During that the enterprise crew is desperatly trying to get the enterprise working again and get out of the atmosphere as it is in danger of burning up. At least that is what happened in the book version of that story. (the books did sometimes vary a bit and had "extra" "depth")
Also that doesn't involve "flying" but rather the old put a large enough engine on a brick and it can escape gravity. It ain't dogfighting the jet it is simply trying to get its engines back online and blast out of orbit.
This model plane really few like any other winged aircraft. (wobbly still counts) I was just disappointed to the engine attacked to the saucer section nose. Would be more fun to put pushing propellors in the nacelles. But that would probably destroy what little balance it has.
Make their software WORK. Simply work. No crashes, no unexplained lockups. No things suddenly changing between the eternal reboots. No weird stuff in explorer suddenly happening. No secret installs of software that monitors everything I do.
Simply a working OS. I don't need anything fancy. You can keep your Skinning and translucent windows and god knows what. Just a bloody OS that I setup once and then just keeps running.
Oh wait I got one. It got a quit little penquin I think during bootup. Not sure as I have only booted it once during the last year and my memory ain't what it used to be.
Oh and to be fair yes windows has slowly become more stable. I now run 2k3 and it doesn't crash to often although the taskbar buttons do keep rearring themselves, explorer now opens search when I click on a folder in the right pane, and it does still crash for no reason every other day, despite the fact I don't use it for anything but games. Sad really. Here I got this nice opera on linux wich remembers exactly what I was browsing if it should crash and it doesn't and on windows I got a browser wich doesn't and does.
Oh and don't give me it is the hardwares fault. The linux machines are asus boards with mis matched overclocked P3 and mismatched nobrand overclocked memory with tons of hds hooked up to joke raid cards, while the windows machine is a pure intel board with perfectly matched brand memory and only 1 soundcard as an extra.
IBM stuff is actually good. If you ever had the chance to work on some of their hardware then you will have fallen in love. Think linux on a intel P3 is stable? HAH! You need to invent new words then to talk about it on a RS/6000. I worked with some of their machines where the biggest diffculty during upgrades was finding the bloody thing. I once worked at a big ISP and we had several machines working but lost. That doesn't even count the number of machines at customers where they were hidden around the factory under tons of dust.
During one takeover it became necessary to do stocktaking and we needed several days to locate them all. These machines had been put in place turned on and in several years time noone had a need to touch them. You didn't measure uptimes on these machines, why would you? Uptime implies downtime and they didn't have any.
I am not experienced enough to truly compare the various unixes but comparing AIX to windows is easy. A steaming pile of crap on the one side. Something wich actually works on the other.
So yes IBM was the original inventor of FUD, but when they said their product was best every geek in the world was not rolling on the floor in hysterical laughter. It wasn't always the truth but at least it wasn't a complete lie either.
Imagine that you were accused of murder. First day in court the judge ask if you have any evidence that you didn't do it. No? Well please sit down on that chair with the leather straps over there then.
The legal system needs to give everyone plenty of chances to defend OR attack. It is the only way for it to be fair or to allow the little guy to win against a big guy.
The problem is of course that it can be abused. BUT that is the price to be paid for a fair legal system.
Remember during the boom time when companies who showed a stable profit saw their shareprice go DOWN????????
Companies on the other hand that were burning through borrowed capital like their was no tomorrow (wich it turns out there wasn't) and had never shown a profit or even a sale had their shares go through the roof.
This should have shown everyone that the market is insane. The rise of SCO shares was for me the least suprising. Their is always a sucker somewhere. The market isn't about investment it is about gambling and the larger the odds the bigger the payout. Remember that if you accept a small payout on your gamble their is no need to gamble. Banks are quit willing to pay you a small amount on your investment with very high certainty of payout. They are called saving accounts.
But lets see. SCO changes of winning 1% but payout several thousand percent? Saving account changes of winning 99.9% but payout 4%.
Considering the amount in savings accounts most people are smart. Considering some people bought SCO stock, not all people though.
The post you are commenting was looking at what
would have happened had IBM filed this motion AFTER 1 MONTH.
I know reading is hard but he was responding to someone asking why this was not done after 1 month and he was showing through something called humor why this was not done.
As to the mods who marked you up. Geez. Learn to read as well.
They are now saying, Look we all waiting a full year for SCO to show us anything and they haven't this means they can't and there is no need to wait any longer.
If they had said this after 1 month the judge would and should have ruled that SCO deserved (on the basis that anyone needs to have a fair chance at a trail even if they are morons) more time.
But now with a full year passed SCO has had all the time that they could possibly expect in even the nicest of legal systems. IBM now can say that its been long enough.
I don't agree with many things americans do but one I like "If you can't do the time don't do the crime".
Was the criminal intrested in my rights of freedom when he robbed me at gunpoint? Invaded my privacy when he broke into my house? Tortured through rape? No? Then I don't care about him.
Those who say nasty prisons don't work forget to add that nice prisons don't work either. Holland is about as liberal as you can get with communisties being sentenced to being serviced by rapists. (I am still waiting for pedofiles being told to help out at their local school) AND CRIME IS NOT GOING DOWN. In supressed reports it is even said to be going up. We are approaching america in hard crime (murder) and passed it in the lower (theft) stuff.
So fuck you. Don't want to raped in jail? Don't be a criminal. Human rights == Human duties.
But GNU and minix have ideals wich Linux does not follow. Linux isn't about ideas but about practicality. It explains why it is working when so many other free opensource OS'es are available. Exactly why is BSD dying? Why doesn't anybody use minix? Why does everyone use the term Linux and not the proper GNU/Linux or Linux/GNU?
Because Linus got the balance right. But in a sense this betrays the ideals behind GNU and Minix. GNU for everything to be truly open and free (linus uses the non-free bitkeeper) and for Minix to make a secure stable simple to understand OS. (linux is stabler then window and can be understood but it is minix and wich each new kernel version more and more people are saying the kernel is growing to large)
I am not talking major betrayal here as in stabbing people in the back. Just little minor every day betrayal that people can be upset about for decades after.
Maybe I get the whole geek vs nerds thing mixed up again but one of them knows that what you say is true. We know there is no magic bullet and that it will take multiple solutions all put together to have an effect.
Not everyone who posts on/. is however a geek/nerd. A fairly large amount is just angsty teen boys who think they are leet because they changed the color theme of the windows on their dell.
You can tell the parent post is not a nerd or a geek. Nerd/geeks don't get endless amounts of SPAM. We use disposable email addresses to limit the number of spam lists we are on, don't give out our email address to just every "free porn" site out there and use filters to stop the rest. That does not make us spam free but if you spend more then 1 minute deleting spam you are doing something wrong. Computers work FOR you, not you for the computer.
Please do not make everyone who uses a computer into a nerd/geek. Only those WHO understand our computers and can operate them correctly can possibly qualify.
All those who are diluged under spam fall into the luser group.
This may sound harsh but frankly I am fed up with the whining about spam. It is like virusses. Get some bloody protection and learn how to deal with it. You are the first line of defence. If you are unwilling to act then why do expect anyone else to?
The story is about how a rollout encountered during the testing phase testers who used MAC's. Made by Apple. Running OS-9 or OS-X.
Where the hell did you get linux from?
Now don't worry I know what your trying to say but geez you are just giving the Microsoft Apologists fodder. Oh look Mac story and all the little/. hippies use it to say linux is winning.
As for the question the original poster asked? According to google measurements Windows is 95% of the market. A figure most people repeat. So no need to develop for anything else right?
Ehm imagine this in the real world. A brick and mortar shop that refuses entry to 1 out of every 20 customers.
I do know that right know the supermarkets in holland are fighting a nasty pricing war to win over far smaller numbers of customers. Not smart business to just refuse customers at the door. Why the hell this is considered acceptable in IT I never understood. No sane sales person would accept a product wich locks out such a large group of potential customers. (how many bicycle lock makers are there that make locks that fit only 1 bike, how many petrol companies make petrol that only works in one brand of car (hell most petrol stations sell diesel, natural gas, two stroke fuel))
I wouldn't even call it sour grapes or hubris. He believes in the micro-kernel and Linus didn't use one. So to him Linus is a smart kid who should have paid better attention in class. He talks like a professor. Well that is what he is. His comment on students says it all:)
It is not unlike the whole GNU/linux argument that Stallman keeps bringing up. Stallman fundamentaly believes in the GNU and what it stands for.
Linus isn't to concerned about ideals. That is his secret. He is rather pragmatic and makes the choice that works right now. It is why it is the cute little penguin and not some super slick logo or the BSD devil that is the symbol for everything MS is not. Minix, BSD, hurd. All are free and true to some higher ideal about software. But linux rules them all in actually being used.
Tanenbaum and Stallman are the shoulders Linux stands on (with a lot of others of course) but at the same time it is also betraying them a little. That tanenbaum and Stallman can't help but point this out makes them real human people. Not some politically correct mouthpiece. I like them all the more for it.
In a recent Time Magazine article, George Lucas explains the depressingly foreordained saga of Anakin Skywalker's slide into evil-demigodhood by saying: "He turns into Vader because he gets attached to things. He can't let go of his mother; he can't let go of his girlfriend. He can't let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you're greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you're going to lose things, that you're not going to have the power you need."
How very ironic. Darth Lucas, let go. It is not to late for you to be saved.
Why? One liners. All us oldies and even some of the youngers use lines from the original series all the time. "I find you lack of fate disturbing" "Look at the size of the thing" "Rebel Scum" "etc etc etc". (well not all the time but certainly on nerd speakouts like/. and irc)
Classic stuff! Now see how many people use lines from the new episodes. Zero? Now see how many use lines from the LOTR trilogy. "You shall not pass!" "Precioussss they took my preciousss" "etc etc" Not quit as many because lotr is a bit more wordy and I haven't yet seen it enough to know every line by heart but still people are quoting it.
That is really where George Lucas failed. The orignal 3 were aimed at kids but we kept them with us as kids. We took them into our hearts and treasured them. Todays kids watched the movies, enjoyed them, played with the toys and then forgot. In 30 years time none of the kids who saw The Phantom menace will be writing how that Lucas Junior is ruining the Star Wars legacy with the third trilogy. Sad really.
I got Episode 2 on dvd. Still can't bring myself to watch it yet. Episode 1 nearly killed me. 2 Might make me kill someone else instead. As for the re-edits. ARRGH!
The original movies dominated the top ten of movies of all time for decades. The pair of spielberg and lucas owned the top ten. They were the kings. Only recently, well recently to and old guy like me, have other movies started to overtake them in box office sales.
Episode 1 and 2 have not repeated the originals success by smashing the box office sales and taking top place again. They were successfull to be sure but no record breakers. When you have a move that is squarly aimed at everyone from the age of 40 or downward (the original audience plus all the new kids) boasting a universe people have been waiting to see again on the big screen for decades and you can't break the box office record something is seriously amiss.
So they didn't make a movie that as many people as possibly went to. A new hope will forever be a piece of cinametic history. Episode 1 and 2 and possibly 3 will be just another movie.
Many RPG type games have drugs, certainly the ones set into the futute. More fantasy oriented ones got "drugs" of a sort but they rarely have a negative after effect let alone an addiction penalty.
I however find them usually poorly done in gameplay. It is like all those potions in baldurs gate. Protection against gold, protection against heat, protection against electricity, protection against undead on a friday except on a full moon.
WHO HAS THE TIME!!!!
Geez I am playing a fantasy role of a babarian. Not a bloody chemist. Just sell all those bloody things and spend it on simple healing stuff or even better. Heavy hitters. Who cares is a monster has some weird special attack when one hit puts it down.
I am currently playing Star Wars Galaxies and it got a shitload of drugs/buffs/foods/drinks all wich boost some stat some with some negative after effects. Problem? there are so many that people only bother with 1 or 2 of them. Maybe a 3rd on occasion and all the rest is ignored.
Why? Well I doubt it is an objection to the idea of drugs but more likely that people don't just want to bother. First you got to find a buyer. Then find the money to buy it. Then find the right time to use it. Most of the stuff has short duration and is expensive so you only want to use it when you really need it. Plus the better stuff has after effects so you want to make sure you don't get the downer in the middle of battle.
So drugs in this game are not very intrestting.
It would be intresting to see how a drug would do that has some real and easy to exploit advantages. Say that all your stats go up for a full day but that also has some major side effects like addiction and perhaps overtime less effectivness (so you need more and more just to get the same buzz) and perhaps mental problems like your avatar walking away from battle to look at the pretty colors. Make it illegal in game too so that both imperials and rebels will be looking for it and the components needed.
Then again the real study of addiction is those games themselves. I know SWG is crap with an endless list of bugs and constantly newly introduced bugs, the latest is that mission payouts are not shared out amount the group anymore and sometimes not even being payed out to the mission owner, and yet I keep playing. It is nice weather outside and yet I am inside playing a game that is more an exercise in frustation then fun. At least real world drug addicts can consider themselves cool rebels without a cause. I am just a nerd.
It is simple. Don't ask me. Ask the companies that are spending real money on making their games run on linux as well. Why exactly do the ID and Unreal engines work on linux? Why does Never Winter Nights have a Linux version?
Could of course be that they think their is a market, there isn't, could be they think it will win them customers, it doesn't. OR just maybe these companies don't enjoy they idea of being locked onto a OS made by a company that is DIRECTLY competing with them and has a very long history of wiping out competition.
It has far less to do with promoting linux as not ending up in the pockets of Microsoft.
For now DirectX is pretty open and you have the half-life people saying that the PC is for them more profitable because of the lack of license fees wich are needed for console titles. If MS every comes to truly own the gaming world how long do you think this will last?
You are living in a dream world. Small independent game companies are going bust. The Xth rehash of ancient games does NOT count. It is the orignal new stuff that is getting more and more owned by the BIG companies. Companies that can afford a string of money losing titles without going out of business. Would you enjoy a future where games are owned by only the big boys? I wouldn't.
Personally I had hoped if they had used slightly more cluefull people. I watched it two times and each time they were complete and utter total idiots, their "victories" feeling more like a hollywood scripted one then one won by solid strategic thinking. Or thinking at all.
Basically all the fights were chosen in such a way that the historical winner, wich the team of course played, had the upper hand and were the enemy never exploited the obvious mistakes made by the players.
I would have preffered it if they had for instance gotten real generals to play, history proffessors, politicians, business men. People who might show some intresting aspect on how they would deal with it. How would a modern airforce general deal with an ancient army of footsoldiers. How would a proffesor filled with knowledge of what happened before and after the battle deal with the actual battle when everything is constantly changing?
How would a politician who now a days has to worry about 1 coffin coming home deal with a bodycount in the hundreds of thousands?
I presume you meant it as a joke but who ever modded you up as insightfull needs to learn the meaning of the word. This is a funny comment (or at least I hope it was)
So each time windows needs to be rebooted I should first crawl under the desk to unplug the network cable, wait for windows to finish booting and then replug it?
Granted I seen people do sillier things to get around bad software/hardware but this belongs as a dilbert suggestion.
Someone else posted a long long list of all the things MS has done to kill competition. You might note something intresting. The list against linux is almost as long as the list against everyone else. And linux is still there. Not only that it is growing and all its old enemies are backing it. Or do you really think IBM wouldn't like to knock MS down a bit. Or novell or Correl(wordperfect) and many others.
So MS is scared shitless. It knows it has many enemies but believed it had them under control. Linux is removing that control. Linux is turning up in the strangest places. Sony has now several real products on the market with linux inside, not some tiny upstart company hoping to sell a few thousand products world wide but Sony the giant who makes nearly everything. This is not good if you are MS and want the world to think Computers == Windows.
The more linux is out there the more OS might become like diesel vs gas vs petrol. A choice based on your needs. MS doesn't want you to have a choice. People with choice might expect all kind of weird things. Performance. Reliabilty. Security.
Although for obvious reasons not extremely close experience, I think most people would prefer to know.
Lets face it everyone knows they are going to die and if they are really smart they even know it might be at any moment.
The people I have been with that learned they had a terminal illness went ofcourse through all kinds of emotions. Despair, anger, acceptance, apathy. And it ain't in stages either. Especially during critical moments, like when a last hope cure doesn't work out, they can change between emotions and even have emotions directly oposite.
But mostly it brings a sort of peace. The worst has happened. Parents get mostly worried with their kids. They seem to put in extra effort to make sure the kids can handle themselves afterwards. Kids of course have it harder as most of a kids live is in reality spend studying for later when of course for kids with a terminal illness there is no later. Strangely enough the kids can mostly deal with it in their own way. They have the most difficulty in dealing with adults who can't deal with it.
So the answer I think is probably that most would prefer to know. Let me ask it in reverse. Would you as a parent with two kids etc learn right now that 1 min from now you are going to be dead? No change to make any arrangements, say a last goodbye, make sure your last words with someone weren't a fight?
On who do you think they try it first?
on
Cure for Cancer?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
These kind of things have been shown in tv-movies before. People trying to get into a clinical trial because while there is a huge risk that is still better then certain death.
Problem is of course that goverments are rightly worried about experimenting on humans. So such trials are always small and need very strict guidelines for wich candidates are accepted. They don't want candidates who have multiple diseases since then they wouldn't know what is curing wich and wich other medicines are interering.
The bad news in your case is that there would hardly be a shortage of patients for who this the last change.
As someone who lost his mother to cancer at a young age. Applause to the researchers. Hope they have the magic bullet to get rid of cancer.
It isn't since this isn't a virus or a worm. This is not even really a trojan. It is a malicous script. The idiot downloaded a tiny file wich was a simple script, executed it and it did something he did not want.
Every damn OS has had these things. From DOS to unix to C64 to VMS. Usually people are smarter but these days you got a lot of idiots.
You see stuff on usenet. The Sims 2. 31kb file Full game really works as the description.
User stupidity is not unique to any OS but at least when you use Linux the designers don't help you being stupid.
Sure the thing can blow up. Or fail to ignite. Or fallover. All happened to other launches around the world no matter who did them.
But apart from the joke value it would be real fun if they succeeded. Not truly important but nice to know that space exploration has become so "easy" that individuals can put a payload up there without needing a superpower to fund the project.
The Sims, the original game, has had user made expansions from the beginning and downloadable content. Of course this didn't help the expansion packs at all. Wich game again was it that has broken the expansion pack record several times?
The sims is a house decorating and dress up game. There will always be new things to add. Sure EA will not have much of a market for say a red version of the orginal sofa. That has been taken care off by users. But new models (think skirts, long skirts, mini skirts, etc) new animations, new capabilities.
No this is nothing new. Perhaps this tool makes it easier but if anytbing the more user content there is the more people will play this for a long time making a bigger target audience for EA to add new content. (oh and if they follow the original game then most of the user made content requires the all the expansion packs to be installed, just make sure each expansion pack adds a couple of must have features)
Unless they have totally ruined the game The Sims 2 is going to be a cash-cow for EA for the next couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Also that doesn't involve "flying" but rather the old put a large enough engine on a brick and it can escape gravity. It ain't dogfighting the jet it is simply trying to get its engines back online and blast out of orbit.
This model plane really few like any other winged aircraft. (wobbly still counts) I was just disappointed to the engine attacked to the saucer section nose. Would be more fun to put pushing propellors in the nacelles. But that would probably destroy what little balance it has.
Make their software WORK. Simply work. No crashes, no unexplained lockups. No things suddenly changing between the eternal reboots. No weird stuff in explorer suddenly happening. No secret installs of software that monitors everything I do.
Simply a working OS. I don't need anything fancy. You can keep your Skinning and translucent windows and god knows what. Just a bloody OS that I setup once and then just keeps running.
Oh wait I got one. It got a quit little penquin I think during bootup. Not sure as I have only booted it once during the last year and my memory ain't what it used to be.
Oh and to be fair yes windows has slowly become more stable. I now run 2k3 and it doesn't crash to often although the taskbar buttons do keep rearring themselves, explorer now opens search when I click on a folder in the right pane, and it does still crash for no reason every other day, despite the fact I don't use it for anything but games. Sad really. Here I got this nice opera on linux wich remembers exactly what I was browsing if it should crash and it doesn't and on windows I got a browser wich doesn't and does.
Oh and don't give me it is the hardwares fault. The linux machines are asus boards with mis matched overclocked P3 and mismatched nobrand overclocked memory with tons of hds hooked up to joke raid cards, while the windows machine is a pure intel board with perfectly matched brand memory and only 1 soundcard as an extra.
During one takeover it became necessary to do stocktaking and we needed several days to locate them all. These machines had been put in place turned on and in several years time noone had a need to touch them. You didn't measure uptimes on these machines, why would you? Uptime implies downtime and they didn't have any.
I am not experienced enough to truly compare the various unixes but comparing AIX to windows is easy. A steaming pile of crap on the one side. Something wich actually works on the other.
So yes IBM was the original inventor of FUD, but when they said their product was best every geek in the world was not rolling on the floor in hysterical laughter. It wasn't always the truth but at least it wasn't a complete lie either.
Imagine that you were accused of murder. First day in court the judge ask if you have any evidence that you didn't do it. No? Well please sit down on that chair with the leather straps over there then.
The legal system needs to give everyone plenty of chances to defend OR attack. It is the only way for it to be fair or to allow the little guy to win against a big guy.
The problem is of course that it can be abused. BUT that is the price to be paid for a fair legal system.
Companies on the other hand that were burning through borrowed capital like their was no tomorrow (wich it turns out there wasn't) and had never shown a profit or even a sale had their shares go through the roof.
This should have shown everyone that the market is insane. The rise of SCO shares was for me the least suprising. Their is always a sucker somewhere. The market isn't about investment it is about gambling and the larger the odds the bigger the payout. Remember that if you accept a small payout on your gamble their is no need to gamble. Banks are quit willing to pay you a small amount on your investment with very high certainty of payout. They are called saving accounts.
But lets see. SCO changes of winning 1% but payout several thousand percent? Saving account changes of winning 99.9% but payout 4%.
Considering the amount in savings accounts most people are smart. Considering some people bought SCO stock, not all people though.
Learn to read.
The post you are commenting was looking at what would have happened had IBM filed this motion AFTER 1 MONTH.
I know reading is hard but he was responding to someone asking why this was not done after 1 month and he was showing through something called humor why this was not done.
As to the mods who marked you up. Geez. Learn to read as well.
If they had said this after 1 month the judge would and should have ruled that SCO deserved (on the basis that anyone needs to have a fair chance at a trail even if they are morons) more time.
But now with a full year passed SCO has had all the time that they could possibly expect in even the nicest of legal systems. IBM now can say that its been long enough.
Was the criminal intrested in my rights of freedom when he robbed me at gunpoint? Invaded my privacy when he broke into my house? Tortured through rape? No? Then I don't care about him.
Those who say nasty prisons don't work forget to add that nice prisons don't work either. Holland is about as liberal as you can get with communisties being sentenced to being serviced by rapists. (I am still waiting for pedofiles being told to help out at their local school) AND CRIME IS NOT GOING DOWN. In supressed reports it is even said to be going up. We are approaching america in hard crime (murder) and passed it in the lower (theft) stuff.
So fuck you. Don't want to raped in jail? Don't be a criminal. Human rights == Human duties.
Because Linus got the balance right. But in a sense this betrays the ideals behind GNU and Minix. GNU for everything to be truly open and free (linus uses the non-free bitkeeper) and for Minix to make a secure stable simple to understand OS. (linux is stabler then window and can be understood but it is minix and wich each new kernel version more and more people are saying the kernel is growing to large)
I am not talking major betrayal here as in stabbing people in the back. Just little minor every day betrayal that people can be upset about for decades after.
Not everyone who posts on /. is however a geek/nerd. A fairly large amount is just angsty teen boys who think they are leet because they changed the color theme of the windows on their dell.
You can tell the parent post is not a nerd or a geek. Nerd/geeks don't get endless amounts of SPAM. We use disposable email addresses to limit the number of spam lists we are on, don't give out our email address to just every "free porn" site out there and use filters to stop the rest. That does not make us spam free but if you spend more then 1 minute deleting spam you are doing something wrong. Computers work FOR you, not you for the computer.
Please do not make everyone who uses a computer into a nerd/geek. Only those WHO understand our computers and can operate them correctly can possibly qualify.
All those who are diluged under spam fall into the luser group.
This may sound harsh but frankly I am fed up with the whining about spam. It is like virusses. Get some bloody protection and learn how to deal with it. You are the first line of defence. If you are unwilling to act then why do expect anyone else to?
Where the hell did you get linux from?
Now don't worry I know what your trying to say but geez you are just giving the Microsoft Apologists fodder. Oh look Mac story and all the little /. hippies use it to say linux is winning.
As for the question the original poster asked? According to google measurements Windows is 95% of the market. A figure most people repeat. So no need to develop for anything else right?
Ehm imagine this in the real world. A brick and mortar shop that refuses entry to 1 out of every 20 customers.
I do know that right know the supermarkets in holland are fighting a nasty pricing war to win over far smaller numbers of customers. Not smart business to just refuse customers at the door. Why the hell this is considered acceptable in IT I never understood. No sane sales person would accept a product wich locks out such a large group of potential customers. (how many bicycle lock makers are there that make locks that fit only 1 bike, how many petrol companies make petrol that only works in one brand of car (hell most petrol stations sell diesel, natural gas, two stroke fuel))
It is not unlike the whole GNU/linux argument that Stallman keeps bringing up. Stallman fundamentaly believes in the GNU and what it stands for.
Linus isn't to concerned about ideals. That is his secret. He is rather pragmatic and makes the choice that works right now. It is why it is the cute little penguin and not some super slick logo or the BSD devil that is the symbol for everything MS is not. Minix, BSD, hurd. All are free and true to some higher ideal about software. But linux rules them all in actually being used.
Tanenbaum and Stallman are the shoulders Linux stands on (with a lot of others of course) but at the same time it is also betraying them a little. That tanenbaum and Stallman can't help but point this out makes them real human people. Not some politically correct mouthpiece. I like them all the more for it.
How very ironic. Darth Lucas, let go. It is not to late for you to be saved.
Classic stuff! Now see how many people use lines from the new episodes. Zero? Now see how many use lines from the LOTR trilogy. "You shall not pass!" "Precioussss they took my preciousss" "etc etc" Not quit as many because lotr is a bit more wordy and I haven't yet seen it enough to know every line by heart but still people are quoting it.
That is really where George Lucas failed. The orignal 3 were aimed at kids but we kept them with us as kids. We took them into our hearts and treasured them. Todays kids watched the movies, enjoyed them, played with the toys and then forgot. In 30 years time none of the kids who saw The Phantom menace will be writing how that Lucas Junior is ruining the Star Wars legacy with the third trilogy. Sad really.
I got Episode 2 on dvd. Still can't bring myself to watch it yet. Episode 1 nearly killed me. 2 Might make me kill someone else instead. As for the re-edits. ARRGH!
Episode 1 and 2 have not repeated the originals success by smashing the box office sales and taking top place again. They were successfull to be sure but no record breakers. When you have a move that is squarly aimed at everyone from the age of 40 or downward (the original audience plus all the new kids) boasting a universe people have been waiting to see again on the big screen for decades and you can't break the box office record something is seriously amiss.
So they didn't make a movie that as many people as possibly went to. A new hope will forever be a piece of cinametic history. Episode 1 and 2 and possibly 3 will be just another movie.
I however find them usually poorly done in gameplay. It is like all those potions in baldurs gate. Protection against gold, protection against heat, protection against electricity, protection against undead on a friday except on a full moon.
WHO HAS THE TIME!!!!
Geez I am playing a fantasy role of a babarian. Not a bloody chemist. Just sell all those bloody things and spend it on simple healing stuff or even better. Heavy hitters. Who cares is a monster has some weird special attack when one hit puts it down.
I am currently playing Star Wars Galaxies and it got a shitload of drugs/buffs/foods/drinks all wich boost some stat some with some negative after effects. Problem? there are so many that people only bother with 1 or 2 of them. Maybe a 3rd on occasion and all the rest is ignored.
Why? Well I doubt it is an objection to the idea of drugs but more likely that people don't just want to bother. First you got to find a buyer. Then find the money to buy it. Then find the right time to use it. Most of the stuff has short duration and is expensive so you only want to use it when you really need it. Plus the better stuff has after effects so you want to make sure you don't get the downer in the middle of battle.
So drugs in this game are not very intrestting.
It would be intresting to see how a drug would do that has some real and easy to exploit advantages. Say that all your stats go up for a full day but that also has some major side effects like addiction and perhaps overtime less effectivness (so you need more and more just to get the same buzz) and perhaps mental problems like your avatar walking away from battle to look at the pretty colors. Make it illegal in game too so that both imperials and rebels will be looking for it and the components needed.
Then again the real study of addiction is those games themselves. I know SWG is crap with an endless list of bugs and constantly newly introduced bugs, the latest is that mission payouts are not shared out amount the group anymore and sometimes not even being payed out to the mission owner, and yet I keep playing. It is nice weather outside and yet I am inside playing a game that is more an exercise in frustation then fun. At least real world drug addicts can consider themselves cool rebels without a cause. I am just a nerd.
Could of course be that they think their is a market, there isn't, could be they think it will win them customers, it doesn't. OR just maybe these companies don't enjoy they idea of being locked onto a OS made by a company that is DIRECTLY competing with them and has a very long history of wiping out competition.
It has far less to do with promoting linux as not ending up in the pockets of Microsoft.
For now DirectX is pretty open and you have the half-life people saying that the PC is for them more profitable because of the lack of license fees wich are needed for console titles. If MS every comes to truly own the gaming world how long do you think this will last?
You are living in a dream world. Small independent game companies are going bust. The Xth rehash of ancient games does NOT count. It is the orignal new stuff that is getting more and more owned by the BIG companies. Companies that can afford a string of money losing titles without going out of business. Would you enjoy a future where games are owned by only the big boys? I wouldn't.
Basically all the fights were chosen in such a way that the historical winner, wich the team of course played, had the upper hand and were the enemy never exploited the obvious mistakes made by the players.
I would have preffered it if they had for instance gotten real generals to play, history proffessors, politicians, business men. People who might show some intresting aspect on how they would deal with it. How would a modern airforce general deal with an ancient army of footsoldiers. How would a proffesor filled with knowledge of what happened before and after the battle deal with the actual battle when everything is constantly changing?
How would a politician who now a days has to worry about 1 coffin coming home deal with a bodycount in the hundreds of thousands?
So each time windows needs to be rebooted I should first crawl under the desk to unplug the network cable, wait for windows to finish booting and then replug it?
Granted I seen people do sillier things to get around bad software/hardware but this belongs as a dilbert suggestion.
So MS is scared shitless. It knows it has many enemies but believed it had them under control. Linux is removing that control. Linux is turning up in the strangest places. Sony has now several real products on the market with linux inside, not some tiny upstart company hoping to sell a few thousand products world wide but Sony the giant who makes nearly everything. This is not good if you are MS and want the world to think Computers == Windows.
The more linux is out there the more OS might become like diesel vs gas vs petrol. A choice based on your needs. MS doesn't want you to have a choice. People with choice might expect all kind of weird things. Performance. Reliabilty. Security.
Lets face it everyone knows they are going to die and if they are really smart they even know it might be at any moment.
The people I have been with that learned they had a terminal illness went ofcourse through all kinds of emotions. Despair, anger, acceptance, apathy. And it ain't in stages either. Especially during critical moments, like when a last hope cure doesn't work out, they can change between emotions and even have emotions directly oposite.
But mostly it brings a sort of peace. The worst has happened. Parents get mostly worried with their kids. They seem to put in extra effort to make sure the kids can handle themselves afterwards. Kids of course have it harder as most of a kids live is in reality spend studying for later when of course for kids with a terminal illness there is no later. Strangely enough the kids can mostly deal with it in their own way. They have the most difficulty in dealing with adults who can't deal with it.
So the answer I think is probably that most would prefer to know. Let me ask it in reverse. Would you as a parent with two kids etc learn right now that 1 min from now you are going to be dead? No change to make any arrangements, say a last goodbye, make sure your last words with someone weren't a fight?
Problem is of course that goverments are rightly worried about experimenting on humans. So such trials are always small and need very strict guidelines for wich candidates are accepted. They don't want candidates who have multiple diseases since then they wouldn't know what is curing wich and wich other medicines are interering.
The bad news in your case is that there would hardly be a shortage of patients for who this the last change.
As someone who lost his mother to cancer at a young age. Applause to the researchers. Hope they have the magic bullet to get rid of cancer.
Every damn OS has had these things. From DOS to unix to C64 to VMS. Usually people are smarter but these days you got a lot of idiots.
You see stuff on usenet. The Sims 2. 31kb file Full game really works as the description.
User stupidity is not unique to any OS but at least when you use Linux the designers don't help you being stupid.
But apart from the joke value it would be real fun if they succeeded. Not truly important but nice to know that space exploration has become so "easy" that individuals can put a payload up there without needing a superpower to fund the project.
Good luck.
The sims is a house decorating and dress up game. There will always be new things to add. Sure EA will not have much of a market for say a red version of the orginal sofa. That has been taken care off by users. But new models (think skirts, long skirts, mini skirts, etc) new animations, new capabilities.
No this is nothing new. Perhaps this tool makes it easier but if anytbing the more user content there is the more people will play this for a long time making a bigger target audience for EA to add new content. (oh and if they follow the original game then most of the user made content requires the all the expansion packs to be installed, just make sure each expansion pack adds a couple of must have features)
Unless they have totally ruined the game The Sims 2 is going to be a cash-cow for EA for the next couple of years.