I mentioned Apple just to get them out of the way because they were irrelavant to the point I was trying to make and was trying to preempt the Apple fans. Their strategy seems to be working for them, and there may be antitrust concerns about them in the future if their hold on the market expands.
And Real lost the battle because their technology was irrelevant within a couple of years since their major competitors (MS, Apple) far surpassed them.
True, Real is not blameless in losing their position in the market. Mismanagement and a misunderstanding of what users want in a media player have hastened their decline in the market. My point, however, was that no matter how Real played the game, they would inevitably lose to Microsoft who could always make their player more attractive to other parties, even if the features of it were somewhat worse than their competitors by leveraging their Windows franchise.
Real's mistake in taking on Microsoft was they never really differentiated themselves. Apple had the stylish iPod which became phonenally popular. Microsoft had it tied into their Operating System giving them a tremendous installed base. What does Real have? A buggy, advertising laden, obnoxious player. Despite all this incompetence, that doesn't vindicate Microsoft their anticomptitive behaviour of leveraging their monopoly to dominate the streaming audio/video and DRM markets. By bundling WMP in Windows, WMP became cheaper than Real Player because you actually needed to download and install Real, and the time that takes has some value (jwz's 'Linux is only free if your time has no value' applies to everything, Linux or not).
The absurdity of the claim is that her one script is the basis for BOTH The Terminator and The Matrix. I suppose we should believe that she was the first to think of the idea of war between humans and machines. To make things even more absurd, they offer up the phrase "I'll be back" as proof that The Terminator was a copy, when the writers of that movie have already said that they didn't quite understand why people latched onto that phrase when it was considered by them to just be part of the normal dialogue. It's like saying the Matrix was copied because Keanu Reeves said "Whoa" in it.
I can accept that The Matrix may have been copied or at least inspired by her writings, but The Terminator doesn't fit that mould as well (especially since it was followed up by sequels which were all fairly well written for the type of movie it is).
Microsoft uses the "installed base" which is every installed copy of any recent version of Windows when trying to license their format to others. This fight over the client is just a fight over the server in disguise. Real would have less of a complaint if every version of Windows shipped with the ability to connect to a Real streaming server just as every version of Windows can connect to a Windows Media stream out-of-the-box. However, it's far less troublesome for lawmakers to tell Microsoft to omit something from their product to remedy the monopoly abuse situation than to tell them to include something from a competitor.
Imagine you're looking to license a music format to open up a online music store. Since Apple is not going to talk to you, your choice is Real and Microsoft. Microsoft's format is playable by 90% of Windows computers, and Real's is playable by maybe 60%. In this context, the choice seems clear -- you license Microsoft's technology because your potential market is larger. You can do the same calculation when deciding which format to license for your portable music player, or streaming video. Because of the bundling, Real and Apple lose every time.
Except they changed the way file associations are done for media files in Windows XP. Until vendors updated their software, their programs could not override the WMP file associations without manual hacking of the registry (a registry key under HKCR\[AVI,MPG,etc]File\Shell\Open by the name of LegacyDisable preventing the shell from obeying changes to the association). Then there's the "PercievedType" which ties your media back to WMP in the context menu even if you get over the LegacyDisable hurdle. And let's not forget the Explorer bar that always seems to find a way to tie in WMP ("Shop for Music Online!").
They made the file association system much more complex in Windows XP, and did so only for the file types that Windows Media Player plays. To this day, I have not seen a third-party media player that exercises all references to WiMP to their own player when told to play the files. I'll grant you, that QuickTime and RealPlayer are far more obnoxious programs on Windows than WMP, but the measures they've taken to keep WMP as the media player on your system is certainly obnoxious in another way.
I'm sure there are good, valid reasons how these features help users, but isn't it convenient that the new features just happen to advantage Microsoft and Windows Media Player and disadvantage their competitors? I'm not suggesting that Microsoft nessesarily put in these features to bolster their media player, but I'm sure the competitive advantage to it must've occurred to someone at MSFT (especially when you consider how poorly documented it is -- there's only one mention of LegacyDisable on MSDN).
Shop around--you'll get it at a reasonable price. NEVER buy directly from the manufacturer--you pay more, and they make a higher percentage profit off your purchase!
While I can sympathize with the first point, the second one boggles the mind. Why would you not want the manufacturer of the product you use to make money?
Now they do, but they didn't always. His choice of exact product may have been poor, but it is exactly that type of product that when pirated tends to have little financial effect on the vendor. Photoshop is one program that is particularily widely pirated. Now, clearly some of the people who use pirated copies of it should've purchased it, particularily when their livelyhood directly of indirectly comes from the use of the program, however, a large number of the pirated copies are used by people who are merely fooling around with the program, and if faced with the choice of the (rather high) pricetag, or going without, they would just do without (and mess around with something else instead).
How about we do a study on the gotdotnet workspaces, and how much better sourceforge is in terms of reliability, availablity and usability? How many sites have moved to SF because Microsoft's version were far too unreliable? Why do you suppose that all of Microsoft's "Open Source" projects (WiX, FlexWiki, etc) are located on sourceforge instead of gotdotnet?
Let's be honest. Although the insinuation within the case study is that perl was not capable of handling the task of getting so much traffic, and ASP.NET intrinsically is, this is clearly false. They could've rearchetected the website to cache content better, and perform better, but instead the decision was made to use the website as a showcase of ASP.NET technologies. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should not pretend that it's something that it's not.
Flipping a coin may not be a good idea, either. " A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on." Tossed fairly, 51% of the time it'll land on the same face, and 49% of the time it'll land on the opposite face. Tossed unfairly, it may very predictably land on the same face it started on.
Remember the PS3 isnt built on legacy hardware like a MAC or a x86 to make it backwards compatable, its built for raw speed.
Actually, since they intend for it to run existing PS2 and PS1 games, it does have some legacy hardware. However, it's possible it works like they did in the PS2, where the old PS1 hardware performed a different purpose when the console was running in PS2 mode.
Infact arnt modern x86 processors emulating x86 through hardware's JIT's or is that just a rumour I heard.
Transmeta CPUs used this method, but they're the only one. Other CPUs run most simple x86 instructions directly, but break the complex instructions into simpler instructions. A CISC to RISC converter of sorts. In fact, many new x86 CPUs can receive microcode to update buggy complex instructions with new micro-ops.
You're just coming up with that now? Playstation 3 + Nintendo Revolution = X-Box 360! It's better than a PS3 because it's 360!! And numbers are WAAAAAY leeter than letters and just as round!!!
Sigh, I hate the version number game. This is an old game for Microsoft (Word 2.0 -> Word 6.0 -> Word 95/97/2000 -> Word XP -> Word 2003), and Nintendo's naming scheme has been erratic since the start. Sony, on the other hand, just makes up ridiculous marketspeak for their products.
Sony, you're not the only one working toward this goal, and frankly, you're not NEARLY in the position MS is in to offer it. Their market penetration on the desktop PC gives them a powerful edge, as does the fact that they started doing it in the last generation, so people who were looking for that kind of convergance already found a good thing with the X-Box.
I was with you until this point. Sony nor Microsoft are in any better or worse position for this convergance, they merely have different working bases. Microsoft is working from the PC being the central control, whereas Sony works from the home entertainment system. Microsoft's focus is in software, Sony's is hardware. They have different areas of strength which explains their different strategies. It also explains why Microsoft touts their software features, and Sony touts their hardware specifications.
Secondly, the X-Box had virtually no 'digital convergance' value. There were unlicensed software for it that added that feature, but because it was unlicensed, you cannot call that a feature of the platform. The X-Box was virtually the same as the PS2 in the regard, a game console that could also play DVD movies.
Sony should not be allowed to market.
Neither should Microsoft, but that's beside the point. You might want to take your blinders off, though, because this stupid hype marketting thing is being committed by both sides (MTV, anyone?).
Other projects make sure that the vendors know of a security vulnerability, supply the patch and new tarball (if applicable, which it is in mozilla.org's case), give a brief period of time for the vendors to catch up, and then do a synchronous release with them at a planned time.
I don't see any coordinators sitting around there. I see a patch, and a deadline. A simple invitation-only mailing list, with redistributors only invited to it, where messages go out outlining the discovered vulnerability, a patch that fixes it, and you have 3 business days to fix it because our release is set for today+3 days. Very few people are needed to organize this, and you can even be completely inflexable about the deadline. As long as the majority of participants are happy with the deadline policy, there is no need to cater to the minority that can't make it in time.
This isn't about communication making the world better. It's about a simple courtesy so you're not putting others in uncomfortable situations needlessly.
The idea that one should achieve standardization through a single codebase is the way Windows and Macintosh work; it's a stupid idea.
I never advocated such an idea. I only wish to see things work together more smoothly. Quite frankly, it's usually better to improve an existing effort rather than start a new one from scratch. It reduces duplication of effort, and provides improvement everyone can benefit from. There is, however, more to working together than just using the same code. Thanks to the efforts of the Gnome and KDE folks working together, the clipboard works as expected between applications, window manager hints have been standardized between desktops, drag-and-drop works and they are working better together all the time.
X11 defines standards for how toolkits should behave, and then different toolkits should adhere to those standards.
X11 only defines the mechanism for the toolkits. It does not define the policies for them. In fact, the X clipboard isn't even standardized in X11, however the defacto standard followed by KDE and Gnome is documented somewhat. The "mechanism, not policy" mantra behind X11 has been a mixed curse. On one hand, it's open ended, so you can achieve a lot of things with it. On the other hand, it's open ended, so a lot of different, sometimes conflicting, things are achieved on it.
Gtk+ is a C-based toolkit and Qt is a C++-based toolkit; you can bind them to other languages, but you pay a hefty price compared to toolkits written in those languages.
Most languages need to bind to C to get even the most rudimentary of services. You can't really open a file or socket without libc (sure, you can use the syscalls, but that's extremely non-portable). Anything that wants to talk to X has to link to libX11.so. Binding to C is so extremely common that most other languages have explicit support for it. I'll grant you that C++ isn't as easy, and far fewer languages have direct support for C++ objects, but there's no reason the shim between languages has to be a performance hog.
GUIs aren't going to get anywhere if we are shackled by the limitations of C/C++.
You lost me here. How are GUIs being "shackeled by the limitations of C/C++" today? Aside from ease of development, and ease of debugging, I can't think of a single language feature that any other language has that would be a limitation on GUI development. Sure, managed languages are nice, and they make development a heck of a lot easier, but for lower-level development they usually aren't the best choice, if for no other reason than performance and the fact you end up unable to reuse the code in any other language.
Yes, that's exactly what we need. Yet another, incompatible, alien, single-purpose toolkit so that people can complain even MORE that Linux has no consistent look-and-feel for it's desktop applications. Re-inventing the wheel won't help things any, because all the same mistakes will be made along the way of reinventing it.
No, the right thing to do would be to fix X11 (and xlib) and GTK+(GDK)/Qt. We need more people working TOGETHER rather than apart.
Or if they just gave prizes that encouraged exercise instead of these. Bikes, inline skates, etc would all be good choices. The iPod isn't bad, per se, but the X-Box is a pretty poor choice.
A stone appears to be 14 pounds. I have no idea why someone would intentionally reduce the precision of their measurement by using stones instead of pounds or kilograms. I guess 8 stone sounds "lighter" than 112 pounds?
Generally, more effort is put into making new laws rather than getting rid of old obsolete ones. The basic problem with repealing old laws is they become bikeshed type events with endless debate on things that don't really matter. Secondly, as a politician, no one will remember you for the laws you got rid of, only the ones you brought into existance.
Also, keep in mind that laws that are not enforced might as well not exist. If they do get suddenly enforced, I believe a court may very well turn over any decision because of this selective enforcement.
Well, try NX, or FreeNX. It's based on the X protocol, not VNC (or RFB), and it's extremely fast. Sometimes it's faster than local (no, I'm not kidding). It's very usable over even a dial-up connection. I cannot rave about it enough!
NX is better than VNC because of the fact it uses the X protocol means it can take advantage of any local hardware acceleration on your local workstation (the faster than local effect I'm talking about). NX is better than plain remote X because it reduces or eliminates the level of needless roundtrips between server and client needed to do common tasks, and uses JPEG compression to send large bitmapped objects. Also, it runs over SSH, so it's completely encrypted unlike either VNC or plain remote X.
(No, I don't work for NoMachine. But if I ever needed to set up a Linux terminal server, I'd buy their software.)
Yes, and then SCO will claim that your password is a derrivative work of their password that they invented thirty years ago, and that you need to pay them $699 per CPU to continue using your password.
Depends if you're comparing VNC on Windows or VNC on UNIX/Linux. On Windows, it has to this terrible screen scraping to find out what has changed before it can send it to the client. On UNIX, VNC is providing the framebuffer, so it knows exactly what has changed, when it was changed. The end result is VNC takes up loads of CPU in the host machine, and is slow, and misdraws often.
It's always easy to judge others, isn't it? I'm sure you live a positively pious life, don't you? Every non-working hour working for a charity, I presume?
Now, there are a lot of uses for bittorrent, and it's no more "less than honorable" than something like Firefox, which can help deliver porn to your desktop. Personally, I've used it to download ISO DVD images of Linux distributions (Fedora core 3, Ubuntu 5.04, Knoppix 3.x, and Xandros OC3.0 to be exact), a few applications like World Wind, a few publicly available video clips and some TV shows. Of that list, the first few are all completely legal, and sometimes the preferred (or only) method of distribution. The last item on the list is probably not legal.
It's rarely the technology that's the problem but the use of it. In this case, bittorrent has proven to be quite good at transporting data efficiently. So much so, that it's been adopted for both pirate usage and legitimate usage. Hosting a large file for a hundred thousand people to download isn't as easy or cheap.
Wow.. Just wow. You have just one bad product, and you immediately come to the conclusion that every product from that company is crap. Every company makes some items that are more or less reliable than other ones. I've personally had faulty hard drives from Western Digital (2), Fujitsu (3), and IBM (1). At work, I've seen many faulty Maxtors (especially the slimline drives) and Fujitsus (especially the 10-30GB models).
I've learned one very important thing about hard drives through this -- they die annoyingly frequently. Each tries to outmatch their competition by increasing data density, I/O throughput and decreasing costs, and quality tends to be the casualty. There are a few things you can do to protect yourself, of course. Not the least of which is backing up frequently. First, most top-of-the-line drives are least reliable because they're pushing the limits so tightly (like your 400GB Seagate). Two, new technology is not what you want because they rarely have all the new bugs worked out (see IBM/Hitachi's glass platter technology). Three, look at what others are using because there's no reason to blaze new trails (you might find out that your expectations are too high, or your price range too low).
There is good stuff out there, but you have to know that the good stuff is rarely cheap, and the new stuff is rarely good.
Given the fact you don't even need IEXPLORE.EXE around to use IE, this is hardly surprising. Look at the imports on EXPLORER.EXE -- it pulls in shell32.dll, shdocvw.dll, shlwapi.dll, urlmon.dll, and duser.dll, all of which either directly pull in MSHTML.DLL or have embedded in them GUIDs for the MSHTML COM/OLE/ActiveX/whatever object. Besides, how do you think that fancy "Common tasks" pane is drawn?
Type a URL into any explorer window if you don't beleve me.
Slashdot Mirror
Real's mistake in taking on Microsoft was they never really differentiated themselves. Apple had the stylish iPod which became phonenally popular. Microsoft had it tied into their Operating System giving them a tremendous installed base. What does Real have? A buggy, advertising laden, obnoxious player. Despite all this incompetence, that doesn't vindicate Microsoft their anticomptitive behaviour of leveraging their monopoly to dominate the streaming audio/video and DRM markets. By bundling WMP in Windows, WMP became cheaper than Real Player because you actually needed to download and install Real, and the time that takes has some value (jwz's 'Linux is only free if your time has no value' applies to everything, Linux or not).
I can accept that The Matrix may have been copied or at least inspired by her writings, but The Terminator doesn't fit that mould as well (especially since it was followed up by sequels which were all fairly well written for the type of movie it is).
Imagine you're looking to license a music format to open up a online music store. Since Apple is not going to talk to you, your choice is Real and Microsoft. Microsoft's format is playable by 90% of Windows computers, and Real's is playable by maybe 60%. In this context, the choice seems clear -- you license Microsoft's technology because your potential market is larger. You can do the same calculation when deciding which format to license for your portable music player, or streaming video. Because of the bundling, Real and Apple lose every time.
They made the file association system much more complex in Windows XP, and did so only for the file types that Windows Media Player plays. To this day, I have not seen a third-party media player that exercises all references to WiMP to their own player when told to play the files. I'll grant you, that QuickTime and RealPlayer are far more obnoxious programs on Windows than WMP, but the measures they've taken to keep WMP as the media player on your system is certainly obnoxious in another way.
I'm sure there are good, valid reasons how these features help users, but isn't it convenient that the new features just happen to advantage Microsoft and Windows Media Player and disadvantage their competitors? I'm not suggesting that Microsoft nessesarily put in these features to bolster their media player, but I'm sure the competitive advantage to it must've occurred to someone at MSFT (especially when you consider how poorly documented it is -- there's only one mention of LegacyDisable on MSDN).
Now they do, but they didn't always. His choice of exact product may have been poor, but it is exactly that type of product that when pirated tends to have little financial effect on the vendor. Photoshop is one program that is particularily widely pirated. Now, clearly some of the people who use pirated copies of it should've purchased it, particularily when their livelyhood directly of indirectly comes from the use of the program, however, a large number of the pirated copies are used by people who are merely fooling around with the program, and if faced with the choice of the (rather high) pricetag, or going without, they would just do without (and mess around with something else instead).
Let's be honest. Although the insinuation within the case study is that perl was not capable of handling the task of getting so much traffic, and ASP.NET intrinsically is, this is clearly false. They could've rearchetected the website to cache content better, and perform better, but instead the decision was made to use the website as a showcase of ASP.NET technologies. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should not pretend that it's something that it's not.
Sigh, I hate the version number game. This is an old game for Microsoft (Word 2.0 -> Word 6.0 -> Word 95/97/2000 -> Word XP -> Word 2003), and Nintendo's naming scheme has been erratic since the start. Sony, on the other hand, just makes up ridiculous marketspeak for their products.
Secondly, the X-Box had virtually no 'digital convergance' value. There were unlicensed software for it that added that feature, but because it was unlicensed, you cannot call that a feature of the platform. The X-Box was virtually the same as the PS2 in the regard, a game console that could also play DVD movies.
Neither should Microsoft, but that's beside the point. You might want to take your blinders off, though, because this stupid hype marketting thing is being committed by both sides (MTV, anyone?).No, when it's demonstratably false, it's libel. When it's not demonstratably false, it's marketing.
This isn't about communication making the world better. It's about a simple courtesy so you're not putting others in uncomfortable situations needlessly.
No, the right thing to do would be to fix X11 (and xlib) and GTK+(GDK)/Qt. We need more people working TOGETHER rather than apart.
Or if they just gave prizes that encouraged exercise instead of these. Bikes, inline skates, etc would all be good choices. The iPod isn't bad, per se, but the X-Box is a pretty poor choice.
A stone appears to be 14 pounds. I have no idea why someone would intentionally reduce the precision of their measurement by using stones instead of pounds or kilograms. I guess 8 stone sounds "lighter" than 112 pounds?
Also, keep in mind that laws that are not enforced might as well not exist. If they do get suddenly enforced, I believe a court may very well turn over any decision because of this selective enforcement.
NX is better than VNC because of the fact it uses the X protocol means it can take advantage of any local hardware acceleration on your local workstation (the faster than local effect I'm talking about). NX is better than plain remote X because it reduces or eliminates the level of needless roundtrips between server and client needed to do common tasks, and uses JPEG compression to send large bitmapped objects. Also, it runs over SSH, so it's completely encrypted unlike either VNC or plain remote X.
(No, I don't work for NoMachine. But if I ever needed to set up a Linux terminal server, I'd buy their software.)
Yes, and then SCO will claim that your password is a derrivative work of their password that they invented thirty years ago, and that you need to pay them $699 per CPU to continue using your password.
Depends if you're comparing VNC on Windows or VNC on UNIX/Linux. On Windows, it has to this terrible screen scraping to find out what has changed before it can send it to the client. On UNIX, VNC is providing the framebuffer, so it knows exactly what has changed, when it was changed. The end result is VNC takes up loads of CPU in the host machine, and is slow, and misdraws often.
Now, there are a lot of uses for bittorrent, and it's no more "less than honorable" than something like Firefox, which can help deliver porn to your desktop. Personally, I've used it to download ISO DVD images of Linux distributions (Fedora core 3, Ubuntu 5.04, Knoppix 3.x, and Xandros OC3.0 to be exact), a few applications like World Wind, a few publicly available video clips and some TV shows. Of that list, the first few are all completely legal, and sometimes the preferred (or only) method of distribution. The last item on the list is probably not legal.
It's rarely the technology that's the problem but the use of it. In this case, bittorrent has proven to be quite good at transporting data efficiently. So much so, that it's been adopted for both pirate usage and legitimate usage. Hosting a large file for a hundred thousand people to download isn't as easy or cheap.
I've learned one very important thing about hard drives through this -- they die annoyingly frequently. Each tries to outmatch their competition by increasing data density, I/O throughput and decreasing costs, and quality tends to be the casualty. There are a few things you can do to protect yourself, of course. Not the least of which is backing up frequently. First, most top-of-the-line drives are least reliable because they're pushing the limits so tightly (like your 400GB Seagate). Two, new technology is not what you want because they rarely have all the new bugs worked out (see IBM/Hitachi's glass platter technology). Three, look at what others are using because there's no reason to blaze new trails (you might find out that your expectations are too high, or your price range too low).
There is good stuff out there, but you have to know that the good stuff is rarely cheap, and the new stuff is rarely good.
And who would pass the laws that would make buying laws illegal? Anyone have enough money to buy this law into existance?
Type a URL into any explorer window if you don't beleve me.