if EVERYONE could have a front row seat? Well the answer is TV, everyone has good view and you don't pay 100 dollars for a live concert not even if the camera is on stage!
Live music obeys the normal economic rules, recorded entertainment does not.
What can we do about it?
Very little, you could make a law that stays every recording can only be sold an artificial number of times before it must be re-recorded. This would make it a finite supply product obeying the normal rules of the economy, if you want a specific recording, then just bid for it against other intrested parties. It would solve a lot of problems, but I doubt everyone would agree to it, including the buyers.
You could severely limit the amount of time you could sell a recording. It would have to be severe, a period of maybe a couple of years, this would give popular music a short-time to recoup their costs, give them a change to earn
The article doesn't mention a lot of sites, in fact none of the BIG company backed sites are mentioned. And this makes me wonder, how succesful is iTunes on its own as a business? It has long been rumoured that Apple makes its money from iPods not iTunes. If that is the case, and you accept the same from products launched by the likes of Amazon then there is a 5th category, sites that barely break even thanks to the insane costs, that help keep the online music sales at the level the music industry is comfortable with.
Steve Jobs managed to get the labels to accept the famous 99 cent, but it stalled there. 99 cent is still insanely expensive if you consider the huge cost reduction in distribution.
Apple hasn't been able to drive the price lower nor has it been able to get more music online, like getting the labels to open up their entire catelogue.
I would be very intrested to see any real figures showing that iTunes is turning a profit and enough of a profit for a company whose only product is a music store to keep it alive.
Don't forget that Apple is an awful lot like MS, it can afford to throw money at projects, and internet rumor has it that iTunes is just such a project. Not that Apple minds since the iPod is earning them every dollar spend back tenfold.
That is really my point, it is advertising companies who claim that brand image is important and that ads like these are the way to improve it. Well, excuse me for being a bit doubtfull about the bias.
Has Apple increased its sales because of advertising OR because it simply made good products? Did the iPod ads sell iPods or did iPods sell iPods? The answer seems clear to me, first off, Apple hasn't always done well but always done those brand image ads. So it always done the ads, but not always had success with them. Yet word of mouth about the quality of its products has increased sales when the products were good and descreased it when they were bad.
Brand image is important and the right ad can help re-inforce it but I think that if you got a bad image any ad, especially one like this, is just going to re-inforce peoples negative image of your company as someone who is trying to sell shit in a fancy wrapper.
Yes, ads work, to build on what is already there. If people are buying your crap, your ads can make them buy more, but if people see your crap for the crap it is, you ad will just be throwing good money away.
Say I punch you in the stomach, then I put up an ad campaign to lure you back in range. Will you fall for it? Ever? No, of course not.
On the other hand, if I gave you a cake, and then advertised that I got another cake, you probably would come around AND tell your friends that this guy advertising cake to your cake seeking friends.
That is what Apple has done, it started selling quality and now when it advertises a new item, their existing customers buy it because of their previous reputation and don't hestitate recommending it to others.
I have had to deal with this type of advertising, the rebranding or Telfort (dutch telecom) to o2 and back to telfort again, lot of marketing crap about brand image. The guy in the street didn't give a shit. All the talk about O2 and oxygen and breath of fresh air was completly and utterly wasted.
I seen advertising and worked in it, as the guy who had to implement a specific font because that font represented what the company stood for despite the fact that no OS in the world had it natively so we either had to get users to install a new font for our site OR render all text as images.
There is a lot of money to be made in the brand advertising market, but I feel better selling porn.
It is the dread of every car owner, you come back to your car only to see the hood open, with fear in your heart you circle your strikken vehicle only to see what you suspected, yet another druggie has made of with your engine, to hock it on some streetcorner for a couple of bucks.
Come on, these things weigh a ton, don't believe me? Take out the battery of your laptop and weigh it.
There is another problem, where is the market? Car radios were stolen because they were small and people were willing to buy a cheap stolen radio they would then readily slide in to their radioless car. But any hybrid car is going to be coming with batteries from the factory.
Yes, the replacement market exist but I worry about that when you see people stealing windshields, doors, tiers etc etc. All parts there is a large market for as they need constant replacement but are far to big and low profit to make sense for a crook.
I am nowhere near smart enough to discuss the experiment itself, but lets try this theorie for some Sci-Fi fun.
As most slashdotters know, there are theories that suggest that in an infinite universe such as ours, you must get more then one intelligent form of life, simply by the law of averages. With so many stars and so many planets it is unlikely that just one has spawned life. Where you get life, you would eventually get intelligent life, even if a lot of it goes in other directions, perhaps life like whales, huge brains but no means/desire to affect their enviroment, you would inevitably get life-forms similar to our own with a desire to go out and explore.
So where are they? Because our species is also very young, where are the older space faring species?
One explenation why we haven't been contacted is that it is impossible. Interstellar travel can never go faster then light and this makes any contact missions impossible.
But what about this, say that doomsayers are true, it would neatly explain why there are no galactic civilisations, what is this experiment is pandora's box? Any species with the intelligence/curiousity to attempt to go for space comes across this experiment and pushed the big red button and destroys itself.
If they don't, they are not curious enough and don't want to leave their planet, if they are curious enough, they are doomed.
Star Trek has long had a similar theory, every species has to survive its nuclear phase, you need the tech to advance but must survive it without killing yourself in a nuclear holocaust.
As to the actual experiment soon to take place, we got two sides, both basically saying "we are about to do something we don't understand, based on theories nobody has proven but is safe/going to kill us all because we think part Y is true and part X isn't."
Hawking radiation is going to destroy the blackhole, despite the fact that nobody has ever proven it exists beyond intellectual excersises. It doesn't help the doom-sayers that some of them seem to have clear agenda's, but they got a point. We are about to create a black-hole and then hope that it will be destroyed by something we haven't observed yet.
This is like starting a fire in your house hoping that there is a bucket of water you just haven't seen yet.
Personally I think there is a real risk, the scientist are guessing so it is 50/50 they are right or wrong. Considering how much theory has been over-turned by the scientist involved, I wonder if in 50 years (if we are still around) we won't consider their science like we do Einstein's today, brilliant for the time but outdated.
Oh well, at least this is more fun then discussing the destruction of earth with global warming.
The slashdot article is tagged as troll and flamebait, while the ars article is nothing like that, it simply explains that for Mozilla, Gecko is the right choice because it does a lot more then WebKit does AND has been overhauled recently to such a point that it now does MORE with LESS.
The person who submitted the article either made a mistake by thinking that slashdot readers could read the summary as being a question that was going to be answered when they RTFA OR, more likely, didn't RTFA himself and thought the ars article was going to come to a different conclusion.
To make it bloody clear, the article itself concludes that Mozilla uses Gecko because it needs it, Gecko has been improving rapidly to the point that its biggest weaknesses are now gone and WebKit itself would have to be hacked to bits if it was to be used by Mozilla for its projects.
Played it one day, my review
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
Well, this ain't another The Sims. That game gets some flack from hardcore gamers but is perfectly suited for the casual gamer.
Yet despite its complete lack of depth, Spore isn't a casual game.
Yes, you can create some wonderful creations but where is the gameplay? The Sims combined its audience desire to create art for the game with the capcity to then use it. But in Spore, your beautiful factory with moving parts is just a backdrop in the colony display. Nothing interacts with it, your creatures at this point are just a bit of animation you most likely never even zoom in enough to see.
The first stages are easy and over fairly quickly, but the space age then quickly becomes one of those conquer the entire universe with a single ship and micro-manage everything.
Perfect example? Was trying to terraform a planet when I got a call that a colony was under attack, so I abort and go to its rescue, defeat two waves of enemies in a boring turning fight (one you figured out that you turn faster every battle is won in seconds) and take off, am almost out the system, and bam, another alert, same colony under attack.
WHEE! Micro-management, others who played the game for longer have noticed this, the space stage will see you constantly rushing off to take care of everything. The only real way to win this battle is to just wipe out everyone, try to build a large empire and you will spend all your time running around dealing with whatever crisis the game decides to throw at you.
The lack of depth also quickly become irritating. The cell stage is to simplistic, there really isn't that much difference between the options. You either go for speed or defence. As a carnivour you need some form of attack although I found poison defence plenty good for killing as well.
Because the game is Intelligent Design, you can easily flip your creature design around whenever you wish. This allows you to quickly explore the various routes and notice that in the end, they are pretty similar. I can't escape the feeling that I played this before and done better.
The creature stage seems to give you more options, but doesn't. There are a lot of parts but basically, you have four attacks, charge, spit, claw, bite. You can't even super-power them by making a critter with ten mouths for instance. If you want combat, just build something with good part in the four attacks and you will clobber everything else.
Be social? Then a typical maxis problem comes out. You GOT to follow their path, one social option is to dance, to dance you need feet, so if your critter is a snake, you can't dance so if the social mini-game does a dance move, you fail.
Neither does any choice really affect your creatures survival changes, there are fruits for herbivors and omnivores, some on the ground, some on low shrubs and some high in the trees. A low creature can't reach the highest, but it don't matter, there is enough fruit and no difference between them. An omnivore can get plenty of food from fruit, and your creatures at the nest don't eat.
There is no survival of the fittest, as long as you can either charm or fight with your creature, and building one to do either or even both is trivial, you win. At no point do you feel like a god, mad scientist setting your creature out in the wild to fend for itself.
The tribe stage has two options, kill everyone or do a DDR style minigame. Fun enough, doesn't take long and all elements of evolution are gone. It don't matter SHIT what you developed your creature to be, just stick with what you did before, if you build a warrior creature, kill everyone, if not, or you are bored, sing them into submission.
Civilization is the closest to an RTS and it would be considered simplistic for a flash advergame.
Space, is the closest to a real game but one that should have been left behind the 1990's. It is not that the game elements themselves ain't fun, just that the amount of micro-management needed quickly becomes boring while the actual fights
I think you are very wrong indeed, if you create vacuum, bathe it with UV light and bombard it with high energy particles you would find it very hard to put a petri dish in that spot.
Personally, I would put the petri dish in first, then turn on the vacuum and radiation, saves you having to request yet another research assistent. You obviously never done paperwork.
Follow these stories a bit more closely and it is ALWAYS the network that is blaimed, no matter what. It is easy, normal industry blames IT, IT blames the network.
Getting five nine's is far more then just choosing an OS, after all, you got to account for ALL hardware failures, and they will fail, and power failures and even people digging up your cables. The OS barely gets a look in, when you after all have to account for a server being able to fail for any number of reasons, a crashed windows hardly matters anymore. Your system should be able to work around any failure, hardware, software or human.
That is hard, very very hard.
But the fact they choose.Net is telling, if you followed this, it has been very clear MS has been throwing a lot of money around to get high profile projects to switch to windows from other systems. That is suspect, was.Net choosen for its capabilities or because MS bought its use?
This is setup where you want the absolute best and frankly MS doesn't, yet, have the reputation in this area. That is nothing anti-MS, if you go and ask MS for a brochure they will simply not have anything for sale here. You talk to IBM or Sun for this kinda stuff. Not MS.
If you absolutely must use Windows/.Net you would run it as virtual servers on a cluster or mainframe, let the big guys deal witht the hardware and keep the actual program itself purely in a virtual enviroment where it can be transferred and kept running constantly no matter what happens in the real world.
IF this system had actuall physical boxes running windows 2003, they are insane.
The actual problem by the way seems to have been an update gone wrong. This is more IT speak. It means the company that supplied the network refused to take the blaim this time.
We most likely will never know what the real problem was, because it is often a combination of circumstances that could have been avoided with proper management and anyone silly enough to blaim it on his boss won't be around long.
At the moment we got a story of a high-profile project that MS was very happy to advertise had chosen its product, failing rather miserably. To a lot of us having in the past had to deal with MS less then reliable products, it is nice to see MS embarrased a bit.
Think of it like this, you might buy Ikea, even like their product and have no trouble with them. But if you made me work in a restaurant with an Ikea kitchen I would serve your still beating heart to your mother for her birthday on an Ikea platter.
MS is fine, for small stuff, you do NOT use it when you guarantee 99.999% reliabilty. The fact that you claim at the end they run on.NET/Windows Server shows you know very little about the problem, HA project don't run on Windows or for that matter Linux.
MOST of your systems, that says it all. If you design a system you must be a little bit more certain then that "most" of it will be up for the availability your are promising.
I got a consumer HD that so far lasted for 6 years, non-stop. By your logic therefor consumer HD's are fine for a server enviroment because they last for 6 years running 24/7.
If 100% of you systems run 99.999 availabibilty, THEN you can come back. The acceptable error-rate is 0.001% FOR ALL YOUR SYSTEMS. Lets say that you have 10 2003 systems and MOST is 9, then you only got 90% availabilty, you fail, back to the drawing board.
It is hard to get true HA. MS can't do it, doesn't mean you can't use it for little projects. I have seen many a succesfull project launch on PC's thrown together at a local computer store and shoved into a rack. Worked fine, but only an idiot would guarantee any availability on it. Prove me wrong, put in your contracts that you guarantee HA for your clients. See you how your boss/lawyer reacts.
Speed, who cares.
As I work in websites I of course need to have all browsers installed and running, Opera is my favorite browser, its mouse gestures is simply the most complete and function, in Firefox, it still feels tagged on. Same with tabbed browsing, although firefox is getting better at it, opera does it best.
For specific tasks, I use firefox, I especially like its spell checked in textarea's, if I care about my spelling (guess what weeb site I doo nt car abot speeling) then that is the one I use, it also used to be the one with the best tools for a dev to see what the hell is going on with CSS and html.
And then chrome landed and WOW. Maybe I am using the wrong add-ons in Firefox/Opera but Chrome gives some very nice tools for inspecting CSS and how it is affecting your layout.
I really couldn't care less about executing speed, what I expect in a browser is to do what I want it to do well, a mili-second faster or slower has no effect.
Firefox is still the most well-rounded browser out there, but right now, two of its tasks for me are better handled by other browsers.
They GOT the white football fan. You do NOT suck up to your existing customers, you just give them good deals but not fancy smancy ads because they are already buying your product.
You aim a new commercial campaign setup to change the opinion of a product with the group who needs its opinion changed. That is the mac-whores, the linux-nerds and the XP-lusers. The middle age white guy who uses Vista because that is what came with his dell doesn't need to be convinced to buy Vista.
No, I think this case is far simpler. Advertising companies don't sell products, they sell ads. This advertisement company sold itself to Microsoft and this ad was just the by-product of it. It has no more aim then to get money out of MS and if that is done by convincing Bill Gates that he should shake his ass to the camera with an tv-star who hasn't starred in years, then so be it.
This ad has an audience of one and its name is Gates.
There is a problem, the NEXT HD format is already being developed in Japan, where else. It will be even higher resolution, meaning even more data to transmit.
Is your ISP comcast? Then how does it feel about downloading the next format, say pure a guess, 200gig for a movie?
Optical discs will in 5 years be capable of that, your internet connection will NOT.
That has been the problem for web developers since the dawn of time, everytime the capacity of the net increases, the demand on it increases as well.
It is as simple as the well known avatar in forum like software. It started with small pics, and people complained because it choked their connection, then they increased their bandwidth but at the same time the avatar pics where increased as well. Bandwidth increased again, so people started using signatures.
The end result is that today, some forums still take as long to load as they did on the earliest modems. Everytime data transfer increases we transmit more data.
Proof me wrong, rent your movies in youtube format for display on your HD tv.
There is a quest in the dark elf starting area. 2nd area from the home town, you are asked to collect something from a number of mobs, warlocks if I remember right. Easily killed, I gained 1 and half level and still the item had not dropped.
Please say again how you can quest without grinding?
Lotro has this too, leading to once cartoon "Why do only 1 in 4 boars have stomachs?"
I think you got some serious misconceptions about what casual means. Casual doesn't mean, sure you can play but you just can't play there or do that or have x. Casual means that even with only 3-4 hours a week you can still take part in everything. That is what casual means. No MMORPG so far has managed that really.
That a LOT of PC's are used for playing games, just not monster games that make your CPU scream for mercy and you video card smoke. Flash games are just as much games as any triple A title.
Don't forget that there are web based MMORPG's that can easily be played on a PC that can only handle flash like runescape. Who says all MMORPGs have to be 3D beasts?
Because this is about GNU, not linux. There is a very real and important difference. Linux is a kernel, GNU is a set of tools that you can use NOT just with linux but with all sorts of unixes including of course BSD.
But because a lot of people have no idea about what GNU is, we should pamper to them and call it something completely different, adding a couple of years to a linux distro. If they had celebrated the 25th birthday of Linux you would no doubt be pointing out that linux ain't 25.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it just the skin color? Was it two avatars in the same suit, just different skin tones or was one a black rastafarian and the other a white office worker?
That puts it at far more then simple racism. If I avoid the black drug-dealer on the corner but happily sit next to the white nun you could say I am judging on race but that ain't really the case. I would also avoid the WHITE drug-dealer and sit next to the BLACK nun.
In the series frazier there is a character called Ken Winston or something. What do you first think when you see him. 'Snob', 'brit' or 'black'? I didn't even realize he was black until someone commented that this was the only black character to appear on the show repeatedly. His dark skin tone alone was not enough to trigger the 'black' response in me, because he is whiter then Niles.
Same in real life, do we judge people of other races purely on their skin color OR on behaviors that we have come to associate with negative experiences with people in the past?
I do know racism exist, but do you know where I find it strongest, among so called minorities themselves. Was on a job with an older turkish man and we were in and out of the car constantly, I asked if he shouldn't lock it. He said, no need, there are no morocans around. A white person would have been in serious trouble for saying that but a turk had no problem saying it.
There is plenty of scientific evidence to back it up. Turks are, in holland, less likely to commit crime then other immigrant groups. Turkish men have a rep of being a bit slow/stupid mostly because their language skills tend to be poor but on the whole trustworthy. Men that look 'turkish' get no overly negative response. Turks tend be slightly heavier and hairier. Morocans on the other hand are lighter, often thin and less facial hair. They got a bad rep in holland, not entirely undeserved as a group.
The odd effect is that I seen a morocan guy with a high education but who physical appearance is associated with trouble youth get badly treated while the turkish guy is treated friendly but as a retard.
Of course, that was if I stood WELL to the back. Because invariably if people got a choice between a white guy, a turk and a morocan, they talk to the white guy. The killer? I ain't white, just pale but my genetics come from the same corner of the world.
So I wonder, did this experiment PURELY test skin color or where the avatars behaving differently as well and what does it ultimately show? That we use past experience to judge our reaction to new situations.
I am convinced that if a person never had any reason to associate race X/group Y with a negative experience before, they wouldn't react to it.
The proof? Do you react negativly to say an american indian as a european? No, you never dealt with them, never heard negative stories about them, didn't see them hanging on street corners, so you start the encounter with a blank slate.
Do another experiment, this time use a green-skinned avatar. Then you know wether it is about skin color OR the association we make based on visual signals about what type of person we are dealing with. I am convinced that as soon as you add other signals that this person belongs to a group you can trust, the skin color quickly disappears.
You are confusing spending money on projects and management etc etc with salaries going to the actual teaching staff. BIG difference.
It ain't about shoveling money into "education" but getting decent salaries for the TEACHERS.
But hey, proof me wrong, give up your job and become a teacher. Show me that you take the salary cut.
The revised zune has taken the mp3 market by storm has it? Taken a chunk out of iPod sales? Oh wait, it hasn't.
MS worsed enemy isn't Apple or Linux, it is MS. MS wasn't loosing Vista sales to Apple or anyother OS company/provider, it was loosing Vista sales to XP, its own product.
That is REALLY REALLY scary for a company, after all, yes they COULD copy more of Apple or whatever other product but you can't make a copy of your own product without people wondering, if it is the same, why should I buy a new one?
Vista, as many predicted, turned into Windows ME and people just didn't upgrade and then slowly just stayed with what they had and decided to wait for the next version. MS can't have that, forget the home user, it means billions in lost sales if industry decides not to upgrade. Sure sure, they get Vista with each new PC, but MS has been counting on upgrade sales that now just ain't coming. Worse, MS had this offer where you could suscribe to upgrades. One of the reasons Vista launched earlier for business is that they needed to have a new product out to allow all those companies that had subscribed to actually update just ONCE.
Do you think that in future companies would be less willing to believe MS on a similar upgrade program? That is a lot of lost sales.
And now MS has to fund the development of a new windows, that is promised for 2010 but lets face it, when has MS ever launched on time? Worse, what if it again is a dud? Sure sure they promise lot of new stuff, but they always do that and never once have been able to deliver.
MS still is very rich, but the cracks are showing, it is no longer the darling of the stock market, it has had to pay dividend because its increase in price was no longer enough to keep shareholders happy. MS got a lot of money and a lot of money coming in but it is also bleeding money like mad. The 360 finally managed to beat Sony only for Nintendo to popup again out of nowhere. So MS will have to fight yet another round that might NOT turn a profit straightaway on that market. The Zune still ain't doing well. There is no Microsoft music store that anybody uses. Its office suite is under near constant attack. Netbooks can't run Vista but can do Linux. Apples market share is constantly increasing. Vista can be as easily pirated now as all previous MS software.
The real problem that MS has? That they got far to many problems to list. But the biggest is simply that they are to big to really feel the effect of their failures. Billy boy and dragged out into the streets for Vista or Zune or MSNBC or live search etc etc. MS bleeds some money but the company survives easily and that means they never adapt, never learn from their mistakes. What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But what is also true, that which doesn't hurt us, doesn't force us to change.
Apple on the other hand has felt the bite of failure and has changed because of it. That is what created the iPod and OS-X, because they screwed up before and felt it, so they learned from their mistakes and improved on it. Yes Apple is heavy-handed with its customers and denies problems, that is because so far that attitude hasn't hurt it. Its customers tend to forgiving in that department.
Pay more taxes so teachers can have better salaries, small classes and less time spend on paperwork and more on teaching.
Oops, you voted for the guy promising you a tax cut before any money has actually been cut and instead of saving what little money there is for a rainy day spend it all and more on tax cut only to then find himself involved in a war with no end.
Good teachers get burned out by the system created by voters who can't see anything but that 300 dollar tax refund.
Tell that to every korean MMORPG that has PvP.
The problem is that western MMORPG's do PvP wrong, they do open world PvP and that just doesn't belong in a level based game. Warhammer does things different, far closer to Guild Wars. Wether it will work is anybodies guess, but PvP done well with no ganking could easily attract a large enough userbase to make the game succesfull.
Anyway, it is not like the industry needs another PvE MMORPG.
WoW has got 10 million with the mac and just google for 'wow wine' to see just how active a subject it is.
Blizzard apparently cares enough to have reversed its stance on Wine as being a hacker tool earlier. If the market is so small they could have simply kept it banned but they didn't. Explain please if they don't care about linux users.
Wow that is some creative number crunching, you turn 3 billion people into six billion eyes to be sold to advertisers. Are africans related to cameleons and can focus their eyes on two different ads at the same time?
You say at the end the examples from history about product X trying to stop product Y from replacing it and seem to think this applies to the music industry.
You are wrong, for that to work in media it would have to be theather trying to stop movies, movies trying to stop TV. That indeed does not work.
But what is really the case is that the music industry is not being replaced. There is nothing to take over, it still is the same model that existed since recordable music was invented, X performs for Y who records it who sells it to Z who listens to it. As long as X and Y expect payment from Z, the industry will remain roughly the same. Yes, with advances in tech some X can cut out Y, but this has always been the case. Lots of musicians have in the past created their own labels, in fact most labels were started by musicians out of dissatisfaction by the existing labels, until they became big themselves.
For Z having every X be his own seller is also messy, you don't buy books from writers do you? Hell, you don't even buy them from publishers mostly, you buy them from bookstores. Would you really be comfortable giving your credit card details to every artist asking for 10 cents for their latest album? Not that that would work, the credit card companies want bigger fees. Sure there are some small sites that try to be the go between but there you go already, that site is going to want payment, exactly the same as the labels, and the more they advertise their new sign-ups, the more risks they take, the more they want paid on each song they manage to sell.
The entire problem lies in the recording. In theory, this allows a musician to earn an infinite amount of money from a finite and fixed amount of work, this never works. Play around in virtual economies such as found in games for a while to see why not. Usually, the more you want to earn, the more you got to invest. Imagine a simple chart, X is amount of money invested in a concert, Y is the money earned from tickets. Obviously if you want Y to increase you first need to invest in X by renting a bigger arena.
But with recorded music, this doesn't work, the cost of recording a song is relatively straightforward, rental of studio, salery for techies, but the potential earnings can be anything really. With a piece of recorded music, with every tech advance you are getting closer to a product that has an infinite supply for a finite cost. For, lets say 3000 dollars I can get a song, that I could potentially sell an infinite amount of times and with copyright as it is I got a century to do it in.
This is of course very tempting but it only works if I am the sole supplier of that song. If everybody who has a copy can share that, then all I can count on is to sell 1 copy and at 3000 dollars, finding that first punter is going to be tricky.
The music industry can make enormous profits THANKS to the fact that its product is in infinite supply BUT it can only make those profits if it somehow makes that infinite supply finite.
Live music isn't the answer, is a concert ticket really worth 100 dollars or more if EVERYONE could have a front row seat? Well the answer is TV, everyone has good view and you don't pay 100 dollars for a live concert not even if the camera is on stage!
Live music obeys the normal economic rules, recorded entertainment does not.
What can we do about it?
Very little, you could make a law that stays every recording can only be sold an artificial number of times before it must be re-recorded. This would make it a finite supply product obeying the normal rules of the economy, if you want a specific recording, then just bid for it against other intrested parties. It would solve a lot of problems, but I doubt everyone would agree to it, including the buyers.
You could severely limit the amount of time you could sell a recording. It would have to be severe, a period of maybe a couple of years, this would give popular music a short-time to recoup their costs, give them a change to earn
The article doesn't mention a lot of sites, in fact none of the BIG company backed sites are mentioned. And this makes me wonder, how succesful is iTunes on its own as a business? It has long been rumoured that Apple makes its money from iPods not iTunes. If that is the case, and you accept the same from products launched by the likes of Amazon then there is a 5th category, sites that barely break even thanks to the insane costs, that help keep the online music sales at the level the music industry is comfortable with.
Steve Jobs managed to get the labels to accept the famous 99 cent, but it stalled there. 99 cent is still insanely expensive if you consider the huge cost reduction in distribution.
Apple hasn't been able to drive the price lower nor has it been able to get more music online, like getting the labels to open up their entire catelogue.
I would be very intrested to see any real figures showing that iTunes is turning a profit and enough of a profit for a company whose only product is a music store to keep it alive.
Don't forget that Apple is an awful lot like MS, it can afford to throw money at projects, and internet rumor has it that iTunes is just such a project. Not that Apple minds since the iPod is earning them every dollar spend back tenfold.
Mmm, well you work in advertising?
That is really my point, it is advertising companies who claim that brand image is important and that ads like these are the way to improve it. Well, excuse me for being a bit doubtfull about the bias.
Has Apple increased its sales because of advertising OR because it simply made good products? Did the iPod ads sell iPods or did iPods sell iPods? The answer seems clear to me, first off, Apple hasn't always done well but always done those brand image ads. So it always done the ads, but not always had success with them. Yet word of mouth about the quality of its products has increased sales when the products were good and descreased it when they were bad.
Brand image is important and the right ad can help re-inforce it but I think that if you got a bad image any ad, especially one like this, is just going to re-inforce peoples negative image of your company as someone who is trying to sell shit in a fancy wrapper.
Yes, ads work, to build on what is already there. If people are buying your crap, your ads can make them buy more, but if people see your crap for the crap it is, you ad will just be throwing good money away.
Say I punch you in the stomach, then I put up an ad campaign to lure you back in range. Will you fall for it? Ever? No, of course not.
On the other hand, if I gave you a cake, and then advertised that I got another cake, you probably would come around AND tell your friends that this guy advertising cake to your cake seeking friends.
That is what Apple has done, it started selling quality and now when it advertises a new item, their existing customers buy it because of their previous reputation and don't hestitate recommending it to others.
I have had to deal with this type of advertising, the rebranding or Telfort (dutch telecom) to o2 and back to telfort again, lot of marketing crap about brand image. The guy in the street didn't give a shit. All the talk about O2 and oxygen and breath of fresh air was completly and utterly wasted.
I seen advertising and worked in it, as the guy who had to implement a specific font because that font represented what the company stood for despite the fact that no OS in the world had it natively so we either had to get users to install a new font for our site OR render all text as images.
There is a lot of money to be made in the brand advertising market, but I feel better selling porn.
It is the dread of every car owner, you come back to your car only to see the hood open, with fear in your heart you circle your strikken vehicle only to see what you suspected, yet another druggie has made of with your engine, to hock it on some streetcorner for a couple of bucks.
Come on, these things weigh a ton, don't believe me? Take out the battery of your laptop and weigh it.
There is another problem, where is the market? Car radios were stolen because they were small and people were willing to buy a cheap stolen radio they would then readily slide in to their radioless car. But any hybrid car is going to be coming with batteries from the factory.
Yes, the replacement market exist but I worry about that when you see people stealing windshields, doors, tiers etc etc. All parts there is a large market for as they need constant replacement but are far to big and low profit to make sense for a crook.
I am nowhere near smart enough to discuss the experiment itself, but lets try this theorie for some Sci-Fi fun.
As most slashdotters know, there are theories that suggest that in an infinite universe such as ours, you must get more then one intelligent form of life, simply by the law of averages. With so many stars and so many planets it is unlikely that just one has spawned life. Where you get life, you would eventually get intelligent life, even if a lot of it goes in other directions, perhaps life like whales, huge brains but no means/desire to affect their enviroment, you would inevitably get life-forms similar to our own with a desire to go out and explore.
So where are they? Because our species is also very young, where are the older space faring species?
One explenation why we haven't been contacted is that it is impossible. Interstellar travel can never go faster then light and this makes any contact missions impossible.
But what about this, say that doomsayers are true, it would neatly explain why there are no galactic civilisations, what is this experiment is pandora's box? Any species with the intelligence/curiousity to attempt to go for space comes across this experiment and pushed the big red button and destroys itself.
If they don't, they are not curious enough and don't want to leave their planet, if they are curious enough, they are doomed.
Star Trek has long had a similar theory, every species has to survive its nuclear phase, you need the tech to advance but must survive it without killing yourself in a nuclear holocaust.
As to the actual experiment soon to take place, we got two sides, both basically saying "we are about to do something we don't understand, based on theories nobody has proven but is safe/going to kill us all because we think part Y is true and part X isn't."
Hawking radiation is going to destroy the blackhole, despite the fact that nobody has ever proven it exists beyond intellectual excersises. It doesn't help the doom-sayers that some of them seem to have clear agenda's, but they got a point. We are about to create a black-hole and then hope that it will be destroyed by something we haven't observed yet.
This is like starting a fire in your house hoping that there is a bucket of water you just haven't seen yet.
Personally I think there is a real risk, the scientist are guessing so it is 50/50 they are right or wrong. Considering how much theory has been over-turned by the scientist involved, I wonder if in 50 years (if we are still around) we won't consider their science like we do Einstein's today, brilliant for the time but outdated.
Oh well, at least this is more fun then discussing the destruction of earth with global warming.
The slashdot article is tagged as troll and flamebait, while the ars article is nothing like that, it simply explains that for Mozilla, Gecko is the right choice because it does a lot more then WebKit does AND has been overhauled recently to such a point that it now does MORE with LESS.
The person who submitted the article either made a mistake by thinking that slashdot readers could read the summary as being a question that was going to be answered when they RTFA OR, more likely, didn't RTFA himself and thought the ars article was going to come to a different conclusion.
To make it bloody clear, the article itself concludes that Mozilla uses Gecko because it needs it, Gecko has been improving rapidly to the point that its biggest weaknesses are now gone and WebKit itself would have to be hacked to bits if it was to be used by Mozilla for its projects.
Well, this ain't another The Sims. That game gets some flack from hardcore gamers but is perfectly suited for the casual gamer.
Yet despite its complete lack of depth, Spore isn't a casual game.
Yes, you can create some wonderful creations but where is the gameplay? The Sims combined its audience desire to create art for the game with the capcity to then use it. But in Spore, your beautiful factory with moving parts is just a backdrop in the colony display. Nothing interacts with it, your creatures at this point are just a bit of animation you most likely never even zoom in enough to see.
The first stages are easy and over fairly quickly, but the space age then quickly becomes one of those conquer the entire universe with a single ship and micro-manage everything.
Perfect example? Was trying to terraform a planet when I got a call that a colony was under attack, so I abort and go to its rescue, defeat two waves of enemies in a boring turning fight (one you figured out that you turn faster every battle is won in seconds) and take off, am almost out the system, and bam, another alert, same colony under attack.
WHEE! Micro-management, others who played the game for longer have noticed this, the space stage will see you constantly rushing off to take care of everything. The only real way to win this battle is to just wipe out everyone, try to build a large empire and you will spend all your time running around dealing with whatever crisis the game decides to throw at you.
The lack of depth also quickly become irritating. The cell stage is to simplistic, there really isn't that much difference between the options. You either go for speed or defence. As a carnivour you need some form of attack although I found poison defence plenty good for killing as well.
Because the game is Intelligent Design, you can easily flip your creature design around whenever you wish. This allows you to quickly explore the various routes and notice that in the end, they are pretty similar. I can't escape the feeling that I played this before and done better.
The creature stage seems to give you more options, but doesn't. There are a lot of parts but basically, you have four attacks, charge, spit, claw, bite. You can't even super-power them by making a critter with ten mouths for instance. If you want combat, just build something with good part in the four attacks and you will clobber everything else.
Be social? Then a typical maxis problem comes out. You GOT to follow their path, one social option is to dance, to dance you need feet, so if your critter is a snake, you can't dance so if the social mini-game does a dance move, you fail.
Neither does any choice really affect your creatures survival changes, there are fruits for herbivors and omnivores, some on the ground, some on low shrubs and some high in the trees. A low creature can't reach the highest, but it don't matter, there is enough fruit and no difference between them. An omnivore can get plenty of food from fruit, and your creatures at the nest don't eat.
There is no survival of the fittest, as long as you can either charm or fight with your creature, and building one to do either or even both is trivial, you win. At no point do you feel like a god, mad scientist setting your creature out in the wild to fend for itself.
The tribe stage has two options, kill everyone or do a DDR style minigame. Fun enough, doesn't take long and all elements of evolution are gone. It don't matter SHIT what you developed your creature to be, just stick with what you did before, if you build a warrior creature, kill everyone, if not, or you are bored, sing them into submission.
Civilization is the closest to an RTS and it would be considered simplistic for a flash advergame.
Space, is the closest to a real game but one that should have been left behind the 1990's. It is not that the game elements themselves ain't fun, just that the amount of micro-management needed quickly becomes boring while the actual fights
I think you are very wrong indeed, if you create vacuum, bathe it with UV light and bombard it with high energy particles you would find it very hard to put a petri dish in that spot.
Personally, I would put the petri dish in first, then turn on the vacuum and radiation, saves you having to request yet another research assistent. You obviously never done paperwork.
Follow these stories a bit more closely and it is ALWAYS the network that is blaimed, no matter what. It is easy, normal industry blames IT, IT blames the network.
Getting five nine's is far more then just choosing an OS, after all, you got to account for ALL hardware failures, and they will fail, and power failures and even people digging up your cables. The OS barely gets a look in, when you after all have to account for a server being able to fail for any number of reasons, a crashed windows hardly matters anymore. Your system should be able to work around any failure, hardware, software or human.
That is hard, very very hard.
But the fact they choose .Net is telling, if you followed this, it has been very clear MS has been throwing a lot of money around to get high profile projects to switch to windows from other systems. That is suspect, was .Net choosen for its capabilities or because MS bought its use?
This is setup where you want the absolute best and frankly MS doesn't, yet, have the reputation in this area. That is nothing anti-MS, if you go and ask MS for a brochure they will simply not have anything for sale here. You talk to IBM or Sun for this kinda stuff. Not MS.
If you absolutely must use Windows/.Net you would run it as virtual servers on a cluster or mainframe, let the big guys deal witht the hardware and keep the actual program itself purely in a virtual enviroment where it can be transferred and kept running constantly no matter what happens in the real world.
IF this system had actuall physical boxes running windows 2003, they are insane.
The actual problem by the way seems to have been an update gone wrong. This is more IT speak. It means the company that supplied the network refused to take the blaim this time.
We most likely will never know what the real problem was, because it is often a combination of circumstances that could have been avoided with proper management and anyone silly enough to blaim it on his boss won't be around long.
At the moment we got a story of a high-profile project that MS was very happy to advertise had chosen its product, failing rather miserably. To a lot of us having in the past had to deal with MS less then reliable products, it is nice to see MS embarrased a bit.
Think of it like this, you might buy Ikea, even like their product and have no trouble with them. But if you made me work in a restaurant with an Ikea kitchen I would serve your still beating heart to your mother for her birthday on an Ikea platter.
MS is fine, for small stuff, you do NOT use it when you guarantee 99.999% reliabilty. The fact that you claim at the end they run on .NET/Windows Server shows you know very little about the problem, HA project don't run on Windows or for that matter Linux.
MOST of your systems, that says it all. If you design a system you must be a little bit more certain then that "most" of it will be up for the availability your are promising.
I got a consumer HD that so far lasted for 6 years, non-stop. By your logic therefor consumer HD's are fine for a server enviroment because they last for 6 years running 24/7.
If 100% of you systems run 99.999 availabibilty, THEN you can come back. The acceptable error-rate is 0.001% FOR ALL YOUR SYSTEMS. Lets say that you have 10 2003 systems and MOST is 9, then you only got 90% availabilty, you fail, back to the drawing board.
It is hard to get true HA. MS can't do it, doesn't mean you can't use it for little projects. I have seen many a succesfull project launch on PC's thrown together at a local computer store and shoved into a rack. Worked fine, but only an idiot would guarantee any availability on it. Prove me wrong, put in your contracts that you guarantee HA for your clients. See you how your boss/lawyer reacts.
Speed, who cares. As I work in websites I of course need to have all browsers installed and running, Opera is my favorite browser, its mouse gestures is simply the most complete and function, in Firefox, it still feels tagged on. Same with tabbed browsing, although firefox is getting better at it, opera does it best. For specific tasks, I use firefox, I especially like its spell checked in textarea's, if I care about my spelling (guess what weeb site I doo nt car abot speeling) then that is the one I use, it also used to be the one with the best tools for a dev to see what the hell is going on with CSS and html. And then chrome landed and WOW. Maybe I am using the wrong add-ons in Firefox/Opera but Chrome gives some very nice tools for inspecting CSS and how it is affecting your layout. I really couldn't care less about executing speed, what I expect in a browser is to do what I want it to do well, a mili-second faster or slower has no effect. Firefox is still the most well-rounded browser out there, but right now, two of its tasks for me are better handled by other browsers.
They GOT the white football fan. You do NOT suck up to your existing customers, you just give them good deals but not fancy smancy ads because they are already buying your product.
You aim a new commercial campaign setup to change the opinion of a product with the group who needs its opinion changed. That is the mac-whores, the linux-nerds and the XP-lusers. The middle age white guy who uses Vista because that is what came with his dell doesn't need to be convinced to buy Vista.
No, I think this case is far simpler. Advertising companies don't sell products, they sell ads. This advertisement company sold itself to Microsoft and this ad was just the by-product of it. It has no more aim then to get money out of MS and if that is done by convincing Bill Gates that he should shake his ass to the camera with an tv-star who hasn't starred in years, then so be it.
This ad has an audience of one and its name is Gates.
Bad credit.
Simply give them a sentence of a 5 year bad credit report. No more loans, no more credit-cards etc etc.
If you can't handle money responsibly, you get a warning period in which you can't spend any money easily.
It keeps the jails for real criminals, protects people from themselves while still being a massive deterent.
There is a problem, the NEXT HD format is already being developed in Japan, where else. It will be even higher resolution, meaning even more data to transmit. Is your ISP comcast? Then how does it feel about downloading the next format, say pure a guess, 200gig for a movie? Optical discs will in 5 years be capable of that, your internet connection will NOT. That has been the problem for web developers since the dawn of time, everytime the capacity of the net increases, the demand on it increases as well. It is as simple as the well known avatar in forum like software. It started with small pics, and people complained because it choked their connection, then they increased their bandwidth but at the same time the avatar pics where increased as well. Bandwidth increased again, so people started using signatures. The end result is that today, some forums still take as long to load as they did on the earliest modems. Everytime data transfer increases we transmit more data. Proof me wrong, rent your movies in youtube format for display on your HD tv.
Shred is for HD's, not flash. Learn the difference. It seems you are terrible at your job if you do not know the difference.
There is a quest in the dark elf starting area. 2nd area from the home town, you are asked to collect something from a number of mobs, warlocks if I remember right. Easily killed, I gained 1 and half level and still the item had not dropped.
Please say again how you can quest without grinding?
Lotro has this too, leading to once cartoon "Why do only 1 in 4 boars have stomachs?"
I think you got some serious misconceptions about what casual means. Casual doesn't mean, sure you can play but you just can't play there or do that or have x. Casual means that even with only 3-4 hours a week you can still take part in everything. That is what casual means. No MMORPG so far has managed that really.
That a LOT of PC's are used for playing games, just not monster games that make your CPU scream for mercy and you video card smoke. Flash games are just as much games as any triple A title.
Don't forget that there are web based MMORPG's that can easily be played on a PC that can only handle flash like runescape. Who says all MMORPGs have to be 3D beasts?
Because this is about GNU, not linux. There is a very real and important difference. Linux is a kernel, GNU is a set of tools that you can use NOT just with linux but with all sorts of unixes including of course BSD.
But because a lot of people have no idea about what GNU is, we should pamper to them and call it something completely different, adding a couple of years to a linux distro. If they had celebrated the 25th birthday of Linux you would no doubt be pointing out that linux ain't 25.