"there is simply so much more money to be had in blasé games and infinite sequels."
Yeah, they should instead concentrate on releasing the exact same FPS games and car racing games with shinier textures! Mario Party may be the eighth in the series, but the gameplay is entirely different from all of the previous iterations (though the textures are shinier, that's secondary).
Nintendo is not abandoning new IPs; they are abandoning the idea that the only way to improve is by adding better graphics and more realistic blood spatters. Since that seems to be all that "hardcore gamers" want, they are feeling abandoned. Nintendo is making games that kids and working adults will want to play, and are leaving the 18-24 frat boy crowd to sony and MS.
It's got evil robots, alien planets, skintight spacesuits, vehicular combat, and lots and lots of guns. I don't recall viva pinata having any of that; did you install a mod?
Beyond that, it's still a Bioware RPG, which means that you'll actually want to pay attention to the story and the conversations. Especially with the voice actors they've got lined up (Seth Green, Lance Henriksen, Keith David, etc).
A price cut is not expected for the wii because it's still selling as fast as they can make it! Microsoft and Sony are having trouble moving stock at this point, so a price cut makes sense for them.
My impressions of RoR is that it has some useful scripts to build a skeleton app, it packages up the environment for you, and Ruby is less painful than C. I have yet to find any compelling reason to switch from perl or PHP, especially given that RoR doesn't scale well.
ID is *not* a scientific theory, while evolution *is*. A scientific theory, using the scientific method, must be provable or disprovable through experimentation and observation. You cannot design any repeatable experiments based on ID; you cannot use it to predict future results. Here is an example of a repeatable experiment based on the scientific theory of evolution:
start with a population of 1000 random dogs. Breed only the largest dogs for 20 generations. Expected results: the average dog size of the final population will be greater than the average dog size of the initial population. Methodology: measure the height and weight of the dogs in each generation.
Now let's try the same thing with ID:
do nothing at all, wait for new species to be created by unknown third parties. Expected results: maybe nothing, maybe purple giraffes. Methodology: wait, then wait some more if nothing happens.
You *cannot* perform any experiments to prove or disprove ID, therefore it is not a scientific theory at all. It may be a theory in the same sense that I can theorize that invisible pink unicorns enjoy musical theatre, but this is an entirely different class of thing from evolution, and it is entirely unscientific.
You, of course, are free to believe whatever you want. Believe that giant space lizards farted out the earth in an afternoon, whatever you want! But don't complain when people say it's not on the same footing as evolution, because it demonstrably is not.
Gambling is not the same as WoW. With gambling, the odds are never in your favour. Winning at video games depends on skill, and the time spent improves those skills. Winning at gambling depends entirely on luck, and the time spent does not improve the odds. Even if they're both mental disorders, one is a compulsion to complete some goal, the other is an inability to understand statistics.
"The only reason XP is the target of so many viruses is because it is so widely used! If Vista was as popular as Windows XP, there would be just as many viruses written for those platforms!"
(firmly tongue in cheek, I'm aware that Vista's UAC is still a pale imitation of a real security model).
I'd be willing to bet that a large part of that 1 million downloads is neither IE users nor FF users; rather it would be those people who run multiple browsers already for various reasons (cross-platform web development being one). We'll see what the browser market share numbers do, but I predict that there will be minimal switching going on.
1) I can already check my email on an exchange server using mutt, kmail, or the mail reader of your choice. (Exchange supports IMAP just fine). If you want to get rid of exchange, there's alternatives for that too: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/16/ 1422209 2) You'll have to specify which version of Microsoft Office the boss' boss has; without that info, I can't even accomplish this task with powerpoint in windows. If you drop the "flawless" requirement, then OpenOffice will work just fine. Otherwise, I would highly recommend a PDF instead, as it comes with a much higher guarantee of rendering correctly. 3) I've never worked at a company that had shelled out the $4k or so for MS Project server, but I grant that such might exist. For those companies, they are indeed stuck trying to integrate with that single product, and I highly doubt they would ever consider moving to open source anyway. If project management is the goal as opposed to integrating with MS servers, there's plenty of options. KPlato looks decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_manag ement_software 4) Change your payroll software. Seriously, very few websites these days require activex. Alternately you could install IE and ActiveX in linux. It takes a bit of work, but any reasonably competent IT worker should be able to add it to their standard linux desktop image. http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/activex-linux.php 5) Corporations generally have network printers, which have worked with linux for years. If all you have are printers connected to windows computers, CUPS can deal with that too.
In summary, if you are willing to consider alternatives rather than blindly demanding compatibility with MS products, there's nothing holding a corporate environment back.
The article is talking about web design; CMYK is irrelevant on the web, and the GIMP is an excellent tool for such work. Print professionals can do whatever they like, but they should be aware that their special needs do not apply to everyone.
Really, this is no more an invasion of privacy than anything that happens when living in a small town. People think that cities gave you anonymity; these days search tools are just removing that misconception and making it so that other people can in fact associate the publicly visible bits of your life with your identity.
People should either: - get over it and accept people can see/find things that you do in public - close their blinds or otherwise reduce the amount of their lives that are visible to the public.
It seems entirely obvious that if there is something you don't want seen by strangers, you should take efforts to keep it out of their sight. It's entirely possible to have a private life, just not in public spaces.
Why yes, javascript is slow. But it's moe than fast enough for web apps, which tend not to require massive computation or even all that much UI candy. The vast majority of the rendering/UI/storage work is done by the browser (very fast machine-specific application) and the webserver (high-powered multi-core server farm), which means that javascript is free to chug away at whatever tasks it is given.
If google released their apps as bytecode-compiled java, they would *lose* actual CPU performance in order to overcome some amount of network latency (which is the big slowdown for most web apps). By making it so the app will still work without a network connection, they are overcoming that latency without having to add update complexity or sacrifice cross-platform compatibility (java environments are neither universal nor consistent). Write-one run-anywhere is far more true of web apps than it ever has been of java.
It sucks that Europe has not gotten Super Paper Mario yet, as it is an excellent RPG. Internet play is coming very soon with Mario Strikers, after which it sounds like the floodgates are opening.
If your tastes are not "Standard", then I would think that the wii should be right up your alley; the gamer "standard" these days seems to be Halo 3.
Plumbing is a service, but pipes are a product. If you have hired a plumber to install pipes in your home during initial construction, the plumber is providing a service, but the end product is a house with plumbing. The marginal cost of building an additional identical house with additional identical plumbing will include the cost of hiring the plumber to plumb the second house, because in the end you have two separate houses where separate work was required to plumb each one. You do not include the future costs of calling in a plumber to fix repairs when stating the cost of the house; they are future costs and do not apply.
Now let's try applying this to software. You hire a programmer to write code for your project during initial development. The programmer is providing a service, but the end product is an executable file with a specified behaviour. The marginal cost of producing an additional executable file with identical behaviour is ZERO, because the programmer or the secretary or the computer copies the bits from one place in storage to another in a matter of minutes, *without* requiring the code to be designed/written/tested a second time. You do not include the future costs of providing tech support or bugfixes when stating the cost of the software; they are future costs and do not apply.
If you hire the plumber or sign a service contract after the fact, that's a perfectly normal economic service that makes sense to everybody. But the *extra cost* to create the second piece of software is entirely unrelated! If people were able to copy and paste a house onto your property without damaging or even inconveniencing the original house, the housing market would crash overnight because there would no longer be any scarcity. If you put infinite supply up against finite demand, the standard supply/demand curve states that the cost of the product itself should be zero. If you want to sell support contracts, that's fine, but don't try to tell me that bits can be treated like houses.
"What is the marginal cost of hiring a plumber to fix your broken pipe? You pay once and then tomorrow it still is fixed, for free. The next day, yup still fixed. They day after that, yup still fixed."
That's not marginal cost; that is a service/maintenance cost. Marginal cost is the increase in costs for *producing* (not fixing!) an extra unit. It's an entirely different measurement, and is a well-defined business term.
The GP stated that the _marginal_ cost is 0, not that the entire cost or even the amortized cost is zero. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one extra unit. Your development costs are the same whether you sell 1 license or 1000 licenses; therefore the additional cost of those extra 999 licenses is zero. Thus the GP is exactly right, and software itself breaks the current economic model.
It's called "marketing"; why do you think McDonalds or 7-11 sponsor indy cars? If joe average walks into a computer store and sees "that indy car penguin" on a box of software, he'll be more likely to look at it, and potentially even buy it. It may not make logical sense, but that's how marketing works.
Interestingly, MS doesn't seem to sponsor indy cars, but they certainly work to get their logo on anything else they can find.
Nethack, no question. Infinite replayability, tons of playable classes, powerful artifacts, and a level of detail not found in any other game. I might even manage to beat the damned thing if trapped for long enough.
Plus if I would probably have to build a computer out of coconuts, I would want something that I can run in a console.
The encryption key is a random integer. That's why there's such an outcry over this; they are literally trying to prevent people from posting an integer that was chosen randomly from a list of random big numbers.
If they can copyright 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 , then I hereby copyright the integers 0 and 1. Since their number is clearly a derivative work of mine, I am suing them for damages.
Slashdot Mirror
"there is simply so much more money to be had in blasé games and infinite sequels."
Yeah, they should instead concentrate on releasing the exact same FPS games and car racing games with shinier textures! Mario Party may be the eighth in the series, but the gameplay is entirely different from all of the previous iterations (though the textures are shinier, that's secondary).
Nintendo is not abandoning new IPs; they are abandoning the idea that the only way to improve is by adding better graphics and more realistic blood spatters. Since that seems to be all that "hardcore gamers" want, they are feeling abandoned. Nintendo is making games that kids and working adults will want to play, and are leaving the 18-24 frat boy crowd to sony and MS.
It's got evil robots, alien planets, skintight spacesuits, vehicular combat, and lots and lots of guns. I don't recall viva pinata having any of that; did you install a mod?
Beyond that, it's still a Bioware RPG, which means that you'll actually want to pay attention to the story and the conversations. Especially with the voice actors they've got lined up (Seth Green, Lance Henriksen, Keith David, etc).
A price cut is not expected for the wii because it's still selling as fast as they can make it! Microsoft and Sony are having trouble moving stock at this point, so a price cut makes sense for them.
My impressions of RoR is that it has some useful scripts to build a skeleton app, it packages up the environment for you, and Ruby is less painful than C. I have yet to find any compelling reason to switch from perl or PHP, especially given that RoR doesn't scale well.
ID is *not* a scientific theory, while evolution *is*. A scientific theory, using the scientific method, must be provable or disprovable through experimentation and observation. You cannot design any repeatable experiments based on ID; you cannot use it to predict future results. Here is an example of a repeatable experiment based on the scientific theory of evolution:
start with a population of 1000 random dogs. Breed only the largest dogs for 20 generations. Expected results: the average dog size of the final population will be greater than the average dog size of the initial population. Methodology: measure the height and weight of the dogs in each generation.
Now let's try the same thing with ID:
do nothing at all, wait for new species to be created by unknown third parties. Expected results: maybe nothing, maybe purple giraffes. Methodology: wait, then wait some more if nothing happens.
You *cannot* perform any experiments to prove or disprove ID, therefore it is not a scientific theory at all. It may be a theory in the same sense that I can theorize that invisible pink unicorns enjoy musical theatre, but this is an entirely different class of thing from evolution, and it is entirely unscientific.
You, of course, are free to believe whatever you want. Believe that giant space lizards farted out the earth in an afternoon, whatever you want! But don't complain when people say it's not on the same footing as evolution, because it demonstrably is not.
Gambling is not the same as WoW. With gambling, the odds are never in your favour. Winning at video games depends on skill, and the time spent improves those skills. Winning at gambling depends entirely on luck, and the time spent does not improve the odds. Even if they're both mental disorders, one is a compulsion to complete some goal, the other is an inability to understand statistics.
Let's dig up one of the old /. favourites:
"The only reason XP is the target of so many viruses is because it is so widely used! If Vista was as popular as Windows XP, there would be just as many viruses written for those platforms!"
(firmly tongue in cheek, I'm aware that Vista's UAC is still a pale imitation of a real security model).
I hadn't thought of bundling like that; that makes apple's strategy make a lot more sense.
I'd be willing to bet that a large part of that 1 million downloads is neither IE users nor FF users; rather it would be those people who run multiple browsers already for various reasons (cross-platform web development being one). We'll see what the browser market share numbers do, but I predict that there will be minimal switching going on.
Funny, all of my apps are well behaved, and only put a single entry in the logic part of my application menu. Maybe your apt-get is broken?
No, just the two.
1) I can already check my email on an exchange server using mutt, kmail, or the mail reader of your choice. (Exchange supports IMAP just fine). If you want to get rid of exchange, there's alternatives for that too: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/16/ 1422209g ement_software
2) You'll have to specify which version of Microsoft Office the boss' boss has; without that info, I can't even accomplish this task with powerpoint in windows. If you drop the "flawless" requirement, then OpenOffice will work just fine. Otherwise, I would highly recommend a PDF instead, as it comes with a much higher guarantee of rendering correctly.
3) I've never worked at a company that had shelled out the $4k or so for MS Project server, but I grant that such might exist. For those companies, they are indeed stuck trying to integrate with that single product, and I highly doubt they would ever consider moving to open source anyway. If project management is the goal as opposed to integrating with MS servers, there's plenty of options. KPlato looks decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_mana
4) Change your payroll software. Seriously, very few websites these days require activex. Alternately you could install IE and ActiveX in linux. It takes a bit of work, but any reasonably competent IT worker should be able to add it to their standard linux desktop image. http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/activex-linux.php
5) Corporations generally have network printers, which have worked with linux for years. If all you have are printers connected to windows computers, CUPS can deal with that too.
In summary, if you are willing to consider alternatives rather than blindly demanding compatibility with MS products, there's nothing holding a corporate environment back.
The article is talking about web design; CMYK is irrelevant on the web, and the GIMP is an excellent tool for such work. Print professionals can do whatever they like, but they should be aware that their special needs do not apply to everyone.
Really, this is no more an invasion of privacy than anything that happens when living in a small town. People think that cities gave you anonymity; these days search tools are just removing that misconception and making it so that other people can in fact associate the publicly visible bits of your life with your identity.
People should either:
- get over it and accept people can see/find things that you do in public
- close their blinds or otherwise reduce the amount of their lives that are visible to the public.
It seems entirely obvious that if there is something you don't want seen by strangers, you should take efforts to keep it out of their sight. It's entirely possible to have a private life, just not in public spaces.
Why yes, javascript is slow. But it's moe than fast enough for web apps, which tend not to require massive computation or even all that much UI candy. The vast majority of the rendering/UI/storage work is done by the browser (very fast machine-specific application) and the webserver (high-powered multi-core server farm), which means that javascript is free to chug away at whatever tasks it is given.
If google released their apps as bytecode-compiled java, they would *lose* actual CPU performance in order to overcome some amount of network latency (which is the big slowdown for most web apps). By making it so the app will still work without a network connection, they are overcoming that latency without having to add update complexity or sacrifice cross-platform compatibility (java environments are neither universal nor consistent). Write-one run-anywhere is far more true of web apps than it ever has been of java.
It sucks that Europe has not gotten Super Paper Mario yet, as it is an excellent RPG. Internet play is coming very soon with Mario Strikers, after which it sounds like the floodgates are opening.
If your tastes are not "Standard", then I would think that the wii should be right up your alley; the gamer "standard" these days seems to be Halo 3.
Plumbing is a service, but pipes are a product. If you have hired a plumber to install pipes in your home during initial construction, the plumber is providing a service, but the end product is a house with plumbing. The marginal cost of building an additional identical house with additional identical plumbing will include the cost of hiring the plumber to plumb the second house, because in the end you have two separate houses where separate work was required to plumb each one. You do not include the future costs of calling in a plumber to fix repairs when stating the cost of the house; they are future costs and do not apply.
Now let's try applying this to software. You hire a programmer to write code for your project during initial development. The programmer is providing a service, but the end product is an executable file with a specified behaviour. The marginal cost of producing an additional executable file with identical behaviour is ZERO, because the programmer or the secretary or the computer copies the bits from one place in storage to another in a matter of minutes, *without* requiring the code to be designed/written/tested a second time. You do not include the future costs of providing tech support or bugfixes when stating the cost of the software; they are future costs and do not apply.
If you hire the plumber or sign a service contract after the fact, that's a perfectly normal economic service that makes sense to everybody. But the *extra cost* to create the second piece of software is entirely unrelated! If people were able to copy and paste a house onto your property without damaging or even inconveniencing the original house, the housing market would crash overnight because there would no longer be any scarcity. If you put infinite supply up against finite demand, the standard supply/demand curve states that the cost of the product itself should be zero. If you want to sell support contracts, that's fine, but don't try to tell me that bits can be treated like houses.
"What is the marginal cost of hiring a plumber to fix your broken pipe? You pay once and then tomorrow it still is fixed, for free. The next day, yup still fixed. They day after that, yup still fixed."
a l+cost
That's not marginal cost; that is a service/maintenance cost. Marginal cost is the increase in costs for *producing* (not fixing!) an extra unit. It's an entirely different measurement, and is a well-defined business term.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A%22margin
The GP stated that the _marginal_ cost is 0, not that the entire cost or even the amortized cost is zero. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one extra unit. Your development costs are the same whether you sell 1 license or 1000 licenses; therefore the additional cost of those extra 999 licenses is zero. Thus the GP is exactly right, and software itself breaks the current economic model.
It's called "marketing"; why do you think McDonalds or 7-11 sponsor indy cars? If joe average walks into a computer store and sees "that indy car penguin" on a box of software, he'll be more likely to look at it, and potentially even buy it. It may not make logical sense, but that's how marketing works.
Interestingly, MS doesn't seem to sponsor indy cars, but they certainly work to get their logo on anything else they can find.
Such as?
Or let's say you're a developer whose machine is in the middle of a 16 hour build. Oops, better start over!
Nethack, no question. Infinite replayability, tons of playable classes, powerful artifacts, and a level of detail not found in any other game. I might even manage to beat the damned thing if trapped for long enough.
Plus if I would probably have to build a computer out of coconuts, I would want something that I can run in a console.
The encryption key is a random integer. That's why there's such an outcry over this; they are literally trying to prevent people from posting an integer that was chosen randomly from a list of random big numbers.
0 , then I hereby copyright the integers 0 and 1. Since their number is clearly a derivative work of mine, I am suing them for damages.
If they can copyright 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,64
Journalists tend to understand the need for fact checking.