Games in the US do have a rating system, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). It's completely voluntary, and all publishers have their stuff rated. Unlike movies who fought tooth and nail against ratings.
It's also more specific than anything on movies or TV. A game doesn't just get M for Mature, but there's a short list of icons explaining *why* it got the M. Ie; Language, Adult Situations, Realistic Blood and Gore, Cartoon Blood and Gore.
Thing is, while most retail outlets are now refusing to sell M rated games to minors, there's still a big whoopty doo because of things like Columbine, where the fact that the shooters played video games was blown out of proportion.
Right now one of the big "targets" of the video game lobby is Grand Theft Auto 3. Now first off you have the title, then you have the box art covered with stylized mobsters, pimps, and prostitutes. Then you have a fairly prominent M for Mature, with underneath: Adult Situations, Coarse Language, Violence, Realistic Blood and Gore.
Yet noone clues in that this isn't a game for 6 year old Billy.
AFAIK, there's no legal accountability if Billy gets the game. Thats what they want, and they wouldn't dare hold the parents or gaurdians responsible for their childs welfare. It must be someone in corporate america's fault.
Actually, the Eisenhower dollars were to be meted out back in the 50's and 60's.
Boston had already jumped the gun, and spent their own cash building their SkyWay, which turned out to be an utter piece of crap.
So in the 70s they realized it was worthless, it divided the city in half, was ugly as hell, and couldn't support anywhere near the amount of traffic they had. So they came up with the idea of moving it all underground.
Now, they couldnt afford it. So they went to congress with the notion that "hey, we didn't use up our eisenhower dollars, so you can give them to us now".
Critics noted that Eisenhower wasn't president anymore, and the dollars for the Interstate plan at the time were a 'use it or lose it' type of thing. Many cities and states didn't use their entire allotment - they can't just go to congress now and ask them to pony up the dough.
They got preliminary approval, but then Reagan scrapped it, calling it pork-barrel politics. Which it was.
Funding was eventually re-approved, and here we go. Pissing away billions to correct a localised inconvenience.
Like any gigantiforous project thats so overbudget as this, the programmers are the first to get scratched, in favor of another backhoe or bulldozer.
Then they're the first to be blamed when the entire project is late.
Unlike the other aspects of this project, they can't gauge progress or work yet to be completed based on tons of dirt moved, or number of steel beams installed.
So when Skeeter McPencilneck comes along to audit the project, he can't see a little progress chart with solid numbers, and of course its the software team to blame.
I'm reminded of a story one of my prof's told me, slightly off-topic but shows how 'real world' managers deal with coders.
Some General was overseeing the design and creation of a new fighter plane, and was busy going from team to team measuring the weight of every last nut and bolt used so he could nail down the operating specs.
So he gets to the software control team, and asks them "how much does your part of the system weigh?"
The team replies "Well, nothing sir"
The General is incredulous and miffed at the answer. He storms around the office until he finds a pile of punchcards. He holds them up and says "A-Ha. These have weight! You lied to me."
And the team replies "No, sir. The software isn't the punchcards - it's the holes in them"
Sidebar:
That city should have had to just stick with the useless skyway they pissed away all their dollars on. What a waste.
Lots of cities have terrible traffic problems. I'm stuck halfway between Baltimore and D.C., both could use a new multi-billion dollar traffic infrastructure.
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global Warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
These scientists always seem to oversimplify the complex system that is the earths weather pattern.
They talk as if its fact, but the best anyone can do is an educated guess. We don't understand the earth. If we could you wouldn't hear "60% chance of rain" on the nightly weather report.
I wonder why they do it.
From the about WHOI page:
Funding The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is supported by a mix of grants from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, private contributions, and endowment income.
Oh, I guess people are less likely to contribute to the "Everything is A-OK" foundation.
Not that I'm against them, they're better than other eco-groups which do nothing but spout speculative doom-and-gloom prophecies. At least these guys are scientists, not activists. The article warned of possible climate changes, not an end to all life as we know it.
Yes, but EA's sports games have gotten so complex that you need to be an NFL coach to pick plays in NFL2k3.
There will always be niche markets, filling those niche's will always be lucrative for those who will.
I don't think we're in danger of every game being 'dumbed down'. Appealing to the lowest common denominator isn't always the most profitable course of action.
Flash and dazzle is nice, but not lasting. The biggest boost that the gaming industry is getting from Hollywood is from the writers.
Games are now being scripted like movies. No more "ok so you run this guy around and shoot the red guys and save the blue guys", game storylines are becoming more and more intricate, the characters more interesting.
Alot of script-writers are pitching games, as they would pitch a movie. I'm also seeing alot more talent being enlisted for voiceovers, etc. Personally, I see this as a good trend. Others mileage may vary.
Though, with the gaming industry pulling in more coin than the movie industry, it's a no-brainer that they'd be recruiting a good chunk of their talent, both technical and non-technical.
Umm, what I read wasn't P2P warfare.. I read this:
"... evaluates alternatives for on-line music delivery, P2P warfare, copy protection, etc."
later I read:
"Analyzes all industry wide technological developments and initiatives related to music and music distribution in an effort to help company sustain its competitive advantage in the music technology marketplace."
Alternatives to P2P warfare. I think they realise its just not cost-effective to have a bunch of people sitting around trying to hack everyone who's running KaZaa.
Looks to me like they want someone to come up with realistic solutions and strategies that will work in the real world. Seems they want to 'Adapt or Die'.
"Requirements A college degree or equivalent experience is required in engineering, computer science. Specific knowledge and experience in new media and new technologies is required."
Purely speculation: Their old CTO probably favored the old-school 'sue em all' approach, that's probably why he's lining up for food stamps, and why the particular wording of the job offer. Looks like they want a new direction, not to just bump another talking head into the post.
> I see virtually no difference between this and reaching into one of those bell ringers donation buckets.
Alot are saying this. But yet they *do* see the difference between downloading an album versus shoplifting it from Best Buy.
KaZaa/Morpheus/etc all reek of get-rich-quick schemes based on the success of Napster.
I'm no more shocked than when I get an e-mail promising free porn, and then end up with 9000 popups eaching wanting to charge a dollar on my credit card for 'age verification purposes'.
You can always hide behind some legalese gobbledy-gook in an EULA. All hail the mighty litigator.
They aren't MMORPGs! The latest buzzword, they're riding the wave, thinking outside of the box, surfing the curve, flipping the bird, and doing other jingoistic marketing things.
You can emulate all the originals nicely on the PC. And the ports of 7 & 8 didn't sell well, AFAIK.
Square's been doing this stuff forever.. Remember Super Mario RPG? Actually, that Disney one looks kind of intriguing.. Probably pick that up for 'the kids'.
I'm just upset they're abandoning the installed FF fanbase in favor of a 'trendy' MMORPG. What made the series great was the story lines, characters, the single player experience.
Now instead of leveling up to track down Sephiroth or defeat the Ultimate Weapon, I get to have Jimmy McNutsack in his parents basement in Iowa call me a 'big gay fag homo'.
I swear to god, those things are just irc chatrooms with 3d avatars, and less intelligent conversation.
http://www.nielsenmedia.com/newsreleases/1999/ho me tech.html
I wont bother you with actually reading it, here's the opening paragraph.
NEW YORK, MAY 13, 1999 - Young teens are the biggest users of video game systems - right? Not according to a new survey of home technology from Nielsen Media Research which shows nearly 75% of the 63 million people using video game systems in the U.S. are 18 years old or older (18+). The most recent data show that 25% of video game system users - 15.6 million persons - are teens (persons 12-17), 40% of users - 25.2 million persons - are in the 18 - 34 age bracket, and 34% - 21.4 million persons - are 35+.
Of course NIELSEN wouldnt know anything about entertainment demographics, would they?
And linux is not a social movement, it's an operating system.
Seriously, I'm sick of all the lame typecasting based on what OS happens to be on my box at any particular time.
Right now I'm running Windows 2k, working through some bugs in a custom DCOM object. So I guess I'm a corporate sheep. In an hour or so I'll be working through some fortran code in unix. Then I'm a greasy peace loving hippy.
If you want to brand yourself, go ahead. Keep me out of it. It's just as lame as the 'nintendo vs ps2 vs xbox' crapfests that 12 year olds have on irc.
So it's frontpages fault that mozilla can't display the html it generates?
Maybe the mozilla team could get off their high horses and work with the rest of the world.
Is something a standard because W3 or the Mozilla guys say so? Or because 90% of browsers on peoples machines say so? Like it or not, you have to face facts sometimes.
Making mozilla compatible with real life websites is its best hope for the future.
Librarians have been running wild in this country for too long.
It's about time someone had the courage to say ENOUGH. We've had enough of you librarians.
For too long they've been blantantly stealing money from the hands of hard working authors, like the repeatedly deceased Stephen King, by allowing people to READ BOOKS they haven't even PAYED FOR.
A simple 'Shhh.. This is a library' from one of these liberty-devouring monsters is all it takes to silence free speech in buildings that we all pay for.
And who granted them the power to arbitrarily decide which portions of human knowledge are FICTION and which are NON-FICTION.
They hide truths as make-believe, and make-believe as truth, by use of the dewey decimal system.
I applaud our brave president for standing up to these monsters who would rob us of our precious ignorance.
Just like they're boycotting the MPAA unless a Star Wars or Star Trek movie comes out.
They're also boycotting the RIAA untless N'Sync releases a new CD.
You see, the plan is to boycott only quality entertainment, and watch/listen to only crap.
That way the industry execs get terribly skewed statistics on buying trends, and go bankrupt when they jointly produce "Star Wars vs. Star Trek II - Lance Bass's Big Adventure".
> "ProComp said Microsoft's second violation is that Service Pack 1 neglects to provide Start Menu access to the middleware control, and doesn't include a short-cut icon to the control on the desktop"
Umm, for at least the W2k SP3, the link is on my start menu, right above the windows update link.
It 'resides' in the add/remove programs applet. Makes sense to me.
BTW, I don't want anything else on my desktop, assholes. A link to install/configure netscape would please me about as a much as a link to a free trial version of AOL.
>"Everything about 'Set Program Access and Defaults' says consumers are unwelcome here," the developer said. "It's a barren place, compared to the rest of Windows XP, bereft of simple instructions or extended Help"
What the hell? Have they seen it? It couldn't be simpler! Click the option button next to the one you want. Jeezuz.
> ProComp noted that the time for retrieval, as stated by Microsoft, would be 1.25 hours over a standard dial-up connection
And it'd be 2 hours if they had to include a 10 meg instuctional video on how to fuck^h^h^h fix up your system with netscape. The fact is you can get it.
They also claim you need internet explorer to download it. Not true (well partially, for the 'dynamic' version you may) I downloaded the networked install (100 meg or so) with lynx.
> the Windows 2000 version "is substantially less intuitive than (the one) in Windows XP."
Windows 2000 is an office/pro OS, designed to be administrated by tech-savvy people. Windows XP is for your grandma to check her e-mail and cat breeding websites. No duh it's less intuitive. Do they want the dancing paperclip to help them click the option buttons?
I mean MS could have been real jerks here. They could have made the options read "1) Kick ass Internet Explorer - 2) Slow ass piece of incompatible shit from the retards at Netscape"
I'm not in favor of any MS monopoly, but these whiney special interest groups spend more time dictating how I should use my computer than MS does.
All Sun & Netscape seem to do is sue people to create an environment for their software. If they paid the coders half what they pay their lawyers, they'd have nothing to bitch about.
I lose respect for groups who don't know enough to shut up when they've won.
Microsoft is going to put out another product. Or replace the TP in their corporate bathrooms with 2-ply.
So I get to watch idiotic, paranoid and delusional comments get modded up to +5.
"Oh no they're going to use 802.11 to conquer the world. They're persecuting linux users and sending them to death camps, or forcing them to toil in the underground salt mines."
So what if they want to sell peripherals? They can sell beowulf clusters full of hot grits, for all I care.
Noone gets this paranoid when another large company with dominance in one market announces a new product line. I didn't see anyone get freaked out when Sony announced its Vaio line. "Oh my god! They're going to use the power of playstation to strip my rights away and kill baby kittens."
Diversifying is what companies do to ensure future profitibility. It's foolish to leave all of your eggs in one basket.
Big fat hairy deal. Take a deep breath and join us in the real world, the weathers fine.
'informality' means theres no orginization, there's no obligation. Noone makes Linus et al work on the next version of the kernel. They could decide they want to make gameboy games instead, and abandon it.
While this is an extreme scenario, sourceforge is full of projects that aren't going anywhere.
We all assume, for instance, that a hole in Apache will be quickly closed by a thousand coders from around the world. But there's no guarantee. Guarantees and contracts are FORMAL parts of the business world. Do you understand yet what the statement is saying?
If you base some project that puts your career on the line, you want to be as sure as you can that it's not going to dissapear because the team behind it got bored, changed their mind, got in a flame war and split up, or whatever.
We already know MS uses closed source. It doesn't need to be repeated. But they pay employees to come in and work on the source every day. This leaves at least the impression that work will be done.
I got no problem with linux, I got no problem with windows, os/2 beos or C64 Basic. But call it like it is, take the blinders off.
Linux is not above criticism. If you think it is, you're worse than any MS marketing drone.
Slashdot Mirror
Games in the US do have a rating system, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). It's completely voluntary, and all publishers have their stuff rated. Unlike movies who fought tooth and nail against ratings.
It's also more specific than anything on movies or TV. A game doesn't just get M for Mature, but there's a short list of icons explaining *why* it got the M. Ie; Language, Adult Situations, Realistic Blood and Gore, Cartoon Blood and Gore.
Thing is, while most retail outlets are now refusing to sell M rated games to minors, there's still a big whoopty doo because of things like Columbine, where the fact that the shooters played video games was blown out of proportion.
Right now one of the big "targets" of the video game lobby is Grand Theft Auto 3. Now first off you have the title, then you have the box art covered with stylized mobsters, pimps, and prostitutes. Then you have a fairly prominent M for Mature, with underneath: Adult Situations, Coarse Language, Violence, Realistic Blood and Gore.
Yet noone clues in that this isn't a game for 6 year old Billy.
AFAIK, there's no legal accountability if Billy gets the game. Thats what they want, and they wouldn't dare hold the parents or gaurdians responsible for their childs welfare. It must be someone in corporate america's fault.
Actually, the Eisenhower dollars were to be meted out back in the 50's and 60's.
Boston had already jumped the gun, and spent their own cash building their SkyWay, which turned out to be an utter piece of crap.
So in the 70s they realized it was worthless, it divided the city in half, was ugly as hell, and couldn't support anywhere near the amount of traffic they had. So they came up with the idea of moving it all underground.
Now, they couldnt afford it. So they went to congress with the notion that "hey, we didn't use up our eisenhower dollars, so you can give them to us now".
Critics noted that Eisenhower wasn't president anymore, and the dollars for the Interstate plan at the time were a 'use it or lose it' type of thing. Many cities and states didn't use their entire allotment - they can't just go to congress now and ask them to pony up the dough.
They got preliminary approval, but then Reagan scrapped it, calling it pork-barrel politics. Which it was.
Funding was eventually re-approved, and here we go. Pissing away billions to correct a localised inconvenience.
Most non-bostonians call it the Money Pit.
Like any gigantiforous project thats so overbudget as this, the programmers are the first to get scratched, in favor of another backhoe or bulldozer.
Then they're the first to be blamed when the entire project is late.
Unlike the other aspects of this project, they can't gauge progress or work yet to be completed based on tons of dirt moved, or number of steel beams installed.
So when Skeeter McPencilneck comes along to audit the project, he can't see a little progress chart with solid numbers, and of course its the software team to blame.
I'm reminded of a story one of my prof's told me, slightly off-topic but shows how 'real world' managers deal with coders.
Some General was overseeing the design and creation of a new fighter plane, and was busy going from team to team measuring the weight of every last nut and bolt used so he could nail down the operating specs.
So he gets to the software control team, and asks them "how much does your part of the system weigh?"
The team replies "Well, nothing sir"
The General is incredulous and miffed at the answer. He storms around the office until he finds a pile of punchcards. He holds them up and says "A-Ha. These have weight! You lied to me."
And the team replies "No, sir. The software isn't the punchcards - it's the holes in them"
Sidebar:
That city should have had to just stick with the useless skyway they pissed away all their dollars on. What a waste.
Lots of cities have terrible traffic problems. I'm stuck halfway between Baltimore and D.C., both could use a new multi-billion dollar traffic infrastructure.
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global Warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
These scientists always seem to oversimplify the complex system that is the earths weather pattern.
They talk as if its fact, but the best anyone can do is an educated guess. We don't understand the earth. If we could you wouldn't hear "60% chance of rain" on the nightly weather report.
I wonder why they do it.
From the about WHOI page:
Funding
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is supported by a mix of grants from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, private contributions, and endowment income.
Oh, I guess people are less likely to contribute to the "Everything is A-OK" foundation.
Not that I'm against them, they're better than other eco-groups which do nothing but spout speculative doom-and-gloom prophecies. At least these guys are scientists, not activists. The article warned of possible climate changes, not an end to all life as we know it.
Yes, but EA's sports games have gotten so complex that you need to be an NFL coach to pick plays in NFL2k3.
There will always be niche markets, filling those niche's will always be lucrative for those who will.
I don't think we're in danger of every game being 'dumbed down'. Appealing to the lowest common denominator isn't always the most profitable course of action.
Flash and dazzle is nice, but not lasting. The biggest boost that the gaming industry is getting from Hollywood is from the writers.
Games are now being scripted like movies. No more "ok so you run this guy around and shoot the red guys and save the blue guys", game storylines are becoming more and more intricate, the characters more interesting.
Alot of script-writers are pitching games, as they would pitch a movie. I'm also seeing alot more talent being enlisted for voiceovers, etc. Personally, I see this as a good trend. Others mileage may vary.
Though, with the gaming industry pulling in more coin than the movie industry, it's a no-brainer that they'd be recruiting a good chunk of their talent, both technical and non-technical.
Umm, what I read wasn't P2P warfare.. I read this:
"... evaluates alternatives for on-line music delivery, P2P warfare, copy protection, etc."
later I read:
"Analyzes all industry wide technological developments and initiatives related to music and music distribution in an effort to help company sustain its competitive advantage in the music technology marketplace."
Alternatives to P2P warfare. I think they realise its just not cost-effective to have a bunch of people sitting around trying to hack everyone who's running KaZaa.
Looks to me like they want someone to come up with realistic solutions and strategies that will work in the real world. Seems they want to 'Adapt or Die'.
"Requirements
A college degree or equivalent experience is required in engineering, computer science. Specific knowledge and experience in new media and new technologies is required."
Purely speculation: Their old CTO probably favored the old-school 'sue em all' approach, that's probably why he's lining up for food stamps, and why the particular wording of the job offer. Looks like they want a new direction, not to just bump another talking head into the post.
> I see virtually no difference between this and reaching into one of those bell ringers donation buckets.
Alot are saying this. But yet they *do* see the difference between downloading an album versus shoplifting it from Best Buy.
KaZaa/Morpheus/etc all reek of get-rich-quick schemes based on the success of Napster.
I'm no more shocked than when I get an e-mail promising free porn, and then end up with 9000 popups eaching wanting to charge a dollar on my credit card for 'age verification purposes'.
You can always hide behind some legalese gobbledy-gook in an EULA. All hail the mighty litigator.
If it's in an EULA, it must be legal.
I mean for crissakes - EULA is an ACRONYMN!
They aren't MMORPGs! The latest buzzword, they're riding the wave, thinking outside of the box, surfing the curve, flipping the bird, and doing other jingoistic marketing things.
You can emulate all the originals nicely on the PC. And the ports of 7 & 8 didn't sell well, AFAIK.
Does nVidia have its own proprietary 3D api?
Nope, it's pretty much DirectX or OpenGL.
Of course it will. Probably look alot nicer on a 256 meg Radeon 9700 Pro, to boot.
Square's been doing this stuff forever.. Remember Super Mario RPG? Actually, that Disney one looks kind of intriguing.. Probably pick that up for 'the kids'.
I'm just upset they're abandoning the installed FF fanbase in favor of a 'trendy' MMORPG. What made the series great was the story lines, characters, the single player experience.
Now instead of leveling up to track down Sephiroth or defeat the Ultimate Weapon, I get to have Jimmy McNutsack in his parents basement in Iowa call me a 'big gay fag homo'.
I swear to god, those things are just irc chatrooms with 3d avatars, and less intelligent conversation.
You mean like this?
o me tech.html
http://www.nielsenmedia.com/newsreleases/1999/h
I wont bother you with actually reading it, here's the opening paragraph.
NEW YORK, MAY 13, 1999 - Young teens are the biggest users of video game systems - right? Not according to a new survey of home technology from Nielsen Media Research which shows nearly 75% of the 63 million people using video game systems in the U.S. are 18 years old or older (18+). The most recent data show that 25% of video game system users - 15.6 million persons - are teens (persons 12-17), 40% of users - 25.2 million persons - are in the 18 - 34 age bracket, and 34% - 21.4 million persons - are 35+.
Of course NIELSEN wouldnt know anything about entertainment demographics, would they?
There was nothing anti-anything about my comment.
My point is that using linux doesnt make me a socialist/libertarian any more than wearing Doc Martens would make me a skinhead.
What's self-righteous about that?
Though, it's flattering you've noticed me, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Secret crushes are the most exhilirating.
Actually the lions share of the market is over 18.
RTCW and GTA3 arent designed for little kids. If they were targetting my 9 year old, they'd be doing a piss-poor job.
He couldn't care less about the titles I enjoy.
I mean, how much money does the average 5-10 year old have in his/her pocket? Richie-Rich aside, its not enough to buy a new game every week.
New as in full MSRP on release day, they dont make money when you pick up Warcraft II BattleChest for 4.99 at babbages.
The video game industry didn't surpass the movie industry in gross sales on little Billy's allowance.
That's the reason there are so many 'Mature' games.
All this "good/bad for your kids" debate does is misdirect the public.
Video games aren't "kids entertainment", any more than all movies are "kids entertainment".
> A social movement is not a busness.
And linux is not a social movement, it's an operating system.
Seriously, I'm sick of all the lame typecasting based on what OS happens to be on my box at any particular time.
Right now I'm running Windows 2k, working through some bugs in a custom DCOM object. So I guess I'm a corporate sheep. In an hour or so I'll be working through some fortran code in unix. Then I'm a greasy peace loving hippy.
If you want to brand yourself, go ahead. Keep me out of it. It's just as lame as the 'nintendo vs ps2 vs xbox' crapfests that 12 year olds have on irc.
So it's frontpages fault that mozilla can't display the html it generates?
Maybe the mozilla team could get off their high horses and work with the rest of the world.
Is something a standard because W3 or the Mozilla guys say so? Or because 90% of browsers on peoples machines say so? Like it or not, you have to face facts sometimes.
Making mozilla compatible with real life websites is its best hope for the future.
Or even any dev environment you like that has COM support.
.net.
and the webbrowser control has been there since vb4.0, so even if you wanted to do it in vb, you wouldn't have to shell for
though you'd never convice this crowd.
yay mozilla! you're one step closer to being IE!
Librarians have been running wild in this country for too long.
It's about time someone had the courage to say ENOUGH. We've had enough of you librarians.
For too long they've been blantantly stealing money from the hands of hard working authors, like the repeatedly deceased Stephen King, by allowing people to READ BOOKS they haven't even PAYED FOR.
A simple 'Shhh.. This is a library' from one of these liberty-devouring monsters is all it takes to silence free speech in buildings that we all pay for.
And who granted them the power to arbitrarily decide which portions of human knowledge are FICTION and which are NON-FICTION.
They hide truths as make-believe, and make-believe as truth, by use of the dewey decimal system.
I applaud our brave president for standing up to these monsters who would rob us of our precious ignorance.
use ShowShifter pro to encode in DivX Pro/SVCD. VCD quality really bites. VHS is superior.
BTW if it were just for PVR, AIW Radeon is overkill. My *vintage* AIW does the task of capturing live streams just fine.
AIW 128 would be reasonable. USB versions get enough throughput to do the job well, too.
Just like they're boycotting the MPAA unless a Star Wars or Star Trek movie comes out.
They're also boycotting the RIAA untless N'Sync releases a new CD.
You see, the plan is to boycott only quality entertainment, and watch/listen to only crap.
That way the industry execs get terribly skewed statistics on buying trends, and go bankrupt when they jointly produce "Star Wars vs. Star Trek II - Lance Bass's Big Adventure".
> "ProComp said Microsoft's second violation is that Service Pack 1 neglects to provide Start Menu access to the middleware control, and doesn't include a short-cut icon to the control on the desktop"
Umm, for at least the W2k SP3, the link is on my start menu, right above the windows update link.
It 'resides' in the add/remove programs applet. Makes sense to me.
BTW, I don't want anything else on my desktop, assholes. A link to install/configure netscape would please me about as a much as a link to a free trial version of AOL.
>"Everything about 'Set Program Access and Defaults' says consumers are unwelcome here," the developer said. "It's a barren place, compared to the rest of Windows XP, bereft of simple instructions or extended Help"
What the hell? Have they seen it? It couldn't be simpler! Click the option button next to the one you want. Jeezuz.
> ProComp noted that the time for retrieval, as stated by Microsoft, would be 1.25 hours over a standard dial-up connection
And it'd be 2 hours if they had to include a 10 meg instuctional video on how to fuck^h^h^h fix up your system with netscape. The fact is you can get it.
They also claim you need internet explorer to download it. Not true (well partially, for the 'dynamic' version you may) I downloaded the networked install (100 meg or so) with lynx.
> the Windows 2000 version "is substantially less intuitive than (the one) in Windows XP."
Windows 2000 is an office/pro OS, designed to be administrated by tech-savvy people. Windows XP is for your grandma to check her e-mail and cat breeding websites. No duh it's less intuitive. Do they want the dancing paperclip to help them click the option buttons?
I mean MS could have been real jerks here. They could have made the options read "1) Kick ass Internet Explorer - 2) Slow ass piece of incompatible shit from the retards at Netscape"
I'm not in favor of any MS monopoly, but these whiney special interest groups spend more time dictating how I should use my computer than MS does.
All Sun & Netscape seem to do is sue people to create an environment for their software. If they paid the coders half what they pay their lawyers, they'd have nothing to bitch about.
I lose respect for groups who don't know enough to shut up when they've won.
Microsoft is going to put out another product. Or replace the TP in their corporate bathrooms with 2-ply.
So I get to watch idiotic, paranoid and delusional comments get modded up to +5.
"Oh no they're going to use 802.11 to conquer the world. They're persecuting linux users and sending them to death camps, or forcing them to toil in the underground salt mines."
So what if they want to sell peripherals? They can sell beowulf clusters full of hot grits, for all I care.
Noone gets this paranoid when another large company with dominance in one market announces a new product line. I didn't see anyone get freaked out when Sony announced its Vaio line. "Oh my god! They're going to use the power of playstation to strip my rights away and kill baby kittens."
Diversifying is what companies do to ensure future profitibility. It's foolish to leave all of your eggs in one basket.
Big fat hairy deal. Take a deep breath and join us in the real world, the weathers fine.
'informality' means theres no orginization, there's no obligation. Noone makes Linus et al work on the next version of the kernel. They could decide they want to make gameboy games instead, and abandon it.
While this is an extreme scenario, sourceforge is full of projects that aren't going anywhere.
We all assume, for instance, that a hole in Apache will be quickly closed by a thousand coders from around the world. But there's no guarantee. Guarantees and contracts are FORMAL parts of the business world. Do you understand yet what the statement is saying?
If you base some project that puts your career on the line, you want to be as sure as you can that it's not going to dissapear because the team behind it got bored, changed their mind, got in a flame war and split up, or whatever.
We already know MS uses closed source. It doesn't need to be repeated. But they pay employees to come in and work on the source every day. This leaves at least the impression that work will be done.
I got no problem with linux, I got no problem with windows, os/2 beos or C64 Basic. But call it like it is, take the blinders off.
Linux is not above criticism. If you think it is, you're worse than any MS marketing drone.
An "open source" website.
Ya know, something you can use on your computer without having to register or give up personal information.