Well, I'll play Car Wars, but I won't like it. It's definately his best work design-wise, but I still really enjoy playing the game. It just feels more like a waste of time rather than a pastime.
I'll admit that makes me a little odd. It just seems, well, repetitive and dull.
I dunno, I find GURPS to be top-heavy and cumbersome compared to D20. I'm not sure if it's just bad GURPS GMs or if it's that I don't like Steve Jackson. I never really seem to have any fun playing a Steve Jackson game.
What is the point of this study? Its not like it is going to convince the millions of people who don't like mixing science with their religion that they shouldn't waste time praying for their loved ones. Those people can trust science to make more fuel efficient SUVs, better bombs for Iraq and cure diseases. But when it proves that the earth is round, that the universe is 13-15 billion years old and that prayer doesn't really do anything, they think its hogwash.
If by "prove" you mean "strongly suggests", then sure. Remember, science at it's core is all about being skeptical, even about itself. Never trust anything you didn't see for yourself. Aristotle said that.
If you choose to believe whatever people tell you just because they happen to have a title or happened to publish a book, why do you complain about those who choose "priest" or "rabbi" when you select "doctor" or "PhD" as your title. Seems kinda arbitrary to me. Either way, you're following someone else's thinking blindly. Just because the other guy happens to be smart doesn't mean he's not an idiot, and it certainly doesn't mean he could be wrong.
So, yeah, I'm a lot more worried about people who don't question those who say that the universe is Y billion years old, or that quantum theories are exactly true just because the math seems to work. If it's non-intuitive, you should question it even if you understand it.
And the people who scientifically minded already think that this fact is just plain obvious.
And I'm sure they're just as ferverent in their belief that they are correct as the people who said you can't break the sound barrier, that you can't run a CPU over 50 MHz, that objects of different weight fall at different speeds, that man cannot fly, that bad air causes disease, and that laudanum is a good drug to treat many ailments.
The history of science is littered with incorrect, broken, and useless theories. Don't assume that just because we only study the good ones now that every new one is of equal quality and veracity. Religion hasn't got a monopoly on vocal idiots.
Claiming that what science says is true now is somehow immune to being wrong is ludicrous. Science embraces it's fallibility. It's one of it's greatest strengths, and one of the things that differentiates it from religion (which instead claims infallibility).
So while a study like this may be a amuzing anecdote, in the end its completely pointless.
So because your assumption was correct you assume the study has no merit? Perhaps we should just have your publish all your assumptions, then, and save the world some time. We could title it The Suso Bible or something like that.
I don't really consider it relevant whether the program or design arrived by it's own means or by some nebulous creator. Evolution -- and any scientific area really -- is generally designed to describe the mechanism without regard to the origins of it. Religion is more concerned about who or what made the mechanism the way it is.
If science were to look at a wood screw, it would explain the dimentions and construction of it, and attempt to make guesses about the use of the device. Religion would be more concerned about knowing the use of the screw, and who or what made the screw and what it was made to do. Mixing science with religion, then, is rather like mixing mechanical engineering with interior design. Or feng shui even. Using one to describe limitations of the other serves only to make you look like an idiot, since neither was ever meant to do what the other one is actually good for.
Not that I expect anybody on SlashDot to have any respect for religion in any form, particularly western religions. Whether that's because they've been exposed to too many close-minded religious types or because they're close-minded themselves doesn't really matter, even, since the effect is still the same. They sacrifice any attempt at rational discourse, and consequently lose the ability to learn anything from people they erroneously consider a thought-enemy.
I'm inclined to agree. The brain is designed to find patterns and to make sense of black boxes. We're programmed to assume that a response to stimulation is the result of a process, and we can develop understandings of that process through exposure and experimentation. That applies on both a conscious and a basic neurological level. We are designed to develop comprehension.
So they'd already made their three easy payments of $39.99, and decided that it would be bad form to not pay the $6.95 in shipping and handling just because they didn't check their bank balance first.
Yep. Or I could just buy something that works out of the box so I don't have to pay development costs and spend time developing it to do what I want. Or worry that support is nonexistant right now because the FOSS community for the software I want is to small to be of use. Particularly if I don't care that the EULA prohibits me from modifying it. If it's something like a RDBMS, then it's very unlikely that I'll pick something that's FOSS if it lacks needed features instead of a proprietary solution that is feature complete for my needs.
FOSS is great, and I do think the advantages are genuine. But there's a lot to be said for something that just works, particularly if I'm more concerned about getting it up and running for the next 3-5 years vs having a system that I can maintain forever and ever. It's entirely possible that a non-FOSS product is a better solution for a given project no matter how Slashdotters like to stick their heads in the sand and whine that any FOSS solution -- even if it takes $600,000 and 10 man years in development costs to get it where you need it to be -- is still somehow a better choice than a product that might cost $20,000 and be available now. I'm sorry, but that's being as blind as an SCO marketing rep.
Yeah, that's just the thing. You can't mess with Linux based on your patents, because friends of Linux -- Novell, IBM, et al. will just crush you. You think MS has a lot of patents? IBM has received over 2,000 patents annually for over ten years (making it the #1 recipient annually for just as long)!
That's why SCO had to do it with copyright. Violating copyright is like getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar. As soon as you say the word "patent", though, everybody who has something to lose is suddenly armed against you.
The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but that's the way to bet.
I don't so much believe that popular = good, but I have faith in the consumer to ultimately choose what is best for them. Assuming the average consumer is an idiot who never can pick what is right rings of cynicism and arrogance. I'd rather not look at things that way.
As long as the market is freely open to new choices that might be better, a state of monopoly is not harmful to the market as a whole. Once consumers begin demanding something that Brand X doesn't have, either Brand X changes or something better will come along from someone else. On an instantaneous or short term examination, it looks really bad because consumers want a product that doesn't exist. However, that's nothing new. That always happens, even in markets with healthy competition. Over the long term, consumer and customer dissatisfaction will always drive innovation as long as there are no anti-competitive factors -- like those MS is prone to or anti-cometitive legislation like copyright and patents, and so on.
I still think you're not seeing the difference between a de facto monopoly and a trust. The difference between consumers all choosing the same product because it's the best -- even though the companies have not restricted others from entering the market -- and one which works to prevent innovation.
Here's a good one. Consider the early video game console market. Atari's 2600 was a de facto monopoly. Nintendo's NES was a de facto monopoly. Doesn't mean the market is unhealthy. It just means that they have the best product so everyone gets it. Like x86 based PCs. That's a de facto monopoly. Now that Apple is switching themselves, the number of non-x86 PCs out there is next to nil. Is the market unhealthy? No. There are other choices (Power, Sparc). They just suck for various reasons.
I made no generalization at all! I made up a hypothetic situation that you continue to argue with me that it is not true. I know it's not true. It's hypothetical!
OpenSourced said that a monopoly in the OS market is bad for the consumer. I say not so, if the OS that has the lion's share is truly the best OS ever. In that case, the monopoly is simply the natural result of the fair market, not the result of anti-competitive forces.
Here's another analogy, since you seem to get stuck on the idea that MS might be involved: Let's say that Ford makes a car that is twice as safe, twice as fuel efficient, ans half the cost of any other car on the market. In three years time, nearly every car on the road is a Ford. Is this a monopoly? Yes. Is it bad for the consumer? No, Ford make a genuinely better product.
Now, what you have been doing is akin to telling me that there's no way Ford could ever make such a car. Do you see how irrelevant that is?
So... you're denying the premise? Then why are you arguing? It's like saying the Pythagorean Formula is wrong because you refuse to use Euclidean geometry. You're basically saying "you're wrong because I'm irrelevant to the argument". You have no point.
IMX, the cost of developing new required features for a FOSS product -- and I've only seen it done once -- far exceeds the cost of lisencing a proprietary soltuion. Now, if the proprietary solution is suddenly cheaper *and* already does everything you want... why are you picking FOSS?
I'm not saying that politics shouldn't be a factor. It just shouln't be the factor.
You don't use vi as a word processor, do you? Why not? It's open source and you could use it to write letters and such. So is vi a better word processor than MS Word? Absolutely not. WordPad is a better word processor than vi, primarily because vi is designed as a text editor.
The number one determinations of what software to use should always be the one that does your job the best. If that's MS -- perhaps for compatibility with other MS products or for vendor/customer requirements or whatever -- then you ned to pick MS even if you don't really like them as a company.
The opinion I keep hearing is that if you choose FOSS you can't make a mistake. That's rubbish. There's bad FOSS just as much as there's bad close source.
Consider this. Let's say there's two competing software products. Don't mater what they are. Could be an OS, and httpd, and SQL server, an office suite, etc. One of them is FOSS and the other is proprietary. The proprietary solution has all the features you need and they provide 24/7/365 tech support. If necessary, you can pay a fee and have guaranteed access to a level 3 engineer. The FOSS product lacks some of the features you would like to have. The only method of support is to ask the community for help, which, while considerably large, is under no obligation to help you. You determine that you could hire a developer to add in the features you require -- which could also help with your tech support -- but after crunching the numbers you find that the FOSS solution costs the same as the proprietary solution. Which should you pick?
You're saying that a good OS is not a good OS. Don't play at semantics. The premise -- no matter how unlikely -- is that MS has made the best OS ever. Everyone agrees on it. Yes, even the FOSS community.
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly if it really is the best choice as there's no anti-competitive things going on to make it a trust. (Monopolies can be fine; trusts are bad.) What you're suggesting is that if MS produces the best OS ever it will be bad for the consumer. What? That makes no sense unless your political idology is your number one factor in decision making for what software to use. I have no problem buying software if it's worth the cost of paying for it.
If MS makes such a superior OS -- which I doubt, not because it's MS but because it's too dofficult for anyone to do at all -- either FOSS raises it's bar or it dies. That's not because MS is a monopoly. That would be because FOSS would not be able to survive in the free market.
Look at OpenOffice.org. People compare it to MS Office and they say it's slow and bloated. Compared to MS Office. I'd challenge someone to find any application with more needless bloat than MS Office. For years the number one complaint about the entire Office line was that it was always bloatware. Now OOo comes along and bloat isn't a problem? I'm sorry, that's BS and we all know it. OOo is going nowhere until the codebase is cleaned up. The only reasons it's as popular as it is are because it's FOSS and because it's the only thing besides MS Office. As it stands now you decide if you want to pay for MS Office. If you don't, you get OOo. Not because OOo is better than MS Office (which should be why you choose any piece of software, right?) but simply because it's cheaper. This is like choosing GIMP over Photoshop. If you're a professional, you only do it when you lack the money to afford the real deal (which then suggests you're possibly not as professional as you think).
Now look at Linux. People chose Linux because for what they want to do, the OS is actually better than other OSs. Look at Firefox. People chose that over IE because it's better. Hadly anybody used the old Mozilla Suite for exactly the same reasons that OOo rather sucks. The fact that Linux in particular costs so much less is rather irrlevant to the discussion. Now look at things like LAMP vs Windows/IIS/MS SQL/ASP. Again, choice has little to nothing to do with the lisencing costs. It's what solution you know better, and what you want to do with it.
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I'll admit that makes me a little odd. It just seems, well, repetitive and dull.
Would you like a little food with your salt an acid?
I dunno, I find GURPS to be top-heavy and cumbersome compared to D20. I'm not sure if it's just bad GURPS GMs or if it's that I don't like Steve Jackson. I never really seem to have any fun playing a Steve Jackson game.
If you choose to believe whatever people tell you just because they happen to have a title or happened to publish a book, why do you complain about those who choose "priest" or "rabbi" when you select "doctor" or "PhD" as your title. Seems kinda arbitrary to me. Either way, you're following someone else's thinking blindly. Just because the other guy happens to be smart doesn't mean he's not an idiot, and it certainly doesn't mean he could be wrong.
So, yeah, I'm a lot more worried about people who don't question those who say that the universe is Y billion years old, or that quantum theories are exactly true just because the math seems to work. If it's non-intuitive, you should question it even if you understand it.
And I'm sure they're just as ferverent in their belief that they are correct as the people who said you can't break the sound barrier, that you can't run a CPU over 50 MHz, that objects of different weight fall at different speeds, that man cannot fly, that bad air causes disease, and that laudanum is a good drug to treat many ailments.The history of science is littered with incorrect, broken, and useless theories. Don't assume that just because we only study the good ones now that every new one is of equal quality and veracity. Religion hasn't got a monopoly on vocal idiots.
Claiming that what science says is true now is somehow immune to being wrong is ludicrous. Science embraces it's fallibility. It's one of it's greatest strengths, and one of the things that differentiates it from religion (which instead claims infallibility).
So because your assumption was correct you assume the study has no merit? Perhaps we should just have your publish all your assumptions, then, and save the world some time. We could title it The Suso Bible or something like that.Most Christian churches simply argue that a prayer without faith is like a car without an engine.
If science were to look at a wood screw, it would explain the dimentions and construction of it, and attempt to make guesses about the use of the device. Religion would be more concerned about knowing the use of the screw, and who or what made the screw and what it was made to do. Mixing science with religion, then, is rather like mixing mechanical engineering with interior design. Or feng shui even. Using one to describe limitations of the other serves only to make you look like an idiot, since neither was ever meant to do what the other one is actually good for.
Not that I expect anybody on SlashDot to have any respect for religion in any form, particularly western religions. Whether that's because they've been exposed to too many close-minded religious types or because they're close-minded themselves doesn't really matter, even, since the effect is still the same. They sacrifice any attempt at rational discourse, and consequently lose the ability to learn anything from people they erroneously consider a thought-enemy.
Big business is so going to eat itself. I hope.
I'm inclined to agree. The brain is designed to find patterns and to make sense of black boxes. We're programmed to assume that a response to stimulation is the result of a process, and we can develop understandings of that process through exposure and experimentation. That applies on both a conscious and a basic neurological level. We are designed to develop comprehension.
Ah, that makes more sense. I read "required to terminate the project" as being the same as "required to finish the project".
So they'd already made their three easy payments of $39.99, and decided that it would be bad form to not pay the $6.95 in shipping and handling just because they didn't check their bank balance first.
FOSS is great, and I do think the advantages are genuine. But there's a lot to be said for something that just works, particularly if I'm more concerned about getting it up and running for the next 3-5 years vs having a system that I can maintain forever and ever. It's entirely possible that a non-FOSS product is a better solution for a given project no matter how Slashdotters like to stick their heads in the sand and whine that any FOSS solution -- even if it takes $600,000 and 10 man years in development costs to get it where you need it to be -- is still somehow a better choice than a product that might cost $20,000 and be available now. I'm sorry, but that's being as blind as an SCO marketing rep.
That's why SCO had to do it with copyright. Violating copyright is like getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar. As soon as you say the word "patent", though, everybody who has something to lose is suddenly armed against you.
I don't so much believe that popular = good, but I have faith in the consumer to ultimately choose what is best for them. Assuming the average consumer is an idiot who never can pick what is right rings of cynicism and arrogance. I'd rather not look at things that way.
As long as the market is freely open to new choices that might be better, a state of monopoly is not harmful to the market as a whole. Once consumers begin demanding something that Brand X doesn't have, either Brand X changes or something better will come along from someone else. On an instantaneous or short term examination, it looks really bad because consumers want a product that doesn't exist. However, that's nothing new. That always happens, even in markets with healthy competition. Over the long term, consumer and customer dissatisfaction will always drive innovation as long as there are no anti-competitive factors -- like those MS is prone to or anti-cometitive legislation like copyright and patents, and so on.
Then why would you buy it? Would you use a FOSS solution that didn't do anything you wanted? I hope not.
I still think you're not seeing the difference between a de facto monopoly and a trust. The difference between consumers all choosing the same product because it's the best -- even though the companies have not restricted others from entering the market -- and one which works to prevent innovation.
Here's a good one. Consider the early video game console market. Atari's 2600 was a de facto monopoly. Nintendo's NES was a de facto monopoly. Doesn't mean the market is unhealthy. It just means that they have the best product so everyone gets it. Like x86 based PCs. That's a de facto monopoly. Now that Apple is switching themselves, the number of non-x86 PCs out there is next to nil. Is the market unhealthy? No. There are other choices (Power, Sparc). They just suck for various reasons.
OpenSourced said that a monopoly in the OS market is bad for the consumer. I say not so, if the OS that has the lion's share is truly the best OS ever. In that case, the monopoly is simply the natural result of the fair market, not the result of anti-competitive forces.
Here's another analogy, since you seem to get stuck on the idea that MS might be involved: Let's say that Ford makes a car that is twice as safe, twice as fuel efficient, ans half the cost of any other car on the market. In three years time, nearly every car on the road is a Ford. Is this a monopoly? Yes. Is it bad for the consumer? No, Ford make a genuinely better product.
Now, what you have been doing is akin to telling me that there's no way Ford could ever make such a car. Do you see how irrelevant that is?
IMX, the cost of developing new required features for a FOSS product -- and I've only seen it done once -- far exceeds the cost of lisencing a proprietary soltuion. Now, if the proprietary solution is suddenly cheaper *and* already does everything you want... why are you picking FOSS?
You don't use vi as a word processor, do you? Why not? It's open source and you could use it to write letters and such. So is vi a better word processor than MS Word? Absolutely not. WordPad is a better word processor than vi, primarily because vi is designed as a text editor.
The number one determinations of what software to use should always be the one that does your job the best. If that's MS -- perhaps for compatibility with other MS products or for vendor/customer requirements or whatever -- then you ned to pick MS even if you don't really like them as a company.
The opinion I keep hearing is that if you choose FOSS you can't make a mistake. That's rubbish. There's bad FOSS just as much as there's bad close source.
Consider this. Let's say there's two competing software products. Don't mater what they are. Could be an OS, and httpd, and SQL server, an office suite, etc. One of them is FOSS and the other is proprietary. The proprietary solution has all the features you need and they provide 24/7/365 tech support. If necessary, you can pay a fee and have guaranteed access to a level 3 engineer. The FOSS product lacks some of the features you would like to have. The only method of support is to ask the community for help, which, while considerably large, is under no obligation to help you. You determine that you could hire a developer to add in the features you require -- which could also help with your tech support -- but after crunching the numbers you find that the FOSS solution costs the same as the proprietary solution. Which should you pick?
You're saying that a good OS is not a good OS. Don't play at semantics. The premise -- no matter how unlikely -- is that MS has made the best OS ever. Everyone agrees on it. Yes, even the FOSS community.
Yeah, and their goal is to make money. I'm sure their marketing department understands basic supply and demand. This is MS, not Adobe.
If MS makes such a superior OS -- which I doubt, not because it's MS but because it's too dofficult for anyone to do at all -- either FOSS raises it's bar or it dies. That's not because MS is a monopoly. That would be because FOSS would not be able to survive in the free market.
Look at OpenOffice.org. People compare it to MS Office and they say it's slow and bloated. Compared to MS Office. I'd challenge someone to find any application with more needless bloat than MS Office. For years the number one complaint about the entire Office line was that it was always bloatware. Now OOo comes along and bloat isn't a problem? I'm sorry, that's BS and we all know it. OOo is going nowhere until the codebase is cleaned up. The only reasons it's as popular as it is are because it's FOSS and because it's the only thing besides MS Office. As it stands now you decide if you want to pay for MS Office. If you don't, you get OOo. Not because OOo is better than MS Office (which should be why you choose any piece of software, right?) but simply because it's cheaper. This is like choosing GIMP over Photoshop. If you're a professional, you only do it when you lack the money to afford the real deal (which then suggests you're possibly not as professional as you think).
Now look at Linux. People chose Linux because for what they want to do, the OS is actually better than other OSs. Look at Firefox. People chose that over IE because it's better. Hadly anybody used the old Mozilla Suite for exactly the same reasons that OOo rather sucks. The fact that Linux in particular costs so much less is rather irrlevant to the discussion. Now look at things like LAMP vs Windows/IIS/MS SQL/ASP. Again, choice has little to nothing to do with the lisencing costs. It's what solution you know better, and what you want to do with it.
Wow, now I actually ave something to do when I cast my W-Summon + Knight of Round: I can drive to the store, buy what I need, and then drive home.
Obviously, you didn't see LoRdTAW's comment immediately below yours.