This ain't exactly Microsoft-spin. (I think in this case they were smart enough to keep a low profile.) Note that Microsoft and Unisys refused to comment -- the sentence you're quoting was written by the news.com reporter, and not some Microsoft PR dude.
I think instead, it's a subtle bit of sarcasm on Mr. Kanellos' part. Go back and read it again.
At first, it sounds like they're just a bad sport, but consider this fact.... They are widely visible going through the process of packing up their equipment... And everyone will tell them "Microsoft made them leave". It won't necessarily be 100% accurate, but thats the rumor that's going to go around for the rest of the show.
So they're bad sports and manipulative bastards. Well, I suppose it's good to see Sony can compete with Microsoft and Nintendo on a "pure evil" level.
They came up with a lousy copy protection / validation scheme. Too bad for them
You're right. Here's what Blizzard should do -- they should set up Warcraft III in such a way that it won't work until you "activate" it by calling Blizzard tech support when you first install it. But, if any hardware associated with that activation code changes too drastically (indicating the software might be installed on a second computer), you'll need to call Blizzard again to get another product activation code...
What?! Why is everybody looking at me? Was it something I said?
You sure you ain't confusing GTA3 (Grand Theft Auto 3) with GT3 (Gran Turismo 3)?
GTA3 was developed by DMA Design in Scotland and published by Rockstar games. There's a partial list of credits here. Gran Turismo 3, on the other hand, was published by SCE and I'm pretty sure had an all-Japanese team.
Yeah, the "your system won't sell well unless it does well in Japan" argument has always been the Conventional Wisdom, but I'm not sure we should accept that as a given fact. It's often been true in the past, but let's also remember that the console market is still in its early stages -- a few generations of consoles don't neccessarily dictate the rules for all time.
The U.S. and European markets have certainly grown in the last few years -- to the point that it can certainly sustain a console platform. (Hell, they've been doing that for PC games for years now.) So even if the Xbox doesn't do well in Japan, that doesn't mean Japanese game manufacturers are going to jump ship. Remember, they're businesses. If they think they can make a profit developing games for the Xbox, they will.
(And hey, let's not dismiss all those fine U.S. and European developers that have been making some darned tasty games. Yeah, the Japanese have some great fighting games and FFX, but no PS2 is complete without Tony Hawk and GTA3.)
I don't think Adobe expects to curb piracy at all. But that's not really their goal -- their goal is to spend their R&D money in a way that they can get the most bang for their buck.
If they have to spend $750,000 to develop a Chinese language version of Photoshop, which only sells a thousand legitimate copies (at $600/each), they've just lost money. They'd be better off putting their $750,000 in a savings account (except maybe a BofA savings account, which would charge them a $300K "We gotta count your money" fee) and selling only a hundred copies of their English language version in China.
What's tougher to determine is if, by not creating a Chinese version, they're hurting themselves in the long-term. Let's say they don't develop a Chinese version of Photoshop. Somebody like JASC could develop a Chinese version of Paint Shop Pro and gain a large following in China. Then, if we assume that at some point in the future, the Chinese market is profitable, Adobe might be in trouble. Everybody in China will be used to using Paint Shop Pro, and might not bother swapping over to Photoshop.
It's a question of determining when it'll be profitable to spend money developing Chinese language versions of software, and deciding just how much the Chinese care about getting a native language version of their software.
At my old job, our engineering department successfully lobbied for people to stop sending documents as Word attachments.
Their explanation was a little simpler, which was basically, "Hi. Those of us with Unix machines don't have Word installed, so it's a major pain in the ass for us to read that document you just attached. Can you send it in a different format?" Personally, I wouldn't recommend using any of the examples in the article, as they all sound pretty self-righteous and would probably make an average recipient more likely to walk over and give the writer a massive wedgie than to change their email attachment behavior.
The drawback, of course, is that the people who were sending Word attachments in the first place were still composing them in MS Word. And so you've either got to deal with the huge mess that is Word's "Save as HTML" or you lose all the pretty formatting (which does sometimes include important diagrams or tables) when it's saved as text. But I suppose it's a moral victory, if nothing else...
What a great novel idea! Getting to see the games in action on a television screen! As opposed to 90% of the TV commercials out there which look something like...
25 seconds: "Guy in Crash Bandicoot suit doing funny things" or "Weird Guy Who's Supposed to Be Cool 'Cuz He's Got a Lot of Piercings Doing Weird Artsy Things"
3 seconds: Approximately 458 different scenes of game footage all crammed into one fast-cutting montage
2 seconds: Playstation logo
What the Xbox commercials might lack in cleverness, they make up for by actually showing you the freakin' game. I wish everybody would do this.
Re:Gosh, I guess Linux IS just for fringe whackos.
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 1
Heck, it doesn't just make Linux users look bad. It makes all computer game players look bad.
If you read your average newspaper, it would appear as though the computer game industry has been responsible for all violent acts committed during the last 10 years. And a game where the whole point is to go around shooting innocent civilians ain't gonna improve that image. It seems like RWS decided if they couldn't make a good game, they'd just make a controversial game and ride the wave of publicity from their local news stations.
I was glad that this game faded into obscurity. The last thing we need now is for this thing to resurface and be picked up by Good Morning America.
My problem with WAP is really with WML -- I understand its goal, which is to build a language that strips out all of the unsupported features, and leaves room to add new phone-specific ones, but why do it in a way that makes it incompatible with the millions of web pages already in existence?
Yes, there are pages with crazy Flash intros that I wouldn't expect to work, but it seems to me if I can browse a simple web page with simple text-based browser like Lynx, there is no reason why my phone should not be able to browse that exact same page without giving me a "this page didn't compile correctly" error.
If you ask me, DoCoMo's cHTML is a much better way to go -- AFAIK, it's simply a subset of HTML. Meaning that if I've got a simple HTML page (and even if it contains features that get stripped out), I can view it on my Palm browser AND my DoCoMo phone without having to create two different versions. Want to add phone-specific features? Great! Add them to the cHTML spec and guess what, it still won't break the HTML pages that are already out there.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure there are probably reasons why WML is better than a stripped-down HTML. But given how many HTML pages already exist that would be useful to view on a phone, it boggles my mind there had to be such a rift between the two languages.
(click here to tell them how much traffic their silly registration system costs them)
Dear New York Times Reader Feedback:
It has come to my attention that you require reader registration to have access to your articles. Don't you realize that this costs you several opportunities to be Slashdotted every month? Other sites enjoy the pleasure of watching their service grind to a screeching halt whenever somebody on Slashdot finds an interesting article -- don't miss out on this wonderful opportunity!
Slashdot readers are generally upper-middle class with lots of disposable income, and would be a very valuable commodity to your advertisers, if it weren't for the fact that 80% of them use banner ad blockers to block out all your ads, and the other 20% just write Perl scripts to grab your content directly.
Anyway, I hope you take my words to heart and realize the sooner you make your content free and unrestricted, the sooner your site will end up on fuckedcompany and we can make fun of you for giving away all your content for free.
My first impression was that this is kind of a waste of time. But I suppose this could be useful if you were feeding text into that nifty next-generation text-to-speech tool that was posted on Slashdot a while back.
After all, there's a difference between...
<sincere>That's a great idea</sincere> ...and... <sarcastic>That's a great idea</sarcastic> ...that no text-to-speech program would be able to figure out without some hints.
Not to mention all the different ways to say "Dude".
It will be interesting to see what happens if Eolas goes after Sun for Java.
I'm guessing they'll also go after AOL/TW for including their patented embedded application technology in their browser. (Java's just a language, after all -- I bet Sun could get out of a lawsuit.)
What would be really ironic is if Netscape, in order to avoid any Eolas patent infringement lawsuits, switched to.NET technology. Given that MS is interested in getting.NET as widely used as possible, I bet it'd be a much cheaper route for AOL/TW.
This was the first time I'd heard of the
Eolas patent. Sounds like another company that's looking to get rich off of patents instead of, you know, creating any sort of useful product. (If you go to their web site, it seems to be little more than information about their lawsuit.) If I were Microsoft, I'd probably do the same thing, just to piss them off. But I'm petty and vindictive that way.
The surveillance cameras are inconsequential to the whole story. The problem arose when a magazine ran a photo of him -- he could just as easily have been watching a food processor demonstration or standing next to a famous celebrity who was being photographed.
It would be one thing if the cameras themselves accidentally marked him as a criminal (as the headline misleadingly suggests), but the only way you're gonna prevent problems like this is if you force all publications to remove all faces from their photographs so that ex-wives in Oklahoma don't mistake strangers for deadbeat husbands.
At the risk of pissing off... well... everybody...
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, at the risk of angering Slashdotters and die-hard Apple fans, I'd suggest that Apple bite the bullet and start building Windows machines.
Okay, sure, Apple has a great OS. But there are lots of people who, for reasons valid or not, want a Windows-based computer. But, as the iMac has demonstrated the last couple of years, there are also people who want a computer that just looks cool, and Apple can clearly deliver in that area.
Yeah, Dell and Compaq and other vendors have started making their own versions of cool-looking computers. They're okay, but I'm guessing the designers at Apple could build something that would blow them all away visually. It seems like it would be a good money-maker for Apple (and could help fund their non-Windows efforts), and Windows users could finally have a stylish-looking computer (on the outside, anyway).
Alternately, I'd be happy with a pair of those Dockers Mobile Pants. That way, I can still have my geeky PDA/Phone without embarassing "Palm Pilot Pocket Bulge". (I used to carry my Palm V everywhere until I noticed that all of my jeans had big rectangles faded into the pockets where my PalmPilot used to be. You just can't impress the ladies that way.)
If memory serves me right (it's been a while), I was most annoyed with the fact that you couldn't remove gems after you socketed them, which got to be pretty annoying. (Find a socketed item. Add some gems. Find a better gem. Then go find another socketed item and start over from scratch because you can't replace one of your weaker gems with the newer one.)
Does Blizzard allow you to swap in new gems in the expansion?
No, no. You're thinking of Actuality Systems, which also creates 3D displays (and has been featured on Slashdot), although in a much different way.
Actuality Systems, from what I can tell, displays 3D images by rotating a screen around very fast and then displaying different slices of an image onto that screen. I believe it gives you a "truer" 3D display, at the drawback of having to view it inside a big glass sphere.
ActualDepth appears to be using the hi-tech equivalent of those 3D images you see on the front of children's books sometimes. I'm guessing they're going after the consumer market, while Actuality Systems is probably going after industries.
I still have a hard time beleiving this will make it into the mainstream market for at least a couple more decades due to some unforseen hurdle.
I think I can see the hurdle....
Clerk: Hi! Welcome to Fry's! Can I help you? Shopper: Yes, I'd like one of those 8T holographic cubes. Clerk: Here you are sir. That'll be $300 for the cube... oh, and $18 million for the giant femtosecond laser. You cleared out a room where you can store this? Shopper: Yeah, I decided we don't really need a kitchen.
I am, of course, exaggerating. You can't really help at Fry's.
Slashdot Mirror
This ain't exactly Microsoft-spin. (I think in this case they were smart enough to keep a low profile.) Note that Microsoft and Unisys refused to comment -- the sentence you're quoting was written by the news.com reporter, and not some Microsoft PR dude.
I think instead, it's a subtle bit of sarcasm on Mr. Kanellos' part. Go back and read it again.
--
What?! Why is everybody looking at me? Was it something I said?
GTA3 was developed by DMA Design in Scotland and published by Rockstar games. There's a partial list of credits here. Gran Turismo 3, on the other hand, was published by SCE and I'm pretty sure had an all-Japanese team.
GTA3 is more fun, tho. :)
Yeah, the "your system won't sell well unless it does well in Japan" argument has always been the Conventional Wisdom, but I'm not sure we should accept that as a given fact. It's often been true in the past, but let's also remember that the console market is still in its early stages -- a few generations of consoles don't neccessarily dictate the rules for all time.
The U.S. and European markets have certainly grown in the last few years -- to the point that it can certainly sustain a console platform. (Hell, they've been doing that for PC games for years now.) So even if the Xbox doesn't do well in Japan, that doesn't mean Japanese game manufacturers are going to jump ship. Remember, they're businesses. If they think they can make a profit developing games for the Xbox, they will.
(And hey, let's not dismiss all those fine U.S. and European developers that have been making some darned tasty games. Yeah, the Japanese have some great fighting games and FFX, but no PS2 is complete without Tony Hawk and GTA3.)
I don't think Adobe expects to curb piracy at all. But that's not really their goal -- their goal is to spend their R&D money in a way that they can get the most bang for their buck.
If they have to spend $750,000 to develop a Chinese language version of Photoshop, which only sells a thousand legitimate copies (at $600/each), they've just lost money. They'd be better off putting their $750,000 in a savings account (except maybe a BofA savings account, which would charge them a $300K "We gotta count your money" fee) and selling only a hundred copies of their English language version in China.
What's tougher to determine is if, by not creating a Chinese version, they're hurting themselves in the long-term. Let's say they don't develop a Chinese version of Photoshop. Somebody like JASC could develop a Chinese version of Paint Shop Pro and gain a large following in China. Then, if we assume that at some point in the future, the Chinese market is profitable, Adobe might be in trouble. Everybody in China will be used to using Paint Shop Pro, and might not bother swapping over to Photoshop.
It's a question of determining when it'll be profitable to spend money developing Chinese language versions of software, and deciding just how much the Chinese care about getting a native language version of their software.
At my old job, our engineering department successfully lobbied for people to stop sending documents as Word attachments.
Their explanation was a little simpler, which was basically, "Hi. Those of us with Unix machines don't have Word installed, so it's a major pain in the ass for us to read that document you just attached. Can you send it in a different format?" Personally, I wouldn't recommend using any of the examples in the article, as they all sound pretty self-righteous and would probably make an average recipient more likely to walk over and give the writer a massive wedgie than to change their email attachment behavior.
The drawback, of course, is that the people who were sending Word attachments in the first place were still composing them in MS Word. And so you've either got to deal with the huge mess that is Word's "Save as HTML" or you lose all the pretty formatting (which does sometimes include important diagrams or tables) when it's saved as text. But I suppose it's a moral victory, if nothing else...
So how can a user tell if this tracking program has been installed on their machine? The article was awfully skimpy on details...
What a great novel idea! Getting to see the games in action on a television screen! As opposed to 90% of the TV commercials out there which look something like...
25 seconds: "Guy in Crash Bandicoot suit doing funny things" or "Weird Guy Who's Supposed to Be Cool 'Cuz He's Got a Lot of Piercings Doing Weird Artsy Things"
3 seconds: Approximately 458 different scenes of game footage all crammed into one fast-cutting montage
2 seconds: Playstation logo
What the Xbox commercials might lack in cleverness, they make up for by actually showing you the freakin' game. I wish everybody would do this.
Cough.
Uh... or Sony.
Shit.
"MySQL: When your data doesn't matter that much"
Ehhh... needs some work.
Heck, it doesn't just make Linux users look bad. It makes all computer game players look bad.
If you read your average newspaper, it would appear as though the computer game industry has been responsible for all violent acts committed during the last 10 years. And a game where the whole point is to go around shooting innocent civilians ain't gonna improve that image. It seems like RWS decided if they couldn't make a good game, they'd just make a controversial game and ride the wave of publicity from their local news stations.
I was glad that this game faded into obscurity. The last thing we need now is for this thing to resurface and be picked up by Good Morning America.
Yes, there are pages with crazy Flash intros that I wouldn't expect to work, but it seems to me if I can browse a simple web page with simple text-based browser like Lynx, there is no reason why my phone should not be able to browse that exact same page without giving me a "this page didn't compile correctly" error.
If you ask me, DoCoMo's cHTML is a much better way to go -- AFAIK, it's simply a subset of HTML. Meaning that if I've got a simple HTML page (and even if it contains features that get stripped out), I can view it on my Palm browser AND my DoCoMo phone without having to create two different versions. Want to add phone-specific features? Great! Add them to the cHTML spec and guess what, it still won't break the HTML pages that are already out there.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure there are probably reasons why WML is better than a stripped-down HTML. But given how many HTML pages already exist that would be useful to view on a phone, it boggles my mind there had to be such a rift between the two languages.
Dear New York Times Reader Feedback:
It has come to my attention that you require reader registration to have access to your articles. Don't you realize that this costs you several opportunities to be Slashdotted every month? Other sites enjoy the pleasure of watching their service grind to a screeching halt whenever somebody on Slashdot finds an interesting article -- don't miss out on this wonderful opportunity!
Slashdot readers are generally upper-middle class with lots of disposable income, and would be a very valuable commodity to your advertisers, if it weren't for the fact that 80% of them use banner ad blockers to block out all your ads, and the other 20% just write Perl scripts to grab your content directly.
Anyway, I hope you take my words to heart and realize the sooner you make your content free and unrestricted, the sooner your site will end up on fuckedcompany and we can make fun of you for giving away all your content for free.
Sincerely,
A concerned reader
There. I think that oughta do it.
After all, there's a difference between...
...that no text-to-speech program would be able to figure out without some hints.
<sincere>That's a great idea</sincere>
...and...
<sarcastic>That's a great idea</sarcastic>
Not to mention all the different ways to say "Dude".
What would be really ironic is if Netscape, in order to avoid any Eolas patent infringement lawsuits, switched to .NET technology. Given that MS is interested in getting .NET as widely used as possible, I bet it'd be a much cheaper route for AOL/TW.
This was the first time I'd heard of the Eolas patent. Sounds like another company that's looking to get rich off of patents instead of, you know, creating any sort of useful product. (If you go to their web site, it seems to be little more than information about their lawsuit.) If I were Microsoft, I'd probably do the same thing, just to piss them off. But I'm petty and vindictive that way.
The surveillance cameras are inconsequential to the whole story. The problem arose when a magazine ran a photo of him -- he could just as easily have been watching a food processor demonstration or standing next to a famous celebrity who was being photographed.
It would be one thing if the cameras themselves accidentally marked him as a criminal (as the headline misleadingly suggests), but the only way you're gonna prevent problems like this is if you force all publications to remove all faces from their photographs so that ex-wives in Oklahoma don't mistake strangers for deadbeat husbands.
Okay, sure, Apple has a great OS. But there are lots of people who, for reasons valid or not, want a Windows-based computer. But, as the iMac has demonstrated the last couple of years, there are also people who want a computer that just looks cool, and Apple can clearly deliver in that area.
Yeah, Dell and Compaq and other vendors have started making their own versions of cool-looking computers. They're okay, but I'm guessing the designers at Apple could build something that would blow them all away visually. It seems like it would be a good money-maker for Apple (and could help fund their non-Windows efforts), and Windows users could finally have a stylish-looking computer (on the outside, anyway).
Well, it's just a thought...
Alternately, I'd be happy with a pair of those Dockers Mobile Pants. That way, I can still have my geeky PDA/Phone without embarassing "Palm Pilot Pocket Bulge". (I used to carry my Palm V everywhere until I noticed that all of my jeans had big rectangles faded into the pockets where my PalmPilot used to be. You just can't impress the ladies that way.)
Of course, user number 1 is using Windows, and user number 2 is using Linux, so maybe that explains the disparity...
--
Well, no wonder you don't feel comfortable coding C++ anymore. :)
Does Blizzard allow you to swap in new gems in the expansion?
Actuality Systems, from what I can tell, displays 3D images by rotating a screen around very fast and then displaying different slices of an image onto that screen. I believe it gives you a "truer" 3D display, at the drawback of having to view it inside a big glass sphere.
ActualDepth appears to be using the hi-tech equivalent of those 3D images you see on the front of children's books sometimes. I'm guessing they're going after the consumer market, while Actuality Systems is probably going after industries.
---
Clerk: Hi! Welcome to Fry's! Can I help you?
Shopper: Yes, I'd like one of those 8T holographic cubes.
Clerk: Here you are sir. That'll be $300 for the cube... oh, and $18 million for the giant femtosecond laser. You cleared out a room where you can store this?
Shopper: Yeah, I decided we don't really need a kitchen.
I am, of course, exaggerating. You can't really help at Fry's.