Your analogy here is pretty flawed. Are you suggesting that Microsoft is wrong for making a Netscape-clone? You'd rather, I guess, that IE was *LESS* like Netscape? In an ideal world, Netscape and IE would function 99% similarly, with the only differences being cosmetic UI stuff. Thats what all the open standards at W3C are all about.
Also..I dislike many of Microsoft's tactics are much as anyone else, but Netscape's failure was more due to their own lack of understanding of what users wanted than with Microsoft leveraging the OS. For me, "Netscape Communicator" was the beginning of the end. Sorry, I don't need a bloated e-mail/news read, etc, etc inside my web browser.
Uhm, I don't understand how Tim O'Reilly (and other posters here at Slashdot) could agree with the reasoning that Amazon had to file the patent to protect themselves from Barnes and Noble!!!
For me, that completely misses the point! I don't fault Amazon for filing for the 1-click shopping patent. If they felt they needed to patent it to protect their own usage of the technology, more power to them -- in that case I'd just rant about the USPTO. Its the fact that they are SUING another company over the patent that has me riled.
LOTS of companies that produce software have big patent portfolios -- the responsible ones don't go around waving their patents like a baseball bat, and truly use them only for defensive purposes.
Jeff is just rationalizing, and it seems to me like Tim O'Reilly is blowing a lot of smoke because the issue is on the frontburner for many of his readers, but he seems very unlikely to take any real action. Of course, I DO understand he has obligations to others than himself, so I don't really BLAME him for inaction, but if he's not going to do anything substainial about the problem, he shouldn't posture like he is.
Dear Slashdot Story Posters (especially you CmdrTaco),
Please do not post stories like this in the future. I will not list all of the myriad reasons why the headline here was sensationalist bullshit, please read other messages that have been previously posted for that. However, by posting headlines such as this one, you make the community out to be a bunch of Art Bell-listening, super-anti-government, militia-member crazies, and it weakens our voice on REAL ISSUES like DeCSS, net privacy, and the various patent fights.
The author of the GURPS Cyberpunk book, one Loyd Blankenship, AKA "The Mentor", was a member of the LEGION OF DOOM hacking group that was infamous in the 80s and early 90s.
The raid had very little to do with the game he was writing and everything to do with the fact that the government had reason to believe he was involved in a number of real, illegal cracking incidents.
Having said all of that, clearly the government overstepped its bounds in the SJGames raid and deserved to be pushed back by the EFF, et al, but SJGames is now engaging in REVISIONIST HISTORY by claiming they were raided simply because of the subject matter of the game!!!
Computers that'll boot from a cd are certainly less common than computers that have floppy drives, particularly if you discount iMacs completely and talk only of PCs.
However, most BIOS/motherboards made over the past 2-3 years are capable of CD booting. And when you can fit 140 megabytes of data onto a business-card sized CD, you can offer a lot more than the 1.44 meg a standard floppy allows.
Nintedo purposefully delayed the release of the Game Boy Advance. It seems they are perfectly content with creating a few more Pokemon games for the Game Boy Color and N64, have those sell millions of copies, and THEN move on to the Dolphin, etc.
The Pokemon craze has, in the short term, is more than enough to keep the company going, even on 'outdated' hardware. This might be a good thing. Perhaps rumors of a PS2 killer are true, even though we'll get it a year later (like the PS2 compared to Dreamcast).
Microsoft's uninstaller, even as far back as Office 97, will warn you of situations where it might want to delete a DLL, but other applications use it. So whoever uninstalled the app was a total moron for telling the uninstaller to go and delete the DLLs anyway.
I'm sure somewhere in the archives of history you could find a Mac user saying nearly the same thing as this when Microsoft started producing Macintosh software.
Carmack doesn't care THAT much about the GPL. I quite remember some time ago during Quake II's launch he even said he disagreed with the FSF's position on many issues.
He mentioned this while discussing that he donated some money he made playing Blackjack to the FSF..saying he didnt really agree with their view of the software world, but he had benefited from their efforts via gcc, etc.
Carmack gets to release older engines and such things under the GPL, _knowing_ that nobody can take his work and build it into a competing closed source project.
I doubt competition figures into his reasoning at all. If someone could whip the Quake1 engine into something that could compete with Quake3 and beyond, they wouldn't really have to steal the Quake1 work to begin with....
Granted, he can't cherry-pick ideas from the GPL stuff he seeded and use them in his closed stuff, but he doesn't need to, he has plenty of ideas of his own to use.
Of course he could cherry pick IDEAS, if he wanted to. Just not the actual source code. If it weren't for being to cherry pick other people's ideas from published scientific literature, games like Quake wouldn't even exist..These games are largely implementions of graphics algorithms invented up to decades ago by academia.
It's immensely gratifying to see that the GPL suits Carmack's purpose so well, what with the constant bashing it gets
Its still kind of a shame that most of these high profile GPL releases like Quake1's engine are abandonware/obsolete stuff.
Personally, I hope this guy doesn't release the source code.
Why? Because I'd really like to see the GPL tested in court. Having never had a serious test, the GPL current is just a bunch of words, nobody knows how big the legal bite is. And it would be better to set a precedent against a Quake mod author than a large big-money, lotsa-lawyers megacorp.
Someone is working on a basic version of a GUI system similar to what you suggested. Read about it here. Not likely to be directly supported under Linux, though!
Why the "If you're reading this" -- not everyone who reads Slashdot is part of the tech industry.
Why the nitpicking? I'm sure that if you're reading this you either ARE part of the tech industry, or at the least very interested in it. Either that or you have some sort of weird Natalie Portman and/or grits fetish.
Well..I think a big part of the issue that wasn't specifically touched upon in Katz' stuff above is that the vast majority of knowledge workers are paid a base salary -- work 40 hrs, work 80 hrs...you make the same money either way.
Its up to the film producers to choose the song they want to have considered for this category. Trey/Matt are the ones who picked "Blame Canada", so it was the only song the Academy could consider. Of course, they almost certainly chose that song because many of the others are so incredibly vulgar that they would never have been picked for nomination.
Bleem! for X-Box! Not as compatible as the PSX2, as PSX2 will have most of the actual PSX hardware in it...But....still!
-faster floating point performance than any PC
True!
-costs
X-Box will be cheaper!
-can be a dvd player
X-Box can too!
-can be upgraded like a PC
Do you really think PSX will be MORE upgradable than a console based on standard PC parts?
-uses Linux as its development platform
While a nice bit of trivia..So? Visual C++, which will undoubtably get extentions for X-Box development, is my favorite IDE. Linux has some nice things coming up, like KDevelop -- but nothing too great right now, unless you're a diehard Emacs or VIer. Don't take my word for it? Ask John Carmack, hero to many Linux-heads, his opinion -- or just read his previous Slashdot Q&A posts.
64 megs of ram are a ridiculous amount, and the 4Gigs HDD is acceptable only for very specific purposes, like a "slow-ram"/swap area and high score tables.
The 4GB drive will be useful for game extentions -- like new maps. The standard consoles have been moving to this themselves, with products such as N64's ill-fated DD, and the Dreamcast Zip drive coming out.
That's $495.75 without a motherboard, cooling fan, case, keyboard, monitor, mouse, joystick or anything else. Hmm. The price on this is looking suspiciously like it will come down to $149 when you sign up for 3 years with an ISP to be named later. I wonder who that would be.
Monitor? Do understand the concept here? There wont be a monitor. It will plug into your TV, which wont be included in the final price. Ditto keyboard and mouse..optional items..This is a console not a PC.
Also, you're forgetting that it will be far cheaper for Microsoft to assemble on these components onto a single motherboard, that is just punched out at a factory -- everything surface mounted. Its a CONSOLE, not a PC, upgradability won't matter. My guess is the end price for them will be about $250 a unit to start. They can afford to lose money on HW sales until they sell enough units to get economies of scale even if they don't charge software developers to license titles.
Slashdot Mirror
Also..I dislike many of Microsoft's tactics are much as anyone else, but Netscape's failure was more due to their own lack of understanding of what users wanted than with Microsoft leveraging the OS. For me, "Netscape Communicator" was the beginning of the end. Sorry, I don't need a bloated e-mail/news read, etc, etc inside my web browser.
For me, that completely misses the point! I don't fault Amazon for filing for the 1-click shopping patent. If they felt they needed to patent it to protect their own usage of the technology, more power to them -- in that case I'd just rant about the USPTO. Its the fact that they are SUING another company over the patent that has me riled.
LOTS of companies that produce software have big patent portfolios -- the responsible ones don't go around waving their patents like a baseball bat, and truly use them only for defensive purposes.
Jeff is just rationalizing, and it seems to me like Tim O'Reilly is blowing a lot of smoke because the issue is on the frontburner for many of his readers, but he seems very unlikely to take any real action. Of course, I DO understand he has obligations to others than himself, so I don't really BLAME him for inaction, but if he's not going to do anything substainial about the problem, he shouldn't posture like he is.
Please do not post stories like this in the future. I will not list all of the myriad reasons why the headline here was sensationalist bullshit, please read other messages that have been previously posted for that. However, by posting headlines such as this one, you make the community out to be a bunch of Art Bell-listening, super-anti-government, militia-member crazies, and it weakens our voice on REAL ISSUES like DeCSS, net privacy, and the various patent fights.
Thanks, that is all.
The author of the GURPS Cyberpunk book, one Loyd Blankenship, AKA "The Mentor", was a member of the LEGION OF DOOM hacking group that was infamous in the 80s and early 90s.
The raid had very little to do with the game he was writing and everything to do with the fact that the government had reason to believe he was involved in a number of real, illegal cracking incidents.
Having said all of that, clearly the government overstepped its bounds in the SJGames raid and deserved to be pushed back by the EFF, et al, but SJGames is now engaging in REVISIONIST HISTORY by claiming they were raided simply because of the subject matter of the game!!!
However, most BIOS/motherboards made over the past 2-3 years are capable of CD booting. And when you can fit 140 megabytes of data onto a business-card sized CD, you can offer a lot more than the 1.44 meg a standard floppy allows.
The Pokemon craze has, in the short term, is more than enough to keep the company going, even on 'outdated' hardware. This might be a good thing. Perhaps rumors of a PS2 killer are true, even though we'll get it a year later (like the PS2 compared to Dreamcast).
Why do people care what JWZ does or thinks?
YEAH THATS RIGHT!! USING XEMACS AS THE BASIS OF A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT!!! FUCK YOU JWZ!!
Microsoft's uninstaller, even as far back as Office 97, will warn you of situations where it might want to delete a DLL, but other applications use it. So whoever uninstalled the app was a total moron for telling the uninstaller to go and delete the DLLs anyway.
I'm sure somewhere in the archives of history you could find a Mac user saying nearly the same thing as this when Microsoft started producing Macintosh software.
He mentioned this while discussing that he donated some money he made playing Blackjack to the FSF..saying he didnt really agree with their view of the software world, but he had benefited from their efforts via gcc, etc.
I doubt competition figures into his reasoning at all. If someone could whip the Quake1 engine into something that could compete with Quake3 and beyond, they wouldn't really have to steal the Quake1 work to begin with....
Granted, he can't cherry-pick ideas from the GPL stuff he seeded and use them in his closed stuff, but he doesn't need to, he has plenty of ideas of his own to use.
Of course he could cherry pick IDEAS, if he wanted to. Just not the actual source code. If it weren't for being to cherry pick other people's ideas from published scientific literature, games like Quake wouldn't even exist..These games are largely implementions of graphics algorithms invented up to decades ago by academia.
It's immensely gratifying to see that the GPL suits Carmack's purpose so well, what with the constant bashing it gets
Its still kind of a shame that most of these high profile GPL releases like Quake1's engine are abandonware/obsolete stuff.
Why? Because I'd really like to see the GPL tested in court. Having never had a serious test, the GPL current is just a bunch of words, nobody knows how big the legal bite is. And it would be better to set a precedent against a Quake mod author than a large big-money, lotsa-lawyers megacorp.
Nope
Does it cost a fortune like everythign else Rational makes?
Yes
Do you work for Rational?
Nope. I actually dislike Rational, as was very sad that they aquired the original Purify developers. But I still think Its
...
Someone is working on a basic version of a GUI system similar to what you suggested. Read about it here. Not likely to be directly supported under Linux, though!
Its no fun til someone loses an eye!!
Why the nitpicking? I'm sure that if you're reading this you either ARE part of the tech industry, or at the least very interested in it. Either that or you have some sort of weird Natalie Portman and/or grits fetish.
Well..I think a big part of the issue that wasn't specifically touched upon in Katz' stuff above is that the vast majority of knowledge workers are paid a base salary -- work 40 hrs, work 80 hrs...you make the same money either way.
Its up to the film producers to choose the song they want to have considered for this category. Trey/Matt are the ones who picked "Blame Canada", so it was the only song the Academy could consider. Of course, they almost certainly chose that song because many of the others are so incredibly vulgar that they would never have been picked for nomination.
Bleem! for X-Box! Not as compatible as the PSX2, as PSX2 will have most of the actual PSX hardware in it...But....still!
-faster floating point performance than any PC
True!
-costs
X-Box will be cheaper!
-can be a dvd player
X-Box can too!
-can be upgraded like a PC
Do you really think PSX will be MORE upgradable than a console based on standard PC parts?
-uses Linux as its development platform
While a nice bit of trivia..So? Visual C++, which will undoubtably get extentions for X-Box development, is my favorite IDE. Linux has some nice things coming up, like KDevelop -- but nothing too great right now, unless you're a diehard Emacs or VIer. Don't take my word for it? Ask John Carmack, hero to many Linux-heads, his opinion -- or just read his previous Slashdot Q&A posts.
Microsoft sees the future -- it knows PCs will play a smaller and smaller role in it. They aren't going to just drop this.
The 4GB drive will be useful for game extentions -- like new maps. The standard consoles have been moving to this themselves, with products such as N64's ill-fated DD, and the Dreamcast Zip drive coming out.
Monitor? Do understand the concept here? There wont be a monitor. It will plug into your TV, which wont be included in the final price. Ditto keyboard and mouse..optional items..This is a console not a PC.
Also, you're forgetting that it will be far cheaper for Microsoft to assemble on these components onto a single motherboard, that is just punched out at a factory -- everything surface mounted. Its a CONSOLE, not a PC, upgradability won't matter. My guess is the end price for them will be about $250 a unit to start. They can afford to lose money on HW sales until they sell enough units to get economies of scale even if they don't charge software developers to license titles.