That's not very discoverable for someone who isn't actively trying to figure out how the hell he is going to get his money's worth out of a game.
I tried the demo. I extrapolated from the demo that the game was too hard, the cutscenes were horribly interruptive, the acting was bad, and I just plain wouldn't have enough time to go around doing cool stuff. This added up to "shitty game, don't buy".
However, if the story is optional, that makes a difference. And the save system sounds innovative enough that I'd like to see it in action. I would really rather run around killing a lot of zombies for a while before I get wrapped up in accomplishing goals and earning achievements, and I'd expect that the resulting experience would make the game somewhat easier once I dec ided to buckle down and play through the main storyline.
So it's moved from the "No" list (with N3) to the "Maybe" list. It hasn't joined Saint's Row on the "Yes" list, though.
N3 was demoted after I played the demo a couple times. I just got bored with it. I thought it would be fun, and it was, but I blew through all the fun in a day.
I think the biggest projected benefit of Manifesto is to serve as a portal where lots of people come to see good games.
However, there's one critical thing missing: there is no draw for the game PLAYER to come to this site. It's a classic case of the consumer and the customer being different. The consumer of this site is the game developer. Unfortunately, the customer needs to be the game player.
Game developers always have a list of the greatest games ever that you just HAVE to play, and game players know damn well that most of those games suck... because we're not just players anymore. We look at things through different eyes and judge them on different criteria.
Unfortunately, what appeals to the player is... what big publishers are already providing on a much larger scale. Oops.
Look at all those heads in the sand. They're everywhere. An unsigned extension has been installed into Firefox without confirmation or verification by a piece of malware, and nobody seems to care.
The open source world has a problem. It's a reasonably new problem for them, but it's the same problem Microsoft have been facing for years: once you get big enough, you become a target.
The problem *behind* the problem is that there is simply no avenue for the open source community to address it. Microsoft had control over their production and distribution chain; the open source community does not. They need to install order into chaos in a community that thrives - and indeed fundamentally DEPENDS - on the chaos itself.
In short, they need to choose *which* pound of flesh they're going to cut off. They'll live; they'll heal; they'll probably even be better off for it in the long run.
> it is only hurting and hindering legitimate users
A major problem with Windows piracy was small OEMs buying just a few copies of Windows and installing them on thousands of PCs. Microsoft have successfully shut down several such operations, who were collectively responsible for distributing counterfeit software to millions of customers WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE.
Let me clarify that somewhat more: THE CUSTOMER WAS PERFECTLY INNOCENT. The purpose of the notification service in WGA is not to make users feel guilty for using software they pirate themselves; that is a perfectly fruitless endeavor. It is instead to notify the INNOCENT customer who has purchased or otherwise received illegal software from a source they believe to be legitimate.
It is for precisely this reason that disabling or crippling the computer that fails WGA is immensely stupid. There is simply no benefit to it: the major piracy problem is not Joe down the street installing the same copy of Windows on two computers, it's organised crime syndicates that sell thousands of counterfeit CDs to people who expect to receive legitimate, licensed software. Whatever someone might do to those computers doesn't do anything to the actual criminals, so it's just plain ill-tempered and mean. It's punishing the victim.
What Microsoft are trying to do instead is tell the victim "Hey, you're a victim. Come to us and we will help you." If you're a victim of yourself, however, chances are you don't want Microsoft's help.
Paul Thurott installed this copy of Windows a long time ago, presumably before there was notification in the WGA service, and possibly before there was a WGA service at all. Chances are his Windows installation was *never* legitimate, but he just didn't know it. Since his copy is in fact legitimate, he can readily fix this problem with a little effort. If he doesn't want to bother, he can disable the notification, as could a willful software pirate.
And I for one find it decidedly odd that his "false positive" happens the day after a Microsoft blogger writes extensively about them: http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/default.aspx
I'll bet Microsoft can identify and produce each and every developer that worked on this emulator, and that each and every one would testify that they did not refer in any way, shape, or form to any GPL code.
Now try and do that for an open source project. Who wrote this change here? How do you know? Where is he? What's his real name? Will he come out and testify?
It's a much harder question. The courts are also far more likely to believe a professional software developer, where they might not be so quick to believe Heinrich the 19-year-old unemployed Austrian slacker who writes long flames about Microsoft being evil three times a week.
I think Microsoft is always in the middle of paradigm shift. There's been a lot of study and evaluation of what Microsoft can gain from the open source community, and I think we're now starting to see the fruits of that. The major Shared Source licenses available from Microsoft look an awful lot like GPL, BSD/MIT, and the old "look but don't touch" flavor of Shared Source.
Basically, yes, Microsoft could learn a lot of lessons from open source. It's learning them. But how exactly has the open source community learned from Microsoft?
There is one and only one mechanism Microsoft uses to stay in power: find out what the biggest competitor is doing, and do it better. The open source community may scoff and claim Microsoft can't do this, but the fact is THEY CAN. There's very little you can't do when you can afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a problem, but when you have minimal funding and only fair-weather support from most of your adherents, there's an awful lot you can't do. The open source community needs to be very worried and start looking very hard for ways to respond to this.
ObDoomsdayTheory: Consider the competitive implications of this. We have an ARMV4I emulator for Windows which is released as shared source under the academic license, a close parallel to the GPL which forbids any derivatives that do not run on Microsoft operating systems. Is it feasible that the open source community can EVER develop an ARMV4I emulator for Linux without facing the impending shadow of a lawsuit demanding they *prove* nobody on the project made use of Microsoft's shared source release? Could that ever be proven?
The flaw in the open source model here is that most contributors are anonymous, do not get held accountable for their contributions, and never face any scrutiny as to whether their code is free of trademark and patent claims. If this case went to court, could all the developers on the project be located to appear in court? How could any of them demonstrate that their code was clear of any "contaminant" effect from the Microsoft Shared Source release?
And exactly how much interesting and useful technology *is* Microsoft going to dump onto the market under the Academic Shared Source (ASS... hehehehe oh wait I'm not twelve) license? Will that create a problem for open source developers who want to provide similar functionality? How high *is* the wall Microsoft has created around ARMV4I emulation? Can open source even *contemplate* surmounting it?
Microsoft has a history of learning its competitors' tactics very, very well and using them to slaughter those competitors in the marketplace. There was a time that the saying was nobody ever got fired for buying *IBM*, and everyone was worried about how IBM was going to take over the world and nobody could stop them. But Microsoft stopped the unstoppable, so calling open source invincible and unstoppable doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies when you look at how IBM is doing these days.
This isn't really something I see as being intended to prevent anything. It's probably more along the lines of forcing acknowledgement of criminal behavior. I'm imagining something like this:
- The military produces the Badass Mark V, which is approved for police use. - The Badass Mark V only chambers and fires ammunition with RFID safety on it. - Ammunition with RFID safety is not made available to the general public. - A criminal steals several Badass Mark V firearms from a police armory. - The criminal sells them to a fence, who puts them up for sale at a gun show. - A private citizen buys one and finds that it takes ammunition he cannot legally own. - The citizen calls the police, like a good citizen should.
When the police go to the gun show and arrest the fence, he CANNOT ARGUE that he "didn't know" the guns were stolen. If the citizen obtains the RFID ammunition through some channel, on the other hand, he cannot argue that he "didn't know" it was illegal ammunition.
> isn't it possible that the real problem is > piss-poor programmers among the competition?
It's a combination of factors. There's a lot of fear in the industry that if you compete with Microsoft, Microsoft will crush you. There's also a lot of room for people to do things that DON'T compete with Microsoft. And in the middle of that, there's a vast amount of Microsoft-connected work that Microsoft will actually *help* you get into the market because it ultimately means more people want Microsoft products.
So there's a very small market segment you could target with something that competes on Microsoft's turf. And if you want to compete with Microsoft, you need to play Microsoft's game, which means having billions of dollars in resources and using it to your best PR advantage.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is far less risky to build something that not only doesn't compete with Microsoft, but indeed helps Microsoft's platform stay dominant.
Now, given that it is safer from a commercial perspective to build such a project, you are forced to ask yourself what is *wrong* with the people who want to compete with Microsoft. Are they bad business people? Do they not understand that doing business on this level costs billions of dollars? Do they not understand that when you threaten a multi-billion dollar business, that business spends billions to stop you?
I firmly believe that any company complaining they can't do business because of Microsoft is a company with bad leadership, bad vision, and bad business sense. None of which are Microsoft's fault.
...how many adults are becoming absolutely PANICKED at the idea that children can TALK ABOUT THEM.
Adults have always treated children like crap, but there's never really been any concrete evidence of it because adults have played the strongarm card over everything the child is allowed to say or do. If you took a picture of an adult doing something embarrassing, the picture could be taken away. But now that the picture is a bundle of unfettered electrons stored on a web server that belongs to someone you DON'T have the right to bully and coerce, they can't do that anymore.
It might make being an adult somewhat more problematic, but I'm willing to bet it makes the children's lives a whole hell of a lot better.
The death of privacy is GOOD. The only people that care about it are the ones who shouldn't be doing what they're doing ANYWAY.
Hi Russ... I read you regularly, even though we don't always agree.
On this, we do. Right now, the commercial internet works because I pay someone to connect me to the internet and give me a certain amount of bandwidth. I do this for my connection at home, because I want bandwidth to get what I ask to see. I do this for my server at a data center, because I want bandwidth to get to people that ask to see me.
When I use bandwidth to my own server, like when I get my email, I pay twice for that bandwidth. I pay for sending the email from my server, and I pay for receiving the email at my desktop. And that's fine. It makes perfect sense to me.
What isn't fine is that now someone in the middle is saying that I should have to pay them extra so I can use the bandwidth I'm already paying to have. They seem to be of the opinion that I need to pay THREE people for the bandwidth I use. I understand that there are two ends to the connection, so I need to pay people on both sides. But this third charge is someone in the middle. How many "third" charges *are* there? How many networks does my data traverse on the way from point A to point B? Can they all charge me? When? If I go from network A to network B and then back to network A, do I have to pay network A twice?
This is a big-ass can of worms. We need to keep it well and truly sealed.
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
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Apache down, IIS up
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· Score: -1, Troll
> businesses shouldn't be quick to oblige
Ever run a business?
You don't have enough money. You don't have enough people. You don't have enough work. And every last thing you have to do in your own house to run your own stuff is taking your people away from the work that pays the bills.
I tried to do the open source thing. I damn near went bankrupt. Then I partnered with Microsoft, and my income went from negative to just short of six figures almost overnight.
The weird thing is that I made every dime of that money working with open source products. But until I was a Microsoft partner, nobody would talk to me. Then I went back to the same companies that turned me down, and the word "Microsoft" somehow meant I was more qualified to work on their LAMP stack applications. Sure, that's retarded. We all know that. But that's the way it happened.
So tell me again how I should have stuck it out and gone down with the company. I go around talking principles and freedom, I go broke. I stick the word "Microsoft" on my marketing materials, and I make money. Go ahead. Argue with that. Tell me how I should have been happy to lose my house, my car, every dime of my savings, and all the other crap I would have lost riding the open source handbasket.
Microsoft saved my ass. Open source just kicked it. Screw you people, I know who butters my bread.
I wrote a version of DopeWars. Open source, as it happens; derivative of the version written by Captain Howdy, but completely reimplemented from scratch, adding various useful bits like scrollable windows and jail time and even a music soundtrack.
Today some jerk has made a Windows version, sells it as shareware, and doesn't even list my name in the credits. He claims hundreds of thousands of registered users. Some of the elements in his software made their first appearance in mine, so there's really no question that he had access to it.
Now tell me again how open source is so good for developers.
Oh, but to answer your question... no, it's not just you. And that *may* have something to do with why it was pulled. I'd be happy with a single line in the credits, but chances are the shareware version's "author" is more interested in cash.
My thoughts exactly. You'd have to be pretty weak to consider 17 pounds a weight worth lifting. Anything less than 50 isn't even worth *counting*, is it?
> If a game gave you everything at the start once you > got bored with the game that would be it.
No, once I get bored with the game, that IS it.
End of story.
It doesn't matter whether I have unlocked everything. It doesn't even matter whether I have finished it. What matters is whether the game is fun.
That's why I have not unlocked everything in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, and I haven't even finished Gun (nor will I, because it's NOT FUN anymore), but I've got all fifty achievements in Oblivion and I continue to play it anyway.
I play a game because it is fun. When it stops being fun, I'm finished. Unlockables are not fun; they are quite distinctly NOT fun, in fact, because I DON'T HAVE THEM. What you have to do is convince me that if I unlock this unlockable, it will be *more* fun than what I have to do to unlock it.
See, I'm damn near forty. I did the 100% complete thing in the first four Tony Hawk games because I was having fun, but in the last three I wasn't so I didn't. And if you want to point a finger and laugh, I. Don't. Care. You're some random dillweed I don't know and will never meet, and what you think will neither make me money nor get me laid.
However, if you happen to make games, and I think your games kick ass because they remain fun long after I've unlocked everything and completed the game several times... that WILL make you money, which in turn will get you laid. Not because *I'm* so great, but because there are millions of people who think the same way because - like me - they are pushing forty and have wives, kids, and jobs competing for their time and attention.
Oh, and incidentally: we also have MONEY and total control over what games our children "buy". (Because really, it's *us* buying the games and *giving* them to the children.) So if we like your games, we're going to be well-disposed toward buying just about anything our kids want that has your name on it.
IM seems a likely possibility. If the IM networks simply saved messages received while people were offline and delivered them later when the people came online, probably 90% of the legitimate email I receive could go away. I get a huge amount of email that says "Can you send me file X?", which could be done in an IM, and I would make the same response. But if your IM simply doesn't arrive when I'm offline, you get the pattern I actually see (and use) everyday: send the IM, get told the person is not online, and go write the same message in an email.
We would, of course, need to resolve the problem of file attachments.
I've made money on both sides, and I've lost money on both sides. Neither side is "better" economically. Neither side is "better" at all. They're just different.
Proprietary software pays developers for writing it. FOSS doesn't. It pays writers for documenting it. It pays techs for supporting it. It pays IT guys for installing it. And yes, it pays developers for *customising* it when it's not good enough.
But at no point does the developer get rewarded for doing it right in the first place. If it's so flexible and intuitive and stable that you don't need documentation or support or installation or customisation, the developer doesn't get squat.
And I call that STUPID. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. That's not chess, it's 52 pick-up, which might be more accurately called BEND OVER.
Unless, of course, you're not a developer! Then FOSS is great, because you get to really stick it to those people who write code. They're all a bunch of nerds anyway. Who needs them!
Re:The Myth of the 80 Hour Week
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On Point On Slacking
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· Score: 2, Interesting
> I have not met a single soul outside of the medical > and legal profession whose actual and typical > workload could not be accomplished in 30-40 hours > of real honest work.
As a former pastry chef, I disagree.
It does not matter how hard you try, you CANNOT produce *good* milles-feuille in less than three hours. Sure, you can go through the motions. You can follow the steps. But you won't meet the criteria - if you roll the dough out too fast, you develop the gluten in the dough too much, and you end up with crap. If you don't roll it enough times, you don't get enough layers, and you end up with crap. If there's not enough salt, or not enough yeast, or not enough water, or not enough butter, or - God help you - TOO MUCH of any of the above, let alone if your butter is too warm or cut too small or not small enough, you end up with crap. And when you cook it, you'd better wait for the oven to FULLY preheat, and you'd better be absolutely sure the oven is neither too hot (which will burn it) or too cool (which will not puff the layers). You simply cannot screw up. Fundamentally, this is chemistry, and it's every bit as precise and critical as it would be in a laboratory.
But most people don't understand that. They say sure, you mix this and that and these and those, and then you roll it out and do a double book fold three or four times. They never add cold water by drops to the hot water until it's exactly the right temperature for the yeast, and they don't stand over it watching the last few seconds tick by on the timer. Which is why they produce - you guessed it - crap.
Today, I'm a software developer, and if you think PASTRY is complex... you don't know the half of it. These things take time. No matter how much you yell, or how little you understand, nothing you can do or say will make it happen any faster. It will happen when it happens. Fundamentally, it's bound by rules and processes which are every bit as rigid and inflexible as the laws of physics and chemistry.
And yes, there are a great many people out there who grab a Linux distro and read a few books on programming, and then they write this and that and these and those and build a couple of data structures and chuck it through the linker. They never write a use case, they never take a class, and they never test their code. And they produce crap. Which is fine, because it's GPL, and that's what really counts, right? Right. (snort)
But you can't compare those people to me. There is a big difference between what a talented amateur does - even though it is frequently amazing - and what I do. I can do what he does, but he can't do what I do. So just leave him to write mail processors and graphics filters, and I'll build the APIs and systems infrastructure that get the mail and the graphics onto his system in the first place. Don't complain that he's got his head down in the code all day every day, while I post on Slashdot and read a dozen different blogs. I am not doing what he is doing, so you can't compare my work to his in any productive sense.
My take on this is that it's not what you do that constitutes invasion of privacy, but WHY YOU DO IT.
See, I write my blog for an audience. If you are in that audience, you are invited to read my blog. If you are not, then you are not invited. But if you claim to be such a person, I will take your word for it. I will not cross-examine you or make you fill out an application.
Now, when you come to my blog to read what I wrote and participate in the dialog, that's fine. That's what blogs are designed to create: dialog. Even if you have your dialog on another blog, that's fine. If you contribute to the dialog that you think I am a complete dork who should STFU, that's still dialog. That's what we're trying to do here.
But when you go to my blog with no intention of participating in the dialog, YOU DO NOT BELONG THERE. You are not a member of my community. You are a trespasser. You are the creepy old guy hanging around the playground with a sack of candy, looking for someone to abuse and traumatise.
Arguing that the victim agreed to go with you doesn't hold water, because the victim did NOT agree to be tortured and publicly humiliated at your hands. He only agreed to let you read what he wrote and respond to it, and you lied to him. You coerced and forced your way into what you wanted without regard to his rights or desires.
And yes, I *do* believe this sort of abuse by authority can be productively compared to rape.
Pay attention, boys. Following several mystifying cases where a great job interview was followed by a withdrawal of interest, I went over my blog and carefully chucked all the truly shocking stuff under "offensive post" introductions with a "more" link.
I got a solid offer the next week. Connect the dots.
A market is the intersection of supply and demand.
Is his demand for Windows, or for Linux?
That's his market.
> Also, it's not a case of whether > the supply and demand curves intersect,
Supply and demand curves ALWAYS intersect.
You're really bad at this.
> but rather a case of their stability.
I am still waiting for you to define what YOU mean by "stable". I know what *I* mean when I say it, but you're the one asking the question.
> If they intersect at (q1, p1) today, at > (q2, p2) tomorrow, and (q3, p3) the day > after that, then what equilibrium can > one have?
Let me repeat this again, since you don't quite seem to be getting it.
In the real world, you don't normally *get* equilibrium.
You do, however, sometimes get stability (in the sense that I use it). Stability doesn't depend on the exact values of q and p. It depends on the *ratio* of q to p; as long as that doesn't change, you have economic stability. When the ratio is 1:1, you have economic equilibrium.
So it is possible for both q and p to vary continuously, and as long as those changes are proportionally identical, neither stability nor equilibrium will be disrupted. Even when the market is not in equlibrium, and it's almost always nowhere close to it, the price remains the same as long as both supply and demand change in the same ratio.
There are a lot of variables involved in the process; we don't talk about price as a number of dollars or Euros, but as a function of other variables. Which other variables you use depends largely on your own personal preferences in which economic theories best represent reality. There is a frequent criticism that marginalist economics is a circular argument, but it would be more correctly called a feedback loop - you have to enter at some arbitrary position, but over time it converges to what the market dictates no matter what position was initially taken.
Think of it like writing multithreaded code. Each thread represents a demand for the supply of O/S resources. This is an economy. Economic principles apply. When the demand is twice the supply, it doesn't matter what the numbers are, the system runs like a dog. When the supply is twice the demand, it still doesn't matter what the numbers are, the system whizzes along happily.
And if, like most people, you're completely stymied by multithreaded code and can't get it to work reliably... a couple of courses in economics might help. At the very least, it will demonstrate why no amount of priority setting will make your system any more efficient overall, and will in fact make it slightly LESS efficient in the long run.
> No, the cost of Windows is something they pay > while attempting to buy a computer.
And when the consumer wants a PC for the purpose of running Linux, but cannot *conveniently* buy one without also buying Windows (in the consumer's sole judgement), this is an obstacle to running Linux. When the consumer complains, he is complaining about what he needs to do to run Linux. He is in the Linux market. His complaints are about the market he is in.
> Wrong again.
The word "again" is certainly incorrect, and the word "wrong" also appears inaccurate.
> The problem is that in astrophysics one can treat > friction as negligible
Why do you consider that a problem? There are questions in physics textbooks like: "if the universe is expanding at the speed of light and has done so for eight billion years, what is its diameter?" This demonstrates a student's ability to identify the assumptions underlying the question. The answer to the above would be sixteen billion light years (diameter, not radius) PLUS the initial diameter of the universe. Whether it accurately represents reality is irrelevant.
Likewise, when an economics textbook says "given perfect competition, what is the point of stability for this market?", it is asking the student to calculate the intersection of the average and marginal cost curves. This is a useful basic skill. Whether perfect competition ever really exists doesn't matter.
> Also, physicists can deal with friction.
And economists can and do deal with non-perfect competition.
> And what are these "certain basic concepts"?
Well, one of them would be the basic concept that the first few classes in any given field are devoted to learning the theory rather than its application. Perhaps this is too esoteric an idea for you.
> Knowing that a market is (perfectly) competitive > contributes little to determining its supply and > demand curves.
That's true. I guess it must be useless, since you don't understand how to use it.
> And if the supply and demand curves are themselves > unstable?
Do they intersect or not? If not, equilibrium is impossible. If so, it is possible in theory, but whether it can ever happen in the real world is another matter entirely. It depends on the exact nature of the market.
You may as well be asking whether two particles ever collide. Which two particles? Any two? Happens all the time. But as soon as you start asking whether THIS particle ever collides with another particle, the specifics of that particle are necessary to answer the question.
> Then, according to your definition, freedom never exists.
COMPLETE freedom never exists, no. There is always some degree of freedom available, but when only one choice meets your needs, there's no practical freedom at all.
> The freedom about which I'm speaking is that the choice > isn't restricted by the strategy of a *sinlge company* > who got a strong desktop share by doing lock-in marketing.
It's not the strategy of a single company. It's the strategy of a great many companies, most of which do not provide an operating system alternative, while those who do are not providing the features and compatibility desired by the consumer marketplace. I used BSD as my main desktop O/S for years, and only kept DOS around as a compatibility measure. For a time, there were three varieties of DOS - PC-DOS, MS-DOS, and DR-DOS. I personally preferred PC-DOS. I used OS/2 for a while, I was part of the BeOS developer community, and I've got an old Mac sitting on my desk right now.
I don't select Microsoft because it's the only choice I have. I have a lot of choices. Unfortunately, only Microsoft is producing a choice which offers a level of stability, performance, and reliability I consider acceptable. I don't blame Microsoft for producing the only O/S that isn't a piece of unadulterated crap, I blame the competition for not producing anything better.
> This is a proof that the "lock-in" marketing of > microsoft is the only reason why companies keep > using their shit, and that Linux is a mature and > valid solution for companies
No it isn't. It's an unsupported assertion from someone with an obvious bias against Microsoft.
The difference between American O/S markets and third world O/S markets is the difference in cost between humans and computers. In many of these third world countries, an employee makes less than a hundred dollars per year. The computer costs several times that. The cost of a $5 Linux CD is a month's salary for one of these employees.
If you compare a $150 copy of Windows (not that Microsoft charges that much in developing markets... but I'm sure you consider that predatory pricing), that's more than a year's salary for an employee. Windows is only worth that kind of money if an employee can do twice as much work on Windows as he can on Linux, and generally speaking, that's not the case.
However, if the Microsoft alternative saves your employees fifteen minutes a day, that amounts to roughly 62 hours annually. So if you pay your employees more than $2.50 an hour, Microsoft is the clear and obvious choice.
Since the third world is paying its employees a dollar and change each week, they scoff at these tiny little gains, but here in the U.S. we have a federal law requiring that we pay anyone and everyone more than twice this wage. So if Windows saves you seven minutes a day, it's worth it. And since most computer professionals make twenty dollars an hour or more, if it saves you TWO minutes a day, it's worth it. If you operate a serious technical company where the average wage is closer to $40 an hour, recovering less than one minute a day pays for the software.
So the clear and obvious choice here is to use Windows, regardless of Microsoft's "get the facts" campaign. The situation in the third world is closer to the mainframe era, where people were routinely expected to invest weeks in optimisation and redesign to save a few clock cycles on the massively expensive single computer down in the lab.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not very discoverable for someone who isn't actively trying to figure out how the hell he is going to get his money's worth out of a game.
I tried the demo. I extrapolated from the demo that the game was too hard, the cutscenes were horribly interruptive, the acting was bad, and I just plain wouldn't have enough time to go around doing cool stuff. This added up to "shitty game, don't buy".
However, if the story is optional, that makes a difference. And the save system sounds innovative enough that I'd like to see it in action. I would really rather run around killing a lot of zombies for a while before I get wrapped up in accomplishing goals and earning achievements, and I'd expect that the resulting experience would make the game somewhat easier once I dec ided to buckle down and play through the main storyline.
So it's moved from the "No" list (with N3) to the "Maybe" list. It hasn't joined Saint's Row on the "Yes" list, though.
N3 was demoted after I played the demo a couple times. I just got bored with it. I thought it would be fun, and it was, but I blew through all the fun in a day.
I think the biggest projected benefit of Manifesto is to serve as a portal where lots of people come to see good games.
However, there's one critical thing missing: there is no draw for the game PLAYER to come to this site. It's a classic case of the consumer and the customer being different. The consumer of this site is the game developer. Unfortunately, the customer needs to be the game player.
Game developers always have a list of the greatest games ever that you just HAVE to play, and game players know damn well that most of those games suck... because we're not just players anymore. We look at things through different eyes and judge them on different criteria.
Unfortunately, what appeals to the player is... what big publishers are already providing on a much larger scale. Oops.
What a shockingly intelligent person you are.
Look at all those heads in the sand. They're everywhere. An unsigned extension has been installed into Firefox without confirmation or verification by a piece of malware, and nobody seems to care.
The open source world has a problem. It's a reasonably new problem for them, but it's the same problem Microsoft have been facing for years: once you get big enough, you become a target.
The problem *behind* the problem is that there is simply no avenue for the open source community to address it. Microsoft had control over their production and distribution chain; the open source community does not. They need to install order into chaos in a community that thrives - and indeed fundamentally DEPENDS - on the chaos itself.
In short, they need to choose *which* pound of flesh they're going to cut off. They'll live; they'll heal; they'll probably even be better off for it in the long run.
But it's still going to hurt like hell.
> it is only hurting and hindering legitimate users
A major problem with Windows piracy was small OEMs buying just a few copies of Windows and installing them on thousands of PCs. Microsoft have successfully shut down several such operations, who were collectively responsible for distributing counterfeit software to millions of customers WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE.
Let me clarify that somewhat more: THE CUSTOMER WAS PERFECTLY INNOCENT. The purpose of the notification service in WGA is not to make users feel guilty for using software they pirate themselves; that is a perfectly fruitless endeavor. It is instead to notify the INNOCENT customer who has purchased or otherwise received illegal software from a source they believe to be legitimate.
It is for precisely this reason that disabling or crippling the computer that fails WGA is immensely stupid. There is simply no benefit to it: the major piracy problem is not Joe down the street installing the same copy of Windows on two computers, it's organised crime syndicates that sell thousands of counterfeit CDs to people who expect to receive legitimate, licensed software. Whatever someone might do to those computers doesn't do anything to the actual criminals, so it's just plain ill-tempered and mean. It's punishing the victim.
What Microsoft are trying to do instead is tell the victim "Hey, you're a victim. Come to us and we will help you." If you're a victim of yourself, however, chances are you don't want Microsoft's help.
Paul Thurott installed this copy of Windows a long time ago, presumably before there was notification in the WGA service, and possibly before there was a WGA service at all. Chances are his Windows installation was *never* legitimate, but he just didn't know it. Since his copy is in fact legitimate, he can readily fix this problem with a little effort. If he doesn't want to bother, he can disable the notification, as could a willful software pirate.
And I for one find it decidedly odd that his "false positive" happens the day after a Microsoft blogger writes extensively about them: http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/default.aspx
> I really, really don't think what I code is
> amazing flaming shit that the Russian mafia
> is trying to steal.
That's the smartest thing I've heard another developer say in years.
I wonder why I haven't heard anyone else saying it?
I'll bet Microsoft can identify and produce each and every developer that worked on this emulator, and that each and every one would testify that they did not refer in any way, shape, or form to any GPL code.
Now try and do that for an open source project. Who wrote this change here? How do you know? Where is he? What's his real name? Will he come out and testify?
It's a much harder question. The courts are also far more likely to believe a professional software developer, where they might not be so quick to believe Heinrich the 19-year-old unemployed Austrian slacker who writes long flames about Microsoft being evil three times a week.
The "bitch" in the Rotor license is the non-commercial provision. Other than that, it's pretty similar to early BSD license terms.
I think Microsoft is always in the middle of paradigm shift. There's been a lot of study and evaluation of what Microsoft can gain from the open source community, and I think we're now starting to see the fruits of that. The major Shared Source licenses available from Microsoft look an awful lot like GPL, BSD/MIT, and the old "look but don't touch" flavor of Shared Source.
Basically, yes, Microsoft could learn a lot of lessons from open source. It's learning them. But how exactly has the open source community learned from Microsoft?
There is one and only one mechanism Microsoft uses to stay in power: find out what the biggest competitor is doing, and do it better. The open source community may scoff and claim Microsoft can't do this, but the fact is THEY CAN. There's very little you can't do when you can afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a problem, but when you have minimal funding and only fair-weather support from most of your adherents, there's an awful lot you can't do. The open source community needs to be very worried and start looking very hard for ways to respond to this.
ObDoomsdayTheory: Consider the competitive implications of this. We have an ARMV4I emulator for Windows which is released as shared source under the academic license, a close parallel to the GPL which forbids any derivatives that do not run on Microsoft operating systems. Is it feasible that the open source community can EVER develop an ARMV4I emulator for Linux without facing the impending shadow of a lawsuit demanding they *prove* nobody on the project made use of Microsoft's shared source release? Could that ever be proven?
The flaw in the open source model here is that most contributors are anonymous, do not get held accountable for their contributions, and never face any scrutiny as to whether their code is free of trademark and patent claims. If this case went to court, could all the developers on the project be located to appear in court? How could any of them demonstrate that their code was clear of any "contaminant" effect from the Microsoft Shared Source release?
And exactly how much interesting and useful technology *is* Microsoft going to dump onto the market under the Academic Shared Source (ASS... hehehehe oh wait I'm not twelve) license? Will that create a problem for open source developers who want to provide similar functionality? How high *is* the wall Microsoft has created around ARMV4I emulation? Can open source even *contemplate* surmounting it?
Microsoft has a history of learning its competitors' tactics very, very well and using them to slaughter those competitors in the marketplace. There was a time that the saying was nobody ever got fired for buying *IBM*, and everyone was worried about how IBM was going to take over the world and nobody could stop them. But Microsoft stopped the unstoppable, so calling open source invincible and unstoppable doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies when you look at how IBM is doing these days.
This isn't really something I see as being intended to prevent anything. It's probably more along the lines of forcing acknowledgement of criminal behavior. I'm imagining something like this:
- The military produces the Badass Mark V, which is approved for police use.
- The Badass Mark V only chambers and fires ammunition with RFID safety on it.
- Ammunition with RFID safety is not made available to the general public.
- A criminal steals several Badass Mark V firearms from a police armory.
- The criminal sells them to a fence, who puts them up for sale at a gun show.
- A private citizen buys one and finds that it takes ammunition he cannot legally own.
- The citizen calls the police, like a good citizen should.
When the police go to the gun show and arrest the fence, he CANNOT ARGUE that he "didn't know" the guns were stolen. If the citizen obtains the RFID ammunition through some channel, on the other hand, he cannot argue that he "didn't know" it was illegal ammunition.
> isn't it possible that the real problem is
> piss-poor programmers among the competition?
It's a combination of factors. There's a lot of fear in the industry that if you compete with Microsoft, Microsoft will crush you. There's also a lot of room for people to do things that DON'T compete with Microsoft. And in the middle of that, there's a vast amount of Microsoft-connected work that Microsoft will actually *help* you get into the market because it ultimately means more people want Microsoft products.
So there's a very small market segment you could target with something that competes on Microsoft's turf. And if you want to compete with Microsoft, you need to play Microsoft's game, which means having billions of dollars in resources and using it to your best PR advantage.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is far less risky to build something that not only doesn't compete with Microsoft, but indeed helps Microsoft's platform stay dominant.
Now, given that it is safer from a commercial perspective to build such a project, you are forced to ask yourself what is *wrong* with the people who want to compete with Microsoft. Are they bad business people? Do they not understand that doing business on this level costs billions of dollars? Do they not understand that when you threaten a multi-billion dollar business, that business spends billions to stop you?
I firmly believe that any company complaining they can't do business because of Microsoft is a company with bad leadership, bad vision, and bad business sense. None of which are Microsoft's fault.
...how many adults are becoming absolutely PANICKED at the idea that children can TALK ABOUT THEM.
Adults have always treated children like crap, but there's never really been any concrete evidence of it because adults have played the strongarm card over everything the child is allowed to say or do. If you took a picture of an adult doing something embarrassing, the picture could be taken away. But now that the picture is a bundle of unfettered electrons stored on a web server that belongs to someone you DON'T have the right to bully and coerce, they can't do that anymore.
It might make being an adult somewhat more problematic, but I'm willing to bet it makes the children's lives a whole hell of a lot better.
The death of privacy is GOOD. The only people that care about it are the ones who shouldn't be doing what they're doing ANYWAY.
Yeah, these are the requirements for my company to use Vista. ...
Oh, wait, I work at Microsoft.
Hi Russ... I read you regularly, even though we don't always agree.
On this, we do. Right now, the commercial internet works because I pay someone to connect me to the internet and give me a certain amount of bandwidth. I do this for my connection at home, because I want bandwidth to get what I ask to see. I do this for my server at a data center, because I want bandwidth to get to people that ask to see me.
When I use bandwidth to my own server, like when I get my email, I pay twice for that bandwidth. I pay for sending the email from my server, and I pay for receiving the email at my desktop. And that's fine. It makes perfect sense to me.
What isn't fine is that now someone in the middle is saying that I should have to pay them extra so I can use the bandwidth I'm already paying to have. They seem to be of the opinion that I need to pay THREE people for the bandwidth I use. I understand that there are two ends to the connection, so I need to pay people on both sides. But this third charge is someone in the middle. How many "third" charges *are* there? How many networks does my data traverse on the way from point A to point B? Can they all charge me? When? If I go from network A to network B and then back to network A, do I have to pay network A twice?
This is a big-ass can of worms. We need to keep it well and truly sealed.
> businesses shouldn't be quick to oblige
Ever run a business?
You don't have enough money. You don't have enough people. You don't have enough work. And every last thing you have to do in your own house to run your own stuff is taking your people away from the work that pays the bills.
I tried to do the open source thing. I damn near went bankrupt. Then I partnered with Microsoft, and my income went from negative to just short of six figures almost overnight.
The weird thing is that I made every dime of that money working with open source products. But until I was a Microsoft partner, nobody would talk to me. Then I went back to the same companies that turned me down, and the word "Microsoft" somehow meant I was more qualified to work on their LAMP stack applications. Sure, that's retarded. We all know that. But that's the way it happened.
So tell me again how I should have stuck it out and gone down with the company. I go around talking principles and freedom, I go broke. I stick the word "Microsoft" on my marketing materials, and I make money. Go ahead. Argue with that. Tell me how I should have been happy to lose my house, my car, every dime of my savings, and all the other crap I would have lost riding the open source handbasket.
Microsoft saved my ass. Open source just kicked it. Screw you people, I know who butters my bread.
I wrote a version of DopeWars. Open source, as it happens; derivative of the version written by Captain Howdy, but completely reimplemented from scratch, adding various useful bits like scrollable windows and jail time and even a music soundtrack.
Today some jerk has made a Windows version, sells it as shareware, and doesn't even list my name in the credits. He claims hundreds of thousands of registered users. Some of the elements in his software made their first appearance in mine, so there's really no question that he had access to it.
Now tell me again how open source is so good for developers.
Oh, but to answer your question... no, it's not just you. And that *may* have something to do with why it was pulled. I'd be happy with a single line in the credits, but chances are the shareware version's "author" is more interested in cash.
My thoughts exactly. You'd have to be pretty weak to consider 17 pounds a weight worth lifting. Anything less than 50 isn't even worth *counting*, is it?
> If a game gave you everything at the start once you
> got bored with the game that would be it.
No, once I get bored with the game, that IS it.
End of story.
It doesn't matter whether I have unlocked everything. It doesn't even matter whether I have finished it. What matters is whether the game is fun.
That's why I have not unlocked everything in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, and I haven't even finished Gun (nor will I, because it's NOT FUN anymore), but I've got all fifty achievements in Oblivion and I continue to play it anyway.
I play a game because it is fun. When it stops being fun, I'm finished. Unlockables are not fun; they are quite distinctly NOT fun, in fact, because I DON'T HAVE THEM. What you have to do is convince me that if I unlock this unlockable, it will be *more* fun than what I have to do to unlock it.
See, I'm damn near forty. I did the 100% complete thing in the first four Tony Hawk games because I was having fun, but in the last three I wasn't so I didn't. And if you want to point a finger and laugh, I. Don't. Care. You're some random dillweed I don't know and will never meet, and what you think will neither make me money nor get me laid.
However, if you happen to make games, and I think your games kick ass because they remain fun long after I've unlocked everything and completed the game several times... that WILL make you money, which in turn will get you laid. Not because *I'm* so great, but because there are millions of people who think the same way because - like me - they are pushing forty and have wives, kids, and jobs competing for their time and attention.
Oh, and incidentally: we also have MONEY and total control over what games our children "buy". (Because really, it's *us* buying the games and *giving* them to the children.) So if we like your games, we're going to be well-disposed toward buying just about anything our kids want that has your name on it.
IM seems a likely possibility. If the IM networks simply saved messages received while people were offline and delivered them later when the people came online, probably 90% of the legitimate email I receive could go away. I get a huge amount of email that says "Can you send me file X?", which could be done in an IM, and I would make the same response. But if your IM simply doesn't arrive when I'm offline, you get the pattern I actually see (and use) everyday: send the IM, get told the person is not online, and go write the same message in an email.
We would, of course, need to resolve the problem of file attachments.
I've made money on both sides, and I've lost money on both sides. Neither side is "better" economically. Neither side is "better" at all. They're just different.
Proprietary software pays developers for writing it. FOSS doesn't. It pays writers for documenting it. It pays techs for supporting it. It pays IT guys for installing it. And yes, it pays developers for *customising* it when it's not good enough.
But at no point does the developer get rewarded for doing it right in the first place. If it's so flexible and intuitive and stable that you don't need documentation or support or installation or customisation, the developer doesn't get squat.
And I call that STUPID. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. That's not chess, it's 52 pick-up, which might be more accurately called BEND OVER.
Unless, of course, you're not a developer! Then FOSS is great, because you get to really stick it to those people who write code. They're all a bunch of nerds anyway. Who needs them!
> I have not met a single soul outside of the medical
> and legal profession whose actual and typical
> workload could not be accomplished in 30-40 hours
> of real honest work.
As a former pastry chef, I disagree.
It does not matter how hard you try, you CANNOT produce *good* milles-feuille in less than three hours. Sure, you can go through the motions. You can follow the steps. But you won't meet the criteria - if you roll the dough out too fast, you develop the gluten in the dough too much, and you end up with crap. If you don't roll it enough times, you don't get enough layers, and you end up with crap. If there's not enough salt, or not enough yeast, or not enough water, or not enough butter, or - God help you - TOO MUCH of any of the above, let alone if your butter is too warm or cut too small or not small enough, you end up with crap. And when you cook it, you'd better wait for the oven to FULLY preheat, and you'd better be absolutely sure the oven is neither too hot (which will burn it) or too cool (which will not puff the layers). You simply cannot screw up. Fundamentally, this is chemistry, and it's every bit as precise and critical as it would be in a laboratory.
But most people don't understand that. They say sure, you mix this and that and these and those, and then you roll it out and do a double book fold three or four times. They never add cold water by drops to the hot water until it's exactly the right temperature for the yeast, and they don't stand over it watching the last few seconds tick by on the timer. Which is why they produce - you guessed it - crap.
Today, I'm a software developer, and if you think PASTRY is complex... you don't know the half of it. These things take time. No matter how much you yell, or how little you understand, nothing you can do or say will make it happen any faster. It will happen when it happens. Fundamentally, it's bound by rules and processes which are every bit as rigid and inflexible as the laws of physics and chemistry.
And yes, there are a great many people out there who grab a Linux distro and read a few books on programming, and then they write this and that and these and those and build a couple of data structures and chuck it through the linker. They never write a use case, they never take a class, and they never test their code. And they produce crap. Which is fine, because it's GPL, and that's what really counts, right? Right. (snort)
But you can't compare those people to me. There is a big difference between what a talented amateur does - even though it is frequently amazing - and what I do. I can do what he does, but he can't do what I do. So just leave him to write mail processors and graphics filters, and I'll build the APIs and systems infrastructure that get the mail and the graphics onto his system in the first place. Don't complain that he's got his head down in the code all day every day, while I post on Slashdot and read a dozen different blogs. I am not doing what he is doing, so you can't compare my work to his in any productive sense.
And I *still* make a damn fine cheesecake.
My take on this is that it's not what you do that constitutes invasion of privacy, but WHY YOU DO IT.
See, I write my blog for an audience. If you are in that audience, you are invited to read my blog. If you are not, then you are not invited. But if you claim to be such a person, I will take your word for it. I will not cross-examine you or make you fill out an application.
Now, when you come to my blog to read what I wrote and participate in the dialog, that's fine. That's what blogs are designed to create: dialog. Even if you have your dialog on another blog, that's fine. If you contribute to the dialog that you think I am a complete dork who should STFU, that's still dialog. That's what we're trying to do here.
But when you go to my blog with no intention of participating in the dialog, YOU DO NOT BELONG THERE. You are not a member of my community. You are a trespasser. You are the creepy old guy hanging around the playground with a sack of candy, looking for someone to abuse and traumatise.
Arguing that the victim agreed to go with you doesn't hold water, because the victim did NOT agree to be tortured and publicly humiliated at your hands. He only agreed to let you read what he wrote and respond to it, and you lied to him. You coerced and forced your way into what you wanted without regard to his rights or desires.
And yes, I *do* believe this sort of abuse by authority can be productively compared to rape.
Pay attention, boys. Following several mystifying cases where a great job interview was followed by a withdrawal of interest, I went over my blog and carefully chucked all the truly shocking stuff under "offensive post" introductions with a "more" link.
I got a solid offer the next week. Connect the dots.
> No, he isn't in the Linux maket.
A market is the intersection of supply and demand.
Is his demand for Windows, or for Linux?
That's his market.
> Also, it's not a case of whether
> the supply and demand curves intersect,
Supply and demand curves ALWAYS intersect.
You're really bad at this.
> but rather a case of their stability.
I am still waiting for you to define what YOU mean by "stable". I know what *I* mean when I say it, but you're the one asking the question.
> If they intersect at (q1, p1) today, at
> (q2, p2) tomorrow, and (q3, p3) the day
> after that, then what equilibrium can
> one have?
Let me repeat this again, since you don't quite seem to be getting it.
In the real world, you don't normally *get* equilibrium.
You do, however, sometimes get stability (in the sense that I use it). Stability doesn't depend on the exact values of q and p. It depends on the *ratio* of q to p; as long as that doesn't change, you have economic stability. When the ratio is 1:1, you have economic equilibrium.
So it is possible for both q and p to vary continuously, and as long as those changes are proportionally identical, neither stability nor equilibrium will be disrupted. Even when the market is not in equlibrium, and it's almost always nowhere close to it, the price remains the same as long as both supply and demand change in the same ratio.
There are a lot of variables involved in the process; we don't talk about price as a number of dollars or Euros, but as a function of other variables. Which other variables you use depends largely on your own personal preferences in which economic theories best represent reality. There is a frequent criticism that marginalist economics is a circular argument, but it would be more correctly called a feedback loop - you have to enter at some arbitrary position, but over time it converges to what the market dictates no matter what position was initially taken.
Think of it like writing multithreaded code. Each thread represents a demand for the supply of O/S resources. This is an economy. Economic principles apply. When the demand is twice the supply, it doesn't matter what the numbers are, the system runs like a dog. When the supply is twice the demand, it still doesn't matter what the numbers are, the system whizzes along happily.
And if, like most people, you're completely stymied by multithreaded code and can't get it to work reliably... a couple of courses in economics might help. At the very least, it will demonstrate why no amount of priority setting will make your system any more efficient overall, and will in fact make it slightly LESS efficient in the long run.
> No, the cost of Windows is something they pay
> while attempting to buy a computer.
And when the consumer wants a PC for the purpose of running Linux, but cannot *conveniently* buy one without also buying Windows (in the consumer's sole judgement), this is an obstacle to running Linux. When the consumer complains, he is complaining about what he needs to do to run Linux. He is in the Linux market. His complaints are about the market he is in.
> Wrong again.
The word "again" is certainly incorrect, and the word "wrong" also appears inaccurate.
> The problem is that in astrophysics one can treat
> friction as negligible
Why do you consider that a problem? There are questions in physics textbooks like: "if the universe is expanding at the speed of light and has done so for eight billion years, what is its diameter?" This demonstrates a student's ability to identify the assumptions underlying the question. The answer to the above would be sixteen billion light years (diameter, not radius) PLUS the initial diameter of the universe. Whether it accurately represents reality is irrelevant.
Likewise, when an economics textbook says "given perfect competition, what is the point of stability for this market?", it is asking the student to calculate the intersection of the average and marginal cost curves. This is a useful basic skill. Whether perfect competition ever really exists doesn't matter.
> Also, physicists can deal with friction.
And economists can and do deal with non-perfect competition.
> And what are these "certain basic concepts"?
Well, one of them would be the basic concept that the first few classes in any given field are devoted to learning the theory rather than its application. Perhaps this is too esoteric an idea for you.
> Knowing that a market is (perfectly) competitive
> contributes little to determining its supply and
> demand curves.
That's true. I guess it must be useless, since you don't understand how to use it.
> And if the supply and demand curves are themselves
> unstable?
Do they intersect or not? If not, equilibrium is impossible. If so, it is possible in theory, but whether it can ever happen in the real world is another matter entirely. It depends on the exact nature of the market.
You may as well be asking whether two particles ever collide. Which two particles? Any two? Happens all the time. But as soon as you start asking whether THIS particle ever collides with another particle, the specifics of that particle are necessary to answer the question.
> Then, according to your definition, freedom never exists.
COMPLETE freedom never exists, no. There is always some degree of freedom available, but when only one choice meets your needs, there's no practical freedom at all.
> The freedom about which I'm speaking is that the choice
> isn't restricted by the strategy of a *sinlge company*
> who got a strong desktop share by doing lock-in marketing.
It's not the strategy of a single company. It's the strategy of a great many companies, most of which do not provide an operating system alternative, while those who do are not providing the features and compatibility desired by the consumer marketplace. I used BSD as my main desktop O/S for years, and only kept DOS around as a compatibility measure. For a time, there were three varieties of DOS - PC-DOS, MS-DOS, and DR-DOS. I personally preferred PC-DOS. I used OS/2 for a while, I was part of the BeOS developer community, and I've got an old Mac sitting on my desk right now.
I don't select Microsoft because it's the only choice I have. I have a lot of choices. Unfortunately, only Microsoft is producing a choice which offers a level of stability, performance, and reliability I consider acceptable. I don't blame Microsoft for producing the only O/S that isn't a piece of unadulterated crap, I blame the competition for not producing anything better.
> This is a proof that the "lock-in" marketing of
> microsoft is the only reason why companies keep
> using their shit, and that Linux is a mature and
> valid solution for companies
No it isn't. It's an unsupported assertion from someone with an obvious bias against Microsoft.
The difference between American O/S markets and third world O/S markets is the difference in cost between humans and computers. In many of these third world countries, an employee makes less than a hundred dollars per year. The computer costs several times that. The cost of a $5 Linux CD is a month's salary for one of these employees.
If you compare a $150 copy of Windows (not that Microsoft charges that much in developing markets... but I'm sure you consider that predatory pricing), that's more than a year's salary for an employee. Windows is only worth that kind of money if an employee can do twice as much work on Windows as he can on Linux, and generally speaking, that's not the case.
However, if the Microsoft alternative saves your employees fifteen minutes a day, that amounts to roughly 62 hours annually. So if you pay your employees more than $2.50 an hour, Microsoft is the clear and obvious choice.
Since the third world is paying its employees a dollar and change each week, they scoff at these tiny little gains, but here in the U.S. we have a federal law requiring that we pay anyone and everyone more than twice this wage. So if Windows saves you seven minutes a day, it's worth it. And since most computer professionals make twenty dollars an hour or more, if it saves you TWO minutes a day, it's worth it. If you operate a serious technical company where the average wage is closer to $40 an hour, recovering less than one minute a day pays for the software.
So the clear and obvious choice here is to use Windows, regardless of Microsoft's "get the facts" campaign. The situation in the third world is closer to the mainframe era, where people were routinely expected to invest weeks in optimisation and redesign to save a few clock cycles on the massively expensive single computer down in the lab.