Obviously, it would be an mmorpg that cared more about their world than they did about their money. It should be noted that we haven't yet reached any sort of saturation point with MMORPGs. Each and every new one seems to be opening with a huge influx of players, and yet, I know there are MANY players who would play these games that do not, because they aren't "right" yet.
That said, you're certainly right about the name thing, although it might help some people try to remember their setting. I think the best rule of thumb is just that a name should be something you could be born with -- ie, Jonathon would be fine, but "BoltThrower" would not be.
Of course, free-to-join, free-to-play IS NWN, and their ability to "link" servers means eventually there may be hundreds of people across dozens of servers all playing freely and under the supervision of "GMs", who can address abuses and encourage/enforce roleplay.
I still think, though, that when it gets to the point that a new MMORPG can only get players by taking them from an existing one because we reach saturation, that we may see a flight to quality by some new contenders. Certainly, I hope so.
That's called "poor game design", although traditioanlly, even MOST games which generally permit "unrestricted" killing do restrict widely-divergent kills like that, like the muds I mentioned, have an absolutely limit of at most 9 levels of difference between the would-be combatants.
Some friends and I were discussing this the other day. We were discussing how if gold/etc rewards from killing things scales up with levels, it is trivial for a high-level character to supply low levels with gear. Therefore, what should happen, is items should have wear and tear, and the wear and tear should be too expensive to repair on a too-powerful-for-your-level item. This is one key to a functional economy, since the major problem with a MMORPH economy is there is eventually infinite supply, because nothing ever is destroyed. IE, give us entropy, or give us a joke economy.
That said, people seem to have forgotten the "RP" in MMORPG. I'm waiting for a company to not only make a game like Everquest or DaoC, but enforce roleplaying so that idiots running around going, "d00d, the sword will spawn soon, let's get it!" are simply slain irrevocably and directed to read some "don't be an idiot" FAQ. Of course, this is the good thing about Neverwinter Nights -- it will form communities that do just this, and without the profit motive that Verant/et al have to permit any player, regardless of their crappy roleplaying. The sale of items, and more so characters, completely undermines the RP in a MMORPG. You should, over time, get to know what a person behaves like -- are they aggressive, generous, noble, etc? Of course, if they actually made a balanced game, then they could take an important step: permitting unwanted PKs to occur anyhow. A game isn't "competitive" if players can't compete against each other in a meaningful way. Racing to a certain level is not meaningful, because it indicates nothing more than time available to play. Best equipment? normally the same. But if players can take things from other players by force, killing them against their will -- that's different. Now its a fight to survive, a hunt to kill people off, etc, and you wrap that up with excellent roleplay, and its an unbeatable blast. Several muds do it well -- for example, Avendar or Carrion Fields. This REQUIRES some sort of active enforcement. Not a lot, but some, because it is important to not let the game be ruined by non-roleplayed mass murder, especially aganist the helpless/uninvolved, just for kicks (this was a serious issue with UO).
Most bugs that show up for redhat or any other linux distribution will NOT affect a well-secured machine in the first place. If you plan, for example, a standard web or database server, you're only going to permit ssh and apache or ssh and your brand of sql. How many vulnerabilities in the past year have been on those services? Practically none. Only 1 in ssh, and there was AMPLE warning to get patched before exploits were in the wild. The majority of bugs are for packages not often deployed, or not relevent to a server system where there is no user access.
Meanwhile, an enormous number of these linux bugs are irrelevent on a firewalled system, never mind the incompetency of sysadmins. A firewall will protect your X font server or your installed-by-default nfsd/statd, but Microsoft has had many high-profile, extremely-widely-abused holes in a server's primary services (IIS, MS-SQL, etc).
Anyhow, trying to say these statistics show that NT is more secure than Linux is not only irresponsible but absurd.
I hope you're in the minority, because I'd much rather have BG2 than a bunch of smaller episodes. The game would just lack its epic feel without its enormity -- although it should be added you can complete BG2 in 40 hrs or less if you stick to the core path. In fact, if you picked the right NPCs, you might be able to finish it in a single sitting if you know exactly how to shave time off. (Buy Balduran's shield to decimate the beholder caves, etc, run the trademeet quest to get your gold for the shadow thieves, etc)
Anyhow, you're in luck -- NWN has an official campaign broken into 4 parts, and then the variety of user-created content is likely to be astonishing. Whether you want a 3-hr vignette or an 80-hr epic quest, you'll get it. It is probably the best idea to hit RPGs EVER, and I hope they continue to release new content/tile sets/etc to keep it fresh.
I can't directly argue that, since I'm very unfamiliar with the methodology behind either linux OR sun SMP features. I can say, however, that almost all applications I've used on both platforms when utilizing them as servers have inevitably run more smoothly and with better price/performance under linux. While I've used multi-processor suns, I have yet to utilize a multiprocessor linux box, so it is hard to make a comparison there, although I've always read heartening things about the linux SMP design that made me think it was well thought out and should be effective.
I was aware that Solaris' IP stack, which was supposedly a derivative of the powerful/robust Mentat Portable Streams, was superior to Linux's, at least until the 2.4 kernel, but that should have changed in 2.4.X.
Anyhow, poor hardware support? Obviously if sun spent their time improving linux for SPARC instead of building Solaris, that would change immediately.
You'd have to cite more specifics otherwise to convince me (or probably most people who've used solaris and linux extensively, and prefer the latter). I've deployed hundreds of sun servers (mostly as firewalls, but many as mail/dns/web/etc servers) in my short career, and was an intern at Sun one summer as well. I've been much happier with my linux servers, even before the 2.4.x enhancements. What, more specifically, is so deficient in linux?
Better to make Sol-x86 or soffice?
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You're dead on. Sun's primarily business is hardware. So making an x86 port of solaris seems silly when they could spend the money/manpower of improving what is their best chance in the longrun -- staroffice -- of breaking microsoft's deathgrip. In fact, I'm a bit surprised they even want to make Solaris. Sun has the support capabilities to roadmap an end of life for Solaris and plan to release linux instead, and they could spend their time tuning linux for sparc processors. Solaris already has a lot of POSIX compliance (like its own pthreads library), and even sun sysadmins would take to linux -- I'd say Solaris and Linux feel like closer cousins from an administrators point of view than Linux and BSD.
I was a longtime sr. security architect at a NSP with security services ranked highly by Gartner. One thing I know from interaction with hundreds of customers is that they are interested in your assurances far more than the products you use. We had occasion from time to time to shift vendors, and the customers did follow. There are plus and minus points to everything. The real market isn't for an appliance, but for services sold month-to-month or year-by-year which implement traditional security methods (firewalling, vuln. analysis, IDS, etc) using free software. Instead of saying, "trust this software", you simply say, "We use best-of-breed tools" and you use YOUR reputation to back them.
This isn't all that common yet, although nessus is making a lot of headway being used commercially. It will be more common, though, if the OSS alternatives remain ahead of the curve in development (and eventually probably get funding).
A friend of mine raves about his nomad (although bemoans a lack of belt clips). I was pondering getting one, but I have to ask: why should I buy one that has SDMI anything at all? I certainly don't want my music restricted. I really don't even want people to thinkthe players that are compliant are widespread, because I want mp3s, not some funky SDMI-encoded file.
There was a law proposed a while back which would make unpatentable anything which merely moved a brick&mortar process into the online world. Things such as shopping carts and referral programs would, in most of their forms, be unpatentable. However, that law did not, AFAIK, pass, and therefore technically a network-ified version of even ancient processes might be patentable.
Even if the "demo" clip from the Stanford professor wasn't prior art, I don't think even a victory against prodigy is going to cause, say, Microsoft, to license the technology, and if M$ can beat the DOJ, they can beat BT in court. And M$ was using hyperlinks in their help system even before the Internet was popularized, so they're double-guilty of the violation.
No one, least of all me, said that a non-exec stack was all you needed to keep a box safe. However, it is still useful to have, and contains a variety of other useful patches, just as restricted access to/proc and some things to avoid games in/tmp, like symlinks to other system files, etc. Nonetheless, there's also such a plethora of buffer overruns available, and they are still common, probably because there is so much "example" code available, and smashing the stack is easier to code than trying to heap overrun malloc'd values or whatever a would-be exploiter might choose to do. Furthermore, many exploits that make it into the wild begin as proof-of-concepts, and therefore START as buffer overflows, since the writer has no intention of cracking anything. Several buffer exploits have been out in 2001. If you buy yourself any extra time, it is a patch well-applied, and the other features may be useful depending on the system.
Alternately, a lock on your house door won't protect you from a burglar (the *only* entry that a lock will stop is a standard check-for-open-door entry, in case you didn't know), so you can have a lock on your door, as long as Assumption #0 is that the lock won't even slow down a burglar.
According to openwall, the non-exec stack and other security patches so useful in 2.0.x and 2.2.x are finally on the way to 2.4.x, giving you that extra bit of protection. Of course, it looks like it will have its own beta period, but those patches protected my 2.0.x box for quite a while from 0-day exploits, and let it manage a full year of uptime at one point despite dozens of users and a bunch of services (including the ever-dangerous wu-ftpd).
C.S. Lewis was very much a Christian author, and most of his works were non-fiction. The Chronicles of Narnia are very much Christian allegory, as you'll note Aslan (the Jesus-figure) breathing life back into statues, and in later books having his mane shorn (crown of thorns) before being killed and resurrected.
While Tolkein is far less obvious, because he wasn't a well-known Christian non-fiction writer as Lewis, there are similar themes. Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White after being killed, most notably, but a lot of other themes can be drawn -- such as the tools of evil not being able to be used for good purpose (the ring subverts). I doubt it was intentional in his case, and is merely shared mythology, you might say, whereas with C.S. Lewis, it is likely very planned.
I had the same problem in school -- I even flunked out, not because I couldn't handle the cirriculum (in fact, it was trivially easy), but because I just didn't care. I didn't see the point of most of it. Once in the real world, I excelled because I did care, because I knew that the businesses I worked in had goals and reasons and I understood them and agreed with them and I could innovate and create and see my work rewarded with more than a letter grade.
Work is much more fun than school. School is like work with training wheels. As for the things that burn people out (bad managers, shitty legacy code, etc), well, find something else do to where you don't deal with those. There are amazing examples of good coders who tackled niche markets with products they made solo and have a living off selling and maintaining a single piece of software, alone. Some people thrive on revamping old code, or fixing architectures, some people enjoy solutions in niche markets. Etc.
I've been using Linux since 1996 as a server, but didn't switch my primary desktop use to it until 1999. (Enlightenment: too cool to pass up, and staroffice could spawn attachments from inside mutt). But there are more people that you know. I was on a flight a while back, from Austin to San Jose, maybe a year or 18 months ago, and some guy sitting next to me booted up...gnome! I started talking to him about it, and learned he was the founder of a EE firm that was doing advanced package design (package, in this parlance, being the EE work of designing a chip), and the whole firm was on Linux, using gnome, and doing their design in xfig, and he thought it was saving them a ton of money, not only in hardware (not buying win*, visio, etc), but in TCO, saying they had a lot less problems, etc.
Is that typical? Probably not. Meanwhile, I love my linux box and its infinite flexibility. Because I interact with so many other heterogenous environments, the fact that I have all the power of the linux kernel (ever use iproute2?) at my fingertips, along with the security of not being constantly under assault by viruses and having built-in firewalling, means that I get more done in less time. One would figure that EE exec thought the same.
The author of the original article complained about StarOffice -- but I'm the end user. I type on it, I print it or mail it, and I've never noticed any problems. The people I know maintaining high quality web sites don't do it with Word, that's for sure.
Certainly, some things have a ways to go. The Gimp is cool, I use it, but I know photoshop is simply easier/more powerful, especially for a novice. And I have a $2000 windows box just so I can play games. If there was just one MUST HAVE game that only ran under linux, it would turn the whole PC market on its head. Everyone would be getting at least a dual boot running to play it, and then there would suddenly be a huge untapped market for linux apps -- if the OSS alternatives didn't meet the need, commercial developers might come in. Photoshop for linux anyone?
The fact that there's all this open source driver code helps make other OS's possible, and also helps make them more usable (in case you need a new driver for the niche OS). The contribution of a device driver writer for linux is obvious when you get your linux distro and have the device; but there is a big secondary benefit in the way they help contribute knowledge that can be used by others on other projects.
I already tend to badger my own representatives in congress over anything offense, like the SSSCA, etc. But I don't feel like I'm making enough of a difference. What's the best way to really impact the thought process of a congressperson to persuade them to take my viewpoint on an issue? Does the best methodology change if I have money?
Despite all the raving about how easy it is to cheat, I've run across one, and only one, person cheating at quake in a year of playing it now. Given that I don't generally lose in games at large on the net, only when playing on unadvertised pro or wannabe-pro servers, I tend to notice when people win 'artificially'.
Let's not forget about Dave Matthews Band. They had the foresight to pass on several offers from record companies because they wanted one of them to guarantee them the right to allow their fans to record concerts and swap songs. For that reason, while I have not bought a new CD in months, and don't intend to, I will make a small exception to my boycott and buy them -- assuming they don't allow copy protection to be foisted off on their CDs, in which case, I'll have to take a pass on that, too, since I almost exclusively listen to them on my box while working.
Am I bad for business? I've bought every album, some more than once because of mishap, plus their bio CD and a pair of DVDs (one was videos, one was a concert). I've also been to two of their concerts and would gladly go to another, and snap up their professionally recorded live albums eagerly.
All they'd have to do is hide no-backdoor encrypted messages within backdoor-encrypted messages, and it would be undetected unless Carnivore automatically decrypted all messages, which conflicts with what the lawmakers are saying -- "only under the oversight of a court".
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote my own review a while back of netflix, and there were some other comments when someone asked about it. See it here.
Obviously, it would be an mmorpg that cared more about their world than they did about their money. It should be noted that we haven't yet reached any sort of saturation point with MMORPGs. Each and every new one seems to be opening with a huge influx of players, and yet, I know there are MANY players who would play these games that do not, because they aren't "right" yet.
That said, you're certainly right about the name thing, although it might help some people try to remember their setting. I think the best rule of thumb is just that a name should be something you could be born with -- ie, Jonathon would be fine, but "BoltThrower" would not be.
Of course, free-to-join, free-to-play IS NWN, and their ability to "link" servers means eventually there may be hundreds of people across dozens of servers all playing freely and under the supervision of "GMs", who can address abuses and encourage/enforce roleplay.
I still think, though, that when it gets to the point that a new MMORPG can only get players by taking them from an existing one because we reach saturation, that we may see a flight to quality by some new contenders. Certainly, I hope so.
That's called "poor game design", although traditioanlly, even MOST games which generally permit "unrestricted" killing do restrict widely-divergent kills like that, like the muds I mentioned, have an absolutely limit of at most 9 levels of difference between the would-be combatants.
Some friends and I were discussing this the other day. We were discussing how if gold/etc rewards from killing things scales up with levels, it is trivial for a high-level character to supply low levels with gear. Therefore, what should happen, is items should have wear and tear, and the wear and tear should be too expensive to repair on a too-powerful-for-your-level item. This is one key to a functional economy, since the major problem with a MMORPH economy is there is eventually infinite supply, because nothing ever is destroyed. IE, give us entropy, or give us a joke economy.
That said, people seem to have forgotten the "RP" in MMORPG. I'm waiting for a company to not only make a game like Everquest or DaoC, but enforce roleplaying so that idiots running around going, "d00d, the sword will spawn soon, let's get it!" are simply slain irrevocably and directed to read some "don't be an idiot" FAQ. Of course, this is the good thing about Neverwinter Nights -- it will form communities that do just this, and without the profit motive that Verant/et al have to permit any player, regardless of their crappy roleplaying. The sale of items, and more so characters, completely undermines the RP in a MMORPG. You should, over time, get to know what a person behaves like -- are they aggressive, generous, noble, etc? Of course, if they actually made a balanced game, then they could take an important step: permitting unwanted PKs to occur anyhow. A game isn't "competitive" if players can't compete against each other in a meaningful way. Racing to a certain level is not meaningful, because it indicates nothing more than time available to play. Best equipment? normally the same. But if players can take things from other players by force, killing them against their will -- that's different. Now its a fight to survive, a hunt to kill people off, etc, and you wrap that up with excellent roleplay, and its an unbeatable blast. Several muds do it well -- for example, Avendar or Carrion Fields. This REQUIRES some sort of active enforcement. Not a lot, but some, because it is important to not let the game be ruined by non-roleplayed mass murder, especially aganist the helpless/uninvolved, just for kicks (this was a serious issue with UO).
It gets worse than that. Let's consider:
Most bugs that show up for redhat or any other linux distribution will NOT affect a well-secured machine in the first place. If you plan, for example, a standard web or database server, you're only going to permit ssh and apache or ssh and your brand of sql. How many vulnerabilities in the past year have been on those services? Practically none. Only 1 in ssh, and there was AMPLE warning to get patched before exploits were in the wild. The majority of bugs are for packages not often deployed, or not relevent to a server system where there is no user access.
Meanwhile, an enormous number of these linux bugs are irrelevent on a firewalled system, never mind the incompetency of sysadmins. A firewall will protect your X font server or your installed-by-default nfsd/statd, but Microsoft has had many high-profile, extremely-widely-abused holes in a server's primary services (IIS, MS-SQL, etc).
Anyhow, trying to say these statistics show that NT is more secure than Linux is not only irresponsible but absurd.
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
Just a gzip'd 640x480 xpm, trivial to replace. VERY cool.
I hope you're in the minority, because I'd much rather have BG2 than a bunch of smaller episodes. The game would just lack its epic feel without its enormity -- although it should be added you can complete BG2 in 40 hrs or less if you stick to the core path. In fact, if you picked the right NPCs, you might be able to finish it in a single sitting if you know exactly how to shave time off. (Buy Balduran's shield to decimate the beholder caves, etc, run the trademeet quest to get your gold for the shadow thieves, etc)
Anyhow, you're in luck -- NWN has an official campaign broken into 4 parts, and then the variety of user-created content is likely to be astonishing. Whether you want a 3-hr vignette or an 80-hr epic quest, you'll get it. It is probably the best idea to hit RPGs EVER, and I hope they continue to release new content/tile sets/etc to keep it fresh.
I can't directly argue that, since I'm very unfamiliar with the methodology behind either linux OR sun SMP features. I can say, however, that almost all applications I've used on both platforms when utilizing them as servers have inevitably run more smoothly and with better price/performance under linux. While I've used multi-processor suns, I have yet to utilize a multiprocessor linux box, so it is hard to make a comparison there, although I've always read heartening things about the linux SMP design that made me think it was well thought out and should be effective.
I was aware that Solaris' IP stack, which was supposedly a derivative of the powerful/robust Mentat Portable Streams, was superior to Linux's, at least until the 2.4 kernel, but that should have changed in 2.4.X.
Anyhow, poor hardware support? Obviously if sun spent their time improving linux for SPARC instead of building Solaris, that would change immediately.
You'd have to cite more specifics otherwise to convince me (or probably most people who've used solaris and linux extensively, and prefer the latter). I've deployed hundreds of sun servers (mostly as firewalls, but many as mail/dns/web/etc servers) in my short career, and was an intern at Sun one summer as well. I've been much happier with my linux servers, even before the 2.4.x enhancements. What, more specifically, is so deficient in linux?
You're dead on. Sun's primarily business is hardware. So making an x86 port of solaris seems silly when they could spend the money/manpower of improving what is their best chance in the longrun -- staroffice -- of breaking microsoft's deathgrip. In fact, I'm a bit surprised they even want to make Solaris. Sun has the support capabilities to roadmap an end of life for Solaris and plan to release linux instead, and they could spend their time tuning linux for sparc processors. Solaris already has a lot of POSIX compliance (like its own pthreads library), and even sun sysadmins would take to linux -- I'd say Solaris and Linux feel like closer cousins from an administrators point of view than Linux and BSD.
I was a longtime sr. security architect at a NSP with security services ranked highly by Gartner. One thing I know from interaction with hundreds of customers is that they are interested in your assurances far more than the products you use. We had occasion from time to time to shift vendors, and the customers did follow. There are plus and minus points to everything. The real market isn't for an appliance, but for services sold month-to-month or year-by-year which implement traditional security methods (firewalling, vuln. analysis, IDS, etc) using free software. Instead of saying, "trust this software", you simply say, "We use best-of-breed tools" and you use YOUR reputation to back them.
This isn't all that common yet, although nessus is making a lot of headway being used commercially. It will be more common, though, if the OSS alternatives remain ahead of the curve in development (and eventually probably get funding).
A friend of mine raves about his nomad (although bemoans a lack of belt clips). I was pondering getting one, but I have to ask: why should I buy one that has SDMI anything at all? I certainly don't want my music restricted. I really don't even want people to thinkthe players that are compliant are widespread, because I want mp3s, not some funky SDMI-encoded file.
There was a law proposed a while back which would make unpatentable anything which merely moved a brick&mortar process into the online world. Things such as shopping carts and referral programs would, in most of their forms, be unpatentable. However, that law did not, AFAIK, pass, and therefore technically a network-ified version of even ancient processes might be patentable.
Even if the "demo" clip from the Stanford professor wasn't prior art, I don't think even a victory against prodigy is going to cause, say, Microsoft, to license the technology, and if M$ can beat the DOJ, they can beat BT in court. And M$ was using hyperlinks in their help system even before the Internet was popularized, so they're double-guilty of the violation.
No one, least of all me, said that a non-exec stack was all you needed to keep a box safe. However, it is still useful to have, and contains a variety of other useful patches, just as restricted access to /proc and some things to avoid games in /tmp, like symlinks to other system files, etc. Nonetheless, there's also such a plethora of buffer overruns available, and they are still common, probably because there is so much "example" code available, and smashing the stack is easier to code than trying to heap overrun malloc'd values or whatever a would-be exploiter might choose to do. Furthermore, many exploits that make it into the wild begin as proof-of-concepts, and therefore START as buffer overflows, since the writer has no intention of cracking anything. Several buffer exploits have been out in 2001. If you buy yourself any extra time, it is a patch well-applied, and the other features may be useful depending on the system.
Alternately, a lock on your house door won't protect you from a burglar (the *only* entry that a lock will stop is a standard check-for-open-door entry, in case you didn't know), so you can have a lock on your door, as long as Assumption #0 is that the lock won't even slow down a burglar.
According to openwall, the non-exec stack and other security patches so useful in 2.0.x and 2.2.x are finally on the way to 2.4.x, giving you that extra bit of protection. Of course, it looks like it will have its own beta period, but those patches protected my 2.0.x box for quite a while from 0-day exploits, and let it manage a full year of uptime at one point despite dozens of users and a bunch of services (including the ever-dangerous wu-ftpd).
C.S. Lewis was very much a Christian author, and most of his works were non-fiction. The Chronicles of Narnia are very much Christian allegory, as you'll note Aslan (the Jesus-figure) breathing life back into statues, and in later books having his mane shorn (crown of thorns) before being killed and resurrected.
While Tolkein is far less obvious, because he wasn't a well-known Christian non-fiction writer as Lewis, there are similar themes. Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White after being killed, most notably, but a lot of other themes can be drawn -- such as the tools of evil not being able to be used for good purpose (the ring subverts). I doubt it was intentional in his case, and is merely shared mythology, you might say, whereas with C.S. Lewis, it is likely very planned.
I had the same problem in school -- I even flunked out, not because I couldn't handle the cirriculum (in fact, it was trivially easy), but because I just didn't care. I didn't see the point of most of it. Once in the real world, I excelled because I did care, because I knew that the businesses I worked in had goals and reasons and I understood them and agreed with them and I could innovate and create and see my work rewarded with more than a letter grade.
Work is much more fun than school. School is like work with training wheels. As for the things that burn people out (bad managers, shitty legacy code, etc), well, find something else do to where you don't deal with those. There are amazing examples of good coders who tackled niche markets with products they made solo and have a living off selling and maintaining a single piece of software, alone. Some people thrive on revamping old code, or fixing architectures, some people enjoy solutions in niche markets. Etc.
Keep in mind, Lucas has said he won't be making 7-9 into movies. (ostensibly, he's too old)
me no think fans of original be liking dumbed down sequels. methinks second-run matinee for AOTC (at best).
I've been using Linux since 1996 as a server, but didn't switch my primary desktop use to it until 1999. (Enlightenment: too cool to pass up, and staroffice could spawn attachments from inside mutt). But there are more people that you know. I was on a flight a while back, from Austin to San Jose, maybe a year or 18 months ago, and some guy sitting next to me booted up...gnome! I started talking to him about it, and learned he was the founder of a EE firm that was doing advanced package design (package, in this parlance, being the EE work of designing a chip), and the whole firm was on Linux, using gnome, and doing their design in xfig, and he thought it was saving them a ton of money, not only in hardware (not buying win*, visio, etc), but in TCO, saying they had a lot less problems, etc.
Is that typical? Probably not. Meanwhile, I love my linux box and its infinite flexibility. Because I interact with so many other heterogenous environments, the fact that I have all the power of the linux kernel (ever use iproute2?) at my fingertips, along with the security of not being constantly under assault by viruses and having built-in firewalling, means that I get more done in less time. One would figure that EE exec thought the same.
The author of the original article complained about StarOffice -- but I'm the end user. I type on it, I print it or mail it, and I've never noticed any problems. The people I know maintaining high quality web sites don't do it with Word, that's for sure.
Certainly, some things have a ways to go. The Gimp is cool, I use it, but I know photoshop is simply easier/more powerful, especially for a novice. And I have a $2000 windows box just so I can play games. If there was just one MUST HAVE game that only ran under linux, it would turn the whole PC market on its head. Everyone would be getting at least a dual boot running to play it, and then there would suddenly be a huge untapped market for linux apps -- if the OSS alternatives didn't meet the need, commercial developers might come in. Photoshop for linux anyone?
The fact that there's all this open source driver code helps make other OS's possible, and also helps make them more usable (in case you need a new driver for the niche OS). The contribution of a device driver writer for linux is obvious when you get your linux distro and have the device; but there is a big secondary benefit in the way they help contribute knowledge that can be used by others on other projects.
I already tend to badger my own representatives in congress over anything offense, like the SSSCA, etc. But I don't feel like I'm making enough of a difference. What's the best way to really impact the thought process of a congressperson to persuade them to take my viewpoint on an issue? Does the best methodology change if I have money?
Once you get the 'dot' TLD, you can finally move slashdot to slashdot.dot. That will be even more fun to say around the uninitiated.
Despite all the raving about how easy it is to cheat, I've run across one, and only one, person cheating at quake in a year of playing it now. Given that I don't generally lose in games at large on the net, only when playing on unadvertised pro or wannabe-pro servers, I tend to notice when people win 'artificially'.
Let's not forget about Dave Matthews Band. They had the foresight to pass on several offers from record companies because they wanted one of them to guarantee them the right to allow their fans to record concerts and swap songs. For that reason, while I have not bought a new CD in months, and don't intend to, I will make a small exception to my boycott and buy them -- assuming they don't allow copy protection to be foisted off on their CDs, in which case, I'll have to take a pass on that, too, since I almost exclusively listen to them on my box while working.
Am I bad for business? I've bought every album, some more than once because of mishap, plus their bio CD and a pair of DVDs (one was videos, one was a concert). I've also been to two of their concerts and would gladly go to another, and snap up their professionally recorded live albums eagerly.
All they'd have to do is hide no-backdoor encrypted messages within backdoor-encrypted messages, and it would be undetected unless Carnivore automatically decrypted all messages, which conflicts with what the lawmakers are saying -- "only under the oversight of a court".