If Microsoft doesn't drop it's price on the PS3 release date I'd be very surprised.
That said, Microsoft isn't about to shoot itself in the foot by telling people that a price drop will happen. If they say, "Nov 17th we will drop our price $50US", then people will stop buying 360s until Nov 17th. Microsoft wants people to keep on buying normally up until that point and the best way to do that is to keep people believing that no price drop is happening.
The people you meet on IRC/Forums are not there because they're being paid, but instead because they're getting help themselves, or simply just chatting. It's very common to try to help people who's problems are more interesting or deemed easier to solve over those with more complex or ill-defined problems.
That doesn't excuse rudeness and elitism, it's just something to keep in mind. You will find these elitists on any forum or chat for most software and operating systems. It's not a matter of "you get what you pay for" either, simply human nature when we're given the anonymity of the internet to really make us fearless.
You answered your own question. People hit up IRC for answers because:
"I want an answer now!"
Not all IRC channels are created equal, but many of them are full of people who are really just interested showing off how much they know by "helping" other people.
I think your average l33t kiddie's instinctual reaction to being asked a question to which he does not know the answer is to puff up and make himself appear bigger and more threatening. Admitting that they don't know the answer or aren't familiar with that kernel/server/programing language would be devastating for their fragile egos.
Oh, and to summarize the article: People on IRC/Forums, cloaked in the anonynmity the internet provides, were rude to other people. What's the big deal? I've found this same elitist "RTFM, n00b!" attitude on every forum or public IRC channel i've spent much time on, and that includes windows, mac, and linux specific support forums and community sites.
Gold-farming and selling ingame items/money for real world money is expressly forbidden in the terms of service every player agrees to when they sign up to play WoW and many other MMOGs.
It is "illegal". Those of us who feel that buying gold is cheating/immoral don't have to make a moral argument. We can simply point to the ToS.
The game is rated Teen and not Mature. I imagine that the Teen rating limits the sexual content of the game, and blizzard's Terms of Service reflect that rating by also restricting people's ability to discuss sex and sexuality in game.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if your character is Gay/Straight. World of Warcraft is not supposed to be a game in which sex and sexuality is a defining aspect of a character. I wonder how you are supposed to recruit for a Gay/Lesbian guild while not being allowed to discuss sex in game?
Anyway, the "why?" is the Teen rating. Blizzard may need to work on the "how?" especially since they seem to be just pissing more people off with their current policy of "Don't ask, don't tell."
I don't think the average computer user is very interested in "how hard disks work". I don't think most people care about "how" their TV works, or "how" their car works.
For the vast majority of users( not IT or CS people ), computers are just tools. Because of the increasing complexity of cars very few people are expected to know enough about their car to service it themselves. I think that computers are headed in the same direction, if they aren't already there. The average non-it/non-cs person is not going to be dealing with
the hardware directly, but instead dealing with the interface.
The "average" user isn't concerned about how the components work. Instead, they're interested in how to make their computer perform a certain task. I think you can write a book like this and find that your intended audience has little to no motivation to read details about the internal workings of their computer
I certainly understand the frustration of trying to explain something to a non-techy family member or friend and having their eyes glaze over. However, to solve that problem you have to try to express yourself in a way that actually addresses how they(the non-techy) think about computers. In my opinion, that means focusing on tasks, what they want to accomplish, rather then just descriptions of how the pieces work. Do they need more space to store photos?(Storage Capacity, kilobytes, partitions) Does it take forever to copy files?(System Bus, drive access times and transfer rates, etc). Depending on the task you can introduce the basic concepts associated with it and how they might solve a problem or actually accomplish something with the PC.
Even the Windows kernel developers rejected them as a bad idea. Don't do it. Don't accept any patch that allows it.
Yeah, every major design decision in the Linux kernel has been based on the design of the Windows kernel. Windows is such a stable and bug free system that they've never made design mistakes!
Whether it's worth responding to this article or not, that's a frightening attitude.
It is ridiculous to wait until someone tries to (do something harmful) pass a law banning videogames before you speak up. By the time that popular opinion has moved people to act it is too late to really do much about the situation.
Yes, columnists can generate FUD pretty fast, but it takes time for an idea to really set in.
I think that part of what is preventing "something harmful" from happening is the constant exchange between two camps for and against videogames. If the pro-game faction stopped speaking up (until people consider doing "something harmful"), that's when these "harmful" things would be most likely to happen.
Another way of looking at it would be that simply telling people that videogames are violent and that cause violence is "something harmful", because it shifts opinion towards banning or placing controls on games.
Tortoise SVN is a version of the subversion client server that integrates with windows 2000, XP.
Right click on a file or folder to check it in, create a repository and just about everything else. It's actually very simple to use and you get all the power of a Subversion.
Verisign (One of the companies that owns major pieces of the internets backbone ), decided a month or so ago to try and route web requests to their pages.
Since they sell domain names, if you typed in a url that doesn't exist they would forward you to one of their pages so you could buy the URL.
Anyway, this _WAS_ a big deal. It's since been "resolved".
Anyway, my understanding is that there is a standards body, ICANN, and then a number of companies/gov/orgs that own the phsyical infrastructure. In general, most of these people follow ICANN rules. In fact I think threats of sanctions by ICANN and massive public outrage caused Verisign to stop screwing with DNS.
Linux has in the last few years really started to get the attention of big corps, and just the other day Microsoft finally admitted that linux has them scared. I also know that days after this whole SCO thing started MS was one of the first companies to purchase licensing rights to SCO IP.
I don't believe it's a coincidence. MS has been looking for an opportunity like this for quite a while. Companies that were unsure about linux because of issues like support and licensing will be scared away by garbage like this, concerned that at any moment they'll be required to license something that was supposed to be Free.
This is exactly what the oponents of Free/Open Source software need to try to stop linuxs growth into the marketplace. Scare tactics and vague claims. I doubt many people will be switching over to linux in the coming months, and companies considering it are going to have second thoughts. Linux vendors now have to attempt to reassure people that the product they are selling is really what it's supposed to be.
Anyway, this is ridiculous. This is extremely damaging to the image of Linux as a platform, and any business attempting to make money off of linux should start screaming for SCO's blood now. Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, IBM, Google,... etc. This needs to be stopped, and the sooner the better.
No, Human lives should not be worth more then anything else. My life or yours is not that valuable in and of itself. I believe that principles and ideas are worth far more then material goods, and peoples lives. I think people underestimate the value of freedom because quite a few of us actually have it. I personally don't see what value my life would have if I couldn't live it the way I wished.
That fact that some people abuse the system doesn't make the system bad. If some of us aren't allowed to challenge the system, break or bend the law, we all lose a significant portion of my freedom. I may not wish to kill people, but the fact of the matter is given an opportunity, I could. That is an element of being free. I don't see how you could protect everyone, all the time, and have a free society. I don't see how you can enforce the laws 100% of the time, to the very letter of the law, and still have a free society.
Sometimes, principles are more important than lives, more important then money, and certainly more important then some corporation's profit margin.
Essentially what your saying is that there is a cost associated with free speech, and that at some point, the cost of all those pirated materials will outweight the benefit of free speech for people who have none.
It's very easy to decide that you don't care about freedom because you can't put dollar values on it. However there is no more valuable "commodity" then freedom. Freedom of speech outweighs any amount of illegal filesharing. Copyright infringement cuts into the sales of business (both large and small), and that can be a very serious problem. But regardless of how bad this problem might become it is unacceptable to restrict free speech.
Why don't they give out sacks of Golden Delicious apples with every purchase?
Why don't they stop selling computers and start selling expensive toasters?
Have you noticed that you can run plenty of windows AND GNU/linux apps on mac os through compatibility layers like virtual pc, vmware, etc, through official support(Microsoft Office, and unfortunately IE), and through the darwin core?
400Mb/s is 400Mbits/s / 8 bits = 50 Megabytes/s...
Harddrives have been running at 66 Megabyte transfer rates forever. I think even old externel firewire drives are running at 66 Megabytes/s. Most modern harddrives run at 100 Megabytes a second, which is much closer to 800Mb/s firewire.
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6 Games is 300 dollars. The controller is 60.
If Microsoft doesn't drop it's price on the PS3 release date I'd be very surprised.
That said, Microsoft isn't about to shoot itself in the foot by telling people that a price drop will happen. If they say, "Nov 17th we will drop our price $50US", then people will stop buying 360s until Nov 17th. Microsoft wants people to keep on buying normally up until that point and the best way to do that is to keep people believing that no price drop is happening.
This is a very good point!
The people you meet on IRC/Forums are not there because they're being paid, but instead because they're getting help themselves, or simply just chatting. It's very common to try to help people who's problems are more interesting or deemed easier to solve over those with more complex or ill-defined problems.
That doesn't excuse rudeness and elitism, it's just something to keep in mind. You will find these elitists on any forum or chat for most software and operating systems. It's not a matter of "you get what you pay for" either, simply human nature when we're given the anonymity of the internet to really make us fearless.
You answered your own question. People hit up IRC for answers because:
Not all IRC channels are created equal, but many of them are full of people who are really just interested showing off how much they know by "helping" other people.
I think your average l33t kiddie's instinctual reaction to being asked a question to which he does not know the answer is to puff up and make himself appear bigger and more threatening. Admitting that they don't know the answer or aren't familiar with that kernel/server/programing language would be devastating for their fragile egos.
Oh, and to summarize the article: People on IRC/Forums, cloaked in the anonynmity the internet provides, were rude to other people. What's the big deal? I've found this same elitist "RTFM, n00b!" attitude on every forum or public IRC channel i've spent much time on, and that includes windows, mac, and linux specific support forums and community sites.
Gold-farming and selling ingame items/money for real world money is expressly forbidden in the terms of service every player agrees to when they sign up to play WoW and many other MMOGs.
It is "illegal". Those of us who feel that buying gold is cheating/immoral don't have to make a moral argument. We can simply point to the ToS.
Aside from the operating system... And the applications... And the tight integration of hardware and software...
The game is rated Teen and not Mature. I imagine that the Teen rating limits the sexual content of the game, and blizzard's Terms of Service reflect that rating by also restricting people's ability to discuss sex and sexuality in game.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if your character is Gay/Straight. World of Warcraft is not supposed to be a game in which sex and sexuality is a defining aspect of a character. I wonder how you are supposed to recruit for a Gay/Lesbian guild while not being allowed to discuss sex in game?
Anyway, the "why?" is the Teen rating. Blizzard may need to work on the "how?" especially since they seem to be just pissing more people off with their current policy of "Don't ask, don't tell."
I don't think the average computer user is very interested in "how hard disks work". I don't think most people care about "how" their TV works, or "how" their car works.
For the vast majority of users( not IT or CS people ), computers are just tools. Because of the increasing complexity of cars very few people are expected to know enough about their car to service it themselves. I think that computers are headed in the same direction, if they aren't already there. The average non-it/non-cs person is not going to be dealing with the hardware directly, but instead dealing with the interface.
The "average" user isn't concerned about how the components work. Instead, they're interested in how to make their computer perform a certain task. I think you can write a book like this and find that your intended audience has little to no motivation to read details about the internal workings of their computer
I certainly understand the frustration of trying to explain something to a non-techy family member or friend and having their eyes glaze over. However, to solve that problem you have to try to express yourself in a way that actually addresses how they(the non-techy) think about computers. In my opinion, that means focusing on tasks, what they want to accomplish, rather then just descriptions of how the pieces work. Do they need more space to store photos?(Storage Capacity, kilobytes, partitions) Does it take forever to copy files?(System Bus, drive access times and transfer rates, etc). Depending on the task you can introduce the basic concepts associated with it and how they might solve a problem or actually accomplish something with the PC.
I'd mod you up if I could.
How have children been targetted in Grand Theft Auto advertising? Is Joe Camel playing Grand Theft Auto now?
GTA Player:
"I will steal his car and run him over with it."
Quake Player:
"I will frag him with my rocket launcher."
Whether it's worth responding to this article or not, that's a frightening attitude.
It is ridiculous to wait until someone tries to (do something harmful) pass a law banning videogames before you speak up. By the time that popular opinion has moved people to act it is too late to really do much about the situation.
Yes, columnists can generate FUD pretty fast, but it takes time for an idea to really set in.
I think that part of what is preventing "something harmful" from happening is the constant exchange between two camps for and against videogames. If the pro-game faction stopped speaking up (until people consider doing "something harmful"), that's when these "harmful" things would be most likely to happen.
Another way of looking at it would be that simply telling people that videogames are violent and that cause violence is "something harmful", because it shifts opinion towards banning or placing controls on games.
Tortoise SVN is a version of the subversion client server that integrates with windows 2000, XP.
Right click on a file or folder to check it in, create a repository and just about everything else. It's actually very simple to use and you get all the power of a Subversion.
Verisign (One of the companies that owns major pieces of the internets backbone ), decided a month or so ago to try and route web requests to their pages. Since they sell domain names, if you typed in a url that doesn't exist they would forward you to one of their pages so you could buy the URL. Anyway, this _WAS_ a big deal. It's since been "resolved". Anyway, my understanding is that there is a standards body, ICANN, and then a number of companies/gov/orgs that own the phsyical infrastructure. In general, most of these people follow ICANN rules. In fact I think threats of sanctions by ICANN and massive public outrage caused Verisign to stop screwing with DNS.
Yeah, kind of like it is now.
Mod this guy up.
This is the best explanation I've seen so far. Good Job.
I don't believe it's a coincidence. MS has been looking for an opportunity like this for quite a while. Companies that were unsure about linux because of issues like support and licensing will be scared away by garbage like this, concerned that at any moment they'll be required to license something that was supposed to be Free.
This is exactly what the oponents of Free/Open Source software need to try to stop linuxs growth into the marketplace. Scare tactics and vague claims. I doubt many people will be switching over to linux in the coming months, and companies considering it are going to have second thoughts. Linux vendors now have to attempt to reassure people that the product they are selling is really what it's supposed to be.
Anyway, this is ridiculous. This is extremely damaging to the image of Linux as a platform, and any business attempting to make money off of linux should start screaming for SCO's blood now. Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, IBM, Google, ... etc. This needs to be stopped, and the sooner the better.
No, Human lives should not be worth more then anything else. My life or yours is not that valuable in and of itself. I believe that principles and ideas are worth far more then material goods, and peoples lives. I think people underestimate the value of freedom because quite a few of us actually have it. I personally don't see what value my life would have if I couldn't live it the way I wished. That fact that some people abuse the system doesn't make the system bad. If some of us aren't allowed to challenge the system, break or bend the law, we all lose a significant portion of my freedom. I may not wish to kill people, but the fact of the matter is given an opportunity, I could. That is an element of being free. I don't see how you could protect everyone, all the time, and have a free society. I don't see how you can enforce the laws 100% of the time, to the very letter of the law, and still have a free society. Sometimes, principles are more important than lives, more important then money, and certainly more important then some corporation's profit margin.
By any factor you'd like to define!
Essentially what your saying is that there is a cost associated with free speech, and that at some point, the cost of all those pirated materials will outweight the benefit of free speech for people who have none.
It's very easy to decide that you don't care about freedom because you can't put dollar values on it. However there is no more valuable "commodity" then freedom. Freedom of speech outweighs any amount of illegal filesharing. Copyright infringement cuts into the sales of business (both large and small), and that can be a very serious problem. But regardless of how bad this problem might become it is unacceptable to restrict free speech.
Why don't they give out sacks of Golden Delicious apples with every purchase?
Why don't they stop selling computers and start selling expensive toasters?
Have you noticed that you can run plenty of windows AND GNU/linux apps on mac os through compatibility layers like virtual pc, vmware, etc, through official support(Microsoft Office, and unfortunately IE), and through the darwin core?
AMD (Opteron), Intel (Itanium/Itanium 2)...
These guys have had 64 bit chipsets for months and years respectively. They are also multiprocessing.
Plus, this is RUMOR, the AMD and Intel chips are REALITY.
Harddrives have been running at 66 Megabyte transfer rates forever. I think even old externel firewire drives are running at 66 Megabytes/s. Most modern harddrives run at 100 Megabytes a second, which is much closer to 800Mb/s firewire.
:~)
Your logic on this is kind of circular. Essentially everyone who responds to anyone will be a zealot...
It is a discussion/news site last I checked...