This also opens the door for consumers to access the same movie on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and online. The key is we are not paying for a license to use the material again, we only ever pay for the media and/or the bandwidth to acquire the content.
Providers can offer varying QOS, where top-tier movie vendors might charge $15 to get the movie in 5 minutes onto a DVD disc and a discount service might charge $9 a month to download the movie over the Internet.
The music industry might want to try something like this too. I've still got LP's and cassette tapes that I wouldn't mind "upgrading" to CD or MP3, I'm just not keen on paying $15 for $0.50 worth of media.
When will the media industry learn that DRM strategies simply don't work?
As soon as you can see or hear it, it is then possible to duplicate it. No amount of copy protection will ever be able to prevent that short of preventing consumers from accessing the material altogether.
Learn to trust your consumers a little and focus on adding value to the material, and then people will buy your content. It might also help to provide some flexibility in the content licensing model, maybe giving people the option to upgrade DVD discs to HD-DVD for the same content may encourage them to continue buying media.
Is anyone offering movie downloads in a format without any goofy DRM restriction? What about music as an MP3 that I can play on my computers at home and at work?
How complicated does this need to be???? It's _just_ a media file, if consumers were going to make so many illegal copies of these things then I would be flooding the street with copies of my home movie collection even as we speak.
I'm not. Why? Because I have better things to do with my time. This is the same reason I didn't steal music from the radio and try to sell it on cassette tape.
The complexity of an encryption key, or a proprietary movie player or some custom CODEC is beyond the scope of what I'm willing to do to play media on my PC. Even if I was running Windows at home I wouldn't be doing this, it's as if the media industry is demanding that we all go out and buy a specific brand of AM/FM tuner to listen to their content.
I think this should go to the next logical level -- email should not be free to send. Just like you need to make a conscious decision to send a letter in the USPS, an email message should require postage.
If someone wants to earnestly contact you, they would be willing to pay 5-10 cents postage to get an email to you. Not only would this virtually eliminate spam, it would drastically abate the casual me-too emails. Some email postage services could run to make a profit while others could allow the users to share in the proceeds.
This has been mentioned in a few other postings, but I'll echo those sentiments again here. If you're just coming out of college and you haven't already "settled-down" (family/kids/etc.) -- NOW is the time to take a chance with a smaller company.
When your obligations change as you grow older, it won't be possible for you to risk a startup that may need to skip a few paychecks on the way. Take the time now to do something you believe in and try to innovate on your own, neither Microsoft or Google are going to be true innovators -- these are large insular organizations that are focused on making money. They will take existing technologies and make them look pretty, but they won't take something completely new and run with it.
The items the guy completely missed is training costs, deployment costs, and business process changes. Those will wind up costing the organization just as much, if not more than the licensing costs.
This is without a doubt the real expense of delivering Vista to your organization. It is one of the more significant UI overhauls since Windows 98, quite a few applications behave very differently under Vista and your average user will require at least some training to understand how to utilize these features.
The reality is corporate deployments of Vista are a few years away for any existing Windows environment. Microsoft has some opportunity to convert enterprise users from extremely legacy platforms (Win98/NT3.5) but most of the early adoption will be from the home consumer. When W2K/XP corporate users get to MS Vista, processing power and the cost of PC's will have changed yet again - so estimating these kinds of costs now is entirely unrealistic.
This is also a good thing for game publishers and ultimately Microsoft in general. If you can write a game for both XBOX360 and the Windows PC platform at the same time, think of the cost savings. It will basically make one of these platforms free, and if Microsoft can get a good CLR to Macintosh (we will be able to play these games on any of the major desktop platforms.
Hopefully, the continued work on Mono will eventually make XLR part of our Linux environments as well. This is a fabulous idea, and in the long run will benefit Microsoft and PC users alike.
I think the argument that games require "low-level" (ie: ASM) development in order to operate effectively is irrelavent. Processing power has far exceeded what was available even a few years ago, with a high-speed multi-core chip the average user has more processing power then they can ever use. Since most gameplay is submersive (ie: you can't do anything else while you're playing) it is a perfect fit for our modern personal computer.
Having suffered WineX and now Cedega, my subscription was never able to provide gameplay for any of the games I enjoy. My list of games is not very long and for the most part they aren't too demanding, but they simply won't install or play correctly under Cedega.
It's frustrating and it means I need to keep a Windows 98 partition so I can boot and play games. There probably isn't a good fix for any of these legacy games, but going forward there is a lot that vendors could do.
Game manufacturers should agree on a platform using an application virtual machine implementation similar to Java or the Microsoft CLR. Examples of this include things like ScummVM or MAME -- but a true gaming system would require 3D capability and some hardware access (eg: play audio CD). For this kind of virtual platform to work, major game vendors need to band together and garner support from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
Imagine the benefit! We could play a game in our Windows PC, Macintosh, XBox or even portable GameBoy. The _same_ game. Console vendors could choose to implement features of the game machine in hardware or software, and it might even open up the market to competition from third party gaming consoles. Game makers would cut expenses by developing to a single virtual platform, and they would not need to recode popular titles to multiple platforms... they would just work.
It won't really adversely affect the console vendors, since gamers who want a console would still buy one. Console vendors will need to provide other value to help increase sales, which has already become a reality for the XBox and WMC. Users with PC's could purchase either third-party emulators or download open source implementations when the become available. There should be a reference implementation suitable for running under Windows, and other platforms can follow from that.
Yes, but even the worst of my junk snail-mail is for a real product or service. The VAST majority of my SPAM email is for a non-existent product/service/scam and is not from a real company at all. There are occasional SPAM emails from real vendors that I will actually read, since they are interested in selling me something.
Why is everyone so adverse to charging for email? We're paying for it anyway, why not pay for the product we want?
As a result of spam/phishing emails, an entire suite of technology industries have cropped up. We need virus filters for our email, spam filters for junk email, and UI protections to prevent users from tripping into phishing scams. While most of this stuff works pretty well, it's certainly not reliable and quite a bit of your regular email is affected by all of these features.
Think about. If someone sends you an email today, there are quite a few ways it can fail and you may never know about it. Spam messages delivered to your spambucket might as well not be delivered at all, with 500+ SPAM emails a day I just don't bother checking what's in there.
If someone really want's to send me an email, or if I really want to send someone else an email, then a $0.01 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, I would be willing to pay $0.10 or more to obtain delivery of my email. If the sender is not willing to pay the fee to deliver the message to me, then it's not a message I am interested in receiving anyway.
Think about it.
How much are _you_ willing to pay to send someone a batch of useless junk email? Probably nothing. It's junk email and you're a sensible person - it should just be deleted.
How much are you willing to pay to send an email to your wife? Your mom? Your best friend? Probably a lot more than nothing.
I must agree, virtually every Windows PC I have ever worked on has been bogged down by a triumpherant of anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software. Most users don't understand that they only need one of each of these programs, and they never seem to comprehend that after installing an anti-virus/anti-spyware program the most important thing is to keep it up-to-date.
It doesn't get any easier when Microsoft starts publishing programs that do the same thing. Users then "upgrade" their PC's to include the MS versions of everything, and chaos ensues.
Apple has made inroads by avoiding NIH syndrom. They were more than happy to leverage a UNIX platform, and rather than invent all sorts of new ways to do the same thing they simply took advantage of simple UNIX truisims. Microsoft is trying to invent something new, and this can be an especially painful process if there is nothing new to be invented.
Why do people think that because they pay their ISP to store email messages that they have already covered the cost of sending email?
The recipient must pay the cost to receive/store them. If a spammer sends you 1000 10MB messages in one day, should your ISP charge you to keep these on their server? Right now you have no way to prevent someone from sending you massive amounts of useless email. If ISP's started to assess fines for any accounts that exceeded a maximum bandwidth/data transfer, then users would quickly lose interest in the expense of maintaining an email account.
Spammers need a reason to stop. People need a reason to stop all the me-too forwarding. My email inbox has gone from a few targeted messages a day to over 80% useless spam. As far as I can tell, this is not a very effective system.
Kudos to Yahoo! and AOL for taking a stance on this. Microsoft will be following with a similiar capability shortly, and I look forward to the day when sending email will no longer be free.
Agreed -- while the Wine project is a valiant attempt to simulate the Windows API calls, it simply doesn't provide the transparent support necessary to enable all of your Windows apps. While it comes very close, and there are at least a few cases where you will be pleasantly surprised, you will be much happier discovering the open source alternatives for your favorite Windows app.
The only place where this falls apart is when you want to play a game on your PC. The fact is, developers support the Windows platform and without something like Wine you simply cannot play these games on other operating systems.
Maybe one day the game publishers will see the light, and will instead develop to a portable platform (eg: Qt libs or somesuch) and everyone can then enjoy these games on any platform.
Have you seen Microsoft Office 12? It's an even more radical departure from the look & feel of previous MS Office suites than OpenOffice. Users will require significant retraining in order to learn MS Office 12; here is the press release with various screenshots:
Very interesting. Actually, Microsoft will have protections for video but they are still researching ways they can protect the audio. All of this has reached a level of complexity that the consumer will never understand.
Recently, I tried to play some discs on a JVC mini-stereo and some media refused to play. While they won't play in my computer they will play on other CD players in the house. At this point, as far as I can tell the JVC player is "broken" and it should be replaced - but the replacement system will need to be able to play these CD's. Maybe it's okay that the discs won't play on my PC, but they should work in my stereo systems.
As a consumer, what am I suppose to do? There is no incentive for me to buy any new CD's until my JVC stereo has been replaced, and that's just going to take away from media purchases.
Recently, a co-worker lost the hard drive on his personal laptop computer. There was a sizable portion of the disk devoted to music that had been purchased online; however, after copying the music to the new drive it could not be played. What kind of backup is this? Imagine if these kinds of restrictions are extended to other digital media, you might have a Word document that can be read on one computer but is inaccessible from another.
For now I have stopped buying any kind of digital media content, this includes movies, music and anything online. It's simply too difficult to know if this content is going to work on my own hardware, and for now I will continue to enjoy the thousands of CD's and LP's that I accumulated in the past 20 years with my eyes on a turntable upgrade that will let me enjoy my collection for many years to come.
Apple isn't doing it because they are working with Transitive to build Rosetta for the Mac.
At this stage, I imagine it would be politically incorrect to switch sides and start supporting VMWare. It might be the easy thing to do, but it may also jeopardize ongoing agreements with another vendor.
The layout of the menu bar might have been a customization on the client PC. I just tried IE 6.0 on my computer and was able to mis-place the main menu bar.
Using tabs is a great addition, but as the author points out the empty tab (ie: the "new" tab) is a weird convention. Why not just let the user pick File -> New Tab? A toolbar button can be provided to perform the same operation, it seems superfluous to have an empty tab onscreen that is doing nothing and may never actually get used.
I'm also wary of all the new stateful buttons. It's nice to know the Stop button is always the Stop button, I can imagine you might try hitting stop and a second before you click it finishes loading and you get a Reload button instead.
I wonder if they will address ActiveX issues in this release at all? This feature should be disabled by default, and users should be able to enable them after a tutorial. Most importantly, you shouldn't have to be Administrator to "install" and ActiveX control, individual users should be able to do this.
Interestingly enough, with Windows 3.1 one of the advertising gimmics was the elimination of the UAE. Not surprisingly, after upgrading virtually all of the apps that use to give me UAE's would give me GPF's instead.
I wonder if this new red-screen-of-death is the precurser to the end of the blue-screen-of-death?
TBPH, it would be nice to have some indication when the fault is the result of something the OS did rather than an bad app. It gets tricky when you start talking about drivers though, this is where most of my trouble has been in the past.
It's generally easier to convince a user they need to run Windows Update, especially now that XP automates the entire process for you. So in that regard, it's much more likely that Metro is already installed.
However, to your point on maturity, it does seem likely that a few revisions will be needed before Metro is on par with PDF or PostScript. In the meantime, a little competition will be good for everyone.
The fact is, PDF does serve a purpose but it is not an ideal format by any stretch.
For those of us doing real work, many sites are now offering PDF "forms" that allow us to complete an online version of a traditionally printed form. Since the form must look exactly as intended, PDF is ideal for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't always function as designed. Some sites don't support Acrobat 7.0 while others require it, and depending on the HTTP content-type then newer versions of Acrobat will simply reject dynamically generated PDF's (they don't end in.PDF and they don't match an application/x-pdf MIME type).
To make matters even more frustrating, the ever-elusive PDF plugin is required. This means if you happen to not be at your computer, the first thing you need to do is install Acrobat Reader. I can assure you that when using a client's PC this is not always possible.
For this particular application, I think there is plenty of room for a new format. If Metro can support the same layout capabilities of PDF, and provide simplified XML representations that can run in a standard browser (Firefox, IE, etc.) without a plugin... Then MS might just be on to something.
Yet another difficulty is the automagical reformatting Acrobat does when you try printing a PDF. If will invariably auto-rotate and shrink-to-fit your document to the page, which is awkward when you are trying to produce something with very tight margins. While Acrobat 7 has addressed this issue, upgrades are not possible for everyone and sometimes you end up cropping pages.
Again... plenty of room for improvement here, especially for pre-press stuff that may need to get tweaked by a printer before a run.
I wonder what kind of per-processor license Oracle would charge?
These kind of licensing schemes have a certain absurdity to them.... It's especially confusing when you have restrictions in your os.
While XP Home might effectively be the same software, both developers and users need to address certain issues that may restrict access to some applications on these platforms. The entire system is already complicated enough, we don't need unnecessary restrictions to further complicate matters.
Actually, this is a great new revenue stream for Microsoft. Users are going to pickup the Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition "N" and discover later that they really wanted the version that included a media player of some sort.
Are they going to go to the Internet and download any one of the hundreds of media players for Windows? Nooooo - they'll head back to the store and pickup Microsoft Windows Media Player Toolkit for Home Edition "N". Heck, if they play it right, MS could even bundle some features in this second version that would make even non-N users envious.
Honestly, if the EU thinks this is suitable punishment for the Microsoft monopoly, they obviously don't understand computer software. We need to enforce open standards for data interchange; for example, there should be a common word processing file format that can be accurately read by any wordprocessor.
This is somewhat serendipitous for Microsoft, now they can provide anti-virus software to protect you from invisible files that could be performing unwanted activities on your computer. Conveniently enough, these affect process listings in such a way that makes them equally indetectable, thus rendering these kinds of virii completely unviewable.
How convenient. Fortunately, the only fix is the Strider Ghostbuster CDROM toolkit which is a new utility that requires media to run and is sold as another product offering from Microsoft.
This is such a scam. These kinds of rootkits have existed in the UNIX world for as long as I can remember, once a box has been sufficiently owned in this fashion the only truly safe measure is a complete reinstall.
btw, if you avoid logging in to your PC as superuser you can provide some reasonable protection from rootkits that masquerade as a trojan app. The other common means is to exploit a security hole to gain root access (eg: SMTPD runs as root and has buffer overflow bug, etc.), but your Windows updates are going to protect you from these.... aren't they?
Anyone else remember the boxy little IPC/IPX boxes from Sun? They were a stacking nightmare with the limited space inside, but if you could navigate the labyrinth of SCSI cables things were quite usable.
Something missing altogether from the article is any mention of power consumption. A typical CRT monitor burns 120 watts while an LCD can work with 30 watts. Depending on your electrical rates, this can translate into hundreds of dollars a year. It also lowers the load on your UPS during a brownout, which means it's more likely your complete system will be able to stay up for extended periods of time.
While a CRT can offer superior contrast ratios, a quality LCD can provide 500:1 or better (CRT's are generally 1000:1). The advent of OLED will help LCD's advance in this area, and quite likely surpass CRT's in the very near future.
Slashdot Mirror
This also opens the door for consumers to access the same movie on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and online. The key is we are not paying for a license to use the material again, we only ever pay for the media and/or the bandwidth to acquire the content.
Providers can offer varying QOS, where top-tier movie vendors might charge $15 to get the movie in 5 minutes onto a DVD disc and a discount service might charge $9 a month to download the movie over the Internet.
The music industry might want to try something like this too. I've still got LP's and cassette tapes that I wouldn't mind "upgrading" to CD or MP3, I'm just not keen on paying $15 for $0.50 worth of media.
When will the media industry learn that DRM strategies simply don't work?
As soon as you can see or hear it, it is then possible to duplicate it. No amount of copy protection will ever be able to prevent that short of preventing consumers from accessing the material altogether.
Learn to trust your consumers a little and focus on adding value to the material, and then people will buy your content. It might also help to provide some flexibility in the content licensing model, maybe giving people the option to upgrade DVD discs to HD-DVD for the same content may encourage them to continue buying media.
Is anyone offering movie downloads in a format without any goofy DRM restriction? What about music as an MP3 that I can play on my computers at home and at work?
How complicated does this need to be???? It's _just_ a media file, if consumers were going to make so many illegal copies of these things then I would be flooding the street with copies of my home movie collection even as we speak.
I'm not. Why? Because I have better things to do with my time. This is the same reason I didn't steal music from the radio and try to sell it on cassette tape.
The complexity of an encryption key, or a proprietary movie player or some custom CODEC is beyond the scope of what I'm willing to do to play media on my PC. Even if I was running Windows at home I wouldn't be doing this, it's as if the media industry is demanding that we all go out and buy a specific brand of AM/FM tuner to listen to their content.
I think this should go to the next logical level -- email should not be free to send. Just like you need to make a conscious decision to send a letter in the USPS, an email message should require postage.
If someone wants to earnestly contact you, they would be willing to pay 5-10 cents postage to get an email to you. Not only would this virtually eliminate spam, it would drastically abate the casual me-too emails. Some email postage services could run to make a profit while others could allow the users to share in the proceeds.
This has been mentioned in a few other postings, but I'll echo those sentiments again here. If you're just coming out of college and you haven't already "settled-down" (family/kids/etc.) -- NOW is the time to take a chance with a smaller company.
When your obligations change as you grow older, it won't be possible for you to risk a startup that may need to skip a few paychecks on the way. Take the time now to do something you believe in and try to innovate on your own, neither Microsoft or Google are going to be true innovators -- these are large insular organizations that are focused on making money. They will take existing technologies and make them look pretty, but they won't take something completely new and run with it.
This is without a doubt the real expense of delivering Vista to your organization. It is one of the more significant UI overhauls since Windows 98, quite a few applications behave very differently under Vista and your average user will require at least some training to understand how to utilize these features.
The reality is corporate deployments of Vista are a few years away for any existing Windows environment. Microsoft has some opportunity to convert enterprise users from extremely legacy platforms (Win98/NT3.5) but most of the early adoption will be from the home consumer. When W2K/XP corporate users get to MS Vista, processing power and the cost of PC's will have changed yet again - so estimating these kinds of costs now is entirely unrealistic.
This is also a good thing for game publishers and ultimately Microsoft in general. If you can write a game for both XBOX360 and the Windows PC platform at the same time, think of the cost savings. It will basically make one of these platforms free, and if Microsoft can get a good CLR to Macintosh (we will be able to play these games on any of the major desktop platforms.
Hopefully, the continued work on Mono will eventually make XLR part of our Linux environments as well. This is a fabulous idea, and in the long run will benefit Microsoft and PC users alike.
I think the argument that games require "low-level" (ie: ASM) development in order to operate effectively is irrelavent. Processing power has far exceeded what was available even a few years ago, with a high-speed multi-core chip the average user has more processing power then they can ever use. Since most gameplay is submersive (ie: you can't do anything else while you're playing) it is a perfect fit for our modern personal computer.
Having suffered WineX and now Cedega, my subscription was never able to provide gameplay for any of the games I enjoy. My list of games is not very long and for the most part they aren't too demanding, but they simply won't install or play correctly under Cedega.
It's frustrating and it means I need to keep a Windows 98 partition so I can boot and play games. There probably isn't a good fix for any of these legacy games, but going forward there is a lot that vendors could do.
Game manufacturers should agree on a platform using an application virtual machine implementation similar to Java or the Microsoft CLR. Examples of this include things like ScummVM or MAME -- but a true gaming system would require 3D capability and some hardware access (eg: play audio CD). For this kind of virtual platform to work, major game vendors need to band together and garner support from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
Imagine the benefit! We could play a game in our Windows PC, Macintosh, XBox or even portable GameBoy. The _same_ game. Console vendors could choose to implement features of the game machine in hardware or software, and it might even open up the market to competition from third party gaming consoles. Game makers would cut expenses by developing to a single virtual platform, and they would not need to recode popular titles to multiple platforms... they would just work.
It won't really adversely affect the console vendors, since gamers who want a console would still buy one. Console vendors will need to provide other value to help increase sales, which has already become a reality for the XBox and WMC. Users with PC's could purchase either third-party emulators or download open source implementations when the become available. There should be a reference implementation suitable for running under Windows, and other platforms can follow from that.
Yes, but even the worst of my junk snail-mail is for a real product or service. The VAST majority of my SPAM email is for a non-existent product/service/scam and is not from a real company at all. There are occasional SPAM emails from real vendors that I will actually read, since they are interested in selling me something.
Why is everyone so adverse to charging for email? We're paying for it anyway, why not pay for the product we want?
As a result of spam/phishing emails, an entire suite of technology industries have cropped up. We need virus filters for our email, spam filters for junk email, and UI protections to prevent users from tripping into phishing scams. While most of this stuff works pretty well, it's certainly not reliable and quite a bit of your regular email is affected by all of these features.
Think about. If someone sends you an email today, there are quite a few ways it can fail and you may never know about it. Spam messages delivered to your spambucket might as well not be delivered at all, with 500+ SPAM emails a day I just don't bother checking what's in there.
If someone really want's to send me an email, or if I really want to send someone else an email, then a $0.01 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, I would be willing to pay $0.10 or more to obtain delivery of my email. If the sender is not willing to pay the fee to deliver the message to me, then it's not a message I am interested in receiving anyway.
Think about it.
How much are _you_ willing to pay to send someone a batch of useless junk email? Probably nothing. It's junk email and you're a sensible person - it should just be deleted.
How much are you willing to pay to send an email to your wife? Your mom? Your best friend? Probably a lot more than nothing.
Yes - that would be the right word -- "triumvirate"
I must agree, virtually every Windows PC I have ever worked on has been bogged down by a triumpherant of anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software. Most users don't understand that they only need one of each of these programs, and they never seem to comprehend that after installing an anti-virus/anti-spyware program the most important thing is to keep it up-to-date.
It doesn't get any easier when Microsoft starts publishing programs that do the same thing. Users then "upgrade" their PC's to include the MS versions of everything, and chaos ensues.
Apple has made inroads by avoiding NIH syndrom. They were more than happy to leverage a UNIX platform, and rather than invent all sorts of new ways to do the same thing they simply took advantage of simple UNIX truisims. Microsoft is trying to invent something new, and this can be an especially painful process if there is nothing new to be invented.
Why do people think that because they pay their ISP to store email messages that they have already covered the cost of sending email?
The recipient must pay the cost to receive/store them. If a spammer sends you 1000 10MB messages in one day, should your ISP charge you to keep these on their server? Right now you have no way to prevent someone from sending you massive amounts of useless email. If ISP's started to assess fines for any accounts that exceeded a maximum bandwidth/data transfer, then users would quickly lose interest in the expense of maintaining an email account.
Spammers need a reason to stop. People need a reason to stop all the me-too forwarding. My email inbox has gone from a few targeted messages a day to over 80% useless spam. As far as I can tell, this is not a very effective system.
Kudos to Yahoo! and AOL for taking a stance on this. Microsoft will be following with a similiar capability shortly, and I look forward to the day when sending email will no longer be free.
Agreed -- while the Wine project is a valiant attempt to simulate the Windows API calls, it simply doesn't provide the transparent support necessary to enable all of your Windows apps. While it comes very close, and there are at least a few cases where you will be pleasantly surprised, you will be much happier discovering the open source alternatives for your favorite Windows app.
The only place where this falls apart is when you want to play a game on your PC. The fact is, developers support the Windows platform and without something like Wine you simply cannot play these games on other operating systems.
Maybe one day the game publishers will see the light, and will instead develop to a portable platform (eg: Qt libs or somesuch) and everyone can then enjoy these games on any platform.
Have you seen Microsoft Office 12? It's an even more radical departure from the look & feel of previous MS Office suites than OpenOffice. Users will require significant retraining in order to learn MS Office 12; here is the press release with various screenshots:
s ep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/
Very interesting. Actually, Microsoft will have protections for video but they are still researching ways they can protect the audio. All of this has reached a level of complexity that the consumer will never understand.
Recently, I tried to play some discs on a JVC mini-stereo and some media refused to play. While they won't play in my computer they will play on other CD players in the house. At this point, as far as I can tell the JVC player is "broken" and it should be replaced - but the replacement system will need to be able to play these CD's. Maybe it's okay that the discs won't play on my PC, but they should work in my stereo systems.
As a consumer, what am I suppose to do? There is no incentive for me to buy any new CD's until my JVC stereo has been replaced, and that's just going to take away from media purchases.
Recently, a co-worker lost the hard drive on his personal laptop computer. There was a sizable portion of the disk devoted to music that had been purchased online; however, after copying the music to the new drive it could not be played. What kind of backup is this? Imagine if these kinds of restrictions are extended to other digital media, you might have a Word document that can be read on one computer but is inaccessible from another.
For now I have stopped buying any kind of digital media content, this includes movies, music and anything online. It's simply too difficult to know if this content is going to work on my own hardware, and for now I will continue to enjoy the thousands of CD's and LP's that I accumulated in the past 20 years with my eyes on a turntable upgrade that will let me enjoy my collection for many years to come.
Apple isn't doing it because they are working with Transitive to build Rosetta for the Mac.
At this stage, I imagine it would be politically incorrect to switch sides and start supporting VMWare. It might be the easy thing to do, but it may also jeopardize ongoing agreements with another vendor.
The layout of the menu bar might have been a customization on the client PC. I just tried IE 6.0 on my computer and was able to mis-place the main menu bar.
Using tabs is a great addition, but as the author points out the empty tab (ie: the "new" tab) is a weird convention. Why not just let the user pick File -> New Tab? A toolbar button can be provided to perform the same operation, it seems superfluous to have an empty tab onscreen that is doing nothing and may never actually get used.
I'm also wary of all the new stateful buttons. It's nice to know the Stop button is always the Stop button, I can imagine you might try hitting stop and a second before you click it finishes loading and you get a Reload button instead.
I wonder if they will address ActiveX issues in this release at all? This feature should be disabled by default, and users should be able to enable them after a tutorial. Most importantly, you shouldn't have to be Administrator to "install" and ActiveX control, individual users should be able to do this.
Interestingly enough, with Windows 3.1 one of the advertising gimmics was the elimination of the UAE. Not surprisingly, after upgrading virtually all of the apps that use to give me UAE's would give me GPF's instead.
I wonder if this new red-screen-of-death is the precurser to the end of the blue-screen-of-death?
TBPH, it would be nice to have some indication when the fault is the result of something the OS did rather than an bad app. It gets tricky when you start talking about drivers though, this is where most of my trouble has been in the past.
It's generally easier to convince a user they need to run Windows Update, especially now that XP automates the entire process for you. So in that regard, it's much more likely that Metro is already installed.
However, to your point on maturity, it does seem likely that a few revisions will be needed before Metro is on par with PDF or PostScript. In the meantime, a little competition will be good for everyone.
The fact is, PDF does serve a purpose but it is not an ideal format by any stretch.
.PDF and they don't match an application/x-pdf MIME type).
For those of us doing real work, many sites are now offering PDF "forms" that allow us to complete an online version of a traditionally printed form. Since the form must look exactly as intended, PDF is ideal for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't always function as designed. Some sites don't support Acrobat 7.0 while others require it, and depending on the HTTP content-type then newer versions of Acrobat will simply reject dynamically generated PDF's (they don't end in
To make matters even more frustrating, the ever-elusive PDF plugin is required. This means if you happen to not be at your computer, the first thing you need to do is install Acrobat Reader. I can assure you that when using a client's PC this is not always possible.
For this particular application, I think there is plenty of room for a new format. If Metro can support the same layout capabilities of PDF, and provide simplified XML representations that can run in a standard browser (Firefox, IE, etc.) without a plugin... Then MS might just be on to something.
Yet another difficulty is the automagical reformatting Acrobat does when you try printing a PDF. If will invariably auto-rotate and shrink-to-fit your document to the page, which is awkward when you are trying to produce something with very tight margins. While Acrobat 7 has addressed this issue, upgrades are not possible for everyone and sometimes you end up cropping pages.
Again... plenty of room for improvement here, especially for pre-press stuff that may need to get tweaked by a printer before a run.
I wonder what kind of per-processor license Oracle would charge?
These kind of licensing schemes have a certain absurdity to them.... It's especially confusing when you have restrictions in your os.
While XP Home might effectively be the same software, both developers and users need to address certain issues that may restrict access to some applications on these platforms. The entire system is already complicated enough, we don't need unnecessary restrictions to further complicate matters.
Actually, this is a great new revenue stream for Microsoft. Users are going to pickup the Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition "N" and discover later that they really wanted the version that included a media player of some sort.
Are they going to go to the Internet and download any one of the hundreds of media players for Windows? Nooooo - they'll head back to the store and pickup Microsoft Windows Media Player Toolkit for Home Edition "N". Heck, if they play it right, MS could even bundle some features in this second version that would make even non-N users envious.
Honestly, if the EU thinks this is suitable punishment for the Microsoft monopoly, they obviously don't understand computer software. We need to enforce open standards for data interchange; for example, there should be a common word processing file format that can be accurately read by any wordprocessor.
This is somewhat serendipitous for Microsoft, now they can provide anti-virus software to protect you from invisible files that could be performing unwanted activities on your computer. Conveniently enough, these affect process listings in such a way that makes them equally indetectable, thus rendering these kinds of virii completely unviewable.
How convenient. Fortunately, the only fix is the Strider Ghostbuster CDROM toolkit which is a new utility that requires media to run and is sold as another product offering from Microsoft.
This is such a scam. These kinds of rootkits have existed in the UNIX world for as long as I can remember, once a box has been sufficiently owned in this fashion the only truly safe measure is a complete reinstall.
btw, if you avoid logging in to your PC as superuser you can provide some reasonable protection from rootkits that masquerade as a trojan app. The other common means is to exploit a security hole to gain root access (eg: SMTPD runs as root and has buffer overflow bug, etc.), but your Windows updates are going to protect you from these.... aren't they?
Seems like Apple might have borrowed one from the Sun playbook:
Sun IPX Workstation
Anyone else remember the boxy little IPC/IPX boxes from Sun? They were a stacking nightmare with the limited space inside, but if you could navigate the labyrinth of SCSI cables things were quite usable.
Something missing altogether from the article is any mention of power consumption. A typical CRT monitor burns 120 watts while an LCD can work with 30 watts. Depending on your electrical rates, this can translate into hundreds of dollars a year. It also lowers the load on your UPS during a brownout, which means it's more likely your complete system will be able to stay up for extended periods of time.
While a CRT can offer superior contrast ratios, a quality LCD can provide 500:1 or better (CRT's are generally 1000:1). The advent of OLED will help LCD's advance in this area, and quite likely surpass CRT's in the very near future.