Thanks for the link!

That's a very good point, they should pull those games from the market if they're going to go forward with this. They have an obligation to inform people that these games may not work as advertised.

There are plenty of DOS games that I enjoyed playing, good luck getting them to run now. Got a dos driver for your embedded RealTek audio card? How about a dos driver for your wireless mouse? Fretting about not being able to play a 15-year-old game just seems silly to me. That's what technology does to things, we constantly move forward and at some point it doesn't make sense to carry along support for old things. I have a library of Beta tapes, where can i buy a new Beta player? Hell, I can't remember the last time i saw a new movie on VHS at the store. OS X 10.6 doesn't run on PPC macs, Windows 7 doesn't support some XP programs, etc. It's convenient to blame the manufacturer and claim they're purposefully screwing the consumers but at some point you have to let go. What about all of those Windows XP users that want to play the latest DirectX 11 games ... too bad.

My point is, as a consumer you have to ready yourself for the 6 year life that most software carries nowadays. And if that frustrates you then you best find another source of entertainment.

For this reason I truly appreciated the way that Halo 3 handles this. It keeps track of your completion and difficulty on a level-by-level basis, including playing single vs. co-op. That way, you still get game completion credit for having played every level, but only the the "hard difficulty completion" achievement if you played all of the levels on hard difficulty. So at the end of the game if you played two levels on normal, you can go back and just play those two levels on hard to wrap things up.

I completely agree with you and have often thought the same thing. Difficulty in multi-player games is "technically" a different challenge than dynamic difficulty in a single player game. As previously mentioned, single player dynamics can be easily, if not poorly, adjusted by increasing enemy count, etc. But multiplayer adds the dimension that you have to adjust the ratio of difficulty between two players. Something should be done to put both teams on even ground. Whether that's through ramping up health or biasing weapon spawns to the losing team, or just making the best players stand out more by glowing or something, there are things that can and should be done to make it easier to have a fair fight when a group of players get together to game. We've already seen this sort of thing starting and we have no farther to look than Rock Band / Guitar Hero that allow players of multiple skill levels to play at the same time.

GCD and OpenMP have very little in common. OpenMP is a language extension. It requires the programmer to understand what environment their program is going to run in, what variables can be shared and how, etc. GCD merely asks you to identify blocks of code that are independent and it handles parsing them out to threads, variable replication, etc. It's the difference between providing detailed blueprints of a car (the OpenMP way) and just saying "I want a car" (the GCD way). You can *almost* think of GCD as a user-friendly frontend for OpenMP.

Why is everyone so caught up on the hot swappable feature. I mean, I get it, it's convenient to hot swap, but that's gotta be a terrible price / performance penalty. First off, convenient hot swap requires real estate, i.e., you have to be able to access the drive from the front of the rack which means you won't fit 45 drives in a 4U space (not 3.5 inch drives anyway). Assuming they have massive redundancy (which someone using a system like this would), it's not that big of a pain to power off the entire node, slide it out, swap a drive, slide it in. That just took you what, 4 minutes? Hot swapping requires a lot of faith in your OS (raid and filesystem subsystems) and controller cards to handle that situation gracefully and reliably (which is why you pay a lot for a box from Sun/HP that "guarantees" you have that ability).

That's what I was thinking. In many retail businesses (clothing I know for sure), there is almost always a 100% markup over wholesale. Perform the same analysis on a Monster RCA cable and tell me what their margin is ...

You left out the #1 reason to shop online which is what the article relates to most: there are no sales people when you shop online. Amazon has never given me an obtrusive pop-up about an extended warranty or lied to me about being in stock.

The only real downsides are 1) if you want to return it during the return period you have to ship it (pain as far as I'm concerned), and many online stores now don't have a price guarantee for the first 30 days like most brick and mortar stores (Amazon cancelled their program almost a year ago but will still honor it once per user if you email them).

I, too, vote for spotlight!

Agreed, though there have been several instances where OpenOffice would not start until I removed the entire preferences directory and started over.

While you are correct, this thread was specifically talking about the command line apt-cache search and the like. The GUI's are an improvement, especially recently, though I believe Synaptic is still just as ignorant, but I don't have an up to date Ubuntu system to try it on.

Out of curiosity, do you know if most Windows applications also remove your personal preferences from the hidden directories in your home folder? It seems to me that they wouldn't though I guess I remember a few specifically asking me if they should do so ... just curious.

The problem of storing user preferences has always been a pain but I do prefer their non-hidden state on the Mac to the hidden "Local Settings" folder on Windows (or even worse, in the registry).