Not that unusual. When a business goes national, it's not uncommon that have to payoff a small business so that they have rights the name in that state. The problem is that the web is implicity national, so it's easier to step on someone's toes.
This all reminds me of the story about McDonald's going around the country and threating to sue every "MacDonald's Auto Repair and Towing" shop. (I don't think they ever followed through with their threat.) Or Apple Computer being sued by Apple Records and McIntosh Amplifiers.
There are quite a few companies whose official corporate name is "FooFoo.com" or "Amazon.com". Now does Amazon have rights to the name "Amazon.com", or do the Amazonians?
However, with the coming TLD expansion, I doubt Amazon.com would have automatic rights over Amazon.co, Amazon.store or Amazon.web. Another employment act for lawyers! --
Sounds to me that he knew what he was doing and planned from the start to take the issue to ICANN and get the domain from the squatter. Presumably this was cheaper than just paying him off. --
On the other hand you have California, where property taxes have been politically frozen for 20 years. The only viable source of revenue for local government is sales taxes (which is one reason we have so many strip malls).
In the Silicon Valley, local sales taxes are even a popular way of funding highway projects. The irony is that can be cheaper to mail order from San Jose than to actually drive there and pick it up. --
In the US, farming is more profitable than ranching. If they could grow anything edible on those ranchlands, they would.
Drive around the country a bit, you'll see. Inevitably, where there is farming in arid areas, it's only because of a boondogle federal irrigation project. (This is not to say that ranchlands are managed very effectively -- in general, they're not. Only that you can't farm there.) --
1993-4 -- Sega introduces the CD and 32X add-ons for the Genesis. Some games require the CD, some require the 32X, others require both. Confusion reigns, developers and users get pissed when Sega drops both in favor of the Saturn a year later.
1995 -- Sega tries to beat everyone to the market with the Saturn. Despite all the hype, the initial cost is $500, pricing it out of the market. PSX is introduced at $300, dropping soon to $200. There's lots of hype that the PSX is better hardware and since there's so few Saturns on the market, nobody actually knows. Result: Saturn never gets of the ground. --
For $300 bucks, I'd consider it just to play networked PC games with my real computer. The only question is if the resolution is good enough to play strategy games.
My assumption is that this thing will eventually replace the WebTV. Those currently sell for $200-300 and have found a market.
Your argument is true to a certain extent (ahh, the days when I would tout my ColecoVision over my friend's Atari 5200).
But if you look at rec.games.video.*.advocacy groups, the sad thing is that quite a few posters are actually adults with jobs (or their.sigs say they do, anyway). The sad fact is that immature fanboy advocacy doesn't necessarily fade with age. Just look at Slashdot, for example. --
I really don't see how they are going to get the licensing money that is critical to the game market.
Note that in the US, it's actually illegal to require licencing for video games produced for a system. This was shown in 1980s lawsuits between Atari and Activision and also Sega and Electronic Arts.
The reason game licencing is so prevalent is that it's the only way to sell into the large Japanese market, and it's just easier to develop if you have the specs and the development setup. Nintendo, IIRC, has actually patented the cartridge slot on the N64 and only allows manufacturing at their factories, leading to more costs.
Since the XBox seems to the standard 'open' PC hardware/software specification, I can't imagine anyone would be jumping up and down to pay Microsoft royalties. Perhaps they require a special installer or something, but even that might be documented, and could probably quite easily be worked around. --
Actually, if you've seen how WebTV handles updates, it's pretty transparent to the user, though it does take time over a 56K connection. Of course, there is always the problem of bad patch levels, or disappearing functionality (WebTV dropped Real support at some point), but they could solve these problems by just pushing a new update. Since the hardware is standardized it's much easier to produce a tested solution.
It's a difficult problem -- people want a gaming box that's also a full featured browser AND they want bugs to be fixed AND they want functionality that hasn't been invented yet (DirectX version 32, or XHTML for example). It's virtually impossible problem to solve without a patch system of some sort. I would suspect that Linux-based devices such as the Tivo have the same issues. --
You are correct -- the Mac II was demoed in 1987 with six NuBus display controllers driving a 'video wall' of six 13" Apple displays. My guess is that this trick is still impossible on PC hardware.
This was before MacOS had version numbers, IIRC (although the Finder and System files had version numbers). Apple used to be loath to admit that the Macintosh was anything less than unified and would require special software. --
Hey -- slashdot is full of the same blatantly obvious statements repeated every single day. In fact, the moderation system usually rewards these comments. Sometimes the act of articulating the message is more important than the message itself.
It's only reasonable that they respond to the attitudes which do exist out there in the Linux community. If you can see 'around' these issues, it might seem condecending to you, but not everyone might be as insightful as you are. I would suspect that the article has quashed quite a bit of fear and doubt surrounding their product. --
Is that Delphi being available for Linux might actually spur the sales of their Windows product quite a bit.
At this point, more savvy IT departments are aware of Linux, but the common perception is that "it's not ready yet" (or is it "we're not ready yet"?). But, even out on the horizon, the existence of alternative environments has to cast some doubt on the typical Windows Standard Environment policy in place at most shops.
So, when a large internal RAD project comes down the pipe, even if 100% of the clients are currently Windows systems, Delphi may look like a better choice than Visual Basic simply because Borland is willing to consider popular non-Windows platforms. It at least gives you long term options -- in 2002, you'd hate to be the person to tell the CIO that Linux on the desktop is impossible because your department has just completed two million dollars of VB development -- a much worse problem than some poorly converted DOC files.
I'd expect there will be quite a few "We get along fine with gcc and vi, thank you." posts, but keep in mind this move isn't really about you. It's about the people on the S curve the author talked about (who probably care as much about you as you care about them), and my guess that in the short term, it's really about providing a more attractive product to their Windows customers. --
Microsoft actually takes OpenGL support fairly seriously. Without it they have no hope of competing with Sun/SGI/Linux in the 'engineering workstation' market. Cross-platform games are just a small side-effect of cross-platform engineering applications.
DirectX/Direct3D exist only to support and encourage game development on Windows, but with today's home computer market the way it is, that's where the game development would be anyway even without it. The fact that DirectX is not cross-platform is not a nefarious plot to destroy other OSes (well, maybe a goal was to destroy DOS games), it's just how Microsoft builds things. --
One interesting thing about OpenGL is that it's vendor-extendable, and it allows vendors to establish new APIs to support their various specific features. Presumably an audio analog will allow this also.
(Which brings up and interesting question about OpenGL -- how do vendor-specific additions get integrated into the standard? How are implementation disagreements handled? I assume there's some committee at SGI that handles these sorts of issues.) --
"Features like extended cab, 3rd/4th door, etc. weren't available in trucks 10 or 20 years ago. "
Sure they were -- Your average DOT has a fleet of ancient orange four door trucks. Besides, putting a truck bed on the back of a 4-door SUV body is hardly a significant change.
Trucks have seen improvements, just not as radical as cars have. Compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Suburban with the 1970 model, then compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Impala with the 1970 model -- you'll see the difference.
(However, note that trucks and SUVs are not covered by the same fuel economy and emission rules as cars - a big reason cars had to change is government regulation, and the popularity of SUVs is to some extent a reaction against this.) --
You're right that the lack of backward compatibility hurt the Atari 5200, which was a shame because they could have easily made it compatible with/upgradable to the computer systems. (The Atari 7800 failed because the games were all five year old rehashes: Galaga and Robotron2084 were old news in 1988.) On the other hand, The ColecoVision offered a 2600 expansion module which was very popular and helped the platform. The moral is that compatibility matters.
Even Sega understood this at one time -- with add-ons both the Genesis and GameGear could play old Master System games. Then they blew it with the whole Sega CD/32 versus Saturn thing, and lost lots of customer loyalty.
I think that backward compatibility is a wonderful feature in a video game system, and something that will become mandatory sooner or later. You can no longer pretend that your audience are all 12 year olds that are going to forget about you and start chasing girls in a year or two. Especially as Internet-based communities start around these games, you have to be able to move the user base forward and stop starting from scratch every three years. --
Cars are enormously better than they were 15 years ago -- much higher quality, much safer, much higher efficency (although the efficency is usually applied to get horsepower rather than fuel economy). They are also relatively more expensive than they used to be.
Of course, the American public doesn't like buying cars as much as they used to. Instead, half the market is trucks, which are usually much more primative in design and efficency. --
I know you mean well, but I just want to point out the FUDdy nature of this 'revelation' about Lotus.
1) What is described (part of the 'international' in NSA escrow) is common practice for the US Software industry. Netscape and Microsoft do it in their mailers. Yeah, it sucks, but that's our gubernmint.
In fact, if you have the export version of Netscape Communicator on your desktop, as many Linux users do, the NSA has part of your encryption key.
2) It's now OK to export the 'North American' version of Notes to most countries. This version supposedly doesn't have any part of the key in escrow.
3) AFAIK, sendmail is just an MTA and doesn't do any encryption. If it does, it's configured as a site policy which means that the NSA may or may not have all or some of your key in escrow, depending. Anyway, I'm not sure what sendmail has to do with Lotus/MS/Netscape's mail encryption, which is all done on the MUA side. --
Veerrry interesting... One of the supposed positives of the UCITA is that consumers actually have the reasonable option of saying "No, I don't agree to your licence - give me my money back." (Which as the whole Windows Refund thing proved, doesn't really exist right now -- a big argument why EULAs are not currently enforceable.)
If the retailers can easily opt out of the return clause, we have a situation where software companies can take your money, try to force a ridiculous clickthru EULA on you, and refuse to give a refund when you don't agree. Yow! One wonders if this has any chances of passing in consumer rights states (California, midwest). --
That sounds like the "3D0 2 to be based on Amiga Technology" rumor from a bit back. Mostly wishful thinking, I'd guess.
The Amiga console machine (CD32?) was out 8-10 years ago. Do you really think it's got anything to offer a modern system? Any rewrite or other OS (QNX, Linux, Be, whatever) doesn't really count as "Amiga technology". --
Actually, IT types had a lot of resistance to Windows in the early days. It didn't play well with their carefully crafted Novell networks. It conflicted with Lotus 1-2-3. It looked too much like one of those sissy Macintoshes. It diminished their DOS wizardry skills. And so on. About the only thing it seemed good for was multi-tasking DOS apps.
Windows got in the door because Microsoft preinstalled it on every DOS machine. The users, once they got a taste of the WIMP interface, rebelled against the tyranny of text mode, IT Managers fell in line and the rest is history.
Of course, some IT types got behind Windows because it substantially reduced training costs. Little did they know it would push desktop support costs through the roof. --
Now carefully consider what I am saying about ease of use. It really isn't that important. What did people do when they were using DOS or, even worse, Windows 3.1?
You are correct that the "ease of use" factor is a canard. So is the pretty window trimmings factor. So is the GUI installer factor.
The real problem with Unix-like systems is that they demand too much in terms of administration skills. Fine for people who read "News For Nerd", but not fine for someone who wants to plug-n-play their digital camera or their WinNT/Novell network. As bad as DOS/Win3.1 was, anyone could install a driver or a program by running INSTALL.EXE, and you could count the important configuration files on one hand. --
Slashdot Mirror
Not that unusual. When a business goes national, it's not uncommon that have to payoff a small business so that they have rights the name in that state. The problem is that the web is implicity national, so it's easier to step on someone's toes.
This all reminds me of the story about McDonald's going around the country and threating to sue every "MacDonald's Auto Repair and Towing" shop. (I don't think they ever followed through with their threat.) Or Apple Computer being sued by Apple Records and McIntosh Amplifiers.
--
There are quite a few companies whose official corporate name is "FooFoo.com" or "Amazon.com". Now does Amazon have rights to the name "Amazon.com", or do the Amazonians?
However, with the coming TLD expansion, I doubt Amazon.com would have automatic rights over Amazon.co, Amazon.store or Amazon.web. Another employment act for lawyers!
--
I don't think he was inadequate in his research.
Sounds to me that he knew what he was doing and planned from the start to take the issue to ICANN and get the domain from the squatter. Presumably this was cheaper than just paying him off.
--
On the other hand you have California, where property taxes have been politically frozen for 20 years. The only viable source of revenue for local government is sales taxes (which is one reason we have so many strip malls).
In the Silicon Valley, local sales taxes are even a popular way of funding highway projects. The irony is that can be cheaper to mail order from San Jose than to actually drive there and pick it up.
--
In the US, farming is more profitable than ranching. If they could grow anything edible on those ranchlands, they would.
Drive around the country a bit, you'll see. Inevitably, where there is farming in arid areas, it's only because of a boondogle federal irrigation project. (This is not to say that ranchlands are managed very effectively -- in general, they're not. Only that you can't farm there.)
--
You skipped a couple essential points:
1993-4 -- Sega introduces the CD and 32X add-ons for the Genesis. Some games require the CD, some require the 32X, others require both. Confusion reigns, developers and users get pissed when Sega drops both in favor of the Saturn a year later.
1995 -- Sega tries to beat everyone to the market with the Saturn. Despite all the hype, the initial cost is $500, pricing it out of the market. PSX is introduced at $300, dropping soon to $200. There's lots of hype that the PSX is better hardware and since there's so few Saturns on the market, nobody actually knows. Result: Saturn never gets of the ground.
--
For $300 bucks, I'd consider it just to play networked PC games with my real computer. The only question is if the resolution is good enough to play strategy games.
My assumption is that this thing will eventually replace the WebTV. Those currently sell for $200-300 and have found a market.
--
Your argument is true to a certain extent (ahh, the days when I would tout my ColecoVision over my friend's Atari 5200).
.sigs say they do, anyway). The sad fact is that immature fanboy advocacy doesn't necessarily fade with age. Just look at Slashdot, for example.
But if you look at rec.games.video.*.advocacy groups, the sad thing is that quite a few posters are actually adults with jobs (or their
--
I really don't see how they are going to get the licensing money that is critical to the game market.
Note that in the US, it's actually illegal to require licencing for video games produced for a system. This was shown in 1980s lawsuits between Atari and Activision and also Sega and Electronic Arts.
The reason game licencing is so prevalent is that it's the only way to sell into the large Japanese market, and it's just easier to develop if you have the specs and the development setup. Nintendo, IIRC, has actually patented the cartridge slot on the N64 and only allows manufacturing at their factories, leading to more costs.
Since the XBox seems to the standard 'open' PC hardware/software specification, I can't imagine anyone would be jumping up and down to pay Microsoft royalties. Perhaps they require a special installer or something, but even that might be documented, and could probably quite easily be worked around.
--
Actually, if you've seen how WebTV handles updates, it's pretty transparent to the user, though it does take time over a 56K connection. Of course, there is always the problem of bad patch levels, or disappearing functionality (WebTV dropped Real support at some point), but they could solve these problems by just pushing a new update. Since the hardware is standardized it's much easier to produce a tested solution.
It's a difficult problem -- people want a gaming box that's also a full featured browser AND they want bugs to be fixed AND they want functionality that hasn't been invented yet (DirectX version 32, or XHTML for example). It's virtually impossible problem to solve without a patch system of some sort. I would suspect that Linux-based devices such as the Tivo have the same issues.
--
You are correct -- the Mac II was demoed in 1987 with six NuBus display controllers driving a 'video wall' of six 13" Apple displays. My guess is that this trick is still impossible on PC hardware.
This was before MacOS had version numbers, IIRC (although the Finder and System files had version numbers). Apple used to be loath to admit that the Macintosh was anything less than unified and would require special software.
--
Hey -- slashdot is full of the same blatantly obvious statements repeated every single day. In fact, the moderation system usually rewards these comments. Sometimes the act of articulating the message is more important than the message itself.
It's only reasonable that they respond to the attitudes which do exist out there in the Linux community. If you can see 'around' these issues, it might seem condecending to you, but not everyone might be as insightful as you are. I would suspect that the article has quashed quite a bit of fear and doubt surrounding their product.
--
Is that Delphi being available for Linux might actually spur the sales of their Windows product quite a bit.
At this point, more savvy IT departments are aware of Linux, but the common perception is that "it's not ready yet" (or is it "we're not ready yet"?). But, even out on the horizon, the existence of alternative environments has to cast some doubt on the typical Windows Standard Environment policy in place at most shops.
So, when a large internal RAD project comes down the pipe, even if 100% of the clients are currently Windows systems, Delphi may look like a better choice than Visual Basic simply because Borland is willing to consider popular non-Windows platforms. It at least gives you long term options -- in 2002, you'd hate to be the person to tell the CIO that Linux on the desktop is impossible because your department has just completed two million dollars of VB development -- a much worse problem than some poorly converted DOC files.
I'd expect there will be quite a few "We get along fine with gcc and vi, thank you." posts, but keep in mind this move isn't really about you. It's about the people on the S curve the author talked about (who probably care as much about you as you care about them), and my guess that in the short term, it's really about providing a more attractive product to their Windows customers.
--
Microsoft actually takes OpenGL support fairly seriously. Without it they have no hope of competing with Sun/SGI/Linux in the 'engineering workstation' market. Cross-platform games are just a small side-effect of cross-platform engineering applications.
DirectX/Direct3D exist only to support and encourage game development on Windows, but with today's home computer market the way it is, that's where the game development would be anyway even without it. The fact that DirectX is not cross-platform is not a nefarious plot to destroy other OSes (well, maybe a goal was to destroy DOS games), it's just how Microsoft builds things.
--
One interesting thing about OpenGL is that it's vendor-extendable, and it allows vendors to establish new APIs to support their various specific features. Presumably an audio analog will allow this also.
(Which brings up and interesting question about OpenGL -- how do vendor-specific additions get integrated into the standard? How are implementation disagreements handled? I assume there's some committee at SGI that handles these sorts of issues.)
--
"Features like extended cab, 3rd/4th door, etc. weren't available in trucks 10 or 20 years ago. "
Sure they were -- Your average DOT has a fleet of ancient orange four door trucks. Besides, putting a truck bed on the back of a 4-door SUV body is hardly a significant change.
Trucks have seen improvements, just not as radical as cars have. Compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Suburban with the 1970 model, then compare the brand new 2000 Chevy Impala with the 1970 model -- you'll see the difference.
(However, note that trucks and SUVs are not covered by the same fuel economy and emission rules as cars - a big reason cars had to change is government regulation, and the popularity of SUVs is to some extent a reaction against this.)
--
You're right that the lack of backward compatibility hurt the Atari 5200, which was a shame because they could have easily made it compatible with/upgradable to the computer systems. (The Atari 7800 failed because the games were all five year old rehashes: Galaga and Robotron2084 were old news in 1988.) On the other hand, The ColecoVision offered a 2600 expansion module which was very popular and helped the platform. The moral is that compatibility matters.
Even Sega understood this at one time -- with add-ons both the Genesis and GameGear could play old Master System games. Then they blew it with the whole Sega CD/32 versus Saturn thing, and lost lots of customer loyalty.
I think that backward compatibility is a wonderful feature in a video game system, and something that will become mandatory sooner or later. You can no longer pretend that your audience are all 12 year olds that are going to forget about you and start chasing girls in a year or two. Especially as Internet-based communities start around these games, you have to be able to move the user base forward and stop starting from scratch every three years.
--
Cars are enormously better than they were 15 years ago -- much higher quality, much safer, much higher efficency (although the efficency is usually applied to get horsepower rather than fuel economy). They are also relatively more expensive than they used to be.
Of course, the American public doesn't like buying cars as much as they used to. Instead, half the market is trucks, which are usually much more primative in design and efficency.
--
I know you mean well, but I just want to point out the FUDdy nature of this 'revelation' about Lotus.
1) What is described (part of the 'international' in NSA escrow) is common practice for the US Software industry. Netscape and Microsoft do it in their mailers. Yeah, it sucks, but that's our gubernmint.
In fact, if you have the export version of Netscape Communicator on your desktop, as many Linux users do, the NSA has part of your encryption key.
2) It's now OK to export the 'North American' version of Notes to most countries. This version supposedly doesn't have any part of the key in escrow.
3) AFAIK, sendmail is just an MTA and doesn't do any encryption. If it does, it's configured as a site policy which means that the NSA may or may not have all or some of your key in escrow, depending. Anyway, I'm not sure what sendmail has to do with Lotus/MS/Netscape's mail encryption, which is all done on the MUA side.
--
Veerrry interesting ... One of the supposed positives of the UCITA is that consumers actually have the reasonable option of saying "No, I don't agree to your licence - give me my money back." (Which as the whole Windows Refund thing proved, doesn't really exist right now -- a big argument why EULAs are not currently enforceable.)
If the retailers can easily opt out of the return clause, we have a situation where software companies can take your money, try to force a ridiculous clickthru EULA on you, and refuse to give a refund when you don't agree. Yow! One wonders if this has any chances of passing in consumer rights states (California, midwest).
--
That sounds like the "3D0 2 to be based on Amiga Technology" rumor from a bit back. Mostly wishful thinking, I'd guess.
The Amiga console machine (CD32?) was out 8-10 years ago. Do you really think it's got anything to offer a modern system? Any rewrite or other OS (QNX, Linux, Be, whatever) doesn't really count as "Amiga technology".
--
You could easily fit every Atari 2600 game on one standard CD-ROM. The largest are only 8K in size, most are 2-4K.
I think about 2000 games were made for the 2600, which works out to around 8 - 16 MB storage for all of them.
--
Actually, IT types had a lot of resistance to Windows in the early days. It didn't play well with their carefully crafted Novell networks. It conflicted with Lotus 1-2-3. It looked too much like one of those sissy Macintoshes. It diminished their DOS wizardry skills. And so on. About the only thing it seemed good for was multi-tasking DOS apps.
Windows got in the door because Microsoft preinstalled it on every DOS machine. The users, once they got a taste of the WIMP interface, rebelled against the tyranny of text mode, IT Managers fell in line and the rest is history.
Of course, some IT types got behind Windows because it substantially reduced training costs. Little did they know it would push desktop support costs through the roof.
--
Now carefully consider what I am saying about ease of use. It really isn't that important. What did people do when they were using DOS or, even worse, Windows 3.1?
You are correct that the "ease of use" factor is a canard. So is the pretty window trimmings factor. So is the GUI installer factor.
The real problem with Unix-like systems is that they demand too much in terms of administration skills. Fine for people who read "News For Nerd", but not fine for someone who wants to plug-n-play their digital camera or their WinNT/Novell network. As bad as DOS/Win3.1 was, anyone could install a driver or a program by running INSTALL.EXE, and you could count the important configuration files on one hand.
--
Microsoft's Remote Access Server has done this for years (for NetBEUI over serial links). It's most likely possible to do with network links too.
--