The best you'd be able to hope for is a Iraq style guerrilla insurgency, but even that wouldn't work, since the troops you're fighting against would be from a similar cultural background as you.
Gurrilla insurgencies work well regardless of cultural backgrounds. If things started to go socially bust in the US, there would be a massive number of police and military personnel joining the "rebels" and bringing their weapons and tactical knowledge with them.
I agree, too, the concept of stockpiling is questionable. It seems like an easy target to take out, as all it takes is for one person with knowledge of it to be caught, then the "rebels" lost a large supply. It seems much more effective for the majority of people to obtain a few firearms, even sports models of AR/AK assult weapons, deer rifles, etc. This way the weapons are likely to be maintained, and in the hands of people comfortable with the upkeep and usage of said firearm. Not so effective on a large scale war scenario, since ammo resupplies would get complicated since you aren't just supplying millions of 7.62x39mm rounds, which would work in literally everyone's gun in Iraq.
Most of the people that really overbinge and all are the visitors here who go apeshit seeing how liberal it is here with the drinking laws...and they're just not used to not having the govt. tell them how to regulate themselves in a more permissive environment.
Considering Marti Gras isn't the only street party in the USA, I'd be willing to suggest the people going apeshit have less to do with the government sheltering them than they are doing it for the same reasons they do in Panama City, used to do in Atlanta during Freaknic, and many other places. They are out of town, young, and are going to "blow it out" regardless of what the local laws are. You can get picked up just as quickly in New Orleans for public intoxication as you can in any college town I've stayed in, as the differences in the laws are minor at best.
Personally, I did not like my time there. It seemed like the police trolled visitors for trouble more than any other place I've lived. I've yet to be asked "Where are you from?" by a cop since leaving Louisiana while it was a common occurrence while living there.
It is a video game where you can regenerate health with the services of a prostitute, kill her when she gets out of the car, take your money back, kill a cop and steal his cop car, kill national guard members and steal their tank, and these people are worried about a little bit of clothed dry humping?
Exactly. I bought this game and enjoyed it. There's no way I would stick it to the people who gave me so many hours of fun game play.
I really doubt any of the people actually purchasing this game were offended. There might be an occasional stupid parent who thought the hyper-violence in the game was tolerable, but the nudity was over the line. Regardless, it was baseless, in my opinion-- and the people who are okay with violence and freak out over nudity are rather scary. I would not enjoy living in their heads. Give me nude women any day over guns. I'll take both in my video games when it's an option, though.
Actually, the people who have a stranglehold on America's censorship are the scariest of all. Every other TV show or movie have probably ten times the violence than sex. I remember in the 1970s and early 80s, you could, at least, see the occasional boob on UHF broadcast. Something went wrong somewhere.
The Dad surfing for porn thing is normal Agreed. My dad had a big stash of hardcore magazines he kept locked away in one of his shop cabinets, my grandfather kept a big stash of lower quality stuff in his garage. Just because this generation gets it on the computer, doesn't mean the concepts are anything new.
I can agree, somewhat, that the younger people have some gripe about their parents fiddling around in chatrooms or WoW, but kids of previous generations often dealt with parents that were either gone fishing, drinking, or like one of my parents and buried in novels endlessly. It was much the same thing, if she wasn't holding a book, she'd be rather distant, would read through the family tv time, would skip meals to find out what the next chapter holds and when one book was finished, it was off to the next one. It seems more like humans exhibiting the same particular types of behavior through different conduits.
Well, the mast was on a hill about 75 feet away, if I had to guess, and the cable was the cheapest stuff Radio Shack had. The per capita ratio of Miltons on/. has increased lately.
I think my station was only a couple of amps, but the amplifier was 5-7 amps at most. It all came from the Radio Shack down the street, but that was the 70s so lord only knows how legitimate it was in reality, as many Radio Shacks back then stocked items they wanted and not like the cookie cutter stores like they are nowadays. I got it to overcome some rather long cables between the station and the antenna. All I know for sure, nobody ever yelled at me over boosting and bleeding over to other signals.
I also had some knobs for tweaking reception in another box, but have no recollection of what it was called.
A lot of people chime in when I bring up something from the mid 70's, saying was illegal with a tidy link they Googled, but you have to remember that was a time when you had to hit the library to even begin to know what the laws were and many "illegal" items were on store shelves in small towns everywhere, even the police officers of the time didn't know, or care, about much of it. It wasn't until the mid-80's they even started to crack down on illegal firecracker sales around here.:)
Agreed, we need regulation. Back in the 1970's I had a nice Bearcat Citizen's Band radio with an antenna on a mast and linear amplifier to run right at the legal limit. Back then, these waves were similar to the local Internet chat room of today except you likely knew the folks you were talking to in real life, assisting drivers with directions, etc. Plus we all used snazzy handles just like on the Internet today.
Starting in probably 79, a lot of people started using linear amps that were so powerful, you could pick their signal up from 30+ miles away and it would drown out channels above and below the one you'd be monitoring. These people were so ungodly annoying because you would not be able to respond to them, as they are out of range of probably 90% of the people who were getting their signal, and causing general mayhem for folks trying to hold down a conversation miles away.
If it hadn't been for the above, I probably never would have cared or understood, but just knowing how annoying random people can be with radio technology when enforcement is weak, makes me like the idea of reasonable regulations. If anything interferes with current radio infrastructure, it needs to go back to the drawing board until something is improved. It only takes five minutes with a portable scanner to see how many non-data, critical services are managed via radio and it's reasonable to suggest that any change to those would be far more expensive to society than not running Internet over power lines unless they are reasonably shielded.
I am on the same page as you. I suspect I am old enough to be one of the few people here who have had to do pre-IT work in my younger days. I once worked for a gigantic (800,000 sq ft) food distribution center. Many times, the outside of pallets "packages" would have the bar codes scraped off them due to handling with forklifts, lift-clamps, etc. If I had the option of just driving a big palette of food products through a scanning device that counted the products and gave me weights automatically, it would have added up to likely 10 hours of time saved per loader a week. Not to mention the hazards of having to get on and off an industrial lift repeatedly all day long, the shock to joints, the static discharge (sometimes reaching an 8" arc), and so on would have been nice to cut down on.
My impression with a lot of the folks who play a scared advocate on such technologies don't have much of a grasp of what the rest of the world has to put up with in their day-to-day experiences and could care less about their lives being easier, because, there *might* be some madman somewhere ready to spy on them given the chance. These same people probably do their banking online, have credit cards, and homes without decent security systems. Those are the real things to worry about, in my opinion.
This same line of thought often reminds me of the "sticking it to the man" attitude I see around here a lot. Like "It's about time Company X learned it's lesson", well, Company X doesn't usually learn a lesson. The individuals on the lower end of the employment ladder just get treated worse, while the shareholders and executives don't really have much to worry about. Or, "Corporate greed", got to love that one. It's the individual greed of many people combined with a lot of Joes trying to keep their households afloat. There I go rambling again.
Scripts that visit the exact same pages, for the exact same time, do the exact same things across all browsers provide consistent, quantifiable results. Since everyone's browsing behavior is different no script will ever provide "accurate" results for real world usage.
Yes, these jokers could have demonstrated a bit of consistency with something as simple as WinMacro or one of the countless available tools you can grab off the Web to automate tasks in Windows. Also, fourteen hours is a relatively brief for testing such things. I kept FireFox open for days upon days under FreeBSD several years back, with multiple tabs open, some auto-refreshing network status information with little, to no, crashing-- then would open up something like Google and get an instant crash.
But then again, those scripts could be closer to my real world usage than this guys anecdotal test. Get it? Nowadays, I browse a pretty consistent circle of sites, so yeah, this would fit for simulating my web activities too.:)
(why would anybody install that piece of crap is beyond me) Well, there is a lot of content on the web which requires flash, regardless of whether we wish to be elitist about what we do with the web, or not.
I, personally, wish flash development under Linux was remotely on par with the Windows offering. This has been one of the things holding the "old folks" in my family and down the street from running something nice on their PC like Ubuntu instead of Windows. An amazing number of them have Bongo premium accounts (and the like) and after setting one person up, then having to nuke Ubuntu for Windows because 90% of their flash-based games would no longer work, made me think something more needs to be done in this area instead of just ignoring it. Sadly, it's closed source and the open source options don't suit their needs. It's unfortunate, as if this one hitch were removed, I could think of five people I could get running Linux by next week. As it stands, I'm still waiting indefinitely to save them from Vista.
I'm not a coder, I'm an electronics/hardware/telco/admin/networking guy so I am pulling this out of my butt, but would it be worth investing in getting the Windows version of flash to run under Linux somehow?
I don't think this Microsoft guy's argument is realistic.
Imagine if Microsoft held all rights and patents related to proxy software. Now imagine if they said they were no longer going to support or sale it-- but maintain their intellectual property rights. Plenty of businesses would be screwed.
Imagine if, in this scenario, they said "We aren't going to sell this software for platform _______", then every company depending on that platform would have to go out and find something that is supported.
I'd imagine, in the real world, if the maintainers of say, Squid, stepped down or pulled any bullshit-- it would be forked or new people would step in immediately to carry on with it.
But, he works for Microsoft, so when speaking in public, he's got to stick to a certain story regardless of his true feelings. I've got a couple of friends who work for them, and they aren't stupid. They just know not to ever say anything anti-microsoft while the public is listening.
Being an avid biker for years, I've never owned one of those LED cluster lights that didn't have multiple modes. My last one would do a static always-on light, then a couple of different flashing modes. Everyone I've seen use the same type seems to just leave them flashing.
When away from traffic, I always leave my light off. It gives foot/bike patrol officers too much visibility on your location when illegally cutting through parks after midnight. I actually had a plump female officer try and chase me down on foot for this minor infraction recently.
But you appear to be able to set the options back after setting them too high. The point is, you probably aren't going to find a situation where you are completely locked out of a game because it loaded the wrong config file.
I've never had a situation arise where a friend would come over and install a game on my machine so one of us could sit around and watch the other play. Either you bring your own machine and I'll supply the monitor or we'll be playing something on the 360.
Oh, I see. They want to avoid utilizing a vacuum. This doesn't seem to matter either, as long as someone comes up with a way to do it with greater efficiency.
It'll take a lot of research and effort to figure out how to make a better LED with only (up to) $20m in rewards.
Sooo... You store your settings locally, they are uploaded silently, then you go to a friend's place, who has a computer with lower hardware specs, and... your save is unplayable, because it never makes it to the config screen? I don't know what world you live in, but even when changing video cards and monitors, most Windows games will still load but fail back to the default resolution and color depth. This isn't 1990.
'Already, [Mark Bigham, director of business development for Raytheon Tactical Intelligence Systems] says that Raytheon has been experimenting with Wii controllers to explore the possibilities for training simulators and other applications that require physical movement. Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.'" I think they are using every modern gaming controller for research these days. I've seen several Xbox 360 controllers controlling things on Futureweapons lately.
Quite honestly, it seems like it would be easier and less trouble to just hack together some accelerometers and bluetooth circuits and go from there instead of trying to build things around the Wii controller-- but it's not my project.
For all the people jabbering about Nintendo doing development for US war efforts, don't count on it any time soon. Sure, they've helped in the past, but utilizing a Wii controller for an application does not have to involve a Wii or Nintendo. It involves someone on the project going down to the store to purchase some controllers and hooking them up to a PC.
People also need to quit knocking sims for not being "like actual gunfire". A lot of military folks I know play paintball avidly. Does it improve accuracy with an M16? Probably not, but it helps develop the areas of the brain that have to figure out friend from foe, how to function in small teams, hand-eye coordination, not to mention all the excersize from running around. Even FPS games on a console help some of these skills, albeit, nowhere near as much as getting off your butt and practicing hurling your own body through time and space while dealing with real projectiles.
Shooting at ducks, aliens, mutants, circles and boxes, fine, thats just skill training and entertainment, shooting at human looking objects, is something else, and rather sociopathic. A friend of mine has an old stand-up machine of this:
So Nintendo must be pretty sociopathic. I don't see the problem as just about every first-person shooter uses human, or human-like models. Counter-Strike, Quake, Halo, Call of Duty, BF1942, and countless others.
It actually makes me happy to see them drop this feature. Web sites who sell games rarely give objective points of view, whether it be due to staff pressures or the person writing it wanting to fit in with his gamer friends by assuming a group opinion instead of an honest one.
Think of how people spew exaggerated claims about Linux and piss on Windows in a semi-anonymous environment for nothing more than mod points on here. Imagine if money and reputation were on the line.
On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. Though it is a guarantee to get +5 for saying what you said, it's not the complete reality. Many programs would just GPF and the system would carry on just fine. Note how I said Linux + X, not Linux. DOS and Desqview were entirely stable for that era in their own rights, it was just a matter of what applications you could get away with running.
Loading a CD burning application and any other intensive software was beyond any system from that era's abilities. If the writer didn't get data at a certain speed, it would screw up the burn.
Also, what's the difference in losing an hour's work due to Windows crashing while working on a paper and X crashing while working on a paper? Not much, the whole system might as well have tanked in both cases. I also consider word processing and office applications from the mid 90s superior to Linux applications under X from the same era. It's only been since the early 2000s one could scrape by in a Windows house without a Windows box.
System stability from the mid 90s in both Linux and Windows is what prompted me to go entirely BSD until a couple of years ago.
KDE was also unusable garbage in 96. It took a few years before it matured into anything remotely like you see today. WindowMaker, in my opinion, was the best thing going at that time.
Sometimes companies can't afford to spend so much money up front. They also don't want to spend a lot of money helping the business across the street become that much more competition. Short sighted, yes, but it's the real world and not everyone can afford to contract out open source projects or wait several years for a project to suddenly have files posted on a sourceforge project page.
I don't see the mac being the symbol of stability in the Win95 days. I did support on both platforms back then and we had a much higher costs per user for support than when it came to Windows.
Sure, a lot of it was "I tried to connect to the Intarweb and now my school project is gone" but it was mostly people having corrupt things littering their Preferences folder, the same people having the same problems daily, weekly, or whatever. Nobody doing support at my shop back then was very happy with macs due to all the problems average users were having at the time.
Many of these users had been through the mac support wringer, which wasn't much different than the Windows one, except mac would replace the hardware and the same issues would keep cropping up endlessly.
Slashdot Mirror
Gurrilla insurgencies work well regardless of cultural backgrounds. If things started to go socially bust in the US, there would be a massive number of police and military personnel joining the "rebels" and bringing their weapons and tactical knowledge with them.
I agree, too, the concept of stockpiling is questionable. It seems like an easy target to take out, as all it takes is for one person with knowledge of it to be caught, then the "rebels" lost a large supply. It seems much more effective for the majority of people to obtain a few firearms, even sports models of AR/AK assult weapons, deer rifles, etc. This way the weapons are likely to be maintained, and in the hands of people comfortable with the upkeep and usage of said firearm. Not so effective on a large scale war scenario, since ammo resupplies would get complicated since you aren't just supplying millions of 7.62x39mm rounds, which would work in literally everyone's gun in Iraq.
Well I suck at spelling. I also don't call cops "sir", I call them "officer". Perhaps that's why they came across as pricks. :)
Considering Marti Gras isn't the only street party in the USA, I'd be willing to suggest the people going apeshit have less to do with the government sheltering them than they are doing it for the same reasons they do in Panama City, used to do in Atlanta during Freaknic, and many other places. They are out of town, young, and are going to "blow it out" regardless of what the local laws are. You can get picked up just as quickly in New Orleans for public intoxication as you can in any college town I've stayed in, as the differences in the laws are minor at best.
Personally, I did not like my time there. It seemed like the police trolled visitors for trouble more than any other place I've lived. I've yet to be asked "Where are you from?" by a cop since leaving Louisiana while it was a common occurrence while living there.
Exactly. I bought this game and enjoyed it. There's no way I would stick it to the people who gave me so many hours of fun game play.
I really doubt any of the people actually purchasing this game were offended. There might be an occasional stupid parent who thought the hyper-violence in the game was tolerable, but the nudity was over the line. Regardless, it was baseless, in my opinion-- and the people who are okay with violence and freak out over nudity are rather scary. I would not enjoy living in their heads. Give me nude women any day over guns. I'll take both in my video games when it's an option, though.
Actually, the people who have a stranglehold on America's censorship are the scariest of all. Every other TV show or movie have probably ten times the violence than sex. I remember in the 1970s and early 80s, you could, at least, see the occasional boob on UHF broadcast. Something went wrong somewhere.
I can agree, somewhat, that the younger people have some gripe about their parents fiddling around in chatrooms or WoW, but kids of previous generations often dealt with parents that were either gone fishing, drinking, or like one of my parents and buried in novels endlessly. It was much the same thing, if she wasn't holding a book, she'd be rather distant, would read through the family tv time, would skip meals to find out what the next chapter holds and when one book was finished, it was off to the next one. It seems more like humans exhibiting the same particular types of behavior through different conduits.
Well, the mast was on a hill about 75 feet away, if I had to guess, and the cable was the cheapest stuff Radio Shack had. The per capita ratio of Miltons on /. has increased lately.
I think my station was only a couple of amps, but the amplifier was 5-7 amps at most. It all came from the Radio Shack down the street, but that was the 70s so lord only knows how legitimate it was in reality, as many Radio Shacks back then stocked items they wanted and not like the cookie cutter stores like they are nowadays. I got it to overcome some rather long cables between the station and the antenna. All I know for sure, nobody ever yelled at me over boosting and bleeding over to other signals.
I also had some knobs for tweaking reception in another box, but have no recollection of what it was called.
A lot of people chime in when I bring up something from the mid 70's, saying was illegal with a tidy link they Googled, but you have to remember that was a time when you had to hit the library to even begin to know what the laws were and many "illegal" items were on store shelves in small towns everywhere, even the police officers of the time didn't know, or care, about much of it. It wasn't until the mid-80's they even started to crack down on illegal firecracker sales around here. :)
Agreed, we need regulation. Back in the 1970's I had a nice Bearcat Citizen's Band radio with an antenna on a mast and linear amplifier to run right at the legal limit. Back then, these waves were similar to the local Internet chat room of today except you likely knew the folks you were talking to in real life, assisting drivers with directions, etc. Plus we all used snazzy handles just like on the Internet today.
Starting in probably 79, a lot of people started using linear amps that were so powerful, you could pick their signal up from 30+ miles away and it would drown out channels above and below the one you'd be monitoring. These people were so ungodly annoying because you would not be able to respond to them, as they are out of range of probably 90% of the people who were getting their signal, and causing general mayhem for folks trying to hold down a conversation miles away.
If it hadn't been for the above, I probably never would have cared or understood, but just knowing how annoying random people can be with radio technology when enforcement is weak, makes me like the idea of reasonable regulations. If anything interferes with current radio infrastructure, it needs to go back to the drawing board until something is improved. It only takes five minutes with a portable scanner to see how many non-data, critical services are managed via radio and it's reasonable to suggest that any change to those would be far more expensive to society than not running Internet over power lines unless they are reasonably shielded.
I am on the same page as you. I suspect I am old enough to be one of the few people here who have had to do pre-IT work in my younger days. I once worked for a gigantic (800,000 sq ft) food distribution center. Many times, the outside of pallets "packages" would have the bar codes scraped off them due to handling with forklifts, lift-clamps, etc. If I had the option of just driving a big palette of food products through a scanning device that counted the products and gave me weights automatically, it would have added up to likely 10 hours of time saved per loader a week. Not to mention the hazards of having to get on and off an industrial lift repeatedly all day long, the shock to joints, the static discharge (sometimes reaching an 8" arc), and so on would have been nice to cut down on.
My impression with a lot of the folks who play a scared advocate on such technologies don't have much of a grasp of what the rest of the world has to put up with in their day-to-day experiences and could care less about their lives being easier, because, there *might* be some madman somewhere ready to spy on them given the chance. These same people probably do their banking online, have credit cards, and homes without decent security systems. Those are the real things to worry about, in my opinion.
This same line of thought often reminds me of the "sticking it to the man" attitude I see around here a lot. Like "It's about time Company X learned it's lesson", well, Company X doesn't usually learn a lesson. The individuals on the lower end of the employment ladder just get treated worse, while the shareholders and executives don't really have much to worry about. Or, "Corporate greed", got to love that one. It's the individual greed of many people combined with a lot of Joes trying to keep their households afloat. There I go rambling again.
Yes, these jokers could have demonstrated a bit of consistency with something as simple as WinMacro or one of the countless available tools you can grab off the Web to automate tasks in Windows. Also, fourteen hours is a relatively brief for testing such things. I kept FireFox open for days upon days under FreeBSD several years back, with multiple tabs open, some auto-refreshing network status information with little, to no, crashing-- then would open up something like Google and get an instant crash.
But then again, those scripts could be closer to my real world usage than this guys anecdotal test. Get it? Nowadays, I browse a pretty consistent circle of sites, so yeah, this would fit for simulating my web activities too.I, personally, wish flash development under Linux was remotely on par with the Windows offering. This has been one of the things holding the "old folks" in my family and down the street from running something nice on their PC like Ubuntu instead of Windows. An amazing number of them have Bongo premium accounts (and the like) and after setting one person up, then having to nuke Ubuntu for Windows because 90% of their flash-based games would no longer work, made me think something more needs to be done in this area instead of just ignoring it. Sadly, it's closed source and the open source options don't suit their needs. It's unfortunate, as if this one hitch were removed, I could think of five people I could get running Linux by next week. As it stands, I'm still waiting indefinitely to save them from Vista.
I'm not a coder, I'm an electronics/hardware/telco/admin/networking guy so I am pulling this out of my butt, but would it be worth investing in getting the Windows version of flash to run under Linux somehow?
I'd imagine whoever calling NS from SA would be so hell-bent on making drama so they'd have something to post about later.
I don't think this Microsoft guy's argument is realistic.
Imagine if Microsoft held all rights and patents related to proxy software. Now imagine if they said they were no longer going to support or sale it-- but maintain their intellectual property rights. Plenty of businesses would be screwed.
Imagine if, in this scenario, they said "We aren't going to sell this software for platform _______", then every company depending on that platform would have to go out and find something that is supported.
I'd imagine, in the real world, if the maintainers of say, Squid, stepped down or pulled any bullshit-- it would be forked or new people would step in immediately to carry on with it.
But, he works for Microsoft, so when speaking in public, he's got to stick to a certain story regardless of his true feelings. I've got a couple of friends who work for them, and they aren't stupid. They just know not to ever say anything anti-microsoft while the public is listening.
Being an avid biker for years, I've never owned one of those LED cluster lights that didn't have multiple modes. My last one would do a static always-on light, then a couple of different flashing modes. Everyone I've seen use the same type seems to just leave them flashing.
When away from traffic, I always leave my light off. It gives foot/bike patrol officers too much visibility on your location when illegally cutting through parks after midnight. I actually had a plump female officer try and chase me down on foot for this minor infraction recently.
But you appear to be able to set the options back after setting them too high. The point is, you probably aren't going to find a situation where you are completely locked out of a game because it loaded the wrong config file.
I've never had a situation arise where a friend would come over and install a game on my machine so one of us could sit around and watch the other play. Either you bring your own machine and I'll supply the monitor or we'll be playing something on the 360.
Oh, I see. They want to avoid utilizing a vacuum. This doesn't seem to matter either, as long as someone comes up with a way to do it with greater efficiency.
It'll take a lot of research and effort to figure out how to make a better LED with only (up to) $20m in rewards.
Wouldn't it be assumed all modern light bulbs are 'solid-state' and will continue to be?
Perhaps someone wanted to sound smart by using more words than needed in that press release.
in 1999 Linux + X was completely different from 1996. People don't read very well on /. :)
Quite honestly, it seems like it would be easier and less trouble to just hack together some accelerometers and bluetooth circuits and go from there instead of trying to build things around the Wii controller-- but it's not my project.
For all the people jabbering about Nintendo doing development for US war efforts, don't count on it any time soon. Sure, they've helped in the past, but utilizing a Wii controller for an application does not have to involve a Wii or Nintendo. It involves someone on the project going down to the store to purchase some controllers and hooking them up to a PC.
People also need to quit knocking sims for not being "like actual gunfire". A lot of military folks I know play paintball avidly. Does it improve accuracy with an M16? Probably not, but it helps develop the areas of the brain that have to figure out friend from foe, how to function in small teams, hand-eye coordination, not to mention all the excersize from running around. Even FPS games on a console help some of these skills, albeit, nowhere near as much as getting off your butt and practicing hurling your own body through time and space while dealing with real projectiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley_(arcade_game)
So Nintendo must be pretty sociopathic. I don't see the problem as just about every first-person shooter uses human, or human-like models. Counter-Strike, Quake, Halo, Call of Duty, BF1942, and countless others.
It actually makes me happy to see them drop this feature. Web sites who sell games rarely give objective points of view, whether it be due to staff pressures or the person writing it wanting to fit in with his gamer friends by assuming a group opinion instead of an honest one.
Think of how people spew exaggerated claims about Linux and piss on Windows in a semi-anonymous environment for nothing more than mod points on here. Imagine if money and reputation were on the line.
Loading a CD burning application and any other intensive software was beyond any system from that era's abilities. If the writer didn't get data at a certain speed, it would screw up the burn.
Also, what's the difference in losing an hour's work due to Windows crashing while working on a paper and X crashing while working on a paper? Not much, the whole system might as well have tanked in both cases. I also consider word processing and office applications from the mid 90s superior to Linux applications under X from the same era. It's only been since the early 2000s one could scrape by in a Windows house without a Windows box.
System stability from the mid 90s in both Linux and Windows is what prompted me to go entirely BSD until a couple of years ago.
KDE was also unusable garbage in 96. It took a few years before it matured into anything remotely like you see today. WindowMaker, in my opinion, was the best thing going at that time.
Sometimes companies can't afford to spend so much money up front. They also don't want to spend a lot of money helping the business across the street become that much more competition. Short sighted, yes, but it's the real world and not everyone can afford to contract out open source projects or wait several years for a project to suddenly have files posted on a sourceforge project page.
I don't see the mac being the symbol of stability in the Win95 days. I did support on both platforms back then and we had a much higher costs per user for support than when it came to Windows.
Sure, a lot of it was "I tried to connect to the Intarweb and now my school project is gone" but it was mostly people having corrupt things littering their Preferences folder, the same people having the same problems daily, weekly, or whatever. Nobody doing support at my shop back then was very happy with macs due to all the problems average users were having at the time.
Many of these users had been through the mac support wringer, which wasn't much different than the Windows one, except mac would replace the hardware and the same issues would keep cropping up endlessly.