Unfortunately, I need to keep my workstation on in case I need to remote-control it from home if a client has an emergency. Otherwise, I'd happily follow your example. (I do turn off the monitors.)
I should also mention that it's definitely possible to break-in to the industry. The guys who made Alien Hominid started with a fancy Flash movie, and now they have multiple console games under their belt.
Microsoft's new game studio express product (I think that's the name...) will let you create a temporary Xbox 360 port for QA/testing purposes and for submission to Microsoft to consider publishing it on Live. Of course, the catch is that the game has to be made with that specific development tool; if you made it in plain C++ I'm not sure how you'd port it to 360.
I dunno if Sony and Nintendo have any similar program in place, but I get the impression Nintendo's service is only for retro/emulated games.
Although, frankly, getting capital is part of business. If you really have a killer game you think belongs on a console, raise the capital for it... if you can 'wow' people with your game, raising a dozen grand should be no problem at all. Nothing different from any other industry-- you also need a lot of capital to get a TV show on the air. Complaining that you need to raise capital to start a business sounds like a goofy complaint.
It's an interesting market. The console makers get a "cut" because they hold the keys to the car. Without using Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo's encryption on your disk, it's unplayable on their console. Slashdotters hate DRM. (And stop winging on about Nintendo being so great, the reason the Gamecube disks are so mutant is specifically to make them hard to copy.)
The console makers generally charge a fee to publish the game on their console, but then they spend this fee in additional testing and QA for the game. Microsoft has teams of people QAing non-Microsoft games to meet minimum established standards of quality. Since the publishers don't complain about this arrangement, I'm guessing that the QA service Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo provides is worth the publishing fee, but I don't know.
Cars like this will always fail because they're never designed to be practical.
Sure you can make a car that will seat two and get 90 MPG, but can you make it: 1) Safe, meet crash-test standards 2) Have enough storage space to take your groceries home 3) Be able to reach freeway speeds in a reasonable-enough amount of time to merge with existing gasoline-powered traffic 4) Capable of cross-country road-trips when needed
This air-powered car looks like it meets none of those requirements, except perhaps the last. A gasoline car can do all of those for (relatively) cheap.
Well, he probably didn't know the interview was going to be featured on the so-Wii-it's-insane Slashdot Games site.
It's not like he dissed the Wii, said it was a horrible idea and Nintendo is going to hell for inventing it. He just said he likes Zelda, doesn't like Wii Sports, and doesn't think the Wii is a good fit for the type of games he makes. That's it. Posters here make it sound like he insulted Nintendo or something.
I'm sorry, I call BS, along with the claim that the iPod created the market for HD-based players. HD-players existed long before the iPod, and anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition.
Did you even read the article? He acknowledges that the iPod didn't invent the HD-based music player market.
His point, which you seemed to miss, was that most of Apple's iPod sales since 2002 have been market expansion, that is, new users who never before owned a music player. The other players in the HD-based music player market have had a slight rise in sales, but have not expanded the market in the same way the iPod has.
The comparison was to Microsoft Windows and early PCs, which expanded the PC market by selling to secretaries, low-end machines to poorer families, that is people who never before owned a computer. During this time, Microsoft hugely expanded the Windows marketshare while Apple's sales were a flat-line. Flat-line isn't to say Apple was doing poorly, just that they didn't expand the PC market in the same way Microsoft/PC-makers did.
That's the entire point of the article. Apple is doing to Microsoft and other HD-based players what Microsoft did to Apple in the mid-90s. Expanding the market to new users.
I'm the asshole? Read the responses I've been given on the thread. I just proposed an idea I've had floating around in my head for a few years. I'm not demanding Google do anything (that would be an asshole move), and I'm not writing super-hostile posts like yours (also an asshole move.)
Just remove the embarrasing stuff from where you posted it and it'll stop appearing in Google's search results automatically.
You're assuming I have any control over the sites where this material is posted. I don't. It's in "archived" forums (which used to be live forums, but got saved as plain HTML) from which items can't be deleted.
Look, when I was young I posted some things I'm now ashamed of under my own (uncommon- less than 10 people in the US) name. Now when my name is Googled, those things come up before any good references to myself because the sites I happened to post them on just happen to have very high rankings. I'd love to have those postings removed from Google, but there's no way at all to request Google to remove them.
Was I doing something stupid? Yes, yes I was. I fully admit that. But the point is that if I'd have done this same stupid thing in written form, say a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, it would be long forgotten by now and finding it would be a time-consuming and expensive process. Google makes finding stuff like this not only easy, but actually easiER than my current postings because of how their pagerank system works. I don't think that's fair.
I understand the need to keep troubleshooting posts around, but Google should have SOME facility for lowering the pagerank of things like this (if not delisting them entirely.)
Sorry for posting the dumbest idea you've ever read.
Thus my posting as a "devil's advocate." If you (and the moderator who modded you up) don't know what that term means, you might try looking it up before posting a reply.
Yes, but it SHOULD be -1 Off Topic. Instead, my pointing out that it should be Off-Topic was moderated Off-Topic. (Which is fair, I suppose, but only after the original off-topic post was modded.) Which goes to show how well Slashdot moderation works in general.
As a devil's advocate, though, what enforcement is there of robots.txt?
I could easily write a program that runs on my workstation and completely ignores it. In fact, I have a offline-browser that downloads sites and *does* completely ignore it while spidering for which pages to download (I won't name names.) There's nothing technical requiring spiders to honor it, presumably there's no legal system to honor it, it's all just trust.
Next time this comes up in court, the case might be a much more interesting, "I had a robots.txt file, but [search engine] ignored it!"
I had archive.org erase my old blog from its memory because I posted a lot of stupid stuff I don't want anybody to read now. I have no idea what this lady's beef is, but I think the ability to remove personal information from search engines and archive.org is needed in this day and age.
Imagine interviewing from a job, and having your top hit in Google being, "John Doe: OMG that black dude is such an unfair bitch he hit me with the fucking rocket launcher when I was trying to give money to this hooker" just because GamePostings.coom happens to have a high siterank. People change, and the internet is old enough now that people in the world looking for jobs, loans, girlfriends, etc have crap like that posted all over.
I'd love it if Google and other search engines had a policy of booting forum posts from their index after a period of time, say 2 years. That said, I don't think the government needs to be involved.
The only possible use for this information is to better target advertising. And frankly, I like targeted advertising a lot more than un-targeted advertising, so I'm all for it. It costs me nothing, doesn't hurt me in any way, but potentially could stop me from having to see tampon ads. All for it.
"Ha ha Europeans are so much better than you stupid Americans because we don't have to pay for pointless* luxury item! Also, since I know this site is full of hate America liberals, I'm sure to be posted up! Of course, if there's a Slashdot article about something that the US truly excels at, like, say, actually having a healthy IT or Aerospace industry, I'd never post something like this."
What's interesting to me is the number of people on Slashdot, as revealed by comments and posted questions like these, who (apparently) work in corporations and yet have absolutely no idea how corporations work. It's like this site is full of the guy who stays at Quality Assurance I because they don't know how to get promoted... I don't like that guy.
I'm pretty sure the first The Longest Journey had no copy protection. But this must vastly limit the games you buy... for instance, Dreamfall has copy protection on the disk, and almost every game made in... well, ever has copy protection of some sort. (It used to be looking things up in a manual, then specially formatted disks that reported "bad blocks" when you tried to copy them, then CD copy protection drivers, now internet activation.) The only game I can think of that had no copy protection whatsoever was Tribes in 1996.
In short, it seems a little hypocritical to me to play Dreamfall with copy protection and refuse to play The Longest Journey 3 with a slightly different method of copy protection. But, hey, it's your money.
It's not just training, it's also management and staffing.
Linux system admins cost more than Windows system admins, making no judgment about their capabilities. And it's not true that a single Linux system administrator can manage more machines than a Windows system administrator... in fact, with Microsoft's management tools, the opposite is probably true.
In fact, probably 90% of usability is finding what people want to do and making it trivially easy. The stuff the majority don't want to do remains hard or impossible. It sounds a little strict, but it seems to pay off for, say, Apple.
The reason Linus doesn't like it is because he wants every little byte to be configurable, like a lot of Linux users. That's fine; he can use KDE instead. The stupid things about this situation is:
1) That people give a crap what Linus says about usability. He programs the kernel! The lowest-level component of the OS! He has no usability experience whatsoever. Have you seen the kind of GUIs that kernel programmers design? Look at anything from IBM, for instance. I understand that Linus is like an open source superhero, but you shouldn't trust Linus' opinion on usability issues any more than you should trust Superman's opinion on railway maintenance.
2) That Linus uses GNOME and gripes about it instead of just using what he likes. Isn't the entire point of the open source ecosystem to give the user choices? Linus can hardly bitch if he doesn't bother to use an alternative.
2a) Or (even worse) he uses KDE but chooses to go out of his way to bitch at some other open source project.
As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
Sounds like Apple's OpenDoc?
It didn't work because: 1) They released it too early and it quickly gained a reputation for being too buggy. 2) The only application that really embraced it was ClarisWorks. Oh, there was some lame web browser Apple made that used it too called Cyberdog, IIRC.
The idea isn't *bad*, but it really needs a killer app around it to make it work. An app better than ClarisWorks/Cyberdog.
Are open source desktop developers so focused on trying to make it "easy" for Windows user to convert they get Microsoft tunnel vision and can't innovate?
Yup. Open source seems to lack a lot of designers-- without designers, you have to program based on established designs. Designs from a company like, say, Microsoft who solved all those problems before. KDE and Windows, in the default configuration, look almost identical. Say what you want about Apple and Microsoft, but at least Windows and OS X don't look and work identically.
Slashdot Mirror
The support calls are probably due to how much WMA sucks ass compared to Apple's DRM. At least Apple's DRM *works*. (And cross-platform, too.)
Unfortunately, I need to keep my workstation on in case I need to remote-control it from home if a client has an emergency. Otherwise, I'd happily follow your example. (I do turn off the monitors.)
I should also mention that it's definitely possible to break-in to the industry. The guys who made Alien Hominid started with a fancy Flash movie, and now they have multiple console games under their belt.
Microsoft's new game studio express product (I think that's the name...) will let you create a temporary Xbox 360 port for QA/testing purposes and for submission to Microsoft to consider publishing it on Live. Of course, the catch is that the game has to be made with that specific development tool; if you made it in plain C++ I'm not sure how you'd port it to 360.
I dunno if Sony and Nintendo have any similar program in place, but I get the impression Nintendo's service is only for retro/emulated games.
Although, frankly, getting capital is part of business. If you really have a killer game you think belongs on a console, raise the capital for it... if you can 'wow' people with your game, raising a dozen grand should be no problem at all. Nothing different from any other industry-- you also need a lot of capital to get a TV show on the air. Complaining that you need to raise capital to start a business sounds like a goofy complaint.
Although Windows certainly isn't perfect, shame on you for installing an OS with no backup in place!
Backup your data! Backup! Backup! Back! Up!
Especially before doing anything involving disk partitions (like installing an OS).
It's an interesting market. The console makers get a "cut" because they hold the keys to the car. Without using Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo's encryption on your disk, it's unplayable on their console. Slashdotters hate DRM. (And stop winging on about Nintendo being so great, the reason the Gamecube disks are so mutant is specifically to make them hard to copy.)
The console makers generally charge a fee to publish the game on their console, but then they spend this fee in additional testing and QA for the game. Microsoft has teams of people QAing non-Microsoft games to meet minimum established standards of quality. Since the publishers don't complain about this arrangement, I'm guessing that the QA service Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo provides is worth the publishing fee, but I don't know.
Cars like this will always fail because they're never designed to be practical.
Sure you can make a car that will seat two and get 90 MPG, but can you make it:
1) Safe, meet crash-test standards
2) Have enough storage space to take your groceries home
3) Be able to reach freeway speeds in a reasonable-enough amount of time to merge with existing gasoline-powered traffic
4) Capable of cross-country road-trips when needed
This air-powered car looks like it meets none of those requirements, except perhaps the last. A gasoline car can do all of those for (relatively) cheap.
Well, he probably didn't know the interview was going to be featured on the so-Wii-it's-insane Slashdot Games site.
It's not like he dissed the Wii, said it was a horrible idea and Nintendo is going to hell for inventing it. He just said he likes Zelda, doesn't like Wii Sports, and doesn't think the Wii is a good fit for the type of games he makes. That's it. Posters here make it sound like he insulted Nintendo or something.
I agree that the article is kind of misleading, but you'll never find Apple by looking at corporations. Apple hardly even bothers with that market.
I'm sorry, I call BS, along with the claim that the iPod created the market for HD-based players. HD-players existed long before the iPod, and anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition.
Did you even read the article? He acknowledges that the iPod didn't invent the HD-based music player market.
His point, which you seemed to miss, was that most of Apple's iPod sales since 2002 have been market expansion, that is, new users who never before owned a music player. The other players in the HD-based music player market have had a slight rise in sales, but have not expanded the market in the same way the iPod has.
The comparison was to Microsoft Windows and early PCs, which expanded the PC market by selling to secretaries, low-end machines to poorer families, that is people who never before owned a computer. During this time, Microsoft hugely expanded the Windows marketshare while Apple's sales were a flat-line. Flat-line isn't to say Apple was doing poorly, just that they didn't expand the PC market in the same way Microsoft/PC-makers did.
That's the entire point of the article. Apple is doing to Microsoft and other HD-based players what Microsoft did to Apple in the mid-90s. Expanding the market to new users.
I'm the asshole? Read the responses I've been given on the thread. I just proposed an idea I've had floating around in my head for a few years. I'm not demanding Google do anything (that would be an asshole move), and I'm not writing super-hostile posts like yours (also an asshole move.)
Just remove the embarrasing stuff from where you posted it and it'll stop appearing in Google's search results automatically.
You're assuming I have any control over the sites where this material is posted. I don't. It's in "archived" forums (which used to be live forums, but got saved as plain HTML) from which items can't be deleted.
Why are you being such an ass?
Look, when I was young I posted some things I'm now ashamed of under my own (uncommon- less than 10 people in the US) name. Now when my name is Googled, those things come up before any good references to myself because the sites I happened to post them on just happen to have very high rankings. I'd love to have those postings removed from Google, but there's no way at all to request Google to remove them.
Was I doing something stupid? Yes, yes I was. I fully admit that. But the point is that if I'd have done this same stupid thing in written form, say a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, it would be long forgotten by now and finding it would be a time-consuming and expensive process. Google makes finding stuff like this not only easy, but actually easiER than my current postings because of how their pagerank system works. I don't think that's fair.
I understand the need to keep troubleshooting posts around, but Google should have SOME facility for lowering the pagerank of things like this (if not delisting them entirely.)
Sorry for posting the dumbest idea you've ever read.
Thus my posting as a "devil's advocate." If you (and the moderator who modded you up) don't know what that term means, you might try looking it up before posting a reply.
Yes, but it SHOULD be -1 Off Topic. Instead, my pointing out that it should be Off-Topic was moderated Off-Topic. (Which is fair, I suppose, but only after the original off-topic post was modded.) Which goes to show how well Slashdot moderation works in general.
As a devil's advocate, though, what enforcement is there of robots.txt?
I could easily write a program that runs on my workstation and completely ignores it. In fact, I have a offline-browser that downloads sites and *does* completely ignore it while spidering for which pages to download (I won't name names.) There's nothing technical requiring spiders to honor it, presumably there's no legal system to honor it, it's all just trust.
Next time this comes up in court, the case might be a much more interesting, "I had a robots.txt file, but [search engine] ignored it!"
I had archive.org erase my old blog from its memory because I posted a lot of stupid stuff I don't want anybody to read now. I have no idea what this lady's beef is, but I think the ability to remove personal information from search engines and archive.org is needed in this day and age.
Imagine interviewing from a job, and having your top hit in Google being, "John Doe: OMG that black dude is such an unfair bitch he hit me with the fucking rocket launcher when I was trying to give money to this hooker" just because GamePostings.coom happens to have a high siterank. People change, and the internet is old enough now that people in the world looking for jobs, loans, girlfriends, etc have crap like that posted all over.
I'd love it if Google and other search engines had a policy of booting forum posts from their index after a period of time, say 2 years. That said, I don't think the government needs to be involved.
This is extremely relevant to the topic of buying computers without Windows pre-installed. Good job, moderators.
There's also the whole "who cares?" factor.
The only possible use for this information is to better target advertising. And frankly, I like targeted advertising a lot more than un-targeted advertising, so I'm all for it. It costs me nothing, doesn't hurt me in any way, but potentially could stop me from having to see tampon ads. All for it.
I think what he's trying to say is basically:
"Ha ha Europeans are so much better than you stupid Americans because we don't have to pay for pointless* luxury item! Also, since I know this site is full of hate America liberals, I'm sure to be posted up! Of course, if there's a Slashdot article about something that the US truly excels at, like, say, actually having a healthy IT or Aerospace industry, I'd never post something like this."
* hint: phones are designed to talk on.
What's interesting to me is the number of people on Slashdot, as revealed by comments and posted questions like these, who (apparently) work in corporations and yet have absolutely no idea how corporations work. It's like this site is full of the guy who stays at Quality Assurance I because they don't know how to get promoted... I don't like that guy.
I'm pretty sure the first The Longest Journey had no copy protection. But this must vastly limit the games you buy... for instance, Dreamfall has copy protection on the disk, and almost every game made in ... well, ever has copy protection of some sort. (It used to be looking things up in a manual, then specially formatted disks that reported "bad blocks" when you tried to copy them, then CD copy protection drivers, now internet activation.) The only game I can think of that had no copy protection whatsoever was Tribes in 1996.
In short, it seems a little hypocritical to me to play Dreamfall with copy protection and refuse to play The Longest Journey 3 with a slightly different method of copy protection. But, hey, it's your money.
Implying that if it hadn't been leaked by a Funcom employee, it wouldn't have been pirated at all?
I think that logic deserves a "Huh!?"
The point is that a ton of people pirated the game. Whether they pirated before the official release or after, that doesn't change anything.
It's not just training, it's also management and staffing.
Linux system admins cost more than Windows system admins, making no judgment about their capabilities. And it's not true that a single Linux system administrator can manage more machines than a Windows system administrator... in fact, with Microsoft's management tools, the opposite is probably true.
Generally, less choice = better usability.
In fact, probably 90% of usability is finding what people want to do and making it trivially easy. The stuff the majority don't want to do remains hard or impossible. It sounds a little strict, but it seems to pay off for, say, Apple.
The reason Linus doesn't like it is because he wants every little byte to be configurable, like a lot of Linux users. That's fine; he can use KDE instead. The stupid things about this situation is:
1) That people give a crap what Linus says about usability. He programs the kernel! The lowest-level component of the OS! He has no usability experience whatsoever. Have you seen the kind of GUIs that kernel programmers design? Look at anything from IBM, for instance. I understand that Linus is like an open source superhero, but you shouldn't trust Linus' opinion on usability issues any more than you should trust Superman's opinion on railway maintenance.
2) That Linus uses GNOME and gripes about it instead of just using what he likes. Isn't the entire point of the open source ecosystem to give the user choices? Linus can hardly bitch if he doesn't bother to use an alternative.
2a) Or (even worse) he uses KDE but chooses to go out of his way to bitch at some other open source project.
As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
Sounds like Apple's OpenDoc?
It didn't work because:
1) They released it too early and it quickly gained a reputation for being too buggy.
2) The only application that really embraced it was ClarisWorks. Oh, there was some lame web browser Apple made that used it too called Cyberdog, IIRC.
The idea isn't *bad*, but it really needs a killer app around it to make it work. An app better than ClarisWorks/Cyberdog.
Are open source desktop developers so focused on trying to make it "easy" for Windows user to convert they get Microsoft tunnel vision and can't innovate?
Yup. Open source seems to lack a lot of designers-- without designers, you have to program based on established designs. Designs from a company like, say, Microsoft who solved all those problems before. KDE and Windows, in the default configuration, look almost identical. Say what you want about Apple and Microsoft, but at least Windows and OS X don't look and work identically.