I got 20-30 FPS on a GeForce 440 MX. Running on a Pentium 3 with 256 megs of RAM. Under WINE on Linux.
I doubt there's a system still operational that couldn't run this game.
Yeah, and you can pick up a copy of Dos 6.11 for fifty cents and spend TEN years writing batch files, and it comes out to like a billionth of a cent per hour!!!1!
The problem with your reasoning is you are assuming that "Playing WoW" is equivalent to "Playing a wide variety of story-driven self-contained RPGs." It's like saying that since an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus is cheaper per-page than 20 sci-fi books it makes for better reading.
Bollucks. That politician was being hostile, openly threatening, accusatory, and pretty much as NON-helpful as they come. I think the 'IT guy' was being more than reasonable. He made considerable effort to help even though he was being accused and threatened. Personally I would have just marked the crap as spam.
It was at this -- and only until this -- point in the comment list that I realized it was ExpertsExchange.com and not ExpertSexChange.com. I was having serious trouble reconciling the relevance.
I don't think you caught what he was referring to. Cable TV was originally and partially still is the sale of over-the-air stations that can be had for free, delivered via wire. TV Season DVDs are selling you something you could have already recorded for free. All three of those are simply sale of free+convenient.
Ok, I'll bite, even though no one is reading this deep in the thread anymore. There's a critical point that everyone leaves out here: it wasn't Chell or GladOS that said the cake was a lie. It was the anonymous test subject/scientist that had blazed the trail prior, losing his sanity in the process. One cannot prove that he/she did not receive cake; however, as his/her 'clues' ended at and following the large room with multiple turrets, one can presume that he/she did not survive and that, for him/her, there was no cake or grief counseling.
This. I mean, seriously. It is AMAZING how many people are still playing StarCraft. Completely amazing. I'm suprised they've taken so long at deveoloping StarCraft II -- but they bet that no one would take their pie and they were right, I guess. Don't let me sound derisive -- SC is an awesome game, and I've had much fun with it. WoW has kind of disillusioned me, but I'm huge on looking forward to SCII.
Yeah, FF was released after Dragon Quest, a series which did pretty well and the original made a lot of money for an entirely different company. DQ was originally by Enix, which had nothing to do with Square or Square's FF at the time. They didn't merge until very recently, you may remember. FF was very much their last stab at glory.
I submit that the fanbase of, say, Star Trek is starting to want very much to see it not continue on. Stories must end to be stories, which is something appealing to a lot of us.
My only exception taken here is thus: Studies of incidents of lung cancer in smokers are among all this radon and exhaust that we are all exposed to. It's true, cancer causes and risks across the board are higher than they've ever been, as we exit the Industrial Age and ease into the Information Age, but any study I'm aware of for smoking causing lung cancer studied many people in the same environment, exposed to the same risks. They were controlled for as many factors as possible besides smoking, and the correlation -- and probable causation is strong. Please don't ignore the risk; indeed, I urge you to read up on it, just so you're comfortable. If you feel that you have reached that stage already, then by all means.
Other than that -- you seem comfortable with your position and accepting of the risks, although I wish you would pay them more heed. As both of us are adults, if you have made your decision well-considered then I shall of course accept it -- not that my acceptance should have bearing on it. I've given you all I have, and I have no wish to rant or lecture -- which I may have come too close to already.
My concern is satisfied, although any questions I will happily field, and I will hope for your future. Best of luck.
On the matter of lung cancer: the number of cases of lung cancer have risen in direct proportion to the number of smokers. This means with probability that approaches certainty that the two events are correlated. That only leaves the cause and effect relationship to discover, and cigarettes contain compounds that are known and proven to be carcinogenic. I'm sorry, but stating at this point, after years and years of medical research and experience, that tobacco is not a cancer risk is not only self-delusion, it's wishful thinking.
Regarding the statement: no harm done on either side.
Regarding Wikipedia: that's fair enough, and a reasonable viewpoint, if a bit harsh, I feel. There are other excellent statistics pages available on the internet as well as truly useful texts at any public library.
And regarding your ultimate demise: you trust yourself to let yourself go without doctor assistance, eh? How does your family feel? How will they feel? Your wife? Your kids? The tobacco tax doesn't nearly begin to cover the huge debt incurred by unpaid medical bills as related to smoking.
Smoking really is that bad, and it's still legal because a huge portion of the population was physiologically addicted before they knew it's problems. It's not just the tobacco, it's the additives. It's still legal because, like so many things, of politics.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not complaining about your lifestyle at all. I'm just trying to save your life. And, true enough, it's not mine to save, and I'm meddling in other people's business, and whatnot -- but I will not be the guy that doesn't try because he's afraid. I urge you, stop smoking. You stand to lose nothing and gain much. It's just how I see things.
I spoke too casually with the cancer, I suppose, but incidents of lung cancer in number were less than one percent of what they became after a large number of people started smoking. No, smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. But if you have lung cancer, it is in very nearly all cases because of tobacco smoke.
Regarding what you said, the bit I was replying to was:
So you have the gull to tell me that because I am smoking, I am killing myself when the actual figures say I have almost a fifty percent chance of living longer then the average person in the US
which I may have interpreted erroneously, in which case I apologize. I still cannot find a valid statement in it besides the one I inferred, however.
All meaningful pages I link at Wikipedia list dozens of peer-reviewed sources that can be pursued -- indeed, if one is that prickly about the nature of wikis one could simply ignore the text of the article and treat the cite list as a reading guide. The result is the same. Do you seriously propose that the entries on elementary statistics are wrong? Could you point me to some errors on the topic I referenced you to?
But, most importantly:
You will have to allow me a bit of fervor. You say that you want to die sooner by smoking so that you won't be a burden on people -- and yet the death smoking brings you to leaves you rotting, unable to breathe, on a bed, or if you're lucky attached to a machine at home, lingering, for months or years, forcing your family to live with providing for you, with the grief of watching you wither away, and leaving them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of hospital debt, which will ruin their credit and their finances, and the remainder of which will be passed on to the public in the form of taxes (eventually, don't make me trace the chain). I am trying to tell you that it is smoking that gives you the lingering, expensive, and burdensome death that you purport to avoid. You will wind up on artificial pulmonary, you will wither away slowly, unable to care for yourself, you will rack up six digits of medical debt. If you seriously think that smoking gives you a 'cleaner' death than living a natural life then I fear for your future.
Smoking has been proven -- proven -- to cause lung cancer first and foremost, but also a whole array of secondary complications relating to the lungs as well as a few things related to the circulatory system. Getting shot doesn't kill you -- blood loss kills you, organ necrosis kills you, peritonitis kills you. Same thing with smoking. No diagnosis will ever read 'died of smoking.' It's the problems it brings with it that greatly shortens your lifespan, unless you draw the short straw and get lung cancer. Actually, a lot of the straws are short.
I pay higher taxes because of health care provided by public hospitals to patients that cannot afford to make good on it. A large fraction of this is, as a matter of record, due to smoking-related cancers and complications.
Do you seriously expect me to address the comment that smoking gives you a 50% chance of extending your life? This sounds woefully like you misunderstand statistics. Which is understandable, as it has nonintuitive parts -- there is sufficient material on Wikipedia, at least, to catch you up with your errors there, and I am not paid to teach elementary statistics, so forgive me.
You'll feel a lot different about those wasted years when it's tomorrow, or the day after. Have you had your lungs checked? Do you visit a doctor frequently? Lung cancer can crop up at any time. Seriously, get checked, then stop killing yourself. I know you're angry with me, and I try not to come off like an arrogant ass -- and fail, but what motivates me is just a serious concern for people, and if you could in a years time tell me that you've quit smoking and can look forward to a longer, healthier life, with no risks or fears of sudden death (let alone the waning years) the only person whom would be more happy than me... is you.
(Oh, and Obama has quite a few interesting ideas, but I'd hardly say I sleep on his platform.)
It's considerate of you to not smoke in restaurants, and I thank you for it. However, concerning your children -- it's not whether you can make the decision properly, it's whether every parent can make the decision properly, and the answer is 'probably not'. Mass Big Brother invasion? No, no more than the law requiring parents to feed their children instead of killing them.
Health is not a 'superficial' reason.
Paying higher taxes to subsidize the health costs of smokers is not a 'superficial' reason.
Death is not a 'superficial' reason.
Suicide is not a 'superficial' reason
Murder is not a 'superficial' reason.
Smoking is all of these things.
You say smoking is a nasty habit and shouldn't be allowed around you? Well, I think that those little asthma inhalers are nasty. So should I be allowed to restrict where you use you inhaler? I know you say that you NEED your inhaler, but I call bullshit. You don't need your inhaler around me. If you want to use your inhaler, you go outside or do it in the comfort of your own home!
As written this is complete nonsense, but we're almost at something. How about if people with asthma took their medicine-filled inhalers and walked around spraying them in the air, occasionally your face, and you couldn't be anywhere near them without getting a whiff of inhaler? Even better, what if those inhalers contained body altering, physiologically addictive, cancer-causing, health stealing and lung-rotting drugs? Your habits offend people everywhere you go, and worsen their health. You are stealing not only your own life, but the life of others.
Do you know what an allergy is? Because the people behind those articles didn't. No, it is flat, 100% impossible to be allergic to water, full stop, no question. I can't believe I'm even having to explain this. The human body is mostly water. An allergy would, as stated, prevent you from developing past the point at which it was (impossibly) acquired.
Those articles sound to me seriously like a skin moisture problem. Some skins have too little oil or an over-sensitivity to being too dry (note, that is an absence of water within the skin). This causes an irritating rash. I've had it happen to me. Frequent washing with soap can cause it -- and when people develop the rash they start soaping it more hoping to rid themselves of some imagined contaminant, and a bad cycle starts. Sometimes the skin is dry enough that merely passing water over the skin and toweling dry can wick enough moisture away to trigger the rash, but it is very, very rare. The real way to deal with these rashes -- and any reoccuring rash that doesn't respond to environmental changes -- is to just leave it alone, don't soap or scrub it -- you're probably ok getting it wet, but washing it with any vigor will likely worsen matters, and rarely help.
Man, I've been ranting too much these past few days. Sorry.
Give me a break. I'm well and truly tired of hearing this empty argument. Is FOSS guaranteed to be bug- and exploit-free? Hardly. Does the fact that millions of people can look at it make a difference, even if only a few do? Absolutely. Tell ya what. I'll pick up a list of five hundred closed-source programs with malware. If you can get me a list of ten open-source programs with malware, I'll concede.
Geez, lay off. Here's a perfect example of a cop who doesn't like to taser people and you still try to rail him? Give me a break. Would you rather there weren't paperwork for such incidents? Can you think of a better way that doesn't waste more man-hours or instill less of a sense of responsibility?
Sorry... I don't mean to rant. I just feel for these cops, sometimes. I've known plenty of truly decent ones.
And that's what's on the Blu-Ray disk, right? A series of tiny little photographs etched into the optical media, and a tiny little projector shines through them? Idiot.
I actually think the "All-You-Can-Eat" moniker is pretty bloody accurate here -- it's the same type of psudeoscam. A business sells you the right to consume without limits, then makes sure it stays within reason. A perfectly honorable transaction if both parties are honorable, but then, corporations have little incentive to remain honorable.
Or, put another way, walk into your favorite "All-You-Can-Eat" buffet and ask if you would be allowed to consume, say, fifteen plates of food, or wait at your table until you hungered again. It's the same type of thing.
Ok, there's people everywhere in here saying it's stupid to say 1GB = 1024 MB, instead use GiB, blah blah, but I have an honest question: if everyone did, for whatever reason, use GiB and MiB and whatnot, of what use would MB and GB be? None, right? No one in their right mind would ever measure units on binary hardware in powers of ten. Just like I don't measure grams of soup or whatever in powers of two. I guess what I'm saying is if the switch to GiB and MiB was made in earnest then GB and MB would be utterly, completely useless -- and I see that as an argument that we might as well just use GB and MB, since it involves no conflict, fewer meaningless terms, and a more intuitive, uh, interface, if you will.
I read the linked essay and found it thorough, if a bit dry. My own thoughts on the matter parallel, I'm sure, that of most people here: sure, I may not have anything to hide right now, but if the government has absolute watch over the people, that gives it the ability to do a lot of dangerous things -- the ability to isolate and persecute groups or individuals through selective legislation, or the ability to further its own ends unfairly. Indeed, who does watch the government? When people speak of having nothing too hide, they forget that the government of this country (any country) is just as human, and just as prone.
I think developers and companies should think long and hard about how such policies would be received if the end-user were presented with them in plainspeak.
"Welcome, JoeUser. This is WidgetMax v2.0.3. As a reminder, this product may contain security holes or exploits that we already know about and don't want to spend the money to fix because we internally classify them as low-to-medium risk."
I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong -- budgets are finite -- but keeping policies internal because of how they would be viewed publicly is deceiving your customer, full stop. Also, these guys are setting themselves up as final arbiter of what's risky in code exploits. It makes one uncomfortable to think about.
Assuming GoDaddy had a set of pages, and ALL of them used Apache, that means they selected Apache on MERIT and that those numbers reflect HONEST Apache market share by WILLING CONSUMERS. If trivial (unused) pages were switched to IIS with no intention of them being ever used, then yeah, that's dishonest where the Apache use wasn't. Why the hell would they park with IIS and host with Apache? C'mon, now. It's garbage.
"Artificially Inflated" implies here that the totals are being inflated by products not in use. Using the same product for ALL your pages is natural (see: not artificial). This IIS swapover payoff is as artificial as it gets.
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I got 20-30 FPS on a GeForce 440 MX. Running on a Pentium 3 with 256 megs of RAM. Under WINE on Linux. I doubt there's a system still operational that couldn't run this game.
Yeah, and you can pick up a copy of Dos 6.11 for fifty cents and spend TEN years writing batch files, and it comes out to like a billionth of a cent per hour!!!1! The problem with your reasoning is you are assuming that "Playing WoW" is equivalent to "Playing a wide variety of story-driven self-contained RPGs." It's like saying that since an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus is cheaper per-page than 20 sci-fi books it makes for better reading.
Bollucks. That politician was being hostile, openly threatening, accusatory, and pretty much as NON-helpful as they come. I think the 'IT guy' was being more than reasonable. He made considerable effort to help even though he was being accused and threatened. Personally I would have just marked the crap as spam.
It was at this -- and only until this -- point in the comment list that I realized it was ExpertsExchange.com and not ExpertSexChange.com. I was having serious trouble reconciling the relevance.
I don't think you caught what he was referring to. Cable TV was originally and partially still is the sale of over-the-air stations that can be had for free, delivered via wire. TV Season DVDs are selling you something you could have already recorded for free. All three of those are simply sale of free+convenient.
Ok, I'll bite, even though no one is reading this deep in the thread anymore. There's a critical point that everyone leaves out here: it wasn't Chell or GladOS that said the cake was a lie. It was the anonymous test subject/scientist that had blazed the trail prior, losing his sanity in the process. One cannot prove that he/she did not receive cake; however, as his/her 'clues' ended at and following the large room with multiple turrets, one can presume that he/she did not survive and that, for him/her, there was no cake or grief counseling.
This. I mean, seriously. It is AMAZING how many people are still playing StarCraft. Completely amazing. I'm suprised they've taken so long at deveoloping StarCraft II -- but they bet that no one would take their pie and they were right, I guess. Don't let me sound derisive -- SC is an awesome game, and I've had much fun with it. WoW has kind of disillusioned me, but I'm huge on looking forward to SCII.
Yeah, FF was released after Dragon Quest, a series which did pretty well and the original made a lot of money for an entirely different company. DQ was originally by Enix, which had nothing to do with Square or Square's FF at the time. They didn't merge until very recently, you may remember. FF was very much their last stab at glory.
I submit that the fanbase of, say, Star Trek is starting to want very much to see it not continue on. Stories must end to be stories, which is something appealing to a lot of us.
My only exception taken here is thus: Studies of incidents of lung cancer in smokers are among all this radon and exhaust that we are all exposed to. It's true, cancer causes and risks across the board are higher than they've ever been, as we exit the Industrial Age and ease into the Information Age, but any study I'm aware of for smoking causing lung cancer studied many people in the same environment, exposed to the same risks. They were controlled for as many factors as possible besides smoking, and the correlation -- and probable causation is strong. Please don't ignore the risk; indeed, I urge you to read up on it, just so you're comfortable. If you feel that you have reached that stage already, then by all means.
Other than that -- you seem comfortable with your position and accepting of the risks, although I wish you would pay them more heed. As both of us are adults, if you have made your decision well-considered then I shall of course accept it -- not that my acceptance should have bearing on it. I've given you all I have, and I have no wish to rant or lecture -- which I may have come too close to already.
My concern is satisfied, although any questions I will happily field, and I will hope for your future. Best of luck.
--Shane
On the matter of lung cancer: the number of cases of lung cancer have risen in direct proportion to the number of smokers. This means with probability that approaches certainty that the two events are correlated. That only leaves the cause and effect relationship to discover, and cigarettes contain compounds that are known and proven to be carcinogenic. I'm sorry, but stating at this point, after years and years of medical research and experience, that tobacco is not a cancer risk is not only self-delusion, it's wishful thinking.
Regarding the statement: no harm done on either side.
Regarding Wikipedia: that's fair enough, and a reasonable viewpoint, if a bit harsh, I feel. There are other excellent statistics pages available on the internet as well as truly useful texts at any public library.
And regarding your ultimate demise: you trust yourself to let yourself go without doctor assistance, eh? How does your family feel? How will they feel? Your wife? Your kids? The tobacco tax doesn't nearly begin to cover the huge debt incurred by unpaid medical bills as related to smoking.
Smoking really is that bad, and it's still legal because a huge portion of the population was physiologically addicted before they knew it's problems. It's not just the tobacco, it's the additives. It's still legal because, like so many things, of politics.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not complaining about your lifestyle at all. I'm just trying to save your life. And, true enough, it's not mine to save, and I'm meddling in other people's business, and whatnot -- but I will not be the guy that doesn't try because he's afraid. I urge you, stop smoking. You stand to lose nothing and gain much. It's just how I see things.
I spoke too casually with the cancer, I suppose, but incidents of lung cancer in number were less than one percent of what they became after a large number of people started smoking. No, smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. But if you have lung cancer, it is in very nearly all cases because of tobacco smoke.
Regarding what you said, the bit I was replying to was: which I may have interpreted erroneously, in which case I apologize. I still cannot find a valid statement in it besides the one I inferred, however.
All meaningful pages I link at Wikipedia list dozens of peer-reviewed sources that can be pursued -- indeed, if one is that prickly about the nature of wikis one could simply ignore the text of the article and treat the cite list as a reading guide. The result is the same. Do you seriously propose that the entries on elementary statistics are wrong? Could you point me to some errors on the topic I referenced you to?
But, most importantly:
You will have to allow me a bit of fervor. You say that you want to die sooner by smoking so that you won't be a burden on people -- and yet the death smoking brings you to leaves you rotting, unable to breathe, on a bed, or if you're lucky attached to a machine at home, lingering, for months or years, forcing your family to live with providing for you, with the grief of watching you wither away, and leaving them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of hospital debt, which will ruin their credit and their finances, and the remainder of which will be passed on to the public in the form of taxes (eventually, don't make me trace the chain). I am trying to tell you that it is smoking that gives you the lingering, expensive, and burdensome death that you purport to avoid. You will wind up on artificial pulmonary, you will wither away slowly, unable to care for yourself, you will rack up six digits of medical debt. If you seriously think that smoking gives you a 'cleaner' death than living a natural life then I fear for your future.
I never told anyone what to do, least of all you.
Smoking has been proven -- proven -- to cause lung cancer first and foremost, but also a whole array of secondary complications relating to the lungs as well as a few things related to the circulatory system. Getting shot doesn't kill you -- blood loss kills you, organ necrosis kills you, peritonitis kills you. Same thing with smoking. No diagnosis will ever read 'died of smoking.' It's the problems it brings with it that greatly shortens your lifespan, unless you draw the short straw and get lung cancer. Actually, a lot of the straws are short.
I pay higher taxes because of health care provided by public hospitals to patients that cannot afford to make good on it. A large fraction of this is, as a matter of record, due to smoking-related cancers and complications.
Do you seriously expect me to address the comment that smoking gives you a 50% chance of extending your life? This sounds woefully like you misunderstand statistics. Which is understandable, as it has nonintuitive parts -- there is sufficient material on Wikipedia, at least, to catch you up with your errors there, and I am not paid to teach elementary statistics, so forgive me.
You'll feel a lot different about those wasted years when it's tomorrow, or the day after. Have you had your lungs checked? Do you visit a doctor frequently? Lung cancer can crop up at any time. Seriously, get checked, then stop killing yourself. I know you're angry with me, and I try not to come off like an arrogant ass -- and fail, but what motivates me is just a serious concern for people, and if you could in a years time tell me that you've quit smoking and can look forward to a longer, healthier life, with no risks or fears of sudden death (let alone the waning years) the only person whom would be more happy than me... is you.
(Oh, and Obama has quite a few interesting ideas, but I'd hardly say I sleep on his platform.)
It's considerate of you to not smoke in restaurants, and I thank you for it. However, concerning your children -- it's not whether you can make the decision properly, it's whether every parent can make the decision properly, and the answer is 'probably not'. Mass Big Brother invasion? No, no more than the law requiring parents to feed their children instead of killing them.
Health is not a 'superficial' reason. Paying higher taxes to subsidize the health costs of smokers is not a 'superficial' reason. Death is not a 'superficial' reason. Suicide is not a 'superficial' reason Murder is not a 'superficial' reason. Smoking is all of these things.
As written this is complete nonsense, but we're almost at something. How about if people with asthma took their medicine-filled inhalers and walked around spraying them in the air, occasionally your face, and you couldn't be anywhere near them without getting a whiff of inhaler? Even better, what if those inhalers contained body altering, physiologically addictive, cancer-causing, health stealing and lung-rotting drugs? Your habits offend people everywhere you go, and worsen their health. You are stealing not only your own life, but the life of others.
Do you know what an allergy is? Because the people behind those articles didn't. No, it is flat, 100% impossible to be allergic to water, full stop, no question. I can't believe I'm even having to explain this. The human body is mostly water. An allergy would, as stated, prevent you from developing past the point at which it was (impossibly) acquired.
Those articles sound to me seriously like a skin moisture problem. Some skins have too little oil or an over-sensitivity to being too dry (note, that is an absence of water within the skin). This causes an irritating rash. I've had it happen to me. Frequent washing with soap can cause it -- and when people develop the rash they start soaping it more hoping to rid themselves of some imagined contaminant, and a bad cycle starts. Sometimes the skin is dry enough that merely passing water over the skin and toweling dry can wick enough moisture away to trigger the rash, but it is very, very rare. The real way to deal with these rashes -- and any reoccuring rash that doesn't respond to environmental changes -- is to just leave it alone, don't soap or scrub it -- you're probably ok getting it wet, but washing it with any vigor will likely worsen matters, and rarely help.
Man, I've been ranting too much these past few days. Sorry.
Give me a break. I'm well and truly tired of hearing this empty argument. Is FOSS guaranteed to be bug- and exploit-free? Hardly. Does the fact that millions of people can look at it make a difference, even if only a few do? Absolutely. Tell ya what. I'll pick up a list of five hundred closed-source programs with malware. If you can get me a list of ten open-source programs with malware, I'll concede.
I'll be waiting over there. Asleep.
Geez, lay off. Here's a perfect example of a cop who doesn't like to taser people and you still try to rail him? Give me a break. Would you rather there weren't paperwork for such incidents? Can you think of a better way that doesn't waste more man-hours or instill less of a sense of responsibility?
Sorry... I don't mean to rant. I just feel for these cops, sometimes. I've known plenty of truly decent ones.
And that's what's on the Blu-Ray disk, right? A series of tiny little photographs etched into the optical media, and a tiny little projector shines through them? Idiot.
I actually think the "All-You-Can-Eat" moniker is pretty bloody accurate here -- it's the same type of psudeoscam. A business sells you the right to consume without limits, then makes sure it stays within reason. A perfectly honorable transaction if both parties are honorable, but then, corporations have little incentive to remain honorable.
Or, put another way, walk into your favorite "All-You-Can-Eat" buffet and ask if you would be allowed to consume, say, fifteen plates of food, or wait at your table until you hungered again. It's the same type of thing.
Ok, there's people everywhere in here saying it's stupid to say 1GB = 1024 MB, instead use GiB, blah blah, but I have an honest question: if everyone did, for whatever reason, use GiB and MiB and whatnot, of what use would MB and GB be? None, right? No one in their right mind would ever measure units on binary hardware in powers of ten. Just like I don't measure grams of soup or whatever in powers of two. I guess what I'm saying is if the switch to GiB and MiB was made in earnest then GB and MB would be utterly, completely useless -- and I see that as an argument that we might as well just use GB and MB, since it involves no conflict, fewer meaningless terms, and a more intuitive, uh, interface, if you will.
I read the linked essay and found it thorough, if a bit dry. My own thoughts on the matter parallel, I'm sure, that of most people here: sure, I may not have anything to hide right now, but if the government has absolute watch over the people, that gives it the ability to do a lot of dangerous things -- the ability to isolate and persecute groups or individuals through selective legislation, or the ability to further its own ends unfairly. Indeed, who does watch the government? When people speak of having nothing too hide, they forget that the government of this country (any country) is just as human, and just as prone.
I think developers and companies should think long and hard about how such policies would be received if the end-user were presented with them in plainspeak.
"Welcome, JoeUser. This is WidgetMax v2.0.3. As a reminder, this product may contain security holes or exploits that we already know about and don't want to spend the money to fix because we internally classify them as low-to-medium risk."
I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong -- budgets are finite -- but keeping policies internal because of how they would be viewed publicly is deceiving your customer, full stop. Also, these guys are setting themselves up as final arbiter of what's risky in code exploits. It makes one uncomfortable to think about.
Assuming GoDaddy had a set of pages, and ALL of them used Apache, that means they selected Apache on MERIT and that those numbers reflect HONEST Apache market share by WILLING CONSUMERS. If trivial (unused) pages were switched to IIS with no intention of them being ever used, then yeah, that's dishonest where the Apache use wasn't. Why the hell would they park with IIS and host with Apache? C'mon, now. It's garbage.
"Artificially Inflated" implies here that the totals are being inflated by products not in use. Using the same product for ALL your pages is natural (see: not artificial). This IIS swapover payoff is as artificial as it gets.