I just wonder, no matter how efficient, safe, and cheap this thing can be, if it will ever sell. Nuclear tech seems to be kind of a boogeyman still. How long until Fox or the SciFi channel makes a Made for TV movie about someone's pace maker having a meltdown and taking out 2/3 of north america.
Re:Since when did time off cost anyone anything?
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Star Wars Sickout
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actually, the big thing about showing up sick is that you get other people sick.
That, and if you show up and work while sick, instead of resting and getting better, you end up sending a month being unproductive because you are sick, instead of a couple of days being unproductive because you are at home getting better.
Which I guess goes to partially prove your point, making this comment meaningless....oh well.
While I cetainly understand why one would want their children to be able to get money from their acheivements, my problem with it has always been that essentially it leads to a situation where, within a given family, someone only need to contribute to society once very X generations, when the cash from the original contribution starts to run dry. Granted that in the ideal world this wouldn't be the case, as people who inherited money from an ancestors invention would still have the drive to contribute to society, and may even be able to contribute more as they would have greater resources, but as it stands most people won't do anything unless there is profit in it. And people that already have a lot of money have less incentive to contribute to society even for profit, mostly because once a person reaches a critical amount of wealthy, they no longer need to do anything productive to generate more wealth, and instead need only to move money around, and manipulate abstract economic numbers, essentially living off of interest, accounting loopholes, and buying out people who actually have to work and create and better society to make a living.
Because of this, I think that copyright should end upon the death of the author. If I create something and die the next day, too bad, it goes into public domain. This is the same reason I support heafty inheritence taxes for anything over a certain amount.
here are just some ideas that I think is fair to both the consumer and to content creators.
Anytime content is sold, it should be a license for the person who purchased said content in whatever form or medium he or she choses. That means that if one buys a CD or a DVD, that person is within their rights to convert that audio or video recording into whatever format they want, and view it whereever they want (car/pc/mp3 player/etc).
As a consumer purchases a license to use the content, that person should be able to backup their investment, by copying files to a hard driver, burning to a CD/DVD, etc.
As per 1 and 2, if a distributer takes steps to prevent copying or re-encoding of content by the end user, then they are liable for providing the content in an acceptable alternate format, and providing replacement media should the original be damaged. (If they put copy protection on a CD, then the user should be able to get an electronic copy of the music should they wish to listen to the music on an mp3 player. If their original CD is damaged, then the seller should be required to provide a new copy of the medium).
If a person obtains a copy of some content without a license, that person is permitted to preview the content for a period of 24 hours, after which they must delete/destroy the their copy of the content, or purchase a valid license.
A license is transferable.
If less than 1/3 of the total content, or 15 minutes (whichever is less) of the content is used, it should be considered fair use and not require any additional licensing.
A license for content may belong to a single person, or at the option of the purchaser, be limited to a single source. (ie, a person can buy a CD, and then be allowed to copy that cd to a computer, listen to it on the computer/in the car/whatever, or they can have the license follow the original media, so that whoever has posession of the media has the license to use it, but can not keep a copy for themselves and provide a copy for someone else (with the 24 hour preview exception as noted above) ).
All content must enter the public domain after 20 years, or upon the death of the creator (if an organization owns the rights to the content, so there is no "creator" to die, then the content must enter public domain after 10 years).
I've always liked the concept of post-it notes, since my memory for tasks is abysmal (or rather I'm too easily distracted from the tasks I need to complete). I've tried using post-it notes, but the problem is that usually after a few hours, they stop sticking. I've tried using other brands but I can't get any of them to stick for more than an hour or two. Anyone have any experience with a brand that will actually stay stuck on vertical surface (e.g. monitor, fridge, etc) for more than an hour or two?
I would suspect that hardware keyloggers are more common than software keyloggers anyway. In even moderately sized computer labs like those at schools/universities, and public libraries, it would be fairly trivial to stick a keylogger on a machine. I know that at my university, people are constantly unplugging network cables from machines on in the lab so they can hook up their laptops (which I find really annoying since they offer tables with power and network connections for people with laptops). So it's really common to see someone reaching back behind a machine to plug it's network cable back in. It would be trivial for someone to just stick a keylogger on a machine while they were back there.
A hardware keylogger is also a bit more secure for the perpetraitor, since they are quick to put in, pull out, and can be checked in the less conspicuous saftey of ones own home.
I think your looking at it the wrong way.
A couple of months ago, my GeForce 3 64MB card started to have problems with the fan. It had been a good card, and supported all of the games and applications I ran with it well enough, and I could have just replaced the fan, but I decided instead to put the card on the shelf, and use it in the new box I'm slowly collecting parts to build.
So, when I went shopping around for new video cards, because every few months there is a new line for $500, the older models go down in price. This meant for for about $200 I was able to get a nice, not top of the line, but still much better than what I had video card that will last me a long time.
Even when people do buy the latest and greatest video card, most of the time they don't upgrade each generation. Even my friends who are hard core PC gamers generally wait 2 or 3 generations between upgrades, and each time there is a new generation, the last generation gets cheaper.
I'm not sure why they decided that they need such a huge change from what they already had, I always thought that (exessive ads from in the buddy list aside) AIM had a pretty decent UI. In fact, the only thing that ever really annoyed me about AIM was it allowing people to set the background color on their text, because people seem to invariably love sending lime green text on a hot pink background, or something else equally blinding. But looking at the screenshots of this new client, it seems bulky and way to flashy. Generally when I get an IM, I just want a small text window that will pop-up that I can read and reply to quickly. Along these lines, I think tabbed IMs are a bad idea (turned them off in Gaim), because tabbed IMs only really seem to work if your concentrating only on IMing people, instead of (what I do, and what I would suspect most other people do) simply leaving the IM services on in the background while you do other stuff.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, until they add support for multiple protocols, and a linux port, I'll be sticking with Gaim, though I certainly hope Gaim doesn't try to copy this new look.
I understand the desire to have a custom modded computer, something that someone would build themselves to make it unique, and I also understand the desire for a computer that is more asthetically pleasing than most standard towers, but I've never really understood the desire to buy gaming rigs like this.
When you buy a machine like this, it automatically takes away the first reason, personalization, to own a non-standard machine like this, and most of them are dead ugly.
Plus, the extra charge for these machines tends to be really high compared to a machine of equal specs in a standard case.
In all fairness to microsoft, this may not be it at all.
I'm going to preface my argument with the fact that I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, I use Linux and Mac at home, and I do believe that microsoft has taken part in (and still takes part in) unfair business practices.
That said, the bottom line might have had little to do with this decision. The fact is that it's very misleading to say "X withdraws support for law Y" because it might not mean that "X is against Y". We don't know if microsoft withdrew support from this bill because of some change in stance on Gay rights. For all we know the law might have been something to the extent of "LGBT people have equal rights in the workplace.....and it's legal to kill children and rape kittens on the third tuesday of every month".
The problem is that importing.doc files into OO.org is a bit of a craps shoot, sometimes the document imports perfectly, other times it's usable but ugly, and sometimes it's so garbled as to be nearly useless. Not that I'm discounting the work done by the folks at OO.org or the other F/OSS projects that import.doc files (KWord usually does a pretty good job in my experience, and abiword tends to be all or nothing, though I haven't use abiword in a logn while, so it might be better now).
Of course, support is always improving, but that's because the.doc format has been pretty stationary for a while, the new format will still require time to reverse engineer (assume the authors won't or can't agree to whatever MS wants them to sign). I suspect that there will be a decent amount of time where the new format is the preferred windows document format, but importing/exporting for Linux applications isn't quite good enough.
Of course, the real problem, IMO, has little to do with the format itself, but with how often people send.docs for seemingly no reason. It aggravates me to no end how often clients and peopel from school send out emails with the text of the email in an attatched.doc file, when the content of the file is nothing more than plain text that could have simply been put in the email, or at least a plaintext file.
A bit off topic, but also, why the heck won't MS Office import OO.org.swx files? The merits of each file format aside, I generally save office documents as.swx, and it's a pita when I have to open up the file and export it to a.doc everytime I want to send it to someone. Since OO.org is GPL (IIRC), would allowing Office to import OO.org files mean that it would have to be GPL as well, or is it just microsoft trying to fruther their monopoly?
Historically, I've always found console launches to be pretty exciting. Saving my money up for a year in advance so I can get the consoles on launch date along with a couple of launch titles. Rallying behind your favorite console (even though I really know it's all about the games, and I generally have all the consoles anyway).
But, this round of console launches seems to be a little disconcerting to me. First and foremost, I'm worried about nintend (seems like someone needs to worry on their behalf) - who should be focusing on rebuilding their relationship with third party game makers, instead of going out of their way to make something strange and difficult to make games for. Microsoft looks like they might really do well this year, which worries me more than the thought that nintendo might utterly fail. It's not that I have anything against microsoft personally, it's just that they seem to really be pushing bringing PC style games onto consoles, as opposed to console style games. I find the vast majority of the xbox games to suck horribly (just my opinion).
Sony seems to be doing it's own sony thing, overhyping the system and such. I'm not sure how well they'll do either, there are a lot of people who were burned by the poor quality of the initial PS2s last time around, and they historically have a hard time getting supply to meet demand. They might also be pulling a nintendo and shooting themselves in the foot with the Cell architecture. Difficulty of programming was one of the biggest complaints about the PS2, and from what I know about the cell architecture sony may have exacerbated the problem.
In the end, I predict that Microsoft will win, sony will take a distant second place with a few ports and very few original games, and nintendo will be completely out in left field making some money on things that bear very little resemblance to traditional games, and which may or may not be any fun at all.
I don't think that it's necessarily that PC and Console style RPGs are so different as I think that the difference is in the japanese vs american style of story telling (and types of stories). In american style RPGs, the focus seems to be on adventure for the sake of adventure, collecting treasure, and the story of a common person picking themselves up by the bootstraps and becoming a hero. In contrast, Japanese style RPGs seem to focus on the reluctant hero, chosen by fate, to to fulfill some great destiny/prophacy/etc. In American (or perhaps Western style would be more appropriate) RPGs, there is a bit more lattitude in the characters themselves, essentially the entire gamut frrom Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil can still be seen as being Heroic. In Japanese style games the storyline tends to only work with a character, though often reluctantly, struggling with the morality of a situation and eventually becoming something like Chaotic Good.
I think that these differences end up effecting the games in a number of ways (or rather, each type of story faces it's own technological limitations). In the Japanese style games, since there is a more fixed character (the player controls the character) A much less branching storyline is acceptable. In Western style games (the player IS the character) the character has more choice, and that limits the possibilities for the pre-written scripts. Because of the limitations on how much story can be written in American style games, the games themselves seem to focus more on dungeon crawling, accumulating treasure and experience (which also fits in with the image of the western style hero as the rouge adventurer).
I think that the reason it seems to be divided among PC/Console lines is that most PC games are developed by american companies, whereas historically the majority of console games (especially RPGs) were developed by Japanese companies.
Although I don't think that either style is inherintly superior to the other, I personally tend to prefer the more story driven Japanese style games to the Adventure driven American style games.
I think that the actual reason that there is limited adoption of F/OSS software is that most people who use it don't want to see Joe User using their software, I think that at the end of the day, a lot of the geeks would perfer to see uncle joe and aunt tilly to go with a proprietary/semi-proprietary solution like Apple, or yes even Microsoft.
I think the real reason that a lot of people shout about wanting F/OSS adoption is they actually just want a little more support from commerical vendors.
actually, I know a lot of people with the current generation of systems, who will also buy the next-gen systems, who do not have cable/sattelite tv. I, and most of the people I know, rarely if ever watch TV. Most shows I ever cared about have been cancelled seasons ago and are available on DVD now. The way I see it, I could spend $50/month for 100 channels of reality TV, or get an extra game a month. I'd much rather have the game.
I think that the problem with in-game ads is that at first it's all well and good to see ad's when you play for free in a game with a setting that's condusive to seeing ads, pretty soon they will start to creep into subscription based games where they don't fit at all.
The first time I ever recall seing product placement in a game was in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 arcade game, with pizza hut billboards, this fit the game, as the characters were walking around a city where billboards would be common, and pizza was a big theme in the show anyway.
The most vivid recollection of product-placement that I can remember was in Jet Moto for PSX, with Mountain Dew billboards, which also fit.
I agree with the sentiments that I've seen from other posts that in these types of games, product placement can make the game feel more authentic. Even banner ads not actually in the game would be fine if it allowed me to play a game for free (especially if it was a preview so I could decide if I wanted to pay a monthly fee).
What worries me is what happenes when game makers realize that they can make even more money by charging a monthly fee AND including product placement. How long until we see ads in loading screens (and reduce the incentive for game makers to reduce loading time), how long until we start seeing spam in our in-game message boxes, or have to complete a quest by punching the monkey.
I've actually been in the same situation lately. I just finished a job where I was required to sign an NDA which is applicable until the release of the product. My job was finished a couple of months ago, but the product itself is still a ways off from release. Now that I've been interviewing for new work, I've ran into the same problem "what do you say when you can't say anything about your previous work".
The conclusion I came too, after talking to my old boss (with whom I still get along, and hold no ill-will against for my position being eliminated). What it was decided was that although I cannot give exact details on what exactly I did, it's still fair game to talk about generalities of what I did. For example, although you probably can't tell an employer "I worked on project X and developed algorithm foo which works like... and here is some sample code", you can probably say something along the lines of "I worked on a project using technologies X, Y and Z, and developed algorithms or techniques related to fields A, B and C."
Of course, a lot of this depends on what exactly you were working on at your last job, if you were developing something neat using existing technologies, or expanding an existing field, then it's probably a lot easier than if you were developing something completely new.
OT: if MS has breached its requirements to a person, is that person then justified in breaching his/her requirements? For example, the one about not decompiling. Just a thought.
No, just as with the GPL, under copyright law, Microsoft's license is the only thing that allows you to use their software at all, so technically if they breach their license, then you no longer are able to use that license to use the software, and are therefore in violation of copyright.
Hmmm, maybe this could be a new business plan for microsoft. Breach the license for Windows, thereby invalidating everyone's licenses, then sue the people still using windows over copyright infringement if they refuse to buy another license. (My gods, I should be sure to put this post on my resume for SCO and the RI/MPAA)
Just a guess, but I would imagine that access goes through a proxy, and the advertisers pay for ads on the proxy. Either they replace banner ads (not sure if this is even legal or not), or they just have it so that whenever you go to a site, you get a page with an ad that then redirects you to your site.
This might not even be that bad of a thing if the majority of the ads came from stores in the area, people would get (semi) relevant ads for stores in their immediate location, and could even help the economy in the area.
you know, I realize that this was just an april fools joke, but really, it goes to show something. One of the biggest drain on laptop batteries is the screen, and I know a lot of people keep the brightness on their monitor up pretty high. Yet people ran this program, and didn't notice any difference in the screen gradually darkening. This might be a good way to save battery power on laptops. Start the screen at "normal" brightness, and then have it slowly start to darken, letting your eyes adjust slowly, in order to save battery life.
(do I get extra karma for posting an insightful comment on slashdot on april 1?)
I think that mind share is really at the core of it. Suse might not completely take over redhat anytime soon, but it is gaining mindshare, and I think that's what novell really needs. Mindshare won't make companies go out and scrap their entire RedHat installations, but it will make them consider Suse when it's time to upgrade, and Suse having a good mindshare also makes Novell's solutions that are built on top of Suse look more attractive.
Novell may be facing competition with a lot of other distributions, but I have to say that I don't see Suse fading anytime soon. In fact, in my experience, Suse has been getting more popular as of late. It certainly seems like the most well refined distribution I've used lately. Redhat seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of Linux users, and I've never heard of anyone using Mandrake on a server, which really leaves Suse as the last of the major distributions with commercial backing (I know there are other commercial Linux distributions, but when I think of commercial Linux distributions, I always think of the big 3 as Suse, Redhat and Mandrake).
YaST is probably one of the best system tools I've used on any Linux distribution, and hopefully we will see some really great things once we see some (forgive the buzz word) synergy between Suse and Ximian.
Kartoo is one of the most unique search engines I've ever used, and while a lot of the time it just has the "gee-wiz" factor, sometimes it can really be useful.
Kartoo is basically just a meta-search engine, but what is truly unique about it is the way that it displays the results. Instead of just giving a list of results, it shows a flash "map" of different pages, what links to what, what words link them, different categories, and allows you to click on links between sites to refine your search.
I've found that this is really helpful in two specific circumstances. The first is when you are trying to find something specific, but the keywords for it tend to lead you to a bunch of junk pages, or when you are trying to search for something and you don't know enough about it to know all of the proper keywords. It can also be useful in research to see how different pages are linked together.
Although I can only speak for myself and my friends, I would be unsuprised if this held true for most people, but I know that I certainly haven't stopped using Yahoo, just the crappy parts of Yahoo.
Yahoo messenger for example, alawys seemed to be the best IM client (servers more stable than MSN, more features than AIM, and my friends actually use it, unlike Jabber). Yahoo groups is a great thing, probably the best thing Yahoo does, and I would suspect this is probably the only way that a lot of people use Yahoo.
I've also always liked Yahoo maps better than Mapquest or Google Maps. No particular reason why really, it just happens to strike my fancy a bit more than the other two.
Of course, on the other hand, I stopped visiting Yahoo's home page long ago, because it looks to me like it was designed by a hyperactive web developer who was encouraged toward the espresso machine a few dozen too many times.
I also stopped using their webmail quite a while ago, because I found the interface abysmal and the spam filters only so-so. Of course, I've heard that they've gotten a bit better in order to compete with gmail, but I haven't had a chance to check it out, since I already have so many email addresses I can barely remember all of them as it is.
Their search engine ever was horrible, but in my experience most of the time it's just not as good as google, plus google is the default for firefox and it would take more effort to change than I have the werewithal to exert.
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I just wonder, no matter how efficient, safe, and cheap this thing can be, if it will ever sell. Nuclear tech seems to be kind of a boogeyman still. How long until Fox or the SciFi channel makes a Made for TV movie about someone's pace maker having a meltdown and taking out 2/3 of north america.
actually, the big thing about showing up sick is that you get other people sick.
That, and if you show up and work while sick, instead of resting and getting better, you end up sending a month being unproductive because you are sick, instead of a couple of days being unproductive because you are at home getting better.
Which I guess goes to partially prove your point, making this comment meaningless....oh well.
While I cetainly understand why one would want their children to be able to get money from their acheivements, my problem with it has always been that essentially it leads to a situation where, within a given family, someone only need to contribute to society once very X generations, when the cash from the original contribution starts to run dry. Granted that in the ideal world this wouldn't be the case, as people who inherited money from an ancestors invention would still have the drive to contribute to society, and may even be able to contribute more as they would have greater resources, but as it stands most people won't do anything unless there is profit in it. And people that already have a lot of money have less incentive to contribute to society even for profit, mostly because once a person reaches a critical amount of wealthy, they no longer need to do anything productive to generate more wealth, and instead need only to move money around, and manipulate abstract economic numbers, essentially living off of interest, accounting loopholes, and buying out people who actually have to work and create and better society to make a living.
Because of this, I think that copyright should end upon the death of the author. If I create something and die the next day, too bad, it goes into public domain. This is the same reason I support heafty inheritence taxes for anything over a certain amount.
here are just some ideas that I think is fair to both the consumer and to content creators.
Anytime content is sold, it should be a license for the person who purchased said content in whatever form or medium he or she choses. That means that if one buys a CD or a DVD, that person is within their rights to convert that audio or video recording into whatever format they want, and view it whereever they want (car/pc/mp3 player/etc).
As a consumer purchases a license to use the content, that person should be able to backup their investment, by copying files to a hard driver, burning to a CD/DVD, etc.
As per 1 and 2, if a distributer takes steps to prevent copying or re-encoding of content by the end user, then they are liable for providing the content in an acceptable alternate format, and providing replacement media should the original be damaged. (If they put copy protection on a CD, then the user should be able to get an electronic copy of the music should they wish to listen to the music on an mp3 player. If their original CD is damaged, then the seller should be required to provide a new copy of the medium).
If a person obtains a copy of some content without a license, that person is permitted to preview the content for a period of 24 hours, after which they must delete/destroy the their copy of the content, or purchase a valid license.
A license is transferable.
If less than 1/3 of the total content, or 15 minutes (whichever is less) of the content is used, it should be considered fair use and not require any additional licensing.
A license for content may belong to a single person, or at the option of the purchaser, be limited to a single source. (ie, a person can buy a CD, and then be allowed to copy that cd to a computer, listen to it on the computer/in the car/whatever, or they can have the license follow the original media, so that whoever has posession of the media has the license to use it, but can not keep a copy for themselves and provide a copy for someone else (with the 24 hour preview exception as noted above) ).
All content must enter the public domain after 20 years, or upon the death of the creator (if an organization owns the rights to the content, so there is no "creator" to die, then the content must enter public domain after 10 years).
I've always liked the concept of post-it notes, since my memory for tasks is abysmal (or rather I'm too easily distracted from the tasks I need to complete). I've tried using post-it notes, but the problem is that usually after a few hours, they stop sticking. I've tried using other brands but I can't get any of them to stick for more than an hour or two. Anyone have any experience with a brand that will actually stay stuck on vertical surface (e.g. monitor, fridge, etc) for more than an hour or two?
I would suspect that hardware keyloggers are more common than software keyloggers anyway. In even moderately sized computer labs like those at schools/universities, and public libraries, it would be fairly trivial to stick a keylogger on a machine. I know that at my university, people are constantly unplugging network cables from machines on in the lab so they can hook up their laptops (which I find really annoying since they offer tables with power and network connections for people with laptops). So it's really common to see someone reaching back behind a machine to plug it's network cable back in. It would be trivial for someone to just stick a keylogger on a machine while they were back there.
A hardware keylogger is also a bit more secure for the perpetraitor, since they are quick to put in, pull out, and can be checked in the less conspicuous saftey of ones own home.
I think your looking at it the wrong way.
A couple of months ago, my GeForce 3 64MB card started to have problems with the fan. It had been a good card, and supported all of the games and applications I ran with it well enough, and I could have just replaced the fan, but I decided instead to put the card on the shelf, and use it in the new box I'm slowly collecting parts to build.
So, when I went shopping around for new video cards, because every few months there is a new line for $500, the older models go down in price. This meant for for about $200 I was able to get a nice, not top of the line, but still much better than what I had video card that will last me a long time.
Even when people do buy the latest and greatest video card, most of the time they don't upgrade each generation. Even my friends who are hard core PC gamers generally wait 2 or 3 generations between upgrades, and each time there is a new generation, the last generation gets cheaper.
I'm not sure why they decided that they need such a huge change from what they already had, I always thought that (exessive ads from in the buddy list aside) AIM had a pretty decent UI. In fact, the only thing that ever really annoyed me about AIM was it allowing people to set the background color on their text, because people seem to invariably love sending lime green text on a hot pink background, or something else equally blinding. But looking at the screenshots of this new client, it seems bulky and way to flashy. Generally when I get an IM, I just want a small text window that will pop-up that I can read and reply to quickly. Along these lines, I think tabbed IMs are a bad idea (turned them off in Gaim), because tabbed IMs only really seem to work if your concentrating only on IMing people, instead of (what I do, and what I would suspect most other people do) simply leaving the IM services on in the background while you do other stuff.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, until they add support for multiple protocols, and a linux port, I'll be sticking with Gaim, though I certainly hope Gaim doesn't try to copy this new look.
I understand the desire to have a custom modded computer, something that someone would build themselves to make it unique, and I also understand the desire for a computer that is more asthetically pleasing than most standard towers, but I've never really understood the desire to buy gaming rigs like this.
When you buy a machine like this, it automatically takes away the first reason, personalization, to own a non-standard machine like this, and most of them are dead ugly.
Plus, the extra charge for these machines tends to be really high compared to a machine of equal specs in a standard case.
I thought Microsoft's Motto was "It Compiles".
In all fairness to microsoft, this may not be it at all.
I'm going to preface my argument with the fact that I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, I use Linux and Mac at home, and I do believe that microsoft has taken part in (and still takes part in) unfair business practices.
That said, the bottom line might have had little to do with this decision. The fact is that it's very misleading to say "X withdraws support for law Y" because it might not mean that "X is against Y". We don't know if microsoft withdrew support from this bill because of some change in stance on Gay rights. For all we know the law might have been something to the extent of "LGBT people have equal rights in the workplace.....and it's legal to kill children and rape kittens on the third tuesday of every month".
The problem is that importing .doc files into OO.org is a bit of a craps shoot, sometimes the document imports perfectly, other times it's usable but ugly, and sometimes it's so garbled as to be nearly useless. Not that I'm discounting the work done by the folks at OO.org or the other F/OSS projects that import .doc files (KWord usually does a pretty good job in my experience, and abiword tends to be all or nothing, though I haven't use abiword in a logn while, so it might be better now). .doc format has been pretty stationary for a while, the new format will still require time to reverse engineer (assume the authors won't or can't agree to whatever MS wants them to sign). I suspect that there will be a decent amount of time where the new format is the preferred windows document format, but importing/exporting for Linux applications isn't quite good enough. .docs for seemingly no reason. It aggravates me to no end how often clients and peopel from school send out emails with the text of the email in an attatched .doc file, when the content of the file is nothing more than plain text that could have simply been put in the email, or at least a plaintext file. .swx files? The merits of each file format aside, I generally save office documents as .swx, and it's a pita when I have to open up the file and export it to a .doc everytime I want to send it to someone. Since OO.org is GPL (IIRC), would allowing Office to import OO.org files mean that it would have to be GPL as well, or is it just microsoft trying to fruther their monopoly?
Of course, support is always improving, but that's because the
Of course, the real problem, IMO, has little to do with the format itself, but with how often people send
A bit off topic, but also, why the heck won't MS Office import OO.org
Historically, I've always found console launches to be pretty exciting. Saving my money up for a year in advance so I can get the consoles on launch date along with a couple of launch titles. Rallying behind your favorite console (even though I really know it's all about the games, and I generally have all the consoles anyway).
But, this round of console launches seems to be a little disconcerting to me. First and foremost, I'm worried about nintend (seems like someone needs to worry on their behalf) - who should be focusing on rebuilding their relationship with third party game makers, instead of going out of their way to make something strange and difficult to make games for. Microsoft looks like they might really do well this year, which worries me more than the thought that nintendo might utterly fail. It's not that I have anything against microsoft personally, it's just that they seem to really be pushing bringing PC style games onto consoles, as opposed to console style games. I find the vast majority of the xbox games to suck horribly (just my opinion).
Sony seems to be doing it's own sony thing, overhyping the system and such. I'm not sure how well they'll do either, there are a lot of people who were burned by the poor quality of the initial PS2s last time around, and they historically have a hard time getting supply to meet demand. They might also be pulling a nintendo and shooting themselves in the foot with the Cell architecture. Difficulty of programming was one of the biggest complaints about the PS2, and from what I know about the cell architecture sony may have exacerbated the problem.
In the end, I predict that Microsoft will win, sony will take a distant second place with a few ports and very few original games, and nintendo will be completely out in left field making some money on things that bear very little resemblance to traditional games, and which may or may not be any fun at all.
I don't think that it's necessarily that PC and Console style RPGs are so different as I think that the difference is in the japanese vs american style of story telling (and types of stories). In american style RPGs, the focus seems to be on adventure for the sake of adventure, collecting treasure, and the story of a common person picking themselves up by the bootstraps and becoming a hero. In contrast, Japanese style RPGs seem to focus on the reluctant hero, chosen by fate, to to fulfill some great destiny/prophacy/etc. In American (or perhaps Western style would be more appropriate) RPGs, there is a bit more lattitude in the characters themselves, essentially the entire gamut frrom Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil can still be seen as being Heroic. In Japanese style games the storyline tends to only work with a character, though often reluctantly, struggling with the morality of a situation and eventually becoming something like Chaotic Good.
I think that these differences end up effecting the games in a number of ways (or rather, each type of story faces it's own technological limitations). In the Japanese style games, since there is a more fixed character (the player controls the character) A much less branching storyline is acceptable. In Western style games (the player IS the character) the character has more choice, and that limits the possibilities for the pre-written scripts. Because of the limitations on how much story can be written in American style games, the games themselves seem to focus more on dungeon crawling, accumulating treasure and experience (which also fits in with the image of the western style hero as the rouge adventurer).
I think that the reason it seems to be divided among PC/Console lines is that most PC games are developed by american companies, whereas historically the majority of console games (especially RPGs) were developed by Japanese companies.
Although I don't think that either style is inherintly superior to the other, I personally tend to prefer the more story driven Japanese style games to the Adventure driven American style games.
I think that the actual reason that there is limited adoption of F/OSS software is that most people who use it don't want to see Joe User using their software, I think that at the end of the day, a lot of the geeks would perfer to see uncle joe and aunt tilly to go with a proprietary/semi-proprietary solution like Apple, or yes even Microsoft.
I think the real reason that a lot of people shout about wanting F/OSS adoption is they actually just want a little more support from commerical vendors.
actually, I know a lot of people with the current generation of systems, who will also buy the next-gen systems, who do not have cable/sattelite tv. I, and most of the people I know, rarely if ever watch TV. Most shows I ever cared about have been cancelled seasons ago and are available on DVD now. The way I see it, I could spend $50/month for 100 channels of reality TV, or get an extra game a month. I'd much rather have the game.
I think that the problem with in-game ads is that at first it's all well and good to see ad's when you play for free in a game with a setting that's condusive to seeing ads, pretty soon they will start to creep into subscription based games where they don't fit at all.
The first time I ever recall seing product placement in a game was in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 arcade game, with pizza hut billboards, this fit the game, as the characters were walking around a city where billboards would be common, and pizza was a big theme in the show anyway.
The most vivid recollection of product-placement that I can remember was in Jet Moto for PSX, with Mountain Dew billboards, which also fit.
I agree with the sentiments that I've seen from other posts that in these types of games, product placement can make the game feel more authentic. Even banner ads not actually in the game would be fine if it allowed me to play a game for free (especially if it was a preview so I could decide if I wanted to pay a monthly fee).
What worries me is what happenes when game makers realize that they can make even more money by charging a monthly fee AND including product placement. How long until we see ads in loading screens (and reduce the incentive for game makers to reduce loading time), how long until we start seeing spam in our in-game message boxes, or have to complete a quest by punching the monkey.
I've actually been in the same situation lately. I just finished a job where I was required to sign an NDA which is applicable until the release of the product. My job was finished a couple of months ago, but the product itself is still a ways off from release. Now that I've been interviewing for new work, I've ran into the same problem "what do you say when you can't say anything about your previous work". ... and here is some sample code", you can probably say something along the lines of "I worked on a project using technologies X, Y and Z, and developed algorithms or techniques related to fields A, B and C."
The conclusion I came too, after talking to my old boss (with whom I still get along, and hold no ill-will against for my position being eliminated). What it was decided was that although I cannot give exact details on what exactly I did, it's still fair game to talk about generalities of what I did. For example, although you probably can't tell an employer "I worked on project X and developed algorithm foo which works like
Of course, a lot of this depends on what exactly you were working on at your last job, if you were developing something neat using existing technologies, or expanding an existing field, then it's probably a lot easier than if you were developing something completely new.
OT: if MS has breached its requirements to a person, is that person then justified in breaching his/her requirements? For example, the one about not decompiling. Just a thought.
No, just as with the GPL, under copyright law, Microsoft's license is the only thing that allows you to use their software at all, so technically if they breach their license, then you no longer are able to use that license to use the software, and are therefore in violation of copyright.
Hmmm, maybe this could be a new business plan for microsoft. Breach the license for Windows, thereby invalidating everyone's licenses, then sue the people still using windows over copyright infringement if they refuse to buy another license. (My gods, I should be sure to put this post on my resume for SCO and the RI/MPAA)
Just a guess, but I would imagine that access goes through a proxy, and the advertisers pay for ads on the proxy. Either they replace banner ads (not sure if this is even legal or not), or they just have it so that whenever you go to a site, you get a page with an ad that then redirects you to your site.
This might not even be that bad of a thing if the majority of the ads came from stores in the area, people would get (semi) relevant ads for stores in their immediate location, and could even help the economy in the area.
you know, I realize that this was just an april fools joke, but really, it goes to show something. One of the biggest drain on laptop batteries is the screen, and I know a lot of people keep the brightness on their monitor up pretty high. Yet people ran this program, and didn't notice any difference in the screen gradually darkening. This might be a good way to save battery power on laptops. Start the screen at "normal" brightness, and then have it slowly start to darken, letting your eyes adjust slowly, in order to save battery life.
(do I get extra karma for posting an insightful comment on slashdot on april 1?)
I think that mind share is really at the core of it. Suse might not completely take over redhat anytime soon, but it is gaining mindshare, and I think that's what novell really needs. Mindshare won't make companies go out and scrap their entire RedHat installations, but it will make them consider Suse when it's time to upgrade, and Suse having a good mindshare also makes Novell's solutions that are built on top of Suse look more attractive.
Novell may be facing competition with a lot of other distributions, but I have to say that I don't see Suse fading anytime soon. In fact, in my experience, Suse has been getting more popular as of late. It certainly seems like the most well refined distribution I've used lately. Redhat seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of Linux users, and I've never heard of anyone using Mandrake on a server, which really leaves Suse as the last of the major distributions with commercial backing (I know there are other commercial Linux distributions, but when I think of commercial Linux distributions, I always think of the big 3 as Suse, Redhat and Mandrake).
YaST is probably one of the best system tools I've used on any Linux distribution, and hopefully we will see some really great things once we see some (forgive the buzz word) synergy between Suse and Ximian.
Kartoo is one of the most unique search engines I've ever used, and while a lot of the time it just has the "gee-wiz" factor, sometimes it can really be useful.
Kartoo is basically just a meta-search engine, but what is truly unique about it is the way that it displays the results. Instead of just giving a list of results, it shows a flash "map" of different pages, what links to what, what words link them, different categories, and allows you to click on links between sites to refine your search.
I've found that this is really helpful in two specific circumstances. The first is when you are trying to find something specific, but the keywords for it tend to lead you to a bunch of junk pages, or when you are trying to search for something and you don't know enough about it to know all of the proper keywords. It can also be useful in research to see how different pages are linked together.
Although I can only speak for myself and my friends, I would be unsuprised if this held true for most people, but I know that I certainly haven't stopped using Yahoo, just the crappy parts of Yahoo.
Yahoo messenger for example, alawys seemed to be the best IM client (servers more stable than MSN, more features than AIM, and my friends actually use it, unlike Jabber). Yahoo groups is a great thing, probably the best thing Yahoo does, and I would suspect this is probably the only way that a lot of people use Yahoo.
I've also always liked Yahoo maps better than Mapquest or Google Maps. No particular reason why really, it just happens to strike my fancy a bit more than the other two.
Of course, on the other hand, I stopped visiting Yahoo's home page long ago, because it looks to me like it was designed by a hyperactive web developer who was encouraged toward the espresso machine a few dozen too many times.
I also stopped using their webmail quite a while ago, because I found the interface abysmal and the spam filters only so-so. Of course, I've heard that they've gotten a bit better in order to compete with gmail, but I haven't had a chance to check it out, since I already have so many email addresses I can barely remember all of them as it is.
Their search engine ever was horrible, but in my experience most of the time it's just not as good as google, plus google is the default for firefox and it would take more effort to change than I have the werewithal to exert.