* viewing of a photograph of child abuse --> no one is hurt
try selling that argument to the parent or guardian of a sexually abused child and you may learn the real meaning of pain.
it is not a defense to the charge of receiving stolen goods that you were not the one holding a gun to the face of the clerk at the gas station.
it is not a defense to the chatge of possession of child pornography that you did not rape the child, you only paid the rapist for pictures of his crime.
remember when they outlawed quake? well we all know why... hitler played a lot of id games growing up - they don't want that to happen again.
The Nazis issued ceremonial daggers to the Hitler Youth.
The boys began training with mock rifles and grenades. Books and board game younger kids were all put into service of the regime. If Hitket had the tech of the video game, he would have used the tech of the video game.
Who says a computer has to do what someone else wants to be considered functional?
The executive at Target who sees a marketable product in OEM Windows. The buyers who keep Dell's consumer production lines running at full capacity 24/7.
does HP include a monitor with every single computer they sell? No? OH NOES! They're selling non-working computers!
Would you care to guess how many consumer PCs HP and Dell sell as full system bundles? With multifunction printer-scanner, wide-screen LCD monitor, etc., etc
given the choice between an HP with Windows for $1000 and an identical HP with Linux for $600, I think most consumers would pick Linux every time
Good lord. Even Walmart couldn't undercut OEM Windows on price. OEM Windows is priced for the mass market. Sales in the millions and tens of millions of units.
There is a twenty year backlist of MSDOS and Windows titles that should run just fine under 32 bit Vista. There are few genuine first-time buyers in the consumer market and many very real barriers to migration.
I think most non-gaming consumers would realize that OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim, and Thunderbird meet all their requirements.
Anything of interest to home users in FOSS gets ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app. FOSS is not a driver for the adoption of Linux. End of line.
If it's to be used as an appliance for basic web browsing, e-mail, word processing
The PC in the home has become more than the web, more than e-mail, more than games. The Geek understands nothing of this market.
wouldn't Linux be a better choice because everything not necessary for those tasks can be stripped the heck out?
Hell, no. This is simply the web appliance fallacy revisited. Your one-way ticket to liquidation.
The non-technical user does not want anything stripped away. He does not want to look under the hood. Ever. He wants a general-purpose machine that will adapt to his changing needs and interests without complaint. That he why he buys a system grotesquely overpowered for what the Geek thinks he needs.
While you need to go to a store to buy batteries and DVD for your non-products,
for an OS, you may not even need to go to the store. You could download one of many free Linux (or BSD or other) OS's many of which do not even need to be installed to function.
The fundamental flaw in all the arguments posted here is that the posters persist in thinking like Geeks.
The consumer PC market is a Geek-free zone. It has its own rules and values, which have been shaped by twenty-five --- near thirty years --- experience with the PC as a toy, an appliance and an office machine.
People know what they want and it isn't the stripped-down network appliance.
It isn't the "bare bones" PC. It isn't Heathkit, DIY electronics, twenty years dead. It is a rich, deep, software library, oriented from the beginning towards the needs and desires of ordinary people.
[Windows, not Linux, is the populist OS. Quite literally the OS of the marketplace, the thieves' bazaar.]
It is backwards compatibility. It is the powerful, affordable, OEM Windows system which benefits from enormous economies of scale in every aspect of production, marketing and distribution.
It isn't the Politically Correct which sells, and that is what is important to HP.
___
It is particularly ridiculous to think of the OS as a consumable like an ink jet cartridge or a ream of paper.
There are numerous people on this and other boards who would claim that a Microsoft Windows operating system is unsuitable for use in a consumer product.
Windows is overwhelmingly the OS of choice of the middle class.
The direct seller or big box retailer doesn't give a damn what the Geek thinks is a viable consumer product. He only knows what people are buying and it sure as hell ain't OEM Linux.
A PC without an OS can actually work, by allowing the installation of another OS without much hassle.
Consumers don't want and consumers won't accept any hassles. They expect their new system to launch as soon as they connect the damn cables. They expect to see Windows.
I order barebone machines all the time (Sun X2100's being a great example, they offer Solaris, SuSE, Red Hat, Windows or no OS). I can do the same from many vendors for desktop systems. Apparently selling machines without an OS is acceptable to a large number of consumers.
You are a Geek. You think in terms of purchase orders in units of 10, 100, 1000.
You are Dell or HP. You sign contracts for the entire output of a half-dozen Asian OEMs for the next five years. To help meet your commitments in the retail market for the Windows laptop.
No, I think it should be mandated that computers can be purchased OS-free for a price that is less than the price of one with the OS by a difference of the retail price of the OS. I think people should have the choice.
There are enormous economies of scale that come from bundling the hardware and Windows. Economies in production. Economies in sales and marketing.
That is precisely why OEM Linux has disappeared from Walmart.com.
The OEM Windows PC is still cheaper even after you pay the "Microsoft Tax." The most ridiculous of all Slashdot fancies and obsessions.
The cheapest Windows system I've seen advertised this holiday season was in-store special on an e-Machine. $200 USD after rebates including the upgrade to Vista.
You can get PC hardware at near-commodity prices for your Linux box for one reason only: because OEM Windows is genuinely mass-market, with an installed base in the tens and hundreds of millions.
He is an idiot. A PC will probably need an OS eventually, but it most definitely does NOT need to be included for the computer to operate. Anyone who's ever built their own machine can tell you that.
You market a PC as a consumer product you must ship it with an OEM system install.
System builders are insignificant in this market segment. The Geek is insignificant in this market segment.
The PC as a plug and play appliance has been the gold standard for users for over twenty-five years.
For example the "age of consent" in most western countries will vary from 14 years old to 18 years old with little rhyme or reason as to why it was set at a particular age, and many of your grandparents (or great grandparents) were married at 14 or 15 years old.
Your great grandfather went through several wives who died in childbirth. You marry young when you expect to die young.
Child pornography reaches down to the abuse of infants and toddlers.
There are no limits and there cannot be consent by any meaningful definition of the word.
I still don't understand the concept behind making images illegal. Granted, someone who wants to look at this kind of stuff might have a really messed up sense of morality, and probably reality as well, but I don't see how this is a legal issue before there is an actual victim.
Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult.
To claim that there is no victim is sophistry.
How do you even begin to bring peace to a child whose violation was recorded for distribution world-wide?
You can at least teach those who benefited from the crime something of its price.
a legal means of establishing the validity of thought crime
Orwell would have wryly amused but surely not surprised by this perversion of his own ideas.
The crime is the in the downloading of photographs of a sexually abused children. It is your acts and not your thoughts that land you in jail.
I'm not sure how much you know about XNA, but i have looked into it a bit. What it looks like to me is just a template for 2D, mostly side-scrolling games.
I will be going into a purchase freeze to let "everything else" sort itself out to see "who's on top in 2010 and beyond"
Buy now and the Vista upgrade will be free. You may want that DVD.
I'll take the odds that in 2010 Vista will be dominant in the home market and growing very strong elsewhere.
That anything in free and open source of interest to end users will be ported to Vista or begin as native Vista applications.
That anything in hardware of interest to end users will be shaped by Vista.
Ok so now we're in the 26th Century. Time travel, trading bodies on demand, immortality, whatnot. The further you push this stuff into the future the more it becomes a Science Fantasy Chick Flick Soap Opera. Everything will get magically solved with magic science at the end of every episode
You have two choices:
Four centuries of technological advances, contact with other civilizations and philosophies.
To which human society has remained stubbornly immune?
Think of the real-life changes which began with the invention of the birth control pill. Its impact on the Roman Catholic church, the authority of the Pope.
The alternative is to accept change and find a way to weave it intelligently into your story. This does not mean you need to settle for a sterile socialist Utopia in which ambition, wealth, malice and madness do not exist.
If MS can release a Blue Dragon equivalent every month, maybe they'd have a chance of getting a minority market share, but at this rate it's just going to be a lot of money wasted for almost no gain in market share.
If MS can hit the mark with games which sell well in both Japan and the West, the money won't be wasted.
It seems like the ages where a single console could be sufficient if you picked well...are over.
The Wii (or the Wii controller) seems perfect for casual social gaming.
If you crave the depth, the intensity, and opportunities for customization to be found in other genres, you will probably be looking at the PC, the XBox 360 and the PS3. Perhaps it is time to admit that one size doesn't fit all.
There are many other series out there, such as Stargate, Babylon 5, Firefly and so on.
Babylon 5 has a clear beginning, a middle, and an end.
Battlestar Galactica is prime time drama with strong writing and performance, and special effects are all the more impressive because they are used with such restraint. You do not have to be a sci-fi geek to appreciate what the series has to offer.
--- a steady diet of war stories does however become a little fatiguing.
Star Trek in its prime could be infectious and playful. You were at least spared Picard's weekly lectures on the higher morality of the Prime Directive:
sounding all to like like the bureaucrat's spin on FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina.
I look at space opera and sci-fi in anime and I see several interesting things:
The regular military is often far in the background. If it visible at all.
In a chaotic universe there are opportunities for ordinary people to shape extraordinary events. Why else would you abandon the certainties of the home world to take your chances in the outlands?
There is room for the exceptional talent. The wild talent. Humans do not collapse into self-doubt because they work in partnership with the beast and the machine. ---or because they feel love for the other. ---or because they have in some measure become the other.
These worlds are richly and fully alive. There are children. There are elders. Both can be a significant part of the story, without apologizing to anyone.
How was he killed? What there something mortally dangerous in what he was doing, or was it just some kind of wild fluke? I've heard of people being injured with fireworks, but I can honestly say this is the first time I've heard of anyone being killed.
Slashdot Mirror
try selling that argument to the parent or guardian of a sexually abused child and you may learn the real meaning of pain.
it is not a defense to the charge of receiving stolen goods that you were not the one holding a gun to the face of the clerk at the gas station.
it is not a defense to the chatge of possession of child pornography that you did not rape the child, you only paid the rapist for pictures of his crime.
The Nazis issued ceremonial daggers to the Hitler Youth.
The boys began training with mock rifles and grenades. Books and board game younger kids were all put into service of the regime. If Hitket had the tech of the video game, he would have used the tech of the video game.
It is not a problem for the buyer when competition for mass market Windows sales drives system prices down and specs up.
The executive at Target who sees a marketable product in OEM Windows. The buyers who keep Dell's consumer production lines running at full capacity 24/7.
does HP include a monitor with every single computer they sell? No? OH NOES! They're selling non-working computers!
Would you care to guess how many consumer PCs HP and Dell sell as full system bundles? With multifunction printer-scanner, wide-screen LCD monitor, etc., etc
Because no one in the consumer market will buy it. Simple as that.
Good lord. Even Walmart couldn't undercut OEM Windows on price. OEM Windows is priced for the mass market. Sales in the millions and tens of millions of units.
There is a twenty year backlist of MSDOS and Windows titles that should run just fine under 32 bit Vista. There are few genuine first-time buyers in the consumer market and many very real barriers to migration.
I think most non-gaming consumers would realize that OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim, and Thunderbird meet all their requirements.
Anything of interest to home users in FOSS gets ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app. FOSS is not a driver for the adoption of Linux. End of line.
The PC in the home has become more than the web, more than e-mail, more than games. The Geek understands nothing of this market.
wouldn't Linux be a better choice because everything not necessary for those tasks can be stripped the heck out?
Hell, no. This is simply the web appliance fallacy revisited. Your one-way ticket to liquidation.
The non-technical user does not want anything stripped away. He does not want to look under the hood. Ever. He wants a general-purpose machine that will adapt to his changing needs and interests without complaint. That he why he buys a system grotesquely overpowered for what the Geek thinks he needs.
They expect the movie to load and play without giving one second of thought to installing an OS to make it all work.
The fundamental flaw in all the arguments posted here is that the posters persist in thinking like Geeks.
The consumer PC market is a Geek-free zone. It has its own rules and values, which have been shaped by twenty-five --- near thirty years --- experience with the PC as a toy, an appliance and an office machine.
People know what they want and it isn't the stripped-down network appliance.
It isn't the "bare bones" PC. It isn't Heathkit, DIY electronics, twenty years dead. It is a rich, deep, software library, oriented from the beginning towards the needs and desires of ordinary people.
[Windows, not Linux, is the populist OS. Quite literally the OS of the marketplace, the thieves' bazaar.]
It is backwards compatibility. It is the powerful, affordable, OEM Windows system which benefits from enormous economies of scale in every aspect of production, marketing and distribution.
It isn't the Politically Correct which sells, and that is what is important to HP.
___
It is particularly ridiculous to think of the OS as a consumable like an ink jet cartridge or a ream of paper.
Windows is overwhelmingly the OS of choice of the middle class.
The direct seller or big box retailer doesn't give a damn what the Geek thinks is a viable consumer product. He only knows what people are buying and it sure as hell ain't OEM Linux.
Not in the numbers which matter.
Consumers don't want and consumers won't accept any hassles. They expect their new system to launch as soon as they connect the damn cables. They expect to see Windows.
Is it so obvious to the users who have bought PCs as plug and play appliances for the last twenty-five years?
Stop thinking like a Geek and start thinking like a Christmas shopper. Do you really want to spend Christmas Eve assembling that bicycle for your kid?
You are a Geek. You think in terms of purchase orders in units of 10, 100, 1000.
You are Dell or HP. You sign contracts for the entire output of a half-dozen Asian OEMs for the next five years. To help meet your commitments in the retail market for the Windows laptop.
There are enormous economies of scale that come from bundling the hardware and Windows. Economies in production. Economies in sales and marketing.
That is precisely why OEM Linux has disappeared from Walmart.com.
The OEM Windows PC is still cheaper even after you pay the "Microsoft Tax." The most ridiculous of all Slashdot fancies and obsessions.
The cheapest Windows system I've seen advertised this holiday season was in-store special on an e-Machine. $200 USD after rebates including the upgrade to Vista.
You can get PC hardware at near-commodity prices for your Linux box for one reason only: because OEM Windows is genuinely mass-market, with an installed base in the tens and hundreds of millions.
You market a PC as a consumer product you must ship it with an OEM system install.
System builders are insignificant in this market segment. The Geek is insignificant in this market segment. The PC as a plug and play appliance has been the gold standard for users for over twenty-five years.
He isn't the idiot. You are the idiot.
Your great grandfather went through several wives who died in childbirth. You marry young when you expect to die young.
Child pornography reaches down to the abuse of infants and toddlers.
There are no limits and there cannot be consent by any meaningful definition of the word.
Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult.
To claim that there is no victim is sophistry.
How do you even begin to bring peace to a child whose violation was recorded for distribution world-wide?
You can at least teach those who benefited from the crime something of its price.
a legal means of establishing the validity of thought crime
Orwell would have wryly amused but surely not surprised by this perversion of his own ideas.
The crime is the in the downloading of photographs of a sexually abused children. It is your acts and not your thoughts that land you in jail.
Not so.
In this entry-level XNA turtorial you build a 3D Flight Simulator: XNA Tutorial using C# > Series 2: Flightsim
Who the hell pays retail list for a legit copy of Office?
Buy now and the Vista upgrade will be free. You may want that DVD.
I'll take the odds that in 2010 Vista will be dominant in the home market and growing very strong elsewhere.
That anything in free and open source of interest to end users will be ported to Vista or begin as native Vista applications. That anything in hardware of interest to end users will be shaped by Vista.
You have two choices:
Four centuries of technological advances, contact with other civilizations and philosophies.
To which human society has remained stubbornly immune?
Think of the real-life changes which began with the invention of the birth control pill. Its impact on the Roman Catholic church, the authority of the Pope.
The alternative is to accept change and find a way to weave it intelligently into your story. This does not mean you need to settle for a sterile socialist Utopia in which ambition, wealth, malice and madness do not exist.
If MS can hit the mark with games which sell well in both Japan and the West, the money won't be wasted.
The Wii (or the Wii controller) seems perfect for casual social gaming.
If you crave the depth, the intensity, and opportunities for customization to be found in other genres, you will probably be looking at the PC, the XBox 360 and the PS3. Perhaps it is time to admit that one size doesn't fit all.
Babylon 5 has a clear beginning, a middle, and an end.
Battlestar Galactica is prime time drama with strong writing and performance, and special effects are all the more impressive because they are used with such restraint. You do not have to be a sci-fi geek to appreciate what the series has to offer.
--- a steady diet of war stories does however become a little fatiguing.
Star Trek in its prime could be infectious and playful. You were at least spared Picard's weekly lectures on the higher morality of the Prime Directive: sounding all to like like the bureaucrat's spin on FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina.
I look at space opera and sci-fi in anime and I see several interesting things:
The regular military is often far in the background. If it visible at all.
In a chaotic universe there are opportunities for ordinary people to shape extraordinary events. Why else would you abandon the certainties of the home world to take your chances in the outlands?
There is room for the exceptional talent. The wild talent. Humans do not collapse into self-doubt because they work in partnership with the beast and the machine. ---or because they feel love for the other. ---or because they have in some measure become the other.
These worlds are richly and fully alive. There are children. There are elders. Both can be a significant part of the story, without apologizing to anyone.
It happens now and again even to a pro. The Fireworks Alliance