I like my monitor perfectly clean. Using displays all covered in finger grease drives me nuts.
1) You can clean it. 2) Not everyone has sweaty cheetos fingers.
Your hands conceal parts of the screen while you're using it.
So? Your hands concel parts of virtually anything you use. Does this cause you much trouble? Do you have trouble writing? Opening doors? Flushing toilets? Putting clothes on?
You can move a mouse over a greater distance much more quickly than your entire hand.
True, but you have a lot more accuracy with your hand. Put your cursor in the lower right corner, and then -snap it in one single quick motion- to an icon two or 3 inches in from the top left. Do not overshoot it, do not snap it half way and then move it gradually into place.
Now point at the bottom left, and then point to an the same icon as fast as you can. You can rapidly move your finger to point directly at the correct place far mroe rapidly.
The mouse does require less muscle effort though.
It's also much easier to get to a specific pixel / small area with a mouse than with your fat fingertip.
meh, yeah, your finger is clumsier than a mouse for fine precision. But that's trivially compensated for with a ui designed to be used with fingers. If you know users are going to be selecting with their fingers, make the region they need to select 'finger sized' and give them visual feedback before they click. (The blackberry storm does this really well... when your finger is hovering over the screen, the btton that will be 'selected' is highlighted.
People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day?
Absolutely not. But who says I have to?
Sometimes I type text into my blackberry's mini-keyboard. Its a good device that fits in my pocket and I can take it anywhere. I wouldn't want to write a novel with it. Touch/gesture interfaces are the same... I wouldn't want to to use it to write software... but maybe it would be a much more efficient way of doing, say, level design or fine tuning the 3D animation in a video game...
Positioning the screen ergonomically for use as in input device puts it in a position where you're hanging your head looking down all day. The minority report problem obviously applies if you position your screen at the optimal viewing position.
You mean the position most people read books in? The position all business and financial and scientific work was completed in for last few 1000 years before computers. Are you sure its that unbearable a position? This 'seated at a desk' or perhaps 'seated at a slanted desk' position?
Others have already mentioned it, but lack of tactile feedback is a big one. This is particularly important for programs whose UIs aren't that great.
So make better UI's. Touch ui's should have feedback before you press (like a hover-highlight), as well as one or all of haptic/audio/visual feedback.
After all the mouse was kind of annoying way back when too, in DOS text mode, with its inverted character and its tendancy to get its ball jammed with crud. And I'm not a fan of apple's mighty mouse either for that matter. And keyboards with squishy low-travel keys suck too. Bad implementations don't make them bad ui's.
How is wasting half of your screen real estate on a keyboard a good idea?
False premise. You'd just get a bigger screen. Right now, you have x inches of screen, and y inches of keyboard. So just replace with x+y inches of screen and ditch the keyboard. Imagine opening your 7" laptop, and having a screen on both the top and bottom.
Oh, you can bring it up dynamically?
Good point. When you were doing something that didn't need a keyboard, you'd have a lot more screen.
Oh, you can bring it up dynamically? Oh great, well then I guess you don't get to use keyboard shortcuts. That sucks.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. If you can't get your service to work with all major browsers, your service is going to be seen as inferior, not the browser.
Meh... people who have rejected Microsoft's browser aren't likely to use many of their web services anyway. So they are losing less than it would at first appear.
That said, I avoid Google's services like the plague... they get enough information about me from my use of search, plus the tracking they do via their ads, plus all the sites that use their analytics... I'm not about to hand them anything else if I can avoid it.
Is calling it nuka-cola instead of coke-cola is really going to ruin your game of fallout 3? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Is coca-cola really going to let the game developers allow their drink give you radiation poisoning?
I looked at doing ads in games once, and the real problem was that the advertisers weren't happy to merely see their products in the game, but rather the product placements had to be positive, and on message, and they wanted exclusivity so no competitors products... maybe the climbate has changed since then but I doubt it.
I mean, there was that huge Dodge Ram tie in with the new season of Terminator/SarahConner, and you can sort of see the same sort of placement 'control' going on. I suspect the script writers weren't allowed to write a scene where that truck gets toasted... that would be 'off message'. Dodge Ram's are safe, reliable, indestructable -- they aren't going to pay you for product placement, and then have it not start, or blow a tire, or crash...
In a game its even worse, because not everything is scripted. So while Nuka-Cola can give you radiation poisoning, Coca-Cola won't buy into that. The game becomes souless because the advertisers won't pay to associate their product with something negative.
Frankly, I'm surprised EA manages to get the exotics to sign on for some its Need for Speed outings. As much as they thrive on the dreams of street racing, they tend to avoid any official endorsement of it. Plus with NFS my understanding is that EA is paying the manufacturers, not the other way around.
Meanwhile Grand Theft Auto IV has 'Comets' instead of 'Porsches'. I'm not sure if the reason is that EA has soem sort of exclusivity, so the manufacturers can't license them, or whether the manufacturers are turning them down due to the level of criminal/violent content, or whether GTA isn't simply isn't asking because it doesn't want to pay?
I'm also curious what the situation is with military hardware/weaponry -- does a title like Rainbow six have to license the various rifles and pistols, etc? Or the rights to use an Apache / Comanche / Blackhawk...?
A lot of people shoot home movies and then become obsessed with preserving the footage. That adds up fast. It seems that deciding what isn't important is a hard part of backing up.
After a loved one dies, even the lowest quality outtake with a thumb covering half the shot can be a priceless memory.
Alternatively, if they can skew the numbers to say that Prince of Persia was pirated on a larger scale than any of their other games, it will be the poster boy for DRM-pushers.
On the other hand, since they aren't paying for the DRM, which I suspect is licensed per copy, not a one time purchase, there is actually a range, where its being pirated more, they sell less, and they actually make more money. It would be beyond funny if the actual results fell into this range.
That said, I figure the reality is that this game will be pirated exactly as much as any other. No more, no less.
Vista is a continuation of the NT codebase and is nowhere near the first.
Sure Vista is a "continuation" of NT. It just doesn't have much in common with it. Different kernel. Different driver model. Different networking stack. Different scheduler. Different memory manager.
Now compare windows ME to windows 98. All of those above swtich from 'different' to 'same'.
If you do believe that a fetus of a particular age is a full human being, then it's irrelevant how it came into existence. Rape and incest are hardly the fault of the fetus, are they?
Prior to that 'particular age' I believe it is not a full person. So there is an opportunity to abort prior to it being a full person.
I don't have a solid fix on what that particular age is; I will say that, for me, 4 weeks from conception isn't a person but 4 weeks from birth is.
As for medical risks, do you believe that it's OK in general to kill an innocent human being to save yourself?
No. But that cuts both ways. I don't believe its OK in general for a fetus to kill an innocent human being either.
If not, why would abortion be any different (again, assuming you believe the fetus to be fully human)?
When trying to balance the right to life between a 'becoming a person' and a 'person', I choose the 'person'. So early on in the pregnancy if life threatening complications occur, save the parent. At 2 weeks prior to birth if there are complications, they are both people, and normal medical triage applies.
Oh, and "Fully a person" not "fully human". I think its fully "human" from conception./pedant
Admittedly 10.6 won't probably run on said G4's any more because Apple stops supporting PowerPC
Nor on G5's sold as recently as 2006. So if we have this same argument next year you probably will want to keep your head down. And that's my point. Apple has no qualms about cutting support for "legacy" stuff. They dropped the floppy and left it to 3rd parties to show up with options for people who still needed them. They dropped classic within a couple years of OSX. They dropped ADB and obsoleted millions of peripherals. They've gone and dropped firewire on the new non-pro laptops, pissing off legions who bought fireware cameras and hard drives. The new mac laptops only have mini-displayport leaving everyone scrambling to buy adapters. Apple clearly thinks VGA is 'legacy', and now DVI is on its way out.
but for comparison try to run Vista on 8 years old hardware and compare that to the performance of my Macs of the same age.
I have an old P3 1GHz with 1GB of RAM and a geforce fx5200. Its actually fine with Vista. not 'great' of course, and it can't touch my newer 3GHz Core 2 Quad with 260GTX and 4GB RAM, but its still perfectly usable. I admit I upgraded the unit slightly though - it didn't have 1GB of ram until around 2004 but I suspect you probably upgraded the ram on your 8 year old mac too.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
So schedule it to turn on 5 minutes before you start work?
A lot of BIOSes can do this, and a company that was a little more organized could use Wake-On-LAN features to wake up the network a few minutes before everyone showed up.
If someone on slashdot couldn't think this up for themselves they aren't worth federal minimum wage I hope they are being paid.
How about next time you just leave well enough alone?
Linux gets faster on the same hardware because of new schedulers, etc.
Only if you don't use any of the new features. Compiz, selinux, apparmor... all slow it down. Not complaining of course, but still, if you gutted vista's security features back to the level they were at in XP it would ran faster than it is now too.
Granted with linux at least vast majority of the 'bloat' is optional. But still.
OS X 10.4 was markedly faster than 10.3.
10.0 started out like a gigantic turd that was almost unbearable on brand new systems. Sure its gotten better over time. People wouldn't have tolerated it getting worse.
Current Windows 7 builds are beating Vista. I guess if you release something slow enough, the next version is easy to make faster.
Oh, and Apple isn't immune from the bloat trend:
10.5 isn't markedly faster than 10.4. 10.x is markedly slower than OS9 OS9 was markedly slower than OS8 OS8 was markedly slower than System 7 System 7 was markedly slower than System 6...
What does legacy hardware have to do with an operating system?
Everything.
One of the 'problems' Vista has is that a lot of hardware that worked perfectly well under XP has no Vista driver. Or has a vista driver that's just been thrown together and barely tested... and barely works.
As a result, the user experience with Vista isn't nearly as a good, some stuff just doesn't work. Other stuff doesn't work very well, and bad drivers can crash the OS (any OS). A lot of the complaints about Vista are the result of this.
No, actually it's an almost completely irrational position tied only to religion.
No its not. What is the difference between a child 1 hour old and a fetus 1 hour away from being born? Pretty much squat. Going backwards from there you definitely pass to a point where everyone agrees its not a person... but can you define that point meaningfully?
There are even groups that are pushing to ban the "morning after" pill, because they want to count the SINGLE free-floating cell that hasn't even attached to the mother yet as a human being.
Yes its easy to point at the most extreme fringe in any argument and ridicule them. There is a big difference between a zygote and 3 month old fetus and a 6 month old one.
Take a look at the lunatic fringe in the pro-choice camp, and you'll find people pushing stuff just as dense.
I agree that the pro-abortionist can have a rational position. Where did I state otherwise?
A lot of people think that the "other side" of what they are on is simply and wrong and being irrational. I'm just clarifying that I think its rational on BOTH sides of this question.
Why does the potential to become a person suddenly grant a non-person the rights we ascribe to people?
There is no threshold when that non-person becomes a person. Yet we seem to have to pick a point. It seems to me that it would be a far bigger failure to withhold from them person-status when they should have it than to grant a non-person a bit of protection so that it might become a person. ie... if we have to pick an arbitrary point, I'd like to err on the side of caution.
You bring up DNA, but every cell in the arm has DNA in it to, and furthermore "human" does not equate "person".
The point about DNA is that the DNA in a fetus is not your DNA. Your arm just has your DNA. The fetus has its own. It is distinct from "you" in an important way that your arm is not.
Like I said, since I'd have to be installing all new applications anyway, they'd hardly be legacy. Macs are not a one-solution-fits-all system, I know that.
No no... I was actually referring to the fact that Apple frequently leaves its customers in the lurch and forces them to upgrade. They are worse for forcing customers into upgrades, and dropping support for old stuff.
They drop support for peripheral buses at the drop of a hat. They've switched CPU architectures completely a couple times. If you've still got any OS9 apps kicking around, you better have an old machine to run it on.
Vista may not have backwards compatibility completely mastered, but I can take a windows 3.1 app have be reasonably confident it will work. And if not, between Virtualization, DOSBOX, and so on, I can make most apps work. With Apple, if you've got something 10 years old. Its not going to run on a new unit. Full stop.
Problem is - as you may already know - a lot of those apps from the opto vendors don't even work on Vista.
Yep. But at least Vista support is generally actually coming, and it really has come along way over the last year. I won't be holding my breath for a Ubuntu version any time soon.;)
Overall I agree, switching to OSS has never been easier. I've even switched my parents and brother over. Firefox and OpenOffice are mature enough and familiar enough for the masses... I'm just saying that when it comes to a lot of businesses though, its often not that easy.
No, Microsoft dug themselves into a hole by taking five years to upgrade XP. Had they stuck to their usual 2-3 year product cycle, XP wouldn't have become entrenched to the point of irreplaceable.
That's actually a valid point. They DID let businesses get entrenched, and once they'd stopped moving its a lot harder to start them up again.
Today "Legacy hardware" means hardware no longer produced.
When you spend hundreds of thousands on equipment and you study what you buy and do not even consider suppliers that do not support linux it starts to hurt.
You get into niche medical / diagnostic equipment, and no, suitable linux software simply doesn't exist. Full stop. If you refuse to consider suppliers that do not support linux you simply have no suppliers.
Phone/flash/sync/update, why? why would I ever need such sh!t?
If you ran a cellular service center, as in the example given, you'd need them to service your customers phones. Not much good to your customers if they bring you their phone and you can't put the updated software in, because the software flashing tools are windows only.
I'm not here to teach or preach but if you open your mind you will see that the only obstacle is this proprietary lock in that most people get themselves into.
Preaching to the choir, I always select components based in part on cross platform compatibility, but I support a lot of hardware where there simply is no cross platform alternative, or if there is, its 10x the price, and missing half the features. Cross platform is not ALWAYS available and when it is, its not always a good value proposition.
You can run Leopard just fine on a 6 year old Mac just fine...why don't you try doing the same with Vista and a 6 year old PC, and get back to us.
"Yawn." Cherry picking at its finest.
Six months from now Snow leopard comes out, and it won't run on the G5's they sold until mid 2006. What are you going to say then, when the new Apple OS absolutely won't run on the top end macs of only 3 years ago? See I can cherry pick too.
Oh, and for what its worth, Vista actually runs just fine on a 6 year old 1GHz Pentium 3 with an nvidia geforce4 Ti4600, and 1GB of RAM. No worse than my 10.5 runs on my old G3 ibook (with a ram upgrade).
Except XP, of course.
XP is no longer current. Yes, its still 'available', but the writing is on the wall. And if your IT strategy is to just keep running XP, you're going to run into that wall.
Macs and Linux also have applications that only run on those operating systems. Yawn.
And people running them can't switch either. The point wasn't that Windows is the only system with unique apps, the point was that if you use those unique apps you can't switch.
The bottom line is a fetus in my opinion is not a person, while in your opinion it may be. Apply your morals to you and your wife and leave us out of it.
By that logic, if I decide you are not a person, then I can kill you. Keep your morals to yoruself. And everyone decides for themselves what a person is. See why that doesn't work?
An "independent" life eh?
"Independent" in the sense the sense that it is a separate organism with its own DNA. Not independent in the sense that it can survive on its own.
Lets take it out of the woman and see how long it survives. You just hit the epic fail scenario.
It would make a big difference where you put it, now wouldn't it?
Lots of creatures are parasites or symbiotes or have unique environmental requirements. Next you'll be saying fleas aren't independent creatures because if you take them off the dog they rapidly starve too.
Do not, however, impose your idiotic worldview on the rest of us. Just move to a red state and live amongst your own kind.
I'm pro-choice. I said as much multiple times, Dipshit. But if society as a whole rules that fetuses are people, then they deserve to be protected.
I agree with you on pretty much every facet of this, but AFAIK there haven't been any driver debacles since pre-SP1. (if I'm wrong feel free to correct me.)
Pre SP1 of what?
If you mean that Vista, since SP1 has mostly put its driver debacle behind it, I'd agree. But the PR damage has been done.
If you mean that XP hasn't had a driver debacle since preSP1, I'd agree with that too, but for XP, it was a driver debacle that only affected home users, not businesses. Plus its been a few years, and memories are short. Nobody remembers their old samsung usb1 mp3 player/cheap parallel scanner/acer webcam/cmedia integrated sound/pcchips NIC/ etc didn't ever work with XP.
This is what passes for insightful on Slashdot these days? Seriously mods, this guy thinks Microsoft made Vista that way on purpose as some sort of genius grand plan!
Heh, not quite. Vista isn't the success Microsoft hoped for. From microsofts point of view, Vista has been a dismal marketing failure, possibly even a commercial failure - they pushed too much change all at once, and the market dug in its heels.
However, when all is said and done Vista isn't really a technical failure, and so Windows 7 isn't going in a new technical direction. So windows 7 is just going to address the market failure, which it will be able to do, since the failure of Vista was too much change too fast. Windows 7 isn't going to have much change, and is just going to build on Vista which will have already 'broken the new ground', so the strategy for 7 will likely succeed.
He says Vista isn't ME-2, but provides no reason -- except opinion -- for it. This would never have been modded-up in my day!
Vista isn't ME-2 because:
1) ME was the last of its code base and it died off; its successor was a completely different code base. 2) Vista is the first of its code base, and its successor will be little more than a refinement of it.
The problem happens when they want their morals to govern everyone else's actions.
That is not generally a problem. Good laws don't restrict your actions more than are required to prevent harm to another person. Right?
ie You can do what ever you want, as long as you don't hurt another. The reason you aren't allowed to shoot someone isn't because I want to control you but because letting you do that hurts someone else. Were protecting them, not controlling you. See the difference?
This is where abortion gets tricky. If the fetus is a person, that it merits being protected from you. An anti abortion law isn't really about controlling you, as it is protecting them.
The dispute of course, is whether the fetus merits protection. If its its own person it does merit protection. If its not a person, then you should be left alone to decide for yourself what its fate will be.
To me, the mere fact of it being such a complicated issue is all the more reason why women should be able to make the individual choice for themselves.
Normally I'd agree with this. If society can't come to consensus, than it should be left to individual. However, this case has some nuances -- the first is that its a right to life case so I'm inclined to err on the side of life, even if its 'wrong'. And secondly, the life in question is an *independent* life, so the mother is not just deciding for herself, she is deciding for the new being as well. So again, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution here.
That's just me, making a moral judgement.
Despite all this I identify as pro choice without hesitation when it comes to rape, incest, medical risks, etc, and while I would vote pro choice in any ballot, I think abortion-as-birth-control or as convenience is reprehensible.
Even a healthy pregnancy is not nine months of sunshine and rainbows, and I'm not even going to mention the things birth can do to the female body.
Life after birth isn't all sunshine and rainbows either. My wife tells me that the first 6 months after our kids were born were far harder on her than the actual pregnancies themselves. Should we be allowed "post-partum abortions"? Surely not.
And as for what a pregnancy does to the body... a lot of that is more a sad reflection on society and its unrealistic, unhealthy standards of beauty than anything else. (I get that attraction to youthful beauty is to some extent hardwired in to our biology -- but the degree the obsession has reached in society is more sad than useful.)
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I like my monitor perfectly clean. Using displays all covered in finger grease drives me nuts.
1) You can clean it.
2) Not everyone has sweaty cheetos fingers.
Your hands conceal parts of the screen while you're using it.
So? Your hands concel parts of virtually anything you use. Does this cause you much trouble? Do you have trouble writing? Opening doors? Flushing toilets? Putting clothes on?
You can move a mouse over a greater distance much more quickly than your entire hand.
True, but you have a lot more accuracy with your hand. Put your cursor in the lower right corner, and then -snap it in one single quick motion- to an icon two or 3 inches in from the top left. Do not overshoot it, do not snap it half way and then move it gradually into place.
Now point at the bottom left, and then point to an the same icon as fast as you can. You can rapidly move your finger to point directly at the correct place far mroe rapidly.
The mouse does require less muscle effort though.
It's also much easier to get to a specific pixel / small area with a mouse than with your fat fingertip.
meh, yeah, your finger is clumsier than a mouse for fine precision. But that's trivially compensated for with a ui designed to be used with fingers. If you know users are going to be selecting with their fingers, make the region they need to select 'finger sized' and give them visual feedback before they click. (The blackberry storm does this really well... when your finger is hovering over the screen, the btton that will be 'selected' is highlighted.
People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day?
Absolutely not. But who says I have to?
Sometimes I type text into my blackberry's mini-keyboard. Its a good device that fits in my pocket and I can take it anywhere. I wouldn't want to write a novel with it. Touch/gesture interfaces are the same... I wouldn't want to to use it to write software... but maybe it would be a much more efficient way of doing, say, level design or fine tuning the 3D animation in a video game...
Positioning the screen ergonomically for use as in input device puts it in a position where you're hanging your head looking down all day. The minority report problem obviously applies if you position your screen at the optimal viewing position.
You mean the position most people read books in? The position all business and financial and scientific work was completed in for last few 1000 years before computers. Are you sure its that unbearable a position? This 'seated at a desk' or perhaps 'seated at a slanted desk' position?
Others have already mentioned it, but lack of tactile feedback is a big one. This is particularly important for programs whose UIs aren't that great.
So make better UI's. Touch ui's should have feedback before you press (like a hover-highlight), as well as one or all of haptic/audio/visual feedback.
After all the mouse was kind of annoying way back when too, in DOS text mode, with its inverted character and its tendancy to get its ball jammed with crud. And I'm not a fan of apple's mighty mouse either for that matter. And keyboards with squishy low-travel keys suck too. Bad implementations don't make them bad ui's.
How is wasting half of your screen real estate on a keyboard a good idea?
False premise. You'd just get a bigger screen. Right now, you have x inches of screen, and y inches of keyboard. So just replace with x+y inches of screen and ditch the keyboard. Imagine opening your 7" laptop, and having a screen on both the top and bottom.
Oh, you can bring it up dynamically?
Good point. When you were doing something that didn't need a keyboard, you'd have a lot more screen.
Oh, you can bring it up dynamically? Oh great, well then I guess you don't get to use keyboard shortcuts. That sucks.
Well, i
Microsoft just doesn't get it. If you can't get your service to work with all major browsers, your service is going to be seen as inferior, not the browser.
Meh... people who have rejected Microsoft's browser aren't likely to use many of their web services anyway. So they are losing less than it would at first appear.
That said, I avoid Google's services like the plague... they get enough information about me from my use of search, plus the tracking they do via their ads, plus all the sites that use their analytics... I'm not about to hand them anything else if I can avoid it.
Is calling it nuka-cola instead of coke-cola is really going to ruin your game of fallout 3? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Is coca-cola really going to let the game developers allow their drink give you radiation poisoning?
I looked at doing ads in games once, and the real problem was that the advertisers weren't happy to merely see their products in the game, but rather the product placements had to be positive, and on message, and they wanted exclusivity so no competitors products... maybe the climbate has changed since then but I doubt it.
I mean, there was that huge Dodge Ram tie in with the new season of Terminator/SarahConner, and you can sort of see the same sort of placement 'control' going on. I suspect the script writers weren't allowed to write a scene where that truck gets toasted... that would be 'off message'. Dodge Ram's are safe, reliable, indestructable -- they aren't going to pay you for product placement, and then have it not start, or blow a tire, or crash...
In a game its even worse, because not everything is scripted. So while Nuka-Cola can give you radiation poisoning, Coca-Cola won't buy into that. The game becomes souless because the advertisers won't pay to associate their product with something negative.
Frankly, I'm surprised EA manages to get the exotics to sign on for some its Need for Speed outings. As much as they thrive on the dreams of street racing, they tend to avoid any official endorsement of it. Plus with NFS my understanding is that EA is paying the manufacturers, not the other way around.
Meanwhile Grand Theft Auto IV has 'Comets' instead of 'Porsches'. I'm not sure if the reason is that EA has soem sort of exclusivity, so the manufacturers can't license them, or whether the manufacturers are turning them down due to the level of criminal/violent content, or whether GTA isn't simply isn't asking because it doesn't want to pay?
I'm also curious what the situation is with military hardware/weaponry -- does a title like Rainbow six have to license the various rifles and pistols, etc? Or the rights to use an Apache / Comanche / Blackhawk...?
A lot of people shoot home movies and then become obsessed with preserving the footage. That adds up fast.
It seems that deciding what isn't important is a hard part of backing up.
After a loved one dies, even the lowest quality outtake with a thumb covering half the shot can be a priceless memory.
Alternatively, if they can skew the numbers to say that Prince of Persia was pirated on a larger scale than any of their other games, it will be the poster boy for DRM-pushers.
On the other hand, since they aren't paying for the DRM, which I suspect is licensed per copy, not a one time purchase, there is actually a range, where its being pirated more, they sell less, and they actually make more money. It would be beyond funny if the actual results fell into this range.
That said, I figure the reality is that this game will be pirated exactly as much as any other. No more, no less.
Except the neighborhood baker could claim its just a caricature and that its legally acceptable as a form of art.
That -might- get you out of a copyright infringement suit... but wouldn't dodge the trademark suit.
If this opened in the US would Blizzard sue them out of existence?
I think probably.
Vista is a continuation of the NT codebase and is nowhere near the first.
Sure Vista is a "continuation" of NT. It just doesn't have much in common with it. Different kernel. Different driver model. Different networking stack. Different scheduler. Different memory manager.
Now compare windows ME to windows 98. All of those above swtich from 'different' to 'same'.
If you do believe that a fetus of a particular age is a full human being, then it's irrelevant how it came into existence. Rape and incest are hardly the fault of the fetus, are they?
Prior to that 'particular age' I believe it is not a full person. So there is an opportunity to abort prior to it being a full person.
I don't have a solid fix on what that particular age is; I will say that, for me, 4 weeks from conception isn't a person but 4 weeks from birth is.
As for medical risks, do you believe that it's OK in general to kill an innocent human being to save yourself?
No. But that cuts both ways. I don't believe its OK in general for a fetus to kill an innocent human being either.
If not, why would abortion be any different (again, assuming you believe the fetus to be fully human)?
When trying to balance the right to life between a 'becoming a person' and a 'person', I choose the 'person'. So early on in the pregnancy if life threatening complications occur, save the parent. At 2 weeks prior to birth if there are complications, they are both people, and normal medical triage applies.
Oh, and "Fully a person" not "fully human". I think its fully "human" from conception. /pedant
Admittedly 10.6 won't probably run on said G4's any more because Apple stops supporting PowerPC
Nor on G5's sold as recently as 2006. So if we have this same argument next year you probably will want to keep your head down. And that's my point. Apple has no qualms about cutting support for "legacy" stuff. They dropped the floppy and left it to 3rd parties to show up with options for people who still needed them. They dropped classic within a couple years of OSX. They dropped ADB and obsoleted millions of peripherals. They've gone and dropped firewire on the new non-pro laptops, pissing off legions who bought fireware cameras and hard drives. The new mac laptops only have mini-displayport leaving everyone scrambling to buy adapters. Apple clearly thinks VGA is 'legacy', and now DVI is on its way out.
but for comparison try to run Vista on 8 years old hardware and compare that to the performance of my Macs of the same age.
I have an old P3 1GHz with 1GB of RAM and a geforce fx5200. Its actually fine with Vista. not 'great' of course, and it can't touch my newer 3GHz Core 2 Quad with 260GTX and 4GB RAM, but its still perfectly usable. I admit I upgraded the unit slightly though - it didn't have 1GB of ram until around 2004 but I suspect you probably upgraded the ram on your 8 year old mac too.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
So schedule it to turn on 5 minutes before you start work?
A lot of BIOSes can do this, and a company that was a little more organized could use Wake-On-LAN features to wake up the network a few minutes before everyone showed up.
If someone on slashdot couldn't think this up for themselves they aren't worth federal minimum wage I hope they are being paid.
Fixed that for you.
How about next time you just leave well enough alone?
Linux gets faster on the same hardware because of new schedulers, etc.
Only if you don't use any of the new features. Compiz, selinux, apparmor... all slow it down. Not complaining of course, but still, if you gutted vista's security features back to the level they were at in XP it would ran faster than it is now too.
Granted with linux at least vast majority of the 'bloat' is optional. But still.
OS X 10.4 was markedly faster than 10.3.
10.0 started out like a gigantic turd that was almost unbearable on brand new systems. Sure its gotten better over time. People wouldn't have tolerated it getting worse.
Current Windows 7 builds are beating Vista. I guess if you release something slow enough, the next version is easy to make faster.
Oh, and Apple isn't immune from the bloat trend:
10.5 isn't markedly faster than 10.4. ...
10.x is markedly slower than OS9
OS9 was markedly slower than OS8
OS8 was markedly slower than System 7
System 7 was markedly slower than System 6
What does legacy hardware have to do with an operating system?
Everything.
One of the 'problems' Vista has is that a lot of hardware that worked perfectly well under XP has no Vista driver. Or has a vista driver that's just been thrown together and barely tested... and barely works.
As a result, the user experience with Vista isn't nearly as a good, some stuff just doesn't work. Other stuff doesn't work very well, and bad drivers can crash the OS (any OS). A lot of the complaints about Vista are the result of this.
No, actually it's an almost completely irrational position tied only to religion.
No its not. What is the difference between a child 1 hour old and a fetus 1 hour away from being born? Pretty much squat. Going backwards from there you definitely pass to a point where everyone agrees its not a person... but can you define that point meaningfully?
There are even groups that are pushing to ban the "morning after" pill, because they want to count the SINGLE free-floating cell that hasn't even attached to the mother yet as a human being.
Yes its easy to point at the most extreme fringe in any argument and ridicule them. There is a big difference between a zygote and 3 month old fetus and a 6 month old one.
Take a look at the lunatic fringe in the pro-choice camp, and you'll find people pushing stuff just as dense.
I agree that the pro-abortionist can have a rational position. Where did I state otherwise?
A lot of people think that the "other side" of what they are on is simply and wrong and being irrational. I'm just clarifying that I think its rational on BOTH sides of this question.
Why does the potential to become a person suddenly grant a non-person the rights we ascribe to people?
There is no threshold when that non-person becomes a person. Yet we seem to have to pick a point. It seems to me that it would be a far bigger failure to withhold from them person-status when they should have it than to grant a non-person a bit of protection so that it might become a person. ie... if we have to pick an arbitrary point, I'd like to err on the side of caution.
You bring up DNA, but every cell in the arm has DNA in it to, and furthermore "human" does not equate "person".
The point about DNA is that the DNA in a fetus is not your DNA. Your arm just has your DNA. The fetus has its own. It is distinct from "you" in an important way that your arm is not.
Like I said, since I'd have to be installing all new applications anyway, they'd hardly be legacy. Macs are not a one-solution-fits-all system, I know that.
No no... I was actually referring to the fact that Apple frequently leaves its customers in the lurch and forces them to upgrade. They are worse for forcing customers into upgrades, and dropping support for old stuff.
They drop support for peripheral buses at the drop of a hat. They've switched CPU architectures completely a couple times. If you've still got any OS9 apps kicking around, you better have an old machine to run it on.
Vista may not have backwards compatibility completely mastered, but I can take a windows 3.1 app have be reasonably confident it will work. And if not, between Virtualization, DOSBOX, and so on, I can make most apps work. With Apple, if you've got something 10 years old. Its not going to run on a new unit. Full stop.
Problem is - as you may already know - a lot of those apps from the opto vendors don't even work on Vista.
Yep. But at least Vista support is generally actually coming, and it really has come along way over the last year. I won't be holding my breath for a Ubuntu version any time soon. ;)
Overall I agree, switching to OSS has never been easier. I've even switched my parents and brother over. Firefox and OpenOffice are mature enough and familiar enough for the masses... I'm just saying that when it comes to a lot of businesses though, its often not that easy.
WTF? VMWare Fusion.
So your solution to going to a new platform and leaving windows behind is to bring windows with you?
You might want to rethink that.
No, Microsoft dug themselves into a hole by taking five years to upgrade XP.
Had they stuck to their usual 2-3 year product cycle, XP wouldn't have become entrenched to the point of irreplaceable.
That's actually a valid point. They DID let businesses get entrenched, and once they'd stopped moving its a lot harder to start them up again.
Legacy used to mean over 10 years.
Today "Legacy hardware" means hardware no longer produced.
When you spend hundreds of thousands on equipment and you study what you buy and do not even consider suppliers that do not support linux it starts to hurt.
You get into niche medical / diagnostic equipment, and no, suitable linux software simply doesn't exist. Full stop. If you refuse to consider suppliers that do not support linux you simply have no suppliers.
Phone/flash/sync/update, why? why would I ever need such sh!t?
If you ran a cellular service center, as in the example given, you'd need them to service your customers phones. Not much good to your customers if they bring you their phone and you can't put the updated software in, because the software flashing tools are windows only.
I'm not here to teach or preach but if you open your mind you will see that the only obstacle is this proprietary lock in that most people get themselves into.
Preaching to the choir, I always select components based in part on cross platform compatibility, but I support a lot of hardware where there simply is no cross platform alternative, or if there is, its 10x the price, and missing half the features. Cross platform is not ALWAYS available and when it is, its not always a good value proposition.
You can run Leopard just fine on a 6 year old Mac just fine...why don't you try doing the same with Vista and a 6 year old PC, and get back to us.
"Yawn." Cherry picking at its finest.
Six months from now Snow leopard comes out, and it won't run on the G5's they sold until mid 2006. What are you going to say then, when the new Apple OS absolutely won't run on the top end macs of only 3 years ago? See I can cherry pick too.
Oh, and for what its worth, Vista actually runs just fine on a 6 year old 1GHz Pentium 3 with an nvidia geforce4 Ti4600, and 1GB of RAM. No worse than my 10.5 runs on my old G3 ibook (with a ram upgrade).
Except XP, of course.
XP is no longer current. Yes, its still 'available', but the writing is on the wall. And if your IT strategy is to just keep running XP, you're going to run into that wall.
Macs and Linux also have applications that only run on those operating systems. Yawn.
And people running them can't switch either. The point wasn't that Windows is the only system with unique apps, the point was that if you use those unique apps you can't switch.
I'm typing this from OS X Lepoard on my 12" PowerBook G4.
You won't be running snow leopard though.
The bottom line is a fetus in my opinion is not a person, while in your opinion it may be. Apply your morals to you and your wife and leave us out of it.
By that logic, if I decide you are not a person, then I can kill you. Keep your morals to yoruself. And everyone decides for themselves what a person is. See why that doesn't work?
An "independent" life eh?
"Independent" in the sense the sense that it is a separate organism with its own DNA.
Not independent in the sense that it can survive on its own.
Lets take it out of the woman and see how long it survives. You just hit the epic fail scenario.
It would make a big difference where you put it, now wouldn't it?
Lots of creatures are parasites or symbiotes or have unique environmental requirements. Next you'll be saying fleas aren't independent creatures because if you take them off the dog they rapidly starve too.
Do not, however, impose your idiotic worldview on the rest of us. Just move to a red state and live amongst your own kind.
I'm pro-choice. I said as much multiple times, Dipshit. But if society as a whole rules that fetuses are people, then they deserve to be protected.
I agree with you on pretty much every facet of this, but AFAIK there haven't been any driver debacles since pre-SP1. (if I'm wrong feel free to correct me.)
Pre SP1 of what?
If you mean that Vista, since SP1 has mostly put its driver debacle behind it, I'd agree. But the PR damage has been done.
If you mean that XP hasn't had a driver debacle since preSP1, I'd agree with that too, but for XP, it was a driver debacle that only affected home users, not businesses. Plus its been a few years, and memories are short. Nobody remembers their old samsung usb1 mp3 player/cheap parallel scanner/acer webcam/cmedia integrated sound/pcchips NIC/ etc didn't ever work with XP.
This is what passes for insightful on Slashdot these days? Seriously mods, this guy thinks Microsoft made Vista that way on purpose as some sort of genius grand plan!
Heh, not quite. Vista isn't the success Microsoft hoped for. From microsofts point of view, Vista has been a dismal marketing failure, possibly even a commercial failure - they pushed too much change all at once, and the market dug in its heels.
However, when all is said and done Vista isn't really a technical failure, and so Windows 7 isn't going in a new technical direction. So windows 7 is just going to address the market failure, which it will be able to do, since the failure of Vista was too much change too fast. Windows 7 isn't going to have much change, and is just going to build on Vista which will have already 'broken the new ground', so the strategy for 7 will likely succeed.
He says Vista isn't ME-2, but provides no reason -- except opinion -- for it. This would never have been modded-up in my day!
Vista isn't ME-2 because:
1) ME was the last of its code base and it died off; its successor was a completely different code base.
2) Vista is the first of its code base, and its successor will be little more than a refinement of it.
That pretty much makes Vista the opposite of ME.
The problem happens when they want their morals to govern everyone else's actions.
That is not generally a problem. Good laws don't restrict your actions more than are required to prevent harm to another person. Right?
ie You can do what ever you want, as long as you don't hurt another. The reason you aren't allowed to shoot someone isn't because I want to control you but because letting you do that hurts someone else. Were protecting them, not controlling you. See the difference?
This is where abortion gets tricky. If the fetus is a person, that it merits being protected from you. An anti abortion law isn't really about controlling you, as it is protecting them.
The dispute of course, is whether the fetus merits protection. If its its own person it does merit protection. If its not a person, then you should be left alone to decide for yourself what its fate will be.
To me, the mere fact of it being such a complicated issue is all the more reason why women should be able to make the individual choice for themselves.
Normally I'd agree with this. If society can't come to consensus, than it should be left to individual. However, this case has some nuances -- the first is that its a right to life case so I'm inclined to err on the side of life, even if its 'wrong'. And secondly, the life in question is an *independent* life, so the mother is not just deciding for herself, she is deciding for the new being as well. So again, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution here.
That's just me, making a moral judgement.
Despite all this I identify as pro choice without hesitation when it comes to rape, incest, medical risks, etc, and while I would vote pro choice in any ballot, I think abortion-as-birth-control or as convenience is reprehensible.
Even a healthy pregnancy is not nine months of sunshine and rainbows, and I'm not even going to mention the things birth can do to the female body.
Life after birth isn't all sunshine and rainbows either. My wife tells me that the first 6 months after our kids were born were far harder on her than the actual pregnancies themselves. Should we be allowed "post-partum abortions"? Surely not.
And as for what a pregnancy does to the body... a lot of that is more a sad reflection on society and its unrealistic, unhealthy standards of beauty than anything else. (I get that attraction to youthful beauty is to some extent hardwired in to our biology -- but the degree the obsession has reached in society is more sad than useful.)