Instead Microsoft tried to cram everything but the kicthen sink into their bloated piece of shit, and then had it sink its cancerous roots into the entire OS while trying to circumvent the W3C by implementing their own psuedo HTML (and let's not even talk about the nightmare that is Active X).
Netscape lost because they got fat and lazy while Bill sank millions and millions of dollars into the bottomless pit and waited for them to bleed to death first. Just like the USA did to the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Many of you are missing the point. The point is that if this goes over and no one objects then soon all of our games will be stuffed with ads and product placements. Do yuo really want to be killing imps in Nike shoes? Nazi soldiers lobbing grenades painted like Pepsi cans? Imperial storm troopers in Tommy Hifliger (SP?) pants? Penguins in Victoria's Secret lingerie (wait, I retract that last one, some of you might!)?
At what point do we say enough is enough? Are we so inundated by advertisements that we can't even see them anymore?
Where I live billboards are banned. They do not exist. Every time I go to California I am reminded of the unholy blight those damned things are. Games have been one of teh few types of entertainment I've been able to get away from the pervasive flood of advertisements and I'm resentful that these people are trying to take that away from me.
To those of you willing to put up with ads to keep the cost down I ask this: How far are you willing to let them go? Do any of you rememebr the album bu Zig Zig Sputnik (sp?) with commercials between the tracks? Is that what you want the world to be reduced to: every possible medium to be exploited by advertising? How much spam would you be willing to put up with to keep the cost of your email down?
I really do. I don't pay money to have ads shived down my throat. I don't like product placement in my movies, TV shows or games. Maybe it comes from living in a place where billboards are BANNED and I can actually see the world around me. Or maybe it's because I do not being treated as little more than a consumer whore bred to feed the machines.
Here's a free whack on the head with a Clue Stick: most people won't care. Most customers don't get anywhere near their bandwidth limits unless their teen-aged kids are downloading porn or gigs of MP3s all day and night.
You want to watch TV, get a damned TV and turn it on when what you want to watch is on. Your programming not on when you want to watch? Get a Tiivo or a VCR. Why watch crappy 1/2 scale DivXes of "Love Boat" anyway?
Here's your vocabulary word of the day: "TANSTAAFL" Look iit up.
It's like cable TV: No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive. Not the Federal Hiighway Commission, but state a local governments. Ever hear of toll roads? How about taxes on your gasoline? Guess what they get used to pay for? That's right: roads.
And as for this: Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over, I really don't know what to say. I'm speechless.
I have capped internet, 512K down, 128K up, 10GB a month bandwidth limit. I'm on the Net at least four hours a day and I have never once even hit 80% of my bandwidth limit. It absolutely flumoxes me to think of what those people out there sucking down 30-40GB a month are doing to eat that much bandwidth.
Lego had/has a line for really small tykes called Duplo. They are quite huge.
Though, I think you are referring to even bigger blocks. Yeah, I think I rememeber those. And those giant Tinker Toys. Made a 5-foot tall robot out of giant Tiinker Toys when I was in the third grade.
I play a lot of games. Windows has the highest number of game titles.
I Already have all of the tools I need running under Windows and I do not feel like spending the time learning to use analogs of those tools in another OS.
I know my way around Windows well enough to do the administration I need to do. I don't feel like throwing all that knowledge away.
I can't afford a system that can run Mac OSX at a reasonable speed.
I do not like *nix. I like it for its technical aspects and its power, but administering it gives me headaches.
I do not like KDE or Gnome.
All that being said I am no fan of Microsoft's business practices. I do not use most MS products other than the OSes. I use the computer and OS to run the applications I want to run. I am not an OS hobbiest who uses the computer in order to use a particular OS.
Keep it open, stupid. The barrier to entry is very high for Xbox development. Do you really want to play Ken's Laberynth or Morraff's World on your XBox? AAA and AA games cost way too much money for basement hobbiests to produce. MS doesn't want an avalanche of crap titles for their system. The cost of entry is high to keep all but the serious out.
Buck the content industry. Excuse me? Have you been paying attention to the whole DRM hysteria with Windows Media PLayer? Do you think Microsoft, of all people, would disable region encoding? MS is four-square in the regional control camp, both for games and media.
Focus on getting better games. That is in direct conflict with your first point. Hentai games? Are you serious? Look at the hoohaw raised about that BMX title with bare breasts in it! Do you honestly think MS is going to go for Hentai? Be realisitc.
Microsoft needs to switch to AMD or Transmeta chips. They can't. Xboxes are not PCs. The specs can not be changed. Ever. Every Xbox must have (within very narrow tolerances) the exact same perfomrance as every other unit. That is the strength of the console: the fixed platform. You make major changes to such critical systems as the CPU and you screw the pooch in very serious ways. And as someone else ointed out, AMD chips are hotter than Intel and Transmeta (and VIA) chips do not have the same horsepower.
What Microsoft needs to do is light some big bonfires under the asses of some of their developers to get their shit together and get their games out. Malice is a year late and other anticipated titles will be missing this holiday season.
MS recently started a new bundle of an XBox, JSRF , Controller S and the DVD remote for US $250.00 (or very close to that) and sales have already jumped.
The XBox is a rather expensive DVD player. US $200.00 plus US $39.00 for the DVD remote. You can get a perfectly good DVD player from CostCo/Sams/whatever for $79.00.
Did you look at the numbers? Do you really think that you are going to "fsck it to microsoft" (If you want to say "fuck" then say "fuck", Jesus!) by buying an XBox and running Linux on it? They are reporting a loss of $177,000,000.00 on revenues of over $500,000,000.00 with an estimated department budget in the billions of dollars over the next five years!
You might as well try to kill a blue whale with a Nerf bat for all the good your little act will do.
If you want to buy an XBox because you wan to tuen the worlds most powerfull (spec-wise) console into a crappy (spec-wise) and unubradable PC then have at it. If you want to hack an XBox for the fun of hacking something, go for it. But doing it to "stick it to the Man" is just pathetic.
Why bother. all you are doing is padding their sales numbers and reducing the greater loss they would suffer if that XBox sat unsold in some wearhouse somewhere.
Since I moved to Opera I've not had to deal with any Gators or other crap like that. Opera Beta 7.0 is really nice (once you get used to it) and is worth the money, IMHO.
So Dragon's Lair is old? Is it fun? That's the only thing that matters. So it doesn't use all of the eye candy special effects that the XBox can produce? Special effects won't make a bad game better and lack of special effects won't make a good game bad (badly done effects are a different matter but I digress).
Personally, I am glad that they are making oilder games available for consoles. One of the most played games in my house is the Atari Archive Pack (Asteroids, Tempest, etc...) on my Dreamcast. None of these games use any 3D (hell, most of them barely use color!) but they are all fun and that is all that matters.
Should public money be used for building nuclear bombs? Should public money be used to perform painful and life-threatening experiments on animals? Should public money be used to create lasers that can blind hundreds of people at once? Public money gets used to pay for lots of things I don't like. That's one of the prices you pay for living in a society where not everyone has the same set of values.
Anybody reading slashdot should know that this is pure spin.
Anyone reading/. knows that is false. Filter software (all of it) has a long and sordid history of blocking all kinds of things that should not be blocked. And why should the librarian be forced to unlock your site for you? He/She's got enough to do as it is.
But it's not irresponsible to let your child go to the library.
It is if you are not supervising them and they are not of an age where you trust them to do The Right Thing(TM). You (and your wife/partner/whatever) are ultimately responcible for your child. No one else. If you do not take the responcibility to keep your child safe then you have failed in your job as a parent. The library is not a free babysitting service and many have rules against unsupervised children. Thankfully they ignore that rule so your precious child does not have to stand outside in the freezing rain because you can't be bothered to take the time out of your oh so busy day and do your job as a parent.
Despite what the ALA and ACLU say, porn is not information. Nor is it "art" or "speech".
To you, this is true. But this is not true for everyone else and I resent you forcing your view down my thraot.
Yes, it is your duty to make sure your children are not exposed to material you deem offensive. It is not the duty of the library to do it for you. You are the parent, your children's lives are your responcibility. Not mine, not the libraries, not anybody but yours.
As the husband of a Librarian I can tell you that you never, ever, just drop your children off at the library. Ever. Most libraries have rules against this (though they are often ignored so the abandoned tykes don't have to stand out in the rain like The Little Match Girl and freeze to death as their uncaring parents browse Ikea or The Gap). The Library is not a free baby sitter and should not be thought of as such.
And consider that in many cities libraries are frequented not just by those who want to learn and read, but also by the local nutjobs and basket cases as the library is one of the few warm and dry public places they can go and loiter without the need to spend money. You should talk to your local librarians about the wierd shit that goes on in libraries. It can get pretty scary.
As to your last point: TOUGH SHIT! They're your kids. Your "free time" was lost the day the first one was born. Your life is not yours anymore. Don't like it? Too bad, You shouldn't have had kids. Parenting is not a part-time job. It is the rest of your life.
(I'll bet dollars to donuts anybody who was browsing hardcore porn on a library computer would quickly find his access to said computer cut off)
Sorry, but that's just not the way it works. My wife works for the local city library and people are constantly looking at hard core porn there. Their solution? Bury the moniters in the desk so that only the person using the workstation can see the screen.
Libraries don't want to know what you are looking at. Most don't even keep any records of who uses them anymore. What they don't know they can't be compelled to tell the FBI under the Patriot Act.
School libraries might have different policies, but municipal public libraries, for the most part, are not interested in knowing what you do on their internet terminals.
I mean, really, who the hell cares? You can not create anything in a vacuum anymore. No matter how hard you try, you can not help but be influenced by things, ideas, places, people, etc... that already exists, often without you even knowing about it.
Copying work without the owners permission is theft. No amount of self-serving rationalizations will change that. You are not stealing your friend's cd of the Back Street Boys when copy it, but you are stealing money from the record company that owns the rights to the music (and Lance and his little friends).
Hide behind semantic hair-splitting all you want. It won't make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead Microsoft tried to cram everything but the kicthen sink into their bloated piece of shit, and then had it sink its cancerous roots into the entire OS while trying to circumvent the W3C by implementing their own psuedo HTML (and let's not even talk about the nightmare that is Active X).
Netscape lost because they got fat and lazy while Bill sank millions and millions of dollars into the bottomless pit and waited for them to bleed to death first. Just like the USA did to the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Many of you are missing the point. The point is that if this goes over and no one objects then soon all of our games will be stuffed with ads and product placements. Do yuo really want to be killing imps in Nike shoes? Nazi soldiers lobbing grenades painted like Pepsi cans? Imperial storm troopers in Tommy Hifliger (SP?) pants? Penguins in Victoria's Secret lingerie (wait, I retract that last one, some of you might!)?
At what point do we say enough is enough? Are we so inundated by advertisements that we can't even see them anymore?
Where I live billboards are banned. They do not exist. Every time I go to California I am reminded of the unholy blight those damned things are. Games have been one of teh few types of entertainment I've been able to get away from the pervasive flood of advertisements and I'm resentful that these people are trying to take that away from me.
To those of you willing to put up with ads to keep the cost down I ask this: How far are you willing to let them go? Do any of you rememebr the album bu Zig Zig Sputnik (sp?) with commercials between the tracks? Is that what you want the world to be reduced to: every possible medium to be exploited by advertising? How much spam would you be willing to put up with to keep the cost of your email down?
I really do. I don't pay money to have ads shived down my throat. I don't like product placement in my movies, TV shows or games. Maybe it comes from living in a place where billboards are BANNED and I can actually see the world around me. Or maybe it's because I do not being treated as little more than a consumer whore bred to feed the machines.
Here's a free whack on the head with a Clue Stick: most people won't care. Most customers don't get anywhere near their bandwidth limits unless their teen-aged kids are downloading porn or gigs of MP3s all day and night.
You want to watch TV, get a damned TV and turn it on when what you want to watch is on. Your programming not on when you want to watch? Get a Tiivo or a VCR. Why watch crappy 1/2 scale DivXes of "Love Boat" anyway?
Here's your vocabulary word of the day: "TANSTAAFL" Look iit up.
- It's like cable TV:
- Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
And as for this: Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over, I really don't know what to say. I'm speechless.No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions.
Not the Federal Hiighway Commission, but state a local governments. Ever hear of toll roads? How about taxes on your gasoline? Guess what they get used to pay for? That's right: roads.
I have capped internet, 512K down, 128K up, 10GB a month bandwidth limit. I'm on the Net at least four hours a day and I have never once even hit 80% of my bandwidth limit. It absolutely flumoxes me to think of what those people out there sucking down 30-40GB a month are doing to eat that much bandwidth.
Lego had/has a line for really small tykes called Duplo. They are quite huge.
Though, I think you are referring to even bigger blocks. Yeah, I think I rememeber those. And those giant Tinker Toys. Made a 5-foot tall robot out of giant Tiinker Toys when I was in the third grade.
Get a job! Then you get to buy all kinds of fun toys!
or
3: A cannister vac with a hose on the exhaust port. Works great for getting crud out of the computer.
The Leonids would be cool if they were Open Source.
Oh, not only redundant, but wrong! Boxing Day is Dec 26, not Dec 25.
Sad. So sad.
- I play a lot of games. Windows has the highest number of game titles.
- I Already have all of the tools I need running under Windows and I do not feel like spending the time learning to use analogs of those tools in another OS.
- I know my way around Windows well enough to do the administration I need to do. I don't feel like throwing all that knowledge away.
- I can't afford a system that can run Mac OSX at a reasonable speed.
- I do not like *nix. I like it for its technical aspects and its power, but administering it gives me headaches.
- I do not like KDE or Gnome.
All that being said I am no fan of Microsoft's business practices. I do not use most MS products other than the OSes. I use the computer and OS to run the applications I want to run. I am not an OS hobbiest who uses the computer in order to use a particular OS.- Keep it open, stupid. The barrier to entry is very high for Xbox development. Do you really want to play Ken's Laberynth or Morraff's World on your XBox? AAA and AA games cost way too much money for basement hobbiests to produce. MS doesn't want an avalanche of crap titles for their system. The cost of entry is high to keep all but the serious out.
- Buck the content industry. Excuse me? Have you been paying attention to the whole DRM hysteria with Windows Media PLayer? Do you think Microsoft, of all people, would disable region encoding? MS is four-square in the regional control camp, both for games and media.
- Focus on getting better games. That is in direct conflict with your first point. Hentai games? Are you serious? Look at the hoohaw raised about that BMX title with bare breasts in it! Do you honestly think MS is going to go for Hentai? Be realisitc.
- Microsoft needs to switch to AMD or Transmeta chips. They can't. Xboxes are not PCs. The specs can not be changed. Ever. Every Xbox must have (within very narrow tolerances) the exact same perfomrance as every other unit. That is the strength of the console: the fixed platform. You make major changes to such critical systems as the CPU and you screw the pooch in very serious ways. And as someone else ointed out, AMD chips are hotter than Intel and Transmeta (and VIA) chips do not have the same horsepower.
What Microsoft needs to do is light some big bonfires under the asses of some of their developers to get their shit together and get their games out. Malice is a year late and other anticipated titles will be missing this holiday season.MS recently started a new bundle of an XBox, JSRF , Controller S and the DVD remote for US $250.00 (or very close to that) and sales have already jumped.
The XBox is a rather expensive DVD player. US $200.00 plus US $39.00 for the DVD remote. You can get a perfectly good DVD player from CostCo/Sams/whatever for $79.00.
- Your numbers are suspect. Recent estimates place the loss for each console sold at about $40.00 US.
- They loose even more money, the entire cost of the unit, for every XBox rotting unsold in a wearhouse.
Save your money to buy something you actually want rather than using it to reduce The Beasts losses.Did you look at the numbers? Do you really think that you are going to "fsck it to microsoft" (If you want to say "fuck" then say "fuck", Jesus!) by buying an XBox and running Linux on it? They are reporting a loss of $177,000,000.00 on revenues of over $500,000,000.00 with an estimated department budget in the billions of dollars over the next five years!
You might as well try to kill a blue whale with a Nerf bat for all the good your little act will do.
If you want to buy an XBox because you wan to tuen the worlds most powerfull (spec-wise) console into a crappy (spec-wise) and unubradable PC then have at it. If you want to hack an XBox for the fun of hacking something, go for it. But doing it to "stick it to the Man" is just pathetic.
Why bother. all you are doing is padding their sales numbers and reducing the greater loss they would suffer if that XBox sat unsold in some wearhouse somewhere.
Quite a few people don't know this simple fact. And it's not because they're stupid, either.
One person's "common sense" is another person's "mystery of the unknown."
Since I moved to Opera I've not had to deal with any Gators or other crap like that. Opera Beta 7.0 is really nice (once you get used to it) and is worth the money, IMHO.
With IE you really get what you pay for. Nothing.
So Dragon's Lair is old? Is it fun? That's the only thing that matters. So it doesn't use all of the eye candy special effects that the XBox can produce? Special effects won't make a bad game better and lack of special effects won't make a good game bad (badly done effects are a different matter but I digress).
Personally, I am glad that they are making oilder games available for consoles. One of the most played games in my house is the Atari Archive Pack (Asteroids, Tempest, etc...) on my Dreamcast. None of these games use any 3D (hell, most of them barely use color!) but they are all fun and that is all that matters.
Should public money be used for building nuclear bombs? Should public money be used to perform painful and life-threatening experiments on animals? Should public money be used to create lasers that can blind hundreds of people at once? Public money gets used to pay for lots of things I don't like. That's one of the prices you pay for living in a society where not everyone has the same set of values.
Anybody reading slashdot should know that this is pure spin.
Anyone reading /. knows that is false. Filter software (all of it) has a long and sordid history of blocking all kinds of things that should not be blocked. And why should the librarian be forced to unlock your site for you? He/She's got enough to do as it is.
But it's not irresponsible to let your child go to the library.
It is if you are not supervising them and they are not of an age where you trust them to do The Right Thing(TM). You (and your wife/partner/whatever) are ultimately responcible for your child. No one else. If you do not take the responcibility to keep your child safe then you have failed in your job as a parent. The library is not a free babysitting service and many have rules against unsupervised children. Thankfully they ignore that rule so your precious child does not have to stand outside in the freezing rain because you can't be bothered to take the time out of your oh so busy day and do your job as a parent.
Despite what the ALA and ACLU say, porn is not information. Nor is it "art" or "speech".
To you, this is true. But this is not true for everyone else and I resent you forcing your view down my thraot.
As the husband of a librarian, that's not funny. It happens. Often. And this has been happening long before any library had an internet terminal.
As the husband of a Librarian I can tell you that you never, ever, just drop your children off at the library. Ever. Most libraries have rules against this (though they are often ignored so the abandoned tykes don't have to stand out in the rain like The Little Match Girl and freeze to death as their uncaring parents browse Ikea or The Gap). The Library is not a free baby sitter and should not be thought of as such.
And consider that in many cities libraries are frequented not just by those who want to learn and read, but also by the local nutjobs and basket cases as the library is one of the few warm and dry public places they can go and loiter without the need to spend money. You should talk to your local librarians about the wierd shit that goes on in libraries. It can get pretty scary.
As to your last point: TOUGH SHIT! They're your kids. Your "free time" was lost the day the first one was born. Your life is not yours anymore. Don't like it? Too bad, You shouldn't have had kids. Parenting is not a part-time job. It is the rest of your life.
Sorry, but that's just not the way it works. My wife works for the local city library and people are constantly looking at hard core porn there. Their solution? Bury the moniters in the desk so that only the person using the workstation can see the screen.
Libraries don't want to know what you are looking at. Most don't even keep any records of who uses them anymore. What they don't know they can't be compelled to tell the FBI under the Patriot Act.
School libraries might have different policies, but municipal public libraries, for the most part, are not interested in knowing what you do on their internet terminals.
I mean, really, who the hell cares? You can not create anything in a vacuum anymore. No matter how hard you try, you can not help but be influenced by things, ideas, places, people, etc... that already exists, often without you even knowing about it.
Copying work without the owners permission is theft. No amount of self-serving rationalizations will change that. You are not stealing your friend's cd of the Back Street Boys when copy it, but you are stealing money from the record company that owns the rights to the music (and Lance and his little friends).
Hide behind semantic hair-splitting all you want. It won't make a difference.
There isn't a telescope built by Man* that can see any of the objects we left behind on the moon. Not even the mighty Hubble.
*Who knows what telescopes aliens might be able to do, if they actually exist and give a rat's festering rectum about us.