It isn't the lack of originality in PC games, console games will always be rehashes with new twists. Mario, zelda, metroid, etc as examples will always be new rehashes of an old consept; the trick here is to add in new storylines and put twists on the gameplay.
PC games are evolving quite rapidly however. Planetside, a Massivly Multiplayer online FPS just came out and after being in the beta, I still think it needs a few more months of developement before it's worth any cash atall, however it's interesting what they are doing; realtime war between 3 sides and 30,000 or so people.
Morrowind, aka the elder scrolls 3, is another example, and although bethesda's engine for it is so shitty I wouldn't even plop down $10 US for this game and it's add-on packs, it is innovative and different.
The RTS genre is an example where the PC industry has not evolved, not since Total Annihilation and it's gazillion of mods or kickass UI. CC is just rehash after rehash of the same, crap game and people buy it over and over; generals is so god auful that I don't even know why anyone would buy it accept to look at the pretty graphics.
In any case, I'v got some problems with the PC games being released; most are still very much Beta, and a lot of game makers won't give you your money back if you buy it and it doesn't work. You can't take an opened CD back to the store and this needs to change. Companies are afraid of loosing sales becuase we'll burn the games and return them, but it pisses me off that the truth is that these assholes spend millions influencing game reviewers, and then some kid spends $50 of his x-mas dough on a game that crashes to the desktop every 5 minutes, and when he trys to return it he can't because the store labels him a criminal before he is one. They have a nice little advantage to everyone else in the fact that their products can't be returned on any basis unless the CD itself is physically broken.
What pisses me off even more is that other companies, *cough*Eidos*cough* like to release games in single-cd packages instead of the boxed forms, call it "special edition" and charge $19 for it, when really it's a demo of the game. Can't return that one either, and other companies do this too.
So, you can't blame people for deciding to pirate, that goes for PC and Console. If you rip people off, they will do the same back and since they ARE the people they will win.
1,000,000,000\$5 a box = 200,000,000 boxes at say,.75 cubic feet = 200,000,000 *.75 = 150,000,000 cubic feet of waste. Thats 28409.09 cubic miles of waste.
Seriously though, they are giving away software so they can get deductions and even if not, they also get money for the support they will be selling. And lord only knows what they are asking these npc's to sign.
Since when was taking apart my car ilegal? "trade secrets" and lisence agreements that demand you give up your right to take apart a piece of software are hogwash and total BS. I have the right to know what my computer is doing, because it's mine, and besides, I can still take apart the cotton gin and rigure out how it works, the same applies to software. Just becuase it's a computer and has thousands of magical circuts doesn't mean I can't learn how it ticks.
Removing one of the barriers that keeps people from learning what a program does is a great idea.
It's easy to claim your software is cheaper to operate when almost every school and goverment on earth that has a machine is running windows on it. People then buy what their kids suggest; windows machines, and everyone learns it. Along comes linux and in order to use it you've got to retrain your workforce to use it, and retrain anyone coming in to use it. Once Linux gets into schools, desktops, college tech classes etc and is widespread, then we will see demand for people who know it grow and this situation change quite a bit.
The only reason microsoft is screwed if that happens is that they are doing nothing to innovate or make their software better. On the contrary, they are selling windows at a huge profit to loose millions on other things like the x-box. The reason they don't compete with linux, as an example, on the ability to patch security issues, is becuase it would literally cost them too much to be loosing money on other things. They can, contrary to popular belief, innovate; they have the money to pay for the innovation, but they don't. Case in point, Windows hasn't seen a better version since NT4. Win2k was the more user friendly version of nt4 and WinXP is basically a reskinned Win2k with a few new features added. I doubt in 2005 when longhorn is release it'll be much different than windows xp.
Right now microsoft is being caught at an odd point; they are trying to take over the console market and failing miserably, they are trying to push into developers, they have passport which probably isn't making a bunch of moolah at the moment, the crashing stock market took a bite out of them, and all sorts of BS. They can either pull out of some of their investments, put together a solid OS and market it, or they can continue to peddle BS and I think if they continue to peddle Windows without innovating it, they'll be left behind.
So, they are taking heat for the failure, and now we've got the idiots yelling "You COULD have saved them!!!!"...
This isn't like someone making a huge error, it's a small error. Nasa designs their parts to be probability-tolerent. IE, they build a part, test it 1000 times, figure out how many times it will fail then improve on it. They get their parts down to a 99% fault tolerency and then they put 8 or 9 of them on the shuttle to lessen the chance of them breaking.
It isn't like the crew didn't know about it and didn't take a look at the damage before re-entry and figure it was minor. Sometimes accidents just happen, miscalculators lead to deaths and we aren't perfect. But you're an idiot for saying that these people are a bunch of dumbnuts for not sending up a shuttle for every little incident.
The problem with Nasa is that they are low on funding and are run (as in, leaded by, not as in the people donig the work) by a bunch of idiots. This wouldn't have happened if they weren't going up in a 20 year old rickety tin can, and they probably do have the funding to build new shuttles they just waste so much that they don't have the recources to do so.
"I'm sorry I can't be here, but if you look to your left, you can see a big blue cube with a TV on it..."
Why do it in reality when you can do it in VR? Personally, I'd prefer to have video conferencing in a modified version of counterstrike or planetside; if they piss me off they get shot, etc etc. Or if it's an actual conference with people attending and 1 or 2 people attending virtually, give them a big screen and some software to let them control it, and you're set.
Although, you just know that the first one that's going to happen you're going to have one robot going and toppling the other ones over while the other ones attempt to whirr away at slow speed, only to be kicked by frightened workers who think the robot has eaten their boss or someone is going through the building planning a terrorist bombing. Afterall, you could probably put a face of bin-ladeon in their...
Well gee, what can I say? These people smokin crack or are they just plain dumb?
Videogames don't make you violent, or any more so than you'd be towards another soccer team if you lost a game of soccer. Videogames make you smart; your ability to systemize and think go through the roof. Just play a game of hitman 2; think you'll get far in that game without cognative thinking?
But seriously, a game is a work of art, banning art is, as we know it a bad and stupid thing unless that art is hurting someone without permission. Games like GTA don't hurt anyone, they just depict that, and lemmme tell you, I'd rather take out my anger towards society in Postal 2 than in real life.
Are you suggesting a 2nd cartel that competes with the RIAA to be more evil and put out music so horrible as to make a soda can bleed?
In all actuality, the internet itself is huge competition for the RIAA and major media organizations, and the only reason they aren't doing poorly financially is because (big suprise here) mainstream media companies don't report on what they are doing bad and they already have name. Going to MSNBC and beliefing whatever they tell you is so much easier than using google to do research on something and coming up with an opinion on it.
The only point when they will see a huge drop in sales is when a kid puts a music CD into his computer and is asked to register it in order to be allowed to play it or puts a music cd into their walkman and finds out it doesn't play. They will, as most sheeple do, ask their geeky friends for help of whom they never listen to or care about, and becuase we're all socially starved psychopaths, we'll tell them the truth and suggest a filesharing app, and some bands.
And at which point they will type in "metal" or "techno" and find the stuff all the geeks like, which is actual music not pop music made by some gal *cough*Spears*cough* who gets shuffled around by helicopter from execuitive to execuitive handing out blowjobs.
The internet cuts out the middleman; them. They stand to loose everything they have if they can't lock down on this new medium. Special interest groups stand to loose a lot, political groups stand to loose a lot and large companies stand to loose a lot. Afterall, most bands that are smalltime like the exposure on a peer 2 peer application. They can stick performance dates in and make some moolah as well as have people buy recordings. No need for the RIAA atall. Linux is getting better by the hour; no need for M$oft in a year or 2. And if you try to pull something on the public, they will write their friends in otuer countries; good luck trying to keep that one bottled up.
The black box is supposed to help the police and prosecuters figure out the speed before an accident, and car companies fix defects in their design?
That, my friend, is what I call a shovel of bullshit.
Firstly, speed can be gandered by a number of methods, mainly by the length of skidmarks.
Secondly, since when did car companies begin caring about their customers getting killed? As soon as the car is sold, they don't give a ratsass about it unless you stop the payments, inwhich case they reposess it and try to sell it for more than it's actually worth.
Blackboxes are on airline jets becuase, well, there's gotta be an excuse besides "we didn't maintain the plane properly" when one goes down, and it's nice to know what happened. Popular ones are: Sheets of ice were on the plane wings hindering movement, wind broke a wing, or my personal favorite, the piolet was drunk(why would a piolet fly if he was drunk? I'd think if they are smart enough to fly, they are smart enough not to drink and fly). Mostly, it makes a certain amount of sense; if boeing makes a few thousand planes with defencts, the industry is going to find a way to fix them becuase if a large percentage of a fleet of 500 planes goes down, they've got a major financial and PR crisis. How are you going to explain 5 or 6 planes crashing in a 2 month period? Blackboxes help to detect defects. On planes, they are justified to an extend, but on cars...it just doesn't add up.
Firstly, that letter is BS. The ending part where it says that copyright infringment is theft is false. Going on a P2P network, downloading a few songs and listening to them isn't theft, it's if anything copyright infringment.
A lot of schools are doing this these days, it's called "being a bunch of cheap bastards while at the same time taking payoffs from large corperations". They'd rather spend a couple hundred a month on a T1 and crappy networking equipment than spend a few thousand a month on a T3 and a good deal of money on some decent networking equipment and staff. All they need is a reason that people are dumb enough to buy and they'll do it.
Afterall, the only need a college go-er has for the internet surely is just an educational one? No counterstrike or Warcraft here! No, guys don't want any porn and going to websites to do anything other than research is surely not done...
Obviously, as time goes on we'll be getting new technologies such as self-configuring networks and networks with some level of conscienceness capable of detecting and stopping break-ins as well as doing a number of mundain things such as patching automatically and updating software. The current nearly 20 year old approach to compromising these networks through software exploit or social engineering will be nearly impossible to do from right off of the bat as we've all seen them before; what kinds of attacks do you anticipate happening on these kinds of networks and what do you think the technician will be doing to stop them?
I went to bowling every saturday, and the time that wasn't spent bowling in the morning and spending time with my pop in the afternoon was spent playing videogames.
Now when I turn on the tele, for cartoons that is, pretty much it's nothing but potty humor and pokemon-like cartoons that dominate the airwavs. I don't enjoy watchin those atall. There are No gundams, no transformers, no reboot, no tom n' jerry n' friends, roadrunner, none of that anymore. Now it's utter shit and networks are wondering why the morning soapoperas that air every day of the week are doing better than cartoons.
UT2K3, tribes2, counterstrike, postal 2(heheeee), and other games are obviously more entertaining and/or educational than the tele ever was. Every night I get on with a couple of guys to play tribes2 and we talk for hours on end about strats, life, other games, cooking recipies, etc. I wouldn't be suprised if some kids spent their saturday mornings doing the same, or sleeping in from being tired from the adrenaline of a late friday night match, starting at 8 and ending at 10, then partying with your team over voicechat on the public servers or trying out new games. Any game that allows 40 and 60 year old people to talk to 10 to 20 year old people is definatly a game that rocks, and you certianly do learn a lot from the older people I'll tell you that much.
I was actually kind of suprised they took down cartoons on the weekdays as well, I mean, what else am I supposed to get ready for school or work too? The news? don't make me cring and throw up,. It's still more entertaining to watch pokemon or some really fucked up disney cartoon than it'll ever be to watch news stations that not only report on trivial bullshit before important bullshit, but are also afraid to offend anyone.
Firstly, Calculate the TCO for them. If it shows that the application is indeed cheaper, then present it to them. Mostly, the cost of aquisition will be the main selling point. Otherwise, why try? Then, request to spend some time on feasability research.
A good TCO includes, and itemizes, the fallowing
- Price of aquisition; how much you spend on it and how much it will take to install.
- Price of Reaquisition; how much it costs if it's stolen or broken. You put things like insurance here.
- Price of upkeep (in manhours per day, not $$$); How many verifyable manhours a day it costs per day to keep it running (don't factor in unexpected crashes, support of staff, and failing hardware). If it takes you 40 minuts to backup 10 servers onto tape, then you factor that in manhours. If you're ordering 10 drives, then it's going to be 4 minutes per drive. Try to use old statistics as well as examples instead of estemations.
- Cost of retraining. Give an approxamate amount of manhours to train someone to work with the application. Remember, do this in manhours, not cost. They can calculate the $$$ later.
- Price of consumables per day; electricity, AC, canned air, backup tapes, etc should be factored on a per day basis.
- Price of support ; how much does it cost per month for the support line.
- Cost of downtime per hour (if it goes down and nobody can work, # of workers ^ average pay per hour is this cost).
After you establish it is indeed less expensive, you then need to argue the quality to them.
The quality revolves around 4 key consepts: Security, Features, Support and Expense. We've already established it's less expensive at this point. Feature wise, that's something you do but make sure to give them the technical info you dig up anyway. Make sure they know it will do what you need it to do.
Security is likely an easy one. If it's a popular application, then it's undoubtedly patched a bunch if the people making it have a rep. If they stick to microsoft solutions and say "Microsoft patches too" it might be pointient to point out Microsofts less than shining history with security. Pointing out that it took MS 6 months to patch an exploit that allowed a webpage to delete everything on a harddisk while with a linux solution it takes all of 2 days, which includes testing, to patch a bug will probably get them thinking. On the other hand, if it's some 3rd party app that works well but has no support and an unknown on the security, it's something you shouldn't be trying to push.
Support is where people get caught up on. Replying "We are your support staff" isn't good enough because you probably won't be working their 3 years down the line and the idiots maintaining it may need to find information. Showing them a google search is a bad way to present support: the internet may not be up and it takes time to find information, although it is certainly something to do while waiting for 3 hours on the tech support line. Make sure to factually assure them that, unless the world ends, the 4 layers (You, someone else, support line (PHONE NUMBER!!!), then a contractor in that order) will ensure they can sleep safely with the network being up.
Another facet of support is competance of the staff. You are the first line of support, and you fix 90% of issues. When something truely bizzare comes up, then you call a comrade to help for a 2nd opinion, and if need be, a 3rd opinion can be supplied by a guru. When that all fails, then you look for support via a phone number or google. And if that fails, then you hire a contractor.
All-in-all, it should take you about 2 days to figure out if a given solution is good enough for a company and to convince management. Remember the biggest thing here though:
If it works, use it. If opensource doesn't work, don't use it. If your experience with a given thing is good, then use that. If they are microsoft only, and say upgrading from win2k to winxp, it may be in your interest to convince them to stay with win2k and wait a bit longer for suse.
"Instead of providing a service for free, lets provide no service and turn ourselves into an advertising engine targeted towards letting the consumers pick what they're interested in, in disguise of a free service."
I'v also noticed that I'm getting ad's in the games I buy, the movies I spend $20 a pop to go to, banner ad's in the e-mail box I pay $5 a month to have, billboard ad's in the games I play, and despite my ranting and raving at soliciters, I'm still getting hordes of junk mail, both electronic and snail.
It's as if they are leaving me with no choice accept to retialite. Either by threatening legal action or by simply not buying their ad-stacked products...
Every computer system has a weakness that can be exploited. Especially if your a uber-whackjob like me. I mean, really. I wear the same clothing every day, religously almost, I never show when I don't need to, and when I do I shower every day. I eat ketchup with every meal, and I engauge in other activities that are rather bewildering, even to me.
That, and a system like that is bound to gain sentience one day and either begin governing, or see me and crash, badly. Or someone else will come along and make it go insane. To think, someone could probably have so many cache-22's going through it's little microprocesser system that it'll think it's a tweeety bird or some other form of land animal, and be asleet at the cranks.
Users don't have to sign any eulas or sign any agreements...the thing can probably install invisibly and quickly without the user even noticing, especially on todays uber-machines.
You know, I think I was right to buy this router...I may be needing it (as supposed to being glad it's there) within the coming year or 2.
VOIP = Number of wireless devices you've got...
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[i]what's not to like about a new wireless Internet where the users are free to roam and create their own groups, spread their information, and share resources?[/i]
Say I baught 300 wireless routers and decided to start flooding UBB's and whatnot with BS...Fex, I could start a rumor that AMD's CPU's are crap or something of the sort. I could start one heck of a rumor using some wireless routers to mimic different IP stacks (Once IP ver 6 comes out, and if we had a wireless netwoek, I'd bet they'll drop in price 100-fold+) and a decent AI, plus some computing power.
This also brings up an interesting idea. 1 Guy (me, or someone else) can make one heck of as stink using machines. As AI intellegence increases and processer power increases, so too will their ability to stuff, it will no doubt get to the point of being a lifeform, and our majority-rule society will become extremly outdated. Just think, I build 10 robots and since I built them, I have some leverage over them, so I get 11 votes, while you only get 1...
So, in short, this is the communist version of the internet. Everyone is trusted to do their job, no more and no less. Not a good idea, considering that if the protocol isn't robust enough, someone can set their IP to their neighbors IP and crash all the routers on the entire block. It will take a feat of engineering to get everyone together on this. At least we have some regulation with large telco's running rampant.
Point in case, you've got packet loss...ping...noise...I'd think a fiber line would have much better quality and speed than a 100-mbps Wifi router, plus the routers would take forever to get between geographically distant points. In a suburban enviroment, you'd have mabye 600+ routers before you get to some geographically distant place, fex, between chicago and say, newyork, and it'd take 2-3 seconds to get their, and thats if the router has a broadcasting distance of 20-40 feet()plus the people who decided to get them nice 5-10 mile broadcasting routers). Not everyone is going to buy a 1-5 mile router, some are going to be cheap about it and buy a 30-foot wifi hub and leech off of their neighbors for access.
Great idea in consept, but you'll need to rework it into some solid standards with certain regulation and standardization agencies before it can really take off, much less be better than what we've currently got. And, it's got to monentarily beat the current standard.
Programmers get lazier, dumber, and more stoned. If I were a bettin man, I'd bet that in 10 years, we'll have a word processer that will talk, teach you grammer, and all that good stuff and was all programmed on some psuedo-6th generation progamming software by a slack-jawed idiot who can barely count to 6, much less comprehend C...and it'll run slow too.
Not that I think we should go back to coding in fortran. Hell no, I wouldn't wish that even on a competant mind. I think we should at least require programmers to have a basic understanding of electronics, assembler, basic, C, C++, etc such and so forth, going through all of the basic generations of language. Just because they can make something doesn't mean they will do it well.
It would work better to act like your interested, and ask the person to explain the deal 20 or 40 times, over and over, until they go insane. After wasting an hour or 2 of their time, finally say, in the middle of their explination, "OH! I get it...not interested." then start bitching at them at how telemarketing is wrong and how they should never call you again.
If and when the time comes to give them a CC number, mess up 1 or 2 numbers here and there every time you give it to them, this will make you seem utterly retarded and make them want to gouge out their eye with a spoon.
By doing this, you not only make telemarketing less feasable, as less people are being advertised to, but you're also annoying the hell out of the poor guy on the other end of the phone, whom will go slowly insane as people do this to him/her.
Although, I'd prefer a PSTN switch or answering machine in my house with the ability to have a phone number firewall installed on it. Someone calls me I don't like, and I can simply ban their number from ever calling again. I'd bet most places don't change their phone numbers every week and the phone companies would be quite annoyed if they had to deal with that.
First of all, finding a accurate statistic takes time to properly research and quite frankly, it's better to think than to push petty statistics. Statistics are only useful if you want to figure out how to fine-tune an economy or figure out there is a quantifyable problem. Saying "10,000 deaths a year occure from guns" only quantifies and justifies more research, not a ban on all guns.
As for the debate on gun control.
Buying a gun to defend your household isn't the only reason why you buy them. Many lawmakers and activists forget the reason we have rights to a gun isn't just for protection, but also for insurrection if we ever get into another civil war. In order for a people to stay free, they have to have arms to use against the goverment. Lest they fall into a state of slavery. And frankly, at our current rate of decention, I wouldn't be suprised if we had another civil war within the next 50 years.
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I suppose they couldn't handle a REAL wizard afterall! Because if I was a wizard, and I was good, those are the things I'd do.
It isn't the lack of originality in PC games, console games will always be rehashes with new twists. Mario, zelda, metroid, etc as examples will always be new rehashes of an old consept; the trick here is to add in new storylines and put twists on the gameplay.
PC games are evolving quite rapidly however. Planetside, a Massivly Multiplayer online FPS just came out and after being in the beta, I still think it needs a few more months of developement before it's worth any cash atall, however it's interesting what they are doing; realtime war between 3 sides and 30,000 or so people.
Morrowind, aka the elder scrolls 3, is another example, and although bethesda's engine for it is so shitty I wouldn't even plop down $10 US for this game and it's add-on packs, it is innovative and different.
The RTS genre is an example where the PC industry has not evolved, not since Total Annihilation and it's gazillion of mods or kickass UI. CC is just rehash after rehash of the same, crap game and people buy it over and over; generals is so god auful that I don't even know why anyone would buy it accept to look at the pretty graphics.
In any case, I'v got some problems with the PC games being released; most are still very much Beta, and a lot of game makers won't give you your money back if you buy it and it doesn't work. You can't take an opened CD back to the store and this needs to change. Companies are afraid of loosing sales becuase we'll burn the games and return them, but it pisses me off that the truth is that these assholes spend millions influencing game reviewers, and then some kid spends $50 of his x-mas dough on a game that crashes to the desktop every 5 minutes, and when he trys to return it he can't because the store labels him a criminal before he is one. They have a nice little advantage to everyone else in the fact that their products can't be returned on any basis unless the CD itself is physically broken.
What pisses me off even more is that other companies, *cough*Eidos*cough* like to release games in single-cd packages instead of the boxed forms, call it "special edition" and charge $19 for it, when really it's a demo of the game. Can't return that one either, and other companies do this too.
So, you can't blame people for deciding to pirate, that goes for PC and Console. If you rip people off, they will do the same back and since they ARE the people they will win.
of the boxes, cd's etc...
.75 cubic feet = 200,000,000 * .75 = 150,000,000 cubic feet of waste. Thats 28409.09 cubic miles of waste.
wOOO, I can just see the landfills now!!!
1,000,000,000\$5 a box = 200,000,000 boxes at say,
Seriously though, they are giving away software so they can get deductions and even if not, they also get money for the support they will be selling. And lord only knows what they are asking these npc's to sign.
Since when was taking apart my car ilegal? "trade secrets" and lisence agreements that demand you give up your right to take apart a piece of software are hogwash and total BS. I have the right to know what my computer is doing, because it's mine, and besides, I can still take apart the cotton gin and rigure out how it works, the same applies to software. Just becuase it's a computer and has thousands of magical circuts doesn't mean I can't learn how it ticks.
Removing one of the barriers that keeps people from learning what a program does is a great idea.
It's easy to claim your software is cheaper to operate when almost every school and goverment on earth that has a machine is running windows on it. People then buy what their kids suggest; windows machines, and everyone learns it. Along comes linux and in order to use it you've got to retrain your workforce to use it, and retrain anyone coming in to use it. Once Linux gets into schools, desktops, college tech classes etc and is widespread, then we will see demand for people who know it grow and this situation change quite a bit.
The only reason microsoft is screwed if that happens is that they are doing nothing to innovate or make their software better. On the contrary, they are selling windows at a huge profit to loose millions on other things like the x-box. The reason they don't compete with linux, as an example, on the ability to patch security issues, is becuase it would literally cost them too much to be loosing money on other things. They can, contrary to popular belief, innovate; they have the money to pay for the innovation, but they don't. Case in point, Windows hasn't seen a better version since NT4. Win2k was the more user friendly version of nt4 and WinXP is basically a reskinned Win2k with a few new features added. I doubt in 2005 when longhorn is release it'll be much different than windows xp.
Right now microsoft is being caught at an odd point; they are trying to take over the console market and failing miserably, they are trying to push into developers, they have passport which probably isn't making a bunch of moolah at the moment, the crashing stock market took a bite out of them, and all sorts of BS. They can either pull out of some of their investments, put together a solid OS and market it, or they can continue to peddle BS and I think if they continue to peddle Windows without innovating it, they'll be left behind.
So, they are taking heat for the failure, and now we've got the idiots yelling "You COULD have saved them!!!!"...
This isn't like someone making a huge error, it's a small error. Nasa designs their parts to be probability-tolerent. IE, they build a part, test it 1000 times, figure out how many times it will fail then improve on it. They get their parts down to a 99% fault tolerency and then they put 8 or 9 of them on the shuttle to lessen the chance of them breaking.
It isn't like the crew didn't know about it and didn't take a look at the damage before re-entry and figure it was minor. Sometimes accidents just happen, miscalculators lead to deaths and we aren't perfect. But you're an idiot for saying that these people are a bunch of dumbnuts for not sending up a shuttle for every little incident.
The problem with Nasa is that they are low on funding and are run (as in, leaded by, not as in the people donig the work) by a bunch of idiots. This wouldn't have happened if they weren't going up in a 20 year old rickety tin can, and they probably do have the funding to build new shuttles they just waste so much that they don't have the recources to do so.
Buerocracy is a bitch.
"I'm sorry I can't be here, but if you look to your left, you can see a big blue cube with a TV on it..."
Why do it in reality when you can do it in VR? Personally, I'd prefer to have video conferencing in a modified version of counterstrike or planetside; if they piss me off they get shot, etc etc. Or if it's an actual conference with people attending and 1 or 2 people attending virtually, give them a big screen and some software to let them control it, and you're set.
Although, you just know that the first one that's going to happen you're going to have one robot going and toppling the other ones over while the other ones attempt to whirr away at slow speed, only to be kicked by frightened workers who think the robot has eaten their boss or someone is going through the building planning a terrorist bombing. Afterall, you could probably put a face of bin-ladeon in their...
Kidna makes me wonder as to how much time they spend making that and if they even tested it before releasing it...
Well gee, what can I say? These people smokin crack or are they just plain dumb?
Videogames don't make you violent, or any more so than you'd be towards another soccer team if you lost a game of soccer. Videogames make you smart; your ability to systemize and think go through the roof. Just play a game of hitman 2; think you'll get far in that game without cognative thinking?
But seriously, a game is a work of art, banning art is, as we know it a bad and stupid thing unless that art is hurting someone without permission. Games like GTA don't hurt anyone, they just depict that, and lemmme tell you, I'd rather take out my anger towards society in Postal 2 than in real life.
Are you suggesting a 2nd cartel that competes with the RIAA to be more evil and put out music so horrible as to make a soda can bleed?
In all actuality, the internet itself is huge competition for the RIAA and major media organizations, and the only reason they aren't doing poorly financially is because (big suprise here) mainstream media companies don't report on what they are doing bad and they already have name. Going to MSNBC and beliefing whatever they tell you is so much easier than using google to do research on something and coming up with an opinion on it.
The only point when they will see a huge drop in sales is when a kid puts a music CD into his computer and is asked to register it in order to be allowed to play it or puts a music cd into their walkman and finds out it doesn't play. They will, as most sheeple do, ask their geeky friends for help of whom they never listen to or care about, and becuase we're all socially starved psychopaths, we'll tell them the truth and suggest a filesharing app, and some bands.
And at which point they will type in "metal" or "techno" and find the stuff all the geeks like, which is actual music not pop music made by some gal *cough*Spears*cough* who gets shuffled around by helicopter from execuitive to execuitive handing out blowjobs.
The internet cuts out the middleman; them. They stand to loose everything they have if they can't lock down on this new medium. Special interest groups stand to loose a lot, political groups stand to loose a lot and large companies stand to loose a lot. Afterall, most bands that are smalltime like the exposure on a peer 2 peer application. They can stick performance dates in and make some moolah as well as have people buy recordings. No need for the RIAA atall. Linux is getting better by the hour; no need for M$oft in a year or 2. And if you try to pull something on the public, they will write their friends in otuer countries; good luck trying to keep that one bottled up.
Thousands of americans are labeled terrorists becuase they buy the right kind of Draino and some Aluminum foil when they goto the supermarket...
Alright, so let me get this one straight.
The black box is supposed to help the police and prosecuters figure out the speed before an accident, and car companies fix defects in their design?
That, my friend, is what I call a shovel of bullshit.
Firstly, speed can be gandered by a number of methods, mainly by the length of skidmarks.
Secondly, since when did car companies begin caring about their customers getting killed? As soon as the car is sold, they don't give a ratsass about it unless you stop the payments, inwhich case they reposess it and try to sell it for more than it's actually worth.
Blackboxes are on airline jets becuase, well, there's gotta be an excuse besides "we didn't maintain the plane properly" when one goes down, and it's nice to know what happened. Popular ones are: Sheets of ice were on the plane wings hindering movement, wind broke a wing, or my personal favorite, the piolet was drunk(why would a piolet fly if he was drunk? I'd think if they are smart enough to fly, they are smart enough not to drink and fly). Mostly, it makes a certain amount of sense; if boeing makes a few thousand planes with defencts, the industry is going to find a way to fix them becuase if a large percentage of a fleet of 500 planes goes down, they've got a major financial and PR crisis. How are you going to explain 5 or 6 planes crashing in a 2 month period? Blackboxes help to detect defects. On planes, they are justified to an extend, but on cars...it just doesn't add up.
Firstly, that letter is BS. The ending part where it says that copyright infringment is theft is false. Going on a P2P network, downloading a few songs and listening to them isn't theft, it's if anything copyright infringment.
A lot of schools are doing this these days, it's called "being a bunch of cheap bastards while at the same time taking payoffs from large corperations". They'd rather spend a couple hundred a month on a T1 and crappy networking equipment than spend a few thousand a month on a T3 and a good deal of money on some decent networking equipment and staff. All they need is a reason that people are dumb enough to buy and they'll do it.
Afterall, the only need a college go-er has for the internet surely is just an educational one? No counterstrike or Warcraft here! No, guys don't want any porn and going to websites to do anything other than research is surely not done...
Obviously, as time goes on we'll be getting new technologies such as self-configuring networks and networks with some level of conscienceness capable of detecting and stopping break-ins as well as doing a number of mundain things such as patching automatically and updating software. The current nearly 20 year old approach to compromising these networks through software exploit or social engineering will be nearly impossible to do from right off of the bat as we've all seen them before; what kinds of attacks do you anticipate happening on these kinds of networks and what do you think the technician will be doing to stop them?
I went to bowling every saturday, and the time that wasn't spent bowling in the morning and spending time with my pop in the afternoon was spent playing videogames.
Now when I turn on the tele, for cartoons that is, pretty much it's nothing but potty humor and pokemon-like cartoons that dominate the airwavs. I don't enjoy watchin those atall. There are No gundams, no transformers, no reboot, no tom n' jerry n' friends, roadrunner, none of that anymore. Now it's utter shit and networks are wondering why the morning soapoperas that air every day of the week are doing better than cartoons.
UT2K3, tribes2, counterstrike, postal 2(heheeee), and other games are obviously more entertaining and/or educational than the tele ever was. Every night I get on with a couple of guys to play tribes2 and we talk for hours on end about strats, life, other games, cooking recipies, etc. I wouldn't be suprised if some kids spent their saturday mornings doing the same, or sleeping in from being tired from the adrenaline of a late friday night match, starting at 8 and ending at 10, then partying with your team over voicechat on the public servers or trying out new games. Any game that allows 40 and 60 year old people to talk to 10 to 20 year old people is definatly a game that rocks, and you certianly do learn a lot from the older people I'll tell you that much.
I was actually kind of suprised they took down cartoons on the weekdays as well, I mean, what else am I supposed to get ready for school or work too? The news? don't make me cring and throw up,. It's still more entertaining to watch pokemon or some really fucked up disney cartoon than it'll ever be to watch news stations that not only report on trivial bullshit before important bullshit, but are also afraid to offend anyone.
Firstly, Calculate the TCO for them. If it shows that the application is indeed cheaper, then present it to them. Mostly, the cost of aquisition will be the main selling point. Otherwise, why try? Then, request to spend some time on feasability research.
A good TCO includes, and itemizes, the fallowing
- Price of aquisition; how much you spend on it and how much it will take to install.
- Price of Reaquisition; how much it costs if it's stolen or broken. You put things like insurance here.
- Price of upkeep (in manhours per day, not $$$); How many verifyable manhours a day it costs per day to keep it running (don't factor in unexpected crashes, support of staff, and failing hardware). If it takes you 40 minuts to backup 10 servers onto tape, then you factor that in manhours. If you're ordering 10 drives, then it's going to be 4 minutes per drive. Try to use old statistics as well as examples instead of estemations. - Cost of retraining. Give an approxamate amount of manhours to train someone to work with the application. Remember, do this in manhours, not cost. They can calculate the $$$ later.
- Price of consumables per day; electricity, AC, canned air, backup tapes, etc should be factored on a per day basis.
- Price of support ; how much does it cost per month for the support line.
- Cost of downtime per hour (if it goes down and nobody can work, # of workers ^ average pay per hour is this cost).
After you establish it is indeed less expensive, you then need to argue the quality to them.
The quality revolves around 4 key consepts: Security, Features, Support and Expense. We've already established it's less expensive at this point. Feature wise, that's something you do but make sure to give them the technical info you dig up anyway. Make sure they know it will do what you need it to do.
Security is likely an easy one. If it's a popular application, then it's undoubtedly patched a bunch if the people making it have a rep. If they stick to microsoft solutions and say "Microsoft patches too" it might be pointient to point out Microsofts less than shining history with security. Pointing out that it took MS 6 months to patch an exploit that allowed a webpage to delete everything on a harddisk while with a linux solution it takes all of 2 days, which includes testing, to patch a bug will probably get them thinking. On the other hand, if it's some 3rd party app that works well but has no support and an unknown on the security, it's something you shouldn't be trying to push.
Support is where people get caught up on. Replying "We are your support staff" isn't good enough because you probably won't be working their 3 years down the line and the idiots maintaining it may need to find information. Showing them a google search is a bad way to present support: the internet may not be up and it takes time to find information, although it is certainly something to do while waiting for 3 hours on the tech support line. Make sure to factually assure them that, unless the world ends, the 4 layers (You, someone else, support line (PHONE NUMBER!!!), then a contractor in that order) will ensure they can sleep safely with the network being up.
Another facet of support is competance of the staff. You are the first line of support, and you fix 90% of issues. When something truely bizzare comes up, then you call a comrade to help for a 2nd opinion, and if need be, a 3rd opinion can be supplied by a guru. When that all fails, then you look for support via a phone number or google. And if that fails, then you hire a contractor.
All-in-all, it should take you about 2 days to figure out if a given solution is good enough for a company and to convince management. Remember the biggest thing here though:
If it works, use it. If opensource doesn't work, don't use it. If your experience with a given thing is good, then use that. If they are microsoft only, and say upgrading from win2k to winxp, it may be in your interest to convince them to stay with win2k and wait a bit longer for suse.
"Instead of providing a service for free, lets provide no service and turn ourselves into an advertising engine targeted towards letting the consumers pick what they're interested in, in disguise of a free service."
I'v also noticed that I'm getting ad's in the games I buy, the movies I spend $20 a pop to go to, banner ad's in the e-mail box I pay $5 a month to have, billboard ad's in the games I play, and despite my ranting and raving at soliciters, I'm still getting hordes of junk mail, both electronic and snail.
It's as if they are leaving me with no choice accept to retialite. Either by threatening legal action or by simply not buying their ad-stacked products...
At least you can buy a gamecube or PS2 for less...
Break it >:)
Every computer system has a weakness that can be exploited. Especially if your a uber-whackjob like me. I mean, really. I wear the same clothing every day, religously almost, I never show when I don't need to, and when I do I shower every day. I eat ketchup with every meal, and I engauge in other activities that are rather bewildering, even to me.
That, and a system like that is bound to gain sentience one day and either begin governing, or see me and crash, badly. Or someone else will come along and make it go insane. To think, someone could probably have so many cache-22's going through it's little microprocesser system that it'll think it's a tweeety bird or some other form of land animal, and be asleet at the cranks.
Users don't have to sign any eulas or sign any agreements...the thing can probably install invisibly and quickly without the user even noticing, especially on todays uber-machines.
You know, I think I was right to buy this router...I may be needing it (as supposed to being glad it's there) within the coming year or 2.
[i]what's not to like about a new wireless Internet where the users are free to roam and create their own groups, spread their information, and share resources?[/i]
Say I baught 300 wireless routers and decided to start flooding UBB's and whatnot with BS...Fex, I could start a rumor that AMD's CPU's are crap or something of the sort. I could start one heck of a rumor using some wireless routers to mimic different IP stacks (Once IP ver 6 comes out, and if we had a wireless netwoek, I'd bet they'll drop in price 100-fold+) and a decent AI, plus some computing power.
This also brings up an interesting idea. 1 Guy (me, or someone else) can make one heck of as stink using machines. As AI intellegence increases and processer power increases, so too will their ability to stuff, it will no doubt get to the point of being a lifeform, and our majority-rule society will become extremly outdated. Just think, I build 10 robots and since I built them, I have some leverage over them, so I get 11 votes, while you only get 1...
So, in short, this is the communist version of the internet. Everyone is trusted to do their job, no more and no less. Not a good idea, considering that if the protocol isn't robust enough, someone can set their IP to their neighbors IP and crash all the routers on the entire block. It will take a feat of engineering to get everyone together on this. At least we have some regulation with large telco's running rampant.
Point in case, you've got packet loss...ping...noise...I'd think a fiber line would have much better quality and speed than a 100-mbps Wifi router, plus the routers would take forever to get between geographically distant points. In a suburban enviroment, you'd have mabye 600+ routers before you get to some geographically distant place, fex, between chicago and say, newyork, and it'd take 2-3 seconds to get their, and thats if the router has a broadcasting distance of 20-40 feet()plus the people who decided to get them nice 5-10 mile broadcasting routers). Not everyone is going to buy a 1-5 mile router, some are going to be cheap about it and buy a 30-foot wifi hub and leech off of their neighbors for access.
Great idea in consept, but you'll need to rework it into some solid standards with certain regulation and standardization agencies before it can really take off, much less be better than what we've currently got. And, it's got to monentarily beat the current standard.
Programmers get lazier, dumber, and more stoned. If I were a bettin man, I'd bet that in 10 years, we'll have a word processer that will talk, teach you grammer, and all that good stuff and was all programmed on some psuedo-6th generation progamming software by a slack-jawed idiot who can barely count to 6, much less comprehend C...and it'll run slow too.
Not that I think we should go back to coding in fortran. Hell no, I wouldn't wish that even on a competant mind. I think we should at least require programmers to have a basic understanding of electronics, assembler, basic, C, C++, etc such and so forth, going through all of the basic generations of language. Just because they can make something doesn't mean they will do it well.
It would work better to act like your interested, and ask the person to explain the deal 20 or 40 times, over and over, until they go insane. After wasting an hour or 2 of their time, finally say, in the middle of their explination, "OH! I get it...not interested." then start bitching at them at how telemarketing is wrong and how they should never call you again.
If and when the time comes to give them a CC number, mess up 1 or 2 numbers here and there every time you give it to them, this will make you seem utterly retarded and make them want to gouge out their eye with a spoon.
By doing this, you not only make telemarketing less feasable, as less people are being advertised to, but you're also annoying the hell out of the poor guy on the other end of the phone, whom will go slowly insane as people do this to him/her.
Although, I'd prefer a PSTN switch or answering machine in my house with the ability to have a phone number firewall installed on it. Someone calls me I don't like, and I can simply ban their number from ever calling again. I'd bet most places don't change their phone numbers every week and the phone companies would be quite annoyed if they had to deal with that.
FIRST_P0ST!!!!!!!.... uhm... hrm
First of all, finding a accurate statistic takes time to properly research and quite frankly, it's better to think than to push petty statistics. Statistics are only useful if you want to figure out how to fine-tune an economy or figure out there is a quantifyable problem. Saying "10,000 deaths a year occure from guns" only quantifies and justifies more research, not a ban on all guns.
As for the debate on gun control.
Buying a gun to defend your household isn't the only reason why you buy them. Many lawmakers and activists forget the reason we have rights to a gun isn't just for protection, but also for insurrection if we ever get into another civil war. In order for a people to stay free, they have to have arms to use against the goverment. Lest they fall into a state of slavery. And frankly, at our current rate of decention, I wouldn't be suprised if we had another civil war within the next 50 years.