For the ultimate insult, they're using software patents as justification for their story plot patents. On the other hand, this might work out rather well -- what better way to get software patent law reformed?
Which brings me back to the note I ended my last post on. It's highly unlikely Sony will sell the PS3 for $600+. They will take a loss on it, like every other console they introduced to the market. It's far more likely the PS3 will debut at $400 versus the X-Box which might have dropped to $275(core)/$350 by then.
You can't expect me to believe that after years of taking losses on their consoles during the first year or two of life that they'll just decide to stop and demand profitablity from it from day one.
I'm no SQL expert, but it has always bothered me that you have to enter your relationships between tables twice -- once in the database construction itself via foreign keys, and again in each and every query that will make use of that relationship. Why can't I write: SELECT prefs.val FROM login,prefs WHERE login.username="myid" AND prefs.type="name" instead of SELECT prefs.val FROM login,prefs WHERE login.username="myid" AND prefs.type="name" AND prefs.userid=login.id (or the equiv if using JOINs instead) if I have the appropriate keys set up? Wouldn't that be an easier query to optimize? Wouldn't that create fewer resulting bugs?
Perhaps I'm ignorant to some important detail of databases, but I feel that it would be much easier to work with them if the server could represent the relationships between the tables in some meaningful way.
I'm not sure if it is actually a bill yet. The EFF article on this topic has a link to the draft bill. The law is an attempt to force the electronics/computer industry to embed the MPAA's chosen copy protection schemes (VEIL and CGMS-A) into their products. Needless to say, I imagine a large number of companies will have a problem with this (from Intel to Microsoft to Conexant to ATI and many others).
Exactly how much Microsoft is paying for this advertising campaign. It seems like every day or two, there's a new story on the X-Box 360, usually comparing it favorably to Sony's offerings. I call bullshit on this, though. Console prices do NOT depreciate that fast. Given the fact that Microsoft subsidizes their console prices, and the fact that no other console has ever dropped in price that fast, there is virtually no way it'll end up being 1/2 of the price of a PS3 in one years time.
The numbers look a little defective, too. A 20GB 2.5" HDD for $25 today? And $15 in three years? Probably fairly unlikely. I doubt that cost will change, even if you accept that Microsoft is only paying $25 for the HDD today. I would expect that the price of DVD-ROM drives has pretty much hit the lowest point you can expect to see, so I don't know how they think that Microsoft will manage to get them for 60% less in three years time.
Unless they think Sony is going to release the PS3 at the $600-700 price point (it'd be suicide), I wouldn't expect the X-Box (with HDD according to those numbers) to be 1/2 the price of the PS3.
Anyway, my point here is that time and time again people compare Live to PS2 online and state that Live's fee covers most all games, but that PS2 you might have to pay to play some games - there is no difference between the two statements.
My point was that there may be a few games that would request subscription from PS3 users where they would just accept a small amount of the Live revenue for X-Box users instead. My gut feeling is that these games would be a severe minority, but I can't underestimate that some publishers may get greedy and try it. I'd guess that any company that tries this (for a non-MMO game) will likely end up losing more far more in sales than their subscription system could ever hope to contibute.
It's quite likely that the identity persistence and integration that you mentioned (MSN Messenger for X-Box?) will end up being the only distinguishing feature separating X-Box and PS3 online systems, despite the fact that gamers will have to pay $60/yr for the X-Box (or use the VPN systems that allow you to convince the X-Box that it's on a LAN instead). Only time will tell.
No, the problem is the monopoly leveraging their monopoly to gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Dumping, and putting products on the market far below cost to drive competition out of business is already illegal (monopoly or not). Combining the two tactics only makes things worse (and more effective).
I'm sure that Open Source and Free software projects will be have anti-trust lawsuits filed against them in the future. Perhaps if some company actually gets big enough, they may even be successful. If it happens, it'll be one of the most interesting court cases to be tested against antitrust lawsuits in a very long time.
Exactly. Once the system price gets to around the $200 mark, things might change a bit. But expecting people to shell out $300 for the console (which won't even run any of the older games you might have -- you need the $100 hard disc for that), plus $50-60 for a game (there aren't any used or classic games yet), and $40 for a memory card. You're already at nearly $400, and you only have a single game to play on it. If you're stupid enough to go to EB/GameStop, they'll gouge you for at least $600 for the basic system since they require you to buy their bundle of four games with it.
I suppose snob appeal might apply, but I just get the feeling it's a little too expensive. It was the same thing with the PSP. I've met people who've purchased a PSP, but they're no where near as popular as the GBA was (the DS hasn't done terribly well either, but the DS is just strange). Entertainment items really should fit within the limits of most people's disposable income. I shouldn't need to get a loan to afford these promotions.
If you believe some of the Slashdot posts on this article, you can be sure that it has nothing to do with the fact the network adapter for the PS2 was a $50 add-on. If the Sega Genesis/CD/32X saga should've taught people, is that an optional add-on is never terribly successful. PS2 online gaming is weak for that reason alone, even if you ignore the benefits or drawbacks of the subscription-based XBL system.
Frankly, there will be plenty of time to determine a winner. The X-Box Live! system has certain advantages, and the PS3 method has other advantages. XBL will likely have more online playable games, and they will likely remain playable for as long as the income from the subscriptions pays for the expenses of maintaining the service. PS3 will likely have more free online playable games, but they may stop working if the publisher decides it wasn't popular enough, or if they've released a sequel and want people to buy that instead of playing the old ones. The Live system requires a subscription that might turn some people away, but it is a single subscription for nearly all online games. The PS3 system doesn't require a subscription, but individual games may. If too many games require individual subscriptions, this may alienate gamers, too.
This will be interesting to see which approach wins out in the end.
What Are the Advantages of Running the Osa.exe File?
The Osa.exe file initializes the shared code that is used by the Office XP programs. When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster. If the Office programs, instead of Osa.exe, initialize the shared code, the programs take longer to start.
Osa.exe is installed by Office and is automaticalled added to the start menu in the Startup group. It doesn't preload as much as the OOo preloader does, but it does preload (Specifically, Mso{$OFFICE_VERSION}.dll, which may load other DLLs).
In the future, if you want to rant about misinformation, you might want to make sure that your information is correct.
There's nothing wrong with bundling. The problem was that Microsoft is a monopoly, and the use of bunding was to expand their monopoly into another area by giving their version of the product way under cost. If you assume your time has a particular cost associated with it, it was more expensive to download another free browser than it was to use the one built-in to MS Windows.
The end result is that despite the fact that dumping is an anti-competitive tactic, the fact that Microsoft could leverage their monopoly over desktop operating systems in such a way that nobody could compete with them, even if you gave your product away. As long as their product was sufficiently capable, they would prevail.
Now, Netscape deserved a fair bit of blame for this, too. Frankly, nothing significant really changed in Netscape versions past 3, and the 4.x series just plain stunk. Netscape accelerated their own decline by not pushing their software hard enough, fast enough. To make matters worse, IE 4 was actually fairly good, and IE 5 was better.
No, it cannot. Whatever proof you might come up with to disprove ID will simply be countered with, "Well, He must've put it there." You cannot disprove a theory that begins and ends with faith.
The entire thing is stupid. Why do people project their failures and faults onto a being that is supposed to be omnipotent? Saying that some omnipotent being would have to tamper with his design after creating it is a method of assuming that a deity is subject to the same restrictions as we are as humans. I find it much more likely, that any deity of such power could simply create the universe and have it turn out exactly as intended. ID really is the height of human arrogance -- the idea that a super powerful being would have to constantly concern itself with our existance.
Real professionals use Visual Source Safe? Even Microsoft doesn't use it! It's like putting all your valuable source code in a Microsoft Access database -- it's a flat file stored on a network share that is prone to corruption if just a single client happens to crash while accessing it. It IS, however, used by a large number of small businesses (who don't know any better) who have small projects worked on by a small number of users.
I had a professor like that, too, except instead of Microsoft, he was crazy about Macintosh. He took a significant portion of a class just to praise the SIZE of the damn mouse pointer in MacOS. Somehow that Macintosh 16x16 black pointer was somehow so much better than the 32x32 white pointer Windows uses. After the second class about how much Macs were better than Windows, I stopped going to class.
That's assuming that you could find a bus and processor that would allow you to transfer that to memory. At it's peak, Infiniband only allows for up to 25 Gbps, and most CPUs are far below that at only 3 to 8 Gbps. I don't think there's any memory systems that could handle that inflow of data, either.
* Sealing classes is good practice when that class is not designed for inheritance.
Perhaps, but when classes are sealed in a framework from which you must build your application, sealed classes get in the way an awful lot. For example, there's no way to create a control that is usable as an ImageList in the GUI designer because the ImageList class is sealed. Regardless of if it's a good practice or not, it is frustrating.
* Classes that only exist to provide some internal implementation are best left internal - a smaller public API means less things to support in perpetuity, and less chance that a programmer will rely on implementation details.
True enough, but having so much hidden black magic isn't always a good thing, either.
* Static classes have many uses - you can use them to represent a singleton object, or you can encapsulate, non-object specific operations. Like everying in System.Math for example. Not everything is best represented as an object - Microsoft is pragmatic enough to recognize that, even if some object-oriented bigots don't or won't.
I'll agree with you here. There's nothing wrong with functional programming, and it can often simplify the task if you don't need proper OO structures. When you don't have macro expansion capabilities, utility classes are often the only way to avoid massive duplication of usually buggy code (if you copied it a half dozen times, there has to be a bug in it [must be some kind of natural law], and you'll always miss fixing one of the instances of that duplicated code).
Microsoft restricts software to API reuse in.NET - not as "open" as open source perhaps, but it makes versioning far less painful, and hence, backwards compatibility is much easier to achieve.
Microsoft doesn't care terribly much about backwards compatibilty in the framework versions since they have side-by-side support built into the framework. 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 all co-exist peacefully, and apps written for 1.0 may not work as intended on 1.1 or 2.0. Microsoft has tried to reduce the number of changes they make to the interface because it makes porting between the versions more difficult.
A simple Google query would've given you what you seek, but what you need is ncpmount. There are numerous HOWTOs and FAQs on this topic. If people have written these HOWTOs, they've surely implemented it at some point.
Geeze. I read the summary, and my first thought was, "This looks like Daniel Lyons' writing". Frankly, the stuff he writes is often far worse than I read on most blogs. He's deliberately inflamitory and seems to talk in absolutes most of the time. I wonder if he thinks he's playing Devil's Advocate or something when he writes this garbage.
Except they've only really ever managed to make money off two or three things. Windows, server software and Office are their prime money makers (at quite a handsome profit margin), but virtually everything else either loses money or makes extremely slim profits. Microsoft's strategy seems to be more deprive everyone else of income rather than extracting any income from the markets they enter. It's a strategy that's working for the Beast (but we could debate if this strategy is intentional or not), but for how long? If they succeed at killing Google, will MSN actually become cash positive, or will it simply kill a company that was profitable to prevent it from eventually competing with a Microsoft core product?
Microsoft is certainly profitable, but I'm not sure it's a model one should (or even could) follow for building a company. If they didn't have something insane like a %70 profit margin on their core products, I don't think the business would be sustainable.
Transarc was acquired by IBM in 1998, and released OpenAFS in 2000. This used to be IBM's site for Transarc technologies, but it looks like it doesn't exist anymore, and instead just redirects to IBM's software page.
I don't know why, but economics, physics, and cryptography seem to draw kooks sugar draws flies. I suppose that biology should be in that list as well, but I digress.
I think every field has it's share of kooks. It's just the kooks in those particular fields are attracted to forums like Slashdot. And don't forget the kooks and extremists are always the loudest voice of the crowd.
It's amazing to me how many people think that pegging our money supply to gold or some other random precious metal will somehow fix this problem.
The "Gold Standard" is an idea that just won't die. Economics is one of those strange fields where there are few hard truths, and where much of the field depends on what people believe NOW. In this field, perception can shape reality because a large portion of the field relies on human behaviour, and the theories can affect that behaviour.
There's a lot of topics that get people going like this. Just start talking about trade deficits or supply-side economics, and you'll probably get an earful. You might even hear them talk about the gold standard as they discuss their theories on this concepts. Sturgeon's Law applies is economics quite well, it seems.
Really? You haven't seen the damage that it can do to someone by telling them that their conception was an accident (via birth control malfunction)? That the pregnancy was unwanted? I'm pretty certain the sense of rejection, from being told that you were unwanted, is pretty much the same in either case. It's not the sadness of not being able to live that would hurt, but the rejection of your existance by your parents.
How about the fact that they serve different purposes. PDAs are information devices, the iPod is an entertainment device. PDAs can do just about everything, but the battery life sucks, and it can't always do everything well. iPods serve a single purpose, and they do that one thing extremely well. Add to this the fact that most information services people want while on the road are being added to cellular phones, and that leaves the PDAs in smaller and smaller markets. It basically comes down to the fact that people prefer single purpose devices because they're generally much simpler to use.
Slashdot Mirror
For the ultimate insult, they're using software patents as justification for their story plot patents. On the other hand, this might work out rather well -- what better way to get software patent law reformed?
Any free OS that can be a Xen guest is okay in my books. Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Plan9... All good stuff.
You can't expect me to believe that after years of taking losses on their consoles during the first year or two of life that they'll just decide to stop and demand profitablity from it from day one.
Perhaps I'm ignorant to some important detail of databases, but I feel that it would be much easier to work with them if the server could represent the relationships between the tables in some meaningful way.
I'm not sure if it is actually a bill yet. The EFF article on this topic has a link to the draft bill. The law is an attempt to force the electronics/computer industry to embed the MPAA's chosen copy protection schemes (VEIL and CGMS-A) into their products. Needless to say, I imagine a large number of companies will have a problem with this (from Intel to Microsoft to Conexant to ATI and many others).
The numbers look a little defective, too. A 20GB 2.5" HDD for $25 today? And $15 in three years? Probably fairly unlikely. I doubt that cost will change, even if you accept that Microsoft is only paying $25 for the HDD today. I would expect that the price of DVD-ROM drives has pretty much hit the lowest point you can expect to see, so I don't know how they think that Microsoft will manage to get them for 60% less in three years time.
Unless they think Sony is going to release the PS3 at the $600-700 price point (it'd be suicide), I wouldn't expect the X-Box (with HDD according to those numbers) to be 1/2 the price of the PS3.
It's quite likely that the identity persistence and integration that you mentioned (MSN Messenger for X-Box?) will end up being the only distinguishing feature separating X-Box and PS3 online systems, despite the fact that gamers will have to pay $60/yr for the X-Box (or use the VPN systems that allow you to convince the X-Box that it's on a LAN instead). Only time will tell.
I'm sure that Open Source and Free software projects will be have anti-trust lawsuits filed against them in the future. Perhaps if some company actually gets big enough, they may even be successful. If it happens, it'll be one of the most interesting court cases to be tested against antitrust lawsuits in a very long time.
I suppose snob appeal might apply, but I just get the feeling it's a little too expensive. It was the same thing with the PSP. I've met people who've purchased a PSP, but they're no where near as popular as the GBA was (the DS hasn't done terribly well either, but the DS is just strange). Entertainment items really should fit within the limits of most people's disposable income. I shouldn't need to get a loan to afford these promotions.
Frankly, there will be plenty of time to determine a winner. The X-Box Live! system has certain advantages, and the PS3 method has other advantages. XBL will likely have more online playable games, and they will likely remain playable for as long as the income from the subscriptions pays for the expenses of maintaining the service. PS3 will likely have more free online playable games, but they may stop working if the publisher decides it wasn't popular enough, or if they've released a sequel and want people to buy that instead of playing the old ones. The Live system requires a subscription that might turn some people away, but it is a single subscription for nearly all online games. The PS3 system doesn't require a subscription, but individual games may. If too many games require individual subscriptions, this may alienate gamers, too.
This will be interesting to see which approach wins out in the end.
In the future, if you want to rant about misinformation, you might want to make sure that your information is correct.
The end result is that despite the fact that dumping is an anti-competitive tactic, the fact that Microsoft could leverage their monopoly over desktop operating systems in such a way that nobody could compete with them, even if you gave your product away. As long as their product was sufficiently capable, they would prevail.
Now, Netscape deserved a fair bit of blame for this, too. Frankly, nothing significant really changed in Netscape versions past 3, and the 4.x series just plain stunk. Netscape accelerated their own decline by not pushing their software hard enough, fast enough. To make matters worse, IE 4 was actually fairly good, and IE 5 was better.
The entire thing is stupid. Why do people project their failures and faults onto a being that is supposed to be omnipotent? Saying that some omnipotent being would have to tamper with his design after creating it is a method of assuming that a deity is subject to the same restrictions as we are as humans. I find it much more likely, that any deity of such power could simply create the universe and have it turn out exactly as intended. ID really is the height of human arrogance -- the idea that a super powerful being would have to constantly concern itself with our existance.
I had a professor like that, too, except instead of Microsoft, he was crazy about Macintosh. He took a significant portion of a class just to praise the SIZE of the damn mouse pointer in MacOS. Somehow that Macintosh 16x16 black pointer was somehow so much better than the 32x32 white pointer Windows uses. After the second class about how much Macs were better than Windows, I stopped going to class.
That's assuming that you could find a bus and processor that would allow you to transfer that to memory. At it's peak, Infiniband only allows for up to 25 Gbps, and most CPUs are far below that at only 3 to 8 Gbps. I don't think there's any memory systems that could handle that inflow of data, either.
Perhaps, but when classes are sealed in a framework from which you must build your application, sealed classes get in the way an awful lot. For example, there's no way to create a control that is usable as an ImageList in the GUI designer because the ImageList class is sealed. Regardless of if it's a good practice or not, it is frustrating.
* Classes that only exist to provide some internal implementation are best left internal - a smaller public API means less things to support in perpetuity, and less chance that a programmer will rely on implementation details.
True enough, but having so much hidden black magic isn't always a good thing, either.
* Static classes have many uses - you can use them to represent a singleton object, or you can encapsulate, non-object specific operations. Like everying in System.Math for example. Not everything is best represented as an object - Microsoft is pragmatic enough to recognize that, even if some object-oriented bigots don't or won't.
I'll agree with you here. There's nothing wrong with functional programming, and it can often simplify the task if you don't need proper OO structures. When you don't have macro expansion capabilities, utility classes are often the only way to avoid massive duplication of usually buggy code (if you copied it a half dozen times, there has to be a bug in it [must be some kind of natural law], and you'll always miss fixing one of the instances of that duplicated code).
Microsoft restricts software to API reuse in .NET - not as "open" as open source perhaps, but it makes versioning far less painful, and hence, backwards compatibility is much easier to achieve.
Microsoft doesn't care terribly much about backwards compatibilty in the framework versions since they have side-by-side support built into the framework. 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 all co-exist peacefully, and apps written for 1.0 may not work as intended on 1.1 or 2.0. Microsoft has tried to reduce the number of changes they make to the interface because it makes porting between the versions more difficult.
A simple Google query would've given you what you seek, but what you need is ncpmount. There are numerous HOWTOs and FAQs on this topic. If people have written these HOWTOs, they've surely implemented it at some point.
Geeze. I read the summary, and my first thought was, "This looks like Daniel Lyons' writing". Frankly, the stuff he writes is often far worse than I read on most blogs. He's deliberately inflamitory and seems to talk in absolutes most of the time. I wonder if he thinks he's playing Devil's Advocate or something when he writes this garbage.
Microsoft is certainly profitable, but I'm not sure it's a model one should (or even could) follow for building a company. If they didn't have something insane like a %70 profit margin on their core products, I don't think the business would be sustainable.
PII? Weakling. Real gamers played it on nothing higher than a 80486SX, and often 80386s.
Transarc was acquired by IBM in 1998, and released OpenAFS in 2000. This used to be IBM's site for Transarc technologies, but it looks like it doesn't exist anymore, and instead just redirects to IBM's software page.
There's a lot of topics that get people going like this. Just start talking about trade deficits or supply-side economics, and you'll probably get an earful. You might even hear them talk about the gold standard as they discuss their theories on this concepts. Sturgeon's Law applies is economics quite well, it seems.
Really? You haven't seen the damage that it can do to someone by telling them that their conception was an accident (via birth control malfunction)? That the pregnancy was unwanted? I'm pretty certain the sense of rejection, from being told that you were unwanted, is pretty much the same in either case. It's not the sadness of not being able to live that would hurt, but the rejection of your existance by your parents.
How about the fact that they serve different purposes. PDAs are information devices, the iPod is an entertainment device. PDAs can do just about everything, but the battery life sucks, and it can't always do everything well. iPods serve a single purpose, and they do that one thing extremely well. Add to this the fact that most information services people want while on the road are being added to cellular phones, and that leaves the PDAs in smaller and smaller markets. It basically comes down to the fact that people prefer single purpose devices because they're generally much simpler to use.
I don't think I've heard anyone, once, translate BFG into big force gun.
And why does a university club have a PR man?