I don't know. They did it with electricity deregulation here. There is a connectivity provider and a service provider. The service provider can be any of multiple companies. I see no reason why the communications networks couldn't be similarly liberated from their service providers, especially considering that we're now almost back to pure monopolies in both coax cable and twisted pair networks (that'd be cable tv and telco, who also happen to be installing fiber in someplaces along their twisted pair networks).
It'd be hugely disruptive to the telco's and cable co's, for sure, but it would level the playing field for all service providers.
I too tend to adopt early. Bought my HDTV at the end of 2000. What did I get for my trouble? A really really sharp TV that doesn't interface with many HD components anymore, as that abomination known as HDMI came out afterwards. But, that aside, DVDs provide pretty darn sharp pictures on this TV, as does HD OTA content. Matter of fact, when watching either, it's hard to discern quality differences without pausing the picture. (Broadcast HD is by far better on stills) Considering that OTA HD is higher quality than what will be on either disc format, what's the point in buying an expensive new format, especially one that's hamstrung with all sorts of DRM requirements. (Speaking of, has there been a determination of whether these new boxes MUST be connected to phone/internet? I haven't bothered following it since then, but it seems that their inactivation policy requires some sort of connection to phone home, something else I'm against if I'm purchasing personal AV hardware)
I still think the way to fix this permanently is to separate the cabling from the service provider. Since the cabling technically belongs to those that paid for it - that'd be the people btw, check where those $ to lay the cables came from, that'd be tax money from people like you and me, all the way back to the original universal access fund tax. Also, check the huge tax bonanza the telco's received to provide broadband to US houses (that tax bonanza is basically tax $s given to the telco's, whether it was actually a hand-off of bags of money or not).
Oh, and while the cabling may be "monopoly" controlled, the services aren't, and this whole issue of net-neutrality should become moot.
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
Obviously I haven't played WoW - lost interest in MMOGs when EQ2 came out and several other things happened that sucked up all available spare time (ok - lost interest is a little harsh - lack the time to play is more accurate).
If WoW has a real day/night cycle following your supposed day/night cycle, I'd think that would be confusing more than anything else. What if I'm on the western edge of a time-zone vs the eastern edge, especially if I'm situated along a geographic border more than an actual line of longitude? The server time will be off by more than 30 min compared to my time, and possibly as much as 60+ min, depending upon what part of the time zone the server is actually trying to model.
Also, WoW would force people like me to always play at night, and seldom in the day. Seems dumb, even though WoW is wildly successful.
Lastly, I think even the dimmest dimwit can handle day/night cycles in game time which is significantly different than real time cycles. I just happen to disagree with how most are handled today.
That's what Dell wants you to continue to think. The reality is that the new Apple notebooks and workstations compete very well against Dell's offerings, and as soon as the bugs are out, will be much more appealing to the mass market. (There will be bugs, new chip, new architecture, new bugs - it's inevitable)
You make good points on all accounts regarding money, ease, etc. However, take into account Tivo's commercial popups, auto-downloading, etc, Dish Network's current patent issues (w/ Tivo) and forced patch updates, DirecTV's forced patch updates and just general limitations of all purchased DVRs in one way or another including the FTC's ever threatening Broadcast Flag requirement, and building your own suddenly becomes more interesting.
I'm about to embark on the media center PC DIY build cycle. Perhaps I'll document (wait, I've got to be a geek) ^H^H^Hblog about it.
Especially not when in a year or so Apple goes AMD....;)
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
The time issue isn't one. Since when does any RPG follow a "real" clock? (I'm aware that EQ, for one, cycled days based on elapsed time, but there were many days per real day)
As for you other issues, I don't see that as being a problem either, and they could all be handled by a single system (note - system does not equal 1 computer).
The one thing that is an issue is network latency. That one can be handled as well, but that particular problem is not trivial, as it requires knowledge in several domains to minimize, and even then you have to address the fact that communications may take 500ms. Truly distributed systems can be programmed correctly by only a few at this time, and that number drops when high performance becomes a requirement. (Systems in a single data center aren't really distributed. They're more clustered.)
you'd think that the monthly subscription fee would be plenty good enough. Take EQ for example, it came with a month's play included. That seems reasonable to me, although 2 months would be better. After that, you get the monthly fee.
You'd think the companies would prefer more monthly subscriptions over the minimal profit of selling a boxed copy.
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
Much spluttering.... The major feature that made HL awesome was the networked multi-player. Hell, my entire company bought copies to play each other online. I doubt 5% even knew it played single player (ok, maybe they saw the menu item, but that was it)
And for your argument about time investment. Let's see, EQ - hundreds of hours invested. EQ 2 and WoW come along, EQ 2 had a lot of people try it out because EQ 1, but, nothing transferable. Then WoW really takes off, and people bail on EQ 1 & 2, non-transferrable items be damned.
So the success of WoW itself indicates the fallacy of your argument. After a while, games get boring. It's very very very hard to keep a MMOG interesting forever. Generally a different MMOG will appeal after a while.
I'm talking about when they "broke out". I'd heard of UO coming out, but no one I knew had even tried it. I didn't even really see anything about it until after EQ broke the mainstream. "EverCrack" after all, is what made MMOGs mainstream.
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not hard to see something beating WoW. Look at it this way, with FPS's, there was Doom, then Quake, Quake2 and everyone kneeled to the alter of id. Then along came Half-Life, and the FPS arena went there. Now there are some decent contenders, Unreal, FarCry, HL2, and Q4. None currently have retaken the FPS crown, but something will shake out sometime soon.
In the MMOG arena, first you had MUD's, remember them? Then there were a couple of graphical MUD's, then EQ, which was the bee's knees. EQ ruled. Ultima Online and Asheron's Call broke after, and developed major followings, but never could beat the mind share of EQ. Then EQ 2 and WoW hit. WoW won. Will there be others? Of course, and one of those will be a winner, at some point.
To be honest, I can probably predict what the next round of super MMOG will be. It's obvious to anyone that even plays the games - the whole "what server are you on" concept needs to die. That brings up a whole slew of issues that need to be solved, and hopefully patent trolls aren't killing the methodology. In actuality, most of those issues are already solved, they just need to be applied to the MMOG engines.
a 5 year warranty doesn't mean your backup drive is good for 5 years. It just means that the manufacturer believes the quality is good enough that the number of warranty returned drives over 5 years will have minimal impact to their bottom line. (I've got some 10 year old disks that are still working, and a 2 year old disk that's fried. Something about storing it out in the garage for a year....)
We've all heard the stories about a HD failing within a week. You address this by buying several HDs, from different lots at the least, and different manufacturers at best. (The odds of getting multiple bad drives and needing to restore from those drives when they all go bad simultaneously are astronomically low, but they're still not '0'.
It really depends upon the use of those systems. Webservers commonly need no more than 1 or 2P, and are 1U or blade systems. Appservers? Depends upon the usage. DBs? Again, depends upon their usage.
To make a sweeping statement that servers of type 'X' are the only kind of servers now going into a datacenter is short-sighted and almost always inherently wrong. Anyone buying $100K machines to serve webpages ought to be fired on the spot. Anyone buying $2K 1U boxes for use as high-transaction volume DB servers should also be fired.
JFK did no such thing, LBJ ordered the US into the Vietnam War.
As for who "gave" us the Vietnam War, that appears to be a rather bit more muddled issue as the timeline indicates. You could say the French gave it to us, but perhaps their ineptitude was more at fault for allowing the situation to continue. It appears the real root lies all the way back at the defeat of Japan in WWII by the US and a number of failures after that. (French troops expected to fix Vietnam back then? France was just freed from Germany and had a country to rebuild, all jokes about the French fighting ability aside.)
This comment makes me think again about AMD's acquisition of ATI. Would AMD put an ATI graphics core in the CPU package? (HTT allows for all the bandwidth the GPU could handle - no separate cache needed). Need a faster GPU? By the time you do - there'll be a faster CPU with a new GPU included, and this packaging might be less expensive than the current high end cards.
This combination would also work fine for 90% of the world's computer users, and possibly be much cheaper. Think Sempron with RAM and a miniscule motherboard with ports. The $100 laptop might drop in price.
IANAL, of course, but that 2 year after period clause might be hard to enforce, especially in some states. Texas, for instance, routinely holds those types of contractual clauses invalid as interfering with one's right to work.
The thing is - words in use to describe something should not have the ability to be Trademarked for that respective industry.
Regarding O'Reilly books: I quit buying them a while ago. I'm sure I'm not alone, and that will hopefully get their attention. As far as book quality goes, that's something that seems to affect the entire book industry at the moment. There are very few decent books out there. Many are the same empty tripe, and it's usually obsolete tripe by the time it's published. A definite issue in our current superfast paced growth.
and therein lies the rub - the trademark was post WWW and the web, and by extension, the term "web site", which was commonly used by those working with the technology.
age of consent, drinking, etc, is pretty much irrelevant. Yes, some mature faster, and you will not know for a while yet what I'm talking about. I didn't realize it until much much more recently, after looking back at changes in my personal life. (Let's say I'm older than you and leave it at that;)
At 22, the world's still a wide-open book. You're still changing, learning, and adapting. Your brain's still growing significantly, or at least the rest of us hope so.
FYI - I knew quite a few folks who started relationships in middle school. They even got married somewhere between 18-22 (the latest one I knew about). Not a single one of them stayed married through 28. I only know 1 person that got married at 22 to a relatively recent acquaintance that is still currently married, and they went through hell and almost divorced.
Everyone else that I know that got married and stayed married was 25 or older. That's just my personal experience. (Note: my particular circle of friends don't believe in staying together for the children, or because you'll go to hell, or whatever. If the love leaves the relationship, the relationship's dead)
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I don't know. They did it with electricity deregulation here. There is a connectivity provider and a service provider. The service provider can be any of multiple companies. I see no reason why the communications networks couldn't be similarly liberated from their service providers, especially considering that we're now almost back to pure monopolies in both coax cable and twisted pair networks (that'd be cable tv and telco, who also happen to be installing fiber in someplaces along their twisted pair networks).
It'd be hugely disruptive to the telco's and cable co's, for sure, but it would level the playing field for all service providers.
I too tend to adopt early. Bought my HDTV at the end of 2000. What did I get for my trouble? A really really sharp TV that doesn't interface with many HD components anymore, as that abomination known as HDMI came out afterwards. But, that aside, DVDs provide pretty darn sharp pictures on this TV, as does HD OTA content. Matter of fact, when watching either, it's hard to discern quality differences without pausing the picture. (Broadcast HD is by far better on stills) Considering that OTA HD is higher quality than what will be on either disc format, what's the point in buying an expensive new format, especially one that's hamstrung with all sorts of DRM requirements. (Speaking of, has there been a determination of whether these new boxes MUST be connected to phone/internet? I haven't bothered following it since then, but it seems that their inactivation policy requires some sort of connection to phone home, something else I'm against if I'm purchasing personal AV hardware)
I still think the way to fix this permanently is to separate the cabling from the service provider. Since the cabling technically belongs to those that paid for it - that'd be the people btw, check where those $ to lay the cables came from, that'd be tax money from people like you and me, all the way back to the original universal access fund tax. Also, check the huge tax bonanza the telco's received to provide broadband to US houses (that tax bonanza is basically tax $s given to the telco's, whether it was actually a hand-off of bags of money or not).
Oh, and while the cabling may be "monopoly" controlled, the services aren't, and this whole issue of net-neutrality should become moot.
Obviously I haven't played WoW - lost interest in MMOGs when EQ2 came out and several other things happened that sucked up all available spare time (ok - lost interest is a little harsh - lack the time to play is more accurate).
If WoW has a real day/night cycle following your supposed day/night cycle, I'd think that would be confusing more than anything else. What if I'm on the western edge of a time-zone vs the eastern edge, especially if I'm situated along a geographic border more than an actual line of longitude? The server time will be off by more than 30 min compared to my time, and possibly as much as 60+ min, depending upon what part of the time zone the server is actually trying to model.
Also, WoW would force people like me to always play at night, and seldom in the day. Seems dumb, even though WoW is wildly successful.
Lastly, I think even the dimmest dimwit can handle day/night cycles in game time which is significantly different than real time cycles. I just happen to disagree with how most are handled today.
That's what Dell wants you to continue to think. The reality is that the new Apple notebooks and workstations compete very well against Dell's offerings, and as soon as the bugs are out, will be much more appealing to the mass market. (There will be bugs, new chip, new architecture, new bugs - it's inevitable)
You make good points on all accounts regarding money, ease, etc. However, take into account Tivo's commercial popups, auto-downloading, etc, Dish Network's current patent issues (w/ Tivo) and forced patch updates, DirecTV's forced patch updates and just general limitations of all purchased DVRs in one way or another including the FTC's ever threatening Broadcast Flag requirement, and building your own suddenly becomes more interesting.
I'm about to embark on the media center PC DIY build cycle. Perhaps I'll document (wait, I've got to be a geek) ^H^H^Hblog about it.
Especially not when in a year or so Apple goes AMD.... ;)
The time issue isn't one. Since when does any RPG follow a "real" clock? (I'm aware that EQ, for one, cycled days based on elapsed time, but there were many days per real day)
As for you other issues, I don't see that as being a problem either, and they could all be handled by a single system (note - system does not equal 1 computer).
The one thing that is an issue is network latency. That one can be handled as well, but that particular problem is not trivial, as it requires knowledge in several domains to minimize, and even then you have to address the fact that communications may take 500ms. Truly distributed systems can be programmed correctly by only a few at this time, and that number drops when high performance becomes a requirement. (Systems in a single data center aren't really distributed. They're more clustered.)
you'd think that the monthly subscription fee would be plenty good enough. Take EQ for example, it came with a month's play included. That seems reasonable to me, although 2 months would be better. After that, you get the monthly fee.
You'd think the companies would prefer more monthly subscriptions over the minimal profit of selling a boxed copy.
Much spluttering.... The major feature that made HL awesome was the networked multi-player. Hell, my entire company bought copies to play each other online. I doubt 5% even knew it played single player (ok, maybe they saw the menu item, but that was it)
And for your argument about time investment. Let's see, EQ - hundreds of hours invested. EQ 2 and WoW come along, EQ 2 had a lot of people try it out because EQ 1, but, nothing transferable. Then WoW really takes off, and people bail on EQ 1 & 2, non-transferrable items be damned.
So the success of WoW itself indicates the fallacy of your argument. After a while, games get boring. It's very very very hard to keep a MMOG interesting forever. Generally a different MMOG will appeal after a while.
I'm talking about when they "broke out". I'd heard of UO coming out, but no one I knew had even tried it. I didn't even really see anything about it until after EQ broke the mainstream. "EverCrack" after all, is what made MMOGs mainstream.
It's not hard to see something beating WoW. Look at it this way, with FPS's, there was Doom, then Quake, Quake2 and everyone kneeled to the alter of id. Then along came Half-Life, and the FPS arena went there. Now there are some decent contenders, Unreal, FarCry, HL2, and Q4. None currently have retaken the FPS crown, but something will shake out sometime soon.
In the MMOG arena, first you had MUD's, remember them? Then there were a couple of graphical MUD's, then EQ, which was the bee's knees. EQ ruled. Ultima Online and Asheron's Call broke after, and developed major followings, but never could beat the mind share of EQ. Then EQ 2 and WoW hit. WoW won. Will there be others? Of course, and one of those will be a winner, at some point.
To be honest, I can probably predict what the next round of super MMOG will be. It's obvious to anyone that even plays the games - the whole "what server are you on" concept needs to die. That brings up a whole slew of issues that need to be solved, and hopefully patent trolls aren't killing the methodology. In actuality, most of those issues are already solved, they just need to be applied to the MMOG engines.
I believe that only applies to those that are paid for financial advice. Anyone can give free "advice". You get what you pay for, and usually less...
Well then! Go Go GO!!!
a 5 year warranty doesn't mean your backup drive is good for 5 years. It just means that the manufacturer believes the quality is good enough that the number of warranty returned drives over 5 years will have minimal impact to their bottom line. (I've got some 10 year old disks that are still working, and a 2 year old disk that's fried. Something about storing it out in the garage for a year....)
We've all heard the stories about a HD failing within a week. You address this by buying several HDs, from different lots at the least, and different manufacturers at best. (The odds of getting multiple bad drives and needing to restore from those drives when they all go bad simultaneously are astronomically low, but they're still not '0'.
It really depends upon the use of those systems. Webservers commonly need no more than 1 or 2P, and are 1U or blade systems. Appservers? Depends upon the usage. DBs? Again, depends upon their usage.
To make a sweeping statement that servers of type 'X' are the only kind of servers now going into a datacenter is short-sighted and almost always inherently wrong. Anyone buying $100K machines to serve webpages ought to be fired on the spot. Anyone buying $2K 1U boxes for use as high-transaction volume DB servers should also be fired.
Except that it is a 2P system w/ a total of 4 cores. Learn to count, or at least learn the syntax.
JFK did no such thing, LBJ ordered the US into the Vietnam War.
As for who "gave" us the Vietnam War, that appears to be a rather bit more muddled issue as the timeline indicates. You could say the French gave it to us, but perhaps their ineptitude was more at fault for allowing the situation to continue. It appears the real root lies all the way back at the defeat of Japan in WWII by the US and a number of failures after that. (French troops expected to fix Vietnam back then? France was just freed from Germany and had a country to rebuild, all jokes about the French fighting ability aside.)
Supposedly the laserdisc versions are better quality than the superbit DVD versions of movies. Or so I hear anyways.
This comment makes me think again about AMD's acquisition of ATI. Would AMD put an ATI graphics core in the CPU package? (HTT allows for all the bandwidth the GPU could handle - no separate cache needed). Need a faster GPU? By the time you do - there'll be a faster CPU with a new GPU included, and this packaging might be less expensive than the current high end cards.
This combination would also work fine for 90% of the world's computer users, and possibly be much cheaper. Think Sempron with RAM and a miniscule motherboard with ports. The $100 laptop might drop in price.
IANAL, of course, but that 2 year after period clause might be hard to enforce, especially in some states. Texas, for instance, routinely holds those types of contractual clauses invalid as interfering with one's right to work.
The thing is - words in use to describe something should not have the ability to be Trademarked for that respective industry.
Regarding O'Reilly books: I quit buying them a while ago. I'm sure I'm not alone, and that will hopefully get their attention. As far as book quality goes, that's something that seems to affect the entire book industry at the moment. There are very few decent books out there. Many are the same empty tripe, and it's usually obsolete tripe by the time it's published. A definite issue in our current superfast paced growth.
That wooosh is the jet carrying your clue flying 1" above your head.
and therein lies the rub - the trademark was post WWW and the web, and by extension, the term "web site", which was commonly used by those working with the technology.
age of consent, drinking, etc, is pretty much irrelevant. Yes, some mature faster, and you will not know for a while yet what I'm talking about. I didn't realize it until much much more recently, after looking back at changes in my personal life. (Let's say I'm older than you and leave it at that;)
At 22, the world's still a wide-open book. You're still changing, learning, and adapting. Your brain's still growing significantly, or at least the rest of us hope so.
FYI - I knew quite a few folks who started relationships in middle school. They even got married somewhere between 18-22 (the latest one I knew about). Not a single one of them stayed married through 28. I only know 1 person that got married at 22 to a relatively recent acquaintance that is still currently married, and they went through hell and almost divorced.
Everyone else that I know that got married and stayed married was 25 or older. That's just my personal experience. (Note: my particular circle of friends don't believe in staying together for the children, or because you'll go to hell, or whatever. If the love leaves the relationship, the relationship's dead)