Bitch about Florida all you want, but at least we are one of the few states without any state income tax (a direct result of the nicer weather, i.e. tourism).
This isn't a new concept by any means. Back in the summer of 2001 I had an internship with Whirlpool working on their wired home project. We had a table PC with a web based interface that would allow us to remotely control the fridge, washer/dryer, oven, microwave, etc. It had a "cool" factor to it, but I don't think it ever made it out of R&D just because it wasn't practical at the time.
The best implication I saw was being able to use it in conjunction with an oven that could refrigerate as well as cook, that way you could put whatever in it before you left for work, and then start it remotely from work so it'd be ready when you arrived home.
A strategy that revolved around marketing smoke and mirrors? Slashing research budgets and firing the actual brainpower?
And people were happy when Carly left? Why, that just blows my mind. Engineering types always love it when a smooth talking well dressed MBA type comes into the lab and begins talking about direction and uses words like "edgy" and "synergy". How in the world could they hate Carly?m
Sarcasm aside, I gotta get me a job where I can royally fuck up a company and be given a severance package that includes more money than I could ever hope to spend in a lifetime.
I think this is a very cool project, but somehow I don't think it'll be out there very long. I'm sure the credit card companies, or some other large corporation will be doing the DMCA smackdown dance soon enough, claiming this software could only be used for criminal purposes and serves no academic purpose.
Now the actual process itself isn't horrible, it actually probably will end up giving you a better end product if you are attempting to keep a large development team organized and productive...the only problem is:
Rational Tools Suck. Badly.
The entire Rational Toolset is bloated, unintuitive, and you will probably spend more time in beasts such as Requisite Pro and Clear Quest than you do actually programming or fixing bugs.
Yes, specs are important, bug tracking is important, design and modeling are important...the only problem is the Rational Tools make these tasks near impossible.
Tivo + Airport Express = Sweet.
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If Apple were to do this and buy Tivo, all they'd have to do is integrate the airport express hardware into a tivo and you'd have a very nice way to wireless stream audio and video to your tv from your computer as well as still having a great DVR. I'd also like to see what Apple could do to possible improve the Tivo UI.
Why would this work for Apple? Yes, Tivo is getting hammered by the big cable companies, but Apple has never needed market share to succeed, if they make a nice box to fix in the home threatre cabinet then the Apple hoardes will follow.
Currently in Tallahassee you can get free wireless internet both downtown and at the airport. It's called Canopy, and it basically requires you to access a website first and then it connects you. It's quite convienent in the airport while you're waiting for a plane, I haven't had a chance to use it much downtown yet.
Also, just for reference: Comcast highspeed internet without cable, $55/month. Gotta love monopolies fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their huge profits.
I shop at Publix, I fairly major chain in Florida, and they don't have any loyalty card system. They post discounts on certain items very clearly, and if you buy it, you get the discount. No membership card is needed, ever. Now I'm sure they could track your purchases if you use the same credit card over and over, but regardless it was nice to find a store that did this.
The sad thing is, I'm been a faithful mac user (1ghz G4 iBook) for about a year now, and absolutely love it. Yet what do I use for my email program? Entourage. I'd be willing say that Mac Office 2004 is a necessity ($150 student edition, or get a friend at college to get it for $10). I have yet to try Pages or Keynote, but Appleworks just isn't that good, and there really aren't any other alternatives on Mac. And quite frankly, Entourage does a much better job as an all-in-one PIM than the combination of iCal, Mail, and Address Book. And the best thing is, I think mac users actually get the better end of the deal, as most people I show office 2004 to seem to prefer it to Windows Office 2003.
Any job will teach you at least some valuable skills, programming or not...at the very least any job where you have coworkers will teach how to exist comfortably in an environment where you are dependant on other people to get things done.
Now, as for the whole beach/camp vs. intern argument...I say do both. The internship I had with Whirlpool in St. Joe, MI (right on Lake Michigan) was great. Get off work every day at 4:30, and have 5 hours of free time to go to beach and enjoy the sand and the weather. I spent more time outside in those 3 months than I did in the whole year previously.
So go look for those internships in California, Florida, or other states with large bodies of water nearby.
Mac hardware is what brought me to OS X, I love my 12" iBook, and it just works so much better than my brick of an XP laptop ever did. Battery life and stability overall are just better. But Mac OS X 10.3 has just been one huge surprise. I knew it was good, but I never realized how well it caters to both beginnings and power users. It keeps things simple enough to not have to worry about constant maintenance and tweaking, but allows people to peek under the hood if they so desire.
I also love the fact that just like most llinux distros, mac comes ready for developers. I have a native bash terminal, java, gcc, and xcode ready to go. I can't say that much windows.
Also, other huge surprise, there is a -ton- of freeware/shareware available for os x, and i find most of it to be of high quality (i.e. adium, transmit, subethaedit, colloquy, etc, etc).
Now that I'm on a laptop with OS X, I really don't see myself switching back anytime soon, even with centrino options maturing somewhat.
I agree with some of the other posts on the main thread, I don't so much care about people trying to see what I'm doing, I have SSH, VPNs, PGP, and other mechanisms that can do that for me when I really need to send passwords and other sensitive information over the internet. My main insentive for securing my wireless AP is so that people can't use my connection for illegal purposes.
It's a liability issues, and it doesn't seem like a big deal until one day you have to find a way to prove to the Feds and your ISP that it wasn't you sending kiddie porn to some offshore server in Eastern Europe. If your name is on the bill for that connection, I'm sure you signed a contract somewhere that states you are responsible for not allowing illegal activity on your connection.
As a big fan of the St. Louis Science Center, I don't what's wrong with simplifying science for exhibits, especially when they're aimed at kids. I hear alot on Slashdot how America is being dumbed down and losing it's focus on science and industry. If science museums, while maybe slightly flawed, keep kids interested in science and help them gravitate towards science and engineering, what's the problem?
Yeah, it'll be alot slower, but I guess the only surefire way around this is to start burning entire MP3 librarys to CDs, iPods, USB harddrives... whatever, and swapping music the old fashioned way.
Usability studies are great, and will definately help Linux down the road, but can we agreed on some general standards first? RPMs, or source compliation, or tgz packages? Swaret, Apt, Portage? Gnome or KDE?
These things make Linux awesome and infuriating at the same time. The choice is awesome, because if you don't like one thing, then something else is probably available that does it differently. But then it comes down to hoping your distro has packages for the software you want, or you get to be brave enough to compile everything from source and hope you don't get stuck in dependancy limbo.
Maybe a large distro collalition is needed where the big guys all agreed to at least use a standard frontend? That way they can all still use different backends, but people would be able to sit down at a different distro and easy jump right in. How to do this? Heh, right. If I knew that answer I'd be rich, not posting on Slashdot.
I downloaded the 3 ISOs for Mandrake 10 Community when it came out, and kept up with the updates throughout the next few weeks. I had it installed on an Asus L3C laptop that dual booted between XP and Linux. Here's my experiences:
1. Install: rocks. Take note Linux Distros, this is how things should happen, enough configuration available, but simple enough to let it go and go watch Family Guy instead.
2. Boot: One major issue, every time I booted it would alternate between thinking my Orinoco gold pcmcia wireless card would be not present, or thing a new one had been put in and try to reinstall it, this was a real pain the in ass, and was the major reason Mandrake 10 got booted for a second time (9.2 is no longer on my good list either) from this laptop. Maybe this distro is just better for desktops.
3. Usage: KDE 3.2 is nice, I like it, but quite frankly, I think I'm still a Gnome person. Also, if all the drak tools worked correctly all the time, I wouldn't have a problem with Mandrake having their config files all over the place, but tweaking config files by hand just isn't a good thing to do with this distro, and therefore some things just don't work properly (drakconnect!).
Overall, Mandrake is a nice distro, and is great for people new to Linux, but for more intermediate and advanced users, there's better things out there. Quite frankly, my laptop runs really really well using Slackware 9.1, Kernel 2.6.5, Dropline Gnome 2.6, and Swaret (using slackware-current) to automate the upgrade process. Yes, you have to get your hands dirty with Slackware sometimes, but at least things work like they're susposed to, and things that aren't there can be easily installed, and personalized shell/perl scripts are finally reality for those who want full control of their machine.
Don't misunderstand me, I think Mandrake has a ton of potential and I really want to see them succeed, it just still needs more polish. But compared to Fedora and SUSE, I think Mandrake is the best jumping in point for users who have never touched Linux before.
Google + open protocols = awesome.
on
Google's Next Steps
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Google mail would be nice, especially if it had quality POP3/IMAP access that only cost $5-10/month. But that's nothing terribly special, there are some good services out there that already do that. Now if they made Google chat available, and based made it a Jabber based service and just put the Google name it on, that'd be awesome. It'd have the name recognition to get popular, and programs like gaim wouldn't have to constantly fight for access like they do with the AIM, Yahoo, and MSN protocols.
For those of you interested, CERIAS is actually a pretty impressive research group. One of the PhD students is teaching our cs426 class right now, and it's one of the few CS classes I've taken where I'm actually learning practical knowledge about computer security.
I have to agree with the above statements, this is a surprisingly well written article that assumes the person has never seen Linux before. Linux users tend to forget that even burning ISO images can be a bit daunting when you're first starting out.
Also, yes, even as a slackware user, I wouldn't wish Slackware, Debian, Gentoo or the other niche distros (Vector, Arch, etc, etc) upon hapless newbies. Let them get their feet wet with Mandrake/SUSE/Fedora, and then give the more flexible stripped down distros a shot.
I also like the step by step instructions for backing up user data, it's guides like this that people like my Mom need (who needs nothing more than Thunderbird but assumes she can't live without Outlook).
Now what I'd really like to see is a distribution called BeginnerLinux or something along those lines, maybe based off of one of the big distros, that works as a LiveCD and is specifically tailored to giving the new user a comprehensive walkthrough of Linux, from apps to everything under the hood, and then shows them how to move to a full blown distro.
Oh, and as a sidenote, I showed my parents Slax 4.0.1, and let them play around with it for a bit on my laptop, and they were hooked...not ready to switch, but they'll finally at least admit that Linux isn't some scary uber-super-user computer nerd cloud of mystery that normal surburban parents shouldn't get within 10ft of.
Let's see, a simple distribution that takes the most popular software and gives you that as a single choice. So instead of having Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, and such that I don't use, I have Firefox waiting for me. Same goes for Thunderbird.
Getting rid of the bloat of Gnome and KDE in favor of XFce4...this is bad how? XFc3 + gDesklets makes for a very nice desktop.
So let's review here: 1 CD? check. Basic software package? check. Use yum to add whatever else I need? check.
Once Cobind gets a few more version updates under it's belt, I see it being very popular to those of us that prefer simplicity to the 4 CD monstrousity that is Fedora Core.
I was wondering how Apple gets reprimanded for these claims, yet MS goes unheeded with all of its comparative TCO mumbo jumbo, and the fact that "exagerated advertising" is, well, normal. My only guess is that Apple was just too straightforward with its claims (gee, what a novel concept!), and didn't throw in enough technical buzzwords and marketing FUD to confuse everybody.
Apple's current stance: Our G5's are damn fast, faster than Wintel stuff, and we'll stand by that claim. Average Consumer: Really? Wow. Dell: Crap.
Apple's new stance: Our G5's have multi-threaded double buffered optimized 256 bit parallel pipelined 64 bit x-streaming architecture! Average consumer: Dell: much better.
While yes it can be said that the PC and Console game markets are directly competing, the types of games they excel at are worlds apart. Ever try playing Vice City on a PC, it's a completely different experience from the PS2 due to the excellent aiming but horrible driving. Difficult sniping missions become simple with a mouse, and easy driving missions become difficult with a keyboard.
PCs will most likely continue to dominate the online arena, as well as the cutting edge in terms of graphics. Consoles still excel at what they've always excelled in: sports games, multiplayer on a local scale, and ease of use.
It's much easier for parents to buy their children a $100 Gamecube where every game is guareenteed to work without compatibility hassles, where as enthusiasts have no problem shelling out $400 on a video card and dealing with driver issues for when Half-Life 2 comes outs.
There just completely different worlds, quite frankly, I don't want a console that's a media center, I want a console that just plays games.
If you simplify the situation that much, sure, it comes across as a valid point, but you're ignoring so many other factors. Most the technology companies (game developers included) are located in metropolitan areas, which have a relatively high cost of living compared to less densely populated areas of the US, and countries such as Russia, India, China, etc, etc.
It costs a fair amount of money to live somewhere like New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston. When you factor in car insurance, rent/mortage, food, utilities, and everything else that goes along with it, well, it adds up quickly.
You also have to factor in all the added costs from the management side that it takes to employ somebody in the US. Alot of those taxes and benefits just don't exist in countries that are big outsourcing destinations.
So yes, it is perfectly legitimate for somebody to outsource work, but don't say it's because the salary of local workers are bloated.
And yes, I think game developers should get paid well, because they have special skill sets that take a long time to develop and it is not something everybody can do. So I don't think lowering their wages to that of a burger flipper at McDonald's is the answer to compete with the outsourcing.
If it's anything the US has west of the Rockies, it's large empty tracks of nothing but dirt and sand. I'm sure this project in the UK will be cool and all, but with all those trees and hills and cities getting the way, well, it just doesn't do much for me. Now if they set something like this up in the Great Basin Desert (190,000 sq mi) and you could actually stand at one planet and use high powered binoculars to see the next closet planet...it'd probably give somebody a much better idea of how big the solar system really is.
Tivo still has the best UI
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
The author's argument would be akin to saying that the iPod is going to die because of increased competition. I like the Tivo for the same reason I like the iPod, ease of use and a clean user interface. Why hasn't the iPod or the Tivo drastically dropped in price even with increasing competition? Easy, there may be more competition, but that doesn't mean the competition is good enough to dethrone the current consumer favorite.
I have digital cable right now, and I hate the UI for the channel guide, so much so that I almost never use it. On the other hand, my Dad has the DirectTV / Tivo combo unit, and the UI makes it really easy to check out whats on, and still watch TV at the same time.
I really have yet to find anything out there that matches the UI of Tivo. The transparent channel guide that shows so much information at once and it's appealing to me that I can still have an idea of what's going on with the current channel I'm watching, and effectively channel surf all 500 channels in a matter of seconds at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitch about Florida all you want, but at least we are one of the few states without any state income tax (a direct result of the nicer weather, i.e. tourism).
This isn't a new concept by any means. Back in the summer of 2001 I had an internship with Whirlpool working on their wired home project. We had a table PC with a web based interface that would allow us to remotely control the fridge, washer/dryer, oven, microwave, etc. It had a "cool" factor to it, but I don't think it ever made it out of R&D just because it wasn't practical at the time.
The best implication I saw was being able to use it in conjunction with an oven that could refrigerate as well as cook, that way you could put whatever in it before you left for work, and then start it remotely from work so it'd be ready when you arrived home.
A strategy that revolved around marketing smoke and mirrors?
Slashing research budgets and firing the actual brainpower?
And people were happy when Carly left? Why, that just blows my mind. Engineering types always love it when a smooth talking well dressed MBA type comes into the lab and begins talking about direction and uses words like "edgy" and "synergy". How in the world could they hate Carly?m
Sarcasm aside, I gotta get me a job where I can royally fuck up a company and be given a severance package that includes more money than I could ever hope to spend in a lifetime.
I think this is a very cool project, but somehow I don't think it'll be out there very long. I'm sure the credit card companies, or some other large corporation will be doing the DMCA smackdown dance soon enough, claiming this software could only be used for criminal purposes and serves no academic purpose.
Now the actual process itself isn't horrible, it actually probably will end up giving you a better end product if you are attempting to keep a large development team organized and productive ...the only problem is:
...the only problem is the Rational Tools make these tasks near impossible.
Rational Tools Suck. Badly.
The entire Rational Toolset is bloated, unintuitive, and you will probably spend more time in beasts such as Requisite Pro and Clear Quest than you do actually programming or fixing bugs.
Yes, specs are important, bug tracking is important, design and modeling are important
If Apple were to do this and buy Tivo, all they'd have to do is integrate the airport express hardware into a tivo and you'd have a very nice way to wireless stream audio and video to your tv from your computer as well as still having a great DVR. I'd also like to see what Apple could do to possible improve the Tivo UI.
Why would this work for Apple? Yes, Tivo is getting hammered by the big cable companies, but Apple has never needed market share to succeed, if they make a nice box to fix in the home threatre cabinet then the Apple hoardes will follow.
Currently in Tallahassee you can get free wireless internet both downtown and at the airport. It's called Canopy, and it basically requires you to access a website first and then it connects you. It's quite convienent in the airport while you're waiting for a plane, I haven't had a chance to use it much downtown yet.
Also, just for reference: Comcast highspeed internet without cable, $55/month. Gotta love monopolies fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their huge profits.
I shop at Publix, I fairly major chain in Florida, and they don't have any loyalty card system. They post discounts on certain items very clearly, and if you buy it, you get the discount. No membership card is needed, ever. Now I'm sure they could track your purchases if you use the same credit card over and over, but regardless it was nice to find a store that did this.
The sad thing is, I'm been a faithful mac user (1ghz G4 iBook) for about a year now, and absolutely love it. Yet what do I use for my email program? Entourage. I'd be willing say that Mac Office 2004 is a necessity ($150 student edition, or get a friend at college to get it for $10). I have yet to try Pages or Keynote, but Appleworks just isn't that good, and there really aren't any other alternatives on Mac. And quite frankly, Entourage does a much better job as an all-in-one PIM than the combination of iCal, Mail, and Address Book. And the best thing is, I think mac users actually get the better end of the deal, as most people I show office 2004 to seem to prefer it to Windows Office 2003.
Any job will teach you at least some valuable skills, programming or not ...at the very least any job where you have coworkers will teach how to exist comfortably in an environment where you are dependant on other people to get things done.
Now, as for the whole beach/camp vs. intern argument ...I say do both. The internship I had with Whirlpool in St. Joe, MI (right on Lake Michigan) was great. Get off work every day at 4:30, and have 5 hours of free time to go to beach and enjoy the sand and the weather. I spent more time outside in those 3 months than I did in the whole year previously.
So go look for those internships in California, Florida, or other states with large bodies of water nearby.
Mac hardware is what brought me to OS X, I love my 12" iBook, and it just works so much better than my brick of an XP laptop ever did. Battery life and stability overall are just better. But Mac OS X 10.3 has just been one huge surprise. I knew it was good, but I never realized how well it caters to both beginnings and power users. It keeps things simple enough to not have to worry about constant maintenance and tweaking, but allows people to peek under the hood if they so desire.
I also love the fact that just like most llinux distros, mac comes ready for developers. I have a native bash terminal, java, gcc, and xcode ready to go. I can't say that much windows.
Also, other huge surprise, there is a -ton- of freeware/shareware available for os x, and i find most of it to be of high quality (i.e. adium, transmit, subethaedit, colloquy, etc, etc).
Now that I'm on a laptop with OS X, I really don't see myself switching back anytime soon, even with centrino options maturing somewhat.
I agree with some of the other posts on the main thread, I don't so much care about people trying to see what I'm doing, I have SSH, VPNs, PGP, and other mechanisms that can do that for me when I really need to send passwords and other sensitive information over the internet. My main insentive for securing my wireless AP is so that people can't use my connection for illegal purposes.
It's a liability issues, and it doesn't seem like a big deal until one day you have to find a way to prove to the Feds and your ISP that it wasn't you sending kiddie porn to some offshore server in Eastern Europe. If your name is on the bill for that connection, I'm sure you signed a contract somewhere that states you are responsible for not allowing illegal activity on your connection.
As a big fan of the St. Louis Science Center, I don't what's wrong with simplifying science for exhibits, especially when they're aimed at kids. I hear alot on Slashdot how America is being dumbed down and losing it's focus on science and industry. If science museums, while maybe slightly flawed, keep kids interested in science and help them gravitate towards science and engineering, what's the problem?
Yeah, it'll be alot slower, but I guess the only surefire way around this is to start burning entire MP3 librarys to CDs, iPods, USB harddrives ... whatever, and swapping music the old fashioned way.
Usability studies are great, and will definately help Linux down the road, but can we agreed on some general standards first? RPMs, or source compliation, or tgz packages? Swaret, Apt, Portage? Gnome or KDE?
These things make Linux awesome and infuriating at the same time. The choice is awesome, because if you don't like one thing, then something else is probably available that does it differently. But then it comes down to hoping your distro has packages for the software you want, or you get to be brave enough to compile everything from source and hope you don't get stuck in dependancy limbo.
Maybe a large distro collalition is needed where the big guys all agreed to at least use a standard frontend? That way they can all still use different backends, but people would be able to sit down at a different distro and easy jump right in. How to do this? Heh, right. If I knew that answer I'd be rich, not posting on Slashdot.
I downloaded the 3 ISOs for Mandrake 10 Community when it came out, and kept up with the updates throughout the next few weeks. I had it installed on an Asus L3C laptop that dual booted between XP and Linux. Here's my experiences:
1. Install: rocks. Take note Linux Distros, this is how things should happen, enough configuration available, but simple enough to let it go and go watch Family Guy instead.
2. Boot: One major issue, every time I booted it would alternate between thinking my Orinoco gold pcmcia wireless card would be not present, or thing a new one had been put in and try to reinstall it, this was a real pain the in ass, and was the major reason Mandrake 10 got booted for a second time (9.2 is no longer on my good list either) from this laptop. Maybe this distro is just better for desktops.
3. Usage: KDE 3.2 is nice, I like it, but quite frankly, I think I'm still a Gnome person. Also, if all the drak tools worked correctly all the time, I wouldn't have a problem with Mandrake having their config files all over the place, but tweaking config files by hand just isn't a good thing to do with this distro, and therefore some things just don't work properly (drakconnect!).
Overall, Mandrake is a nice distro, and is great for people new to Linux, but for more intermediate and advanced users, there's better things out there. Quite frankly, my laptop runs really really well using Slackware 9.1, Kernel 2.6.5, Dropline Gnome 2.6, and Swaret (using slackware-current) to automate the upgrade process. Yes, you have to get your hands dirty with Slackware sometimes, but at least things work like they're susposed to, and things that aren't there can be easily installed, and personalized shell/perl scripts are finally reality for those who want full control of their machine.
Don't misunderstand me, I think Mandrake has a ton of potential and I really want to see them succeed, it just still needs more polish. But compared to Fedora and SUSE, I think Mandrake is the best jumping in point for users who have never touched Linux before.
Google mail would be nice, especially if it had quality POP3/IMAP access that only cost $5-10/month. But that's nothing terribly special, there are some good services out there that already do that. Now if they made Google chat available, and based made it a Jabber based service and just put the Google name it on, that'd be awesome. It'd have the name recognition to get popular, and programs like gaim wouldn't have to constantly fight for access like they do with the AIM, Yahoo, and MSN protocols.
For those of you interested, CERIAS is actually a pretty impressive research group. One of the PhD students is teaching our cs426 class right now, and it's one of the few CS classes I've taken where I'm actually learning practical knowledge about computer security.
Go Boilers!
I have to agree with the above statements, this is a surprisingly well written article that assumes the person has never seen Linux before. Linux users tend to forget that even burning ISO images can be a bit daunting when you're first starting out.
...not ready to switch, but they'll finally at least admit that Linux isn't some scary uber-super-user computer nerd cloud of mystery that normal surburban parents shouldn't get within 10ft of.
Also, yes, even as a slackware user, I wouldn't wish Slackware, Debian, Gentoo or the other niche distros (Vector, Arch, etc, etc) upon hapless newbies. Let them get their feet wet with Mandrake/SUSE/Fedora, and then give the more flexible stripped down distros a shot.
I also like the step by step instructions for backing up user data, it's guides like this that people like my Mom need (who needs nothing more than Thunderbird but assumes she can't live without Outlook).
Now what I'd really like to see is a distribution called BeginnerLinux or something along those lines, maybe based off of one of the big distros, that works as a LiveCD and is specifically tailored to giving the new user a comprehensive walkthrough of Linux, from apps to everything under the hood, and then shows them how to move to a full blown distro.
Oh, and as a sidenote, I showed my parents Slax 4.0.1, and let them play around with it for a bit on my laptop, and they were hooked
Let's see, a simple distribution that takes the most popular software and gives you that as a single choice. So instead of having Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, and such that I don't use, I have Firefox waiting for me. Same goes for Thunderbird.
...this is bad how? XFc3 + gDesklets makes for a very nice desktop.
Getting rid of the bloat of Gnome and KDE in favor of XFce4
So let's review here:
1 CD? check.
Basic software package? check.
Use yum to add whatever else I need? check.
Once Cobind gets a few more version updates under it's belt, I see it being very popular to those of us that prefer simplicity to the 4 CD monstrousity that is Fedora Core.
I was wondering how Apple gets reprimanded for these claims, yet MS goes unheeded with all of its comparative TCO mumbo jumbo, and the fact that "exagerated advertising" is, well, normal. My only guess is that Apple was just too straightforward with its claims (gee, what a novel concept!), and didn't throw in enough technical buzzwords and marketing FUD to confuse everybody.
Apple's current stance: Our G5's are damn fast, faster than Wintel stuff, and we'll stand by that claim.
Average Consumer: Really? Wow.
Dell: Crap.
Apple's new stance: Our G5's have multi-threaded double buffered optimized 256 bit parallel pipelined 64 bit x-streaming architecture!
Average consumer:
Dell: much better.
While yes it can be said that the PC and Console game markets are directly competing, the types of games they excel at are worlds apart. Ever try playing Vice City on a PC, it's a completely different experience from the PS2 due to the excellent aiming but horrible driving. Difficult sniping missions become simple with a mouse, and easy driving missions become difficult with a keyboard.
PCs will most likely continue to dominate the online arena, as well as the cutting edge in terms of graphics. Consoles still excel at what they've always excelled in: sports games, multiplayer on a local scale, and ease of use.
It's much easier for parents to buy their children a $100 Gamecube where every game is guareenteed to work without compatibility hassles, where as enthusiasts have no problem shelling out $400 on a video card and dealing with driver issues for when Half-Life 2 comes outs.
There just completely different worlds, quite frankly, I don't want a console that's a media center, I want a console that just plays games.
If you simplify the situation that much, sure, it comes across as a valid point, but you're ignoring so many other factors. Most the technology companies (game developers included) are located in metropolitan areas, which have a relatively high cost of living compared to less densely populated areas of the US, and countries such as Russia, India, China, etc, etc.
It costs a fair amount of money to live somewhere like New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston. When you factor in car insurance, rent/mortage, food, utilities, and everything else that goes along with it, well, it adds up quickly.
You also have to factor in all the added costs from the management side that it takes to employ somebody in the US. Alot of those taxes and benefits just don't exist in countries that are big outsourcing destinations.
So yes, it is perfectly legitimate for somebody to outsource work, but don't say it's because the salary of local workers are bloated.
And yes, I think game developers should get paid well, because they have special skill sets that take a long time to develop and it is not something everybody can do. So I don't think lowering their wages to that of a burger flipper at McDonald's is the answer to compete with the outsourcing.
If it's anything the US has west of the Rockies, it's large empty tracks of nothing but dirt and sand. I'm sure this project in the UK will be cool and all, but with all those trees and hills and cities getting the way, well, it just doesn't do much for me. Now if they set something like this up in the Great Basin Desert (190,000 sq mi) and you could actually stand at one planet and use high powered binoculars to see the next closet planet ...it'd probably give somebody a much better idea of how big the solar system really is.
The author's argument would be akin to saying that the iPod is going to die because of increased competition. I like the Tivo for the same reason I like the iPod, ease of use and a clean user interface. Why hasn't the iPod or the Tivo drastically dropped in price even with increasing competition? Easy, there may be more competition, but that doesn't mean the competition is good enough to dethrone the current consumer favorite.
I have digital cable right now, and I hate the UI for the channel guide, so much so that I almost never use it. On the other hand, my Dad has the DirectTV / Tivo combo unit, and the UI makes it really easy to check out whats on, and still watch TV at the same time.
I really have yet to find anything out there that matches the UI of Tivo. The transparent channel guide that shows so much information at once and it's appealing to me that I can still have an idea of what's going on with the current channel I'm watching, and effectively channel surf all 500 channels in a matter of seconds at the same time.