Bill Gates is paid no where near $2 billion a year from Microsoft though. No stock options either. He (and now Balmer) are actually some of the lowest paid CEOs.
How else is he going to dodge the IRS unless he has low earnings?
I really don't think there are all that many killer apps out there anymore.
I went to a trade show, and most of the software they were trying to sell for windows already comes for free on Linux. Any admin worth their salt knows how to get most business oriented software running for free on a UNIX/Linux system (with the exception of a few programs like Oracle for example)
I see software for boot passwords for windows (When GRUB is free), and disk encrytion for Windows (Linux has cryptoloop, dm-crypt, and Windows already has encrytion built in if anyone cared to ask about it!)
Most of the software sales I see are for application on Windows where a free software version already exists from download.com OR for Linux. People are paying $50 a pop for internet firewalls for example, whereas a firewall for linux is what.... a pagelong free script off the internet? How about internet speed up tools? With a bit of skill, anyone can hack the proc settings of a Linux box to get the same effect. Cost to me = $0 Many clueless users DO see the value in having particular services set up for them, but once they find out from their PC savvy friends that they're being ripped off..... uh-oh.
To me, there seems to be no killer software ap out there that I need to buy, UNLESS I had a specific need for it... and I don't. Other than Windows, the only other app that I felt compelled to buy was Nero and a firewall. I found the rest for free. Not to mention that I got a load of bundled software which came included with my PC hardware (and that does the job quite nicely!) And I dual boot with Linux as well.
Average users these days just don't understand the concept of software anyway. They just expect their box to work and have everything set up and in there. They're not looking for a computer, they're looking for a home appliance... on par with the reliability of a TV and fridge. When their boxes get filled full of spyware, spam, and god knows what else... they feel ticked off that they should have to pay more money to keep their systems ACTUALLY WORKING! They don't see the value in software, because they feel as if they are being TAXED! So maybe this is where piracy comes into the picture.
Also with so many free alternatives out there, it's a wonder much commerical software is getting sold at all. There's only so many word processors that people need, you know, and the market has matured. We're not still using VisiCalc anymore.
Online content is a different story however... and I think the only way to deal with that situation is to overhaul copyright law. The genie is out of the bottle.
Fact seems to be that most recent bleeding edge distros are very crippled as far as that gaming support hasn't caught up to them yet. Also, ATI just don't seem to have an Xorg driver yet.
Here's my experiences (I have a P4 with ATi Radeon 9700)
Red Hat 9/Fedora 1 - both burp when they see my onboard RAID. I don't get far at all. Don't get me started on lack of NTFS and MP3 Fedora 2 - I simply refuse to install that while that dual boot bug exists Slackware 10 - Too much tweaking needed to get the ATI driver working... like recompile the kernel in a different GCC and change certain module functions. It's also missing a ton of libraries. Mandrake 10 - ATI in there by deafult! Except that there's no sound!:( Knoppix - Can't install the ATI drivers without having to convert the rpm to a deb, at which point that fails anyway Gentoo - Now if I could only figure out the installation...
Damn there's just no decent and painless distros out there for my hardware to do gaming any justice.
"The Linux desktop is quite different from what students are used to in (Microsoft's) Windows. For that reason, I can't see a quick changeover," he said.
I didn't know that pointing and clicking was quite different in either system.
Moreover, users with elaborate computing needs would probably shy away from a multi-user machine like HP 441, said Nikos Drakos, an analyst with tech consultancy Gartner.
"Elaborate" is a bit of a vague word here. I don't know any software that is so elaborate that Linux couldn't handle it. Nothing that uncommon that WINE couldn't handle anyway... and if it's elaborate enough to be clustering or scientific programs, Linux is vastly superior to Windows on that front.
Whose paying Gartner these days anyway?
"That's why South African schools make sense. But it would not work for the general knowledge worker who needs to run software programs written for Windows," he said.
Well I grew up using an Apple ][e, and somehow that never affected my ability to use Windows in the office today.... but it did make me good at the command line in Unix/Linux.
Imagine giving tourists a cell phone with this system and specfic detail of an area in the database.
You step close to some historic moment and you get a phone note with info about it.
Meddle with the phone and place it back to the graffiti channel, and you'll get more info than you bargained for.
I was thinking the same thing about the tips, so I agree with you on that point.
I did get good service on occasions... but they were few and far between... BUT they were the memorable parts of the trip. I had no problems with the included service charges at some of the restaurants... because the service WAS excellent. (Our business customers were great cause they always sent a limo)
I appreciate the fact that everything is "the job is what counts" as well. As I worked for Japanese business customers who expect to treated like the emporer with no clothes, their level of standards exceed that of my own country, and having to cater to them is incredibly difficult because they are as fussy and nitpicky - and starting crying like babies when they don't get their way. I went with some of them to the US, and they were besides themselves with the service there. What I chalked up to cultural difference in the US... they didn't see it the same way....
About making the waitresses feel better, I agree. There seemed to be a lot of ticked off unhappy people in the US. Well, I guess if I lived there I would get that way too
I'm an Australian and I went on a trip to the US not so long ago for only a week on a business trip.
My first impressions of service in the US (other than the really fancy joints, and the customers on the business trip) was pretty appalling. People talk to you as if you, the customer, are a problem that has to go away.
Let's see... well apart from certain airline stewardess being a bit careless about which passengers they make fun of about on a flight, to the endless cancellations from hotel to hotel and at short notice.... to the rude replies when you ask a simple question:
"Excuse me, can you show me where the bathroom is?" "Huh? YOU WANNA KNOW WHERE THE BATHROOM IS? WELL! IT'S STRAIGHT DOWN THADDAWAY!" Oh yes... the image of the bored-out-of-her-mind angry waitress I saw in the movies actually existed! Then some woman decided she'd check my ID for beer (I'm creeping up on 30 if you don't mind. But hey, nice to feel under 21 again), in a manner which made me feel like I did something wrong.
The taxi driver tried to rip me off, which reminded me of a similar experience I had in a third world country (Well the driver WAS from a third world country), but I'm not sure that this is the kind of experience vistors to the US should be getting. Made more sense to fork out for a limo.
I only tipped for good service (and believe me, it wasn't that often!).
I dunno, but maybe this talk down to the customer thing is just the way of life over there. Maybe you guys are all as tough as nuts and don't get easily offended - but the ordeals were a bit uneccessary. Everybody seems to be competing to be the alpha-male... for some reason. Makes the RIAA spats against customers seem a little more realistic in my mind.
Oh yeah... and what the hell is it with you guys and Atkins anyway?
To be fair, the article on Yahoo DID point out some of the frustrations in Linux that many clusers face when using Linux.
* Not all hardware is detected and/or supported (and when it gets supported, it's at least a year after Windows had the driver) * Installing stuff (while automated over the internet) requires something called a command line... which scares the living hell out of Grandma. Not to mention binary &'%+$*%& only modules! * Fedora STILL doesn't want to give us MP3 and NTFS * Then there's that "lack of software" issue (which while considerable on Linux, still gets dwarfed by that of Windows). * Hard disk partitioning... actually I think Mandrake does well here, but trying to get a cluser to learn what a hard disk is and what a partition is is on par with pulling teeth.
Also, that writer made an ignorant mistake saying that you needed expensive partitioning software to dual boot on a Windows system. That's just plain garbage (fdisk/cfdisk/parted on floppy-based Linux or Knoppix do the job)
I thought for a moment that a gyro in IIS got fixed via a spacewalk. I never knew that there was a gyro in IIS requiring a spacewalk to fix, but it might explain the bugs.
There was one political game I remember playing on the Commodore 64 called Tyrant. But there were other ones called "Dictator 64" and "Banana republic" as well
Anyway, in Tyrant you played the dicatator of an impoverished third world country, which is slowly falling to pieces and going into higher debt and inflation. You had to survive as long as you could before the next cout de etat. The game was *just* about impossible to win. You would try and stave off the coutry's problems as long as you could, but eventually you would bankrupt the country and get ousted.
Finally, I played the game enough to find out a secret on how to actually MAKE money and become a really wealthy country. I don't think the authors intended anyone to be able to do this, but anyway.... the methods needed to do this in the game were, well,... shocking to say the least.
What you had to do first was to get a huge army and smash all the surrounding countries with an iron fist. Then slowly convert your army into a huge secret police force. Then convert from Communism to a Democracy and hold elections. Then tax the population of everything they have (100% taxation) until the population was really angry. At election times, you spend a fortune brainwashing the populace to vote for you... and somehow that worked to get you relected again. To counter unemployment and deal with population growth, you send everyone into the secret police force. Crime is not an issue because you've effectively got a big brother police state.
Somehow the game mechanics let you amass money every year doing that, and you could stay in power indefinitely. So you end up with a police state which conquers all the other countries with a powerful army, taxes its citizens through the nose and takes all its property, pretends it's a democracy and then brainwashes its citizens during election times.
It shocked me because it sounded almost too close to home.
But, really, as a game developer I can tell you that there's still plenty of ideas that could be made into games. Ideas are cheap, and I probably have half a dozen good ideas before my first meal of the day.
But my question is... how many of those ideas will rise above one of the genres that we're already familiar with? There's only so many RPGs and FPSs a person can take, for sure.
Sure, you can get a new idea, change the themes, plot, storyline to something original... but will the gameplay rise out of the ordinary?
The sims is completely abstracted from the gameplay of most other games, and I agree that original game concepts are usually chelved these days for what will sell.
Very rarely a new game genre emerges to become popular these days. To me it feels that whatever could be done already has been done.... in one form or another.
Not that it won't stop me playing games.... but it's getting a bit boring these days.
The VIC name in VIC-20 actually referred to the GRAPHICS chip inside the machine! The graphics chip in the Vic-20 was the VIC-1, and the Commodore 64 had the VIC-II graphics chip!
So why did they call this the e-VIC when it is a SOUND device? It just makes no sense.
The e-SID, maybe.... but not the e-VIC.
There already is a hobbyist Commodore out there called the Commodore-1, and it's got nothing to do with Tulip.
After all the posts about killing more people (which is part of the problem in the first place), finally a sane post.
I agree that Islam is fragmented, and muslims know this too.
The problem is that Islam never really was a religion about peace and justice initially. The prophet Muhammad and his own army went and slaughtered the populations of several cities to create the first Islamic society. There are passages in the Koran which deal exclusively with war and battle, and killing those not on your side. The only notion of peace is when Islam wins thorugh after battle.
The interpretation problem happens when extremists take the lessons of "fighting evil" and "understanding life through conflict and self sacrifice" as discussed in the Koran, and placing it upon its historic context. That's when we get extremists trying to follow in Muhammad's footsteps for their own self-enlightenment.
I never heard of any prior and specific demands when those planes hit the WTC. I figure that they simply couldn't be bothered asking and having to go through the ordeal of taking hostages - knowing full well the US wouldn't give anyway.
I suppose this is a consolation for having REALLY LONG security lineups in the US, but I can't help but wonder....
Rather than concentrating on doing things to secure planes from mad people, shouldn't we concentrate more on doing things to make mad people NOT want to blow us all up?
I think that video gaming has reached a kind of "post-modernism" these days. That basically means that everything than can be done with a screen and a controller has already been done - which leaves very few original ideas left to develop on.
Maybe this is just a pessimistic view, but I just tried to think up a new game idea and realised that I'm coming up short.
Most of the other posters make the right comments though. I'm in Japan. There are fewer children. The adults that are here work long hours and have no time to play. The country is slowly recovering from recession, but the fact that there are few new Japanese kids means it won't get too far. The pension system is a mess... people are hoarding cash (I know I am).
The fact that new consoles don't offer anything new that hasn't already been done (can't rely on fancy graphics anymore), so there's no incentive to buy. Maybe when the PS3 comes out everyone will jump out to get one and we'll see renewed interest... but I don't know. Xbox in Japan is DOA now... VERY few titles on the shelves. Nintendo is losing their target market to a low birth rate.
If we're talking casual gamers in Japan... well they use cell phones mainly. Others use Gameboys. The Japanese are more into fun cutesy games as opposed to the west where graphics and realism take a front seat.
Still, Japan has plenty of nerds and manga never seems to bore anyone. And as long as you write a cheap game with little playability, lots of scantily clad ladies, and make it a complete rip-off of the "dead and alive" series (as one budget game company just did in Japan), you can score highly on the Japanese game charts.
Why don't they just call it "Windows XP - Free edition"
As free as Linux but completely stripped of anything useful. Just enough in the OS to get the system to boot and show the bliss screen, but nothing more.
If you want accessories, notepad, solitaire, IE and all of the other goodies, you pay money.
So then a customer gets two choices... Get a free copy of Windows with nothing, or get a free copy of Linux with everything and the kitchen sink.....and then Microsoft will be competitive.:D
"The number one enemy of progress is QUESTIONS! National security is MORE IMPORTANT than individual will. Obey all orders without question! The comfort you demanded is now mandatory! BE HAPPY! At last everything is done FOR you"
This looks exciting. I can't wait to try this one out. Especially as it has 2.6.7 in it.
Why are some linux releases still hanging onto the 2.4.26 kernel, or relasing two kernels (Knoppix comes to mind) ? Th2 2.4 kernel tree still has that floating point kernel bug in it, doesn't it?
When old IBMs, Apples, and even Commodore 64s were in the offices of the 80s... was the risk of lawsuits, wasted money on computers, and digital property rights really an issue?
You would have thought that by now game developers would have figured this one out.
A certain demographic of young women spend their waking hours endlessly entertained with shopping for clothes (to attract boys), putting on makeup (to attract boys), watching endless images of boys on music video, and talking about all three things above... including how to get lots of boys and everyone else to fall hopelessly in love with them.
Jeez... if the geeks of the world were paying enough attention, they'd have a slew of girlfriends by now and enough common sense to develop a suitable game for women!.....but it won't happen! Women hate geeks and their games because geeks are clueless!
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates is paid no where near $2 billion a year from Microsoft though. No stock options either. He (and now Balmer) are actually some of the lowest paid CEOs.
How else is he going to dodge the IRS unless he has low earnings?
I really don't think there are all that many killer apps out there anymore.
I went to a trade show, and most of the software they were trying to sell for windows already comes for free on Linux. Any admin worth their salt knows how to get most business oriented software running for free on a UNIX/Linux system (with the exception of a few programs like Oracle for example)
I see software for boot passwords for windows (When GRUB is free), and disk encrytion for Windows (Linux has cryptoloop, dm-crypt, and Windows already has encrytion built in if anyone cared to ask about it!)
Most of the software sales I see are for application on Windows where a free software version already exists from download.com OR for Linux. People are paying $50 a pop for internet firewalls for example, whereas a firewall for linux is what.... a pagelong free script off the internet? How about internet speed up tools? With a bit of skill, anyone can hack the proc settings of a Linux box to get the same effect. Cost to me = $0
Many clueless users DO see the value in having particular services set up for them, but once they find out from their PC savvy friends that they're being ripped off..... uh-oh.
To me, there seems to be no killer software ap out there that I need to buy, UNLESS I had a specific need for it... and I don't. Other than Windows, the only other app that I felt compelled to buy was Nero and a firewall. I found the rest for free. Not to mention that I got a load of bundled software which came included with my PC hardware (and that does the job quite nicely!)
And I dual boot with Linux as well.
Average users these days just don't understand the concept of software anyway. They just expect their box to work and have everything set up and in there. They're not looking for a computer, they're looking for a home appliance... on par with the reliability of a TV and fridge.
When their boxes get filled full of spyware, spam, and god knows what else... they feel ticked off that they should have to pay more money to keep their systems ACTUALLY WORKING! They don't see the value in software, because they feel as if they are being TAXED! So maybe this is where piracy comes into the picture.
Also with so many free alternatives out there, it's a wonder much commerical software is getting sold at all. There's only so many word processors that people need, you know, and the market has matured. We're not still using VisiCalc anymore.
Online content is a different story however... and I think the only way to deal with that situation is to overhaul copyright law. The genie is out of the bottle.
Fact seems to be that most recent bleeding edge distros are very crippled as far as that gaming support hasn't caught up to them yet.
:(
Also, ATI just don't seem to have an Xorg driver yet.
Here's my experiences (I have a P4 with ATi Radeon 9700)
Red Hat 9/Fedora 1 - both burp when they see my onboard RAID. I don't get far at all. Don't get me started on lack of NTFS and MP3
Fedora 2 - I simply refuse to install that while that dual boot bug exists
Slackware 10 - Too much tweaking needed to get the ATI driver working... like recompile the kernel in a different GCC and change certain module functions. It's also missing a ton of libraries.
Mandrake 10 - ATI in there by deafult! Except that there's no sound!
Knoppix - Can't install the ATI drivers without having to convert the rpm to a deb, at which point that fails anyway
Gentoo - Now if I could only figure out the installation...
Damn there's just no decent and painless distros out there for my hardware to do gaming any justice.
"The Linux desktop is quite different from what students are used to in (Microsoft's) Windows. For that reason, I can't see a quick changeover," he said.
I didn't know that pointing and clicking was quite different in either system.
Moreover, users with elaborate computing needs would probably shy away from a multi-user machine like HP 441, said Nikos Drakos, an analyst with tech consultancy Gartner.
"Elaborate" is a bit of a vague word here. I don't know any software that is so elaborate that Linux couldn't handle it.
Nothing that uncommon that WINE couldn't handle anyway... and if it's elaborate enough to be clustering or scientific programs, Linux is vastly superior to Windows on that front.
Whose paying Gartner these days anyway?
"That's why South African schools make sense. But it would not work for the general knowledge worker who needs to run software programs written for Windows," he said.
Well I grew up using an Apple ][e, and somehow that never affected my ability to use Windows in the office today.... but it did make me good at the command line in Unix/Linux.
Imagine giving tourists a cell phone with this system and specfic detail of an area in the database. You step close to some historic moment and you get a phone note with info about it. Meddle with the phone and place it back to the graffiti channel, and you'll get more info than you bargained for.
I was thinking the same thing about the tips, so I agree with you on that point.
I did get good service on occasions... but they were few and far between... BUT they were the memorable parts of the trip.
I had no problems with the included service charges at some of the restaurants... because the service WAS excellent.
(Our business customers were great cause they always sent a limo)
I appreciate the fact that everything is "the job is what counts" as well. As I worked for Japanese business customers who expect to treated like the emporer with no clothes, their level of standards exceed that of my own country, and having to cater to them is incredibly difficult because they are as fussy and nitpicky - and starting crying like babies when they don't get their way.
I went with some of them to the US, and they were besides themselves with the service there. What I chalked up to cultural difference in the US... they didn't see it the same way....
About making the waitresses feel better, I agree. There seemed to be a lot of ticked off unhappy people in the US. Well, I guess if I lived there I would get that way too
*ducks*
I'm an Australian and I went on a trip to the US not so long ago for only a week on a business trip.
My first impressions of service in the US (other than the really fancy joints, and the customers on the business trip) was pretty appalling. People talk to you as if you, the customer, are a problem that has to go away.
Let's see... well apart from certain airline stewardess being a bit careless about which passengers they make fun of about on a flight, to the endless cancellations from hotel to hotel and at short notice.... to the rude replies when you ask a simple question:
"Excuse me, can you show me where the bathroom is?"
"Huh? YOU WANNA KNOW WHERE THE BATHROOM IS? WELL! IT'S STRAIGHT DOWN THADDAWAY!"
Oh yes... the image of the bored-out-of-her-mind angry waitress I saw in the movies actually existed!
Then some woman decided she'd check my ID for beer (I'm creeping up on 30 if you don't mind. But hey, nice to feel under 21 again), in a manner which made me feel like I did something wrong.
The taxi driver tried to rip me off, which reminded me of a similar experience I had in a third world country (Well the driver WAS from a third world country), but I'm not sure that this is the kind of experience vistors to the US should be getting. Made more sense to fork out for a limo.
I only tipped for good service (and believe me, it wasn't that often!).
I dunno, but maybe this talk down to the customer thing is just the way of life over there. Maybe you guys are all as tough as nuts and don't get easily offended - but the ordeals were a bit uneccessary. Everybody seems to be competing to be the alpha-male... for some reason.
Makes the RIAA spats against customers seem a little more realistic in my mind.
Oh yeah... and what the hell is it with you guys and Atkins anyway?
To be fair, the article on Yahoo DID point out some of the frustrations in Linux that many clusers face when using Linux.
* Not all hardware is detected and/or supported (and when it gets supported, it's at least a year after Windows had the driver)
* Installing stuff (while automated over the internet) requires something called a command line... which scares the living hell out of Grandma. Not to mention binary &'%+$*%& only modules!
* Fedora STILL doesn't want to give us MP3 and NTFS
* Then there's that "lack of software" issue (which while considerable on Linux, still gets dwarfed by that of Windows).
* Hard disk partitioning... actually I think Mandrake does well here, but trying to get a cluser to learn what a hard disk is and what a partition is is on par with pulling teeth.
Also, that writer made an ignorant mistake saying that you needed expensive partitioning software to dual boot on a Windows system. That's just plain garbage (fdisk/cfdisk/parted on floppy-based Linux or Knoppix do the job)
I thought for a moment that a gyro in IIS got fixed via a spacewalk. I never knew that there was a gyro in IIS requiring a spacewalk to fix, but it might explain the bugs.
There was one political game I remember playing on the Commodore 64 called Tyrant. But there were other ones called "Dictator 64" and "Banana republic" as well
Anyway, in Tyrant you played the dicatator of an impoverished third world country, which is slowly falling to pieces and going into higher debt and inflation. You had to survive as long as you could before the next cout de etat. The game was *just* about impossible to win. You would try and stave off the coutry's problems as long as you could, but eventually you would bankrupt the country and get ousted.
Finally, I played the game enough to find out a secret on how to actually MAKE money and become a really wealthy country. I don't think the authors intended anyone to be able to do this, but anyway.... the methods needed to do this in the game were, well,... shocking to say the least.
What you had to do first was to get a huge army and smash all the surrounding countries with an iron fist. Then slowly convert your army into a huge secret police force. Then convert from Communism to a Democracy and hold elections. Then tax the population of everything they have (100% taxation) until the population was really angry. At election times, you spend a fortune brainwashing the populace to vote for you... and somehow that worked to get you relected again. To counter unemployment and deal with population growth, you send everyone into the secret police force. Crime is not an issue because you've effectively got a big brother police state.
Somehow the game mechanics let you amass money every year doing that, and you could stay in power indefinitely. So you end up with a police state which conquers all the other countries with a powerful army, taxes its citizens through the nose and takes all its property, pretends it's a democracy and then brainwashes its citizens during election times.
It shocked me because it sounded almost too close to home.
But, really, as a game developer I can tell you that there's still plenty of ideas that could be made into games. Ideas are cheap, and I probably have half a dozen good ideas before my first meal of the day. But my question is... how many of those ideas will rise above one of the genres that we're already familiar with? There's only so many RPGs and FPSs a person can take, for sure. Sure, you can get a new idea, change the themes, plot, storyline to something original... but will the gameplay rise out of the ordinary? The sims is completely abstracted from the gameplay of most other games, and I agree that original game concepts are usually chelved these days for what will sell. Very rarely a new game genre emerges to become popular these days. To me it feels that whatever could be done already has been done.... in one form or another. Not that it won't stop me playing games.... but it's getting a bit boring these days.
The VIC name in VIC-20 actually referred to the GRAPHICS chip inside the machine! The graphics chip in the Vic-20 was the VIC-1, and the Commodore 64 had the VIC-II graphics chip!
So why did they call this the e-VIC when it is a SOUND device? It just makes no sense.
The e-SID, maybe.... but not the e-VIC.
There already is a hobbyist Commodore out there called the Commodore-1, and it's got nothing to do with Tulip.
After all the posts about killing more people (which is part of the problem in the first place), finally a sane post.
I agree that Islam is fragmented, and muslims know this too.
The problem is that Islam never really was a religion about peace and justice initially. The prophet Muhammad and his own army went and slaughtered the populations of several cities to create the first Islamic society. There are passages in the Koran which deal exclusively with war and battle, and killing those not on your side.
The only notion of peace is when Islam wins thorugh after battle.
The interpretation problem happens when extremists take the lessons of "fighting evil" and "understanding life through conflict and self sacrifice" as discussed in the Koran, and placing it upon its historic context. That's when we get extremists trying to follow in Muhammad's footsteps for their own self-enlightenment.
No. More like "Stop being assholes".
I never heard of any prior and specific demands when those planes hit the WTC. I figure that they simply couldn't be bothered asking and having to go through the ordeal of taking hostages - knowing full well the US wouldn't give anyway.
I suppose this is a consolation for having REALLY LONG security lineups in the US, but I can't help but wonder....
Rather than concentrating on doing things to secure planes from mad people, shouldn't we concentrate more on doing things to make mad people NOT want to blow us all up?
I think that video gaming has reached a kind of "post-modernism" these days. That basically means that everything than can be done with a screen and a controller has already been done - which leaves very few original ideas left to develop on.
Maybe this is just a pessimistic view, but I just tried to think up a new game idea and realised that I'm coming up short.
Most of the other posters make the right comments though. I'm in Japan. There are fewer children. The adults that are here work long hours and have no time to play. The country is slowly recovering from recession, but the fact that there are few new Japanese kids means it won't get too far. The pension system is a mess... people are hoarding cash (I know I am).
The fact that new consoles don't offer anything new that hasn't already been done (can't rely on fancy graphics anymore), so there's no incentive to buy. Maybe when the PS3 comes out everyone will jump out to get one and we'll see renewed interest... but I don't know. Xbox in Japan is DOA now... VERY few titles on the shelves. Nintendo is losing their target market to a low birth rate.
If we're talking casual gamers in Japan... well they use cell phones mainly. Others use Gameboys.
The Japanese are more into fun cutesy games as opposed to the west where graphics and realism take a front seat.
Still, Japan has plenty of nerds and manga never seems to bore anyone. And as long as you write a cheap game with little playability, lots of scantily clad ladies, and make it a complete rip-off of the "dead and alive" series (as one budget game company just did in Japan), you can score highly on the Japanese game charts.
Music that speaks, ey?
Isn't that called "rap music"?
Why don't they just call it "Windows XP - Free edition" As free as Linux but completely stripped of anything useful. Just enough in the OS to get the system to boot and show the bliss screen, but nothing more. If you want accessories, notepad, solitaire, IE and all of the other goodies, you pay money. So then a customer gets two choices... Get a free copy of Windows with nothing, or get a free copy of Linux with everything and the kitchen sink. ....and then Microsoft will be competitive. :D
"The number one enemy of progress is QUESTIONS!
National security is MORE IMPORTANT than individual will.
Obey all orders without question!
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory!
BE HAPPY!
At last everything is done FOR you"
This sounds more like where we're all headed...
All constitutional rights have been suspended.
Stay in your homes!
SHUT UP! BE HAPPY!
Anyone interfering with the collection of urine samples WILL BE SHOT!
This looks exciting. I can't wait to try this one out. Especially as it has 2.6.7 in it.
Why are some linux releases still hanging onto the 2.4.26 kernel, or relasing two kernels (Knoppix comes to mind) ?
Th2 2.4 kernel tree still has that floating point kernel bug in it, doesn't it?
Just curious...
When old IBMs, Apples, and even Commodore 64s were in the offices of the 80s... was the risk of lawsuits, wasted money on computers, and digital property rights really an issue?
If not,... why now?
Linux is more expensive than Windows and worth every penny.
If you can't afford Linux, then you deserve your crappy cheap-ass Windows server.
Isn't there already a Sims game like that?
You would have thought that by now game developers would have figured this one out.
.....but it won't happen! Women hate geeks and their games because geeks are clueless!
A certain demographic of young women spend their waking hours endlessly entertained with shopping for clothes (to attract boys), putting on makeup (to attract boys), watching endless images of boys on music video, and talking about all three things above... including how to get lots of boys and everyone else to fall hopelessly in love with them.
Jeez... if the geeks of the world were paying enough attention, they'd have a slew of girlfriends by now and enough common sense to develop a suitable game for women!