You can't very well have someone tell you to go west when you should be going east.
You just made me think of something: if thye mirrored the whole thing, won't the sun set in the east and rise in the west? I'm sure they'll be other confusing problems, too. I don't understand why they didn't just change Link, instead of the whole world.
They can throw whatever horrible review they want at it, but the fact is I'm fairly certain I'm going to purchase 'Final Fantasy XII' anyway.
FFXII has gotten some good reviews, too, especially in Japan. Famitsu gave it a perfect 40. Also, a good reviewer will give enough detail that you'll be able to figure out if you'd like the game even if the reviewer doesn't (or vice versa). I generally read a lot of reviews before buying a game to figure out if it's worth $50. I don't want to buy another X-2.
Few expect truly dedicated gamers to choose the Wii over the PS3 or Xbox.
The "truly dedicated gamers" are planning on getting all three. Everyone else has a limited gaming budget, and the Wii definately has an advantage in that regard.
OpenOffice wants to take marketshare from Microsoft Office. One block in convincing people to switch is the lack of an Outlook equivalent. Sure, people can go to Mozilla.com to get Thunderbird, but it's hard to convince people that OO is an MS Office replacement when it doesn't have an equivalent to their most-used program.
You don't have to be a programmer to file a bug report. If you want to complain about the usability of OO (or anything open source), then complain to the people who can actually fix the problems. It would be mroe productive than whining on a message board.
I agree in every area except partitioning; most linux distributions have traditionally made this at least as difficult as it is in DOS; sure, to you and I it's a doddle, but to the masses it might as well be written in sanskrit.
The Linux distros I've used try to make it as easy as possible. It's certainly easier than trying to partition with Windows. At least the graphical tools make it look less intimidating, and you can resize your Windows partition and then just tell it to install on the free space. And if you don't want to dual boot, you can skip partitioning altogether.
Uh no. I guess you haven't tried many then. I have owned several pieces of hardware that were even based on the same chipset as some supported hardware, but wouldn't work without significant driver hacking/kernel mods.
I've listed the ones I've used. I'm not an expert in all Linuxes and all hardware, but I (and everyone I know in real life that uses Linux) have never had to resort to driver hacking or kernel mods (I wouldn't even know how to begin to figure out how to do that). I guess if you had some really strange hardware, but if it requires that much effort just replace it.
It is only easier if you have a no name desktop that has supported components.It is a pain in the ass for intermidiates to install if you using things like laptops with shitty graphics.
I haven't had a problem before, even on laptops, except for some wireless cards. Linux supports so many components anymore that I don't even worry about it.
I bought Lindows once, just before Lindows changed its name to Lin---s and then to Linspire. It was very glitzy, but it certainly wasn't a distro for people who didn't want to spend money. IIRC, without a paid subscription to their service, you couldn't even do things with it that you could do a normal Debian installation, such as updating non-proprietary software.
If you find that's still the case, I suggest you try Ubuntu (or Debian itself, if you're more technically-oriented). Less BS and more getting-stuff-done, IMHO.
It's not like that anymore. Their Click and Run is now free, and apt-get works. You can even get the whole distro free, under the name Freespire. For people who want as little learning curve as possible between Windows and Linux, Freespire/Linspire is a good choice.
I've been using it for years...and it is VERY easy to do now. I mean, it might be a little difficult for a complete Linux noob, coming from a mac or windows machine where you might not know what hardware you even have on your box...but, any Linux install would prove a little difficult for a first timer.
I'm not sure what your definition of "first timer" is, but all the Linux distros I've used are *much* easier to install than Windows. Really, the hardest part for newbies is figuring out how to burn an iso.
But, really...as far as Linux installs go...Gentoo is about as easy as any I've tried. With any of them, you often have to do a little research on the chipset of some component you have on board...hell, you need to know that for many items on a simple kernel config....and everyone has to do that sooner or later....
I guess you haven't tried many then. I've installed Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Mandrake, Freespire, PCBSD (not a Linux, whatever), ELX, and.... I don't even know what your talking about. Ok, so arguing that I know less than you isn't the greatest retort, but you're seriously out there if you think that anything you've said qualifies as "easy" even for Linux.
To be honest, the main reasons I like Gentoo are because it's relatively free from political hassles (you want easy NVidia XOrg drivers? MP3 playback? Win32 Codecs? Go nuts!)
Don't you still have to compile or install those with Gentoo? How is that different than the other distros that you have to install that stuff, or better than the distros that automatically install them?
Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.
Not to mention...I love how it's 'infected' by DRM when it's MS whereas where it's Apple they're protecting themself.
Who has that double standard? Not the EFF (the writers of TFA), who make posters of people tied up with iPods and go to Apple stores in hazmat suits. No, the EFF is very clear they don't like DRM, no matter who makes it.
The PS2 was primarily just a graphical upgrade to the PS1. The controller is the same. Can you honestly claim that PS2 games play just like old PS1 games?
This RPG fan says yes. And it's not that I think RPGs don't innovate. The PS1 had some great innovative RPGs, like Valkyrie Profile, Star Ocean, and Chrono Cross which had very unique battle systems. The only PS2 RPG I've seen with innovative gameplay was Unlimited SaGa, which was absolutely painful.
I was going to talk about some of the other genres I like, but then I realized that I don't even bother to play them on my PS2 anymore. The Cube has better platformers, and the XBox has better fighting and sports games, so I don't even look at the PS2 except for my RPGs.
And Nintendo's new controller does not inherently guarantee innovation any more than Sony's tilt function.
Nintendo put tilt function in Gameboy games, so Sony's is, by definition, not innovative because it's been done before. Nintendo's new controller is innovative, the question is whether it's good innovation or if everyone's just going to plug in their wavebirds and try to forget the "wiimote" ever happened. However, I don't think it will fail and I'm very happy that Nintendo is doing something besides the same old but prettier. Sony doesn't impress me. I've had almost every console since the NES, but I'm really not sure if I'll ever be getting a PS3.
This LCD-ness is what Linux lacks (Ubuntu's getting close), right now it seems (again, in my opinion) that the sheer lack of open drivers for devices and PCI cards make this damn near impossible.
There's a lot of drivers in Linux. I've installed Linux on a bunch of different computers, and pretty much the only things that aren't autodetected have been wireless. Now, I don't use things like webcams or dial-up modems, and I'm not saying Linux is perfect, but for a lot of your basic hardware Linux is already plug and play.
Either way, I hope someone makes a distro where you never see the guts and it attempts to take advantage of any drivers, open or not. Not so I would use it but so that someone with less time on their hands might be able to.
That would be Linspire. Mepis and PCLinuxOS and a few others also are good about not forcing you to mess with the guts.
The XBox is a good example - they sucked it initially,
then basically poured money and effort into it till they became a dominant
player in the market.
I wouldn't call tied for distant second in a three player market a "dominant player".
Those who want Gnome and KDE to stop doing parallel efforts and instead concentrate on a unified GUI for linux... and then those who appreciate having more choices and want KDE and Gnome to push each other.
I'm in the latter. Competition is good for almost everything. Without the competition, why would they bother to innovate (think about IE6)? Also, being separate, KDE and GNOME (and XFCE, and Fluxbox, and...) will innovate in different directions, so you have options and are not herded into what "most people" like (if you liked what "most people" like, you'd be using Windows XP anyways).
Anyways, it's trivial in most distros to install and use both. In Ubuntu, type sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, and KDE is an option in the options menu on the log in screen. Consult your distro's wiki, and try a different desktop just for fun.
Y'know, London managed the transition just fine, by adding bus routes and increasing service at the same time they introduced the congestion charge a few years back. There's nothing stopping the regional transit authority from working with private operators (as happens here in NYC) to provide a good level of service.
London and NYC are not Cleveland. I've been talking about Cleveland, because that's the city I know the best. Cleveland's public transportation system cannot handle its current level of demand, and it will not be able to rise to meet more (unless it gets serious government aid, which it already does). Clevelanders do not know what "good service" means when applied to public transportation. For many of us, there is not a bus that goes anywhere near our house to anywhere near our jobs (or where ever else we need to be), so we don't even get "service".
If Cleveland had a decent transportation system and people just didn't use it, I would support measures to encourage them to. But right now there are lots of people who want to use public transportation who just can't because they don't have the routes, and they don't seem very interested in making more routes. I don't see that changing with tolls. I see the majority of people just paying the tolls, and I don't see the number of people who absolutely cannot being high enough that the bus companies would make all the new routes they'd require. I don't see a congestion charge doing any good in Cleveland, because we just don't have a strong enough public transportation system to fall back on.
You're acting like everyone out there is just completely clueless and doesn't know how to respond to any economic change whatsoever.
Some people can't. Your crazy idea would fuck over the working poor, because there aren't enough buses now and more will not magically appear the day you add tollbooths. If you want to increase buses and then make the highways toll, I would support that, but you can't get people off the roads until they have another alternative.
Your post reeks of a secret desire to be a central planner.
No thanks.
You don't know how many buses are available.
My husband is a bus mechanic. Have you even been to Cleveland?
There are lots of private buses that, for the right price, will switch their current buses over to this new use.
There are not enough private buses in Cleveland to handle the demand that you want tolls to create.
There are qualified drivers who aren't driving right now but would if higher pay (spurred by the new demand) were offered.
They still need to be trained, which takes time.
Hon, all kinds of economic decisions are made every day that would just astound you.
Yes, I know, and THEY PISS ME THE FUCK OFF, because, like you, people don't think of the impact these decisions have on people. Tell me, what exactly are the people who can't afford to take the toll roads going to do while the bus companies get new buses, make new routes, and train new drivers?
"The" bus company? "They" would have dozens ready? Um, hi statically-minded thinker. The point I was making (third time) is that when suddenly over half the commuters find it economically advantageous to ride a bus, there will be *gasp* new entrants into the bus market.
Will it be that day? You said that buses would be ready the moment highways switch to toll. I'm asking how that's possible, and if it's not, people will lose their jobs before the new bus companies show up.
And another cute thing you might learn is that there are buses... outside your city! Really! And when a demand pops up, they might *rent those buses* until they can build new ones!
When I said community, I meant the greater Cleveland area, which is basically Cuyahoga County, the largest county in Ohio. Yes, there are buses in other counties, but they can barely handle their demand, let alone have enough buses to rent out to cover the demand of a county several times their size. Also, they need more than buses. They need drivers, who need to be trained, and they would need to make *whole new routes* (currently, most of the the routes go from suburb to downtown, they would need to make dozens or more of suburb-to-suburb routes to handle the new demand). How are they going to do that fast enough that people who can't afford tolls won't lose their jobs?
It's a bright, dynamic economy out there, hon. Entrepreneurs react with all kinds of innovative tricks. You just kinda have to think outside the box for once in your life
And you need to think realistically sometimes, sweety.
Not to take you to task or anything, but I used to ride my bicycle four miles to the bus stop along a freeway, pop my bike on the bus, ride for thirty-five minutes and then ride my bike the last three miles to work. That distance isn't the reason you're not riding the bus to work.
No, if you actually read the post, it's because public transportation won't get the poster to the childcare center in time to pick up his/her kids. That's wonderful that you did your part to not pollute the Earth, but not everyone's in the same situation as you were.
No, buses can be ready the moment you switch over. (Companies would have significant warning before the switch.) The only infrastructure they need is sparser roads, which the tolls provide.
No, they need more buses, which the bus company in my community cannot afford. They barely stay in business now, how would they have the dozens (or hundreds?) more buses ready the moment that the highways become toll?
Why tax the gasoline? Tax the ROAD USAGE. Slap on a toll on roads high enough to clear up the rush hour traffic. (We have the technology for this.)
And what are you going to do for all the people who lose their jobs because they can't afford the drive to work anymore?
Then, the market will have all the incentive it needs to give buses that can blaze through the sparse roads. Probably save on commute time too. (But of course, people would rather spend an hour in traffic each way than half an hour on a private bus. Go fig.)
I would LOVE to spend a half hour on a bus rather than an hour driving through rush hour traffic. But there isn't a bus that goes between my house and my job. You have to build the public transportation system first, then do things to reduce car traffic, because people can't just sit around without transportation for a few years while you figure out how to transport them.
Would you pay $6/gallon for gas to support the taxes required for all those socialist services?
If the socialist service we're talking about is good public transportation, then sure. With good public transportation I could cut my driving down to a tenth of what I do now, so I'd spend less on gas even with the higher prices (not to mention less stress, less pollution...). Unfortunately, you can't just raise gas prices up to $6 or more and then build good public transportation over the next decade or so, because the working poor can not afford that and without the public transportation they will not be able to get to work. It's a terrible catch-22, and I'm not sure what can fix that.
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I would assume they have.
No, I don't. I have no idea what the Open Office people are doing. I use KOffice.
OpenOffice wants to take marketshare from Microsoft Office. One block in convincing people to switch is the lack of an Outlook equivalent. Sure, people can go to Mozilla.com to get Thunderbird, but it's hard to convince people that OO is an MS Office replacement when it doesn't have an equivalent to their most-used program.
You don't have to be a programmer to file a bug report. If you want to complain about the usability of OO (or anything open source), then complain to the people who can actually fix the problems. It would be mroe productive than whining on a message board.
Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) would probably run better. You'd probably want to run Abiword and Gnumetric instead of OO though. OO is a resource hog.
I've listed the ones I've used. I'm not an expert in all Linuxes and all hardware, but I (and everyone I know in real life that uses Linux) have never had to resort to driver hacking or kernel mods (I wouldn't even know how to begin to figure out how to do that). I guess if you had some really strange hardware, but if it requires that much effort just replace it.
I bought Lindows once, just before Lindows changed its name to Lin---s and then to Linspire. It was very glitzy, but it certainly wasn't a distro for people who didn't want to spend money. IIRC, without a paid subscription to their service, you couldn't even do things with it that you could do a normal Debian installation, such as updating non-proprietary software. If you find that's still the case, I suggest you try Ubuntu (or Debian itself, if you're more technically-oriented). Less BS and more getting-stuff-done, IMHO. It's not like that anymore. Their Click and Run is now free, and apt-get works. You can even get the whole distro free, under the name Freespire. For people who want as little learning curve as possible between Windows and Linux, Freespire/Linspire is a good choice.
I guess you haven't tried many then. I've installed Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Mandrake, Freespire, PCBSD (not a Linux, whatever), ELX, and.... I don't even know what your talking about. Ok, so arguing that I know less than you isn't the greatest retort, but you're seriously out there if you think that anything you've said qualifies as "easy" even for Linux.
Try Kororaa.
I was going to talk about some of the other genres I like, but then I realized that I don't even bother to play them on my PS2 anymore. The Cube has better platformers, and the XBox has better fighting and sports games, so I don't even look at the PS2 except for my RPGs.
Nintendo put tilt function in Gameboy games, so Sony's is, by definition, not innovative because it's been done before. Nintendo's new controller is innovative, the question is whether it's good innovation or if everyone's just going to plug in their wavebirds and try to forget the "wiimote" ever happened. However, I don't think it will fail and I'm very happy that Nintendo is doing something besides the same old but prettier. Sony doesn't impress me. I've had almost every console since the NES, but I'm really not sure if I'll ever be getting a PS3.
That would be Linspire. Mepis and PCLinuxOS and a few others also are good about not forcing you to mess with the guts.
Anyways, it's trivial in most distros to install and use both. In Ubuntu, type sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, and KDE is an option in the options menu on the log in screen. Consult your distro's wiki, and try a different desktop just for fun.
If Cleveland had a decent transportation system and people just didn't use it, I would support measures to encourage them to. But right now there are lots of people who want to use public transportation who just can't because they don't have the routes, and they don't seem very interested in making more routes. I don't see that changing with tolls. I see the majority of people just paying the tolls, and I don't see the number of people who absolutely cannot being high enough that the bus companies would make all the new routes they'd require. I don't see a congestion charge doing any good in Cleveland, because we just don't have a strong enough public transportation system to fall back on.
No thanks.
My husband is a bus mechanic. Have you even been to Cleveland?
There are not enough private buses in Cleveland to handle the demand that you want tolls to create.
They still need to be trained, which takes time.
Yes, I know, and THEY PISS ME THE FUCK OFF, because, like you, people don't think of the impact these decisions have on people. Tell me, what exactly are the people who can't afford to take the toll roads going to do while the bus companies get new buses, make new routes, and train new drivers?
When I said community, I meant the greater Cleveland area, which is basically Cuyahoga County, the largest county in Ohio. Yes, there are buses in other counties, but they can barely handle their demand, let alone have enough buses to rent out to cover the demand of a county several times their size. Also, they need more than buses. They need drivers, who need to be trained, and they would need to make *whole new routes* (currently, most of the the routes go from suburb to downtown, they would need to make dozens or more of suburb-to-suburb routes to handle the new demand). How are they going to do that fast enough that people who can't afford tolls won't lose their jobs? And you need to think realistically sometimes, sweety.
I would LOVE to spend a half hour on a bus rather than an hour driving through rush hour traffic. But there isn't a bus that goes between my house and my job. You have to build the public transportation system first, then do things to reduce car traffic, because people can't just sit around without transportation for a few years while you figure out how to transport them.