In Lord of the Rings Online the Lore-master and Captain classes both heal at expense of their own morale (health). So you can still seriously deplete yourselve, most combat moves of the lore-master cost morale as well, so even if you are not attacked in a battle you still end up damaged.
The HAM system was different but could have worked, I just think that you were never meant to wear the heavy armour in the way that it ended up. Perhaps it was supposed to hamsting you and have you in constant need of a medic because the Star Wars universe is not one of heavy armour. None of the heroes wear it. Only the baddies and they die like flies.
The HAM system did make it that if you were hurt, you were less effective (because you couldn't afford to keep spamming the heavy hitters moves), this is far more realistic then 99% of games were you can be at a sliver of your stats and fight as if you were fresh.
What I think was fatally wrong was not any specific design in itself, but rather the handling of it. HAM meant you could not just wear heavy armour without a medic to then heal you (it was possible to shift your stats enough to wear it). Heavy armour was supposed to be rare. Then SOE decided against this original design and instead of reworking it completely released a kludge of a fix that broke the whole design.
But not all blame lies with SOE. How many Terra Kasi did you know that fought in heavy armour. That exploited the armour bugs with some parts not being needed? Why couldn't players simply play the game as it was, before the doc buff I never had need of heavy armour. You just made sure to fight in a decent group and stayed alive that way.
I like MMO's and I liked SWG. For a while and then something happened. Through various design choices AND player actions the game got ruined.
To explain I have to tell you how SWG worked. Like most MMO's you picked a race, sex and apperance, and a class. HOWEVER that last choice had little meaning as you could pick up all the classes with just little bit of money at the start. Unlike the rigid class structures of the Everquest clones (Ultima Online is a seperate beast) in SWG your character could advance in any skill set if he/she used it. If you wanted to advance in pistol class, you had to buy the skill class of pistoleer, and then just use pistols to kill something.
The precise arrangement was a little complex but it allowed you to combine several skill sets together to make your character. Want to be a robot building sharpshooter? A medic with a big sword? A bounty hunter with passion for cooking? A jedi... ah well we will get to that. But more or less, you could.
You had the base skill set of ranged combat (pistol, carbine, rifle (and something I forgot)), melee (unarmed, sword etc) (It has been a while cut me some slack) and support skills like medic, crafter and scout.
The idea was that you would pick those skills that most suited your style of play. For a short time in the games history it worked. A lot of players had a bit of scouting skill to help with gathering resources, some had some medic skills to help with healing even if their main intrest was combat. While others took on the role of pure fighters, secure in knowing that others in their party could heal them in exchange for taking the brunt in a fight.
It more or less worked, skills sets were varied and most were of real use.
What you have to remember was that SWG had far less of the rigid level system that other games have. If you wanted too, and could afford the modest fee you could go straight to fighting rancors, sure you would be eaten, but you could.
SWG did NOT have the quest system, instead you got generic missions of the level of your party and went out to kill spawns. While it sounds less intresting then quests, it helped with one thing. Finding a group, I never had a problem. Granted this was because EVERYBODY hunter naff's but at least you didn't spend an hour LFG. NOR because of the mixed skill sets did you have to beg for a healer to join you.
Once in a while, a group would form to hunt rancors. There were no uber elites back then, just ordinary playrs with varied skills sets seeking fame and glory. A rancor group was a time to prepare, to get your best medicine from stall, repair that armour and get all your equipment checked out.
Once ready, you left, to arrive on a dark world where EVERYTHING could kick your ass. The only way to survive was in a group and to use ALL the skills you had. The best time I had in game was doing deep into rancor valley with a small group, taking shelter among friendly animals (who if a rancor came near would attack, yes my friend MMO critters who have fights amongst themselves) and hunting. Camping out, a small lighted area under a night sky while the trader tried to find some resources so the medic could make some more stimms.
Ah yes, SWG was FUN. It was adventuring.
And then, the doc buffs. SWG had some unusual systems and one was that armour reduced your recovery rates to the point where you wouldn't heal or even were simply unable to wear the armour. To counter that, there were buffs in the forms of food, but the doc buff was introduced to allow the heaviest armour to be actually used. And sony miscalculated. Because resources were dynamic in their quality, the quality if the doc buff depended on the materials players combined. THe results were far more powerfull then intended, with a decent quality doc buff, costing 20k you could walk up to a rancor nest, tap it and just area attack away, spawning rancors until the nest was destoryed and you were surrounded by half a dozen dead beasts. Who needs a jedi now?
Look at happened to poor Oblivion when it dared to charge people for a small upgrade, why they were nothing more then common fraudsters.
Meanwhile a small company called Blizzard is raking in several times what that horse armour costs EACH month PLUS they charge 5-6 times for an upgrade. Oh okay so their upgrade is a lot bigger, but people been paying them a monthly fee for years and they still want more AND get it?
Companies got to be asking themselves why they spend years on a product that if it is a big hit might make them a small fortune once while they can also spend that time making an MMO and if it is a hit make more money then they can dream off.
On the other hand, will this be an MMO? With Star Wars Galaxies still running and it still having a lousy rep and neither company having any experience (except lucasrts with destroying one) with MMO's?
We shall see. But MMO's are here to stay, because Blizzard has shown you can get some serious money from them.
Offcourse, if you are really old, you remember Lucasfilm Games as a flightsim company. Kids these days and their new fangled adventures. You want adventures, you go to Sierra.
Another company that went down the crapper.
Actually I have no idea if it was adventures or flightsim that came first.
Just as you think you killed them off for good, someone drops a little blood and Guess Who Is BACK!
Most video games, and I think Halo certainly qualifies, use story telling because being told to kill X of Y because, is a little bit boring after a while. Oh sure sure, Halo got a rich universe, intresting characters, yada yada. Sorry. NO.
It really doesn't. It is enough to motivate you to play the game BUT it is the game that is the main attraction. NOT the story. To give you a counter example, The Longest Journey you play for the story NOT the puzzles.
In a movie you can do two things, tell a story or WOW the audience. There may be a certain amusement seeing the characters come to life, problam is that in modern video games they are already "alive".
Then there is telling a story. If you retell the same story as in the game, why bother. It is not like games today can't do that themselves.
What is left is to tell an intresting story and so far games to movies haven't done that. Even the passable Dungeon & Dragon 2 didn't exactly tell a tale that amazed.
Frankly, it is almost doomed (get it doom?) from the start. Doom3 made a better movie then doom the movie. Halo as far as it can be movie, already IS a movie, just with lots of interactive bits.
What could you do to Halo that would A not mess up the original material B present a fresh new intresting story.
You can't. Mario Brothers only hinted at the game and basically invented lots of stuff never in the game. Doom tried to make it an aliens wannabe. I can understand the attraction, but lets not forget that Lord of The Rings is NOT a good example. That movie was nice because it allowed us to see what we previously had to imagine. It wasn't a retelling of the stories, more and illustrated edition of the story that skipped and simplified a great deal but that didn't matter because it had huge battles.
Raid protects against complete sudden failure of a disk, NOT slow corruption.
If you think an IDE disk is suitable for a heavy use mail server, you are dreaming. There is a reason they still make scsi disk and this is it.
Google is NOT a good example. Google is under no legal obligation to protect its data and ensure it stays that way for years. If one of googles servers dies and takes a ton of data with it, so what. Read the EULA of your gmail account, they make no guarantees.
Yes you can make servers with IDE and for some tasks they even make sense, email is not one of them. You might have some luck with Sata but even then you still will have to spring for quality disks, not the cheapo ones you get for your desktop.
I agree that sometimes money is wasted, scsi on webserver with enough memory to keep the entire site loaded in memory is a bit of a waste but on the whole things are done the way they are because they work.
Frankly if you are responsible for the servers in a large company you just can't say "ooops, lost some data, oh well, it was a year old, who cares right". You need to make sure that data is kept intact, this means using hardware that doesn't loose random bits.
I would very much like a look at googles serverroom. I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that its payroll systems and adsense accounting does NOT run on IDE disks or whitebox equipment.
Once it is outside the IT system, they don't know. Your word ISN'T good enough.
Hell, for certain information (financial, medical) just getting it onto googles servers is illegal. Especially if you consider that google READS the emails.
Certain info is NOT allowed out of the corperate network and you need to prove that it didn't.
Once you export it to gmail, that can no longer be done.
I realize how frustrating it is, but I have been in that position to often to not know that sometimes the IT guy just doesn't have a choice. If the boss doesn't want to pay for more storage I can't create it out of thin air.
It is one of the main reasons I stopped doing admin work because you are always the one who gets blaimed.
I have to go with the dutch situation because that is the one I know.
In holland you used to have PTT (Post, Telecom, Telegram) which was owned by the state and also had banking services. Basically they where huge, slow, old but worked and kept things under control. For instance Postbank does NOT charge end users for tranferring money and has a free debit card. Essentially for normal people banking in holland was FREE and paid an interest if you had a postive balance.
But no that was not good enough, we needed competition and PTT was split up into the mail segment, the phone segment (KPN) and the bank segment (postbank) (The whole story is a bit more complex)
KPN now is a commercial business competing on a free market. Yeah right, it was the state that lay down the copper network that they essentially got for free. How is any other business supposed to compete with that?
It is as laughable as competing the NS (dutch railway) which is now supposed to be a commercial company, but got all its infrastructure for free. Oh yeah, they got to pay a few million each year, how does this compare with the cost of installing a rail network thatruns right to major cities?
Free market and fair market are insane ideas by themselves, but the idea that you can have BOTH is so laughable it is to cry.
For telecoms the problems is the wire, who has the wire, controls the user. So either you put in very heavy regulation to make sure everyone can access those wires (not a free market) or you accept that those who happen to inherit the wires own the customer (not a fair market).
The idea that a new player in the market can just install their own network is idiotic, the costs are extreme and the benefits miniscule, plus do we really want anymore companies digging up roads?
We are in luck that years ago cable tv happened, else the telecoms would totally own the internet. Now at least we got two end-point networks in the ground, but as The Netherlands showed, until the phone network was forcibly opened and a third part could enter the market and start offering better service for less money only then did the cable companies start to improve theirs.
At least on the phone network you now got plenty of supplies, yes they use the underlying KPN network, but some of them are indeed competing by just selling you bandwidth and nothing else. You rent a pipe from them, and that is what you get.
Offcourse, you pay for that, and as long as Joe Average continues to only look at the initial price, companies that offer real quality with no hidden strings are going to lose out.
Fist off, gmail does NOT guarantee that your emails are secure. Several laws demand that business keeps all emails. Try explaining to judge that, ooops sorry, HD crashed, all the emails are gone.
Proper email and file servers need quality hardware. No matrox IDE here. They also need backup's. That costs money. Lots of money. Money that is almost always impossible to get.
I seen this problem WAY to often before, IT's budget can afford the ever increasing demands on its services, so people start going around it, this creates problems that put an even bigger strain on IT until one day someone makes a mistake or leaves and vital data goes missing. IT gets the blaim, responds with even more drastic measures, but never actually gets the money to meet demands.
Gmail is a very nice and usefull service, but your corperate email HAS to be stored reliably and accurately so that when the officials come you can prove that you kept up with the law, the law does NOT make a distinction between joke emails, emails with extremely large attachements that choke the exchange server and emails of proper business nature. ALL emails got to be kept safe. How can they be sure that that email you send via gmail really wasn't important?
Same with installing your own software, in many places their are laws that forbid the transmition of information to the outside (hospitals, banks) the only way to be sure this doesn't happen accidently is by NOT allowing outside communication that isn't monitored. No, you can therefore not install IM software. No I don't care how much you need it. It is the law. Your IT department got better things to do with its money the police every user, but that is what they got to do, because if they do not, they are allowing the company to break the law.
Years ago, I think it was during the first Clinton campaign, a russian reporter commented that with the two candidates, the requirement that questions be submitted in advance, the carefully screened events etc etc, it was becoming more and more like the USSR elections he used to "report" on before the collapse.
This is NOT a slam against the US, most countries are going through this at the moment. It isn't even about any polical leaning, Labour in Great Britian is supposed to be left. It just seems as if we seem destined to go to more and more restrictions on our freedoms, in the name of protecting us. Except that it never seems to be about us, but rather the people already in power.
That is not what has me worried. What worries me is how little the comman man cares about it all. Bread and Circusses, it really seems true. Give them reality tv, and the masses will keep queit. Move people vote on Idol then on elections. Starlets get more news coverage then the war.
What I think has happened is that we have led the press become too commercial, they were supposed to be the watchdog of the goverment, instead we allowed them to become slaves to the dollar, worried about ever increasing viewing figures/profits instead of reporting the news.
Paranoids don't help, sometimes I think they are a plot in themselves, by coming up with insane theories while the simplest is simply that the fast majority of news outlets are owned by just a handfull of people.
And who is going to report on the press going bad? The press? It is all a simply slippery slope. Where does it end? The rush to have scoop first, leads news outlet after news ooutlet to report stories that later turn out to be false. Some people even put scams up in order to prove this and NEVER FAIL. Does the media do anything with it? Holland has had one recently, how many reporters/editors were fired? None.
The first time a reporter agreed not to ask a question duing a press conference that led to now questions having to be asked in advance all the way to staged FEMA press-conference.
But hey, there is good news, in the 2008 elections, old USSR reporters can relive the old times.
The dutch news is a prime example, the intros have gotten longer and flashier, total airtime has shrunk, what time remains is now wasted on pre-views and recaps of things that are in that same news program, more time is spend on weather and sports. It was during gulf war 1 that the dutch news had a 5 minute segment of the queen opening some art exhibit. The US got Britney Spears, we got Maxima, no dear news editor, a new royal being born is NOT headline news, it is at best a human interest story, worth no more then a 20 second segment at the end of the news.
If you want to see why democracy is failing, watch the news. It will become painfully clear when you realize that the actuall NEWS content is starting to approach zero.
Almost all trains are electrical nowadays, where they get their power from is the big question. Diesels get it from carrying a diesel generator with them. Handy because you can be totally disconnected from the net, disadvantage, extra weight (not that much of a problem in cargo trains where the locomotive needs all the weight it can get) and you are limited by the amount of fuel you can carry. Plus you smell bad.
The brits get their power from a third rail. Very hard wearing BUT you got a live wire exposed where everyone can touch it. Bad for level crossings, meaning the train needs facilities to be able to cross a spot without third rail.
Most other trains including light rail system like in the article and trolly busses, use an overhead wire (busses need two since they can't use the rails as the second wire). The problem with this is that it is fairly expensive, can easily break and gets in the way at level crossings where it puts a height restriction on traffic using the crossing.
There are ways around this, for instance at a bridge in holland by zaandam the overhead wire just has a missing part. Since trains typically only got one pentograph the train better be at speed or it will find itself without power (it is only a few meters and trains are notknown for their short stopping distances so this happening is highly unlikely).
This tram would allow itself to run off the overhead wires where they can be installed, but continue normal operation where they can't. This would make planning a lot easier because you can then keep roads open for special transports and still have tram system. This is extremely handy as lifting the wires everytime something big needs to pass is a hassle.
Finally why trams and not busses.
Several reasons, the simplest is driving license. Buss requires a bigger more expensive license then a tram/metro. This is important because while their not all that many jobs for a tram/metro driver, trucking has plenty of competition.
Trains offer a lot more space, because they can be build differently. A buss of the same weight as a tram simply can carry fewer people. While I have seen segmented busses with three segments now, that can carry a lot of people, they are still of lesser capacity then trams and have lost a lot of the freedom of movement of small busses.
Basically trams can move more people then busses can, on less real estate. The prime example might be in holland, between Leidseplein and Koningsplein, where trams run in both directions but the tracks "merge" in the street and split again on the bridges. If you know the area, imagine implementing the same amount of transportation with busses. YIKES!
Busses have their use, on infrequent routes, or routes that are too complex for a tramline. But when you have to move lots of people at street level, trams make a lot of sense.
I don't even have iTunes installed, no version for linux, so how exactly does your logic work?
My content of the iPod comes in the form of Mp3's which I can pretend I got legally (fair use is still firmly enshrined in dutch laws, for now) but won't.
But really all you need to do to see how insane this guy is, is to translate it to other situations. Should brewers get a cut from the glass industry? Even if people are brewing their own?
Should cable tv get money from say Sony to make up for people having illegal cable hookups?
Or far simpler, should casette tape makers pay music makers?
Frankly we are giving far to much weight to content producers and their demands.
The iPod is a device for playing music and video. HOW that music and video gets on there is not Apples concern. They do happen to offer ONE of the many ways through iTunes. They do busines with iTunes on their terms. NBC can choose not to do business that way but demanding money from hardware sales as part of selling content is just insane.
Note that what Apple does is not at all unusual. Not so long holland had a small story when Albert Heyn (supermarket chain) offered a jumbosize product at a price the manufacturer thought was too low. AH responded by dropping the product and selling their own version for cheaper, screwing the sales of the manufacturer. That is free market. AH is free to go as low as it wants as long as it does not sell below costs (else it counts as a promotion) the manufacturer has NOTHING to say about it except to stop selling it.
If NBC doesn't like Apples pricing in iTunes, then it is free to not supply. What next, they want a cut of pc sales as well? A cut of tivo? A cut of HD's? A cut of the chips industry (the eadible kind)?
NBC can charge what it wants for their content. NOTHING is stopping them from offering their OWN content through their own shop. It would also be trivial to post it in formats compatible with the iPod.
I think evolution is true, but as the article states, SEVERAL republican candidates do NOT think it is true and they share this with a segment of the population.
Global warming is even worse then evolution. The US goverment denies it exist, or that if it exists is caused by mankind. YOU may think that is a load of bull BUT that is the official view of the republicans.
Therefore a question as you ask "what do you plan to do about global warming" is really no different then asking "what do you plan to do about your immortal soul" to an atheist. The question is loaded.
Let me ask you, how do you intend to make up for you shooting Kennedy? Note how this question gives you no room to even claim you are innocent of the act. Why would a person who is innocent of shooting Kennedy subject himself to this question?
Why would a creationist answer questions on evolution. Why would a global climate change (global warming is a lousy name) denier come up with plans to counter what he claims does not exist?
I read the entire review and I get the distinct feeling that we got an amazing example of Fanboy syndrome at work here.
IF you replace OSX and Apple with say Vista and Microsoft or even KDE and Linux, you would perhaps find a far harsher review.
The icons suck, dock is unclear, new gui api is still not working. Lots of stuff added that is useless and distracts from the usability.
And yet, throughout it all,you sense that the reviewer really wants to be positive. Wants to make excuses, wants to see the good in it all.
WHY? That is NOT the job of a reviewer, he should simply state "this is good" or "this is bad", not try to explain why it happens, or why the designers might have thought it was a good idea.
Same with Apple still using HFS+, lets face it. It is in need of replacement, if MS was still using Fat32 it would get slammed, a linux distro still using ext2 would be laughed at, Apple uses HFS+ well that is just great.
No, this review like so many other Apple reviews reads like it was paid for OR the reviewer is a fanboy.
Really, be honest with yourselve, if you slammed MS for making meaningless chances to the UI in Vista/XP/2000/98 why do you not do the same when Apple does it?
If you come down on inconsistent design rules in KDE why do you lets OSX get away with it?
Read the review again but blot out that this is Apple we are talking about. Would you accept those icons from ANYBODY else? They are pretty horrible you got to admit.
If I read the review I can't think of anything else then "meh". A lot of UI changes, and some small upgrades. This is what Apple spend years on? This is it?
No, don't talk to me about Vista taking 5 years. I don't give a shit about Vista. If you take 2 days to run the mile it doesn't make my half hour run look any better. I am still a fat tub of lard even if you are worse.
Honestly, try to review a product WITHOUT wanting to be either positive OR negative. Review a product on its own merits.
Each time I consider buying a mac I come across a review like this that makes me shudder. Thanks but I will stick with XP for gaming and Linux for desktop yet. One I have gotten used to and the other allows me lots more freedom to have the desktop I want, the way I want it.
The author pretends to want a debate, but then goes on to claim evolution as a fact, ridiculing those candidates who believe otherwise including the current president of the US of A.
DOn't get me wrong, I think bush is a looney and that evolution is self-evident HOWEVER if you already go into it with an opionin that evolution is true AND global warming (and related stuff) is true, then what is left to debate?
It is an intresting idea, but sadly it won't happen.
By alrights todays average computers ARE supercomputers, you just have to measure them against the supercomputers of the past.
By that same token you will NEVER have a handheld superocmputer because by simply combining a couple of them together you would have an ever more powerfull computer.
So the article basiclly states, in the future you will have more processing power then you have today. Mmm, yeah, that might happen.
Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
So, it is a shitload of cash. Guess that shows those people who claimed Steve Jobs was anti-drm because of what he said about music.
DRM is bad, if it is COSTING him money. DRM is GOOD when it MAKES him money. Because that is what this is, DRM, digital rights restrictions. You buy the product, they tell you how to use it.
Oh well, no worry, I am sure some Apple fanboy will explain it all away.
That is the only real way to seriously review a product. Buy a real version of it from a real retailer who had no idea who you are. That is how consumer watchdogs do it, they want to avoid any potential that the producer tries to influence the results.
We all seen the stories about reviewers being send special versions, geared to do really well in the used benchmarks.
Do it like the pros do it. Seperate yourselve completly from the people whose product you are reviewing.
Offcourse, that means the public has to start A paying the reviewers B wait till the product has already been released before the review can be done. Not going to happen, I am afraid.
What happens to linux during an economic downturn, what you mean like the one we had when the bubble burst? People all of sudden realized that no, you do NOT require expensive systems to run servers, you can do it with a whiteboxes running linux. You pick up sun gear for a song as all the dotcoms who had splurged on unneeded equipment went bust, while the likes of google (linux) continued on, because they kept their costs under control.
Your troll sounds reasonable, until you remember linux has been around long enough to have seen what you predict, and came out stronger then ever.
As for MS making lots more money, that is true enough (it is also spending a lot more) but if what you say then MS shouldn't feel at all threatned, so why is it acting like it is? You are sayinga mighty lion is not going to be scared by a little dog, while behind you that lion is trying to climb a tree to get away from it.
Most opensource developers already got good jobs, they do this on the side, because they want too. You are predicting that people will stop their hobby when the economy goes bad? A hobby that doesn't really cost anything except time? You got a weird view of human nature.
I got a next troll for you, linux will die when the developers discover girls.
Although blaming slashdot editors for doing a poor job is... well been there, done that.
It is sad because it really is the key of the issue, linux, cups, kde etc etc are ALL different projects that some other projects called distros happen to put together.
It would be like expecting someone from Redhat to fix problems with Gentoo. It may be what the enduser wants, but it just doesn't work that way.
What you still don't seem to get is that these are DIFFERENT projects. Do you call Ford when your petrol has water in it? Do you expect the roadservices department to fix your car?
I am a carpenter, I ask you if you want anything fixed, you ask that I fix the faulty washing machine. Do you then rant that I won't fix it? That you don't care about the differences between an electricien and a carpenter?
I am starting to see why Stallman is so pasionate about the GNU/Linux naming.
Now if it had been a person from say RedHat who claimed "oh that is userspace" THEN you would have a point. RedHat supplies a package to the enduser. Linux DOES NOT.
As for pushing all the drives to userspace, well that just makes it clear you know nothing about this matter. SOME drivers can be in the kernel, others do not. Every printer driver in existence as part of the kernel. Ugh. That is so yuck even MS wouldn't do that.
The seperation between kernelspace and userland is NOT theoretical. This is slashdot and it would be like saying that the people who worked on your cars powertrain should fix the issues with the electrical subsystem. It then offcourse becomes obvious why this is idiotic, people who know engines don't need to know anything about electricity, yes both are "power" but at the same time totally different.
The kernels task is to provide the base system that other software can then use to run on. You really don't want to tie to much stuff into the kernel, and if possible migrate stuff OUT of it and keep only the bare fundementals inside. Why? Windows is an excellent reason why. If the kernel crashes your are fucked, if a userspace program crashes, then you just restart that program while the kernel goes on.
Take printers, the kernel does the USB protocol, but CUPS talks to the printer. The kernel handles the AGP bus, but is X11 that does the video work. Therefore the drivers for your printer and video card need to be part of these later projects. Offcourse it gets confusing with video cards because they ALSO need to be part of the kernel.
Say you call up the electricity company to complain your PC don't work, they are very nice and send an engineer over. He will check the outlet, confirm it supplies the proper current and then leave. Your PC still don't work? Not his problem, not his job and most important, he may very well not even know where to start. Call Dell instead.
Cups is a totally different project with its own team of people and own goals and ambition. To say that a kernel developer should just switch to that project instead is starting to smell a lot like extreme arrogance from your part. Who are you to say what an other person should do?
People often start speaking of elitism, but what do you call it when a person like you expects everyone else to jump at their demands?
The strength of Linux comes from its volunteers, who work hard on the stuff they are passionate about. Sadly there are also weaknesses in this which according to the reactions so far seem to be, don't buy Lexmark. I can live with that, if you can't. Well there is a small company called Microsoft operating out of Redmond. YOu might want to give them a call, I am sure they will JUMP at the change to develop drivers specifically for your hardware needs.
Oh but wait. MS doesn't do that does it. Does MS provide code to run old software that don't wanna run on their latests OS? No. Does it provide drivers for hardware that has problems? No.
Odd, that you are so undemanding of a product you pay for, but think volunteers should be at your beg and call.
Next time something don't work, blame the company you paid for it.
If you read the story then it seems as if this mother went to the EFF and they are representing her. The EFF ain't a commercial organization, this isn't a lawyer who is going to get his money wether he wins or loses.
Yet many will spout that she doesn't stand a chance. Yeah, because the EFF lawyers are NOT leaders in their field with a long history of winning.
This is a video with music playing in the background. Imagine if that was illegal, does the same go for images? BAM, you just destroyed all visual media taken in say Disney land. Disney owns the image rights to their park. Hell, simply picture on the street is likely to have lots of copyrighted advertising signs. Your clothes? Owned by the designer. Could you only make homemovies in a sterile white room with naked people? Might get a bit boring.
You could barely film/photograph anything without showing something that infringes on a copyright.
I am not going to watch a video of a baby, but the music was playing in the background, it was NOT a soundtrack added to the video. If we make it illegal to film normal live we have really bend over to far to the music industry.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Talk to a lawyer. A good one. Who does his work because he believes in a cause and does it without saying "win or lose, you own me". IANAL but the EFF is.
Who do you think knows the law better, the people of the EFF who are handling the case OR some idiot with a slashdot account?
She didn't hire some ambulance chaser who is going to get his money anyway, she went to the EFF and they took on her case. That is smarts. The EFF doesn't exactly have a long history of losing. The content industry may be able to hire lots of lawyers but the EFF seems to get the smart ones.
Will she win? Wrong question, will the EFF win on HER behalve.
Also this will play extremely badly for Prince. I doubt he wishes to be known as the artists that sues moms. You can bet your ass that the press will have a field day because of his former name. THey LOVE pun headlines. If you have them a choice between a pun headline about a kitten or the outbreak of WW3, they choose the kitten.
No my friend, I will take the legal opinion of the EFF any time over yours. To many people on slashdot think they are lawyers. I listen to the ones who really are AND have a track record of being any good at it.
Slashdot Mirror
In Lord of the Rings Online the Lore-master and Captain classes both heal at expense of their own morale (health). So you can still seriously deplete yourselve, most combat moves of the lore-master cost morale as well, so even if you are not attacked in a battle you still end up damaged.
The HAM system was different but could have worked, I just think that you were never meant to wear the heavy armour in the way that it ended up. Perhaps it was supposed to hamsting you and have you in constant need of a medic because the Star Wars universe is not one of heavy armour. None of the heroes wear it. Only the baddies and they die like flies.
The HAM system did make it that if you were hurt, you were less effective (because you couldn't afford to keep spamming the heavy hitters moves), this is far more realistic then 99% of games were you can be at a sliver of your stats and fight as if you were fresh.
What I think was fatally wrong was not any specific design in itself, but rather the handling of it. HAM meant you could not just wear heavy armour without a medic to then heal you (it was possible to shift your stats enough to wear it). Heavy armour was supposed to be rare. Then SOE decided against this original design and instead of reworking it completely released a kludge of a fix that broke the whole design.
But not all blame lies with SOE. How many Terra Kasi did you know that fought in heavy armour. That exploited the armour bugs with some parts not being needed? Why couldn't players simply play the game as it was, before the doc buff I never had need of heavy armour. You just made sure to fight in a decent group and stayed alive that way.
I like MMO's and I liked SWG. For a while and then something happened. Through various design choices AND player actions the game got ruined.
To explain I have to tell you how SWG worked. Like most MMO's you picked a race, sex and apperance, and a class. HOWEVER that last choice had little meaning as you could pick up all the classes with just little bit of money at the start. Unlike the rigid class structures of the Everquest clones (Ultima Online is a seperate beast) in SWG your character could advance in any skill set if he/she used it. If you wanted to advance in pistol class, you had to buy the skill class of pistoleer, and then just use pistols to kill something.
The precise arrangement was a little complex but it allowed you to combine several skill sets together to make your character. Want to be a robot building sharpshooter? A medic with a big sword? A bounty hunter with passion for cooking? A jedi... ah well we will get to that. But more or less, you could.
You had the base skill set of ranged combat (pistol, carbine, rifle (and something I forgot)), melee (unarmed, sword etc) (It has been a while cut me some slack) and support skills like medic, crafter and scout.
The idea was that you would pick those skills that most suited your style of play. For a short time in the games history it worked. A lot of players had a bit of scouting skill to help with gathering resources, some had some medic skills to help with healing even if their main intrest was combat. While others took on the role of pure fighters, secure in knowing that others in their party could heal them in exchange for taking the brunt in a fight.
It more or less worked, skills sets were varied and most were of real use.
What you have to remember was that SWG had far less of the rigid level system that other games have. If you wanted too, and could afford the modest fee you could go straight to fighting rancors, sure you would be eaten, but you could.
SWG did NOT have the quest system, instead you got generic missions of the level of your party and went out to kill spawns. While it sounds less intresting then quests, it helped with one thing. Finding a group, I never had a problem. Granted this was because EVERYBODY hunter naff's but at least you didn't spend an hour LFG. NOR because of the mixed skill sets did you have to beg for a healer to join you.
Once in a while, a group would form to hunt rancors. There were no uber elites back then, just ordinary playrs with varied skills sets seeking fame and glory. A rancor group was a time to prepare, to get your best medicine from stall, repair that armour and get all your equipment checked out.
Once ready, you left, to arrive on a dark world where EVERYTHING could kick your ass. The only way to survive was in a group and to use ALL the skills you had. The best time I had in game was doing deep into rancor valley with a small group, taking shelter among friendly animals (who if a rancor came near would attack, yes my friend MMO critters who have fights amongst themselves) and hunting. Camping out, a small lighted area under a night sky while the trader tried to find some resources so the medic could make some more stimms.
Ah yes, SWG was FUN. It was adventuring.
And then, the doc buffs. SWG had some unusual systems and one was that armour reduced your recovery rates to the point where you wouldn't heal or even were simply unable to wear the armour. To counter that, there were buffs in the forms of food, but the doc buff was introduced to allow the heaviest armour to be actually used. And sony miscalculated. Because resources were dynamic in their quality, the quality if the doc buff depended on the materials players combined. THe results were far more powerfull then intended, with a decent quality doc buff, costing 20k you could walk up to a rancor nest, tap it and just area attack away, spawning rancors until the nest was destoryed and you were surrounded by half a dozen dead beasts. Who needs a jedi now?
The doc buff
Look at happened to poor Oblivion when it dared to charge people for a small upgrade, why they were nothing more then common fraudsters.
Meanwhile a small company called Blizzard is raking in several times what that horse armour costs EACH month PLUS they charge 5-6 times for an upgrade. Oh okay so their upgrade is a lot bigger, but people been paying them a monthly fee for years and they still want more AND get it?
Companies got to be asking themselves why they spend years on a product that if it is a big hit might make them a small fortune once while they can also spend that time making an MMO and if it is a hit make more money then they can dream off.
On the other hand, will this be an MMO? With Star Wars Galaxies still running and it still having a lousy rep and neither company having any experience (except lucasrts with destroying one) with MMO's?
We shall see. But MMO's are here to stay, because Blizzard has shown you can get some serious money from them.
You know, when they made good star wars games.
Now they just make bad star wars games.
Offcourse, if you are really old, you remember Lucasfilm Games as a flightsim company. Kids these days and their new fangled adventures. You want adventures, you go to Sierra.
Another company that went down the crapper.
Actually I have no idea if it was adventures or flightsim that came first.
Just as you think you killed them off for good, someone drops a little blood and Guess Who Is BACK!
Most video games, and I think Halo certainly qualifies, use story telling because being told to kill X of Y because, is a little bit boring after a while. Oh sure sure, Halo got a rich universe, intresting characters, yada yada. Sorry. NO.
It really doesn't. It is enough to motivate you to play the game BUT it is the game that is the main attraction. NOT the story. To give you a counter example, The Longest Journey you play for the story NOT the puzzles.
In a movie you can do two things, tell a story or WOW the audience. There may be a certain amusement seeing the characters come to life, problam is that in modern video games they are already "alive".
Then there is telling a story. If you retell the same story as in the game, why bother. It is not like games today can't do that themselves.
What is left is to tell an intresting story and so far games to movies haven't done that. Even the passable Dungeon & Dragon 2 didn't exactly tell a tale that amazed.
Frankly, it is almost doomed (get it doom?) from the start. Doom3 made a better movie then doom the movie. Halo as far as it can be movie, already IS a movie, just with lots of interactive bits.
What could you do to Halo that would A not mess up the original material B present a fresh new intresting story.
You can't. Mario Brothers only hinted at the game and basically invented lots of stuff never in the game. Doom tried to make it an aliens wannabe. I can understand the attraction, but lets not forget that Lord of The Rings is NOT a good example. That movie was nice because it allowed us to see what we previously had to imagine. It wasn't a retelling of the stories, more and illustrated edition of the story that skipped and simplified a great deal but that didn't matter because it had huge battles.
Raid protects against complete sudden failure of a disk, NOT slow corruption.
If you think an IDE disk is suitable for a heavy use mail server, you are dreaming. There is a reason they still make scsi disk and this is it.
Google is NOT a good example. Google is under no legal obligation to protect its data and ensure it stays that way for years. If one of googles servers dies and takes a ton of data with it, so what. Read the EULA of your gmail account, they make no guarantees.
Yes you can make servers with IDE and for some tasks they even make sense, email is not one of them. You might have some luck with Sata but even then you still will have to spring for quality disks, not the cheapo ones you get for your desktop.
I agree that sometimes money is wasted, scsi on webserver with enough memory to keep the entire site loaded in memory is a bit of a waste but on the whole things are done the way they are because they work.
Frankly if you are responsible for the servers in a large company you just can't say "ooops, lost some data, oh well, it was a year old, who cares right". You need to make sure that data is kept intact, this means using hardware that doesn't loose random bits.
I would very much like a look at googles serverroom. I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that its payroll systems and adsense accounting does NOT run on IDE disks or whitebox equipment.
Once it is outside the IT system, they don't know. Your word ISN'T good enough.
Hell, for certain information (financial, medical) just getting it onto googles servers is illegal. Especially if you consider that google READS the emails.
Certain info is NOT allowed out of the corperate network and you need to prove that it didn't.
Once you export it to gmail, that can no longer be done.
I realize how frustrating it is, but I have been in that position to often to not know that sometimes the IT guy just doesn't have a choice. If the boss doesn't want to pay for more storage I can't create it out of thin air.
It is one of the main reasons I stopped doing admin work because you are always the one who gets blaimed.
I have to go with the dutch situation because that is the one I know.
In holland you used to have PTT (Post, Telecom, Telegram) which was owned by the state and also had banking services. Basically they where huge, slow, old but worked and kept things under control. For instance Postbank does NOT charge end users for tranferring money and has a free debit card. Essentially for normal people banking in holland was FREE and paid an interest if you had a postive balance.
But no that was not good enough, we needed competition and PTT was split up into the mail segment, the phone segment (KPN) and the bank segment (postbank) (The whole story is a bit more complex)
KPN now is a commercial business competing on a free market. Yeah right, it was the state that lay down the copper network that they essentially got for free. How is any other business supposed to compete with that?
It is as laughable as competing the NS (dutch railway) which is now supposed to be a commercial company, but got all its infrastructure for free. Oh yeah, they got to pay a few million each year, how does this compare with the cost of installing a rail network thatruns right to major cities?
Free market and fair market are insane ideas by themselves, but the idea that you can have BOTH is so laughable it is to cry.
For telecoms the problems is the wire, who has the wire, controls the user. So either you put in very heavy regulation to make sure everyone can access those wires (not a free market) or you accept that those who happen to inherit the wires own the customer (not a fair market).
The idea that a new player in the market can just install their own network is idiotic, the costs are extreme and the benefits miniscule, plus do we really want anymore companies digging up roads?
We are in luck that years ago cable tv happened, else the telecoms would totally own the internet. Now at least we got two end-point networks in the ground, but as The Netherlands showed, until the phone network was forcibly opened and a third part could enter the market and start offering better service for less money only then did the cable companies start to improve theirs.
At least on the phone network you now got plenty of supplies, yes they use the underlying KPN network, but some of them are indeed competing by just selling you bandwidth and nothing else. You rent a pipe from them, and that is what you get.
Offcourse, you pay for that, and as long as Joe Average continues to only look at the initial price, companies that offer real quality with no hidden strings are going to lose out.
Fist off, gmail does NOT guarantee that your emails are secure. Several laws demand that business keeps all emails. Try explaining to judge that, ooops sorry, HD crashed, all the emails are gone.
Proper email and file servers need quality hardware. No matrox IDE here. They also need backup's. That costs money. Lots of money. Money that is almost always impossible to get.
I seen this problem WAY to often before, IT's budget can afford the ever increasing demands on its services, so people start going around it, this creates problems that put an even bigger strain on IT until one day someone makes a mistake or leaves and vital data goes missing. IT gets the blaim, responds with even more drastic measures, but never actually gets the money to meet demands.
Gmail is a very nice and usefull service, but your corperate email HAS to be stored reliably and accurately so that when the officials come you can prove that you kept up with the law, the law does NOT make a distinction between joke emails, emails with extremely large attachements that choke the exchange server and emails of proper business nature. ALL emails got to be kept safe. How can they be sure that that email you send via gmail really wasn't important?
Same with installing your own software, in many places their are laws that forbid the transmition of information to the outside (hospitals, banks) the only way to be sure this doesn't happen accidently is by NOT allowing outside communication that isn't monitored. No, you can therefore not install IM software. No I don't care how much you need it. It is the law. Your IT department got better things to do with its money the police every user, but that is what they got to do, because if they do not, they are allowing the company to break the law.
Years ago, I think it was during the first Clinton campaign, a russian reporter commented that with the two candidates, the requirement that questions be submitted in advance, the carefully screened events etc etc, it was becoming more and more like the USSR elections he used to "report" on before the collapse.
This is NOT a slam against the US, most countries are going through this at the moment. It isn't even about any polical leaning, Labour in Great Britian is supposed to be left. It just seems as if we seem destined to go to more and more restrictions on our freedoms, in the name of protecting us. Except that it never seems to be about us, but rather the people already in power.
That is not what has me worried. What worries me is how little the comman man cares about it all. Bread and Circusses, it really seems true. Give them reality tv, and the masses will keep queit. Move people vote on Idol then on elections. Starlets get more news coverage then the war.
What I think has happened is that we have led the press become too commercial, they were supposed to be the watchdog of the goverment, instead we allowed them to become slaves to the dollar, worried about ever increasing viewing figures/profits instead of reporting the news.
Paranoids don't help, sometimes I think they are a plot in themselves, by coming up with insane theories while the simplest is simply that the fast majority of news outlets are owned by just a handfull of people.
And who is going to report on the press going bad? The press? It is all a simply slippery slope. Where does it end? The rush to have scoop first, leads news outlet after news ooutlet to report stories that later turn out to be false. Some people even put scams up in order to prove this and NEVER FAIL. Does the media do anything with it? Holland has had one recently, how many reporters/editors were fired? None.
The first time a reporter agreed not to ask a question duing a press conference that led to now questions having to be asked in advance all the way to staged FEMA press-conference.
But hey, there is good news, in the 2008 elections, old USSR reporters can relive the old times.
The dutch news is a prime example, the intros have gotten longer and flashier, total airtime has shrunk, what time remains is now wasted on pre-views and recaps of things that are in that same news program, more time is spend on weather and sports. It was during gulf war 1 that the dutch news had a 5 minute segment of the queen opening some art exhibit. The US got Britney Spears, we got Maxima, no dear news editor, a new royal being born is NOT headline news, it is at best a human interest story, worth no more then a 20 second segment at the end of the news.
If you want to see why democracy is failing, watch the news. It will become painfully clear when you realize that the actuall NEWS content is starting to approach zero.
Almost all trains are electrical nowadays, where they get their power from is the big question. Diesels get it from carrying a diesel generator with them. Handy because you can be totally disconnected from the net, disadvantage, extra weight (not that much of a problem in cargo trains where the locomotive needs all the weight it can get) and you are limited by the amount of fuel you can carry. Plus you smell bad.
The brits get their power from a third rail. Very hard wearing BUT you got a live wire exposed where everyone can touch it. Bad for level crossings, meaning the train needs facilities to be able to cross a spot without third rail.
Most other trains including light rail system like in the article and trolly busses, use an overhead wire (busses need two since they can't use the rails as the second wire). The problem with this is that it is fairly expensive, can easily break and gets in the way at level crossings where it puts a height restriction on traffic using the crossing.
There are ways around this, for instance at a bridge in holland by zaandam the overhead wire just has a missing part. Since trains typically only got one pentograph the train better be at speed or it will find itself without power (it is only a few meters and trains are notknown for their short stopping distances so this happening is highly unlikely).
This tram would allow itself to run off the overhead wires where they can be installed, but continue normal operation where they can't. This would make planning a lot easier because you can then keep roads open for special transports and still have tram system. This is extremely handy as lifting the wires everytime something big needs to pass is a hassle.
Finally why trams and not busses.
Several reasons, the simplest is driving license. Buss requires a bigger more expensive license then a tram/metro. This is important because while their not all that many jobs for a tram/metro driver, trucking has plenty of competition.
Trains offer a lot more space, because they can be build differently. A buss of the same weight as a tram simply can carry fewer people. While I have seen segmented busses with three segments now, that can carry a lot of people, they are still of lesser capacity then trams and have lost a lot of the freedom of movement of small busses.
Basically trams can move more people then busses can, on less real estate. The prime example might be in holland, between Leidseplein and Koningsplein, where trams run in both directions but the tracks "merge" in the street and split again on the bridges. If you know the area, imagine implementing the same amount of transportation with busses. YIKES!
Busses have their use, on infrequent routes, or routes that are too complex for a tramline. But when you have to move lots of people at street level, trams make a lot of sense.
I don't even have iTunes installed, no version for linux, so how exactly does your logic work?
My content of the iPod comes in the form of Mp3's which I can pretend I got legally (fair use is still firmly enshrined in dutch laws, for now) but won't.
But really all you need to do to see how insane this guy is, is to translate it to other situations. Should brewers get a cut from the glass industry? Even if people are brewing their own?
Should cable tv get money from say Sony to make up for people having illegal cable hookups?
Or far simpler, should casette tape makers pay music makers?
Frankly we are giving far to much weight to content producers and their demands.
The iPod is a device for playing music and video. HOW that music and video gets on there is not Apples concern. They do happen to offer ONE of the many ways through iTunes. They do busines with iTunes on their terms. NBC can choose not to do business that way but demanding money from hardware sales as part of selling content is just insane.
Note that what Apple does is not at all unusual. Not so long holland had a small story when Albert Heyn (supermarket chain) offered a jumbosize product at a price the manufacturer thought was too low. AH responded by dropping the product and selling their own version for cheaper, screwing the sales of the manufacturer. That is free market. AH is free to go as low as it wants as long as it does not sell below costs (else it counts as a promotion) the manufacturer has NOTHING to say about it except to stop selling it.
If NBC doesn't like Apples pricing in iTunes, then it is free to not supply. What next, they want a cut of pc sales as well? A cut of tivo? A cut of HD's? A cut of the chips industry (the eadible kind)?
NBC can charge what it wants for their content. NOTHING is stopping them from offering their OWN content through their own shop. It would also be trivial to post it in formats compatible with the iPod.
I think evolution is true, but as the article states, SEVERAL republican candidates do NOT think it is true and they share this with a segment of the population.
Global warming is even worse then evolution. The US goverment denies it exist, or that if it exists is caused by mankind. YOU may think that is a load of bull BUT that is the official view of the republicans.
Therefore a question as you ask "what do you plan to do about global warming" is really no different then asking "what do you plan to do about your immortal soul" to an atheist. The question is loaded.
Let me ask you, how do you intend to make up for you shooting Kennedy? Note how this question gives you no room to even claim you are innocent of the act. Why would a person who is innocent of shooting Kennedy subject himself to this question?
Why would a creationist answer questions on evolution. Why would a global climate change (global warming is a lousy name) denier come up with plans to counter what he claims does not exist?
I read the entire review and I get the distinct feeling that we got an amazing example of Fanboy syndrome at work here.
IF you replace OSX and Apple with say Vista and Microsoft or even KDE and Linux, you would perhaps find a far harsher review.
The icons suck, dock is unclear, new gui api is still not working. Lots of stuff added that is useless and distracts from the usability.
And yet, throughout it all,you sense that the reviewer really wants to be positive. Wants to make excuses, wants to see the good in it all.
WHY? That is NOT the job of a reviewer, he should simply state "this is good" or "this is bad", not try to explain why it happens, or why the designers might have thought it was a good idea.
Same with Apple still using HFS+, lets face it. It is in need of replacement, if MS was still using Fat32 it would get slammed, a linux distro still using ext2 would be laughed at, Apple uses HFS+ well that is just great.
No, this review like so many other Apple reviews reads like it was paid for OR the reviewer is a fanboy.
Really, be honest with yourselve, if you slammed MS for making meaningless chances to the UI in Vista/XP/2000/98 why do you not do the same when Apple does it?
If you come down on inconsistent design rules in KDE why do you lets OSX get away with it?
Read the review again but blot out that this is Apple we are talking about. Would you accept those icons from ANYBODY else? They are pretty horrible you got to admit.
If I read the review I can't think of anything else then "meh". A lot of UI changes, and some small upgrades. This is what Apple spend years on? This is it?
No, don't talk to me about Vista taking 5 years. I don't give a shit about Vista. If you take 2 days to run the mile it doesn't make my half hour run look any better. I am still a fat tub of lard even if you are worse.
Honestly, try to review a product WITHOUT wanting to be either positive OR negative. Review a product on its own merits.
Each time I consider buying a mac I come across a review like this that makes me shudder. Thanks but I will stick with XP for gaming and Linux for desktop yet. One I have gotten used to and the other allows me lots more freedom to have the desktop I want, the way I want it.
The author pretends to want a debate, but then goes on to claim evolution as a fact, ridiculing those candidates who believe otherwise including the current president of the US of A.
DOn't get me wrong, I think bush is a looney and that evolution is self-evident HOWEVER if you already go into it with an opionin that evolution is true AND global warming (and related stuff) is true, then what is left to debate?
It is an intresting idea, but sadly it won't happen.
What is correct? Both.
By alrights todays average computers ARE supercomputers, you just have to measure them against the supercomputers of the past.
By that same token you will NEVER have a handheld superocmputer because by simply combining a couple of them together you would have an ever more powerfull computer.
So the article basiclly states, in the future you will have more processing power then you have today. Mmm, yeah, that might happen.
Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
So, it is a shitload of cash. Guess that shows those people who claimed Steve Jobs was anti-drm because of what he said about music.
DRM is bad, if it is COSTING him money. DRM is GOOD when it MAKES him money. Because that is what this is, DRM, digital rights restrictions. You buy the product, they tell you how to use it.
Oh well, no worry, I am sure some Apple fanboy will explain it all away.
That is the only real way to seriously review a product. Buy a real version of it from a real retailer who had no idea who you are. That is how consumer watchdogs do it, they want to avoid any potential that the producer tries to influence the results.
We all seen the stories about reviewers being send special versions, geared to do really well in the used benchmarks.
Do it like the pros do it. Seperate yourselve completly from the people whose product you are reviewing.
Offcourse, that means the public has to start A paying the reviewers B wait till the product has already been released before the review can be done. Not going to happen, I am afraid.
What happens to linux during an economic downturn, what you mean like the one we had when the bubble burst? People all of sudden realized that no, you do NOT require expensive systems to run servers, you can do it with a whiteboxes running linux. You pick up sun gear for a song as all the dotcoms who had splurged on unneeded equipment went bust, while the likes of google (linux) continued on, because they kept their costs under control.
Your troll sounds reasonable, until you remember linux has been around long enough to have seen what you predict, and came out stronger then ever.
As for MS making lots more money, that is true enough (it is also spending a lot more) but if what you say then MS shouldn't feel at all threatned, so why is it acting like it is? You are sayinga mighty lion is not going to be scared by a little dog, while behind you that lion is trying to climb a tree to get away from it.
Most opensource developers already got good jobs, they do this on the side, because they want too. You are predicting that people will stop their hobby when the economy goes bad? A hobby that doesn't really cost anything except time? You got a weird view of human nature.
I got a next troll for you, linux will die when the developers discover girls.
Although blaming slashdot editors for doing a poor job is... well been there, done that.
It is sad because it really is the key of the issue, linux, cups, kde etc etc are ALL different projects that some other projects called distros happen to put together.
It would be like expecting someone from Redhat to fix problems with Gentoo. It may be what the enduser wants, but it just doesn't work that way.
NOT KDE
NOT Gnome
NOT Ubuntu
NOT RedHat
NOT IBM
NOT Cups
NOT X
What you still don't seem to get is that these are DIFFERENT projects. Do you call Ford when your petrol has water in it? Do you expect the roadservices department to fix your car?
I am a carpenter, I ask you if you want anything fixed, you ask that I fix the faulty washing machine. Do you then rant that I won't fix it? That you don't care about the differences between an electricien and a carpenter?
I am starting to see why Stallman is so pasionate about the GNU/Linux naming.
Now if it had been a person from say RedHat who claimed "oh that is userspace" THEN you would have a point. RedHat supplies a package to the enduser. Linux DOES NOT.
As for pushing all the drives to userspace, well that just makes it clear you know nothing about this matter. SOME drivers can be in the kernel, others do not. Every printer driver in existence as part of the kernel. Ugh. That is so yuck even MS wouldn't do that.
The seperation between kernelspace and userland is NOT theoretical. This is slashdot and it would be like saying that the people who worked on your cars powertrain should fix the issues with the electrical subsystem. It then offcourse becomes obvious why this is idiotic, people who know engines don't need to know anything about electricity, yes both are "power" but at the same time totally different.
The kernels task is to provide the base system that other software can then use to run on. You really don't want to tie to much stuff into the kernel, and if possible migrate stuff OUT of it and keep only the bare fundementals inside. Why? Windows is an excellent reason why. If the kernel crashes your are fucked, if a userspace program crashes, then you just restart that program while the kernel goes on.
Take printers, the kernel does the USB protocol, but CUPS talks to the printer. The kernel handles the AGP bus, but is X11 that does the video work. Therefore the drivers for your printer and video card need to be part of these later projects. Offcourse it gets confusing with video cards because they ALSO need to be part of the kernel.
Say you call up the electricity company to complain your PC don't work, they are very nice and send an engineer over. He will check the outlet, confirm it supplies the proper current and then leave. Your PC still don't work? Not his problem, not his job and most important, he may very well not even know where to start. Call Dell instead.
Cups is a totally different project with its own team of people and own goals and ambition. To say that a kernel developer should just switch to that project instead is starting to smell a lot like extreme arrogance from your part. Who are you to say what an other person should do?
People often start speaking of elitism, but what do you call it when a person like you expects everyone else to jump at their demands?
The strength of Linux comes from its volunteers, who work hard on the stuff they are passionate about. Sadly there are also weaknesses in this which according to the reactions so far seem to be, don't buy Lexmark. I can live with that, if you can't. Well there is a small company called Microsoft operating out of Redmond. YOu might want to give them a call, I am sure they will JUMP at the change to develop drivers specifically for your hardware needs.
Oh but wait. MS doesn't do that does it. Does MS provide code to run old software that don't wanna run on their latests OS? No. Does it provide drivers for hardware that has problems? No.
Odd, that you are so undemanding of a product you pay for, but think volunteers should be at your beg and call.
Next time something don't work, blame the company you paid for it.
If you read the story then it seems as if this mother went to the EFF and they are representing her. The EFF ain't a commercial organization, this isn't a lawyer who is going to get his money wether he wins or loses.
Yet many will spout that she doesn't stand a chance. Yeah, because the EFF lawyers are NOT leaders in their field with a long history of winning.
This is a video with music playing in the background. Imagine if that was illegal, does the same go for images? BAM, you just destroyed all visual media taken in say Disney land. Disney owns the image rights to their park. Hell, simply picture on the street is likely to have lots of copyrighted advertising signs. Your clothes? Owned by the designer. Could you only make homemovies in a sterile white room with naked people? Might get a bit boring.
You could barely film/photograph anything without showing something that infringes on a copyright.
I am not going to watch a video of a baby, but the music was playing in the background, it was NOT a soundtrack added to the video. If we make it illegal to film normal live we have really bend over to far to the music industry.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Talk to a lawyer. A good one. Who does his work because he believes in a cause and does it without saying "win or lose, you own me". IANAL but the EFF is.
Who do you think knows the law better, the people of the EFF who are handling the case OR some idiot with a slashdot account?
She didn't hire some ambulance chaser who is going to get his money anyway, she went to the EFF and they took on her case. That is smarts. The EFF doesn't exactly have a long history of losing. The content industry may be able to hire lots of lawyers but the EFF seems to get the smart ones.
Will she win? Wrong question, will the EFF win on HER behalve.
Also this will play extremely badly for Prince. I doubt he wishes to be known as the artists that sues moms. You can bet your ass that the press will have a field day because of his former name. THey LOVE pun headlines. If you have them a choice between a pun headline about a kitten or the outbreak of WW3, they choose the kitten.
No my friend, I will take the legal opinion of the EFF any time over yours. To many people on slashdot think they are lawyers. I listen to the ones who really are AND have a track record of being any good at it.