It's not against "Halo" persay (sic), it's against "popular things." This is Slashdot, remember... anything that everybody uses/likes (Windows, CDs, movies) is just total crap designed to placate the "sheeple."
Do you think Budweiser is a good beer?
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it isn't crap. For instance, MS-Windows fucking blows chunks, popularity notwithstanding. Most popular movies also suck. Not all, but most. I'm not sure where "CDs" come into it, as I haven't seen much ranting against CDs, unless you are talking about music, in which case, the most popular stuff generally *does* suck.
It doesn't suck because it's popular. It just sucks.
Now.
That said, Halo 3 looks like a decent FPS, with a good story line and decent gameplay. I played it for a couple of hours at a friend's house. (I don't own a 360, mostly because I refuse to support Microsoft in any way, and because I already have a Wii and a PS3.) I don't dislike Halo or Halo 3, though Halo 2 was most disappointing-- basically a retread of Halo, with some on-line play enhancements that made it almost as fun as Unreal Tournament.
But, c'mon. Disliking things just because they're popular? That doesn't happen as much as you seem to think. In general, people on/. dislike things because they suck, like MS-Windows, and popular entertainment.
This is a rhetorical question, right?
on
The 700MHz Question
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· Score: 4, Insightful
With stakes this high, is the playing field fair, and are business needs trumping consumer and technological interests?
No. Yes. In that order.
They playing field is rarely fair when business is concerned. If corporate interest is involved, there is always a corporation able to affect the environment much more than any governmental regulation; and they will always affect the environment in their own favor, whether it is in the best interest of citizens or technology or progress or any other damned thing that doesn't have anything at all to do with "maximizing profits."
This is all stupid talk. Some corporation will end up in control of a public resource. The public will get fucked. That's how it works. That's how it always works.
No, it wasn't Mr. Gates who "Got it." Gates was pushing MSN as an AOL alternative, as a standard closed environment separate from the internet. He was part of the reason Microsoft *didn't* respond to the internet in a timely fashion.
It was new kids coming in to Microsoft from college who "got it." It was the cover articles in Time and Newsweek who "got it." Microsoft only "got it" because they had no other choice. If they had followed Mr. Gates' plan, they would've missed it entirely.
He allowed the police officer to inspect his bags. Then the police officer insisted on seeing his ID; but, because he wasn't driving a vehicle, and since he was cleared of the accusation by the police officer himself, he was under no obligation to provide his ID.
It was the principle of the thing, and I fully understand and agree with him.
Can't do that. Any new game engine must look to the next two or three years, and Microsoft is not going to let Vista fail. This time next year, Vista will have 25% of the market. In another year, it'll have 75%. Just like XP did, and MS-Win2k before that.
Microsoft is not going to support ODF directly. They are paying other people to write ODF converters. This way, they save face. Microsoft wins.
Also, when the other filters imperfectly translate to/from OOXML, they can blame the makers of the ODF filters, rather than trying to come up with some lame half-assed excuse for imperfect document translation. And so people upgrade to the new MS-Office ("Now supports international standards!"), and they see that ODF documents "suck."
360 doesn't even have the HD-DVD built in, it's an "add-on".
This, to me, is even a bigger issue than the difference in processing power. The 360 has a slightly better GPU, which helps, but the PS3 has much more raw available power. (Emphasis on "raw.")
Really, the big deal *is* the BluRay, and not for movies. The fact that Sony included both a hard drive and a BluRay player means the game developer can assume certain things-- a fast hard-drive cache and 50GB of data storage topping the list.
I believe Microsoft was foolish to skip the HD storage medium for their HD-capable game machine. Games are getting *way* above 8GB these days.
The 360 fanbois are counting Sony out on this one. I don't think they realize Sony has the edge here as games grow to take advantage of the new system capabilities. What you see on the 360 today is about what you'll see on the 360 in four years. The PS3 is still in the Rayman stages.
But, to each his own. I'm very pleased with my PS3. Others will be pleased with their 360s. And we all win.
Take a NeXT computer. Use it for a while. (Never mind how slow it is. You're working with 15-year-old hardware.)
Then use whatever version of MS-Windows you like. Find one that matches the ease-of-use, flexibility, and just niceness of the NeXT. Subtract the difference in age between the two operating systems.
That'll give you a good idea of how far Microsoft has set us back.
In my estimation, it's about 17 years and counting.
That isn't quite how they did it. Both Borland (compilers, Quattro Pro, Paradox, etc) sold cheap software that was superior to Microsoft's equivelents. WordPerfect wasn't terribly expensive, and they dropped their prices to match Microsoft's prices; and WordPerfect was far superior to MS-Word. (WordPerfect for the NeXT was perhaps the best word processor for a decade. Too bad their MS-Windows version blew.)
Microsoft had one advantage that stemmed from their unique position of supplying the DOS for PC compatibles. They were able to make exclusive deals with computer manufacturers. They used their superior market position to push MS-Windows, to lock out DR-DOS, and to bundle MS-Office with every business computer sold.
It had nothing to do with "good enough," or price. There were plenty of competitors to fight them on both the quality and price metrics.
Microsoft realized the tremendous business potential of essentially owning the supply chain, and using that to freeze out competitors.
The cheap microcomputer itself is largely a product of Compaq reverse engineering the IBM PC.
I get where you're going, but the cheap microcomputer existed years before IBM ever built a PC. It existed as Altair, and as Apple ][, and Commodore 64, and a slew of others that were more advanced than the first IBM PC.
This is just more evidence that Microsoft did not cause the wave of personal computing, they merely surfed it to massive success. The power behind the wave was intrinsic in the times. If anything, Microsoft has set us back several years.
I hear this a lot from Microsoft apologists, that Microsoft created the PC revolution. I'm not surprised to see Mundie trying to reinforce that idea. In fact, he may well believe it.
"serious limitations that diminish their ability to effectively verify election results."
Paper trail limitations: they require other equipment or groups of people to count them for audits or recounts.
Other technology: you have to rely on the original equipment to report the results correctly the first time. This is cheaper and more accurate, as your results are always the same.
Downtown traffic and parking issues are better managed through supply-demand. Too much demand? Up goes the price. Congestion pricing and higher meter rates are the solution, not enlargement of roads by removal of side-street parking.
Yes! Absolutely!
That way, only the well-off can park downtown, and that means only newer cars can park downtown. That'll improve the look of the city, as well, with all those Lexus, BMWs, and Hummers sitting along side the road.
Or, as I like to say, fuck the poor! Their lives suck anyway. They should be used to it by now.
Tellysavalliskojak Johnson, of Bartholomew, Illinois. He was born to a crack whore in a squalid apartment on fourth street. (His sister, Imaginemyjoy, also had no opportunity.)
Actually, my history is exactly correct. Microsoft officially participated in the Open Office Document TC. Rabih Filfili was Microsoft's observer of record. They may have been creating their own standard at the same time, but at that point, ODF was in the long process of becoming a standard. So, Microsoft chose to go their own way, rather than collaborate on a standard equitable to all.
So the history was correct, as is my assertion that Microsoft has reasons to not participate in a standard accepted by others; and that these reasons benefit only Microsoft.
As for your link to Mr. Jones' blog: it's a rather MS-biased timeline, don't you think? It mentioned neither Microsoft's participation in the OASIS TC, nor their later withdrawal. It also glosses over ODF development, leaving the implication that ODF was quickly developed, and quickly accepted as a standard, neither of which is true.
Finally, as for your reason for not giving a full reply: accepted. I'd rather watch Colbert than argue with a het-up idiot like me any day.
Despite having lived in Atlanta for a number of years in the past, I was absolutely amazed to be subjected to this sort of hate.
Don't be. This sort of hate is being pushed from the highest levels of government as the latest distraction from a disintegrating economy, lack of a good health care system, an unwinnable war in the middle east, and the fact that our music sucks.
You, sir, are nothing more than a distraction from the real problems in America.
And something that bugs me is this constant denial that some people do, in fact, choose to fail.
Absolutely. Some people do choose to fail. And many have no other choice.
Being born into privelege gives you strong advantages over those not born into privelege. The system is not set up to give everyone a fair chance. Consider our education system: in many (if not most) cases, schools are funded by property tax. This translates into per-student funding in ratio to average income. This biases education in favor of upper-middle-class and above, leaving middle-class with an "average" education, and the poor with, well, poor education. This tends to reduce the opportunity of the poor, while favoring the rich.
Consider healthcare. Almost a third of Americans have essentially no health coverage. If someone gets cancer, they have no way to pay for treatment. This leads to others staying home to take care of them as they die.
I could go on about how the system is stacked against a *large* number of Americans, but why bother? I've seen how those with money don't care, and those without don't have the opportunity to make the choices to make a better life for themselves.
I think there should be numerous opportunities given to people to succeed . ..
And that is the crux of the matter. Millions of people in the US are never given an opportunity to succeed, by any reasonable definition of "success." And the worst part is, the system is designed that way.
Slashdot Mirror
...you can swap it with a different 2.5" laptop harddrive.
You can swap it out for a SATA 2.5" hard drive. Regular old IDE hard drives won't cut it.
It's not against "Halo" persay (sic), it's against "popular things." This is Slashdot, remember... anything that everybody uses/likes (Windows, CDs, movies) is just total crap designed to placate the "sheeple."
/. dislike things because they suck, like MS-Windows, and popular entertainment.
Do you think Budweiser is a good beer?
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it isn't crap. For instance, MS-Windows fucking blows chunks, popularity notwithstanding. Most popular movies also suck. Not all, but most. I'm not sure where "CDs" come into it, as I haven't seen much ranting against CDs, unless you are talking about music, in which case, the most popular stuff generally *does* suck.
It doesn't suck because it's popular. It just sucks.
Now.
That said, Halo 3 looks like a decent FPS, with a good story line and decent gameplay. I played it for a couple of hours at a friend's house. (I don't own a 360, mostly because I refuse to support Microsoft in any way, and because I already have a Wii and a PS3.) I don't dislike Halo or Halo 3, though Halo 2 was most disappointing-- basically a retread of Halo, with some on-line play enhancements that made it almost as fun as Unreal Tournament.
But, c'mon. Disliking things just because they're popular? That doesn't happen as much as you seem to think. In general, people on
With stakes this high, is the playing field fair, and are business needs trumping consumer and technological interests?
No. Yes. In that order.
They playing field is rarely fair when business is concerned. If corporate interest is involved, there is always a corporation able to affect the environment much more than any governmental regulation; and they will always affect the environment in their own favor, whether it is in the best interest of citizens or technology or progress or any other damned thing that doesn't have anything at all to do with "maximizing profits."
This is all stupid talk. Some corporation will end up in control of a public resource. The public will get fucked. That's how it works. That's how it always works.
No, it wasn't Mr. Gates who "Got it." Gates was pushing MSN as an AOL alternative, as a standard closed environment separate from the internet. He was part of the reason Microsoft *didn't* respond to the internet in a timely fashion.
It was new kids coming in to Microsoft from college who "got it." It was the cover articles in Time and Newsweek who "got it." Microsoft only "got it" because they had no other choice. If they had followed Mr. Gates' plan, they would've missed it entirely.
He was not charged with not showing his ID. He was charged with restricting the duties of a police officer.
He was charged with restricting the duties of a police officer for not showing his ID.
You say toMAYto, and I say the police had no duty to ask for the guy's ID.
Why should money have anything to do with justice being served?
Who makes the laws? In general, lawyers.
Who makes money defending or prosecuting laws?
Lawyers.
It's a good deal, if you can get it.
A victory would have been showing your receipt and spending the time as intended, stress-free with his family.
"Freedom isn't free."
A lot of people say this as if they mean it. Not many are willing to pay the price.
He allowed the police officer to inspect his bags. Then the police officer insisted on seeing his ID; but, because he wasn't driving a vehicle, and since he was cleared of the accusation by the police officer himself, he was under no obligation to provide his ID.
It was the principle of the thing, and I fully understand and agree with him.
...how much of a 'vicious carnivore' can a 13 kg creature really be?
Go ask a wolverine.
It keeps crashing. Any advice?
Learn to fly?
Can't do that. Any new game engine must look to the next two or three years, and Microsoft is not going to let Vista fail. This time next year, Vista will have 25% of the market. In another year, it'll have 75%. Just like XP did, and MS-Win2k before that.
For PC gamers, the future is Vista.
Microsoft is not going to support ODF directly. They are paying other people to write ODF converters. This way, they save face. Microsoft wins.
Also, when the other filters imperfectly translate to/from OOXML, they can blame the makers of the ODF filters, rather than trying to come up with some lame half-assed excuse for imperfect document translation. And so people upgrade to the new MS-Office ("Now supports international standards!"), and they see that ODF documents "suck."
Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins.
He's also done far more to hurt computing than all the gamerzzz combined. So what?
360 doesn't even have the HD-DVD built in, it's an "add-on".
This, to me, is even a bigger issue than the difference in processing power. The 360 has a slightly better GPU, which helps, but the PS3 has much more raw available power. (Emphasis on "raw.")
Really, the big deal *is* the BluRay, and not for movies. The fact that Sony included both a hard drive and a BluRay player means the game developer can assume certain things-- a fast hard-drive cache and 50GB of data storage topping the list.
I believe Microsoft was foolish to skip the HD storage medium for their HD-capable game machine. Games are getting *way* above 8GB these days.
The 360 fanbois are counting Sony out on this one. I don't think they realize Sony has the edge here as games grow to take advantage of the new system capabilities. What you see on the 360 today is about what you'll see on the 360 in four years. The PS3 is still in the Rayman stages.
But, to each his own. I'm very pleased with my PS3. Others will be pleased with their 360s. And we all win.
Take a NeXT computer. Use it for a while. (Never mind how slow it is. You're working with 15-year-old hardware.)
Then use whatever version of MS-Windows you like. Find one that matches the ease-of-use, flexibility, and just niceness of the NeXT. Subtract the difference in age between the two operating systems.
That'll give you a good idea of how far Microsoft has set us back.
In my estimation, it's about 17 years and counting.
That isn't quite how they did it. Both Borland (compilers, Quattro Pro, Paradox, etc) sold cheap software that was superior to Microsoft's equivelents. WordPerfect wasn't terribly expensive, and they dropped their prices to match Microsoft's prices; and WordPerfect was far superior to MS-Word. (WordPerfect for the NeXT was perhaps the best word processor for a decade. Too bad their MS-Windows version blew.)
Microsoft had one advantage that stemmed from their unique position of supplying the DOS for PC compatibles. They were able to make exclusive deals with computer manufacturers. They used their superior market position to push MS-Windows, to lock out DR-DOS, and to bundle MS-Office with every business computer sold.
It had nothing to do with "good enough," or price. There were plenty of competitors to fight them on both the quality and price metrics.
Microsoft realized the tremendous business potential of essentially owning the supply chain, and using that to freeze out competitors.
I used the "surf the wave" analogy just a second ago, in another post.
And you used it much more effectively, all poetical and stuff.
The cheap microcomputer itself is largely a product of Compaq reverse engineering the IBM PC.
I get where you're going, but the cheap microcomputer existed years before IBM ever built a PC. It existed as Altair, and as Apple ][, and Commodore 64, and a slew of others that were more advanced than the first IBM PC.
This is just more evidence that Microsoft did not cause the wave of personal computing, they merely surfed it to massive success. The power behind the wave was intrinsic in the times. If anything, Microsoft has set us back several years.
I hear this a lot from Microsoft apologists, that Microsoft created the PC revolution. I'm not surprised to see Mundie trying to reinforce that idea. In fact, he may well believe it.
"serious limitations that diminish their ability to effectively verify election results."
Paper trail limitations: they require other equipment or groups of people to count them for audits or recounts.
Other technology: you have to rely on the original equipment to report the results correctly the first time. This is cheaper and more accurate, as your results are always the same.
I've heard enough about WoW to make me want to puke every time I hear it and I have never played it.
That's funny. I feel the same way about Halo 3.
Downtown traffic and parking issues are better managed through supply-demand. Too much demand? Up goes the price. Congestion pricing and higher meter rates are the solution, not enlargement of roads by removal of side-street parking.
Yes! Absolutely!
That way, only the well-off can park downtown, and that means only newer cars can park downtown. That'll improve the look of the city, as well, with all those Lexus, BMWs, and Hummers sitting along side the road.
Or, as I like to say, fuck the poor! Their lives suck anyway. They should be used to it by now.
Tellysavalliskojak Johnson, of Bartholomew, Illinois. He was born to a crack whore in a squalid apartment on fourth street. (His sister, Imaginemyjoy, also had no opportunity.)
There. I've named two.
Out of millions.
Hey, Miguel, thanks for the reply.
Actually, my history is exactly correct. Microsoft officially participated in the Open Office Document TC. Rabih Filfili was Microsoft's observer of record. They may have been creating their own standard at the same time, but at that point, ODF was in the long process of becoming a standard. So, Microsoft chose to go their own way, rather than collaborate on a standard equitable to all.
So the history was correct, as is my assertion that Microsoft has reasons to not participate in a standard accepted by others; and that these reasons benefit only Microsoft.
As for your link to Mr. Jones' blog: it's a rather MS-biased timeline, don't you think? It mentioned neither Microsoft's participation in the OASIS TC, nor their later withdrawal. It also glosses over ODF development, leaving the implication that ODF was quickly developed, and quickly accepted as a standard, neither of which is true.
Finally, as for your reason for not giving a full reply: accepted. I'd rather watch Colbert than argue with a het-up idiot like me any day.
Despite having lived in Atlanta for a number of years in the past, I was absolutely amazed to be subjected to this sort of hate.
Don't be. This sort of hate is being pushed from the highest levels of government as the latest distraction from a disintegrating economy, lack of a good health care system, an unwinnable war in the middle east, and the fact that our music sucks.
You, sir, are nothing more than a distraction from the real problems in America.
And something that bugs me is this constant denial that some people do, in fact, choose to fail.
.
Absolutely. Some people do choose to fail. And many have no other choice.
Being born into privelege gives you strong advantages over those not born into privelege. The system is not set up to give everyone a fair chance. Consider our education system: in many (if not most) cases, schools are funded by property tax. This translates into per-student funding in ratio to average income. This biases education in favor of upper-middle-class and above, leaving middle-class with an "average" education, and the poor with, well, poor education. This tends to reduce the opportunity of the poor, while favoring the rich.
Consider healthcare. Almost a third of Americans have essentially no health coverage. If someone gets cancer, they have no way to pay for treatment. This leads to others staying home to take care of them as they die.
I could go on about how the system is stacked against a *large* number of Americans, but why bother? I've seen how those with money don't care, and those without don't have the opportunity to make the choices to make a better life for themselves.
I think there should be numerous opportunities given to people to succeed . .
And that is the crux of the matter. Millions of people in the US are never given an opportunity to succeed, by any reasonable definition of "success." And the worst part is, the system is designed that way.