The 'do exactly as I say and nobody will get hurt' attitude is why many people hate microsoft.
Only in slashdot circles. Look outside of the headspace around here, and you'll see that most of the world is, at best, indifferent to Microsoft.
They feel comfortable with Windows because that's what they learned on in college/high school. That's the system that their nephew showed them how to play solitair on, etc.
Options are great, but some people don't need them. Sometimes they just confuse the issue.
Imagine a car that shipped with manual, automatic and slap-stick transmissions, and how confused you'd feel when you sat down the first time to see a gear shifter marked "P R N D L", one marked "R N 1 2 3 4", and a clutch.
Solaris couldn't kick linux out of every possible niche (embedded wagoo 3sx-12 cpus or whatnot), it could cream it on the desktop.
Sun will throw all its muscle behind it's Java Desktop to deliver a polished, cohisive system. Linux will continue to be pulled in 100 directions at once.
Distros need to stop offering Gnome, KDE, fluxbox, and 9000 other window managers, and pick a path and stick to it.
There really isn't that much of a market for people who like to dick around with 10000 different ways to close a window, each with it's own myriad of quirks and bugs. They like to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work pretty much the same way as the one in the next cubicle, or the next building.
Linux' strength (versatility) is it's achilles heel when it comes to the desktop market.
If I want to sit around and smoke weed all day, it is my business, and the government can't interfere. Until some "medicol doctar!!!1! kekeke!" diagnoses with me with a fancy new politically correct disease, now it's the governments duty to lock me up.
We had the article yesterday about internet porn. Apparantly getting a hardon is a medical condition caused by "erototoxins". So no first amendment rights for internet porn! It's an addictive disease causing substance just like crack.
Of course there are people engaged in self destructive behaviour who legitimately are mentally or physically ill. Our society as a whole doesn't have enough common sense to draw the line.
So lets criminalize Big Macs and titties, bring back prohibition. Umm, lets see, what else do people enjoy. Puppies, kitties, etc..
...when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.'
When he grew up women stayed at home and men did all the work and sex was something that was viewed as a contractual obligation to marraige.
The guy grew up in the 60s, wasnt he paying attention to all that sexual revolution business? Sucks to be him.
Congress better stay away from porn and cut it out with this "erototoxin addiction" angle. That kind of rhetoric is more damaging than porn, in my opinion. Science is the new religion, and now instead of labelling people "evil", we label them all "sick". Erototoxin. What a retarded buzzword. Worst ever.
Yeah, sex and drugs are similar in that they are both a hell of a lot of fun if you do them right.
The people who are legitimately concerned about the voting systems would still be concerned.
Slashdot wouldn't care, though. Just like they aren't concerned with DRM or product activation or trusted computing when Microsoft is doing it, and they wont be concerned with the MPAA's sprawling evil or Lucas' disregard for his fans when the next Star Wars hits theatres.
Find something specific, some niche that isn't going to go away, become an expert on it. If that niche does go away, become an expert on something else.
There's money out there to be made for FORTRAN-to-Java/C#/etc porting gurus, being able to maintain old mainframes etc..
AFAIK, DVD-R was designed originally for the mastering process, and is layed out more like a pressed disc, whereas +R was designed for consumer use, so I guess that's what that's all about. It's also the reason older DVD players and PS2s supposedly like -R better, too.
Still, I don't think that makes much of a difference, if at all, in the consumer world. I mean, the entire TV industry always used Beta, but it didn't make a bit of difference in the marketplace.
When it comes to burning your home videos or backing up all the porn you downloaded, people will generally buy what's cheapest unless they have a real reason not to.
No, but when you have a 36" inch set thats as "shallow" as your old 23" set, it might move more product, because the new "big" TV can fit in the same spot as the old one.
I have a nice entertainment bench that would be wide enough for a 60" plasma that I can't afford, but is only deep enough to accomodate about a 21~27" set. Everything else about the bench is great, it holds everything perfectly, is well built, and it's frankly worth more than the TV set that sets on it, so replacing it isn't a real option.
I've actually been out at Circuit City, et al, with a measuring tape trying to find the skinniest set with the biggest picture.
I like the picture on a CRT much better than a plasma or LCD, as well. I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" last week on my buddies new plasma set. It's contrast is so poor with dark colors.
All the storm cloud scenes looked horrible, with the worst color banding I've seen since 8 bit color was in fashion, it looked like a greyscale version of that old 256 color "plasma" demo.
The "+/-" war became irrelevant, now all burners burn both, and all new readers read both.
There was no winner, just a tie.
Neither was clearly a "better technology". They're both about the same, slightly different. Everything else you heard was marketting hype, which is what HP was apparantly good at (convincing you they chose the better technology).
MS and N have both announced their using new proprietery formats. I heard rumblings about HDDVD in XBox 2
Who knows what that means, exactly. It would be too expensive to set up facilities to create a physically different drive and press non-standard discs, who knows what writing technology they'll use.
But, practically, any modern DVD player (for PC or set-top) that was meant to playback recorded discs will play back both formats. Every modern burner will burn both formats.
The +/- thing is only an issue to folks burning discs for their modded XBoxes or PS2s, the way I see it (PS2s tend to prefer -, or XBox prefers +).
For most all real life purposes, I can just buy whatever pack of discs are cheapest, make sure they have the letters "DVDR" in that order, and not worry about the technical differences.
Automatic updates suck, game patches have broken more than they've fixed in the past. But then, who wants to be in charge of the software that they bought and installed? I'm sure Valve won't break my CD-R or whatever else they consider "piracy" tools in the future.
I could care less about Valves SDK, it has nothing to do with their method of selling the game.
Every FPS in the PC world supports third party mods. Valve built themselves up by exploiting those third party mods, and reselling them as original titles (Counterstrike).
Theres no point in arguing about it. You love Steam, you love the whole idea of it.
But, will you still love it so much when Microsoft releases their own version, and makes it integral to windows, so that virtually all PC games have such a wonderful spyware/anti-piracy/YAY GPL service API to rely on?
Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ drive and ~$1 media will be the one that gets adopted.
That's how it's always been, really, from Beta v VHS to DVD-R vs DVD+R, the latter of which resolved itself by having everything read/write everything else (+/- is pretty much irrelevant).
That's how it will be with the next gen. Whoever gets their stuff out there will get bought.
The PC market desperately needs some sort of cheap media that stores in the 10s of gigs. Even if it's only useful as an affordable/practical backup/archive system for home users.
By the time I could afford a DVD-R, it's paltry 4.5 gigs was too small to be useful backing up 160gigs of drives.
At work, I have an MSDN license to XP. At home, I stayed with 2000 having no compelling reason to upgrade.
To install on a friends machine, I called the 1-800 number. I never had to be online to activate XP.
And, for the record, I hate the XP scheme just as much. I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove.
Having to go online at all, even if its only once, is too much. I cant install it on standalone machines, there are firewall/router problems.
In 5 years when Valve is bankrupt, or they abandon steam, or they "upgrade it" to break all your older games so you have to buy the new ones, you won't be able to play the game legally at all. If it only affected the steam version, and I could go buy a working, standalong copy of the game, I'd feel different. But they had to go and sell retail discs full of useless random bits.
And to really put the icing on the cake, they took the Doom 3 route and made sure that the game costs 10 dollars more than anything else at Best Buy.
Fuck Valve, it's pure greed on their parts. They could have just sold a good game and made a lot of money doing it. Instead I'll spend my time playing the dozens of other AAA titles out there.
Gabe Newell is the George Lucas of the video game world. All Valve has ever done was leech off the success of their accidental masterpiece.
How about the targetted advertisements when you log in?
How about knowing what and when your playing, for how long, etc?
They have tons of marketting data to mine, that's part of the whole point of steam.
Steam *is* spyware. We already have a "content delivery" system if it was just about getting 'games on the internet. It's called HTTP. If it was just about selling games digitally, a good website would be more than adequate.
Same thing goes for iTunes.
You download and install what's basically a front-end for a retail store, and you don't think theres any data collection or advertising related stuff going on in there?
Not mine. I sure as hell wouldnt let you install Steam, Bonzi Buddy, KaZaa or any other spyware crap just so that you can waste my bandwidth downloading 3 gigs of HL2 because you're too lazy to carry a DVD around.
When the dust settles, Steam will be remembered as the utter failure it is.
We bitch and bitch about how much we hate corporations sticking it to us. We hate DRM, we hate devices that phone home, we hate buying a game, and then being unable to take that game over to a friends and just play it.
And yet, everyones head is so far up Valve's ass, that noone seems to be bothered with how odious this steam thing really is.
I mean, you can't play single player without a 'net connection. You cant drag your disk over to your friends house and just play.
It stinks worse than ANYTHING I've ever seen. This is the absolute worst ass-reaming any pointy haired manager ever decided to give the consumers.
You all are just grabbing your ankles and grinning.
I won't buy, leech, crack, play, or even talk about Half Life 2 anymore until they reissue it in a format which I can just install and start playing the single player game without phone-home activation, or being bundled with your ad delivery service.
Fuck you Valve. I will never purchase games via Steam. Luckily I have Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, Doom 3, and a pile of other titles to keep me entertained.
Yes, and the patent only applies to the IsNot keyword, it specifically says that "A IsNot B" a "better grammatical construction" than "Not (A Is B)".
Let 'em have it. So long as "Not (A Is B)" is public domain. I disagree with them, and think in practical use, it's a better statement structure. When A and B involve lots of crazy variables and references and whanot, I like to see the "Not" negator right there at the beginning of the mess.
What is the law regarding an online library? I guess not even the government can do it.
The local library has every edition of the local papers on microfilm, and I suppose they could put it all on DVD too.. When does it become a copyright issue?
Slashdot Mirror
If it's "definative", why did it need a second revision?
Huh? Sounds like some shenanigans. All those GPL guys are out to screw you, don't trust 'em.
The 'do exactly as I say and nobody will get hurt' attitude is why many people hate microsoft.
Only in slashdot circles. Look outside of the headspace around here, and you'll see that most of the world is, at best, indifferent to Microsoft.
They feel comfortable with Windows because that's what they learned on in college/high school. That's the system that their nephew showed them how to play solitair on, etc.
Options are great, but some people don't need them. Sometimes they just confuse the issue.
Imagine a car that shipped with manual, automatic and slap-stick transmissions, and how confused you'd feel when you sat down the first time to see a gear shifter marked "P R N D L", one marked "R N 1 2 3 4", and a clutch.
I love product activation, standalone games the "phone home" for no reason, the loss of the right of first sale, and other such things.
I love paying extra for a game that I may or may not be able to play 5 years from now, too.
Valve can shove Steam, and every other publisher can shove their fever-brained new schemes to fuck the customer ever harder.
The market is full of AAA titles right now. Half Life 2 rightfully deserves to be buried in them.
Solaris couldn't kick linux out of every possible niche (embedded wagoo 3sx-12 cpus or whatnot), it could cream it on the desktop.
Sun will throw all its muscle behind it's Java Desktop to deliver a polished, cohisive system. Linux will continue to be pulled in 100 directions at once.
Distros need to stop offering Gnome, KDE, fluxbox, and 9000 other window managers, and pick a path and stick to it.
There really isn't that much of a market for people who like to dick around with 10000 different ways to close a window, each with it's own myriad of quirks and bugs. They like to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work pretty much the same way as the one in the next cubicle, or the next building.
Linux' strength (versatility) is it's achilles heel when it comes to the desktop market.
Ah, unless you make it a "health concern".
If I want to sit around and smoke weed all day, it is my business, and the government can't interfere. Until some "medicol doctar!!!1! kekeke!" diagnoses with me with a fancy new politically correct disease, now it's the governments duty to lock me up.
We had the article yesterday about internet porn. Apparantly getting a hardon is a medical condition caused by "erototoxins". So no first amendment rights for internet porn! It's an addictive disease causing substance just like crack.
Of course there are people engaged in self destructive behaviour who legitimately are mentally or physically ill. Our society as a whole doesn't have enough common sense to draw the line.
So lets criminalize Big Macs and titties, bring back prohibition. Umm, lets see, what else do people enjoy. Puppies, kitties, etc..
You said "begs the question" instead of "raises the question" and now you're going to get it hard from the pedantic grammar assholes of the interweb.
...when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.'
When he grew up women stayed at home and men did all the work and sex was something that was viewed as a contractual obligation to marraige.
The guy grew up in the 60s, wasnt he paying attention to all that sexual revolution business? Sucks to be him.
Congress better stay away from porn and cut it out with this "erototoxin addiction" angle. That kind of rhetoric is more damaging than porn, in my opinion. Science is the new religion, and now instead of labelling people "evil", we label them all "sick". Erototoxin. What a retarded buzzword. Worst ever.
Yeah, sex and drugs are similar in that they are both a hell of a lot of fun if you do them right.
Wait till these guys find out about Rock n Roll.
YOU CAN PRY MY PORN FROM MY WARM STICKY HANDS!!!!!
Imagine how much funnier that could have been without the slashdot lameness filters.
Some things were meant to be yelled.
Law of what? Law of wasted time and effort and using popular science as an economic control tool, that's what Kyoto is the law of.
That's just proof that someone read them.
What else can use a stack of papers for in the bathro-- oh my god dear no! someone think of the childern.
The people who are legitimately concerned about the voting systems would still be concerned.
Slashdot wouldn't care, though. Just like they aren't concerned with DRM or product activation or trusted computing when Microsoft is doing it, and they wont be concerned with the MPAA's sprawling evil or Lucas' disregard for his fans when the next Star Wars hits theatres.
Just "knowing computers" isn't enough these days.
Find something specific, some niche that isn't going to go away, become an expert on it. If that niche does go away, become an expert on something else.
There's money out there to be made for FORTRAN-to-Java/C#/etc porting gurus, being able to maintain old mainframes etc..
AFAIK, DVD-R was designed originally for the mastering process, and is layed out more like a pressed disc, whereas +R was designed for consumer use, so I guess that's what that's all about. It's also the reason older DVD players and PS2s supposedly like -R better, too.
Still, I don't think that makes much of a difference, if at all, in the consumer world. I mean, the entire TV industry always used Beta, but it didn't make a bit of difference in the marketplace.
When it comes to burning your home videos or backing up all the porn you downloaded, people will generally buy what's cheapest unless they have a real reason not to.
No, but when you have a 36" inch set thats as "shallow" as your old 23" set, it might move more product, because the new "big" TV can fit in the same spot as the old one.
I have a nice entertainment bench that would be wide enough for a 60" plasma that I can't afford, but is only deep enough to accomodate about a 21~27" set. Everything else about the bench is great, it holds everything perfectly, is well built, and it's frankly worth more than the TV set that sets on it, so replacing it isn't a real option.
I've actually been out at Circuit City, et al, with a measuring tape trying to find the skinniest set with the biggest picture.
I like the picture on a CRT much better than a plasma or LCD, as well. I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" last week on my buddies new plasma set. It's contrast is so poor with dark colors.
All the storm cloud scenes looked horrible, with the worst color banding I've seen since 8 bit color was in fashion, it looked like a greyscale version of that old 256 color "plasma" demo.
The "+/-" war became irrelevant, now all burners burn both, and all new readers read both.
There was no winner, just a tie.
Neither was clearly a "better technology". They're both about the same, slightly different. Everything else you heard was marketting hype, which is what HP was apparantly good at (convincing you they chose the better technology).
MS and N have both announced their using new proprietery formats. I heard rumblings about HDDVD in XBox 2
Who knows what that means, exactly. It would be too expensive to set up facilities to create a physically different drive and press non-standard discs, who knows what writing technology they'll use.
No doubt it'll be high-capacity.
But, practically, any modern DVD player (for PC or set-top) that was meant to playback recorded discs will play back both formats. Every modern burner will burn both formats.
The +/- thing is only an issue to folks burning discs for their modded XBoxes or PS2s, the way I see it (PS2s tend to prefer -, or XBox prefers +).
For most all real life purposes, I can just buy whatever pack of discs are cheapest, make sure they have the letters "DVDR" in that order, and not worry about the technical differences.
Automatic updates suck, game patches have broken more than they've fixed in the past. But then, who wants to be in charge of the software that they bought and installed? I'm sure Valve won't break my CD-R or whatever else they consider "piracy" tools in the future.
I could care less about Valves SDK, it has nothing to do with their method of selling the game.
Every FPS in the PC world supports third party mods. Valve built themselves up by exploiting those third party mods, and reselling them as original titles (Counterstrike).
Theres no point in arguing about it. You love Steam, you love the whole idea of it.
But, will you still love it so much when Microsoft releases their own version, and makes it integral to windows, so that virtually all PC games have such a wonderful spyware/anti-piracy/YAY GPL service API to rely on?
Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ drive and ~$1 media will be the one that gets adopted.
That's how it's always been, really, from Beta v VHS to DVD-R vs DVD+R, the latter of which resolved itself by having everything read/write everything else (+/- is pretty much irrelevant).
That's how it will be with the next gen. Whoever gets their stuff out there will get bought.
The PC market desperately needs some sort of cheap media that stores in the 10s of gigs. Even if it's only useful as an affordable/practical backup/archive system for home users.
By the time I could afford a DVD-R, it's paltry 4.5 gigs was too small to be useful backing up 160gigs of drives.
At work, I have an MSDN license to XP. At home, I stayed with 2000 having no compelling reason to upgrade.
To install on a friends machine, I called the 1-800 number. I never had to be online to activate XP.
And, for the record, I hate the XP scheme just as much. I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove.
Having to go online at all, even if its only once, is too much. I cant install it on standalone machines, there are firewall/router problems.
In 5 years when Valve is bankrupt, or they abandon steam, or they "upgrade it" to break all your older games so you have to buy the new ones, you won't be able to play the game legally at all. If it only affected the steam version, and I could go buy a working, standalong copy of the game, I'd feel different. But they had to go and sell retail discs full of useless random bits.
And to really put the icing on the cake, they took the Doom 3 route and made sure that the game costs 10 dollars more than anything else at Best Buy.
Fuck Valve, it's pure greed on their parts. They could have just sold a good game and made a lot of money doing it. Instead I'll spend my time playing the dozens of other AAA titles out there.
Gabe Newell is the George Lucas of the video game world. All Valve has ever done was leech off the success of their accidental masterpiece.
How about the targetted advertisements when you log in?
How about knowing what and when your playing, for how long, etc?
They have tons of marketting data to mine, that's part of the whole point of steam.
Steam *is* spyware. We already have a "content delivery" system if it was just about getting 'games on the internet. It's called HTTP. If it was just about selling games digitally, a good website would be more than adequate.
Same thing goes for iTunes.
You download and install what's basically a front-end for a retail store, and you don't think theres any data collection or advertising related stuff going on in there?
Not mine. I sure as hell wouldnt let you install Steam, Bonzi Buddy, KaZaa or any other spyware crap just so that you can waste my bandwidth downloading 3 gigs of HL2 because you're too lazy to carry a DVD around.
When the dust settles, Steam will be remembered as the utter failure it is.
We bitch and bitch about how much we hate corporations sticking it to us. We hate DRM, we hate devices that phone home, we hate buying a game, and then being unable to take that game over to a friends and just play it.
And yet, everyones head is so far up Valve's ass, that noone seems to be bothered with how odious this steam thing really is.
I mean, you can't play single player without a 'net connection. You cant drag your disk over to your friends house and just play.
It stinks worse than ANYTHING I've ever seen. This is the absolute worst ass-reaming any pointy haired manager ever decided to give the consumers.
You all are just grabbing your ankles and grinning.
I won't buy, leech, crack, play, or even talk about Half Life 2 anymore until they reissue it in a format which I can just install and start playing the single player game without phone-home activation, or being bundled with your ad delivery service.
Fuck you Valve. I will never purchase games via Steam. Luckily I have Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, Doom 3, and a pile of other titles to keep me entertained.
Yes, and the patent only applies to the IsNot keyword, it specifically says that "A IsNot B" a "better grammatical construction" than "Not (A Is B)".
Let 'em have it. So long as "Not (A Is B)" is public domain. I disagree with them, and think in practical use, it's a better statement structure. When A and B involve lots of crazy variables and references and whanot, I like to see the "Not" negator right there at the beginning of the mess.
What is the law regarding an online library? I guess not even the government can do it.
The local library has every edition of the local papers on microfilm, and I suppose they could put it all on DVD too.. When does it become a copyright issue?