Heh, yeah, I used to think that way. Then suddenly one day it became extremely painful to use a mouse. Seemed to develop overnight almost. Now I'm in my early twenties, and have a mild form of carpal tunnel in my right hand; a mouse like that would be very nice for me.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I got the impression the slow downs in competing products were due to having multiple search implementations indexing the hard drive at once. At least, thats what I've been lead to believe from the previous articles in this thread.
You said you saw it... yes. But again, they're really selling the service that comes with the box. And retail is most certainly not RedHat's bread and butter. I've seen lots of products on shelves from companies that are still in business and doing well. For instance, just the other day I saw a Zune sitting in Best Buy. That doesn't mean Microsoft is making any money off of it. And part of the reason I'm wondering about retail space is that while I used to be able to go into Best Buy and pick up a copy of RedHat, those boxes have slowly been disappearing off the shelves. Nowadays, I really can't find any linux distribution at a major software retailer. I'm guessing that's partly because online sales is cannibalizing some of it, but I'm also guessing a lot of that is because it wasn't doing well for whatever reason. Regardless, its still dancing around my question about software that is sold with no support attached in brick and mortar stores. I'm really just asking for what people think the solution is for things like video games, office software, etc. that are normally sold with no service. Is there a feeling that such software will continue to be licensed closed source, because it would be difficult to be profitable? Or that they'll switch to GPL, and have some way to make money (and if so, what do you think that would be)? As I've said before, I'm genuinely interested in what people think about it, not trying to troll or anything.
You know, there really was no need to send off a snarky sarcastic reply. I wasn't attacking GPL at all, I was genuinely curious. And yes, I'm fully aware that the service model works fine for a lot of companies, Red Hat included. My question was more specifically targeted at the traditional retail space, where generally copies of the software are sold, and not service. For instance, I'm curious what strategy would be used to sell video games, because it seems likely that people would very rapidly start re-distributing the software for free, which would make it difficult to make back your initial investment (although I imagine you'd get some really spectacular derivative works, but I digress). Anyway, I've already gotten a couple of informative replies from others, and if you have any ideas on how you think companies would be profitable in that manner, I'd love to hear them.
Thank you, to both you and the other two that posted replies so far. The service model I knew was possible, but I was thinking mostly of the traditional method where money comes from just selling copies of software. You guys raised some other good ideas as well. I think after reading this, my conclusion is that it might not work for every situation, but it would likely work in more situations than I had previously thought possible.
Again, thanks.
Well yes, that is true; there is a difference. I guess my point was that even with WoW you can get acceptable performance out of it; graphically it is simple enough that you can easily play it without too many problems. I never really suffered slowdowns even at native resolution, and I didn't have all the settings turned down either (although if I remember correctly some of the graphical settings weren't even available on the intel chipset). Yes, there was a definite difference comparing them side by side, but when playing on the laptop I didn't really notice anything that stood out unless I really paid attention.
Perhaps you can help explain this to me... I've never understood how one could easily sell GPL'd software. As far as I can tell, from my limited knowledge of GPL, anyone you distribute your software to has the right to modify and distribute the source code as well. With that being true, whats to stop the first person who buys the software from taking the source and beginning distribution of it for free, or trying to compete with the original seller? I love open source software, and have contributed to GPL projects before, but just have trouble understanding how it would be profitable. This is something that I've always found confusing, so any clarification would be more than welcome.
Actually, even running WoW you might not notice. I play WoW on both my Macbook, and on my home gaming PC. The Macbook of course has the intel graphics, and the gaming PC has a Geforce 8800GTS. I really don't notice much difference between the two graphically though. I have to turn down some of the settings, sure, but it doesn't really affect the gameplay, even in Ironforge. WoW isn't a particularly demanding game graphically:-).
Yeah, thats a big problem for me too. I mostly play my MMORPGs on my Macbook, and I loved that WoW came with an OSX client. However, I'm a bit sick of WoW, so I'd really like to try this. Unfortunately, it looks like its either take a pass, or use Boot Camp (or maybe the new Parallels).
Well, I've seen a single Wii out in the wild, and its owner waited in line for 8 hours to get his (2 months after release no less). I have to say though, that I'm in the crowd of people who's probably going to end up with a 360 for now due to the shortage. I was really pumped about the Wii at launch, waited in line at launch to get one (2 people back, darnit), even bought a couple of Wii controllers because I saw them in the store and they were as rare as Wii's in the beginning. But... I still haven't seen one on a shelf, and its been months. I figured that by March I could walk into a store and grab a box off of a huge pile, but they're still nowhere to be found. Then I started noticing that there aren't a whole lot of great single player games for it. I still badly want Zelda, Paper Mario, and a couple of other titles, but the big draw for me has always been the party game aspect of the Wii. And that position has been filled admirably by Guitar Hero. So I find myself looking to the Xbox360 to fill my single player gaming fix, because I can get one now and there are loads of games I'd like to try for it. I'll still pick up a Wii eventually, but man if Nintendo had fixed the supply problem I'd own one already. Oh well, in the meantime at least I've found a home for my Wii accessories, as my parents plan on picking up a Wii (if they can find one) later this summer for my little sister who's still in high school.
I have to agree. I buy a fair amount of CDs, because I like having a high quality, physical backup of my media, and if I like one song, I generally like most of the songs in an album. However, I haven't bought an album that was made more recently than 15 years ago in a long time. Theres a lot of good music out there that I still want, because I'm young enough to have missed when it originally came out. However, once I've filled my backlog, I don't see much new music that I have any desire to own. I'm sure there'll be a few good bands every once in a while, but unless I start seeing new compelling content, my CD purchases are rapidly going to dwindle in the near future.
I might argue that it did work for the Xbox. True, they've lost a boat-load of money. But they've also, in less than one generation, managed to become a major player in the video game market. Microsoft has enough money lying around that tossing a billion dollars into a market as a sunk cost to establish themselves is probably a good investment. If they can maintain their market share, they might have a chance of making a fair amount of money ultimately, especially now that they've apparently gotten to the point where they're not selling the 360 for a loss anymore.
I can attest to that. I drove an old early nineties Pontiac Grand Prix all through high school and college. By the time I graduated and purchased a new car, it had nearly 250,000 miles on it. And this is a cheap, relatively low end car not particularly known for its reliability. Now, a couple of years later, that car is still going strong as my little sister's high school vehicle.
Two things: 1.) The US does have a fairly high level of technical knowledge. Perhaps the average person off the street couldn't write malware, but there are tons of self-taught and university educated people in the US that could. The knowledge required is widely available and not too difficult to procure.
2.) Just because someone would like to know more about something but doesn't take the time to learn about it hardly means they're lazy or stupid. It simply means their priorities are different. I'd love to know more about astronomy, photography, economics, history, and a dozen different computer fields ranging from IT and networking to graphics engine design. I don't have time to become an expert in everything I find interesting, however, so I pick the things that have the highest priority to me and put the others off for another day. Your backhand condemnation of your dental hygienist because she doesn't have the time to learn more about computers is rather narrow minded.
Actually, I think he might be right. Firefox has its own toolkit (XUL I think), OpenOffice has its own toolkit, Gimp uses GTK, and KIllustrator uses QT. And I'm pretty sure that KIllustrator at least depends on KDE libraries to run.
I'm not quite certain why what he's asking for wouldn't make good business sense though. As far as I understood, what he's asking for is a more modular mac in the iMac price range. He's not asking to run OSX on generic hardware or anything, which has been pointed out before as not likely a good business move. I love my Macbook, and I also would love to have a nice mac desktop that I could use, but unfortunately the Mac Pro's are really pricey, the Mac Mini's not powerful enough, and while the iMac is right in the proper performance/price range for me, I dislike having everything bundled into one package. Especially since it means that if I decide to upgrade, that nice, shiny, and pricey big monitor has to be replaced likewise.
I can't speak for all schools, but at my school, we used the metric system an awful lot (I live in America). Most of the general science/math courses used the metric, and all of the science/math classes in high school did (Physics, Chemistry, Calculus, Biology) because the metric system is just so much easier to work with. University was the same, with all the science/engineering classes using metric almost exclusively (with the occasional problem using feet, lb., etc. just to mix things up every once in a while... and boy did we complain about those). I like the metric system, its really easy to use, calculations are simple, etc. The problem is that outside of school, I never used the metric system, and hence am not really comfortable using the system in every day life. I don't think in metric terms, and have to convert metric terms when I hear them to the English system before I can get a good feel for it. To be honest, I'm not sure what the ultimate benefit would be, because most (at least everything I've worked on) science/engineering projects already use metric. But anyway, I think my point is that most schools already use metric in science/math. And its still confusing to people, so theres still going to be a lot of resistance.
~sigh~ I suppose I started the name calling, so I can hardly complain when you continue it:-).
First of all, world war 2. Yes, they got supplies from the US, and depended on them. They're an island nation, and hence don't have a whole lot of resources. That's a large part of why they founded the colonies. Even so, they did a fair amount before the US got involved. They did a pretty decent job down in North Africa. They outfought the Germans in the Battle of Britain. They still had a large naval presence which did a lot in the Mediterranean (unfortunately for them, they were late to the navy-air game, and hence took heavy losses against the Japanese). Later, they also provided large portions of the troops for Operation Torch, the allied invasion of Sicily, the invasion of Italy, and finally, the Normandy invasion. As for the bronze vs. iron, I was mostly referring to the Assyrians. They developed iron working very early on, and used it to build their empire. I think part of the problem is that you seem to be largely referring to the late british empire, where they concentrated heavily on asia/africa, whereas I was mostly referring to the earlier british empire, built around the americas and the colonies there. Your assertion that the British only fought those that had lower tech, whereas most other empires took on people with similar tech is where my main argument lies. Yes, they had superior technology to the people they conquered in the later years of the empire, often overwhelmingly so. That was not always the case. They did fight many of the other european nations, and especially in the water, were pretty successful. They won the Seven Years War (or as we would call it, the French and Indian war) and kicked the French out of the Americas.
Finally, I'm still uncertain why you seem to think the Gauls and Romans were at technological parity. Yes, the Romans had superior organization and tactics. But I seem to remember that they also had quite good siege technology, and superior armor to the Gauls. They certainly had better infrastructure, and the technology that allowed that was part of why they were so powerful. As to your comment about the gatling gun, yes, its obvious that gatling guns are superior to spears (I assume here that you're talking about the Anglo-Zulu war). I never disagreed. What I do disagree with, was that it was always that way. The British Empire has taken on more than just the Zulus.
I think what I was trying to point out is that if you're new to the system, and aren't experienced with it; if you don't know something exists, why would you go looking for it? I suppose I'd consider myself a power user; I've built and used my own dos/windows PC's since I was a kid, discovered linux freshman year of college and used more linux distro's on more servers for home projects than I can count, and in the last year or so, finally picked up a mac to try that out. I also have a fair understanding of how computers work, as a kernel level programmer. But I never thought to even check out the keyboard support thing. I'm a keyboard-centric user, and I noticed that the keyboard didn't always work how I wanted it to. But OS X userland is different enough from other OS's that I'd used, that I just thought perhaps this was by design. And since it wasn't a big deal to me, I didn't dig farther.
As I noted before, performance in World War II is hardly an indication of past performance. The British Empire was in existence long before WWII, and by the time WWII came about, the empire was effectively crumbling. The empire had its beginnings in the 15th and 16th centuries, nearly 5 centuries before World War II began. Also, to say that the evacuation was their biggest success is ignorant; they (and the commonwealth) were significant participants in all theaters. Also, the British did in fact at several points conquer significant portions of France. Read up on the Hundred Years War if you wish some background. You don't seem to realize that recent performance has no bearing on past performance. Finally, if you believe that it was just superior methodologies and tactics that paved the way for previous empires, because they were still "two men with swords", you are sorely mistaken. There is a world of difference between a bronze sword and an iron sword. And there is an incredible difference between a naked barbarian with a club or axe, and a fully armored soldier with tower shield, iron sword, and a vast array of siege technology behind him.
Well, it is true, anecdotal evidence does not indicate a trend. I'm just passing on my observation. I don't really appreciate my honesty being called into question, but this is the internet, so I can't really expect more. You also might note that I didn't draw conclusions as to why the consoles were in stock. For all I know, Sony has seriously ramped up their production and are deluging the stores with PS3's. Or it could be that the people in my area just aren't as interested in consoles as everyone else. There do seem to be plenty of other similar anecdotes on the internet, however, including one by Penny Arcade, so its hardly an isolated observation. But then again, I don't really know the accuracy of these reports.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by selling out. If any of the stores in my city are indication, there are loads of them lying around. Heck, yesterday afternoon, I walked into one of the local Best Buys, where they had a prominent sign declaring that they had PS3's, and informing people where the line was to form at opening. But even 6 hours after opening time, they had a massive pyramid of PS3s still sitting in the entrance waiting for buyers. The manager told me that hardly anyone had showed up to purchase one. Nearly every retailer I've been to since christmas has had PS3's on the shelves. I'm not sure if thats due to lackluster demand, or oversupply, but regardless, they don't seem to be selling out.
Heh, you have a pretty distorted view of history. There are so many things wrong with your post I don't know where to start. First off, your mention of the Japanese and Germans beating up on Britain. I can only assume you're referring to World War 2, and it might be noted that the British Empire was no longer in existence at that point. To say that the British got the "arses roundly handed to them" when they faced an equivalent enemy is foolish. Read up on the events prior to world war 2, and you might realize this. Trafalgar might be a good starting point. They went toe to toe with the French and Spanish for an awful long time. (And the French were no pushovers either... They were THE land power for a long time). You also might want to do some checking up on the statement about the British being the only nation with high tech of Europe and a fleet to go with. Reference the Spanish, or the French, or any of the other various nations that colonized the Americas. Your statement that previous empires went after countries with equivalent tech levels is also foolish; many of the empires came about precisely because the country had superior technology. If not that, they often had superior population or resources. If you think it was a fair fight with the Romans vs. the Gauls, you don't know much at all. In short, you're an idiot. I would suggest you inform yourself a little bit before going off next time. A good place to start is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_empire or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_empire.
I think what the gp might have been referring to is that even if you in general know what you're doing, if you don't know an option exists, you aren't going to look for how to enable said option. I've been using OSX for a couple of years, but I never knew that it was possible to enable this extra keyboard support until today. I'd just noticed that, huh, I can't use the keyboard to do some things, weird. I never thought to look for a way to enable keyboard support, because I didn't know it was even possible.
The thing you need to realize about HDCP "carrying" over the DVI converter, is that DVI and HDMI are compatible with each other. There is no real "conversion". All a HDMI to DVI cable does is switch the wires around into a different pin-out.
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Heh, yeah, I used to think that way. Then suddenly one day it became extremely painful to use a mouse. Seemed to develop overnight almost. Now I'm in my early twenties, and have a mild form of carpal tunnel in my right hand; a mouse like that would be very nice for me.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I got the impression the slow downs in competing products were due to having multiple search implementations indexing the hard drive at once. At least, thats what I've been lead to believe from the previous articles in this thread.
You said you saw it... yes. But again, they're really selling the service that comes with the box. And retail is most certainly not RedHat's bread and butter. I've seen lots of products on shelves from companies that are still in business and doing well. For instance, just the other day I saw a Zune sitting in Best Buy. That doesn't mean Microsoft is making any money off of it. And part of the reason I'm wondering about retail space is that while I used to be able to go into Best Buy and pick up a copy of RedHat, those boxes have slowly been disappearing off the shelves. Nowadays, I really can't find any linux distribution at a major software retailer. I'm guessing that's partly because online sales is cannibalizing some of it, but I'm also guessing a lot of that is because it wasn't doing well for whatever reason. Regardless, its still dancing around my question about software that is sold with no support attached in brick and mortar stores. I'm really just asking for what people think the solution is for things like video games, office software, etc. that are normally sold with no service. Is there a feeling that such software will continue to be licensed closed source, because it would be difficult to be profitable? Or that they'll switch to GPL, and have some way to make money (and if so, what do you think that would be)? As I've said before, I'm genuinely interested in what people think about it, not trying to troll or anything.
You know, there really was no need to send off a snarky sarcastic reply. I wasn't attacking GPL at all, I was genuinely curious. And yes, I'm fully aware that the service model works fine for a lot of companies, Red Hat included. My question was more specifically targeted at the traditional retail space, where generally copies of the software are sold, and not service. For instance, I'm curious what strategy would be used to sell video games, because it seems likely that people would very rapidly start re-distributing the software for free, which would make it difficult to make back your initial investment (although I imagine you'd get some really spectacular derivative works, but I digress). Anyway, I've already gotten a couple of informative replies from others, and if you have any ideas on how you think companies would be profitable in that manner, I'd love to hear them.
Thank you, to both you and the other two that posted replies so far. The service model I knew was possible, but I was thinking mostly of the traditional method where money comes from just selling copies of software. You guys raised some other good ideas as well. I think after reading this, my conclusion is that it might not work for every situation, but it would likely work in more situations than I had previously thought possible.
Again, thanks.
Well yes, that is true; there is a difference. I guess my point was that even with WoW you can get acceptable performance out of it; graphically it is simple enough that you can easily play it without too many problems. I never really suffered slowdowns even at native resolution, and I didn't have all the settings turned down either (although if I remember correctly some of the graphical settings weren't even available on the intel chipset). Yes, there was a definite difference comparing them side by side, but when playing on the laptop I didn't really notice anything that stood out unless I really paid attention.
Perhaps you can help explain this to me... I've never understood how one could easily sell GPL'd software. As far as I can tell, from my limited knowledge of GPL, anyone you distribute your software to has the right to modify and distribute the source code as well. With that being true, whats to stop the first person who buys the software from taking the source and beginning distribution of it for free, or trying to compete with the original seller?
I love open source software, and have contributed to GPL projects before, but just have trouble understanding how it would be profitable.
This is something that I've always found confusing, so any clarification would be more than welcome.
Actually, even running WoW you might not notice. I play WoW on both my Macbook, and on my home gaming PC. The Macbook of course has the intel graphics, and the gaming PC has a Geforce 8800GTS. I really don't notice much difference between the two graphically though. I have to turn down some of the settings, sure, but it doesn't really affect the gameplay, even in Ironforge. WoW isn't a particularly demanding game graphically :-).
Yeah, thats a big problem for me too. I mostly play my MMORPGs on my Macbook, and I loved that WoW came with an OSX client. However, I'm a bit sick of WoW, so I'd really like to try this. Unfortunately, it looks like its either take a pass, or use Boot Camp (or maybe the new Parallels).
Well, I've seen a single Wii out in the wild, and its owner waited in line for 8 hours to get his (2 months after release no less). I have to say though, that I'm in the crowd of people who's probably going to end up with a 360 for now due to the shortage. I was really pumped about the Wii at launch, waited in line at launch to get one (2 people back, darnit), even bought a couple of Wii controllers because I saw them in the store and they were as rare as Wii's in the beginning. But... I still haven't seen one on a shelf, and its been months. I figured that by March I could walk into a store and grab a box off of a huge pile, but they're still nowhere to be found. Then I started noticing that there aren't a whole lot of great single player games for it. I still badly want Zelda, Paper Mario, and a couple of other titles, but the big draw for me has always been the party game aspect of the Wii. And that position has been filled admirably by Guitar Hero. So I find myself looking to the Xbox360 to fill my single player gaming fix, because I can get one now and there are loads of games I'd like to try for it. I'll still pick up a Wii eventually, but man if Nintendo had fixed the supply problem I'd own one already. Oh well, in the meantime at least I've found a home for my Wii accessories, as my parents plan on picking up a Wii (if they can find one) later this summer for my little sister who's still in high school.
I have to agree. I buy a fair amount of CDs, because I like having a high quality, physical backup of my media, and if I like one song, I generally like most of the songs in an album. However, I haven't bought an album that was made more recently than 15 years ago in a long time. Theres a lot of good music out there that I still want, because I'm young enough to have missed when it originally came out. However, once I've filled my backlog, I don't see much new music that I have any desire to own. I'm sure there'll be a few good bands every once in a while, but unless I start seeing new compelling content, my CD purchases are rapidly going to dwindle in the near future.
I might argue that it did work for the Xbox. True, they've lost a boat-load of money. But they've also, in less than one generation, managed to become a major player in the video game market. Microsoft has enough money lying around that tossing a billion dollars into a market as a sunk cost to establish themselves is probably a good investment. If they can maintain their market share, they might have a chance of making a fair amount of money ultimately, especially now that they've apparently gotten to the point where they're not selling the 360 for a loss anymore.
I can attest to that. I drove an old early nineties Pontiac Grand Prix all through high school and college. By the time I graduated and purchased a new car, it had nearly 250,000 miles on it. And this is a cheap, relatively low end car not particularly known for its reliability. Now, a couple of years later, that car is still going strong as my little sister's high school vehicle.
Two things:
1.) The US does have a fairly high level of technical knowledge. Perhaps the average person off the street couldn't write malware, but there are tons of self-taught and university educated people in the US that could. The knowledge required is widely available and not too difficult to procure.
2.) Just because someone would like to know more about something but doesn't take the time to learn about it hardly means they're lazy or stupid. It simply means their priorities are different. I'd love to know more about astronomy, photography, economics, history, and a dozen different computer fields ranging from IT and networking to graphics engine design. I don't have time to become an expert in everything I find interesting, however, so I pick the things that have the highest priority to me and put the others off for another day. Your backhand condemnation of your dental hygienist because she doesn't have the time to learn more about computers is rather narrow minded.
Actually, I think he might be right. Firefox has its own toolkit (XUL I think), OpenOffice has its own toolkit, Gimp uses GTK, and KIllustrator uses QT. And I'm pretty sure that KIllustrator at least depends on KDE libraries to run.
I'm not quite certain why what he's asking for wouldn't make good business sense though. As far as I understood, what he's asking for is a more modular mac in the iMac price range. He's not asking to run OSX on generic hardware or anything, which has been pointed out before as not likely a good business move. I love my Macbook, and I also would love to have a nice mac desktop that I could use, but unfortunately the Mac Pro's are really pricey, the Mac Mini's not powerful enough, and while the iMac is right in the proper performance/price range for me, I dislike having everything bundled into one package. Especially since it means that if I decide to upgrade, that nice, shiny, and pricey big monitor has to be replaced likewise.
I can't speak for all schools, but at my school, we used the metric system an awful lot (I live in America). Most of the general science/math courses used the metric, and all of the science/math classes in high school did (Physics, Chemistry, Calculus, Biology) because the metric system is just so much easier to work with. University was the same, with all the science/engineering classes using metric almost exclusively (with the occasional problem using feet, lb., etc. just to mix things up every once in a while... and boy did we complain about those). I like the metric system, its really easy to use, calculations are simple, etc. The problem is that outside of school, I never used the metric system, and hence am not really comfortable using the system in every day life. I don't think in metric terms, and have to convert metric terms when I hear them to the English system before I can get a good feel for it. To be honest, I'm not sure what the ultimate benefit would be, because most (at least everything I've worked on) science/engineering projects already use metric. But anyway, I think my point is that most schools already use metric in science/math. And its still confusing to people, so theres still going to be a lot of resistance.
~sigh~ I suppose I started the name calling, so I can hardly complain when you continue it :-).
First of all, world war 2. Yes, they got supplies from the US, and depended on them. They're an island nation, and hence don't have a whole lot of resources. That's a large part of why they founded the colonies. Even so, they did a fair amount before the US got involved. They did a pretty decent job down in North Africa. They outfought the Germans in the Battle of Britain. They still had a large naval presence which did a lot in the Mediterranean (unfortunately for them, they were late to the navy-air game, and hence took heavy losses against the Japanese). Later, they also provided large portions of the troops for Operation Torch, the allied invasion of Sicily, the invasion of Italy, and finally, the Normandy invasion. As for the bronze vs. iron, I was mostly referring to the Assyrians. They developed iron working very early on, and used it to build their empire. I think part of the problem is that you seem to be largely referring to the late british empire, where they concentrated heavily on asia/africa, whereas I was mostly referring to the earlier british empire, built around the americas and the colonies there. Your assertion that the British only fought those that had lower tech, whereas most other empires took on people with similar tech is where my main argument lies. Yes, they had superior technology to the people they conquered in the later years of the empire, often overwhelmingly so. That was not always the case. They did fight many of the other european nations, and especially in the water, were pretty successful. They won the Seven Years War (or as we would call it, the French and Indian war) and kicked the French out of the Americas.
Finally, I'm still uncertain why you seem to think the Gauls and Romans were at technological parity. Yes, the Romans had superior organization and tactics. But I seem to remember that they also had quite good siege technology, and superior armor to the Gauls. They certainly had better infrastructure, and the technology that allowed that was part of why they were so powerful. As to your comment about the gatling gun, yes, its obvious that gatling guns are superior to spears (I assume here that you're talking about the Anglo-Zulu war). I never disagreed. What I do disagree with, was that it was always that way. The British Empire has taken on more than just the Zulus.
I think what I was trying to point out is that if you're new to the system, and aren't experienced with it; if you don't know something exists, why would you go looking for it? I suppose I'd consider myself a power user; I've built and used my own dos/windows PC's since I was a kid, discovered linux freshman year of college and used more linux distro's on more servers for home projects than I can count, and in the last year or so, finally picked up a mac to try that out. I also have a fair understanding of how computers work, as a kernel level programmer. But I never thought to even check out the keyboard support thing. I'm a keyboard-centric user, and I noticed that the keyboard didn't always work how I wanted it to. But OS X userland is different enough from other OS's that I'd used, that I just thought perhaps this was by design. And since it wasn't a big deal to me, I didn't dig farther.
As I noted before, performance in World War II is hardly an indication of past performance. The British Empire was in existence long before WWII, and by the time WWII came about, the empire was effectively crumbling. The empire had its beginnings in the 15th and 16th centuries, nearly 5 centuries before World War II began. Also, to say that the evacuation was their biggest success is ignorant; they (and the commonwealth) were significant participants in all theaters. Also, the British did in fact at several points conquer significant portions of France. Read up on the Hundred Years War if you wish some background. You don't seem to realize that recent performance has no bearing on past performance. Finally, if you believe that it was just superior methodologies and tactics that paved the way for previous empires, because they were still "two men with swords", you are sorely mistaken. There is a world of difference between a bronze sword and an iron sword. And there is an incredible difference between a naked barbarian with a club or axe, and a fully armored soldier with tower shield, iron sword, and a vast array of siege technology behind him.
Well, it is true, anecdotal evidence does not indicate a trend. I'm just passing on my observation. I don't really appreciate my honesty being called into question, but this is the internet, so I can't really expect more. You also might note that I didn't draw conclusions as to why the consoles were in stock. For all I know, Sony has seriously ramped up their production and are deluging the stores with PS3's. Or it could be that the people in my area just aren't as interested in consoles as everyone else. There do seem to be plenty of other similar anecdotes on the internet, however, including one by Penny Arcade, so its hardly an isolated observation. But then again, I don't really know the accuracy of these reports.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by selling out. If any of the stores in my city are indication, there are loads of them lying around. Heck, yesterday afternoon, I walked into one of the local Best Buys, where they had a prominent sign declaring that they had PS3's, and informing people where the line was to form at opening. But even 6 hours after opening time, they had a massive pyramid of PS3s still sitting in the entrance waiting for buyers. The manager told me that hardly anyone had showed up to purchase one. Nearly every retailer I've been to since christmas has had PS3's on the shelves. I'm not sure if thats due to lackluster demand, or oversupply, but regardless, they don't seem to be selling out.
Heh, you have a pretty distorted view of history. There are so many things wrong with your post I don't know where to start. First off, your mention of the Japanese and Germans beating up on Britain. I can only assume you're referring to World War 2, and it might be noted that the British Empire was no longer in existence at that point. To say that the British got the "arses roundly handed to them" when they faced an equivalent enemy is foolish. Read up on the events prior to world war 2, and you might realize this. Trafalgar might be a good starting point. They went toe to toe with the French and Spanish for an awful long time. (And the French were no pushovers either... They were THE land power for a long time). You also might want to do some checking up on the statement about the British being the only nation with high tech of Europe and a fleet to go with. Reference the Spanish, or the French, or any of the other various nations that colonized the Americas. Your statement that previous empires went after countries with equivalent tech levels is also foolish; many of the empires came about precisely because the country had superior technology. If not that, they often had superior population or resources. If you think it was a fair fight with the Romans vs. the Gauls, you don't know much at all. In short, you're an idiot. I would suggest you inform yourself a little bit before going off next time. A good place to start is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_empire or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_empire.
I think what the gp might have been referring to is that even if you in general know what you're doing, if you don't know an option exists, you aren't going to look for how to enable said option. I've been using OSX for a couple of years, but I never knew that it was possible to enable this extra keyboard support until today. I'd just noticed that, huh, I can't use the keyboard to do some things, weird. I never thought to look for a way to enable keyboard support, because I didn't know it was even possible.
The thing you need to realize about HDCP "carrying" over the DVI converter, is that DVI and HDMI are compatible with each other. There is no real "conversion". All a HDMI to DVI cable does is switch the wires around into a different pin-out.