Personally I've always liked Paranoia's approach... Player questioning you? They are disloyal commie traitors. Player doesn't like the fact that you often don't even roll the dice to decide how combat goes? Roll the dice whilst intentionally keeping your gaze fixed on the player and not on the dice and inform them that they've been incinerated. Paranoia was a game that taught gave players a good, healthy fear of a vengeful GM.
Considering that Mac desktops are pretty much just beige boxes nowadays, I don't understand why they won't sell their motherboards so people who refuse to pay their outrageous desktop prices (me) can roll their own. Hell, keep the motherboards priced at a healthy margin (say, $400), but just make them available. I'll Newegg all the other components myself and save a bundle. As it is, I'm a consumer who likes Apple, would love to have a dual booting Mac/Windows rig and is willing to pay a slight premium to get it. However, I won't pay the stupid amounts that Apple demands for their desktop systems when I know full well what a comparable PC system assembled myself costs. OSX is good, it's just not that good.
Why lose our business? They'd make a nice comfortable margin on a motherboard, make some money on me buying their OS, and better yet, get mindshare.
The internet will be taken over "conquered" if you will by a master race of Microsoft software engineers. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume internet users or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; Microsoft will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new monopolistic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality that I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Excel, Access, and Dot.net cubicle farms.
Yeah, here's an asshole who's going out of his way to sabotage the only really successful legit music sharing service out there; one which really doesn't have too strenuous a DRM method, and the Slashdot refrain is what?
It also sounds like entrapment. "Hey, can we be in your scene?!? Here's some 133t zero day games!" sounds a lot like "Hey honey, you working? $50 if you show me a good time."
That's pretty damned brilliant. I've always been really uneasy of just how accepting people are of my credit card. I'd say only 20% of the time do I get carded, which to me pretty much constitutes gross negligience. I'll keep this in mind for my future cards.
I overstated it, there was nothing legal to it. However, the French librarian association got all in a huff over Project Gutenberg's bias towards English, and felt that French wasn't strongly enough represented.
It basically just boils down to a tremendous fear that between English, Spanish and Chinese, French is becoming an inconsequential language.
Does France keep Johnny Cochrane on speed-dial for all things web related, or is it just that they get reported on more?
They've gone after Yahoo, Google (multiple times now), and even taken swings at that incarnation of evil; Project Gutenberg. This has got to be the SCO of nation-states.
No, not at all. You misunderstand what I'm saying. I don't think this tendency in OSS is necessarily a bad thing, either. However, look at how splintered just one branch of open source is, Linux. That's just one sect of the OSS movement, and the infighting there is legendary. Now toss in all the other Unix variants and their own subsets.
You just don't see this in the proprietary companies. Sure, they compete with each other, but within the companies themselves there's much tighter integration.
I think this has the tendency to make OSS be sort of the breeding ground for the real innovations in tech, but largely unable to provide the sort of polish that proprietary companies can. I also think it's a large part of what keeps projects like Linux, Unix, etc. from really breaking through in areas like the desktop.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think to dismiss it is a mistake.
And no, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. One reality of open source OSes, though, is that there are always going to be people developing The Next Big Thing, and it dilutes effort over the wider spectrum. Some of the best minds in the scene get spread far too thin under this model.
That's the difference between OSS and proprietary companies. They can focus like a laser on what they want to develop and leave a lot of the infrastructural heavy lifting to those hippy anarchists in the open source scene.
It's win-win for them, because they get the benefit of a lot of what these groups produce, and often can improve upon it (BSD --> OSX). It's like having an unpaid R&D dept. working for you 24/7.
I wouldn't count your chickens before they hatch. Look at how quickly Firefox made inroads, largely off of word of mouth. Although I'm biased, I'd still say it's not quite as good as Opera (although it's a very good browser), so it's not as though it's in an insurmountable position. Things just change so quickly in IT that no one can rest on their laurels. Look at how huge Yahoo was only 4 years ago. In no time flat they got their lunch eaten by Google, and now they're the company du jour.
MS can come back from this and be resurgent again in the browser space. All it takes is will, it's certainly not a matter of resources for an entity the size of Microsoft.
I haven't had any problems like that. I passed down my old PI/133Mhz to my father just so he could browse and email. Installed Win2K on it, and it runs fine. Sure, it takes a little longer for it to boot than it would with Win98, but once you get passed the bootsplash it runs fine. More than adequate for what he does with it, and Win2K is a whole lot more reliable than the 9X series could ever hope to be.
You think that's scary, I was a records clerk in the Army, and enlisted personnel records were kept on machines that would have been considered ancient back in the mid-80's. The system was called SIDPERS, and was a gigantic OD green box with an old 5 1/4" floppy drive and tape back up. The monitors were old green and black monochrome CGA. I got out in 1998, but they were still using SIDPERS at that point, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if they still were.
Of course officer records was a different matter. Modern computers hooked to a central DB. Bastards.
RAM, my friend. In multitasking it's all about memory, not so much about the cycles. Hell, I would keep multiple apps open in Win95 before I ever even got a Pentium. It's more than doable.
Does Win95 still access the internet? Play Solitaire? MineSweeper? MP3's (even on old, creaky Pentium I systems)?
Then, quite simply, for most people who just want email and browsing it's more than sufficient for them. Same goes for a lot of small businesses. They don't need multi-Gigahertz machines or recent OS licenses. They just need something that will run their word processors, spreadsheets, and print docs.
"I'm Sam Waterston, of the popular TV series "Law & Order". As a senior citizen, you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Well, now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of robot attack, with Old Glory Insurance. Old Glory will cover you with no health check-up or age consideration. You need to feel safe. And that's harder and harder to do nowadays, because robots may strike at any time. And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.
Now, for only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So, don't cower under your afghan any longer. Make a choice.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will."
There's also the fact that Blizzard tends to move at a glacial speed (no pun intended) with patches. Compare them to the other players in the industry, like Cryptic or even the dreaded SOE.
I understand wanting to make sure everything is polished, but Blizzard just takes that concept way too far. The MMOG industry is just too competitive nowadays to not be light on your feet.
It actually does work (as you can see from me pimping for a MacMini in my sig). You fill out an app for something you never intend to use, and wait for your referrals to come in. I've been enjoying my iPod for months, and figured what the hell, I'd love to have an actual Mac around to hook it to instead of the PC.
Possibly not... A case could be made that PearPC merely emulates the PPC, and isn't specifically made to run OSX. Hell, you could probably run YellowDog on it if you wanted to.
Of course, we all know that's not the true purpose behind PearPC, but they could win on a technicality.
Considering that we both play together, probably more than you do. Of course, I had the good sense to get involved with a geek girl in the first place, and not some ball breaking harridan who wants everything to be about her.
Thankfully I have no kids, so my free time is just that; mine
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I've always liked Paranoia's approach... Player questioning you? They are disloyal commie traitors. Player doesn't like the fact that you often don't even roll the dice to decide how combat goes? Roll the dice whilst intentionally keeping your gaze fixed on the player and not on the dice and inform them that they've been incinerated. Paranoia was a game that taught gave players a good, healthy fear of a vengeful GM.
That's why I like the solution we used in the military. For instance, today would be 13/JAN/07. Impossible for anyone to confuse.
Considering that Mac desktops are pretty much just beige boxes nowadays, I don't understand why they won't sell their motherboards so people who refuse to pay their outrageous desktop prices (me) can roll their own. Hell, keep the motherboards priced at a healthy margin (say, $400), but just make them available. I'll Newegg all the other components myself and save a bundle. As it is, I'm a consumer who likes Apple, would love to have a dual booting Mac/Windows rig and is willing to pay a slight premium to get it. However, I won't pay the stupid amounts that Apple demands for their desktop systems when I know full well what a comparable PC system assembled myself costs. OSX is good, it's just not that good.
Why lose our business? They'd make a nice comfortable margin on a motherboard, make some money on me buying their OS, and better yet, get mindshare.
An alternate set of hassles? Huzzah! You've replaced my spyware problems with a complete lack of commercial software! Thank you, son!
The internet will be taken over "conquered" if you will by a master race of Microsoft software engineers. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume internet users or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; Microsoft will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new monopolistic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality that I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Excel, Access, and Dot.net cubicle farms.
More power to you. That's just beautiful.
He busts corporate thieves AND stargazes!
It also sounds like entrapment. "Hey, can we be in your scene?!? Here's some 133t zero day games!" sounds a lot like "Hey honey, you working? $50 if you show me a good time."
That's pretty damned brilliant. I've always been really uneasy of just how accepting people are of my credit card. I'd say only 20% of the time do I get carded, which to me pretty much constitutes gross negligience. I'll keep this in mind for my future cards.
You slam it violently against the wall. Sure, you may destroy your Powerbook, but you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you won.
It basically just boils down to a tremendous fear that between English, Spanish and Chinese, French is becoming an inconsequential language.
They've gone after Yahoo, Google (multiple times now), and even taken swings at that incarnation of evil; Project Gutenberg. This has got to be the SCO of nation-states.
You just don't see this in the proprietary companies. Sure, they compete with each other, but within the companies themselves there's much tighter integration.
I think this has the tendency to make OSS be sort of the breeding ground for the real innovations in tech, but largely unable to provide the sort of polish that proprietary companies can. I also think it's a large part of what keeps projects like Linux, Unix, etc. from really breaking through in areas like the desktop.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think to dismiss it is a mistake.
That's the difference between OSS and proprietary companies. They can focus like a laser on what they want to develop and leave a lot of the infrastructural heavy lifting to those hippy anarchists in the open source scene.
It's win-win for them, because they get the benefit of a lot of what these groups produce, and often can improve upon it (BSD --> OSX). It's like having an unpaid R&D dept. working for you 24/7.
MS can come back from this and be resurgent again in the browser space. All it takes is will, it's certainly not a matter of resources for an entity the size of Microsoft.
I haven't had any problems like that. I passed down my old PI/133Mhz to my father just so he could browse and email. Installed Win2K on it, and it runs fine. Sure, it takes a little longer for it to boot than it would with Win98, but once you get passed the bootsplash it runs fine. More than adequate for what he does with it, and Win2K is a whole lot more reliable than the 9X series could ever hope to be.
Of course officer records was a different matter. Modern computers hooked to a central DB. Bastards.
RAM, my friend. In multitasking it's all about memory, not so much about the cycles. Hell, I would keep multiple apps open in Win95 before I ever even got a Pentium. It's more than doable.
Then, quite simply, for most people who just want email and browsing it's more than sufficient for them. Same goes for a lot of small businesses. They don't need multi-Gigahertz machines or recent OS licenses. They just need something that will run their word processors, spreadsheets, and print docs.
Well, now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of robot attack, with Old Glory Insurance. Old Glory will cover you with no health check-up or age consideration. You need to feel safe. And that's harder and harder to do nowadays, because robots may strike at any time. And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.
Now, for only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So, don't cower under your afghan any longer. Make a choice.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will."
I understand wanting to make sure everything is polished, but Blizzard just takes that concept way too far. The MMOG industry is just too competitive nowadays to not be light on your feet.
It actually does work (as you can see from me pimping for a MacMini in my sig). You fill out an app for something you never intend to use, and wait for your referrals to come in. I've been enjoying my iPod for months, and figured what the hell, I'd love to have an actual Mac around to hook it to instead of the PC.
Of course, we all know that's not the true purpose behind PearPC, but they could win on a technicality.
Thankfully I have no kids, so my free time is just that; mine