Not necessarily. I've often clicked the wrong button/used the wrong command and thought to myself "Why couldn't the computer have known that I really meant to hit the button just to the left of that?" Of course it's nearly impossible, and probably won't be done this decade, but I would certainly like such a system, provided I could control the information flow.
I would just like to point out that I use Thunderbird, and still get spam in my inbox. I usually get about 10 spams a day (I'm very careful with my e-mail address for that inbox) and thunderbird will catch 6-7 of those. Sure, it's better than nothing, but you make it sound like Thunderbird stops all spam and cures cancer and it clearly does not.
I think that the recent surge of Halo 3 sales shows pretty clearly that CTF and Deathmatch is not getting boring for the majority (yes there are other gametypes but, besides territories, they're always vetoed when I play).
No offense dude but complaining about incompatibility in a demo, much less 64 bit incompatibility (which has been a problem with many, many release products) is a little sad, especially when it is possible to get it to work. I had a problem with Supreme Commander's demo when it came out, and so did many ATI users, it's a part of demos and open betas to discover incompatibilities and correct them for the full product, the fact that 64 bit has a workaround at all is great news.
The other side is that a lot of people don't see it that way. I still trust Microsoft to not mess up my machine, even if they're pushing stealth updates to their software. I'm usually anti-stealth anything, I hate software DRM for that reason (don't go patching my CD rom driver to play your game) but in this case it's a good idea to have Microsoft able to stealth update the windows updater, it's one piece of software on your machine that doesn't really interact with the others all that much.
I know a lot of people are going to clammering slippery slope here, claiming that MS will use this to destroy everyone's life, but I just don't see it that way. Yes the computer's mine, and yes I should know everything that's installed on it, but if MS really wants to stealth patch their updater then yay for them, all that means is I won't have to go through the whole 'Windows Updater must update itself to receive Windows Updates from the Windows Update Site' nonsense again. So long as Microsoft stays within that box of only stealth updating the updater, and I have no doubt they will, I trust them.
Doesn't mean I don't still want to get Linux running though:P.
"Umm, dude, by admitting his mistake, he hasn't done anything special"
Actually, in our modern world, that is something special. What you should have done and what is commonly done are rarely equal and so when someone embraces their responsibility and admits to being wrong they should be praised in order that more people realize that truth is what we want, not looking infallible.
What in the world? Okay, this is just plain weird. First that they would deny Bill Gates a visa, I mean, unlike what many/.er's seem to think he's not exactly an evil guy or anything, it's not like he tortures puppies for fun or something. Second what kind of lame excuse is that they offered? I highly doubt Bill has any plans to move permanently to Nigeria (no offense to Nigeria but it's not quite the same as the US in terms of high end services) and that he would be a burden on social services is absurd, he's one of the richest people in the world, how could he strain social services?
This is by far one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen...
He's probably referring to the (likely fake) previous story about a spammer supposedly killed by the Russian Mafia, and alluding to a desire to see something similar happen to this organization.
Or you could, you know, criticize the group without their trademark...it's not impossible...I mean, if I say "Those gosh darned Recoding Industry Association of America people are dumb" I've criticized them without using their trademark, just their name. Names are almost never trademarked, or at least full names (Pepsi may be, but Pepsi Cola Company isn't as far as I know).
Honestly, if you're going to criticize someone you may as well spell out who you're criticizing, what with the ton of different acronyms we have today.
"customers get what they want and MSFT gets burned by developing an OS that no one wants."
Or, customers get what they think they want, and Microsoft (why must people abbreviate it? It's not that long of a word) gets to keep it's market share relatively even while also having it's older OS (XP) look much better to many people (upgrade to linux? Nah, I'll just go back to XP. It was perfect as I remember).
I agree with pretty much everything you said (despite my dislike for EA as the life-sucking vampire of the game industry, You made battlefield '42! Where's the good games EA!?). The one part I draw question to is your final question, it's much more likely that the problems stem from the DRM rather than the DRM-free versions for the simple reason that extra code tends to add extra problems. Cracker's are very good at what they do* and it's unlikely that anyone grabbing one of the cracked games would have the types of problems they're having, and would report it to EA ('What's that? You're having problems? Well lets just check your CD Key...oh what's this? Cracked version, BANNINATION).
I mean, cracking is by no means perfect, and is illegal to boot, but tends to produce higher quality products than the un-cracked versions, one of the big DRM criticisms (and my personal favorite, people don't seem to understand that they could run their favorite programs without the CD if there was no DRM, they seem to think there's some kind of hardware issue that requires the CD, or that it's too much data to write to the hard drive (sometimes the case for the new DVD games).
*I've more than once considered grabbing cracked versions of games I own, mainly so I can run them without the CD...I'm considering getting a cracked BF 1942 as I lost 1 disk, have the other and the key, and can't do anything about it:(
And I just realized my first sentence looks like something else, it's supposed to be an arrow pointing to my name, not to the parent. Sorry bout that. I was just trying to get the point across that I don't normally defend the free market, as I think there should be a decent amount of regulation (especially in cases like this where the general population is ignorant to what's important)
"sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't."
The problem in this case is not the free market itself, but rather that the average person has no idea what most of the stuff means. It's getting better, and we're seeing the beginning of the end for the market-speak in the internet area (the recent unlimited capped internet being the big thing now), but for the most part the average consumer has no idea what the applicable difference is between a 100 mb/s and 300 mb/s line is (they do know that one is 3x faster, but not how that will affect them and whether it's worth it). Because of that ignorance the providers are able to keep all the important information secret, because the majority cares more about whether they'll have the internet and be able to send e-mails rather than what they can expect their upload and download rates to be and what the caps are on their internet use. Once those are seen as important by the majority (read: once the majority is at least technologically sufficient, if not proficient) they'll start being advertised.
Just thought I'd point that out. Internet here is quite pathetic, but it's not strictly a free market problem. It's more a general population problem which is amplified by having a free market environment.
"For consumer electronics, I guess the assumption is that if it's 40 degrees in your room, you're going to go find somewhere cooler to be, rather than sitting there with your PC blowing hot air on you."
I'm sure that's a good assumption in many situations, but I've sat outside on my computer during the day a few (read: every friday since school started back up) times this year when the temp was over 110 F. I was out there when it was 117 F running along just fine for almost 20 minutes before my class opened up.
It's not a bad assumption, in general the amount of time a computer's going to be running in >104 F is very small, but it's not exactly impossible.
"now the only people who have the guns are criminals and the government for the most part"
You my friend are sadly mistaken. Plenty of non-criminal, non-governmental citizens own firearms, I have a friend with 3 semi-automatic rifles (one of which can be made automatic, illegally, with only a twisty tie, he's decline to do that so far), not to mention pistols. As far as I can tell the US has one of the highest armed civilians to population ratios in the world, I've heard many many anti-American insults about how we're all crazy loonatics with guns.
If you really think that no good honest American citizens own guns then you've either been getting your information solely through the media (which considers anyone with a gun a criminal, even if they've never committed any crimes) or you're just plain wrong.
Okay, we'll ROT2 it first...will that make you happy?
(Actually it would probably be better represented as a full string of the candidate's name. Sure, it's more memory, but it'd be an especially remarkable series of faults that manages to flip every bit in that string to another candidate's name (assuming it's not purposefully tampered with) while just about any error would mess up a single, or double (got to assume there's not just 2 candidates, even if there are usually only 2 candidates) bit encoding.)
*whisper* Hey, yeah you, you over there. The one with the comment. I'll let you in a little secret of mine, don't spread it around to much. You ready? It's called 'You don't have to buy the new stuff'. It'll solve all your problems right there, don't want to see Pine as Kirk in Generations? Just hang on to your old copy of Generations which I'm sure you have since you care about who the actor is. Wrath of Khan too. Same goes for Star Wars. You can thank me later for this tip, preferably with cash. *whisper*
I've never really understood the controversy around the Special Edition. If you actually care enough about it to not like the new stuff then you definitely have an old copy, watch that. No one can take away something you like if you've already bought it (Until DRM because even worse than it is now) so just keep living in a world where the only Kirk is The Shatner and don't watch the new movies or buy old ones with a photoshopped in Pine.
Be that as it may, 99% of that beauty and complexity is useless. Just because something is nice doesn't mean it should be used on a daily basis, Latin is nice sounding but I don't want to give a speech in it, English is much better for that purpose.
Now then spelling might change as a result of text messaging, but speech probably won't since 99% of people pronounce the words (except lol, which gets you ridiculed if you say it but confuses people if you spell it out (laugh out loud?)) as the real word. The written language will probably be hugely affected by text messaging, but speech will be mostly unaffected (besides the addition of a few new words, acronyms, which has been happening for a long time now, ASAP, AWOL etc). It's going to be something else that changes speech.
As for Imperative, I highly doubt that most people can't link Imperative to Important, especially with it being used a good amount in games/movies. It's other meanings aren't well known (I only had a fuzzy recall of it off-hand) but that's because they're not important to anyone besides an English Major. Imperative has a 5th meaning I'd bet you don't know, it's a form of Computer programming (similar to Procedural programming). Just because people don't know something doesn't imply that knowledge is being lost, most people have no need to learn what Imperative means for grammar, just as most don't need to know what it means in programming.
As a non-average user and almost Linux convert (soon as I can get it to play nice with my ATI card) I agree completely. The first distro I looked at was Freespire, simply because I have a lot of WMV files that I don't want to have to go through and convert just so I can run Linux. That's the number one thing that's making me less than excited to swap, the fact that Linux doesn't play nice with proprietary stuff. Yes that is the proprietary stuff's fault, not Linux's, but it doesn't really matter when comparing Windows (which runs everything I want to run out of the box) and Linux (which runs most of what I want to run out of the box, and the rest can possibly be added on with WINE and a few other things).
I wonder if there's a new version of Freespire out as well, it always looked better than Ubuntu and if it plays nice with ATI then I'll be set.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. I've often clicked the wrong button/used the wrong command and thought to myself "Why couldn't the computer have known that I really meant to hit the button just to the left of that?" Of course it's nearly impossible, and probably won't be done this decade, but I would certainly like such a system, provided I could control the information flow.
I would just like to point out that I use Thunderbird, and still get spam in my inbox. I usually get about 10 spams a day (I'm very careful with my e-mail address for that inbox) and thunderbird will catch 6-7 of those. Sure, it's better than nothing, but you make it sound like Thunderbird stops all spam and cures cancer and it clearly does not.
I think that the recent surge of Halo 3 sales shows pretty clearly that CTF and Deathmatch is not getting boring for the majority (yes there are other gametypes but, besides territories, they're always vetoed when I play).
No offense dude but complaining about incompatibility in a demo, much less 64 bit incompatibility (which has been a problem with many, many release products) is a little sad, especially when it is possible to get it to work. I had a problem with Supreme Commander's demo when it came out, and so did many ATI users, it's a part of demos and open betas to discover incompatibilities and correct them for the full product, the fact that 64 bit has a workaround at all is great news.
Myworks? DRM folder? I don't have either of those, and I don't use IE so it doesn't matter to me what MS does to it.
I'd like to know what you're talking about so I can be properly prepared for it in the future if you don't mind.
The other side is that a lot of people don't see it that way. I still trust Microsoft to not mess up my machine, even if they're pushing stealth updates to their software. I'm usually anti-stealth anything, I hate software DRM for that reason (don't go patching my CD rom driver to play your game) but in this case it's a good idea to have Microsoft able to stealth update the windows updater, it's one piece of software on your machine that doesn't really interact with the others all that much.
:P.
I know a lot of people are going to clammering slippery slope here, claiming that MS will use this to destroy everyone's life, but I just don't see it that way. Yes the computer's mine, and yes I should know everything that's installed on it, but if MS really wants to stealth patch their updater then yay for them, all that means is I won't have to go through the whole 'Windows Updater must update itself to receive Windows Updates from the Windows Update Site' nonsense again. So long as Microsoft stays within that box of only stealth updating the updater, and I have no doubt they will, I trust them.
Doesn't mean I don't still want to get Linux running though
"Umm, dude, by admitting his mistake, he hasn't done anything special"
Actually, in our modern world, that is something special. What you should have done and what is commonly done are rarely equal and so when someone embraces their responsibility and admits to being wrong they should be praised in order that more people realize that truth is what we want, not looking infallible.
What in the world? Okay, this is just plain weird. First that they would deny Bill Gates a visa, I mean, unlike what many /.er's seem to think he's not exactly an evil guy or anything, it's not like he tortures puppies for fun or something. Second what kind of lame excuse is that they offered? I highly doubt Bill has any plans to move permanently to Nigeria (no offense to Nigeria but it's not quite the same as the US in terms of high end services) and that he would be a burden on social services is absurd, he's one of the richest people in the world, how could he strain social services?
This is by far one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen...
He's probably referring to the (likely fake) previous story about a spammer supposedly killed by the Russian Mafia, and alluding to a desire to see something similar happen to this organization.
Don't forget Dogpile and AskJeeves (isn't that vaguely languagecist (yeah, just made that word up, live with it)?).
Internet search engines have weird names...
Or you could, you know, criticize the group without their trademark...it's not impossible...I mean, if I say "Those gosh darned Recoding Industry Association of America people are dumb" I've criticized them without using their trademark, just their name. Names are almost never trademarked, or at least full names (Pepsi may be, but Pepsi Cola Company isn't as far as I know).
Honestly, if you're going to criticize someone you may as well spell out who you're criticizing, what with the ton of different acronyms we have today.
"customers get what they want and MSFT gets burned by developing an OS that no one wants."
Or, customers get what they think they want, and Microsoft (why must people abbreviate it? It's not that long of a word) gets to keep it's market share relatively even while also having it's older OS (XP) look much better to many people (upgrade to linux? Nah, I'll just go back to XP. It was perfect as I remember).
Wow...is the new /. trend to not even read the title? I've got to keep up with these things better...
I agree with pretty much everything you said (despite my dislike for EA as the life-sucking vampire of the game industry, You made battlefield '42! Where's the good games EA!?). The one part I draw question to is your final question, it's much more likely that the problems stem from the DRM rather than the DRM-free versions for the simple reason that extra code tends to add extra problems. Cracker's are very good at what they do* and it's unlikely that anyone grabbing one of the cracked games would have the types of problems they're having, and would report it to EA ('What's that? You're having problems? Well lets just check your CD Key...oh what's this? Cracked version, BANNINATION).
:(
I mean, cracking is by no means perfect, and is illegal to boot, but tends to produce higher quality products than the un-cracked versions, one of the big DRM criticisms (and my personal favorite, people don't seem to understand that they could run their favorite programs without the CD if there was no DRM, they seem to think there's some kind of hardware issue that requires the CD, or that it's too much data to write to the hard drive (sometimes the case for the new DVD games).
*I've more than once considered grabbing cracked versions of games I own, mainly so I can run them without the CD...I'm considering getting a cracked BF 1942 as I lost 1 disk, have the other and the key, and can't do anything about it
And I just realized my first sentence looks like something else, it's supposed to be an arrow pointing to my name, not to the parent. Sorry bout that. I was just trying to get the point across that I don't normally defend the free market, as I think there should be a decent amount of regulation (especially in cases like this where the general population is ignorant to what's important)
^ Not a big free market believer
"sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't."
The problem in this case is not the free market itself, but rather that the average person has no idea what most of the stuff means. It's getting better, and we're seeing the beginning of the end for the market-speak in the internet area (the recent unlimited capped internet being the big thing now), but for the most part the average consumer has no idea what the applicable difference is between a 100 mb/s and 300 mb/s line is (they do know that one is 3x faster, but not how that will affect them and whether it's worth it). Because of that ignorance the providers are able to keep all the important information secret, because the majority cares more about whether they'll have the internet and be able to send e-mails rather than what they can expect their upload and download rates to be and what the caps are on their internet use. Once those are seen as important by the majority (read: once the majority is at least technologically sufficient, if not proficient) they'll start being advertised.
Just thought I'd point that out. Internet here is quite pathetic, but it's not strictly a free market problem. It's more a general population problem which is amplified by having a free market environment.
"For consumer electronics, I guess the assumption is that if it's 40 degrees in your room, you're going to go find somewhere cooler to be, rather than sitting there with your PC blowing hot air on you."
I'm sure that's a good assumption in many situations, but I've sat outside on my computer during the day a few (read: every friday since school started back up) times this year when the temp was over 110 F. I was out there when it was 117 F running along just fine for almost 20 minutes before my class opened up.
It's not a bad assumption, in general the amount of time a computer's going to be running in >104 F is very small, but it's not exactly impossible.
"February != the Christmas season."
/.'s html formatting is so much different than php forum formatting...)
Smash Bros wasn't the only anticipated game release this Q4 though
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Galaxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil:_The_Umbrella_Chronicles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero_III:_Legends_of_Rock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEGO_Star_Wars:_The_Complete_Saga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_Radiant_Dawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Squad
(Ugh...
"now the only people who have the guns are criminals and the government for the most part"
You my friend are sadly mistaken. Plenty of non-criminal, non-governmental citizens own firearms, I have a friend with 3 semi-automatic rifles (one of which can be made automatic, illegally, with only a twisty tie, he's decline to do that so far), not to mention pistols. As far as I can tell the US has one of the highest armed civilians to population ratios in the world, I've heard many many anti-American insults about how we're all crazy loonatics with guns.
If you really think that no good honest American citizens own guns then you've either been getting your information solely through the media (which considers anyone with a gun a criminal, even if they've never committed any crimes) or you're just plain wrong.
Who modded this insightful again?
But the biggest question of all...how many Parsecs does it take for this system to make the Kessel Run?
They put him in a box with a large radiation emitter. The same thing's being considered over here I hear :P.
What's that? We were only supposed to leave him in there a short time? Oh...new election!
Okay, we'll ROT2 it first...will that make you happy?
(Actually it would probably be better represented as a full string of the candidate's name. Sure, it's more memory, but it'd be an especially remarkable series of faults that manages to flip every bit in that string to another candidate's name (assuming it's not purposefully tampered with) while just about any error would mess up a single, or double (got to assume there's not just 2 candidates, even if there are usually only 2 candidates) bit encoding.)
*whisper* Hey, yeah you, you over there. The one with the comment. I'll let you in a little secret of mine, don't spread it around to much. You ready? It's called 'You don't have to buy the new stuff'. It'll solve all your problems right there, don't want to see Pine as Kirk in Generations? Just hang on to your old copy of Generations which I'm sure you have since you care about who the actor is. Wrath of Khan too. Same goes for Star Wars. You can thank me later for this tip, preferably with cash. *whisper*
I've never really understood the controversy around the Special Edition. If you actually care enough about it to not like the new stuff then you definitely have an old copy, watch that. No one can take away something you like if you've already bought it (Until DRM because even worse than it is now) so just keep living in a world where the only Kirk is The Shatner and don't watch the new movies or buy old ones with a photoshopped in Pine.
"the beauty and possibility a complex language"
Be that as it may, 99% of that beauty and complexity is useless. Just because something is nice doesn't mean it should be used on a daily basis, Latin is nice sounding but I don't want to give a speech in it, English is much better for that purpose.
Now then spelling might change as a result of text messaging, but speech probably won't since 99% of people pronounce the words (except lol, which gets you ridiculed if you say it but confuses people if you spell it out (laugh out loud?)) as the real word. The written language will probably be hugely affected by text messaging, but speech will be mostly unaffected (besides the addition of a few new words, acronyms, which has been happening for a long time now, ASAP, AWOL etc). It's going to be something else that changes speech.
As for Imperative, I highly doubt that most people can't link Imperative to Important, especially with it being used a good amount in games/movies. It's other meanings aren't well known (I only had a fuzzy recall of it off-hand) but that's because they're not important to anyone besides an English Major. Imperative has a 5th meaning I'd bet you don't know, it's a form of Computer programming (similar to Procedural programming). Just because people don't know something doesn't imply that knowledge is being lost, most people have no need to learn what Imperative means for grammar, just as most don't need to know what it means in programming.
As a non-average user and almost Linux convert (soon as I can get it to play nice with my ATI card) I agree completely. The first distro I looked at was Freespire, simply because I have a lot of WMV files that I don't want to have to go through and convert just so I can run Linux. That's the number one thing that's making me less than excited to swap, the fact that Linux doesn't play nice with proprietary stuff. Yes that is the proprietary stuff's fault, not Linux's, but it doesn't really matter when comparing Windows (which runs everything I want to run out of the box) and Linux (which runs most of what I want to run out of the box, and the rest can possibly be added on with WINE and a few other things).
I wonder if there's a new version of Freespire out as well, it always looked better than Ubuntu and if it plays nice with ATI then I'll be set.