See, the world doesn't have to be all MS software.
Look at the car industry for a comparison. Not everyone drives a Ferrari. Precisely _because_ not everyone can afford a Ferrari, and they can't just pirate one, some will go buy a cheaper Ford Fiesta instead.
Or, and here's the most important part: in some of those countries they'll go buy a locally produced car, creating employment and taxes in their own economy. E.g., if a citizen of Russia can't afford a Ferrari, maybe maybe they can afford a locally produced Lada instead. Pretty good cars too, and they're creating employment and taxes in their own country. (Ok, I know Russia not quite a developping country, but it's the only one I know a car brand from, so for this example it will have to do.)
The same applies for other products too. E.g., Via sells a lot of their CPUs in China. If a Chinese family (earning about 1000$ a year) can't afford the latest dual-core Opteron, they'll buy a dirt-cheap C3 instead.
Yet invariably the same countries don't have much of an internal software market (and pretty much no retail boxed software market), because they pirate MS software instead. There's a bunch of jobs which never were created, because everyone downloaded a cracked version of Windows and Office.
Here if I go to Saturn to buy an GTA (since we keep talking about it), it won't just have an 18+ sticker on it, it will actually be put in a big red playstic box that I have to take to the cashier. And last I've heard, it had no "chilling effect" on their sales or anything.
Yes, that big red box means "it's an 18+ game!!" Well, blimey, and I'm well over 18. That's a fortunate coincidence, eh? Yes, I'm buying a game that's deemed not suitable for children. And I'm not a child. The problem is...? Why should I be ashamed of that?
Maybe it has to do with the culture here being less hypocritical, and less stuck on trying to _seem_ like upstanding and moralistic citizens.
"(Not having played with the PSP for any length of time, I don't know exactly how long it takes to be playing a game on that system. Anyone know?)"
A bit longer when you first put the game in (it _is_ a mini-CD, so it has load times), but after that it's instant on/off. Turning it "off" really just puts it to sleep, so when you turn it back "on", you're playing again in less than half a second. Literally. No need to search for a save point or try to finish the level or whatever. You can literally just turn it off when you get off the train, and turn it back on later to resume from the same point as if nothing happened.
It has a "really off" mode too, if you keep the power button pushed for a few seconds, but it beats me why you'd want to. Pretty much everyone I know prefers to just put it to sleep.
Which is really what left me scratching my head when I've read the grandparent post, and all that rant about how games need to be instant-on and all that. I mean, wtf? It's like seeing someone ranting about how cars will never be successful until they start having 4 wheels. Well, blimey, they already do.
What about non-English/USA readers? I figure I'm pretty fluent in English, but obscure archaic meanings, such as the jousting meaning for "tilt" are not stuff I run into every day. Even having read Don Quixote, but not in English, I still had to take a trip to the dictionary to understand wth that title means.
They also just announced the next Gizmondo in September. It will apparently come in 2006 and feature wide screen.
Now think about it. You could blow $399 on a model that'll last less than half a year, and doesn't have any games worth playing anyway. Or you could just wait for the frickin' widescreen one, and see if any good games will be available by then.
Makes me wonder wtf are these people smoking. It's like they're actually trying to discourage people from buying one.
"Any reason why you didn't fix it when you first saw it? It obviously bothered you since you brought it up, and yet you didn't fix it.
(I don't mean to be too accusatory here, but Wikipedia is only as good as the community makes it, and you seem to care about its quality.)"
Well, I'm not trying to be an arsehole about it, but basically I don't really care. I never thought that an unrestricted shared blog had any value when looking for actual information. (Although I do sometimes post links to it, just as an Appeal To Authority kind of Sophism.) When I look for actual info, I'll look in other places. That incident just served as a reminder to keep it that way. That's really why I've mentioned it.
Don't get me wrong I can respect the idealism and faith in humanity of those who think they can add actual signal to the noise of a million monkeys with a million keyboards. But being a jade old misanthrope, well, I find that faith mis-placed.
Yeah, that's what I was suspecting/wondering. Some games have been launched with such glaring errors, that, yes, I've always wondered if anyone actually tried finding any bugs during their much-hyped beta.
Heck, while you have a point that UO _is_ a good example there, I have an even better one: Anarchy Online. Read the review on Something Awful, and I can personally atest that yes, the game was _that_ broken after the devs claimed it was finally 110% fixed and stable. In fact, there's a whole slew of of more problems that Something Awful didn't even touch, like people swimming in the floor or suddenly finding themselves falling to their death from stratosphere, when a second earlier they were running on flat ground. As released, it was even worse.
I mean, it's not even minor bugs or balance issues. There were some issues which a beta test, no matter how superficial and unmotivated, simply couldn't have missed.
E.g., you could have to go through those opaque light swirls that their buggy open doors often looked like, and find yourself falling into a 6 ft hole that the random map generator had created. There just was no way out. You either tried contacting support to get you out, or (eventually) grudgingly commit suicide and respawn in the city.
Hasn't _any_ tester fallen into one of those holes? (Or even just ran into the sheer annoyance of open doors turning into a swirly graphical glitch that you can't actually see through.) I fid that totally improbable. Did everyone rather silently commit suicide than report the bug? Equally improbable. Or maybe it's simply that the developpers and publisher didn't give a rat's ass about those bug reports?
"Very few people of the ultra-conservative persuasion, however, need to be persuaded - they already are fanatically against video games that contain violence, sex, etc."
1. Even then, you can convince them that you represent their views the best. For a politician trying to get elected, that may well be enough.
Also, you can point their existing hatred and bigotry at your own target. E.g., someone might already be rabidly against the mere mention of sex in the media, but not see video games as the main threat. They might not even have bothered looking at what games are available. Even if they had a brief look at the Bible Blaster their own little Dick and Jane are playing, they don't know what Jack and Jill across the street are playing. If you drum up games as being _the_ main offenders to their bigotry, you might have gained some allies.
Even and even if you didn't sidetrack them towards hating games, again, see the first paragraph. You've told them "I'm fighting for the same values _you_ have" (e.g., against any mention of sex) anyway.
Also, you can shift their priorities a bit. Humans, even bigots, are complex beings. They don't just have _one_ issue or problem, they have a variety of issues, some related, some not. E.g., someone might already, to different extents, be for Issue A, but also for Issues B, C and D. E.g., someone could be against sex in games, yes, but currently be more concerned about national security, or the recession, or their job getting offshored, or whatever. Yes, they're already convinced that games are filth, but might consider other issues as a more immediate need.
And you _can_ push the right buttons to shuffle some of those existing concerns around. E.g., if you appeal enough to their fear that their kids will get raped and/or shot by a gamer school-mate, that pre-existing conviction will go up the scale. Where previously they might have rather voted for someone who promisses to end the recession, you might get them around to think "hmm, well, even _if_ I were to lose a job, saving my children from being shot is probably more important."
2. You have to realize that some people are into protesting something just _for_ the act itself of protesting something. It's not even just that some people are RL trolls, it's also that some people actually _need_ to feel like they're part of something that'll save the world. They have to see themselves as the few chosen ones that see the big danger everyone else ignores, and the ones who do the up-hill battle of saving you all. (If needed, sprinkle a bit of persecution complex, for even more self-backpatting oportunities.)
And for a lot of them it doesn't really matter _what_ they're saving us all from. It can be from atheism, or from sex in video games, or from Intel, or from emacs, or from buttering the bread on the wrong side. What really matters is being a messiah and a martyr, not the actual goal, nor if it actually makes any sense.
And such a loud-mouthed crusader offers a high profile crusade to join. It doesn't matter if it's wilfully distorting the truth, word games, and straw men. Those are the normal tools of the trade in the messiah business anyway. What matters is that it offers a great (imaginary) "threat" to save the world from.
Quantity doesn't always equal quality. If that were the case, we'd still be using the old no-ranking search engines on the Internet, and Google's attempt at sorting out by relevance would have silently failed. At some point, you'd rather just get the actual info, and not scroll through 10 pages of crap before you find anything relevant. One more guy posting "my class sucks" threads is just more noise, not more signal.
In other words, when I Google for something, I'd rather have 1 link that is exactly what I want, than 100,000,000,000 irrelevant links. The same goes for beta-testing, _if_ the goal is actually to beta-test, and not just to get some free publicity: I'd rather have just 50 people actually professionally looking for bugs, than 50,000 whining about everything else.
Having 500 people who genuinely test for bugs, is _worthless_ if their signal is drowned in the noise from 50,000 people posting like there's no tomorrow about how your game sucks ass because his Priest doest't _start_ with the Mages' level 50 spell. (That's sadly not even a joke. Something Awful once had a parody of an open letter to Sony, in which they asked for really ludicrious stuff, including _literally_ that a level 1 priest should start with the most powerful mage spell. Much to their surprise, they got a helluva bunch of emails aggreeing wholeheartedly.) Or how it sucks ass and is unbalanced because it doesn't _force_ everyone else to group with his Priest that bought everything _except_ healing/buff spells. (Add a long circular-backpatting whine about how players are idiots and don't appreciate how useful that priest is with his mace alone.) Etc.
And it goes downhill from there. The guy who discovered a bug and filed it, will start _one_ post. The guys arguing that their characters should have 100% resistance to damage and an insta-kill spell that costs no mana, will start one per day. And more often than not, spill into the other topics too. (Surely a post about how a mage spell sometimes fails with no explanation, not even a "your spell was interrupted" message, is _the_ right place to post about how either (A) you mages had it too good and it was about damn time that spell got a downgrade, or (B) about how we mages are the whipping boys of the devs, and they downgraded yet another of our spells. Doom, gloom, run for the hills, and all that.)
Welcome to the wonderful world of looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
You know, much as the guy _is_ insane, some of the stuff before sounded at least _technically_ true, or a truism. E.g., _technically_ the Hot Coffee material was there on the CD, and the modders used what was already there. Yes, I know, it still wasn't available in the game as published, so Jack _is_ full of shit. But in a lawyer's technicallities and verbal fallacies game he does have _some_ actual fact (minor and irrelevant as it may be) from which to start the fallacies game.
But The Sims 2? Give me a fucking break. As shipped there are _no_ models or textures on the CD that include penises, vaginas, nipples and all the crap that Jack's been spouting.
In this case, it's 100% user-created material, and typically requires one to get an account to an adult-oriented mod site, or the adult section of a mod site. (I.e., if Jack saw that in his copy of the Sims, he must have not only downloaded it himself, but even then he wasn't getting it unknowingly while thinking he's just getting a new haircut for his sims. The only way to get those is knowingly, after registering to a site which explicitly tells you what are you registering for.)
At any rate, it's not EA's material, it's not on EA's CDs, it's not on EA's site, it's not even linked to by EA. How the f-word can he hold EA responsible for it? It's like holding a car company responsible for changes a customer did to his own car.
It's not even that the game "allows" third-party skins, in much the same way as HalfLife, Doom 3, or Unreal Tournament allow user-created skins. It's that Maxis, for all the "yay, we love the mods users create for our game" declaration, is actually fairly hostile to modding. Beyond recolouring clothes, EA and Maxis haven't published the file formats, haven't published any tools, etc. All modding has happened pretty much against EA's and Maxis's wishes, by reverse engineering their binary files.
In fact, the latest Nightlife expansion pack is pretty much a slap in the face to the modders by EA, because it warns the users that any script mods could interfere with the game, and by default offers to disable them. There's a lot of Joe Average and Jane Clueless users who've just been told by EA, "don't use mods, they screw up your game." (If EA is so concerned about that, wouldn't it be nicer to offer a clean stable API and tools or documentation instead? You know, beats throwing a fit about how those reverse-engineered hacks are screwing their game.)
So again, the short story is that any mods other than recoloured clothes and haircuts happened _against_ EA's wishes and lack of support. They were _hacks_ to EA's game.
So how the heck can Jack hold EA responsible for that?
What's EA supposed to do there? DRM the files, to prevent the users from reverse-engineering them? Sue the modders (i.e., their own fans and customers) under the DMCA? Yeah, suing one's own customers gives a company such good publicity and goodwill. Or _what_? What does Jack want them to do to prevent users from creating their own skins?
(6) The idiot who thinks he's funny. In fact, so funny, that _everyone_ should find his stand-up comedy act when seriously searching for information. In fact, heck, everyone should be mandated by law to read his jokes, but finding them instead of actual info is almost an acceptable substitute.
I still remember one article in the German wikipedia... about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of tiny little digeridoos in test tubes, and a paragraph about how they live longer than the ones born naturally. About a year later, it was still there. (Now it's finally gone, though.)
OK, so it's a sorta the bastard child of your points 3 and 4. Except while the PR professional knows they're subverting and polluting a resource for profit, and the vandal knows they're defacing, the "funny" idiot might actually think he's doing a public service.
Dude, I'm a veteran of many flame wars, starting with FidoNET, long before the Internet was anything else than an academic experiment. I've seen and written worse trolls than what you do there. But enough to know a lame troll when I see one.
And yes, that's you. The whole "let's put words in your mouth, and then pretend to be a shrink and discover repressed himosexual/oedipus/inferiority/etc complexes" spiel is just that: a lamer's trolling weapon. I've seen and wrote worse than that, so, honestly, I'm just amused at this point.
And yes, that's another one of the fallacies that the whole gay propaganda is built upon. "See, if you don't support us, you're secretly gay too and affraid to admit it." I'll call bullshit on that. It's just as bullshit as Card's "if you're gay, you're a victim secretly yearning to become hetero". It's just a case of begging the question, or in other words a circular-referencing premise pulled out of the ass. Other than as a means to troll those you extrapolate about, it holds as much water as a sieve.
But if you really want to play shrink, how about you address what was wrote there, instead of inventing strawmen you're comfortable with. Noone said anything about finding homosexuality itself offensive. I talked explicitly about attention-whoring and whole arguments built on fallacies (e.g., verbal fallacies, ad hominem, guilt by association and appeals to spite), and the whole off-topic trolling a topic that had nothing to do with either homosexuality or homophobia to start with.
See some highlighted words in the above paragraph? Those are the real keywords. Not sexuality. I don't care if it's about sexuality, vi-vs-emacs, Nintendo/Sony/MS fanboyism, or Linux/Amiga/BSD persecution syndrome. You can just quit the trolling, attention-whoring and fallacies. That's all. That's what it's all about.
In a nutshell, it's _not_ "don't be gay", it's simply "fucking grow up already". That's all.
But I have no doubt that you'll dodge the topic again, and turn it all into the same persecution complex you're comfortable with. "Waah, the bad man is secretly finding us offensive after all!" It's times like these that I wonder where did evolution go wrong.
"It is unlikely that a publisher would publish it, and more unlikely that any retailers would carry it."
First of all, Take Two _is_ a publisher, so they could easily do that without needing anyone's approval. In fact, if I was the CEO, I'd actually do that and call it something like "Jack Thompson's Murder Simulator" just to make a point. Heck, one up him at that. Say half the profits will go to a charity, to match Jack's generous offer.
The deadline is a bit unrealistic, though. Games take more time than that to make nowadays. They could make it a cheap expansion pack to an existing game, though. E.g., to Postal 2.
As for the retailers, there was no shortage of retailers who carried other games whose _only_ advertised merit was, basically, "hey looky, we can have even more blood and gore than the previous one." Starting with, say, the old "Soldier Of Fortune" which, for whatever other merits it may have had, was advertised _only_ as "yay, now you can see more realistic carnage, complete with detailed bloody textures."
No, I really dislike propaganda, especially the kind based on verbal fallacies. That was the whole point.
"You also like the repressed "you can do what you want, but don't let anyone know"."
I'm not saying "don't let anyone know", I'm saying "you can stop shoving it in my face". Which is slightly different. When I read about a SF magazine, for example, I'm really _not_ looking for "don't read his books because he's a homophobe" any more than I'd be looking for "don't read his books, his gay". Which is to say, not at all. You can start leaving me out of it, that's all.
"How do gay people feel about seeing heterosexuals get sexy all over the place?"
Hell if I know. I'm taking a wild guess that if someone started doing a whole "look at me, I'm hetero!" attention-whoring act, they'd find him just as annoying. Heck, I'm hetero and I would.
"But why? Who cares?"
Precisely.
"We "redefined" the term "man" to include women and nonwhites, when we clarified that what we mean by "man" includes those people, too. Even though legally and traditionally, they had been excluded from voting etc, just like gays from marriage."
Yes, but again, it's been something that took some voting and was an act of Congress, not a judge deciding to redefine a word. Because, again, for whatever other sins Card may have, that's what he was ticked about in the article you linked to.
"You really need to look more closely at your country. Because eventually these fascists get everyone - and you yourself are somewhere down the list."
We already had the real deal. Guess it's one reason to not be keen on one-man decisions that regulate a whole country. There's a parliament, and here it's actually doing a remarkably good job of, well, at least pretending to represent the people, let them decide these things.
"There's plenty of other evidence that Card is, in fact, a Nazi. Not because of who he doesn't support, but because of who he does support, and who he attacks."
So post a link to those, if you want to make a point. Linking to the Humpty Dumpty article where (even if strictly technically) he does have a point, isn't really getting that message across.
"Get a clue, or your relative acceptance of people different from you (as long as you don't know about it?) won't be an option any longer."
I have co-workers who are openly gay, and have worked pretty closely with a client's representative who was a lesbian, so it's not about "as long as you don't know about it." But that doesn't mean they had to squeeze that into every conversation.
There's a difference between knowing about it and getting a "waah, I'm persecuted! Bad people are against me!" emo act every turn. That goes for both homo- and hetero-sexuals. "Waah, I'm persecuted! I'm a Nice Guy (TM) and women avoid me!" acts from hetero-sexuals are just as annoying if you're getting them all the time. There's a time and place for sobbing on someone's shoulder, and there's a time and place for discussing one's sexuality (or in the Nice Guy case, lack thereof), but then there's also a time and place for giving it a rest and sticking to other topics at hand.
"Someone with this belief is pretty much the definition of a homophobe."
Well, yes, but from there to "insane rightwing religious fanatic" there's a bit of a difference. Someone can be one without being either religious or right wing.
"The rest of the article, as you point out, is a bunch of strictly speaking correct but irrelevant technicalities. Less objectionable I suppose, but the only reason one would want to raise them in the first place is because one is a homophobe --- it's similar to Neo-nazis raising minor technical quibbles about the Holocaust, without necessarily explicitly revealing their racist agenda."
Well, yes, but then I'd assume that if his agenda is that of an "insane rightwing religious fanatic", there would be some better articles to illustrate that, then one which is mainly about a real verbal fallacy, and has a total of one phrase or two debatably relevant to homophobia (or then again could be explained by Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity), but none even remotely relevant to being either overly religious or right wing. To take your comparison with the Neo-nazis, I'd say that if you want to denounce someone as a Neo-nazi, it would make more sense to link to an article where they _do_ reveal their racist agenda, than one where they merely discuss some irrelevant technicalities (e.g., how many IBM machines the Nazis bought)... and are even right about those technicalities.
Disclaimer: I'm an adept of "do whatever the fuck you please, as long as it's in the privacy of your home, and between consenting adults". I'm not opposed to your being gay, or whatever else you want to be. This time however, I'll basically also add "but fucking _keep_ it to the privacy of your own home, and leave the rest of us out of it already, because I'm already tired of the 'waah, you're a nazi if you don't support us' guilt-tripping."
So where should I start? He's a "rightwing religious fanatic"? Well, how about you support that claim? Because in that article you linked to, I've seen him actually argue his point of view without needing to base it on "God said it's wrong". So how the heck is it religious fanatism? He bases his argument on some things that are technically true, too. Things like:
1. That it's a redefinition of the word "marriage" to mean something it never meant before. It's true. Marriage always meant something involving a man and a woman. Anything else is an extension of the meaning. Now you may argue that it's a logical extension, and that it doesn't do anyone any harm, and we can even aggree on that. But an extension it is.
2. That you did have the exact same rights as heterosexual people, including, yes, the right to a heterosexual marriage. It may not be the kind of right you wanted, but technically you had the same rights. (Same as technically if homosexual marriage is allowed, heterosexuals have that right too. They might not want to exert that right, but they have it.) What you wanted was a _new_ right, that noone else had. Again, it may be a logical one, or one that doesn't harm anyone, and we can even aggree there, but it _is_ a new one.
3. Passing laws and granting new rights is a privilege of congress, not of a judge legislating from the bench. The courts of law are the branch that should apply the existing laws, not the ones that make new ones as they see fit. Separation of powers in the state is there for a reason, and let's keep it that way.
So how about you address those, if you really wish to discuss that, instead of reaching for the canned "insane rightwing religious fanatic" ad-hominem? (And if not, why did you bring it up?)
Because it seems to me like all three are technically right. Again, I'm not opposed to your getting that right. Makes sense to me. But the bullshit verbal fallacies (i.e., a whole argument based on redefining what a word means), ad-hominems, and endless guilt-tripping attempts based on those verbal falkacies, _are_ starting to get my goat. If you want to make your case, make it logically already, and not by fallacies. Verbal, ad-hominem, guilt by association (e.g., don't read his books because he's one of the homophobes), or otherwise. Or in other words, ffs, be honest for a start: if you want a new right, say just that, don't pretend someone was denying you something everyone else had.
And judging from the page you linked to, basically that's the same thing that Orson Scott Card was having a problem with too: that verbal fallacy involved. Hence the Humpty Dumpty reference. Can't even say I blame him for getting annoyed at hearing the same fallacy over and over again.
And you know what? It might even make your cause a lot of good to be honest for a change, and make a logical case instead of the whole "waah, I'm a victim" guilt trip. A lot of us couldn't care less what you do in your home. Sure, marry another guy, if that makes you happy. But if you act like an attention-whore, attention you'll get. And sometimes of the annoyed kind. If you scream the same fallacy (i.e., lie) again at people often enough, you've just insulted their intelligence and you've just lost their sympathy. Yes, the average human might be an idiot, but if you keep treating him like one and make your whole argument based on word-plays, he'll catch on to it. Just something to consider.
"You do realize most of the anti-paypal stuff out there is just people bitching and complaining because they were attempting some sort of fraud and paypal caught them on it."
Actually, of all the anti-paypal stuff I've read so far, none involved a fraud.
Plus, people commiting frauds tend to keep a low profile, because we're talking a crime punishable by law. You don't see whole public web-sites of people advertising that they've commited fraud against, say, a bank, any more than you see web sites full of people advertising their rapist prowess. Much less class-action lawsuits against the bank by them.
So I'm wondering on what do you base that kind of a broad-sweeping generalization. You're accusing a helluva lot of people of commiting a crime, so I'd like that to be based on some actual evidence, rather than fanboyism.
But even that's missing the whole point: even without those complaints, why should I trust my money to a company (A) who ostensibly is not a bank, and (B) whose terms and conditions of use basically say "all your money are belong to us. We can do whatever we wish, for any damn reason we wish. You have no rights, and don't guarantee anything, not even that you'll ever see your money back. And, oh, suing us to get your money back is also a breach of this contract."
See, banks aren't just a big company that you trust, but are subject to strict government regulations _and_ backing. You essentially don't even have to trust your bank, because there's a whole legal framework that's not only there to kick them in the teeth if they tried to run away with it, but also to make sure that you _will_ get your money back. From your government, if all else fails.
By comparison, PayPal is... what? A dot-com which overtly makes no guarantees, puts itself outside any rules or obligations, and you just have to trust them that they'll do the right thing. It's like giving your CC to a John Doe on the street, because he looks like a thrustworthy fellow. Or to the widdow of Mr Bantu Nguana from Nigeria, because she seems so sincere in that email asking for your help to transfer those 80 million dollars.
And even if you trust their current management, we're talking a dot-com which changed management and got bought at least once. Do you automatically trust that any future managers will also be trustworthy, even though your contract with them says "do what you will with my money, you are always automatically right, and I'm automatically wrong if I disaggree"? Why?
"They havn't had any breaches in security that would cause your CC data to be worrysome."
No, you don't know that. You only know that they haven't published any incident, but then they also didn't put their other mistakes on the front page. But even assuming it were so:
1. How do you know it will stay so? What happens when a new CEO is brought to reduce costs and he outsources it all to the cheapest monkeys he can find? I'm not even talking about offshoring only: there has been a recent case right on/. of some american idiot rent-a-coder that exported and zipped a productive database, and posted it on a website, asking if someone can help him format that data. In fact, he posted it twice. Complete with people's names, addresses, etc.
2. What is your recourse when that eventually happens? With a bank you have a certain guarantee, both from it and from your government, that your money won't just disappear down a rat hole. PayPal explicitly gives none.
Scheduling time like that is good and fine in theory, but:
1. Sometimes something pops up that's important, or at least project-related.
2. Sometimes management pops up.
3. I swear some people are such windbags, you could put whistles on them and call them a bagpipe. They tend to not be deterred by subtle hints like a briefcase on the chair (they can talk while standing anyway) or even a "Not now, please, I'm really really busy. We have an integration test today and I have to finish this." One particular co-worker just said he'll wait for me to finish that method I was typing, and then he started to hum loudly while waiting. Throwing a bit of a fit about it, still was a bit too subtle a hint for him.
And I don't even mean for project related stuff. It tends to be, to pick only on this one co-worker:
- about how we should change the whole structure and organization of our project (it's a framework) so it better fits his own vision. And I don't mean the way it works or the way it's split in modules, but such irrelevant crap as how it's tagged in CVS, because his vision is to rebuild it all himself at each compile instead of using the released distribution. (Was his program compiling too quickly, or what?) And while he can do it already, it doesn't fit his own view of the Right Way (TM) CVS tags should be used.
- about how I should do something, because it would take him 2 hours (including testing!) to do that in his own code. So he wastes 1 hour of my time, and 1 hour of my boss's time about it. (So still 2 hours of his own time too, and he still hasn't even started on it.)
- office politics to that end. Such as that he's already talked to some other team and convinced them too that they want us to change something, and look, they even have the funds to pay for that change. (Then said team is like "Huh? We never said that, and our funding isn't even approved yet.")
- about how he absolutely needs to understand some purely internal details of our framework, that frankly, is none of his business and not a part of the published API. So he comes with a bunch of class diagrams and absolutely has to know what each private member does, and if "uniqueID" in this one is perhaps a reference to "uniqueID" in that other class. (Nope.)
- about how he absolutely needs to understand exactly how much memory and CPU cycles are involved in initializing one facade class, and if he'd be better off using a pool of those instead. "So use a bloody profiler and call me if it actually shows as at least 1% time or memory used, because from where I stand it looks to me like an empty delegator class that just calls a singleton. So AFAIK it uses 8 bytes. But profile before you optimize anyway" doesn't seem to satisfy him, so he still spends the next hour waxing philosophical over the potential waste of resources in initializing 100 of those per hour. (Yeah, a whole hundred.)
- about how some weird bug _could_ be because of our framework, because it happened two weeks after our release, and it can't possibly be his own changes in his own code that produced that. And it's usually something that leaves me like "huh? So what does that have to do with my code? AFAIK none of us even has a method that does that, so how would a framework bug affect _that_?" But no, really, can't it at least theoretically be our internal changes to logging (e.g., that now we write some more stuff as "trace" that used to be "debug" level) that cause his application to send an email to the wrong person?
And so on and so forth. I suspect that for some of these people it's sorta like a social life. Except they can claim with a straight face that it's work-related.
"I beg to differ. To simplify to the max, reasons for Windows being used has NOTHING to do with the reasons for people that go to McDonald's. People don't go to Mc Donald's because they know someone in the vicinity that will help them to eat for free, while that's the case with OSes. Mc Donald's imply a sense of scarcity, nothing like that with software."
I'll say you missed the whole point by a mile, then. The point is _not_ that the reasons to choose a restaurant are the exact same as the reasons you use to choose an OS. The point is simply that there is more than one reason in both cases.
Most of the "System X rules, System Y sucks, people use Y only because they're idiots" rants take 1 or 2 qualities out of context, and then pretend that only that matters. E.g., "but in Unix I can use the command line to do stuff like this faster: <insert horribly complicated one-liner involving grep, sed, and a few other stuff, but that Joe Average never needs or wants>" or "but in Unix you have less viruses!" And then pretend like those are _all_ the reasons one could possibly have in mind, and everything else can't possibly ever matter for anyone.
In real life, a real decision includes a lot of other stuff, like "will it run application X?", "can I use my <insert piece of hardware or peripheral>?", "how easy is it to <insert everyday stuff like printing a digital photo sideways>?", "can I get it pre-installed?", "can I use the skills I already have?" (no, they're not sysadmins, but normal users do have _some_ minimal everyday skills already), "how easy can I get trained in new basic skills?" (e.g., next time I need to print a photo, and want it portrait again, do I have to wait for you again, or can I ask the next guy with a camera in the park?), etc.
And it's not just what the objective comparison is like in those cases, but also how reassuring the answers sound. And one camp tends to answer just what Joe wants to hear, while the other tends to give all the awfully wrong answers. Even when the Linux solution would actually be the better and more intuitive one, Joe will get shown some awfully scary CLI way to do it, or get some bullshit speech about how Application X is evil and you shouldn't run it anyway, or whatever.
So at the end of the day, when putting all that together, Windows does look like the better choice to Joe, which is why Joe then goes and gets his next computer with Windows on it. Or gets a copy of Windows installed on that WalMart PC that comes with Linux. That's all there is to it.
I hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
"SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!""
Yes, but they didn't tell you it's a good thing back then.
Fact is, the commodities market isn't a place you'd voluntarily want to be in. Look at the mom-and-pop beige-box PCs or the generic cola drinks market. Those are commodity markets. They're not making a huge fortune out of it. Trust me, if either had a choice, they'd very much rather have a unique product they pretty much have a monopoly on, or a brand name that's been hammered down everyone's throat already, or whatever that allows them to charge an arm and a leg instead of a 5% profit margin.
And the same happened with computers. Whoever was ahead didn't want to become a commodity vendor.
E.g., while all swore undying love to Unix's portability and to open standards, they sure worked hard to make theirs incompatible with any other Unix, and to subvert and destroy any standard. Because open standards and the "write once, run everywhere" that Sun nowadays preaches is basically turning it all into a commodity market. All of a sudden it doesn't matter which computer you run it on, and you can just pick between a Sun, an IBM, a Mac and a PC purely on price/performance considerations.
Worse yet, a commodity market doesn't allow "vertical integration", a.k.a., "lock them in, and make them pay through the nose for everything." That's where the big money is. Having a bunch of customers that will gnash their teeth and buy everything from you anyway, because the alternative would imply ripping out and re-writing/re-buying everything else they have. You want a bunch of sheep penned in such a walled enclosure where the effort to climb out of it (e.g., to rip out all your Sun hardware and port everything to AIX) is greater than just staying there and being sheared by you every year.
People will often even take a loss to get you locked in, so they can shear you later. (E.g., see the console market, where the console itself is usually sold at a loss.)
So Sun, IBM and everyone did the same thing when they were ahead. Big surprise, eh? And now MS does it, once they're ahead. Who woulda thunk it?
The moment you start preaching a pure commodity market and how lock-in is bad, as a vendor, is when you're losing. When everyone else has the customers neatly penned in thir lock-in markets, and you'd want those customers set free, so maybe some will buy your kit instead. Then suddenly those artifficial walls are bad, because they're not keeping _your_ customers in _your_ pen, to be sheared by _you_, but they're keeping them in someone else's pen and out of your reach.
So now you see IBM, Novell, Sun and a bunch of others suddenly preaching about open standards and portability. Because they too would like a shot at shearing MS's penned flock, so they want that pen torn down already. They sure didn't mind it when it was _their_ pen, but now it's time to preach against it.
What's changed is that, as the article says, 95% of computers run Windows. It may not be the fastest. (But then again, I'm writing this in Konqueror on a Gnome desktop, and... well, it seems to me that Windows XP on my gaming machine does boot faster, and renders a lot faster. Maybe because it doesn't render and antialias everything in software.) It may not be _the_ one that discovered the wheel. Etc. But a lot of people like it anyway. It's an achievent they can be proud of.
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the world doesn't have to be all MS software.
Look at the car industry for a comparison. Not everyone drives a Ferrari. Precisely _because_ not everyone can afford a Ferrari, and they can't just pirate one, some will go buy a cheaper Ford Fiesta instead.
Or, and here's the most important part: in some of those countries they'll go buy a locally produced car, creating employment and taxes in their own economy. E.g., if a citizen of Russia can't afford a Ferrari, maybe maybe they can afford a locally produced Lada instead. Pretty good cars too, and they're creating employment and taxes in their own country. (Ok, I know Russia not quite a developping country, but it's the only one I know a car brand from, so for this example it will have to do.)
The same applies for other products too. E.g., Via sells a lot of their CPUs in China. If a Chinese family (earning about 1000$ a year) can't afford the latest dual-core Opteron, they'll buy a dirt-cheap C3 instead.
Yet invariably the same countries don't have much of an internal software market (and pretty much no retail boxed software market), because they pirate MS software instead. There's a bunch of jobs which never were created, because everyone downloaded a cracked version of Windows and Office.
Here if I go to Saturn to buy an GTA (since we keep talking about it), it won't just have an 18+ sticker on it, it will actually be put in a big red playstic box that I have to take to the cashier. And last I've heard, it had no "chilling effect" on their sales or anything.
Yes, that big red box means "it's an 18+ game!!" Well, blimey, and I'm well over 18. That's a fortunate coincidence, eh? Yes, I'm buying a game that's deemed not suitable for children. And I'm not a child. The problem is...? Why should I be ashamed of that?
Maybe it has to do with the culture here being less hypocritical, and less stuck on trying to _seem_ like upstanding and moralistic citizens.
"(Not having played with the PSP for any length of time, I don't know exactly how long it takes to be playing a game on that system. Anyone know?)"
A bit longer when you first put the game in (it _is_ a mini-CD, so it has load times), but after that it's instant on/off. Turning it "off" really just puts it to sleep, so when you turn it back "on", you're playing again in less than half a second. Literally. No need to search for a save point or try to finish the level or whatever. You can literally just turn it off when you get off the train, and turn it back on later to resume from the same point as if nothing happened.
It has a "really off" mode too, if you keep the power button pushed for a few seconds, but it beats me why you'd want to. Pretty much everyone I know prefers to just put it to sleep.
Which is really what left me scratching my head when I've read the grandparent post, and all that rant about how games need to be instant-on and all that. I mean, wtf? It's like seeing someone ranting about how cars will never be successful until they start having 4 wheels. Well, blimey, they already do.
What about non-English/USA readers? I figure I'm pretty fluent in English, but obscure archaic meanings, such as the jousting meaning for "tilt" are not stuff I run into every day. Even having read Don Quixote, but not in English, I still had to take a trip to the dictionary to understand wth that title means.
They also just announced the next Gizmondo in September. It will apparently come in 2006 and feature wide screen.
Now think about it. You could blow $399 on a model that'll last less than half a year, and doesn't have any games worth playing anyway. Or you could just wait for the frickin' widescreen one, and see if any good games will be available by then.
Makes me wonder wtf are these people smoking. It's like they're actually trying to discourage people from buying one.
"Any reason why you didn't fix it when you first saw it? It obviously bothered you since you brought it up, and yet you didn't fix it.
(I don't mean to be too accusatory here, but Wikipedia is only as good as the community makes it, and you seem to care about its quality.)"
Well, I'm not trying to be an arsehole about it, but basically I don't really care. I never thought that an unrestricted shared blog had any value when looking for actual information. (Although I do sometimes post links to it, just as an Appeal To Authority kind of Sophism.) When I look for actual info, I'll look in other places. That incident just served as a reminder to keep it that way. That's really why I've mentioned it.
Don't get me wrong I can respect the idealism and faith in humanity of those who think they can add actual signal to the noise of a million monkeys with a million keyboards. But being a jade old misanthrope, well, I find that faith mis-placed.
Yeah, that's what I was suspecting/wondering. Some games have been launched with such glaring errors, that, yes, I've always wondered if anyone actually tried finding any bugs during their much-hyped beta.
Heck, while you have a point that UO _is_ a good example there, I have an even better one: Anarchy Online. Read the review on Something Awful, and I can personally atest that yes, the game was _that_ broken after the devs claimed it was finally 110% fixed and stable. In fact, there's a whole slew of of more problems that Something Awful didn't even touch, like people swimming in the floor or suddenly finding themselves falling to their death from stratosphere, when a second earlier they were running on flat ground. As released, it was even worse.
I mean, it's not even minor bugs or balance issues. There were some issues which a beta test, no matter how superficial and unmotivated, simply couldn't have missed.
E.g., you could have to go through those opaque light swirls that their buggy open doors often looked like, and find yourself falling into a 6 ft hole that the random map generator had created. There just was no way out. You either tried contacting support to get you out, or (eventually) grudgingly commit suicide and respawn in the city.
Hasn't _any_ tester fallen into one of those holes? (Or even just ran into the sheer annoyance of open doors turning into a swirly graphical glitch that you can't actually see through.) I fid that totally improbable. Did everyone rather silently commit suicide than report the bug? Equally improbable. Or maybe it's simply that the developpers and publisher didn't give a rat's ass about those bug reports?
"Very few people of the ultra-conservative persuasion, however, need to be persuaded - they already are fanatically against video games that contain violence, sex, etc."
1. Even then, you can convince them that you represent their views the best. For a politician trying to get elected, that may well be enough.
Also, you can point their existing hatred and bigotry at your own target. E.g., someone might already be rabidly against the mere mention of sex in the media, but not see video games as the main threat. They might not even have bothered looking at what games are available. Even if they had a brief look at the Bible Blaster their own little Dick and Jane are playing, they don't know what Jack and Jill across the street are playing. If you drum up games as being _the_ main offenders to their bigotry, you might have gained some allies.
Even and even if you didn't sidetrack them towards hating games, again, see the first paragraph. You've told them "I'm fighting for the same values _you_ have" (e.g., against any mention of sex) anyway.
Also, you can shift their priorities a bit. Humans, even bigots, are complex beings. They don't just have _one_ issue or problem, they have a variety of issues, some related, some not. E.g., someone might already, to different extents, be for Issue A, but also for Issues B, C and D. E.g., someone could be against sex in games, yes, but currently be more concerned about national security, or the recession, or their job getting offshored, or whatever. Yes, they're already convinced that games are filth, but might consider other issues as a more immediate need.
And you _can_ push the right buttons to shuffle some of those existing concerns around. E.g., if you appeal enough to their fear that their kids will get raped and/or shot by a gamer school-mate, that pre-existing conviction will go up the scale. Where previously they might have rather voted for someone who promisses to end the recession, you might get them around to think "hmm, well, even _if_ I were to lose a job, saving my children from being shot is probably more important."
2. You have to realize that some people are into protesting something just _for_ the act itself of protesting something. It's not even just that some people are RL trolls, it's also that some people actually _need_ to feel like they're part of something that'll save the world. They have to see themselves as the few chosen ones that see the big danger everyone else ignores, and the ones who do the up-hill battle of saving you all. (If needed, sprinkle a bit of persecution complex, for even more self-backpatting oportunities.)
And for a lot of them it doesn't really matter _what_ they're saving us all from. It can be from atheism, or from sex in video games, or from Intel, or from emacs, or from buttering the bread on the wrong side. What really matters is being a messiah and a martyr, not the actual goal, nor if it actually makes any sense.
And such a loud-mouthed crusader offers a high profile crusade to join. It doesn't matter if it's wilfully distorting the truth, word games, and straw men. Those are the normal tools of the trade in the messiah business anyway. What matters is that it offers a great (imaginary) "threat" to save the world from.
Quantity doesn't always equal quality. If that were the case, we'd still be using the old no-ranking search engines on the Internet, and Google's attempt at sorting out by relevance would have silently failed. At some point, you'd rather just get the actual info, and not scroll through 10 pages of crap before you find anything relevant. One more guy posting "my class sucks" threads is just more noise, not more signal.
In other words, when I Google for something, I'd rather have 1 link that is exactly what I want, than 100,000,000,000 irrelevant links. The same goes for beta-testing, _if_ the goal is actually to beta-test, and not just to get some free publicity: I'd rather have just 50 people actually professionally looking for bugs, than 50,000 whining about everything else.
Having 500 people who genuinely test for bugs, is _worthless_ if their signal is drowned in the noise from 50,000 people posting like there's no tomorrow about how your game sucks ass because his Priest doest't _start_ with the Mages' level 50 spell. (That's sadly not even a joke. Something Awful once had a parody of an open letter to Sony, in which they asked for really ludicrious stuff, including _literally_ that a level 1 priest should start with the most powerful mage spell. Much to their surprise, they got a helluva bunch of emails aggreeing wholeheartedly.) Or how it sucks ass and is unbalanced because it doesn't _force_ everyone else to group with his Priest that bought everything _except_ healing/buff spells. (Add a long circular-backpatting whine about how players are idiots and don't appreciate how useful that priest is with his mace alone.) Etc.
And it goes downhill from there. The guy who discovered a bug and filed it, will start _one_ post. The guys arguing that their characters should have 100% resistance to damage and an insta-kill spell that costs no mana, will start one per day. And more often than not, spill into the other topics too. (Surely a post about how a mage spell sometimes fails with no explanation, not even a "your spell was interrupted" message, is _the_ right place to post about how either (A) you mages had it too good and it was about damn time that spell got a downgrade, or (B) about how we mages are the whipping boys of the devs, and they downgraded yet another of our spells. Doom, gloom, run for the hills, and all that.)
Welcome to the wonderful world of looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
You know, much as the guy _is_ insane, some of the stuff before sounded at least _technically_ true, or a truism. E.g., _technically_ the Hot Coffee material was there on the CD, and the modders used what was already there. Yes, I know, it still wasn't available in the game as published, so Jack _is_ full of shit. But in a lawyer's technicallities and verbal fallacies game he does have _some_ actual fact (minor and irrelevant as it may be) from which to start the fallacies game.
But The Sims 2? Give me a fucking break. As shipped there are _no_ models or textures on the CD that include penises, vaginas, nipples and all the crap that Jack's been spouting.
In this case, it's 100% user-created material, and typically requires one to get an account to an adult-oriented mod site, or the adult section of a mod site. (I.e., if Jack saw that in his copy of the Sims, he must have not only downloaded it himself, but even then he wasn't getting it unknowingly while thinking he's just getting a new haircut for his sims. The only way to get those is knowingly, after registering to a site which explicitly tells you what are you registering for.)
At any rate, it's not EA's material, it's not on EA's CDs, it's not on EA's site, it's not even linked to by EA. How the f-word can he hold EA responsible for it? It's like holding a car company responsible for changes a customer did to his own car.
It's not even that the game "allows" third-party skins, in much the same way as HalfLife, Doom 3, or Unreal Tournament allow user-created skins. It's that Maxis, for all the "yay, we love the mods users create for our game" declaration, is actually fairly hostile to modding. Beyond recolouring clothes, EA and Maxis haven't published the file formats, haven't published any tools, etc. All modding has happened pretty much against EA's and Maxis's wishes, by reverse engineering their binary files.
In fact, the latest Nightlife expansion pack is pretty much a slap in the face to the modders by EA, because it warns the users that any script mods could interfere with the game, and by default offers to disable them. There's a lot of Joe Average and Jane Clueless users who've just been told by EA, "don't use mods, they screw up your game." (If EA is so concerned about that, wouldn't it be nicer to offer a clean stable API and tools or documentation instead? You know, beats throwing a fit about how those reverse-engineered hacks are screwing their game.)
So again, the short story is that any mods other than recoloured clothes and haircuts happened _against_ EA's wishes and lack of support. They were _hacks_ to EA's game.
So how the heck can Jack hold EA responsible for that?
What's EA supposed to do there? DRM the files, to prevent the users from reverse-engineering them? Sue the modders (i.e., their own fans and customers) under the DMCA? Yeah, suing one's own customers gives a company such good publicity and goodwill. Or _what_? What does Jack want them to do to prevent users from creating their own skins?
(6) The idiot who thinks he's funny. In fact, so funny, that _everyone_ should find his stand-up comedy act when seriously searching for information. In fact, heck, everyone should be mandated by law to read his jokes, but finding them instead of actual info is almost an acceptable substitute.
I still remember one article in the German wikipedia... about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of tiny little digeridoos in test tubes, and a paragraph about how they live longer than the ones born naturally. About a year later, it was still there. (Now it's finally gone, though.)
OK, so it's a sorta the bastard child of your points 3 and 4. Except while the PR professional knows they're subverting and polluting a resource for profit, and the vandal knows they're defacing, the "funny" idiot might actually think he's doing a public service.
Dude, I'm a veteran of many flame wars, starting with FidoNET, long before the Internet was anything else than an academic experiment. I've seen and written worse trolls than what you do there. But enough to know a lame troll when I see one.
And yes, that's you. The whole "let's put words in your mouth, and then pretend to be a shrink and discover repressed himosexual/oedipus/inferiority/etc complexes" spiel is just that: a lamer's trolling weapon. I've seen and wrote worse than that, so, honestly, I'm just amused at this point.
And yes, that's another one of the fallacies that the whole gay propaganda is built upon. "See, if you don't support us, you're secretly gay too and affraid to admit it." I'll call bullshit on that. It's just as bullshit as Card's "if you're gay, you're a victim secretly yearning to become hetero". It's just a case of begging the question, or in other words a circular-referencing premise pulled out of the ass. Other than as a means to troll those you extrapolate about, it holds as much water as a sieve.
But if you really want to play shrink, how about you address what was wrote there, instead of inventing strawmen you're comfortable with. Noone said anything about finding homosexuality itself offensive. I talked explicitly about attention-whoring and whole arguments built on fallacies (e.g., verbal fallacies, ad hominem, guilt by association and appeals to spite), and the whole off-topic trolling a topic that had nothing to do with either homosexuality or homophobia to start with.
See some highlighted words in the above paragraph? Those are the real keywords. Not sexuality. I don't care if it's about sexuality, vi-vs-emacs, Nintendo/Sony/MS fanboyism, or Linux/Amiga/BSD persecution syndrome. You can just quit the trolling, attention-whoring and fallacies. That's all. That's what it's all about.
In a nutshell, it's _not_ "don't be gay", it's simply "fucking grow up already". That's all.
But I have no doubt that you'll dodge the topic again, and turn it all into the same persecution complex you're comfortable with. "Waah, the bad man is secretly finding us offensive after all!" It's times like these that I wonder where did evolution go wrong.
"It is unlikely that a publisher would publish it, and more unlikely that any retailers would carry it."
First of all, Take Two _is_ a publisher, so they could easily do that without needing anyone's approval. In fact, if I was the CEO, I'd actually do that and call it something like "Jack Thompson's Murder Simulator" just to make a point. Heck, one up him at that. Say half the profits will go to a charity, to match Jack's generous offer.
The deadline is a bit unrealistic, though. Games take more time than that to make nowadays. They could make it a cheap expansion pack to an existing game, though. E.g., to Postal 2.
As for the retailers, there was no shortage of retailers who carried other games whose _only_ advertised merit was, basically, "hey looky, we can have even more blood and gore than the previous one." Starting with, say, the old "Soldier Of Fortune" which, for whatever other merits it may have had, was advertised _only_ as "yay, now you can see more realistic carnage, complete with detailed bloody textures."
" You really like the propaganda."
No, I really dislike propaganda, especially the kind based on verbal fallacies. That was the whole point.
"You also like the repressed "you can do what you want, but don't let anyone know"."
I'm not saying "don't let anyone know", I'm saying "you can stop shoving it in my face". Which is slightly different. When I read about a SF magazine, for example, I'm really _not_ looking for "don't read his books because he's a homophobe" any more than I'd be looking for "don't read his books, his gay". Which is to say, not at all. You can start leaving me out of it, that's all.
"How do gay people feel about seeing heterosexuals get sexy all over the place?"
Hell if I know. I'm taking a wild guess that if someone started doing a whole "look at me, I'm hetero!" attention-whoring act, they'd find him just as annoying. Heck, I'm hetero and I would.
"But why? Who cares?"
Precisely.
"We "redefined" the term "man" to include women and nonwhites, when we clarified that what we mean by "man" includes those people, too. Even though legally and traditionally, they had been excluded from voting etc, just like gays from marriage."
Yes, but again, it's been something that took some voting and was an act of Congress, not a judge deciding to redefine a word. Because, again, for whatever other sins Card may have, that's what he was ticked about in the article you linked to.
"You really need to look more closely at your country. Because eventually these fascists get everyone - and you yourself are somewhere down the list."
We already had the real deal. Guess it's one reason to not be keen on one-man decisions that regulate a whole country. There's a parliament, and here it's actually doing a remarkably good job of, well, at least pretending to represent the people, let them decide these things.
"There's plenty of other evidence that Card is, in fact, a Nazi. Not because of who he doesn't support, but because of who he does support, and who he attacks."
So post a link to those, if you want to make a point. Linking to the Humpty Dumpty article where (even if strictly technically) he does have a point, isn't really getting that message across.
"Get a clue, or your relative acceptance of people different from you (as long as you don't know about it?) won't be an option any longer."
I have co-workers who are openly gay, and have worked pretty closely with a client's representative who was a lesbian, so it's not about "as long as you don't know about it." But that doesn't mean they had to squeeze that into every conversation.
There's a difference between knowing about it and getting a "waah, I'm persecuted! Bad people are against me!" emo act every turn. That goes for both homo- and hetero-sexuals. "Waah, I'm persecuted! I'm a Nice Guy (TM) and women avoid me!" acts from hetero-sexuals are just as annoying if you're getting them all the time. There's a time and place for sobbing on someone's shoulder, and there's a time and place for discussing one's sexuality (or in the Nice Guy case, lack thereof), but then there's also a time and place for giving it a rest and sticking to other topics at hand.
"Someone with this belief is pretty much the definition of a homophobe."
Well, yes, but from there to "insane rightwing religious fanatic" there's a bit of a difference. Someone can be one without being either religious or right wing.
"The rest of the article, as you point out, is a bunch of strictly speaking correct but irrelevant technicalities. Less objectionable I suppose, but the only reason one would want to raise them in the first place is because one is a homophobe --- it's similar to Neo-nazis raising minor technical quibbles about the Holocaust, without necessarily explicitly revealing their racist agenda."
Well, yes, but then I'd assume that if his agenda is that of an "insane rightwing religious fanatic", there would be some better articles to illustrate that, then one which is mainly about a real verbal fallacy, and has a total of one phrase or two debatably relevant to homophobia (or then again could be explained by Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity), but none even remotely relevant to being either overly religious or right wing. To take your comparison with the Neo-nazis, I'd say that if you want to denounce someone as a Neo-nazi, it would make more sense to link to an article where they _do_ reveal their racist agenda, than one where they merely discuss some irrelevant technicalities (e.g., how many IBM machines the Nazis bought)... and are even right about those technicalities.
"I don't know where people got the idea that PayPal was anything like a bank in the first place."
Thank you. That was actually the whole point: yes, it's nothing like a bank, which is precisely _why_ I don't trust them with my money.
Disclaimer: I'm an adept of "do whatever the fuck you please, as long as it's in the privacy of your home, and between consenting adults". I'm not opposed to your being gay, or whatever else you want to be. This time however, I'll basically also add "but fucking _keep_ it to the privacy of your own home, and leave the rest of us out of it already, because I'm already tired of the 'waah, you're a nazi if you don't support us' guilt-tripping."
So where should I start? He's a "rightwing religious fanatic"? Well, how about you support that claim? Because in that article you linked to, I've seen him actually argue his point of view without needing to base it on "God said it's wrong". So how the heck is it religious fanatism? He bases his argument on some things that are technically true, too. Things like:
1. That it's a redefinition of the word "marriage" to mean something it never meant before. It's true. Marriage always meant something involving a man and a woman. Anything else is an extension of the meaning. Now you may argue that it's a logical extension, and that it doesn't do anyone any harm, and we can even aggree on that. But an extension it is.
2. That you did have the exact same rights as heterosexual people, including, yes, the right to a heterosexual marriage. It may not be the kind of right you wanted, but technically you had the same rights. (Same as technically if homosexual marriage is allowed, heterosexuals have that right too. They might not want to exert that right, but they have it.) What you wanted was a _new_ right, that noone else had. Again, it may be a logical one, or one that doesn't harm anyone, and we can even aggree there, but it _is_ a new one.
3. Passing laws and granting new rights is a privilege of congress, not of a judge legislating from the bench. The courts of law are the branch that should apply the existing laws, not the ones that make new ones as they see fit. Separation of powers in the state is there for a reason, and let's keep it that way.
So how about you address those, if you really wish to discuss that, instead of reaching for the canned "insane rightwing religious fanatic" ad-hominem? (And if not, why did you bring it up?)
Because it seems to me like all three are technically right. Again, I'm not opposed to your getting that right. Makes sense to me. But the bullshit verbal fallacies (i.e., a whole argument based on redefining what a word means), ad-hominems, and endless guilt-tripping attempts based on those verbal falkacies, _are_ starting to get my goat. If you want to make your case, make it logically already, and not by fallacies. Verbal, ad-hominem, guilt by association (e.g., don't read his books because he's one of the homophobes), or otherwise. Or in other words, ffs, be honest for a start: if you want a new right, say just that, don't pretend someone was denying you something everyone else had.
And judging from the page you linked to, basically that's the same thing that Orson Scott Card was having a problem with too: that verbal fallacy involved. Hence the Humpty Dumpty reference. Can't even say I blame him for getting annoyed at hearing the same fallacy over and over again.
And you know what? It might even make your cause a lot of good to be honest for a change, and make a logical case instead of the whole "waah, I'm a victim" guilt trip. A lot of us couldn't care less what you do in your home. Sure, marry another guy, if that makes you happy. But if you act like an attention-whore, attention you'll get. And sometimes of the annoyed kind. If you scream the same fallacy (i.e., lie) again at people often enough, you've just insulted their intelligence and you've just lost their sympathy. Yes, the average human might be an idiot, but if you keep treating him like one and make your whole argument based on word-plays, he'll catch on to it. Just something to consider.
"You do realize most of the anti-paypal stuff out there is just people bitching and complaining because they were attempting some sort of fraud and paypal caught them on it."
/. of some american idiot rent-a-coder that exported and zipped a productive database, and posted it on a website, asking if someone can help him format that data. In fact, he posted it twice. Complete with people's names, addresses, etc.
Actually, of all the anti-paypal stuff I've read so far, none involved a fraud.
Plus, people commiting frauds tend to keep a low profile, because we're talking a crime punishable by law. You don't see whole public web-sites of people advertising that they've commited fraud against, say, a bank, any more than you see web sites full of people advertising their rapist prowess. Much less class-action lawsuits against the bank by them.
So I'm wondering on what do you base that kind of a broad-sweeping generalization. You're accusing a helluva lot of people of commiting a crime, so I'd like that to be based on some actual evidence, rather than fanboyism.
But even that's missing the whole point: even without those complaints, why should I trust my money to a company (A) who ostensibly is not a bank, and (B) whose terms and conditions of use basically say "all your money are belong to us. We can do whatever we wish, for any damn reason we wish. You have no rights, and don't guarantee anything, not even that you'll ever see your money back. And, oh, suing us to get your money back is also a breach of this contract."
See, banks aren't just a big company that you trust, but are subject to strict government regulations _and_ backing. You essentially don't even have to trust your bank, because there's a whole legal framework that's not only there to kick them in the teeth if they tried to run away with it, but also to make sure that you _will_ get your money back. From your government, if all else fails.
By comparison, PayPal is... what? A dot-com which overtly makes no guarantees, puts itself outside any rules or obligations, and you just have to trust them that they'll do the right thing. It's like giving your CC to a John Doe on the street, because he looks like a thrustworthy fellow. Or to the widdow of Mr Bantu Nguana from Nigeria, because she seems so sincere in that email asking for your help to transfer those 80 million dollars.
And even if you trust their current management, we're talking a dot-com which changed management and got bought at least once. Do you automatically trust that any future managers will also be trustworthy, even though your contract with them says "do what you will with my money, you are always automatically right, and I'm automatically wrong if I disaggree"? Why?
"They havn't had any breaches in security that would cause your CC data to be worrysome."
No, you don't know that. You only know that they haven't published any incident, but then they also didn't put their other mistakes on the front page. But even assuming it were so:
1. How do you know it will stay so? What happens when a new CEO is brought to reduce costs and he outsources it all to the cheapest monkeys he can find? I'm not even talking about offshoring only: there has been a recent case right on
2. What is your recourse when that eventually happens? With a bank you have a certain guarantee, both from it and from your government, that your money won't just disappear down a rat hole. PayPal explicitly gives none.
Scheduling time like that is good and fine in theory, but:
1. Sometimes something pops up that's important, or at least project-related.
2. Sometimes management pops up.
3. I swear some people are such windbags, you could put whistles on them and call them a bagpipe. They tend to not be deterred by subtle hints like a briefcase on the chair (they can talk while standing anyway) or even a "Not now, please, I'm really really busy. We have an integration test today and I have to finish this." One particular co-worker just said he'll wait for me to finish that method I was typing, and then he started to hum loudly while waiting. Throwing a bit of a fit about it, still was a bit too subtle a hint for him.
And I don't even mean for project related stuff. It tends to be, to pick only on this one co-worker:
- about how we should change the whole structure and organization of our project (it's a framework) so it better fits his own vision. And I don't mean the way it works or the way it's split in modules, but such irrelevant crap as how it's tagged in CVS, because his vision is to rebuild it all himself at each compile instead of using the released distribution. (Was his program compiling too quickly, or what?) And while he can do it already, it doesn't fit his own view of the Right Way (TM) CVS tags should be used.
- about how I should do something, because it would take him 2 hours (including testing!) to do that in his own code. So he wastes 1 hour of my time, and 1 hour of my boss's time about it. (So still 2 hours of his own time too, and he still hasn't even started on it.)
- office politics to that end. Such as that he's already talked to some other team and convinced them too that they want us to change something, and look, they even have the funds to pay for that change. (Then said team is like "Huh? We never said that, and our funding isn't even approved yet.")
- about how he absolutely needs to understand some purely internal details of our framework, that frankly, is none of his business and not a part of the published API. So he comes with a bunch of class diagrams and absolutely has to know what each private member does, and if "uniqueID" in this one is perhaps a reference to "uniqueID" in that other class. (Nope.)
- about how he absolutely needs to understand exactly how much memory and CPU cycles are involved in initializing one facade class, and if he'd be better off using a pool of those instead. "So use a bloody profiler and call me if it actually shows as at least 1% time or memory used, because from where I stand it looks to me like an empty delegator class that just calls a singleton. So AFAIK it uses 8 bytes. But profile before you optimize anyway" doesn't seem to satisfy him, so he still spends the next hour waxing philosophical over the potential waste of resources in initializing 100 of those per hour. (Yeah, a whole hundred.)
- about how some weird bug _could_ be because of our framework, because it happened two weeks after our release, and it can't possibly be his own changes in his own code that produced that. And it's usually something that leaves me like "huh? So what does that have to do with my code? AFAIK none of us even has a method that does that, so how would a framework bug affect _that_?" But no, really, can't it at least theoretically be our internal changes to logging (e.g., that now we write some more stuff as "trace" that used to be "debug" level) that cause his application to send an email to the wrong person?
And so on and so forth. I suspect that for some of these people it's sorta like a social life. Except they can claim with a straight face that it's work-related.
Since I run a legit retail version of Windows that I've personally bought, I'm not sure what the illegality might be.
"I beg to differ. To simplify to the max, reasons for Windows being used has NOTHING to do with the reasons for people that go to McDonald's.
People don't go to Mc Donald's because they know someone in the vicinity that will help them to eat for free, while that's the case with OSes.
Mc Donald's imply a sense of scarcity, nothing like that with software."
I'll say you missed the whole point by a mile, then. The point is _not_ that the reasons to choose a restaurant are the exact same as the reasons you use to choose an OS. The point is simply that there is more than one reason in both cases.
Most of the "System X rules, System Y sucks, people use Y only because they're idiots" rants take 1 or 2 qualities out of context, and then pretend that only that matters. E.g., "but in Unix I can use the command line to do stuff like this faster: <insert horribly complicated one-liner involving grep, sed, and a few other stuff, but that Joe Average never needs or wants>" or "but in Unix you have less viruses!" And then pretend like those are _all_ the reasons one could possibly have in mind, and everything else can't possibly ever matter for anyone.
In real life, a real decision includes a lot of other stuff, like "will it run application X?", "can I use my <insert piece of hardware or peripheral>?", "how easy is it to <insert everyday stuff like printing a digital photo sideways>?", "can I get it pre-installed?", "can I use the skills I already have?" (no, they're not sysadmins, but normal users do have _some_ minimal everyday skills already), "how easy can I get trained in new basic skills?" (e.g., next time I need to print a photo, and want it portrait again, do I have to wait for you again, or can I ask the next guy with a camera in the park?), etc.
And it's not just what the objective comparison is like in those cases, but also how reassuring the answers sound. And one camp tends to answer just what Joe wants to hear, while the other tends to give all the awfully wrong answers. Even when the Linux solution would actually be the better and more intuitive one, Joe will get shown some awfully scary CLI way to do it, or get some bullshit speech about how Application X is evil and you shouldn't run it anyway, or whatever.
So at the end of the day, when putting all that together, Windows does look like the better choice to Joe, which is why Joe then goes and gets his next computer with Windows on it. Or gets a copy of Windows installed on that WalMart PC that comes with Linux. That's all there is to it.
I hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
"SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!""
Yes, but they didn't tell you it's a good thing back then.
Fact is, the commodities market isn't a place you'd voluntarily want to be in. Look at the mom-and-pop beige-box PCs or the generic cola drinks market. Those are commodity markets. They're not making a huge fortune out of it. Trust me, if either had a choice, they'd very much rather have a unique product they pretty much have a monopoly on, or a brand name that's been hammered down everyone's throat already, or whatever that allows them to charge an arm and a leg instead of a 5% profit margin.
And the same happened with computers. Whoever was ahead didn't want to become a commodity vendor.
E.g., while all swore undying love to Unix's portability and to open standards, they sure worked hard to make theirs incompatible with any other Unix, and to subvert and destroy any standard. Because open standards and the "write once, run everywhere" that Sun nowadays preaches is basically turning it all into a commodity market. All of a sudden it doesn't matter which computer you run it on, and you can just pick between a Sun, an IBM, a Mac and a PC purely on price/performance considerations.
Worse yet, a commodity market doesn't allow "vertical integration", a.k.a., "lock them in, and make them pay through the nose for everything." That's where the big money is. Having a bunch of customers that will gnash their teeth and buy everything from you anyway, because the alternative would imply ripping out and re-writing/re-buying everything else they have. You want a bunch of sheep penned in such a walled enclosure where the effort to climb out of it (e.g., to rip out all your Sun hardware and port everything to AIX) is greater than just staying there and being sheared by you every year.
People will often even take a loss to get you locked in, so they can shear you later. (E.g., see the console market, where the console itself is usually sold at a loss.)
So Sun, IBM and everyone did the same thing when they were ahead. Big surprise, eh? And now MS does it, once they're ahead. Who woulda thunk it?
The moment you start preaching a pure commodity market and how lock-in is bad, as a vendor, is when you're losing. When everyone else has the customers neatly penned in thir lock-in markets, and you'd want those customers set free, so maybe some will buy your kit instead. Then suddenly those artifficial walls are bad, because they're not keeping _your_ customers in _your_ pen, to be sheared by _you_, but they're keeping them in someone else's pen and out of your reach.
So now you see IBM, Novell, Sun and a bunch of others suddenly preaching about open standards and portability. Because they too would like a shot at shearing MS's penned flock, so they want that pen torn down already. They sure didn't mind it when it was _their_ pen, but now it's time to preach against it.
That's all there is to it in a nutshell.
What's changed is that, as the article says, 95% of computers run Windows. It may not be the fastest. (But then again, I'm writing this in Konqueror on a Gnome desktop, and... well, it seems to me that Windows XP on my gaming machine does boot faster, and renders a lot faster. Maybe because it doesn't render and antialias everything in software.) It may not be _the_ one that discovered the wheel. Etc. But a lot of people like it anyway. It's an achievent they can be proud of.
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
"If you read that link you know that later hoplon shields were often coated in a thin layer of bronze."
On the outer, convex side, not the inner side that the guy was talking about.