Simple solution, steal the license from a machine freed from MS clutches.
Is how I got most of my MS licenses. I liberate a machine by installing linux then use the license for my game needs. I do believe that MS doesn't like that but for now this perfectly legal under dutch laws.
What he says is absolutly true. Every little bit of it. Then again the first almanacs and encyclopedia suffered from the same thing and continue to suffer from it.
Facts are hard to come by. He shows this himselve. The bit about the date of birth not being nailed down. Wikipedia gets it wrong but he admits that other reference books also get it wrong. Nothing new there then.
How many articles in the Britannica are wrong? Just because the person writing the article has a few titles does not mean they are correct.
There cannot be a totally accurate encyclopdia. Somethings we just don't know at the moment. Dinosaurs have changed an awfull lot. From cold-blooded lizards to caring parents and everything in between. While articles were written about the facts of cold-blooded lizards, crackpots were writing about them being warm-blooded. Now it is the crackpots who think they are cold-blooded.
A wiki has the unique capabiltie that the crackpots get their change to. Group think will moderate it until you get a sort of grey goo that will hopefully tell sorta the truth (we don't really know).
The best bet for the future would be a wiki like setup but with known sources. If I want to submit my data I have to submit my credentials. If data clearly conflicts then both pieces are mentioned allowing people to judge for themselves.
At the moment the wiki model is just as corrupt as the conventional model. Open to "experts" who just shout loud enough to be believed.
No shiny SP2 for us. We just got to do with patches now and then. Bah.
Oh I do got my windows game machine but that is windows 2003 (it ain't xp wich is why it is better).
No SP2 for that either then again it is firewalled with a proper firewall and only runs games. Nothing else.
Intresting eh? Considering MS own figures on XP takeup this is not all that rare. Many many people are still on w2k or 98. Until recently for home use their was no reason to upgrade. I think only Star Wars Battlefront claimed to require XP.
Oh and for those who want to know, 2003 ran all but one game (vietcong purple haze) allthough some have problems during install because 2003 is not regonized as a valid target OS. Edit the msi files and it works fine.
The reviewer seems unable to make up his mind as to wich type of customer he is. Every review of a product needs to be made from the viewpoint of a type of customer. So if I review a car I can review it as family and look at space for kids and ease with wich the driver can turn around and beat the bawling kids. I can look at it as a sales person were I care little about the size of the backseat but a hanger for my suit jacket is very important.
Is this guy reviewing the desktop as a system admin, a user who admins his own, or a desktop user who does NOT have the root password?
He mentions there being 3 package systems available. But is this bad? A system admin might like that he can just use the one he likes best. If the package systems are aware of each other so actions in 1 are reflect in the others then this just is choice for the admin. Admins ain't supposed to get confused by simple choice.
For a user supposed to admin his own machine it might be confusing but the user without root will never even see it.
See how the perspective changes? 3 package systems represent Choice, confusion, don't matter, depending on who you are.
Does anybody in a big business install their own OS? Or setup things like ntp? He complains that novell has not prepopulated the list with working ntp servers. However a big company might not want all their thousands of desktops going outside to get the time. The ntp server might also have a thing or two to say about it. Makes far more sense to setup their own ntp server inside and be able to block of another port on the firewall.
What I totally missed in the review of a desktop aimed at mass business installs is how easily installs are automated. Can I create an install setup wich just creates the same desktop over and over and over? I really don't want to have to configure a thousand ntp clients.
I presume it is there, other linux distros have it, but the reviewer who never made up his mind how he is going to review the product totally ignores this.
This seems like one of the many home desktop reviews out there. This is not a home desktop. I think NLD is meant to be installed unattended with all the defaults set. After wich a user will use the installed applications and every bit of configuration will be done by the support staff.
What matters here the following things.
Can every needed option be pre-configured so that during a rollout you don't need support to log into a thousands of machines to set the web proxie in firefox?
Can it integrate with the existing sytems? File shares, databases, file formats.
Can it be remotely administrated. If I call the helpdesk and they can just login and do their stuff while I am working (should be possible with linux) then that is a lot better then windows. (were you need reboots and can't have admin and user at the same time).
Can the user be kept from doing harm to the system?
Is it reliable?
Is the desktop clear enough for people to do their job. Most people use only a tiny handfull of applications, you would be suprised how many people get by with just their office suit. Can the desktop be setup to just work for them?
Is in an attempt to make the desktop user friendly not the mistake being made of making the system hard to admin? The 3 package managers might be confusing to a user but an admin should find it refreshing to be able to use his favorite.
Questions on KDE vs Gnome don't matter at all. The powers that be will decice the install and the user will just have to live with it. Just as millions still have to live with NT4.
Next time split the review into a setup/admin part and an end-user part because that is how this desktop is supposed to be used.
No I am not going to make jokes. You never played an absolute classic game wich everyone who likes first person shooters would recommend and you want to know about the sequel?
Don't bother.
As for replayability being your major factor for buying games. What a weird choice. Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
But of course the answer is simple. No half-life 2 is not a endless replay game. It is heavily story based and once you know the story you can only improve your "score" except it doesn't keep a score.
This guy must be piss poor as well as insane. Or maybe it is one of the fill in the blanks trolls and he just never increased the hardware.
A pentium pro with nt4? Wtf? That is not just obsolete, it belongs in a museum. Then he mentions windos on a 486. I often get confused about timelines but aren't we talking windows 95 here at best? Wasn't the first windows that wasn't as much a disaster as windows 3 pretty much pentium only?
So basically this is a troll/rant that a game takes time to install on hardware wich can't run it. If it is true, wich is always possible/. has a lot of idiots, then might it take a while because he is downloading it over his leet 9600bps modem?
Anyway he wants a reason to buy valve games? Because half-life was one of the best first person shooters ever and still counts as a benchmark for every other fps out there. Only a tiny handfull of games can even compare. They also shown enormous commitment to maintaining their product. Where most fans fall down on their hands and knees in thanks when their game company fixes bugs that should have been spotted in beta, Valva has continued to upgrade half-life at no cost over the original purchase price. Sure it also allowed them to sell expansion packs but nobody forced you to buy them. You still got the improvments if you updated.
In the interest of full disclosure I am a pinko penquin lover.
But what are they saying. 40% of business will put up a machine running linux somewhere in their business. Gee.
I worked at several windows-only companies were I deployed linux. Typically something like the webserver. If you are talking +10.000 seats of windows +1 linux webserver then it still meets Gartners figures. Hell if it is 1 tech guy running linux and getting away with it it still counts.
Frankly predictions like these are there for the press because they need headlines. Microsoft with dos and later windows never had a year of the "........" breaking through. It was a very slow process for them to breakthrough and be accepted in business used to buy unix and mainframes.
The adoption of MS in the business can also tell you something about what Linux needs to be to get adopted.
Many people complain about Linux being to hard or not running on every piece of hardware they got but they forgot that Dos and Windows have the exact same problems.
Oh Windows runs on every piece of hardware inside business? All right, lets convert this all "apple" company to windows then without buying new hardware. Or this all "mipps" workstation company without buy new hardware. Oh, can't be done? Windows only runs on x86 hardware? This was actually a problem at times in the past, youngsters and old windows lovers just like to forget that their are other pieces of hardware then dells.
And if you think a bunch of dos machines was easier to maintain then a single mainframe with a set of terminals you are insane. Dos threw far more crap at the user then mainframes ever did. Yet the lesser options and increased maintenance were accepted because. Well I don't know. For some reason it seemed to make business sense.
And that is what Linux needs to be adopted. For its use inside the company to make somekind of sense to somebody who has the power to decide. It can be because they think it is cheaper, because they think that being locked into one supplier ain't that smart, because the staff that has to work with it prefers it, because they like the penquin cuddly look, because they want to take the MS salesslime on a tour through the department past the desk off the linux user and go "oh yeah we are really interestted in the tco of linux vs windows".
Gartner needs headlines as advertising for its services. News services need headlines. So long as this is true we will keep seing reports like "XXXX the year of.........". Just ignore. If you want further evidence, ask yourselve this. What was the year of the diesel engine, or the year of the jet engine. There was a time when trucks used petrol engines. Pinpoint the year this changed.
For someone who grew up with nuclear movies, in wich every problem was solved or involved nukes, this is very very nice.
Just don't think it would make a good James Bond movie. "Ah yes Mister Bond I see you managed to find my secret water pump!".
On a more serious note, it is known that taking gas or oil from the earth causes the ground above to sink. In the netherlands this is happening up north although the effects are of course very small according to those in power (and living above sea level).
It also causes some small earth quakes. Nothing major. Last one had all the news channels trying to make a story out of some rooftiles that slid off. We don't get good disasters here anymore.
If this causes a lot of earthquakes because it lubricates the faults might it not be used to untension high risk areas? Put some lubricant in the ground wich causes a lot of small earth quakes to take energy away from the ground so there is not enough left for a big one?
I have no idea how lethal a 3.9 is but it must be a hell of a lot better for places like LA then a 8.
What do you mean this is potentially very dangerous. You are talking about a city that got nuclear reactors in an earthquake zone. They like danger over there.
What is this guy smoking? The music industry got its head so far up its ass they just can't see that the world has changed.
Not that I ever seen big companies put ads on P2P sites but if they do it is a sure sign that the music industry is now considered worthy of being ripped off by both consumers and other industries.
Lets face it. File sharing is good business. ISP's and telecoms make money off it. Recordable CD/DVD makers earn from every burned game/movie/cd. Burner makers profit. HD makers profit. Modem makers profit. Cable companies making the cables being rolled out to support our ever increasing data needs profit. Streetmakers profit because cables go underground.
Everybody is making money of filesharing except the music industry and now even totally unrelated industries are finding ways to make a buck out of it. It makes sense for a mobile phone company to advertise to music file sharers. Kids who don't spend money on overpriced cd's DO spend it on SMS packages.
Music industry wake up. Nobody likes you or your product. Get with the times or die. When the first cars arrived I bet the horse industry held similar pleas and nobody cared back then either.
Want to beat filesharing? I got a very simple solution. Get rid of pre-pressed cd's. Put 1 big central computer in each record labels basement wich contains all their songs ever recorded. Put smaller computers hooked up to the net in each point of sale. Give it a few terrabyte cache with the best sellers. Put up several terminals for people to browse the catalogs and sample songs. On request burn or upload selected songs to the buyer. Songs in the cache cost no extra bandwidth and HD space is cheap. Songs downloaded cost peanuts.
Every point of sale will have an infinite stock and be able to sell to every type of music lover. No longer problems with over or understocking. No stolen cd cases.
A simple business model and one the point of sales people love. They have been suggesting this for a long time and several have tried.
But the music industry doesn't want it. It prefers to cling on to the old model. Some horse cart makers turned to making horseless carriages and survived, some didn't. Do we really care about the losers?
In the past you had the unix companies and the new upstart Microsoft. Unix was expensive and good, windows wasn't.
However some people realised that at times you didn't need unix. Dos would do. Slowly MS sneaked its way into the business through the backdoor. On cheap clones doing simple tasks for wich the IBM's HP's and SUN's were just to damn expensive. A dos based Wordprocessor with its own printer may seem primitive but it worked. Sure multi user shared systems are nice but in a small office the old floppy network can work as well.
But the old unixes still sold because while dos and later windows were getting better (lets face it they could hardly get worse) and remained a lot cheaper MS has never been able to compete with unix for the high end market.
So MS sold the lowend, the unixes the highend and all was well.
Until some fin stopped being totally drunk for a moment and made his own little unix and opened the source code to it. It most likely was just the right time, since other unixes had been free long before, but this free unix started to take off.
Very slowly during the recent internet bubble it was sneaking its way into business just as MS had done with DOS. However this time the unixes saw not a tiny little crap unreliable single user no-networking OS coming from below but a increasingly capable unix like themselves. Except a whole lot cheaper.
During the bubble SUN sold a whole lot of sun machines (with the solaris ofcourse) because money was cheap and the sky was the limit. HOWEVER not everyone saw the need to use super expensive hardware with super expensive software. Some went with windows and crashed a lot but some went with this new unix and with cheap hardware and crashed a bit more often then unix but less then windows and had plenty of money left over to spend on good admins.
This new unix was a threat except that some unixes saw it more as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Linux was hurting unix but it was also hurting windows. So IBM and later HP asked themselves this. Do we fight Linux or do we join it and perhaps be able to attack Windows from below and above? Remember that with Linux in a Unix company like IBM you now got a complete set of price ranges. Linux on cheap x86 to score below windows. Linux on good hardware to be equal to windows. Unix on their own hardware for the highend.
Now the problem was and is that Linux is free. The free speech is nice but from this flow that it is very hard to sell linux at the old unix prices. Worse with linux now getting closer and closer to unix capabilities it becomes harder and harder to justify the price difference.
Sun has a very simple choice. Keep trying to sell very expensive hardware running very expensive software in a down economy while competing directly with very cheap hardware running very cheap software wich is almost as good. After the bubble the price difference is often more important.
If they make Solaris as free as linux (remember linux can and is sold for money) then they remove at least one obstacle to their sales pitch. The only economic question is wether the loss in license fees is offset by an increase in hardware sales and support licenses.
But it may also be that they have no choice. If your a salesperson losing sale after sale because people buy into the idea of a free unix then you either follow or just don't sell stuff.
Sun ain't doing to well at the moment. I think that opening the source and making solaris 10 free is their attempt to compete better with IBM or worse Dell/Linux. They have little else left. People just don't want to buy Sun anymore for their websites.
MS keeps spouting of about how everyone should make sure they use properly licensed software. On how companies should do constant and costly audits on their software to make sure they are in compliance. Do you really think that the MS backed BSA ignores an illegal windows license in say charity they raid? Oh wait we know the answer to that. MS even protested that giving away your windows license to charities was illegal
Yet somehow when MS steal software it is allright?
God I hate hypocrits like you. MS can't have it both ways no matter how many apologists like you they have behind them.
So MS has two choices. Either back down of their stance on software audits or be known as a hypocrit. Then again those of us not licking gates ass already know this.
Because that is EXACTLY what MS does. If somebody in my company installs windows (we are a unix shop) on some machine and they audit me then I will get a big fine. MS tells everyone they should audit their software to avoid stuff like this. Now MS has shown that they can't be bothered to author themselves.
This is like a cop who takes drugs. And yes 1 cop taking drugs does reflect on the whole fucking department. MS has some explaining to do and they better come up with a better excuse then yours.
That is the whole point after all. Terrorism or freedom fighter or guerrialas or commandoes all come into action when normal warfare is impossible. Wich one you call it really depends where you are on the battlefield.
When the allies were unable to attack the germans through convential means they used civilians in occupied europe to launch attacks. Freedom fighters or terrorists? Well they won and the germans lost so freedom fighters they are.
Certain groups feel that they have to wage a war against the goverments to achieve their objectives. This is nothing new and sometimes we are sympatetic and sometimes we are not.
There are however three problems in fighting them. The first is that the terrorists don't obey the same set of rules. Lets face it, baskenland/ireland/palestine terrorists could be easily wiped out if spain/england/israel just used the same methods but on a slightly larger scale. But that ain't allowed. Terrorists have no rules, those that fight them can't afford to have no rules.
Second is that crime may not pay but terrorism certainly does. Just check Arafat. The guy has become filthy rich. Some people here complain about how western goverments are only stuffing their own pockets yet the income of a blair or bush pales to the self enrichment that goes on in palestine.
Ireland has the same problem. On both sides the terrorists have established a very nice power base for themselves with criminals empires that may once have been put up to fund their activities but now give their controllers a very nice income.
But the final problem has become clear time and time again. It is easy to track the ringleaders but impossible to take them out without angering all the bleeding hard liberals. The recruits who commit the actual attacks are unknowns. Check the 9/11 attackers. Check the murderer of Theo van Gogh. Check the people who blow themselves up in Israel and Iraq.
But really check them. They are not just clean as in having no previous terrorist connections. They are clean in that they come from "good" backgrounds. Not the poor, family killed, religious lunatics that people like to imagine.
If anything they are poor little rich kids.
You can't track them. The ring leaders stay outside reach and keep themselves just low profile enough that you can't just send a commando team to kill them. The raw recruits are to clean to show up.
Sure there can be arrests and you can spend billions on tracking them all but the terrorists don't care. They have won. Every second we spend on chasing them they have won. Every second we are afraid they have won. We could arrest 99% of their people and if they only manage 1 feeble attack every few years they will still have won.
It is in many ways like the war of drugs. Unless you are willing to go the way of the soviet union or china then their is no way to fight drugs. Stalin was very succesfull at keeping all the populations in the USSR in line. Slaughter everyone. Dead people don't riot. Then again who needed terrorism in the USSR when the state was so ready to hand it out?
I think the problem here is that people rape the GPL. Not open source. You see you say open source is not the same as public domain. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG. Open source only tells you that you have access to the source. It tells nothing about any other part of the license. A piece of public domain could just as easily be closed source as open source.
With BSD you have far less requirements to give credit to the original creator.
So change the words open source in your speech with GPL and you are right. Use open source and you show you haven't understood anything.
Then again you use IP rights. Lets be clear. Open source and Free software are often mis used when instead you should use a license name like BSD/GPL/LGPL/Public domain/god knows what
Look mate that is not the way we do it in the capatalist world. You see it is okay for business to have their cd's printed in the lowest wage country available BUT IT IS NOT OKAY FOR YOU PINKO'S TERRORISTS TO THEN BUY THE CD FROM THE LOWEST PRICED REGION. Okay? (or what do you think dvd regions are all about eh?)
It has always been one rule for the consumers and another for business.
In it the civil service just can't get it into their heads that a hospital with a full staff of adminstrators but no medical staff is not much use.
The NHS is a former shadow of itself as a healer of the public. Yes it is spending more and more money and employing lots of people. But the ratio of medical vs administrators is going down. In the wrong direction and the care is decreasing. I worked in england for a british company long enoug to know that the NHS is great at spending money and hiring people. It is getting people threathed by doctors and nurses that they seem to find hard to do. Funny thing is that both the conservatives (think democrats for the americans) and labour (think pinko commies) have screwed it up. Maybe it is just a cycle. One generation gives free medical care for everyone. The other destroys it.
I am in the same problem sort off. I also don't have the cd anymore and their new version of playcenter is bugged in that it uses some crap MS database wich it says is not installed. A known bug and creative is doing nothing to solve it.
Their are ways around it but there shouldn't have to be. Creative is really getting weird. Worst thing? For some reason my pc always played a vid of the creative logo while booting until I ripped the software apart. WTF is with them? Soundblaster used to be a decent card but the company behind them got marketing mad.
There are companies that support OGG and there are companies that do not. Apple doesn't feel it needs to and neither does creative. Not their kind of market. Maybe this will change like Sony is now supporting mp3 but I doubt it.
So if you want OGG buy from a company that supports it in its current players.
For linux support try to find a player that is really just an usb storage device wich just happens to be able to read its own contents. Many of the smaller companies are not going to bother making their own. They just buy a usb storage solution and built their player around it. The more generic their chosen USB storage the more likely someone somewhere will have written a driver for it. Some rio models are supported probably because they were the first popular ones long before anyone at Apple had seen the light.
As for creative. Well I got their zen model and thought it was pretty good. Until I got my iriver to make up for the zens lower and lower battery life. Better sound, easier to get music on, worse button layout. Go figure.
I might be wrong but I seem to remember that the ipod was there before the music store.
I also know a lot of people with mp3 players and absolutly no-one who buys music online. Might have something to do with being dutch.
I think that a good mp3 player needs just to work your OS. I got a creative zen and a iriver one but I must say that I now mostly use the iriver. It just appears as an extra drive under windows. What can be easier to manage.
Both reviews talk about it but don't really seem to have spotted it. SWG has become poisoned. It has become poisoned with something that is lethal to any team game. Solo'ers.
SWG has a skill system where you use XP to buy boxes wich give you new skills. XP can easily be gained doing stuff related to the skills, kill for combat skills, craft for crafting skills. However each skill box also costs skill points of wich you only have a very limited amount. You can spend them as you wish, unlearn a skill and you get the points back.
The job of marksman cost 15 points to get novice in. Then you have 4 trees, carabine, pistol and rifle and a generic ranged combat. Now don't think that if you master the tree of pistol you are a capable shooter. You are crap. Totally and utterly. You need however novice marksman, the pistol tree and then go into the advanced profession of pistoleer. If you want to be any use in combat you better have an advanced combat job. Worse certain jobs like smuggler require you to have multiple novice jobs. These eat up skill points.
This leads to a problem. It is due to two bad design points. All jobs cost exactly the same amount of skill points despite the fact that a ranger is far less needed then say a melee. Second is that you need to be high level in any job to be of any use. Scout at low level does allow you to harvest wich is usefull but very costly in Skill points. Novice Medic is also theoretically usefull as long as you don't make your own medicine BUT because nobody wants to waste the points AND then have to pay for the pleasure of healing others EVERYONE uses docs to buff their stats to the point they don't need healing.
It basically means that people are in very narrow defined jobs with an awfull lot of people going for pure combat. I myself am guilty of this. Sure I could use scout to harvest and sell those resources to crafters BUT I can get more money being a pure combat class to buy the inflated prices becauuse the crafters can't get enough resources.
You starting to see the poison? Basically Sony has made the game have to few players harvest.
Another part of the poison is the lack of new or casual players. Basically the player base has matured and everyone is in the role they want. This leads to a problem. Absolutly no-one needs or wants to do low level stuff anymore. Recently a creature started dropping a very high quality resource needed for docs. The offered prices were insane. The take up non-existent. Why? The creature is extremely low level meaning no xp and little meat per kill and zero challenge. New players could have made their fortune but there weren't any around.
The simple problem is this. There is a mission type, killing humans on dantooine, wich pays so much so easily that money is no object. Far easier to grind missions solo buffed with some cheap armour then gather resources to increase supply and therefore drive prices down.
SWG also had another element. The hidden job of Jedi. Recently the path to gaining jedi has changed but the change has created more story but has increased the poison. Before each character had a hidden list of jobs you needed to master. Master them and you could create a new character on the same server that was a jedi.
This saw a lot of people grinding jobs they were not intrested in player BUT at least people were constantly shifting jobs and there was some movement. Even the most dedicacted holo/jedi grinder would be a doctor a medic a ranger etc for a while.
Now this is gone. Now you need to just get all the badges (for exploring) and then get an awfull lot of combat xp. An insane amount. A truly giganticlly insane amount of XP. Each combat type has its own XP pool wich is capped. What is the best way to grind jedi? Get two master combat jobs. First get one combat type maxed out on XP then the other, this will also fillout your generic combat xp, convert it to jedi xp and repeat.
Now all kinds of missions give XP BUT certain missions just make better sense. Your weapons and
Okay lets assume for a moment that Mars at one time had a eco system. IF this was ever the case it might have been a very different system then the one we live in. It has only been a few decades since we discovered two completly different eco systems wich are not like us dependent on the sun and plants.
But if it existed then it was a long time ago. Plenty of time for all the evidence to be hidden beneath the sand. Mars is not exactly known for its non-sand storm nature.
Even if there are fossils to be found the chances of finding them with 2 little carts pottering about are about zero. It would be like driving around your local city and claiming there never been dinosaurs because you didn't find any.
At the moment what everyone is doing is speculating. Worse the speculations are based on very small samples and compared to only 1 planet wich we don't really understand yet either.
I have lived long enough to have gone through several cycles of mars having and not having water. The only thing I know for certain is that nobody knows for certain.
Could an intelligent species have lived on mars and left? We only recently discovered that a small species of humans has existed very recently very close by. Frankly anyone who claims to know the answer to what lived or didn't live on mars in the past is insane. You can guess. You can estimate. But certain we can't be. More fun anyway.
England is a nation living of its past reputation. To be fair I am dutch and we are living with our head in the sand hoping troubles will go away and that things like political assination, massive corruption, racial tensions happen elsewhere. But back to england.
England changed massivly during the second world war. Although food supplies became for more limited because they were now rationed out the fast majority of people actually got a better diet. It also saw the start of the National Health Service. The idea that everyone should have access to the same kind of good medical care without having to pay huge bills. To the americans, this is not such a bad idea because healthy workers can worker harder and longer.
However a NHS is also expensive. Of course the long, intelligent and complex view is that like a public transport system or social services they kinda pay for themselves. While they do not make a profit it is because they reduce the cost of others. A NHS makes sure people are sick less often and don't die so early so they can pay taxes as workers for longer. This is simple. Every kid costs the state money. The same amount wether this kid is a tax payer for 20 years or 40 years. Public transport takes people of the roads. For all those car drivers cursing about money spend on trains while you are stuck in traffic. Just imagine how long the jam would be if the people in the train were on the road with you.
However certain types of goverment seek election by promising to lower taxes. This works on the simple minded voter. You can't of course lower taxes without spending less and the NHS or public transport are easy targets. Invest a little bit later. Freeze salaries. What will it hurt for 1 term of office eh?
England now has an NHS wich is a shadow of its former self. "Efficiency" programs have the amount of managers running out of control while the NHS is bleeding developing nations of its nurses while british nurses are going stateside (language is a problem but the pay is better). Health care has gone down the crapper again with it costing more and more for those who are least capable of paying for it.
Funny thing is that all those cuts on the NHS happened to lower taxes. I wish I could have everyone who voted for lower taxes and who ended up with a higher monthly burden flogged in public for being to stupid to live. Get a clue, it don't matter what you taxation is. What matters is the monthly bill. Simple example. $100 tax bill + $0 medical bill vs $50 tax bill $100 medical bill. Doesn't tax an economic genius to figure out wich is cheaper eh?
Anyway Blair is a MS fanboy and the NHS is famous for making the totally wrong decission. Buying MS at huge costs because it is cheaper seems business as usual.
It is quit normal for goverments to inspect all kinds off things. Food regulations in all the food preperation areas two times per year. Every person getting onboard an aircraft. Every car every couple of years. And so on and so on.
China is huge. I am slightly more puzzled about the huge number of internet bars. Even with a billion residents it seems high. But then they might not have home internet so have a higher demand for internet cafes. Since most responsible goverments check bars anyway for food regulation and drink regulations checking them for internet regulations shouldn't be that much work.
Each and every FPS or similar game promises revolutionary AI that will stun you. It never happens. The problem is that while moving out of a corner is easy for humans it isn't for computers. Even realising that something is in a corner is a complex piece of programming.
Only with very thight scripting and severely limiting the available options can current AI be made to look at least slightly as smart as a concussed kitten.
The reason? Two fold, AI research is just bloody complex and expensive. If they can't do it with purpose built robots costing billions then why should a game company be able? Second is that AI takes a lot of CPU power and the fast majority of users are still stuck on the old 1 cpu crap that intel been pushing for decades.
A game company has a simple choice, spend money on flash graphics and be sure it will look pretty or spend it on AI and risk it still being dumb as shit but also ugly looking.
If you don't believe me that AI is difficult just try to write a path finding routine in pseudo code. Your in an artificial enviroment so you don't need to worry about how you detect wether you are in front of a wall. The detection always works. BUT it is not a simple maze. Walls are at odd angles, some are wide some are small and walking down the middle of them is a no-no.
Just try it. Then you will have your answer. Oh and if you manage, now add objectives like having to chase a randomly moving object while avoiding other moving objects. That is after all what is happening in GTA.
RPM based distro's have one slight disadvantage. They tend to lead to dependency hell. Although mandrake is a doddle to install upgrading it with software that has not made it into their releases is not. Maybe I am doing it wrong but I often have to install a lot of stuff from source to get all the header files I need for additional software.
Gentoo of course has all the header files as everything is compiled from source. this doesn't make it faster, it just makes it a lot easier to install a new app wich hasn't yet made it into an rpm.
Yes mandrake is easy to use, far easier to use in fact then windows thanks to its very nice installer BUT it was so easy to use that I could learn all kinds of advanced stuff on it. Like compiling my own kernel to take advantage of my own hardware. I have a rather crappy Asus Dual P3 wich for some reason never works in dual mode with stock kernels. I always have to mess around with boot parameters until I roll my own.
If you then roll your own php and mysql because you want to see the beta's and be prepared with knowing the new features when they reach production well. It is just a short step to just roll your own.
There are probably other distros out there that I could use but I will probably never go back to RPM, it is nice if you never want to bother with compiling but to me that is not a bother.
But making harmless and not so harmless fun of other distros is all part of the fun of using linux. There is so much choice available and people have this in build need to defend their own choice that conflict is inevitable. Some people take it to far but that is just part of it.
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Is how I got most of my MS licenses. I liberate a machine by installing linux then use the license for my game needs. I do believe that MS doesn't like that but for now this perfectly legal under dutch laws.
Facts are hard to come by. He shows this himselve. The bit about the date of birth not being nailed down. Wikipedia gets it wrong but he admits that other reference books also get it wrong. Nothing new there then.
How many articles in the Britannica are wrong? Just because the person writing the article has a few titles does not mean they are correct.
There cannot be a totally accurate encyclopdia. Somethings we just don't know at the moment. Dinosaurs have changed an awfull lot. From cold-blooded lizards to caring parents and everything in between. While articles were written about the facts of cold-blooded lizards, crackpots were writing about them being warm-blooded. Now it is the crackpots who think they are cold-blooded.
A wiki has the unique capabiltie that the crackpots get their change to. Group think will moderate it until you get a sort of grey goo that will hopefully tell sorta the truth (we don't really know).
The best bet for the future would be a wiki like setup but with known sources. If I want to submit my data I have to submit my credentials. If data clearly conflicts then both pieces are mentioned allowing people to judge for themselves.
At the moment the wiki model is just as corrupt as the conventional model. Open to "experts" who just shout loud enough to be believed.
Oh I do got my windows game machine but that is windows 2003 (it ain't xp wich is why it is better).
No SP2 for that either then again it is firewalled with a proper firewall and only runs games. Nothing else.
Intresting eh? Considering MS own figures on XP takeup this is not all that rare. Many many people are still on w2k or 98. Until recently for home use their was no reason to upgrade. I think only Star Wars Battlefront claimed to require XP.
Oh and for those who want to know, 2003 ran all but one game (vietcong purple haze) allthough some have problems during install because 2003 is not regonized as a valid target OS. Edit the msi files and it works fine.
Is this guy reviewing the desktop as a system admin, a user who admins his own, or a desktop user who does NOT have the root password?
He mentions there being 3 package systems available. But is this bad? A system admin might like that he can just use the one he likes best. If the package systems are aware of each other so actions in 1 are reflect in the others then this just is choice for the admin. Admins ain't supposed to get confused by simple choice.
For a user supposed to admin his own machine it might be confusing but the user without root will never even see it.
See how the perspective changes? 3 package systems represent Choice, confusion, don't matter, depending on who you are.
Does anybody in a big business install their own OS? Or setup things like ntp? He complains that novell has not prepopulated the list with working ntp servers. However a big company might not want all their thousands of desktops going outside to get the time. The ntp server might also have a thing or two to say about it. Makes far more sense to setup their own ntp server inside and be able to block of another port on the firewall.
What I totally missed in the review of a desktop aimed at mass business installs is how easily installs are automated. Can I create an install setup wich just creates the same desktop over and over and over? I really don't want to have to configure a thousand ntp clients.
I presume it is there, other linux distros have it, but the reviewer who never made up his mind how he is going to review the product totally ignores this.
This seems like one of the many home desktop reviews out there. This is not a home desktop. I think NLD is meant to be installed unattended with all the defaults set. After wich a user will use the installed applications and every bit of configuration will be done by the support staff.
What matters here the following things.
Questions on KDE vs Gnome don't matter at all. The powers that be will decice the install and the user will just have to live with it. Just as millions still have to live with NT4.
Next time split the review into a setup/admin part and an end-user part because that is how this desktop is supposed to be used.
Don't bother.
As for replayability being your major factor for buying games. What a weird choice. Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
But of course the answer is simple. No half-life 2 is not a endless replay game. It is heavily story based and once you know the story you can only improve your "score" except it doesn't keep a score.
Go play tetris.
A pentium pro with nt4? Wtf? That is not just obsolete, it belongs in a museum. Then he mentions windos on a 486. I often get confused about timelines but aren't we talking windows 95 here at best? Wasn't the first windows that wasn't as much a disaster as windows 3 pretty much pentium only?
So basically this is a troll/rant that a game takes time to install on hardware wich can't run it. If it is true, wich is always possible /. has a lot of idiots, then might it take a while because he is downloading it over his leet 9600bps modem?
Anyway he wants a reason to buy valve games? Because half-life was one of the best first person shooters ever and still counts as a benchmark for every other fps out there. Only a tiny handfull of games can even compare. They also shown enormous commitment to maintaining their product. Where most fans fall down on their hands and knees in thanks when their game company fixes bugs that should have been spotted in beta, Valva has continued to upgrade half-life at no cost over the original purchase price. Sure it also allowed them to sell expansion packs but nobody forced you to buy them. You still got the improvments if you updated.
But what are they saying. 40% of business will put up a machine running linux somewhere in their business. Gee.
I worked at several windows-only companies were I deployed linux. Typically something like the webserver. If you are talking +10.000 seats of windows +1 linux webserver then it still meets Gartners figures. Hell if it is 1 tech guy running linux and getting away with it it still counts.
Frankly predictions like these are there for the press because they need headlines. Microsoft with dos and later windows never had a year of the "........" breaking through. It was a very slow process for them to breakthrough and be accepted in business used to buy unix and mainframes.
The adoption of MS in the business can also tell you something about what Linux needs to be to get adopted.
Many people complain about Linux being to hard or not running on every piece of hardware they got but they forgot that Dos and Windows have the exact same problems.
Oh Windows runs on every piece of hardware inside business? All right, lets convert this all "apple" company to windows then without buying new hardware. Or this all "mipps" workstation company without buy new hardware. Oh, can't be done? Windows only runs on x86 hardware? This was actually a problem at times in the past, youngsters and old windows lovers just like to forget that their are other pieces of hardware then dells.
And if you think a bunch of dos machines was easier to maintain then a single mainframe with a set of terminals you are insane. Dos threw far more crap at the user then mainframes ever did. Yet the lesser options and increased maintenance were accepted because. Well I don't know. For some reason it seemed to make business sense.
And that is what Linux needs to be adopted. For its use inside the company to make somekind of sense to somebody who has the power to decide. It can be because they think it is cheaper, because they think that being locked into one supplier ain't that smart, because the staff that has to work with it prefers it, because they like the penquin cuddly look, because they want to take the MS salesslime on a tour through the department past the desk off the linux user and go "oh yeah we are really interestted in the tco of linux vs windows".
Gartner needs headlines as advertising for its services. News services need headlines. So long as this is true we will keep seing reports like "XXXX the year of .........". Just ignore. If you want further evidence, ask yourselve this. What was the year of the diesel engine, or the year of the jet engine. There was a time when trucks used petrol engines. Pinpoint the year this changed.
Just don't think it would make a good James Bond movie. "Ah yes Mister Bond I see you managed to find my secret water pump!".
On a more serious note, it is known that taking gas or oil from the earth causes the ground above to sink. In the netherlands this is happening up north although the effects are of course very small according to those in power (and living above sea level).
It also causes some small earth quakes. Nothing major. Last one had all the news channels trying to make a story out of some rooftiles that slid off. We don't get good disasters here anymore.
If this causes a lot of earthquakes because it lubricates the faults might it not be used to untension high risk areas? Put some lubricant in the ground wich causes a lot of small earth quakes to take energy away from the ground so there is not enough left for a big one?
I have no idea how lethal a 3.9 is but it must be a hell of a lot better for places like LA then a 8.
What do you mean this is potentially very dangerous. You are talking about a city that got nuclear reactors in an earthquake zone. They like danger over there.
Not that I ever seen big companies put ads on P2P sites but if they do it is a sure sign that the music industry is now considered worthy of being ripped off by both consumers and other industries.
Lets face it. File sharing is good business. ISP's and telecoms make money off it. Recordable CD/DVD makers earn from every burned game/movie/cd. Burner makers profit. HD makers profit. Modem makers profit. Cable companies making the cables being rolled out to support our ever increasing data needs profit. Streetmakers profit because cables go underground.
Everybody is making money of filesharing except the music industry and now even totally unrelated industries are finding ways to make a buck out of it. It makes sense for a mobile phone company to advertise to music file sharers. Kids who don't spend money on overpriced cd's DO spend it on SMS packages.
Music industry wake up. Nobody likes you or your product. Get with the times or die. When the first cars arrived I bet the horse industry held similar pleas and nobody cared back then either.
Want to beat filesharing? I got a very simple solution. Get rid of pre-pressed cd's. Put 1 big central computer in each record labels basement wich contains all their songs ever recorded. Put smaller computers hooked up to the net in each point of sale. Give it a few terrabyte cache with the best sellers. Put up several terminals for people to browse the catalogs and sample songs. On request burn or upload selected songs to the buyer. Songs in the cache cost no extra bandwidth and HD space is cheap. Songs downloaded cost peanuts.
Every point of sale will have an infinite stock and be able to sell to every type of music lover. No longer problems with over or understocking. No stolen cd cases.
A simple business model and one the point of sales people love. They have been suggesting this for a long time and several have tried.
But the music industry doesn't want it. It prefers to cling on to the old model. Some horse cart makers turned to making horseless carriages and survived, some didn't. Do we really care about the losers?
However some people realised that at times you didn't need unix. Dos would do. Slowly MS sneaked its way into the business through the backdoor. On cheap clones doing simple tasks for wich the IBM's HP's and SUN's were just to damn expensive. A dos based Wordprocessor with its own printer may seem primitive but it worked. Sure multi user shared systems are nice but in a small office the old floppy network can work as well.
But the old unixes still sold because while dos and later windows were getting better (lets face it they could hardly get worse) and remained a lot cheaper MS has never been able to compete with unix for the high end market.
So MS sold the lowend, the unixes the highend and all was well.
Until some fin stopped being totally drunk for a moment and made his own little unix and opened the source code to it. It most likely was just the right time, since other unixes had been free long before, but this free unix started to take off.
Very slowly during the recent internet bubble it was sneaking its way into business just as MS had done with DOS. However this time the unixes saw not a tiny little crap unreliable single user no-networking OS coming from below but a increasingly capable unix like themselves. Except a whole lot cheaper.
During the bubble SUN sold a whole lot of sun machines (with the solaris ofcourse) because money was cheap and the sky was the limit. HOWEVER not everyone saw the need to use super expensive hardware with super expensive software. Some went with windows and crashed a lot but some went with this new unix and with cheap hardware and crashed a bit more often then unix but less then windows and had plenty of money left over to spend on good admins.
This new unix was a threat except that some unixes saw it more as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Linux was hurting unix but it was also hurting windows. So IBM and later HP asked themselves this. Do we fight Linux or do we join it and perhaps be able to attack Windows from below and above? Remember that with Linux in a Unix company like IBM you now got a complete set of price ranges. Linux on cheap x86 to score below windows. Linux on good hardware to be equal to windows. Unix on their own hardware for the highend.
Now the problem was and is that Linux is free. The free speech is nice but from this flow that it is very hard to sell linux at the old unix prices. Worse with linux now getting closer and closer to unix capabilities it becomes harder and harder to justify the price difference.
Sun has a very simple choice. Keep trying to sell very expensive hardware running very expensive software in a down economy while competing directly with very cheap hardware running very cheap software wich is almost as good. After the bubble the price difference is often more important.
If they make Solaris as free as linux (remember linux can and is sold for money) then they remove at least one obstacle to their sales pitch. The only economic question is wether the loss in license fees is offset by an increase in hardware sales and support licenses.
But it may also be that they have no choice. If your a salesperson losing sale after sale because people buy into the idea of a free unix then you either follow or just don't sell stuff.
Sun ain't doing to well at the moment. I think that opening the source and making solaris 10 free is their attempt to compete better with IBM or worse Dell/Linux. They have little else left. People just don't want to buy Sun anymore for their websites.
Yet somehow when MS steal software it is allright?
God I hate hypocrits like you. MS can't have it both ways no matter how many apologists like you they have behind them.
So MS has two choices. Either back down of their stance on software audits or be known as a hypocrit. Then again those of us not licking gates ass already know this.
This is like a cop who takes drugs. And yes 1 cop taking drugs does reflect on the whole fucking department. MS has some explaining to do and they better come up with a better excuse then yours.
When the allies were unable to attack the germans through convential means they used civilians in occupied europe to launch attacks. Freedom fighters or terrorists? Well they won and the germans lost so freedom fighters they are.
Certain groups feel that they have to wage a war against the goverments to achieve their objectives. This is nothing new and sometimes we are sympatetic and sometimes we are not.
There are however three problems in fighting them. The first is that the terrorists don't obey the same set of rules. Lets face it, baskenland/ireland/palestine terrorists could be easily wiped out if spain/england/israel just used the same methods but on a slightly larger scale. But that ain't allowed. Terrorists have no rules, those that fight them can't afford to have no rules.
Second is that crime may not pay but terrorism certainly does. Just check Arafat. The guy has become filthy rich. Some people here complain about how western goverments are only stuffing their own pockets yet the income of a blair or bush pales to the self enrichment that goes on in palestine.
Ireland has the same problem. On both sides the terrorists have established a very nice power base for themselves with criminals empires that may once have been put up to fund their activities but now give their controllers a very nice income.
But the final problem has become clear time and time again. It is easy to track the ringleaders but impossible to take them out without angering all the bleeding hard liberals. The recruits who commit the actual attacks are unknowns. Check the 9/11 attackers. Check the murderer of Theo van Gogh. Check the people who blow themselves up in Israel and Iraq.
But really check them. They are not just clean as in having no previous terrorist connections. They are clean in that they come from "good" backgrounds. Not the poor, family killed, religious lunatics that people like to imagine.
If anything they are poor little rich kids.
You can't track them. The ring leaders stay outside reach and keep themselves just low profile enough that you can't just send a commando team to kill them. The raw recruits are to clean to show up.
Sure there can be arrests and you can spend billions on tracking them all but the terrorists don't care. They have won. Every second we spend on chasing them they have won. Every second we are afraid they have won. We could arrest 99% of their people and if they only manage 1 feeble attack every few years they will still have won.
It is in many ways like the war of drugs. Unless you are willing to go the way of the soviet union or china then their is no way to fight drugs. Stalin was very succesfull at keeping all the populations in the USSR in line. Slaughter everyone. Dead people don't riot. Then again who needed terrorism in the USSR when the state was so ready to hand it out?
With BSD you have far less requirements to give credit to the original creator.
So change the words open source in your speech with GPL and you are right. Use open source and you show you haven't understood anything.
Then again you use IP rights. Lets be clear. Open source and Free software are often mis used when instead you should use a license name like BSD/GPL/LGPL/Public domain/god knows what
It has always been one rule for the consumers and another for business.
The NHS is a former shadow of itself as a healer of the public. Yes it is spending more and more money and employing lots of people. But the ratio of medical vs administrators is going down. In the wrong direction and the care is decreasing. I worked in england for a british company long enoug to know that the NHS is great at spending money and hiring people. It is getting people threathed by doctors and nurses that they seem to find hard to do. Funny thing is that both the conservatives (think democrats for the americans) and labour (think pinko commies) have screwed it up. Maybe it is just a cycle. One generation gives free medical care for everyone. The other destroys it.
Their are ways around it but there shouldn't have to be. Creative is really getting weird. Worst thing? For some reason my pc always played a vid of the creative logo while booting until I ripped the software apart. WTF is with them? Soundblaster used to be a decent card but the company behind them got marketing mad.
So if you want OGG buy from a company that supports it in its current players.
For linux support try to find a player that is really just an usb storage device wich just happens to be able to read its own contents. Many of the smaller companies are not going to bother making their own. They just buy a usb storage solution and built their player around it. The more generic their chosen USB storage the more likely someone somewhere will have written a driver for it. Some rio models are supported probably because they were the first popular ones long before anyone at Apple had seen the light.
As for creative. Well I got their zen model and thought it was pretty good. Until I got my iriver to make up for the zens lower and lower battery life. Better sound, easier to get music on, worse button layout. Go figure.
I also know a lot of people with mp3 players and absolutly no-one who buys music online. Might have something to do with being dutch.
I think that a good mp3 player needs just to work your OS. I got a creative zen and a iriver one but I must say that I now mostly use the iriver. It just appears as an extra drive under windows. What can be easier to manage.
SWG has a skill system where you use XP to buy boxes wich give you new skills. XP can easily be gained doing stuff related to the skills, kill for combat skills, craft for crafting skills. However each skill box also costs skill points of wich you only have a very limited amount. You can spend them as you wish, unlearn a skill and you get the points back.
The job of marksman cost 15 points to get novice in. Then you have 4 trees, carabine, pistol and rifle and a generic ranged combat. Now don't think that if you master the tree of pistol you are a capable shooter. You are crap. Totally and utterly. You need however novice marksman, the pistol tree and then go into the advanced profession of pistoleer. If you want to be any use in combat you better have an advanced combat job. Worse certain jobs like smuggler require you to have multiple novice jobs. These eat up skill points.
This leads to a problem. It is due to two bad design points. All jobs cost exactly the same amount of skill points despite the fact that a ranger is far less needed then say a melee. Second is that you need to be high level in any job to be of any use. Scout at low level does allow you to harvest wich is usefull but very costly in Skill points. Novice Medic is also theoretically usefull as long as you don't make your own medicine BUT because nobody wants to waste the points AND then have to pay for the pleasure of healing others EVERYONE uses docs to buff their stats to the point they don't need healing.
It basically means that people are in very narrow defined jobs with an awfull lot of people going for pure combat. I myself am guilty of this. Sure I could use scout to harvest and sell those resources to crafters BUT I can get more money being a pure combat class to buy the inflated prices becauuse the crafters can't get enough resources.
You starting to see the poison? Basically Sony has made the game have to few players harvest.
Another part of the poison is the lack of new or casual players. Basically the player base has matured and everyone is in the role they want. This leads to a problem. Absolutly no-one needs or wants to do low level stuff anymore. Recently a creature started dropping a very high quality resource needed for docs. The offered prices were insane. The take up non-existent. Why? The creature is extremely low level meaning no xp and little meat per kill and zero challenge. New players could have made their fortune but there weren't any around.
The simple problem is this. There is a mission type, killing humans on dantooine, wich pays so much so easily that money is no object. Far easier to grind missions solo buffed with some cheap armour then gather resources to increase supply and therefore drive prices down.
SWG also had another element. The hidden job of Jedi. Recently the path to gaining jedi has changed but the change has created more story but has increased the poison. Before each character had a hidden list of jobs you needed to master. Master them and you could create a new character on the same server that was a jedi.
This saw a lot of people grinding jobs they were not intrested in player BUT at least people were constantly shifting jobs and there was some movement. Even the most dedicacted holo/jedi grinder would be a doctor a medic a ranger etc for a while.
Now this is gone. Now you need to just get all the badges (for exploring) and then get an awfull lot of combat xp. An insane amount. A truly giganticlly insane amount of XP. Each combat type has its own XP pool wich is capped. What is the best way to grind jedi? Get two master combat jobs. First get one combat type maxed out on XP then the other, this will also fillout your generic combat xp, convert it to jedi xp and repeat.
Now all kinds of missions give XP BUT certain missions just make better sense. Your weapons and
But if it existed then it was a long time ago. Plenty of time for all the evidence to be hidden beneath the sand. Mars is not exactly known for its non-sand storm nature.
Even if there are fossils to be found the chances of finding them with 2 little carts pottering about are about zero. It would be like driving around your local city and claiming there never been dinosaurs because you didn't find any.
At the moment what everyone is doing is speculating. Worse the speculations are based on very small samples and compared to only 1 planet wich we don't really understand yet either.
I have lived long enough to have gone through several cycles of mars having and not having water. The only thing I know for certain is that nobody knows for certain.
Could an intelligent species have lived on mars and left? We only recently discovered that a small species of humans has existed very recently very close by. Frankly anyone who claims to know the answer to what lived or didn't live on mars in the past is insane. You can guess. You can estimate. But certain we can't be. More fun anyway.
England changed massivly during the second world war. Although food supplies became for more limited because they were now rationed out the fast majority of people actually got a better diet. It also saw the start of the National Health Service. The idea that everyone should have access to the same kind of good medical care without having to pay huge bills. To the americans, this is not such a bad idea because healthy workers can worker harder and longer.
However a NHS is also expensive. Of course the long, intelligent and complex view is that like a public transport system or social services they kinda pay for themselves. While they do not make a profit it is because they reduce the cost of others. A NHS makes sure people are sick less often and don't die so early so they can pay taxes as workers for longer. This is simple. Every kid costs the state money. The same amount wether this kid is a tax payer for 20 years or 40 years. Public transport takes people of the roads. For all those car drivers cursing about money spend on trains while you are stuck in traffic. Just imagine how long the jam would be if the people in the train were on the road with you.
However certain types of goverment seek election by promising to lower taxes. This works on the simple minded voter. You can't of course lower taxes without spending less and the NHS or public transport are easy targets. Invest a little bit later. Freeze salaries. What will it hurt for 1 term of office eh?
England now has an NHS wich is a shadow of its former self. "Efficiency" programs have the amount of managers running out of control while the NHS is bleeding developing nations of its nurses while british nurses are going stateside (language is a problem but the pay is better). Health care has gone down the crapper again with it costing more and more for those who are least capable of paying for it.
Funny thing is that all those cuts on the NHS happened to lower taxes. I wish I could have everyone who voted for lower taxes and who ended up with a higher monthly burden flogged in public for being to stupid to live. Get a clue, it don't matter what you taxation is. What matters is the monthly bill. Simple example. $100 tax bill + $0 medical bill vs $50 tax bill $100 medical bill. Doesn't tax an economic genius to figure out wich is cheaper eh?
Anyway Blair is a MS fanboy and the NHS is famous for making the totally wrong decission. Buying MS at huge costs because it is cheaper seems business as usual.
China is huge. I am slightly more puzzled about the huge number of internet bars. Even with a billion residents it seems high. But then they might not have home internet so have a higher demand for internet cafes. Since most responsible goverments check bars anyway for food regulation and drink regulations checking them for internet regulations shouldn't be that much work.
Only with very thight scripting and severely limiting the available options can current AI be made to look at least slightly as smart as a concussed kitten.
The reason? Two fold, AI research is just bloody complex and expensive. If they can't do it with purpose built robots costing billions then why should a game company be able? Second is that AI takes a lot of CPU power and the fast majority of users are still stuck on the old 1 cpu crap that intel been pushing for decades.
A game company has a simple choice, spend money on flash graphics and be sure it will look pretty or spend it on AI and risk it still being dumb as shit but also ugly looking.
If you don't believe me that AI is difficult just try to write a path finding routine in pseudo code. Your in an artificial enviroment so you don't need to worry about how you detect wether you are in front of a wall. The detection always works. BUT it is not a simple maze. Walls are at odd angles, some are wide some are small and walking down the middle of them is a no-no.
Just try it. Then you will have your answer. Oh and if you manage, now add objectives like having to chase a randomly moving object while avoiding other moving objects. That is after all what is happening in GTA.
Gentoo of course has all the header files as everything is compiled from source. this doesn't make it faster, it just makes it a lot easier to install a new app wich hasn't yet made it into an rpm.
Yes mandrake is easy to use, far easier to use in fact then windows thanks to its very nice installer BUT it was so easy to use that I could learn all kinds of advanced stuff on it. Like compiling my own kernel to take advantage of my own hardware. I have a rather crappy Asus Dual P3 wich for some reason never works in dual mode with stock kernels. I always have to mess around with boot parameters until I roll my own.
If you then roll your own php and mysql because you want to see the beta's and be prepared with knowing the new features when they reach production well. It is just a short step to just roll your own.
There are probably other distros out there that I could use but I will probably never go back to RPM, it is nice if you never want to bother with compiling but to me that is not a bother.
But making harmless and not so harmless fun of other distros is all part of the fun of using linux. There is so much choice available and people have this in build need to defend their own choice that conflict is inevitable. Some people take it to far but that is just part of it.