Either hire a better administrator OR just suck it up and be a windows shop.
The simple fact is that lack of skills in your employees is a problem you have to deal with in many fields, either hire better ones, train the ones you got OR do without that skill.
It is the reaon you see those semi-cars. They are small trucks drivable with a car license that have a setup similar to a semi (those big trucks with a tractor element and the eh cargo element (am I dazzling you with my tech speak yet?)) because transport companies find it impossible to hire enough people with truck licenses (and are unwilling to train new ones). They offer more cargo space then a van wich in some business is more important then their low weight limit.
Linux will have to be a choice similar to that, you can forget getting your nephews 12 year old kid to configure it, you are going to have to move your business software of Excell and you are going to have to hire someone who in 2007 isn't still baffled by setting up a printer.
Oh am I too harsh? Well, I am so sorry but for the last decade I seen nothing but people come up with one excuse after another why Linux is so hard, while at the same time I get those things working without a sweat. Am I that brilliant, are you that stupid OR are you just making up excuses.
Use windows, but don't try to put the blame on linux.
In my younger days I volunteerd at a local television station as a cameraman. It was fun to do, going out to events and make reports. Part of it was to report on art events, local stuff so for instance the art students giving a show. God what a load of crap that was.
Being a cameraman is a great way to see things without actually having to show any interest. You get into places you normally never would go into and can "stare" as much as you want without anybody coming up to you and asking for an opinion.
What struck me most was how disconnected these people were from real life, taking their art WAY to seriously. You can use your art to send a message but if you think a piece of performance art is going to chance the world you need to get out more.
This game is a game that uses an event for shock value. Using such stuff is an easy way to rouse emotions. It is simple really, if I need to show that someone is baddy I have them kill someone, a male if they are just a little bit bad, blonde female if they are bad and a brunette if they are truly evil. You do NOT kill redheads.
So a lot of movies use this trick because it is the easiest way of showing that the baddie is the bad guy. You could use story elements to show that, but hey, that takes time and the audience has a 5 second attention span.
Therefore I don't consider this game to be art, it is a simple exploitation game, perhaps a new angle for games but we already know it all to well from the movies.
It is a simple formula, examine what is keep society busy, use that as your maintheme and make sure to emphasize the controversy as much as possible.Is that art? Well perhaps but that don't make it special.
This game is nothing more then any of those movies with taglines like "too shocking for tv", "the story they didn't want you to see", etc etc.
Am I saying games should NOT use subjects such as this? Not at all, go righ ahead and make all the exploitation games you want, it is not new. Remember GTA Hot Coffee? Tell me that is not a black exploitation game.
Just don't expect me to give you any special credit. All games are art in the same that movies and books and painting and photos and etc etc are art. They are somebodies form of expresion and you get to experience it.
But using shock value doesn't make it any better.
If you have not been moved by a single game before this game I would suggest you have either been playing the wrong games OR lack empathic capabilities.
On the other hand, I am increasingly worried that games are dumbing down to satisfy puritans. NWN2 and its lack of the chainmail bikini is an excellent example. I don't mind exploitation movies and I don't mind PG movies made by disney, but there should be a nice middle ground were adults can simple play games made for adults and not constantly have to worry that some 12 yr old might see a nipple. Or god forbid a Wii.
I think the west has gotten to lax, not enough people remember anymore what freedom and democracy are REALLY about. This will change, it has before and it will again. Dictatorship just don't work, it ain't the natural state of affairs.
BUT neither is freedom. The result is that you have a constant seesaw motion between the two extremes, the best you can hope for is that you happen to live during one of the quiet moments BUT you will only be able to do so thanks to the efforts of people who have come before.
The sad fact is the seventies generation has done shit for freedom, they shouted a lot but haven't actually acomplished a single thing. It was the WW2 generation that has formed what we like to think of as our free society. They had to, WW2 forced change. Equality of the sexes and races is a direct result of the allied efforts to turn the tide of war.
But whatever they achieved the natural state of affairs is to take back every hard won liberty for the practical day to day running of the world. Just as WW2 saw the injust internment of the japanese this war two has its miscarriages of justice.
but it ain't gone over the edge, the proof? We can still report on it, the story of this and other mistakes is getting out and is getting attention. If the dictators had won, you wouldn't even know about it until you were taken off the street and never heard from again.
As much as these stories may shock you they fact that they come out are proof that the system is still working.Not well, but then we get the system we voted for and Bush was re-elected.
For that matter so is education in general. I am not a computer scientist, my education is technical instead. (LTS/MTS/HTS for the dutch)
When I attended the LTS we had real shop class, learning how to work with wood, steel, electricty with real world equipment in an area that looked much like you would expect to find in industry.
I recently had the occasion to visit a modern school that supposedly teaches the same skills, yet what I found was an ordinary classroom with a very limited and lightweight set of equipment. The kind of stuff you would find at home, NOT at work.
Yet somehow todays kids are supposed to learn the same skills.
And as if that ain't enough the number of hours of shop class have been reduced while the number of theory hours has been increased. Worse, the amount of technical theory has decreased as well and instead the amount of soft theory like history and such has taken over.
This has TWO negative impacts. First young kids coming to work can't hold basic equipment and don't understand the theory behind it and even worse the kinds of kids (like me) that used to select a techincal education because they don't like theory have that choice removed. I myself was far too restless to do a theorectical class, 18 hours of shop class per week however made the remainign theory that much easier to handle and because theory and practice were linked it all made sense.
Even worse, the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?
No this is not old people talk. Notice even here on slashdot how the art of discussion is dying out, say anything remotely controversial and be labelled a flamebaiter or a troll by some kid who can't handle the heat. I actually had a 20 year old burst in tears about two years ago because I chewed him out for drilling through the work bench. Modern education is so much about empowerment that kids who think they are the top of the top can't handle suddenly being the lowest of the low when they enter a working life. This is already a shock simply because you just went from being the youngest in school to the oldest in school and now suddenly you are the youngest again.
Simply put, I think education in general is less and less about turning out skilled proffesionals and more and more about just keeping kids of the job market. Comp Sci ain't the only victim. Just try to get a good welder nowadays. Hell I settle for anyone who can knows the difference between a steel drill bit and a stone one. (And no, that doesn't mean one is made out of stone, rather what it is for drilling into).
For instance claiming that there are a large number of producers and consumers in the commodity market.Eh what? How many commodity producers are there? Flower mills, power generators, oil producers etc etc. Not all that many and they are merging all the time.
He also claims that it is easy to go into that market, yeah right. Isn't it exactly other way around usually, hard to get into a commodity market?
I think we got the wonders of reverse logic in a powerpoint presentation at work here.
The trick is to put your conclusion on a slide and then keep inserting pages in front of it to make sure that you arrive there.
Yes his end conclusion makes some sense, that software is not a commodity and that opensource business model can work, BUT the logic he uses to get there is seriously flawed.
The simple fact is that economics are a lot more complex then he makes them out to be.
Take the product water, getting into the tap water market is next to impossible. Just try it, go ahead, dig up the whole town to install new pipes, find a clean source of water, put installations in place to get it to drinking level and setup up the whole supporting operation. No hope.
Getting into the bottled water market is a lot easier, just find a clean spring and get a cheapo bottle plant and voila, new brand product and watch the millions roll in.
So is water a commodity? No, not by this guys definition, tap water don't count because there is only one supplier and bottled water don't count because it is not massive enough. Brand loyalty is extremely low. How many people do you know that drink bottled water who won't drink tap water (in countries were tap water is drinkable) and remember, the water you make coffee with counts.
But his greatest mistake is this. Red Hat does NOT sell software. It sells support. Read this and understand this. Red Hat is NOT in the production industry it is in the services industry.
Go back a few pages and read his list of products in commodity markets, he mentions wheat, pork bellies, cars, chips nails etc etc.
ALL physical products.
He doesn't mention banking, insurance, support, even labor services. Red Hat doesn't have a physical product, it doesn't BUY a ton of plastic to produce 10.000 RHEL discs. It sells a service, the service of support a software package that you can just as easily get for free.
The service industry is a WHOLE different beast, for instance it is almost always far easier to get into. All you need is a phone line to start a support line after all. Even banking and insurance are easy, all you need is a bit of cash. Loan sharking is excellent proof of just how easy it is to get into banking (easy ain't the same as legal).
The service industry is also different from the production industry in another extremely simple way. Labor.
If Vista had been a physical product MS could have easily finished it on time by just hiring more people, if you want to build a road faster you just have more people working at it, more or less you can just keep upping the labor force to increase production.
Service industry on the other hand can't be automated. You got production plants that are run by one old man while next door the office has hundreds of people manning the phone lines. Luckily scaling this up is easy and relativly cheap. It don't cost that much to install another 100 phones lines for support.
Anyway, I think the article is just plain wrong in its basic logic. THe conclusion might be correct but that is because the author already arrived at that beforehand.
Then change the system, don't hold on to the old days when the real world didn't know about the internet.
I come from the BBS era and as such have gone through that magic time when the internet was just for techies. Nobody knew about it and it was a grand time. No ads, no spam, no leet speak, just men, real men and stuff geeks cared about. (Star Trek ASCII Porn mostly)
And then things changed, more people found out about it and with them came the coorperations, the criminals (often hard to tell the difference) and finally the politicians.
The early days of the net are over, no longer is it free and unregulated because nobody knew about it, it now has to live in the real world.
What you describe above has always been illegal, good or bad, that is the way your country is run. For a couple of years the internet was a safe heaven, a new playground were the rules were not yet enforced. Great BUT it sadly has made many of us think that this was going to last forever or even worse, that this was a normal state of affairs. That somehow it is NORMAL for there to be a HUGE and PUBLIC yet totally unregulated segment of daily life.
Simple example, child porn. Trading it in the real world has been illegal for decades in most countries, if you were caught sending it through the mail you would be prosecuted and the laws for the police to be able to check the mail are well established. I believe in the US they even got a special police force for doing that. NOBODY seems to protest this capability. Your postal mail CAN and will be checked, customs officials especially can open any package they want. When was the last time you succesfully protested your luggage being seached? Hell, they can even do a full cavity search with absolutly no evidence of wrong doing.
Yet somehow, for a period of time we could send digital data across the globe without anybody paying the slightest bit of attention. It was great but it was not going to last, sooner or later the real world would notice it and demand that the same laws that apply in the physical world be applied to the digital world. That email should be able to be checked in the same way as regular mail.
Just because the Internet operated in a grey area doesn't mean that this has become the law.
Think of it like this, if a black market operates in your area and stays unnoticed/unhindered for years that does NOT make it at any time legal, when the police after a decade finally moves in it is NOT a valid defence to say, "but we got so used to it, please let it stay the way it is".
We are now faced with the reality that real world laws are finally being applied to the net, no longer do we have this safe heaven that the police hadn't figured out yet.
We can now do two things, cry about it, pray that the police will somehow loose their memory and forget about the internet once again OR change the laws. Not just the laws regarding the internet but ALL laws that affect us.
Don't fight for the right of bloggers, fight for the rights of ALL journalists. Don't protest against snooping on email FIGHT against ALL snooping laws.
There was a time when you had publicly available usenet groups were people openly posted child porn without even bothering to hide were it came from. That era is past us. It would do a pedofile absolutly no good to protest an arrest because the internet should be free. If a pedophile wants to do what he does he should change the laws in the real world, just because the internet has given them a safe heaven for ten years does not mean that is going to continue.
Change the world, don't hang on to the past.
Game over for free-speech on the internet in India? No, it was game over for free-speech in India long ago, the internet just gave you an excuse to ignore it.
The simplest difference between gentoo and binary distros is NOT that you compile your own. That is just a side effect. What is far more important is that you have the CODE, or rather more importantly, the HEADERS!
If you EVER tried to compile a package yourselve on a binary distro you will have found that you first have to download a ton of headers, wich are often out of date, or you are using some weird binary.
Simply put, if I want to compile a package on gentoo on my own I can do so by JUST compiling the package, I do not first have to download the package with the linux headers for my kernel, because the headers, and everything is already there.
This is important for when you are chasing the cutting edge, and cutting edge on gentoo ain't beta's, even alpha's are considered kiddie work. Real gentoo users run with custom made patches handrolled by the developers to fix YOUR bug. It is what seperates the men from the boys. Unstable? My machine is locked in a cupboard, I have a bolt on the outside, at night I hear it clawing at the door, testing for a weakness, I sleep with one eye open cluthcing a desert eagle.
The difference between slashdot (/.) and dotslash (./) is that the latter is in theory a legal address. Unless early monday sunshine has rotted my brain all internet addresses start with a . (.slashdot.org) to indicate the root of the address, just that it is usually left off.
The / indicates the end of the domain name and the start of, eh what is the rest called again, DAMN YOU SUN!
So./ would be the website running on the root servers.
It works, up to a point but it is extremely limited.
If you read the article you will have noted that an area in the game is run on a single processor. That makes it fairly simple to grow, more areas == more servers.
But it is a bit like handling multi-tasking on your PC by adding more cores for every task. Run your OS, 1 cure, run a music player another core, run a game, another core, run a virus scanner, another core.
This is NOT the way things are done and for three reasons.
First it is wastefull, an empty area (no players) would still be using a full processor, granted probably a light one but it would be like having one Pentium4 cpu dedicated to running your mp3 player, even the cheapest available is going to be overkill.
Second it is limited, you can only use 1 cpu and they are still limited in how fast you can go, worse each speed increase is going to cost you more and more. So an area with lots of visitors will be unable to scale.
Last is that areas are seperated, you have to move from cpu to cpu as you move areas, this means transferring a lot of data even if you go from one desolate area to another.
Imagine if an ISP had every website on a single CPU box and that is the only option. Wastefull for small sites, not powerfull enough for large sites and a nightmare to administrate.
So why did they do it?
Well, it is relativly simple to setup. You don't need loadbalancing for instance or dynamic scaling. Customer simply buys a server space from you and that is the their server. It should in theory also be fairly robust, one cpu/server crashing won't really affect all the others. In a cluster setup one bit going down CAN (doesn't have to but it seems like it in MMORPG terms) take everything with it.
it is also cheap, they can use stock hardware buyable from any cheap box maker. Blizzard and Sony had to cough up some serious cash long before they could even open their game to get their servers running.
It is the reason why today the majority of hosting providers still work with crappy intel/amd boxes and not virtual servers on proper sun/ibm or some such hardware. It is cheap and you can get started with just one desktop PC (I seen server farms that had racks specially designed to house desktops, not racks).
More traditional setups for MMO's are to have clusters, each cluster is made up of a combination of hardware setup to serve a particular area. The advantage here is that you can more easily upgrade a cluster to handle a bigger load from an area. There are limits but more or less you can simply plug in more hardware to handle a high load. Offcourse such hardware is going to cost you.
The software for it is more complex to build and in all it is just more costly BUT in the long run more flexible.
Linden Labs had (still doesn't) have anywhere near the resources of a SOE or Blizzard. Their system worked for them but by now they are feeling the pinch as some areas just can't handle the load.
Their advantage is that customers themselves pay for the servers directly, so anyone with an underused area is wasting their own money, not Linden Labs. Same as when you buy a dedicated super server to serve you knitting club photo's. Your money your waste.
By the way, the above is based on an extremely old in depth article, it could well be that nowadays a sim (area) can use more then 1 cpu, but back in the day it couldn't
A social security system depends on the support of the middle (the worker) class. Not the rich and not the poor but that large majority in the middle.
If they think social security benefits them (directly, because they think they might one day need it themselves, or indirectly because they think it makes a better society for them to live in).
Sweden is a country were, so far, the population clearly believes a strong social security system is to the benefit of all AND therefore continue to support it.
The US is clearly a country were the majority doesn't believe it, and so it has a weak social security system
The point here is NOT a debate about who is right but that wichever system is chosen depends on the majority vote, the middle worker class usually, willing to support it.
I think the same is true of 'privacy'. The simple fact is that no matter how hard some people attempt to shout, a lot of people just don't seem to think it is a big deal.
I think that the privacy/bigbrother level of a country is going to depend on what the middle working class believes is right for them. Not that I am saying they are "right" in anyway.
Goverments, especially goverments that like to be elected will therefore follow the vote of that middle class. They are not going to list to fringe nutcases on either side because fringes don't have enough votes.
There is however a problem, the middle class tends to stay silent, they have better things to do then organize protest rallies or post on forums. A good politician must be able to tell apart a mass of voters from a small group that just happens to make a lof of noise.
From daily experience I just don't see all the much concern about bigbrother in the "common" man. If anything I see a great amount of concern about to much freedom. One in the netherlands at the moment is about TBS (It is a sentence given to a criminal who is consdered mentally ill, apart from a regular prison sentence (fixed maximum time according to human rights laws) the prisoner also has to report for treatment. In theory this only ends AFTER the patient is cured. This could lead, and has, to a person being send to 10 years and then spending the rest of their lives in a mental hospital (this is against human rights as you need to be told the length of your sentence, this is a lifesentence without being told).
So are the people upset about this, that the state can just pro-long the sentence of a human for as long as they can find a shrink to call him mentally ill?
No, in fact, the system is under attack because patients who are let out on leave commit serious crimes and people want them to be locked up permanntly.
You also hear loud voices about traffic camera's, yet the major complaint from real people is about people who speed and other traffic assholes.b Could it be the anti-speed camera is just very loud and the real "middle class" thinks they are a good idea? Some polls suggest this.
We will have to see what the brits think about this, england has regular elections so they can send a signal to the goverment every couple of years.
Will they? Does the man on the street, really care? I think not. He might be wrong in this but that is not the issue, the issue is what the majority will vote for. Doesn't help that england effectivly is a one party country.
You have to remember one thing, england is the place of london, I believe the first the place in the world to have congestion charging (you pay for using the road at peak times). It was widely believed to be political suicide. Until one man dared to introduce it, he succeeded, it worked and the plan has been extended and is going to get a whole new level on top AND he has been relected. Despite ALL the extremely loud fringe groups claiming it was going to be a disaster.
I have learned to stop paying attention to what some people shout and instead am trying to hear what a lot of people are NOT saying. Until the majority says NO to bigbrother it will happen, because apparently the majority thinks it is good for them. Right or wrong they might be, but they are not going to be swayed by people shouting loudly, they never have and they never will.
A virus scanner found an infected file and put it somewhere safe. It is in the logs so you can find out what happened.
Yes it is not very userfriendly but it sounds to me a bit like you complain that the fireman who got you out of burning building bumped you against the doorframe and now you got a sore toe. Cry me a river.
Should infected files NOT be moved just because they belong to a certain program?
I could understand the upset if it had moved a critical system file and brought the whole machine crashing down but that is now what happened.
Would it be as bad if a virusscanner moved a document because it was infected?
Truly this to me sounds like the conflict that arises between making software actually do anything and some users who expect computers to work by magic. Sorry, they do not.
Maybe MS virusscanner should know about special files, especially those belonging to its own products, maybe it should be capable of handling these files securely without having to move them. Perhaps.
It is not like the email disappeared. The file was moved. Move it back, and voila, all is restored. (I am guessing here, this is how it works on unix mailboxes anyway.)
Yes, perhaps the virus scanner did NOT report it clearly what it had done (more likely, the user in question simply did not read the log) and perhaps a proper virusscanner by MS should be able to handle the insides of a MS file and clean it on the spot, not have to move the entire file. BUT if this happened on a unix I would find it perfectly acceptable. Then again, I read logs.
The sources of a newspaper are KNOWN, they are NOT anonymous, except to the public at large, but the reporter and editor and in fact the entire newspaper staff ARE known. So we still got a degree of accountability. If you want to remain anonymous as a news source you must first convince a reporter to risk being thrown in jail (a legal action that can be used by the state) to reveal his sources.
However if you publish anonymous on a blog, you got no such layer, anyone can do it, and without anyone to throw in jail to force the revelation of the sources.
Protected sources are a very important part of western civilization that allows newspaper to obtain news from people who are at risk for disclosing it. Anonymous writers are an entirely different story. There is nobody you can go to if they are saying outright lies.
It is about layers of trust, a newssouce will have with you an X amount of trust.
Now wich story do you trust more, a story written by a known writer citing publicly available records and quoting known officials?
Or a story written by a known writer quoting people that don't want to be named by are identified as sources close too X.
Or a story on the letter pape signed by A.Nonymous.
Only an idiot would attach the same weight to all three. Blogs fall in the last group.
Read up on reuters and the numerous doctored and staged photo's from the lebanon war just how dangerous it is to accept new sources as truthfull that are not.
A reporter can keep his sources anonymous, that does NOT mean that the source is unknown to the reporter. HUGE difference. I would trust a reporter that uses anonymous sources (people UNKNOWN to him) about as far as I wuld trust a slashdot poster.
realize what you are saying, if a report publishes anonymous sources (unknown to him) he would be publishing stuff he can't verify at all. Even gossip columinists frown on that.
It is simple, the new image format is NOT compatible with the gpl, meaning that once you have chosen that format you will be locked in to using software that supports it. Hmmm, now wich software would that be. Ooh, I know, MS wants you to be locked into OS-X!
Oh, you thinks it is windows. Well I suppose if you are paranoid you could think that MS is trying to introduce a new format that would lock people to its own products by capturing their content.
For this to work MS doesn't have to destroy jpeg at all, it doesn't even have to touch it. It just has to make it that enough people use the new format that it becomes an essential thing.
Just imagine what happens to the web if IE supports this and other browsers can't. Voila, only IE (on windows) can be used to see the whole web. Wanna bet that losts of myspace and other social sites visitors where people upload snaps made with their MS phones would be laden with this new image?
With every thing MS does you simply got to ask yourselve this, "how can this be used to futher tie the user into using MS software exclusively".
If you look at the number of posts here that are about the format rather then the license then even slashdotters are taken in by it.
There have been plenty of F1 sims, some with the option to setup your own car. Great, get it to ride as low as possible because that is what F1 cars do. Everybody does it.
So then came grand prix legends, a historic racing sim, with even more options for tuning. So everyone tried to get their car as low as possible and something wasn't right.
Cars were hellish to drive, skittish and any error would lead to a crash.
The problem? Well F1 cars of that era had NO wings and therefore no benefit to riding low. What everyone was doing was what customizers do today, get their cars soo low you remove all the handling from it. Old style F1 cars NEED their suspecion to be able to travel.
The moment you stopped thinking LOW == GOOD the cars became a lot easier to handle resulting in fastly improved lap times.
A clear case of the physics of the game going beyond simple programming. If the game designer had simply put something like for every centimeter down increase top speed this would never have happened, but in the end the real physics demaning realistic setups are a lot more fun.
What you are saying is in fact 100% reversed. The closer you get to truly creating that race car as a reprensentation of physics the easier it becomes. Rather then setting up a completly new script for every model you just tweak the parameters a bit.
So in effect, it becomes EXACTLY as you think scripting works. Set weight = 450 set horsepower = 400 and you got a car that will accelarate like a rocket. Chance the horsepower to 4 and with the same physics engine you will have suddenly created yourselve a lead brick.
That is how people do it today in all kinds of games, from golden oldies like Grand Prix Legends to FS2007. In fact these games would not be possible without it. A scripted racing game would like going back to the pre-arcade days and topdown racers on LCD screens.
Saying scripting is easier is like saying it is easier to rebuild the entire universe from scratch in a studio rather then just film outside. ILM is good, but not quite that good.
Face it, you just don't work that way. I was asked to go along with our sales guy to back him up. He was amazingly good at it but weak on the tech side, but no worries that is were I came in and it worked.
Only problem on the ride home I would be knackered, an early meeting would leave me useless for the rest of the day.
HR and Sales people by their nature are not introverts. They LIKE hanging out with people, a good meeting invocorates them, gets them buzzing and eager to make things happen. You will be wanting a siesta.
It is extremely hard for extroverts (the majority of people) to relate to introverts. it is NOT that we are anti-social, or don't enjoy being with people, it just tires us. Extroverts are charged up after a party, intoverts are drained. Typical HR fault when dealing with techies (often introverts) throw an early social meeting and then hope to get some work done. Good luck, all the techies will be drained, do socials ONLY on fridays at the end of the day, to the techie can recharge during the weekend.
Then there is an other aspect. Social skill, not that introverts don't have them, but ask yourselve this, do you have to remember others people birthdays, name of kids, golf score OR does that come natural to you. You don't ask about their family, you WANT to know about their family, it won't be a good day if you don't hear about it. Extroverts really care, they are not being social because they have too, they need too.
Not that introverts don't care, it is just that they don't HAVE to know. If they are told, they will remember and show concern but if you don't tell them that is fine too.
A introvert doesn't get "why did you never ask me about X, you don't care". They care but if you don't tell them they presume it is none of their business.
Sales people HAVE to show they care, that they know the customer, what he likes, what he dislikes. An introvert will find this very taxing.
I did sort of enjoy assisting the sales guy, it was intresting to see what goes on before the spec is drawn that you will have to build. But I also found it to be tiring with lots of senseless talking and not enough getting things done.
it was nice to do as a change of pace, but to do that the whole week, year in year out? Your choice offcourse but don't make the mistake of thinking that something you like doing every now and then makes a good career. You might like sex, but would you enjoy becoming a porn star?
That would be like setting of a flair signalling that you are doing something the goverment disapproves off.
Your silly attitude is pampered by living in the free west. A program called freenet suffers from that too. Its latest version attempts to sit on a darknet.
Yeah, that works. In the free west where NOBODY (we know off so far) gives a shit about wich ports traffic is going across or wether they can read it.
For the chinese goverment it would be trivial to just report any traffic that does not go over legit ports in a legit form. A darknet would stand out like sore thumb. If you think a darknet works then you must also think that sending mail to your own adress with a phoney name is going to fool anyone.
Same with wireless, radio signals can be detected you know. EASILY. And what would you connect to anyway? The state run ISP wireless service? Then it don't matter shit. You will still be monitored. and your location can be easily found with decades old equipment.
Crypto, well even if it is unbreakable under a dictator ship that would just mean you just proved you had something to hide, wich is a crime so of you go to be re-educated, you little counter-revolutionist.
Only in the free world can you hide in plain sight. Sending ANY content that cannot be identified but can be traced back to you is enough to land you in jail in a dictatorship.
Only if you somehow manage to come up with a solution that allows you to send and receive without being traced are you safe. Good luck with that. Spy agencies the world over would like to hear from you.
Take for instance ONLINE play. Check back to the gamecube era and see what Nintendo had to say about that. Then Xbox Live becomes a success and see there, the Wii copies it.
I am afraid the attitude you describe is just sensible business practice. What the competitor does that you don't do is obviously stupid, costly, senseless and kills the cat, else the customer MIGHT just ask why YOU aren't doing it and wether they wouldn't be better of going to the competitor.
In public transport you can meet other people, fall in love. This is GOOD. In cars you are alone, without smelly people who talk to loud. This is GOOD.
It is just how you advertise yourselve. You don't see car companies promoting public transport do you? "Ride the tube, meet intresting people, get laid OR drive our car and get killed by the fuel bill and die a lonely death in a traffic jam surrounded by hatefull car drivers who won't move out of the way to let the ambulance through"
OR public transport companies "Get a car, listen to your own surround sound music, in a comfortable leather chair, leave anytime you want, be cool, pick up chicks OR buy a overpriced ticket, get delayed for no reason with no anoucements, stand for hours next to smelly foreigners who smoke and would kill you if you commented on it."
It makes sense doesn't it. So why should Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft behave any differently, they will say they got the best and that the others suck. Then they will queitly look what works and copy that for future use. Possibly improving on it.
The Wiimote original? Please, I seen that stuff done in the arcades for years and even in the form of addon controllers. Nintendo watched what worked, noted what didn't, improved on it and then used it. Same as it copied online play.
Everyone does it, it is how things work and frankly I don't see anything wrong with it unless you are a mental retard and take anything game companies say at face value. It is PR speak.
What do you call 10.000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
What do you call 10.000 pr spokes persons at the bottom of the ocean? Even better.
The problem is that computers are still computers, dumb as shit, and that coding is still coding, an amazingly labor intensive task requiring a high degree of skill and a proffesion were throwing more people at it don't help.
Coding is expensive, if you want a dozen armour models/textures you can put a dozen artists on it. A dozen coders working on the same code just does not work.
Computers are dumb. Well they are. Comic/manga readers might be familiar with CBZ/CBR archives, nothing more then zip/rar files renamed. Yet most downloads still come with the zip or rar extensions meaning YOU have to tell the computer to open it with a comic reader rather then your regular archive reader. It don't matter wich OS or file explorer you use. NONE of them can tell a image archive from a regular archive. Humans on the other hand can do it in an instant just by the name alone.
Amazing!
This matters in games. There is NO magic that allows NPC's to adress you as female/male. Someone somewhere has spend a lot of time writing a lot of if(x) then Y else Z statements to deal with the fact that you were given a choice of sex. What sex to play, geez. Don't get your hopes up, you are still a CRPG player.
The more choices the more IF statements and it goes up in the way one of those curves go up that go up faster then the other value increases. Logo something (and people say playing computer games improves your brain)
NWN2 suffers from this in a bad way. You have so many choices that even the main story can't cope and you end up with the ultimate weapon being a sword. Nice, my monk sure could use that. Your wizard didn't like it much either?
It is even worse, in all the talks about the dwarf becoming a monk never once was the fact mentioned that I was one. Or did the thiefling mention I was a thiefling.
For that matter as you gained more potential party members the interaction between them in the game became less and less. Not because it wasn't designed, simply because at location X where A and B were to have a discussion you had A and C in your party so it never triggered.
Free, non-linear play doesn't make it any easier, playing a monk I offcourse build the monestary. I kept checking back to see if that dude was finally going to offer me some training. No deal, told to come back later.
Yeah great, was there something there after I got fed up? More linear play would have prevented a dozen checks and lots of frustration.
I wonder what could then be done in NWN2 had axed half the choices and instead fleshed out the remaining content more. Say that you had only first party members. Would they then have been able to get a lot more interaction. Might you have been able to influence anyone else then the dwarf to change proffesions.
A gameboy game solved that nicely, despite a HUGE party from wich you had to select a cast for battle ALL characters were present during cut scenes even if they had been critically wounded in a previous fight (not killed just not available for future combat missions). The game still had the problem that certain paths could only be opened in combat with the right character but that was usually hinted at in the briefing.
NWN2 totally did that in the wrong way. It FORCED you to take certain characters while at the same time punishing you (by not showing interactions) for not choosing the magic combo. I am not talking about the female that became a fixed member of your group, that worked, but those quests you had to take for instance bishop with you.
What about freedom to roam then? Well that was what Oblivion had. But in order to prevent you to be killed to easily OR find nothing a challenge things had to scale. So in the beginning even remote areas were a cakewalk and later on you would face thugs on imperial roads in million dollar outfits demanding loose chance.
Now compare this to the far more linear, less freedom, Planescape Torment. Areas were locked off, stopping you from going to far too fast, you couldn't p
You got some amazing posts today, including some kid who thinks The Sims was Maxis first big hit. HA!
This guy is a pro and works for a company that has been making fun games when SERIOUS power was 8mhz.
However since that day two things have happened. We have got more and mhz on our cpu's which at times seems to be only used to update the graphics. It is of no doubt that the Wii in this department cannot compete, pure polygon/texture/fps count it is going to loose to the 360/PS3 and ALL consoles will SUCK donkyballs increasingly so compared to the PC.
BUT that is not what this guy is talking about. He is complaining about lack of power to power NOT the graphics but the game itself. The AI.
AI is often ignored by gamers, we note it when it is bad but in most reviews a decent AI will take second place in importance to the graphics. I have no idea way I mean sure the human race has developed above such supervisial OOOH SHINY!
Eh where was I?
However in the background the AI code has been getting a share of the increased processing power and it shows. Today's AI in games is still nothing to worry any real human but if you ever make the mistake of playing a game from the dark ages you can see just how moronic the old ai's were that had to run on ancient hardware.
This guys complaint is that the Wii with it's simpler hardware just doesn't deliver enough oomph to power the AI in games.
First off, this guy works for Maxis, a game company that has NEVER produced a single OOOOH SHINY game. In fact all their games heavily depend on AI. This has been a problem for them before, their games never looked as spiffy as say your average FPS but offcourse the AI in them was still making your computer sweat. If you ever designed your own FPS level with AI monsters you know how fucking difficult it is to get them to walk straight down a corridor EVEN with massive pre-proccessing. In the sims you got easily a dozen AI all finding their way around a constanstly changing enviroment. While you maybe only seeing the effect of all your girls queing up for the same toilet and peeing themselves (Mmm, there might be a reality show in that) the fact that they even can do that requires a lot of code to be run.
There is a reason the full sims never appeared on the consoles, they just can't do it. (Try them if you don't believe them, the console versions are extremely reduced in capability compard to the PC versions)
Spore, if it delivers what it promises, is going to be much the same. For it to work there must be some serious number crunching going on in the background, yet ALL people see is the graphics.
Maxis can't produce a game that don't look the part. The graphics must pass a certain level or people just won't buy it. I am sure there is a market for a game with amazing ai and 8bit graphics BUT sadly maxis is to much into making a profit to explore that segment. Shame on them.
His claim is then that if a game is going to have passable graphics the Wii doesn't have enough horsepower left to power the AI. It is something PC owners have ALWAYS known. In some games you can alter your settings INCLUDING the ai difficulty level, lower it and performance improves. It is even simpler in the modding scene, lots of user made content mentions that you need a higher specced rig for their content then the original game simply because they upped the number of AI's in the game.
An old example is transport tycoon. A train game from I think the 386 days. If in those days you had more then a 50 or so trains in the game it would start to grind to a halt as the CPU simply couldn't cope. Nowadays a hacked version of the game happily runs with hundreds of trains of any length using the increased horsepower NOT just for graphics (increased resolution) but to run the AI for all those extra objects.
If you take the same game and try to port it fairly to all the gaming machines out there then the Wii is going to have to be the one with the smaller levels (less memory) fewe
Oh my god, IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
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This one so goes into my quotes database. If you thought it up yourselve, brilliant!
If I go into a newly opened restaurant, give my order and seven hours later I would still be waiting for my food, I would NOT give that restaurant another chance.
You seem to have an amazingly silly idea of how you sell things. In the real world you get your stuff in order and THEN launch. I know I know, this the computer industry, home of the patch and beta release, but regular stores like McDonalds do NOT work that way.
Why on earth you label a regular business with Microsoft or for that matter an IT company is beyond me.
You can rest assure that when McD launches a new hamburger they will have at least done some testing to see that the majority of customers are in fact able to digest it. They also do not attempt to stop you from feeding that burger to your dog, splitting a cola with your friends or use the ice cubes to cool your overheated radiator.
If the article is accurate then it is extremely bad, but expected, news for the site. Crippling DRM, inability to just take the customers money (imagine if McD refused to sell you food because it thought you were from the wrong country) and just plain not being able to match up with the ease of downloading the same stuff for free.
I could have gotten all the stuff he payed for, for less and play it without WiMP. Oh and used the money for snacks and drinks.
You know the funny thing? It is not that I am cheap, I got money to burn, and never had a trouble renting or buying stuff before. Just that it has gotten so much easier to just fire up a torrent.
Frankly this looks the same as when napster went legit. Too little, too late.
Furthermore that is a delay NOT lag. Lag would the time between when something is supposed to happen and when it actually happens.
User hovers over menu item -> Configured delay -> OS starts drawing the menu item -> Lag -> OS displays menu item.
Two seperate issues wich granted may be easily confused because without checking what the delay setting is it is hard to determine what causes the time difference between mouse over and popup.
The article should be clearer on this, and you should learn NOT to assume that a setting wich exists in XP is the cause of something in Vista.
Finally, if there is a delay build in (to prevent constant popups as you browse the menu) then any futher delay is unforgiveable as the OS should use that delay time to prepare the popup. Or is that a little bit too much to expect of a modern GUI?
Tada! DB2, IBM's database product, certified for Windows.
If you can read you will also note that they list the versions of 2003 that are certified.
So your entire argument is null and void. Specific windows distro/version's get certified or not to work with software by the companies supporting said software. You will not that windows XP for instance is NOT certified to work with DB2.
Doesn't mean you cannot run DB2 on Windows XP (or other versions) just that if you do, you are on your own. Exactly the same as with linux distro's or even IBM's un-certified AIX versions.
Certification is nothing more the saying, we tested our product with that product and if there are problems we will help you (for an ungodly amount of money) and if you choose to run our product on another product we won't help you, unless you pay an even large sum of money.
Everyone keeps calling it a loss-leader. However for that to work iTunes (the store) got to be loosing Apple money. From what I been able to gather it does in fact make a profit. Not as big as other divisions within Apple and certainly NOT with the margins of other divisions BUT a profit nonetheless.
That rules out it being a loss-leader. In super market bread is a lossleader for its other products. It has to sell bread to get people in the store so it can then sell them the profitable items like candy.
A decent supermarket will also sell dairy products like butter, the margin on them is extremely small, (or at least they were 20 years ago when I studied this) BUT the margin is there and results in a profit. Therefore these items are NOT a loss-leader.
Some economists think a company got to focus on only the high margin items. This is typical armchair thinking, real business leaders know that it is often the low-margin low-profit items that are the most stable.
Think of this, were is the risk with iTunes? The store is up and running requiring only patches to stay current. Compare this to the iPod were each new model that costs a fortune to develop AND produce could bomb leaving Apple with unsold stock.
High margins, lots of profit but also lots of risk.
The entire article doesn't really address this question, the author just takes the logic leap of "iPod needs content, therefore the iTunes store".
Yet he does notice that the fast majority of music content (wich is what the iPod needs) is sold on CD. Not online.
So why would iPod software not just be an extremely efficient, easy to use, piece of ripping software? (It appently is but I do not use it so I leave that upto other to judge)
Did any of the other MP3 players out there NOT sell because there wasn't a online music store for them? Is the iPod a success because of the iTunes music store?
Well, considering the extremely poor sales of the iTunes store and considering the record breaking sales of the iPod I would assume that like me, an awfull lot of iTunes (the program) users simply ignore the store or even have found out you can disable it altogether.
Why does Apple bother with re-selling music, wich the author claims is a low profit business, and taking on the huge mess of DRM?
I can think of a number of reasons.
A: MP3 players have been called the tools of piracy by the RIAA loonies. Therefore, the iPod being the largest is therefore the largest piracy tool for music. Que voters voting for idiot politicians who then put a tax on MP3players and other digital content holders so fatten the RIAA pockets. This could eat into Apples real moneymaker, ipod sales. With the iTunes store Apple has the defence of saying that it gives users access to legal music and since ALL ipod users use iTunes and iTunes is the store therefore iPods are filled with legal music. Yes there are holes in this argument but this is the music industry we are talking about. Logic can take a flying leap.
Is this likely? iTunes store being nothing more then a cover while Apple knows that its iPods will really be filled with ripped CD content (either legal or illegal, with Apple not really caring but having to pretend that it does).
Perhaps, except that it doesn't work, the music industry still is demanding that MP3 players (including iPods) be taxed.
B: The author is an idiot who cannot understand that low-profit still is profit. Especially when combined with huge volume. Especially when combined with low-risk.
Unlike some CD based publisher/seller Apple takes NO risk on its "stocking" a track. A few megabyte of storage space, a monkey to enter the details in the database and off you go. Those costs remain the same if it sells 0 copies or a million of that track. Compare this to a the CD version where you run the risk of either not pressing enough discs so you can't sell to the demand (and people go to another store OR alternative distrubution method) or to many and you have to take the surpless back.
Perhaps Apple tought the iTunes store was going to do a lot better, surely at the beginning everyone seemed to think this was going to be massive. Then it didn't and now everyone seems to take it for granted that Apple NEVER thought that iTunes was going to be big.
But there is another simpler issue, iTunes may not be making Apple a lot of money, but it is making them money. Profit of any sort is good. Even if iTunes made Apple only a single million in pure profit it would be foolish of them to drop it. Profit is profit.
Could Apple just be in it for the money? Hoping that it might become big but in the meantime happy as long it doesn't cost money? This ain't MS xbox or MSN, this attempt to reach into other markets IS making Apple money.
C: Apple LOVES DRM. Ah, well I got karma to burn. Think about it, none of its products are exactly know for their openeness. Apple is NOT one of the nice companies out there. In a world were all of the old grumpy giants are turning out GPL software left right and center Apple remains a bastion of closed software.
Oh yeah, darwin. Right. Except what has actually come out of it? Has a single tool made its way out of OS-X and onto say linux? Has Apple done anything but take take take?
Slashdot Mirror
Either hire a better administrator OR just suck it up and be a windows shop.
The simple fact is that lack of skills in your employees is a problem you have to deal with in many fields, either hire better ones, train the ones you got OR do without that skill.
It is the reaon you see those semi-cars. They are small trucks drivable with a car license that have a setup similar to a semi (those big trucks with a tractor element and the eh cargo element (am I dazzling you with my tech speak yet?)) because transport companies find it impossible to hire enough people with truck licenses (and are unwilling to train new ones). They offer more cargo space then a van wich in some business is more important then their low weight limit.
Linux will have to be a choice similar to that, you can forget getting your nephews 12 year old kid to configure it, you are going to have to move your business software of Excell and you are going to have to hire someone who in 2007 isn't still baffled by setting up a printer.
Oh am I too harsh? Well, I am so sorry but for the last decade I seen nothing but people come up with one excuse after another why Linux is so hard, while at the same time I get those things working without a sweat. Am I that brilliant, are you that stupid OR are you just making up excuses.
Use windows, but don't try to put the blame on linux.
In my younger days I volunteerd at a local television station as a cameraman. It was fun to do, going out to events and make reports. Part of it was to report on art events, local stuff so for instance the art students giving a show. God what a load of crap that was.
Being a cameraman is a great way to see things without actually having to show any interest. You get into places you normally never would go into and can "stare" as much as you want without anybody coming up to you and asking for an opinion.
What struck me most was how disconnected these people were from real life, taking their art WAY to seriously. You can use your art to send a message but if you think a piece of performance art is going to chance the world you need to get out more.
This game is a game that uses an event for shock value. Using such stuff is an easy way to rouse emotions. It is simple really, if I need to show that someone is baddy I have them kill someone, a male if they are just a little bit bad, blonde female if they are bad and a brunette if they are truly evil. You do NOT kill redheads.
So a lot of movies use this trick because it is the easiest way of showing that the baddie is the bad guy. You could use story elements to show that, but hey, that takes time and the audience has a 5 second attention span.
Therefore I don't consider this game to be art, it is a simple exploitation game, perhaps a new angle for games but we already know it all to well from the movies.
It is a simple formula, examine what is keep society busy, use that as your maintheme and make sure to emphasize the controversy as much as possible.Is that art? Well perhaps but that don't make it special.
This game is nothing more then any of those movies with taglines like "too shocking for tv", "the story they didn't want you to see", etc etc.
Am I saying games should NOT use subjects such as this? Not at all, go righ ahead and make all the exploitation games you want, it is not new. Remember GTA Hot Coffee? Tell me that is not a black exploitation game.
Just don't expect me to give you any special credit. All games are art in the same that movies and books and painting and photos and etc etc are art. They are somebodies form of expresion and you get to experience it.
But using shock value doesn't make it any better.
If you have not been moved by a single game before this game I would suggest you have either been playing the wrong games OR lack empathic capabilities.
On the other hand, I am increasingly worried that games are dumbing down to satisfy puritans. NWN2 and its lack of the chainmail bikini is an excellent example. I don't mind exploitation movies and I don't mind PG movies made by disney, but there should be a nice middle ground were adults can simple play games made for adults and not constantly have to worry that some 12 yr old might see a nipple. Or god forbid a Wii.
I think the west has gotten to lax, not enough people remember anymore what freedom and democracy are REALLY about. This will change, it has before and it will again. Dictatorship just don't work, it ain't the natural state of affairs.
BUT neither is freedom. The result is that you have a constant seesaw motion between the two extremes, the best you can hope for is that you happen to live during one of the quiet moments BUT you will only be able to do so thanks to the efforts of people who have come before.
The sad fact is the seventies generation has done shit for freedom, they shouted a lot but haven't actually acomplished a single thing. It was the WW2 generation that has formed what we like to think of as our free society. They had to, WW2 forced change. Equality of the sexes and races is a direct result of the allied efforts to turn the tide of war.
But whatever they achieved the natural state of affairs is to take back every hard won liberty for the practical day to day running of the world. Just as WW2 saw the injust internment of the japanese this war two has its miscarriages of justice.
but it ain't gone over the edge, the proof? We can still report on it, the story of this and other mistakes is getting out and is getting attention. If the dictators had won, you wouldn't even know about it until you were taken off the street and never heard from again.
As much as these stories may shock you they fact that they come out are proof that the system is still working.Not well, but then we get the system we voted for and Bush was re-elected.
For that matter so is education in general. I am not a computer scientist, my education is technical instead. (LTS/MTS/HTS for the dutch)
When I attended the LTS we had real shop class, learning how to work with wood, steel, electricty with real world equipment in an area that looked much like you would expect to find in industry.
I recently had the occasion to visit a modern school that supposedly teaches the same skills, yet what I found was an ordinary classroom with a very limited and lightweight set of equipment. The kind of stuff you would find at home, NOT at work.
Yet somehow todays kids are supposed to learn the same skills.
And as if that ain't enough the number of hours of shop class have been reduced while the number of theory hours has been increased. Worse, the amount of technical theory has decreased as well and instead the amount of soft theory like history and such has taken over.
This has TWO negative impacts. First young kids coming to work can't hold basic equipment and don't understand the theory behind it and even worse the kinds of kids (like me) that used to select a techincal education because they don't like theory have that choice removed. I myself was far too restless to do a theorectical class, 18 hours of shop class per week however made the remainign theory that much easier to handle and because theory and practice were linked it all made sense.
Even worse, the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?
No this is not old people talk. Notice even here on slashdot how the art of discussion is dying out, say anything remotely controversial and be labelled a flamebaiter or a troll by some kid who can't handle the heat. I actually had a 20 year old burst in tears about two years ago because I chewed him out for drilling through the work bench. Modern education is so much about empowerment that kids who think they are the top of the top can't handle suddenly being the lowest of the low when they enter a working life. This is already a shock simply because you just went from being the youngest in school to the oldest in school and now suddenly you are the youngest again.
Simply put, I think education in general is less and less about turning out skilled proffesionals and more and more about just keeping kids of the job market. Comp Sci ain't the only victim. Just try to get a good welder nowadays. Hell I settle for anyone who can knows the difference between a steel drill bit and a stone one. (And no, that doesn't mean one is made out of stone, rather what it is for drilling into).
For instance claiming that there are a large number of producers and consumers in the commodity market.Eh what? How many commodity producers are there? Flower mills, power generators, oil producers etc etc. Not all that many and they are merging all the time.
He also claims that it is easy to go into that market, yeah right. Isn't it exactly other way around usually, hard to get into a commodity market?
I think we got the wonders of reverse logic in a powerpoint presentation at work here.
The trick is to put your conclusion on a slide and then keep inserting pages in front of it to make sure that you arrive there.
Yes his end conclusion makes some sense, that software is not a commodity and that opensource business model can work, BUT the logic he uses to get there is seriously flawed.
The simple fact is that economics are a lot more complex then he makes them out to be.
Take the product water, getting into the tap water market is next to impossible. Just try it, go ahead, dig up the whole town to install new pipes, find a clean source of water, put installations in place to get it to drinking level and setup up the whole supporting operation. No hope.
Getting into the bottled water market is a lot easier, just find a clean spring and get a cheapo bottle plant and voila, new brand product and watch the millions roll in.
So is water a commodity? No, not by this guys definition, tap water don't count because there is only one supplier and bottled water don't count because it is not massive enough. Brand loyalty is extremely low. How many people do you know that drink bottled water who won't drink tap water (in countries were tap water is drinkable) and remember, the water you make coffee with counts.
But his greatest mistake is this. Red Hat does NOT sell software. It sells support. Read this and understand this. Red Hat is NOT in the production industry it is in the services industry.
Go back a few pages and read his list of products in commodity markets, he mentions wheat, pork bellies, cars, chips nails etc etc.
ALL physical products.
He doesn't mention banking, insurance, support, even labor services. Red Hat doesn't have a physical product, it doesn't BUY a ton of plastic to produce 10.000 RHEL discs. It sells a service, the service of support a software package that you can just as easily get for free.
The service industry is a WHOLE different beast, for instance it is almost always far easier to get into. All you need is a phone line to start a support line after all. Even banking and insurance are easy, all you need is a bit of cash. Loan sharking is excellent proof of just how easy it is to get into banking (easy ain't the same as legal).
The service industry is also different from the production industry in another extremely simple way. Labor.
If Vista had been a physical product MS could have easily finished it on time by just hiring more people, if you want to build a road faster you just have more people working at it, more or less you can just keep upping the labor force to increase production.
Service industry on the other hand can't be automated. You got production plants that are run by one old man while next door the office has hundreds of people manning the phone lines. Luckily scaling this up is easy and relativly cheap. It don't cost that much to install another 100 phones lines for support.
Anyway, I think the article is just plain wrong in its basic logic. THe conclusion might be correct but that is because the author already arrived at that beforehand.
Then change the system, don't hold on to the old days when the real world didn't know about the internet.
I come from the BBS era and as such have gone through that magic time when the internet was just for techies. Nobody knew about it and it was a grand time. No ads, no spam, no leet speak, just men, real men and stuff geeks cared about. (Star Trek ASCII Porn mostly)
And then things changed, more people found out about it and with them came the coorperations, the criminals (often hard to tell the difference) and finally the politicians.
The early days of the net are over, no longer is it free and unregulated because nobody knew about it, it now has to live in the real world.
What you describe above has always been illegal, good or bad, that is the way your country is run. For a couple of years the internet was a safe heaven, a new playground were the rules were not yet enforced. Great BUT it sadly has made many of us think that this was going to last forever or even worse, that this was a normal state of affairs. That somehow it is NORMAL for there to be a HUGE and PUBLIC yet totally unregulated segment of daily life.
Simple example, child porn. Trading it in the real world has been illegal for decades in most countries, if you were caught sending it through the mail you would be prosecuted and the laws for the police to be able to check the mail are well established. I believe in the US they even got a special police force for doing that. NOBODY seems to protest this capability. Your postal mail CAN and will be checked, customs officials especially can open any package they want. When was the last time you succesfully protested your luggage being seached? Hell, they can even do a full cavity search with absolutly no evidence of wrong doing.
Yet somehow, for a period of time we could send digital data across the globe without anybody paying the slightest bit of attention. It was great but it was not going to last, sooner or later the real world would notice it and demand that the same laws that apply in the physical world be applied to the digital world. That email should be able to be checked in the same way as regular mail.
Just because the Internet operated in a grey area doesn't mean that this has become the law.
Think of it like this, if a black market operates in your area and stays unnoticed/unhindered for years that does NOT make it at any time legal, when the police after a decade finally moves in it is NOT a valid defence to say, "but we got so used to it, please let it stay the way it is".
We are now faced with the reality that real world laws are finally being applied to the net, no longer do we have this safe heaven that the police hadn't figured out yet.
We can now do two things, cry about it, pray that the police will somehow loose their memory and forget about the internet once again OR change the laws. Not just the laws regarding the internet but ALL laws that affect us.
Don't fight for the right of bloggers, fight for the rights of ALL journalists. Don't protest against snooping on email FIGHT against ALL snooping laws.
There was a time when you had publicly available usenet groups were people openly posted child porn without even bothering to hide were it came from. That era is past us. It would do a pedofile absolutly no good to protest an arrest because the internet should be free. If a pedophile wants to do what he does he should change the laws in the real world, just because the internet has given them a safe heaven for ten years does not mean that is going to continue.
Change the world, don't hang on to the past.
Game over for free-speech on the internet in India? No, it was game over for free-speech in India long ago, the internet just gave you an excuse to ignore it.
The simplest difference between gentoo and binary distros is NOT that you compile your own. That is just a side effect. What is far more important is that you have the CODE, or rather more importantly, the HEADERS!
If you EVER tried to compile a package yourselve on a binary distro you will have found that you first have to download a ton of headers, wich are often out of date, or you are using some weird binary.
Simply put, if I want to compile a package on gentoo on my own I can do so by JUST compiling the package, I do not first have to download the package with the linux headers for my kernel, because the headers, and everything is already there.
This is important for when you are chasing the cutting edge, and cutting edge on gentoo ain't beta's, even alpha's are considered kiddie work. Real gentoo users run with custom made patches handrolled by the developers to fix YOUR bug. It is what seperates the men from the boys. Unstable? My machine is locked in a cupboard, I have a bolt on the outside, at night I hear it clawing at the door, testing for a weakness, I sleep with one eye open cluthcing a desert eagle.
Offcourse for you girls, you can use debian.
The difference between slashdot (/.) and dotslash (./) is that the latter is in theory a legal address. Unless early monday sunshine has rotted my brain all internet addresses start with a . (.slashdot.org) to indicate the root of the address, just that it is usually left off.
The / indicates the end of the domain name and the start of, eh what is the rest called again, DAMN YOU SUN!
So ./ would be the website running on the root servers.
Or maybe I am just spouting nonsense.
It works, up to a point but it is extremely limited.
If you read the article you will have noted that an area in the game is run on a single processor. That makes it fairly simple to grow, more areas == more servers.
But it is a bit like handling multi-tasking on your PC by adding more cores for every task. Run your OS, 1 cure, run a music player another core, run a game, another core, run a virus scanner, another core.
This is NOT the way things are done and for three reasons.
First it is wastefull, an empty area (no players) would still be using a full processor, granted probably a light one but it would be like having one Pentium4 cpu dedicated to running your mp3 player, even the cheapest available is going to be overkill.
Second it is limited, you can only use 1 cpu and they are still limited in how fast you can go, worse each speed increase is going to cost you more and more. So an area with lots of visitors will be unable to scale.
Last is that areas are seperated, you have to move from cpu to cpu as you move areas, this means transferring a lot of data even if you go from one desolate area to another.
Imagine if an ISP had every website on a single CPU box and that is the only option. Wastefull for small sites, not powerfull enough for large sites and a nightmare to administrate.
So why did they do it?
Well, it is relativly simple to setup. You don't need loadbalancing for instance or dynamic scaling. Customer simply buys a server space from you and that is the their server. It should in theory also be fairly robust, one cpu/server crashing won't really affect all the others. In a cluster setup one bit going down CAN (doesn't have to but it seems like it in MMORPG terms) take everything with it.
it is also cheap, they can use stock hardware buyable from any cheap box maker. Blizzard and Sony had to cough up some serious cash long before they could even open their game to get their servers running.
It is the reason why today the majority of hosting providers still work with crappy intel/amd boxes and not virtual servers on proper sun/ibm or some such hardware. It is cheap and you can get started with just one desktop PC (I seen server farms that had racks specially designed to house desktops, not racks).
More traditional setups for MMO's are to have clusters, each cluster is made up of a combination of hardware setup to serve a particular area. The advantage here is that you can more easily upgrade a cluster to handle a bigger load from an area. There are limits but more or less you can simply plug in more hardware to handle a high load. Offcourse such hardware is going to cost you.
The software for it is more complex to build and in all it is just more costly BUT in the long run more flexible.
Linden Labs had (still doesn't) have anywhere near the resources of a SOE or Blizzard. Their system worked for them but by now they are feeling the pinch as some areas just can't handle the load.
Their advantage is that customers themselves pay for the servers directly, so anyone with an underused area is wasting their own money, not Linden Labs. Same as when you buy a dedicated super server to serve you knitting club photo's. Your money your waste.
By the way, the above is based on an extremely old in depth article, it could well be that nowadays a sim (area) can use more then 1 cpu, but back in the day it couldn't
A social security system depends on the support of the middle (the worker) class. Not the rich and not the poor but that large majority in the middle.
If they think social security benefits them (directly, because they think they might one day need it themselves, or indirectly because they think it makes a better society for them to live in).
Sweden is a country were, so far, the population clearly believes a strong social security system is to the benefit of all AND therefore continue to support it.
The US is clearly a country were the majority doesn't believe it, and so it has a weak social security system
The point here is NOT a debate about who is right but that wichever system is chosen depends on the majority vote, the middle worker class usually, willing to support it.
I think the same is true of 'privacy'. The simple fact is that no matter how hard some people attempt to shout, a lot of people just don't seem to think it is a big deal.
I think that the privacy/bigbrother level of a country is going to depend on what the middle working class believes is right for them. Not that I am saying they are "right" in anyway.
Goverments, especially goverments that like to be elected will therefore follow the vote of that middle class. They are not going to list to fringe nutcases on either side because fringes don't have enough votes.
There is however a problem, the middle class tends to stay silent, they have better things to do then organize protest rallies or post on forums. A good politician must be able to tell apart a mass of voters from a small group that just happens to make a lof of noise.
From daily experience I just don't see all the much concern about bigbrother in the "common" man. If anything I see a great amount of concern about to much freedom. One in the netherlands at the moment is about TBS (It is a sentence given to a criminal who is consdered mentally ill, apart from a regular prison sentence (fixed maximum time according to human rights laws) the prisoner also has to report for treatment. In theory this only ends AFTER the patient is cured. This could lead, and has, to a person being send to 10 years and then spending the rest of their lives in a mental hospital (this is against human rights as you need to be told the length of your sentence, this is a lifesentence without being told).
So are the people upset about this, that the state can just pro-long the sentence of a human for as long as they can find a shrink to call him mentally ill?
No, in fact, the system is under attack because patients who are let out on leave commit serious crimes and people want them to be locked up permanntly.
You also hear loud voices about traffic camera's, yet the major complaint from real people is about people who speed and other traffic assholes.b Could it be the anti-speed camera is just very loud and the real "middle class" thinks they are a good idea? Some polls suggest this.
We will have to see what the brits think about this, england has regular elections so they can send a signal to the goverment every couple of years.
Will they? Does the man on the street, really care? I think not. He might be wrong in this but that is not the issue, the issue is what the majority will vote for. Doesn't help that england effectivly is a one party country.
You have to remember one thing, england is the place of london, I believe the first the place in the world to have congestion charging (you pay for using the road at peak times). It was widely believed to be political suicide. Until one man dared to introduce it, he succeeded, it worked and the plan has been extended and is going to get a whole new level on top AND he has been relected. Despite ALL the extremely loud fringe groups claiming it was going to be a disaster.
I have learned to stop paying attention to what some people shout and instead am trying to hear what a lot of people are NOT saying. Until the majority says NO to bigbrother it will happen, because apparently the majority thinks it is good for them. Right or wrong they might be, but they are not going to be swayed by people shouting loudly, they never have and they never will.
A virus scanner found an infected file and put it somewhere safe. It is in the logs so you can find out what happened.
Yes it is not very userfriendly but it sounds to me a bit like you complain that the fireman who got you out of burning building bumped you against the doorframe and now you got a sore toe. Cry me a river.
Should infected files NOT be moved just because they belong to a certain program?
I could understand the upset if it had moved a critical system file and brought the whole machine crashing down but that is now what happened.
Would it be as bad if a virusscanner moved a document because it was infected?
Truly this to me sounds like the conflict that arises between making software actually do anything and some users who expect computers to work by magic. Sorry, they do not.
Maybe MS virusscanner should know about special files, especially those belonging to its own products, maybe it should be capable of handling these files securely without having to move them. Perhaps.
It is not like the email disappeared. The file was moved. Move it back, and voila, all is restored. (I am guessing here, this is how it works on unix mailboxes anyway.)
Yes, perhaps the virus scanner did NOT report it clearly what it had done (more likely, the user in question simply did not read the log) and perhaps a proper virusscanner by MS should be able to handle the insides of a MS file and clean it on the spot, not have to move the entire file. BUT if this happened on a unix I would find it perfectly acceptable. Then again, I read logs.
The sources of a newspaper are KNOWN, they are NOT anonymous, except to the public at large, but the reporter and editor and in fact the entire newspaper staff ARE known. So we still got a degree of accountability. If you want to remain anonymous as a news source you must first convince a reporter to risk being thrown in jail (a legal action that can be used by the state) to reveal his sources.
However if you publish anonymous on a blog, you got no such layer, anyone can do it, and without anyone to throw in jail to force the revelation of the sources.
Protected sources are a very important part of western civilization that allows newspaper to obtain news from people who are at risk for disclosing it. Anonymous writers are an entirely different story. There is nobody you can go to if they are saying outright lies.
It is about layers of trust, a newssouce will have with you an X amount of trust.
Now wich story do you trust more, a story written by a known writer citing publicly available records and quoting known officials?
Or a story written by a known writer quoting people that don't want to be named by are identified as sources close too X.
Or a story on the letter pape signed by A.Nonymous.
Only an idiot would attach the same weight to all three. Blogs fall in the last group.
Read up on reuters and the numerous doctored and staged photo's from the lebanon war just how dangerous it is to accept new sources as truthfull that are not.
A reporter can keep his sources anonymous, that does NOT mean that the source is unknown to the reporter. HUGE difference. I would trust a reporter that uses anonymous sources (people UNKNOWN to him) about as far as I wuld trust a slashdot poster.
realize what you are saying, if a report publishes anonymous sources (unknown to him) he would be publishing stuff he can't verify at all. Even gossip columinists frown on that.
It is simple, the new image format is NOT compatible with the gpl, meaning that once you have chosen that format you will be locked in to using software that supports it. Hmmm, now wich software would that be. Ooh, I know, MS wants you to be locked into OS-X!
Oh, you thinks it is windows. Well I suppose if you are paranoid you could think that MS is trying to introduce a new format that would lock people to its own products by capturing their content.
For this to work MS doesn't have to destroy jpeg at all, it doesn't even have to touch it. It just has to make it that enough people use the new format that it becomes an essential thing.
Just imagine what happens to the web if IE supports this and other browsers can't. Voila, only IE (on windows) can be used to see the whole web. Wanna bet that losts of myspace and other social sites visitors where people upload snaps made with their MS phones would be laden with this new image?
With every thing MS does you simply got to ask yourselve this, "how can this be used to futher tie the user into using MS software exclusively".
If you look at the number of posts here that are about the format rather then the license then even slashdotters are taken in by it.
There have been plenty of F1 sims, some with the option to setup your own car. Great, get it to ride as low as possible because that is what F1 cars do. Everybody does it.
So then came grand prix legends, a historic racing sim, with even more options for tuning. So everyone tried to get their car as low as possible and something wasn't right.
Cars were hellish to drive, skittish and any error would lead to a crash.
The problem? Well F1 cars of that era had NO wings and therefore no benefit to riding low. What everyone was doing was what customizers do today, get their cars soo low you remove all the handling from it. Old style F1 cars NEED their suspecion to be able to travel.
The moment you stopped thinking LOW == GOOD the cars became a lot easier to handle resulting in fastly improved lap times.
A clear case of the physics of the game going beyond simple programming. If the game designer had simply put something like for every centimeter down increase top speed this would never have happened, but in the end the real physics demaning realistic setups are a lot more fun.
What you are saying is in fact 100% reversed. The closer you get to truly creating that race car as a reprensentation of physics the easier it becomes. Rather then setting up a completly new script for every model you just tweak the parameters a bit.
So in effect, it becomes EXACTLY as you think scripting works. Set weight = 450 set horsepower = 400 and you got a car that will accelarate like a rocket. Chance the horsepower to 4 and with the same physics engine you will have suddenly created yourselve a lead brick.
That is how people do it today in all kinds of games, from golden oldies like Grand Prix Legends to FS2007. In fact these games would not be possible without it. A scripted racing game would like going back to the pre-arcade days and topdown racers on LCD screens.
Saying scripting is easier is like saying it is easier to rebuild the entire universe from scratch in a studio rather then just film outside. ILM is good, but not quite that good.
Face it, you just don't work that way. I was asked to go along with our sales guy to back him up. He was amazingly good at it but weak on the tech side, but no worries that is were I came in and it worked.
Only problem on the ride home I would be knackered, an early meeting would leave me useless for the rest of the day.
HR and Sales people by their nature are not introverts. They LIKE hanging out with people, a good meeting invocorates them, gets them buzzing and eager to make things happen. You will be wanting a siesta.
It is extremely hard for extroverts (the majority of people) to relate to introverts. it is NOT that we are anti-social, or don't enjoy being with people, it just tires us. Extroverts are charged up after a party, intoverts are drained. Typical HR fault when dealing with techies (often introverts) throw an early social meeting and then hope to get some work done. Good luck, all the techies will be drained, do socials ONLY on fridays at the end of the day, to the techie can recharge during the weekend.
Then there is an other aspect. Social skill, not that introverts don't have them, but ask yourselve this, do you have to remember others people birthdays, name of kids, golf score OR does that come natural to you. You don't ask about their family, you WANT to know about their family, it won't be a good day if you don't hear about it. Extroverts really care, they are not being social because they have too, they need too.
Not that introverts don't care, it is just that they don't HAVE to know. If they are told, they will remember and show concern but if you don't tell them that is fine too.
A introvert doesn't get "why did you never ask me about X, you don't care". They care but if you don't tell them they presume it is none of their business.
Sales people HAVE to show they care, that they know the customer, what he likes, what he dislikes. An introvert will find this very taxing.
I did sort of enjoy assisting the sales guy, it was intresting to see what goes on before the spec is drawn that you will have to build. But I also found it to be tiring with lots of senseless talking and not enough getting things done.
it was nice to do as a change of pace, but to do that the whole week, year in year out? Your choice offcourse but don't make the mistake of thinking that something you like doing every now and then makes a good career. You might like sex, but would you enjoy becoming a porn star?
That would be like setting of a flair signalling that you are doing something the goverment disapproves off.
Your silly attitude is pampered by living in the free west. A program called freenet suffers from that too. Its latest version attempts to sit on a darknet.
Yeah, that works. In the free west where NOBODY (we know off so far) gives a shit about wich ports traffic is going across or wether they can read it.
For the chinese goverment it would be trivial to just report any traffic that does not go over legit ports in a legit form. A darknet would stand out like sore thumb. If you think a darknet works then you must also think that sending mail to your own adress with a phoney name is going to fool anyone.
Same with wireless, radio signals can be detected you know. EASILY. And what would you connect to anyway? The state run ISP wireless service? Then it don't matter shit. You will still be monitored. and your location can be easily found with decades old equipment.
Crypto, well even if it is unbreakable under a dictator ship that would just mean you just proved you had something to hide, wich is a crime so of you go to be re-educated, you little counter-revolutionist.
Only in the free world can you hide in plain sight. Sending ANY content that cannot be identified but can be traced back to you is enough to land you in jail in a dictatorship.
Only if you somehow manage to come up with a solution that allows you to send and receive without being traced are you safe. Good luck with that. Spy agencies the world over would like to hear from you.
Take for instance ONLINE play. Check back to the gamecube era and see what Nintendo had to say about that. Then Xbox Live becomes a success and see there, the Wii copies it.
I am afraid the attitude you describe is just sensible business practice. What the competitor does that you don't do is obviously stupid, costly, senseless and kills the cat, else the customer MIGHT just ask why YOU aren't doing it and wether they wouldn't be better of going to the competitor.
In public transport you can meet other people, fall in love. This is GOOD. In cars you are alone, without smelly people who talk to loud. This is GOOD.
It is just how you advertise yourselve. You don't see car companies promoting public transport do you? "Ride the tube, meet intresting people, get laid OR drive our car and get killed by the fuel bill and die a lonely death in a traffic jam surrounded by hatefull car drivers who won't move out of the way to let the ambulance through"
OR public transport companies "Get a car, listen to your own surround sound music, in a comfortable leather chair, leave anytime you want, be cool, pick up chicks OR buy a overpriced ticket, get delayed for no reason with no anoucements, stand for hours next to smelly foreigners who smoke and would kill you if you commented on it."
It makes sense doesn't it. So why should Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft behave any differently, they will say they got the best and that the others suck. Then they will queitly look what works and copy that for future use. Possibly improving on it.
The Wiimote original? Please, I seen that stuff done in the arcades for years and even in the form of addon controllers. Nintendo watched what worked, noted what didn't, improved on it and then used it. Same as it copied online play.
Everyone does it, it is how things work and frankly I don't see anything wrong with it unless you are a mental retard and take anything game companies say at face value. It is PR speak.
What do you call 10.000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
What do you call 10.000 pr spokes persons at the bottom of the ocean? Even better.
The problem is that computers are still computers, dumb as shit, and that coding is still coding, an amazingly labor intensive task requiring a high degree of skill and a proffesion were throwing more people at it don't help.
Coding is expensive, if you want a dozen armour models/textures you can put a dozen artists on it. A dozen coders working on the same code just does not work.
Computers are dumb. Well they are. Comic/manga readers might be familiar with CBZ/CBR archives, nothing more then zip/rar files renamed. Yet most downloads still come with the zip or rar extensions meaning YOU have to tell the computer to open it with a comic reader rather then your regular archive reader. It don't matter wich OS or file explorer you use. NONE of them can tell a image archive from a regular archive. Humans on the other hand can do it in an instant just by the name alone.
Amazing!
This matters in games. There is NO magic that allows NPC's to adress you as female/male. Someone somewhere has spend a lot of time writing a lot of if(x) then Y else Z statements to deal with the fact that you were given a choice of sex. What sex to play, geez. Don't get your hopes up, you are still a CRPG player.
The more choices the more IF statements and it goes up in the way one of those curves go up that go up faster then the other value increases. Logo something (and people say playing computer games improves your brain)
NWN2 suffers from this in a bad way. You have so many choices that even the main story can't cope and you end up with the ultimate weapon being a sword. Nice, my monk sure could use that. Your wizard didn't like it much either?
It is even worse, in all the talks about the dwarf becoming a monk never once was the fact mentioned that I was one. Or did the thiefling mention I was a thiefling.
For that matter as you gained more potential party members the interaction between them in the game became less and less. Not because it wasn't designed, simply because at location X where A and B were to have a discussion you had A and C in your party so it never triggered.
Free, non-linear play doesn't make it any easier, playing a monk I offcourse build the monestary. I kept checking back to see if that dude was finally going to offer me some training. No deal, told to come back later.
Yeah great, was there something there after I got fed up? More linear play would have prevented a dozen checks and lots of frustration.
I wonder what could then be done in NWN2 had axed half the choices and instead fleshed out the remaining content more. Say that you had only first party members. Would they then have been able to get a lot more interaction. Might you have been able to influence anyone else then the dwarf to change proffesions.
A gameboy game solved that nicely, despite a HUGE party from wich you had to select a cast for battle ALL characters were present during cut scenes even if they had been critically wounded in a previous fight (not killed just not available for future combat missions). The game still had the problem that certain paths could only be opened in combat with the right character but that was usually hinted at in the briefing.
NWN2 totally did that in the wrong way. It FORCED you to take certain characters while at the same time punishing you (by not showing interactions) for not choosing the magic combo. I am not talking about the female that became a fixed member of your group, that worked, but those quests you had to take for instance bishop with you.
What about freedom to roam then? Well that was what Oblivion had. But in order to prevent you to be killed to easily OR find nothing a challenge things had to scale. So in the beginning even remote areas were a cakewalk and later on you would face thugs on imperial roads in million dollar outfits demanding loose chance.
Now compare this to the far more linear, less freedom, Planescape Torment. Areas were locked off, stopping you from going to far too fast, you couldn't p
You got some amazing posts today, including some kid who thinks The Sims was Maxis first big hit. HA!
This guy is a pro and works for a company that has been making fun games when SERIOUS power was 8mhz.
However since that day two things have happened. We have got more and mhz on our cpu's which at times seems to be only used to update the graphics. It is of no doubt that the Wii in this department cannot compete, pure polygon/texture/fps count it is going to loose to the 360/PS3 and ALL consoles will SUCK donkyballs increasingly so compared to the PC.
BUT that is not what this guy is talking about. He is complaining about lack of power to power NOT the graphics but the game itself. The AI.
AI is often ignored by gamers, we note it when it is bad but in most reviews a decent AI will take second place in importance to the graphics. I have no idea way I mean sure the human race has developed above such supervisial OOOH SHINY!
Eh where was I?
However in the background the AI code has been getting a share of the increased processing power and it shows. Today's AI in games is still nothing to worry any real human but if you ever make the mistake of playing a game from the dark ages you can see just how moronic the old ai's were that had to run on ancient hardware.
This guys complaint is that the Wii with it's simpler hardware just doesn't deliver enough oomph to power the AI in games.
First off, this guy works for Maxis, a game company that has NEVER produced a single OOOOH SHINY game. In fact all their games heavily depend on AI. This has been a problem for them before, their games never looked as spiffy as say your average FPS but offcourse the AI in them was still making your computer sweat. If you ever designed your own FPS level with AI monsters you know how fucking difficult it is to get them to walk straight down a corridor EVEN with massive pre-proccessing. In the sims you got easily a dozen AI all finding their way around a constanstly changing enviroment. While you maybe only seeing the effect of all your girls queing up for the same toilet and peeing themselves (Mmm, there might be a reality show in that) the fact that they even can do that requires a lot of code to be run.
There is a reason the full sims never appeared on the consoles, they just can't do it. (Try them if you don't believe them, the console versions are extremely reduced in capability compard to the PC versions)
Spore, if it delivers what it promises, is going to be much the same. For it to work there must be some serious number crunching going on in the background, yet ALL people see is the graphics.
Maxis can't produce a game that don't look the part. The graphics must pass a certain level or people just won't buy it. I am sure there is a market for a game with amazing ai and 8bit graphics BUT sadly maxis is to much into making a profit to explore that segment. Shame on them.
His claim is then that if a game is going to have passable graphics the Wii doesn't have enough horsepower left to power the AI. It is something PC owners have ALWAYS known. In some games you can alter your settings INCLUDING the ai difficulty level, lower it and performance improves. It is even simpler in the modding scene, lots of user made content mentions that you need a higher specced rig for their content then the original game simply because they upped the number of AI's in the game.
An old example is transport tycoon. A train game from I think the 386 days. If in those days you had more then a 50 or so trains in the game it would start to grind to a halt as the CPU simply couldn't cope. Nowadays a hacked version of the game happily runs with hundreds of trains of any length using the increased horsepower NOT just for graphics (increased resolution) but to run the AI for all those extra objects.
If you take the same game and try to port it fairly to all the gaming machines out there then the Wii is going to have to be the one with the smaller levels (less memory) fewe
This one so goes into my quotes database. If you thought it up yourselve, brilliant!
If I go into a newly opened restaurant, give my order and seven hours later I would still be waiting for my food, I would NOT give that restaurant another chance.
You seem to have an amazingly silly idea of how you sell things. In the real world you get your stuff in order and THEN launch. I know I know, this the computer industry, home of the patch and beta release, but regular stores like McDonalds do NOT work that way.
Why on earth you label a regular business with Microsoft or for that matter an IT company is beyond me.
You can rest assure that when McD launches a new hamburger they will have at least done some testing to see that the majority of customers are in fact able to digest it. They also do not attempt to stop you from feeding that burger to your dog, splitting a cola with your friends or use the ice cubes to cool your overheated radiator.
If the article is accurate then it is extremely bad, but expected, news for the site. Crippling DRM, inability to just take the customers money (imagine if McD refused to sell you food because it thought you were from the wrong country) and just plain not being able to match up with the ease of downloading the same stuff for free.
I could have gotten all the stuff he payed for, for less and play it without WiMP. Oh and used the money for snacks and drinks.
You know the funny thing? It is not that I am cheap, I got money to burn, and never had a trouble renting or buying stuff before. Just that it has gotten so much easier to just fire up a torrent.
Frankly this looks the same as when napster went legit. Too little, too late.
what part of tweakXP do you not understand?
Furthermore that is a delay NOT lag. Lag would the time between when something is supposed to happen and when it actually happens.
User hovers over menu item -> Configured delay -> OS starts drawing the menu item -> Lag -> OS displays menu item.
Two seperate issues wich granted may be easily confused because without checking what the delay setting is it is hard to determine what causes the time difference between mouse over and popup.
The article should be clearer on this, and you should learn NOT to assume that a setting wich exists in XP is the cause of something in Vista.
Finally, if there is a delay build in (to prevent constant popups as you browse the menu) then any futher delay is unforgiveable as the OS should use that delay time to prepare the popup. Or is that a little bit too much to expect of a modern GUI?
Tada! DB2, IBM's database product, certified for Windows.
If you can read you will also note that they list the versions of 2003 that are certified.
So your entire argument is null and void. Specific windows distro/version's get certified or not to work with software by the companies supporting said software. You will not that windows XP for instance is NOT certified to work with DB2.
Doesn't mean you cannot run DB2 on Windows XP (or other versions) just that if you do, you are on your own. Exactly the same as with linux distro's or even IBM's un-certified AIX versions.
Certification is nothing more the saying, we tested our product with that product and if there are problems we will help you (for an ungodly amount of money) and if you choose to run our product on another product we won't help you, unless you pay an even large sum of money.
Everyone keeps calling it a loss-leader. However for that to work iTunes (the store) got to be loosing Apple money. From what I been able to gather it does in fact make a profit. Not as big as other divisions within Apple and certainly NOT with the margins of other divisions BUT a profit nonetheless.
That rules out it being a loss-leader. In super market bread is a lossleader for its other products. It has to sell bread to get people in the store so it can then sell them the profitable items like candy.
A decent supermarket will also sell dairy products like butter, the margin on them is extremely small, (or at least they were 20 years ago when I studied this) BUT the margin is there and results in a profit. Therefore these items are NOT a loss-leader.
Some economists think a company got to focus on only the high margin items. This is typical armchair thinking, real business leaders know that it is often the low-margin low-profit items that are the most stable.
Think of this, were is the risk with iTunes? The store is up and running requiring only patches to stay current. Compare this to the iPod were each new model that costs a fortune to develop AND produce could bomb leaving Apple with unsold stock.
High margins, lots of profit but also lots of risk.
The entire article doesn't really address this question, the author just takes the logic leap of "iPod needs content, therefore the iTunes store".
Yet he does notice that the fast majority of music content (wich is what the iPod needs) is sold on CD. Not online.
So why would iPod software not just be an extremely efficient, easy to use, piece of ripping software? (It appently is but I do not use it so I leave that upto other to judge)
Did any of the other MP3 players out there NOT sell because there wasn't a online music store for them? Is the iPod a success because of the iTunes music store?
Well, considering the extremely poor sales of the iTunes store and considering the record breaking sales of the iPod I would assume that like me, an awfull lot of iTunes (the program) users simply ignore the store or even have found out you can disable it altogether.
Why does Apple bother with re-selling music, wich the author claims is a low profit business, and taking on the huge mess of DRM?
I can think of a number of reasons.
A: MP3 players have been called the tools of piracy by the RIAA loonies. Therefore, the iPod being the largest is therefore the largest piracy tool for music. Que voters voting for idiot politicians who then put a tax on MP3players and other digital content holders so fatten the RIAA pockets. This could eat into Apples real moneymaker, ipod sales. With the iTunes store Apple has the defence of saying that it gives users access to legal music and since ALL ipod users use iTunes and iTunes is the store therefore iPods are filled with legal music. Yes there are holes in this argument but this is the music industry we are talking about. Logic can take a flying leap.
Is this likely? iTunes store being nothing more then a cover while Apple knows that its iPods will really be filled with ripped CD content (either legal or illegal, with Apple not really caring but having to pretend that it does).
Perhaps, except that it doesn't work, the music industry still is demanding that MP3 players (including iPods) be taxed.
B: The author is an idiot who cannot understand that low-profit still is profit. Especially when combined with huge volume. Especially when combined with low-risk.
Unlike some CD based publisher/seller Apple takes NO risk on its "stocking" a track. A few megabyte of storage space, a monkey to enter the details in the database and off you go. Those costs remain the same if it sells 0 copies or a million of that track. Compare this to a the CD version where you run the risk of either not pressing enough discs so you can't sell to the demand (and people go to another store OR alternative distrubution method) or to many and you have to take the surpless back.
Perhaps Apple tought the iTunes store was going to do a lot better, surely at the beginning everyone seemed to think this was going to be massive. Then it didn't and now everyone seems to take it for granted that Apple NEVER thought that iTunes was going to be big.
But there is another simpler issue, iTunes may not be making Apple a lot of money, but it is making them money. Profit of any sort is good. Even if iTunes made Apple only a single million in pure profit it would be foolish of them to drop it. Profit is profit.
Could Apple just be in it for the money? Hoping that it might become big but in the meantime happy as long it doesn't cost money? This ain't MS xbox or MSN, this attempt to reach into other markets IS making Apple money.
C: Apple LOVES DRM. Ah, well I got karma to burn. Think about it, none of its products are exactly know for their openeness. Apple is NOT one of the nice companies out there. In a world were all of the old grumpy giants are turning out GPL software left right and center Apple remains a bastion of closed software.
Oh yeah, darwin. Right. Except what has actually come out of it? Has a single tool made its way out of OS-X and onto say linux? Has Apple done anything but take take take?
Not really. They a