You paid a subscription fee and got a special game console that connected to the cable system. I never knew anyone who ever tried it, so I have no idea how good it was, but I guess that's the point: Very few tried it.
The first version of this that I saw was a modified Mattel Intellivision, and all the games were standard Intellie games. The game selector with the Intellivision font was cool though.
Thought I'd also point out that renting software is illegal according to the copyright act:
Sec. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
b) Lease, Sale, or Other Transfer of Additional Copy or Adaptation. - Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner.
Well, Apple didn't invent the WIMP itself. But they did invent pull-down menus, the file/folder file system viewer, and many other things which made the GUI workable.
And above all, they sold it for a couple thousand bucks -- Most of Microsoft's innovations fall into that category too: Existing ideas refined for mass consumption and priced accordingly.
Which is why MS's defense of "innovation" is so silly. Historically, their vision was "A personal computer on every desk and in every home" -- meaning they were commodizing technology for the everyman, ergo they were the cheapest vendor (and with the exception of open source and Office, they still are). This did them quite well until they felt they needed some intellectual argument against the government. I'd much rather have them point at the installed base of PCs in 2001 versus 1981 and their original mission statement than this BS innovation PR crap.
But then again, when I hear the word innovation, I reach for my pistol. --
1) Given that EJB Session Beans at least are almost a straight rip-off of DCOM, I'd be interested in what exactly the problem is.
objectwatch.com touts itself on the homepage as a MS consulting firm and their white paper reads essentially like a Microsoft whitepaper. I doubt he has any working knowlege of Java (or.NET). Besides he's comparing existing versions of Java with future versions of.NET. Sun will ship SOAP and UDDI around the same time as Microsoft, for example. Furthemore he seems to think that SOAP is a scalability tool, which it isn't.
I see you posting lots of pro-MS information, which is fine. I do it sometimes myself. Just get better sources. Besides, you dodged the question about if COM+ is a permenent part of.NET (my guess is no).
2) There's a couple licenced ports of MS COM on Unixes. Microsoft has stated that COM+ will not be licenced for porting. XPCOM and Bonobo are similar but incompatible. Again, I think you are dodging the valid question of how.NET programs will be portable if an essential part of the runtime (for both ADO.NET and ASP.NET) is Windows-specific. (And, back to EJBs, you could avoid those with CORBA as well, but the day MS ships a CORBA product, hell freezes over.) --
I'm not bitching, just pointing out what's going on. I get really sick of insecure Open Source fanboys who view random observations as attacks.
And I have reported a few bugs to bugzilla in the past, including some basic compatibitility stuff. If I can figure out how to reproduce these, I'll be happy to report them -- as it is Bugzilla is completely clogged full of useless to mozilla.org 'Something Happened' crap such as found in my post above.
Another:
Text randomly highlights while editing in textareas. --
Quick trip to MSDN shows that you are correct.. certain types of NET calls thunk to COM+. I was confused by the earlier propaganda that.NET was independant of COM.
Now the obvious two questions are:
1) Is this an architectual decision or a stopgap -- will we see 'Enterprise.NET Beans' sometime in the future?
2) How the hell is NET portable to other platforms if it heavily relies on COM+? MS seems to be having their cake and eating it at the same time. --
I agree that Microsoft has many many market failures under it's belt. This is primarily due to their paranoid desire to be in every market possible to ensure that nobody is sneaking up on them (as they did to IBM and DEC). And their enormous cash reserves which make this sort of shotgun approach feasible.
What's worse is that they are very effecive in wiping out the collective memory of failed products in nearly Soviet fashion. Remember "MS Commercial Internet Mail Server"? You won't find much about it on their site - all technotes and so on have mysteriously disappeared.
This attitude translates to their userbase quite effectively. Last year it was "Windows DNA and COM+ Rah Rah Rah." Now folks are already talking about.NET as if it really existed as a product and not just a preview kit. How long until you are being sneared at for using COM+ instead of.NET?
Microsoft gets that they need to be in the enterprise software market. However, they don't quite get how to act like an enterprise vendor (provide proper technical documentation, don't just "disappear" products, provide legacy support and migration tools, providing patches for older product releases, provide a sane way of delivering and installing patches, etc etc.)
And that's why software rental maybe isn't the worst thing if you are a MS shop. Right now, most of the industry has this little concept called "annual maintenance" which often runs up to 40% of the purchase cost -- Essentially a rental fee, although it's sorta optional. It also give the manufacturer a strong incentive to support legacy customers. Microsoft most all their residual income off not off of support but instead off of upgrades, which is a huge incentive to NOT support legacy customers and to make it as painful as possible to avoid spending the considerable amount of money (labor and licences) to upgrade. --
I setup a system that used x509 client certs, and I'd agree that the "certificate store" is the biggest blackbox from the user standpoint. Users commonly switch machines and browsers, or have their machines reinstalled, and just had problems getting that there needed to be something "in" the browser for them to connect. If it was just a regular file you could copy it wouldn't be so bad (for example the Lotus Notes ID file, which effectively the same thing).
On the other hand, we used a private CA, and nobody really squealed about it. Turns out IE and Netscape's handling wasn't so bad.
I agree that this could be another great opportunity for the porn industry to show leadership. --
Every Compaq or Dell server that I've seen come out of a box comes BLANK. In fact, the drives are often packaged seperately. If you don't install the OS, you can certainly pay an 'integrator' to do it for you, someone who is also happy to install NetWare or Linux.
Now, I have no doubt that there's low-end server bundles with NTS pre-installed. However, at $500 for the base licence, that's not an insigificant sum to pay if you don't want it. It has to be easy enough to order a version without NT installed.
Bundling has been Microsoft's practice in consumer space. But the server market has always been too diversified for this to fly (has MS ever had more than 50% marketshare?). There is no "Microsoft tax" for servers. --
Perhaps this is because Corel's WordPerfect is what MS made a cheap knock off of when they made Word.
I am sick of seeing some punk claim that Word is a knock-off of WordPerfect. Did you even use early versions of either program? Or are you going on something your big brother or some other slashdot moron told you
First of all, neither Microsoft or WordPerfect invented modern word processing. That's probably Xerox, or maybe even Charles Simioni, employee of Microsoft for a number of years. The first front runner in PC word processing space was WordStar, a program in many ways better than WordPerfect ever dreamed to be.
Word was the first "full-featured" GUI word processor for PCs, taking Xerox and Apple innovations and adding all the feature checklist stuff. WordPerfect for DOS operated on a very different user interface and text processing model. The first GUI versions of WordPerfect shipped years and years after Word did, and if anything have never been more than a cheap knock-off of Word.
Now, I have no doubts that WordPerfect 9 is an excellent program. I also have no doubts that Word is laden with a lot of crap that actually makes it less appealing than earlier verisons. But trying to attribute Word as a rip-off is completely moronically wrong. --
It has little, if anything, to do with the technical merits of the OS.
Good time to bring up the quip about "a collection of poorly debugged device drivers". Come to think of it, the last time the technical merits of the OS really mattered was when PageMaker 1.0 shipped for the Mac Plus.
Somewhere I read that Linux was UNIX for the DOS generation, and to some extent it's advocate community is stuck in the same 1980s OS-centric worldview as Microsoft and everyone else in the PC camp (including Be). The fact is the OS (which ever one it is) is finished technically, and so are the OS Wars. Repeat: "It Just Doesn't Matter. It Just Doesn't Matter."
For years I've thought that Microsoft's horrible attraction to their own monopolies was the one thing holding them back from producing really good technology. It's been an unfortuante history of somewhat good ideas turned into just another way to sell copies of Excel or get someone to cough up $100 for the next incremental Windows release.
But, now even Microsoft got wind of the irrelevance of it all (well, after Andreeson stuck his finger in their eye), and have reached a state where even MS, the king of operating systems, doesn't even want to be in the OS market anymore. It it wasn't for that troublesome billions of dollars of annual revenue they'd be totally off on the next thing by now.
Fighting over what's left as if it was of central importence is not very broad thinking. Microsoft is the alpha and omega of PC Operating Systems and that's the way it is. The real battleground is in the middleware and content delivery markets. Sun, where the Network Is The Computer, and the rest of the market has been sitting their waiting for Microsoft in the apocolyptic battle royale to end all battles royales. Meanwhile, the Linux/Be/MacOSX crowd is running around trying to perfect something that Microsoft did half-assed 10 years ago and is completely missing the big picture. --
1) Netscape 6.0 was terrible -- Virtually everyone in my office tried it (once). These are people in the tech industry and therefore somewhat infulential. Ironically, it seems to be hated more by the Netscape 4 people than the IE people. Of course, that's just not news anyone here.
2) Mozilla is just not advertised enough. Sure, there's lots of good word of mouth here on/., but NOWHERE else. When I try to tell co-workers and other tech people about it they seem rather dubious and don't go out of their way to try it as they did with NS6. My theory is that "Moe Zilla" is just too cheezy and bad shareware sounding.
3) Microsoft advertises the IE beta on "WindowsUpdate". I bet lots of people get the "Critical Update Notification" and go up to download a new IE patch and end up with the 6.0 Beta. (Generally, MS Beta browsers are not a good bet for average users, so it's strange placement right below the "critical" stuff.) --
Well, some windows DLLs mysteriously became IE dlls a few years back, if you recall.
The real bugger is Roxio/Adaptec's deal with Microsoft in Windows Media Player 7.0. Turns out my previously compatible EZ CD Creator 3.5+patches software bluescreened on 2K boot due to the lack of the now necessary proper content protection doohickey.
Thankfully Microsoft's technotes addressed the solution (Last Known Good), but I thought it took a little gaul on their parts to retroactively make working software incompatible with Windows. --
If they got greedy and tried to do it all in a year or so, then they would never get agreeement.
In my observation of Microsoft, they have the tendancy to say they've done something before it actually has been done (meaning shipped). They have a wonderful ability to talk about their grand product plans as if they were real products.
The point is that they are greedy, and if they could somehow migrate the world over to a software-as-services infrastructure by Tuesday, they would. But the problem is that when you radically change the model of software sales (not to mention the entire technical infrastructure your company has built over the last 12 years), it takes time.
Which is not to say you shouldn't listen to them. In 1995, Bill Gates stood up and made the public announcement that they were going to integrate IE into the Windows shell and steal the market from Netscape. From then on, MS treated IE as an integrated product when it wasn't, but nobody should have been shocked 3 years later when it finally started to happened. --
Urk, apparently the 2D Nvidia situation is so bleak that people have taken to modding their cards (http://www.geocities.com/porotuner/). On the other hand, I did find some ancedotal evidence that Visiontek make is better than others. --
Can't comment on that either, because I have TV out on my second head, and am using a G200 PCI for my second monitor. This resolves a W2K problem with mishandling duel head cards. --
Re:My take on the death of the Trek series...
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Well, the fish rots from the head down, and when they decided to make the Captain's distinguishing characteristic to be "She always plays it by the book", the series was doomed from the start to have every epoisode be "Prime Directive, Ma'am! Yes, Ma'am!" Well, they could have fixed that, but they waited until the very last episode to do so.
Chakotay, the big bad rebel could have been a great character but was completely neutered into an administrative yes man. B'Elanna, Tuvok, and Kes never got any writing and acted more like props. The Doctor could have been a somewhat interesting minor character, but since he was the only one who actually got development, every other show became about him (the other ones being about 7of9).
I guess my original point was this was only half a failing of the writers. My theory is is that producers were chickenshit to do anything interesting on a network show with a supposedly more mainstream audience, and ended up with a show just like "Seven Days". It wasn't so much Dumb as Dumbed Down, which is not what the trekies want to see. Worse, corrections weren't made midcourse. Anyway, I chuckled at the die cast remark. --
The G400 is generally considered to be the 'high-end quality' card and the G450 the 'cheap mass produced' card.
I have a G400Max on a 21" IBM flattube monitor , and 2D image quality is excellent (and it also was arguably the fastest 3D card when I bought it). I've never seen a G450, so no comment there.
The only downside to Matrox is that they are verrry slow to get new drivers out. The regular driver set for Win2K didn't become really good until a year past the OS release. Meanwhile, since I picked up a RainbowRunner G capture board, I'm stuck with beta drivers that are more than a year old (and they supposedly are actually working on on them..)
Does anyone know of a 2D image quality comparison between different GeForce makes? I've heard they vary wildly depending on the integrator, but nothing is published but quake numbers on the big hardware sites. --
Re:My take on the death of the Trek series...
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Well, in a show full of Janeways, Tuvoks, and Harry Kims, that "neutral", "bland" character really was one of the most interesting ones. Ironic because Star Trek was supposed to be about character drama. --
"brand name" manufacturers are looking for ways of differentiating themselves from mom&pop computer store-style computers as they can't compete on the very thin margins of PCs (well under 5%). they need to make something sufficiently different from the do-it-yourself computer world so they can extract higher margins for their computers
I am not an economist, but I would have to think that there's nothing guarenteed about that 5% profit margin, and it has in fact been dropping over the years. In a slow-growth market where you have an infinate number of suppliers with identical products, my guess is that the both the profit margin and the quality will go radically down over time.
To argue with the AC below, "open" hardware might be a good thing in the short term due to lower prices, but in the long term, you might not necessarily like the resulting product. Having your favorite vendors delve into a pricewar when you want a stable server is not necessarily a good thing.
Name brand makes like Compaq and Dell used to be able to demand a premium based on the fact they were better engineered (more stable, more compatible, etc). However, this hasn't been especially true for many years. In fact, Compaq doesn't even really make (personal) computers anymore -- that's Intel and AMD's job, and Compaq functions as what used to be called an "integrator" -- someone who installs the OS and various add-on boards and makes sure that it ships on time. In short, nothing but a well capitalized salesman for Intel and Microsoft's warez.
But, none of this is rocket-science, which is why the automobile industry doesn't have the same Soviet-style organization as the computer industry. Oh, what? It turns out style sells just as it sells cars? I guess I've committed Slashdot heresy and will go to the corner and administer myself lashes. Meanwhile, here's to your Turbo buttons. --
Slashdot Mirror
The first version of this that I saw was a modified Mattel Intellivision, and all the games were standard Intellie games. The game selector with the Intellivision font was cool though.
Thought I'd also point out that renting software is illegal according to the copyright act:
--
Well, Apple didn't invent the WIMP itself. But they did invent pull-down menus, the file/folder file system viewer, and many other things which made the GUI workable.
And above all, they sold it for a couple thousand bucks -- Most of Microsoft's innovations fall into that category too: Existing ideas refined for mass consumption and priced accordingly.
Which is why MS's defense of "innovation" is so silly. Historically, their vision was "A personal computer on every desk and in every home" -- meaning they were commodizing technology for the everyman, ergo they were the cheapest vendor (and with the exception of open source and Office, they still are). This did them quite well until they felt they needed some intellectual argument against the government. I'd much rather have them point at the installed base of PCs in 2001 versus 1981 and their original mission statement than this BS innovation PR crap.
But then again, when I hear the word innovation, I reach for my pistol.
--
1) Given that EJB Session Beans at least are almost a straight rip-off of DCOM, I'd be interested in what exactly the problem is.
.NET). Besides he's comparing existing versions of Java with future versions of .NET. Sun will ship SOAP and UDDI around the same time as Microsoft, for example. Furthemore he seems to think that SOAP is a scalability tool, which it isn't.
.NET (my guess is no).
.NET programs will be portable if an essential part of the runtime (for both ADO.NET and ASP.NET) is Windows-specific. (And, back to EJBs, you could avoid those with CORBA as well, but the day MS ships a CORBA product, hell freezes over.)
objectwatch.com touts itself on the homepage as a MS consulting firm and their white paper reads essentially like a Microsoft whitepaper. I doubt he has any working knowlege of Java (or
I see you posting lots of pro-MS information, which is fine. I do it sometimes myself. Just get better sources. Besides, you dodged the question about if COM+ is a permenent part of
2) There's a couple licenced ports of MS COM on Unixes. Microsoft has stated that COM+ will not be licenced for porting. XPCOM and Bonobo are similar but incompatible. Again, I think you are dodging the valid question of how
--
I'm not bitching, just pointing out what's going on. I get really sick of insecure Open Source fanboys who view random observations as attacks.
And I have reported a few bugs to bugzilla in the past, including some basic compatibitility stuff. If I can figure out how to reproduce these, I'll be happy to report them -- as it is Bugzilla is completely clogged full of useless to mozilla.org 'Something Happened' crap such as found in my post above.
Another:
Text randomly highlights while editing in textareas.
--
Back button doesn't work!! (Now it does?)
Dropping down the bookmarks menu and then clicking in the browser window to pop it up sometimes makes it start scrolling up and down like crazy.
Dragging bookmarks to and from the shell works now. So does IE Favorites.
CPU usage is dramatically lower. Startup time is about the same.
No longer behaves badly on slow loading pages.
Still can't easily sort in threaded mode in the newsreader.
Still doesn't recognize external mailers, probably never will
--
Quick trip to MSDN shows that you are correct .. certain types of NET calls thunk to COM+. I was confused by the earlier propaganda that .NET was independant of COM.
.NET Beans' sometime in the future?
Now the obvious two questions are:
1) Is this an architectual decision or a stopgap -- will we see 'Enterprise
2) How the hell is NET portable to other platforms if it heavily relies on COM+? MS seems to be having their cake and eating it at the same time.
--
COOL is C#, which hasn't shipped yet but will.
.NET as if it really existed as a product and not just a preview kit. How long until you are being sneared at for using COM+ instead of .NET?
I agree that Microsoft has many many market failures under it's belt. This is primarily due to their paranoid desire to be in every market possible to ensure that nobody is sneaking up on them (as they did to IBM and DEC). And their enormous cash reserves which make this sort of shotgun approach feasible.
What's worse is that they are very effecive in wiping out the collective memory of failed products in nearly Soviet fashion. Remember "MS Commercial Internet Mail Server"? You won't find much about it on their site - all technotes and so on have mysteriously disappeared.
This attitude translates to their userbase quite effectively. Last year it was "Windows DNA and COM+ Rah Rah Rah." Now folks are already talking about
Microsoft gets that they need to be in the enterprise software market. However, they don't quite get how to act like an enterprise vendor (provide proper technical documentation, don't just "disappear" products, provide legacy support and migration tools, providing patches for older product releases, provide a sane way of delivering and installing patches, etc etc.)
And that's why software rental maybe isn't the worst thing if you are a MS shop. Right now, most of the industry has this little concept called "annual maintenance" which often runs up to 40% of the purchase cost -- Essentially a rental fee, although it's sorta optional. It also give the manufacturer a strong incentive to support legacy customers. Microsoft most all their residual income off not off of support but instead off of upgrades, which is a huge incentive to NOT support legacy customers and to make it as painful as possible to avoid spending the considerable amount of money (labor and licences) to upgrade.
--
Wasn't there an old Disney sound box that hooked up through the parallel port?
Anyway, I just though I'd point out the worst thing ever to get hooked up to the LPT port: The Xircom Pocket Ethernet Adapter. And, gack, even one for Token Ring!
It seems a general truth of PC hardware is that anything hooked into the parallel port that isn't a printer is bound to work poorly if at all.
--
I setup a system that used x509 client certs, and I'd agree that the "certificate store" is the biggest blackbox from the user standpoint. Users commonly switch machines and browsers, or have their machines reinstalled, and just had problems getting that there needed to be something "in" the browser for them to connect. If it was just a regular file you could copy it wouldn't be so bad (for example the Lotus Notes ID file, which effectively the same thing).
On the other hand, we used a private CA, and nobody really squealed about it. Turns out IE and Netscape's handling wasn't so bad.
I agree that this could be another great opportunity for the porn industry to show leadership.
--
Speaking of "FUD and misconceptions"....
Every Compaq or Dell server that I've seen come out of a box comes BLANK. In fact, the drives are often packaged seperately. If you don't install the OS, you can certainly pay an 'integrator' to do it for you, someone who is also happy to install NetWare or Linux.
Now, I have no doubt that there's low-end server bundles with NTS pre-installed. However, at $500 for the base licence, that's not an insigificant sum to pay if you don't want it. It has to be easy enough to order a version without NT installed.
Bundling has been Microsoft's practice in consumer space. But the server market has always been too diversified for this to fly (has MS ever had more than 50% marketshare?). There is no "Microsoft tax" for servers.
--
Perhaps this is because Corel's WordPerfect is what MS made a cheap knock off of when they made Word.
I am sick of seeing some punk claim that Word is a knock-off of WordPerfect. Did you even use early versions of either program? Or are you going on something your big brother or some other slashdot moron told you
First of all, neither Microsoft or WordPerfect invented modern word processing. That's probably Xerox, or maybe even Charles Simioni, employee of Microsoft for a number of years. The first front runner in PC word processing space was WordStar, a program in many ways better than WordPerfect ever dreamed to be.
Word was the first "full-featured" GUI word processor for PCs, taking Xerox and Apple innovations and adding all the feature checklist stuff. WordPerfect for DOS operated on a very different user interface and text processing model. The first GUI versions of WordPerfect shipped years and years after Word did, and if anything have never been more than a cheap knock-off of Word.
Now, I have no doubts that WordPerfect 9 is an excellent program. I also have no doubts that Word is laden with a lot of crap that actually makes it less appealing than earlier verisons. But trying to attribute Word as a rip-off is completely moronically wrong.
--
It has little, if anything, to do with the technical merits of the OS.
Good time to bring up the quip about "a collection of poorly debugged device drivers". Come to think of it, the last time the technical merits of the OS really mattered was when PageMaker 1.0 shipped for the Mac Plus.
Somewhere I read that Linux was UNIX for the DOS generation, and to some extent it's advocate community is stuck in the same 1980s OS-centric worldview as Microsoft and everyone else in the PC camp (including Be). The fact is the OS (which ever one it is) is finished technically, and so are the OS Wars. Repeat: "It Just Doesn't Matter. It Just Doesn't Matter."
For years I've thought that Microsoft's horrible attraction to their own monopolies was the one thing holding them back from producing really good technology. It's been an unfortuante history of somewhat good ideas turned into just another way to sell copies of Excel or get someone to cough up $100 for the next incremental Windows release.
But, now even Microsoft got wind of the irrelevance of it all (well, after Andreeson stuck his finger in their eye), and have reached a state where even MS, the king of operating systems, doesn't even want to be in the OS market anymore. It it wasn't for that troublesome billions of dollars of annual revenue they'd be totally off on the next thing by now.
Fighting over what's left as if it was of central importence is not very broad thinking. Microsoft is the alpha and omega of PC Operating Systems and that's the way it is. The real battleground is in the middleware and content delivery markets. Sun, where the Network Is The Computer, and the rest of the market has been sitting their waiting for Microsoft in the apocolyptic battle royale to end all battles royales. Meanwhile, the Linux/Be/MacOSX crowd is running around trying to perfect something that Microsoft did half-assed 10 years ago and is completely missing the big picture.
--
1) Netscape 6.0 was terrible -- Virtually everyone in my office tried it (once). These are people in the tech industry and therefore somewhat infulential. Ironically, it seems to be hated more by the Netscape 4 people than the IE people. Of course, that's just not news anyone here.
/., but NOWHERE else. When I try to tell co-workers and other tech people about it they seem rather dubious and don't go out of their way to try it as they did with NS6. My theory is that "Moe Zilla" is just too cheezy and bad shareware sounding.
2) Mozilla is just not advertised enough. Sure, there's lots of good word of mouth here on
3) Microsoft advertises the IE beta on "WindowsUpdate". I bet lots of people get the "Critical Update Notification" and go up to download a new IE patch and end up with the 6.0 Beta. (Generally, MS Beta browsers are not a good bet for average users, so it's strange placement right below the "critical" stuff.)
--
Apple doesn't make exclusive manufacturing arrangements to sell sexy flat panel displays to Windows users, they do it to sell Macs.
Just wait -- similar displays at similar prices will be mass-market within a year.
--
Well, some windows DLLs mysteriously became IE dlls a few years back, if you recall.
The real bugger is Roxio/Adaptec's deal with Microsoft in Windows Media Player 7.0. Turns out my previously compatible EZ CD Creator 3.5+patches software bluescreened on 2K boot due to the lack of the now necessary proper content protection doohickey.
Thankfully Microsoft's technotes addressed the solution (Last Known Good), but I thought it took a little gaul on their parts to retroactively make working software incompatible with Windows.
--
If they got greedy and tried to do it all in a year or so, then they would never get agreeement.
In my observation of Microsoft, they have the tendancy to say they've done something before it actually has been done (meaning shipped). They have a wonderful ability to talk about their grand product plans as if they were real products.
The point is that they are greedy, and if they could somehow migrate the world over to a software-as-services infrastructure by Tuesday, they would. But the problem is that when you radically change the model of software sales (not to mention the entire technical infrastructure your company has built over the last 12 years), it takes time.
Which is not to say you shouldn't listen to them. In 1995, Bill Gates stood up and made the public announcement that they were going to integrate IE into the Windows shell and steal the market from Netscape. From then on, MS treated IE as an integrated product when it wasn't, but nobody should have been shocked 3 years later when it finally started to happened.
--
Urk, apparently the 2D Nvidia situation is so bleak that people have taken to modding their cards (http://www.geocities.com/porotuner/). On the other hand, I did find some ancedotal evidence that Visiontek make is better than others.
--
Thanks for the info. I'd love a fancy new game card, but it's a combo work/home box, so the 80/20 rule once again applies.
--
Can't comment on that either, because I have TV out on my second head, and am using a G200 PCI for my second monitor. This resolves a W2K problem with mishandling duel head cards.
--
Well, the fish rots from the head down, and when they decided to make the Captain's distinguishing characteristic to be "She always plays it by the book", the series was doomed from the start to have every epoisode be "Prime Directive, Ma'am! Yes, Ma'am!" Well, they could have fixed that, but they waited until the very last episode to do so.
Chakotay, the big bad rebel could have been a great character but was completely neutered into an administrative yes man. B'Elanna, Tuvok, and Kes never got any writing and acted more like props. The Doctor could have been a somewhat interesting minor character, but since he was the only one who actually got development, every other show became about him (the other ones being about 7of9).
I guess my original point was this was only half a failing of the writers. My theory is is that producers were chickenshit to do anything interesting on a network show with a supposedly more mainstream audience, and ended up with a show just like "Seven Days". It wasn't so much Dumb as Dumbed Down, which is not what the trekies want to see. Worse, corrections weren't made midcourse. Anyway, I chuckled at the die cast remark.
--
The G400 is generally considered to be the 'high-end quality' card and the G450 the 'cheap mass produced' card.
I have a G400Max on a 21" IBM flattube monitor , and 2D image quality is excellent (and it also was arguably the fastest 3D card when I bought it). I've never seen a G450, so no comment there.
The only downside to Matrox is that they are verrry slow to get new drivers out. The regular driver set for Win2K didn't become really good until a year past the OS release. Meanwhile, since I picked up a RainbowRunner G capture board, I'm stuck with beta drivers that are more than a year old (and they supposedly are actually working on on them..)
Does anyone know of a 2D image quality comparison between different GeForce makes? I've heard they vary wildly depending on the integrator, but nothing is published but quake numbers on the big hardware sites.
--
Imagineers - you are correct.
--
Well, in a show full of Janeways, Tuvoks, and Harry Kims, that "neutral", "bland" character really was one of the most interesting ones. Ironic because Star Trek was supposed to be about character drama.
--
Disney has used the term "Visioneer" for a number of years (for theme park designers). Most likely predating the scanner company.
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"brand name" manufacturers are looking for ways of differentiating themselves from mom&pop computer store-style computers as they can't compete on the very thin margins of PCs (well under 5%). they need to make something sufficiently different from the do-it-yourself computer world so they can extract higher margins for their computers
I am not an economist, but I would have to think that there's nothing guarenteed about that 5% profit margin, and it has in fact been dropping over the years. In a slow-growth market where you have an infinate number of suppliers with identical products, my guess is that the both the profit margin and the quality will go radically down over time.
To argue with the AC below, "open" hardware might be a good thing in the short term due to lower prices, but in the long term, you might not necessarily like the resulting product. Having your favorite vendors delve into a pricewar when you want a stable server is not necessarily a good thing.
Name brand makes like Compaq and Dell used to be able to demand a premium based on the fact they were better engineered (more stable, more compatible, etc). However, this hasn't been especially true for many years. In fact, Compaq doesn't even really make (personal) computers anymore -- that's Intel and AMD's job, and Compaq functions as what used to be called an "integrator" -- someone who installs the OS and various add-on boards and makes sure that it ships on time. In short, nothing but a well capitalized salesman for Intel and Microsoft's warez.
But, none of this is rocket-science, which is why the automobile industry doesn't have the same Soviet-style organization as the computer industry. Oh, what? It turns out style sells just as it sells cars? I guess I've committed Slashdot heresy and will go to the corner and administer myself lashes. Meanwhile, here's to your Turbo buttons.
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