And in theaters that don't enforce the "turn off your cell phone" thing by kicking people who abuse theirs too much, there's always a BUNCH of asses talking their butts off during the movie.
You need teeth. In this day and age, a lot of people go by the "if I can do it without getting in trouble, I'll do it" moto. Being "nice" is a suggestion observed by a minority.
Its really rough on the side, and isn't quite versatile enough yet, but the idea behind it shows promise... It literally parse your query to figure out what you meant in natural language, translate that in something more usuable by a computer, then use a logical bank of keyword to understand the full meaning of your request, then give you exactly the answer you want.
So you can type "How old is XYZ", and it will tell you something like "I understand your query as asking what is the length of time that has passed since the date of birth of XYZ", then give you the exact answer, along with its primary sources.
Its pretty cool, honestly (right now it doesn't understand enough query variations though. Its getting there).
Admitedly, there are quite a few relatively large, mature software companies who do that stuff. Maybe not to that level, but still. If you have a revolutionary idea, have big customers, yet your app isn't so tough to maintain (relatively speaking), money can flow quite nicely, and as long as you're not publicly traded, you can burn the extra cash if you want. Its still an investment, since it helps retain employees, which is an extremely severe problem these days, with the IT job market starved for -qualified- people (I stress the word qualified).
Oh, and while not naming em, let just say I have a screenshot from long ago that I took from a trace route to Google that I did, and all of the routers that my ISP owned on the way had been renamed to something like "xyz-cannot-secure-their-routers.xyz.com" and such things. Nuff said:)
As far as I can tell, and from the information I gather on the patch, and the tests I ran... the losers DID patch the darn thing, but they stuck their DNS servers behind a firewall that blocks most ports (probably a 2 headed department, where the people in charge of firewall and the ones in charge of DNS arent the same and dont talk much), so while the ports are randomized, there's only a couple that can go through, so it kills the point.
I just switched to it right now because my ISP -still- didnt do anything about it. Its pretty zippy honestly (my ISP's DNS servers were actually the bottleneck of my connection). I'm happy.
I agree with you, though a note on your first point: That kind of peer pressure, especially in the professional world, is definately there, as you state it.
I personally don't have a car, or even a license (I live in an area where its not needed if you're not too lazy, and I don't have kids that could MAKE it needed... I'll get the license when I get around to it, but for now it force me to do things the hard way... and before someone wonders, I'm almost 30).
I get it all the time. I'm a consultant (taking medium terms, so its just like normal jobs, except I switch every year or so), and people who hire me conveniently "forget" to ask if I have a car or even can drive, since it is so "expected" in my area (where my girlfriend works, literally 40% of the company, several hundred people, are driver's license-less, so it really depends on where you live). So sometimes 3 months in a contract, someone asks me to go buy something for the office 40 miles away or to go on a client's site (which was never talked about in the contract). They usually totally freak out and throw a huge fit about it.
On one of my last permanent job, same deal happened... my boss -never- asked if I could drive (and I was quite young at the time too, so it wasn't even a given that I did have a license, and especially not a car), so he kept pushing me to get one. I eventually looked for another job too (with a 120% salary increase, so I'm not complaining).
Now with the price of gas (and I'm Canadian, so its a lot worse than in the US... something like 5$ a gallon if I can convert liters to US gallons correctly), there's no way in hell I'm driving to work (which in peek hour is suicide anyway... Subway all the way, dodge the traffic).
Meh, allergies to pollens (not sure about dust) are something only masochists suffer with in the long term. Desensitization treatments are cheap as hell (especially when compared with mainstream allergy meds), and work amazingly well.
Pretty much what the title says. Leave the car at home if you can. If you take public transportation, walking to the bus stop (rushing so you don't miss it =P), running down the stairs of the subway station (not using those fancy high tech automated ones!/cough), and so on, the pounds go away quite fast.
That is if you live somewhere where its possible. I've melted a lot doing that.
Point 2 stands, though it came -after- the big come back of the PSP (plus its not like the DS Lite... if you look at the demos in stores, the 2 PSPs look the same from a couple of feets away unless you look carefuly =).
Mind you, I do have a PSP2000, mostly because component support kicks ass, so it still helped at least move one unit.
The other 2 are -results- of what I was talking about:) first party aside, the good games came -after- (MUCH after, too) the DS got piracy-pwned.
Its already too late. At this point, the PSP has it -better- than the DS... There -is- a reason why the PSP made a "come back". It was originally the one of the two that was pirate-land... but now that the two are (and the DS doesn't even require custom firmware), PSP looks better from a publisher's point of view than it did originally...
You're right though. I'm sure console makers would like nothing more than to give us a cool SDK and tools... it would raise the value of the machine enough to sell it at a profit earlier on (I'm guessing the DS always was, but I doubt the PSP did). But they can't: the FIRST freagin application that -always- comes out on these things is Emulator ABCD for console XYZ.
If all you had to do was keep a constant opinion, what would be the freagin point of posting at all? Bunch of zombies that all say the same thing, oh yeah, very constructive (though its ALMOST what it is anyhow).
Whats important is how constructive what you say is and if it adds value to the discussion (and yes, being funny does add value).
The system is broken, but not as much as one would think... Most the moderations I get on pro-Windows post get modded up (and those that get modded down, half of the time its because I was not constructive and only ranting), on such an anti-MS web site... so its not completly hopeless.
Mass Market doesn't mean they're no luxury. You don't need it to live (or even be comfy), you don't need it to find a job or do a job, you don't need it to take care of your kids or even stay in touch with the world (which a cheap TV kind of helps a lot with), you don't need it to go fetch food, etc (though in some areas a car is seriously not needed and IS a luxury, its more the exception than the norm).
If you have a 52" HDTV, you probably don't fit the profile of the people these guys are trying to delay:) Maybe with 1/5th of your disposable income....
They seriously didn't... the Vista issues are a self fullfilling prophesy... A lot of people in the tech circles want MS to die... they haven't had a new OS to bash (like they do at -every- new Windows launch... gto back in the slashdot archive for XP's launch, it was very similar, if not as bad) in a long time (since Vista took so long to release), and they were ready for it.
Vista had launch issues, mainly because of Nvidia and Creative drivers, which got blown out of proportions, and it caused a chain reaction.
I work for a company that has a fairly large IT department. Every few days, I overhear people talking about how they got a new computer, and got XP (its relatively easy to get for us because employees have access to our supliers via contract deals, so they save money and stuff) because they hate Vista and its slow and it crash a lot...
When asked about how they tried it, they usually say "Oh, I didn't, but I asked XYZ's option, and thats what he said, and I trust him!" (XYZ is our main sysadmin and network architect, and has about 20 years in the field, so people trust him blindly).
Thing is, I sit near XYZ (keeping the name out in case he reads Slashdot =P), and 2 weeks ago I overheard him talking with another sysadmin about Vista. "Oh, you use Vista? You're a sick man! Its so slow and crash so much! I'm not even going to TRY it until Service Pack 2. What? No, I didn't dare try it yet, way too many problems!!).
So you have a couple douzen people from the IT department who went on with the opinion of someone who never tried it... Those people probably have a lot of friends from non-IT fields (our other employees, among others...and we have a lot), and they'll tell each other that... its Viral.
Add the occasional person who DID have -real- issues with Vista (most of which are anti-virus, poor OEM image, or creative sound cards related), and you have the worse case of Viral Anti-Marketing in the freagin history of software.
Their server OSs are always better than the client machines, because they come out later. the difference between WinServer 2003 and Xp is the same as between Win Server 2008 and Vista. Its huge, and the server version is much, much better, even as a client OS (though it eats a bit more RAM)
Keep in mind that this is a machine from a major OEM that came preloaded with signed Vista drivers. I can only imagine what my experience would have been had I installed Vista on an older machine without the proper hardware and drivers.
It would have been a -lot- better, plain and simple. I had Vista installed on douzens and hundreds of computers (the last company I worked for used Vista across the board). Zero problems, zero crash, no problems, ever (all of them installed on our own or via images we made ourselves)
Then I buy 2 computers from Dell. The desktop crash. The control panel doesn't show any icons. I get random error popup messages all over (thats out of the box! did they even -test- their fucking image?), the machine is dog slow, even though it has 3 times better hardware than my work computers, etc.
Turns out many of the drivers were -not- Vista certified, and had -documented- issues with Vista (the documentation stating it shouldn't be installed on Vista dated from MONTHS before the drivers were installed), had a version of Nero installed with -known- Vista compatibility issues (it was -several- versions behind) which caused 80% of my crashes (uncompatible codecs), and some of the bloatware was also not Vista compatible in the installed version.
Updated all my drivers (Vista certified versions had been out for months, wtf Dell?), upgraded Nero, uninstalled the bloatware garbage.
Now everything was fine. Still, never had any issue on computers that I built myself, or the business machines we installed on our own, and they had old (often incompatible!!) hardware. Yet it worked better than these 2 stupid Dell machines with Vista pre-installed.
I did a quick survey with people around me who got OEM installed Vista, and helped them fix issues they had... the above seems to be the norm more than the exception, and HP is worse than Dell at it. I seriously can't beleive they even try and boot up their Vista machines... there's so many issues with their default installs, its mind boggling.
I generally like Vista. Its flawed though and i hope that Microsoft will fix the silly memory management which just gobbles of all of your ram and never releases it to applications (they say it does... but it does not, on my computer, even though it does on hundreds of others)
I can't tell about Asia, but I want to see your source numbers about Canada. Even in techy circles I don't know all that many people who build computers. If you add businesses in there, the percentage must be seriously insignificant.
My experience is a bit different. The relation between being technologically inclined and piracy is more of a wave...
-Clueless people don't even know that a CD can be ripped, so they don't pirate. (thats like, let say, my grandparents)
-Those who know JUST a little more than that, because their nephew or whatever showed em, have almost exclusively pirated content. They know how to pirate, yet don't even KNOW that there -is- intellectual property laws. (My inlaws are like that. They have hundreds of pirated movies and CDs. They think DRM and whatsnot is a non-deliberate problem, that if movie producers COULD make DVDs copiable more easily, they would)
-Then you have people from the above category who just learned that it was against some laws, and they're freaked out, so they don't copy -anything- because they beleive it is possible to get caught and they'll go to federal pound in the ass prison.
-Then the script kiddies/newbie techies/students who learned about Torrent and understand enough to know that they most likely will never get caught. Pirate like nuts, but are still careful (they won't mass distribute, because they know enough to understand their school may turn them over or something).
-Then more senior techs who understand that IP law is the only reason they ARE being paid at all. (Even the GPL comes from IP... Redhat and stuff are pretty swift to defend theirs, as much as they embrace open source).
And it continues like that back and forth, and there's everything in between those rough categories. (these are just examples and shouldn't be taken too literally).
Slashdot Mirror
And in theaters that don't enforce the "turn off your cell phone" thing by kicking people who abuse theirs too much, there's always a BUNCH of asses talking their butts off during the movie.
You need teeth. In this day and age, a lot of people go by the "if I can do it without getting in trouble, I'll do it" moto. Being "nice" is a suggestion observed by a minority.
http://www.trueknowledge.com/
Its really rough on the side, and isn't quite versatile enough yet, but the idea behind it shows promise... It literally parse your query to figure out what you meant in natural language, translate that in something more usuable by a computer, then use a logical bank of keyword to understand the full meaning of your request, then give you exactly the answer you want.
So you can type "How old is XYZ", and it will tell you something like "I understand your query as asking what is the length of time that has passed since the date of birth of XYZ", then give you the exact answer, along with its primary sources.
Its pretty cool, honestly (right now it doesn't understand enough query variations though. Its getting there).
Admitedly, there are quite a few relatively large, mature software companies who do that stuff. Maybe not to that level, but still. If you have a revolutionary idea, have big customers, yet your app isn't so tough to maintain (relatively speaking), money can flow quite nicely, and as long as you're not publicly traded, you can burn the extra cash if you want. Its still an investment, since it helps retain employees, which is an extremely severe problem these days, with the IT job market starved for -qualified- people (I stress the word qualified).
Oh, and while not naming em, let just say I have a screenshot from long ago that I took from a trace route to Google that I did, and all of the routers that my ISP owned on the way had been renamed to something like "xyz-cannot-secure-their-routers.xyz.com" and such things. Nuff said :)
As far as I can tell, and from the information I gather on the patch, and the tests I ran... the losers DID patch the darn thing, but they stuck their DNS servers behind a firewall that blocks most ports (probably a 2 headed department, where the people in charge of firewall and the ones in charge of DNS arent the same and dont talk much), so while the ports are randomized, there's only a couple that can go through, so it kills the point.
I just switched to it right now because my ISP -still- didnt do anything about it. Its pretty zippy honestly (my ISP's DNS servers were actually the bottleneck of my connection). I'm happy.
I agree with you, though a note on your first point: That kind of peer pressure, especially in the professional world, is definately there, as you state it.
I personally don't have a car, or even a license (I live in an area where its not needed if you're not too lazy, and I don't have kids that could MAKE it needed... I'll get the license when I get around to it, but for now it force me to do things the hard way... and before someone wonders, I'm almost 30).
I get it all the time. I'm a consultant (taking medium terms, so its just like normal jobs, except I switch every year or so), and people who hire me conveniently "forget" to ask if I have a car or even can drive, since it is so "expected" in my area (where my girlfriend works, literally 40% of the company, several hundred people, are driver's license-less, so it really depends on where you live). So sometimes 3 months in a contract, someone asks me to go buy something for the office 40 miles away or to go on a client's site (which was never talked about in the contract). They usually totally freak out and throw a huge fit about it.
On one of my last permanent job, same deal happened... my boss -never- asked if I could drive (and I was quite young at the time too, so it wasn't even a given that I did have a license, and especially not a car), so he kept pushing me to get one. I eventually looked for another job too (with a 120% salary increase, so I'm not complaining).
Now with the price of gas (and I'm Canadian, so its a lot worse than in the US... something like 5$ a gallon if I can convert liters to US gallons correctly), there's no way in hell I'm driving to work (which in peek hour is suicide anyway... Subway all the way, dodge the traffic).
Meh, allergies to pollens (not sure about dust) are something only masochists suffer with in the long term. Desensitization treatments are cheap as hell (especially when compared with mainstream allergy meds), and work amazingly well.
Pretty much what the title says. Leave the car at home if you can. If you take public transportation, walking to the bus stop (rushing so you don't miss it =P), running down the stairs of the subway station (not using those fancy high tech automated ones! /cough), and so on, the pounds go away quite fast.
That is if you live somewhere where its possible. I've melted a lot doing that.
Point 2 stands, though it came -after- the big come back of the PSP (plus its not like the DS Lite... if you look at the demos in stores, the 2 PSPs look the same from a couple of feets away unless you look carefuly =).
Mind you, I do have a PSP2000, mostly because component support kicks ass, so it still helped at least move one unit.
The other 2 are -results- of what I was talking about :) first party aside, the good games came -after- (MUCH after, too) the DS got piracy-pwned.
Its already too late. At this point, the PSP has it -better- than the DS... There -is- a reason why the PSP made a "come back". It was originally the one of the two that was pirate-land... but now that the two are (and the DS doesn't even require custom firmware), PSP looks better from a publisher's point of view than it did originally...
You're right though. I'm sure console makers would like nothing more than to give us a cool SDK and tools... it would raise the value of the machine enough to sell it at a profit earlier on (I'm guessing the DS always was, but I doubt the PSP did). But they can't: the FIRST freagin application that -always- comes out on these things is Emulator ABCD for console XYZ.
Hehe, i was reading the beggining of your post, and I was like "There there, another one who's going to justify pir....what? WOW!".
My hat off to you for finding better solutions to your software cost issues than just "making" it free.
You sir, just won at the internet
If all you had to do was keep a constant opinion, what would be the freagin point of posting at all? Bunch of zombies that all say the same thing, oh yeah, very constructive (though its ALMOST what it is anyhow).
Whats important is how constructive what you say is and if it adds value to the discussion (and yes, being funny does add value).
The system is broken, but not as much as one would think... Most the moderations I get on pro-Windows post get modded up (and those that get modded down, half of the time its because I was not constructive and only ranting), on such an anti-MS web site... so its not completly hopeless.
Mass Market doesn't mean they're no luxury. You don't need it to live (or even be comfy), you don't need it to find a job or do a job, you don't need it to take care of your kids or even stay in touch with the world (which a cheap TV kind of helps a lot with), you don't need it to go fetch food, etc (though in some areas a car is seriously not needed and IS a luxury, its more the exception than the norm).
Thus, its a luxury :) -Especially- a large one.
Its still a luxury. You don't need it and a 15 inch TV will let you know if school is canceled for your kids just fine.
Personally though, I stuck my luxury at 32 inch HDTVs and just put the TV a bit closer :)
If you have a 52" HDTV, you probably don't fit the profile of the people these guys are trying to delay :) Maybe with 1/5th of your disposable income....
They seriously didn't... the Vista issues are a self fullfilling prophesy... A lot of people in the tech circles want MS to die... they haven't had a new OS to bash (like they do at -every- new Windows launch... gto back in the slashdot archive for XP's launch, it was very similar, if not as bad) in a long time (since Vista took so long to release), and they were ready for it.
Vista had launch issues, mainly because of Nvidia and Creative drivers, which got blown out of proportions, and it caused a chain reaction.
I work for a company that has a fairly large IT department. Every few days, I overhear people talking about how they got a new computer, and got XP (its relatively easy to get for us because employees have access to our supliers via contract deals, so they save money and stuff) because they hate Vista and its slow and it crash a lot...
When asked about how they tried it, they usually say "Oh, I didn't, but I asked XYZ's option, and thats what he said, and I trust him!" (XYZ is our main sysadmin and network architect, and has about 20 years in the field, so people trust him blindly).
Thing is, I sit near XYZ (keeping the name out in case he reads Slashdot =P), and 2 weeks ago I overheard him talking with another sysadmin about Vista. "Oh, you use Vista? You're a sick man! Its so slow and crash so much! I'm not even going to TRY it until Service Pack 2. What? No, I didn't dare try it yet, way too many problems!!).
So you have a couple douzen people from the IT department who went on with the opinion of someone who never tried it... Those people probably have a lot of friends from non-IT fields (our other employees, among others...and we have a lot), and they'll tell each other that... its Viral.
Add the occasional person who DID have -real- issues with Vista (most of which are anti-virus, poor OEM image, or creative sound cards related), and you have the worse case of Viral Anti-Marketing in the freagin history of software.
Their server OSs are always better than the client machines, because they come out later. the difference between WinServer 2003 and Xp is the same as between Win Server 2008 and Vista. Its huge, and the server version is much, much better, even as a client OS (though it eats a bit more RAM)
It would have been a -lot- better, plain and simple. I had Vista installed on douzens and hundreds of computers (the last company I worked for used Vista across the board). Zero problems, zero crash, no problems, ever (all of them installed on our own or via images we made ourselves)
Then I buy 2 computers from Dell. The desktop crash. The control panel doesn't show any icons. I get random error popup messages all over (thats out of the box! did they even -test- their fucking image?), the machine is dog slow, even though it has 3 times better hardware than my work computers, etc.
Turns out many of the drivers were -not- Vista certified, and had -documented- issues with Vista (the documentation stating it shouldn't be installed on Vista dated from MONTHS before the drivers were installed), had a version of Nero installed with -known- Vista compatibility issues (it was -several- versions behind) which caused 80% of my crashes (uncompatible codecs), and some of the bloatware was also not Vista compatible in the installed version.
Updated all my drivers (Vista certified versions had been out for months, wtf Dell?), upgraded Nero, uninstalled the bloatware garbage.
Now everything was fine. Still, never had any issue on computers that I built myself, or the business machines we installed on our own, and they had old (often incompatible!!) hardware. Yet it worked better than these 2 stupid Dell machines with Vista pre-installed.
I did a quick survey with people around me who got OEM installed Vista, and helped them fix issues they had... the above seems to be the norm more than the exception, and HP is worse than Dell at it. I seriously can't beleive they even try and boot up their Vista machines... there's so many issues with their default installs, its mind boggling.
Fixed, with added emphasis :)
Well, Windows 7 looks exactly like Vista, UI wise... Win98 and 2k looked a lot alike too. So it would make sense.
I can't tell about Asia, but I want to see your source numbers about Canada. Even in techy circles I don't know all that many people who build computers. If you add businesses in there, the percentage must be seriously insignificant.
Step 1: get OneNote (part of Office 2007... in office 2003 it was a stand alone product and it sucked anyway)
Step 2: Print to OneNote (think of it as a PDF printer that lets you organize stuff).
Problem Solved.
My experience is a bit different. The relation between being technologically inclined and piracy is more of a wave...
-Clueless people don't even know that a CD can be ripped, so they don't pirate. (thats like, let say, my grandparents)
-Those who know JUST a little more than that, because their nephew or whatever showed em, have almost exclusively pirated content. They know how to pirate, yet don't even KNOW that there -is- intellectual property laws. (My inlaws are like that. They have hundreds of pirated movies and CDs. They think DRM and whatsnot is a non-deliberate problem, that if movie producers COULD make DVDs copiable more easily, they would)
-Then you have people from the above category who just learned that it was against some laws, and they're freaked out, so they don't copy -anything- because they beleive it is possible to get caught and they'll go to federal pound in the ass prison.
-Then the script kiddies/newbie techies/students who learned about Torrent and understand enough to know that they most likely will never get caught. Pirate like nuts, but are still careful (they won't mass distribute, because they know enough to understand their school may turn them over or something).
-Then more senior techs who understand that IP law is the only reason they ARE being paid at all. (Even the GPL comes from IP... Redhat and stuff are pretty swift to defend theirs, as much as they embrace open source).
And it continues like that back and forth, and there's everything in between those rough categories. (these are just examples and shouldn't be taken too literally).