No kidding, they're freakin' barcodes! I've used a RFID chip to get into my workplace every day for the last 3 years and it's not giving me cancer and I'm not being trailed by men in black. It's cheaper for the company than hiring a security guard on all 14 floors, and it's handier for me to be able to get into work after hours. It's not some satan technology from hell to enslave us all, it's a fricken' barcode.
Oh shut up. We're not super-geniuses like you are.
Even if I spent the 20 minutes to read the World of Warcraft EULA (every freakin' time they make a 0.0.1 version update) what are the odds I'd be able to make heads or tails of it? They aren't written in english, and there's no point in my wasting my hour of video game time to read three hundred pages I won't understand anyway.
If you really care about people reading your license, you need to summarize it in one easy-to-understand paragraph. If you don't even take that amount of effort, then I'm just going to assume you don't care about actually communicating your point, and skip it.
Does Sony pay you? You forgot to mention your Sony digital camera and Sony portable music player which you sync with your Sony Vaio laptop while you're browsing the Sony Style store. Sony.
What are you referring to, exactly? Nothing in that interview rubbed me the wrong way... he had a little dispute with some of his former co-workers, but didn't go into details, that's not that big a deal, is it?
Question for you: Does Bill Gates' current actions forgive Microsoft's repeated illegal and unethical business practices? In other words, do the ends justify the means?
Uh, yes?
Is helping millions of people cure themselves of disease, pull their standard of living up, and become more self-reliant worth some people having to use an OS that may not have been the best choice? How is that answer not obvious to you?
When it comes down to it, Microsoft's anti-competitive practices are this: 1) Some people had to use Windows/Office even if Windows wasn't ideal for the task. (Obviously Windows/Office was good enough to complete the task, or people would have gone to OS/2 or Apple.) 2) Some technical development that may have happened due to increased competition didn't happen.
That's nothing compared to the big picture. Saving a single person's life is worth that, 30 times over. It's a ridiculous question; the fact you even need to ask it shows me you need to stop reading Slashdot and get some fresh air. Get a grip.
As for your specific proposal - everything depends on the details of implementation. If the proposal simply subsidizes slave labor, that doesn't benefit anyone.
If the average cost of living in Poorberia is $10/year and you're paying $20k, you're not "subsidizing slave labor." You're paying less than you would in, say, San Francisco where that value is closer to $50k, yes. Saying that if you pay $65k in San Francisco for the position you should also pay $65k in Poorberia is idiotic, because no businesses will take that deal-- there's no incentive.
The thing a lot of bleeding hearts don't realize is that without the incentive, there's no action. You can lecture me until your lungs deflate about global warming, but if it's cheaper for me to buy gas for my PT Cruiser than to buy a Prius, I'm not going to act on that. I might "feel" guilty, but I won't act. This is Psychology 101 stuff.
If they completely ditch backwards compatibility, they could remove all this old cruft and start again with a proper clean design, but as usual they're taking a half-assed poorly thought out approach.
What's a "proper clean design?" Is there an OS out there that doesn't contain layers and layers of hacks for 20-year-old bugs in it? The "cleanest" OS I can think of is BeOS, and it didn't succeed because it didn't run any software. Apple's running an OS kernel with a longer history than NT, and people call their OS better... is that because it's "cleaner?" In your opinion?
Firstly, for governments to "encourage" private corporations to help the poor basically means: the government should give the rich some money, and the rich will, in turn, give a fraction of that to the poor.
You're arguing that if the government just gave money away, nothing would change. Duh. If your long quoted essay is based on this argument, then I'll just skip it.
I imagine a more realistic implementation would be like this: Your company gets a tax credit for each job created in a nation with a GDP lower than $10,000. Now you have a financial incentive to build your factory in the Dominican Republic (GDP: 256). You get the same number of workers, and the local economy benefits from the added jobs, and you get a tax break in return.
One of the greatest destroyers of capitalism speaks out on how to make a better capitalism?
Can you defend this belief? In what way has Bill Gates "destroyed" capitalism? All I see is that he played the game better than most others who play the game. Capitalism is the same with or without Microsoft, just like it was the same before and after Standard Oil.
...how long before M$ starts their own MMORPG, and then finds a small company that holds a patent on something in WoW, fronts them the money to sue the pants off Blizzard, while licensing the use of the patent-holder's IP? Or just goes the easy route and sues under anti-trust?
First of all, your post is idiotic. Blizzard *sells* PCs copies of Windows for Microsoft, and Windows is more profitable than WOW is anyway. (I would guess, if you consider all factors.) And Microsoft doesn't pay Blizzard a thin cent for the marketing either.
Secondly, in addition to your post being idiotic, you're an idiot. Microsoft ran Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2 for years. They sold it to Turbine after awhile, but they ran it for a very long time as part of their MSN Gaming Zone business.
You did it totally backwards. Normal people quit when the game gets boring (i.e. end-content), and then re-up when the expansion comes out and it's not nearly as boring anymore. Then when the expansion gets boring, they quit again until the next one comes out. If the game's boring, in short, don't play it! Why should Blizzard be getting your hard-earned money for a boring game?
Unless you're one of those rare souls who can actually stand doing the same battleground 46 times, and the same dungeon raid 82 times for some extra +1 str over the next guy. Then you just sit in your basement all day and eat Cheetos.
The problem as I see it, is that they develop a game, in the lifecycle plan for the game, I am almost positive they already have a project plan for the expansion before the game is even initially released. And they release the game, with the mechanics that are designed to hopefully satisfy people till the expansion comes out. But they under estimate the users every time, within the first few months, possibly even weeks, you have groups of users that have maxed out their character level, and sure it fun getting shiny new toys for the first year, but it then becomes a chore, and is tedious, and at that point is where the game developer has failed.
They're doomed to failure. Think about it: 1) There's 100 staff creating content and millions consuming it. 2) The staff creating the content goes to work for 8 hours, the goes home. Many of those consuming it work at it for 16+ hours a day, 7 days a week. 3) Creating content is much slower than consuming content, and if you skimp, consumers complain. (You complain that Blizzard hasn't created new content quickly enough, but you'd complain even louder if they released content that wasn't fully tested to save time.)
In short, the game you want doesn't exist and *cannot* exist. Unless you're willing to accept a really crappy game with user generated content, say, Second Life, you'll just have to be disappointed.
Quick Math: 10 million * 15.00 * 12 = 1.8 billion a year + 10 million * 30 = 300 million a year for the box + expansions (I'm eyeballing this one, but Blizzard did say they wanted an expansion a year)
$2.1 billion. Not bad for a single game! Maybe someone more in-tune with the WoW world can tighten up my estimate of the price of the box + expansions. How much up front? How much for expansions? How frequently?
Good thing Blizzard doesn't have any payroll and gets servers and bandwidth for free from the Server Fairy!
Remember that slog in the original game when you hit about level 40 or so, halfway through STV, and it's all mind-numbing tedium and it seems impossible to get anywhere with the game? That's actually gone now, thank God, and the mind-numbing tedium doesn't start until you get into Outlands. The biggest problem is that on old servers, the ones where 99% of the population is level 70, it's nearly impossible to get groups together to do the 60 dungeons.
I'm going to find the person who coined the term "toon" and slap them. In the MUD world, we used to say either "alt" (for alternate) or "avatar." "Toon" is just stupid.
Consider that approximately 80% of web developers don't know what doctype switching is and how or why to use it. Further consider that these web developers frequently create pages that: 1) Have a HTML/xhtml strict doctype, but use tags banned in strict mode (for example, IE6-only tags) 2) Are perfectly compliant HTML/xhtml, but have no doctype at all
What this flag is is a, "I know what strict mode in browsers is" flag. If you set it, IE8 will honor your actual doctype definition and know that you're not one of those idiots mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you set this mode, you're telling IE's rendering engine that you're smart enough to know how to write a standards compliant website, so IE can trust the doctype you set.
The biggest problem IE has with the box model is that it renders elements in the way that makes logical sense to everybody on earth instead of the weird-ass backwards and confusing way the CSS spec wants it to work. Unlike most of Slashdot, I don't think Microsoft did anything purposefully malicious, I just think web standards have been, historically, flaming piles of shit that were impossible for *anybody* to understand and implement. And since they were "recommended" and not "required", there was no penalty for not doing them right except having some shrill Linux users scream at you, so why bother?
Now that the specs are actually "required," now that we have doctype switching which at least pretends to be some kind of version awareness, things are much better for everyone involved. Could Microsoft have updated IE sooner? Of course.
But it would make the world even better still if Firefox would actually throw the web a damned bone sometimes and implement "innerText", or get rid of empty pointless text nodes in the DOM, or start using OBJECT tags for Flash, or fixing any of the umpteen small ways it's incompatible with IE for no reason whatsoever.
Yes, because sudo is only used rarely every once in a while (when you do some system-wide installation or configuration) whereas UAC opens up in Windows at the slightest event ("You're going to sneeze. Cancel or Allow ?")
I've used Windows Vista for 6 months now, and the UAC prompt only comes up when you expect it to. I've had it come up maybe twice in the last week, once while installing a program and once while looking at the list of Services. Both of those operations were clearly marked with the UAC icon, telling me I should expect a UAC prompt for them. Both of those operations were "system-wide installation or configuration," so they fit your rules for SUDO also. UAC has opened up for nothing else in the last week of using Vista. And, in fact, I've gone weeks without seeing it at all.
It's not a badly-implemented feature. It's the exact same feature as SUDO in Linux or OS X, with the exception that it can be configured to ask permission from admin users as well. (Actually, OS X does that too-- so exact same all around.)
Now what about you, DrYak? Do you actually use Vista? Can you give me a specific example of an action that brings up a UAC confirmation and is not "system-wide installation or configuration?" Let's see you put your money where your anti-Microsoft zealotry is.
(I actually can think of one possibility; World of Warcraft brings up a UAC prompt when installing UI plug-ins because Blizzard decided to store UI plug-ins in the Program Files folder. Which is an obvious but that they haven't yet fixed. But that's not Microsoft's problem, that's Blizzard's, and it still technically fits your SUDO description of "system-wide installation.")
Because users lose time by switching from pointing to typing and vice versa.
Good thing there's a keyboard key to pop-up the Start menu.
Look, I also think the Vista Start menu makes bad use of space. I like Vista, and I'm admit that readily. That said, you can easily change it to use an older-style Win2000-ish Start menu if you prefer that. Or you can learn how to use the keyboard, like the grandparent poster mentioned. Or you can launch your programs another way altogether-- I bet at least 40%+ of PC users laugh all their programs from shortcuts on the desktop. It's not a deal-breaker, if you don't like it turn it off.
Apparently people running tons of crap on XP don't see as much performance degradation as people running Vista.
"Apparently?" Now you're arguing against Vista based on... what? Your internal monologue? Messages beamed into your brain from aliens on Venus? How about you actually, you know, run XP and compare it to Vista side-by-side, and then come here and give us your opinion when your opinion's actually worth something.
Or just admit the truth: You've never actually used Vista for more than 3 minutes, you're just a human echo-chamber repeating and amplifying the bullcrap floating all over here on Slashdot with no consideration for intellectual honesty.
What he means is that while you have the right to remain silence, your silence can be construed as an admission of guilt later on. Where in the United States, the 5th Amendment prevents your silence to be considered a factor in your trial.
Don't get me started on IE7 printing though...autoscaling is a cute idea for sites without CSS, but a nightmare if you actually have print styles.
At least IE7 can actually print.
I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to print a page in Firefox, only to have the last few words of every single line of text cut-off by Firefox's shitty printing code. My guess is that it's completely ignoring the printer margins, and the printer cuts off the text when it hits the normal margin point, but I can't say for sure. Either way, I have to open the page in IE7 to print and IE7 always prints-- well it might not be pretty, but I can read the damned thing.
Explain to me how this is Microsoft's fault and not HP's shitty software at fault.
You're right that a browser upgrade should never disable a driver. But the real question is, what the hell kind of shitty-ass driver relies on a web browser to function?!
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, they're freakin' barcodes! I've used a RFID chip to get into my workplace every day for the last 3 years and it's not giving me cancer and I'm not being trailed by men in black. It's cheaper for the company than hiring a security guard on all 14 floors, and it's handier for me to be able to get into work after hours. It's not some satan technology from hell to enslave us all, it's a fricken' barcode.
Oh shut up. We're not super-geniuses like you are.
Even if I spent the 20 minutes to read the World of Warcraft EULA (every freakin' time they make a 0.0.1 version update) what are the odds I'd be able to make heads or tails of it? They aren't written in english, and there's no point in my wasting my hour of video game time to read three hundred pages I won't understand anyway.
If you really care about people reading your license, you need to summarize it in one easy-to-understand paragraph. If you don't even take that amount of effort, then I'm just going to assume you don't care about actually communicating your point, and skip it.
Does Sony pay you? You forgot to mention your Sony digital camera and Sony portable music player which you sync with your Sony Vaio laptop while you're browsing the Sony Style store. Sony.
CPAN is nothing if not infinite
What does that mean? CPAN is infinite? Or not infinite?
I'm guessing it's somewhere in the TOS, but wouldn't storage/backup be part of what one of their customers is paying for?
This is Charter. Charter customers are just happy they don't come to your house every day and kick you in the balls.
What are you referring to, exactly? Nothing in that interview rubbed me the wrong way... he had a little dispute with some of his former co-workers, but didn't go into details, that's not that big a deal, is it?
Question for you: Does Bill Gates' current actions forgive Microsoft's repeated illegal and unethical business practices? In other words, do the ends justify the means?
Uh, yes?
Is helping millions of people cure themselves of disease, pull their standard of living up, and become more self-reliant worth some people having to use an OS that may not have been the best choice? How is that answer not obvious to you?
When it comes down to it, Microsoft's anti-competitive practices are this:
1) Some people had to use Windows/Office even if Windows wasn't ideal for the task. (Obviously Windows/Office was good enough to complete the task, or people would have gone to OS/2 or Apple.)
2) Some technical development that may have happened due to increased competition didn't happen.
That's nothing compared to the big picture. Saving a single person's life is worth that, 30 times over. It's a ridiculous question; the fact you even need to ask it shows me you need to stop reading Slashdot and get some fresh air. Get a grip.
As for your specific proposal - everything depends on the details of implementation. If the proposal simply subsidizes slave labor, that doesn't benefit anyone.
If the average cost of living in Poorberia is $10/year and you're paying $20k, you're not "subsidizing slave labor." You're paying less than you would in, say, San Francisco where that value is closer to $50k, yes. Saying that if you pay $65k in San Francisco for the position you should also pay $65k in Poorberia is idiotic, because no businesses will take that deal-- there's no incentive.
The thing a lot of bleeding hearts don't realize is that without the incentive, there's no action. You can lecture me until your lungs deflate about global warming, but if it's cheaper for me to buy gas for my PT Cruiser than to buy a Prius, I'm not going to act on that. I might "feel" guilty, but I won't act. This is Psychology 101 stuff.
If they completely ditch backwards compatibility, they could remove all this old cruft and start again with a proper clean design, but as usual they're taking a half-assed poorly thought out approach.
What's a "proper clean design?" Is there an OS out there that doesn't contain layers and layers of hacks for 20-year-old bugs in it? The "cleanest" OS I can think of is BeOS, and it didn't succeed because it didn't run any software. Apple's running an OS kernel with a longer history than NT, and people call their OS better... is that because it's "cleaner?" In your opinion?
Firstly, for governments to "encourage" private corporations to help the poor basically means: the government should give the rich some money, and the rich will, in turn, give a fraction of that to the poor.
You're arguing that if the government just gave money away, nothing would change. Duh. If your long quoted essay is based on this argument, then I'll just skip it.
I imagine a more realistic implementation would be like this: Your company gets a tax credit for each job created in a nation with a GDP lower than $10,000. Now you have a financial incentive to build your factory in the Dominican Republic (GDP: 256). You get the same number of workers, and the local economy benefits from the added jobs, and you get a tax break in return.
One of the greatest destroyers of capitalism speaks out on how to make a better capitalism?
Can you defend this belief? In what way has Bill Gates "destroyed" capitalism? All I see is that he played the game better than most others who play the game. Capitalism is the same with or without Microsoft, just like it was the same before and after Standard Oil.
Yeah! Adobe doesn't need the help, they do a good enough job breaking their own products.
(Sorry; just spent a few hours wading in that piece of software shit that used to be called "Macromedia Flash".)
...how long before M$ starts their own MMORPG, and then finds a small company that holds a patent on something in WoW, fronts them the money to sue the pants off Blizzard, while licensing the use of the patent-holder's IP? Or just goes the easy route and sues under anti-trust?
First of all, your post is idiotic. Blizzard *sells* PCs copies of Windows for Microsoft, and Windows is more profitable than WOW is anyway. (I would guess, if you consider all factors.) And Microsoft doesn't pay Blizzard a thin cent for the marketing either.
Secondly, in addition to your post being idiotic, you're an idiot. Microsoft ran Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2 for years. They sold it to Turbine after awhile, but they ran it for a very long time as part of their MSN Gaming Zone business.
You did it totally backwards. Normal people quit when the game gets boring (i.e. end-content), and then re-up when the expansion comes out and it's not nearly as boring anymore. Then when the expansion gets boring, they quit again until the next one comes out. If the game's boring, in short, don't play it! Why should Blizzard be getting your hard-earned money for a boring game?
Unless you're one of those rare souls who can actually stand doing the same battleground 46 times, and the same dungeon raid 82 times for some extra +1 str over the next guy. Then you just sit in your basement all day and eat Cheetos.
The problem as I see it, is that they develop a game, in the lifecycle plan for the game, I am almost positive they already have a project plan for the expansion before the game is even initially released. And they release the game, with the mechanics that are designed to hopefully satisfy people till the expansion comes out. But they under estimate the users every time, within the first few months, possibly even weeks, you have groups of users that have maxed out their character level, and sure it fun getting shiny new toys for the first year, but it then becomes a chore, and is tedious, and at that point is where the game developer has failed.
They're doomed to failure. Think about it:
1) There's 100 staff creating content and millions consuming it.
2) The staff creating the content goes to work for 8 hours, the goes home. Many of those consuming it work at it for 16+ hours a day, 7 days a week.
3) Creating content is much slower than consuming content, and if you skimp, consumers complain. (You complain that Blizzard hasn't created new content quickly enough, but you'd complain even louder if they released content that wasn't fully tested to save time.)
In short, the game you want doesn't exist and *cannot* exist. Unless you're willing to accept a really crappy game with user generated content, say, Second Life, you'll just have to be disappointed.
Quick Math:
10 million * 15.00 * 12 = 1.8 billion a year
+ 10 million * 30 = 300 million a year for the box + expansions (I'm eyeballing this one, but Blizzard did say they wanted an expansion a year)
$2.1 billion. Not bad for a single game! Maybe someone more in-tune with the WoW world can tighten up my estimate of the price of the box + expansions. How much up front? How much for expansions? How frequently?
Good thing Blizzard doesn't have any payroll and gets servers and bandwidth for free from the Server Fairy!
Dance, my little piñata-smacking monkeys, dance for me!
:)
I think you're confused. Viva Piñata is for Xbox and PC, doesn't have anything to do with WOW.
All the way to the bank. BFD.
Black Fathom Deeps? That's like level 25, you can't bank much there. Try upping your level and doing Sunken Temple.
Remember that slog in the original game when you hit about level 40 or so, halfway through STV, and it's all mind-numbing tedium and it seems impossible to get anywhere with the game? That's actually gone now, thank God, and the mind-numbing tedium doesn't start until you get into Outlands. The biggest problem is that on old servers, the ones where 99% of the population is level 70, it's nearly impossible to get groups together to do the 60 dungeons.
I'm going to find the person who coined the term "toon" and slap them. In the MUD world, we used to say either "alt" (for alternate) or "avatar." "Toon" is just stupid.
Consider that approximately 80% of web developers don't know what doctype switching is and how or why to use it. Further consider that these web developers frequently create pages that:
1) Have a HTML/xhtml strict doctype, but use tags banned in strict mode (for example, IE6-only tags)
2) Are perfectly compliant HTML/xhtml, but have no doctype at all
What this flag is is a, "I know what strict mode in browsers is" flag. If you set it, IE8 will honor your actual doctype definition and know that you're not one of those idiots mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you set this mode, you're telling IE's rendering engine that you're smart enough to know how to write a standards compliant website, so IE can trust the doctype you set.
The biggest problem IE has with the box model is that it renders elements in the way that makes logical sense to everybody on earth instead of the weird-ass backwards and confusing way the CSS spec wants it to work. Unlike most of Slashdot, I don't think Microsoft did anything purposefully malicious, I just think web standards have been, historically, flaming piles of shit that were impossible for *anybody* to understand and implement. And since they were "recommended" and not "required", there was no penalty for not doing them right except having some shrill Linux users scream at you, so why bother?
Now that the specs are actually "required," now that we have doctype switching which at least pretends to be some kind of version awareness, things are much better for everyone involved. Could Microsoft have updated IE sooner? Of course.
But it would make the world even better still if Firefox would actually throw the web a damned bone sometimes and implement "innerText", or get rid of empty pointless text nodes in the DOM, or start using OBJECT tags for Flash, or fixing any of the umpteen small ways it's incompatible with IE for no reason whatsoever.
But was is Same Day or Next Day? Was it an envelope or box, and if it was a box was it a 9"x12" or something bigger? THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME!!
Yes, because sudo is only used rarely every once in a while (when you do some system-wide installation or configuration) whereas UAC opens up in Windows at the slightest event ("You're going to sneeze. Cancel or Allow ?")
I've used Windows Vista for 6 months now, and the UAC prompt only comes up when you expect it to. I've had it come up maybe twice in the last week, once while installing a program and once while looking at the list of Services. Both of those operations were clearly marked with the UAC icon, telling me I should expect a UAC prompt for them. Both of those operations were "system-wide installation or configuration," so they fit your rules for SUDO also. UAC has opened up for nothing else in the last week of using Vista. And, in fact, I've gone weeks without seeing it at all.
It's not a badly-implemented feature. It's the exact same feature as SUDO in Linux or OS X, with the exception that it can be configured to ask permission from admin users as well. (Actually, OS X does that too-- so exact same all around.)
Now what about you, DrYak? Do you actually use Vista? Can you give me a specific example of an action that brings up a UAC confirmation and is not "system-wide installation or configuration?" Let's see you put your money where your anti-Microsoft zealotry is.
(I actually can think of one possibility; World of Warcraft brings up a UAC prompt when installing UI plug-ins because Blizzard decided to store UI plug-ins in the Program Files folder. Which is an obvious but that they haven't yet fixed. But that's not Microsoft's problem, that's Blizzard's, and it still technically fits your SUDO description of "system-wide installation.")
Because users lose time by switching from pointing to typing and vice versa.
Good thing there's a keyboard key to pop-up the Start menu.
Look, I also think the Vista Start menu makes bad use of space. I like Vista, and I'm admit that readily. That said, you can easily change it to use an older-style Win2000-ish Start menu if you prefer that. Or you can learn how to use the keyboard, like the grandparent poster mentioned. Or you can launch your programs another way altogether-- I bet at least 40%+ of PC users laugh all their programs from shortcuts on the desktop. It's not a deal-breaker, if you don't like it turn it off.
Apparently people running tons of crap on XP don't see as much performance degradation as people running Vista.
"Apparently?" Now you're arguing against Vista based on... what? Your internal monologue? Messages beamed into your brain from aliens on Venus? How about you actually, you know, run XP and compare it to Vista side-by-side, and then come here and give us your opinion when your opinion's actually worth something.
Or just admit the truth: You've never actually used Vista for more than 3 minutes, you're just a human echo-chamber repeating and amplifying the bullcrap floating all over here on Slashdot with no consideration for intellectual honesty.
What he means is that while you have the right to remain silence, your silence can be construed as an admission of guilt later on. Where in the United States, the 5th Amendment prevents your silence to be considered a factor in your trial.
Or maybe I misunderstand the point.
Don't get me started on IE7 printing though...autoscaling is a cute idea for sites without CSS, but a nightmare if you actually have print styles.
At least IE7 can actually print.
I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to print a page in Firefox, only to have the last few words of every single line of text cut-off by Firefox's shitty printing code. My guess is that it's completely ignoring the printer margins, and the printer cuts off the text when it hits the normal margin point, but I can't say for sure. Either way, I have to open the page in IE7 to print and IE7 always prints-- well it might not be pretty, but I can read the damned thing.
Explain to me how this is Microsoft's fault and not HP's shitty software at fault.
You're right that a browser upgrade should never disable a driver. But the real question is, what the hell kind of shitty-ass driver relies on a web browser to function?!