Netbooks partially failed because they sold with slow HD's and tiny amounts of memory, hurting their performance no end.
Netbooks failed because they kept creeping up in price until they became cheap, crappy laptops, complete with the same cheap, crappy bundled software that ran terribly on the lowly hardware. It was a cool idea that was blown out of proportion.
Tablets are hugely expensive for what they offer and have slow "HD's" and tiny amounts of memory. Thanks to software that was written with the hardware in mind, tablets seem to be selling just fine.
While I sympathize with developers who have ambitious ideas, the bottom line is that you have to develop within the limitations of the hardware. If your software is too slow or otherwise suffers in performance, then your software is simply too slow.
Cue stories about how RAM chips were too slow to keep up with cutting-edge video controllers in the 90's.
(1) Licensing requires an ongoing relationship and probably periodic payments.
How much are these periodic payments? Given how much money could be up for grabs, I would think this could quickly get too expensive for individual inventors. Periodic payments and a broken industry are rarely an encouraging combination.
I could feel the effects of such periodic payments when my old bank told me they were charging me a monthly image fee for sending me badly scanned and scaled pictures of each check I wrote. So, they started charging me for digital prints, when previously they mailed me the used checks with my monthly statement for free.
But then you're depriving them the wealth and access to technology that would help lift them out of the stone age. That's why we should never feel guilty about outsourcing.
What's surprising about this? The Amiga community was notorious for it's hackers, and those guys threw their code into the public domain back when public domain was actually public and the GPL didn't exist.
Granted, mal-ware was more for yuks than profit back then.
I've seen this quite clearly with my health insurance. In exchange for a blood sample and "wellness coaching", they would offer a $300 discount on my premium. The next year, by NOT participating in the program, I'd face a $300 surcharge. This year, they are again warning about a surcharge, but at the time the sign-up sheet was handed out, the amount of the surcharge, "has not yet been determined."
I had to go to the company web site to find out how much the surcharge is, and it's four days to the sign-up deadline. They are also adding a tobacco surcharge.
I just know that in a year or two, the surcharge will apply even if you participate in the program, but you "fail." Then they'll have a blood pressure surcharge, where you will fail if it is above 120/70, or a cholesterol surcharge if is above whatever is perfect, and so on. I know it's coming.
Oh yeah, and standard premiums have gone up and coverage has gone down. Apathy and laziness wins again.
I'm a console guy. I don't like installing games with their insidious DRM and copy protection crap on my work computer. I've heard nightmares about USB ports dying and software not working unless you reboot exactly 8 times. I like just putting in the disc and playing. For many games, I also like gamepads. However, the only reason why I'll buy a console is because there's a game that interests me and it's not available for the PC, or a particular genre is not popular on the PC or sucks sewage on the PC.
If good exclusive titles stop coming, I'll stop buying consoles.
When I look at the requirements for most Mac software, it usually says (paraphrased):
"Only works on a Mac built within the last two years. Requires absolute latest version of OSX, which might be Snow Leapord or possibly Lion depending on what mega-important security patch we release tomorrow morning."
Seriously, I just tried to download that new game "Limbo" for the PC, and I figured I'd check out the Mac system requirements. Yup -- the game will only work on Lion, and it says that the game probably won't work on some Macs due to shader effects and some such nonsense. It's as if it's impossible to support older hardware, or Mac people just don't give a shit about ancient, decrepit, painfully obsolete machines... like Macs with 32-bit Intel CPUs.
You forgot to mention that your school isn't actually located on this planet.
My experience is very much in line with the parent. I put up with bullying for quite a long time by one individual. I asked the principal for help and did everything to get my teachers involved, but to no avail. Eventually I got fed up with the little brat and threw him 20 feet down the hallway. I got in a lot of trouble, but nobody ever picked on me again.
These days, the "getting in trouble" bit no longer makes violence reasonable. However, substitute violence with creativity, and the lesson learned in school remains valuable.
Re:And FF10 also makes addons compatible by defaul
on
Firefox 10 Released
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· Score: 1
I think having software that automatically runs as admin is the problem.
When Sony announced the forced arbitration agreement, with an option to opt-out, gamers everywhere were furious. When Microsoft introduced forced arbitration, I didn't hear a peep about it. I found out only by actually reading the new EULA (and fully rejected it. Now, some of my downloaded games no longer work).
The quantity of evilness has little to do with reputation. Sometimes it just depends on who moves first.
I've finally figured out the cause of [most of] the pauses. It's the session restore feature that saves the browser state, cookies, and session data every 10 seconds (in JSON format, no less). I've turned it off and the pauses are now almost entirely gone.
browser.sessionstore.interval = "300000"
browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo = "0"
browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo = "0"
Naturally, this will remove the feature that restores your tabs in the event of a crash, but seeing how little Firefox blows up on me, this features is hardly useful, and certainly not worth the frustration of constant pauses and missed clicks. Firefox is now finally usable for everyday browsing.
Seriously, I've been hearing about this problem for years, and have been suffering with it since FF2, and nobody seems to have a clue what causes it. Personally, I thought it was a memory management issue. Turns out, it's just a bad design decision.
I learned the hard way that you should NEVER check an NTFS volume with a boot disk for a newer version of Windows. It might decide to automatically update the filesystem to the new version and cause a whole heap of problems.
Around 2003, I used to work in a small photo store, and we had a Noritsu optical photo printer hooked up to a WinNT4 workstation running Kodak DLS MiniLab software. From the ground up, it was designed for totally digital workflow, so processing orders from floppy disks and CDs was common, as was saving orders to NAS.
It was buggy as hell, the GUI frequently drew garbage and tears, it wouldn't run on Win2K so we couldn't use a lot of card readers or USB anything, it crashed several times a day, and the database would just stop working for no reason which required frequent restarts and losing orders. The system was supposed to be all digital, but any orders we loaded from customer media always printed yellow and washed out, and any color adjustments resulted in horrible banding and color shifts. It was a total black box system, and I couldn't even tell what colorspace the machine was using to process images. JPEG files with embedded color profiles either showed up totally black, or in some cases would cause the system to crash. I eventually developed a system of filtering all customer orders through Irfanview to weed out color profiles the DLS software couldn't handle, to make sure we could actually print on a 1-hour schedule without fear the system would collapse. Just about everything crashed that software, and the CD burner would frequently make coasters -- a big deal when Kodak was charging several dollars for their PhotoCDs (the system would write to blank CDs, thankfully).
Photos scanned on the Kodak PictureMaker kiosk (running a SparcStation III which took over 15 minutes just to boot up), would take about 10 minutes just to network the final images to the DLS software, even though it took half as long for the Noritsu printer to spit them out. Don't even get me started about the greeting card templates, where more than 150K of XML was required just to define a canvas and a transparency mask to make bordered cards.
Naturally, proprietary file formats were used for everything, so it was impossible to access customer orders directly through the NAS. You had to use special client software to connect to the DLS system, search for the order strictly by customer number (not order number), retrieve thumbnails of the orders one at a time until you haphazardly discovered the actual order you wanted, retrieve the high-resolution image for the whole order, and then you could actually save the images to a disk. This procedure could take 3-4 minutes if you were lucky, more than 15 if you weren't. The Image Extractor client was about the only thing in the whole setup that ran on Win2K, so that was what we used to write orders to USB thumb drives. The DLS system itself required a horrifically expensive multi card reader connected via SCSI.
If there was anything that shattered my impression of Kodak, it was their "high-end" software. Kodak did a horrible job adapting to the digital market.
Sounds a lot like Chernobyl. Foreign scientists had virtually no access to the site for study. It took years to drill into the reactor core, with a makeshift camera strapped to a disassembled toy tank, just to look at what was inside.
Put the token inside the power adapter, in a little compartment. Hell, you can duct tape it to the adapter (or anything else). Make your wristwatch your token. How many people go on trips without a watch?
Of course, I suppose people likely to forget their master password aren't likely to be very creative in the first place.
"because people would be pissed off if they had to think too much about the price"
This suggests that the movie industry is just like the candy rack at the supermarket... an impulse market. I'd like to disagree with that, but I used to work in retail, so I know better.
When I worked in a camera store, I was amazed at first how many people just walked into the store and wanted to buy... anything. They relied almost entirely on my recommendation. I was also told never to show the customer more than 3 options at a time because it would confuse them and take longer to make the sale. It didn't take me long to realize that the only people who shopped in retail stores were the ones who did no research at all.
Slashdot Mirror
failed to push high end netbooks
Don't you mean laptops?
Netbooks partially failed because they sold with slow HD's and tiny amounts of memory, hurting their performance no end.
Netbooks failed because they kept creeping up in price until they became cheap, crappy laptops, complete with the same cheap, crappy bundled software that ran terribly on the lowly hardware. It was a cool idea that was blown out of proportion.
Tablets are hugely expensive for what they offer and have slow "HD's" and tiny amounts of memory. Thanks to software that was written with the hardware in mind, tablets seem to be selling just fine.
While I sympathize with developers who have ambitious ideas, the bottom line is that you have to develop within the limitations of the hardware. If your software is too slow or otherwise suffers in performance, then your software is simply too slow.
Cue stories about how RAM chips were too slow to keep up with cutting-edge video controllers in the 90's.
(1) Licensing requires an ongoing relationship and probably periodic payments.
How much are these periodic payments? Given how much money could be up for grabs, I would think this could quickly get too expensive for individual inventors. Periodic payments and a broken industry are rarely an encouraging combination.
I could feel the effects of such periodic payments when my old bank told me they were charging me a monthly image fee for sending me badly scanned and scaled pictures of each check I wrote. So, they started charging me for digital prints, when previously they mailed me the used checks with my monthly statement for free.
But then you're depriving them the wealth and access to technology that would help lift them out of the stone age. That's why we should never feel guilty about outsourcing.
</bs>
What's surprising about this? The Amiga community was notorious for it's hackers, and those guys threw their code into the public domain back when public domain was actually public and the GPL didn't exist.
Granted, mal-ware was more for yuks than profit back then.
I am. I heard China is building a lot of nuclear plants.
Inefficiency isn't always a bad thing. Many small companies instead of one big one, for example.
Greed, apathy, and ignorance on the other hand...
Americans love their cheap widgets.
Wait a minute...
Apple? Cheap? Popular?
Aren't I supposed to pick two or something?
the cube was part of a new of thinking that (re)valued design in computers.
Indeed. Most notably the part where it overheated to the point of killing itself -- visual design over function.
That's served Apple quite well for a long time.
I've seen this quite clearly with my health insurance. In exchange for a blood sample and "wellness coaching", they would offer a $300 discount on my premium. The next year, by NOT participating in the program, I'd face a $300 surcharge. This year, they are again warning about a surcharge, but at the time the sign-up sheet was handed out, the amount of the surcharge, "has not yet been determined."
I had to go to the company web site to find out how much the surcharge is, and it's four days to the sign-up deadline. They are also adding a tobacco surcharge.
I just know that in a year or two, the surcharge will apply even if you participate in the program, but you "fail." Then they'll have a blood pressure surcharge, where you will fail if it is above 120/70, or a cholesterol surcharge if is above whatever is perfect, and so on. I know it's coming.
Oh yeah, and standard premiums have gone up and coverage has gone down. Apathy and laziness wins again.
Same reason why I buy maps even though I have a GPS.
This is the military we're talking about. Two for twice the price... plus backups.
Hmm. Sounds like "too big to fail" to me.
You forgot:
3. Exclusive titles.
I'm a console guy. I don't like installing games with their insidious DRM and copy protection crap on my work computer. I've heard nightmares about USB ports dying and software not working unless you reboot exactly 8 times. I like just putting in the disc and playing. For many games, I also like gamepads. However, the only reason why I'll buy a console is because there's a game that interests me and it's not available for the PC, or a particular genre is not popular on the PC or sucks sewage on the PC.
If good exclusive titles stop coming, I'll stop buying consoles.
When I look at the requirements for most Mac software, it usually says (paraphrased):
"Only works on a Mac built within the last two years. Requires absolute latest version of OSX, which might be Snow Leapord or possibly Lion depending on what mega-important security patch we release tomorrow morning."
Seriously, I just tried to download that new game "Limbo" for the PC, and I figured I'd check out the Mac system requirements. Yup -- the game will only work on Lion, and it says that the game probably won't work on some Macs due to shader effects and some such nonsense. It's as if it's impossible to support older hardware, or Mac people just don't give a shit about ancient, decrepit, painfully obsolete machines... like Macs with 32-bit Intel CPUs.
Like a budget increase, so you can do your job more effectively.
You forgot to mention that your school isn't actually located on this planet.
My experience is very much in line with the parent. I put up with bullying for quite a long time by one individual. I asked the principal for help and did everything to get my teachers involved, but to no avail. Eventually I got fed up with the little brat and threw him 20 feet down the hallway. I got in a lot of trouble, but nobody ever picked on me again.
These days, the "getting in trouble" bit no longer makes violence reasonable. However, substitute violence with creativity, and the lesson learned in school remains valuable.
I think having software that automatically runs as admin is the problem.
When Sony announced the forced arbitration agreement, with an option to opt-out, gamers everywhere were furious. When Microsoft introduced forced arbitration, I didn't hear a peep about it. I found out only by actually reading the new EULA (and fully rejected it. Now, some of my downloaded games no longer work).
The quantity of evilness has little to do with reputation. Sometimes it just depends on who moves first.
Now that Microsoft uses a forced arbitration agreement that's even worse than Sony's, I've rejected my 360.
I've finally figured out the cause of [most of] the pauses. It's the session restore feature that saves the browser state, cookies, and session data every 10 seconds (in JSON format, no less). I've turned it off and the pauses are now almost entirely gone.
Naturally, this will remove the feature that restores your tabs in the event of a crash, but seeing how little Firefox blows up on me, this features is hardly useful, and certainly not worth the frustration of constant pauses and missed clicks. Firefox is now finally usable for everyday browsing.
Seriously, I've been hearing about this problem for years, and have been suffering with it since FF2, and nobody seems to have a clue what causes it. Personally, I thought it was a memory management issue. Turns out, it's just a bad design decision.
I learned the hard way that you should NEVER check an NTFS volume with a boot disk for a newer version of Windows. It might decide to automatically update the filesystem to the new version and cause a whole heap of problems.
Yes, the same filesystem... but in name only.
Around 2003, I used to work in a small photo store, and we had a Noritsu optical photo printer hooked up to a WinNT4 workstation running Kodak DLS MiniLab software. From the ground up, it was designed for totally digital workflow, so processing orders from floppy disks and CDs was common, as was saving orders to NAS.
It was buggy as hell, the GUI frequently drew garbage and tears, it wouldn't run on Win2K so we couldn't use a lot of card readers or USB anything, it crashed several times a day, and the database would just stop working for no reason which required frequent restarts and losing orders. The system was supposed to be all digital, but any orders we loaded from customer media always printed yellow and washed out, and any color adjustments resulted in horrible banding and color shifts. It was a total black box system, and I couldn't even tell what colorspace the machine was using to process images. JPEG files with embedded color profiles either showed up totally black, or in some cases would cause the system to crash. I eventually developed a system of filtering all customer orders through Irfanview to weed out color profiles the DLS software couldn't handle, to make sure we could actually print on a 1-hour schedule without fear the system would collapse. Just about everything crashed that software, and the CD burner would frequently make coasters -- a big deal when Kodak was charging several dollars for their PhotoCDs (the system would write to blank CDs, thankfully).
Photos scanned on the Kodak PictureMaker kiosk (running a SparcStation III which took over 15 minutes just to boot up), would take about 10 minutes just to network the final images to the DLS software, even though it took half as long for the Noritsu printer to spit them out. Don't even get me started about the greeting card templates, where more than 150K of XML was required just to define a canvas and a transparency mask to make bordered cards.
Naturally, proprietary file formats were used for everything, so it was impossible to access customer orders directly through the NAS. You had to use special client software to connect to the DLS system, search for the order strictly by customer number (not order number), retrieve thumbnails of the orders one at a time until you haphazardly discovered the actual order you wanted, retrieve the high-resolution image for the whole order, and then you could actually save the images to a disk. This procedure could take 3-4 minutes if you were lucky, more than 15 if you weren't. The Image Extractor client was about the only thing in the whole setup that ran on Win2K, so that was what we used to write orders to USB thumb drives. The DLS system itself required a horrifically expensive multi card reader connected via SCSI.
If there was anything that shattered my impression of Kodak, it was their "high-end" software. Kodak did a horrible job adapting to the digital market.
Sounds a lot like Chernobyl. Foreign scientists had virtually no access to the site for study. It took years to drill into the reactor core, with a makeshift camera strapped to a disassembled toy tank, just to look at what was inside.
Put the token inside the power adapter, in a little compartment. Hell, you can duct tape it to the adapter (or anything else). Make your wristwatch your token. How many people go on trips without a watch?
Of course, I suppose people likely to forget their master password aren't likely to be very creative in the first place.
"because people would be pissed off if they had to think too much about the price"
This suggests that the movie industry is just like the candy rack at the supermarket... an impulse market. I'd like to disagree with that, but I used to work in retail, so I know better.
When I worked in a camera store, I was amazed at first how many people just walked into the store and wanted to buy... anything. They relied almost entirely on my recommendation. I was also told never to show the customer more than 3 options at a time because it would confuse them and take longer to make the sale. It didn't take me long to realize that the only people who shopped in retail stores were the ones who did no research at all.