I agree with every point you've made. I grew up in the 1980s when video games were a great novelty, which made even the bad ones seem great, now that we're inundated with them it's a chore to be bothered to find a good one. I'd be really interested in seeing surveys on how many people who used to be hard-core gamers are now down to short sessions that occur daily at most, and find out how many of them just got bored with playing the same old recycled game ideas and moved on to more rewarding hobbies.
This argument isn't lame. Sure it's possible to drastically reconfigure Microsoft's horrible default security settings to something secure, and add-on some third party products to deal with all the glaring bugs that Microsoft often fixes at a snails pace. But for Microsoft to sell antiviral/antispyware software to consumers who aren't IT professionals and don't have the time and knowledge to implement fixes all the problems caused by Microsoft's pathetic default security setup is grossly unethical. It's like a bank leaving its vault unlocked and guarded only by an unarmed guard, and then selling robbery insurance policies to customers who have valuables stored in the vault. If any other OS vendor tried this they'd be ripped apart by the press and customers would flee immediately, the only reason Microsoft can pull it off is that consumers are used to Microsoft's monopoly, and know that as long as Microsoft continues to buy off politicians in both of America's major political parties, it isn't going to change.
I see Wikipedia as an imperfect but much needed update to the traditional encyclopedia. Because the writers work for free, with not topic restrictions are space limits, Wikipedia will inevitably end up covering more topics in more detail than traditional encyclopedias. Hyperlinking also allows Wikipedia to link to related information, which will eventually make it a valuable research tool. Wikipedia articles may often be inaccurate or biased, but the same can be said of many encyclodpedias - which is why so many teachers limited the number of encyclopedias a student could cite in papers (I use the past tense because it doesn't happen anymore, as most students don't seem to bother with the old encyclopedias.).
The important thing to remember regarding Wikipedia is that if you're doing important research, double check it somewhere else. Just like the old printed encylopedias, Wikipedia should be used as a starting point, and not a primary source.
"SATAN and SAINT appear to be gone. Now Nessus. What other projects are out there for security auditing tools? This is not a good trend."
Why is this a bad trend? If the open-source community doesn't have enough of a need to keep open-source scanners alive than they probably don't need access to the source code, and the sales of propietary security software and appliances make it pretty clear that businesses aren't interested either. So outside of the mindset that releasing closed-source software is immoral, I don't see why any reasonable person would see this as a disturbing trend.
Sun has been trying this for years - the problem is that most vendors won't touch StarOffice due to almost nonexistant demand, which probably has to do with most of the StarOffice features being available for free in OpenOffice.
"Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine?
Given how bad most people are at file management and backing stuff up, everyone storing files on redundant, automatically backed-up remote servers would likely be a boon to mankind.
I doubt that AOL would dump that kind of money into promoting Netscape. It's not like they'll make the money back, and they aren't gaining any leverage with Microsoft by paying HP to dump Netscape on their machines.
IMHO, this is just HP floundering to seem relevant and get some press. Carly Fiorina and the board at HP made a huge mess out of that company, and unless they've suddenly hired a bunch of good executives, it seems safe to assume that they're scared, afraid, and pretty out of touch with the industry - which would explain why they went with Netscape and not Firefox.
That's true, but that doesn't mean that we have to keep our bodies. I doubt the technology will be popping up any time soon, but once science can separate our conscious minds from our bodies to be dumped out into artficial bodies, a not-too-undesireable future might be available to us all.
The easiest way to work through the bureacracy in any office environment is to feed people. If a greedy middle-manager likes free lunches, take him to lunch. If someone in purchasing likes sweets, bring in cookies. Keep a large, well-stocked bowl of candy in your office and people will always be dropping by to grab some candy and maybe gossip. Convince management that there need to be regular free pizza lunches. Memorize everyone's favorite Starbucks drinks, and bring drinks to the imporant people now and then.
I've done everything on that list and I've had people do them all to me. I've also seen people take food to wild extremes; at one employer someone in HR used fudged numbers to convince management that it would cost less money skip a yearly company picnic in favor of bi-weekly parties with endless quanities of food and booze - which included purchasing a corporate frozen Margarita machine - and it made him a hero. Food is the ultimate grease in the wheels of the corporate machine, and those who learn how to use it will have a much easier time bending rules and calling in favors than those who don't. If you aren't buying people off with snacks, it's time to start.
I think you're probably right to assume that Nintendo doesn't consider the Revolution to be much in terms of competition (Although they're probably scared to death that the DS will win the portable war), and I doubt that Sony has any surprises in the sense that the Revolution controller managed to surprise a whole lot of people. It seems likely that Sony's surprise will be a bit noisy marketing campaign targeted in whatever region Microsoft looks most likely to do well in, and maybe a few exclusive game announcements.
You hit that one right on the head. I didn't stop building and designing networks because the work was hard, it was because I got sick of working for people who made decisions at random, promised bosses/clients the moon and stars, and then expected me to make amazing things materialize out of my ass over the course of a weekend.
If America really wants to recover it's position as the technically elite nation in this world, it's time to throw out the old-boys-club culture of management that consistently rewards and promotes corrupt morons who think technology is just magic pixie dust.
While I think that piracy is often just as much behind these things as homebrew software, at least homebrew software for consoles does exist, unlike the old "I use my modchip to play backups..." excuse.
"The mainstream market isn't even aware hacks like this exist (much less where to find or how to use them), for the most part."
They aren't aware YET, and Sony doesn't want them to be aware ever. Unlike Nintendo's cartridge-based portable systems, on which loading homebrewed and pirated games requires special equipment that is being banned in the US and Western Europe as fast as it is created, once the details are worked out people will have little to no trouble burning PSP discs or booting games and watching movies stored on cheap Lexmark memory sticks. That would be the kiss of death for the PSP, a system that appears to many to be floundering now that the initial wave of publicity has faded out of most memories.
One of the biggest nails in the Dreamcast's coffin was widespread distribution of the tools and knowledge required to burn Dreamcast games that booted with no modifications to the disc. Sony was paying a lot of attention to that, and will fight tooth-nail-to stop it from happening on the PSP. They'll fail, of course, but they'll fight.
You just keep drinking that Kool-Aid and see where it gets you. The old "small-government and states rights" platform republicans love to tout has always been a load of bullshit. From Lincoln to Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes, the Republicans have touted those ideals and then sold the voters out to big government ideals.
Scientists have discovered aliens living in the executive office suites at Sun Microsystems headquarters. These strange creatures require methane to survive, fear daylight, and thus spend 99% of their lives with their heads inserted in their own rectums. The aliens remove their heads from their rectums only to make pronouncements about the way computing is done on their own homeworld, where fiber-optic cable occurs naturally instead of dirt, and stale RISC processor designs run twice as fast as their contemporary x86 counterparts.
People love Jackson for making fantasy movies that aren't unwatchably bad. Before he did the LoTR trilogy, the total number of non-horrible fantasy movies to come out of Hollywood (Excluding Disneys kiddie movies) could by counted on one hand by discriminating viewers, and two hands by less picky people. There was a great fear that the whole thing would be bungled and turned into a barely coherent mess - after all, nobody else has handled the rings story well since Das Nibelungen was turned into a silent film.
Jackson's attempts to transfer the books to screen wasn't perfect, but nobody was expecting it to be. The fact that he didn't butcher it and churn out a piece of shit like "Legend" or "Dungeons and Dragons," however, endeared him to all the fanboys out there who just wanted fantasy that didn't suck.
"Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties."
My point was that most Live games don't have a general off feature, and without a headset, it just gets pumped out with the other sounds - meaning that every time some moron starts babbling or ranting, everyone else in the game has to either listen to it or stop playing and mute that player. It's a pretty crappy way of doing things.
"No Buck Rogers, no bucks" is an old phrase used by Congress to describe why so much of the money in our space program goes toward manned space. The American space program was created to show off just how much Americans could achieve that other nations couldn't. Astronauts became not just heroes, but figureheads for NASA and the USA. A lot of people who lived through the space race got trapped in the mindset that those individual astronauts were what really mattered, and not the greater technological achievements.
Too many of our nation's legislators are those sort of people. They're afraid that voters won't be interested in robots exploring space or space elevators so those legislators only approve funding for more orbital flights, satellite flybys of nearby planets, and the occasional rover to explore Mars.
I think this will all start to change in another decade or two, when the majority of America's legislators grew up after the moon landings, and aren't as concerned with Astronauts as they are with science, technology, and exploration.
"He said that Nintendo has worked hard to design a system which is secure and protected from the kind of abuse that can come from anonymity."
Does that mean I'll be able to completely disable voice chat, unlike most Xbox Live games, which force everyone to individually mute 14-year-old net bullies who spend their lives calling everyone on the internet a nigger? Because if that's what they mean, they've got my Next Gen console dollars.
"The "significant additional bonus content" has already been reported to be jack shit."
I concur - they're just stealing a trick from the movie industry, adding in $0.50 of special packaging and some promo movies that were last seen on ET/Inside Hollywood and convince people that it's worth an extra $9.00.
One person who isn't sure what to do probably shouldn't be handling this on his own (I say probably on the off-chance that you're a competent genius, in which case you wouldn't have asked/.). What you really need to decide is if you want to do Windows or OSS, and then hire a good firm to implement the system and train the IT staff to use it.
I would buy more ebooks if reasonably priced ebook readers hit the market. I read a lot of technical/design ebooks as it is, but for novels, textbooks, and magazines it would be nice to have something bigger than a PDA but smaller than a laptop to read on. I think a lot of the old ebook reader designs were great, but the prices were insanely expensive.
What publishers need to do is learn from the video game industry. Sell us the reader at a loss, and then make back money with huge margins on books. I doubt that's going to happen, though, because big publishers make a ton of money from people browsing in Borders and B&N stores, and are loathe to risk pissing off either of those companies.
I agree, the Xbox 360 launch is pretty bland. I think that the biggest problem is a lack of hyped games - there was the big crazy launch party where they showed a bunch of CGI rendered on Powermacs and claimed it was what we'll be playing, and then went into hiding. Due to this big lack of important press, if I got an Xbox 360 for launch, I don't even know what the hell I'd be able to do with. If Microsoft wants to avoid stores with huge overstocks of Xbox 360s on December 26, they really need to shut up about the hardware and show us the games.
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I agree with every point you've made. I grew up in the 1980s when video games were a great novelty, which made even the bad ones seem great, now that we're inundated with them it's a chore to be bothered to find a good one. I'd be really interested in seeing surveys on how many people who used to be hard-core gamers are now down to short sessions that occur daily at most, and find out how many of them just got bored with playing the same old recycled game ideas and moved on to more rewarding hobbies.
This argument isn't lame. Sure it's possible to drastically reconfigure Microsoft's horrible default security settings to something secure, and add-on some third party products to deal with all the glaring bugs that Microsoft often fixes at a snails pace. But for Microsoft to sell antiviral/antispyware software to consumers who aren't IT professionals and don't have the time and knowledge to implement fixes all the problems caused by Microsoft's pathetic default security setup is grossly unethical. It's like a bank leaving its vault unlocked and guarded only by an unarmed guard, and then selling robbery insurance policies to customers who have valuables stored in the vault. If any other OS vendor tried this they'd be ripped apart by the press and customers would flee immediately, the only reason Microsoft can pull it off is that consumers are used to Microsoft's monopoly, and know that as long as Microsoft continues to buy off politicians in both of America's major political parties, it isn't going to change.
I see Wikipedia as an imperfect but much needed update to the traditional encyclopedia. Because the writers work for free, with not topic restrictions are space limits, Wikipedia will inevitably end up covering more topics in more detail than traditional encyclopedias. Hyperlinking also allows Wikipedia to link to related information, which will eventually make it a valuable research tool. Wikipedia articles may often be inaccurate or biased, but the same can be said of many encyclodpedias - which is why so many teachers limited the number of encyclopedias a student could cite in papers (I use the past tense because it doesn't happen anymore, as most students don't seem to bother with the old encyclopedias.).
The important thing to remember regarding Wikipedia is that if you're doing important research, double check it somewhere else. Just like the old printed encylopedias, Wikipedia should be used as a starting point, and not a primary source.
"SATAN and SAINT appear to be gone. Now Nessus. What other projects are out there for security auditing tools? This is not a good trend."
Why is this a bad trend? If the open-source community doesn't have enough of a need to keep open-source scanners alive than they probably don't need access to the source code, and the sales of propietary security software and appliances make it pretty clear that businesses aren't interested either. So outside of the mindset that releasing closed-source software is immoral, I don't see why any reasonable person would see this as a disturbing trend.
Sun has been trying this for years - the problem is that most vendors won't touch StarOffice due to almost nonexistant demand, which probably has to do with most of the StarOffice features being available for free in OpenOffice.
"Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine?
Given how bad most people are at file management and backing stuff up, everyone storing files on redundant, automatically backed-up remote servers would likely be a boon to mankind.
I doubt that AOL would dump that kind of money into promoting Netscape. It's not like they'll make the money back, and they aren't gaining any leverage with Microsoft by paying HP to dump Netscape on their machines.
IMHO, this is just HP floundering to seem relevant and get some press. Carly Fiorina and the board at HP made a huge mess out of that company, and unless they've suddenly hired a bunch of good executives, it seems safe to assume that they're scared, afraid, and pretty out of touch with the industry - which would explain why they went with Netscape and not Firefox.
"...every part in our body wears out with time."
That's true, but that doesn't mean that we have to keep our bodies. I doubt the technology will be popping up any time soon, but once science can separate our conscious minds from our bodies to be dumped out into artficial bodies, a not-too-undesireable future might be available to us all.
The easiest way to work through the bureacracy in any office environment is to feed people. If a greedy middle-manager likes free lunches, take him to lunch. If someone in purchasing likes sweets, bring in cookies. Keep a large, well-stocked bowl of candy in your office and people will always be dropping by to grab some candy and maybe gossip. Convince management that there need to be regular free pizza lunches. Memorize everyone's favorite Starbucks drinks, and bring drinks to the imporant people now and then.
I've done everything on that list and I've had people do them all to me. I've also seen people take food to wild extremes; at one employer someone in HR used fudged numbers to convince management that it would cost less money skip a yearly company picnic in favor of bi-weekly parties with endless quanities of food and booze - which included purchasing a corporate frozen Margarita machine - and it made him a hero. Food is the ultimate grease in the wheels of the corporate machine, and those who learn how to use it will have a much easier time bending rules and calling in favors than those who don't. If you aren't buying people off with snacks, it's time to start.
I think you're probably right to assume that Nintendo doesn't consider the Revolution to be much in terms of competition (Although they're probably scared to death that the DS will win the portable war), and I doubt that Sony has any surprises in the sense that the Revolution controller managed to surprise a whole lot of people. It seems likely that Sony's surprise will be a bit noisy marketing campaign targeted in whatever region Microsoft looks most likely to do well in, and maybe a few exclusive game announcements.
You hit that one right on the head. I didn't stop building and designing networks because the work was hard, it was because I got sick of working for people who made decisions at random, promised bosses/clients the moon and stars, and then expected me to make amazing things materialize out of my ass over the course of a weekend.
If America really wants to recover it's position as the technically elite nation in this world, it's time to throw out the old-boys-club culture of management that consistently rewards and promotes corrupt morons who think technology is just magic pixie dust.
While I think that piracy is often just as much behind these things as homebrew software, at least homebrew software for consoles does exist, unlike the old "I use my modchip to play backups..." excuse.
"The mainstream market isn't even aware hacks like this exist (much less where to find or how to use them), for the most part."
They aren't aware YET, and Sony doesn't want them to be aware ever. Unlike Nintendo's cartridge-based portable systems, on which loading homebrewed and pirated games requires special equipment that is being banned in the US and Western Europe as fast as it is created, once the details are worked out people will have little to no trouble burning PSP discs or booting games and watching movies stored on cheap Lexmark memory sticks. That would be the kiss of death for the PSP, a system that appears to many to be floundering now that the initial wave of publicity has faded out of most memories.
One of the biggest nails in the Dreamcast's coffin was widespread distribution of the tools and knowledge required to burn Dreamcast games that booted with no modifications to the disc. Sony was paying a lot of attention to that, and will fight tooth-nail-to stop it from happening on the PSP. They'll fail, of course, but they'll fight.
You just keep drinking that Kool-Aid and see where it gets you. The old "small-government and states rights" platform republicans love to tout has always been a load of bullshit. From Lincoln to Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes, the Republicans have touted those ideals and then sold the voters out to big government ideals.
Scientists have discovered aliens living in the executive office suites at Sun Microsystems headquarters. These strange creatures require methane to survive, fear daylight, and thus spend 99% of their lives with their heads inserted in their own rectums. The aliens remove their heads from their rectums only to make pronouncements about the way computing is done on their own homeworld, where fiber-optic cable occurs naturally instead of dirt, and stale RISC processor designs run twice as fast as their contemporary x86 counterparts.
People love Jackson for making fantasy movies that aren't unwatchably bad. Before he did the LoTR trilogy, the total number of non-horrible fantasy movies to come out of Hollywood (Excluding Disneys kiddie movies) could by counted on one hand by discriminating viewers, and two hands by less picky people. There was a great fear that the whole thing would be bungled and turned into a barely coherent mess - after all, nobody else has handled the rings story well since Das Nibelungen was turned into a silent film.
Jackson's attempts to transfer the books to screen wasn't perfect, but nobody was expecting it to be. The fact that he didn't butcher it and churn out a piece of shit like "Legend" or "Dungeons and Dragons," however, endeared him to all the fanboys out there who just wanted fantasy that didn't suck.
"Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties."
;)
Computing for enthusiats has never been cheap
My point was that most Live games don't have a general off feature, and without a headset, it just gets pumped out with the other sounds - meaning that every time some moron starts babbling or ranting, everyone else in the game has to either listen to it or stop playing and mute that player. It's a pretty crappy way of doing things.
"No Buck Rogers, no bucks" is an old phrase used by Congress to describe why so much of the money in our space program goes toward manned space. The American space program was created to show off just how much Americans could achieve that other nations couldn't. Astronauts became not just heroes, but figureheads for NASA and the USA. A lot of people who lived through the space race got trapped in the mindset that those individual astronauts were what really mattered, and not the greater technological achievements.
Too many of our nation's legislators are those sort of people. They're afraid that voters won't be interested in robots exploring space or space elevators so those legislators only approve funding for more orbital flights, satellite flybys of nearby planets, and the occasional rover to explore Mars.
I think this will all start to change in another decade or two, when the majority of America's legislators grew up after the moon landings, and aren't as concerned with Astronauts as they are with science, technology, and exploration.
"He said that Nintendo has worked hard to design a system which is secure and protected from the kind of abuse that can come from anonymity."
Does that mean I'll be able to completely disable voice chat, unlike most Xbox Live games, which force everyone to individually mute 14-year-old net bullies who spend their lives calling everyone on the internet a nigger? Because if that's what they mean, they've got my Next Gen console dollars.
"The "significant additional bonus content" has already been reported to be jack shit."
I concur - they're just stealing a trick from the movie industry, adding in $0.50 of special packaging and some promo movies that were last seen on ET/Inside Hollywood and convince people that it's worth an extra $9.00.
The Adblock plugin for Firefox is all the reason I need to not switch to Opera.
One person who isn't sure what to do probably shouldn't be handling this on his own (I say probably on the off-chance that you're a competent genius, in which case you wouldn't have asked /.). What you really need to decide is if you want to do Windows or OSS, and then hire a good firm to implement the system and train the IT staff to use it.
So call IBM.
I would buy more ebooks if reasonably priced ebook readers hit the market. I read a lot of technical/design ebooks as it is, but for novels, textbooks, and magazines it would be nice to have something bigger than a PDA but smaller than a laptop to read on. I think a lot of the old ebook reader designs were great, but the prices were insanely expensive.
What publishers need to do is learn from the video game industry. Sell us the reader at a loss, and then make back money with huge margins on books. I doubt that's going to happen, though, because big publishers make a ton of money from people browsing in Borders and B&N stores, and are loathe to risk pissing off either of those companies.
I agree, the Xbox 360 launch is pretty bland. I think that the biggest problem is a lack of hyped games - there was the big crazy launch party where they showed a bunch of CGI rendered on Powermacs and claimed it was what we'll be playing, and then went into hiding. Due to this big lack of important press, if I got an Xbox 360 for launch, I don't even know what the hell I'd be able to do with. If Microsoft wants to avoid stores with huge overstocks of Xbox 360s on December 26, they really need to shut up about the hardware and show us the games.