The poor old mobile phone is supposed to bloody kill everything on this planet while all it wants is to sit in your pocket and cook your testicles.
Lets see: The article claims that this year phones are going to be launched with 30gb storage, the same as an iPod.
Mmmm, what they really mean is that 1 phone is going to be launched, possibly this year, in japan, that is going to cost a fortune, eat batteries for lunch, not going to tiny while having the storage of the smallest 5th gen iPod.
Doesn't exactly sound like it is going to sweep the market. In fact the mobile phone market is incredibly fractured with not a single manufacturer having the kind of market share that apple enjoys in the mp3 player market. Let alone that a single new model will achieve anywhere near the penetration that iPods have.
Oh but there is the anology to the PC's where IBM clones pushed Apple into a corner. Yup that is true.
Except that how does this relate to mp3 players? The "clones" arrived first in this case. It was the tiny asian "clone" companies that launched first and only later did Apple join the party and even later did the real big boys like Sony get involved. If anything this is the exact opposite of what happened with PC's. This would have like if Compaq and the other clones had their PC market gobbled up by IBM.
For some reason when it comes to IT most people seem to loose common sense. Surely we all here remember how the N-cage was supposed to take over? Nintendo better watch out with its GBA.
Didn't happen.
Some people point to camera phones as to how the mobile phone can replace single purpose devices by combining them into the phone.
Except that this did not really happen. The camera phone did not replace regular camera's. Or do you really record your kids birthday party on your mobile phone? No the quality seperate camera market is still there. What the camera phone replaced is the throw away camera and incredibly cheap, good for 1 holiday, market. What it mostly did however was expand the market. There are now simply more cameras about then there were before.
I think the same will be true for mobile phone MP3 players. They will partially replace the very cheap players and partially expand the market so that people who never owned a portable music player before will have one now.
The iPod is as threathend by the mobile phone as the SLR camera is by the camera phone. Or the GBA is by the N-cage. Or the computer is by the PDA.
Offcourse the PDA is under threath by the smart phone and one day it may be true that the mobile phone will be so powerfull that it can replace the iPod. Looking at current tech I think that is still years if not decades away.
But a headline off "Business as usual" does not sell ads does it now.
When your phone can hold 10-20 gigs your ipod can hold a terrabyte.
Who needs that much space. Yeah right. I have heard that one ever since I bought a HD floppy.
There have always been devices that do it all and there have always been devices that do one thing only.
There are washing machines that can also function as a dryer. Funny thing, do you know you can still buy JUST washing machines + a seperate spin dryer + a seperate warm air dryer?
Yes thats right, spin dryers still exist despite the fact that nearly every washing machine can do it that function nowadays. Just not as well as a true purpose spin dryer.
Oh and the whole camera phone argument is faulty. NOBODY uses a camera phone as a replacement for a regular phone. The camera phone is the replacement of the throwaway/rented camera. Its function is to be always with you for those moments when you do not have a regular camera with you.
In fact that is the function of all the extra's on the mobile phone. Games? Fun for when you got your phone but not a real game system. Calendar? Usefull for when you do not got access to your real calendar. Music? Nice for when you forgot your real music player.
Offcourse some people will be happy with the limited capabilities that their phone offers them. Just as some people are happy with a 10 dollar MP3 player they got from the bargain bin.
That is not Apples market. Apples market is what used to be the Walkman->Minidisc/CD-man market. They effectivly replaced sony for portable audio.
Oh and if you think your phone MP3 players is not going to have DRM your insane.
Say your a carpenter. In school you take fresh wood from supplies and in HUGE classroom with all the latest hardware you get to make the chair you want.
In real life you got to fix peoples old smelly peeed on wobbly chairs.
In school a mechanic gets to build a car from scrath with the whole class.
In real life you will be changing the oil on cars that never been washed.
In school a nurse... well nurses pretty much know their job is going to suck.
School is nothing like real life. EVER.
As for CS. Lets be honest here. 99% of what you are learn is out of date or off no use or just wrong. The remaining 1% you can get out of a book.
You will be suprised how many people in IT got the best grades in maths and now end up spending a year getting all the code to be adjusted for a simple tax change. Yeah, that is high science!
Most real IT is just putting to code what somebody else has done. How much of you code does anything more complex then adding up?
There are offcourse exceptions but the not for the average code monkey.
Just like most car mechanics spend most of their time changing oil and spark plugs most programmers just do basic maintenance. Both can make a very good living out of it but it ain't as existing as their school projects.
The british study is automatically suspect. I don't think the country that gave us Mad Cow Disease can be trusted with anything scientific. Ever. Would be like asking a german about human rights.
Any study on bad effect of a popular product wich forms a billion dollar industry is going to be under a lot of pressure to find said product safe or at least to report that no absolute evidence could be found.
Note that so far no study has claimed that cellphones are safe. That is what the newspaper headlines claim but the studies themselves go no further than saying that they could not find direct evidence of any significant increased risk.
Watch "Yes Minister" episode "The greasy pole" for how it works.
For the subject off cellphone radiation and how bad it is, just remember that almost everything we do is bad for us. Even simple stuff like eating and drinking is killing us slowly. Hell even breathing is bad for you in the long term. The whole being alive thing is slowly killing you.
Now with that in mind how can holding a small mircowave to your head possibly be good for you?
It has been proven with lab tests that rats exposed to constant cellphone exposure DO develop tumors. So there is absolutly an effect.
Off course human beings are larger, we do not hold the phone to our heads 24/7 and we ain't rats.
And still, we have had all those studies that claimed that smoking was perfectly safe and that seatbelts cause more deaths and that BSE wasn't transmittable to humans etc etc etc.
Is the typical slashdot reaction that cellphones can't possibly cause braintumors not the same as all those smokers claiming that smoking couldn't be bad for you?
For me two things need to be done. A: a simple study as to just how bad cellphone and similar radiation is for a human. Pigs are similar to us. Strap a cellphone to their heads and test away.
B: then take that data and translate it to typical real world use. It might very well be that for normal use it means that in 100 years you have say a 1% increased chance to get a braintumor. Whoopie.
C: then translate these results to future developments. How bad is not just cellphone radiation but those bluetooth headsets, WI-FI, RFID and god knows what else we will have in the future.
D: then decide wether we are willing to give it all up or that we just accept the risk. Or perhaps that by the time the tumor develops cancer will be threatable.
I think the majority of people will judge it an acceptable risk. Well until they are dying of cancer of course and need somebody to sue. How many smokers do you know who are dying of lung cancer who say "Well I smoked them so now I deserve a slow painfull death"?
Oh, now for a note of realism
on
Living In Oblivion
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The reviewer notes the game called "Planescape: Torment". Now Oblivion is an RPG and a good game but it belongs not in the same class as that game. Very little can compare to that game. To be fair, Oblivion does beat it in the graphics terms but then so does pong.
The reviewer is gushing with love for Oblivion and that compels me to counter with a harsher review.
First the hardware requirements. I got 2.6 HT P4 overclocked to 3.1 and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb and 1 gig of mem and a fast HD. The game is certainly playable although it helps a lot if you turn grass off. Not all of the settings can be maxed BUT you can leave the land distance maxed AND have distant buildings drawns. So the outside still looks damn fucking big with trees all the way to the horizon and that distant city clearly visible.
I upgraded to a ATI X1600 Pro 512MB (agp version because I don't want to upgrade a complete PC until AMD upgrades memory) and the difference is noticiable.
BUT not staggering. The CPU is the limiter it seems and you notice it when panning outside that it is still not fluid. But it looks beautifull, I never worry to much about high frame rates in non-shooters and I wouldn't buy a 360 if it came with Brooke Shields (Blue lagoon edition).
For those who care about fps, you need a state of the art machine. For the rest, a quality machine of the last 2 years is passable.
Frankly the game to me seems to a mismatched bundle of ideas. It marries FPS with Melee. It has stealth ALA Thief but no instant kills. It has lots of potions and spells but only 8 slots to quickly use them in. It has friendlies wich conflicts with lots of friendly fire.
RPG's are pretty rare and everyone that is not crap is welcome and Oblivion is not crap. It just isn't a Baldur Gate either.
The combat is boring and confusing with more time spend running after your opponent the actually doing battle. I want to re-enact the scene from the Princess Bride ontop the cliffs of despair. Oblivion gives me a drunken scuffle.
Worse is that when you finally get people/horses to help you out you more often end up hitting them then the enemy causing them to attack you. Was this playtested or did the designers really enjoy beating up their own horse instead of the clanfear lizard thingy?
The magic is boring. None of the spells do it for me. Yeah you can combine some but whoopee. 3 boring spells in one is not 3 times the fun. Oh and you can't be a true mage when you got only 8 hot slots for your weapons spells and potions.
Alchemy is very detailed. NOT. Sure sure you got loads and loads of ingredients BUT they do not make sense. Each item just got 4 effects attached seemingly at random and you combine two or more to get a potion with 1 or more effects. Yet it is not logical. You do not combine grapes with yeast for instance to get wine to give you a confidence boost.
Everquest 2 at least did associate some logic behind wich foods give wich effects. Not Oblivion.
Since I need my hot slots for weapons and spells I do not bother with potions.
Then there is the sneaking. The stupid placing of the light gem thingy is indeed truly stupid. In the center of the screen. Probably afraid you would miss it. It has none of the shading of thief. you seem to be either invisible (you can hit an enemy with a sword and they won't see you), sorta invisible until you hit someone and fully visible. At least your state of visibilty is related to the darkness of your surroundings.
The bad thing however is that you do not have an instant kill. So if your sneaking up to an old harmless woman sleeping peacefully and whack her with a deadric (big sword) long sword be prepared for a long fight.
A bit of background banter in the Dark Brotherhood (assasin guild) has an NPC saying how he had to keep hacking and sawing at a woman's neck, I know what he is talking about.
A silent assasin only works if he/she can kill with one blow. What i
I did those quests and it is very simple choice with no world effect or even an effect down the line.
Yes it is a choice and more then you get in adventure games but a long way from roleplaying. I would have loved to have been able to infiltrate the black brotherhood and destroy them from within. Not a choice. Neither can you join the brotherhood and then destroy all the other guilds.
Perhaps Oblivion is just to big for its own good. The first part of the brotherhood is a lot of fun on its own (the "fake" missions are boring to the extreme) and it almost seems a shame they did not make it the full game. Sure sure it is nice I can join half a dozen guilds but what do you prefer. 2 highly detailed opposing guilds with you either joining one or the other or playing them off against each other, OR the current, generic unrelated shallow groups?
It is a nice, game but it sets no new RPG standards for those who were pleseantly suprised by BB and its offspring years ago.
Now that I got your attention, this is offtopic but on the subject of RPG's.
I remember a western RPG that had actually nude paperdolls of your avatar on your inventory screen. Purely for gameplay reasons of course. Not to oggle your female elves boobies.
Just can't remember the game names. I always thought it was one of the Elder Scrolls series but that don't seem to be it.
Anyone know the answer?
Oh, and to be on topic. The western RPG has died and reborn so many times they put a revolving door on its tomb.
The sad thing is that we, the human race, always try to pigeon hole everything. What is worse is that we often get it wrong.
Hands up if you ever seen a game claimed to have "rpg" elements when the only thing the game has is that units can gain "level up"?
For some reason some people have come to believe that levelling up == RPG. It of course does not. Many games level up. Being allowed to fly bigger aircraft in an aircraft sim is a form of levelling up. Getting a bigger gun in Doom is.
Take away the levelling up from games like FF and you will see that they play very much like the adventure games of old. In fact the old "Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis" also had fights in it.
Adventures however are not RPG's most notably because you do not choose a role to play but rather follow the lead character through a pre-determined story. Adventures are as much about roleplaying as a FPS. Sure, you can roleplay in Doom. Just as long as you roleplay a guntoting silent marine who shoots everything on sight.
FF does not give you a role to play.
So where does this leave oblivion? Well in limbo. The thing that is missing from the elder scrolls is choices. You can join any guild you want even if they seem mutually exclusive. Only a hand full of quests even have a choice in them as to how you complete them. Usually either giving an item to the cops or the criminals. You can very easily however complete both quests for the dark brotherhood (evil assasins) as for some noble band of knights.
The old taking a side in a quest is not part of the Elder Scrolls and I miss it.
Oblivion ain't a bad game, just that it is RPG light compared to the real stuff like baldur gate, KOTOR, planescape torment etc.
Oblivion is free as those games but the individual quests are pretty much on rails. I would have loved to have been able to choose a side in the whole dark brotherhood deal. Not in this game.
To some this makes Obilion a union of the worst elements of eastern and western RPG's. The "feeling lost" of western RPG's and the "on rails" of eastern adventure+levellingup games.
It almost reminds me of Doom3. Nice engine. Now can a real game company make a proper game with it? For me Oblivion is only acceptable because there the lovers of western RPG are not exactly swamped with choice. When is the next company going to revive the genre like Baldur's gate did?
In times of old we used to had a short time in wich people figured out that Intel had 'goofed' a bit and that it was possible to get dual celerons. While I had enough money to go dual with regular P3 there was a small crowd that got a hint of what it means to have two cpu's in a machine and they never went back.
Well not until the P4 disabled cheap duals and you had to spend a fortune on xeon's.
What is the advantage of a dual over a single. Simple. NO MORE FREEZING.
No I am not talking about the heat output. I am talking about that effect when you do something mundane but cpu intensive like opening a large slow folder and your entire desktop just crashes to a halt only to resume a few secs later often stopping your music as well.
Fatal? No of course not. Just that it disappears with a dual. Why? Because the one CPU that is entirely preoccupied with that lengthy task can keep doing that while the other CPU does the task of keeping your bloody desktop responding and playing the fucking music.
Oh it is probably more complex then that but in practice it means your computer just keeps working even under load.
In more terminal freezes where a single core only has the option to do a hard reboot because a single task has run out of control a dual can still run the OS tasks of killing the runaway. kill/process manager whatever is your poison.
So is this of use to business users? Well it is to me. Given the choice I between a dual P3 and a single p4 for office use give me the old machine any day. No it will not be as fast in single tasks as the P4 but frankly I don't do many tasks that are lenghty CPU grinds.
I do however prefer it if I don't have to wait for my desktop to finish something wich seems to cause it to faint.
Dual core/cpu vs Single core/cpu is like the difference between sex with a partner and on your own. Some of you might not yet know the difference but once you experienced it you don't want to go back.
Perhaps I got strange eyes, but mine start to hurt if I got a bright white nearly empty window in front of me with just some black text. Often with the width of a single pixel. Yes I am talking about your average web browser/file browser window. Adding a slight tone to it to soften the whiteness (bit like tanning for your computer) makes the desktop easier on the eyes and therefore easier to use in general.
Adding an image. Perhaps even an image that tells me something about the contents of the window could be considered eyecandy OR and extra clue. Was it gnome that colored the entire desktop red if you ran as root? Eyecandy or vital visual feedback?
Stricly speaking everything not in X is eyecandy. Run solaris on a xerox printer machine and you will get the bare basics of a window manager and yes it does everything it needs to but gee gods it is hard on the eyes.
So where do you draw the line?
Personally I liked Enlightenment but now run XFCE4 wich suggests that while I like a pretty picture I don't want it to get in the way of business. KDE 3.* is nice and all but gee gods it loves the animations. Gnome is too inflexible for me.
Give me candy but don't slow me down. No animations. INSTANT popups/slides/whatever.
Then again I do usually have gkrellm open. Lots of flashy blinky shiny thingys. But they don't slow me down and while they are eyecandy also tell me someting about my computer. Since I am on old hardware wich I tend to try to do things it isn't designed for I "use" the gkrellm eyecandy to tell me if I can expect a freeze to happen or when gentoos emerge is about to fill its HD space again.
So usefull eyecandy?
As for pure eyecandy effects like the holy grail of true transparancy. Well. My terminals are semi transparant and I would have it anyother way as I think (just my opinion) that it is easier on the eyes then a monochrome background. True transparancy would perhaps look even nicer and if it was as smooth as a FPS then all the better.
Yes off course it doesn't really matter and I would hardly use a bad terminal emulator over a good one just for the sake of transparancy BUT if two terms are equal is the one that lets you choose your type of background better?
Is the windows manager that then allows your term emulator to offer you transparancy then better for it? Etc all the way down to the kernel.
I personally don't like eyecandy that steals window space OR takes time but I do like eyecandy that makes the desktop less endless grey slabs of unused space.
Should the OS/window manager developers care about eyecandy? Well that is the beauty of OSS isn't it? Use pure X if you hate all eyecandy or use any of the window managers if you want more.
A bit of sugar makes the medicine go down. Yes the medicine still needs to be good but sugar helps.
Will windows new 3d desktop rendering be a good or a bad thing? Well, there was a recent discussion about offloading physics in games onto the gpu. That would help run the game a lot faster. Ages ago, long before GPU's, some video cards started offering windows acceleration wich supposedly helped offload some of the desktop rendering from the CPU onto the vidcard.
It makes sense in a way. If you can save the CPU a boring task then it can spend its cycles on more meaningfull things. I do know for a fact that a true dual CPU machine has a lot less waiting for redraws then a single cpu machine. Would a single CPU machine with GPU desktop rendering be just as responsive? Surely that can't be bad.
In a way I don't see the problem that the author has with it. Sure sure, windows users who want vista "security" (see a few articles below about IE7 for vista and how secure it is) need to upgrade and pay for the eyecandy but that is MS business model. They got more money some some countries so it works. Anyway I am fairly sure MS allows people to turn off all the candy they don't want.
Ultimately the candy has little to do with the underlying OS. How a widget is drawn has
So clearly this bug does not exist in Windows XP SP2 and most certainly the same bug does not exist in the completly Windows Vista.
Didn't we just have an article about MS wanting to go after Big Blue's business in the serious computer market? That they had spend 20 billion dollars on getting Windows ready to compete with the big boys and that IBM better look out?
Some MS fan boys of course swallowed that line hook, line and sinker. The same line MS has spun since it began business. "The next version will be lots better then what our competitor offers so please buy our [inferior] product now, we promise to ship the next version on time and as promised. Honestly. Have we ever lied to you before, or failed to meet a deadline, or failed to live up to our own hype?".
So the question by the poster of how this will affect MS in the market.
Not at all.
Simple as that. MS can keep producing crap and the public will continue to lap it up. I don't even care for the reasons and excuses anymore. They start to sound more and more like what you get at an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting or a session for battered wives.
As a LAMP developer I was recently offered a position with the opportunity to grow into.NET development. Gee thanks. What is the bonus package like? Kick in the nuts?
For those wondering what IE 7 and Vista will be really be like. More of the same old crap just a lot more useless crap that nobody really uses but that adds a lot of bloat that makes it impossible to debug. IF IE 1 - 6 have been buggy security holes and IE 7 has so far had the exact same bugs and security holes as 6 then it is obvious that MS hasn't really done anything with that supposed security audit of theirs.
First WMF now this. Vista is just another re-release of the same crap code that MS has been logging around since Billy boy first stole his basic interpreter.
Business as usuall. No doubt they will make a fat profit on it.
Would go up light anything if someone carelessly dropped a match you know what I mean?
Very dangerous location this internet, accidents happen all the time. Now if you made an entirely volntery donation to our neighbourhood watch program we make sure you remain save and don't have your legs broken by vinnie with a lead pipe if you catch my drift.
I don't do a good mafia impression, you want one talk to your local telecom
What you describe is the current system. Just like I pay more to have a letter send fast I also pay more for a fast line. You pay more for a 3mb line then a dial up modem. Same as with postage stamps.
Oh well not entirely. Because on the internet BOTH parties pay. Google pays a hosting bill as well. Bit like you would need to pay a subscription fee to receive mail as well pay for postage for sending mail.
What the new idea is to add yet another fee for the middle man. For the snail mail example imagine that you had to pay the post office to accept your letter, the receiver had to have a subscription to have a mail adress and now the mailman wants a cut for delivering the message at the normal speed.
As for your road example, it would be true if the car maker charged you extra for when your car is not stuck in traffic. Do not pay and your steering goes wobbly above 20 miles per hour.
No, there really is no precedent for this. The closest thing is the mafia who is famous for trying to get a cut of whatever money is being made even if they have no right to do so.
The telecoms are already getting paid by both google and the enduser for handling the traffic. This is just a way to get even more money.
Then again, there certainly is plenty of precedent for greed.
If anything this proves we need MORE goverment control and not less. More and stricter goverment control that is not swayed by commercial forces.
Give you libs their way and we will be totally at the mercy of the telcos who build their networks with tax money in the first place. A really strong goverment would have slapped the telcos down hard and demanded several billions in return for the initial investment of the goverment having payed to invent the internet.
Left and Right wingers are both nuts but either are to be preffered to the libs. It is no wonder NO country in the world is run by them. Voters ain't that stupid.
Might the lack of a links on every google page to every google service possible be on purpose?
Several posts above moan about how portals like yahoo filled their pages with ever more stuff making them impossible to use.
Perhaps google has decided to keep all their services seperate making it possible to keep their pages clean and not wasting screen space on links that should be in your bookmarks anyway.
You seem to want to turn google in another Yahoo. No thank you.
I pretty much doubt the blind would even care very much about the kind of pictures that speak a thousand words. I at least haven't seen lenghty and detailed descriptions of famous works of art in museums so blind people can enjoy them.
So your image gallery of ehm nature shots is save. No need to describe each nudy shot in details in the alt attribute.
However for most of the images on a normal site this does not apply. Take for instance images serving as navigation links. The oh so cool animatited letter leading to the email link could easily have an alt value of "email" and then it would be clear to all.
Same with menu links. Just have the alt say what ever you have rendered in the image.
Yes there are going to be difficulties like what the hell do you do with product images. How exactly do you describe a piece of clothing. Or worse a motherboard. Well, you don't need to. If your normal product description is good enough then all you need to put in the alt value is that this is an image of the product.
Sure many motherboard descriptions are so fucking poor you need to study the image to learn what exactly is on the board but is that a problem just for the blind?
Frankly it isn't so hard to make a website that the blind can use. This complaint is about navigation only. Not that target doesn't properly describe its furniture.
The only problem in doing proper navigation is that you first got to shoot the managers and the designers. Management just seems to insist on using pointless flash for essential site elements.
The designers should be shot just because. Why the fuck does CSS not have constants forcing me to do the search and replace for minute color changes because designers don't understand complex functions like that?
Fine, put it in your store window. Lets see how long you last.
Rights got to be balanced. It is what makes real life so difficult. How do you balance the right of target to make its website the way they like it with some peoples rights to live a normal live despite a physical disability.
My freedom to form a club of people I like is offset by the rights of other people to join clubs they wish. So whites only golf clubs are a no-no.
It all depends what you consider more important. The freedom of people with bad eye sight or the freedom of website designers.
Off course as a programmer I personnally think that designers should have NO rights but that is just me.
How anyone could seriously believe a disney man would hate DRM is beyond me. Well not really beyond me. I am too old and bitter and cynical and paranoid for that. People are stupid.
MS is doing DRM but also fights it. As a gigantic player it knows deep down that piracy hasn't exactly hurt it. MS software is pirated to hell and back yet the billions keep rolling in and it controls the OS and office software markets. Could there be a link? That software that is easy to pirate gets used a lot so that is what people know so companies that need to decide on what to buy choose the package that people are familiar with at home from their pirated version?
That because MS is what everyone knows when people buy a new PC they don't mind that MS software is installed "for free" giving MS a nice steady stream of hazzle free revenue (no messy boxes to sell) as long as people buy new pc's?
Then their is Sony, a favorite target for the anti-drm crowd and they certainly screwed up badly enough with their music cd drm debacle but lets not forget that it was sony who gave us unrestricted video recording.
Yet the hero is Apple who has always maintained the thightest control on its software. Isn't making sure only YOU can make the hardware that runs YOUR software and sell them bundled only the best DRM? Go ahead. Pirate Mac OS X. What are you going to use it for? You need to buy a Mac to run it on. Oh sure, the paid updates are pirated but the main revenue source is safe.
Apple has also been very active in trying to get movie drm in place.
The whole story that Steve Jobs only did DRM for iTunes to keep the record industry happy just doesn't ring true to me.
What I think that Steve Jobs has done is realize that you need to take baby steps when tackling a difficult subject.
iTunes DRM isn't the least he could get away with regarding the music industry.
iTunes DRM is the most he could get away with regarding the paying public.
He knew that existing DRM crippled music stores were not succeeding so he added as much DRM as he could without scaring off customers.
It worked.
Steve Jobs is very good at that. He knows exactly how far to push something that it is still accepted. iPod's really ain't all the great. Every other MP3 player would be slammed for not working as a straight HD (you need itunes to put songs onto it in any meaningfull way) and slammed even worse for renaming your songs.
Same with the price. It is just not high enough to piss people off. Just high enough to generate a shitload of cash but not high enough to be seen as insanely overpriced.
Same with Apple PC's. Every apple story has comments about their bad service even going so far as that when you order a Apple with more memory all of a sudden it is a custom build and you loose a lot of warranty. Dell would never get away with it but Steve Jobs just judged it right that Apple fans defend that a PC build entirely by Apple is still a custom build because you told them to plug in more memory and therefore you don't deserve full warranty.
Steve Jobs is more about DRM then any other playing in the market. Check out his speeches and proposals. If he has his way we will have trusted computing shoved down our throath and media DRM'ed till we choke on it.
Just for now he isn't big enough to rely force the issue and MS who could is still sitting on the fence.
There are some people at MS warning that in a DRM and trusted computing world there would be very little value to a open PC. If I can't do anything with my media anyway do I need anything more then a console to play it? MS knows that the console market is far harder to dominate then the PC market.
Killing the PC would be very very silly of MS if they are not 100% sure they are going to be selling everyone the replacement.
The old slashdot standby "replace Apple with MS/Sony and reread the story" advice still stands.
I give you three seconds to see why this statement is a load of crap that could only be uttered by a complete and utter moron.
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What about Enzo Ferrari?
Why do think it is called a Ferrari anyway? Named after its maker. Oh sure you could argue that since he didn't personally fasten all the nuts and bolts he didn't build it but that is just petty.
I don't 'build' my own PC's anyway. Nobody does if you want to be pedantic because no matter how detailed you go there is always a supplier. A supplier of components, of chips, of metal, of ore, or labor to mine the ore, of food to power the laborers.
So I stick with the definition that Enzo Ferrari made his own cars called Ferraries.
Making the statement "Nobody builds their own Ferrari." 100% false.
It is even an odd statement to use for a company that seems to claim they make the ferrari of computers. They are building their own ferraris aren't they? (well no, the laptops at least are just badged with their logo)
Or for that matter any other part of the world. While you get a lot of people who are against the Patriot Act here, or at least people who claim to be against it, in the real world the majority either do not care, or do not consider it important enough to vote against it.
Bush got re-elected.
That is democracy for you. Very few people can accept it when democracy results in laws they do not approve off. The left of the patriot act and similar stuff. The right of abortion and social security systems.
Some even go so far as thinking that democracy is right and good and would result in good goverment if it ever really was allowed a chance and not corrupted by rightwing and/or leftwing extremists who have hidden agenda's and god knows what else the paranoid come up with.
Sadly in the real world even if you had a pure democracy where people would vote for ideas not people you would still be faced with the fact that it is people doing the voting.
Normal average people you meet everyday on the street.
The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is ultimately the size of the group that does the telling. It don't much matter to the group that is being supressed. Ghandi had a saying that went something like, "what does it matter to the person wether they were killed in the name of freedom or oppression".
Oh, and as for the people who protest against it? Well take this board game. The maker is an Arab civil rights activist. Not Human rights. Very important. Name one arab/muslim who has every fought for someone elses rights.
Then there is: U.S. citizens get 5; non-citizens 1. Whites and Asians get 5; Arabs 1. Ultra right-wingers get 6; Democrats 3 or 4.
Where are the blacks, the jews, the hispanics?
No, this again is democracy. Everyone votes for himself. Wake me when we get a real Civil rights activists who is for EVERY human being. Not just his own group.
You can also wake me when a single arab/muslim run country has even a sliver of the human rights that the evil west has, even the west under Bush. It is no excuse for westerners but it certainly means that arabs should first fix their own affairs. Just check resent developments in indonesia where muslims are suprresing the other religions for being to erotic.
In Planescape Torment you come across a society made up out of ghouls, skeletons and zombies. No it is not hack and slash time, well you can but then your playing the wrong game, but the 'quest' is not to do the 'quest'. You can find out the truth of their 'god' but that would destroy the carefull balance that makes this undead society work.
All of the quests in that area are nice but the best is helping a zombie remember her name. It has multiple solutions and none of them involve killing anything just making what you think is the best choice.
Same as, what can chance the nature of a man. That one had me really thinking about what to answer. It doesn't matter of course as the game continues on the same path but I felt the 'right' response was important.
Those are the best quests for me. When you can make choices that perhaps don't 'matter' but wich you feel are the ones you can live with. When you choose a response not based on loot or XP but just on roleplaying THAT is when a RPG is at its best.
Vampire Bloodlines has another quest like that. You come across an apartment of a prostitute and can read her diary where she talks off how she hates the live but has met someone nice. It also becomes clear that some vampire has infected her and her new love with a deadly disease. She is dying and you can talk to her to find out more. Depending on your race of vampire you can comfort her by pretending to be her love. It doesn't do anything. Just feels right. As the mad vampire race you even have some very poignant observations to make.
Nice. When I went to slay the vampire that infected her it wasn't for the XP.
MMORPG's rarely if ever can achieve this. How can they? It would ruin the moment of her passing away if there was a line behind you waiting to talk to her as well. The nameless zombie would be more comedy for having thousands of people tell her her name only to forget again.
A truly great RPG is about roleplaying, where you make your choices based on the character you have chosen to play. To me a that would mean that an evil character would indeed have more wealth and power but also find himself ultimately alone with noone to trust.
BUT a purely good character would be poor (not nice to accept a widows wedding ring as payment for rescueing her childeren) and ultimately just as alone as a purely good character could never tolerate say a thief in his/her party.
For me a true MMORPG would have 3 alignments. Good, evil and the most common one. Slightly evil. The alignment most of us have in real live. Make a player pay throught the nose if he wants to play a dogooder. Make evil characters outcasts from society who like real criminals have to spend much of their wealth in bribing people to be their friends.
Oh and stop it with the quest que. It ruins it when a dozen people are getting the same quest if everything in the story suggests that the quest should be unique.
I always thought the problem with cooling a PC was in getting the heat OUT of the PC case. Air can be a good cooler but the problem is that it is so hard to direct the cold air in and the hot air out. Escpecially in a PC case wich is usually cramped and filled with great big walls wich block the airflow.
CUE watercooling wich takes the heat via the water outside of the case where you can have a slow unobstructed fan get rid of the heat.
Almost every design I seen always gets the hot water out of the case to be cooled down by large unobstructed fans.
Yet this setup seems to pump the water from the hot graphics card to a spare PCI slot in your PC where the fan will be blowing the heat away right inside your computer.
If you unlucky right back onto your gpu.
To be efficient the cooler would have to be outside your case, with the water cables coming out of the back of the gpu and the cooler not having a PCI mounting but something that is easily attached to your case.
It is not the first time I seen this mistake, people put the nicest fans inside their case but never spend any time considering that all that does is blow the hot air around if you do not somehow setup a flow to carry it out. Oh and another to get cool air back in.
Now you can have a thousand infected virtual PC's in one machine!
20 billion. 3 years. Pity they didn't catch that WMF thingy. So what exactly was the money spend on? I am old enough to know that in IT it is very easy to both spend time and money yet accomplish nothing.
Now it is just possible that WMF was the one last bug in Windows that MS overlooked and that Vista will indeed be the bee knees when it comes to security.
Anyone willing to bet any money on it? No, didn't think so.
Will MS sell some in the big iron market? Sure. There is a sucker born every minute and they all seem to go into management. Even if it fatally goes wrong it won't matter. If people will still buy windows for their desktop after more then a decade of crap they will stick with it for their business. If you made a bad decission then you can't ever go back because that would be admitting your wrong.
So IBM has something to worry about. Not because MS has a better product but because crap sells as long as it seems cheaper and shinier.
Lets face it, IBM lost the round for the desktop OS. Why should the server OS be any different? Because server OS buyers are smarter then desktop OS buyers?
If you want to know the answer too that, just check wich OS is on the desktop of the server OS buyers.
Remember you write the code to exploit.Net in PHP.
Why if you used.net for the exploit then EVERYONE could just steal your keylog files!
This is basically a non-story. Someone at the washintingpost seems suprised that people do not print out their key logs and search them by hand. The only "new" element is that the tools are migrating to web based apps. Then again isn't that suppopsed to be the next big thing? Why should criminals ignore IT development? I am willing to bet the next one will be using AJAX.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see: The article claims that this year phones are going to be launched with 30gb storage, the same as an iPod.
Mmmm, what they really mean is that 1 phone is going to be launched, possibly this year, in japan, that is going to cost a fortune, eat batteries for lunch, not going to tiny while having the storage of the smallest 5th gen iPod.
Doesn't exactly sound like it is going to sweep the market. In fact the mobile phone market is incredibly fractured with not a single manufacturer having the kind of market share that apple enjoys in the mp3 player market. Let alone that a single new model will achieve anywhere near the penetration that iPods have.
Oh but there is the anology to the PC's where IBM clones pushed Apple into a corner. Yup that is true.
Except that how does this relate to mp3 players? The "clones" arrived first in this case. It was the tiny asian "clone" companies that launched first and only later did Apple join the party and even later did the real big boys like Sony get involved. If anything this is the exact opposite of what happened with PC's. This would have like if Compaq and the other clones had their PC market gobbled up by IBM.
For some reason when it comes to IT most people seem to loose common sense. Surely we all here remember how the N-cage was supposed to take over? Nintendo better watch out with its GBA.
Didn't happen.
Some people point to camera phones as to how the mobile phone can replace single purpose devices by combining them into the phone.
Except that this did not really happen. The camera phone did not replace regular camera's. Or do you really record your kids birthday party on your mobile phone? No the quality seperate camera market is still there. What the camera phone replaced is the throw away camera and incredibly cheap, good for 1 holiday, market. What it mostly did however was expand the market. There are now simply more cameras about then there were before.
I think the same will be true for mobile phone MP3 players. They will partially replace the very cheap players and partially expand the market so that people who never owned a portable music player before will have one now.
The iPod is as threathend by the mobile phone as the SLR camera is by the camera phone. Or the GBA is by the N-cage. Or the computer is by the PDA.
Offcourse the PDA is under threath by the smart phone and one day it may be true that the mobile phone will be so powerfull that it can replace the iPod. Looking at current tech I think that is still years if not decades away.
But a headline off "Business as usual" does not sell ads does it now.
Who needs that much space. Yeah right. I have heard that one ever since I bought a HD floppy.
There have always been devices that do it all and there have always been devices that do one thing only.
There are washing machines that can also function as a dryer. Funny thing, do you know you can still buy JUST washing machines + a seperate spin dryer + a seperate warm air dryer?
Yes thats right, spin dryers still exist despite the fact that nearly every washing machine can do it that function nowadays. Just not as well as a true purpose spin dryer.
Oh and the whole camera phone argument is faulty. NOBODY uses a camera phone as a replacement for a regular phone. The camera phone is the replacement of the throwaway/rented camera. Its function is to be always with you for those moments when you do not have a regular camera with you.
In fact that is the function of all the extra's on the mobile phone. Games? Fun for when you got your phone but not a real game system. Calendar? Usefull for when you do not got access to your real calendar. Music? Nice for when you forgot your real music player.
Offcourse some people will be happy with the limited capabilities that their phone offers them. Just as some people are happy with a 10 dollar MP3 player they got from the bargain bin.
That is not Apples market. Apples market is what used to be the Walkman->Minidisc/CD-man market. They effectivly replaced sony for portable audio.
Oh and if you think your phone MP3 players is not going to have DRM your insane.
In real life you got to fix peoples old smelly peeed on wobbly chairs.
In school a mechanic gets to build a car from scrath with the whole class.
In real life you will be changing the oil on cars that never been washed.
In school a nurse... well nurses pretty much know their job is going to suck.
School is nothing like real life. EVER.
As for CS. Lets be honest here. 99% of what you are learn is out of date or off no use or just wrong. The remaining 1% you can get out of a book.
You will be suprised how many people in IT got the best grades in maths and now end up spending a year getting all the code to be adjusted for a simple tax change. Yeah, that is high science!
Most real IT is just putting to code what somebody else has done. How much of you code does anything more complex then adding up?
There are offcourse exceptions but the not for the average code monkey.
Just like most car mechanics spend most of their time changing oil and spark plugs most programmers just do basic maintenance. Both can make a very good living out of it but it ain't as existing as their school projects.
Any study on bad effect of a popular product wich forms a billion dollar industry is going to be under a lot of pressure to find said product safe or at least to report that no absolute evidence could be found.
Note that so far no study has claimed that cellphones are safe. That is what the newspaper headlines claim but the studies themselves go no further than saying that they could not find direct evidence of any significant increased risk.
Watch "Yes Minister" episode "The greasy pole" for how it works.
For the subject off cellphone radiation and how bad it is, just remember that almost everything we do is bad for us. Even simple stuff like eating and drinking is killing us slowly. Hell even breathing is bad for you in the long term. The whole being alive thing is slowly killing you.
Now with that in mind how can holding a small mircowave to your head possibly be good for you?
It has been proven with lab tests that rats exposed to constant cellphone exposure DO develop tumors. So there is absolutly an effect.
Off course human beings are larger, we do not hold the phone to our heads 24/7 and we ain't rats.
And still, we have had all those studies that claimed that smoking was perfectly safe and that seatbelts cause more deaths and that BSE wasn't transmittable to humans etc etc etc.
Is the typical slashdot reaction that cellphones can't possibly cause braintumors not the same as all those smokers claiming that smoking couldn't be bad for you?
For me two things need to be done. A: a simple study as to just how bad cellphone and similar radiation is for a human. Pigs are similar to us. Strap a cellphone to their heads and test away.
B: then take that data and translate it to typical real world use. It might very well be that for normal use it means that in 100 years you have say a 1% increased chance to get a braintumor. Whoopie.
C: then translate these results to future developments. How bad is not just cellphone radiation but those bluetooth headsets, WI-FI, RFID and god knows what else we will have in the future.
D: then decide wether we are willing to give it all up or that we just accept the risk. Or perhaps that by the time the tumor develops cancer will be threatable.
I think the majority of people will judge it an acceptable risk. Well until they are dying of cancer of course and need somebody to sue. How many smokers do you know who are dying of lung cancer who say "Well I smoked them so now I deserve a slow painfull death"?
The reviewer is gushing with love for Oblivion and that compels me to counter with a harsher review.
First the hardware requirements. I got 2.6 HT P4 overclocked to 3.1 and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb and 1 gig of mem and a fast HD. The game is certainly playable although it helps a lot if you turn grass off. Not all of the settings can be maxed BUT you can leave the land distance maxed AND have distant buildings drawns. So the outside still looks damn fucking big with trees all the way to the horizon and that distant city clearly visible.
I upgraded to a ATI X1600 Pro 512MB (agp version because I don't want to upgrade a complete PC until AMD upgrades memory) and the difference is noticiable.
BUT not staggering. The CPU is the limiter it seems and you notice it when panning outside that it is still not fluid. But it looks beautifull, I never worry to much about high frame rates in non-shooters and I wouldn't buy a 360 if it came with Brooke Shields (Blue lagoon edition).
For those who care about fps, you need a state of the art machine. For the rest, a quality machine of the last 2 years is passable.
Frankly the game to me seems to a mismatched bundle of ideas. It marries FPS with Melee. It has stealth ALA Thief but no instant kills. It has lots of potions and spells but only 8 slots to quickly use them in. It has friendlies wich conflicts with lots of friendly fire.
RPG's are pretty rare and everyone that is not crap is welcome and Oblivion is not crap. It just isn't a Baldur Gate either.
The combat is boring and confusing with more time spend running after your opponent the actually doing battle. I want to re-enact the scene from the Princess Bride ontop the cliffs of despair. Oblivion gives me a drunken scuffle.
Worse is that when you finally get people/horses to help you out you more often end up hitting them then the enemy causing them to attack you. Was this playtested or did the designers really enjoy beating up their own horse instead of the clanfear lizard thingy?
The magic is boring. None of the spells do it for me. Yeah you can combine some but whoopee. 3 boring spells in one is not 3 times the fun. Oh and you can't be a true mage when you got only 8 hot slots for your weapons spells and potions.
Alchemy is very detailed. NOT. Sure sure you got loads and loads of ingredients BUT they do not make sense. Each item just got 4 effects attached seemingly at random and you combine two or more to get a potion with 1 or more effects. Yet it is not logical. You do not combine grapes with yeast for instance to get wine to give you a confidence boost.
Everquest 2 at least did associate some logic behind wich foods give wich effects. Not Oblivion.
Since I need my hot slots for weapons and spells I do not bother with potions.
Then there is the sneaking. The stupid placing of the light gem thingy is indeed truly stupid. In the center of the screen. Probably afraid you would miss it. It has none of the shading of thief. you seem to be either invisible (you can hit an enemy with a sword and they won't see you), sorta invisible until you hit someone and fully visible. At least your state of visibilty is related to the darkness of your surroundings.
The bad thing however is that you do not have an instant kill. So if your sneaking up to an old harmless woman sleeping peacefully and whack her with a deadric (big sword) long sword be prepared for a long fight.
A bit of background banter in the Dark Brotherhood (assasin guild) has an NPC saying how he had to keep hacking and sawing at a woman's neck, I know what he is talking about.
A silent assasin only works if he/she can kill with one blow. What i
Yes it is a choice and more then you get in adventure games but a long way from roleplaying. I would have loved to have been able to infiltrate the black brotherhood and destroy them from within. Not a choice. Neither can you join the brotherhood and then destroy all the other guilds.
Perhaps Oblivion is just to big for its own good. The first part of the brotherhood is a lot of fun on its own (the "fake" missions are boring to the extreme) and it almost seems a shame they did not make it the full game. Sure sure it is nice I can join half a dozen guilds but what do you prefer. 2 highly detailed opposing guilds with you either joining one or the other or playing them off against each other, OR the current, generic unrelated shallow groups?
It is a nice, game but it sets no new RPG standards for those who were pleseantly suprised by BB and its offspring years ago.
I remember a western RPG that had actually nude paperdolls of your avatar on your inventory screen. Purely for gameplay reasons of course. Not to oggle your female elves boobies.
Just can't remember the game names. I always thought it was one of the Elder Scrolls series but that don't seem to be it.
Anyone know the answer?
Oh, and to be on topic. The western RPG has died and reborn so many times they put a revolving door on its tomb.
Hands up if you ever seen a game claimed to have "rpg" elements when the only thing the game has is that units can gain "level up"?
For some reason some people have come to believe that levelling up == RPG. It of course does not. Many games level up. Being allowed to fly bigger aircraft in an aircraft sim is a form of levelling up. Getting a bigger gun in Doom is.
Take away the levelling up from games like FF and you will see that they play very much like the adventure games of old. In fact the old "Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis" also had fights in it.
Adventures however are not RPG's most notably because you do not choose a role to play but rather follow the lead character through a pre-determined story. Adventures are as much about roleplaying as a FPS. Sure, you can roleplay in Doom. Just as long as you roleplay a guntoting silent marine who shoots everything on sight.
FF does not give you a role to play.
So where does this leave oblivion? Well in limbo. The thing that is missing from the elder scrolls is choices. You can join any guild you want even if they seem mutually exclusive. Only a hand full of quests even have a choice in them as to how you complete them. Usually either giving an item to the cops or the criminals. You can very easily however complete both quests for the dark brotherhood (evil assasins) as for some noble band of knights.
The old taking a side in a quest is not part of the Elder Scrolls and I miss it.
Oblivion ain't a bad game, just that it is RPG light compared to the real stuff like baldur gate, KOTOR, planescape torment etc.
Oblivion is free as those games but the individual quests are pretty much on rails. I would have loved to have been able to choose a side in the whole dark brotherhood deal. Not in this game.
To some this makes Obilion a union of the worst elements of eastern and western RPG's. The "feeling lost" of western RPG's and the "on rails" of eastern adventure+levellingup games.
It almost reminds me of Doom3. Nice engine. Now can a real game company make a proper game with it? For me Oblivion is only acceptable because there the lovers of western RPG are not exactly swamped with choice. When is the next company going to revive the genre like Baldur's gate did?
Guess just showing ads in a program doesn't work anymore. /me looks at the top right corner of his opera browser.
Well not until the P4 disabled cheap duals and you had to spend a fortune on xeon's.
What is the advantage of a dual over a single. Simple. NO MORE FREEZING.
No I am not talking about the heat output. I am talking about that effect when you do something mundane but cpu intensive like opening a large slow folder and your entire desktop just crashes to a halt only to resume a few secs later often stopping your music as well.
Fatal? No of course not. Just that it disappears with a dual. Why? Because the one CPU that is entirely preoccupied with that lengthy task can keep doing that while the other CPU does the task of keeping your bloody desktop responding and playing the fucking music.
Oh it is probably more complex then that but in practice it means your computer just keeps working even under load.
In more terminal freezes where a single core only has the option to do a hard reboot because a single task has run out of control a dual can still run the OS tasks of killing the runaway. kill/process manager whatever is your poison.
So is this of use to business users? Well it is to me. Given the choice I between a dual P3 and a single p4 for office use give me the old machine any day. No it will not be as fast in single tasks as the P4 but frankly I don't do many tasks that are lenghty CPU grinds.
I do however prefer it if I don't have to wait for my desktop to finish something wich seems to cause it to faint.
Dual core/cpu vs Single core/cpu is like the difference between sex with a partner and on your own. Some of you might not yet know the difference but once you experienced it you don't want to go back.
Adding an image. Perhaps even an image that tells me something about the contents of the window could be considered eyecandy OR and extra clue. Was it gnome that colored the entire desktop red if you ran as root? Eyecandy or vital visual feedback?
Stricly speaking everything not in X is eyecandy. Run solaris on a xerox printer machine and you will get the bare basics of a window manager and yes it does everything it needs to but gee gods it is hard on the eyes.
So where do you draw the line?
Personally I liked Enlightenment but now run XFCE4 wich suggests that while I like a pretty picture I don't want it to get in the way of business. KDE 3.* is nice and all but gee gods it loves the animations. Gnome is too inflexible for me.
Give me candy but don't slow me down. No animations. INSTANT popups/slides/whatever.
Then again I do usually have gkrellm open. Lots of flashy blinky shiny thingys. But they don't slow me down and while they are eyecandy also tell me someting about my computer. Since I am on old hardware wich I tend to try to do things it isn't designed for I "use" the gkrellm eyecandy to tell me if I can expect a freeze to happen or when gentoos emerge is about to fill its HD space again.
So usefull eyecandy?
As for pure eyecandy effects like the holy grail of true transparancy. Well. My terminals are semi transparant and I would have it anyother way as I think (just my opinion) that it is easier on the eyes then a monochrome background. True transparancy would perhaps look even nicer and if it was as smooth as a FPS then all the better.
Yes off course it doesn't really matter and I would hardly use a bad terminal emulator over a good one just for the sake of transparancy BUT if two terms are equal is the one that lets you choose your type of background better?
Is the windows manager that then allows your term emulator to offer you transparancy then better for it? Etc all the way down to the kernel.
I personally don't like eyecandy that steals window space OR takes time but I do like eyecandy that makes the desktop less endless grey slabs of unused space.
Should the OS/window manager developers care about eyecandy? Well that is the beauty of OSS isn't it? Use pure X if you hate all eyecandy or use any of the window managers if you want more.
A bit of sugar makes the medicine go down. Yes the medicine still needs to be good but sugar helps.
Will windows new 3d desktop rendering be a good or a bad thing? Well, there was a recent discussion about offloading physics in games onto the gpu. That would help run the game a lot faster. Ages ago, long before GPU's, some video cards started offering windows acceleration wich supposedly helped offload some of the desktop rendering from the CPU onto the vidcard.
It makes sense in a way. If you can save the CPU a boring task then it can spend its cycles on more meaningfull things. I do know for a fact that a true dual CPU machine has a lot less waiting for redraws then a single cpu machine. Would a single CPU machine with GPU desktop rendering be just as responsive? Surely that can't be bad.
In a way I don't see the problem that the author has with it. Sure sure, windows users who want vista "security" (see a few articles below about IE7 for vista and how secure it is) need to upgrade and pay for the eyecandy but that is MS business model. They got more money some some countries so it works. Anyway I am fairly sure MS allows people to turn off all the candy they don't want.
Ultimately the candy has little to do with the underlying OS. How a widget is drawn has
Didn't we just have an article about MS wanting to go after Big Blue's business in the serious computer market? That they had spend 20 billion dollars on getting Windows ready to compete with the big boys and that IBM better look out?
Some MS fan boys of course swallowed that line hook, line and sinker. The same line MS has spun since it began business. "The next version will be lots better then what our competitor offers so please buy our [inferior] product now, we promise to ship the next version on time and as promised. Honestly. Have we ever lied to you before, or failed to meet a deadline, or failed to live up to our own hype?".
So the question by the poster of how this will affect MS in the market.
Not at all.
Simple as that. MS can keep producing crap and the public will continue to lap it up. I don't even care for the reasons and excuses anymore. They start to sound more and more like what you get at an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting or a session for battered wives.
As a LAMP developer I was recently offered a position with the opportunity to grow into .NET development. Gee thanks. What is the bonus package like? Kick in the nuts?
For those wondering what IE 7 and Vista will be really be like. More of the same old crap just a lot more useless crap that nobody really uses but that adds a lot of bloat that makes it impossible to debug. IF IE 1 - 6 have been buggy security holes and IE 7 has so far had the exact same bugs and security holes as 6 then it is obvious that MS hasn't really done anything with that supposed security audit of theirs.
First WMF now this. Vista is just another re-release of the same crap code that MS has been logging around since Billy boy first stole his basic interpreter.
Business as usuall. No doubt they will make a fat profit on it.
Very dangerous location this internet, accidents happen all the time. Now if you made an entirely volntery donation to our neighbourhood watch program we make sure you remain save and don't have your legs broken by vinnie with a lead pipe if you catch my drift.
I don't do a good mafia impression, you want one talk to your local telecom
Oh well not entirely. Because on the internet BOTH parties pay. Google pays a hosting bill as well. Bit like you would need to pay a subscription fee to receive mail as well pay for postage for sending mail.
What the new idea is to add yet another fee for the middle man. For the snail mail example imagine that you had to pay the post office to accept your letter, the receiver had to have a subscription to have a mail adress and now the mailman wants a cut for delivering the message at the normal speed.
As for your road example, it would be true if the car maker charged you extra for when your car is not stuck in traffic. Do not pay and your steering goes wobbly above 20 miles per hour.
No, there really is no precedent for this. The closest thing is the mafia who is famous for trying to get a cut of whatever money is being made even if they have no right to do so.
The telecoms are already getting paid by both google and the enduser for handling the traffic. This is just a way to get even more money.
Then again, there certainly is plenty of precedent for greed.
Give you libs their way and we will be totally at the mercy of the telcos who build their networks with tax money in the first place. A really strong goverment would have slapped the telcos down hard and demanded several billions in return for the initial investment of the goverment having payed to invent the internet.
Left and Right wingers are both nuts but either are to be preffered to the libs. It is no wonder NO country in the world is run by them. Voters ain't that stupid.
Several posts above moan about how portals like yahoo filled their pages with ever more stuff making them impossible to use.
Perhaps google has decided to keep all their services seperate making it possible to keep their pages clean and not wasting screen space on links that should be in your bookmarks anyway.
You seem to want to turn google in another Yahoo. No thank you.
I pretty much doubt the blind would even care very much about the kind of pictures that speak a thousand words. I at least haven't seen lenghty and detailed descriptions of famous works of art in museums so blind people can enjoy them.
So your image gallery of ehm nature shots is save. No need to describe each nudy shot in details in the alt attribute.
However for most of the images on a normal site this does not apply. Take for instance images serving as navigation links. The oh so cool animatited letter leading to the email link could easily have an alt value of "email" and then it would be clear to all.
Same with menu links. Just have the alt say what ever you have rendered in the image.
Yes there are going to be difficulties like what the hell do you do with product images. How exactly do you describe a piece of clothing. Or worse a motherboard. Well, you don't need to. If your normal product description is good enough then all you need to put in the alt value is that this is an image of the product.
Sure many motherboard descriptions are so fucking poor you need to study the image to learn what exactly is on the board but is that a problem just for the blind?
Frankly it isn't so hard to make a website that the blind can use. This complaint is about navigation only. Not that target doesn't properly describe its furniture.
The only problem in doing proper navigation is that you first got to shoot the managers and the designers. Management just seems to insist on using pointless flash for essential site elements.
The designers should be shot just because. Why the fuck does CSS not have constants forcing me to do the search and replace for minute color changes because designers don't understand complex functions like that?
Rights got to be balanced. It is what makes real life so difficult. How do you balance the right of target to make its website the way they like it with some peoples rights to live a normal live despite a physical disability.
My freedom to form a club of people I like is offset by the rights of other people to join clubs they wish. So whites only golf clubs are a no-no.
It all depends what you consider more important. The freedom of people with bad eye sight or the freedom of website designers.
Off course as a programmer I personnally think that designers should have NO rights but that is just me.
MS is doing DRM but also fights it. As a gigantic player it knows deep down that piracy hasn't exactly hurt it. MS software is pirated to hell and back yet the billions keep rolling in and it controls the OS and office software markets. Could there be a link? That software that is easy to pirate gets used a lot so that is what people know so companies that need to decide on what to buy choose the package that people are familiar with at home from their pirated version?
That because MS is what everyone knows when people buy a new PC they don't mind that MS software is installed "for free" giving MS a nice steady stream of hazzle free revenue (no messy boxes to sell) as long as people buy new pc's?
Then their is Sony, a favorite target for the anti-drm crowd and they certainly screwed up badly enough with their music cd drm debacle but lets not forget that it was sony who gave us unrestricted video recording.
Yet the hero is Apple who has always maintained the thightest control on its software. Isn't making sure only YOU can make the hardware that runs YOUR software and sell them bundled only the best DRM? Go ahead. Pirate Mac OS X. What are you going to use it for? You need to buy a Mac to run it on. Oh sure, the paid updates are pirated but the main revenue source is safe.
Apple has also been very active in trying to get movie drm in place.
The whole story that Steve Jobs only did DRM for iTunes to keep the record industry happy just doesn't ring true to me.
What I think that Steve Jobs has done is realize that you need to take baby steps when tackling a difficult subject.
iTunes DRM isn't the least he could get away with regarding the music industry.
iTunes DRM is the most he could get away with regarding the paying public.
He knew that existing DRM crippled music stores were not succeeding so he added as much DRM as he could without scaring off customers.
It worked.
Steve Jobs is very good at that. He knows exactly how far to push something that it is still accepted. iPod's really ain't all the great. Every other MP3 player would be slammed for not working as a straight HD (you need itunes to put songs onto it in any meaningfull way) and slammed even worse for renaming your songs.
Same with the price. It is just not high enough to piss people off. Just high enough to generate a shitload of cash but not high enough to be seen as insanely overpriced.
Same with Apple PC's. Every apple story has comments about their bad service even going so far as that when you order a Apple with more memory all of a sudden it is a custom build and you loose a lot of warranty. Dell would never get away with it but Steve Jobs just judged it right that Apple fans defend that a PC build entirely by Apple is still a custom build because you told them to plug in more memory and therefore you don't deserve full warranty.
Steve Jobs is more about DRM then any other playing in the market. Check out his speeches and proposals. If he has his way we will have trusted computing shoved down our throath and media DRM'ed till we choke on it.
Just for now he isn't big enough to rely force the issue and MS who could is still sitting on the fence.
There are some people at MS warning that in a DRM and trusted computing world there would be very little value to a open PC. If I can't do anything with my media anyway do I need anything more then a console to play it? MS knows that the console market is far harder to dominate then the PC market.
Killing the PC would be very very silly of MS if they are not 100% sure they are going to be selling everyone the replacement.
The old slashdot standby "replace Apple with MS/Sony and reread the story" advice still stands.
I give you three seconds to see why this statement is a load of crap that could only be uttered by a complete and utter moron.
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What about Enzo Ferrari?
Why do think it is called a Ferrari anyway? Named after its maker. Oh sure you could argue that since he didn't personally fasten all the nuts and bolts he didn't build it but that is just petty.
I don't 'build' my own PC's anyway. Nobody does if you want to be pedantic because no matter how detailed you go there is always a supplier. A supplier of components, of chips, of metal, of ore, or labor to mine the ore, of food to power the laborers.
So I stick with the definition that Enzo Ferrari made his own cars called Ferraries.
Making the statement "Nobody builds their own Ferrari." 100% false.
It is even an odd statement to use for a company that seems to claim they make the ferrari of computers. They are building their own ferraris aren't they? (well no, the laptops at least are just badged with their logo)
Am I being pedantic? Yup. Sue me.
Bush got re-elected.
That is democracy for you. Very few people can accept it when democracy results in laws they do not approve off. The left of the patriot act and similar stuff. The right of abortion and social security systems.
Some even go so far as thinking that democracy is right and good and would result in good goverment if it ever really was allowed a chance and not corrupted by rightwing and/or leftwing extremists who have hidden agenda's and god knows what else the paranoid come up with.
Sadly in the real world even if you had a pure democracy where people would vote for ideas not people you would still be faced with the fact that it is people doing the voting.
Normal average people you meet everyday on the street.
The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is ultimately the size of the group that does the telling. It don't much matter to the group that is being supressed. Ghandi had a saying that went something like, "what does it matter to the person wether they were killed in the name of freedom or oppression".
Oh, and as for the people who protest against it? Well take this board game. The maker is an Arab civil rights activist. Not Human rights. Very important. Name one arab/muslim who has every fought for someone elses rights.
Then there is: U.S. citizens get 5; non-citizens 1. Whites and Asians get 5; Arabs 1. Ultra right-wingers get 6; Democrats 3 or 4.
Where are the blacks, the jews, the hispanics?
No, this again is democracy. Everyone votes for himself. Wake me when we get a real Civil rights activists who is for EVERY human being. Not just his own group.
You can also wake me when a single arab/muslim run country has even a sliver of the human rights that the evil west has, even the west under Bush. It is no excuse for westerners but it certainly means that arabs should first fix their own affairs. Just check resent developments in indonesia where muslims are suprresing the other religions for being to erotic.
All of the quests in that area are nice but the best is helping a zombie remember her name. It has multiple solutions and none of them involve killing anything just making what you think is the best choice.
Same as, what can chance the nature of a man. That one had me really thinking about what to answer. It doesn't matter of course as the game continues on the same path but I felt the 'right' response was important.
Those are the best quests for me. When you can make choices that perhaps don't 'matter' but wich you feel are the ones you can live with. When you choose a response not based on loot or XP but just on roleplaying THAT is when a RPG is at its best.
Vampire Bloodlines has another quest like that. You come across an apartment of a prostitute and can read her diary where she talks off how she hates the live but has met someone nice. It also becomes clear that some vampire has infected her and her new love with a deadly disease. She is dying and you can talk to her to find out more. Depending on your race of vampire you can comfort her by pretending to be her love. It doesn't do anything. Just feels right. As the mad vampire race you even have some very poignant observations to make.
Nice. When I went to slay the vampire that infected her it wasn't for the XP.
MMORPG's rarely if ever can achieve this. How can they? It would ruin the moment of her passing away if there was a line behind you waiting to talk to her as well. The nameless zombie would be more comedy for having thousands of people tell her her name only to forget again.
A truly great RPG is about roleplaying, where you make your choices based on the character you have chosen to play. To me a that would mean that an evil character would indeed have more wealth and power but also find himself ultimately alone with noone to trust.
BUT a purely good character would be poor (not nice to accept a widows wedding ring as payment for rescueing her childeren) and ultimately just as alone as a purely good character could never tolerate say a thief in his/her party.
For me a true MMORPG would have 3 alignments. Good, evil and the most common one. Slightly evil. The alignment most of us have in real live. Make a player pay throught the nose if he wants to play a dogooder. Make evil characters outcasts from society who like real criminals have to spend much of their wealth in bribing people to be their friends.
Oh and stop it with the quest que. It ruins it when a dozen people are getting the same quest if everything in the story suggests that the quest should be unique.
CUE watercooling wich takes the heat via the water outside of the case where you can have a slow unobstructed fan get rid of the heat.
Almost every design I seen always gets the hot water out of the case to be cooled down by large unobstructed fans.
Yet this setup seems to pump the water from the hot graphics card to a spare PCI slot in your PC where the fan will be blowing the heat away right inside your computer.
If you unlucky right back onto your gpu.
To be efficient the cooler would have to be outside your case, with the water cables coming out of the back of the gpu and the cooler not having a PCI mounting but something that is easily attached to your case.
It is not the first time I seen this mistake, people put the nicest fans inside their case but never spend any time considering that all that does is blow the hot air around if you do not somehow setup a flow to carry it out. Oh and another to get cool air back in.
20 billion. 3 years. Pity they didn't catch that WMF thingy. So what exactly was the money spend on? I am old enough to know that in IT it is very easy to both spend time and money yet accomplish nothing.
Now it is just possible that WMF was the one last bug in Windows that MS overlooked and that Vista will indeed be the bee knees when it comes to security.
Anyone willing to bet any money on it? No, didn't think so.
Will MS sell some in the big iron market? Sure. There is a sucker born every minute and they all seem to go into management. Even if it fatally goes wrong it won't matter. If people will still buy windows for their desktop after more then a decade of crap they will stick with it for their business. If you made a bad decission then you can't ever go back because that would be admitting your wrong.
So IBM has something to worry about. Not because MS has a better product but because crap sells as long as it seems cheaper and shinier.
Lets face it, IBM lost the round for the desktop OS. Why should the server OS be any different? Because server OS buyers are smarter then desktop OS buyers?
If you want to know the answer too that, just check wich OS is on the desktop of the server OS buyers.
Why if you used .net for the exploit then EVERYONE could just steal your keylog files!
This is basically a non-story. Someone at the washintingpost seems suprised that people do not print out their key logs and search them by hand. The only "new" element is that the tools are migrating to web based apps. Then again isn't that suppopsed to be the next big thing? Why should criminals ignore IT development? I am willing to bet the next one will be using AJAX.