Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.
I used to think matrox cards were the way to go but even they have a binary HAL bit that you need if you want the more advanced features needed for xgl and the likes.
Anyway the matrox cards are not supported anyway, as they are listed as missing certain features that are required.
The only lists I ever find mention ONLY nVidia and Ati cards. Yet I have seen some references that Intel was working on opensource drivers for its cards or at least hired some developers to do so.
So, is there a graphics card out there that I can use that is simply fully opensource, no hidden tricks, that is capable enough to give me the candy?
Because that would I think send the strongest message of all, if everyone who runs linux just buys a fully opensource card the others would be sure to take notice.
A gold ring costs hundreds of dollars therefore a chain made of steel rings is going to cost a fortune.
You are comparing the price of a niche luxury item with mainstream production costs.
Air compression ain't that expensive, it is used all the time in industry to power lots of equipment.
I would suggest that the cost of filling your scuba tank is that high because A: you would hate it if it smelled like regular compressed air (think rancid oil) B: the guy running the stand wants to make a fat profit C: the guy selling it saw you coming and knew he could charge you $5-$10 dollars for stuffing air into your own tank.
Basic lesson: price you are charged does NOT equal the cost of production.
Trust me, if your estimates were truth business wouldn't be using so much air compression in production. High powered air tools are becoming the norm and use far less elec then their directly electrically powered cousins. The reason for this is extremely simple. The compressor engine can be optomised for efficiency rather then having to be designed to fit on the tool your holding. It can run 24/7 using a tank to offset peak loads and it can be located somewhere were you don't mind it making a sound like, well nothing quits make a racket like an air compressor.
The zero pollution finally is about the amount of pollution generated at the point of use and compared to petrol cars it does indeed come close to zero.
The only people who would assume that such a claim is a crank are the same one who think global warming can be disproven because it is snowing. People with a brain KNOW without being told what is meant by this "zero emission" claim.
Anything after all polutes, a simple bicycle has a CO2 emitting engine and nasty brake pads.
Lets face it, everyone who uses linux or even thinks about using linux knows that that site is a piece of lying bullshit invented by marketing to give the windows fanboys some excuses for why there IT systems are constantly down and require costly licenses.
You don't even have to be a linux fan to know this. Any decent IT person knows that a website made by the marketing department of any company is hardly going to give you the facts. I wouldn't trust a Red Hat or IBM getthefacts site either.
Read the suggested tools for getting an affecionado to use windows. Getthefacts website. Right, yeah sure that is going to do it.
I probably fall into that category as I would deploy a windows server over my dead body and any MS sales person who comes to me with that sales pitch is going to find the interview terminated within a second of using that kinda crap.
Frankly at this point the only way I would ever consider using MS software again is if Bill Gates went on tv, admitted they had been selling crap and as penance gave away the next round of software for free with a real warranty that says MS pays for any damages that comes from using their software.
I have always had the luxury of only having to deal with unixes for my primary job but even then you invariably get asked to help out with the windows crap because the MSCE's can't handle it when the shit hits the fan. Yes I am still pissed of about code red. Why did I have to come back to the office when MY unixes were totally unaffected.
Pay me back for that and I might be willing to listen about how Windows 2003 isn't the total suckjob that everything else MS has always produced is.
I won't believe you, but it is the best offer you are going to get from me.
Linux delivers, it ain't perfect by a long shot, it requires real skill to use properly BUT the reward is there when the system just keeps running.
It crashed on that flash monstrosity that showsup in a POPUP.
I can only guess this site was never meant to be read by actuall linux users but rather by just by windows sellers who offcourse run windows and LOVE flash and popups.
Anyway it crashed opera wich is something that hasn't happened in a LONG time. Good job MS. Even on Linux/Opera you can still give me a IE experience.
You are asking what will happen to this chinese university that came 2nd, when it aquires the same level of "development" as the univeristy that a shared 3rd?
Mmmm, geez, that is a though one.
They would loose to the next country that spends more time learning then on needless luxuries?
Your question would only work in a positive way IF the chinese had come say third to MIT. If I, an amateur, drive in Formula 1 and end in 10th place then you might well wonder what I could do if in couple of years time I race again but with proper training and a good support team. You do NOT ask that question if I came in second and the so called top team didn't come in second but third. A shared third. First going to another cheapo team like Benneton (do they still race?)
Perhaps MIT should learn from this and cut down on the luxuries a bit.
There was once a system that worked, they changed it, it no longer worked. So you then reverse the change to undo the damage and kill of the people who suggested the change and anyone who in future suggests doing similar changes right?
Offcourse not, that would be sensible, instead you chase the dream, you ask the same people who made the bad changes to come up with yet more changes.
Games in the classroom. Real world problems. Right.
The biggest problem in education right now is the believe that all kids are equal. They are not. Some kids are smart, some are stupid. Some kids like to study, some do not. Some kids are favor the soft subjects, some the hard sciences. Trying to create a one size fits all system is NOT going to work.
In the netherlands there used to be a simple system, you had the LTS/MTS/HTS wich stand for Lower/Middle/Higher Technical School and LEAO/MAVO/HAVO/University were the A stand for administrative. Basically the plumber and the engineer go to the technical schools, the shop assistent and manager go to the administrative school.
ADD and all that crap? Simple go to the T school and 24 hours of shop class a week will take care of it enough that the remaining hours can be spend on theory. Within each school there is still a system of grades so that the brightest students get more theory. A top LTS student was of higher caliber then a top MAVO student. Both got roughly the same level of theory BUT the LTS student did that on top of the practical lessons.
But in the idea that all kids should be molded in to the same standard shape these two system were merged, it had wonderfull results. Drop out rates sored, scores dropped and companies complain that school leavers have no skills. Wonderfull!
EVERYONE in the teaching proffesion itself has warned that this would happen, and now when it is examined why the change happened you get a nasty story off backroom deals and the idea that just a handfull of people decided to experiment with an entire generation of kids.
It don't work, BUT to admit that now would mean that you would have to go against the whole system, any party that suggests going to back to the old system would be forced to say that they got it badly wrong and offcourse that just isn't done.
So we muddle through applying bandaid after bandaid and hope for a miracle.
Might childeren learn from a computer game. Well, early learning is a game so the idea has some appeal BUT real life is NOT a game. So sooner or later kids are going to have to learn an important lesson, that they are now at work and no, there is no recess, no school holidays, that getting suspended means being fired and that basically playtime is over and get your ass to work and nobody gives a shit about your ADD or emotional needs.
I don't think many employers think that this learning experience should come on the workfloor.
One recent example I come across of how badly schools prepare kids for real life is this. A class is 50 minutes yet the schedule is based on a full hour, leaving 10 minutes time between classes, wich are needed to move between classrooms. Sensible, to a point. Shopclass for instance is several hours in the same classroom so the 10 minutes are then for some reason used as a break. This is very nice, and in previous decades was all right, since on the workfloor this is also the custom, every hour there used to be a coffee break. However the laws on the working times have changed with the goverment not laying down the law as hard anymore with the idea that workers and employers could figure it out themselves. Yeah right. If they could there woudn't have been a need for the laws in the first place.
Nowadays typical hours in simple jobs are 2.5 hours of work followed by a break. If you stand on your stripes and demand it. Kids used to a 10 minute break every hour and the light workload of a school shopclass are in for a rude suprise.
Learning in a video game why the fish in the park are dying? Yeah, there is a real
What instead is the case is this, a quality machine will last longer then a crap one. Shocker no?
But that is what the article is claiming, that a 2000 dollar Mac will outlast a 500 dollar Dell. Well, that is a suprise?
If you compare expensive Mac's with expensive PC's you might see a difference but basically all this says is that quality pays for itself. Well, I be damned.
To be honest he talks about technical lifespan NOT usefullness lifespan, be honest, did your designers REALLY need to upgrade their Mac OR did they just want too?
And if I had an IBM machine I wouldn't upgrade it either out of fear the upgrade would turn out to be a Dell.
Simple send each and every person who works for the company in anyway to a lawyer and tell the obey the first rule.
SHUT THE FUCK UP
Just stop talking, do NOT say anything, remain silent.
MS just can't do that and keeps blurting out things that make it seem extremely silly indeed.
This latest claim is like saying that a grease fire in your kitchen isn't dangerous if you live near a firestation. That getting shot through the chest isn't as much a of a hassle and shouldn't count as an attempt on your life because you happen to be in a emergency room.
A bug, is a bug, a security hole is a security hole. That they are even rated is already bad enough. They should have just one variable "fixed" wich is a boolean.
Claiming that a so called critical bug isn't as severe because the unproven untested OS it runs on has some safety measures, which by the way have been programmed by the same people who programmed the bug, is not exactly raising my opinion of MS.
Had they simply listened to the lawyer they would have kept their mouth shut and not dropped another notch in my estimation.
Perhaps it is all part of a cunning plan with them hoping that humans like computers suffer from wrap around and if they lower my opinion far enough it would wrap around to positive again.
or they are stupid.
But I liked the end, unless Vista picks up it will receive the same non-attention as OS-X, now that gotta smart.
The article is intresting enough although you really get the feeling this guy is a major mac fan and a zune hater, but that is alright, doesn't mean he doesn't have a point.
He however then goes on to claim that installed base is everything and that Apple's installed base for computer market is 8%
While a 2% share of the entire worlds PCs wouldnt suggest much of a reason to target Macs for software development, having 8% of the active US installed base certainly does.
He then goes on with this:
Since more than half of all PCs are used in business, Apple owns an even larger portion of the consumer markets installed base, where Apple choses to compete.
Pulling out business PCs, Apple's share of the consumer PC installed base is above 15%, which correlates with the software available for the Mac.
While Apple may be a success this just doesn't make sense. Granted I am from holland and so have no way of knowing how the situation over there is BUT here at least 1 out of 10 business pc's is most certainly NOT a mac. Not any company I have visited except artistic places and they hardly count because of their size.
If you claim such a high percentage of installed base you better explain to me why I never ever see them. There are Apples out there but they are single machines surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of Dells, HP's, Compaqs and even IBM's. Are the mac's perhaps up in the boardroom with a hundred machines for every director?
That is not his only mistake.
In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsofts $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, thats right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.
Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apples 2% of the PC market doesnt seem so small anymore.
I just read several articles on the site claiming that statisitcs are mis-represented comparing useless figures against equally useless figures that do not even correspond.
Simple fact, MS is a software company dabbling in everything from servers to games. Apple on the other hand produces mainly a desktop OS, some tools for that OS BUT is mainly a PC maker. Apple is if you like Dell and MS rolled into one with a bit shaved off the sides (Dells server market and MS games division). This is not helped by the fact that you might use a MS mouse with a Mac and use MS office on OS-X. For that matter how do you count that story about a university going to Apple for its hardware and using dualbooting into windows? Is Apple the box shifter and MS the OS seller if people end up only running windows on Mac hardware?
Comparing their sales is therefore extremely silly. MS is dependant on Dell for its sales and it is Dell that takes the majority of the sales figure for each new PC sold. Yes the MS tax is high but not even close to the major part of the costs of a new PC.
If you could only get new Windows PC's with MS hardware just how fucking high would MS figures be? Well simply add up the sales of the windows PC segments of Dell IBM HP and the countless other Windows PC makers out there. I think the total Windows + Hardware sales figure would make Apples OS-X + Hardware sales figure seem an awfull lot smaller.
It is NOT that his point about the meaningless nature of certain sales figures that is wrong, what is wrong that he then does exactly the same thing by comparing the sales figures of two totally different companies.
Oh and if there is one company that absolutely believes in sales figures it is Apple, they LIVE by the acceptance that reported marketshare is everything. If they did NOT, they would have iTunes for linux or even more so, iTunes the OS neutral edition. Instead they
Your average police officer on tv will use lethal force more often then regular cops ever use their gun on the firing range.
In some a single hero will kill more people then are killed by violence in a whole year in a small country. Hell, games are even worse in that aspect, I shot down more germans in Battle of Britain then the real germans even had aircraft during the entire war.
Does this have an effect on people? Well recently there has been a shooting in holland involving a lot of confusing details and a riot and a cityblock being sealed off for several days BUT most importantly a police officer shooting a man holding a knife.
What you get is a lot of people saying that this is wrong followed by a debate as to when you would shoot your gun against someone attacking you.
What becomes quickly apparent is that most people seem to take their notions of how a fight goes from entertainment and sadly not that part of entertainment that includes police reality shows.
The most often heard comment that shows how out of touch people are is that using a pistol against someone holding a knife is unfair.
Hello? It ain't a friendly round of golf. You don't give the lesser player a change by giving yourselve a handicap. A guy is coming at you with a knife. What do you do:
I drop my pistol, fair is fair, and fight him one on one. If he wins, well that is how the game is played.
I empty my pistol in his head torso and genitals, do NOT pull a knife on a man with a gun.
I take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Option 1 is a movie thing. Only in movies does the good guy choose to fight the bad guy one on one because he knows the writer will make sure he still wins.
In real life a cop does NOT want to get hurt, he has no interest in playing it fair, and most sane people don't expect this. We don't say "Hey, you got one serial rapist out there and the police put 30 men on the case, that ain't fair, it should be one detective against one criminal!"
I don't think violence itself has a bad effect on people but that it can cause them think that real life reflects what they see on tv. Ask a lawyer handling criminal cases how often they have to tell their clinets that no, this isn't Perry Mason and if I pulled his kinda stunts I would be disbarred in a second.
Same as only beautifull people exist in tv land so a person who is a bit simple might come to believe that the US is filled to overflowing with gorgeous thin women.
Is there something that can be done against this? No not really except to raise people to realize that TV is not real. No, just because Norm on Cheers drinks beer every waking hour does NOT mean you can do the same thing without turning into a stinking drunk, and no just because Sam kicks his alcoholism in one episode does NOT mean you can do the same thing.
It doesn't sound complex to me, but perhaps there are some people out there who are fooled by this old show into believing this.
Then again, how many of us when we imagine ourselves in the age of Star Trek put ourselves in a red shirt?
Perhaps what we need is more diversity in shows, in a way reality shows have already shown us that the police is NOT miami vice. Or maybe we all just need to have a sign above our tv, "this is NOT real".
First off some people have trouble admitting something in court that they did not do. Silly isn't it?
It would also mean that he owes that money for the rest of his life (even presuming that in the US they have socialist protections against people being forced to live below the bare minimum, hell even in the EU these basic human laws are being torn apart by the servants of evil)
Imagine he won the lottery or got an inheritance OR even managed to recover, he would then have to pay the RIAA whatever he got for something he didn't do.
That is your idea of a smart move?
The guy claims he wasn't in the state were the infringement took place, offcourse that in itself doesn't prove a thing, there is after all remote access. I am not in the same province as my webserver either, doesn't mean I am not responsible for it. IF he is telling the truth then he is innocent. I would hate to think that innocent people have to say they are guilty just to avoid the cost of a lawsuit. I am aware that this happens in criminal cases already and it is extremely bad. It is a fundemental attack on the very basis of a fair legal system. Make it so costly to defend yourselve that the poor are criminals by default.
The witch hunts worked this way. I think that in general it was thought to be a good thing that these and similar practices were ended and that everyone deserves a fair trial. Even the innocent.
They want a tax on blank media AND prosecute file sharers. That at least is the case in the netherlands and you can see them trying to do the same in canada. Just because the judges have made it "legal" to download in the frozen wastelands of north america does not mean it is legal to upload.
So no a tax on blank media would NOT be good, not until the RIAA and the likes learn to accept that they cannot have it all.
What you have to remember is that the RIAA is not so much against file sharing but against any loss of absolute control of what happens to content. If you elimated all filesharing right now they would launch a crusade against people ripping CD's and putting them on mp3 players, you would have people in court being charged with having more then one copy of a song they bought.
Somewhere in the media industry the idea has grown that they have the absolute god given right to control exactly what happens to their product even after it is sold. It is unique to the content/software industry and it is an evil thought. Imagine for a second any other industry doing the same, Ford saying that you cannot share your car with your wife, cookie company forbidding you to go halfies, it would be idiotic.
You cannot reason with the RIAA. It would be like trying to reason with a hungry shark and you in the water, miles away from land. Sure I suppose you could cut of your finger and feed it to the shark and hope that will satisfy it. It is a novel approach and untested. Or maybe people tested it and for some reason they were never heard from again. I wonder why.
This is not opensource vs closed source at all, at least from the description, but a far simpler, custom build vs off-the-shelf AND/OR inhouse vs external.
Simply put the poster has tried, and failed to get a self developed system going to replace an existing system. Fed up with the delays management has now decided to go for a ready made system. It just so happens that the selfmade system including opensource components while the commercials vendor is not.
However the nature of the source code does NOT matter in this case.
What seems to matter is that management seems to think that the off-the-shelf system will be ready of use sooner and with less hassle then the custom system. They are willing to trade in flexibility that a custom solution can give for this.
This is a sound business decision, not a correct one perhaps, it depends on what exactly they are given up and just how far along the custom setup is.
This is NOT a failure of opensource, if an outside vendor offered a readymade solution using opensource would it not be accepted? The article does not suggest that.
Rather they choose off-the-shelf ready NOW if less flexible software over flexible custom made but so far pie-in-the-sky software.
Personally I have come to hate off-the-shelf content systems with a passion. They never ever work and you spend far more time customizing them to suit your needs then you would building your own system in the first place BUT the difference is that the ready made system is "ready" sooner. Compare it like this, a custom car build up from the ground won't be ready to drive until at least the frame has been finished the drive mecchanics attached, the engine bolted on, some kind of steering fixed up etc etc. Probably after a lot of work. On the other hand an existing car destined to be modified can be driven at day one. Sure, if you want to drive it on day two, three etc you are going to have an hell of job to actually modify it in any significant way BUT you can.
And that is what management often wants. Not a quality product at some point in the future but something that works to a minimum standard today. If that means they will then have to be satisfied with that minimum for all time, so be it. Because lets face it, the custom product might still deliver nothing even after several months.
Personally I have taken the following solution, develop such software in your own time so that you only have to sell it to management once you have a working product. You then "charge" this in whatever form you like, free time, a raise whatever to make up for the free time you spend on it. It works very well, you end up with a system to maintain that actually does what you want it to, management gets their instant result and if you fail at the building it, well it is just your own free time, so who is going to care?
This does indeed happen, when MS next compains about piracy ask them just how many double copies are out there.
The worsed I personally seen is NOT just the above of every machine having two licenses but actually THREE! One XP license set for EVERY machine, the original Dell license, Server 2003 licenses for every server EVEN the one running linux.
SO the linux machine had THREE unused MS licenses.
No wonder MS hates piracy, they know how lucrative it is.
I was once in the situation were an external department was brought back under the companies big wing, basically a bunch of hippes was put in an office of suits. This lead to the following amusing situation.
I could NOT get ssh and ftp access to the companies external servers wich ran the company owned website. The proxy in use, was not just extremely slow and frequently out of action, it also blocked certain key sites an admin/developer needs access too. Trivial stuff perhaps but as a webdeveloper I sometimes need to able to browse to such obscure corners of the internet as the companies own site. I know I know, crazy.
When that was finally solved (well actually I only ever managed to get ssh access, but well, with that you can solve almost every other network problem, but I don't need to tell slashdot that), I got called in by HR, apparently people from other departments had complained that whenever they walked by our desks they always saw us reading news or playing webgames.
Indeed we did, my job was to add a newsfeed to the site and the graphics monkeys were building/adopting flashgames for the site. Odd as it may sound but that required us to actually test that stuff over and over again.
It is truly amazing how bad some companies can get if they get too big. They had outsourced most of their IT and it was a mess, the internal IT department had been gutted by people just leaving. I at one time was asked to make it possible for a re-seller to upload their sales data into the system to automate this process. So I developed a system against the test system they had setup. Reasonable, except I know IT and so I said the test system was not the same as the live system, they said it was, I said it wasn't, they said it was, they knew for certain and I should just do as I told. I told the director it wasn't and went ahead and coded the system. I wanted it tested but their developer was on holiday, so the deadline approached, it went life with everyone present and voila, live system totally incompatible with the test system and the developers holidy, turns out he is on a sailboat on some around the world trip and has given his notice months ago.
Guess who got to clean up the mess? Guess who that sameday activated his resume on monsterboard and handed in his notice?
Still I spent another two weeks trying to get a crappy windows system with undocumented and untested software to accept my linux requests. Would you believe that it can take a windows machine over 5 minutes to add a new customer to a pending activation list?
Apparently this was already known by the reseller wich is why they wanted it automated, NOT because the job of typing in the sales by hand was to much but because the person doing it had to wait for minutes between each entry and refresh to see if the system had finally processed the action.
The sad thing? When I started working there it was just as your describe your departmant, IT in service of the business and not the other way around. That is not just good news for the sales department, it is actually good for the people in IT itself.
Since business won't be adopting Vista until at least the next service pack and that is the trail blazers, the companies the like to live on the edge.
Offcourse my own daily experiences of companies still running NT4 are probably not at all relevan.
Second remains the question of how many people who were in a position to choose linux over windows and were actually willing to contemplate that honestly in the first place believed any of this.
Simply put, the only people that bought the fud were MS shops that will stay MS shops if god himself decended from the heavens to proclaim Linux the second coming and that users of closed source all are invented to go to a ruin in Irak wich some dude claims is called Sodom.
They funded this and it backfired. In essence this is a trial by fire for linux and the GPL and so far it seems to have stood up with flying colors.
FUD stands for Fear, uncertainty and denial. What MS absolutly does NOT want is for uncertainty about the legit nature of Linux to go away. Anymore then they want it to be made certain that the GPL is a legal license that can hold its own in court.
In the Netherlands by a place called Oudewater was a "waag" a large scale, a person acused of witchcraft could be weighed there and if the measured weight was in correspondce with their build they would be a given a certificate that they were not a witch. The unique thing about this one is that it was not fixed. Hence nobody ever was denied a certificate for obvious reasons.
Witchhunters HATED it, they rely on FUD since the facts offcourse are that witches do not exist. A unbiased scale that ALWAYS reports the persons true weight therefore is the enemy of their FUD.
And the same with SCO now, they called Linux a witch and Linux has been weighed and been given a certificate. Anyone else who now calls linux a witch is going to look extremely silly and some people might well start to ask how it comes that not a single person who has been accused and weighed has been found guilty and start to question NOT the people accused but the accusers as to their true motives.
But things don't happen fast, sucks if you are about to be burned to the stake but nowadays we don't just round up people because somebody with dubious motives tells us too. Right US of A? Right EU countries that gave the CIA free access? Right?
If I write a recipe for a cake it may be a completely original cake with a completly NEW taste that will amaze all who try it, nonetheless some lines will be similar to other cake recipes.
How many ways can you say "preheat oven to 180 degrees" without starting to sound like a japanese highschool girl?
Same with "3 medium eggs" and countless other lines.
If you bake regular cake the ingredients are in a 1:1:1:1 relation, flower, sugar, butter and eggs. 2:1:1 for the cake that is used for eh, cakes (god translating this stuff to english for dutch is damned hard) (eggs, flower, sugar (if I recall correctly).
The last one especially forms the base for a lot of different cakes with different fullings and toppings and whatever it is called yet all these different deserts share the same lines for making the base.
By your logic the ones I once created we not created by me because some standard parts of it I copied from textbook examples?
No, Linus Torvald could well have written the file in question himself, he would just have been following the textbook examples as a guide.
Next thing SCO will be claiming is that they own the english language and that therefore any comments included in code that are in english belongs to them.
If your logic and that of sco worked then no architect can create an original work because all blueprints share the same layout with the same default values and even the same symbols!
It is just such a wrong idea that it is almost impossible to explain just how silly it is.
In real life you can create something while still using standard material. The difference in in the fine details.
Whenever someone mods a game, you are doing exactly what George Lucas did, changing the "story" to what you thinks work better.
NWN2 is a prudish game with no nudity, that was a morallity decision by the creators, so are people who mod the game for nudity/sexy altering the original true vision?
There is also demand for more content, especialy romance/interaction type content. This again is then going against the original work. If Obsidian released a patch that suddenly allowed same sex romances to occur would that be seen in the same light as George Lucas work?
What if they released a patch that allowed the final weapon (a sword) to be formed into something more logical for non-fighter classes? Say gloves for a monk and staff for magic users?
What if they changed the story so that the two deaths are no longer unavoidable but depends on your influence with the characters?
All of the would be an improvement in terms of depth, it would be more of a roleplaying game, but when would it cross the line into Han Solo becomes a wimp territory? A patch is afterall mandatory if you want to play online so effectivly it would be like Lucas not releasing DVD's of the orignal version.
There is a hentai game called X-change3, for the western release two scenes were altered because the company didn't want to risk trouble (there is no actuall law against the scenes and since it is an adult game anyway no problem with ratings either). Yet this changes the original story. Almost similar to the han solo incident, if you want to see the original story you have to go to the old japanese copy.
If games are art wich so many claim at wich point does it then become vandalism to alter them? It is not a new question in itself, history has always had periods in wich art has beeen censored/altered to suit the politics of that time BUT in the digital age it has become easier then ever before.
Imagine if you like a full CGI movie but one that is released NOT as a regular video file but rather the animation file so that you render it locally on your own machine. It then becomes trivial to alter it, if YOU choose to not make Han Solo shoot first, is that the same as George Lucas not doing it?
It is something I have thinking about messing around with NWN2, I am seriously tempted to take the original content and rework it to be fuller, remove some of the fluff companions and instead focus more heavily on the better characters and make your actions count for more. In short, the two females would die or not die depending on your actions. For Amie it would depend on your leadership capability, does she obey you to stay out of it OR does she ignore you. Your actions during the fair would determine that.
For Shandra it would be slightly more complex, if you have leadership skill, she would obey your orders, if she had deep feelings for you she would choose to sacrifice her UNLESS you own actions have shown her that selfisness is the way.
The simple fact is that I do not like the heavy handed drama the game has, didn't like it in Wing Commander and still don't like it. People under my command only die on my express orders so stop bleeding soldier, that is an order!
But if I do that am I then not just like Lucas, re-writing an existing finished story to suit my needs?
I happened to be be in an IRC channel were one also hang out, or claimed to be one anyway, and he was very proud for posting the troll that the GNAA does (or used too).
Yet one day he was ranting about how some guy was wasting his bandwidth on his site by downloading the same thing over and over again.
Griefers, bullies and their like can dish it out but they can't take it. This is absolutly nothing different from criminals who abuse their victims without mercy and then complain when the police is a bit too rough.
But in a way we are lucky in this case, all too easily the press could have just gone the usuall "awh, the poor victim" route and taken his side. See the movie "dead man walking" and wonder why it isn't a two parter, the second part being called "dead woman walking" following the last days of the man's victim.
I am rather bemused by how easily people seem to give up on the idea of privacy however, remember all the outrage about that ousted blogger a few days ago?
The ancient empires have indeed been around a long time indeed. And they did NOTHING.
Those thousand year empires you speak about have indeed lasted for a long time, and that is all they did. They stopped their progress often getting locked into pointless and resource sapping religious or political crap that kept them from achieving in a thousand years what western democracy has done in a couple of hundred years.
Just think back to the dawn of western democracy, when first we started to replace kings with parlements and the level of technology available, often more primitive then that of ancient Rome or even China of that age. Yet somehow this new "democratic" system, with stops and starts has been moving at an amazing pace ever since.
Coincedence?
Just exactly WHY has science progressed the fastest in the west and not in one of those ancient empires that have been around for ages? By your logic we would all be ruled by the turks or the chinese (Imperial chinese, the communist takeover effectibly started them over again)
Oh and as far as extremes go, I use the term as in meaning the opposites. Not as in radical.
It was the allies who used "lesser" people to augment their war machine, people previously considered unfit to do anything meaningfull were allowed to play a more active role. I am talking about females working in the war industies and for instance blacks and later even japanese americans being used in the armed forces. Hell it even saw women in fighting roles to an unprecedented degree if you count intelligence operations and the soviet use of women.
After WW2 this was supposed to go away again, women back to the kitchen and blacks back to the end of busses, some people feel however that once being given the taste of this freedom these groups didn't want to go back.
In that sense WW2 was a boost for equal rights, in the allied nations.
Oh and I said, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. The problem of course is that when you are in the night is impossible to say just how dark it will still be. If you take the european view then WW2 was an extremely dark hour, just before the dawn of the EU and peace for the last 60 years and counting.
I am not saying things won't get worse, but that it will also get better, either by our own hands or by future generations. If you don't want to wait that long, then act now.
Oh but a ray of sunshine, the republicans didn't do so well in the last elections and the upcoming ones might just see an all democrate US goverment. Will they reverse the mistakes OR will they add to them? Will the night become darker OR are we at the crack of dawn?
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Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.
I used to think matrox cards were the way to go but even they have a binary HAL bit that you need if you want the more advanced features needed for xgl and the likes.
Anyway the matrox cards are not supported anyway, as they are listed as missing certain features that are required.
The only lists I ever find mention ONLY nVidia and Ati cards. Yet I have seen some references that Intel was working on opensource drivers for its cards or at least hired some developers to do so.
So, is there a graphics card out there that I can use that is simply fully opensource, no hidden tricks, that is capable enough to give me the candy?
Because that would I think send the strongest message of all, if everyone who runs linux just buys a fully opensource card the others would be sure to take notice.
A gold ring costs hundreds of dollars therefore a chain made of steel rings is going to cost a fortune.
You are comparing the price of a niche luxury item with mainstream production costs.
Air compression ain't that expensive, it is used all the time in industry to power lots of equipment.
I would suggest that the cost of filling your scuba tank is that high because A: you would hate it if it smelled like regular compressed air (think rancid oil) B: the guy running the stand wants to make a fat profit C: the guy selling it saw you coming and knew he could charge you $5-$10 dollars for stuffing air into your own tank.
Basic lesson: price you are charged does NOT equal the cost of production.
Trust me, if your estimates were truth business wouldn't be using so much air compression in production. High powered air tools are becoming the norm and use far less elec then their directly electrically powered cousins. The reason for this is extremely simple. The compressor engine can be optomised for efficiency rather then having to be designed to fit on the tool your holding. It can run 24/7 using a tank to offset peak loads and it can be located somewhere were you don't mind it making a sound like, well nothing quits make a racket like an air compressor.
The zero pollution finally is about the amount of pollution generated at the point of use and compared to petrol cars it does indeed come close to zero.
The only people who would assume that such a claim is a crank are the same one who think global warming can be disproven because it is snowing. People with a brain KNOW without being told what is meant by this "zero emission" claim.
Anything after all polutes, a simple bicycle has a CO2 emitting engine and nasty brake pads.
Tell me, sir. Did your mother drop you on your head or were you just born stupid.
Here is a hint, there isn't a big market in India for electrically heated seats either.
How does it keep my feet warm in the scorching heat. Jezus H. Christ.
Lets face it, everyone who uses linux or even thinks about using linux knows that that site is a piece of lying bullshit invented by marketing to give the windows fanboys some excuses for why there IT systems are constantly down and require costly licenses.
You don't even have to be a linux fan to know this. Any decent IT person knows that a website made by the marketing department of any company is hardly going to give you the facts. I wouldn't trust a Red Hat or IBM getthefacts site either.
Read the suggested tools for getting an affecionado to use windows. Getthefacts website. Right, yeah sure that is going to do it.
I probably fall into that category as I would deploy a windows server over my dead body and any MS sales person who comes to me with that sales pitch is going to find the interview terminated within a second of using that kinda crap.
Frankly at this point the only way I would ever consider using MS software again is if Bill Gates went on tv, admitted they had been selling crap and as penance gave away the next round of software for free with a real warranty that says MS pays for any damages that comes from using their software.
I have always had the luxury of only having to deal with unixes for my primary job but even then you invariably get asked to help out with the windows crap because the MSCE's can't handle it when the shit hits the fan. Yes I am still pissed of about code red. Why did I have to come back to the office when MY unixes were totally unaffected.
Pay me back for that and I might be willing to listen about how Windows 2003 isn't the total suckjob that everything else MS has always produced is.
I won't believe you, but it is the best offer you are going to get from me.
Linux delivers, it ain't perfect by a long shot, it requires real skill to use properly BUT the reward is there when the system just keeps running.
It crashed on that flash monstrosity that showsup in a POPUP.
I can only guess this site was never meant to be read by actuall linux users but rather by just by windows sellers who offcourse run windows and LOVE flash and popups.
Anyway it crashed opera wich is something that hasn't happened in a LONG time. Good job MS. Even on Linux/Opera you can still give me a IE experience.
The enemies of ancient egypt were orcs and vampires? There you have it gentlemen, the proof that education through games is a bad idea.
What? Wrong story? Oh.
Well, okay, so what you take half a page to say is, "follow the money". Okay got it.
But what you really should say is this. Be doubtfull of a person who disagrees with you but be suspicious as hell when a person agrees with you.
In that light, "just what is your game bud, who is paying you eh!"
You are asking what will happen to this chinese university that came 2nd, when it aquires the same level of "development" as the univeristy that a shared 3rd?
Mmmm, geez, that is a though one.
They would loose to the next country that spends more time learning then on needless luxuries?
Your question would only work in a positive way IF the chinese had come say third to MIT. If I, an amateur, drive in Formula 1 and end in 10th place then you might well wonder what I could do if in couple of years time I race again but with proper training and a good support team. You do NOT ask that question if I came in second and the so called top team didn't come in second but third. A shared third. First going to another cheapo team like Benneton (do they still race?)
Perhaps MIT should learn from this and cut down on the luxuries a bit.
There was once a system that worked, they changed it, it no longer worked. So you then reverse the change to undo the damage and kill of the people who suggested the change and anyone who in future suggests doing similar changes right?
Offcourse not, that would be sensible, instead you chase the dream, you ask the same people who made the bad changes to come up with yet more changes.
Games in the classroom. Real world problems. Right.
The biggest problem in education right now is the believe that all kids are equal. They are not. Some kids are smart, some are stupid. Some kids like to study, some do not. Some kids are favor the soft subjects, some the hard sciences. Trying to create a one size fits all system is NOT going to work.
In the netherlands there used to be a simple system, you had the LTS/MTS/HTS wich stand for Lower/Middle/Higher Technical School and LEAO/MAVO/HAVO/University were the A stand for administrative. Basically the plumber and the engineer go to the technical schools, the shop assistent and manager go to the administrative school.
ADD and all that crap? Simple go to the T school and 24 hours of shop class a week will take care of it enough that the remaining hours can be spend on theory. Within each school there is still a system of grades so that the brightest students get more theory. A top LTS student was of higher caliber then a top MAVO student. Both got roughly the same level of theory BUT the LTS student did that on top of the practical lessons.
But in the idea that all kids should be molded in to the same standard shape these two system were merged, it had wonderfull results. Drop out rates sored, scores dropped and companies complain that school leavers have no skills. Wonderfull!
EVERYONE in the teaching proffesion itself has warned that this would happen, and now when it is examined why the change happened you get a nasty story off backroom deals and the idea that just a handfull of people decided to experiment with an entire generation of kids.
It don't work, BUT to admit that now would mean that you would have to go against the whole system, any party that suggests going to back to the old system would be forced to say that they got it badly wrong and offcourse that just isn't done.
So we muddle through applying bandaid after bandaid and hope for a miracle.
Might childeren learn from a computer game. Well, early learning is a game so the idea has some appeal BUT real life is NOT a game. So sooner or later kids are going to have to learn an important lesson, that they are now at work and no, there is no recess, no school holidays, that getting suspended means being fired and that basically playtime is over and get your ass to work and nobody gives a shit about your ADD or emotional needs.
I don't think many employers think that this learning experience should come on the workfloor.
One recent example I come across of how badly schools prepare kids for real life is this. A class is 50 minutes yet the schedule is based on a full hour, leaving 10 minutes time between classes, wich are needed to move between classrooms. Sensible, to a point. Shopclass for instance is several hours in the same classroom so the 10 minutes are then for some reason used as a break. This is very nice, and in previous decades was all right, since on the workfloor this is also the custom, every hour there used to be a coffee break. However the laws on the working times have changed with the goverment not laying down the law as hard anymore with the idea that workers and employers could figure it out themselves. Yeah right. If they could there woudn't have been a need for the laws in the first place.
Nowadays typical hours in simple jobs are 2.5 hours of work followed by a break. If you stand on your stripes and demand it. Kids used to a 10 minute break every hour and the light workload of a school shopclass are in for a rude suprise.
Learning in a video game why the fish in the park are dying? Yeah, there is a real
What instead is the case is this, a quality machine will last longer then a crap one. Shocker no?
But that is what the article is claiming, that a 2000 dollar Mac will outlast a 500 dollar Dell. Well, that is a suprise?
If you compare expensive Mac's with expensive PC's you might see a difference but basically all this says is that quality pays for itself. Well, I be damned.
To be honest he talks about technical lifespan NOT usefullness lifespan, be honest, did your designers REALLY need to upgrade their Mac OR did they just want too?
And if I had an IBM machine I wouldn't upgrade it either out of fear the upgrade would turn out to be a Dell.
Simple send each and every person who works for the company in anyway to a lawyer and tell the obey the first rule.
SHUT THE FUCK UP
Just stop talking, do NOT say anything, remain silent.
MS just can't do that and keeps blurting out things that make it seem extremely silly indeed.
This latest claim is like saying that a grease fire in your kitchen isn't dangerous if you live near a firestation. That getting shot through the chest isn't as much a of a hassle and shouldn't count as an attempt on your life because you happen to be in a emergency room.
A bug, is a bug, a security hole is a security hole. That they are even rated is already bad enough. They should have just one variable "fixed" wich is a boolean.
Claiming that a so called critical bug isn't as severe because the unproven untested OS it runs on has some safety measures, which by the way have been programmed by the same people who programmed the bug, is not exactly raising my opinion of MS.
Had they simply listened to the lawyer they would have kept their mouth shut and not dropped another notch in my estimation.
Perhaps it is all part of a cunning plan with them hoping that humans like computers suffer from wrap around and if they lower my opinion far enough it would wrap around to positive again.
or they are stupid.
But I liked the end, unless Vista picks up it will receive the same non-attention as OS-X, now that gotta smart.
The article is intresting enough although you really get the feeling this guy is a major mac fan and a zune hater, but that is alright, doesn't mean he doesn't have a point.
He however then goes on to claim that installed base is everything and that Apple's installed base for computer market is 8%
While a 2% share of the entire worlds PCs wouldnt suggest much of a reason to target Macs for software development, having 8% of the active US installed base certainly does.
He then goes on with this:
Since more than half of all PCs are used in business, Apple owns an even larger portion of the consumer markets installed base, where Apple choses to compete.
Pulling out business PCs, Apple's share of the consumer PC installed base is above 15%, which correlates with the software available for the Mac.
While Apple may be a success this just doesn't make sense. Granted I am from holland and so have no way of knowing how the situation over there is BUT here at least 1 out of 10 business pc's is most certainly NOT a mac. Not any company I have visited except artistic places and they hardly count because of their size.
If you claim such a high percentage of installed base you better explain to me why I never ever see them. There are Apples out there but they are single machines surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of Dells, HP's, Compaqs and even IBM's. Are the mac's perhaps up in the boardroom with a hundred machines for every director?
That is not his only mistake.
In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsofts $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, thats right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.
Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apples 2% of the PC market doesnt seem so small anymore.
I just read several articles on the site claiming that statisitcs are mis-represented comparing useless figures against equally useless figures that do not even correspond.
Simple fact, MS is a software company dabbling in everything from servers to games. Apple on the other hand produces mainly a desktop OS, some tools for that OS BUT is mainly a PC maker. Apple is if you like Dell and MS rolled into one with a bit shaved off the sides (Dells server market and MS games division). This is not helped by the fact that you might use a MS mouse with a Mac and use MS office on OS-X. For that matter how do you count that story about a university going to Apple for its hardware and using dualbooting into windows? Is Apple the box shifter and MS the OS seller if people end up only running windows on Mac hardware?
Comparing their sales is therefore extremely silly. MS is dependant on Dell for its sales and it is Dell that takes the majority of the sales figure for each new PC sold. Yes the MS tax is high but not even close to the major part of the costs of a new PC.
If you could only get new Windows PC's with MS hardware just how fucking high would MS figures be? Well simply add up the sales of the windows PC segments of Dell IBM HP and the countless other Windows PC makers out there. I think the total Windows + Hardware sales figure would make Apples OS-X + Hardware sales figure seem an awfull lot smaller.
It is NOT that his point about the meaningless nature of certain sales figures that is wrong, what is wrong that he then does exactly the same thing by comparing the sales figures of two totally different companies.
Oh and if there is one company that absolutely believes in sales figures it is Apple, they LIVE by the acceptance that reported marketshare is everything. If they did NOT, they would have iTunes for linux or even more so, iTunes the OS neutral edition. Instead they
Your average police officer on tv will use lethal force more often then regular cops ever use their gun on the firing range.
In some a single hero will kill more people then are killed by violence in a whole year in a small country. Hell, games are even worse in that aspect, I shot down more germans in Battle of Britain then the real germans even had aircraft during the entire war.
Does this have an effect on people? Well recently there has been a shooting in holland involving a lot of confusing details and a riot and a cityblock being sealed off for several days BUT most importantly a police officer shooting a man holding a knife.
What you get is a lot of people saying that this is wrong followed by a debate as to when you would shoot your gun against someone attacking you.
What becomes quickly apparent is that most people seem to take their notions of how a fight goes from entertainment and sadly not that part of entertainment that includes police reality shows.
The most often heard comment that shows how out of touch people are is that using a pistol against someone holding a knife is unfair.
Hello? It ain't a friendly round of golf. You don't give the lesser player a change by giving yourselve a handicap. A guy is coming at you with a knife. What do you do:
Option 1 is a movie thing. Only in movies does the good guy choose to fight the bad guy one on one because he knows the writer will make sure he still wins.
In real life a cop does NOT want to get hurt, he has no interest in playing it fair, and most sane people don't expect this. We don't say "Hey, you got one serial rapist out there and the police put 30 men on the case, that ain't fair, it should be one detective against one criminal!"
I don't think violence itself has a bad effect on people but that it can cause them think that real life reflects what they see on tv. Ask a lawyer handling criminal cases how often they have to tell their clinets that no, this isn't Perry Mason and if I pulled his kinda stunts I would be disbarred in a second.
Same as only beautifull people exist in tv land so a person who is a bit simple might come to believe that the US is filled to overflowing with gorgeous thin women.
Is there something that can be done against this? No not really except to raise people to realize that TV is not real. No, just because Norm on Cheers drinks beer every waking hour does NOT mean you can do the same thing without turning into a stinking drunk, and no just because Sam kicks his alcoholism in one episode does NOT mean you can do the same thing.
It doesn't sound complex to me, but perhaps there are some people out there who are fooled by this old show into believing this.
Then again, how many of us when we imagine ourselves in the age of Star Trek put ourselves in a red shirt?
Perhaps what we need is more diversity in shows, in a way reality shows have already shown us that the police is NOT miami vice. Or maybe we all just need to have a sign above our tv, "this is NOT real".
First off some people have trouble admitting something in court that they did not do. Silly isn't it?
It would also mean that he owes that money for the rest of his life (even presuming that in the US they have socialist protections against people being forced to live below the bare minimum, hell even in the EU these basic human laws are being torn apart by the servants of evil)
Imagine he won the lottery or got an inheritance OR even managed to recover, he would then have to pay the RIAA whatever he got for something he didn't do.
That is your idea of a smart move?
The guy claims he wasn't in the state were the infringement took place, offcourse that in itself doesn't prove a thing, there is after all remote access. I am not in the same province as my webserver either, doesn't mean I am not responsible for it. IF he is telling the truth then he is innocent. I would hate to think that innocent people have to say they are guilty just to avoid the cost of a lawsuit. I am aware that this happens in criminal cases already and it is extremely bad. It is a fundemental attack on the very basis of a fair legal system. Make it so costly to defend yourselve that the poor are criminals by default.
The witch hunts worked this way. I think that in general it was thought to be a good thing that these and similar practices were ended and that everyone deserves a fair trial. Even the innocent.
They want a tax on blank media AND prosecute file sharers. That at least is the case in the netherlands and you can see them trying to do the same in canada. Just because the judges have made it "legal" to download in the frozen wastelands of north america does not mean it is legal to upload.
So no a tax on blank media would NOT be good, not until the RIAA and the likes learn to accept that they cannot have it all.
What you have to remember is that the RIAA is not so much against file sharing but against any loss of absolute control of what happens to content. If you elimated all filesharing right now they would launch a crusade against people ripping CD's and putting them on mp3 players, you would have people in court being charged with having more then one copy of a song they bought.
Somewhere in the media industry the idea has grown that they have the absolute god given right to control exactly what happens to their product even after it is sold. It is unique to the content/software industry and it is an evil thought. Imagine for a second any other industry doing the same, Ford saying that you cannot share your car with your wife, cookie company forbidding you to go halfies, it would be idiotic.
You cannot reason with the RIAA. It would be like trying to reason with a hungry shark and you in the water, miles away from land. Sure I suppose you could cut of your finger and feed it to the shark and hope that will satisfy it. It is a novel approach and untested. Or maybe people tested it and for some reason they were never heard from again. I wonder why.
This is not opensource vs closed source at all, at least from the description, but a far simpler, custom build vs off-the-shelf AND/OR inhouse vs external.
Simply put the poster has tried, and failed to get a self developed system going to replace an existing system. Fed up with the delays management has now decided to go for a ready made system. It just so happens that the selfmade system including opensource components while the commercials vendor is not.
However the nature of the source code does NOT matter in this case.
What seems to matter is that management seems to think that the off-the-shelf system will be ready of use sooner and with less hassle then the custom system. They are willing to trade in flexibility that a custom solution can give for this.
This is a sound business decision, not a correct one perhaps, it depends on what exactly they are given up and just how far along the custom setup is.
This is NOT a failure of opensource, if an outside vendor offered a readymade solution using opensource would it not be accepted? The article does not suggest that.
Rather they choose off-the-shelf ready NOW if less flexible software over flexible custom made but so far pie-in-the-sky software.
Personally I have come to hate off-the-shelf content systems with a passion. They never ever work and you spend far more time customizing them to suit your needs then you would building your own system in the first place BUT the difference is that the ready made system is "ready" sooner. Compare it like this, a custom car build up from the ground won't be ready to drive until at least the frame has been finished the drive mecchanics attached, the engine bolted on, some kind of steering fixed up etc etc. Probably after a lot of work. On the other hand an existing car destined to be modified can be driven at day one. Sure, if you want to drive it on day two, three etc you are going to have an hell of job to actually modify it in any significant way BUT you can.
And that is what management often wants. Not a quality product at some point in the future but something that works to a minimum standard today. If that means they will then have to be satisfied with that minimum for all time, so be it. Because lets face it, the custom product might still deliver nothing even after several months.
Personally I have taken the following solution, develop such software in your own time so that you only have to sell it to management once you have a working product. You then "charge" this in whatever form you like, free time, a raise whatever to make up for the free time you spend on it. It works very well, you end up with a system to maintain that actually does what you want it to, management gets their instant result and if you fail at the building it, well it is just your own free time, so who is going to care?
This does indeed happen, when MS next compains about piracy ask them just how many double copies are out there.
The worsed I personally seen is NOT just the above of every machine having two licenses but actually THREE! One XP license set for EVERY machine, the original Dell license, Server 2003 licenses for every server EVEN the one running linux.
SO the linux machine had THREE unused MS licenses.
No wonder MS hates piracy, they know how lucrative it is.
I was once in the situation were an external department was brought back under the companies big wing, basically a bunch of hippes was put in an office of suits. This lead to the following amusing situation.
I could NOT get ssh and ftp access to the companies external servers wich ran the company owned website. The proxy in use, was not just extremely slow and frequently out of action, it also blocked certain key sites an admin/developer needs access too. Trivial stuff perhaps but as a webdeveloper I sometimes need to able to browse to such obscure corners of the internet as the companies own site. I know I know, crazy.
When that was finally solved (well actually I only ever managed to get ssh access, but well, with that you can solve almost every other network problem, but I don't need to tell slashdot that), I got called in by HR, apparently people from other departments had complained that whenever they walked by our desks they always saw us reading news or playing webgames.
Indeed we did, my job was to add a newsfeed to the site and the graphics monkeys were building/adopting flashgames for the site. Odd as it may sound but that required us to actually test that stuff over and over again.
It is truly amazing how bad some companies can get if they get too big. They had outsourced most of their IT and it was a mess, the internal IT department had been gutted by people just leaving. I at one time was asked to make it possible for a re-seller to upload their sales data into the system to automate this process. So I developed a system against the test system they had setup. Reasonable, except I know IT and so I said the test system was not the same as the live system, they said it was, I said it wasn't, they said it was, they knew for certain and I should just do as I told. I told the director it wasn't and went ahead and coded the system. I wanted it tested but their developer was on holiday, so the deadline approached, it went life with everyone present and voila, live system totally incompatible with the test system and the developers holidy, turns out he is on a sailboat on some around the world trip and has given his notice months ago.
Guess who got to clean up the mess? Guess who that sameday activated his resume on monsterboard and handed in his notice?
Still I spent another two weeks trying to get a crappy windows system with undocumented and untested software to accept my linux requests. Would you believe that it can take a windows machine over 5 minutes to add a new customer to a pending activation list?
Apparently this was already known by the reseller wich is why they wanted it automated, NOT because the job of typing in the sales by hand was to much but because the person doing it had to wait for minutes between each entry and refresh to see if the system had finally processed the action.
The sad thing? When I started working there it was just as your describe your departmant, IT in service of the business and not the other way around. That is not just good news for the sales department, it is actually good for the people in IT itself.
Since business won't be adopting Vista until at least the next service pack and that is the trail blazers, the companies the like to live on the edge.
Offcourse my own daily experiences of companies still running NT4 are probably not at all relevan.
Second remains the question of how many people who were in a position to choose linux over windows and were actually willing to contemplate that honestly in the first place believed any of this.
Simply put, the only people that bought the fud were MS shops that will stay MS shops if god himself decended from the heavens to proclaim Linux the second coming and that users of closed source all are invented to go to a ruin in Irak wich some dude claims is called Sodom.
They funded this and it backfired. In essence this is a trial by fire for linux and the GPL and so far it seems to have stood up with flying colors.
FUD stands for Fear, uncertainty and denial. What MS absolutly does NOT want is for uncertainty about the legit nature of Linux to go away. Anymore then they want it to be made certain that the GPL is a legal license that can hold its own in court.
In the Netherlands by a place called Oudewater was a "waag" a large scale, a person acused of witchcraft could be weighed there and if the measured weight was in correspondce with their build they would be a given a certificate that they were not a witch. The unique thing about this one is that it was not fixed. Hence nobody ever was denied a certificate for obvious reasons.
Witchhunters HATED it, they rely on FUD since the facts offcourse are that witches do not exist. A unbiased scale that ALWAYS reports the persons true weight therefore is the enemy of their FUD.
And the same with SCO now, they called Linux a witch and Linux has been weighed and been given a certificate. Anyone else who now calls linux a witch is going to look extremely silly and some people might well start to ask how it comes that not a single person who has been accused and weighed has been found guilty and start to question NOT the people accused but the accusers as to their true motives.
But things don't happen fast, sucks if you are about to be burned to the stake but nowadays we don't just round up people because somebody with dubious motives tells us too. Right US of A? Right EU countries that gave the CIA free access? Right?
If I write a recipe for a cake it may be a completely original cake with a completly NEW taste that will amaze all who try it, nonetheless some lines will be similar to other cake recipes.
How many ways can you say "preheat oven to 180 degrees" without starting to sound like a japanese highschool girl?
Same with "3 medium eggs" and countless other lines.
If you bake regular cake the ingredients are in a 1:1:1:1 relation, flower, sugar, butter and eggs. 2:1:1 for the cake that is used for eh, cakes (god translating this stuff to english for dutch is damned hard) (eggs, flower, sugar (if I recall correctly).
The last one especially forms the base for a lot of different cakes with different fullings and toppings and whatever it is called yet all these different deserts share the same lines for making the base.
By your logic the ones I once created we not created by me because some standard parts of it I copied from textbook examples?
No, Linus Torvald could well have written the file in question himself, he would just have been following the textbook examples as a guide.
Next thing SCO will be claiming is that they own the english language and that therefore any comments included in code that are in english belongs to them.
If your logic and that of sco worked then no architect can create an original work because all blueprints share the same layout with the same default values and even the same symbols!
It is just such a wrong idea that it is almost impossible to explain just how silly it is.
In real life you can create something while still using standard material. The difference in in the fine details.
Whenever someone mods a game, you are doing exactly what George Lucas did, changing the "story" to what you thinks work better.
NWN2 is a prudish game with no nudity, that was a morallity decision by the creators, so are people who mod the game for nudity/sexy altering the original true vision?
There is also demand for more content, especialy romance/interaction type content. This again is then going against the original work. If Obsidian released a patch that suddenly allowed same sex romances to occur would that be seen in the same light as George Lucas work?
What if they released a patch that allowed the final weapon (a sword) to be formed into something more logical for non-fighter classes? Say gloves for a monk and staff for magic users?
What if they changed the story so that the two deaths are no longer unavoidable but depends on your influence with the characters?
All of the would be an improvement in terms of depth, it would be more of a roleplaying game, but when would it cross the line into Han Solo becomes a wimp territory? A patch is afterall mandatory if you want to play online so effectivly it would be like Lucas not releasing DVD's of the orignal version.
There is a hentai game called X-change3, for the western release two scenes were altered because the company didn't want to risk trouble (there is no actuall law against the scenes and since it is an adult game anyway no problem with ratings either). Yet this changes the original story. Almost similar to the han solo incident, if you want to see the original story you have to go to the old japanese copy.
If games are art wich so many claim at wich point does it then become vandalism to alter them? It is not a new question in itself, history has always had periods in wich art has beeen censored/altered to suit the politics of that time BUT in the digital age it has become easier then ever before.
Imagine if you like a full CGI movie but one that is released NOT as a regular video file but rather the animation file so that you render it locally on your own machine. It then becomes trivial to alter it, if YOU choose to not make Han Solo shoot first, is that the same as George Lucas not doing it?
It is something I have thinking about messing around with NWN2, I am seriously tempted to take the original content and rework it to be fuller, remove some of the fluff companions and instead focus more heavily on the better characters and make your actions count for more. In short, the two females would die or not die depending on your actions. For Amie it would depend on your leadership capability, does she obey you to stay out of it OR does she ignore you. Your actions during the fair would determine that.
For Shandra it would be slightly more complex, if you have leadership skill, she would obey your orders, if she had deep feelings for you she would choose to sacrifice her UNLESS you own actions have shown her that selfisness is the way.
The simple fact is that I do not like the heavy handed drama the game has, didn't like it in Wing Commander and still don't like it. People under my command only die on my express orders so stop bleeding soldier, that is an order!
But if I do that am I then not just like Lucas, re-writing an existing finished story to suit my needs?
Well, lets face it, on slashdot we are already doing our bit. Just say no to reproduction, or else the terrorists have won!
I happened to be be in an IRC channel were one also hang out, or claimed to be one anyway, and he was very proud for posting the troll that the GNAA does (or used too).
Yet one day he was ranting about how some guy was wasting his bandwidth on his site by downloading the same thing over and over again.
Griefers, bullies and their like can dish it out but they can't take it. This is absolutly nothing different from criminals who abuse their victims without mercy and then complain when the police is a bit too rough.
But in a way we are lucky in this case, all too easily the press could have just gone the usuall "awh, the poor victim" route and taken his side. See the movie "dead man walking" and wonder why it isn't a two parter, the second part being called "dead woman walking" following the last days of the man's victim.
I am rather bemused by how easily people seem to give up on the idea of privacy however, remember all the outrage about that ousted blogger a few days ago?
The ancient empires have indeed been around a long time indeed. And they did NOTHING.
Those thousand year empires you speak about have indeed lasted for a long time, and that is all they did. They stopped their progress often getting locked into pointless and resource sapping religious or political crap that kept them from achieving in a thousand years what western democracy has done in a couple of hundred years.
Just think back to the dawn of western democracy, when first we started to replace kings with parlements and the level of technology available, often more primitive then that of ancient Rome or even China of that age. Yet somehow this new "democratic" system, with stops and starts has been moving at an amazing pace ever since.
Coincedence?
Just exactly WHY has science progressed the fastest in the west and not in one of those ancient empires that have been around for ages? By your logic we would all be ruled by the turks or the chinese (Imperial chinese, the communist takeover effectibly started them over again)
Oh and as far as extremes go, I use the term as in meaning the opposites. Not as in radical.
It was the allies who used "lesser" people to augment their war machine, people previously considered unfit to do anything meaningfull were allowed to play a more active role. I am talking about females working in the war industies and for instance blacks and later even japanese americans being used in the armed forces. Hell it even saw women in fighting roles to an unprecedented degree if you count intelligence operations and the soviet use of women.
After WW2 this was supposed to go away again, women back to the kitchen and blacks back to the end of busses, some people feel however that once being given the taste of this freedom these groups didn't want to go back.
In that sense WW2 was a boost for equal rights, in the allied nations.
Oh and I said, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. The problem of course is that when you are in the night is impossible to say just how dark it will still be. If you take the european view then WW2 was an extremely dark hour, just before the dawn of the EU and peace for the last 60 years and counting.
I am not saying things won't get worse, but that it will also get better, either by our own hands or by future generations. If you don't want to wait that long, then act now.
Oh but a ray of sunshine, the republicans didn't do so well in the last elections and the upcoming ones might just see an all democrate US goverment. Will they reverse the mistakes OR will they add to them? Will the night become darker OR are we at the crack of dawn?