When they started doing Rhapsody, I had about 5 employees come up to me one day and try to sell me the service. I don't mean just hawk it. No. I mean trying to offer me demos, explaining to me what the service was, etc.
I had a similar experience at the local Best Buy when they started in on Rhapsody. The employees were pushing serious FUD on me, too -- telling me that KaZaa or other Rhapsody alternatives would damage my computer permanently and most likely rape my dog.
You get a similar experience with the extended service agreements, too. In one case the cashier kept demanding to hear the reason(s) why we didn't want it, then trying to shoot them down. I finally said, "Look, I don't want it. Now shut up about it or I'm not buying (whatever we were buying)."
I swear, the world would be a better place if I were allowed to kick deserving people in the junk.
They also saved my middle finger, which is over-worked on the wheel scrolling every other window.
Sounds like they made you use that middle finger for something else though...
The advantage here...
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As far as I'm concerned, the thing to get excited about is not, exactly, Iraqis running Linux on their desktops or what have you...
Rather, it's the notion of how OSS grows. It's a good thing if geeks in the west and geeks in Iraq can collaborate on an open source project together. (And if that, or Western/Middle-Eastern OSS collaborations become a more common thing.)
Granted, I think techies tend to be a little more progressive than the general population, but still -- people in the U.S. and people in Iraq being able to work on a project together and come to understand each other better as people, in any capacity, can only be a good thing for the people of both nations, and indeed even the world.
Disclaimer: I'm tres biased, but I think I still have some interesting points. You've been warned.
It's all just a side-effect of society, really. (Isn't everything, but...)
We live in a society that praises the achiever/PvEer mindset, and, importantly, recognizes its goals as valid. For achievers to function, there must be others who recognize their achievements, and agree with the "rules" of the game in which they're achieved. That's not to say that everyone who wants a big house in a good neighborhood, trophy spouse, expensive car, prestigious job, etc. etc. etc. wants each of those things solely to impress others -- but an awful lot of people do, whether they admit it or not. If having a luxury car had the same functionality as it does in our world, but for some reason everyone thought they were dumb and that it was anything but cool to own one, they'd sure sell a lot less of them. This holds for any of the achiever goals.
Society rewards the killer/PvPer mindset to a point, but it generally doesn't overtly encourage it. There are definitely rewards to be had by going out in business, life, etc. and simply just beating everyone else, but don't expect to make a lot of friends doing it. Expect to hear a lot of complaints about being mercenary or unfair. Especially expect people to hate you if you fuck up their proverbial achiever cabbage patch.
In a lot of ways, I think the people who fall deeply into MMORPGS or other achiever games are people who are, at their heart, achievers but are unable to succeed in the traditional achiever rat races. If you can't be a captain of industry or marry a supermodel, well, maybe you can be the leetest guy on EverQuest. Maybe in your success of nightly level-grinding and monster farming will serve as a nepenthe to ease the dull ache of your failures in the great achiever contest that is life.
I don't believe that all PvPers are Sociopaths. I think it's possible to seperate griefers from PvPers.
I agree, but it's often a matter of perspective as to what separates the two.
To a typical MMORPG player, the game is the kind of thing where "everybody wins" -- the game is about getting levels and phat loot, triumphing over the computer-controlled adversaries and the environment. If there's a sense of "beating" another player, it's in doing more (being higher level, having phatter loot, etc.) or doing it faster (being the first to kill the Pseudonatural Diremongoosaurus and steal its magic pants). Your achievement doesn't inherently disallow the achievement of others.
Your typical PvPer is cut from a different mold. To them, for someone to win the game, someone else must lose. I'll laugh at anyone who says this is a juvenile or abberant thought pattern -- chess, basketball, poker, and a million other familiar games are built in this mindset.
Let's say a PvPer, on a game in which it's possible, playerkills your typical MMORPGer and takes his magic pants. It's unlikely that you'd find the truly archetypal examples of both types of players playing the same game, at least for very long, but let's pretend.
From the MMORPGer's perspective, the PvPer is an immature griefer. Why, he didn't earn those magic pants the proper way by killing the Pseudonatural Diremongoosaur! He just took someone else's! That isn't fair. Griefer!
From the PvPer's perspective it looks very different. If he wants magic pants and it's easier to PK for them, he certainly will. If he wants to establish himself as king of the game, he's going to do that by going out and beating people, not by trying to out-catass them. If they complain, call him names, and generally give him a bad reputation, that's not a sign that he's doing something wrong... it's a sign he's doing something right.
I guess you could call that mindset sociopathic, but then, basically everyone in the real world who is successful at anything is a sociopath.
Users will be driven to GNU/Linux systems in droves!
Honestly, even if we accept as true your logic that there is no rational reason to choose Windows over Linux... you'd still be making the incorrect assumption that a majority of users are driven by reason and not, say, inertia, familiarity, and sloth.
No one has ever lost money betting on human laziness.
Don't get me wrong, the discussion on this topic is interesting and all, but...
Other than dramatic headline writing, how is this a danger?
Sticking your wang in a pickle slicer? That's a danger. Beating on a hornet's nest with a baseball bat? Also a danger. Releasing your next-generation system early? Arguably (or not) a bad business decision, but I hardly think the word danger is justified.
So the quality of code inside an OS has *nothing* to do with security?
No, I'm not saying that at all. However, to a large degree, any statements about the quality of the code from a security standpoint are, by necessity, speculative.
Saying that OS X is immune to viruses and trojans is like saying my umbrella is great if I never take it out of my house and into a rainstorm. It might very well be, but because it's never seeing rain, we don't know for sure.
See also: the episode of the Simpsons with the rock that keeps tigers away.
Believe it or not, I'm not trying to troll you here. Honest.
I'm not some kind of super-Mac-hater. OS X is pretty slick, and if on some future day all the software that I would want to use is written for the Mac without my having to endure Windows-emulation headaches I see my Mac-friends having, I would probably switch.
That said, saying there aren't viruses or trojans for Mac is kind of like saying your Amiga doesn't pick up viruses from the intarweb these days. Who would bother to write one?
Security by obscurity doesn't work, true. But security by "Who the fuck cares" does.
The outcome of PvP combat in a MMORPG is heavily dependant on the class and level of the participants.
Historically, this has been true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.
It's possible to create a game in which one or two classes don't dominate PvP.
It's equally possible to create a game in which the higher level character does not win 90% of the time.
I'd further add that I believe that it's possible to do both without creating a game that's stupid or boring.
When I think about PvP, oddly, I often think of the movie My Cousin Vinny. There's a scene in there where Vinny explains that even though the prosecution's case seems very solid, it really can't be because the boys are innocent. He uses cards as an analogy for their witnesses, showing that while they look perfect and respectable taken from one angle, viewed from another, there's nothing there. I'm not explaining it very well, but those who have seen the movie will know what I'm talking about.
I think the balance of various character types in a PvP game needs to be like that. There should be no other character type in the game that yours can't beat with a little ingenuity and the proper setup. If you can engineer a situation that pits the "square" face of your card against some less ideal face of theirs, you should be able to win. The reverse, of course, is also true: there should be no character type in the game that yours can't lose to if you fight dumb enough.
Now, it's probably true that few, if any, MMORPGs currently in existence are deep enough, strategically, for that kind of class balance model to be possible. In my mind, that's a sign that we should be demanding more from games, rather than give up on the PvP model for this kind of game.
Granted, I think the author's own biases show. He describes the "killer" type, which would be the type drawn to PvP, as about griefing. I don't think that's true, though it might certainly seem so from an achiever standpoint. More, I think it's about competition, about an ideal that you're the best because you can and do go out and beat other people, not because you log more hours.
Players of the current crop of MMORPGs are almost universally achievers by Bartle's model. If you wonder why these games turn into super levelling treadmills, the answer is fairly simple: It's because that's what their core audience genuinely wants. They might bitch about the timesink that it is, but their choice to continue playing demonstrates more clearly than words that they anything but despise it.
but iirc, microsoft took like a $200 hit on each console, its probably more now that they're cutting prices
That's not necessarily true -- sure, XBox prices have never been lower, but the same is true of the hardware that comprises one. The longer a system is out, generally, the cheaper it is to manufacture it.
Um. You know you don't have to play Warcraft III (or most games like it) one on one, right?
I've had a lot of fun playing Starcraft with matchups like: 2 more highly skilled players taking on 3 less good players. Obviously, the bigger the skill disparity, the more you have to kick up the ganging factor -- but you can always split the better players between teams as well.
There are still compromises to be made, no question. The two of you still won't want to play the same games at the same time. (I've certainly played a lot more Diablo 2 with my girlfriend than I ever would have wanted if left to my own devices.) And there's still no excuse for neglecting your SO.
All of that said, it's a lot easier starting with someone who on some level likes your hobby rather than disdaining it.
Back in my freshman year of college, my roommate and I were discovering the wonder of the internet. The way the school internet access was set up, usually you would dial up, then get this sort of telnet prompt, from which you could pick one of the uni's student UNIX boxes to connect to to check your e-mail or whatever.
Now, there really weren't enough of the UNIX boxen to handle the load the students placed on them in peak hours. Sometimes they'd be down, and sometimes they'd just have too many users doing too much shit to make you want to use them in anything less than an emergency. My roommate, in the process of trying to feed his burgeoning MUDding addiction, discovered that you could telnet to anywhere, not just the uni's student boxes, despite what they had taught us about our student accounts. This let him connect to his MUD of choice regardless of the status of the UNIX machines.
He had a macro he would hit to enter the MUD's IP, his character's name, and his character's password together in quick succession. His character's password, as it happens, was Cthulhu.
One day, the MUD was down, and so 'Cthulhu' ended up being entered by the macro into the faux-telnet-prompt thing. This connected him to a U.S. government computer in Indiana, apparently named Cthulhu. There wasn't, as far as we were aware, any sort of escape character for this faux-telnet prompt, so he kept typing things like 'exit' and 'quit' trying to get out as Cthulhu demanded his login information. Eventually it cut him off.
The FBI reported him to the uni for "hacking" and they cut his student internet access off for the rest of the year. Comically sad.
No idea if there's still a Cthulhu out there, somewhere in Indiana...
I've been forced to use it 40+ hours a week for work for the last 8 or so months, and not one crash or blue screen of death.
I guess you could keep calling it unstable anyway, but if you're a rabid Linux fanboy (which, I'm not saying you are, but let's be honest... normal people do not write MS with a dollar sign) you'd do better to tout the advantages Linux actually has over Windows. Stability isn't so much one of them, anymore.
Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:2, Interesting)
by jelwell (2152) on Tuesday May 18, @04:29PM (#9189227)
I guess I don't see the problem. Whether the posters were anonymous or not, don't their opinions and refutations of the facts matter?
It depends on the nature of what they're posting anonymously.
Suppose I work for JBoss and I write up various posts of the form: "I used (fill in JBoss competitor here) for my business. Not only did they not do the work I paid them for, but they anally raped my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank! Next time I will go with JBoss for sure."
Or, suppose I work for JBoss and I write up a glowing review of JBoss's work, glossing over the problems or bugs. Then I post a few times agreeing with myself about how excellent they/we are. Astroturfing may be as old as the Internet (if not older) but that doesn't make it particularly ethical business.
The US obviously wants oil. That was never doubted.
Obviously. But you'd have had to somehow slept through all of the media coverage of the Gulf War to not hear the U.S. Government say that it was not concerned with oil loudly and repeatedly. (At least, if you lived in the U.S. at that time, which I suspect you may not have.) Their concern, supposedly, was for the Kuwaiti people. This was not to be an oil war. The fact that these two countries were rich in oil, we were told, was in no way a factor in U.S. involvement.
Probably, I should let this go here. We're meandering further from the topic of the article.
I never thought quasi-defending Saddam would seem logical to me, but, here we are...
No, something about the fact that he created a giant international web of corruption around the Oil-For-Food program kinda tipped me off that Saddam wasn't planning on ever playing nice.
Well, let's think about this for a minute from the perspective of Iraq. So you get slapped down for messing with Kuwait, with the US/World insisting all the while that it's about the freedom of the Kuwaiti people, and that it's certainly not just an "oil war."
Then, they tell you that they aren't going to sell you any food and that you're going to get to watch children starve unless you trade them oil for that food. I'm sure that doesn't already stink of thirty-one flavors of international corruption.
Now, given that program, did Saddam act in the best interest of the Iraqi people? Well, of course not. But it seems silly to expect anyone in Iraq to not be cynical and incredibly suspicious of US foreign policy after that, don't you think?
I sure wouldn't play nice if you tried to starve my people and told me they could only have food if I gave you something you insisted you didn't want from me. I'd know you were completely full of shit and I'd probably sink to that level to compete.
Actually, I think they're (sort of) right about this, at least in a mass-market credibility sense. Obviously Joe Slashdot or anyone used to building their own machines is a different market.
For the relatively technically uninitiated, though, I think it might be a different story. They don't necessarily know about the reliability issues I'm seeing people post about here. What they do know is that HP/Compaq are brands that they've heard of and recognize. These are brands that they expect will be around. They believe that if something goes wrong with their machine in two years, HP/Compaq will still exist to provide customer support for it. Whether or not they'll actually get useful customer support might be another story, but it's not likely that they won't get it because the company doesn't exist. People who aren't supahardcore gamers have heard of the HP/Compaq brands. Even people who don't deal with technology at all may have heard of them. Not so for the hardcore gaming rig companies.
Consumers will feel like they can rely on Compaq to be around in years to come. They will feel like they can rely on Compaq to not, for example, take their money and then disappear without providing a machine. In these senses, yes, Compaq will be seen as a reliable brand and I don't doubt that it will get them some sales in the gaming space, if not necessarily to anyone who reads or posts here.
Slashdot Mirror
When they started doing Rhapsody, I had about 5 employees come up to me one day and try to sell me the service. I don't mean just hawk it. No. I mean trying to offer me demos, explaining to me what the service was, etc.
I had a similar experience at the local Best Buy when they started in on Rhapsody. The employees were pushing serious FUD on me, too -- telling me that KaZaa or other Rhapsody alternatives would damage my computer permanently and most likely rape my dog.
You get a similar experience with the extended service agreements, too. In one case the cashier kept demanding to hear the reason(s) why we didn't want it, then trying to shoot them down. I finally said, "Look, I don't want it. Now shut up about it or I'm not buying (whatever we were buying)."
I swear, the world would be a better place if I were allowed to kick deserving people in the junk.
They also saved my middle finger, which is over-worked on the wheel scrolling every other window.
Sounds like they made you use that middle finger for something else though...
As far as I'm concerned, the thing to get excited about is not, exactly, Iraqis running Linux on their desktops or what have you...
Rather, it's the notion of how OSS grows. It's a good thing if geeks in the west and geeks in Iraq can collaborate on an open source project together. (And if that, or Western/Middle-Eastern OSS collaborations become a more common thing.)
Granted, I think techies tend to be a little more progressive than the general population, but still -- people in the U.S. and people in Iraq being able to work on a project together and come to understand each other better as people, in any capacity, can only be a good thing for the people of both nations, and indeed even the world.
I wish I could mod this thing to 6. Probably the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
Disclaimer: I'm tres biased, but I think I still have some interesting points. You've been warned.
It's all just a side-effect of society, really. (Isn't everything, but...)
We live in a society that praises the achiever/PvEer mindset, and, importantly, recognizes its goals as valid. For achievers to function, there must be others who recognize their achievements, and agree with the "rules" of the game in which they're achieved. That's not to say that everyone who wants a big house in a good neighborhood, trophy spouse, expensive car, prestigious job, etc. etc. etc. wants each of those things solely to impress others -- but an awful lot of people do, whether they admit it or not. If having a luxury car had the same functionality as it does in our world, but for some reason everyone thought they were dumb and that it was anything but cool to own one, they'd sure sell a lot less of them. This holds for any of the achiever goals.
Society rewards the killer/PvPer mindset to a point, but it generally doesn't overtly encourage it. There are definitely rewards to be had by going out in business, life, etc. and simply just beating everyone else, but don't expect to make a lot of friends doing it. Expect to hear a lot of complaints about being mercenary or unfair. Especially expect people to hate you if you fuck up their proverbial achiever cabbage patch.
In a lot of ways, I think the people who fall deeply into MMORPGS or other achiever games are people who are, at their heart, achievers but are unable to succeed in the traditional achiever rat races. If you can't be a captain of industry or marry a supermodel, well, maybe you can be the leetest guy on EverQuest. Maybe in your success of nightly level-grinding and monster farming will serve as a nepenthe to ease the dull ache of your failures in the great achiever contest that is life.
I don't believe that all PvPers are Sociopaths. I think it's possible to seperate griefers from PvPers.
I agree, but it's often a matter of perspective as to what separates the two.
To a typical MMORPG player, the game is the kind of thing where "everybody wins" -- the game is about getting levels and phat loot, triumphing over the computer-controlled adversaries and the environment. If there's a sense of "beating" another player, it's in doing more (being higher level, having phatter loot, etc.) or doing it faster (being the first to kill the Pseudonatural Diremongoosaurus and steal its magic pants). Your achievement doesn't inherently disallow the achievement of others.
Your typical PvPer is cut from a different mold. To them, for someone to win the game, someone else must lose. I'll laugh at anyone who says this is a juvenile or abberant thought pattern -- chess, basketball, poker, and a million other familiar games are built in this mindset.
Let's say a PvPer, on a game in which it's possible, playerkills your typical MMORPGer and takes his magic pants. It's unlikely that you'd find the truly archetypal examples of both types of players playing the same game, at least for very long, but let's pretend.
From the MMORPGer's perspective, the PvPer is an immature griefer. Why, he didn't earn those magic pants the proper way by killing the Pseudonatural Diremongoosaur! He just took someone else's! That isn't fair. Griefer!
From the PvPer's perspective it looks very different. If he wants magic pants and it's easier to PK for them, he certainly will. If he wants to establish himself as king of the game, he's going to do that by going out and beating people, not by trying to out-catass them. If they complain, call him names, and generally give him a bad reputation, that's not a sign that he's doing something wrong... it's a sign he's doing something right.
I guess you could call that mindset sociopathic, but then, basically everyone in the real world who is successful at anything is a sociopath.
Users will be driven to GNU/Linux systems in droves!
Honestly, even if we accept as true your logic that there is no rational reason to choose Windows over Linux... you'd still be making the incorrect assumption that a majority of users are driven by reason and not, say, inertia, familiarity, and sloth.
No one has ever lost money betting on human laziness.
Don't get me wrong, the discussion on this topic is interesting and all, but...
Other than dramatic headline writing, how is this a danger?
Sticking your wang in a pickle slicer? That's a danger. Beating on a hornet's nest with a baseball bat? Also a danger. Releasing your next-generation system early? Arguably (or not) a bad business decision, but I hardly think the word danger is justified.
So the quality of code inside an OS has *nothing* to do with security?
No, I'm not saying that at all. However, to a large degree, any statements about the quality of the code from a security standpoint are, by necessity, speculative.
Saying that OS X is immune to viruses and trojans is like saying my umbrella is great if I never take it out of my house and into a rainstorm. It might very well be, but because it's never seeing rain, we don't know for sure.
See also: the episode of the Simpsons with the rock that keeps tigers away.
Believe it or not, I'm not trying to troll you here. Honest.
I'm not some kind of super-Mac-hater. OS X is pretty slick, and if on some future day all the software that I would want to use is written for the Mac without my having to endure Windows-emulation headaches I see my Mac-friends having, I would probably switch.
That said, saying there aren't viruses or trojans for Mac is kind of like saying your Amiga doesn't pick up viruses from the intarweb these days. Who would bother to write one?
Security by obscurity doesn't work, true. But security by "Who the fuck cares" does.
Disclaimer: I have, in the past, spent significant time as an administrator of a PK MUD. Obviously, this puts a certain spin on my opinions here.
The outcome of PvP combat in a MMORPG is heavily dependant on the class and level of the participants.
Historically, this has been true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.
It's possible to create a game in which one or two classes don't dominate PvP.
It's equally possible to create a game in which the higher level character does not win 90% of the time.
I'd further add that I believe that it's possible to do both without creating a game that's stupid or boring.
When I think about PvP, oddly, I often think of the movie My Cousin Vinny. There's a scene in there where Vinny explains that even though the prosecution's case seems very solid, it really can't be because the boys are innocent. He uses cards as an analogy for their witnesses, showing that while they look perfect and respectable taken from one angle, viewed from another, there's nothing there. I'm not explaining it very well, but those who have seen the movie will know what I'm talking about.
I think the balance of various character types in a PvP game needs to be like that. There should be no other character type in the game that yours can't beat with a little ingenuity and the proper setup. If you can engineer a situation that pits the "square" face of your card against some less ideal face of theirs, you should be able to win. The reverse, of course, is also true: there should be no character type in the game that yours can't lose to if you fight dumb enough.
Now, it's probably true that few, if any, MMORPGs currently in existence are deep enough, strategically, for that kind of class balance model to be possible. In my mind, that's a sign that we should be demanding more from games, rather than give up on the PvP model for this kind of game.
PvP attracts the immature set..
That's not entirely true.
Here's a paper written a long time ago about different player types in MUDs. It holds for other games as well. If you dig around, you can also probably find a test to tell you what type you are.
Granted, I think the author's own biases show. He describes the "killer" type, which would be the type drawn to PvP, as about griefing. I don't think that's true, though it might certainly seem so from an achiever standpoint. More, I think it's about competition, about an ideal that you're the best because you can and do go out and beat other people, not because you log more hours.
Players of the current crop of MMORPGs are almost universally achievers by Bartle's model. If you wonder why these games turn into super levelling treadmills, the answer is fairly simple: It's because that's what their core audience genuinely wants. They might bitch about the timesink that it is, but their choice to continue playing demonstrates more clearly than words that they anything but despise it.
MMORPG PvP is a joke.
Inasmuch as that's true, it suggests a direction for future improvement -- not something all MMORPG developers should give up on entirely.
but iirc, microsoft took like a $200 hit on each console, its probably more now that they're cutting prices
That's not necessarily true -- sure, XBox prices have never been lower, but the same is true of the hardware that comprises one. The longer a system is out, generally, the cheaper it is to manufacture it.
Um. You know you don't have to play Warcraft III (or most games like it) one on one, right?
I've had a lot of fun playing Starcraft with matchups like: 2 more highly skilled players taking on 3 less good players. Obviously, the bigger the skill disparity, the more you have to kick up the ganging factor -- but you can always split the better players between teams as well.
Find a significant other who likes gaming.
There are still compromises to be made, no question. The two of you still won't want to play the same games at the same time. (I've certainly played a lot more Diablo 2 with my girlfriend than I ever would have wanted if left to my own devices.) And there's still no excuse for neglecting your SO.
All of that said, it's a lot easier starting with someone who on some level likes your hobby rather than disdaining it.
FWIW, that'd describe most of the MUDs I've seen as well. . . though admittedly there's a lot of variety in that genre.
That would be too unreal to believe if I hadn't just seen it with my own eyes.
Thanks for sharing. Sheesh, and I thought the Hampster Dance was weird.
By that logic, an MMORPG is glorified IRC with graphics?
That's a serious question.
... but not in the way that you might think.
True story, if about ten years old:
Back in my freshman year of college, my roommate and I were discovering the wonder of the internet. The way the school internet access was set up, usually you would dial up, then get this sort of telnet prompt, from which you could pick one of the uni's student UNIX boxes to connect to to check your e-mail or whatever.
Now, there really weren't enough of the UNIX boxen to handle the load the students placed on them in peak hours. Sometimes they'd be down, and sometimes they'd just have too many users doing too much shit to make you want to use them in anything less than an emergency. My roommate, in the process of trying to feed his burgeoning MUDding addiction, discovered that you could telnet to anywhere, not just the uni's student boxes, despite what they had taught us about our student accounts. This let him connect to his MUD of choice regardless of the status of the UNIX machines.
He had a macro he would hit to enter the MUD's IP, his character's name, and his character's password together in quick succession. His character's password, as it happens, was Cthulhu.
One day, the MUD was down, and so 'Cthulhu' ended up being entered by the macro into the faux-telnet-prompt thing. This connected him to a U.S. government computer in Indiana, apparently named Cthulhu. There wasn't, as far as we were aware, any sort of escape character for this faux-telnet prompt, so he kept typing things like 'exit' and 'quit' trying to get out as Cthulhu demanded his login information. Eventually it cut him off.
The FBI reported him to the uni for "hacking" and they cut his student internet access off for the rest of the year. Comically sad.
No idea if there's still a Cthulhu out there, somewhere in Indiana...
Windows XP is pretty stable.
I've been forced to use it 40+ hours a week for work for the last 8 or so months, and not one crash or blue screen of death.
I guess you could keep calling it unstable anyway, but if you're a rabid Linux fanboy (which, I'm not saying you are, but let's be honest... normal people do not write MS with a dollar sign) you'd do better to tout the advantages Linux actually has over Windows. Stability isn't so much one of them, anymore.
Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:2, Interesting) by jelwell (2152) on Tuesday May 18, @04:29PM (#9189227) I guess I don't see the problem. Whether the posters were anonymous or not, don't their opinions and refutations of the facts matter?
It depends on the nature of what they're posting anonymously.
Suppose I work for JBoss and I write up various posts of the form: "I used (fill in JBoss competitor here) for my business. Not only did they not do the work I paid them for, but they anally raped my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank! Next time I will go with JBoss for sure."
Or, suppose I work for JBoss and I write up a glowing review of JBoss's work, glossing over the problems or bugs. Then I post a few times agreeing with myself about how excellent they/we are. Astroturfing may be as old as the Internet (if not older) but that doesn't make it particularly ethical business.
The US obviously wants oil. That was never doubted. Obviously. But you'd have had to somehow slept through all of the media coverage of the Gulf War to not hear the U.S. Government say that it was not concerned with oil loudly and repeatedly. (At least, if you lived in the U.S. at that time, which I suspect you may not have.) Their concern, supposedly, was for the Kuwaiti people. This was not to be an oil war. The fact that these two countries were rich in oil, we were told, was in no way a factor in U.S. involvement.
Probably, I should let this go here. We're meandering further from the topic of the article.
I never thought quasi-defending Saddam would seem logical to me, but, here we are...
No, something about the fact that he created a giant international web of corruption around the Oil-For-Food program kinda tipped me off that Saddam wasn't planning on ever playing nice.
Well, let's think about this for a minute from the perspective of Iraq. So you get slapped down for messing with Kuwait, with the US/World insisting all the while that it's about the freedom of the Kuwaiti people, and that it's certainly not just an "oil war."
Then, they tell you that they aren't going to sell you any food and that you're going to get to watch children starve unless you trade them oil for that food. I'm sure that doesn't already stink of thirty-one flavors of international corruption.
Now, given that program, did Saddam act in the best interest of the Iraqi people? Well, of course not. But it seems silly to expect anyone in Iraq to not be cynical and incredibly suspicious of US foreign policy after that, don't you think?
I sure wouldn't play nice if you tried to starve my people and told me they could only have food if I gave you something you insisted you didn't want from me. I'd know you were completely full of shit and I'd probably sink to that level to compete.
Actually, I think they're (sort of) right about this, at least in a mass-market credibility sense. Obviously Joe Slashdot or anyone used to building their own machines is a different market.
For the relatively technically uninitiated, though, I think it might be a different story. They don't necessarily know about the reliability issues I'm seeing people post about here. What they do know is that HP/Compaq are brands that they've heard of and recognize. These are brands that they expect will be around. They believe that if something goes wrong with their machine in two years, HP/Compaq will still exist to provide customer support for it. Whether or not they'll actually get useful customer support might be another story, but it's not likely that they won't get it because the company doesn't exist. People who aren't supahardcore gamers have heard of the HP/Compaq brands. Even people who don't deal with technology at all may have heard of them. Not so for the hardcore gaming rig companies.
Consumers will feel like they can rely on Compaq to be around in years to come. They will feel like they can rely on Compaq to not, for example, take their money and then disappear without providing a machine. In these senses, yes, Compaq will be seen as a reliable brand and I don't doubt that it will get them some sales in the gaming space, if not necessarily to anyone who reads or posts here.