Don't forget the Phantasy Star games on the sega, those had some pretty long engaging stories that had plenty of twists. As for as the switch from twitch gaming to today i think the key is finding the right balance between challenging and fun. take a game like ArmA for instance, sure its realistic as hell, but how many are gonna have fun crawling through the grass for 40 plus minutes to get to a position you can fire from that the enemy won't drill you a new asshole? Sure its realistic but that might be a little TOO realistic, on the flip side is what I call the "one man army" like FEAR and Far Cry which while fun, if one guy could slaughter THAT many dudes and walk out unscathed he'd be in some war lab being poked and probed trying to figure out WTH?
But I'd say we also have to be able to look at the past without rose colored glasses. Sure the games at the arcade were entertaining at the time but looking back many of the games like Pleiades and Joust were nothing but a fancier Simon, rewarding memorization of patterns. Now we wants stories, characters we can enjoy, cool effects, give me a Just Cause II or HL 2 over the games of the past any day of the week, they are just more fun,at least to me.
Riiiight, lets just tell that to Gabe at Valve together shall we? "Hey Gabe, this AC says folks don't game on PCs no more, just FYI" Gabe "Wooohoo, I'm using this solid gold slide to jump in my swimming pool of money, I'm fricking Scrooge McDuck, Woohooo"...yeah i don't think Gabe looks all that upset. Considering they added capacity like crazy for the big Xmas sale and there were still plenty of "We're sorry, we have sooo many people trying to snatch these deals up things are jammed up, please hang on" messages i don't even wanna know how much cash went through that thing. i know i probably dropped a couple of hundred there easily snatching games and my boys got so many games i don't see them needing any new ones for at least 3-4 months.
As for TFA, what advantages does this give me over Steam? And don't say "Free as in freedom" because i'm not a programmer and don't get a rat's ass about looking at code. How many games? What kind of services? Does it have chat and matchmaking? Sell it to me, what does it give me that Steam don't?
What fucked WinCE was MSFT trying to make it act like Windows, full stop. Look at WinCE 5.0 and what instantly comes to mind...its a fricking hybrid of Win2K and WinXP, which is precisely the WRONG message you want to give on a device that don't run x86. A local retailer over the holiday thought he was gonna make some extra scratch selling "Windows tablets" with WinCE, hell the way the box was laid out it looked enough like XP if I didn't know what WinCE was i wouldn't have known. The customers didn't know either as they didn't know WTF WinCE was and i'm sure looked at the picture and thought it was just another version of XP. Well the guy ended up having to cover the Windows part and sell them at a loss as generic tablets thanks to all the returns he got.
What Apple and Google got right that MSFT STILL hasn't got right is you can't run the desktop on something you poke with a finger, it just don't work. You'd have thought WinCE would have goten that through their heads but instead we're getting the desktop fucked so Ballmer can try to hoodwink enough developers to get some apps for WinTab. if any developers fall for this let me be the first to give you a Nelson HA HA because that shit is gonna cause confusion just like the WinCE WinTab and its gonna bomb. you need to keep mobile and desktop separate, not jam all that shit together.
If I had modpoints i'd mod you to 1000, so sad yet so true. The only other thing I'd add is look at how companies have become fad chasers, if a fad pops they suddenly drop things that work to chase the fad. look at MSFT which you point out does billions in research, but how many of it that isn't fad chasing to they actually develop into products? Ever since Ballmer they have been pissing away their core business (Business software and OSes) trying to be fucking Apple. Its the business customers and business developers that have been the big money clients yet they are gonna take a big old shit right on top of them to push HTML V5 because Ballmer wants to be the head of Apple so damned bad it hurts, simply because Apple has the buzz with iOS. Well i got news for them if we wanted fricking Apple we'd buy fricking Apple!
But I agree that Google is falling into the same trap as MSFT and IBM, too much focus on short term, not enough on long. The problem Google is gonna have is like Yahoo frankly there is nothing keeping their customers from walking away, whereas big blue will always have mainframes and MSFT will have workstations. It will be curious to see if some startup can just pop up and do to Google what Google did to Yahoo and Altavista, or whether the culture you pointed out of just inhaling startups will ensure we keep these same megacorps for the next decade.
Personally I predict after a couple more megaflops MSFT will accept their fate as the IBM of desktops, what will happen with Google will be anybody's guess, to me the big question mark will be Apple. Will Cook be able to predict new markets like Jobs did and stay one step ahead of the game, or will it be like the Pepsi guy where they try to coast on past success and slowly go downhill? In any case i'd say the next 5 years are gonna be pretty rough and tumble, especially if the economy keeps going south.
Uhhh...you'd just go the the cracksite and get "WGAKiller" and call it a day? BTW for all the talk about "ZOMFG I'll have to reactivate!" the box I'm typing this on has had every. single. piece ripped out and replaced, and I DO mean every piece, the PSU, HDDs, GPU, Motherboard, CPU, RAM, burners, the only piece left that is original from Oct 09 when i installed Win 7 on it is the case and i had to reactivate a grand total of ONE time, and that was when I ripped out the ECS board with the quad for an Asrock with a 6 core. It took less than 5 seconds and it said 'thank you" and that was it.
So with offline software there is ALWAYS a way around it, be it "legit" or no, but online only and you're screwed. After all I don't see anybody playing their Star Wars Galaxies characters they invested serious time and money in now, do you?
Because their offline versions aren't going anywhere and in fact they take great pains to make sure old versions still run on new OSes? My Win 7 box is running Ms Office 2K which is positively ancient but you know what? it works, and with the free converter pack it even opens the new 2k10 docX files just fine and dandy. When i was playing with the Win 8 dev preview (HATE the new UI BTW and I'm just damned glad Win 7 is supported until 2020 so I can skip 8 on my main system like I did Vista) for shits and giggles i stuck on office 2k and guess what? It STILL works.
From what I've seen of Office 360 or whatever the hell they call it they are going for more of a collaborative thing, to let office users share work as well as have a cheaper way to add office machines without needing a full copy of Office. But i haven't seen anybody say they were gonna remove the ability to use plain old offline MS Office and unless Ballmer is even worse of a CEO than i think he is i doubt seriously anybody in the future will be talking that either.
I'd say this is a problem for those that use Google cloud services but frankly most of their stuff is cheap or free and they DO give you plenty of warning and easy ways to migrate so....meh. I really can't fault the company for dumping a money loser as long as they keep giving users easy ways to migrate. This is one point in Google's favor as they do give plenty of time, its not like they just flip the switch the second they decide to kill something. How long did they give you on Wave and Buzz, something like 6 months? Plenty of time IMHO. i'd say the only thing I'd change is that they have a set in stone EOL like on MSFT's products but frankly they have so many I doubt anybody would know what the EOL is on any of them anyway, so keep doing what you are doing Google, it seems to be fair.
I think the difference is long term support contracts as all those corps you named make damned good money and would take a serious hit to their businesses if they abandoned or failed to live up to their long term support contracts. lets take the one whose software I've had the most experience with, Microsoft.
While everyone makes fun of their "glacial" OS development frankly its damned easy to plan around a MSFT Business OS because you know to the day how long you are gonna have support for which is a standard 10 years for business OS. Since there will be at least 2 if not 3 releases in your support window that gives you plenty of time to test and get your core software switched over and simply go from one to the other. I've finally got the last of my business customers switched over to 7 and now that all the software is certified working and they are all happy all I have to do is bring Win 7 machines online as they need them because Win 7 is supported until 2020. this let them skip Vista completely and they'll probably skip 8 and 9 as well and be ready to start certifying their 'must have' software for Windows 10 around 2018.
So I'd say the key is to base your plans around software that has LTS and think long term rather than risk betting too much on software that may not be here tomorrow. A good example below is Red hat. if your software runs on RHEL they have plenty of LTS options and you know they aren't going anywhere so planning your business around RHEL wouldn't be a problem, but as we saw not too long ago planning your business around CentOS would be bad as they could disappear tomorrow. it all comes down to LTS and how much you can trust the company to provide it, all the companies you named along with Red hat and a few others have the LTS options one can plan a business around without any real fear of getting burned.
Funny thing is you would THINK that VMs solved that problem but they haven't. For example I built and maintain a "NOS" early Pentium 4 for a customer who has one piece of "must have" software, Macromedia Xres. That thing is a fricking nightmare pal, good luck getting it to run on ANY modern hardware, even in a VM. I tried dual boots, VMs, shims, you name it, that bitch will NOT run on anything newer than a 2.2Ghz with 1gb of RAM and an IDE HDD. Now some of the other royal PITA software like QuickBooks (Man i'd like to meet the guy that wrote that thing and kick him in the nuts. WTH was he thinking tying the software to a SPECIFIC version of Flash? WTF?) can be run in XP Mode or other VM with some tweaking but I found out the hard way there IS software out there that HAS to be run bare metal.
As for TFA frankly anyone that uses ANY Google service that isn't already extremely popular deserves what they get sadly. Google has shown their entire business model is "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" and anything that doesn't grab a huge share is shitcanned, see TFA and Google Wave and a dozen others like Buzz for examples. If anyone is stupid enough to buy a Google TV, I don't care if its Intel, ARM, or MIPS, they are pissing their money away as i bet that'll be gone soon enough too. Google has shown their whole plan revolves around capitalizing on eyeballs and search while spending as little as possible and while Sony, Apple and MSFT have all cut checks Google has made it clear they ain't paying shit to the content owners so any Google TV will simply be banhammered from their services.
But I hope this has taught many a valuable lesson, don't bother relying on a Google service until it hits 30 million plus users bare minimum, probably 60 to 70 million just to be safe. They have made it clear with these service killings that 8-12 million is just too small potatoes for them to care about and they only want hits, misses will be culled.
Are you forgetting the 6 year old Debian bug? the KDELook bug that lasted for over a year before caught? the hacked Quake 3 that lasted in the repos for a year and a half? The "many eyes makes bugs shallow" is a fallacy because it (incorrectly ) assumes that you have enough eyes that have the required skillset and that those eyes are doing NOTHING but searching said code, literally millions and millions of lines in just your average distro, for bugs. Then of course they have to be scanning ALL updates, patches, changes, for any possible vectors. Do the math friend and you'll find you'll have to clone about a million top level programmers just to keep up! I'd frankly be amazed that there is even 10% of the code in your average distro being checked by eyes other than the ones that actually wrote the thing. Just look at how much cruft and dead code the LO guys are finding in the OO.o codebase and that is one of THE most popular programs in the entire FOSS ecosystem!
In the end there is good and bad code in EVERY format from BSD and GPL to proprietary, it all comes down to the skills of the programmers and how seriously security is stressed in that company. There is nothing "magical" about FOSS that instantly makes it immune to bugs, nor does it give coders the power to instantly write non buggy code. Hell I could paste this post with links to Linux hacks, starting with kernel.org on down, but what's the point? Sadly perception bubbles and flag waving have replaced serious debates here which is why the numbers have been plummeting for nearly 2 years now. i hate to agree with him but old Mikey 500 accounts is right "Slashdot = Stagnated". I mean look at your own post that got a +5 for a simple variation of the classic "Use Linux!" troll. Its like the old Mel Brooks joke "all go to hell except cave 76!" and treating companies and licenses like ballclubs to root for.
Kinda sad that supposedly well educated geeks have ended up no better than those we laugh about cheering for reality TV stars, only we replace the Kardashians and Survivor for Google, Apple, MSFT, and the GPL.
I think he's trying to say they sent him a standard "do not reply to this" email so that any attempt he tried to answer the blatant shilling just got bounced back. that was what the last senator that we punt kicked like a 30 yard field return would do, no matter what you wrote her on you'd get a standard "Vote for me!" reply with a non functional bounce back email address, real douchebag behavior IMHO.
Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! You are missing the "if the prosecutor has an agenda' part friend as they can pile on charges for even the lamest thing if they feel like it so suddenly that 6 months turns into 9-14 in PMITA prison. look at the case I cited, she came up with every charge she could possibly think up because "if you have a penis you're a rapist" so she had everything from simple assault to child endangerment. By the time she was done if he would have had a public pretender he was looking at damned near 40 YEARS in prison friend.
You have to remember pal the law books for just your state could literally crush you under their weight, add in local and fed and you have the weight of a greyhound bus they can drop on your ass. lets see with computers there is theft of services, hacking, possible terrorism charges, hell those three right there slapped together you are looking at a cool dozen, remember friend big numbers helps Mr/MS Prosecutor show he/she is 'tough on crime" and the more they can pile on you the more likely you are to plead so piling that shit on is SOP.
We may not be able to brand him a flip flopper (and the Nazi ref is just tasteless and pointless) but we CAN label him a dumbass and obviously not the right man for the job when he doesn't even bother with a single survey of his actual CUSTOMERS before pulling such a bonehead stunt. Moz may be "free as in beer" but if they don't have users they can't get Google or anybody else to pay for their search results so they had damned well better listen to their users. As we saw here recently the figures show FF has been in a solid death spiral since Version 4, with it shedding more and more users by the month as they get tired of the bullshit. I myself started looking for alternative at V 4 when it started sucking on AMD CPUs and bailed on V 6 for Comodo Dragon. I still have FF installed and keep it updated as well as try each new version but so far its still sucking on AMD CPUs and the CPU spiking and RAM usage, especially on the Zacate dual cores and the older low power singles and multicores like the Phenom e series really sucks.
So instead of wasting their resources and time trying to replace a project that frankly nobody really used in the first place, how about listening to your damned customers and fixing the fricking browser, how about that? Remember the ORIGINAL mission statement, the one you used to get us off the suite, to "build the fastest and lightest standards complaint browser" remember that? Ever since Google released Chrome its been a "ohh me too!" fest at Moz and frankly it sucks. the UI sucks, the performance sucks, and I'd argue its because they are trying to jam shit on there Gecko was never made for, like flash plugin isolation, which at least on AMD causes FF to suck as much as twice the resources playing an SD video as any of the Chromium based.
And finally please fanbois, or those that have "perception bubbles" as I've been told to call you by someone who was offended at the word fanboi, please don't trot out some benchmark because i can trot out one that says the GeForce FX was actually a great Dx9 chip. Of course we all know now that they were writing to the bench which made the benches worthless but IRL all you have to do is use what I call the "Hairyfeet normal folks test" where you fire up a tool like process explorer that will give you the complete resources of a program then send the browser through the basic sites everyone goes to, YouTube, FB, Yahoo Mail/Gmail, and check the resource usage and you'll see for yourself that FF don't stack up so good.
So please moz devs, quit trying to be the saviors of the web and fix your shit first, okay? there are a hell of a lot of us that would be happy to come back to the fold if you'd just quit trying to make a bad Chrome ripoff and go back to making a small fast standards compliant browser we can DIY customize with extensions. Nobody has an extension framework as good as yours, nobody. some come back moz, quit all this crap that has nothing to do with your core business and get back in the business of making browsers because as the numbers show the way you are going now is NOT the correct way to go. kinda sad you are talking about "hiding" the LTS on some back page somewhere just because you are afraid that everyone will dump the main branch for LTS, doesn't that smack you witrh a cluebat that you are on the wrong path?
They took away her teaching credentials so she will get to spend a good couple of decades paying off student loans while working at the Mickey D, don't sound like too much of a win to me.
Sorry to burst anybody's "the truth will set you free' bubble but if a prosecutor decides to fuck up your life because you're the wrong color, they have an agenda, or hell just because its Tuesday you're pretty much fucked even if you do win. i should know one of my old HS buddies lost a house that had been in his family four generations thanks to a bitch prosecutor that had an agenda. he and his wife were going through a nasty divorce, turned out the bitch had been fucking around with a couple of different guys and things were going bad for her so she got her 15 year old daughter to say he grabbed her tits. everybody knew it was bullshit, even the investigator came out and testified FOR the defense because the 15 year old kept changing her story, but it turned out the prosecutor had been raped in college and decided that "if you have a penis you're a rapist" so she drug that shit out nearly 3 years. of course my friend "won" in the end, jury didn't even take 20 minutes to find him not guilty, but the legal fees completely broke him and cost him the family home and left him nothing to fight the bitch in the divorce case so she took his son and left the country with one of the guys she was screwing. Now he'll never see his son ever again and that home that had been built by his great grandpa is gone.
So don't think because you are right or innocent means jack shit anymore, as he found out legal fees can hit a couple of hundred thousand without a bit of trouble so unless you got stacks of cash to fight back pretty much they can stomp all over your life at ANY time. And if you think a public pretender will save your ass you might want to look at the rates of conviction for public pretenders VS lawyers you hire, last i check most public pretenders were looking at an average 90% conviction rate, hell i think the odds are better representing yourself than with a public pretender, at least in my state. that is the problem with the system in a nutshell folks, the rich and the state can stomp all over the average Joe simply by dragging out the case until they go broke. i hope everybody that plays with this gots lots of money they are just sitting on, or plenty of assets they can sell, otherwise innocent or no probably won't make a damned bit of difference.
Well like I said our current senator ran for that job for 12 years straight before finally getting elected and its his first term so he's probably more likely to listen to the folks than many of them. in fact one of the things that got the last one punted like a 30 yard field return was she'd always just shoot out a standard "vote for me/give me money!" form letter while completely ignoring the people time and time again. If it was something big business cut a check for she was all over that buddy,didn't matter if it screwed the people one little bit. She thought she didn't have to worry about it because she had the soccer moms but she found out that even the soccer moms get tired of total bullshit after awhile.
So i give credit where credit is due, the new guy actually seems to be listening and so far I've gotten three replies back, some I agreed with, some i didn't, but each one was addressed to that issue and ONLY that issue and he laid out his reasons, unlike the chain letter BS I'd always get from the last one. The SOPA one said we needed to find a way to fight piracy without trampling on free speech or stifling innovation, which is fine, i personally think the answer is to accept piracy and offer a better product like the Valve Steam model. Make it so I can just go to Amazon, click on a movie, whip out my CC and get it in whatever format i want, easy peasy. Look at the music industry that is making insane profits by selling bog standard plays anywhere MP3s. I don't see why the movie industry can't do the same with.AVI and.MKV and make it just as easy to buy their product, make it easy, make it cheap, make it simple.
But I think the key to winning this thing is to appeal to things both parties rally to easily. With the Dems free speech and protecting the little guy, with the reps it would be smaller government and letting the free market handle it. This way we appeal to the core beliefs of both while still getting what we want, which is SOPA/PIPA killed very very dead. But I'm sorry you are getting the standard chain letter, I guess being a first termer makes mine a little more likely to pay attention.
Good God man, don't even joke about such a thing! Think about it, think about every. single. person. you know that practically lives on that crap and suddenly they don't have access.....and you're a geek....who knows about computers.....Jesus Tap Dancing Christ on a crutch man our phones will be ringing off the damned hook, on a Sunday no less!
Uhh...to use a phrase popular in these parts 'I don't actually have a horse in this race' as i'm happy with my dumbphone and netbook, which BTW said netbook came with not only Windows 7 but also an instant on Linux environment called Expressgate which is one of the reasons I bought it, so i'm not "for" or "against" anybody here and the automatic assuming that I am just lets everyone know you DO have a horse in the race and are one of those "everyone go to hell but cave 76!" types that treat corps like ballclubs.
As for voting with your wallet it doesn't have a damned thing to do with "uberrich" and if it did the only purses you'd see in stores would be Prada and there sure as hell wouldn't be a line of Snooki zebraskin bags in every damned store. No voting with your wallet is VERY democratic and that is probably why FOSS zealots hate it so, because they have yet to make an OS people actually want. lets take Google Android for instance, which only came about because google took it AWAY from the fiddly CLI happy community and used the kernel to make an ALL GUI all the time OS that is based around an app market kinda like...well Apple obviously. if it had a damned thing to do with uberrich how do you explain MSFT being dead last hmmm? They have thrown obscene amounts of money at WinMo and WinPhone and now Win 8 ARM yet people voted with their wallets and you can't give the things away, why? Because people LIKE Android and iOS that's why! they like the features, the like the GUI, they like the form factor, its all decided by people voting with their wallets.
but the fact that you think people shouldn't be able to choose just shows you to be an elitist, thinking the public is "sheeple" that you oh wise one should be able to decide for. Well i got news for you pal, just as MSFT found out with Vista, WinMo, and I'm betting WinPhone and WinARM and Apple is gonna find out if they don't come up with something truly kick ass soon the public is more than willing to dump your ass if you don't have what they want. Its no different than how you can't find a single retailer in America stocking Linux boxes on shelves or how MSFT is dead last in phones, you give the people what they want or they walk away, simple as that. But you thinking the rich can magically decide for the masses just shows how out of touch you are with the average consumer because frankly nothing could be further from the truth, for an example look at how Intel is pushing "ultrabooks" yet the local Walmarts and Staples are packed to the brim with AMD netbooks and laptops that are frankly selling like hotcakes. the corps can say "thin is in" all they want but if the public doesn't want the unit or doesn't think its worth the price its just gonna sit there gathering dust.
All we can do is keeping riding our reps as hard as we can and make it clear ANY that vote yes better be ready to find a new job PERIOD. I was surprised i got an actual email back from my senator saying he had taken his name off the bill and promising to vote against it so he must have got enough nasty hate mail to get spooked as you usually just get a standard "Please vote for me!" bullshit chain letter begging for more cash. of course it may be that our senator had run for about a dozen years before finally getting elected this last round and is scared shitless of being a one termer who knows, but i found it surprising to actually get something addressing the complaint instead of the usual "vote for me/cut me a check' bullshit. The fact that they weren't able to simply buy their way through congress though gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, we can use the fear of a massive firing to keep their asses in line on this single issue at least.
I had a friend that was the same way for more than 20 years, he's now sleeping on a couch and working at Lowe's because 3 of them got knocked up and he got stuck with child support. Karma, it is a bitch. The flipside is of course how culture can affect outlook, my GF is Cherokee and after that many generations of being trodden on with the reservations frankly they are a broken people. her two previous marriages were both abusive and now she is constantly frightened i'm gonna "throw her away" for someone better and its hell getting her to stand up for herself. It'll probably take years to undo the damage her culture has done to her if I ever can.
It still amazes her that there are guys like me out there that will stand up for her WITHOUT using her as a punching bag or trying to sleep with her friends but it just shows you that some times stereotypes don't fit, i'm sure i look like a teddy bear but i spent many a year playing behind chicken wire and biking my ass all over the south. My favorite backup bass still has several dents from guys that didn't know when to back off and if any tried shit at some club I'm playing with my Cherokee princess that bass will be getting another battle scar. But just because I protect what's mine does NOT mean I would ever raise a hand in anger to a female, that shit just don't fly and I was raised a traditional southern gentleman, we don't do that shit.
But I'm happy and if it takes years to slowly build her back up i'll spend the time, my family all think the world of my princess and are being supportive. You do what you gotta do, ya know?
Actually I'd say its a cultural thing. As I said I was the tutor for the HS football team for four years and while the white players were looking at sports as a way to earn a free college education (and get the hot chicks) the blacks saw it as an end unto itself. In their culture athletes are looked up to whereas the education seekers are 'uppity" "acting white" or "Uncle Toms". Sadly I saw this several times, education for the sake of knowledge is looked down upon, its almost like anyone smarter than they are makes them feel inferior so they would tear them down.
Personally I never got that, my oldest is going on his second year at college to be a doctor and i'll be the first to admit he kicks my 156 IQ ass when it comes to brains but that makes me happy as hell personally. He has noble goal like becoming one of the doctors without borders and his strong faith and work ethic (and by faith I mean in the classical Jesus sense, as in helping the poor and downtrodden NOT the bigotry that is passed off as Christianity nowadays) will help him to be a kick ass healer. but if he was black he'd be getting more than half of the community actively treating him like shit, I've again seen it with my own eyes, i just don't get it. But that seems to be ingrained in their culture, music and athletics is encouraged, educational advancement is not. Crazy huh?
Nooo, I actually know several military men including MPs and they take their duty VERY seriously and make it a point of pride how quickly they can stop a situation from getting out of hand WITHOUT causing damage or harm. They also have plenty of practice with troops that come back from leave a little rowdy so some smart ass in business class won't be a problem. if things get nasty they can have the threat safely hogtied and sitting in the corner before he can say "WTF?" and without any damage other than their pride.
So it has nothing to do with romantic notions and everything to do with knowing the skill and training of the men we would be putting in charge of hundreds of lives. you don't want a trigger happy cowboy, you want someone who can safely take them down WITHOUT firing their weapon if at all possible.
But that does bring up a good point of who gets to dump shit and why we should start working at cleaning it up but also be working on "no more dumping shit" rules for space. I mean when you look at the history of our ventures into space we got shit from 1950s (Vanguard) still floating up there as useless shit, and both we and the Ruskies were serious slobs when it came to dumping shit in space with no regards for anybody else.
Now we have not only the Indians and Chinese, who with their sat blowing bit showed they don't give a crap about polluting the hell out of space, we are now gonna have private enterprise (not talking about TFA who is going for a low enough orbit it'll be gone pretty quick) who as we have seen with such lovely messes like superfund sites frankly haven't given a crap about polluting the hell out of earth if it makes them profits, and we are supposed to trust them not to take a big giant dump in space? you just know they'll have everything set up with shell corps they can just dissolve if the poo hits the fan and just walk away leaving the mess while they count their money.
So we REALLY need to get a hold on this thing now, while its a mess but not an unrecoverable mess, and set up some serious ground rules to protect this valuable natural resource. After all it really wouldn't take much of a disaster to create such a minefield out there our birds would be dropping like flies and our society has gotten too used to having sat communications to let it be a free for all. So while i'm all nothing but love for the guys in TFA I do think it just shines a spotlight on how as things get cheaper its gonna become even more riskier if we don't set down with our nations and set some hard ground rules now.
Nice to see i wasn't the only one that happened to. there were several bundles where I was like 'That many games for THAT price? Sweet!" only to get to the page and find at the bottom "This game requires you assume the Goatse pose' and said "no thanks, fuck off" and that was time wasted i could have been buying games. My gamer box also does video trancoding and analog to digital conversions for clients so i'm not gonna have it drug down by 50 damned always on POS DRM craplets running in the background which is why i went to Steam and GOG in the first place yet if Valave don't watch it they are gonna make steam suck as much as GFWL.
The sad part is once again it proves it don't do shit for piracy, just burns legit customers. i'll give an example, Bioshock II. Both the store boxed and Steam version require GFWL crap yet the Razr1911 version has a hacked GFWL that only runs just long enough to fool the program then drops out, no muss no fuss no hassle. But since i grabbed Bioshock II in one of those daily deals i'm stuck with GFWL when i could have had the GFWL free Razr1911, same as i'm stuck with TAGES because one of my boys didn't know and saw Riddick: Dark Athena along with Butcher bay HD on sale for $5 and snatched a copy for himself and gifted me a copy because he thought I'd like it. Its a nice game but if I'd have had the choice i wouldn't have taken it because i wouldn't add that TAGES shit.
Which brings me to another missing feature in Steam: There ought to be a setting in preferences that tells my friends if they try to purachase a game as a gift for me that "This person requests that you don't gift games that contain non Steam DRM" because you don't want to hurt their feelings by saying "I don't want that shit, take it back' but at the same time you don't want it on your system.
I think he's talking about the fact he couldn't get any real backing so all they did was half ass. In a way it reminds me of how MSFT is backed into a corner with x86, because they too were once ahead of the curve with Cutler having Windows on MIPS and SPARC but instead of embracing that portability and developing easy to use IDEs that would make "universal binaries' that would have made them THE OS and software company and would have made the support of ARM when it became the dominant chip trivial none of the PHBs really supported portability and so they went half ass with even their own business software not having a full port (IIRC there was no Access or Excel for anything but x86) so the third parties never ran with it and it dried up and blew away. Now they find themselves a lot like Kodak found themselves at the early 90s, with these upstarts chipping away shares in markets that could have been theirs if they wouldn't have dropped the ball. in the end the only think I think will save MSFT from being Kodak in 20 years is like IBM and the mainframe X86 is a mature market that isn't going anywhere. I believe the x86 desktop/laptop/workstation will stay, it will be a slow growth market with very low turnovers as machines become so powerful they get used for closer to a decade between replacement and like IBM you will see MSFT relegated to that niche that is no longer the hot growth sector.
As for Kodak? There is still money to be made there if someone with vision would come along and save them. I want a Kodachrome camera dammit! I want a digital camera that "lies beautifully" like the old Kodachrome film did, with the extra vibrant greens and blues and white puffy clouds that pop in a picture. if someone were to create a digital camera that gave digital pics that look like Kodachrome and make it say 10MP for $100 i could see those things flying off the shelves. The digital pics just don't look as "alive" as Kodachrome did, for those that haven't ever used it look up some Kodachrome pics and see what i'm talking about, nature shots and outdoor photos (which lets face it most folks are taking pics outside) really had this vibrancy to the colors, especially blue, green, earth tones, and white, that really made the pictures look GOOD. It was damned hard to take a truly shitty looking picture outdoors with Kodachrome. give me THAT and i'll gladly hand you a hundred dollar bill and i bet a lot of other folks would too Kodak.
You had great taste sir. You see i tried telling folks there was just something about Kodachrome, it always as i put it 'lied beautifully' in that the colors were frankly often more vivid and deeper than IRL, for example grasses would often have a wonderful emerald green quality and blue skies really 'popped' for lack of a better word.
If Kodak would have put out a Kodachrome digital camera that automatically gave pictures that "Kodachrome color" so Joe and Sally Average could take pictures just as easily as with a digital but had those beautiful Kodachrome colors frankly they would still be here, but one bad management team after another killed any hope that company had of turning itself around. Sadly i agree that nothing of value was lost because it was lost long ago.
The simple fact is you could end the treat of plane hijackings tomorrow without all this bullshit. You want to ensure that planes will NEVER be hijacked in the USA again? put a pair of USMC MPs with sidearms between the passengers and the door. USAF and US ARMY MPs work just as well in a pinch, and by having a pair of them that takes care of the "ZOMFG what happens if they snap?" somebody always ends up posting. Frankly I'd trust them over these TSA goons any day of the week and twice on Sunday because they volunteered because they love their country NOT because they wanted to get a check for being part of a goon squad. And i'd love to see some punk who thinks he can just waltz up to a couple of MPs and get in their faces and not end up hogtied so damned fast it would make their head swim. But of course that wouldn't let Senator Porkus and Congressman Kickbakman "bring home the bacon" with extra goon squad jobs for their district so it'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the Phantasy Star games on the sega, those had some pretty long engaging stories that had plenty of twists. As for as the switch from twitch gaming to today i think the key is finding the right balance between challenging and fun. take a game like ArmA for instance, sure its realistic as hell, but how many are gonna have fun crawling through the grass for 40 plus minutes to get to a position you can fire from that the enemy won't drill you a new asshole? Sure its realistic but that might be a little TOO realistic, on the flip side is what I call the "one man army" like FEAR and Far Cry which while fun, if one guy could slaughter THAT many dudes and walk out unscathed he'd be in some war lab being poked and probed trying to figure out WTH?
But I'd say we also have to be able to look at the past without rose colored glasses. Sure the games at the arcade were entertaining at the time but looking back many of the games like Pleiades and Joust were nothing but a fancier Simon, rewarding memorization of patterns. Now we wants stories, characters we can enjoy, cool effects, give me a Just Cause II or HL 2 over the games of the past any day of the week, they are just more fun,at least to me.
Riiiight, lets just tell that to Gabe at Valve together shall we? "Hey Gabe, this AC says folks don't game on PCs no more, just FYI" Gabe "Wooohoo, I'm using this solid gold slide to jump in my swimming pool of money, I'm fricking Scrooge McDuck, Woohooo"...yeah i don't think Gabe looks all that upset. Considering they added capacity like crazy for the big Xmas sale and there were still plenty of "We're sorry, we have sooo many people trying to snatch these deals up things are jammed up, please hang on" messages i don't even wanna know how much cash went through that thing. i know i probably dropped a couple of hundred there easily snatching games and my boys got so many games i don't see them needing any new ones for at least 3-4 months.
As for TFA, what advantages does this give me over Steam? And don't say "Free as in freedom" because i'm not a programmer and don't get a rat's ass about looking at code. How many games? What kind of services? Does it have chat and matchmaking? Sell it to me, what does it give me that Steam don't?
What fucked WinCE was MSFT trying to make it act like Windows, full stop. Look at WinCE 5.0 and what instantly comes to mind...its a fricking hybrid of Win2K and WinXP, which is precisely the WRONG message you want to give on a device that don't run x86. A local retailer over the holiday thought he was gonna make some extra scratch selling "Windows tablets" with WinCE, hell the way the box was laid out it looked enough like XP if I didn't know what WinCE was i wouldn't have known. The customers didn't know either as they didn't know WTF WinCE was and i'm sure looked at the picture and thought it was just another version of XP. Well the guy ended up having to cover the Windows part and sell them at a loss as generic tablets thanks to all the returns he got.
What Apple and Google got right that MSFT STILL hasn't got right is you can't run the desktop on something you poke with a finger, it just don't work. You'd have thought WinCE would have goten that through their heads but instead we're getting the desktop fucked so Ballmer can try to hoodwink enough developers to get some apps for WinTab. if any developers fall for this let me be the first to give you a Nelson HA HA because that shit is gonna cause confusion just like the WinCE WinTab and its gonna bomb. you need to keep mobile and desktop separate, not jam all that shit together.
If I had modpoints i'd mod you to 1000, so sad yet so true. The only other thing I'd add is look at how companies have become fad chasers, if a fad pops they suddenly drop things that work to chase the fad. look at MSFT which you point out does billions in research, but how many of it that isn't fad chasing to they actually develop into products? Ever since Ballmer they have been pissing away their core business (Business software and OSes) trying to be fucking Apple. Its the business customers and business developers that have been the big money clients yet they are gonna take a big old shit right on top of them to push HTML V5 because Ballmer wants to be the head of Apple so damned bad it hurts, simply because Apple has the buzz with iOS. Well i got news for them if we wanted fricking Apple we'd buy fricking Apple!
But I agree that Google is falling into the same trap as MSFT and IBM, too much focus on short term, not enough on long. The problem Google is gonna have is like Yahoo frankly there is nothing keeping their customers from walking away, whereas big blue will always have mainframes and MSFT will have workstations. It will be curious to see if some startup can just pop up and do to Google what Google did to Yahoo and Altavista, or whether the culture you pointed out of just inhaling startups will ensure we keep these same megacorps for the next decade.
Personally I predict after a couple more megaflops MSFT will accept their fate as the IBM of desktops, what will happen with Google will be anybody's guess, to me the big question mark will be Apple. Will Cook be able to predict new markets like Jobs did and stay one step ahead of the game, or will it be like the Pepsi guy where they try to coast on past success and slowly go downhill? In any case i'd say the next 5 years are gonna be pretty rough and tumble, especially if the economy keeps going south.
Uhhh...you'd just go the the cracksite and get "WGAKiller" and call it a day? BTW for all the talk about "ZOMFG I'll have to reactivate!" the box I'm typing this on has had every. single. piece ripped out and replaced, and I DO mean every piece, the PSU, HDDs, GPU, Motherboard, CPU, RAM, burners, the only piece left that is original from Oct 09 when i installed Win 7 on it is the case and i had to reactivate a grand total of ONE time, and that was when I ripped out the ECS board with the quad for an Asrock with a 6 core. It took less than 5 seconds and it said 'thank you" and that was it.
So with offline software there is ALWAYS a way around it, be it "legit" or no, but online only and you're screwed. After all I don't see anybody playing their Star Wars Galaxies characters they invested serious time and money in now, do you?
Because their offline versions aren't going anywhere and in fact they take great pains to make sure old versions still run on new OSes? My Win 7 box is running Ms Office 2K which is positively ancient but you know what? it works, and with the free converter pack it even opens the new 2k10 docX files just fine and dandy. When i was playing with the Win 8 dev preview (HATE the new UI BTW and I'm just damned glad Win 7 is supported until 2020 so I can skip 8 on my main system like I did Vista) for shits and giggles i stuck on office 2k and guess what? It STILL works.
From what I've seen of Office 360 or whatever the hell they call it they are going for more of a collaborative thing, to let office users share work as well as have a cheaper way to add office machines without needing a full copy of Office. But i haven't seen anybody say they were gonna remove the ability to use plain old offline MS Office and unless Ballmer is even worse of a CEO than i think he is i doubt seriously anybody in the future will be talking that either.
I'd say this is a problem for those that use Google cloud services but frankly most of their stuff is cheap or free and they DO give you plenty of warning and easy ways to migrate so....meh. I really can't fault the company for dumping a money loser as long as they keep giving users easy ways to migrate. This is one point in Google's favor as they do give plenty of time, its not like they just flip the switch the second they decide to kill something. How long did they give you on Wave and Buzz, something like 6 months? Plenty of time IMHO. i'd say the only thing I'd change is that they have a set in stone EOL like on MSFT's products but frankly they have so many I doubt anybody would know what the EOL is on any of them anyway, so keep doing what you are doing Google, it seems to be fair.
I think the difference is long term support contracts as all those corps you named make damned good money and would take a serious hit to their businesses if they abandoned or failed to live up to their long term support contracts. lets take the one whose software I've had the most experience with, Microsoft.
While everyone makes fun of their "glacial" OS development frankly its damned easy to plan around a MSFT Business OS because you know to the day how long you are gonna have support for which is a standard 10 years for business OS. Since there will be at least 2 if not 3 releases in your support window that gives you plenty of time to test and get your core software switched over and simply go from one to the other. I've finally got the last of my business customers switched over to 7 and now that all the software is certified working and they are all happy all I have to do is bring Win 7 machines online as they need them because Win 7 is supported until 2020. this let them skip Vista completely and they'll probably skip 8 and 9 as well and be ready to start certifying their 'must have' software for Windows 10 around 2018.
So I'd say the key is to base your plans around software that has LTS and think long term rather than risk betting too much on software that may not be here tomorrow. A good example below is Red hat. if your software runs on RHEL they have plenty of LTS options and you know they aren't going anywhere so planning your business around RHEL wouldn't be a problem, but as we saw not too long ago planning your business around CentOS would be bad as they could disappear tomorrow. it all comes down to LTS and how much you can trust the company to provide it, all the companies you named along with Red hat and a few others have the LTS options one can plan a business around without any real fear of getting burned.
Funny thing is you would THINK that VMs solved that problem but they haven't. For example I built and maintain a "NOS" early Pentium 4 for a customer who has one piece of "must have" software, Macromedia Xres. That thing is a fricking nightmare pal, good luck getting it to run on ANY modern hardware, even in a VM. I tried dual boots, VMs, shims, you name it, that bitch will NOT run on anything newer than a 2.2Ghz with 1gb of RAM and an IDE HDD. Now some of the other royal PITA software like QuickBooks (Man i'd like to meet the guy that wrote that thing and kick him in the nuts. WTH was he thinking tying the software to a SPECIFIC version of Flash? WTF?) can be run in XP Mode or other VM with some tweaking but I found out the hard way there IS software out there that HAS to be run bare metal.
As for TFA frankly anyone that uses ANY Google service that isn't already extremely popular deserves what they get sadly. Google has shown their entire business model is "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" and anything that doesn't grab a huge share is shitcanned, see TFA and Google Wave and a dozen others like Buzz for examples. If anyone is stupid enough to buy a Google TV, I don't care if its Intel, ARM, or MIPS, they are pissing their money away as i bet that'll be gone soon enough too. Google has shown their whole plan revolves around capitalizing on eyeballs and search while spending as little as possible and while Sony, Apple and MSFT have all cut checks Google has made it clear they ain't paying shit to the content owners so any Google TV will simply be banhammered from their services.
But I hope this has taught many a valuable lesson, don't bother relying on a Google service until it hits 30 million plus users bare minimum, probably 60 to 70 million just to be safe. They have made it clear with these service killings that 8-12 million is just too small potatoes for them to care about and they only want hits, misses will be culled.
Are you forgetting the 6 year old Debian bug? the KDELook bug that lasted for over a year before caught? the hacked Quake 3 that lasted in the repos for a year and a half? The "many eyes makes bugs shallow" is a fallacy because it (incorrectly ) assumes that you have enough eyes that have the required skillset and that those eyes are doing NOTHING but searching said code, literally millions and millions of lines in just your average distro, for bugs. Then of course they have to be scanning ALL updates, patches, changes, for any possible vectors. Do the math friend and you'll find you'll have to clone about a million top level programmers just to keep up! I'd frankly be amazed that there is even 10% of the code in your average distro being checked by eyes other than the ones that actually wrote the thing. Just look at how much cruft and dead code the LO guys are finding in the OO.o codebase and that is one of THE most popular programs in the entire FOSS ecosystem!
In the end there is good and bad code in EVERY format from BSD and GPL to proprietary, it all comes down to the skills of the programmers and how seriously security is stressed in that company. There is nothing "magical" about FOSS that instantly makes it immune to bugs, nor does it give coders the power to instantly write non buggy code. Hell I could paste this post with links to Linux hacks, starting with kernel.org on down, but what's the point? Sadly perception bubbles and flag waving have replaced serious debates here which is why the numbers have been plummeting for nearly 2 years now. i hate to agree with him but old Mikey 500 accounts is right "Slashdot = Stagnated". I mean look at your own post that got a +5 for a simple variation of the classic "Use Linux!" troll. Its like the old Mel Brooks joke "all go to hell except cave 76!" and treating companies and licenses like ballclubs to root for.
Kinda sad that supposedly well educated geeks have ended up no better than those we laugh about cheering for reality TV stars, only we replace the Kardashians and Survivor for Google, Apple, MSFT, and the GPL.
I think he's trying to say they sent him a standard "do not reply to this" email so that any attempt he tried to answer the blatant shilling just got bounced back. that was what the last senator that we punt kicked like a 30 yard field return would do, no matter what you wrote her on you'd get a standard "Vote for me!" reply with a non functional bounce back email address, real douchebag behavior IMHO.
Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! You are missing the "if the prosecutor has an agenda' part friend as they can pile on charges for even the lamest thing if they feel like it so suddenly that 6 months turns into 9-14 in PMITA prison. look at the case I cited, she came up with every charge she could possibly think up because "if you have a penis you're a rapist" so she had everything from simple assault to child endangerment. By the time she was done if he would have had a public pretender he was looking at damned near 40 YEARS in prison friend.
You have to remember pal the law books for just your state could literally crush you under their weight, add in local and fed and you have the weight of a greyhound bus they can drop on your ass. lets see with computers there is theft of services, hacking, possible terrorism charges, hell those three right there slapped together you are looking at a cool dozen, remember friend big numbers helps Mr/MS Prosecutor show he/she is 'tough on crime" and the more they can pile on you the more likely you are to plead so piling that shit on is SOP.
We may not be able to brand him a flip flopper (and the Nazi ref is just tasteless and pointless) but we CAN label him a dumbass and obviously not the right man for the job when he doesn't even bother with a single survey of his actual CUSTOMERS before pulling such a bonehead stunt. Moz may be "free as in beer" but if they don't have users they can't get Google or anybody else to pay for their search results so they had damned well better listen to their users. As we saw here recently the figures show FF has been in a solid death spiral since Version 4, with it shedding more and more users by the month as they get tired of the bullshit. I myself started looking for alternative at V 4 when it started sucking on AMD CPUs and bailed on V 6 for Comodo Dragon. I still have FF installed and keep it updated as well as try each new version but so far its still sucking on AMD CPUs and the CPU spiking and RAM usage, especially on the Zacate dual cores and the older low power singles and multicores like the Phenom e series really sucks.
So instead of wasting their resources and time trying to replace a project that frankly nobody really used in the first place, how about listening to your damned customers and fixing the fricking browser, how about that? Remember the ORIGINAL mission statement, the one you used to get us off the suite, to "build the fastest and lightest standards complaint browser" remember that? Ever since Google released Chrome its been a "ohh me too!" fest at Moz and frankly it sucks. the UI sucks, the performance sucks, and I'd argue its because they are trying to jam shit on there Gecko was never made for, like flash plugin isolation, which at least on AMD causes FF to suck as much as twice the resources playing an SD video as any of the Chromium based.
And finally please fanbois, or those that have "perception bubbles" as I've been told to call you by someone who was offended at the word fanboi, please don't trot out some benchmark because i can trot out one that says the GeForce FX was actually a great Dx9 chip. Of course we all know now that they were writing to the bench which made the benches worthless but IRL all you have to do is use what I call the "Hairyfeet normal folks test" where you fire up a tool like process explorer that will give you the complete resources of a program then send the browser through the basic sites everyone goes to, YouTube, FB, Yahoo Mail/Gmail, and check the resource usage and you'll see for yourself that FF don't stack up so good.
So please moz devs, quit trying to be the saviors of the web and fix your shit first, okay? there are a hell of a lot of us that would be happy to come back to the fold if you'd just quit trying to make a bad Chrome ripoff and go back to making a small fast standards compliant browser we can DIY customize with extensions. Nobody has an extension framework as good as yours, nobody. some come back moz, quit all this crap that has nothing to do with your core business and get back in the business of making browsers because as the numbers show the way you are going now is NOT the correct way to go. kinda sad you are talking about "hiding" the LTS on some back page somewhere just because you are afraid that everyone will dump the main branch for LTS, doesn't that smack you witrh a cluebat that you are on the wrong path?
They took away her teaching credentials so she will get to spend a good couple of decades paying off student loans while working at the Mickey D, don't sound like too much of a win to me.
Sorry to burst anybody's "the truth will set you free' bubble but if a prosecutor decides to fuck up your life because you're the wrong color, they have an agenda, or hell just because its Tuesday you're pretty much fucked even if you do win. i should know one of my old HS buddies lost a house that had been in his family four generations thanks to a bitch prosecutor that had an agenda. he and his wife were going through a nasty divorce, turned out the bitch had been fucking around with a couple of different guys and things were going bad for her so she got her 15 year old daughter to say he grabbed her tits. everybody knew it was bullshit, even the investigator came out and testified FOR the defense because the 15 year old kept changing her story, but it turned out the prosecutor had been raped in college and decided that "if you have a penis you're a rapist" so she drug that shit out nearly 3 years. of course my friend "won" in the end, jury didn't even take 20 minutes to find him not guilty, but the legal fees completely broke him and cost him the family home and left him nothing to fight the bitch in the divorce case so she took his son and left the country with one of the guys she was screwing. Now he'll never see his son ever again and that home that had been built by his great grandpa is gone.
So don't think because you are right or innocent means jack shit anymore, as he found out legal fees can hit a couple of hundred thousand without a bit of trouble so unless you got stacks of cash to fight back pretty much they can stomp all over your life at ANY time. And if you think a public pretender will save your ass you might want to look at the rates of conviction for public pretenders VS lawyers you hire, last i check most public pretenders were looking at an average 90% conviction rate, hell i think the odds are better representing yourself than with a public pretender, at least in my state. that is the problem with the system in a nutshell folks, the rich and the state can stomp all over the average Joe simply by dragging out the case until they go broke. i hope everybody that plays with this gots lots of money they are just sitting on, or plenty of assets they can sell, otherwise innocent or no probably won't make a damned bit of difference.
Well like I said our current senator ran for that job for 12 years straight before finally getting elected and its his first term so he's probably more likely to listen to the folks than many of them. in fact one of the things that got the last one punted like a 30 yard field return was she'd always just shoot out a standard "vote for me/give me money!" form letter while completely ignoring the people time and time again. If it was something big business cut a check for she was all over that buddy,didn't matter if it screwed the people one little bit. She thought she didn't have to worry about it because she had the soccer moms but she found out that even the soccer moms get tired of total bullshit after awhile.
So i give credit where credit is due, the new guy actually seems to be listening and so far I've gotten three replies back, some I agreed with, some i didn't, but each one was addressed to that issue and ONLY that issue and he laid out his reasons, unlike the chain letter BS I'd always get from the last one. The SOPA one said we needed to find a way to fight piracy without trampling on free speech or stifling innovation, which is fine, i personally think the answer is to accept piracy and offer a better product like the Valve Steam model. Make it so I can just go to Amazon, click on a movie, whip out my CC and get it in whatever format i want, easy peasy. Look at the music industry that is making insane profits by selling bog standard plays anywhere MP3s. I don't see why the movie industry can't do the same with .AVI and .MKV and make it just as easy to buy their product, make it easy, make it cheap, make it simple.
But I think the key to winning this thing is to appeal to things both parties rally to easily. With the Dems free speech and protecting the little guy, with the reps it would be smaller government and letting the free market handle it. This way we appeal to the core beliefs of both while still getting what we want, which is SOPA/PIPA killed very very dead. But I'm sorry you are getting the standard chain letter, I guess being a first termer makes mine a little more likely to pay attention.
Good God man, don't even joke about such a thing! Think about it, think about every. single. person. you know that practically lives on that crap and suddenly they don't have access.....and you're a geek....who knows about computers.....Jesus Tap Dancing Christ on a crutch man our phones will be ringing off the damned hook, on a Sunday no less!
Uhh...to use a phrase popular in these parts 'I don't actually have a horse in this race' as i'm happy with my dumbphone and netbook, which BTW said netbook came with not only Windows 7 but also an instant on Linux environment called Expressgate which is one of the reasons I bought it, so i'm not "for" or "against" anybody here and the automatic assuming that I am just lets everyone know you DO have a horse in the race and are one of those "everyone go to hell but cave 76!" types that treat corps like ballclubs.
As for voting with your wallet it doesn't have a damned thing to do with "uberrich" and if it did the only purses you'd see in stores would be Prada and there sure as hell wouldn't be a line of Snooki zebraskin bags in every damned store. No voting with your wallet is VERY democratic and that is probably why FOSS zealots hate it so, because they have yet to make an OS people actually want. lets take Google Android for instance, which only came about because google took it AWAY from the fiddly CLI happy community and used the kernel to make an ALL GUI all the time OS that is based around an app market kinda like...well Apple obviously. if it had a damned thing to do with uberrich how do you explain MSFT being dead last hmmm? They have thrown obscene amounts of money at WinMo and WinPhone and now Win 8 ARM yet people voted with their wallets and you can't give the things away, why? Because people LIKE Android and iOS that's why! they like the features, the like the GUI, they like the form factor, its all decided by people voting with their wallets.
but the fact that you think people shouldn't be able to choose just shows you to be an elitist, thinking the public is "sheeple" that you oh wise one should be able to decide for. Well i got news for you pal, just as MSFT found out with Vista, WinMo, and I'm betting WinPhone and WinARM and Apple is gonna find out if they don't come up with something truly kick ass soon the public is more than willing to dump your ass if you don't have what they want. Its no different than how you can't find a single retailer in America stocking Linux boxes on shelves or how MSFT is dead last in phones, you give the people what they want or they walk away, simple as that. But you thinking the rich can magically decide for the masses just shows how out of touch you are with the average consumer because frankly nothing could be further from the truth, for an example look at how Intel is pushing "ultrabooks" yet the local Walmarts and Staples are packed to the brim with AMD netbooks and laptops that are frankly selling like hotcakes. the corps can say "thin is in" all they want but if the public doesn't want the unit or doesn't think its worth the price its just gonna sit there gathering dust.
All we can do is keeping riding our reps as hard as we can and make it clear ANY that vote yes better be ready to find a new job PERIOD. I was surprised i got an actual email back from my senator saying he had taken his name off the bill and promising to vote against it so he must have got enough nasty hate mail to get spooked as you usually just get a standard "Please vote for me!" bullshit chain letter begging for more cash. of course it may be that our senator had run for about a dozen years before finally getting elected this last round and is scared shitless of being a one termer who knows, but i found it surprising to actually get something addressing the complaint instead of the usual "vote for me/cut me a check' bullshit. The fact that they weren't able to simply buy their way through congress though gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, we can use the fear of a massive firing to keep their asses in line on this single issue at least.
I had a friend that was the same way for more than 20 years, he's now sleeping on a couch and working at Lowe's because 3 of them got knocked up and he got stuck with child support. Karma, it is a bitch. The flipside is of course how culture can affect outlook, my GF is Cherokee and after that many generations of being trodden on with the reservations frankly they are a broken people. her two previous marriages were both abusive and now she is constantly frightened i'm gonna "throw her away" for someone better and its hell getting her to stand up for herself. It'll probably take years to undo the damage her culture has done to her if I ever can.
It still amazes her that there are guys like me out there that will stand up for her WITHOUT using her as a punching bag or trying to sleep with her friends but it just shows you that some times stereotypes don't fit, i'm sure i look like a teddy bear but i spent many a year playing behind chicken wire and biking my ass all over the south. My favorite backup bass still has several dents from guys that didn't know when to back off and if any tried shit at some club I'm playing with my Cherokee princess that bass will be getting another battle scar. But just because I protect what's mine does NOT mean I would ever raise a hand in anger to a female, that shit just don't fly and I was raised a traditional southern gentleman, we don't do that shit.
But I'm happy and if it takes years to slowly build her back up i'll spend the time, my family all think the world of my princess and are being supportive. You do what you gotta do, ya know?
Actually I'd say its a cultural thing. As I said I was the tutor for the HS football team for four years and while the white players were looking at sports as a way to earn a free college education (and get the hot chicks) the blacks saw it as an end unto itself. In their culture athletes are looked up to whereas the education seekers are 'uppity" "acting white" or "Uncle Toms". Sadly I saw this several times, education for the sake of knowledge is looked down upon, its almost like anyone smarter than they are makes them feel inferior so they would tear them down.
Personally I never got that, my oldest is going on his second year at college to be a doctor and i'll be the first to admit he kicks my 156 IQ ass when it comes to brains but that makes me happy as hell personally. He has noble goal like becoming one of the doctors without borders and his strong faith and work ethic (and by faith I mean in the classical Jesus sense, as in helping the poor and downtrodden NOT the bigotry that is passed off as Christianity nowadays) will help him to be a kick ass healer. but if he was black he'd be getting more than half of the community actively treating him like shit, I've again seen it with my own eyes, i just don't get it. But that seems to be ingrained in their culture, music and athletics is encouraged, educational advancement is not. Crazy huh?
Nooo, I actually know several military men including MPs and they take their duty VERY seriously and make it a point of pride how quickly they can stop a situation from getting out of hand WITHOUT causing damage or harm. They also have plenty of practice with troops that come back from leave a little rowdy so some smart ass in business class won't be a problem. if things get nasty they can have the threat safely hogtied and sitting in the corner before he can say "WTF?" and without any damage other than their pride.
So it has nothing to do with romantic notions and everything to do with knowing the skill and training of the men we would be putting in charge of hundreds of lives. you don't want a trigger happy cowboy, you want someone who can safely take them down WITHOUT firing their weapon if at all possible.
But that does bring up a good point of who gets to dump shit and why we should start working at cleaning it up but also be working on "no more dumping shit" rules for space. I mean when you look at the history of our ventures into space we got shit from 1950s (Vanguard) still floating up there as useless shit, and both we and the Ruskies were serious slobs when it came to dumping shit in space with no regards for anybody else.
Now we have not only the Indians and Chinese, who with their sat blowing bit showed they don't give a crap about polluting the hell out of space, we are now gonna have private enterprise (not talking about TFA who is going for a low enough orbit it'll be gone pretty quick) who as we have seen with such lovely messes like superfund sites frankly haven't given a crap about polluting the hell out of earth if it makes them profits, and we are supposed to trust them not to take a big giant dump in space? you just know they'll have everything set up with shell corps they can just dissolve if the poo hits the fan and just walk away leaving the mess while they count their money.
So we REALLY need to get a hold on this thing now, while its a mess but not an unrecoverable mess, and set up some serious ground rules to protect this valuable natural resource. After all it really wouldn't take much of a disaster to create such a minefield out there our birds would be dropping like flies and our society has gotten too used to having sat communications to let it be a free for all. So while i'm all nothing but love for the guys in TFA I do think it just shines a spotlight on how as things get cheaper its gonna become even more riskier if we don't set down with our nations and set some hard ground rules now.
Nice to see i wasn't the only one that happened to. there were several bundles where I was like 'That many games for THAT price? Sweet!" only to get to the page and find at the bottom "This game requires you assume the Goatse pose' and said "no thanks, fuck off" and that was time wasted i could have been buying games. My gamer box also does video trancoding and analog to digital conversions for clients so i'm not gonna have it drug down by 50 damned always on POS DRM craplets running in the background which is why i went to Steam and GOG in the first place yet if Valave don't watch it they are gonna make steam suck as much as GFWL.
The sad part is once again it proves it don't do shit for piracy, just burns legit customers. i'll give an example, Bioshock II. Both the store boxed and Steam version require GFWL crap yet the Razr1911 version has a hacked GFWL that only runs just long enough to fool the program then drops out, no muss no fuss no hassle. But since i grabbed Bioshock II in one of those daily deals i'm stuck with GFWL when i could have had the GFWL free Razr1911, same as i'm stuck with TAGES because one of my boys didn't know and saw Riddick: Dark Athena along with Butcher bay HD on sale for $5 and snatched a copy for himself and gifted me a copy because he thought I'd like it. Its a nice game but if I'd have had the choice i wouldn't have taken it because i wouldn't add that TAGES shit.
Which brings me to another missing feature in Steam: There ought to be a setting in preferences that tells my friends if they try to purachase a game as a gift for me that "This person requests that you don't gift games that contain non Steam DRM" because you don't want to hurt their feelings by saying "I don't want that shit, take it back' but at the same time you don't want it on your system.
I think he's talking about the fact he couldn't get any real backing so all they did was half ass. In a way it reminds me of how MSFT is backed into a corner with x86, because they too were once ahead of the curve with Cutler having Windows on MIPS and SPARC but instead of embracing that portability and developing easy to use IDEs that would make "universal binaries' that would have made them THE OS and software company and would have made the support of ARM when it became the dominant chip trivial none of the PHBs really supported portability and so they went half ass with even their own business software not having a full port (IIRC there was no Access or Excel for anything but x86) so the third parties never ran with it and it dried up and blew away. Now they find themselves a lot like Kodak found themselves at the early 90s, with these upstarts chipping away shares in markets that could have been theirs if they wouldn't have dropped the ball. in the end the only think I think will save MSFT from being Kodak in 20 years is like IBM and the mainframe X86 is a mature market that isn't going anywhere. I believe the x86 desktop/laptop/workstation will stay, it will be a slow growth market with very low turnovers as machines become so powerful they get used for closer to a decade between replacement and like IBM you will see MSFT relegated to that niche that is no longer the hot growth sector.
As for Kodak? There is still money to be made there if someone with vision would come along and save them. I want a Kodachrome camera dammit! I want a digital camera that "lies beautifully" like the old Kodachrome film did, with the extra vibrant greens and blues and white puffy clouds that pop in a picture. if someone were to create a digital camera that gave digital pics that look like Kodachrome and make it say 10MP for $100 i could see those things flying off the shelves. The digital pics just don't look as "alive" as Kodachrome did, for those that haven't ever used it look up some Kodachrome pics and see what i'm talking about, nature shots and outdoor photos (which lets face it most folks are taking pics outside) really had this vibrancy to the colors, especially blue, green, earth tones, and white, that really made the pictures look GOOD. It was damned hard to take a truly shitty looking picture outdoors with Kodachrome. give me THAT and i'll gladly hand you a hundred dollar bill and i bet a lot of other folks would too Kodak.
You had great taste sir. You see i tried telling folks there was just something about Kodachrome, it always as i put it 'lied beautifully' in that the colors were frankly often more vivid and deeper than IRL, for example grasses would often have a wonderful emerald green quality and blue skies really 'popped' for lack of a better word.
If Kodak would have put out a Kodachrome digital camera that automatically gave pictures that "Kodachrome color" so Joe and Sally Average could take pictures just as easily as with a digital but had those beautiful Kodachrome colors frankly they would still be here, but one bad management team after another killed any hope that company had of turning itself around. Sadly i agree that nothing of value was lost because it was lost long ago.
The simple fact is you could end the treat of plane hijackings tomorrow without all this bullshit. You want to ensure that planes will NEVER be hijacked in the USA again? put a pair of USMC MPs with sidearms between the passengers and the door. USAF and US ARMY MPs work just as well in a pinch, and by having a pair of them that takes care of the "ZOMFG what happens if they snap?" somebody always ends up posting. Frankly I'd trust them over these TSA goons any day of the week and twice on Sunday because they volunteered because they love their country NOT because they wanted to get a check for being part of a goon squad. And i'd love to see some punk who thinks he can just waltz up to a couple of MPs and get in their faces and not end up hogtied so damned fast it would make their head swim. But of course that wouldn't let Senator Porkus and Congressman Kickbakman "bring home the bacon" with extra goon squad jobs for their district so it'll never happen.