Oh yeah, they'll be brought under very quick with all those sales they're making. Vista doesn't need to be quick to the gate for Microsoft to do well. What would hurt them is if the demand for XP dropped too.
That's not entirely true.
Microsoft has bet significant bucks on the success of Vista, in both R&D and research. On the other hand, XP is nearing the "end" of its product cycle (in theory), having been supplanted by Vista. Or, to use a different turn of phrase, "old and busted" versus "new hotness."
Imagine you have an old and busted car, and you're buying a new sexy one. For some reason, you need to hang on to both, but you fully plan to get rid of the old & busted one at your earliest convenience. But it turns out that the new car has some serious problems with it, and it's constantly in the shop: but because of your family's needs, you can't just ditch it and start over. Now you're stuck with two cars, and paying upkeep on both of them...
Anyway, it's a flawed analogy, but suffice it to say that MS stands to lose a hefty chunk of change if Vista dies on the vine.
I'm reading the exact sentence you quoted, but I'm getting a different vibe from it.
The quote says that the difficulty was specifically in porting the environment. Not "the PS3 is hard to develop for," or "we developed this in parallel on the 360 and PS3 and the PS3 version has been harder to do." Just that they developed it on one, and porting it is more difficult than they expected.
I'm happy to blame Sony for a ton of stuff, but it's too early to lay this at their feet.
Don't have time to wade through the Open Group's documentation right now, but is it possible that these certifications are issued in a similar way to government security certs - that is, a specific version of the software running on a specific version of the hardware?
The city is looking to replace its ubiquitous but mostly annoying beach tags - which indicate you paid to get on the beach $5 per day, $10 for a week, or $20 for the whole summer - with wristbands that contain an RFID chip. That way there's be no more hassling with beach tag checkers as they can use handheld devices to see who has a tag and who doesn't. Last year, Ocean City spent more than $282,000 to pay 170 badge checkers and with the new RFID wristband it will certainly reduce that number. From an Asbury Park Press report:...people wouldn't even think about trying to sneak onto the beach without paying: Five to 10% of people going to the beach either try to sneak on without paying, or lie offer excuses including that their badge is on a T-shirt on a beach chair near the water... Will McKinley, a badge checker stationed on boardwalk at the 19th Street beach, said the new system would make his job easier. "It will take the hassle out of going up to people and asking to see their badges," he said. "They're more OK with it up here. On the beach, they don't like to be hassled."
Oh, great.
One of the big issues they're going to "solve" is that people on the beach don't like being asked to show their beach tags. But the shiny new RFID tags, they can check at the beach entrance, meaning that they won't get hassled on the beach. Hey, here's a question: couldn't that particular problem be solved more cheaply by checking non-RFID badges at the entrance?
But there's a difference between a work being served by simplicty of language, and a work being sabotaged by it.
Not that I'm saying that's the case with Rowling's novels (I haven't read them), but, say, Ernest Hemmingway could right in the most direct prose style imaginable, and still created books of unimaginable craft.
Holy crap. How is it possible I've never seen this before?
I know that probably no one else in the world shares this view, but IMO, Freespace 2 was the best damn PC game ever made. Ever. Any genre. Even the voice acting was great. And it managed to create the feelings of fear and foreboding in a video game without even letting the protagonist leave the cockpit.
I enjoyed the conspiracy arc too, but sometimes it would just get so god damn heavy that I would look forward to the relief of a "monster of the week" episode.
And some of those were damn good. Remember the one with the circus freaks? Or the one with the guy who can predict people's deaths?
That was only part of it the original also suffered from "going way out there" at times. It pushed the limits past where some people could bear the strangeness. It was fairly well grounded in the first two seasons, but in the third it went to places that just about (and for some perhaps did) required LSD to get the story to make sense. I had my wife into the show, she is a SCIFI fan of the BSG, Stargate, DR Who, Trek and Star Wars type. FarScape just turned out to be WAY too much for her at times.
That's interesting - my wife can't stand most of the stuff that airs on Sci Fi, but loved Farscape.
Although I'd agree about the writing being pretty inconsistent for the latter half of the series. I think the first episode we saw was "The Way We Weren't" (which was the "Officer Sun comes to terms with the fact that she killed Moya's former Pilot" episode), which was possibly the best episode they shot. It was just sort of on in the background, but after a very intense scene, my wife and I realized we'd been staring at the television, and said, "What the hell is this, and why haven't we been watching it up until now?"
I assume that you're Mr. Varghese? If so, thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. (And if not, thank you for taking the time to comment anyway. I'm going to assume you're the author for now.)
I thank you for providing a specific example of an article you found objectionable. (Irony: my place of business finds the very phrase objectionable, so much so that I can't Google it. I will try to remember to read it this evening.) I also thank you for providing a specific example of a claim that you found objectionable.
The latin phrase "pro bono publico" has a specific meaning; look it up to decide what bias his observations might have. He might be biased toward thinking that he's trying to provide maximum benefit to the public while preserving the rights of the original authors of software to their work. That might not be a bad thing, independent of your implication of his "observations" being "biased".
Moglen is by any account an articulate defender of GPLv3, but you were naming in his capacity as a journalist, not as a partisan. I understand the distinction between a "hired" attorney and one working pro bono, but I don't believe it has the implication you suggest. If I were to write, "So called journalists are doing a terrible job spreading FUD about partial-birth abortion legislation: for an example of good work on the subject, you should read so-and-so," where "so-and-so" is a lawyer providing pro bono counsel to the American Family Association, you'd laugh me out of the room. And rightly so.
Moglen's position provides (or provided) him with a unique perspective on the issue, but it is hardly one that might be described as detached. A disclaimer to that effect would have served your article well: a pity that instead you chose to attack me for suggesting it.
You spend some time in your article attacking various unnamed tech writers for their work on GPLv3, and hold up Brian Profitt of Linux Magazine, and Eben Moglen, as examples of good writing on the topic.
Can you identify a specific column that you disagree with? Or a specific author? Or at least something more specific than the general doom-and-gloom nonspecific "end of FOSS" warning that you quote?
I am far from expert on GPLv3 (haven't even read it), but it strikes me that a large number of the people concerned about version 3 aren't exactly slouches, unless you're prepared to call Torvalds a hack. I'd like a concrete example of a claim you're trying to debunk.
Oh, and while we're at it: when you're looking down your nose at other tech writers that you deem unworthy of the title "journalist," you should probably start trying to observe some fairly basic journalistic principles yourself. For example: Eben Moglen, whom you correctly identify as having worked for the Free Software Foundation, is a co-author of the GPLv3 draft, which doesn't exactly position him as an unbiased observer.
Long story short, this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and vastly predates the rise of mobile devices. And yet, we still seem to be doing fine.
Wow! And the Clinton administration would let Dr. Carmona speak out of needle sharing programs for drug users. Remember Joycelyn Elders?
Say it with me: "Clinton did it too."
Look, it's for damn sure that I'd rather have Bubba back in the White House than Dubya, any day of the week, twice on Sunday. That doesn't mean that we agree with everything he did, especially where something like this is concerned.
Nevertheless, I think it's pretty obvious that you haven't read the article, because:
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name.
"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said.
The Special Olympics is one of the nation's premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.
When asked after the hearing if that "prominent family" was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, "You said it. I didn't."
You know what? That's it. Messing with the Special Olympics? Screw you guys. I already thought that this administration was severely morally challenged, but I had no idea they could be so, abso-fucking-lutely small.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Is it only a question of time before Microsoft starts to compete directly with the likes of Dell and HP?
And also, what would that mean to their competition with Apple? Don't forget that a few years ago, Apple tried allowing 3rd parties to manufacture Mac hardware, and later decided that they wanted to maintain exclusive control of the platform. We still hear people talk about how "Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company," or "Apple can only maintain quality in their drivers / operating system because they have control over the hardware platform".
I guess we'll see what happens when Microsoft has their own reference platform to compare it against...
The support relationship between AT&T and Apple is different from other carriers and their phone manufacturers. Most of the time, phone support is done in-house, so if I buy a Nokia from AT&T, I'm still getting support from AT&T. The iPhones are being supported directly by Apple.
I'm not sure exactly what the fee arrangement is between AT&T and Apple, but the support arrangement is different enough to warrant special attention.
However there's a simple solution. All studios simply need to be encouraged to distribute their show listings via RSS. Once a few start to do it, others will want to do it as well, because they will not want to loose out.
Oh yeah, that's a simple solution. Just ask all the studios, possibly including multiple cable companies, to agree on a common data format with which to publish program information and then get them, to, um... you know. Do it.
Dude, it took Comcast upwards of three months to replace my defective DVR. What makes you think all the studios are going to jump on top of getting this done? Do you really think anyone is going to say, "Well, Sci Fi channel won't update my Myth TV. Looks like I'm not watching Battlestar Galactica anymore"?
A couple years ago, I found myself killing time in a Blockbuster Movies place, looking over their used games rack. Manhunt sorta jumped out at me (ha ha), so I figured I'd take a chance on it.
I don't think I'd ever been nauseated playing a game before. But this managed to do the trick. I'm not sure even why I played it through to the end, because I found the gameplay repetitive and sorta dull, and the gross-out parts... well, just plain old gross.
Anyway, suffice it to say that I'm not wasting any money on the sequel. And just because the thing gets banned (which is a bad thing, by principle) doesn't mean it's any good.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops.
s/in both R&D and research/in both R&D and marketing/.
That's not entirely true.
Microsoft has bet significant bucks on the success of Vista, in both R&D and research. On the other hand, XP is nearing the "end" of its product cycle (in theory), having been supplanted by Vista. Or, to use a different turn of phrase, "old and busted" versus "new hotness."
Imagine you have an old and busted car, and you're buying a new sexy one. For some reason, you need to hang on to both, but you fully plan to get rid of the old & busted one at your earliest convenience. But it turns out that the new car has some serious problems with it, and it's constantly in the shop: but because of your family's needs, you can't just ditch it and start over. Now you're stuck with two cars, and paying upkeep on both of them...
Anyway, it's a flawed analogy, but suffice it to say that MS stands to lose a hefty chunk of change if Vista dies on the vine.
Now that's a prediction that definitely merits some further testing.
"Aha! I observe an Escalade approaching me at about 70 mph. Because I can see it, I have invisibly altered the state of the vehicle, which - "
*SPLAT*
I don't recommend standing in a traffic jam. Should speeds increase again, you could get hit by a car.
I'm reading the exact sentence you quoted, but I'm getting a different vibe from it.
The quote says that the difficulty was specifically in porting the environment. Not "the PS3 is hard to develop for," or "we developed this in parallel on the 360 and PS3 and the PS3 version has been harder to do." Just that they developed it on one, and porting it is more difficult than they expected.
I'm happy to blame Sony for a ton of stuff, but it's too early to lay this at their feet.
True, but be fair: the vast majority of Slashdotters aren't gonna read the article. So, no extra ad revenue for him!
(In Slashdot's defense: reading the article would be counterproductive.)
Don't have time to wade through the Open Group's documentation right now, but is it possible that these certifications are issued in a similar way to government security certs - that is, a specific version of the software running on a specific version of the hardware?
Sir, every space program needs more badass.
That's why I would like to formally nominate Sweet Sweetback as NASA's next director.
Oh, great.
One of the big issues they're going to "solve" is that people on the beach don't like being asked to show their beach tags. But the shiny new RFID tags, they can check at the beach entrance, meaning that they won't get hassled on the beach. Hey, here's a question: couldn't that particular problem be solved more cheaply by checking non-RFID badges at the entrance?
But hey, way to spend some bucks there.
You missed another possibility: that we'll be throwing beads at pasty, flabby geeks to get them to put their clothes back on.
But there's a difference between a work being served by simplicty of language, and a work being sabotaged by it.
Not that I'm saying that's the case with Rowling's novels (I haven't read them), but, say, Ernest Hemmingway could right in the most direct prose style imaginable, and still created books of unimaginable craft.
Sorry I can't provide an authoritative cite... but even if it's apocryphal, it's so perfect that I can't care.
Holy crap. How is it possible I've never seen this before?
I know that probably no one else in the world shares this view, but IMO, Freespace 2 was the best damn PC game ever made. Ever. Any genre. Even the voice acting was great. And it managed to create the feelings of fear and foreboding in a video game without even letting the protagonist leave the cockpit.
Many thanks for posting this link.
I enjoyed the conspiracy arc too, but sometimes it would just get so god damn heavy that I would look forward to the relief of a "monster of the week" episode.
And some of those were damn good. Remember the one with the circus freaks? Or the one with the guy who can predict people's deaths?
That's interesting - my wife can't stand most of the stuff that airs on Sci Fi, but loved Farscape.
Although I'd agree about the writing being pretty inconsistent for the latter half of the series. I think the first episode we saw was "The Way We Weren't" (which was the "Officer Sun comes to terms with the fact that she killed Moya's former Pilot" episode), which was possibly the best episode they shot. It was just sort of on in the background, but after a very intense scene, my wife and I realized we'd been staring at the television, and said, "What the hell is this, and why haven't we been watching it up until now?"
I thank you for providing a specific example of an article you found objectionable. (Irony: my place of business finds the very phrase objectionable, so much so that I can't Google it. I will try to remember to read it this evening.) I also thank you for providing a specific example of a claim that you found objectionable.
Moglen is by any account an articulate defender of GPLv3, but you were naming in his capacity as a journalist, not as a partisan. I understand the distinction between a "hired" attorney and one working pro bono, but I don't believe it has the implication you suggest. If I were to write, "So called journalists are doing a terrible job spreading FUD about partial-birth abortion legislation: for an example of good work on the subject, you should read so-and-so," where "so-and-so" is a lawyer providing pro bono counsel to the American Family Association, you'd laugh me out of the room. And rightly so.
Moglen's position provides (or provided) him with a unique perspective on the issue, but it is hardly one that might be described as detached. A disclaimer to that effect would have served your article well: a pity that instead you chose to attack me for suggesting it.
Mr. Varghese,
You spend some time in your article attacking various unnamed tech writers for their work on GPLv3, and hold up Brian Profitt of Linux Magazine, and Eben Moglen, as examples of good writing on the topic.
Can you identify a specific column that you disagree with? Or a specific author? Or at least something more specific than the general doom-and-gloom nonspecific "end of FOSS" warning that you quote?
I am far from expert on GPLv3 (haven't even read it), but it strikes me that a large number of the people concerned about version 3 aren't exactly slouches, unless you're prepared to call Torvalds a hack. I'd like a concrete example of a claim you're trying to debunk.
Oh, and while we're at it: when you're looking down your nose at other tech writers that you deem unworthy of the title "journalist," you should probably start trying to observe some fairly basic journalistic principles yourself. For example: Eben Moglen, whom you correctly identify as having worked for the Free Software Foundation, is a co-author of the GPLv3 draft , which doesn't exactly position him as an unbiased observer.
Long story short, this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and vastly predates the rise of mobile devices. And yet, we still seem to be doing fine.
Your recommended reading on this topic: Things that Make Us Smart, by Donald Norman.
Say it with me: "Clinton did it too."
Look, it's for damn sure that I'd rather have Bubba back in the White House than Dubya, any day of the week, twice on Sunday. That doesn't mean that we agree with everything he did, especially where something like this is concerned.
Nevertheless, I think it's pretty obvious that you haven't read the article, because:
You know what? That's it. Messing with the Special Olympics? Screw you guys. I already thought that this administration was severely morally challenged, but I had no idea they could be so, abso-fucking-lutely small.
And also, what would that mean to their competition with Apple? Don't forget that a few years ago, Apple tried allowing 3rd parties to manufacture Mac hardware, and later decided that they wanted to maintain exclusive control of the platform. We still hear people talk about how "Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company," or "Apple can only maintain quality in their drivers / operating system because they have control over the hardware platform".
I guess we'll see what happens when Microsoft has their own reference platform to compare it against...
The support relationship between AT&T and Apple is different from other carriers and their phone manufacturers. Most of the time, phone support is done in-house, so if I buy a Nokia from AT&T, I'm still getting support from AT&T. The iPhones are being supported directly by Apple.
I'm not sure exactly what the fee arrangement is between AT&T and Apple, but the support arrangement is different enough to warrant special attention.
Oh yeah, that's a simple solution. Just ask all the studios, possibly including multiple cable companies, to agree on a common data format with which to publish program information and then get them, to, um... you know. Do it.
Dude, it took Comcast upwards of three months to replace my defective DVR. What makes you think all the studios are going to jump on top of getting this done? Do you really think anyone is going to say, "Well, Sci Fi channel won't update my Myth TV. Looks like I'm not watching Battlestar Galactica anymore"?
No.
We thank you for your interest.
A couple years ago, I found myself killing time in a Blockbuster Movies place, looking over their used games rack. Manhunt sorta jumped out at me (ha ha), so I figured I'd take a chance on it.
I don't think I'd ever been nauseated playing a game before. But this managed to do the trick. I'm not sure even why I played it through to the end, because I found the gameplay repetitive and sorta dull, and the gross-out parts... well, just plain old gross.
Anyway, suffice it to say that I'm not wasting any money on the sequel. And just because the thing gets banned (which is a bad thing, by principle) doesn't mean it's any good.