Seriously, played this sleeper off and on for a few months (how could I play a boring game for so long? High tolerance for boredom I guess. ..). Actually, I thought it would get more interesting as I got into higher level content, but it really didn't. It has *got* to be one of the most tedious MMORPG's ever (most of them *are* pretty tedious anyhow).
I'm kinda surprised at how tedious most MMORPG's are. In theory the chief design consideration is keeping players paying subscription fees for as many months as possible. Sure, tedious levelling treadmills can keep players around for a few months, with the expectation that once they have a levelled up char it'll get a lot cooler. But, if you actually have fun, engaging content, I bet you could keep players around without stringing them along with stupid artificial goals ("Hey, only 2.5 million more exp till my next level and I get some crappy upgrade that lets me do 5-10% more dmg! It'll be great!").
Anyhow, my biggest beef with SWG was the almost complete lack of content at high levels. I mean, where is the Galactic Civil War that I was promised? More like a Galactic Civil Bore.
"The reason would not be because Real is a threat (they aren't), but because of the precedent it sets," he added in the e-mail. "Microsoft will be coming out with their own online music shop this fall, and they will be a threat. Better to nip such competition in the bud."
Oh the HORROR! Competition! Gotta nip that competition in the bud.
Well we see what this is really about. . . has nothing to do with preventing illegal theft of intellectual property. Just another cynical attempt to use bad laws to try to stifle competition. . . something which I thought is illegal in the US.
I kind of had a mixed response to NWN personally. I felt like there was way waaaayy too much dialogue and cut-scenes in the game. Don't get me wrong, I like story as much as the next guy, but this game just has a *ton* of dialogue and some long cut-scenes. To go with that, there's so many NPC's that I found it was sometimes difficult to decide which ones to talk to and which ones didn't really have anything to say. Which resulted in talking to just about everyone, which *really* slows down the game.
Also, there were a lot of little differences from 3rd Ed rules that bugged me. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a D&D lawyer - I mostly don't notice differences unless they adversely affect me. And there is one I can give as an example, which should illustrate why some of these differences bugged me.
The big problem I had with the rules-set had to do with the interaction of the magic system and the 'attack of opportunity' system. In D&D, and in NWN, when a player does certain actions (notably casting spells), this provokes additional free attacks from all adjacent attackers. So if you are near 3 enemies, and try to cast a spell, *BAM* 6 attacks (3 'normal' attacks, and 3 'attacks of opportunity'). Ok, so the idea goes that you just be carefull about when/where you cast.
In D&D 3rd Ed rules, in order to heal a friendly unit with non-area-effect heals, you have to cast the heal spell, then touch them. Here's where NWN screwed it up: in 3rd Ed, you can cast the heal spell *anywhere*, store the spell in your hands for some number of rounds, and then walk to your target and heal them. This allows healers to heal their group mates *in battle* without provoking attacks of opportunity. The people who developed 3rd Ed rules spent time actually thinking about, and balancing the rules, as to not too adversely affect any one class.
NWN, in contrast, does *NOT* implement cast and touch (at least, not correctly). In NWN, if you try to cast a heal spell on a target, your character walks over next to the target and begins attacking (*BAM* your dead), and then heals the target. Interestingly, if the target begins walking away after you start casting, you will finish the spell, hold the charge in your hands and start chasing after the target until you can touch it, so they sorta implement it. Just not in a way that's particularly beneficial to the healer.
In normal D&D, where you can't constantly rest, one could make the argument that the touch heal spells should just be used between encounters. But in NWN, anyone can rest away damage between encounters, so healing during battle is the only purpose of a cleric (well, and turning undead) in NWN. And the way they implemented touch spells in NWN really screws that up. =(
This kind of thing might seem overly nitpicky, but the point is, the Bioware devs seemed to change some of the rules (or just not implement them correctly) without knowing the consequences it would have on players.
I know, I know, some of the rules they purposely changed, with the idea of making a better CRPG. The ability to rest frequently *does* have the effect of making the game much faster paced (in a traditional Pen-and-Paper session, magic users are out of magic after one or two encounters, so you typically have a low number of encounters per in-game day). Since NWN is mostly a solo-game (in the single-player version anyhow), and you only get one henchman at a time, it's important to let players re-cuperate hp and spells frequently.
And I decided that, all things considered, NWN doesn't make a very good multi-player game. It can, if you have a group of friends that you only game with together, so you all stay at or near the same level. But as far as just hopping on some public NWN server goes, I've had a *lot* of problems. One is getting ganked by higher level players with nothing better to do than grief others. Another is the fact that NWN tries to dynamically adjust the difficulty of monsters and the number of monsters that spawned, based upon
Let's move unstable nuclear waste like 10000+ miles to the complete opposite side of the earth. I'm sure with such a short trip, there won't ever be any accidents. . .
Well, some of the problems you point out are valid. . . this is, in part, another micro-payment system and runs into the same problem that almost every other micro-payment system runs into - namely that the transaction costs could potentially be higher than the payment itself.
You ask, "how about I am totally careless with my email address, can i then send repeated claims for bond money from all these companies that want to sell me something.[sic]" (note: when you ask a question, you should end the sentence with a '?' not a '.') Well, yes, if you read the FAQ this is exactly the point - to force spammers to be wary of who they send spam to. Right now the spammers just send them to *everyone* and hope they get less than a 1% response rate. This bond system would force spammers to pick the best candidates, and to post a high enough bond to persuade the mark, err, I mean consumer to read the message. If they are carefull, they should be able to make more than enough in sales revenue to offset the bonds they have to pay.
But, I think you misunderstand something fundamental about the proposal. According to the FAQ posted above, this isn't exactly a pay-per-email system. You state, "This system sucks and white listing sucks too, unless you never lost contact with old friends or changed your isp or got in touch with a company." Well, unless your friends are jerks or idiots, they won't claim the bond, so you don't lose any money. That is, under this proposal, you are saying I am willing to warrant that this message is not spam, and I"ll warrant it in the amount of X dollars. When your friend receives the email, they see it's from you, think "Oh it's good to hear from him again." and hit the 'not spam' button, and the 'add to address book' button. Viola, you get your 25 cents (or whatever you posted) back. In fact, you don't *have* to post anything at all, but it's likely that if you don't post a bond, your friend will never even see your message. I think part of this system even allows you to query to find out what bond amount your friend set for messages to get past his filter.
"heck thinking about it somebody makes a product gets a lot of customer complaints then claims their repeated emails from dissatisfied customers is spam and claims the bonds."
Personally, if this system ever gets implemented, I simply would not do business with a company that requires me to post a bond to send customer support email. Under this system, mail recipients can choose whether they require a bond or not, and how much the bond amount has to be. That being the case, I would expect that the company's customer support would either whitelist me as a customer (if they want to use a bond to discourage spam from being sent to their cust support address), or just not require a bond.
The thing about this system is that it's all voluntary. You are never *forced* to pay for an email. No one might ever see your email if you don't post a bond, but you are never actually forced to.
I get new frames about every 5-6, and spend maybe $100-150 on them. New lenses maybe every 2-3 years (because eventually they get scratches on them and aren't quite so clear anymore), and the lenses maybe cost like $50 (sometimes cheaper if you can find a good sale). If LASIK costs $2000, well that's a lot of frames and lenses. . . I'm not sure I'd really spend that on glasses in my lifetime. . . Unless you count the fact that when I hit 50-60 years of age, my eyes might start getting worse again. . . but then, even with the LASIK, at that point in your life if that happened, you'd have to spend more money anyhow.
I'm confused. . . if moving your eye could cause complications, why don't they like temporarily paralzye the eye with some sort of anasthetic/muscle relaxer, so that you can't accidentally move it? I mean, you could get any number of involuntary muscle twitches and BAM! there goes your eye. . .
It seems that successfull capitalism always leads to monopolies or at least oligopolies. At which point, in order to restore competition, you need to have an outside power (govermnent, natural disaster, horrible mis-management) come in and either put severe restrictions (read 'regulations') on the company's behavior, or else bust it up.
While busting it/them up doesn't seem very fair, in the long run it seems more effective than trying to regulate a monopoly (for example, we all see how effective the gov'mt has been at regulating MS, haven't we?)
The day we don't get heated feedback I'll be concerned.
"..because that means our products work as they should and I'll be out of a job."
Actually it's more like "because that means people aren't using our products anymore and I'll be out of a job. . . like that'll ever happen. (*snigger*) Oh, is this thing still on?. .."
For Microsoft, heated complaints are just the noise that reassures them that people are still using their products. It's like a politician or celebrity getting hate-mail - better to get hate-mail than no mail at all - it's silence that is threatening.
I don't see this as being a major problem as long as you are aware of the issue. Seems like it should be possible to put all the system logs, etc, into ram drives. As far as most of the linux system files that you need to load and run apps, they don't need to be written to - just read. Heck, you could maybe partition your flash drive (do memory sticks allow partitioning?) into a read only file-system partition, and a read-write data area for docs and such.
The only hurdle I see to this is that you don't have any swap partition or file. Which is a bit of a drawback, but it should be perfectly possible to run a small linux distro with no swap.
As a case in point - Knoppix loads and runs off a CD - which generally you aren't going to be writing to at all once you've burned the Knoppix image on it. Actually, Knoppix might be an excellent starting point for the person trying to do this - Knoppix devs have already solved a lot of the problems of loading a Linux system from read-only media with no swap.
I mean, you're absolutely right - storage costs next to nothing per-megabyte, and compression can make it go a lot farther. But consider it like this: almost all the free email services have 'free' and 'premium' offers, and the main thing that differentiates the free from the 'premium' is how much storage you get.
Now, when they give free customers >= 100MBytes of storage, there is less reason to pay for the premium service. So, until GMail came in and broke the cartel's artificial shortage, the email services could count on plenty of people coughing up the cash to get a useable amount of storage.
At this point, given the above, why are they increasing their storage quotas? . . . Because if all the free & premium customers decided to move over to GMail (or at least a significant percentage of the user-base), then their current revenues would plummet fast. So, while they get a lot less money per 'free' customer (just the revenue they derive from advertising), by increasing the storage, they mostly take away the prime driver for people to go to GMail.
Predictions: now that GMail is eating away at their ability to sell 'premium' accounts with more storage, I expect that
We will see advertising taken to all new levels of obnoxiousness by the free email providers, to compensate for revenues lost from premium account sales declining.
I suspect some of the features that are currently available with the 'free' accounts (like spam filtering) might be moved over to the 'premium' accounts to attempt to still have differentiation between them so people might still consider using the premium accounts.
And Joel says that in his article. And he's *right.* I can't tell you how many places I've worked where there was at least *one* application, that was critical to the core business function of the company, that was a windows program. These people had no choice to migrate away from windows. They *could* put a mac *and* and wintel box on each desk, but they weren't actually going to do that, when the wintel box did everything they wanted in one computer.
Joel's point - and the reason Microsoft killed netscape, is that as more and more applications (especially business database apps - which constitute most of the lock-in special apps I was talking about earlier) more to being web-based, it becomes less and less necessary to run Windows.
Microsofts's strategy with Internet Explorer, in the end, turns out to have been brilliant (maybe more brilliant than they originally intended). . . Make IE *good enough* to work for most 'current generation' websites, push it out for free to everyone in order to marginalize the competition to the point where no further innovation can happen in web-browsers without Microsoft also adding that functionality to IE, then STOP DEVELOPING IE so that NO innovation happens AT ALL.
Then, once people get frustrated with the limitations of html (which could have been alleviated with on-going development of the standards), announce that you are release a new technology that will give 'rich client' interfaces over the network.
But, unfortunately, as MicroSoft has shown, it doesn't eliminate people who make crappy software that *does* sell. So, we see, how good or bad software is, relatively, isn't the most important point in the software world, just that it is *good enough* to do what people want to do, 80 percent of the time, and has overwhelming marketting advantages.
Oh GOD I hope that immortality is never achieved. Seriously, the one great hope of all people who've ever been under the crushing grip of a totalitarian regime has been "These guys can't live forever, and hopefully their successors won't be such brutal bloody egomaniacs."
In a society where practical immortality were achievable, the *worst* of human nature would probably rule far more than the *best* of human nature. Call it the fear of God, or the fear of death, mortality makes all men equal, and makes them at least consider, sometimes, the consequences of their actions. Some men have, through history, apparently surpressed that instinct.
And as a final bit of food for thought: In a society where you can be given immortality, immortality can also be withheld. How many people would have the moral courage to accept their natural death, rather than submit to whatever power controlled the systems and mechanisms of immortality?
The expression goes, 'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.' There's little greater 'absolute power,' in human terms, than the power of life and death.
I'm not exactly sure, but it sounds like this law, the way it's being stated, would prohibit Google from creating the full-text indexes that are *absolutely necessary* to do fast searches. The *point* of GMail is to have email with the power of google. If I'm gonna be doing searches without any indexes, I might as well stick with my Mozilla Mail client getting mail by POP3 - I already have well over 1Gig of free space on my HD to store mail, and Mozilla has some mail searching capabilities built in.
The only reason GMail is appealing is that I can apply the power of Google (which is built on indexing content) to my mail. *sigh*
I suspect that the webpage linked to was designed more by a marketing person than a tech person - I can't believe they would only have a 1xAGP slot. I think they just mean there is only 1 AGP slot. Because, games aside (it's not their target market anyhow - they are targetting the Workstation Market), if it *truly* has a 1x AGP slot, that would kill it for any kind of CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, 3D graphics design (like the people who create all the 3D models for games, movies, etc).
In otherwords, for a lot of the Workstation market, 1x AGP would be a huge problem in a WS design.
I think a lot of us fall into a 'middle-ground.' I'm fearfull of the long term effects that plant melt-downs have. . . but at the same time I realize that there potentially are safe(r) designs. If someone can truly come up with a 'disaster proof' reactor design that doesn't produce highly dangerous waste (it sounds like the design you mentioned is a likely candidate) then I'm willing to at least consider them.
Safe designs for nuclear reactors actually kind of excite me, because we clearly need to get away from fossil fuel energy.
Although, ultimately, I'm most excited about bio-mass energy (if it can ever be made to be practical at a large scale), because while burning bio-mass derivative fuels produces CO2 - at least the next generation of fuel will re-fixate that CO2 as it grows. . . it's a stable system where we are at least not increasing the amount of CO2.
Well, to give you the benefit of the doubt, the/. editors might have screwed up originally and fixed it by the time I looked at the post, but, uhh. . . it says "South Africa's state-run utility giant." And last time I checked, South Africa is in fact a country in the continent of Africa.
Mmmmm, well I generally agree with you. . . though I could *potentially* see Stallman being helpful to SCO. Not directly helpful as in bringing evidence to their side. But indirectly helpful by being an easy target for SCO to use to represent the Linux developer community.
Stallman takes the hardest line that proprietary software is evil. Now, granted it's a jump from "Proprietary Software is evil" to what SCO will likely try to get the judge and/or jury to believe. . . namely that Linux developers have stolen code from poor little old SCO and dumped it into the Linux kernel in an attempt to destroy Unix, and from there to further de-stabilize proprietary software vendors by continuing to steal code and ideas (I didn't know you could own ideas, but whatever. ..).
If SCO wants to portray the free/open source - software communities in a bad light, Stallman is prime witness #1. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Stallman will play right into their hands. I expect that RMS will go into this well-prepared, and I think Linux will come out right.
As long as RMS can control his temper and his tongue. . .
Well, perhaps in a courtroom he will present himself a little better. Hopefully Eben Moglan will get him cleaned up, and prepped on what to talk about. Don't get me wrong: I like Richard Stallman. But, I've seen him at some Linux conventions, and some of the hardlines he takes makes him a good target for Red-Baiting.
I dunno, I just remember thinking at the shows I saw him at that, well, he's very good at evangelizing geeks about Free Software. But put him on the stand in a courtroom, or in some other very public setting, and he might do a good job of alienating the general public.
I truely hope that I'm wrong. Really, I do. Let's just say I think RMS might need to work on his people skills, and personal appearance, a little bit before getting on the witness stand.
I quite enjoyed the Silmarillion, personally. It doesn't have the 'epic' kind of feel to it that Lord of the Rings does, but I really enjoyed the stories of the elves. A lot of really original tales, which really connect you with the people (elves included) who populate middle earth. However, I will give this warning: Silmarillion has a lot of really fairly tragic tales. Between the ending of RotK, and the Silmarillion, I got the distinct impression that Tolkien was really drawn to tragedy.
Why do Westwood, Blizzard, Microsoft et al force you to either use IPX for LAN games, or connect through their stupid battle.net, westwood.net, msn zone, et al services? Why, when me and a buddy are on the same LAN do we have to either use IPX or use a third-party server to connect to each other? Thank God MacIntosh doesn't support IPX so Blizzard was forced to make a tcp/ip based lan option.
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Seriously, played this sleeper off and on for a few months (how could I play a boring game for so long? High tolerance for boredom I guess. . .). Actually, I thought it would get more interesting as I got into higher level content, but it really didn't. It has *got* to be one of the most tedious MMORPG's ever (most of them *are* pretty tedious anyhow).
I'm kinda surprised at how tedious most MMORPG's are. In theory the chief design consideration is keeping players paying subscription fees for as many months as possible. Sure, tedious levelling treadmills can keep players around for a few months, with the expectation that once they have a levelled up char it'll get a lot cooler. But, if you actually have fun, engaging content, I bet you could keep players around without stringing them along with stupid artificial goals ("Hey, only 2.5 million more exp till my next level and I get some crappy upgrade that lets me do 5-10% more dmg! It'll be great!").
Anyhow, my biggest beef with SWG was the almost complete lack of content at high levels. I mean, where is the Galactic Civil War that I was promised? More like a Galactic Civil Bore.
Oh the HORROR! Competition! Gotta nip that competition in the bud.
Well we see what this is really about. . . has nothing to do with preventing illegal theft of intellectual property. Just another cynical attempt to use bad laws to try to stifle competition. . . something which I thought is illegal in the US.
I kind of had a mixed response to NWN personally. I felt like there was way waaaayy too much dialogue and cut-scenes in the game. Don't get me wrong, I like story as much as the next guy, but this game just has a *ton* of dialogue and some long cut-scenes. To go with that, there's so many NPC's that I found it was sometimes difficult to decide which ones to talk to and which ones didn't really have anything to say. Which resulted in talking to just about everyone, which *really* slows down the game.
Also, there were a lot of little differences from 3rd Ed rules that bugged me. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a D&D lawyer - I mostly don't notice differences unless they adversely affect me. And there is one I can give as an example, which should illustrate why some of these differences bugged me.
The big problem I had with the rules-set had to do with the interaction of the magic system and the 'attack of opportunity' system. In D&D, and in NWN, when a player does certain actions (notably casting spells), this provokes additional free attacks from all adjacent attackers. So if you are near 3 enemies, and try to cast a spell, *BAM* 6 attacks (3 'normal' attacks, and 3 'attacks of opportunity'). Ok, so the idea goes that you just be carefull about when/where you cast.
In D&D 3rd Ed rules, in order to heal a friendly unit with non-area-effect heals, you have to cast the heal spell, then touch them. Here's where NWN screwed it up: in 3rd Ed, you can cast the heal spell *anywhere*, store the spell in your hands for some number of rounds, and then walk to your target and heal them. This allows healers to heal their group mates *in battle* without provoking attacks of opportunity. The people who developed 3rd Ed rules spent time actually thinking about, and balancing the rules, as to not too adversely affect any one class.
NWN, in contrast, does *NOT* implement cast and touch (at least, not correctly). In NWN, if you try to cast a heal spell on a target, your character walks over next to the target and begins attacking (*BAM* your dead), and then heals the target. Interestingly, if the target begins walking away after you start casting, you will finish the spell, hold the charge in your hands and start chasing after the target until you can touch it, so they sorta implement it. Just not in a way that's particularly beneficial to the healer.
In normal D&D, where you can't constantly rest, one could make the argument that the touch heal spells should just be used between encounters. But in NWN, anyone can rest away damage between encounters, so healing during battle is the only purpose of a cleric (well, and turning undead) in NWN. And the way they implemented touch spells in NWN really screws that up. =(
This kind of thing might seem overly nitpicky, but the point is, the Bioware devs seemed to change some of the rules (or just not implement them correctly) without knowing the consequences it would have on players.
I know, I know, some of the rules they purposely changed, with the idea of making a better CRPG. The ability to rest frequently *does* have the effect of making the game much faster paced (in a traditional Pen-and-Paper session, magic users are out of magic after one or two encounters, so you typically have a low number of encounters per in-game day). Since NWN is mostly a solo-game (in the single-player version anyhow), and you only get one henchman at a time, it's important to let players re-cuperate hp and spells frequently.
And I decided that, all things considered, NWN doesn't make a very good multi-player game. It can, if you have a group of friends that you only game with together, so you all stay at or near the same level. But as far as just hopping on some public NWN server goes, I've had a *lot* of problems. One is getting ganked by higher level players with nothing better to do than grief others. Another is the fact that NWN tries to dynamically adjust the difficulty of monsters and the number of monsters that spawned, based upon
Let's move unstable nuclear waste like 10000+ miles to the complete opposite side of the earth. I'm sure with such a short trip, there won't ever be any accidents. . .
Well, some of the problems you point out are valid. . . this is, in part, another micro-payment system and runs into the same problem that almost every other micro-payment system runs into - namely that the transaction costs could potentially be higher than the payment itself.
You ask, "how about I am totally careless with my email address, can i then send repeated claims for bond money from all these companies that want to sell me something.[sic]" (note: when you ask a question, you should end the sentence with a '?' not a '.') Well, yes, if you read the FAQ this is exactly the point - to force spammers to be wary of who they send spam to. Right now the spammers just send them to *everyone* and hope they get less than a 1% response rate. This bond system would force spammers to pick the best candidates, and to post a high enough bond to persuade the mark, err, I mean consumer to read the message. If they are carefull, they should be able to make more than enough in sales revenue to offset the bonds they have to pay.
But, I think you misunderstand something fundamental about the proposal. According to the FAQ posted above, this isn't exactly a pay-per-email system. You state, "This system sucks and white listing sucks too, unless you never lost contact with old friends or changed your isp or got in touch with a company." Well, unless your friends are jerks or idiots, they won't claim the bond, so you don't lose any money. That is, under this proposal, you are saying I am willing to warrant that this message is not spam, and I"ll warrant it in the amount of X dollars. When your friend receives the email, they see it's from you, think "Oh it's good to hear from him again." and hit the 'not spam' button, and the 'add to address book' button. Viola, you get your 25 cents (or whatever you posted) back. In fact, you don't *have* to post anything at all, but it's likely that if you don't post a bond, your friend will never even see your message. I think part of this system even allows you to query to find out what bond amount your friend set for messages to get past his filter.
"heck thinking about it somebody makes a product gets a lot of customer complaints then claims their repeated emails from dissatisfied customers is spam and claims the bonds."
Personally, if this system ever gets implemented, I simply would not do business with a company that requires me to post a bond to send customer support email. Under this system, mail recipients can choose whether they require a bond or not, and how much the bond amount has to be. That being the case, I would expect that the company's customer support would either whitelist me as a customer (if they want to use a bond to discourage spam from being sent to their cust support address), or just not require a bond.
The thing about this system is that it's all voluntary. You are never *forced* to pay for an email. No one might ever see your email if you don't post a bond, but you are never actually forced to.
Uhh, in the first sentence of the post above, it should read 'I get new frames about every 5-6 years. . .'
I get new frames about every 5-6, and spend maybe $100-150 on them. New lenses maybe every 2-3 years (because eventually they get scratches on them and aren't quite so clear anymore), and the lenses maybe cost like $50 (sometimes cheaper if you can find a good sale). If LASIK costs $2000, well that's a lot of frames and lenses. . . I'm not sure I'd really spend that on glasses in my lifetime. . . Unless you count the fact that when I hit 50-60 years of age, my eyes might start getting worse again. . . but then, even with the LASIK, at that point in your life if that happened, you'd have to spend more money anyhow.
I'm confused. . . if moving your eye could cause complications, why don't they like temporarily paralzye the eye with some sort of anasthetic/muscle relaxer, so that you can't accidentally move it? I mean, you could get any number of involuntary muscle twitches and BAM! there goes your eye. . .
It seems that successfull capitalism always leads to monopolies or at least oligopolies. At which point, in order to restore competition, you need to have an outside power (govermnent, natural disaster, horrible mis-management) come in and either put severe restrictions (read 'regulations') on the company's behavior, or else bust it up.
While busting it/them up doesn't seem very fair, in the long run it seems more effective than trying to regulate a monopoly (for example, we all see how effective the gov'mt has been at regulating MS, haven't we?)
Total troll, and promotes illegal activity.
The day we don't get heated feedback I'll be concerned.
."
"..because that means our products work as they should and I'll be out of a job."
Actually it's more like "because that means people aren't using our products anymore and I'll be out of a job. . . like that'll ever happen. (*snigger*) Oh, is this thing still on?. .
For Microsoft, heated complaints are just the noise that reassures them that people are still using their products. It's like a politician or celebrity getting hate-mail - better to get hate-mail than no mail at all - it's silence that is threatening.
I don't see this as being a major problem as long as you are aware of the issue. Seems like it should be possible to put all the system logs, etc, into ram drives. As far as most of the linux system files that you need to load and run apps, they don't need to be written to - just read. Heck, you could maybe partition your flash drive (do memory sticks allow partitioning?) into a read only file-system partition, and a read-write data area for docs and such.
The only hurdle I see to this is that you don't have any swap partition or file. Which is a bit of a drawback, but it should be perfectly possible to run a small linux distro with no swap.
As a case in point - Knoppix loads and runs off a CD - which generally you aren't going to be writing to at all once you've burned the Knoppix image on it. Actually, Knoppix might be an excellent starting point for the person trying to do this - Knoppix devs have already solved a lot of the problems of loading a Linux system from read-only media with no swap.
I mean, you're absolutely right - storage costs next to nothing per-megabyte, and compression can make it go a lot farther. But consider it like this: almost all the free email services have 'free' and 'premium' offers, and the main thing that differentiates the free from the 'premium' is how much storage you get.
Now, when they give free customers >= 100MBytes of storage, there is less reason to pay for the premium service. So, until GMail came in and broke the cartel's artificial shortage, the email services could count on plenty of people coughing up the cash to get a useable amount of storage.At this point, given the above, why are they increasing their storage quotas? . . . Because if all the free & premium customers decided to move over to GMail (or at least a significant percentage of the user-base), then their current revenues would plummet fast. So, while they get a lot less money per 'free' customer (just the revenue they derive from advertising), by increasing the storage, they mostly take away the prime driver for people to go to GMail.
Predictions: now that GMail is eating away at their ability to sell 'premium' accounts with more storage, I expect that
And Joel says that in his article. And he's *right.* I can't tell you how many places I've worked where there was at least *one* application, that was critical to the core business function of the company, that was a windows program. These people had no choice to migrate away from windows. They *could* put a mac *and* and wintel box on each desk, but they weren't actually going to do that, when the wintel box did everything they wanted in one computer.
Joel's point - and the reason Microsoft killed netscape, is that as more and more applications (especially business database apps - which constitute most of the lock-in special apps I was talking about earlier) more to being web-based, it becomes less and less necessary to run Windows.
Microsofts's strategy with Internet Explorer, in the end, turns out to have been brilliant (maybe more brilliant than they originally intended). . . Make IE *good enough* to work for most 'current generation' websites, push it out for free to everyone in order to marginalize the competition to the point where no further innovation can happen in web-browsers without Microsoft also adding that functionality to IE, then STOP DEVELOPING IE so that NO innovation happens AT ALL.
Then, once people get frustrated with the limitations of html (which could have been alleviated with on-going development of the standards), announce that you are release a new technology that will give 'rich client' interfaces over the network.
But, unfortunately, as MicroSoft has shown, it doesn't eliminate people who make crappy software that *does* sell. So, we see, how good or bad software is, relatively, isn't the most important point in the software world, just that it is *good enough* to do what people want to do, 80 percent of the time, and has overwhelming marketting advantages.
Since it's GPL'ed, and since I don't want to fill out that stupid contact info form, can someone just mirror the file? Thx.
Oh GOD I hope that immortality is never achieved. Seriously, the one great hope of all people who've ever been under the crushing grip of a totalitarian regime has been "These guys can't live forever, and hopefully their successors won't be such brutal bloody egomaniacs."
In a society where practical immortality were achievable, the *worst* of human nature would probably rule far more than the *best* of human nature. Call it the fear of God, or the fear of death, mortality makes all men equal, and makes them at least consider, sometimes, the consequences of their actions. Some men have, through history, apparently surpressed that instinct.
And as a final bit of food for thought: In a society where you can be given immortality, immortality can also be withheld. How many people would have the moral courage to accept their natural death, rather than submit to whatever power controlled the systems and mechanisms of immortality?
The expression goes, 'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.' There's little greater 'absolute power,' in human terms, than the power of life and death.
I'm not exactly sure, but it sounds like this law, the way it's being stated, would prohibit Google from creating the full-text indexes that are *absolutely necessary* to do fast searches. The *point* of GMail is to have email with the power of google. If I'm gonna be doing searches without any indexes, I might as well stick with my Mozilla Mail client getting mail by POP3 - I already have well over 1Gig of free space on my HD to store mail, and Mozilla has some mail searching capabilities built in.
The only reason GMail is appealing is that I can apply the power of Google (which is built on indexing content) to my mail. *sigh*
I suspect that the webpage linked to was designed more by a marketing person than a tech person - I can't believe they would only have a 1xAGP slot. I think they just mean there is only 1 AGP slot. Because, games aside (it's not their target market anyhow - they are targetting the Workstation Market), if it *truly* has a 1x AGP slot, that would kill it for any kind of CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, 3D graphics design (like the people who create all the 3D models for games, movies, etc).
In otherwords, for a lot of the Workstation market, 1x AGP would be a huge problem in a WS design.
I think a lot of us fall into a 'middle-ground.' I'm fearfull of the long term effects that plant melt-downs have. . . but at the same time I realize that there potentially are safe(r) designs. If someone can truly come up with a 'disaster proof' reactor design that doesn't produce highly dangerous waste (it sounds like the design you mentioned is a likely candidate) then I'm willing to at least consider them.
Safe designs for nuclear reactors actually kind of excite me, because we clearly need to get away from fossil fuel energy.
Although, ultimately, I'm most excited about bio-mass energy (if it can ever be made to be practical at a large scale), because while burning bio-mass derivative fuels produces CO2 - at least the next generation of fuel will re-fixate that CO2 as it grows. . . it's a stable system where we are at least not increasing the amount of CO2.
Well, to give you the benefit of the doubt, the /. editors might have screwed up originally and fixed it by the time I looked at the post, but, uhh. . . it says "South Africa's state-run utility giant." And last time I checked, South Africa is in fact a country in the continent of Africa.
Mmmmm, well I generally agree with you. . . though I could *potentially* see Stallman being helpful to SCO. Not directly helpful as in bringing evidence to their side. But indirectly helpful by being an easy target for SCO to use to represent the Linux developer community.
.).
Stallman takes the hardest line that proprietary software is evil. Now, granted it's a jump from "Proprietary Software is evil" to what SCO will likely try to get the judge and/or jury to believe. . . namely that Linux developers have stolen code from poor little old SCO and dumped it into the Linux kernel in an attempt to destroy Unix, and from there to further de-stabilize proprietary software vendors by continuing to steal code and ideas (I didn't know you could own ideas, but whatever. .
If SCO wants to portray the free/open source - software communities in a bad light, Stallman is prime witness #1. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Stallman will play right into their hands. I expect that RMS will go into this well-prepared, and I think Linux will come out right.
As long as RMS can control his temper and his tongue. . .
Well, perhaps in a courtroom he will present himself a little better. Hopefully Eben Moglan will get him cleaned up, and prepped on what to talk about. Don't get me wrong: I like Richard Stallman. But, I've seen him at some Linux conventions, and some of the hardlines he takes makes him a good target for Red-Baiting.
I dunno, I just remember thinking at the shows I saw him at that, well, he's very good at evangelizing geeks about Free Software. But put him on the stand in a courtroom, or in some other very public setting, and he might do a good job of alienating the general public.
I truely hope that I'm wrong. Really, I do. Let's just say I think RMS might need to work on his people skills, and personal appearance, a little bit before getting on the witness stand.
I quite enjoyed the Silmarillion, personally. It doesn't have the 'epic' kind of feel to it that Lord of the Rings does, but I really enjoyed the stories of the elves. A lot of really original tales, which really connect you with the people (elves included) who populate middle earth. However, I will give this warning: Silmarillion has a lot of really fairly tragic tales. Between the ending of RotK, and the Silmarillion, I got the distinct impression that Tolkien was really drawn to tragedy.
Why do Westwood, Blizzard, Microsoft et al force you to either use IPX for LAN games, or connect through their stupid battle.net, westwood.net, msn zone, et al services? Why, when me and a buddy are on the same LAN do we have to either use IPX or use a third-party server to connect to each other? Thank God MacIntosh doesn't support IPX so Blizzard was forced to make a tcp/ip based lan option.