Wal-mart already offers computers without windows (with linspire, last I checked), so that's not an issue.
You'll find OEM Linux at Walmart.com. Using a magnifying glass.
The line-up has shrunk to three or four desktops priced at a level that poses no threat to Dell or Windows.
Walmart has discovered that there is no more room at the bottom. The chain wants to see healthy after-market sales. It needs to reclaim the middle class shopper that has defected to competitors like Target.
The days of the Windows monoculture are starting to wane - Apple has a product that's more than competitive with Microsoft's offerings.
Half of Apple's revenues come from the iPod and iTunes.
The iPod reached the take-off point only after the launch of iTunes for Windows. Apple knows how to leverage Microsoft's dominance of the consumer market to gain some temporary advantage. But nothing it has tried in twenty-five years has in the long run had proven to be a serious threat to Redmond.
Microsoft escaped by the hair of their chin with a fortuitous changing of the guard shortly after losing their DOJ battle (Clinton and Democrats to Bush and the big-money-friendly Republicans). Clearly the new regime had no appetite for any meaningful punishment for Microsoft.
The one safe bet in American politics is that the Anti-Trust fever is short-lived.
The break-up of Standard Oil didn't save the independents. Customers stuck with the regional operating companies that delievered the Standard(ized) product they had come to rely on.
I have more than one computer on my home network and I share music between all of them. Are they going to get me too?
The rights agencies don't give a damn about your home network. They do give a damn when your are shareing files with 10 million of your best friends on Kazaa.
Perhaps not, but that's how you manage it. The studio producer used to say to the man with a cause: "If you have a message to deliver, take it to Western Union."
Your Mission: Get Under 50" in the article describes a stats page that tracks sites that have fewer than 50% page views from Microsoft Internet Explorer.
and of course it doesn't matter if the browser-neutral or IE oriented site gets 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 more hits.
The right technique to use would...perhaps display a little banner on top..with the text "Experiencing problems? See here" and a link to a page explaining why the site might look like crap when using IE.
Blogspot.com? Get a life.
In less time than it would take to read your little banner, your target audience will have moved on to another site.
OSX has plenty of other (better) choices. I mean, OSX now comes, out of the box, with perl, python, ruby, PHP and TCL installed, not to mention applescript, javascript and the various shell scripting languages (bash, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh). I'm sure there are more that somebody could point out as well.
But BASIC was supported by dozens of books and magazines, Creative Computing, Compute, etc., which made programming accesible and entertaining to a popular audience.
The Constitution and the concept of federalism has been spat at and vilified since 1933 (with how the Supreme Court has acted since FDR, you would have sworn that the 10th Amendment was repealed along with the 18th in 1933
The American system was first re-defined by the adoption of the Constitution. --- which gave the federal government substantial independent authority and resourses --- and then by the Civil War.
The destruction of the Southern Confederacy by force of arms. The abolition of slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment.
You can argue State Sovereignty until you are blue in the face. But in matters of ultimate consequence, it is the federal government, the government of the nation, which decides.
Yes but with this computer all the money is staying in China! China sees no reason to give billions of dollars of it's money to the US for Windows or for Intel/AMD cpus.
How many billions in exports is the Wintel platform worth to China?
When President Hu Jintao vists the United States, it is Bill Gates who greets him, Bill Gates he wants to see. Guess who did not bone up on China Malayasia News Online.
The world is flat.
It was Lenin's birthday on Sunday. The most important Communist Party meeting in five years was under way. And the star of the show was the world's most famous capitalist, Bill Gates.
The Vietnamese President, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister all excused themselves from the party meeting to have their pictures taken with Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, who has more star power in Vietnam than any of them.
but do you not have to show some sort of identification for welfare and such already? We're already issued identifications to hell and back. Between my drivers license and my social security number, there's probably a zillion people who have some sort of record of me.
In the U.S., fingerprint and photo ID for Medicaid, Food Stamps, public transportation, etc., has been the norm for ten years. For the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, ID is not an option, it is life and death.
You'll not find a lot of sympathy there for the Geek with the six-figure income who is afraid of Big Brother.
I dont care which one is safe i wouldnt download that crap anyway...
Modded insightful, but in no way helpful.
What you think is crap doesn't matter. You aren't the target audience.
The purist who compiles everything from source is one in a million. One in ten million.
But how many of this self-proclaimed geek elite actually take the time to read and understand a program of even the slightest complexity? Fewer still, I suspect.
Anyway, right now the high def dvds are looking a lot like lazerdisk, in the sense that it will be too expensive for anyone to buy it...Just because DVD was a success doesn't mean that the successor to DVD will be.
Adjusted for inflation, HD-DVD is entering the market at a lower price point than laserdisk.
The sane price point as the next-gen game consoles.
Few TVs in the '80s could do justice to laserdisk quality video and sound. HDTV is in 15-20% of american households.
Video recording still excites a younger generation, in the form of the PVR.
But the "Collector's Edition" DVD sells very well.
50 gigabytes of extras stamped into a cheap plastic disk will keep the format competitive.
HD-DVD video disks at Amazon are priced at $20-$25 for mainstream titles. You won't be paying a premium for HD rentals from Netflix.
Regular DVDs are going to be the reigning king for a while to come. Both formats will have a hard time gaining wide spread acceptance as long as the competitor is out there. Especially since in the movie arena, neither has any current offerings that provide consumers with a large tangible advantage over regular DVDs. Movies @ 1024i are pretty, but they are not hundreds of dollars prettier then Movies @ 480p...
But HDTV isn't your grandad's 21" RCA. Movies @ 1280i are more than "pretty" when projected on your $2000 56" Widescreen Panasonic The theatrical experience is what sells.
The players may cost hundreds of dollars. But HD-DVD at Amazon.com is $20-$25 for mainstream titles like Apollo 13. The conplete Firefly bundled with Serenity in HD will set you back $50.
HD in one in five homes in under five years. That's an astonishing rate of adoption. Not just for HD, but for very large wide-screen projection and multichannel digital sound. $1000-$2000 at entry level.
Amazon.com is shipping Phantom of the Opera on HD-DVD for $20, Serenity for $25. Apollo 13 for $25. You do not pay a premium for HD content if you buy from Amazon or rent from Netflix.
The potential domestic market for HD on disk is the same market which paid $290 million for tickets to see Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire in its initial theatrical release.
A big thing I emphasise is that these people are using computers, so they need to become literate in computer culture and start actually paying attention to geekdom, not because it interests them but because they NEED to know what a computer is and how to use it and that involves a lot more than just point and click.
Good luck, you'll need it.
Microsoft and Apple coin money because end-users tend to avoid the computer culture, Geek and Geekdom at all costs.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
an "M" rating means you should be able to interact with kids in a "meaningful way"? Are you a pedophile?
It is tempting to respond to a troll in kind.
Be that as it may.
Children in Fallout had the potential to become fully realized characters, challenging the player's ethics and judgement in new and interesting ways. Unexplored territory in an RPG.
Fertile ground for other storytellers:
J.K. Rowling. Lemony Snicket. Ron Miller's young female Robin in "The Dark Knight Returns." Jake in Stephen King's "Gunslinger" series. Max in James Patterson's "When the Wind Blows."
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
You can't "save" an old painting by taking a brush and repainting parts of it differently so that it appeals to modern tastes
This is what artists do all the time.
"Indiana Jones" is rooted in the Saturday afternoon serials of the 'forties.
"The Mask of Zorro" and "Pirates of the Carribean" were equally succesful in reviving interest in genres that had been dormant for sixty years.
Ron Miller recreated the iconic Batman in "The Dark Knight Returns." There would be "Sin City" and more to come.
I don't care if they don't like the fact that The Secret of Monkey Island doesn't come in 3D-smellovision, they just should be able to play it.
the horribly abortive attempt for Infocom to break out of the game business into the database arena with Cornerstone, which eventually brought the company down
Infocom stuck with text long after King's Quest.
The problem was and is that reading large blocks of text on screen and just isn't as much fun (for most people) as interacting with fully animated characters and environments.
Real Networks stock is up 38% since February. Rhapsody's subscription and download service is doing quite well, thank you very much, in a market dominated by iTunes.
Results for the first quarter of 2006 will be released next week, but right now, things are looking pretty damn good for Real.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
I have no problems with playing an original Command and Conquer that looks like the original Command and Conquer. The art is part of the game.
The children in Fallout help create the illusion that this was a real and populated world.
It raised the stakes for the player in a way that was emotionally satisfying and plausible, but you rarely got the chance to interact with the kids in any meaningful way.
I would have liked to have seen them used as something more than mere window-dressing, as interesting and suggestive a contribution as that was.
This is what an M-rating should give you the freedom to do.
You can't trust retro-gaming to save a game. You can't depend on emulation to save a game. You have to reach out to a new generation of players on some deeper level than that.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll find OEM Linux at Walmart.com. Using a magnifying glass.
The line-up has shrunk to three or four desktops priced at a level that poses no threat to Dell or Windows.
Walmart has discovered that there is no more room at the bottom. The chain wants to see healthy after-market sales. It needs to reclaim the middle class shopper that has defected to competitors like Target.
Linux doesn't figure in that equation.
Half of Apple's revenues come from the iPod and iTunes.
The iPod reached the take-off point only after the launch of iTunes for Windows. Apple knows how to leverage Microsoft's dominance of the consumer market to gain some temporary advantage. But nothing it has tried in twenty-five years has in the long run had proven to be a serious threat to Redmond.
The one safe bet in American politics is that the Anti-Trust fever is short-lived.
The break-up of Standard Oil didn't save the independents. Customers stuck with the regional operating companies that delievered the Standard(ized) product they had come to rely on.
The rights agencies don't give a damn about your home network. They do give a damn when your are shareing files with 10 million of your best friends on Kazaa.
So is pretty much everything Google, free and open source.
Perhaps not, but that's how you manage it. The studio producer used to say to the man with a cause: "If you have a message to deliver, take it to Western Union."
and of course it doesn't matter if the browser-neutral or IE oriented site gets 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 more hits.
IE 7 Beta 2 went public last week: Internet Explorer 7 : Home
Blogspot.com? Get a life.
In less time than it would take to read your little banner, your target audience will have moved on to another site.
But BASIC was supported by dozens of books and magazines, Creative Computing, Compute, etc., which made programming accesible and entertaining to a popular audience.
The American system was first re-defined by the adoption of the Constitution. --- which gave the federal government substantial independent authority and resourses --- and then by the Civil War.
The destruction of the Southern Confederacy by force of arms. The abolition of slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment.
You can argue State Sovereignty until you are blue in the face. But in matters of ultimate consequence, it is the federal government, the government of the nation, which decides.
load balancing is in the utility's interest. much cheaper, surely, then buying or building to meet peak demands,
How many billions in exports is the Wintel platform worth to China?
How much in foreign investment? Microsoft to invest heavily in China The People's Daily.
When President Hu Jintao vists the United States, it is Bill Gates who greets him, Bill Gates he wants to see. Guess who did not bone up on China Malayasia News Online.
The world is flat.
It was Lenin's birthday on Sunday. The most important Communist Party meeting in five years was under way. And the star of the show was the world's most famous capitalist, Bill Gates.
The Vietnamese President, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister all excused themselves from the party meeting to have their pictures taken with Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, who has more star power in Vietnam than any of them.
Gates finds it's just capital in Vietnam
In the U.S., fingerprint and photo ID for Medicaid, Food Stamps, public transportation, etc., has been the norm for ten years. For the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, ID is not an option, it is life and death.
You'll not find a lot of sympathy there for the Geek with the six-figure income who is afraid of Big Brother.
Modded insightful, but in no way helpful.
What you think is crap doesn't matter. You aren't the target audience.
The purist who compiles everything from source is one in a million. One in ten million.
But how many of this self-proclaimed geek elite actually take the time to read and understand a program of even the slightest complexity? Fewer still, I suspect.
Time to trade in that crystal ball.
Because Amazon's prices on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks are $20-$25 High Definition DVDs
Adjusted for inflation, HD-DVD is entering the market at a lower price point than laserdisk.
The sane price point as the next-gen game consoles.
Few TVs in the '80s could do justice to laserdisk quality video and sound. HDTV is in 15-20% of american households.
Video recording still excites a younger generation, in the form of the PVR.
But the "Collector's Edition" DVD sells very well.
50 gigabytes of extras stamped into a cheap plastic disk will keep the format competitive.
HD-DVD video disks at Amazon are priced at $20-$25 for mainstream titles. You won't be paying a premium for HD rentals from Netflix.
HDTV is in 19% of American households: Early Salvos in the High-Definition DVD Format War One in five in less than five years. It took ten years for color tv to become mass market.
But HDTV isn't your grandad's 21" RCA. Movies @ 1280i are more than "pretty" when projected on your $2000 56" Widescreen Panasonic The theatrical experience is what sells.
The players may cost hundreds of dollars. But HD-DVD at Amazon.com is $20-$25 for mainstream titles like Apollo 13. The conplete Firefly bundled with Serenity in HD will set you back $50.
A story in yesterday's New York Times put HDTV in 19% of American households. Early Salvos in the High-Definition DVD Format War
HD in one in five homes in under five years. That's an astonishing rate of adoption. Not just for HD, but for very large wide-screen projection and multichannel digital sound. $1000-$2000 at entry level.
Amazon.com is shipping Phantom of the Opera on HD-DVD for $20, Serenity for $25. Apollo 13 for $25. You do not pay a premium for HD content if you buy from Amazon or rent from Netflix.
The potential domestic market for HD on disk is the same market which paid $290 million for tickets to see Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire in its initial theatrical release.
Good luck, you'll need it.
Microsoft and Apple coin money because end-users tend to avoid the computer culture, Geek and Geekdom at all costs.
It is tempting to respond to a troll in kind.
Be that as it may.
Children in Fallout had the potential to become fully realized characters, challenging the player's ethics and judgement in new and interesting ways. Unexplored territory in an RPG.
Fertile ground for other storytellers:
J.K. Rowling. Lemony Snicket. Ron Miller's young female Robin in "The Dark Knight Returns." Jake in Stephen King's "Gunslinger" series. Max in James Patterson's "When the Wind Blows."
This is what artists do all the time.
"Indiana Jones" is rooted in the Saturday afternoon serials of the 'forties.
"The Mask of Zorro" and "Pirates of the Carribean" were equally succesful in reviving interest in genres that had been dormant for sixty years.
Ron Miller recreated the iconic Batman in "The Dark Knight Returns." There would be "Sin City" and more to come.
I don't care if they don't like the fact that The Secret of Monkey Island doesn't come in 3D-smellovision, they just should be able to play it.
But will they play it?
Infocom stuck with text long after King's Quest.
The problem was and is that reading large blocks of text on screen and just isn't as much fun (for most people) as interacting with fully animated characters and environments.
Real Networks stock is up 38% since February. Rhapsody's subscription and download service is doing quite well, thank you very much, in a market dominated by iTunes.
Results for the first quarter of 2006 will be released next week, but right now, things are looking pretty damn good for Real.
RealNetworks Benefiting From Video Offerings
The children in Fallout help create the illusion that this was a real and populated world.
It raised the stakes for the player in a way that was emotionally satisfying and plausible, but you rarely got the chance to interact with the kids in any meaningful way.
I would have liked to have seen them used as something more than mere window-dressing, as interesting and suggestive a contribution as that was.
This is what an M-rating should give you the freedom to do.
You can't trust retro-gaming to save a game. You can't depend on emulation to save a game. You have to reach out to a new generation of players on some deeper level than that.