True, not to mention the fact that technology sort of compounds itself. Meaning that many of the inventions that humanity has come up with has allowed more people to enter the "leisure" class, although it's not really a leisurely lifestyle anymore. Instead it's just not subsistence living.
I think that sooner or later everyone's going to realize how entirely ridiculous Google's share price is, and it'll quickly come tumbling down to something that actually makes sense. So before that happens, Google should probably try and spend as much money as is possible, because once reality sets in, people will be a lot more scrutinizing of them.
Certain genres of games might be difficult with this controller, yes. Tekken style games are a good example. But try and look past established genres and imagine that this different controller system just might allow whole new genres to form. But even if you can't do without Tekken 6 or whatever, MS and Sony will be more than happy to sell you a system with controllers chock-full of buttons.
You're too caught up in the current controller mindset. The revolution controller is giving up some of the detailed control that buttons provide, and replacing it with the detailed control of a mouse, plus a third dimension. I think this is a pretty decent trade off, and hopefully a lot of developers will agree.
If you took away video games and my computer, I'd pretty quickly find that very few of the things I interact with day to day involve that many buttons. If the revolution lives up to its potential, i don't think I'll be missing X, Y, L, or R very much.
See, I kind of think the opposite. I wish the consoles were more different, because then we'd get more types of games. I'd rather developers not port at all, because a port probably won't take advantage of much of anything that makes a particular piece of hardware unique. If a console only has one or two exclusive games that I can't get anywhere else, well, that's just not a good enough reason for me to buy that console. I'll just play it at a friend's house, or maybe rent the console for a weekend or something.
Then again, I'm a fairly casual gamer nowadays. I have enough other stuff to do that I probably only get a new game once every few months. I guess if I was still 10 years old, subscribed to all the gaming magazines again, and eagerly anticipating six games each month, then I'd feel differently.
Designers, in general, almost never are completely happy with a finished product. Even if you think everything is working well, plain old curiosity will keep you tweaking things, hoping to discover something that you hadn't noticed or thought of before. Deadlines suck for so many reasons, but without them, nothing would ever be finished. There's just this huge hazy area between "good enough" and "excellent", and figuring out where along that line you want to be is probably a big part of any particular company's philosophy.
Personally, I hate the word "blog", I think it just sounds silly, especially when it's inserted into compound words.
But really, I don't think the definition of a weblog really hinges on what sort of technologies you use to make it.
I code my homepage completely by hand. There is a section of it that I consider a weblog, and yes, sometimes it includes pictures. I call it a weblog because it is continually updated with new content, which is displayed in a chronological fashion. It's really that simple. The organization of content is what makes it a weblog, not how the content got there.
My content-management system involves adding a new row to the database using phpMyAdmin. If I just had one big HTML file that I considered my blog, and I did updates by adding more html then uploading again, that'd be ok too. CMS' are really common for weblogs because most people don't want to bother learning HTML or SFTP or any of that. They're just doing it the easiest way they can find. But that's alright.
Taking this discussion further for no good reason, I don't know if I really make "webpages" anymore. A "web page" to me, at least, denotes a more static file, that I create from start to finish, upload, and then it just sits there waiting to be requested. Most of my website now is a series of scripts that reference each other and pull information from databases. I've got a website, without making any individual "web pages." This is nothing more than a semantics argument though, so who really cares?
Ok, so the vast majority are not interesting to you. The vast majority are not interesting to me. But that doesn't make them valueless. Just about every blog out there has value for at least one person, the author, and most likely at least a few others. My blog should be of little interest to you, yet for my family and friends it's a useful source of information about me and what I'm up to.
The only way that blogs can really be compared to spam is perhaps in search engine rankings, where they can muddy the results much like a link farm or whatnot. But I think blaming the blogs themselves is wrong, because that's not what they're trying to do. It's up to google and the others to engineer a solution to this problem.
Yeah, I'm surprised people didn't figure this out sooner. Really, the ipod is a whole lot like an old school gameboy, except that Apple made it smaller to save on material costs, and it's completely worthless without headphones. I mean, they even stole the idea for a non-color screen! And for this, they sell millions? Stupid trendy sheep, that's all people are these days, it makes me sick.
I don't know for sure, but it would seem to me that incapacitating someone underwater probably creates a pretty good chance that they're going to die, even if they have scuba gear on. Then again, I've only been diving a few times, and I've never seen anyone pass out while doing it, so maybe I'm wrong.
Microsoft's attitude is actually really easy to understand here. Feature-wise, office doesn't have anywhere easy to go. The free software office suites are pretty close to caught up with office. Once they get totally caught up, there will only be two things that set MS office apart from it's competitors. Its better compatibility with.doc files, and its big price tag. If something besides.doc becomes the standard, then the only thing that makes Office special is the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Not a very appealing bullet point compared to free alternatives.
The fact that MS has the ultimate control over the default file format is the foundation of their office suite marketshare. They're going to do all that they can to delay the switch to an open standard, even if they will lose in the long run.
Languages are for communicating. Languages have rules. Rules make it understandable. Some rules involve punctuation. Some times you want to denote the end of one phrase. Then you start the next one. There's a piece of punctuation for this. Yes, I'm talking about the period.
.
I hate to pick on someone for their grammar, but there's a difference between having bad grammar and being so incredibly lazy with your writing that a reader has to go over it five times to understand what you're trying to say.
Personally, I think there's a middle ground here. Basically, I'd like sort of a "home mainframe", and a bunch of terminals around the rest of the house. I've got maybe 5 computers in my home, and like you said, they're all 99% idle most of the time. If I could condense all of that down into one box, it'd be great. I'd hopefully be able to access the same desktop from any room(terminal) in the house, when I decide to replace/upgrade hardware, I only have to do it once, and I only have one computer to administer. But most importantly, all my personal data and files are still somewhere that I physically control. Such a system would need to be a little different than today's PC's, but it wouldn't require the complexity or performance of corporate mainframes or anything like that.
I guess you could run into the problem of more than one terminal doing really intensive stuff at the same time, but maybe since I'm only buying one box, I can spend a little extra and put some nice hardware inside to mitigate that problem. As it is, only one of the five machines that I have now is anywhere near state-of-the-art, so it wouldn't be that much of a difference anyways.
Oh definitely, it's a gamble for them. And I think it's one that they're going to end up losing in the long run either way. Open formats are going to take hold, and they're going to lose a whole lot of their power over the market. If they embrace the change, they'll probably just accelerate the process, although they'll continue to make some money along the way. If they fight it, their FUD might slow down the transition so that they can keep make some money the old fashioned way, at the risk of missing out completely in the long term. Maybe they think they'll make more money that way, or maybe it's less about money and more about being control freaks.
I didn't actually. I love ducks. They're inherently funny. Just watching them makes me laugh, and once they start quacking, I can hardly contain myself.
Well, the problem that MS is having is that even if they had designed windows well from the beginning, its purpose is in many ways different now. For example, a single user environment vs multiple users. A stand-alone machine vs. one connected to the internet all the time.
I'd hope that they're not just taking messy code and rewriting it in a neater way. I'd hope they're realizing that some of the design decisions they made in the first place were wrong, or are no longer valid, and replacing it with a better system, not just prettier code. Just because code still works doesn't mean it's useful.
I think backwards compatibility and legacy stuff is a huge weight around MS' neck. There are lots of practical reasons for them to support all that, but also plenty of good reasons for them to just cut the chain and move on. Apple did that with OSX, and it's worked brilliantly for them.
Well, from MS's point of view, it almost makes sense what they're doing. Office does just about everything anyone could ever need already. There's just not many more features worth adding. And even worse, the FOSS alternatives are getting pretty close to catching up in terms of features. So basically, in the near future you'll have two (or more) versions of the same thing, only one costs hundreds of dollars and the others are free.
The only thing that MS can use to differentiate their software is its native support of the.doc format. Once they lose that, then the only thing that will make their office suite different is the big price tag. And that's not the sort of thing that excites consumers. As sad as it is, it's really in MS' best interest to postpone open formats as much as is possible. If they give in now, they might get to keep a few contracts short term, but once the FOSS alternatives catch up feature-wise, the party's over. Office is a huge HUGE cash cow for MS, the company really depends on that income. Now realistically, I don't think MS can hold off the standards movement for much longer. They're failing on most other fronts, because the internet is making people more aware of what's at stake. But maybe the execs there think they can. Or maybe they're just trying to postpone the inevitable so they can make more money in the meantime. But they won't accept open standards until the market absolutely forces them to, and they'll complain about it the whole way.
The market can make MS change. MS has made good software in the past. Apparently you consider that fact that something is proprietary automatically makes it bad. I disagree with that. I realize that my preference for OSX requires me to buy Apple's hardware. But OSX convinces me that proprietary software can be of higher quality than FOSS.
The market can make MS change. It had a chance back when the big internet rush happened. It mostly missed that opportunity, but you could see the beginnings of it. For one, MS made some decent software for a little while. IE certainly has its problems, but for a while, it was a competitive browser in terms of features and usability. Sadly, MS was able to bully around enough people to reaffirm their grip, and things have settled back down to their boring crappy "normalcy".
But I think these latest shifts, a drive to open formats and the web as a platform(for real this time), plus the decentralized nature of FOSS is going to put MS in a situation where they can't just bowl over their competitors. Because what customers are going to be demanding goes directly against MS's business philosophies. The browser war didn't do that.
I'm not too much of a programmer, but I can concur at least on writing websites. It's really hard to get everything right the first time. Web design is just that, design. And software development has plenty of design aspects to it as well. And good design, by its very nature, tends to be iterative. An architect, or an industrial designer, they'll go through dozens, maybe even hundreds of versions of something. Lots of work, plenty of good ideas, they end up not making the final product, but the result is much better because of all that work. Of course, I'd imagine that even the most complicated of buildings is way easier to understand than the windows source code.
The goal isn't for MS to disappear. We don't want them to get replaced by any single organization. We just want them to lose enough monopoly power and influence so that the rest of the computer world can get around without MS stomping on whatever they don't like. It already looks like they've lost some control. Google is doing their own thing, Apple openly taunts MS now, but neither of them are going to suddenly be ubiquitous on 90%+ of the world's computers. If Apple could get their marketshare up around 10%, maybe this "web as a platform" dealie sort of replaces windows 10% of the time, and maybe FOSS gets a 20% marketshare. Things would be way different, and about a zillion times better for consumers. I don't want FOSS to replace Google, Apple, or MS. I just want them all to be competitive, and to keep each other honest.
Yeah, and so what if they do collapse? Are there music listeners out there who really believe that if the record labels go down, we won't ever have any new music to listen to? Do these guys think any of us really care whether or not they make money? All these record exec's are doing is trying to justify their own greed. Probably somewhat for themselves, and probably also for the politicians, who tend to think along very similar lines. They're so out of touch with the everyday person's experiences, it's unreal.
Why's it sad? It's not sad that they've got another excellent product that is selling as quickly as they can make them. It's not like the iPod market is eating away at the Mac market. They'd probably be selling pretty much the same number of macs right now if the ipod didn't exist, so all this extra money is just icing on the cake.
They're able to sell ipods like crazy for a couple reasons, one being that they're cheaper than a computer, another being that there's a much bigger untapped market. There's already plenty of computers to go around now, most of what they sell is replacing older machines. But there's lots of people who don't have mp3 players yet. Some people are predicting a market saturation to catch up with ipod sales soon, but who knows for sure when that'll happen.
Well of course most blogs are about people's personal lives. People write about what they know about. And I know more about my own life than pretty much anything else. Occasionally I'll have a strong opinion on something that I feel like flushing out through writing, and sometimes it'll end up on my weblog. Sometimes I just have a goofy thought and I run with it, and post whatever turns up. But mostly my blog is a way for me to share things with my friends and family without having to tell the same story two dozen times. It's very convenient, since I moved away from home for college, and then after graduation, a lot of my classmates moved to different parts of the country. I sort of view my blog as a "newspaper" that's all about me. It includes factual stories, opinion pages, and through commenting, even letters to the editor. It doesn't have a very wide circulation, but it doesn't cost me anything to make and distribute so I'm ok with that.
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True, not to mention the fact that technology sort of compounds itself. Meaning that many of the inventions that humanity has come up with has allowed more people to enter the "leisure" class, although it's not really a leisurely lifestyle anymore. Instead it's just not subsistence living.
true that. I'd say that at least half the games I buy, for both the GC and the Xbox are the budget priced, $15 dealies.
I think that sooner or later everyone's going to realize how entirely ridiculous Google's share price is, and it'll quickly come tumbling down to something that actually makes sense. So before that happens, Google should probably try and spend as much money as is possible, because once reality sets in, people will be a lot more scrutinizing of them.
Certain genres of games might be difficult with this controller, yes. Tekken style games are a good example. But try and look past established genres and imagine that this different controller system just might allow whole new genres to form. But even if you can't do without Tekken 6 or whatever, MS and Sony will be more than happy to sell you a system with controllers chock-full of buttons.
You're too caught up in the current controller mindset. The revolution controller is giving up some of the detailed control that buttons provide, and replacing it with the detailed control of a mouse, plus a third dimension. I think this is a pretty decent trade off, and hopefully a lot of developers will agree.
If you took away video games and my computer, I'd pretty quickly find that very few of the things I interact with day to day involve that many buttons. If the revolution lives up to its potential, i don't think I'll be missing X, Y, L, or R very much.
See, I kind of think the opposite. I wish the consoles were more different, because then we'd get more types of games. I'd rather developers not port at all, because a port probably won't take advantage of much of anything that makes a particular piece of hardware unique. If a console only has one or two exclusive games that I can't get anywhere else, well, that's just not a good enough reason for me to buy that console. I'll just play it at a friend's house, or maybe rent the console for a weekend or something.
Then again, I'm a fairly casual gamer nowadays. I have enough other stuff to do that I probably only get a new game once every few months. I guess if I was still 10 years old, subscribed to all the gaming magazines again, and eagerly anticipating six games each month, then I'd feel differently.
Designers, in general, almost never are completely happy with a finished product. Even if you think everything is working well, plain old curiosity will keep you tweaking things, hoping to discover something that you hadn't noticed or thought of before. Deadlines suck for so many reasons, but without them, nothing would ever be finished. There's just this huge hazy area between "good enough" and "excellent", and figuring out where along that line you want to be is probably a big part of any particular company's philosophy.
Personally, I hate the word "blog", I think it just sounds silly, especially when it's inserted into compound words.
But really, I don't think the definition of a weblog really hinges on what sort of technologies you use to make it.
I code my homepage completely by hand. There is a section of it that I consider a weblog, and yes, sometimes it includes pictures. I call it a weblog because it is continually updated with new content, which is displayed in a chronological fashion. It's really that simple. The organization of content is what makes it a weblog, not how the content got there.
My content-management system involves adding a new row to the database using phpMyAdmin. If I just had one big HTML file that I considered my blog, and I did updates by adding more html then uploading again, that'd be ok too. CMS' are really common for weblogs because most people don't want to bother learning HTML or SFTP or any of that. They're just doing it the easiest way they can find. But that's alright.
Taking this discussion further for no good reason, I don't know if I really make "webpages" anymore. A "web page" to me, at least, denotes a more static file, that I create from start to finish, upload, and then it just sits there waiting to be requested. Most of my website now is a series of scripts that reference each other and pull information from databases. I've got a website, without making any individual "web pages." This is nothing more than a semantics argument though, so who really cares?
Ok, so the vast majority are not interesting to you. The vast majority are not interesting to me. But that doesn't make them valueless. Just about every blog out there has value for at least one person, the author, and most likely at least a few others. My blog should be of little interest to you, yet for my family and friends it's a useful source of information about me and what I'm up to.
The only way that blogs can really be compared to spam is perhaps in search engine rankings, where they can muddy the results much like a link farm or whatnot. But I think blaming the blogs themselves is wrong, because that's not what they're trying to do. It's up to google and the others to engineer a solution to this problem.
I know, it's sad. Especially because I'm on my 6th mac in the last 15 years. People are strange.
Oh, come on, Flamebait?! Did some jackass think I was actually serious?
Yeah, I'm surprised people didn't figure this out sooner. Really, the ipod is a whole lot like an old school gameboy, except that Apple made it smaller to save on material costs, and it's completely worthless without headphones. I mean, they even stole the idea for a non-color screen! And for this, they sell millions? Stupid trendy sheep, that's all people are these days, it makes me sick.
I don't know for sure, but it would seem to me that incapacitating someone underwater probably creates a pretty good chance that they're going to die, even if they have scuba gear on. Then again, I've only been diving a few times, and I've never seen anyone pass out while doing it, so maybe I'm wrong.
Microsoft's attitude is actually really easy to understand here. Feature-wise, office doesn't have anywhere easy to go. The free software office suites are pretty close to caught up with office. Once they get totally caught up, there will only be two things that set MS office apart from it's competitors. Its better compatibility with .doc files, and its big price tag. If something besides .doc becomes the standard, then the only thing that makes Office special is the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Not a very appealing bullet point compared to free alternatives.
The fact that MS has the ultimate control over the default file format is the foundation of their office suite marketshare. They're going to do all that they can to delay the switch to an open standard, even if they will lose in the long run.
Languages are for communicating. Languages have rules. Rules make it understandable. Some rules involve punctuation. Some times you want to denote the end of one phrase. Then you start the next one. There's a piece of punctuation for this. Yes, I'm talking about the period.
.
I hate to pick on someone for their grammar, but there's a difference between having bad grammar and being so incredibly lazy with your writing that a reader has to go over it five times to understand what you're trying to say.
Personally, I think there's a middle ground here. Basically, I'd like sort of a "home mainframe", and a bunch of terminals around the rest of the house. I've got maybe 5 computers in my home, and like you said, they're all 99% idle most of the time. If I could condense all of that down into one box, it'd be great. I'd hopefully be able to access the same desktop from any room(terminal) in the house, when I decide to replace/upgrade hardware, I only have to do it once, and I only have one computer to administer. But most importantly, all my personal data and files are still somewhere that I physically control. Such a system would need to be a little different than today's PC's, but it wouldn't require the complexity or performance of corporate mainframes or anything like that.
I guess you could run into the problem of more than one terminal doing really intensive stuff at the same time, but maybe since I'm only buying one box, I can spend a little extra and put some nice hardware inside to mitigate that problem. As it is, only one of the five machines that I have now is anywhere near state-of-the-art, so it wouldn't be that much of a difference anyways.
Oh definitely, it's a gamble for them. And I think it's one that they're going to end up losing in the long run either way. Open formats are going to take hold, and they're going to lose a whole lot of their power over the market. If they embrace the change, they'll probably just accelerate the process, although they'll continue to make some money along the way. If they fight it, their FUD might slow down the transition so that they can keep make some money the old fashioned way, at the risk of missing out completely in the long term. Maybe they think they'll make more money that way, or maybe it's less about money and more about being control freaks.
I didn't actually. I love ducks. They're inherently funny. Just watching them makes me laugh, and once they start quacking, I can hardly contain myself.
Well, the problem that MS is having is that even if they had designed windows well from the beginning, its purpose is in many ways different now. For example, a single user environment vs multiple users. A stand-alone machine vs. one connected to the internet all the time.
I'd hope that they're not just taking messy code and rewriting it in a neater way. I'd hope they're realizing that some of the design decisions they made in the first place were wrong, or are no longer valid, and replacing it with a better system, not just prettier code. Just because code still works doesn't mean it's useful.
I think backwards compatibility and legacy stuff is a huge weight around MS' neck. There are lots of practical reasons for them to support all that, but also plenty of good reasons for them to just cut the chain and move on. Apple did that with OSX, and it's worked brilliantly for them.
Well, from MS's point of view, it almost makes sense what they're doing. Office does just about everything anyone could ever need already. There's just not many more features worth adding. And even worse, the FOSS alternatives are getting pretty close to catching up in terms of features. So basically, in the near future you'll have two (or more) versions of the same thing, only one costs hundreds of dollars and the others are free.
.doc format. Once they lose that, then the only thing that will make their office suite different is the big price tag. And that's not the sort of thing that excites consumers. As sad as it is, it's really in MS' best interest to postpone open formats as much as is possible. If they give in now, they might get to keep a few contracts short term, but once the FOSS alternatives catch up feature-wise, the party's over. Office is a huge HUGE cash cow for MS, the company really depends on that income. Now realistically, I don't think MS can hold off the standards movement for much longer. They're failing on most other fronts, because the internet is making people more aware of what's at stake. But maybe the execs there think they can. Or maybe they're just trying to postpone the inevitable so they can make more money in the meantime. But they won't accept open standards until the market absolutely forces them to, and they'll complain about it the whole way.
The only thing that MS can use to differentiate their software is its native support of the
The market can make MS change. MS has made good software in the past. Apparently you consider that fact that something is proprietary automatically makes it bad. I disagree with that. I realize that my preference for OSX requires me to buy Apple's hardware. But OSX convinces me that proprietary software can be of higher quality than FOSS.
The market can make MS change. It had a chance back when the big internet rush happened. It mostly missed that opportunity, but you could see the beginnings of it. For one, MS made some decent software for a little while. IE certainly has its problems, but for a while, it was a competitive browser in terms of features and usability. Sadly, MS was able to bully around enough people to reaffirm their grip, and things have settled back down to their boring crappy "normalcy".
But I think these latest shifts, a drive to open formats and the web as a platform(for real this time), plus the decentralized nature of FOSS is going to put MS in a situation where they can't just bowl over their competitors. Because what customers are going to be demanding goes directly against MS's business philosophies. The browser war didn't do that.
I'm not too much of a programmer, but I can concur at least on writing websites. It's really hard to get everything right the first time. Web design is just that, design. And software development has plenty of design aspects to it as well. And good design, by its very nature, tends to be iterative. An architect, or an industrial designer, they'll go through dozens, maybe even hundreds of versions of something. Lots of work, plenty of good ideas, they end up not making the final product, but the result is much better because of all that work. Of course, I'd imagine that even the most complicated of buildings is way easier to understand than the windows source code.
The goal isn't for MS to disappear. We don't want them to get replaced by any single organization. We just want them to lose enough monopoly power and influence so that the rest of the computer world can get around without MS stomping on whatever they don't like. It already looks like they've lost some control. Google is doing their own thing, Apple openly taunts MS now, but neither of them are going to suddenly be ubiquitous on 90%+ of the world's computers. If Apple could get their marketshare up around 10%, maybe this "web as a platform" dealie sort of replaces windows 10% of the time, and maybe FOSS gets a 20% marketshare. Things would be way different, and about a zillion times better for consumers. I don't want FOSS to replace Google, Apple, or MS. I just want them all to be competitive, and to keep each other honest.
Yeah, and so what if they do collapse? Are there music listeners out there who really believe that if the record labels go down, we won't ever have any new music to listen to? Do these guys think any of us really care whether or not they make money? All these record exec's are doing is trying to justify their own greed. Probably somewhat for themselves, and probably also for the politicians, who tend to think along very similar lines. They're so out of touch with the everyday person's experiences, it's unreal.
Why's it sad? It's not sad that they've got another excellent product that is selling as quickly as they can make them. It's not like the iPod market is eating away at the Mac market. They'd probably be selling pretty much the same number of macs right now if the ipod didn't exist, so all this extra money is just icing on the cake.
They're able to sell ipods like crazy for a couple reasons, one being that they're cheaper than a computer, another being that there's a much bigger untapped market. There's already plenty of computers to go around now, most of what they sell is replacing older machines. But there's lots of people who don't have mp3 players yet. Some people are predicting a market saturation to catch up with ipod sales soon, but who knows for sure when that'll happen.
Well of course most blogs are about people's personal lives. People write about what they know about. And I know more about my own life than pretty much anything else. Occasionally I'll have a strong opinion on something that I feel like flushing out through writing, and sometimes it'll end up on my weblog. Sometimes I just have a goofy thought and I run with it, and post whatever turns up. But mostly my blog is a way for me to share things with my friends and family without having to tell the same story two dozen times. It's very convenient, since I moved away from home for college, and then after graduation, a lot of my classmates moved to different parts of the country. I sort of view my blog as a "newspaper" that's all about me. It includes factual stories, opinion pages, and through commenting, even letters to the editor. It doesn't have a very wide circulation, but it doesn't cost me anything to make and distribute so I'm ok with that.