"5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance. "
I think Apple's shown you can do a pretty good job profiting on hardware as a UNIX vendor. The trick is not to be a one-trick pony. They've diversified into personal entertainment, laptops, servers, and a variety of desktops (from profesional dual G5 towers to that cute little Mac Mini).
The market for pretty much anything running an Alpha or a E10K server is going to be smaller than several markets.
That's still pretty steep. For 39 more cents, I can get a 5 minute song I'll probably listen to for about 3-4 years regularly. How often will I listen to a podcast of some guy for 15 minutes joking about stuff?
Could I get this same content, use a text to speech engine, and have that stored on my iPod for less?
It's not super outrageous, but it's not a steal. A steal would be around 3$ per season, with the option to do episodes separately for a bit of a premium.
"But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me."
These I view as flavour quests. Much like the flavour text of the goblins (stationed at the Lordaeron ruins) who ask you to bring back some nice meat from Orgrimmar, they add a certain sense of being in the game.
The big thing working against this is how none of it is at all randomized or meaningful in the greater scheme. Everytime any character of the correct level happens through that path, the same girl will be there who is being attacked by bandits. Everytime. There is no time you will come across the same NPC who is happy because someone else saved her (or will even mention the name of the person!). Your actions have no lasting effect on the world, making the MMO part of WoW be neutered into playing the Warcraft 3 RPG levels with a world-chat system.
I don't think it would be so hard to increase the # of quests about 4x, and then make it so that they run on different, random timers, so that each playthrough (since all your alts are exactly the same) could have a randomized encounter, or that you could interact with the consequences of other people's encounters.
Perhaps the entire world could be set on a 4-month timer, where everything boils to a head. Over time, as it reset, things could be changed as well. A chance to spend 4 months carving my name across a continent, regardless of my level, would certainly provide me with incentive to play (much more so than the creative guild loot point system the other replier mentioned).
WoW has a lot of potential because the company seems to have more in mind than just killing rats in a tunnels, but so far it's been Diablo on a much larger scale in terms of gameplay. I find myself appreciating Gradius and Ikaruga much more after playing WoW for most of 2005 -- they're short and sweet:D
I already cancelled my WoW account. After level 40, the demands placed on time are really high for someone who doesn't want to do instances with pickup groups, and has no time for a guild. I did play the game for a good 7 months. Here are my thougts on this list:
"Many massively multiplayer games require that you kill endless armies of the same boring enemies to level up. You can do this in WoW, too, but the quest system is so robust and rewarding that you don't actually need to."
No, instead you can either go and kill 1 guy (and bring back some trophy), go and kill several guys until they drop the loot you want, go and talk to someone, go and get something, go and take something, or go and do several of these in a chain. The quests are pretty much the exact some gameplay wrapped up with different names and faces past level 12.
And, of course, once you reach 60, you do these for reputation purely on top of the runs into molten core to get your purple set. I hope you like loot gambling, because it is a week between instance resets, and it can be up to 4 weeks for some people to get 1 extra bit of purple gear if they play all the time.
Seriously, I could sit and play DS or GBA for hours while "playing" WoW (where playing consisted of clicking on an enemy, and then waiting for it to die; repeat). I read several novels while doing it also.
"3. Travel should be easy"
yea, and you should get your mounts at level 30. The level 30 to level 40 slog is very much punctuated by periods where I spent up to half an hour moving from one location to another in order to finish some of the mail-man style quests. That sucked.
"In nearly 200 hours of gameplay, I can count the number of times I've logged off frustrated on one hand. "
Says a person who hasn't been ganked by the elite guards that are around Southshore during a particular quest. I was killed 7 times in the space of a few minutes, and I was level 38 at the time. It wasn't fun.
"WoW's developers tweak the game through patches -- many players would say they tweak it too often, but the principle is sound: Don't be afraid to change things that aren't working,"
You know what's not working for me? Starting alts at level 1. If I'm spent the hours to get to 30, start me with a level 10 alt. If I'm 40, give me a level 15 alt. Max it out at say level 20 alts for level 60 main characters, and make it an option upon character creation. Nothing sucks like having to wade through the 20 hours of repetitive "I'm a newbie who can't play WoW" every time I want to get at alt out of the baby area and into the main part of the game.
Of course, WoW does have strengths as well.
"6. Style should shine through"
I agree here: WoW gets this right. Everything fits well together. No other MMO I've played is quite like this (except possibly Ultima Online, circa 1999).
" And in fact on Linux/MacOS the user has to manually trigger a software update (at least in most versions) "
Ubuntu, the only version I'd give to Mom & Pop, automatically lets you know about upates and installs them.
Mac OS X, the only version you can get, has software update setup to run every week. You can disable it (just like you can disable any autoupdate), but usually every Saturday Evening, I'll find it up and running with any updates I need. It'll also do it if I reboot the machine, but that happens about once a month.
"The big difference between the US and most of the rest of the world (okay, EVERYPLACE I CAN THINK OF, but I don't want to make generalizations), is that in the US we have free local calling. That means that if you want to call your ISP downtown, you can be on 24/7 and it doesn't cost you a dime more on your phone bill."
Except this ignores Canada, which has 53+% market penetration, etc.
I've had broadband for a decade now. The last two times in memory I had to use dialup was in 2001 when I went to the US for LWE, and again when I visited some relatives.
Convincing my US relatives that broadband is important is nigh on impossible, since they don't seem to understand the advantages of having a high-speed, packet-switched, digital network to their door when they can make a shitty phone call that does cost by the minute for long distance (and where I'd say other countries outstrip you, since I don't pay by the minute for my long distance!).
You can lead an American horse to water, but it's impossible to make it drink.
The future is in digital networks. POTS is dead. Cell phone service is on its way out. Once WiMax gets a serious hold, you'll be paying your local wireless ISP for a certain amount of data instead of paying your regional cell provider for minutes. That way, you can use your phone much more transparently. Long distance died most places in the 20th century.
Anyone who's taken 1st year economics knows about supply and demand curves. We see that as the US government has tried to choke off the supply, the demand has fallen off -- except that those that still demand it, are much more willing to pay silly prices to get the goods. Doubly so if it's a real drug that has addictive properties (such as heroin) instead of a recreation drug (like marijuana).
Perhaps they should look at why people want to use drugs and deal with those problems. Alcohol, which I'd say is on par with Marijuana, was prohibited in the US in the early part of the 20th century. That certainly didn't do anything to stop its use or spread, instead leading to the formation of organized crime and rum running.
People will do what they want. If they want to do something illegal, all the punishments in the world won't stop them. You need to attack they demand side. Remove the demand for things you feel are socially undesirable, and they'll be gone. Punish only those that go too far (drunk driving, drunk and disorderdly in public, etc), rather than everyone (arrested for having alcohol at home, possesion of marijuana).
Is it any surprise that people don't feel a contstant need to do drugs when their lives are fine? Or that people who have the basics taken care of (food, shelter, clothing), and can earn other things through a nice job, don't feel the need to commit break and enter crimes?
Yup. Motive, means, opprotunity. S/he went ahead and performed a crime. This is the easiest to prosecute under the very slow-to-adapt laws that exist at the moment.
"The hospital for not securing their computers and network?"
Yup. Not taking due care with patients' lives is a felony, IIRC. This is as bad as not requiring your doctors to have a degree or wash their hands. The hospital is lawfully required to set safe standards.
"Or the adware companies for providing the incentive?"
Yup. These folks are guilty of a different crime, but still guilty. I don't know why there aren't more police aresting people and charging them with theft of service. Ad-ware is almost exactly like spam in terms of its side effects and damage.
Everyone is guilty! Only the student will be prosecuted, unless some smart lawyers get on it.
"Well, on a PC, you do get to use a mouse. I'd argue that they work a hell of a lot better."
Is exactly what the OP needs to know. Don't underestimate the power of the PC Gamer's mind to find little things to justify how leet-sauce they feel about having a computer with lights, loud spinning fans, 15k-rpm SCSI drives, and a copy of Windows running on it, versus spending about 20$ on a keyboard/mouse to Xbox adaptor, and using a keyboard and mouse on an Xbox (or just learning how to play with a joystick, which isn't that hard).
PC gamers are to regular gamers like people in the NRA and who drive SUVs are to regular people driving their Toyota Yaris and who don't own guns -- they are making up for something, and they are willing to spend any amount of money to fix it. Witness the 700$ US video card market.
Any company that has to standardize on one language is asking for trouble; it'll either limit the problems it can solve, or make lots of half-assed solutions to problems better solved in other ways.
Try standardizing on a standard set of languages. With Prolog, Haskell, Perl (and perhaps PHP), C, C++, assembler, experience with shell, you pretty much have the majority of problems you'll ever run into (from bare-metal systems to logic to webpage serving) sown up.
Creative people don't like being restricted to one method anyways. If you don't want your best people to walk, don't choose to standarize on one language.
"Every call is long distance. We're paying through the nose for our cell phones, which barely work in our houses anyway.... It's just not something I have time for."
This seems like a bit of a contradiction. If you're happy with the long run costs (unwilling to make a short-term time investment), why complain?
Asycn application? Do you meant you have two parts of a client-server relationship, such as an SMTP client and server, or a more direct (and less formal) communication channel like shared memory?
By event driven, do you mean that you have events requiring immediate attention, or do you have events you can buffer with water marks?
Is it a direct producer-consumer with only 1-way communication, or do you need bi-directional communication?
If you give some one a poorly worded problem, they cannot be expected to solve it.
My point, though, was that many people could be easily using the internet instead of using floppy disks, let alone USB memory keys! If you want to live the most inexpensive lifestyle possible, it's best to save the money you would've spent on the USB memory key. Free Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo makes this possible even for the least capable people (in terms of having their own servers on a 24/7 fast connection, not intelligence).
Of course, my iPod Shuffle is also a USB memory key. Or, if I have my PSP on me, I simple use my a to b-mini cable and it's another 512mb of portable space that works on any USB mass-storage capable OS (my Linux and my MacOS, but not the Win98 I used in an internet cafe 2 years ago). My cell phone (an N-Gag)e takes the same USB a to b-mini cable and, again, lets me use the MMC card in it just like an ordinary flash memory space. I do have these things, and I'm well aware of their use, I just never use them because the internet's that much easier to use (scping projects between systems).
My University lifestyle (and also my job time, where easy wired internet was available) may not match with your use case, but there are 21,000 people in my city who work or attend my University, and they can easily apply my use case to their lives. Of the remaining 250,000, I'm guessing they could do it too (especially with the open wireless networks everywhere -- any given neigbourhood has 3-4 per block, I've noticed).
"We would not have a game industry these days without Nintendo, Sega and yes, Sony, along with the developers that went along with them (and they were mainly Japanese as well)."
No, not Sony. Sony was a late comer. By 1995, it was pretty damn obvious that gaming was here to stay (having been back in vogue for 12 years) and also was moving to the point where, with the help of optical media, you could really cram some interesting stuff on. Sony only came because it smelt money, not because it was (at its core) a gaming company like Sega or Nintendo.
I will never credit Sony or Microsoft for saving or enhancing gaming in that way. They are only here for the money, as a side channel to diversify from their main income streams -- much like I would probably never take a Nintendo MP3 player or a Sega operating system as seriously as I would from a company that specializes in producing those. Your company cannot be core competent when you do this, especially once you grow to the size where one arms wants DRM in your other arm's fancy new device (the PSP).
I'm talking about the common case I see on my campus -- people have small files they want to transfer between school and home (like a document file), which fits into the model of those people the original poster mentioned. This works great with Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo mail, because all provide very ample temp storage compared to a removeable media device (after all, 2gb of flash is still over 100$ Canadian vs. the free email accounts).
And, of course, when I say "I haven't run across it", I mean I personally have never not been connected. Be it at work or at home, the Internet is right there as another tool in my arsenal. The only jobs I haven't had it handy at were min wage night jobs that support my education. I can come up with plenty of examples that break your little list anyways, as things like Gmail and Hotmail work pretty much everywhere there is http access (even through those persnickety firewalls, or over POTS), and provide that temporary, easy-access storage I mentioned for files of sizes I mentioned. The majority of people live in large economic centres, etc.
Anything over 2 gigabytes is a non-sequitur. Either you're a troll or ignorant for thinking that people regularly go between home and work and want 5gb+ movie files floating around daily via a slow-speed network like the internet, when they could easily use a USB 2.5" or 3.5" external drive (which you would use over flash, since it's about 80x cheaper -- a 160gb external drive + enclosure costs the same as a 2gb external flash device currently).
It's also totally outside the use case me and the original poster were discussing. That is, the problem of small document files that had to move between two locations that were linked by the internet.
My personal anecdote is certainly not a carefully compiled research paper or a full statistics model about a proper pool of people, but it's certainly a plausible situation for most people (vs. using floppy disks, which was probably more prevalent 10 years ago). If you have real studies that show it to not be the case, then it's obvious that education on how to use the internet more effectively is something that needs to be rolled out to those user groups.
if you don't have an end-to-end network. Or if you are dealing with prohibitively large file sizes (more than 512mb usually).
Because my computer(s) at home is(are) connected to the internet, I never need not have access to them. I can freely open up my laptop at the University and access my home resources, much as I can from a University terminal.
Flash media makes sense when you go somewhere where there isn't nice packet switched network joining things, but I haven't run across that yet. The only flash media use I have ever used has been my digital camera, PSP, and iPod Shuffle.
Hell, considering the trivial file sizes involved for most people, they could use that fancy Gmail or (thanks to gmail raising the bar) Yahoo or Hotmail as a virtual storage space, provided they don't mind their files being on servers outside of their direct control.
With scp, sftp, and ssh being how they are, and even how easy it is to email yourself files (and use centralized webmail/imap services such as provided by Gmail or most Universities), it boggles the mind that people would use removable media at all. It's just a 12kb doc file in most cases!
That may be true, but I've never paid for junk snail mail. There's economic incentive to not send me shit I don't care about!!
Do you care about penis englargement? Fake degrees from non-existant, non-acredited institutions? Drugs that are not legal yet in your country since they haven't passed testing? I've never had junk snail mail for it. I also don't have ~200 junk snail mails a day attempting to be delivered to my mailbox.
"our laws cover "operating a motor vehicle" under the influence. That includes lying down in a turned-off motorboat while slammed."
Doubtful. If I'm sleeping inside a parked vehicle, I'm hardly operating it. If I'm using the radio, I am not operating the vehicle.
I think the real reason this vehicle is not useful in Canada is listed here:
"but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. "
Which is useless 6 months of the year in Saskatchewan, and dubious the other 6 because the white lines get worn off in winter anyways.
The radar would be useful, but we'd need something more than line detection. Embedded sensors in the road surface would be good, if a bit costly to maintain (but that's ok, since a group already wants to put little pink pucks in the road surface to indicate black ice, even though they'd likely be covered with black ice and hidden!).
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Since Bush was in 2000-2003, with 2003 - 2000 = 3, several is the wrong word to use:
"several(a): (used with count nouns) of an indefinite number more than 2 or 3 but not many; "several letters came in the mail"; "several people were injured in the accident" "
Thanks.
Oh, you might also mention how the US budget defecit went from 0 to a number much larger.
The US military budget also increased.
In general, Bush has spent more on everything than previous more frugal presidents.
Indeed, he has also raised spending on the military and pork by a higher percentage than things like social programs. I can't remember the exact number, but over 60% of US government spending is spent directly or indirectly on the US military. The NSF gets something like 1%.
And, let's also think about this, "human cloning in all its forms" includes cloned organs for people needing organ transplants. I hope your heart works 100%; I myself have a leaky heart valve, and would rather have a cloned one with the defect cured rather than a pig's heart valve inserted into me (plus the anti-rejection drugs this entails).
"Having not read the warning label I drank the whole bottle within 5 minutes. Within 10 minutes I was blacking out behind the wheel & shaking uncontrollably. I pulled over at a gas station I was having difficulty in swallowing and could not stand, breathe or see straight."
Yea, the whole bottle of concentrate is 30$ after a 50% off at Amazon. I doubt some one is going to spend 60$ on a small bottle of concentrate to chug it. This is probably the stupidest urban legend I've read in the past month.
Slashdot Mirror
"5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance. "
I think Apple's shown you can do a pretty good job profiting on hardware as a UNIX vendor. The trick is not to be a one-trick pony. They've diversified into personal entertainment, laptops, servers, and a variety of desktops (from profesional dual G5 towers to that cute little Mac Mini).
The market for pretty much anything running an Alpha or a E10K server is going to be smaller than several markets.
That's still pretty steep. For 39 more cents, I can get a 5 minute song I'll probably listen to for about 3-4 years regularly. How often will I listen to a podcast of some guy for 15 minutes joking about stuff?
Could I get this same content, use a text to speech engine, and have that stored on my iPod for less?
It's not super outrageous, but it's not a steal. A steal would be around 3$ per season, with the option to do episodes separately for a bit of a premium.
"But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me."
:D
These I view as flavour quests. Much like the flavour text of the goblins (stationed at the Lordaeron ruins) who ask you to bring back some nice meat from Orgrimmar, they add a certain sense of being in the game.
The big thing working against this is how none of it is at all randomized or meaningful in the greater scheme. Everytime any character of the correct level happens through that path, the same girl will be there who is being attacked by bandits. Everytime. There is no time you will come across the same NPC who is happy because someone else saved her (or will even mention the name of the person!). Your actions have no lasting effect on the world, making the MMO part of WoW be neutered into playing the Warcraft 3 RPG levels with a world-chat system.
I don't think it would be so hard to increase the # of quests about 4x, and then make it so that they run on different, random timers, so that each playthrough (since all your alts are exactly the same) could have a randomized encounter, or that you could interact with the consequences of other people's encounters.
Perhaps the entire world could be set on a 4-month timer, where everything boils to a head. Over time, as it reset, things could be changed as well. A chance to spend 4 months carving my name across a continent, regardless of my level, would certainly provide me with incentive to play (much more so than the creative guild loot point system the other replier mentioned).
WoW has a lot of potential because the company seems to have more in mind than just killing rats in a tunnels, but so far it's been Diablo on a much larger scale in terms of gameplay. I find myself appreciating Gradius and Ikaruga much more after playing WoW for most of 2005 -- they're short and sweet
I already cancelled my WoW account. After level 40, the demands placed on time are really high for someone who doesn't want to do instances with pickup groups, and has no time for a guild. I did play the game for a good 7 months. Here are my thougts on this list:
"Many massively multiplayer games require that you kill endless armies of the same boring enemies to level up. You can do this in WoW, too, but the quest system is so robust and rewarding that you don't actually need to."
No, instead you can either go and kill 1 guy (and bring back some trophy), go and kill several guys until they drop the loot you want, go and talk to someone, go and get something, go and take something, or go and do several of these in a chain. The quests are pretty much the exact some gameplay wrapped up with different names and faces past level 12.
And, of course, once you reach 60, you do these for reputation purely on top of the runs into molten core to get your purple set. I hope you like loot gambling, because it is a week between instance resets, and it can be up to 4 weeks for some people to get 1 extra bit of purple gear if they play all the time.
Seriously, I could sit and play DS or GBA for hours while "playing" WoW (where playing consisted of clicking on an enemy, and then waiting for it to die; repeat). I read several novels while doing it also.
"3. Travel should be easy"
yea, and you should get your mounts at level 30. The level 30 to level 40 slog is very much punctuated by periods where I spent up to half an hour moving from one location to another in order to finish some of the mail-man style quests. That sucked.
"In nearly 200 hours of gameplay, I can count the number of times I've logged off frustrated on one hand. "
Says a person who hasn't been ganked by the elite guards that are around Southshore during a particular quest. I was killed 7 times in the space of a few minutes, and I was level 38 at the time. It wasn't fun.
"WoW's developers tweak the game through patches -- many players would say they tweak it too often, but the principle is sound: Don't be afraid to change things that aren't working,"
You know what's not working for me? Starting alts at level 1. If I'm spent the hours to get to 30, start me with a level 10 alt. If I'm 40, give me a level 15 alt. Max it out at say level 20 alts for level 60 main characters, and make it an option upon character creation. Nothing sucks like having to wade through the 20 hours of repetitive "I'm a newbie who can't play WoW" every time I want to get at alt out of the baby area and into the main part of the game.
Of course, WoW does have strengths as well.
"6. Style should shine through"
I agree here: WoW gets this right. Everything fits well together. No other MMO I've played is quite like this (except possibly Ultima Online, circa 1999).
" And in fact on Linux/MacOS the user has to manually trigger a software update (at least in most versions) "
;p
Ubuntu, the only version I'd give to Mom & Pop, automatically lets you know about upates and installs them.
Mac OS X, the only version you can get, has software update setup to run every week. You can disable it (just like you can disable any autoupdate), but usually every Saturday Evening, I'll find it up and running with any updates I need. It'll also do it if I reboot the machine, but that happens about once a month.
Troll your boat gently down the stream
"how far along is WINE? Will it run all of MS-office? What are its limitations?"
It's a pretty odd question to ask in a thread where we are discussing Darwine. People will run Mac-native Office if they really need to.
"The big difference between the US and most of the rest of the world (okay, EVERYPLACE I CAN THINK OF, but I don't want to make generalizations), is that in the US we have free local calling. That means that if you want to call your ISP downtown, you can be on 24/7 and it doesn't cost you a dime more on your phone bill."
Except this ignores Canada, which has 53+% market penetration, etc.
I've had broadband for a decade now. The last two times in memory I had to use dialup was in 2001 when I went to the US for LWE, and again when I visited some relatives.
Convincing my US relatives that broadband is important is nigh on impossible, since they don't seem to understand the advantages of having a high-speed, packet-switched, digital network to their door when they can make a shitty phone call that does cost by the minute for long distance (and where I'd say other countries outstrip you, since I don't pay by the minute for my long distance!).
You can lead an American horse to water, but it's impossible to make it drink.
The future is in digital networks. POTS is dead. Cell phone service is on its way out. Once WiMax gets a serious hold, you'll be paying your local wireless ISP for a certain amount of data instead of paying your regional cell provider for minutes. That way, you can use your phone much more transparently. Long distance died most places in the 20th century.
If you have code you want to maintain, you want it in CVS or SVN (preferably SVN since CVS sucks ass).
With Apache2 or alone, it'll sit on a nice server you can regularly backup, keeping precious meta-data and history information about your code!
To do anything less is foolish.
Anyone who's taken 1st year economics knows about supply and demand curves. We see that as the US government has tried to choke off the supply, the demand has fallen off -- except that those that still demand it, are much more willing to pay silly prices to get the goods. Doubly so if it's a real drug that has addictive properties (such as heroin) instead of a recreation drug (like marijuana).
Perhaps they should look at why people want to use drugs and deal with those problems. Alcohol, which I'd say is on par with Marijuana, was prohibited in the US in the early part of the 20th century. That certainly didn't do anything to stop its use or spread, instead leading to the formation of organized crime and rum running.
People will do what they want. If they want to do something illegal, all the punishments in the world won't stop them. You need to attack they demand side. Remove the demand for things you feel are socially undesirable, and they'll be gone. Punish only those that go too far (drunk driving, drunk and disorderdly in public, etc), rather than everyone (arrested for having alcohol at home, possesion of marijuana).
Is it any surprise that people don't feel a contstant need to do drugs when their lives are fine? Or that people who have the basics taken care of (food, shelter, clothing), and can earn other things through a nice job, don't feel the need to commit break and enter crimes?
"So who's really at fault here? The students?"
Yup. Motive, means, opprotunity. S/he went ahead and performed a crime. This is the easiest to prosecute under the very slow-to-adapt laws that exist at the moment.
"The hospital for not securing their computers and network?"
Yup. Not taking due care with patients' lives is a felony, IIRC. This is as bad as not requiring your doctors to have a degree or wash their hands. The hospital is lawfully required to set safe standards.
"Or the adware companies for providing the incentive?"
Yup. These folks are guilty of a different crime, but still guilty. I don't know why there aren't more police aresting people and charging them with theft of service. Ad-ware is almost exactly like spam in terms of its side effects and damage.
Everyone is guilty! Only the student will be prosecuted, unless some smart lawyers get on it.
"Well, on a PC, you do get to use a mouse. I'd argue that they work a hell of a lot better."
Is exactly what the OP needs to know. Don't underestimate the power of the PC Gamer's mind to find little things to justify how leet-sauce they feel about having a computer with lights, loud spinning fans, 15k-rpm SCSI drives, and a copy of Windows running on it, versus spending about 20$ on a keyboard/mouse to Xbox adaptor, and using a keyboard and mouse on an Xbox (or just learning how to play with a joystick, which isn't that hard).
PC gamers are to regular gamers like people in the NRA and who drive SUVs are to regular people driving their Toyota Yaris and who don't own guns -- they are making up for something, and they are willing to spend any amount of money to fix it. Witness the 700$ US video card market.
Any company that has to standardize on one language is asking for trouble; it'll either limit the problems it can solve, or make lots of half-assed solutions to problems better solved in other ways.
Try standardizing on a standard set of languages. With Prolog, Haskell, Perl (and perhaps PHP), C, C++, assembler, experience with shell, you pretty much have the majority of problems you'll ever run into (from bare-metal systems to logic to webpage serving) sown up.
Creative people don't like being restricted to one method anyways. If you don't want your best people to walk, don't choose to standarize on one language.
"Every call is long distance. We're paying through the nose for our cell phones, which barely work in our houses anyway.... It's just not something I have time for."
This seems like a bit of a contradiction. If you're happy with the long run costs (unwilling to make a short-term time investment), why complain?
Asycn application? Do you meant you have two parts of a client-server relationship, such as an SMTP client and server, or a more direct (and less formal) communication channel like shared memory?
By event driven, do you mean that you have events requiring immediate attention, or do you have events you can buffer with water marks?
Is it a direct producer-consumer with only 1-way communication, or do you need bi-directional communication?
If you give some one a poorly worded problem, they cannot be expected to solve it.
My point, though, was that many people could be easily using the internet instead of using floppy disks, let alone USB memory keys! If you want to live the most inexpensive lifestyle possible, it's best to save the money you would've spent on the USB memory key. Free Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo makes this possible even for the least capable people (in terms of having their own servers on a 24/7 fast connection, not intelligence).
Of course, my iPod Shuffle is also a USB memory key. Or, if I have my PSP on me, I simple use my a to b-mini cable and it's another 512mb of portable space that works on any USB mass-storage capable OS (my Linux and my MacOS, but not the Win98 I used in an internet cafe 2 years ago). My cell phone (an N-Gag)e takes the same USB a to b-mini cable and, again, lets me use the MMC card in it just like an ordinary flash memory space. I do have these things, and I'm well aware of their use, I just never use them because the internet's that much easier to use (scping projects between systems).
My University lifestyle (and also my job time, where easy wired internet was available) may not match with your use case, but there are 21,000 people in my city who work or attend my University, and they can easily apply my use case to their lives. Of the remaining 250,000, I'm guessing they could do it too (especially with the open wireless networks everywhere -- any given neigbourhood has 3-4 per block, I've noticed).
"We would not have a game industry these days without Nintendo, Sega and yes, Sony, along with the developers that went along with them (and they were mainly Japanese as well)."
No, not Sony. Sony was a late comer. By 1995, it was pretty damn obvious that gaming was here to stay (having been back in vogue for 12 years) and also was moving to the point where, with the help of optical media, you could really cram some interesting stuff on. Sony only came because it smelt money, not because it was (at its core) a gaming company like Sega or Nintendo.
I will never credit Sony or Microsoft for saving or enhancing gaming in that way. They are only here for the money, as a side channel to diversify from their main income streams -- much like I would probably never take a Nintendo MP3 player or a Sega operating system as seriously as I would from a company that specializes in producing those. Your company cannot be core competent when you do this, especially once you grow to the size where one arms wants DRM in your other arm's fancy new device (the PSP).
I'm talking about the common case I see on my campus -- people have small files they want to transfer between school and home (like a document file), which fits into the model of those people the original poster mentioned. This works great with Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo mail, because all provide very ample temp storage compared to a removeable media device (after all, 2gb of flash is still over 100$ Canadian vs. the free email accounts).
And, of course, when I say "I haven't run across it", I mean I personally have never not been connected. Be it at work or at home, the Internet is right there as another tool in my arsenal. The only jobs I haven't had it handy at were min wage night jobs that support my education. I can come up with plenty of examples that break your little list anyways, as things like Gmail and Hotmail work pretty much everywhere there is http access (even through those persnickety firewalls, or over POTS), and provide that temporary, easy-access storage I mentioned for files of sizes I mentioned. The majority of people live in large economic centres, etc.
Anything over 2 gigabytes is a non-sequitur. Either you're a troll or ignorant for thinking that people regularly go between home and work and want 5gb+ movie files floating around daily via a slow-speed network like the internet, when they could easily use a USB 2.5" or 3.5" external drive (which you would use over flash, since it's about 80x cheaper -- a 160gb external drive + enclosure costs the same as a 2gb external flash device currently).
It's also totally outside the use case me and the original poster were discussing. That is, the problem of small document files that had to move between two locations that were linked by the internet.
My personal anecdote is certainly not a carefully compiled research paper or a full statistics model about a proper pool of people, but it's certainly a plausible situation for most people (vs. using floppy disks, which was probably more prevalent 10 years ago). If you have real studies that show it to not be the case, then it's obvious that education on how to use the internet more effectively is something that needs to be rolled out to those user groups.
if you don't have an end-to-end network. Or if you are dealing with prohibitively large file sizes (more than 512mb usually).
Because my computer(s) at home is(are) connected to the internet, I never need not have access to them. I can freely open up my laptop at the University and access my home resources, much as I can from a University terminal.
Flash media makes sense when you go somewhere where there isn't nice packet switched network joining things, but I haven't run across that yet. The only flash media use I have ever used has been my digital camera, PSP, and iPod Shuffle.
Hell, considering the trivial file sizes involved for most people, they could use that fancy Gmail or (thanks to gmail raising the bar) Yahoo or Hotmail as a virtual storage space, provided they don't mind their files being on servers outside of their direct control.
With scp, sftp, and ssh being how they are, and even how easy it is to email yourself files (and use centralized webmail/imap services such as provided by Gmail or most Universities), it boggles the mind that people would use removable media at all. It's just a 12kb doc file in most cases!
First class mail is a part of the USPS. I do not live in that country. My tax dollars do not go to its government.
"Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!"
That may be true, but I've never paid for junk snail mail. There's economic incentive to not send me shit I don't care about!!
Do you care about penis englargement? Fake degrees from non-existant, non-acredited institutions? Drugs that are not legal yet in your country since they haven't passed testing? I've never had junk snail mail for it. I also don't have ~200 junk snail mails a day attempting to be delivered to my mailbox.
"If you look carefully, you'll find that 3 is "more than 2 or 3". "
3 > 3?
No. Perhaps you should review your basic math 110 inequalities.
"our laws cover "operating a motor vehicle" under the influence. That includes lying down in a turned-off motorboat while slammed."
Doubtful. If I'm sleeping inside a parked vehicle, I'm hardly operating it. If I'm using the radio, I am not operating the vehicle.
I think the real reason this vehicle is not useful in Canada is listed here:
"but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. "
Which is useless 6 months of the year in Saskatchewan, and dubious the other 6 because the white lines get worn off in winter anyways.
The radar would be useful, but we'd need something more than line detection. Embedded sensors in the road surface would be good, if a bit costly to maintain (but that's ok, since a group already wants to put little pink pucks in the road surface to indicate black ice, even though they'd likely be covered with black ice and hidden!).
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Since Bush was in 2000-2003, with 2003 - 2000 = 3, several is the wrong word to use:
"several(a): (used with count nouns) of an indefinite number more than 2 or 3 but not many; "several letters came in the mail"; "several people were injured in the accident" "
Thanks.
Oh, you might also mention how the US budget defecit went from 0 to a number much larger.
The US military budget also increased.
In general, Bush has spent more on everything than previous more frugal presidents.
Indeed, he has also raised spending on the military and pork by a higher percentage than things like social programs. I can't remember the exact number, but over 60% of US government spending is spent directly or indirectly on the US military. The NSF gets something like 1%.
And, let's also think about this, "human cloning in all its forms" includes cloned organs for people needing organ transplants. I hope your heart works 100%; I myself have a leaky heart valve, and would rather have a cloned one with the defect cured rather than a pig's heart valve inserted into me (plus the anti-rejection drugs this entails).
Try not to dress up a wolf in sheep's clothing!!
"Having not read the warning label I drank the whole bottle within 5 minutes. Within 10 minutes I was blacking out behind the wheel & shaking uncontrollably. I pulled over at a gas station I was having difficulty in swallowing and could not stand, breathe or see straight."
Yea, the whole bottle of concentrate is 30$ after a 50% off at Amazon. I doubt some one is going to spend 60$ on a small bottle of concentrate to chug it. This is probably the stupidest urban legend I've read in the past month.
"I used to get real tired in the evening while driving. So tired that I would zone out and nearly fall asleep at the wheel. "
:)
Yea, I found that any time I've driven an automatic, I get sleepy and bored. There's so little to do in them.
Get a nice 5- or 6-speed sports car.