Don't worry about it, UT3 is not a very good game. The lack of Linux/Apple support was just another in a long line of disappointments regarding the game.
I kind of hate Halo, but there is one aspect of the original game that I consider extremely innovative, and which was ripped off in one of my favorite PC games of all time, Unreal Tournament 2004: actual vehicle integration with a first person shooter (and I don't mean every other level is a "vehicle level"). This innovation should not be ignored, because it entirely changed the design of levels and gameplay.
Every company with more than 20 employees has a wide variance in employee intelligence; I wouldn't judge the company on the HR person or go-fer who is filtering out resumes.
A the same time, the chance that any internet searching will occur in this stage are pretty much nil, so i wouldn't worry about it. If you get to an interview, the company will probably rely on a background check instead of a Google search to figure out if you have been convicted of pedophilia.
A monopoly is a monopoly is bad. Even closed source monopolies are susceptible to being copied, so free source code isn't as much of a benefit as one would think. In fact, a second open source project may be met with further resistance as "yet another attempt at a fork."
All industries need competition - this is one of the great things about having multiple distros of Linux. Fortunately, the web browser market is saturated with competent competitors. Hell, even IE has been innovating a little lately (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Added_features)
It's interesting that the motivations behind their patents aren't as obvious as they may seem. For example, Apple has several patents in the pipeline simply so they can tweak them later to specifically target Palm's Pre.
That's stupid - according to that logic, we have 10x as many IT people as we need. My experience is that this is completely wrong - companies need *more* IT people. We don't want the bottom 90% to leave their profession, they do useful work.
At least in my company, I'd say anyone in the top 80% is extremely competent and smart (4 out of 5 people). Even then, if the bottom 20% left, we'd be in huge trouble.
Depends on how you define "win." If 90% of people don't want to tailor their OS to their needs (this number is probably a severe underestimate), who really wins? Yes, Linux is great for the 10% who embrace its power, but it still hasn't reached the critical mass it will need to be a "win".
Anyway, I think all this is pointless. Of course there should be many distros, but there should be one that gets 90% of the collective energy behind it - the one that is targeted towards the mainstream user. This appears to be Ubuntu.
Your analogy doesn't work. By stripping out features, an operating system can actually run faster. My only experience is with XP, but the Home addition stripped out features most people wouldn't need, and ran faster out the box. At an extreme, a highly-regarded (but of questionable legality) version of Windows called tinyXP speeds up Windows considerably by stripping out tons of features and services 90% of people will never use.
I prefer an operating system to come lean and fast, and to allow me the option to add features I want.
But the target audience has changed. 1950-1980s Mad was actually pretty edgy for its time. Today, it seems kind of... tame and unfunny, especially with all the internet has to offer our 8 year-olds.
The USA has been a de facto melting pot for more than 100 years: it is one of the few countries where the vast majority of family lines immigrated in recorded history (many in the last few generations.) Just from a historical perspective, I think you are being closed-minded in thinking that the 21st century has to be more like 1910 than 1998.
One of the reasons why this country is so great is because of skilled immigrants; immigrants, in general, have had to work harder than the typical American to have the right to stay here, which is typified by programs such as the H1-B. If anything, the USA is hurting other countries by drawing in their talent. Immigrants have created a large number of jobs in the US - it isn't far-fetched to argue that the silicon valley was largely built on the brains of IIT grads from India, for example.
He said that was one possible method, not something that would kill spam in 2 years. Gates knows that implementing and spreading a monetary system of that complexity would take a long time (and in my opinion will never happen.)
Specifically, Gates said: "in the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant"
As a Windows user, I found this article very informative. Every time I have used OSX in the past, I have been frustrated with the application/window behavior. Understanding the motivation behind the way the operating system UIs work will probably go a long way to reducing my frustration in the future.
"Why should corps be silent on issues that affect them?"
It's a stretch in this case. The cost of lobbying is probably more than the potential benefit. I'd like to add that proposition 8 didn't even make civil unions illegal, just marriage (it seems like a big legal gray area).
The problem is that it's unfair to the shareholders who are opposed to gay marriage; these people are also paying for the lobbyists. I agree with GP, it's not a company's - especially a public company's - job to influence the government for ideological reasons. While I completely back Google's cause, it's a line that gets crossed way too much.
A flash cart, short for flash cartridge, is a device you place in your DS. The flash cart contains a flash card, which stores the games/data. This is (was?) the most popular flash cartridge when I got my DS: http://r4ds.cn/
Its a very wide spectrum. I know very few people who modded their Xbox 360s, because if they get caught MSFT disables them from playing online - a pretty severe punishment. Most consoles are similar - they require you to hack hardware (i.e. soldering) with expensive mod chips that void the warranty.
The DS, on the other hand, is ridiculously easy to pirate. A 15 dollar cart from dealextreme, a 10 dollar microsd card, and a 1 hour bit torrent download can get you 50 of the most popular DS games - built into your DS. It's more convenient, far cheaper, and you can play games even before they come out. It doesn't void your warranty and isn't traceable.
I personally bought the DS because of its ability to be hacked, but not for pirating. I run a lot of homebrew on my DS, including a very capable Nintendo emulator, an e-book reader, and a few open source games.
"they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other"
I think this hits an important point. We all forgot how important competition is simply because this project embraced OSS, which overwhelmed everyone with excitement.
When you depend on a single company, no matter how well-intentioned and hard-working they are, you are putting too many of your eggs in one basket. The new generation of cheap, small laptops will use OSS too. If the market exists for educational laptops, at least one company will fill that niche, building off the ideas of several other companies. The OLPC wasn't successful because it had no benchmark to work against. ASUS came in with an idea of what was possible and what people wanted, and provided it. Negroponte promised everything and learned the hard way that unexpected compromises hurt a lot.
Having 100s of memory cards around makes about as much sense as having 100s of rolls of used, unlabeled film laying around. Even if your uncle is taking 20 megapixel RAW pictures, he can fit 800 pictures on eight 2-gig cards. In this extreme example, he shouldn't need more than eight cards if he takes 800 pictures a shoot, because the first thing he should do when his shoot is over is empty the pictures onto a hard drive with an automatic backup, then format the cards.
If you are having trouble organizing your memory cards, you can probably simplify some other aspect of your life to fix the problem.
Mirror's Edge was a big monetary loss for EA, and Spore was received far less enthusiastically than expected. The game that made EA the most money last year? Madden - one of the least innovative series in the industry. And Portal may have helped sell Orange Box, but it never would have stood on its own as a serious revenue generator for Valve.
Sadly, game companies don't always feel the need to innovate because people are finicky and games cost millions to make. After all, they are businesses, usually with stock holders to answer to.
My 2 year laptop can do HD. Anyway, that's irrelevant - in this day and age, a media center computer *has* to play HD, while many laptops are actually regressing to slower speeds for increased battery life and portability. Comparing a media center with a laptop is an apple/oranges comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about it, UT3 is not a very good game. The lack of Linux/Apple support was just another in a long line of disappointments regarding the game.
I kind of hate Halo, but there is one aspect of the original game that I consider extremely innovative, and which was ripped off in one of my favorite PC games of all time, Unreal Tournament 2004: actual vehicle integration with a first person shooter (and I don't mean every other level is a "vehicle level"). This innovation should not be ignored, because it entirely changed the design of levels and gameplay.
Every company with more than 20 employees has a wide variance in employee intelligence; I wouldn't judge the company on the HR person or go-fer who is filtering out resumes.
A the same time, the chance that any internet searching will occur in this stage are pretty much nil, so i wouldn't worry about it. If you get to an interview, the company will probably rely on a background check instead of a Google search to figure out if you have been convicted of pedophilia.
Depends on the technical expertise of the customer. Some people may interpret we have "discussion groups and bug logs" as "we have many bugs."
A monopoly is a monopoly is bad. Even closed source monopolies are susceptible to being copied, so free source code isn't as much of a benefit as one would think. In fact, a second open source project may be met with further resistance as "yet another attempt at a fork."
All industries need competition - this is one of the great things about having multiple distros of Linux. Fortunately, the web browser market is saturated with competent competitors. Hell, even IE has been innovating a little lately (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Added_features)
Engadget wrote a surprisingly well thought out analysis of the patent situation between Apple and Palm:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/
It's interesting that the motivations behind their patents aren't as obvious as they may seem. For example, Apple has several patents in the pipeline simply so they can tweak them later to specifically target Palm's Pre.
That's stupid - according to that logic, we have 10x as many IT people as we need. My experience is that this is completely wrong - companies need *more* IT people. We don't want the bottom 90% to leave their profession, they do useful work.
At least in my company, I'd say anyone in the top 80% is extremely competent and smart (4 out of 5 people). Even then, if the bottom 20% left, we'd be in huge trouble.
Depends on how you define "win." If 90% of people don't want to tailor their OS to their needs (this number is probably a severe underestimate), who really wins? Yes, Linux is great for the 10% who embrace its power, but it still hasn't reached the critical mass it will need to be a "win".
Anyway, I think all this is pointless. Of course there should be many distros, but there should be one that gets 90% of the collective energy behind it - the one that is targeted towards the mainstream user. This appears to be Ubuntu.
Your analogy doesn't work. By stripping out features, an operating system can actually run faster. My only experience is with XP, but the Home addition stripped out features most people wouldn't need, and ran faster out the box. At an extreme, a highly-regarded (but of questionable legality) version of Windows called tinyXP speeds up Windows considerably by stripping out tons of features and services 90% of people will never use.
I prefer an operating system to come lean and fast, and to allow me the option to add features I want.
But the target audience has changed. 1950-1980s Mad was actually pretty edgy for its time. Today, it seems kind of... tame and unfunny, especially with all the internet has to offer our 8 year-olds.
I have a ~25 year old computer that still works. What will happen in the next 25 years that will cause it to fail?
It doesn't matter how long they were **designed** to last - what matters is how long they will realistically last.
The USA has been a de facto melting pot for more than 100 years: it is one of the few countries where the vast majority of family lines immigrated in recorded history (many in the last few generations.) Just from a historical perspective, I think you are being closed-minded in thinking that the 21st century has to be more like 1910 than 1998.
One of the reasons why this country is so great is because of skilled immigrants; immigrants, in general, have had to work harder than the typical American to have the right to stay here, which is typified by programs such as the H1-B. If anything, the USA is hurting other countries by drawing in their talent. Immigrants have created a large number of jobs in the US - it isn't far-fetched to argue that the silicon valley was largely built on the brains of IIT grads from India, for example.
He said that was one possible method, not something that would kill spam in 2 years. Gates knows that implementing and spreading a monetary system of that complexity would take a long time (and in my opinion will never happen.)
Specifically, Gates said: "in the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant"
As a Windows user, I found this article very informative. Every time I have used OSX in the past, I have been frustrated with the application/window behavior. Understanding the motivation behind the way the operating system UIs work will probably go a long way to reducing my frustration in the future.
"Why should corps be silent on issues that affect them?"
It's a stretch in this case. The cost of lobbying is probably more than the potential benefit. I'd like to add that proposition 8 didn't even make civil unions illegal, just marriage (it seems like a big legal gray area).
The problem is that it's unfair to the shareholders who are opposed to gay marriage; these people are also paying for the lobbyists. I agree with GP, it's not a company's - especially a public company's - job to influence the government for ideological reasons. While I completely back Google's cause, it's a line that gets crossed way too much.
If you're cheap and willing to wait a couple of weeks, this one's supposed to be decent:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15947
I remember reading somewhere you can just replace the hard drive, not the whole xbox.
Nothing wrong with that.
A flash cart, short for flash cartridge, is a device you place in your DS. The flash cart contains a flash card, which stores the games/data. This is (was?) the most popular flash cartridge when I got my DS: http://r4ds.cn/
Its a very wide spectrum. I know very few people who modded their Xbox 360s, because if they get caught MSFT disables them from playing online - a pretty severe punishment. Most consoles are similar - they require you to hack hardware (i.e. soldering) with expensive mod chips that void the warranty.
The DS, on the other hand, is ridiculously easy to pirate. A 15 dollar cart from dealextreme, a 10 dollar microsd card, and a 1 hour bit torrent download can get you 50 of the most popular DS games - built into your DS. It's more convenient, far cheaper, and you can play games even before they come out. It doesn't void your warranty and isn't traceable.
I personally bought the DS because of its ability to be hacked, but not for pirating. I run a lot of homebrew on my DS, including a very capable Nintendo emulator, an e-book reader, and a few open source games.
An several of these were pinned up to his wall:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=585451&topic=44127983
"they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other"
I think this hits an important point. We all forgot how important competition is simply because this project embraced OSS, which overwhelmed everyone with excitement.
When you depend on a single company, no matter how well-intentioned and hard-working they are, you are putting too many of your eggs in one basket. The new generation of cheap, small laptops will use OSS too. If the market exists for educational laptops, at least one company will fill that niche, building off the ideas of several other companies. The OLPC wasn't successful because it had no benchmark to work against. ASUS came in with an idea of what was possible and what people wanted, and provided it. Negroponte promised everything and learned the hard way that unexpected compromises hurt a lot.
Having 100s of memory cards around makes about as much sense as having 100s of rolls of used, unlabeled film laying around. Even if your uncle is taking 20 megapixel RAW pictures, he can fit 800 pictures on eight 2-gig cards. In this extreme example, he shouldn't need more than eight cards if he takes 800 pictures a shoot, because the first thing he should do when his shoot is over is empty the pictures onto a hard drive with an automatic backup, then format the cards.
If you are having trouble organizing your memory cards, you can probably simplify some other aspect of your life to fix the problem.
Mirror's Edge was a big monetary loss for EA, and Spore was received far less enthusiastically than expected. The game that made EA the most money last year? Madden - one of the least innovative series in the industry. And Portal may have helped sell Orange Box, but it never would have stood on its own as a serious revenue generator for Valve.
Sadly, game companies don't always feel the need to innovate because people are finicky and games cost millions to make. After all, they are businesses, usually with stock holders to answer to.
Does anyone know why the Zune 80s didn't crash? I assumed they ran the same software and similar hardware.
My 2 year laptop can do HD. Anyway, that's irrelevant - in this day and age, a media center computer *has* to play HD, while many laptops are actually regressing to slower speeds for increased battery life and portability. Comparing a media center with a laptop is an apple/oranges comparison.