What cheaper DRM tracks? NO TRACKS on the iTunes store have DRM on them at all. Back in the day they did, then there was a time where some of them didn't, now ALL of them do not.
Heck, they're even dropping Rosetta in OSX 10.7 - so you can't even run any apps you had that are PowerPC based. Apple doesn't care about compatibility.
Once. They scrapped it ONCE. After which, there were 2.5 years before RTM, and another 2 months before release.
2 years and 8 months to do driver development. Yes, it was a bit of a moving target during that time, but the new audio model and the new video model were early developments in that process.
I had problems from two companies during that time: ATi as soon as they were bought by AMD and fired most if not all of their driver developers (at least on the All-In-Wonder side of things - before then they had been releasing beta drivers with full support for legacy hardware during the beta process - including my All In Wonder cards - and I mean full support, as in they were working on Media Center integration), and Sound Blaster, who specifically refused throughout the process to release drivers for their legacy product line, giving beta testers good indication that the hardware they had would not get Vista drivers at least a year before Vista hit stores.
There was an extensive public beta process. If you wanted to know which manufacturers were on the ball and which weren't, it was easy to tell without paying any money to Microsoft. My Roland sound card had constant updates for audio drivers during the beta process. My legacy NVidia cards had constant updates for video drivers during the beta process. When Vista went gold in November 2006, every single piece of hardware I had in my primary machine was fully supported by Vista, because I had two years as a user to chose to support companies that worked WITH the changes Microsoft was making, instead of complaining about them.
I have, and I totally agree. Also, he fails in terms of "evaluating software compatibility"... many more applications from early versions of windows run in Windows 7 than he made note of, and he didn't even aknoledge that early control panels, designed for EGA usage, look beautiful in True Color because of the way they were programmed.
Also, what's with starting with DOS 5.0 - Couldn't he have found a version released in 1.01? And not finding a 98 upgrade disk, or going to ME instead of 2K seemed moderately flawed...
I think they expect the people who didn't watch the original, but have heard of it to go see their generic, Sci-Fi action piece, with a whole bunch of explosions and shit.
And there's a huge audience for mindless crap in the theatres, especially mindless crap with some sort of name recognition.
You mean the a Window system, rather than a Windows system. Which is the difference. Microsoft's "Windows" trademark does not imply the plural, and in every other context, the "s" at the end of the word absolutely conotes a plural.
The difference is between "Is that windows on your computer screen" vs. "Are those windows on your computer screen". You would not have a "windows manager" you have a "window manager" - etc.
Yes there are cases where one could confuse the plural for the singular, etc. - but in most cases, "Windows" - plural noun and "Windows" singular noun cannot be confused, and I'm not sure I ever saw "Windows" - a singular noun, reffering to anything other than Microsoft's graphical window-based shell for DOS, and later its OS.
When you talk about Operating Systems, not GUI elements, it is very clear what you are talking about. As far as I know, Microsoft doesn't claim to have trademarked the word "Windows" with regards to the gui box to which it is commonly applied, only to their operating environment.
XP has back doors? If only Microsoft would release a new version of the OS with some of those blocked.
OH WAIT.
THEY DID.
TWICE.
Not to mention that if they ever say, included the functionality of say MS Security Essentials in the OS, well, they would never be allowed to because OMG monopoly.
Growth numbers are often misleading.
Let's take an example, oranges and pears.
Month 1: 10 oranges sold. 1000 pears sold.
Month 2: 18 oranges are sold. 1001 pears are sold.
Orange's sales grew by 8. Pear's growth was 1.
So, Orange's growth was 8x Pear's growth.
And by percentage growth, Orange grew by 80% and pear only grew by 0.1%. Even better - from a growth percentage standpoint, Orange is 800x better!
But at the end of the day, there are still 2001 pears, and only 28 oranges.
Now, if the market is infinite, then at some point in the distant future, if the trend continues, there will be more oranges than pears. Orange wins.
Unfortunately markets aren't infinite. At which point, growth has to come at the expense of another. So if there are only 1029 people, then in the next month growth, Orange sells to 26 of them, and Pear sells to 1003 of them. Only now everyone has something, there's no further room for growth of the market. Your numbers reflect everything. At this point, if one portion of the market grows, the other has to shrink. It's a different situation now, because now you aren't selling to a new customer, you're selling to someone else's customer. Now instead of selling to someone who might do a comparison and choose Orange before they've ever eaten a fruit before ever, you now have to win over someone who liked pears enough to chose them, potentially twice over Oranges. Thus you can't extrapolate your former growth figures into this newly saturated market, because the strategies to approach that market are different.
So it's important not to just cherry pick statistics, because on the other hand, Orange sells 2000 first month, Pear sells 1000 first month, and Orange grows to 2008 next month, while Pear grows to 1001. Orange's growth is still 8, Pear's growth is still 1. But Orange is doing a lot better off. Growth without fundamental statistics as to the total number of units sold, is a relatively meaningless indicator of future sucess, and without knowledge of the estimated size of the market, even knowing the total number of units sold has limited utility for predicting future scenarios.
Insanely off topic, I know, but where do you live that Toyota markets their vehicles like that? When I see Toyota being advertised, they typically position themselves in the fun to drive category, not the get you from point a to point b category - at least in terms of cars like the Matrix, their trucks tend to be advertised in terms of unbelieveable ruggedness... doesn't scream "appliance" to me...
I know quite a few people that are moving to windows because of their iPhones... owning an iPhone has left a bad taste in their mouth, and now they want out of the Apple ecosphere completely. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but it is interesting to me that there does seem to be a small formerly Apple-loyal segment that is moving away from Apple because of how controlling and form over function they are perceived to be...
My 80GB system drive is at least 5 years old at this point, running fine with no bad sectors. In fact, most of my drives are pushing on 6 years old with no bad sectors. And my 486 is still kicking with the original 80MB SCSI hard drive it came with in the 80s, and a 540MB hard drive that came from a 486 my family got in 1992...
Not that I haven't had hard drive troubles... it's just been a really long while... possibly something about never buying "consumer" hard drives after a few bad experiences with a certain Hitachi 75GB hard drive... (rather, 6 75 GB hard drives in a 2 year period... which then finally got replaced by IBM with both the afformentioned 80GB hard drive, and a 300GB hard drive...)
Of course, I have backups of everything important... and in a few months time I'll have online backups of everything unimportant too... but even then, it's just a hard drive. I'm not going to buy a new computer just because a hard drive dies or a fan dies or something like that.
Back in the Windows 3.1 days, and into the Windows 95 days, you HAD to choose your browser yourself because no browser was included in the OS. Netscape was awesome back in the 3.1 days, and many people used it.
But the point is, that when competition started developing, it started gaining marketshare. There wasn't instant adoption, but the long term trend is for more diversity.
Also, the point is that this DIDN'T happen 10 years ago, it happened recently, once the market was already on the way to correction, and hasn't been shown to help speed up that process. It also hasn't particularly helped Opera, who were the ones complaining in the first place.
And since none of the major browser trends changed with the introduction of the Ballot, it also shows that the entire situation was overblown, and that there was a competitive market in place which was (and is) correcting the mistake of leaving IE uncontested for so long.
The fundamental problem I see with that UI, at least from the article, is that it is gadget based.
Fine for my phone. Even fine for Surface, which isn't targeted at the home. But 98% of what I do on my computer wouldn't have a useful gadget sibling in any way shape or form. Not to mention, the utter waste of screen real-estate.
To be fair, I've seen people assume that such concepts are new Windows UIs for years. It hasn't been true yet...
Friday night is a death slot on major networks, not specialty channels. For a channel with limited audience, Friday Night is when they can gather the largest share - especially for something like science fiction. As long as you keep the scheduling consistant.
Of course, SyFy SAYS tuesday is their highest rated night, but that has already been proven false. And it's obvious that it was false to begin with - they want to make money, not science fiction - hence putting the highly profitable wrestling on their highly profitable friday night.
Then you would be wrong. While the Infamous Adventures remake is as close to a 1:1 remake as possible, the AGDI game expands on the original, adding new elements to the adventure throughout the game. Not that either is necessarily better; but they are different games.
The remake of KQ1 wasn't even VGA (despite being called that in many an official KQ collection.)
King's Quest 1 was one of the first remakes made by Sierra, and was remade using the SCI0 engine, which was still EGA based. 320x200 resolution, 16 colours. The big improvement in those games was support for devices like the MT-32. If you haven't played an old sierra game with an authentic MT-32 or LAPC card, you are missing out, because Sierra, more than anyone else I know, really took advantage of loading custom patches to that brilliant piece of kit. And even using the text display for the occasional joke when starting the game.
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What cheaper DRM tracks? NO TRACKS on the iTunes store have DRM on them at all. Back in the day they did, then there was a time where some of them didn't, now ALL of them do not.
Yes, because a company can do great things with the funds that they have for a picosecond.
Heck, they're even dropping Rosetta in OSX 10.7 - so you can't even run any apps you had that are PowerPC based. Apple doesn't care about compatibility.
Once. They scrapped it ONCE. After which, there were 2.5 years before RTM, and another 2 months before release.
2 years and 8 months to do driver development. Yes, it was a bit of a moving target during that time, but the new audio model and the new video model were early developments in that process.
I had problems from two companies during that time: ATi as soon as they were bought by AMD and fired most if not all of their driver developers (at least on the All-In-Wonder side of things - before then they had been releasing beta drivers with full support for legacy hardware during the beta process - including my All In Wonder cards - and I mean full support, as in they were working on Media Center integration), and Sound Blaster, who specifically refused throughout the process to release drivers for their legacy product line, giving beta testers good indication that the hardware they had would not get Vista drivers at least a year before Vista hit stores.
There was an extensive public beta process. If you wanted to know which manufacturers were on the ball and which weren't, it was easy to tell without paying any money to Microsoft. My Roland sound card had constant updates for audio drivers during the beta process. My legacy NVidia cards had constant updates for video drivers during the beta process. When Vista went gold in November 2006, every single piece of hardware I had in my primary machine was fully supported by Vista, because I had two years as a user to chose to support companies that worked WITH the changes Microsoft was making, instead of complaining about them.
I have, and I totally agree. Also, he fails in terms of "evaluating software compatibility"... many more applications from early versions of windows run in Windows 7 than he made note of, and he didn't even aknoledge that early control panels, designed for EGA usage, look beautiful in True Color because of the way they were programmed. Also, what's with starting with DOS 5.0 - Couldn't he have found a version released in 1.01? And not finding a 98 upgrade disk, or going to ME instead of 2K seemed moderately flawed...
It's not like device manufacturers didn't literally have YEARS to get their drivers in order for Vista. YEARS.
I think they expect the people who didn't watch the original, but have heard of it to go see their generic, Sci-Fi action piece, with a whole bunch of explosions and shit. And there's a huge audience for mindless crap in the theatres, especially mindless crap with some sort of name recognition.
You mean the a Window system, rather than a Windows system. Which is the difference. Microsoft's "Windows" trademark does not imply the plural, and in every other context, the "s" at the end of the word absolutely conotes a plural. The difference is between "Is that windows on your computer screen" vs. "Are those windows on your computer screen". You would not have a "windows manager" you have a "window manager" - etc. Yes there are cases where one could confuse the plural for the singular, etc. - but in most cases, "Windows" - plural noun and "Windows" singular noun cannot be confused, and I'm not sure I ever saw "Windows" - a singular noun, reffering to anything other than Microsoft's graphical window-based shell for DOS, and later its OS.
When you talk about Operating Systems, not GUI elements, it is very clear what you are talking about. As far as I know, Microsoft doesn't claim to have trademarked the word "Windows" with regards to the gui box to which it is commonly applied, only to their operating environment.
Which is ActiveX in Internet Explorer... so... that would still require ActiveX....
XP has back doors? If only Microsoft would release a new version of the OS with some of those blocked. OH WAIT. THEY DID. TWICE. Not to mention that if they ever say, included the functionality of say MS Security Essentials in the OS, well, they would never be allowed to because OMG monopoly.
Growth numbers are often misleading. Let's take an example, oranges and pears. Month 1: 10 oranges sold. 1000 pears sold. Month 2: 18 oranges are sold. 1001 pears are sold. Orange's sales grew by 8. Pear's growth was 1. So, Orange's growth was 8x Pear's growth. And by percentage growth, Orange grew by 80% and pear only grew by 0.1%. Even better - from a growth percentage standpoint, Orange is 800x better! But at the end of the day, there are still 2001 pears, and only 28 oranges. Now, if the market is infinite, then at some point in the distant future, if the trend continues, there will be more oranges than pears. Orange wins. Unfortunately markets aren't infinite. At which point, growth has to come at the expense of another. So if there are only 1029 people, then in the next month growth, Orange sells to 26 of them, and Pear sells to 1003 of them. Only now everyone has something, there's no further room for growth of the market. Your numbers reflect everything. At this point, if one portion of the market grows, the other has to shrink. It's a different situation now, because now you aren't selling to a new customer, you're selling to someone else's customer. Now instead of selling to someone who might do a comparison and choose Orange before they've ever eaten a fruit before ever, you now have to win over someone who liked pears enough to chose them, potentially twice over Oranges. Thus you can't extrapolate your former growth figures into this newly saturated market, because the strategies to approach that market are different. So it's important not to just cherry pick statistics, because on the other hand, Orange sells 2000 first month, Pear sells 1000 first month, and Orange grows to 2008 next month, while Pear grows to 1001. Orange's growth is still 8, Pear's growth is still 1. But Orange is doing a lot better off. Growth without fundamental statistics as to the total number of units sold, is a relatively meaningless indicator of future sucess, and without knowledge of the estimated size of the market, even knowing the total number of units sold has limited utility for predicting future scenarios.
Insanely off topic, I know, but where do you live that Toyota markets their vehicles like that? When I see Toyota being advertised, they typically position themselves in the fun to drive category, not the get you from point a to point b category - at least in terms of cars like the Matrix, their trucks tend to be advertised in terms of unbelieveable ruggedness... doesn't scream "appliance" to me...
I know quite a few people that are moving to windows because of their iPhones... owning an iPhone has left a bad taste in their mouth, and now they want out of the Apple ecosphere completely. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but it is interesting to me that there does seem to be a small formerly Apple-loyal segment that is moving away from Apple because of how controlling and form over function they are perceived to be...
My 80GB system drive is at least 5 years old at this point, running fine with no bad sectors. In fact, most of my drives are pushing on 6 years old with no bad sectors. And my 486 is still kicking with the original 80MB SCSI hard drive it came with in the 80s, and a 540MB hard drive that came from a 486 my family got in 1992... Not that I haven't had hard drive troubles... it's just been a really long while... possibly something about never buying "consumer" hard drives after a few bad experiences with a certain Hitachi 75GB hard drive... (rather, 6 75 GB hard drives in a 2 year period... which then finally got replaced by IBM with both the afformentioned 80GB hard drive, and a 300GB hard drive...) Of course, I have backups of everything important... and in a few months time I'll have online backups of everything unimportant too... but even then, it's just a hard drive. I'm not going to buy a new computer just because a hard drive dies or a fan dies or something like that.
Back in the Windows 3.1 days, and into the Windows 95 days, you HAD to choose your browser yourself because no browser was included in the OS. Netscape was awesome back in the 3.1 days, and many people used it.
IE was less than 50% before the ballot.
But the point is, that when competition started developing, it started gaining marketshare. There wasn't instant adoption, but the long term trend is for more diversity.
Also, the point is that this DIDN'T happen 10 years ago, it happened recently, once the market was already on the way to correction, and hasn't been shown to help speed up that process. It also hasn't particularly helped Opera, who were the ones complaining in the first place.
And since none of the major browser trends changed with the introduction of the Ballot, it also shows that the entire situation was overblown, and that there was a competitive market in place which was (and is) correcting the mistake of leaving IE uncontested for so long.
But King's Quest 3 did not. Which is what you claimed.
The fundamental problem I see with that UI, at least from the article, is that it is gadget based. Fine for my phone. Even fine for Surface, which isn't targeted at the home. But 98% of what I do on my computer wouldn't have a useful gadget sibling in any way shape or form. Not to mention, the utter waste of screen real-estate. To be fair, I've seen people assume that such concepts are new Windows UIs for years. It hasn't been true yet...
Which is exactly what AGDI did with KQ2, KQ3, and from what I hear QfG2, thoug I've never played it.
Friday night is a death slot on major networks, not specialty channels. For a channel with limited audience, Friday Night is when they can gather the largest share - especially for something like science fiction. As long as you keep the scheduling consistant. Of course, SyFy SAYS tuesday is their highest rated night, but that has already been proven false. And it's obvious that it was false to begin with - they want to make money, not science fiction - hence putting the highly profitable wrestling on their highly profitable friday night.
Then you would be wrong. While the Infamous Adventures remake is as close to a 1:1 remake as possible, the AGDI game expands on the original, adding new elements to the adventure throughout the game. Not that either is necessarily better; but they are different games.
The remake of KQ1 wasn't even VGA (despite being called that in many an official KQ collection.) King's Quest 1 was one of the first remakes made by Sierra, and was remade using the SCI0 engine, which was still EGA based. 320x200 resolution, 16 colours. The big improvement in those games was support for devices like the MT-32. If you haven't played an old sierra game with an authentic MT-32 or LAPC card, you are missing out, because Sierra, more than anyone else I know, really took advantage of loading custom patches to that brilliant piece of kit. And even using the text display for the occasional joke when starting the game.