When was the last fatality with the soyuz? How many decades ago do you say? Many a/.er wasn't even born yet?
The entire space race is more about propaganda and carefully chosen facts then about real accomplisments.
I see it very simple, US has the money, USSR got the tech. The cold war is over so why no cooperate for once. When the two worked together before they succesfully killed a lot of germans. Maybe the new US operated soyuz will be a commercial sucess. Or maybe it will crash on germany. Either way the world wins.
For interest of full disclosure, any country that started two of the two world wars should not now seek a seat on the security council. The proper role for such country is to be quiet.
There are so many holes in his arguments it is impossible to create a coherent argument to counter him. Basically every assumption he makes is wrong. It is amazing but that makes it very hard to argue him without starting to ramble youreselve.
He talks about mobile phones. Neat, everyone loves them, but seems to neglect to mention that mobile data costs are insanely high, that they suck at such things are output and input of data, that the few that are slightly capable cost as much as a fat PC. That so far every mobile phone company has been more intrested at selling wallpapers at 1 euro a piece rather then allowing their customers full and unrestricted access to the real web. That the number of websites that can be rendered on succesfully on all but high end nokia's can be counted on the fingers of one hand. That the idea of doing wordprocessing on a mobile phone would have any non-japanese teenage girl cringing in pain.
And where are those central web-based applications really going to run? At sun headquarters? Oops well the current office I work at can't use it then, I think the dutch goverment has some rules about sending data on social security users outside the office, let alone to another country. America might be more lax with personal data but not over here.
Think about this for a moment, google does NOT ensure that your data remains your data. Do you really think big companies are going to swallow that with all their documents?
Then there is bandwidth, most company networks are already croaning because upgrading everyting from 10mbits cost a lot of money. How do you think they are going to like it if suddenly their 10.000 users are going to be surfing the net fulltime? I think many a office just doesn't have the kind of network to cope.
I could go on and on. I could mention the cost difference between a fat client running decade old software VS a thin client with a annual fee is very much in favor of the fat client. (I really don't want to pay MS or SUN for using office software from 95 wich is ALL I need).
I could point out that SUN has been saying the same thing for years and it never been true and never will be true.
In fact all that has changed is that SUN since they started with the thin client concept (after the fat clients became the standard) is that SUN has become increasingly irrelevant. The fact is simply that what SUN wants to happen is to go back to the old days of mainframes and terminals. We had those once, we had a reason we switched to the current setup. I don't think we are going to go back anytime soon. Not because of computer games or because we really want PC's to do everything but simply because even for office applications it is cheaper. Blame intel and others for making PC's so goddamn cheap they are now given away for free with your mobile phone. Mobile phones with access metered by the MB and 1 euro wallpapers are not going to replace free pc's with free software and unmetered access anytime soon.
Funny thing, those mobile phone applications that really work? Games and route finders? All locally installed software. What webbased software do people really use on their phones?
It is the Alien vs Marines movie, or rather Aliens eat Marines movie.
It appears in the book and is after they get stranded on the planet. They are basically sealing themselves into the medical lab hoping for rescue to arrive before becoming dinner. It all goes bad when they realise the local reactor is going to blow long before they can be rescued.
You see being easy to use is NOT what opensource is all about. It is the fact that YOU can modify YOUR copy of the sourcecode so that YOUR binary will do what YOU want it to do.
It does not mean YOU can alter MY copy of MY sourcecode. Or even to force me to distribute YOUR alteration.
Sure in the case were you are unable to distribute your alteration to those who need it it sucks donkey balls. Just as IE's total domination of the browser market sucks donkey balls because it still means I can't use many many many features that work beautifull in every real browser out there.
So firefox in this case showed both how opensource works, namely that he was able to modify his own copy of it to do what he wanted AND showed why doing doing web development is such a pain in the ass. Because ultimately you can't develop for the browser on your machine, you have to write for the browser installed on your clients machine. Even if that is netscape 4.
Next time I get a snide remark about a C programmer building 100% clientside software for Windows 2000 only I am gonna go postal. PHP/ASP/Perl may be joke languages but crosscoding between browsers is the ultimate challenge. Doom3 engine, PAH! Try just getting a bunch of left floated images to center. Now that takes brains.
If you don't believe me then check out HD based portable movie players. They retail for 2x-3x the price of this gadget.
The secret is that this device comes with only a 64mb card. Those are practically given away for free now. if you want more, you need to put up some extra money but it allows them to keep the machine itself pretty cheap.
Sony pulls the same stunt with the PSP, want to really play movies on it? Well then fork over an other 100 euro for a 1gb memory stick.
So I think that a lot of people would moan if they had added a 20gb drive, they would moan about extra weight, they would moan about extra vulnarability, they would moan about reduced battery live and they would moan about the high price.
Sure portable movie players sound hot but look at the sales figures of the ones that are out there, they ain't to hot. Either they are extremely expensive, even above the price of an i-pod or require you to use memory sticks. Believe me I been looking very closely for a good player.
The "best" at the moment might be the DVD players with divx capabilty. Sadly because of the spinning disc they lack battery life. And are big and heavy, not good in a device you got to hold in your hand.
I should it would run, it ran pretty good on a machine that was 40mhz. How could it not run on a 2x200mhz machine?
Quake might be a little bit different but lets not also forget that this screen is an awfull lot smaller then even my monitor was at the time. Still I had some pretty good matches on a 90mhz pentium and that was with bloated NT sucking up resources in the background.
No 2x200mhz is a lot of power for old games. Wether it can equal the PSP I am not going to debate. This thing is a lot cheaper and not a DRM nightmare.
It all depends I expect on your expectations. I am not a person to be put off by framerates at around 20 in a game. Guess at my age my eyes ain't fast enough to really notice anyway.
Vista ain't out yet. For someone as old as me this is becoming very repetetive. People comparing OS'es that are out with things that MS absolutly swears are going to be in the next version.
XP comes nowwhere near, OSX does a bit but in many ways BeOS is still ahead of its time. It is just suffering from lack of applications, but what it mostly suffers from is idiots like you comparing its features with things MS marketing hype.
It is about software being free, not cheap. You pay them for the work of getting all the different projects together into a working OS. You don't have to pay them, all the software is avialable for free.
As long as the code remains free the ideal remains. They can charge whatever they want for the binary package, you always got the freedom of the LFS distro if you don't want to pay them for their hardwork.
Either I am older then you or you have forgotten the browser wars. Or maybe like me you are just browsing a different part of the net nowadays. Strangely enough most linux sites tend not to use IE only layouts.
But occasionally I still come accross the odd IE only site, hell Fema made one just recently.
Will the web once again be split into "best viewed with browser X" style sites and a few brave ones just hanging on to pure HTML? Who knows. Humanity might have learned but so far humanity has always been ready to make the same mistakes again.
The only thing we can hope for is that the google lesson will hold. That a website doesn't need to have bells and whistles and sparkles. It just needs to do what it does and do it well. Yet I fear that many websites will in future be Windows Vista only. Not the big ones probably, not the important ones but enough to convince a hell of a lot of users that "The Net" is Windows Vista Internet Explorer. Just as many people today blame bugs in IE on the website on bugs in the website on Firefox.
MS doesn't need to own the net, they just got to stop anyone else from owning it. That way they might always succeed at owning it with the next attempt. MS is evil and evil only needs to get lucky once.
Security is hard. Impossibly hard the moment you allow humans to enter the equation.
Security is after all about restricting access. Most extreme way to keep a computer safe is to make it impossible to access. Want a safe websurfing session? Easy just take out that little cables in the back of your computer, the power, the network and the keyboard one would do for starters.
But that kinda security doesn't work because we want things to be easy. What is an often heard complained about windows vs unix security? That by default windows has the user logged in as root, the defence being that users don't want to have to type in a password just to install software.
MS could easily introduce unix like root-user seperation, they used to be a unix company after all. Some linux distros make it very clear when you run your desktop as root and some IRC proggies even flatly refuse to run when you are the root user. MS could easily do the same, refuse to access the net when running as root, force the user to get software under their normal account then install it from the root account, this would force the user to think for a second.
But they can't, that is not the product they are selling. MS wants to sell an OS that will just run. If a website needs the latest flash then that should just be installed without the user noticing.
I don't think MS isn't aware of the risk this poses, I think they view this as the same way as credit card companies view the risk of how easy it is to abuse their card system. Or how easy it is to learn a 4 digit pin number. Would be very easy to make these multi billion dollar payment systems more secure. But it would also introduce a lot more difficulty that might reduce their usage.
So MS probably has people who have a solution to this but it would make windows a lot harder to use, marketing might have a thing or two to say about it. Hell support might too, would MS really want to deal with all of its users suddenly having to learn the concept of user vs admin?
In a way the public has the final say in wether windows ever becomes secure. The same public that buys SUV's wich are the most lethal vehicle on the road 4x times more likely to kill if you hit a pedestrian then other cars. The same public that flies with cutrate airlines offering flights at prices cheaper then the ride to the airport. The same public that still buys each new version of internet explorer after a decade of security alerts.
So from a business perspective why doesn't some big-wig at MS does this? Because the big-wig wants to keep his job. Insecure windows sells, slightly more secure linux does not. It is not greed, it is common business sense. You give the customer what they want. MS is very good at that. Compare it with McD, they used to sell lard with flavor. They only added a few salades after customers started demanding them with their dollars. McD did not fight this, there had to be no legal battles. As soon as they noticed demand, they supplied. Sure they didn't supply it in say the 70's because a few leftie protestors does not equal demand. A bunch of guys at slashdot complaining does not equal demand to MS.
At the place I currently work they need to produce an awfull lot of documentation and other paperwork, so they got a couple of big xerox machines. These machines are of such calibre that they need a complete PC to control them. Guess the OS that runs them? No not linux, Solaris an unix that is way way harder to use.
And it is isn't Solaris in the background, it is the desktop from wich you control the machine.
Have the people working with it got any problems with using a real OS instead of the pretty button Windows/KDE/Gnome crap? No. In fact when some outsiders come in and ask why they don't insist on windows XP for the controlling software the general attitude is what the fuck for?
People will learn to work with the tools they are given. Long before XP, long before KDE yes even long before Gnome even way way before Xerox itself came up with the idea of the modern desktop people have used computers and machines wich were far more difficult to use.
Frankly I think that when someone is incapable of learning to deal with another OS you should seriously question wether that person is capable at all. Would you hire a truck driver who can only drive DAF trucks? A fork lift operator who instantly crashes when he is put on a machine wich uses different peddles instead of a switch to choose direction?
If you ever switch between companies you are likely going to switch a lot of software tools. It is rare to see the same solution in 2 companies, how come people somehow seem able to cope learning an entire new warehouse management system but are unable to learn a new login screen?
10x times the speed per megabyte == 10x times the price per megabyte.
Oh that wasn't what you were hoping for? Though. The mobile phone companies had a cash cow fluke with SMS and have since been trying to emulate it. They gave us WAP wich was like the internet except without the content, cheapness, user content, freedom, speed, images, a keyboard, a screen. GPRS was the next thing, so it was still like WAP but more expensive. UMTS, yet more expensive.
Oh prices should come down as more people use it. But nobody uses it. Well that is not true there a hundreds of business users but strange as it may sound that is not where the money is. Yeah nice that vending machines operators simply attach a phone to send the usage statistics BUT that delivers maybe a euro a day for a thousands customers. They want the SMS craze to spread to mobile internet but fail to realize that A it is to expensive and B people want the internet, not some horrible crippled portal.
The other review also posted on slashdot tore the movie to pieces. So wich one is true?
Well it depends of course on what you want the movie to be. LoTR is generally considered to be a good/okay adapation of the books yet some hardcore fans complain that important elements were left out or changed. Most book to movie adaptations do not go well. I robot and the sound of thunder have people who love the original book (or short story) version crying foul about the movie adapatation.
What I am getting from the Telegraph review is that this reviewer is a lot less critical then the previous one. The Telegraph review seems to be glad there is a towel in the movie, never mind that it is never explained, any real fan surely doesn't need it to be explained once again, while the other reviewer wants the towel to be in the movie exactly as it was in the book/radioplay.
You can look at the LoTR movies and be glad they didn't disney it by making the characters do a little dance number OR you can complain about elves at helmsdeep.
It seems clear that this movie is not a carbon copy of the movie. They changed the story, or for that matter ADDED a storyline, removed classic bits of dialogue and added new bits. Yet they kept enough for you to regonize the original.
Is it any good? Depends, it reminds me of the doom movie but slightly less of a mess. I just wish that someday we will get a movie adapatation where the movie people do not consider themselves better then the original author.
For that is the fundamental problem here, wether it is LoTR, Doom or Hitchhiker Guide, all these movie makers seem to believe that they could improve on the original. Real fans of the original will be outraged by that.
I haven't seen the guide yet but it looks from all the reviews so far that they did a real hollywood on it. Not that hollywood can't do comedy but the guide never was hollywood comedy.
There is a simple reason that the most powerfull PC is used to run Windows games. Because Linux doesn't need an overclocked processor to run a bloody desktop. It will in fact run much better on a P3 dual (easy to get if you realize a lot of dell office machines were sold as dual ready) then on the latest P4.
Overclocking to run a desktop application seems kinda silly. What are you going to do? Overclock your modem so mozilla loads pages faster? Time check the time it takes openoffice to print a page? Better replace the motor on your printer so the head can move faster!
Nah this guy is a troll. He is not consitent. He first claims that both desktop applications AND games are lacking on linux but only proofs this for games.
As for the overclocking crowd being important. HAHA. Yeah right, grow up. That market is so tiny that only the smallest companies care about it. The real hardware market is in office machines. Look at the prices on IBM/HP-Compaq desktops vs the hardware costs and you can easily spot where the real margins are.
I know the crowd of linux desktop/windows gamers all to well being one of them. MS makes great software. It runs my games perfectly (windows 2003 server). It is everything else I don't trust it with. This in turn helps gaming performance no end. You will be suprised how many of the weenies above overclock and tweak and bitch about +1 fps when they got torrents, virus checkers, that really funny wallpaper, those handy free icons all running in the background.
Linux can do without those people. Those who think linux is secure have never seen what a true idiot can do.
Why? Well there are not nearly as many talented people around as you might think, so the talented people tend to be booked and can't just come to a job 3 months later. If they can just delay whatever is being delayed it is a rather big indication that none of the people involved are in high demand.
This movie is going to be bad. Just how bad remains to be seen. We can at most hope for bearable bad OR so fucking bad it becomes good again. Most like it will be unbearable bad. Oh well, who needs a movie when you got the game?
British comedy culture is just different. There have been several attempts to translate british comedies to the american market and not with success.
The most well known is Red Dwarf. A classic BBC sci-fi comedy that was well received all over the world. Well all over the world by geeks and nerds. For reasons unknown some americans wanted to make an american version of it but altered for american tastes. They made a pilot wich at times can be found on P2P networks. It is so bad that it never saw the light of day on american tv.
Why was it so bad? Somehow the american producers who obviously must have seen the original just didn't seem to get it. They changed all the characters that just clicked in the original into versions that just didn't work. The original crew is a bunch of loosers. Nobodies thrown together and never winning. The american version makes them more hollywood. Lister less of a slob. Rimmer likable. For some reason the american producers never seemed to have gotten what made the british original work and become so loved.
It is not on its own. The british comedy classic "doing porridge" was adapted for american tv as well and bombed. Where the original was a comedy set in prison where there was humor in a non-humorous setting, a classic ep has just the two actors talking during the night confinement in their cell, the american version came closer to a regular light hearted sitcom.
It is not all one way however. The american "who's the boss" has a british version as well but missing all the chemistry. It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
The biggest problem I think in making an adoptation of something is in that you are making an adoptation. Red Dwarf, Doing porridge, Who's the boss ALL did well in their original country AND in other parts of the world. So why then try to chance it? Because you want to reach an even bigger market? How can you possibly achieve this? Only by making your version more bland and less likely to upset the tastes of your expanded audience. Remove the slobbness from lister, remove the harsh reality of doing time from a jail comedy, remove lenghty dialog from the guide.
Some saying goes something like this, the translator is a traitor. I think this is very true when trying to translate a story to a new audience. These people who made the guide movie did not try to make a movie for guide fans. They made on for the "hollywood" audience. In doing so they had to loose elements that were to "geeky" or to "nerdy" like the guide itself and replace it with slapstick.
This movie is simply not aimed at us guide fans. For every popular story there is a porn version. Complaining that these porn versions are not fatefull to the original is just as pointless as complaining these hollywood versions are not faithfull. They have an audience to please that does not know or care about the originals.
If there is going to be a guide movie then it can only really come from the BBC. Just take the tv eps and watch them in one sitting with stale popcorn and an overpriced coke.
Not in any specific order but Star Trek has been going to hell and is nothing like what made the original or even the sequel so loved by its fans. I don't exactly know what it is about DS9 or Enterprise that makes me so totally unintrested in them but something is missing from them that made the originals worth watching.
George Lucas showed with The Phantom Menance that he did not understand what made the original Star Wars so well loved. You can say that new movies are still commercial successes but that is missing something vital. Star Wars: A New Hope has a place in film history, Phantom Menace does not. In 20 yrs time the childeren of today will not give a toss about the new movies. What was missing? Well no Han Solo, no chewbacca, no millenium falcon. Star Wars was a slightly dirty universe with pirates. The prequels are bright shiny places with big palaces.
We have other beloved "stories" wich "hollywood" just doesn't seem to get. Mario brothers movie. How could it be so wrong. Why do allmost all game movies suck? Why does the new Doom movie take the doom out of the movie?
Red Dwarf was adapted for the american market and the result was so amazingly bad that even americans realized it. Don't know if this is true but Valva was approached for a Half-life movie but lost intresest when "hollywood" wanted to a add a love interest for Gordon Freeman.
If the review of the HHGTG movie is accurate then it sounds like a typical case of hollywood just not getting the source material. Some people seem to excuse this in this case by pointing out that you can't do bookstuff in movies since it would be boring. These "americans" don't get that the guide has been a radio play, a book, an album, a computer game, a tv series and a stage play. All of them managed to be very guide like even if they had massive differences in them. The tv series and the stage play especially should proof that it isn't impossible to turn the guide into a movie.
I think that just as in the previous mentioned examples the people involved in making the movie just didn't get it OR are so convinced of their own capabilities that they think they can improve upon the source material.
Paramount, fire everyone involved with star trek and hire the writers for the originals series. George Lucas, let the remaining three movies be made by other people. Just do the production. Doom movie crew, doom is on mars with marines and a invasion from hell. That is it.
Will they listen? Of course not. This is hollywood trying to get "geek" culture.
And that is the real problem. Hollywood by definition is hip and happening and cool beautifull people being intresting. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doom, computer games, the guide are the domain of nerds. Silicon valley has proven that they can make excellent Star Trek and Star Wars and Hitchhiker guide games. Because game makers are nerds and so understand geek culture. Hollywood will not and cannot get "it".
Most of these MMO got money growing on trees wich is bad because if you just keep pumping in money (through mission payouts) then inflation will be insanely high. So they add all kinds of silly things to get money out of the system. But why not simply add taxation on money in the bank, where it is safe from everyone but the blizzard goverment OR let you keep it on you but make you risk loosing money if you die AND make bandits not bother with the poor ranger but go after the rich merchants like the RIAA after 12yr olds. Then rich players will have to pay other players to protect them and wham bang you got the money flowing again instead of some players becoming billionairs and complaining the game ain't any fun.
All I know is one thing in the debate wich country is best at computers. Windows is made in the USA.
Some of the most fun games of recent times come from old soviet countries while america got EA games.
Most spam and popups are for american products while the best serials and no-cd sites are in russia.
Saying that russia has the best hackers is pure flamebait BUT it is not entirely without reason. It reminds me a lot of the argument wich space program was/is best. The americans beat themselves on the chest with the fact they went to the moon and the space shuttle can carry a lot of people while Mir was falling apart. Any sensible person will remark that the moon missions have stopped, that the space shuttle is also the most lethal space vehicle if not the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series and that Mir for all its creakiness stayed up for years and years and never killed anyone.
A lot of cybercrime comes from countries were the law enforces got better things to worry about then some rich foreigners getting ripped off. Are russians better at it then anyone else? Maybe but that is hardly something to boast about.
On the other hand we the supposed better west are only hurting ourselves when we laugh of these russian claims. Russian space program is still beating the west even with their ruined economy (how many russians been killed in space since the collapse of the soviet union vs american casualities? Who is currently keeping the international space station up and running?). A whole country whose goverment has no motivation to stop cybercrime is a big threath to the west that want to turn the internet into a big part of their economy.
Isn't Frank Sinatra's work in the public domain?
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I believe I read something that his heirs have released his work into the public domain, or maybe he himself did. His work can therefore be freely distributed.
It seems to me odd that the greatest artists of history from plato to shakespear, mozart and bach and so many others that I am to uncultured to know about created their works without any copy protection what so ever. Yet britney spear's work must somehow be protected by fbi raids. That is advancement? You can keep it. Artists should be starving, it helps the muse.
SWG uses "food buffs" to raise your stats so that a bunny biting you does not instantly kill you. One of the best buffs is "vasarian brandy" as it raises your mind stats wich are not only weak but also used for doing special moves AND an easy target in PvP.
However only a tiny percentage of players take the time to simple prepare themselves for a hunt so it is was not unusual to see people desperately trying to shop for brandy ONLY after having arrived at the remotest planet.
Simple money making scheme? Buy stacks of brandy and sell them at a nice profit at remote locations. The makers of brandy don't want to spend the time to distribute their wares and the customers don't want do spend hours shopping.
In the period it worked before SWG went terminal it gave me so much income I never even bothered with running missions. I don't think resellers themselves are a bad idea. Basically I got my money by providing the same exact service as it exists in the real world.
Buying up every single item is an extreme step but perhaps in some future MMO game with a properly thought out economy some players will be making their game by shipping resources between supplier and user.
Imagine a more spread out game were you cannot reach every corner in a few minutes. Perhaps it even takes hours if not days to go into the deep. Ranger type players will be out alone or small groups hunting and doing their survival thing. Once in a while they will be bringing their loot to small villages were they put up for sale. Now these items are in demand but the crafters that want them tend to be in bigger cities as they would be in real live and don't want to constantly be on the move and fend of all kinds of nasty just to get the resources they need. Two groups, the more solo minded explorers who are playing a hunting sim, the other the more social minded creators who are playing a home improvement sim. Add a third group, the money grabbers and they might get their fun out of buying low and selling high. Travelling the lands in search if items to buy.
So I don't think this is such a bad thing in itself. What has me wondering is how badly upset the basic economy is that in such a new game two players can already have gotten so rich as to buy every item on the market. Even SWG economy ain't that broken.
When I was a young hopefull we had no fancy smancy WoW, we had SWG and we liked it.
Talk about grinding? HA. We had to grind random jobs AND PAY people to be allowed to teach them. Then as soon as you became a master and actually could do anything usefull you had to unlearn everything you worked so hard on learning to make room for the next profession.
Content you say? Tired of running? Why I can still remember having to do the exact same run 6 times through the most hostile planets in the universe JUST to be allowed to open up the option to make a lethal run dozens of times to turn hard earned combat experience into force experience at a conversion rate that would shock banks at airports.
Not unless you add to the specification. How do you know who is on what forklift and how do you know what that forklift is carrying. That is the reason you have to do it long-winded.
What you and others are perhaps comparing this with is truck tracking systems. BUT these systems are for a totally different need. They track trucks (and not what is in them) with gps because they already know what is in the truck from the loading bill AND because it helps them decide wich truck is closest to pick up an new freight.
Every good that comes in a warehouse is labelled. No matter how short it stays. That label is what is tracked. Item comes in, is labelled and assigned a location, moved to location. When it is time to deliver it is taken from location and the location is freed. No need for bloody forklift trucking. CHECK ACTUAL WAREHOUSES. The only time you need to track the forklift if your are automating the forklift itself. But this is very expensive as you need to add things like weight sensors to tell when the load comes on and off, scanners to scan the load in front, good positioning. Far easier just to do it the old fashioned way with good employees. It only fails because management puts to much stress on the employees and doesn't listen when they report that the system ain't working because of a shortage of location or because storage locations are to small for goods. Or simple time constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire space race is more about propaganda and carefully chosen facts then about real accomplisments.
I see it very simple, US has the money, USSR got the tech. The cold war is over so why no cooperate for once. When the two worked together before they succesfully killed a lot of germans. Maybe the new US operated soyuz will be a commercial sucess. Or maybe it will crash on germany. Either way the world wins.
For interest of full disclosure, any country that started two of the two world wars should not now seek a seat on the security council. The proper role for such country is to be quiet.
He talks about mobile phones. Neat, everyone loves them, but seems to neglect to mention that mobile data costs are insanely high, that they suck at such things are output and input of data, that the few that are slightly capable cost as much as a fat PC. That so far every mobile phone company has been more intrested at selling wallpapers at 1 euro a piece rather then allowing their customers full and unrestricted access to the real web. That the number of websites that can be rendered on succesfully on all but high end nokia's can be counted on the fingers of one hand. That the idea of doing wordprocessing on a mobile phone would have any non-japanese teenage girl cringing in pain.
And where are those central web-based applications really going to run? At sun headquarters? Oops well the current office I work at can't use it then, I think the dutch goverment has some rules about sending data on social security users outside the office, let alone to another country. America might be more lax with personal data but not over here.
Think about this for a moment, google does NOT ensure that your data remains your data. Do you really think big companies are going to swallow that with all their documents?
Then there is bandwidth, most company networks are already croaning because upgrading everyting from 10mbits cost a lot of money. How do you think they are going to like it if suddenly their 10.000 users are going to be surfing the net fulltime? I think many a office just doesn't have the kind of network to cope.
I could go on and on. I could mention the cost difference between a fat client running decade old software VS a thin client with a annual fee is very much in favor of the fat client. (I really don't want to pay MS or SUN for using office software from 95 wich is ALL I need).
I could point out that SUN has been saying the same thing for years and it never been true and never will be true.
In fact all that has changed is that SUN since they started with the thin client concept (after the fat clients became the standard) is that SUN has become increasingly irrelevant. The fact is simply that what SUN wants to happen is to go back to the old days of mainframes and terminals. We had those once, we had a reason we switched to the current setup. I don't think we are going to go back anytime soon. Not because of computer games or because we really want PC's to do everything but simply because even for office applications it is cheaper. Blame intel and others for making PC's so goddamn cheap they are now given away for free with your mobile phone. Mobile phones with access metered by the MB and 1 euro wallpapers are not going to replace free pc's with free software and unmetered access anytime soon.
Funny thing, those mobile phone applications that really work? Games and route finders? All locally installed software. What webbased software do people really use on their phones?
It appears in the book and is after they get stranded on the planet. They are basically sealing themselves into the medical lab hoping for rescue to arrive before becoming dinner. It all goes bad when they realise the local reactor is going to blow long before they can be rescued.
It does not mean YOU can alter MY copy of MY sourcecode. Or even to force me to distribute YOUR alteration.
Sure in the case were you are unable to distribute your alteration to those who need it it sucks donkey balls. Just as IE's total domination of the browser market sucks donkey balls because it still means I can't use many many many features that work beautifull in every real browser out there.
So firefox in this case showed both how opensource works, namely that he was able to modify his own copy of it to do what he wanted AND showed why doing doing web development is such a pain in the ass. Because ultimately you can't develop for the browser on your machine, you have to write for the browser installed on your clients machine. Even if that is netscape 4.
Next time I get a snide remark about a C programmer building 100% clientside software for Windows 2000 only I am gonna go postal. PHP/ASP/Perl may be joke languages but crosscoding between browsers is the ultimate challenge. Doom3 engine, PAH! Try just getting a bunch of left floated images to center. Now that takes brains.
What do you mean I sound bitter?
The secret is that this device comes with only a 64mb card. Those are practically given away for free now. if you want more, you need to put up some extra money but it allows them to keep the machine itself pretty cheap.
Sony pulls the same stunt with the PSP, want to really play movies on it? Well then fork over an other 100 euro for a 1gb memory stick.
So I think that a lot of people would moan if they had added a 20gb drive, they would moan about extra weight, they would moan about extra vulnarability, they would moan about reduced battery live and they would moan about the high price.
Sure portable movie players sound hot but look at the sales figures of the ones that are out there, they ain't to hot. Either they are extremely expensive, even above the price of an i-pod or require you to use memory sticks. Believe me I been looking very closely for a good player.
The "best" at the moment might be the DVD players with divx capabilty. Sadly because of the spinning disc they lack battery life. And are big and heavy, not good in a device you got to hold in your hand.
Quake might be a little bit different but lets not also forget that this screen is an awfull lot smaller then even my monitor was at the time. Still I had some pretty good matches on a 90mhz pentium and that was with bloated NT sucking up resources in the background.
No 2x200mhz is a lot of power for old games. Wether it can equal the PSP I am not going to debate. This thing is a lot cheaper and not a DRM nightmare.
It all depends I expect on your expectations. I am not a person to be put off by framerates at around 20 in a game. Guess at my age my eyes ain't fast enough to really notice anyway.
XP comes nowwhere near, OSX does a bit but in many ways BeOS is still ahead of its time. It is just suffering from lack of applications, but what it mostly suffers from is idiots like you comparing its features with things MS marketing hype.
As long as the code remains free the ideal remains. They can charge whatever they want for the binary package, you always got the freedom of the LFS distro if you don't want to pay them for their hardwork.
But occasionally I still come accross the odd IE only site, hell Fema made one just recently.
Will the web once again be split into "best viewed with browser X" style sites and a few brave ones just hanging on to pure HTML? Who knows. Humanity might have learned but so far humanity has always been ready to make the same mistakes again.
The only thing we can hope for is that the google lesson will hold. That a website doesn't need to have bells and whistles and sparkles. It just needs to do what it does and do it well. Yet I fear that many websites will in future be Windows Vista only. Not the big ones probably, not the important ones but enough to convince a hell of a lot of users that "The Net" is Windows Vista Internet Explorer. Just as many people today blame bugs in IE on the website on bugs in the website on Firefox.
MS doesn't need to own the net, they just got to stop anyone else from owning it. That way they might always succeed at owning it with the next attempt. MS is evil and evil only needs to get lucky once.
Intel: Yes it is and by a huge coincedence it will also cost you at least that. Funny thing eh?
Security is after all about restricting access. Most extreme way to keep a computer safe is to make it impossible to access. Want a safe websurfing session? Easy just take out that little cables in the back of your computer, the power, the network and the keyboard one would do for starters.
But that kinda security doesn't work because we want things to be easy. What is an often heard complained about windows vs unix security? That by default windows has the user logged in as root, the defence being that users don't want to have to type in a password just to install software.
MS could easily introduce unix like root-user seperation, they used to be a unix company after all. Some linux distros make it very clear when you run your desktop as root and some IRC proggies even flatly refuse to run when you are the root user. MS could easily do the same, refuse to access the net when running as root, force the user to get software under their normal account then install it from the root account, this would force the user to think for a second.
But they can't, that is not the product they are selling. MS wants to sell an OS that will just run. If a website needs the latest flash then that should just be installed without the user noticing.
I don't think MS isn't aware of the risk this poses, I think they view this as the same way as credit card companies view the risk of how easy it is to abuse their card system. Or how easy it is to learn a 4 digit pin number. Would be very easy to make these multi billion dollar payment systems more secure. But it would also introduce a lot more difficulty that might reduce their usage.
So MS probably has people who have a solution to this but it would make windows a lot harder to use, marketing might have a thing or two to say about it. Hell support might too, would MS really want to deal with all of its users suddenly having to learn the concept of user vs admin?
In a way the public has the final say in wether windows ever becomes secure. The same public that buys SUV's wich are the most lethal vehicle on the road 4x times more likely to kill if you hit a pedestrian then other cars. The same public that flies with cutrate airlines offering flights at prices cheaper then the ride to the airport. The same public that still buys each new version of internet explorer after a decade of security alerts.
So from a business perspective why doesn't some big-wig at MS does this? Because the big-wig wants to keep his job. Insecure windows sells, slightly more secure linux does not. It is not greed, it is common business sense. You give the customer what they want. MS is very good at that. Compare it with McD, they used to sell lard with flavor. They only added a few salades after customers started demanding them with their dollars. McD did not fight this, there had to be no legal battles. As soon as they noticed demand, they supplied. Sure they didn't supply it in say the 70's because a few leftie protestors does not equal demand. A bunch of guys at slashdot complaining does not equal demand to MS.
And it is isn't Solaris in the background, it is the desktop from wich you control the machine.
Have the people working with it got any problems with using a real OS instead of the pretty button Windows/KDE/Gnome crap? No. In fact when some outsiders come in and ask why they don't insist on windows XP for the controlling software the general attitude is what the fuck for?
People will learn to work with the tools they are given. Long before XP, long before KDE yes even long before Gnome even way way before Xerox itself came up with the idea of the modern desktop people have used computers and machines wich were far more difficult to use.
Frankly I think that when someone is incapable of learning to deal with another OS you should seriously question wether that person is capable at all. Would you hire a truck driver who can only drive DAF trucks? A fork lift operator who instantly crashes when he is put on a machine wich uses different peddles instead of a switch to choose direction?
If you ever switch between companies you are likely going to switch a lot of software tools. It is rare to see the same solution in 2 companies, how come people somehow seem able to cope learning an entire new warehouse management system but are unable to learn a new login screen?
Might be a bit of a downer, to be conquered no less then three times by the same country.
Oh that wasn't what you were hoping for? Though. The mobile phone companies had a cash cow fluke with SMS and have since been trying to emulate it. They gave us WAP wich was like the internet except without the content, cheapness, user content, freedom, speed, images, a keyboard, a screen. GPRS was the next thing, so it was still like WAP but more expensive. UMTS, yet more expensive.
Oh prices should come down as more people use it. But nobody uses it. Well that is not true there a hundreds of business users but strange as it may sound that is not where the money is. Yeah nice that vending machines operators simply attach a phone to send the usage statistics BUT that delivers maybe a euro a day for a thousands customers. They want the SMS craze to spread to mobile internet but fail to realize that A it is to expensive and B people want the internet, not some horrible crippled portal.
Well it depends of course on what you want the movie to be. LoTR is generally considered to be a good/okay adapation of the books yet some hardcore fans complain that important elements were left out or changed. Most book to movie adaptations do not go well. I robot and the sound of thunder have people who love the original book (or short story) version crying foul about the movie adapatation.
What I am getting from the Telegraph review is that this reviewer is a lot less critical then the previous one. The Telegraph review seems to be glad there is a towel in the movie, never mind that it is never explained, any real fan surely doesn't need it to be explained once again, while the other reviewer wants the towel to be in the movie exactly as it was in the book/radioplay.
You can look at the LoTR movies and be glad they didn't disney it by making the characters do a little dance number OR you can complain about elves at helmsdeep.
It seems clear that this movie is not a carbon copy of the movie. They changed the story, or for that matter ADDED a storyline, removed classic bits of dialogue and added new bits. Yet they kept enough for you to regonize the original.
Is it any good? Depends, it reminds me of the doom movie but slightly less of a mess. I just wish that someday we will get a movie adapatation where the movie people do not consider themselves better then the original author.
For that is the fundamental problem here, wether it is LoTR, Doom or Hitchhiker Guide, all these movie makers seem to believe that they could improve on the original. Real fans of the original will be outraged by that.
I haven't seen the guide yet but it looks from all the reviews so far that they did a real hollywood on it. Not that hollywood can't do comedy but the guide never was hollywood comedy.
Overclocking to run a desktop application seems kinda silly. What are you going to do? Overclock your modem so mozilla loads pages faster? Time check the time it takes openoffice to print a page? Better replace the motor on your printer so the head can move faster!
Nah this guy is a troll. He is not consitent. He first claims that both desktop applications AND games are lacking on linux but only proofs this for games.
As for the overclocking crowd being important. HAHA. Yeah right, grow up. That market is so tiny that only the smallest companies care about it. The real hardware market is in office machines. Look at the prices on IBM/HP-Compaq desktops vs the hardware costs and you can easily spot where the real margins are.
I know the crowd of linux desktop/windows gamers all to well being one of them. MS makes great software. It runs my games perfectly (windows 2003 server). It is everything else I don't trust it with. This in turn helps gaming performance no end. You will be suprised how many of the weenies above overclock and tweak and bitch about +1 fps when they got torrents, virus checkers, that really funny wallpaper, those handy free icons all running in the background.
Linux can do without those people. Those who think linux is secure have never seen what a true idiot can do.
This movie is going to be bad. Just how bad remains to be seen. We can at most hope for bearable bad OR so fucking bad it becomes good again. Most like it will be unbearable bad. Oh well, who needs a movie when you got the game?
The most well known is Red Dwarf. A classic BBC sci-fi comedy that was well received all over the world. Well all over the world by geeks and nerds. For reasons unknown some americans wanted to make an american version of it but altered for american tastes. They made a pilot wich at times can be found on P2P networks. It is so bad that it never saw the light of day on american tv.
Why was it so bad? Somehow the american producers who obviously must have seen the original just didn't seem to get it. They changed all the characters that just clicked in the original into versions that just didn't work. The original crew is a bunch of loosers. Nobodies thrown together and never winning. The american version makes them more hollywood. Lister less of a slob. Rimmer likable. For some reason the american producers never seemed to have gotten what made the british original work and become so loved.
It is not on its own. The british comedy classic "doing porridge" was adapted for american tv as well and bombed. Where the original was a comedy set in prison where there was humor in a non-humorous setting, a classic ep has just the two actors talking during the night confinement in their cell, the american version came closer to a regular light hearted sitcom.
It is not all one way however. The american "who's the boss" has a british version as well but missing all the chemistry. It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
The biggest problem I think in making an adoptation of something is in that you are making an adoptation. Red Dwarf, Doing porridge, Who's the boss ALL did well in their original country AND in other parts of the world. So why then try to chance it? Because you want to reach an even bigger market? How can you possibly achieve this? Only by making your version more bland and less likely to upset the tastes of your expanded audience. Remove the slobbness from lister, remove the harsh reality of doing time from a jail comedy, remove lenghty dialog from the guide.
Some saying goes something like this, the translator is a traitor. I think this is very true when trying to translate a story to a new audience. These people who made the guide movie did not try to make a movie for guide fans. They made on for the "hollywood" audience. In doing so they had to loose elements that were to "geeky" or to "nerdy" like the guide itself and replace it with slapstick.
This movie is simply not aimed at us guide fans. For every popular story there is a porn version. Complaining that these porn versions are not fatefull to the original is just as pointless as complaining these hollywood versions are not faithfull. They have an audience to please that does not know or care about the originals.
If there is going to be a guide movie then it can only really come from the BBC. Just take the tv eps and watch them in one sitting with stale popcorn and an overpriced coke.
Not in any specific order but Star Trek has been going to hell and is nothing like what made the original or even the sequel so loved by its fans. I don't exactly know what it is about DS9 or Enterprise that makes me so totally unintrested in them but something is missing from them that made the originals worth watching.
George Lucas showed with The Phantom Menance that he did not understand what made the original Star Wars so well loved. You can say that new movies are still commercial successes but that is missing something vital. Star Wars: A New Hope has a place in film history, Phantom Menace does not. In 20 yrs time the childeren of today will not give a toss about the new movies. What was missing? Well no Han Solo, no chewbacca, no millenium falcon. Star Wars was a slightly dirty universe with pirates. The prequels are bright shiny places with big palaces.
We have other beloved "stories" wich "hollywood" just doesn't seem to get. Mario brothers movie. How could it be so wrong. Why do allmost all game movies suck? Why does the new Doom movie take the doom out of the movie?
Red Dwarf was adapted for the american market and the result was so amazingly bad that even americans realized it. Don't know if this is true but Valva was approached for a Half-life movie but lost intresest when "hollywood" wanted to a add a love interest for Gordon Freeman.
If the review of the HHGTG movie is accurate then it sounds like a typical case of hollywood just not getting the source material. Some people seem to excuse this in this case by pointing out that you can't do bookstuff in movies since it would be boring. These "americans" don't get that the guide has been a radio play, a book, an album, a computer game, a tv series and a stage play. All of them managed to be very guide like even if they had massive differences in them. The tv series and the stage play especially should proof that it isn't impossible to turn the guide into a movie.
I think that just as in the previous mentioned examples the people involved in making the movie just didn't get it OR are so convinced of their own capabilities that they think they can improve upon the source material.
Paramount, fire everyone involved with star trek and hire the writers for the originals series. George Lucas, let the remaining three movies be made by other people. Just do the production. Doom movie crew, doom is on mars with marines and a invasion from hell. That is it.
Will they listen? Of course not. This is hollywood trying to get "geek" culture.
And that is the real problem. Hollywood by definition is hip and happening and cool beautifull people being intresting. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doom, computer games, the guide are the domain of nerds. Silicon valley has proven that they can make excellent Star Trek and Star Wars and Hitchhiker guide games. Because game makers are nerds and so understand geek culture. Hollywood will not and cannot get "it".
Most of these MMO got money growing on trees wich is bad because if you just keep pumping in money (through mission payouts) then inflation will be insanely high. So they add all kinds of silly things to get money out of the system. But why not simply add taxation on money in the bank, where it is safe from everyone but the blizzard goverment OR let you keep it on you but make you risk loosing money if you die AND make bandits not bother with the poor ranger but go after the rich merchants like the RIAA after 12yr olds. Then rich players will have to pay other players to protect them and wham bang you got the money flowing again instead of some players becoming billionairs and complaining the game ain't any fun.
Some of the most fun games of recent times come from old soviet countries while america got EA games.
Most spam and popups are for american products while the best serials and no-cd sites are in russia.
Saying that russia has the best hackers is pure flamebait BUT it is not entirely without reason. It reminds me a lot of the argument wich space program was/is best. The americans beat themselves on the chest with the fact they went to the moon and the space shuttle can carry a lot of people while Mir was falling apart. Any sensible person will remark that the moon missions have stopped, that the space shuttle is also the most lethal space vehicle if not the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series and that Mir for all its creakiness stayed up for years and years and never killed anyone.
A lot of cybercrime comes from countries were the law enforces got better things to worry about then some rich foreigners getting ripped off. Are russians better at it then anyone else? Maybe but that is hardly something to boast about.
On the other hand we the supposed better west are only hurting ourselves when we laugh of these russian claims. Russian space program is still beating the west even with their ruined economy (how many russians been killed in space since the collapse of the soviet union vs american casualities? Who is currently keeping the international space station up and running?). A whole country whose goverment has no motivation to stop cybercrime is a big threath to the west that want to turn the internet into a big part of their economy.
It seems to me odd that the greatest artists of history from plato to shakespear, mozart and bach and so many others that I am to uncultured to know about created their works without any copy protection what so ever. Yet britney spear's work must somehow be protected by fbi raids. That is advancement? You can keep it. Artists should be starving, it helps the muse.
However only a tiny percentage of players take the time to simple prepare themselves for a hunt so it is was not unusual to see people desperately trying to shop for brandy ONLY after having arrived at the remotest planet.
Simple money making scheme? Buy stacks of brandy and sell them at a nice profit at remote locations. The makers of brandy don't want to spend the time to distribute their wares and the customers don't want do spend hours shopping.
In the period it worked before SWG went terminal it gave me so much income I never even bothered with running missions. I don't think resellers themselves are a bad idea. Basically I got my money by providing the same exact service as it exists in the real world.
Buying up every single item is an extreme step but perhaps in some future MMO game with a properly thought out economy some players will be making their game by shipping resources between supplier and user.
Imagine a more spread out game were you cannot reach every corner in a few minutes. Perhaps it even takes hours if not days to go into the deep. Ranger type players will be out alone or small groups hunting and doing their survival thing. Once in a while they will be bringing their loot to small villages were they put up for sale. Now these items are in demand but the crafters that want them tend to be in bigger cities as they would be in real live and don't want to constantly be on the move and fend of all kinds of nasty just to get the resources they need. Two groups, the more solo minded explorers who are playing a hunting sim, the other the more social minded creators who are playing a home improvement sim. Add a third group, the money grabbers and they might get their fun out of buying low and selling high. Travelling the lands in search if items to buy.
So I don't think this is such a bad thing in itself. What has me wondering is how badly upset the basic economy is that in such a new game two players can already have gotten so rich as to buy every item on the market. Even SWG economy ain't that broken.
Talk about grinding? HA. We had to grind random jobs AND PAY people to be allowed to teach them. Then as soon as you became a master and actually could do anything usefull you had to unlearn everything you worked so hard on learning to make room for the next profession.
Content you say? Tired of running? Why I can still remember having to do the exact same run 6 times through the most hostile planets in the universe JUST to be allowed to open up the option to make a lethal run dozens of times to turn hard earned combat experience into force experience at a conversion rate that would shock banks at airports.
Pfff, you guys don't know how good you have it.
What you and others are perhaps comparing this with is truck tracking systems. BUT these systems are for a totally different need. They track trucks (and not what is in them) with gps because they already know what is in the truck from the loading bill AND because it helps them decide wich truck is closest to pick up an new freight.
Every good that comes in a warehouse is labelled. No matter how short it stays. That label is what is tracked. Item comes in, is labelled and assigned a location, moved to location. When it is time to deliver it is taken from location and the location is freed. No need for bloody forklift trucking. CHECK ACTUAL WAREHOUSES. The only time you need to track the forklift if your are automating the forklift itself. But this is very expensive as you need to add things like weight sensors to tell when the load comes on and off, scanners to scan the load in front, good positioning. Far easier just to do it the old fashioned way with good employees. It only fails because management puts to much stress on the employees and doesn't listen when they report that the system ain't working because of a shortage of location or because storage locations are to small for goods. Or simple time constraints.