So the G5 has a 32 bit OS, which is obviously far better than the Athlon 64 having a 32 bit OS;)
Not to mention that an Athlon 64, even in 32 bit mode, runs circles around a G5. But wait, at some point in the undefined future, there'll be some miracle IBM compiler and 64 bit OS for the G5, which makes it all faster. Just y'all wait and see. Unlike the Athlon 64, which, uh, is also waiting for a 64 bit compiler and OS to make it all faster.
Sometimes the logic of Mac fans is a bit too strange for me to follow.
Here's another idea: if a Mac is all you need, good for you. By all means, stick to your Mac. I'm genuinely glad that you found your dream computer.
But for some of us a Mac just doesn't fit the needs. E.g.,:
- Games. Yes, I know that you can buy a whole 20 games for the Mac, some of them almost 10 years old (e.g., Fallout), and some of them Solitaire clones that you can download for free in the Windows world. But some of us, you know, need more games than that.
- Price. Yes, the dual G5 is a nice computer, but the price I've paid to build my Athlon 64 3200+ computer, including a shiny new ATI Radeon 9800 _XT_, was a _third_ of that. Or half the price of a single processor 1600 MHz G5 with 9800 _Pro_. On account of keeping my old case, hard drives, RAM, PSU, etc.
And if I'm to add the price of buying all my old software again for a "switch", the price comparison is getting even more disastrous for the Mac.
So basically all I'm saying is: the right tool for the right job. For some of us the Mac is just _not_ the right tool. Our choice is simply "Pentium 4 or Athlon 64".
Actually, more like keep a copy for next time when said boss thinks that 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, actually brings anything except stress and lowered quality.
More to the point, I don't know if some subconscious process during the sleep is really what helped those students there, or just the fact that:
- group A was well rested when they went back at it, while
- group B was ploughing ahead, after being already tired of 8 hours at it. (I.e., being every idiot PHB's ideal workers.)
After a point, fatigue simply lowers the returns more and more.
Now I'd be even more interested to know what were to happen if group B did 12 hours shifts over 6 months or a year. See how eventually they'd start making mistakes like 1+1=3 when calculating those numbers. See how more and more time goes into going back and fixing those mistakes, than in making any actual progress.
Of course, the truly clueless PHB still wouldn't notice. If you're working for a clueless PHB, he'll tend to see only the "hey, cool, I'm getting 50% to 110% more hours out of them" part. But conveniently not notice the "but they between 300% and 500% more time to debug the code they wrote while being tired and stressed."
Actually, you know... I'm _not_ anti-capitalistic. In fact, I'm probably as pro-capitalistic as it gets.
However, my idea of capitalism, dunno, has more to do with what it used to mean, a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The idea that you try to build a better product. That you try to give people something they need, and they'll give you money for it.
At some point it used to be, at least theoretically, that a transaction produced value for _both_ parties involved.
E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, for you a loaf of my bread is worth more than the price I ask for it. And for me, having more loaves than I can possibly eat myself, that money is worth more than the loaf. Thus the transaction is a profit for both sides involved.
Now in this high tech market all this got turned upside down. The whole idea is to rape the consumer as hard as you can. As long as you got their money today, fsck 'em.
Just in the software industry alone, billions of USD worth of _worthless_ software is sold each year by marketting, bribery and lies. The kind of snake-oil transaction which actually produces a huge _loss_ to the buyer (e.g., the wasted time of 20 contractors over 2 years trying to work around the bugs) for a tiny profit to the seller. In fact, the kind that rapes you harder than if they just stole that money out of your account.
Plus it's sad to see everything thrown back in time some 500 years.
A _very_ long time ago, long before computers or even electricity, merchants had discovered that being honest and respectful pays. It paid big time. A satisfied customer was a customer which came back tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and next year. And often brings other customers.
Those people were planning to be in business for a long time. For generations, if possible. _Not_ to pull a quick scam.
Nowadays, again, that all got turned around. People are not planning to be in business for generations. At best they plan to show a bigger figure at the next board meeting. Plans now span a year, or in the worst cases barely weeks.
Hence, now it's perfectly acceptable to sell snake oil, and doubly so to screw the customer hard. He may not buy from you again next year, but, hey, who cares about next year? Rape 'em with a red hot poker, if that's what it takes to get their money NOW.
Dunno, somehow I think this is _not_ what capitalism was supposed to mean. Most of those business models are IMHO closer to the good old medieval highway robery, or to flying the Jolly Roger and plundering the Spanish Main, than to anything capitalism was supposed to mean.
Sounds like the kind of manager that I hate. What's wrong with your points? Lemme see:
"Don't come to me with problems; come to me with solutions."
You know what? Then what is _your_ job? Sounds to me like just another lame filter to avoid work.
If, just as an example, I say that the mail server is unreliable and slow, we simply have a problem. Maybe, not being said server's admin, I do not know what should be done to it. But I do know that emails are lost, or arrive hours too late.
Would you prefer that instead of talking to you, I leave my work and go personally track down the email server admin (in the other end of town!) and work out a solution? Worse yet, would you prefer that 100 people independently go talk to said e-mail admin, because they have to have a solution before they can talk to you? How many lost hour for them _and_ for that admin does that tally up to?
Here's an idea for you: the whole reason to have a chain of command and well defined responsibilities is precisely to avoid screw-ups like that. Your job as a manager is precisely to solve problems, or forward or delegate them to the apropriate people. Not just to sit there and wait for other people to figure out the solutions for you.
Briefly: if we're to come up with our own solutions to everything, we don't need _you_ at all.
"Provide the proper context."
Yet another lame work-avoiding filter.
Again, it's _your_ job to know the whole context, not mine. _That_ is why you're the boss, and I'm a coding monkey. _That_ is why I'd rather stay a coding monkey. Because being a proper boss really means hard work.
Work which obviously you're not willing to do.
For me to learn the proper context, including long term corporate goals, politics, and business relations, means already taking a break from my real work and researching all that. More than 90% of that stuff is totally useless to me.
Already requiring _one_ person to do _your_ work for free and research that context, is plain waste of man-hours. Requiring _everyone_ to keep track of all that before they can even talk to you, is downright surrealistic.
Again, that's why we have managers: so only _one_ person needs to know the bigger picture, while the rest of the team can work on their own slice. If we all need to stay up to date on everything up to corporate goals and strategies, and be able to come up with coherent strategies that fit those, then we don't need _you_.
"Move the conversation forward."
To some extent good advice. However, often there just is a problem. A big real problem. Just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't mean it'll go away.
So maybe, to use a real example, if the whole bloody team comes to you repeatedly to say "this application server is CRAP. Please, please, please, can we use something else?"... you could actually do your job, and investigate. See if there really is a problem and how big.
Locking yourself up in an ivory tower and chalking it up as "everyone's a whiner, and they don't know when to move the conversation forward" is just plain incompetence in that context.
"Focus on the positives"
In other words: "only say what I want to hear." Then you can stay cozily in your office and think everything is just fine and dandy, while the project is heading head first to a disaster.
Everyone only told you the shiny happy positive fantasy that you wanted to hear. Too bad the reality wasn't even remotely like that, eh?
"Network first"
In other words: instead of doing your job and seeing if you do have a problem to solve, you'll focus on if you like someone enough to bother listening to them. Lame.
The biggest problem with that kind of approach, is that most people learn what's expected from them. If being the boss's personal brown-noser (a.k.a., thorougly "networking" and "focusing on the positives") is what pays more than being a good competent professional, that's the kind of people you end up with.
So you end up with a team of total incompetents. Programmers who can't program, Unix admins with no Unix experience, and web designers who don't know HTML. But, by Jove, they're _good_ at networking with the boss and telling him shiny happy positive lies.
The fundamental problem is the mis-conception of "I have a _right_ to make a profit. No matter how immoral/unethical/whatever the means, by Jove, I'll get their money. By _force_ if needed."
The kind of mentality that produced spam, telemarketing and the recent corporate frauds. No means are off-limits, not even cheating investors or infecting other people's computers, if they make a profit. The profit is all that matters.
So now the same mentality that gave us spam, will now give us megabytes of full screen ads. Just another case of "fsck the consumer, my profit is all that matters."
Let me be the arsehole who says it: the problem there is that they expect to be paid for something completely worthless. Just like in the good old dot-com days, eh?
Here's a rule of thumb: if noone's willing to cut a check for the service/goods/whatever you provide, then it's simply not worth anything to them. Period.
Nothing personal. Most sites just fall under that category: pointless distraction for when you're bored enough. But if they crawled somewhere and died, we'd just go back to watching TV or whatever other equally mindless passtime.
Most of those gazillions of "news sites" are not even that. Most of them are just a personal or corporate ego trip. Definitely not something worth paying for.
And that goes double for the gazillions of lobotomized blogs linking to each other. No, they're not providing some politics education to the masses, they're just a bunch of whiny idiots polluting the searches for actual information.
And if they try to levvy a toll in the form of sheer annoyance, we'll just stop going there. (Well, in the case of blogs it's not like anyone went there except by accident in the first place.)
Here's an idea: how about actually having something to sell? That used to be what capitalism was all about.
Well, see, the whole idea is that a lot of us want these scumbags _hurt_. Badly.
I'll take your word that anal rape isn't fun. Well, we don't want these scumbags to have fun in the first place. Hence proposing it as a punishment.
Actually, forget anal rape. What I'd want to happen to all the spamming retards and script kiddies is more along the lines of a slow painful death.
Cancer comes to mind, but that's not available for executing someone in any country.
Failing that, I say bring back the middle ages. Boil them alive. Or impale them on a nice sharp wooden pole and let them squirm for days before they die. Or put them on top of a nice pile of wood, and set it on fire.
Or since a lot of those H3RB4L V14GR4 ads come from Asia, I hear the medieval Chinese had fun ways of killing someone. Like plant a bamboo seed up someone's butt, and let it grow, impaling them in slow motion.
That's how much I hate those retards. I have so much hate for them, that alone would make me a good Sith.
But alas, proposing something like that will just degenerate in a debate about death penalty. Which normally I don't support either. But, hey, we're talking spammers here. Either way, I can see why some people would be against the death penalty.
So instead of that, well... now you know why some people propose state prisons instead.
For starters, if Ogg Vorbis's fault is being "non-descriptive", let's think of the format that's more used than Ogg, WMA and iTunes's format put together: MP3.
Exactly in which way is "MP3" descriptive? Well, it isn't. It's just an abbreviation. Didn't stop it from being a success.
Think of "Zip". Right. It's about as non-descriptive as it gets. It's not called "iCompress" or "eSqueeze" or some other descriptive crap. Neverheless, people now routinely speak of "(un)zipping the files". (You could even argue that the "Zip drive" was named like that to ride piggy-back on the success of the compression format.)
Think of "Google". It's not called something stupid like "iSearch" or "eFind". Yet it's so used, that it even became a verb. Enough people actually say things like "You googled it up, right?"
Think "Amazon". It's not called "iBooks" nor "eBookstore."
Think "Dell" or "Apple". One is the owner's last name, the other is just a fruit. Yet everyone's at least heard about them. Or speaking of their products, "Macintosh" itself wasn't descriptive in any way, but it doesn't stop it from being a big thing.
Heck, even "eBay", in spite of having the mandatory "e", is actually non-descriptive. It doesn't really mention buying or auctions.
Etc, etc, etc.
Think of non-computer products. "Walkman" does mention walking, but doesn't feel a need to describe that it's a tape cassette player.
So it seems to me like to succeed you need more like a good product and good timing. Then people will learn whatever short imaginative name you've put on your product.
Just putting a copycat "iSomething" or "eThingie" on a "me too" effort, won't magically turn it into gold. Au contraire, to people like me it will just make it _scream_ "unimaginative copycat!"
To start with the punchline: well, so filter them away anyway. The way I view "l33t" or "netspeak" is: if it's not important enough for you to bother writing correct, easily readable text, it's not important for me to read either.
So yes, as far as I'm concerned, a good filter should throw away that kind of message away anyway. I don't care if the l33t spelled part was "|-|3rb@1 \/1@gr@" or "Ph34r my 1337 D34thm4tch ski11z", I just don't want to receive it anyway. They're both garbage.
That said... I can somewhat see your point.
Having once written a walkthrough for a game, I have had the dubious honour of receiving tons of mail from people who were both 1 and 2. I.e., 14 year old _and_ gamers.
Ooer. Stuff like "u sux & ur walkthru sux becuz u never sed which of teh terminal 2 klik on & y duzent ne1 make maps" were more common than I would have thought. (The above sequence was about a small level with 3 blinking terminals. You'd think someone could just try all 3 of them if it isn't clear enough.)
But... I don't think it's fair to blame it on the "gamer" part. Some people are simply retards. Plain and simple. Completely coincidental, some of them also play games. But even without the "gamer" part, they'd still be retards. And they'd still write like total analphabets.
No, I do not want every single gadget to be readily available on the net and ready to be telnetted into at any time. In fact, lemme rephrase that: I explicitly want them _not_ to be available on the net by default.
If the service company needs to telnet into my fridge, I'll jolly well open a port for it myself. And close the port when they're done.
Everyone is ranting and raving about Microsoft's security. Or rather: lack thereof.
But you're asking of me to suspend disbelief and trust that every single toaster maker will write perfectly secure code. Code which can't possibly have a buffer overflow. Code which can't possibly be exploited over the net.
No, sorry, I don't buy that. My experience says that more likely they'll hire some burger flipper to string together some libraries he doesn't even understand. And he probably doesn't even know what a buffer overflow is, much less how to test against one.
And don't give me that "but how will they guess your 128 bit IP address" stupidity. Not only it's security by obscurity, it's also the non-working kind.
How do people know your e-mail address? Do they have to randomly test every single letter and digit combination? Well, no.
And neither would they have to guess your 128 bit IP addresses.
It doesn't even take much imagination to just start a database of working IP addresses, same as every single spammer has one for e-mail addresses.
And the best part? Since the addresses aren't dynamic, you only need to find each of them once. Then it stays there. Whoppee.
Who cares about pop-up blocking in IE? How about: _you_ will care, when you start seeing pop-ups in Mozilla or Opera.
The whole "IE is inferior because it can't block popups" charade existed only _because_ the dominant browser didn't block those. Most people were content to make their pop-ups IE only.
Now that IE has changed, let's think like one of those dishonest marketers. So you were making money serving on-load pop-ups. They no longer work. What next?
How about looking at a little detail: IE, just like Mozilla and Opera, will not block stuff resulting from a user click.
Does it give you ideas yet?
If still not: Want to bet how long until you'll see sites where all links are done with JavaScript that also opens a pop-up window? Where every single drop-down and button and link is accessible only through JavaScript, which incidentally also opens a pop-up or three?
But wait, surely people will start blocking pop-ups completely, right?
Again, let's think like a slimeball some more. Remember, the goal of this exercise is to think not like the user annoyed by those pop-ups, but like the slimeball who pushes them onto you.
He doesn't care if you're annoyed, nor how annoyed. He just wants to make a buck. That's all that matters. He's really got the same moral standards as the spammer filling your inbox with V14GR4 ads.
So in that state of mind: Hmm... what to do against those users still blocking your valuable pop-ups, even when they're triggered by a click?
Well, blimey, make the whole site unusable or crippled without pop-ups. E.g., if you have to log in or fill a form, stuff it in a pop-up window. E.g., all the links to other sites are surely best opened in a separate window, via JavaScript. (All in the name of convenience for the user, of course;) E.g., the site-map, search, articles, etc, surely are best viewed in a separate window opened through JavaScript.
So there you go. Now the whole site is unusable unless the user disables pop-up protection.
No, I'm going to say that what you're describing there is:
1. An incompetently programmed GUI.
Any experienced Windows programmer will use a thread if the operation tends to take more than half a second. Better yet, he or she will show you a progress bar, so you know what's happening. Some (e.g., IE), will even show you partial results along the way.
I.e., oh please, just because you never learned how to use a thread, doesn't mean that everyone else is just as clueless. Pick a book. It will do you more good than trolling along the lines of "Windows sucks because I can't program."
2. Just trolling anyway.
For example: if you had actually programmed in Windows (and I mean past the level of a burger-flipper stringing together pre-made components in VB), you'd know that it does _not_ redraw everything 742 times in that situation. Redraw requests are not simply put in the queue one after the other like that, and that has always been the case. (Or at least since Windows 3.0, when I began programming for Windows.)
You'd also know that it has the concept of a clipping region. I.e., even if your own incompetently programmed application explicitly called itself to repaint 742 times, (A) you can detect a needless update and not do it, and (B) the user wouldn't see 742 updates, because the last 741 ones are just clipped away.
So again: pick a book before criticizing something.
No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?
Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets? And where 90% of the GUIs were never even tested in any other resolution or font size than what the developper had? (Here's a hint: 100 DPI fonts are an X standard for a long time now.) And where every app is configured in a different way? And in some cases (e.g., IceWM), contrary to common sense, the changes you do through the menus aren't even saved, and you have to launch a different application to configure your start menu?
Sorry, from the end user point of view, it's the Unix GUIs that suck big time. They suck like an industrial vacuum cleaner. They suck like an expensive hooker.
They're made by geeks, for geeks. And religiously defended by hordes of flaming trolls, ready to insult everyone who dares doubt their idol's wisdom.
What a non-geek user expects is to learn some skills once, and apply those skills again and again. It doesn't matter if you have some cute unique idea. He just doesn't want to have to learn a whole new set of skills for every single program.
He wants that if in Word CTRL+X is "cut", then in every single program it's still "cut". He wants that if F1 is "Help", then by God, it better be "Help" in all programs. And if one program's scrollbars behave in one particular way, then it better be the same way in all programs.
For you discovering how yet another widget set works might count as fun. For Joe Average, it counts as a waste of his time. He'd rather do something else in that time. Like be done sending that e-mail, grab a beer and watch TV, instead of still being at discovering how it works.
And yes, the Windows developpers know that it pays to care about the paying customer. That means, yes, caring about Joe Average who's using those programs. Thinking how you can help Joe Average do what _he_ wants, instead of making it all an exercise in programming for your own ego.
And until more of the Linux crowd discovers the same thing, I just can't see Linux making it big on the desktop. Sorry.
I think more like in some marketroid's imagination. There have been plenty of things that were hyped to hell and back, although noone even started working on a prototype, nor even planned to.
E.g., see the recent re-announcement of disposable cell phones.
E.g., see SCO's IP stolen by Linux, to be released "real soon now". I think it's a very safe bet that they never even existed, except in the SCO management's imagination.
Far as I remember, Fallout 3 was never even officially announced.
There were a few discussions on the Interplay boards along the lines of "we're sorta pondering making Fallout 3 in 3D" (back in '97) or "why does everyone go rabid about the idea of real-time combat in Fallout 3?" (in 2002) But the Interplay official stance always was along the lines of "nope, we're making no Fallout 3, and no Planescape Torment 2. A hack-n-slash like IWD has cost far less to make, and sold far more copies."
Sure, some fans were jumping to proclaim that every new project at Interplay would secretely be Fallout 3. But Interplay always said "nope."
So I'm not sure it even qualifies as vapourware at all. Compared to such shameless hype as the Bitboys or Indrema, or even to the endless interviews about DNF, Fallout 3 was basically not even promised in the first place.
Sorry, I'll bite. That's all good and fine in theory, but in practice that's another story.
I do not regard stuff like a game crashing every half an hour as being caused by "unreasonable" use. Or for example: which of Fallout 2's many script bugs were "unreasonable" use?
I also do not regard stuff like "oops, the user used the back button in the browser" or "oops, the user opened a link in another window" on web sites to be "unreasonable" use. Use of bog-standard browser features, that have been around for more than a decade, _is_ reasonable.
It's the retarded ex-burger flippers who moved into software development during the dot-bomb that are unreasonable there. If Joe Coder can't use the HTTP session right (yes, including supporting multiple windows _and_ the back button) then the only "unreasonable" part is Joe Coder still being employed. Period.
Etc.
Basically I don't know about mandatory government testing, but I would very much like to see some legal responsibility that can't be waved away with an EULA. Some part that says that your responsibility is to the user, not just the current "hey, we only need to take their money. And then who the fsck cares if it works?"
I'd also like to see some legal responsibility for the marketroids, same as in any other industry. If you say that a piece of software does something, then it damn better do that, to the letter. Just like if a steel company's marketroid says "we'll sell you 10 ft long, 1 inch thick beams, with 0.1% carbon content", you can sue the pants off those guys if it's only 9 ft long and with a completely other carbon content.
And yes, I _am_ a software developper. It just makes me sick to see what this industry has turned into. It's the biggest snake oil operation in history. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of snake oil every year.
And this doesn't come out of nowhere. It's draining the rest of the society to keep a bunch of cheats, liars and leeches in business.
A lot of that opportunism was downright dishonesty, and "evil".
Writing a book about potential Y2K problems can actually be "good". (If you only present the information, impartially, not try to be sensational. Information can't be evil.)
But writing endless doom-and-gloom sensational _lies_ in a newspaper, and whipping people into a "the apocalypse is coming" frenzy, just because it helps sell few more copies... no, sorry, that's just evil. It's someone actively harming others to make a personal profit. That's the "bandit" kind of personality.
Or making a BIOS patch (even as an ISA board) or a driver to help people get older computers running in 2000, I'm willing to write off as "good". Assuming that it wasn't mis-represented as some miracle cure, of course.
On the other hand, the endless hordes of predators who just unleashed the hordes of maketing to sell more snake oil, sorry, those I'll consider "evil".
Yes, I know that the attitude that "the client is clueless anyway, so let's sell him overpriced snake oil" is dominant in this industry anyway, even without a Y2K opportunity. But that's still just as dishonest (and thus "evil") as those who sold actual snake oil as miracle medicine, back in the Wild West days. Or those who sold shares to non-existent silver mines, in the same days.
It's nothing less than fraud. In no other industry could one sell a product based on purely _lies_ and get away with it. (E.g., if a company bought steel beams, and those beams didn't _exactly_ match the characteristics in the contract, they'd sue the pants off the con artist. _Not_ just take it as normal, as happens in the IT industry.)
And, yes, I do wish that such con artists and fraudsters would die a slow painful death. It's a pipe dream, I know. But damn nice dream it is.
Actually, no, the hype only caused problems. The greedy f**ks which lined their pokets selling Y2K snake oil, did so at the expense of everyone else.
The IT world was going fairly smooth, until the Y2K scaremongering just _had_ to cause a spending spike. But guess what? Said spike was followed by a quick drop _below_ the original spending levels. All those companies who were scared into spending 3 to 5 years' IT budget in one year (when a _lot_ less was really needed), were left basically licking their wounds and cutting down on IT budget on the next years.
And we're still feeling the effects of this aftershock.
In fact, this and the dot-com burst (another case of dishonest greedy f**ks lining their pockets at the expense of everyone else), were the cause of the whole IT depression that followed.
So everyone who got laid off in the aftermath, and everyone whose job got moved offshore to save costs, and everyone who was in a company that went bankrupt in the aftermath, and so on... well, they really have _nothing_ to thank those scaremongers for.
So: Yes, there was a problem. Yes, it needed to be fixed. But no, it wasn't anywhere _near_ the order of magnitude that the hype made it sound like.
All that hype was not some honest effort to rally the human race to fix a small problem, it was just the self-serving work of a bunch of dishonest journalists, dishonest politicians, and dishonest snake-oil vendors. All of them making a buck at the expense of this industry as a whole.
And I hope you'll excuse me if I wish they all died a slow painful death. Cancer would be nice.
All companies have some form of yearly forecasts. All companies need to store _some_ deadlines that fall in the next year, or beyond. (E.g., if I take a credit for 24 months, the bank _has_ to store somewhere that 2 years from now it's the last deadline for that.)
I.e., everyone was perfectly able to realize in 1999 if they had a Y2K problem. In fact, everyone whose system has a Y2K problem, already had an 1999 problem too. In some cases also an 1998 problem.
I.e., you could bet that most companies who did have a problem, had realized it and worked on it anyway. We just didn't need the big media scare. No bank was going to wait until January 2000, to find out that they can't store dates... when they had jolly well noticed the problem since 1999 or 1998.
What made it even sadder, was that a lot of the systems who were supposed to fail, didn't even have a need (or even a way) to know the date. E.g., I'm not kidding, I even saw a "Y2K compatible" logo on a pair of el-cheapo computer speakers.
Dunno, I found the whole media scaremongering to be just sad. Even otherwise intelligent people insisted that the world is (almost) going to end, just because the media told them so.
Fallout 1 and 2, yes. "Fallout: Tactics" is a completely different game. And to the best of my knowledge, nope.
As for the other games on that list, to the best of my knowledge, they're not Microsoft games. E.g., "Patrician 2" and "Port Royale" are Ascaron's games. "Temple of Elemental Evil" is made by Troika and published by Sierra. And speaking of Troika's games, I don't remember seeing "Arcanum" for the Mac either.)
The "store" I went to was Apple's own store page, at http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/
I'm a programmer by trade. (Well, "computer engineer" according to my diploma, or "IT consultant" according to my contract. Take your pick. I still program computers either way.)
While most of my hobbies do involve computers, they do _not_, for example, involve spending hours searching for drivers for some ancient scanner that the neighbour bought at a garrage sale. (And I mean ancient as in: the manufacturer's site didn't even acknowledge ever selling that model.) They also don't involve diagnosing IRQ conflicts and moving jumpers on an ancient non-PnP ISA bus SCSI card.
No, seriously. It's not what I normally do for fun.
And frankly, if said neighbour (who is _not_ poor) thought that getting that old crap and calling me over is a cool way to save a few bucks, without even asking first, it just tells me what he thinks about my free time. He thinks it's something free and worthless. In his "how much I'll save on this" plans, my time already starred as 0.00$.
Now if they want some quick advice, sure, they'll get that for free. I mean "quick" advice as in asking me first if it's worth getting some old crap. Or "quick" advice as in, "dunno, search on Google and see if you can find anything about that model." Sure, that's free.
But if they want their Windows reinstalled or if they want some ancient DOS device to start working with Windows 2000, well, tough luck: that's what tech support is for.
You're free to think I'm a dick, if it makes you feel any better. Sure. That's me. I'm the dick spending those hours having fun, instead of helping the neighbour:)
And this is why we have a monopoly. If we don't recomend something like Apple, then we will never be able to dump Microsoft
I don't know about you, but I value my parents and real life friends more than the whole "rabid anti-MS fanboy" act. If my mother's needs are better served by a Windows PC, then damn the whole "MS sucks" theatre, I'll get her a PC and MS Windows. It's that simple.
Everone knows that if more people used an os "x", more software would be writen.
Yes, but, here and now, not enough software _is_ written. Here and now, mom is better off with a PC. It's that simple. And I'm not going to set her up with a crippled box just to _maybe_ stimulate the Mac software industry. It's that simple.
However, I have all the software I could ever need and I find more every day for the mac. Sure we don't have 30 accounting software packages to choose from, but we have more then a couple.
As I've said before: if _you_ have all the software you need, good for you. You don't need much software, then. By all means, stay with the mac. Other people, however, need more stuff.
I mean, how many bad copies of Tetrus do you need?
Lemme see. How many "bad" copies of the following games can you find on Apple's store site? Catch:
- The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (there are already _two_ expansion packs for it on the PC, too.)
- Temple of Elemental Evil
- Fallout: Tactics (it's already, what, 2 years old?)
- Vampire, the Masquerade: Redemption
- Planetside
- Patrician II
- Port Royale
- Starlancer
- Mech Warrior 4
Etc, etc, etc. That's just off the top of my head. So, like, please spare me the standard mantra. sIf you're content with one port of Tetris, good for you. Most of the rest of the world isn't.
I get a lot fewer calls from my mac friends than I do my pc friends.
I wouldn't get many calls on the PC either, if they had almost no software to run on those PCs.
Seriously, is there any reason why the clueless folks shouldn't just use apple? Isn't it still more user friendly? Isn't it reliable, with a good warantee?
It may well be all that, but it also runs maybe 5% of the software you can use on the PC. (You mention two such apps yourself, in fact.) That's plenty of reason to not recommend it to most people.
If all you ever wanted was to surf the web and use PaintShop, and you don't play games either, well, ok, probably a Mac is all you'll ever need.
However, most of those "clueless" people actually want more from a computer.
Just as one aspect of the problem, you'd be surprised how many actually want to play a damn game now and then. And I don't mean the dozen games total that got ported to the Mac in the last 5 years. Even if they're not hardcore gamers like myself, they might actually want to go play Backgammon on Microsoft's site, or download some freeware remake of PacMan, or whatnot.
Or they might want to run their existing copy of MS Office, instead of paying another few hundred dollars for the Mac version.
Basically: just because they don't have a PhD in CS, doesn't mean that all they need is a box that can only surf the web and edit photos.
Slashdot Mirror
So the G5 has a 32 bit OS, which is obviously far better than the Athlon 64 having a 32 bit OS ;)
Not to mention that an Athlon 64, even in 32 bit mode, runs circles around a G5. But wait, at some point in the undefined future, there'll be some miracle IBM compiler and 64 bit OS for the G5, which makes it all faster. Just y'all wait and see. Unlike the Athlon 64, which, uh, is also waiting for a 64 bit compiler and OS to make it all faster.
Sometimes the logic of Mac fans is a bit too strange for me to follow.
Here's another idea: if a Mac is all you need, good for you. By all means, stick to your Mac. I'm genuinely glad that you found your dream computer.
But for some of us a Mac just doesn't fit the needs. E.g.,:
- Games. Yes, I know that you can buy a whole 20 games for the Mac, some of them almost 10 years old (e.g., Fallout), and some of them Solitaire clones that you can download for free in the Windows world. But some of us, you know, need more games than that.
- Price. Yes, the dual G5 is a nice computer, but the price I've paid to build my Athlon 64 3200+ computer, including a shiny new ATI Radeon 9800 _XT_, was a _third_ of that. Or half the price of a single processor 1600 MHz G5 with 9800 _Pro_. On account of keeping my old case, hard drives, RAM, PSU, etc.
And if I'm to add the price of buying all my old software again for a "switch", the price comparison is getting even more disastrous for the Mac.
So basically all I'm saying is: the right tool for the right job. For some of us the Mac is just _not_ the right tool. Our choice is simply "Pentium 4 or Athlon 64".
Actually, more like keep a copy for next time when said boss thinks that 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, actually brings anything except stress and lowered quality.
More to the point, I don't know if some subconscious process during the sleep is really what helped those students there, or just the fact that:
- group A was well rested when they went back at it, while
- group B was ploughing ahead, after being already tired of 8 hours at it. (I.e., being every idiot PHB's ideal workers.)
After a point, fatigue simply lowers the returns more and more.
Now I'd be even more interested to know what were to happen if group B did 12 hours shifts over 6 months or a year. See how eventually they'd start making mistakes like 1+1=3 when calculating those numbers. See how more and more time goes into going back and fixing those mistakes, than in making any actual progress.
Of course, the truly clueless PHB still wouldn't notice. If you're working for a clueless PHB, he'll tend to see only the "hey, cool, I'm getting 50% to 110% more hours out of them" part. But conveniently not notice the "but they between 300% and 500% more time to debug the code they wrote while being tired and stressed."
Actually, you know... I'm _not_ anti-capitalistic. In fact, I'm probably as pro-capitalistic as it gets.
However, my idea of capitalism, dunno, has more to do with what it used to mean, a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The idea that you try to build a better product. That you try to give people something they need, and they'll give you money for it.
At some point it used to be, at least theoretically, that a transaction produced value for _both_ parties involved.
E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, for you a loaf of my bread is worth more than the price I ask for it. And for me, having more loaves than I can possibly eat myself, that money is worth more than the loaf. Thus the transaction is a profit for both sides involved.
Now in this high tech market all this got turned upside down. The whole idea is to rape the consumer as hard as you can. As long as you got their money today, fsck 'em.
Just in the software industry alone, billions of USD worth of _worthless_ software is sold each year by marketting, bribery and lies. The kind of snake-oil transaction which actually produces a huge _loss_ to the buyer (e.g., the wasted time of 20 contractors over 2 years trying to work around the bugs) for a tiny profit to the seller. In fact, the kind that rapes you harder than if they just stole that money out of your account.
Plus it's sad to see everything thrown back in time some 500 years.
A _very_ long time ago, long before computers or even electricity, merchants had discovered that being honest and respectful pays. It paid big time. A satisfied customer was a customer which came back tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and next year. And often brings other customers.
Those people were planning to be in business for a long time. For generations, if possible. _Not_ to pull a quick scam.
Nowadays, again, that all got turned around. People are not planning to be in business for generations. At best they plan to show a bigger figure at the next board meeting. Plans now span a year, or in the worst cases barely weeks.
Hence, now it's perfectly acceptable to sell snake oil, and doubly so to screw the customer hard. He may not buy from you again next year, but, hey, who cares about next year? Rape 'em with a red hot poker, if that's what it takes to get their money NOW.
Dunno, somehow I think this is _not_ what capitalism was supposed to mean. Most of those business models are IMHO closer to the good old medieval highway robery, or to flying the Jolly Roger and plundering the Spanish Main, than to anything capitalism was supposed to mean.
Yes, but they probably have the same business model as spammers. And the same morals, obviously.
"Don't come to me with problems; come to me with solutions."
You know what? Then what is _your_ job? Sounds to me like just another lame filter to avoid work.
If, just as an example, I say that the mail server is unreliable and slow, we simply have a problem. Maybe, not being said server's admin, I do not know what should be done to it. But I do know that emails are lost, or arrive hours too late.
Would you prefer that instead of talking to you, I leave my work and go personally track down the email server admin (in the other end of town!) and work out a solution? Worse yet, would you prefer that 100 people independently go talk to said e-mail admin, because they have to have a solution before they can talk to you? How many lost hour for them _and_ for that admin does that tally up to?
Here's an idea for you: the whole reason to have a chain of command and well defined responsibilities is precisely to avoid screw-ups like that. Your job as a manager is precisely to solve problems, or forward or delegate them to the apropriate people. Not just to sit there and wait for other people to figure out the solutions for you.
Briefly: if we're to come up with our own solutions to everything, we don't need _you_ at all.
"Provide the proper context."
Yet another lame work-avoiding filter.
Again, it's _your_ job to know the whole context, not mine. _That_ is why you're the boss, and I'm a coding monkey. _That_ is why I'd rather stay a coding monkey. Because being a proper boss really means hard work.
Work which obviously you're not willing to do.
For me to learn the proper context, including long term corporate goals, politics, and business relations, means already taking a break from my real work and researching all that. More than 90% of that stuff is totally useless to me.
Already requiring _one_ person to do _your_ work for free and research that context, is plain waste of man-hours. Requiring _everyone_ to keep track of all that before they can even talk to you, is downright surrealistic.
Again, that's why we have managers: so only _one_ person needs to know the bigger picture, while the rest of the team can work on their own slice. If we all need to stay up to date on everything up to corporate goals and strategies, and be able to come up with coherent strategies that fit those, then we don't need _you_.
"Move the conversation forward."
To some extent good advice. However, often there just is a problem. A big real problem. Just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't mean it'll go away.
So maybe, to use a real example, if the whole bloody team comes to you repeatedly to say "this application server is CRAP. Please, please, please, can we use something else?"... you could actually do your job, and investigate. See if there really is a problem and how big.
Locking yourself up in an ivory tower and chalking it up as "everyone's a whiner, and they don't know when to move the conversation forward" is just plain incompetence in that context.
"Focus on the positives"
In other words: "only say what I want to hear." Then you can stay cozily in your office and think everything is just fine and dandy, while the project is heading head first to a disaster.
Everyone only told you the shiny happy positive fantasy that you wanted to hear. Too bad the reality wasn't even remotely like that, eh?
"Network first"
In other words: instead of doing your job and seeing if you do have a problem to solve, you'll focus on if you like someone enough to bother listening to them. Lame.
The biggest problem with that kind of approach, is that most people learn what's expected from them. If being the boss's personal brown-noser (a.k.a., thorougly "networking" and "focusing on the positives") is what pays more than being a good competent professional, that's the kind of people you end up with.
So you end up with a team of total incompetents. Programmers who can't program, Unix admins with no Unix experience, and web designers who don't know HTML. But, by Jove, they're _good_ at networking with the boss and telling him shiny happy positive lies.
The fundamental problem is the mis-conception of "I have a _right_ to make a profit. No matter how immoral/unethical/whatever the means, by Jove, I'll get their money. By _force_ if needed."
The kind of mentality that produced spam, telemarketing and the recent corporate frauds. No means are off-limits, not even cheating investors or infecting other people's computers, if they make a profit. The profit is all that matters.
So now the same mentality that gave us spam, will now give us megabytes of full screen ads. Just another case of "fsck the consumer, my profit is all that matters."
Let me be the arsehole who says it: the problem there is that they expect to be paid for something completely worthless. Just like in the good old dot-com days, eh?
Here's a rule of thumb: if noone's willing to cut a check for the service/goods/whatever you provide, then it's simply not worth anything to them. Period.
Nothing personal. Most sites just fall under that category: pointless distraction for when you're bored enough. But if they crawled somewhere and died, we'd just go back to watching TV or whatever other equally mindless passtime.
Most of those gazillions of "news sites" are not even that. Most of them are just a personal or corporate ego trip. Definitely not something worth paying for.
And that goes double for the gazillions of lobotomized blogs linking to each other. No, they're not providing some politics education to the masses, they're just a bunch of whiny idiots polluting the searches for actual information.
And if they try to levvy a toll in the form of sheer annoyance, we'll just stop going there. (Well, in the case of blogs it's not like anyone went there except by accident in the first place.)
Here's an idea: how about actually having something to sell? That used to be what capitalism was all about.
Well, see, the whole idea is that a lot of us want these scumbags _hurt_. Badly.
I'll take your word that anal rape isn't fun. Well, we don't want these scumbags to have fun in the first place. Hence proposing it as a punishment.
Actually, forget anal rape. What I'd want to happen to all the spamming retards and script kiddies is more along the lines of a slow painful death.
Cancer comes to mind, but that's not available for executing someone in any country.
Failing that, I say bring back the middle ages. Boil them alive. Or impale them on a nice sharp wooden pole and let them squirm for days before they die. Or put them on top of a nice pile of wood, and set it on fire.
Or since a lot of those H3RB4L V14GR4 ads come from Asia, I hear the medieval Chinese had fun ways of killing someone. Like plant a bamboo seed up someone's butt, and let it grow, impaling them in slow motion.
That's how much I hate those retards. I have so much hate for them, that alone would make me a good Sith.
But alas, proposing something like that will just degenerate in a debate about death penalty. Which normally I don't support either. But, hey, we're talking spammers here. Either way, I can see why some people would be against the death penalty.
So instead of that, well... now you know why some people propose state prisons instead.
For starters, if Ogg Vorbis's fault is being "non-descriptive", let's think of the format that's more used than Ogg, WMA and iTunes's format put together: MP3.
Exactly in which way is "MP3" descriptive? Well, it isn't. It's just an abbreviation. Didn't stop it from being a success.
Think of "Zip". Right. It's about as non-descriptive as it gets. It's not called "iCompress" or "eSqueeze" or some other descriptive crap. Neverheless, people now routinely speak of "(un)zipping the files". (You could even argue that the "Zip drive" was named like that to ride piggy-back on the success of the compression format.)
Think of "Google". It's not called something stupid like "iSearch" or "eFind". Yet it's so used, that it even became a verb. Enough people actually say things like "You googled it up, right?"
Think "Amazon". It's not called "iBooks" nor "eBookstore."
Think "Dell" or "Apple". One is the owner's last name, the other is just a fruit. Yet everyone's at least heard about them. Or speaking of their products, "Macintosh" itself wasn't descriptive in any way, but it doesn't stop it from being a big thing.
Heck, even "eBay", in spite of having the mandatory "e", is actually non-descriptive. It doesn't really mention buying or auctions.
Etc, etc, etc.
Think of non-computer products. "Walkman" does mention walking, but doesn't feel a need to describe that it's a tape cassette player.
So it seems to me like to succeed you need more like a good product and good timing. Then people will learn whatever short imaginative name you've put on your product.
Just putting a copycat "iSomething" or "eThingie" on a "me too" effort, won't magically turn it into gold. Au contraire, to people like me it will just make it _scream_ "unimaginative copycat!"
To start with the punchline: well, so filter them away anyway. The way I view "l33t" or "netspeak" is: if it's not important enough for you to bother writing correct, easily readable text, it's not important for me to read either.
So yes, as far as I'm concerned, a good filter should throw away that kind of message away anyway. I don't care if the l33t spelled part was "|-|3rb@1 \/1@gr@" or "Ph34r my 1337 D34thm4tch ski11z", I just don't want to receive it anyway. They're both garbage.
That said... I can somewhat see your point.
Having once written a walkthrough for a game, I have had the dubious honour of receiving tons of mail from people who were both 1 and 2. I.e., 14 year old _and_ gamers.
Ooer. Stuff like "u sux & ur walkthru sux becuz u never sed which of teh terminal 2 klik on & y duzent ne1 make maps" were more common than I would have thought. (The above sequence was about a small level with 3 blinking terminals. You'd think someone could just try all 3 of them if it isn't clear enough.)
But... I don't think it's fair to blame it on the "gamer" part. Some people are simply retards. Plain and simple. Completely coincidental, some of them also play games. But even without the "gamer" part, they'd still be retards. And they'd still write like total analphabets.
No, I do not want every single gadget to be readily available on the net and ready to be telnetted into at any time. In fact, lemme rephrase that: I explicitly want them _not_ to be available on the net by default.
If the service company needs to telnet into my fridge, I'll jolly well open a port for it myself. And close the port when they're done.
Everyone is ranting and raving about Microsoft's security. Or rather: lack thereof.
But you're asking of me to suspend disbelief and trust that every single toaster maker will write perfectly secure code. Code which can't possibly have a buffer overflow. Code which can't possibly be exploited over the net.
No, sorry, I don't buy that. My experience says that more likely they'll hire some burger flipper to string together some libraries he doesn't even understand. And he probably doesn't even know what a buffer overflow is, much less how to test against one.
And don't give me that "but how will they guess your 128 bit IP address" stupidity. Not only it's security by obscurity, it's also the non-working kind.
How do people know your e-mail address? Do they have to randomly test every single letter and digit combination? Well, no.
And neither would they have to guess your 128 bit IP addresses.
It doesn't even take much imagination to just start a database of working IP addresses, same as every single spammer has one for e-mail addresses.
And the best part? Since the addresses aren't dynamic, you only need to find each of them once. Then it stays there. Whoppee.
Who cares about pop-up blocking in IE? How about: _you_ will care, when you start seeing pop-ups in Mozilla or Opera.
The whole "IE is inferior because it can't block popups" charade existed only _because_ the dominant browser didn't block those. Most people were content to make their pop-ups IE only.
Now that IE has changed, let's think like one of those dishonest marketers. So you were making money serving on-load pop-ups. They no longer work. What next?
How about looking at a little detail: IE, just like Mozilla and Opera, will not block stuff resulting from a user click.
Does it give you ideas yet?
If still not: Want to bet how long until you'll see sites where all links are done with JavaScript that also opens a pop-up window? Where every single drop-down and button and link is accessible only through JavaScript, which incidentally also opens a pop-up or three?
But wait, surely people will start blocking pop-ups completely, right?
Again, let's think like a slimeball some more. Remember, the goal of this exercise is to think not like the user annoyed by those pop-ups, but like the slimeball who pushes them onto you.
He doesn't care if you're annoyed, nor how annoyed. He just wants to make a buck. That's all that matters. He's really got the same moral standards as the spammer filling your inbox with V14GR4 ads.
So in that state of mind: Hmm... what to do against those users still blocking your valuable pop-ups, even when they're triggered by a click?
Well, blimey, make the whole site unusable or crippled without pop-ups. E.g., if you have to log in or fill a form, stuff it in a pop-up window. E.g., all the links to other sites are surely best opened in a separate window, via JavaScript. (All in the name of convenience for the user, of course;) E.g., the site-map, search, articles, etc, surely are best viewed in a separate window opened through JavaScript.
So there you go. Now the whole site is unusable unless the user disables pop-up protection.
Fat lot of good did that pop-up blocking do, eh?
No, I'm going to say that what you're describing there is:
1. An incompetently programmed GUI.
Any experienced Windows programmer will use a thread if the operation tends to take more than half a second. Better yet, he or she will show you a progress bar, so you know what's happening. Some (e.g., IE), will even show you partial results along the way.
I.e., oh please, just because you never learned how to use a thread, doesn't mean that everyone else is just as clueless. Pick a book. It will do you more good than trolling along the lines of "Windows sucks because I can't program."
2. Just trolling anyway.
For example: if you had actually programmed in Windows (and I mean past the level of a burger-flipper stringing together pre-made components in VB), you'd know that it does _not_ redraw everything 742 times in that situation. Redraw requests are not simply put in the queue one after the other like that, and that has always been the case. (Or at least since Windows 3.0, when I began programming for Windows.)
You'd also know that it has the concept of a clipping region. I.e., even if your own incompetently programmed application explicitly called itself to repaint 742 times, (A) you can detect a needless update and not do it, and (B) the user wouldn't see 742 updates, because the last 741 ones are just clipped away.
So again: pick a book before criticizing something.
Amen, brother. I really wish more people would understand what you say.
No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?
Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets? And where 90% of the GUIs were never even tested in any other resolution or font size than what the developper had? (Here's a hint: 100 DPI fonts are an X standard for a long time now.) And where every app is configured in a different way? And in some cases (e.g., IceWM), contrary to common sense, the changes you do through the menus aren't even saved, and you have to launch a different application to configure your start menu?
Sorry, from the end user point of view, it's the Unix GUIs that suck big time. They suck like an industrial vacuum cleaner. They suck like an expensive hooker.
They're made by geeks, for geeks. And religiously defended by hordes of flaming trolls, ready to insult everyone who dares doubt their idol's wisdom.
What a non-geek user expects is to learn some skills once, and apply those skills again and again. It doesn't matter if you have some cute unique idea. He just doesn't want to have to learn a whole new set of skills for every single program.
He wants that if in Word CTRL+X is "cut", then in every single program it's still "cut". He wants that if F1 is "Help", then by God, it better be "Help" in all programs. And if one program's scrollbars behave in one particular way, then it better be the same way in all programs.
For you discovering how yet another widget set works might count as fun. For Joe Average, it counts as a waste of his time. He'd rather do something else in that time. Like be done sending that e-mail, grab a beer and watch TV, instead of still being at discovering how it works.
And yes, the Windows developpers know that it pays to care about the paying customer. That means, yes, caring about Joe Average who's using those programs. Thinking how you can help Joe Average do what _he_ wants, instead of making it all an exercise in programming for your own ego.
And until more of the Linux crowd discovers the same thing, I just can't see Linux making it big on the desktop. Sorry.
I think more like in some marketroid's imagination. There have been plenty of things that were hyped to hell and back, although noone even started working on a prototype, nor even planned to.
E.g., see the recent re-announcement of disposable cell phones.
E.g., see SCO's IP stolen by Linux, to be released "real soon now". I think it's a very safe bet that they never even existed, except in the SCO management's imagination.
Far as I remember, Fallout 3 was never even officially announced.
There were a few discussions on the Interplay boards along the lines of "we're sorta pondering making Fallout 3 in 3D" (back in '97) or "why does everyone go rabid about the idea of real-time combat in Fallout 3?" (in 2002) But the Interplay official stance always was along the lines of "nope, we're making no Fallout 3, and no Planescape Torment 2. A hack-n-slash like IWD has cost far less to make, and sold far more copies."
Sure, some fans were jumping to proclaim that every new project at Interplay would secretely be Fallout 3. But Interplay always said "nope."
So I'm not sure it even qualifies as vapourware at all. Compared to such shameless hype as the Bitboys or Indrema, or even to the endless interviews about DNF, Fallout 3 was basically not even promised in the first place.
Sorry, I'll bite. That's all good and fine in theory, but in practice that's another story.
I do not regard stuff like a game crashing every half an hour as being caused by "unreasonable" use. Or for example: which of Fallout 2's many script bugs were "unreasonable" use?
I also do not regard stuff like "oops, the user used the back button in the browser" or "oops, the user opened a link in another window" on web sites to be "unreasonable" use. Use of bog-standard browser features, that have been around for more than a decade, _is_ reasonable.
It's the retarded ex-burger flippers who moved into software development during the dot-bomb that are unreasonable there. If Joe Coder can't use the HTTP session right (yes, including supporting multiple windows _and_ the back button) then the only "unreasonable" part is Joe Coder still being employed. Period.
Etc.
Basically I don't know about mandatory government testing, but I would very much like to see some legal responsibility that can't be waved away with an EULA. Some part that says that your responsibility is to the user, not just the current "hey, we only need to take their money. And then who the fsck cares if it works?"
I'd also like to see some legal responsibility for the marketroids, same as in any other industry. If you say that a piece of software does something, then it damn better do that, to the letter. Just like if a steel company's marketroid says "we'll sell you 10 ft long, 1 inch thick beams, with 0.1% carbon content", you can sue the pants off those guys if it's only 9 ft long and with a completely other carbon content.
And yes, I _am_ a software developper. It just makes me sick to see what this industry has turned into. It's the biggest snake oil operation in history. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of snake oil every year.
And this doesn't come out of nowhere. It's draining the rest of the society to keep a bunch of cheats, liars and leeches in business.
A lot of that opportunism was downright dishonesty, and "evil".
Writing a book about potential Y2K problems can actually be "good". (If you only present the information, impartially, not try to be sensational. Information can't be evil.)
But writing endless doom-and-gloom sensational _lies_ in a newspaper, and whipping people into a "the apocalypse is coming" frenzy, just because it helps sell few more copies... no, sorry, that's just evil. It's someone actively harming others to make a personal profit. That's the "bandit" kind of personality.
Or making a BIOS patch (even as an ISA board) or a driver to help people get older computers running in 2000, I'm willing to write off as "good". Assuming that it wasn't mis-represented as some miracle cure, of course.
On the other hand, the endless hordes of predators who just unleashed the hordes of maketing to sell more snake oil, sorry, those I'll consider "evil".
Yes, I know that the attitude that "the client is clueless anyway, so let's sell him overpriced snake oil" is dominant in this industry anyway, even without a Y2K opportunity. But that's still just as dishonest (and thus "evil") as those who sold actual snake oil as miracle medicine, back in the Wild West days. Or those who sold shares to non-existent silver mines, in the same days.
It's nothing less than fraud. In no other industry could one sell a product based on purely _lies_ and get away with it. (E.g., if a company bought steel beams, and those beams didn't _exactly_ match the characteristics in the contract, they'd sue the pants off the con artist. _Not_ just take it as normal, as happens in the IT industry.)
And, yes, I do wish that such con artists and fraudsters would die a slow painful death. It's a pipe dream, I know. But damn nice dream it is.
Actually, no, the hype only caused problems. The greedy f**ks which lined their pokets selling Y2K snake oil, did so at the expense of everyone else.
The IT world was going fairly smooth, until the Y2K scaremongering just _had_ to cause a spending spike. But guess what? Said spike was followed by a quick drop _below_ the original spending levels. All those companies who were scared into spending 3 to 5 years' IT budget in one year (when a _lot_ less was really needed), were left basically licking their wounds and cutting down on IT budget on the next years.
And we're still feeling the effects of this aftershock.
In fact, this and the dot-com burst (another case of dishonest greedy f**ks lining their pockets at the expense of everyone else), were the cause of the whole IT depression that followed.
So everyone who got laid off in the aftermath, and everyone whose job got moved offshore to save costs, and everyone who was in a company that went bankrupt in the aftermath, and so on... well, they really have _nothing_ to thank those scaremongers for.
So: Yes, there was a problem. Yes, it needed to be fixed. But no, it wasn't anywhere _near_ the order of magnitude that the hype made it sound like.
All that hype was not some honest effort to rally the human race to fix a small problem, it was just the self-serving work of a bunch of dishonest journalists, dishonest politicians, and dishonest snake-oil vendors. All of them making a buck at the expense of this industry as a whole.
And I hope you'll excuse me if I wish they all died a slow painful death. Cancer would be nice.
Well, here's what makes it all really sad:
All companies have some form of yearly forecasts. All companies need to store _some_ deadlines that fall in the next year, or beyond. (E.g., if I take a credit for 24 months, the bank _has_ to store somewhere that 2 years from now it's the last deadline for that.)
I.e., everyone was perfectly able to realize in 1999 if they had a Y2K problem. In fact, everyone whose system has a Y2K problem, already had an 1999 problem too. In some cases also an 1998 problem.
I.e., you could bet that most companies who did have a problem, had realized it and worked on it anyway. We just didn't need the big media scare.
No bank was going to wait until January 2000, to find out that they can't store dates... when they had jolly well noticed the problem since 1999 or 1998.
What made it even sadder, was that a lot of the systems who were supposed to fail, didn't even have a need (or even a way) to know the date. E.g., I'm not kidding, I even saw a "Y2K compatible" logo on a pair of el-cheapo computer speakers.
Dunno, I found the whole media scaremongering to be just sad. Even otherwise intelligent people insisted that the world is (almost) going to end, just because the media told them so.
Fallout 1 and 2, yes. "Fallout: Tactics" is a completely different game. And to the best of my knowledge, nope. As for the other games on that list, to the best of my knowledge, they're not Microsoft games. E.g., "Patrician 2" and "Port Royale" are Ascaron's games. "Temple of Elemental Evil" is made by Troika and published by Sierra. And speaking of Troika's games, I don't remember seeing "Arcanum" for the Mac either.) The "store" I went to was Apple's own store page, at http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/
While most of my hobbies do involve computers, they do _not_, for example, involve spending hours searching for drivers for some ancient scanner that the neighbour bought at a garrage sale. (And I mean ancient as in: the manufacturer's site didn't even acknowledge ever selling that model.) They also don't involve diagnosing IRQ conflicts and moving jumpers on an ancient non-PnP ISA bus SCSI card.
No, seriously. It's not what I normally do for fun.
And frankly, if said neighbour (who is _not_ poor) thought that getting that old crap and calling me over is a cool way to save a few bucks, without even asking first, it just tells me what he thinks about my free time. He thinks it's something free and worthless. In his "how much I'll save on this" plans, my time already starred as 0.00$.
Now if they want some quick advice, sure, they'll get that for free. I mean "quick" advice as in asking me first if it's worth getting some old crap. Or "quick" advice as in, "dunno, search on Google and see if you can find anything about that model." Sure, that's free.
But if they want their Windows reinstalled or if they want some ancient DOS device to start working with Windows 2000, well, tough luck: that's what tech support is for.
You're free to think I'm a dick, if it makes you feel any better. Sure. That's me. I'm the dick spending those hours having fun, instead of helping the neighbour :)
I don't know about you, but I value my parents and real life friends more than the whole "rabid anti-MS fanboy" act. If my mother's needs are better served by a Windows PC, then damn the whole "MS sucks" theatre, I'll get her a PC and MS Windows. It's that simple.
Everone knows that if more people used an os "x", more software would be writen.
Yes, but, here and now, not enough software _is_ written. Here and now, mom is better off with a PC. It's that simple. And I'm not going to set her up with a crippled box just to _maybe_ stimulate the Mac software industry. It's that simple.
However, I have all the software I could ever need and I find more every day for the mac. Sure we don't have 30 accounting software packages to choose from, but we have more then a couple.
As I've said before: if _you_ have all the software you need, good for you. You don't need much software, then. By all means, stay with the mac. Other people, however, need more stuff.
I mean, how many bad copies of Tetrus do you need?
Lemme see. How many "bad" copies of the following games can you find on Apple's store site? Catch:
- The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (there are already _two_ expansion packs for it on the PC, too.)
- Temple of Elemental Evil
- Fallout: Tactics (it's already, what, 2 years old?)
- Vampire, the Masquerade: Redemption
- Planetside
- Patrician II
- Port Royale
- Starlancer
- Mech Warrior 4
Etc, etc, etc. That's just off the top of my head. So, like, please spare me the standard mantra. sIf you're content with one port of Tetris, good for you. Most of the rest of the world isn't.
I get a lot fewer calls from my mac friends than I do my pc friends.
I wouldn't get many calls on the PC either, if they had almost no software to run on those PCs.
It may well be all that, but it also runs maybe 5% of the software you can use on the PC. (You mention two such apps yourself, in fact.) That's plenty of reason to not recommend it to most people.
If all you ever wanted was to surf the web and use PaintShop, and you don't play games either, well, ok, probably a Mac is all you'll ever need.
However, most of those "clueless" people actually want more from a computer.
Just as one aspect of the problem, you'd be surprised how many actually want to play a damn game now and then. And I don't mean the dozen games total that got ported to the Mac in the last 5 years. Even if they're not hardcore gamers like myself, they might actually want to go play Backgammon on Microsoft's site, or download some freeware remake of PacMan, or whatnot.
Or they might want to run their existing copy of MS Office, instead of paying another few hundred dollars for the Mac version.
Basically: just because they don't have a PhD in CS, doesn't mean that all they need is a box that can only surf the web and edit photos.