Using breeder reactors, our existing stockpile of Uranium can last more than 5,000 years. (I forget the exact figure-- I think the last estimate I read was closer to 10,000 years.) Fine, it's not renewable, but from my perspective, timescales like "5000 years" are the same as "infinite." Also, that figure assumes that we never find any other uranium ever.
If we don't have a better energy technology in 5000 years, or don't have the ability to get more uranium, then we deserve whatever we get because that's pathetic.
Yah, a huge storm "wiped out" a major city and yet, somehow, our society keeps functioning exactly as it did before. How many people did Katrina kill, despite the botched evacuation? 1836, according to Wikipedia. That's nothing. Look at this handy list that Wikipedia also brought up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_toll
Nothing on that list brought about the end of civilization. At worst, there was a little bit of slowdown in technical knowledge (after the fall of Rome.) Notice also that the vast majority of those deaths are from human-caused events... (the highest death toll from a natural disaster is approx 1,000,000 from the 1931 Yellow River flood.) Does WWII prove how destructive nature is? No, it proves that despite how destructive nature is, humans are still worse-- and despite how bad humans are, we still keep on going day after day.
This is the exact thing that bugs me, your pessimism. Where is the POSITIVE environmentalist? Where's the guy saying, "hey, we're actually in pretty good shape, but here's a few things we can do to improve" instead of "OMG if we don't immediately do X the world will end!!" I don't like the doomsday predictions when religions try to cram them down my throat, and I don't like them when the environmental movement does. In reality, things are better in virtually every measurable way: people are better fed than ever, despite being more of them. The death toll from natural disasters is less than it's ever been. The forests aren't being destroyed, in total. There's less dangerous air pollution than any other time in history (except perhaps in China.) Hell, the Thames River is clean!
Vista is far from being problem-free. A few people who use it successfully do not counter a few people who don't. The plural of anecdote is not 'proof'.
Fair enough, but where's the data one way or another?
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
There's another possibility (you want to talk about flamebait!) That they have used Vista, and this reaction of saying it's the worst thing ever is basically Linux users being afraid of it. After all, it's the compatibility and cost effectiveness of Windows with a lot of the graphical flair and usability improvements of OS X... it's really a good OS, and nothing scares Linux users more.
The only problems I've had with Vista have been with third-party developers who were somehow caught by surprise and released programs that simply don't work in Vista, despite the numerous betas available to them. Can hardly blame Microsoft for that.
In any case, this article is moronic. The alternative to buying Vista is... buying Windows XP. Or maybe buying Windows 2000. Either way, Microsoft makes money.
Personally, I don't think it's that simple, either. There is no legal system, no governmental system in HISTORY, let alone one that respects the rights and freedoms I hold dear, that is capable of managing human reproduction on this scale. People will resist, and fight, and kill and die for their right to overpopulate the planet until it can no longer sustain any life.
We naturally stop growing once the standard of living rises, for various reasons. Look at the birthrate in nations with the highest standards of living compared to the birthrate in the nations with the lowest. Once the standard of living rises across the globe, the population "problem" will resolve itself. (I believe this has been projected at approx. 12 billion people.)
This isn't regulated by any government, legal system, etc. There's no law in Spain, for example, saying you can't have kids; people just decide not to.
Considering how underutilized many of our resources are currently, and how much more efficient everything we do gets over time, I don't think supporting this growth will be any problem.
I suspect that the answer is in Nature. That nature will manage our population for us. It will not be pleasant. It will not be pretty. It won't make anybody happy. But I suspect that since we cannot manage this ourselves - it will be managed for us. Probably multiple times.
I don't buy into this "sky is falling" bullshit. We have a large population because we're smart; we're definitely smart enough to cope with anything nature is going to throw our way.
The environmentalism movement has been based entirely around predicting disasters for decades. I think the major reason that there's so much resistance to this global warming issue is that people are getting sick of it. In the 1970s we were told that there would be no forest left by the year 2000; that never happened. It turns out we have the same percentage of forest now that we had in 1950, before these doomsday predictions.
We were told that people would starve across the world because food production hasn't kept up with population growth; that never happened. On average, the population of the world is eating more calories per capita than ever before in history, despite population growth. Look at the situation in the US, and many other industrialized nations, where we pay farmers *not* to produce food to keep the price of food artificially high.
How long have we been told that there's a 50-year supply of oil left? A century now, and it's getting old. What about the statistics on the thousands of species going extinct every day? Turns out they were based on, to be generous, wild-assed guesses. It used to be global cooling, now it's global warming that's the huge threat.
We've conquered every world-ending threat the environmentalism movement has come up with in the past, what makes you think we won't conquer this one?
The vast majority of energy is used by industry, not consumers. You can get everyone on earth to turn their air conditioner off, but we still need to build buildings, and buildings still require steel, and making steel still consumes a vast amount of energy. Period. You can't make a task like "melt a ton of steel" any more efficient than we already have; the industries that use this energy are already as efficient as possible if only to reduce their own power bills.
If we never did anyting until there was zero risk, we'd still be living in caves.
I understand your basic point, but I don't think living in a cave is significantly low-risk compared to living in an average city. I don't, for instance, typically have bears attempting to hibernate in my kitchen.
1) Coal and oil, because it releases CO2 and is non-renewable 2) Hydro, because it blocks fish spawning 3) Nuclear, because of the scary fallout monsters 4) Wind, because it kills birds
Let's ignore for a moment how wrong these claims are (especially for number 3 and 4.) The only acceptable power source for most environmentalists is solar, and solar doesn't work in large swathes of the country. (I live in Washington State... we have maybe 60 sunny days a year. The problem is I want to run my TV and computer 365 days a year.)
So how, Mr Environmentalist, do we meet our ever-increasing need for power? Unfortunately, we haven't yet figured out the technology for harvesting magical unicorns to run factories. Given the options above, the best by far are Gas and Nuclear. And nuclear, being (mostly) renewable is better than gas by far. (If we use only natural Uranium, there's something like a 60 year supply of fuel; with breeder reactors, we can stretch this fuel supply for thousands of years. And that's assuming we don't find any more uranium.)
To use WOW as an example, since I play a "RP" server there:
1) The game mechanics are exactly the same as a PvE server (Player vs. Environment, i.e. PvP activities are all voluntary)
2) Supposedly, unlike normal PvE servers, name rules are enforced. That said, you frequently see very high-level characters on my RP server with names like "CellPhonia" or "MasterChiefHalo" who have apparently never been asked to change their names.
3) Supposedly, channel rules are enforced. But:
a) The rules are moronic. (The rules are that chat on channels has to be on the topic of World of Warcraft, there is NO requirement that the chat be In Character. So, on an RP server, going on the city chat channel and asking what UI plug-in gives you map coordinates is acceptable.)
b) There's no distinction, graphical or otherwise, of which channels are supposed to be IC and which are supposed to be OOC. (Which produces the problem a lot of RP MUDs had, the telepathic character-- a lot of MUDs declare that the "tell" channel and "guild" channel, both of which span the entire world, are In Character channels. If you think about this, it makes no sense unless all the characters in the game happen to be telepathic. In Character, a blood elf can't talk to a tauren on a different continent.)
c) These rules aren't enforced anyway.
There is a little bit of RP, but rather than actually creating an RP environment, Blizzard is basically just decreeing that they've created one. If you want true RP, you gotta stick with MUDs. (And even amongst MUDs, only a few have really good RP.)
I dunno about you, but I stopped drooling over animated/drawn characters (or even prefering to look at one gender versus the other) somewhere around 14 years old.
You're either lying or neutered. Preferring to look at beautiful/handsome examples of the opposite sex is wired into the human brain. Jessica Alba (and, for that matter, Chris Evans) sure as hell weren't in Fantastic Four for their acting abilities.
Hah, a buddy and I were talking about the "hotness" level of the various Warcraft races. (We both agree that the blood elves are way too skinny, and the bad 80s haircuts don't help!) One of the things he said is that he didn't like the Dranei model because of the digitigrade legs, it creeped him out. Then the next sentence was that he thought the succubus model was pretty hot... I ruined his day by pointing out that the succubus model also has digitigrade. He'd never noticed before.
(Furries must hate Firefox: digitigrade isn't in the default dictionary!)
I'm the same way. I'd even prefer to look at a weird not-quite-human female troll or dranei than a male character. But I look at it kind of differently:
If the game were first-person, and if the game were immersive, I'd pick an avatar that represented myself. But WOW isn't first-person (well, ok, you can set it to a first-person view, but that's a huge disadvantage for targeting monsters and I doubt anybody seriously plays that way), and it's definitely not immersive, what with the massive amounts of clipping errors and moronic 13-year-olds telling Chuck Norris jokes, so it doesn't meet my standards.
I do, however, have to make the occasional kid sad when they ask to cyber(or make some obscene suggestions), and I reveal my gender.
I usually take the SomethingAwful.com course and try to string them along for as much in-game money as possible before crushing their hopes and dreams. I've gotten at least 120g from WOW this way.;) And yes, I am going to hell.
Hm, interesting statement. Isn't pretty much all food processed in one way or another? (Iodine in salt, pasteurization of dairy products, vitamin C added, etc.) Most of these processes are in place specifically to make the food less harmful-- less likely you'll drink spoiled milk, less likely you'll suffer from iodine or vitamin C deficiency, etc.
Whether it's more expensive to buy iodized salt rather than non-iodized salt, I dunno. But saying processed foods are harmful strikes me as simply wrong.
> 1. Playing DVD's requires EXTRA software (Broken Media Player)
Wrong. My brand-new copy of Windows Vista Home Premium can play DVDs without installing anything extra. And it wasn't $400, either.
> 2. Writing and Spell-Checking documents requires EXTRA software (broken wordpad)
Usually the complaint with Windows is that they bundle *too much* software. Now you're arguing that they bundle *too little* software?
In any case, yes, it doesn't come with a spell-checker, although nothing prevents you from using WordPad to write whatever document you want. (Hard to argue WordPad is broken since it *never* came with a spell-checker.)
> 3. Email Security requires EXTRA software (broken outlook)
What software is this? How is Outlook broken?
> 4. viewing certain file types requires EXTRA software (indeo codec, broken due to licenses).
Gasp, and viewing a Photoshop file requires EXTRA software, even on Macintosh! And viewing an AutoCAD file does too! HOLY CRAP!
Plus, what I said for number 2. Now you're asking that Microsoft bundle more software?
> 5. Recording sounds longer than 30 seconds requires EXTRA software (broken/useless sound recorder)
Again, what I replied for number 2. (FYI, unless something's changed in the last version, Mac OS X didn't include any software to record sounds whatsoever, so Windows is ahead of the competition as far as this goes.)
> 6. Internet Security requires EXTRA software (broken Internet Explorer)
Not in Vista. IE runs in a sandbox and has enough permissions dialogs to strangle a moose. If someone manages to get malware on IE7 on Vista, it's their own damned fault.
> 7. Unable to set per-user file restrictions, VERY coarse control (broken multi-user capabilities)
Bullshit. Doesn't even justify a response.
The only explanation I can make for this list is that the last version of Windows the writer tried was Windows ME. That's the only way to explain numbers 3 and 7, at least.
Wow, what is this, institutionalized paranoia? Seriously, does PJ (or you for that matter) have any evidence whatsoever of Microsoft being involved in any way, shape, or form?
I know exactly one person who talks about Linux more than once a year. Other than myself. But I mostly talk about Linux because of the crappy experiences I've had with it.
Thank you! I know it's somewhat off-topic, but the Games section on Slashdot is so flooded with nostalgia that any attempt to re-introduce sanity is great. Especially when modded up.
Except Slammer was patched months before the attack happened. How is it Microsoft's fault that a lot of MS-using system administrators hadn't installed the patch?
If it makes you feel any better, my WOW post got modded -1 Overrated.;)
I think a lot of the problem is, and I mean this seriously, nostalgia. A lot of gamers (and I'm not necessarily saying you're guilty of this) have a 'set' of games that they played for hours and hours in high school or college, and to them those games are the best ever. If you did a truly objective study of the quality of RPG games, would Final Fantasy VII *really* be at the top?
See, I played craploads of Tribes in college. I could easily say that Tribes is the best multiplayer game ever made... but that wouldn't be fair to anybody, because for the most part I haven't given newer multiplayer games the fair trial I gave Tribes. Simply put, I have a job now, and I can't dedicate that much time to any game anymore. So for me to say Tribes is the best game ever is intellectually dishonest, and I recognize that.
(That all said, Marathon is still the best game ever.;)
I don't get people like you. If you think the most fun games were all text-based, Infocom adventures or MUDs, then you're in luck: That technology is already about as advanced as it's going to get! If you don't care about graphics in games, then you're done. Go play your text games and don't bother commenting on stories like this so us people who do appreciate good graphics in games can have a nice civil conversation without you.
I don't know where I sit on the spectrum. But I can say that World of Warcraft's crummy graphics engine is one of the major reasons I don't play it as consistently as my friends... you play some WOW, then move on to (say) Oblivion, or Bioshock, and it's night-and-day. And Blizzard's probably at least two years away from upgrading it.
I'm talking about operating systems that people actually use(d). In this context, a list such as OS/2, Amiga OS, Macintosh, DOS/Windows. Yes, about 50,000 companies, Apple included, had *server* software or *research* software with all sorts of advanced features, but you couldn't walk into Egghead (or Computer City, or whatever) and pick one off the shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
Using breeder reactors, our existing stockpile of Uranium can last more than 5,000 years. (I forget the exact figure-- I think the last estimate I read was closer to 10,000 years.) Fine, it's not renewable, but from my perspective, timescales like "5000 years" are the same as "infinite." Also, that figure assumes that we never find any other uranium ever.
If we don't have a better energy technology in 5000 years, or don't have the ability to get more uranium, then we deserve whatever we get because that's pathetic.
Yah, a huge storm "wiped out" a major city and yet, somehow, our society keeps functioning exactly as it did before. How many people did Katrina kill, despite the botched evacuation? 1836, according to Wikipedia. That's nothing. Look at this handy list that Wikipedia also brought up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_toll
Nothing on that list brought about the end of civilization. At worst, there was a little bit of slowdown in technical knowledge (after the fall of Rome.) Notice also that the vast majority of those deaths are from human-caused events... (the highest death toll from a natural disaster is approx 1,000,000 from the 1931 Yellow River flood.) Does WWII prove how destructive nature is? No, it proves that despite how destructive nature is, humans are still worse-- and despite how bad humans are, we still keep on going day after day.
This is the exact thing that bugs me, your pessimism. Where is the POSITIVE environmentalist? Where's the guy saying, "hey, we're actually in pretty good shape, but here's a few things we can do to improve" instead of "OMG if we don't immediately do X the world will end!!" I don't like the doomsday predictions when religions try to cram them down my throat, and I don't like them when the environmental movement does. In reality, things are better in virtually every measurable way: people are better fed than ever, despite being more of them. The death toll from natural disasters is less than it's ever been. The forests aren't being destroyed, in total. There's less dangerous air pollution than any other time in history (except perhaps in China.) Hell, the Thames River is clean!
Vista is far from being problem-free. A few people who use it successfully do not counter a few people who don't. The plural of anecdote is not 'proof'.
Fair enough, but where's the data one way or another?
No, I'm with you.
... buying Windows XP. Or maybe buying Windows 2000. Either way, Microsoft makes money.
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
There's another possibility (you want to talk about flamebait!) That they have used Vista, and this reaction of saying it's the worst thing ever is basically Linux users being afraid of it. After all, it's the compatibility and cost effectiveness of Windows with a lot of the graphical flair and usability improvements of OS X... it's really a good OS, and nothing scares Linux users more.
The only problems I've had with Vista have been with third-party developers who were somehow caught by surprise and released programs that simply don't work in Vista, despite the numerous betas available to them. Can hardly blame Microsoft for that.
In any case, this article is moronic. The alternative to buying Vista is
Personally, I don't think it's that simple, either. There is no legal system, no governmental system in HISTORY, let alone one that respects the rights and freedoms I hold dear, that is capable of managing human reproduction on this scale. People will resist, and fight, and kill and die for their right to overpopulate the planet until it can no longer sustain any life.
We naturally stop growing once the standard of living rises, for various reasons. Look at the birthrate in nations with the highest standards of living compared to the birthrate in the nations with the lowest. Once the standard of living rises across the globe, the population "problem" will resolve itself. (I believe this has been projected at approx. 12 billion people.)
This isn't regulated by any government, legal system, etc. There's no law in Spain, for example, saying you can't have kids; people just decide not to.
Considering how underutilized many of our resources are currently, and how much more efficient everything we do gets over time, I don't think supporting this growth will be any problem.
I suspect that the answer is in Nature. That nature will manage our population for us. It will not be pleasant. It will not be pretty. It won't make anybody happy. But I suspect that since we cannot manage this ourselves - it will be managed for us. Probably multiple times.
I don't buy into this "sky is falling" bullshit. We have a large population because we're smart; we're definitely smart enough to cope with anything nature is going to throw our way.
The environmentalism movement has been based entirely around predicting disasters for decades. I think the major reason that there's so much resistance to this global warming issue is that people are getting sick of it. In the 1970s we were told that there would be no forest left by the year 2000; that never happened. It turns out we have the same percentage of forest now that we had in 1950, before these doomsday predictions.
We were told that people would starve across the world because food production hasn't kept up with population growth; that never happened. On average, the population of the world is eating more calories per capita than ever before in history, despite population growth. Look at the situation in the US, and many other industrialized nations, where we pay farmers *not* to produce food to keep the price of food artificially high.
How long have we been told that there's a 50-year supply of oil left? A century now, and it's getting old. What about the statistics on the thousands of species going extinct every day? Turns out they were based on, to be generous, wild-assed guesses. It used to be global cooling, now it's global warming that's the huge threat.
We've conquered every world-ending threat the environmentalism movement has come up with in the past, what makes you think we won't conquer this one?
The vast majority of energy is used by industry, not consumers. You can get everyone on earth to turn their air conditioner off, but we still need to build buildings, and buildings still require steel, and making steel still consumes a vast amount of energy. Period. You can't make a task like "melt a ton of steel" any more efficient than we already have; the industries that use this energy are already as efficient as possible if only to reduce their own power bills.
If we never did anyting until there was zero risk, we'd still be living in caves.
I understand your basic point, but I don't think living in a cave is significantly low-risk compared to living in an average city. I don't, for instance, typically have bears attempting to hibernate in my kitchen.
Greenpeace UK recently looked at proposed sites for new reactors in the UK and found that four proposed site may be unsuitable owing to the risk of sea level rise: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/the-impacts-of-climate-change-on-nuclear-power-station-sites.
Isn't the entire point of building nuclear reactors to reduce CO2 output and thus stop global warming before the ocean rises 5m?
In any case, if the oceans rises 5m we're all fucked anyway, shutting down a power plant will be the least of our worries.
Ok, so environmentalists hate:
1) Coal and oil, because it releases CO2 and is non-renewable
2) Hydro, because it blocks fish spawning
3) Nuclear, because of the scary fallout monsters
4) Wind, because it kills birds
Let's ignore for a moment how wrong these claims are (especially for number 3 and 4.) The only acceptable power source for most environmentalists is solar, and solar doesn't work in large swathes of the country. (I live in Washington State... we have maybe 60 sunny days a year. The problem is I want to run my TV and computer 365 days a year.)
So how, Mr Environmentalist, do we meet our ever-increasing need for power? Unfortunately, we haven't yet figured out the technology for harvesting magical unicorns to run factories. Given the options above, the best by far are Gas and Nuclear. And nuclear, being (mostly) renewable is better than gas by far. (If we use only natural Uranium, there's something like a 60 year supply of fuel; with breeder reactors, we can stretch this fuel supply for thousands of years. And that's assuming we don't find any more uranium.)
To use WOW as an example, since I play a "RP" server there:
1) The game mechanics are exactly the same as a PvE server (Player vs. Environment, i.e. PvP activities are all voluntary)
2) Supposedly, unlike normal PvE servers, name rules are enforced. That said, you frequently see very high-level characters on my RP server with names like "CellPhonia" or "MasterChiefHalo" who have apparently never been asked to change their names.
3) Supposedly, channel rules are enforced. But:
a) The rules are moronic. (The rules are that chat on channels has to be on the topic of World of Warcraft, there is NO requirement that the chat be In Character. So, on an RP server, going on the city chat channel and asking what UI plug-in gives you map coordinates is acceptable.)
b) There's no distinction, graphical or otherwise, of which channels are supposed to be IC and which are supposed to be OOC. (Which produces the problem a lot of RP MUDs had, the telepathic character-- a lot of MUDs declare that the "tell" channel and "guild" channel, both of which span the entire world, are In Character channels. If you think about this, it makes no sense unless all the characters in the game happen to be telepathic. In Character, a blood elf can't talk to a tauren on a different continent.)
c) These rules aren't enforced anyway.
There is a little bit of RP, but rather than actually creating an RP environment, Blizzard is basically just decreeing that they've created one. If you want true RP, you gotta stick with MUDs. (And even amongst MUDs, only a few have really good RP.)
I dunno about you, but I stopped drooling over animated/drawn characters (or even prefering to look at one gender versus the other) somewhere around 14 years old.
You're either lying or neutered. Preferring to look at beautiful/handsome examples of the opposite sex is wired into the human brain. Jessica Alba (and, for that matter, Chris Evans) sure as hell weren't in Fantastic Four for their acting abilities.
Hah, a buddy and I were talking about the "hotness" level of the various Warcraft races. (We both agree that the blood elves are way too skinny, and the bad 80s haircuts don't help!) One of the things he said is that he didn't like the Dranei model because of the digitigrade legs, it creeped him out. Then the next sentence was that he thought the succubus model was pretty hot... I ruined his day by pointing out that the succubus model also has digitigrade. He'd never noticed before.
(Furries must hate Firefox: digitigrade isn't in the default dictionary!)
I'm the same way. I'd even prefer to look at a weird not-quite-human female troll or dranei than a male character. But I look at it kind of differently:
;) And yes, I am going to hell.
If the game were first-person, and if the game were immersive, I'd pick an avatar that represented myself. But WOW isn't first-person (well, ok, you can set it to a first-person view, but that's a huge disadvantage for targeting monsters and I doubt anybody seriously plays that way), and it's definitely not immersive, what with the massive amounts of clipping errors and moronic 13-year-olds telling Chuck Norris jokes, so it doesn't meet my standards.
I do, however, have to make the occasional kid sad when they ask to cyber(or make some obscene suggestions), and I reveal my gender.
I usually take the SomethingAwful.com course and try to string them along for as much in-game money as possible before crushing their hopes and dreams. I've gotten at least 120g from WOW this way.
Yikes, I'm sure this is shocking, earth-shattering news for the three MMO fans who don't play WOW.
Processed food is harmful and expensive.
Hm, interesting statement. Isn't pretty much all food processed in one way or another? (Iodine in salt, pasteurization of dairy products, vitamin C added, etc.) Most of these processes are in place specifically to make the food less harmful-- less likely you'll drink spoiled milk, less likely you'll suffer from iodine or vitamin C deficiency, etc.
Whether it's more expensive to buy iodized salt rather than non-iodized salt, I dunno. But saying processed foods are harmful strikes me as simply wrong.
> 1. Playing DVD's requires EXTRA software (Broken Media Player)
Wrong. My brand-new copy of Windows Vista Home Premium can play DVDs without installing anything extra. And it wasn't $400, either.
> 2. Writing and Spell-Checking documents requires EXTRA software (broken wordpad)
Usually the complaint with Windows is that they bundle *too much* software. Now you're arguing that they bundle *too little* software?
In any case, yes, it doesn't come with a spell-checker, although nothing prevents you from using WordPad to write whatever document you want. (Hard to argue WordPad is broken since it *never* came with a spell-checker.)
> 3. Email Security requires EXTRA software (broken outlook)
What software is this? How is Outlook broken?
> 4. viewing certain file types requires EXTRA software (indeo codec, broken due to licenses).
Gasp, and viewing a Photoshop file requires EXTRA software, even on Macintosh! And viewing an AutoCAD file does too! HOLY CRAP!
Plus, what I said for number 2. Now you're asking that Microsoft bundle more software?
> 5. Recording sounds longer than 30 seconds requires EXTRA software (broken/useless sound recorder)
Again, what I replied for number 2. (FYI, unless something's changed in the last version, Mac OS X didn't include any software to record sounds whatsoever, so Windows is ahead of the competition as far as this goes.)
> 6. Internet Security requires EXTRA software (broken Internet Explorer)
Not in Vista. IE runs in a sandbox and has enough permissions dialogs to strangle a moose. If someone manages to get malware on IE7 on Vista, it's their own damned fault.
> 7. Unable to set per-user file restrictions, VERY coarse control (broken multi-user capabilities)
Bullshit. Doesn't even justify a response.
The only explanation I can make for this list is that the last version of Windows the writer tried was Windows ME. That's the only way to explain numbers 3 and 7, at least.
Congratulations, you just found out why more people buy Dells.
Wow, what is this, institutionalized paranoia? Seriously, does PJ (or you for that matter) have any evidence whatsoever of Microsoft being involved in any way, shape, or form?
Are you serious?
I know exactly one person who talks about Linux more than once a year. Other than myself. But I mostly talk about Linux because of the crappy experiences I've had with it.
Thank you! I know it's somewhat off-topic, but the Games section on Slashdot is so flooded with nostalgia that any attempt to re-introduce sanity is great. Especially when modded up.
Except Slammer was patched months before the attack happened. How is it Microsoft's fault that a lot of MS-using system administrators hadn't installed the patch?
If it makes you feel any better, my WOW post got modded -1 Overrated. ;)
;)
I think a lot of the problem is, and I mean this seriously, nostalgia. A lot of gamers (and I'm not necessarily saying you're guilty of this) have a 'set' of games that they played for hours and hours in high school or college, and to them those games are the best ever. If you did a truly objective study of the quality of RPG games, would Final Fantasy VII *really* be at the top?
See, I played craploads of Tribes in college. I could easily say that Tribes is the best multiplayer game ever made... but that wouldn't be fair to anybody, because for the most part I haven't given newer multiplayer games the fair trial I gave Tribes. Simply put, I have a job now, and I can't dedicate that much time to any game anymore. So for me to say Tribes is the best game ever is intellectually dishonest, and I recognize that.
(That all said, Marathon is still the best game ever.
I don't get people like you. If you think the most fun games were all text-based, Infocom adventures or MUDs, then you're in luck: That technology is already about as advanced as it's going to get! If you don't care about graphics in games, then you're done. Go play your text games and don't bother commenting on stories like this so us people who do appreciate good graphics in games can have a nice civil conversation without you.
I don't know where I sit on the spectrum. But I can say that World of Warcraft's crummy graphics engine is one of the major reasons I don't play it as consistently as my friends... you play some WOW, then move on to (say) Oblivion, or Bioshock, and it's night-and-day. And Blizzard's probably at least two years away from upgrading it.
Wow, hostility.
I'm talking about operating systems that people actually use(d). In this context, a list such as OS/2, Amiga OS, Macintosh, DOS/Windows. Yes, about 50,000 companies, Apple included, had *server* software or *research* software with all sorts of advanced features, but you couldn't walk into Egghead (or Computer City, or whatever) and pick one off the shelf.
Apple *had* A/UX, yes.