You have a good point. The "cost of card" should include the total cost they spend buying the cards from distributers wharehousing, shipping, advertising, and selling the card, but the number is probably considerably less than $329. They are also losing some potential customers who would have purchased the cards at retail, but no longer need the card.
Re:Disclaimer?
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Worst Buy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you read the letter from the AG which is on the web page, it seems like the issue isn't them canceling all the orders. It seems like the issue is that they are honoring the price for some people and not for others. It seems like that MAY be illegal, and least in some cases.
Does Best Buy really have the right to arbitrarily change the price on any item you purchase, just because the disclaimer says so?
Is anyone really stating that they are arbitrarily doing this? Someone made an error. They don't want to have to honor erroreous prices, which in this case would cost them over half a million dollars for the 2000 customers that placed orders. They are also canceling before the products were shipped.
Re:Kodak and others
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Worst Buy
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· Score: 1, Troll
2000 orders * $200 each = $400000
They can afford some bad press for nearly half a million dollars. I also don't think that a lot of their customers are going to be that upset with them for trying to not honor the price. It was obviously an error. The reason problem seems to be arising from them honoring the price to some customers, and then not honoring it for others. It kind of makes sence to give people the boards at that price if it were just a few, because it it isn't worth the bad press and upset customers. When you're talking about $400000, it makes more sence to live with a little bad press. If this was a smaller retailer a mistake like this could easily put them out of business. It doesn't make sense that people should be able to lose their jobs and that kind of money over a misprint of a price, even if it wasn't caught immediately.
If that does happen, then that would be a kind of national id system. I think it is likely that in the future our Driver's Licenses will have additional information to properly identify us. This might be digital representation of our thumbprint, so they can scan you're thumbprint to confirm you match the ID.
There's always a balance between a person's right to privacy and properly identifying someone to prevent fraud. I personally don't want companies to be able to track my purchasing habbits and where I go. However, I understand that you need to be able to make sure that the person withdrawing money from an account is the actual owner of the money, or the person selling a car really owns it.
In this specific case, I don't want whoever provides the authentication to be able to track what govenment sites I access and use that info for their own interests, or be able to make that information public. They may be required to keep such tracking info archived to prevent or prosecute fraud, but they shouldn't be able to access it for other reasons.
A password is a poor form of authentication. It's used because the system can't use more eact methods such as comparing you're likness to a photo ID. If MS Passport were using a thumbprint or something like that to authenticate, the you'd have a point, but that's a different problem.
Any system that simply requires you to type some characters in a box isn't excessivly secure. There will be people who find a way to create fake identities under whatever system the govenment selects, just like they create fake IDs now, and provide SSNs for people to work who aren't eligable. The government already provides the Driver's Licenses that are used to idnetify people now.
Microsoft Passport requires the use of serveral proprietary technologies that may not be available to all people who use computers connected to the internet. Passport does not work with these popular web browsers: Netscape Navigator, Opera, Mozilla, iCab, Konquerer, or Lynx. It only works with Internet Explorer, a product made by Microsoft and only works on certain computer operating systems.
Is it really true that passport only works with IE? I find that hard to believe. If it's true it would be in my opinion Microsoft's most blatant Monopoly abuse to date. It would also mean that a bunch of Compuserve and AOL customers are going to have trouble using it very soon. Can anyone who uses those browsers confirm this?
Do you oppose a national ID (which really isn't what this is)?
Do you oppose the govenment making private information, such as tax info available to people through the internet?
Do you oppose the use of a outside (non-government) authentication system?
Do you oppose an authentication system which doesn't have a proven track record of good security and prompt effective responses to security issues?
Do you oppose Microsoft being the provider of the system.
Or all of the above?
Try not to be overly vague in what you write to your Congressmen. They often have little grasp of technical issues, and likley get vague complaints about just about everything the government does. You don't want to confuse them with too much detail, but you need to tell them what you don't like, and why. Alternate solutions might even be helpful.
Problem is, once an entity reaches a certain size, it is required to deal with the federal gov't electronically.
Yes they are, and they currently have ways of being authenticated. This would just be changing the method in which the government determines those companies are who they say they are.
It is not a long step (in fact, it is a very very short step) from there to having employers say to you "Ready to start work? Sure - just step up to that HR kiosk, fire up Internet Explorer(tm), and use your Federal Passport(tm) to authenticate who you are.".
Actually this is a very huge step. Why would your employer want to use passport to authenticate who you are? Passport just requires a password. The current method of a Social Security number and a valid drivers license works much better.
The government is trying to make more information available to it's citizens over the web. They have a responsibility to make sure they aren't giving that information out to the wrong people. Therefore they need a system to authenticate users of the system. This is not the same as requiring one ID for all online transactions, that can be used to track everything you do. You can have multiple MS passports. I have two myself. One I need to access some stuff for work, and it is based on my work email. I use it for nothing but work. My other passport is for Asheron's call. I use that passport only for Asheron's call.
There is a lot of information that the govenment keeps that we as citizens should have easy access to. Much of that information should only go to the person it's about, such as tax or social security info. They need some way to authenticate users. In my opinion, the current form of MS Passport isn't a good solution. THe servers go down, and there are too many serious security flaws. Microsoft claims that they are addressing these problems, and expect to have a rewritten version available next year. I'll believe that when I see it.
Authentication is a real issue that the government many, many other online entities face. There are many good reasons not to like passport, but writing your congressmen that passport is the evil spawn of Microsoft isn't going to be that convincing. It still leaves the govenment with the same problem. The govenment is is going to solve the authentication problem, if you don't like MS Passport, suggest a better solution.
Remember that people got really upset about Social Security numbers. They claimed they were the mark of the beast. We still ended up with SS#s. If you don't like the proposed solution, lobby for a different solution.
What if you invite the person into your home without realizing what they are doing? THere are plenty of times you invite strangers into your home. Someone could plant a camera in your bedroom or bath when they came to install cable TV, or fix the plumbing.
What about hotels? Do you think it's ok if someone sticks cameras in hotels and films people?
There doesn't have to be breaking and entering involved. I guess that individual states could solve this problem, but they don't appear to be handling the problem. Do you really think you should have to worry about what state you get a hotel room in and if they can legally film you while you're in the room?
You don't just buy 270000 licenses from a vendor. When you're dealing with high volumes, the vendor is brokering the deal between the manufacturer and the customer. Oracle was also the one who was pushing for the quick sale to get their quarterly profits up be fore they had to announce them to their stockholders. There's plenty of blame for Oracle to share with Logicon.
There are lots of options that can get you 1-3 microseconds of latency and 1 Gbit of bandwidth. Of course you'll likely have some serious software issues. Most programmers like using the good old IP stack to send and receive data. Trying to send and receive 100+ MB/s through an IP stack will pretty much hog the entire CPU. From my expericece with IP over fibrechannel, the throughput is CPU limited because of the IP stack. THere's no use in building a supercomputer if you're going to spend all the processing power just sending information around the interconnect. This means using Lightweight networking protocols, and writing a lot more custom software. Custom written software is very expensive since all the development costs aren't spread out across selling multiple coppies. This is likely one of those cases where a lot of it can be built with off the shelf hardware, but putting it together as a system is more than 90% of the cost. Fibre Channel is actually a good choice for this because you can run multiple protocols over the same network. Actually the company I work at has LINUX drivers that will do IP, a Lightprotocol, and IP simultaneously. We even have them for both X86 and PPC LINUX. We also have better multiple LUN and RAID support than other LINUX drivers I've seen. I wonder if we're involved in this. Maybe I'll go talk to our Fibre Channel Product Manager.
And there are other reasons than Global Warming to cut back on CO2 production. Go to Delhi to get a whif of why.
CO2 is oderless.
And I thought it was most of the Cl in the atmosphere that was from volcanic activity, or is Rush Limbaugh blaming volcanoes for everything these days?
I have no idea what Rush Limbaugh is blaming stuff on these days, and really don't care.
The real impact of WinDOS quality is going to effect the bottom line of Dell and Gateway. Preventing them from "fixing" things is going to HURT them while being masked from the point of view of "end users". The current regime also prevented (and still prevents) these same OEMs from using a better component for the "WinDOS" part.
Dell and Gateway don't want to fix Windows bugs. That would be a horribly unprofitable prospect for them. They can't afford to have a bunch of software engineers trained in Windows internals working to fix OS bugs. They already farm out support because it's isn't profitable for them to do that themselves. They want to buy a working OS. If there's bugs, they want the vendor to fix the bugs. If Dell, Gateway, and everyone else was fixing OS bugs you'd end up with dozens of incompatible "fixes" that work just fine for software that computer maker is shipping with their computer, but make compatibility testing for software and hardware vendors nearly impossible.
Dell and Gateway do want to be able to bundle different software with their systems in order to differentiate their products. If ayone remembers way back to the Tandy Sensation, that would be a good example of this. The Tandy computer ran windows, but it looked significantly different than other windows computers. If had lots of integrated software that worked through Tandy's custom interface, however it still ran standard Windows apps. This allowed Tandy to mark up the price of those computers based on the value they added through their customization of the interface. They sold a lot of them to joe home user, and even got some good reviews in computer magizines, but I'm not sure consumers really got added value.
I've seen plenty of Solaris machines crash because of OS bugs. I've seen VAXs crash. DEC Alpha's running Digital Unix, or whatever they named it at the time. Linux does many things very well, but it still crashes. Unix boxes can be very, very stable in many configurations, but Windows can also be stable in many configurations as well. The SCO UNIX system we had here was pretty stable, but it wasn't used much either. The only machine I don't remember crashing was the Convex. Of course, in that case, maybe you get what you payed for.
It's also a little egotistical to think that we're causing Global Warming to occur. The Earth was relatively warm, then went through an ICE age, then warmed up again to our current climate well before man was burning significant amounts of fossil fuels.
I've heard in the past that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from volcanic activity.
There's not exactly a shortage of CO2 in the atmosphere. Volcanic activity produces most of it, but it's one of those greenhouse gasses that we are so concerned about in conjunction with global warming. If we were to reduce our usage of fossil fuels and use more hydrogen, there would still be lots of CO2 available. The earth did fine before we started burning fossil fuels, and it will do fine if we burn more hydrogen instead. We might be able have some effect. Local climates around population centers might be raised or lowered. Different plants that need more or less CO2 to prosper may become more prevelent in some areas. The Earth has a great ability to adapt. Once upon a time there was a Glacier that covered the area in which I now live. Some time in the distant future, there may be one again. I think mankind still can't accept what a small effect we have on Nature with respect to climate. However, we have done an impressive job of poluting our water supplies, so maybe my scoffin at our effect is a bit premature.
Sales in Japan haven't been bad. I don't think anyone is really surprised with that. Microsoft hoped to be able to sell well in Japan, but I doubt even they are surprised that sales are "disappointing".
It's hard to tell if the slowing sales are a result of a slowing economy, or a preference for PS2.
The interesting thing I saw was that retailers prefer PS2. I wonder why? Does it sell better? Do they get better margins on PS2 consoles and games? Are Sony's bundling agreements, or lack of them more attractive? Is SOny now better at getting the items distributed to retailers? Is Sony just an extablished name in this market, and retailers trust them more?
The numbers I'd really like to see are sales volumes (quantity and revenues) for the games for each console. The PS2 console has been out longer, so volumes on consoles aren't as usefull of numbers as the volumes on games.
Many online games ban macros, and attempt to enforce those bans through the client code. Players often hack the client in order to cheat. Trying to stop client hacks and prevent macros on clients running on different OS's is an incredibly difficult task. It's an incredibly difficult task even on one OS.
There's also the reality that software has bugs. No developemnt team in their right minds wants to deal with the outrage their customers would express about having one group of customers not being able to do a quest, or not haveing an even chance in player vs player combat because of a client bug that doesn't effect all clients equally. Bugs are bad enough, but a bug that discriminates agains part of the player base fire people up REALLY fast.
An example of a client hack would be to hack the timer which determines how long it takes to cast a spell in the game. Suddenly that player's characters can cast spells twice as fast as other people. They need to be able to detect such hacks from the server side so that they can ban those players.
Developing a game that players can play on multiple platforms is likely going to be too complicated to be practical. It's just too likely that they will piss off their customer base, significantly increase development and especially testing costs, and not gain nearly enough users to justify the effort.
Online games DO have multi-megabyte patches precicsely because they are not simply fixing bugs, they are adding content to justify the monthly fee.
This one apparently won't. I get the feeling that the game will be based on everquest, but will be considerably different in terms of expandability and content. Sounds like a marketing ploy to me, rather than actually bringing Everquest to the PS2.
These games are entertainment. Do you know people who join softball teams and go out and socialize while they play. Or people who go out bowling together, or pick some other hobby. These games are just another hobby that allows people to interact socially with other people.
These games is much more diverse than bowling, or softball. On the other hand you get a lot less exercise playing the game. You also don't get face to face interaction. The lack of face to face interaction has it's benefits and drawbacks.
There's nothing wrong with playing games per se, but I think that games where you do cool stuff you never usually do, like fly jet fighters, and games where you achieve something more than holding a text converstaion with another similar loser, are far superior.
What do you actually achieve in a game where you fly a jet fighter? Both games are entertainment. You do a lot more than hold text conversations with the other players, but it's the interaction with the other players that makes the game unique. Usually, meeting other people is a positive experience, other times, it's not. But it does keep the game interesting.
When I heard of people getting 'married' in these games, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I guess do whichever you like. I play Asheron's Call, and the in game weddings have been broken for as long as I've played. They apparently just got fixed today. Most people joke about the weddings. Some others take it more seriously, at least from a role playing perspective. Hundreds of thousands of people play these games. There is a tremendously diverse player base. You're idea of two losers chatting probably does exist among that diverse player base, but it's only a small representation.
Of course maybe I'm just one of those "losers" who likes holding text conversations with other "losers". Fine with me, I'm still having fun.:)
There's also DIrectX libraries, and all kinds of OS code that is loaded, but in the end Everquest eats memory because of huge textures. I don't know how they're going to get around that for the PS2. It should be interesting to see what the end product looks like.
Besides, does the PS2 actually run an operating system?
The definition of an Operation System is pretty nebulous. The PS2 runs something that can be considered an OS, that OS just isn't very complex, and is doesn't have many of the features of a general purpose OS you would run on a PC.
There's also the other side of the coin. Nuclear weapons are a reality, and we need to know their effectiveness from a defensive point of view as well. Maybe this can also be used to simulate what the effect would be if a terrorist gained access to a nuclear weapon of some type. No amount of wishing nuclear weapons would cease to exist will make it happen. By knowing as much as we can, maybe it's possible to more effectively defend against and deter their use.
We ALREADY HAVE LAWS TO DEAL WITH THIS! We don't need any new ones!! If I make a digital copy of a copyrighted work, and post it on the Internet, I've broken ALREADY EXISTING LAWS!
I strongly agree that Congress could save us a lot of time and money if they stopped passing laws which serve no purpose other than to make it look like they are doing something.
Copyright does however pose a problem that isn't being addressed well by current law. Unenforcable laws server very little purpose. Let face it, Copyright laws in general are pretty hard to enforce. Think about how many people you know who haven't broken Copyright laws by pirating some form of copyrighted material. DO you know anyone, not counting children that are to young to have a practical ability do do so? Currently, Copyright law is generally something enforced on large companies. It's simply to difficult, and not fincially viable to enforce it on the common person. Since the law is unenforsable, Copyright holders seek additional protections in order to attempt to prevent Copyright violations, rather than just to punish people after the fact. Thats where laws requiring copy protection, and making disabling of that copy protection come in. This is the problem that Congress faces and seems to understand.
My issues with this law and the DMCA isn't that they are trying to make it difficult for people to violate Copyright laws. The issue I have is with how the major media companies are using these laws to prevent fair use of copyrighted materials and also maintain their stranglehold of their respective markets. Both the DMCA and this bill say they maintain fair use. However, current copy protection mechanisms don't allow for making backups, or even coppies to use at different locations at different times. The media companies are also going down the route of using media formats that require expensive licensing agreements and make it difficult for individual copyright holders to take advantage of these same protections. They are using thes laws to maintain control of the market.
Another issue, and possibly an even more serious issue is losing the freedom to simply control the data you place on your own computer. When creating software that simply allows you to read raw data off of your hard drive may become illegal, I think we are giving up way too much freedom in order to enforce copyright laws.
How can you have a good computer engineering program at a university when it becomes illegal to properly investigate how a file system works? This bill could have serious consequenses that it's sponsors likely don't intend or understand. Copyright law is intended to help stimulate innovation by protecting the rights a creator to their creations. New laws regarding copyright should be balanced based on how they meet that goal. This bill fails that test miserably, and should not be allowed to become law.
Having a kid would take up much more free time than I could possibly gain. Parenthood may have it's rewards, but I don't think gaming would be one of them. At least not until the child gets older, and then they probably wouldn't be interested in playing the smae game as their old man plays.
Besides, playing a game all day gets boring after a while. Work can be a nice break from gaming and gaming can be a nice break from work.
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You have a good point. The "cost of card" should include the total cost they spend buying the cards from distributers wharehousing, shipping, advertising, and selling the card, but the number is probably considerably less than $329. They are also losing some potential customers who would have purchased the cards at retail, but no longer need the card.
If you read the letter from the AG which is on the web page, it seems like the issue isn't them canceling all the orders. It seems like the issue is that they are honoring the price for some people and not for others. It seems like that MAY be illegal, and least in some cases.
Does Best Buy really have the right to arbitrarily change the price on any item you purchase, just because the disclaimer says so?
Is anyone really stating that they are arbitrarily doing this? Someone made an error. They don't want to have to honor erroreous prices, which in this case would cost them over half a million dollars for the 2000 customers that placed orders. They are also canceling before the products were shipped.
2000 orders * $200 each = $400000
They can afford some bad press for nearly half a million dollars. I also don't think that a lot of their customers are going to be that upset with them for trying to not honor the price. It was obviously an error. The reason problem seems to be arising from them honoring the price to some customers, and then not honoring it for others. It kind of makes sence to give people the boards at that price if it were just a few, because it it isn't worth the bad press and upset customers. When you're talking about $400000, it makes more sence to live with a little bad press. If this was a smaller retailer a mistake like this could easily put them out of business. It doesn't make sense that people should be able to lose their jobs and that kind of money over a misprint of a price, even if it wasn't caught immediately.
If that does happen, then that would be a kind of national id system. I think it is likely that in the future our Driver's Licenses will have additional information to properly identify us. This might be digital representation of our thumbprint, so they can scan you're thumbprint to confirm you match the ID.
There's always a balance between a person's right to privacy and properly identifying someone to prevent fraud. I personally don't want companies to be able to track my purchasing habbits and where I go. However, I understand that you need to be able to make sure that the person withdrawing money from an account is the actual owner of the money, or the person selling a car really owns it.
In this specific case, I don't want whoever provides the authentication to be able to track what govenment sites I access and use that info for their own interests, or be able to make that information public. They may be required to keep such tracking info archived to prevent or prosecute fraud, but they shouldn't be able to access it for other reasons.
A password is a poor form of authentication. It's used because the system can't use more eact methods such as comparing you're likness to a photo ID. If MS Passport were using a thumbprint or something like that to authenticate, the you'd have a point, but that's a different problem.
Any system that simply requires you to type some characters in a box isn't excessivly secure. There will be people who find a way to create fake identities under whatever system the govenment selects, just like they create fake IDs now, and provide SSNs for people to work who aren't eligable. The government already provides the Driver's Licenses that are used to idnetify people now.
Microsoft Passport requires the use of serveral proprietary technologies that may not be available to all people who use computers connected to the internet. Passport does not work with these popular web browsers:
Netscape Navigator, Opera, Mozilla, iCab, Konquerer, or Lynx. It only works with Internet Explorer, a product made by Microsoft and only works on certain computer operating systems.
Is it really true that passport only works with IE? I find that hard to believe. If it's true it would be in my opinion Microsoft's most blatant Monopoly abuse to date. It would also mean that a bunch of Compuserve and AOL customers are going to have trouble using it very soon. Can anyone who uses those browsers confirm this?
Do you oppose a national ID (which really isn't what this is)?
Do you oppose the govenment making private information, such as tax info available to people through the internet?
Do you oppose the use of a outside (non-government) authentication system?
Do you oppose an authentication system which doesn't have a proven track record of good security and prompt effective responses to security issues?
Do you oppose Microsoft being the provider of the system.
Or all of the above?
Try not to be overly vague in what you write to your Congressmen. They often have little grasp of technical issues, and likley get vague complaints about just about everything the government does. You don't want to confuse them with too much detail, but you need to tell them what you don't like, and why. Alternate solutions might even be helpful.
Problem is, once an entity reaches a certain size, it is required to deal with the federal gov't electronically.
Yes they are, and they currently have ways of being authenticated. This would just be changing the method in which the government determines those companies are who they say they are.
It is not a long step (in fact, it is a very very short step) from there to having employers say to you "Ready to start work? Sure - just step up to that HR kiosk, fire up Internet Explorer(tm), and use your Federal Passport(tm) to authenticate who you are.".
Actually this is a very huge step. Why would your employer want to use passport to authenticate who you are? Passport just requires a password. The current method of a Social Security number and a valid drivers license works much better.
The government is trying to make more information available to it's citizens over the web. They have a responsibility to make sure they aren't giving that information out to the wrong people. Therefore they need a system to authenticate users of the system. This is not the same as requiring one ID for all online transactions, that can be used to track everything you do. You can have multiple MS passports. I have two myself. One I need to access some stuff for work, and it is based on my work email. I use it for nothing but work. My other passport is for Asheron's call. I use that passport only for Asheron's call.
There is a lot of information that the govenment keeps that we as citizens should have easy access to. Much of that information should only go to the person it's about, such as tax or social security info. They need some way to authenticate users. In my opinion, the current form of MS Passport isn't a good solution. THe servers go down, and there are too many serious security flaws. Microsoft claims that they are addressing these problems, and expect to have a rewritten version available next year. I'll believe that when I see it.
Authentication is a real issue that the government many, many other online entities face. There are many good reasons not to like passport, but writing your congressmen that passport is the evil spawn of Microsoft isn't going to be that convincing. It still leaves the govenment with the same problem. The govenment is is going to solve the authentication problem, if you don't like MS Passport, suggest a better solution.
Remember that people got really upset about Social Security numbers. They claimed they were the mark of the beast. We still ended up with SS#s. If you don't like the proposed solution, lobby for a different solution.
What if you invite the person into your home without realizing what they are doing? THere are plenty of times you invite strangers into your home. Someone could plant a camera in your bedroom or bath when they came to install cable TV, or fix the plumbing.
What about hotels? Do you think it's ok if someone sticks cameras in hotels and films people?
There doesn't have to be breaking and entering involved. I guess that individual states could solve this problem, but they don't appear to be handling the problem. Do you really think you should have to worry about what state you get a hotel room in and if they can legally film you while you're in the room?
You don't just buy 270000 licenses from a vendor. When you're dealing with high volumes, the vendor is brokering the deal between the manufacturer and the customer. Oracle was also the one who was pushing for the quick sale to get their quarterly profits up be fore they had to announce them to their stockholders. There's plenty of blame for Oracle to share with Logicon.
There are lots of options that can get you 1-3 microseconds of latency and 1 Gbit of bandwidth. Of course you'll likely have some serious software issues. Most programmers like using the good old IP stack to send and receive data. Trying to send and receive 100+ MB/s through an IP stack will pretty much hog the entire CPU. From my expericece with IP over fibrechannel, the throughput is CPU limited because of the IP stack. THere's no use in building a supercomputer if you're going to spend all the processing power just sending information around the interconnect. This means using Lightweight networking protocols, and writing a lot more custom software. Custom written software is very expensive since all the development costs aren't spread out across selling multiple coppies. This is likely one of those cases where a lot of it can be built with off the shelf hardware, but putting it together as a system is more than 90% of the cost. Fibre Channel is actually a good choice for this because you can run multiple protocols over the same network. Actually the company I work at has LINUX drivers that will do IP, a Lightprotocol, and IP simultaneously. We even have them for both X86 and PPC LINUX. We also have better multiple LUN and RAID support than other LINUX drivers I've seen. I wonder if we're involved in this. Maybe I'll go talk to our Fibre Channel Product Manager.
And there are other reasons than Global Warming to cut back on CO2 production. Go to Delhi to get a whif of why.
CO2 is oderless.
And I thought it was most of the Cl in the atmosphere that was from volcanic activity, or is Rush Limbaugh blaming volcanoes for everything these days?
I have no idea what Rush Limbaugh is blaming stuff on these days, and really don't care.
The real impact of WinDOS quality is going to effect the bottom line of Dell and Gateway. Preventing them from "fixing" things is going to HURT them while being masked from the point of view of "end users". The current regime also prevented (and still prevents) these same OEMs from using a better component for the "WinDOS" part.
Dell and Gateway don't want to fix Windows bugs. That would be a horribly unprofitable prospect for them. They can't afford to have a bunch of software engineers trained in Windows internals working to fix OS bugs. They already farm out support because it's isn't profitable for them to do that themselves. They want to buy a working OS. If there's bugs, they want the vendor to fix the bugs. If Dell, Gateway, and everyone else was fixing OS bugs you'd end up with dozens of incompatible "fixes" that work just fine for software that computer maker is shipping with their computer, but make compatibility testing for software and hardware vendors nearly impossible.
Dell and Gateway do want to be able to bundle different software with their systems in order to differentiate their products. If ayone remembers way back to the Tandy Sensation, that would be a good example of this. The Tandy computer ran windows, but it looked significantly different than other windows computers. If had lots of integrated software that worked through Tandy's custom interface, however it still ran standard Windows apps. This allowed Tandy to mark up the price of those computers based on the value they added through their customization of the interface. They sold a lot of them to joe home user, and even got some good reviews in computer magizines, but I'm not sure consumers really got added value.
I've seen plenty of Solaris machines crash because of OS bugs. I've seen VAXs crash. DEC Alpha's running Digital Unix, or whatever they named it at the time. Linux does many things very well, but it still crashes. Unix boxes can be very, very stable in many configurations, but Windows can also be stable in many configurations as well. The SCO UNIX system we had here was pretty stable, but it wasn't used much either. The only machine I don't remember crashing was the Convex. Of course, in that case, maybe you get what you payed for.
It's also a little egotistical to think that we're causing Global Warming to occur. The Earth was relatively warm, then went through an ICE age, then warmed up again to our current climate well before man was burning significant amounts of fossil fuels.
I've heard in the past that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from volcanic activity.
There's not exactly a shortage of CO2 in the atmosphere. Volcanic activity produces most of it, but it's one of those greenhouse gasses that we are so concerned about in conjunction with global warming. If we were to reduce our usage of fossil fuels and use more hydrogen, there would still be lots of CO2 available. The earth did fine before we started burning fossil fuels, and it will do fine if we burn more hydrogen instead. We might be able have some effect. Local climates around population centers might be raised or lowered. Different plants that need more or less CO2 to prosper may become more prevelent in some areas. The Earth has a great ability to adapt. Once upon a time there was a Glacier that covered the area in which I now live. Some time in the distant future, there may be one again. I think mankind still can't accept what a small effect we have on Nature with respect to climate. However, we have done an impressive job of poluting our water supplies, so maybe my scoffin at our effect is a bit premature.
Sales in Japan haven't been bad. I don't think anyone is really surprised with that. Microsoft hoped to be able to sell well in Japan, but I doubt even they are surprised that sales are "disappointing".
It's hard to tell if the slowing sales are a result of a slowing economy, or a preference for PS2.
The interesting thing I saw was that retailers prefer PS2. I wonder why? Does it sell better? Do they get better margins on PS2 consoles and games? Are Sony's bundling agreements, or lack of them more attractive? Is SOny now better at getting the items distributed to retailers? Is Sony just an extablished name in this market, and retailers trust them more?
The numbers I'd really like to see are sales volumes (quantity and revenues) for the games for each console. The PS2 console has been out longer, so volumes on consoles aren't as usefull of numbers as the volumes on games.
Many online games ban macros, and attempt to enforce those bans through the client code. Players often hack the client in order to cheat. Trying to stop client hacks and prevent macros on clients running on different OS's is an incredibly difficult task. It's an incredibly difficult task even on one OS.
There's also the reality that software has bugs. No developemnt team in their right minds wants to deal with the outrage their customers would express about having one group of customers not being able to do a quest, or not haveing an even chance in player vs player combat because of a client bug that doesn't effect all clients equally. Bugs are bad enough, but a bug that discriminates agains part of the player base fire people up REALLY fast.
An example of a client hack would be to hack the timer which determines how long it takes to cast a spell in the game. Suddenly that player's characters can cast spells twice as fast as other people. They need to be able to detect such hacks from the server side so that they can ban those players.
Developing a game that players can play on multiple platforms is likely going to be too complicated to be practical. It's just too likely that they will piss off their customer base, significantly increase development and especially testing costs, and not gain nearly enough users to justify the effort.
Online games DO have multi-megabyte patches precicsely because they are not simply fixing bugs, they are adding content to justify the monthly fee.
This one apparently won't. I get the feeling that the game will be based on everquest, but will be considerably different in terms of expandability and content. Sounds like a marketing ploy to me, rather than actually bringing Everquest to the PS2.
These games are entertainment. Do you know people who join softball teams and go out and socialize while they play. Or people who go out bowling together, or pick some other hobby. These games are just another hobby that allows people to interact socially with other people.
:)
These games is much more diverse than bowling, or softball. On the other hand you get a lot less exercise playing the game. You also don't get face to face interaction. The lack of face to face interaction has it's benefits and drawbacks.
There's nothing wrong with playing games per se, but I think that games where you do cool stuff you never usually do, like fly jet fighters, and games where you achieve something more than holding a text converstaion with another similar loser, are far superior.
What do you actually achieve in a game where you fly a jet fighter? Both games are entertainment. You do a lot more than hold text conversations with the other players, but it's the interaction with the other players that makes the game unique. Usually, meeting other people is a positive experience, other times, it's not. But it does keep the game interesting.
When I heard of people getting 'married' in these games, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I guess do whichever you like. I play Asheron's Call, and the in game weddings have been broken for as long as I've played. They apparently just got fixed today. Most people joke about the weddings. Some others take it more seriously, at least from a role playing perspective. Hundreds of thousands of people play these games. There is a tremendously diverse player base. You're idea of two losers chatting probably does exist among that diverse player base, but it's only a small representation.
Of course maybe I'm just one of those "losers" who likes holding text conversations with other "losers". Fine with me, I'm still having fun.
There's also DIrectX libraries, and all kinds of OS code that is loaded, but in the end Everquest eats memory because of huge textures. I don't know how they're going to get around that for the PS2. It should be interesting to see what the end product looks like.
Besides, does the PS2 actually run an operating system?
The definition of an Operation System is pretty nebulous. The PS2 runs something that can be considered an OS, that OS just isn't very complex, and is doesn't have many of the features of a general purpose OS you would run on a PC.
There's also the other side of the coin. Nuclear weapons are a reality, and we need to know their effectiveness from a defensive point of view as well. Maybe this can also be used to simulate what the effect would be if a terrorist gained access to a nuclear weapon of some type. No amount of wishing nuclear weapons would cease to exist will make it happen. By knowing as much as we can, maybe it's possible to more effectively defend against and deter their use.
We ALREADY HAVE LAWS TO DEAL WITH THIS! We don't need any new ones!! If I make a digital copy of a copyrighted work, and post it on the Internet, I've broken ALREADY EXISTING LAWS!
I strongly agree that Congress could save us a lot of time and money if they stopped passing laws which serve no purpose other than to make it look like they are doing something.
Copyright does however pose a problem that isn't being addressed well by current law. Unenforcable laws server very little purpose. Let face it, Copyright laws in general are pretty hard to enforce. Think about how many people you know who haven't broken Copyright laws by pirating some form of copyrighted material. DO you know anyone, not counting children that are to young to have a practical ability do do so? Currently, Copyright law is generally something enforced on large companies. It's simply to difficult, and not fincially viable to enforce it on the common person. Since the law is unenforsable, Copyright holders seek additional protections in order to attempt to prevent Copyright violations, rather than just to punish people after the fact. Thats where laws requiring copy protection, and making disabling of that copy protection come in. This is the problem that Congress faces and seems to understand.
My issues with this law and the DMCA isn't that they are trying to make it difficult for people to violate Copyright laws. The issue I have is with how the major media companies are using these laws to prevent fair use of copyrighted materials and also maintain their stranglehold of their respective markets. Both the DMCA and this bill say they maintain fair use. However, current copy protection mechanisms don't allow for making backups, or even coppies to use at different locations at different times. The media companies are also going down the route of using media formats that require expensive licensing agreements and make it difficult for individual copyright holders to take advantage of these same protections. They are using thes laws to maintain control of the market.
Another issue, and possibly an even more serious issue is losing the freedom to simply control the data you place on your own computer. When creating software that simply allows you to read raw data off of your hard drive may become illegal, I think we are giving up way too much freedom in order to enforce copyright laws.
How can you have a good computer engineering program at a university when it becomes illegal to properly investigate how a file system works? This bill could have serious consequenses that it's sponsors likely don't intend or understand. Copyright law is intended to help stimulate innovation by protecting the rights a creator to their creations. New laws regarding copyright should be balanced based on how they meet that goal. This bill fails that test miserably, and should not be allowed to become law.
Having a kid would take up much more free time than I could possibly gain. Parenthood may have it's rewards, but I don't think gaming would be one of them. At least not until the child gets older, and then they probably wouldn't be interested in playing the smae game as their old man plays.
Besides, playing a game all day gets boring after a while. Work can be a nice break from gaming and gaming can be a nice break from work.