He is taking the side opposite of corporate fatcats, people who could potentially employ him for large sums of money. If he's doing this for the dough, he's not very smart.
The fatcat hires the experienced trial attorney.
It is a world all it's own.
You have to prove yourself again and again and again.
You can be very, very good at preparing a brief and very, very bad in presenting a case before a jury.
Sometimes you just crap out.
Your client will insist on taking the stand - the client with her own theory of the case, her own spin on the facts.
The client who can't shut up.
There is no way to teach this stuff. You have to learn it from experience.
I got a check engine light on a 2 month old car while driving across country with no dealer for 800 miles. I chose to risk it rather than have to pay a local mechanic to look at it.
You gambled. You won. This time.
Now tell me why you chose a car which has one dealer every 1000 miles. 30 grand does not buy you a Rolls-Royce.
Some of my favorite moments of gaming life were in the Thief and System Shock (no, not Bioshock) mythologies.
Infocom's text adventures drew from every genre in popular fiction, except perhaps the gangster story and the western.
Sierra and Lucas in their prime had a similar range.
"The Dig" was a science problem story - the sort of thing Arthur Clarke cut his teeth on - set in an environment heart-breaking in its loneliness and isolation.
Later games like "Grim Fandango" and "Planescape: Torment" were true journeys of the soul.
The console game designer has played animal characters against their comic stereotypes.
Children had at least a nominal presence as NPCs in "Fallout." It shapes your thinking and decisions in very subtle ways.
"Bioshock" takes you a place that you wish you had the time to explore more fully. There can be greater rewards and deeper satisfaction to be found in a game than the body count.
Sounds like the mechanism by which Microsoft sells one version of Vista to all users, and lets users upgrade to higher-tier flavors of the OS after cash changes hands.
Well, of course, it does.
That's what it's for.
Windows as a client OS cuts across a great many markets. The boundaries are often fuzzy.
The upgrade is there if the user wants it.
Everyone else saves a few pennies when only version of the OEM system disk has to kept in inventory.
I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
The motive for the 3-Apps thing - which is not as constricting as the geek makes it sound - is to make life easier for the inexperienced third world user running Windows on a platform far less robust than the geek's "bare bones" Atom netbook with a gig of RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
If the functionality is beyond the purchaser's need or desire, why do you need to lock it away from them? If they have to pay you extra for that functionality, doesn't that imply that they really did need and desire those rights or functionality.
You distribute all versions of your software on a single disk.
The Home. Small Business. Enterprise. Etc.
The user [or more likely. the OEM manufacturer or the custom system builder] unlocks the appropriate components as required.
It's simple and it's cheap.
When storage space doesn't come at a premium everything can be pre-loaded and - mostly - pre-configured.
The user doesn't need to reinstall the OS to upgrade his version - he only needs to reboot.
The smart way to do this is to offer a free trial of the upgrade at an attractively discounted price - with a graceful fall-back if he decides not to keep it.
Now if we could just get Dell to put a little drop down option in its OS & Productivity Suite selection to have an option for "Ubuntu & Open Office (subtract $200)" on all of their computers
This is the world of mass market retail:
There are marketing costs. There are inventory costs. There are costs for returns, service and support.
Maintaining a dual inventory and support structure is really, really, expensive.
Linux delivers little or nothing in after-market sales.
Linux is firmly anchored in the retailer's mind as a bottom-feeder.
The Ark of the Covenant would be easier to find than the mid-line OEM Linux PC desktop bundle with monitor and printer.
WalMart has never, ever, been able to consistently position OEM Linux at $50 below Windows.
$200 is fantasy.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, MS Office is yours for the price of the media plus S&H.
If you have student ID, it is $60.
Office Home and Student retail boxed with a three seat license is $90-$125 with a three seat license.
one of the biggest hurdles keeping Linux our of the domestic desktop market is the developers apparently can't put themselves in the shoes of the average user. In my personal experience they tend to hold the end user in contempt
Apple and Microsoft both began with the client. The stand-alone PC designed for the non-technical end-user.
Both have strong roots in the home market. In primary and secondary education. In mom-and-pop small business.
They clawed their way up. They didn't work their down.
It's a hobby system that's cute to fiddle with then turn it off when I want to do "real" work? Like working with..an Oracle database, running on a Linux machine. Is my Tivo a "hobby" system? I guess I shouldn't expect much from the routers, phones, and other devices that have put Linux at the core of their stack. I mean, it's just a hobby, right?
All you have done is describe heavily customized and professionally maintained systems that serve a single clearly defined purpose.
It really is funny you should say that, especially considering most Windows installations don't "just work" at all, unless you venture out onto the internet to scrounge up drivers for all the hardware Linux picks up automatically.
Fully loaded and ready to roll.
The OEM system bundle is the gold standard here - and the first place users look for updated drivers is the manufacturer's website.
The geek is deaf, dumb and blind to the realities of the market.
Then you have to install all of the various types of software in Windows that come already installed with virtually any Linux distro so that you can actually do something with your computer.
The Linux user has access to his distro's ready-to-run program library.
The Windows user has access to dozens, hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of program libraries.
He can shop Amazon or Download.com.
He can click over to gog.com. for his fill-up of classic PC games, updated for Vista - at $6 and $10.
The root-canal extraction that is Sourceforge.net will occasionally expose a gem like ScummVM.
Sci-fi is Hollywood entertainment with explosions, technobabble, and spaceships that make rumbling sounds as they travel through space. SF (speculative fiction) is something that might contain a bit of actual intelligence hidden inside.
What you are more likely to get is a self-indulgent and tendentious lecture thinly disguised as a story.
If it's Dangerous Visions and the sixties, the subject will be incest.
I have never been able to focus on this stuff without my mind drifting off into thoughts about marked cards and loaded dice.
The most intractable problem for Linux as a client OS is that it arrived too late.
The mass market desktop in 2009 runs 64 bit Vista Home Premium on a quad core CPU with 4 to 8 GB RAM.
The geek will rant - but this is fundamentally a very solid platform on which to build.
The budget dual core Atom netbook with Win 7 and ION graphics is just down the road. The form factor is attractive, the price is right - and you can even play games.
If UNIX is more to your taste and you want a mature and standardized GUI, than Apple has you covered.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price.
The original Lisa had a 5 mHz 68000 series CPU, 1 MB of RAM and two Apple FileWare 871 KB 5 1/2" floppy disk drives.
It was not - let us say - the most responsive system Apple ever built.
A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself: a separate development OS was required called Lisa Workshop. An engineer runs the two OSes in a dual-boot config, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Apple Lisa
The Lisa belongs in the same family line as the dedicated word processor. But a $10,000 PC on every office desktop was never in the cards.
I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too...
Microsoft doesn't sell an office suite.
It sells MS Office as part of a working environment that scales smoothly from the home user to the enterprise.
Microsoft has client side solutions.
It has server side solutions. It has web based solutions.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft the home-use copy of MS Office is the price of the media plus S&H. Microsoft Software Assurance
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings
Today's sixty-something gamer doesn't like being patronized either.
If you began with the PC in your thirties, you entered a game market that remarkably diverse and often explicitly "adult."
But not as the adolescent imagines it. You can't shoot your way through a Lucas adventure or a Maxis simulation.
For a senior, the most satisfying moments in a stealth shooter, an RPG or strategy game, come when you sense the most economical solution. You aren't role playing as 007 in his prime - you are playing the aging, wounded Batman of The Dark Night Returns or perhaps the very young Carrie Kelley.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless Microsoft has some secret feature in Windows 7 designed for netbooks that nobody's heard of, then Linux could reclaim the lead in netbook OS's.
Dual-core Atom CPU with NVIDIA ION graphics. 1-2 GB RAM. 160 GB HDD. 9" display or better.
With specs like those you don't need a secret feature.
You only need to say that your Win 7 netbook runs pretty much everything 32 bit Windows. Hardware and software.
Including enough games to keep you occupied for the next five years.
He is taking the side opposite of corporate fatcats, people who could potentially employ him for large sums of money. If he's doing this for the dough, he's not very smart.
The fatcat hires the experienced trial attorney.
It is a world all it's own.
You have to prove yourself again and again and again.
You can be very, very good at preparing a brief and very, very bad in presenting a case before a jury.
Sometimes you just crap out.
Your client will insist on taking the stand - the client with her own theory of the case, her own spin on the facts.
The client who can't shut up.
There is no way to teach this stuff. You have to learn it from experience.
In a free market, ANY mechanic would work on ANY car he/she felt like figuring out.
You are not asking Gus to take a look at your Ford V-8.
I don't want the mechanic who thinks he can figure it out. I want the mechanic who knows what to do.
I got a check engine light on a 2 month old car while driving across country with no dealer for 800 miles. I chose to risk it rather than have to pay a local mechanic to look at it.
You gambled. You won. This time.
Now tell me why you chose a car which has one dealer every 1000 miles. 30 grand does not buy you a Rolls-Royce.
Doesn't seems strange to you that only Microsoft handle it very differently?
How many players are there in this game?
How many independent implementations of ODF?
What do you mean by "very" differently?
Any difference would seem to be a problem if the standard is as mature and complete as the geek proclaims it to be.
Which leads directly to my next question:
Is ODF flexible enough to allow - to encourage - the evolution of new types of documents? New ways of working with documents.
The geek tends to perceive the office environment as static.
His thinking tends to be narrowly focused and often quite superficial: X as a replacement for Word, Y as a replacement for Outlook.
His thinking tends to be retro.
It's telling when the Big Corp bets on The Ribbon and wins.
Some of my favorite moments of gaming life were in the Thief and System Shock (no, not Bioshock) mythologies.
Infocom's text adventures drew from every genre in popular fiction, except perhaps the gangster story and the western.
Sierra and Lucas in their prime had a similar range.
"The Dig" was a science problem story - the sort of thing Arthur Clarke cut his teeth on - set in an environment heart-breaking in its loneliness and isolation.
Later games like "Grim Fandango" and "Planescape: Torment" were true journeys of the soul.
The console game designer has played animal characters against their comic stereotypes.
Children had at least a nominal presence as NPCs in "Fallout." It shapes your thinking and decisions in very subtle ways.
"Bioshock" takes you a place that you wish you had the time to explore more fully. There can be greater rewards and deeper satisfaction to be found in a game than the body count.
Sounds like the mechanism by which Microsoft sells one version of Vista to all users, and lets users upgrade to higher-tier flavors of the OS after cash changes hands.
Well, of course, it does.
That's what it's for.
Windows as a client OS cuts across a great many markets. The boundaries are often fuzzy.
The upgrade is there if the user wants it.
Everyone else saves a few pennies when only version of the OEM system disk has to kept in inventory.
My TV set won't pass on the full digital audio from my Blu-Ray player's HDMI output to my amp
I haven't heard of a set-up like this.
If the receiver can handle HDMI it can handle the pass-through.
One HDMI cable "down" for broadcast TV. One HDMI cable "up" for everything else.
I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
The motive for the 3-Apps thing - which is not as constricting as the geek makes it sound - is to make life easier for the inexperienced third world user running Windows on a platform far less robust than the geek's "bare bones" Atom netbook with a gig of RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
If the functionality is beyond the purchaser's need or desire, why do you need to lock it away from them? If they have to pay you extra for that functionality, doesn't that imply that they really did need and desire those rights or functionality.
You distribute all versions of your software on a single disk.
The Home. Small Business. Enterprise. Etc.
The user [or more likely. the OEM manufacturer or the custom system builder] unlocks the appropriate components as required.
It's simple and it's cheap.
When storage space doesn't come at a premium everything can be pre-loaded and - mostly - pre-configured.
The user doesn't need to reinstall the OS to upgrade his version - he only needs to reboot.
The smart way to do this is to offer a free trial of the upgrade at an attractively discounted price -
with a graceful fall-back if he decides not to keep it.
Microsoft sold 5 year bonds at a 1% premium over good-as-gold short term treasury notes.
$2 billion at 3% a year.
You can not borrow money much more cheaply than that.
Meanwhile it still holds $25 billion in interest bearing accounts. You do the math.
Now if we could just get Dell to put a little drop down option in its OS & Productivity Suite selection to have an option for "Ubuntu & Open Office (subtract $200)" on all of their computers
This is the world of mass market retail:
There are marketing costs. There are inventory costs. There are costs for returns, service and support.
Maintaining a dual inventory and support structure is really, really, expensive.
Linux delivers little or nothing in after-market sales.
Linux is firmly anchored in the retailer's mind as a bottom-feeder.
The Ark of the Covenant would be easier to find than the mid-line OEM Linux PC desktop bundle with monitor and printer.
WalMart has never, ever, been able to consistently position OEM Linux at $50 below Windows.
$200 is fantasy.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, MS Office is yours for the price of the media plus S&H.
If you have student ID, it is $60.
Office Home and Student retail boxed with a three seat license is $90-$125 with a three seat license.
The real expense is consumables: ink and paper.
one of the biggest hurdles keeping Linux our of the domestic desktop market is the developers apparently can't put themselves in the shoes of the average user. In my personal experience they tend to hold the end user in contempt
Apple and Microsoft both began with the client. The stand-alone PC designed for the non-technical end-user.
Both have strong roots in the home market. In primary and secondary education. In mom-and-pop small business.
They clawed their way up. They didn't work their down.
It's a hobby system that's cute to fiddle with then turn it off when I want to do "real" work? Like working with..an Oracle database, running on a Linux machine. Is my Tivo a "hobby" system? I guess I shouldn't expect much from the routers, phones, and other devices that have put Linux at the core of their stack. I mean, it's just a hobby, right?
All you have done is describe heavily customized and professionally maintained systems that serve a single clearly defined purpose.
The router routes.
Interaction with end-users is trivial.
It really is funny you should say that, especially considering most Windows installations don't "just work" at all, unless you venture out onto the internet to scrounge up drivers for all the hardware Linux picks up automatically.
Fully loaded and ready to roll.
The OEM system bundle is the gold standard here - and the first place users look for updated drivers is the manufacturer's website.
The geek is deaf, dumb and blind to the realities of the market.
Then you have to install all of the various types of software in Windows that come already installed with virtually any Linux distro so that you can actually do something with your computer.
The Linux user has access to his distro's ready-to-run program library.
The Windows user has access to dozens, hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of program libraries.
He can shop Amazon or Download.com.
He can click over to gog.com. for his fill-up of classic PC games, updated for Vista - at $6 and $10.
The root-canal extraction that is Sourceforge.net will occasionally expose a gem like ScummVM.
I think that's a little over the top.
Perhaps so.
Desktop without monitor
But Windows has solid OEM entries at every price point. With Linux, it's often more a question mark.
A lot of gadgets will be competing for attention in the space the geek sees for the ARM.
The e-book reader. The mp3 player. The hand-held video game. The Jitterbug cell phone, and so on.
Sci-fi is Hollywood entertainment with explosions, technobabble, and spaceships that make rumbling sounds as they travel through space. SF (speculative fiction) is something that might contain a bit of actual intelligence hidden inside.
What you are more likely to get is a self-indulgent and tendentious lecture thinly disguised as a story.
If it's Dangerous Visions and the sixties, the subject will be incest.
I have never been able to focus on this stuff without my mind drifting off into thoughts about marked cards and loaded dice.
I love Linux, but sadly I agree with him.
The most intractable problem for Linux as a client OS is that it arrived too late.
The mass market desktop in 2009 runs 64 bit Vista Home Premium on a quad core CPU with 4 to 8 GB RAM.
The geek will rant -
but this is fundamentally a very solid platform on which to build.
The budget dual core Atom netbook with Win 7 and ION graphics is just down the road. The form factor is attractive, the price is right - and you can even play games.
If UNIX is more to your taste and you want a mature and standardized GUI, than Apple has you covered.
It's tough to find any breathing room here.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price.
The original Lisa had a 5 mHz 68000 series CPU, 1 MB of RAM and two Apple FileWare 871 KB 5 1/2" floppy disk drives.
It was not - let us say - the most responsive system Apple ever built.
A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself: a separate development OS was required called Lisa Workshop. An engineer runs the two OSes in a dual-boot config, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Apple Lisa
The Lisa belongs in the same family line as the dedicated word processor. But a $10,000 PC on every office desktop was never in the cards.
I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too...
Microsoft doesn't sell an office suite.
It sells MS Office as part of a working environment that scales smoothly from the home user to the enterprise.
Microsoft has client side solutions.
It has server side solutions. It has web based solutions.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft the home-use copy of MS Office is the price of the media plus S&H. Microsoft Software Assurance
If you have student ID, the price is $60. The Ultimate Steal
Using the term "meatspace", automatically identifies you a hipster doofus in my book...
When I try a line like this, it's toasted: I don't know what YUI know
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings
Today's sixty-something gamer doesn't like being patronized either.
If you began with the PC in your thirties, you entered a game market that remarkably diverse and often explicitly "adult."
But not as the adolescent imagines it. You can't shoot your way through a Lucas adventure or a Maxis simulation.
For a senior, the most satisfying moments in a stealth shooter, an RPG or strategy game, come when you sense the most economical solution. You aren't role playing as 007 in his prime - you are playing the aging, wounded Batman of The Dark Night Returns or perhaps the very young Carrie Kelley.
Without gadgets. Without armor.
Using only her wits to survive.
I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.
I am less interested in how a file is saved than how in it is used.
The reasons for its creation.
MediaSentry is an unlicensed investigator. As such, any evidence they gained is inadmissable.
In a civil case?
In this jurisdiction?
The trial judge would seem to disagree.
So what do we know about IndianaKim?
He has account 1555547 on Slashdot - no older than his post. But he has been here before. The Slashdot geek in full paranoid flight in unmistakable.
Choosing your own nickname makes for a piss-poor disguise.
"westlake," for example, holds a double geographic clue to my own location and address. For bonus points, you might try guessing my password.
The lower case form is suggestive as well.
I live in the same county, but not the same city
I'd be strongly tempted to place IndianaKim in an upscale suburban tech-corridor - or island - anchored by The Big State U.
His center of gravity the metro core and not the rural county seat.
The document hot as a stove implies that the bearer is also hot as a stove.
They follow him, they find you.
I would call it even money that IndianaKim has already been fingered.
The geek worries about the fly outside the windowsill when the real danger are the wolves he led into the kitchen.