How does Sony deserve any credit for the success of the audio cassette? It was developed purely by Philips, and their very liberal licensing model (basically "You don't have to pay us anything, as long as your product is compatible with our specs") is the main reason it became the audio format.
As for the Walkman — yes, it was bold, innovative, clever, groundbreaking, much imitated product. I never said that Sony couldn't do good products. I never even said they couldn't do good formats. As far as I can tell all their formats are superior. But all except one or two have failed to be accepted by consumers.
When a company does so much good stuff, they're obviously doing something very right. But when they consistently fail to get their stuff accepted as a standard, they're doing something very, very wrong.
The Sony hardware that uses it is also generally over priced for what you're getting.
There you've hit on a key point — Sony hardware is more expensive, and Sony formats tend not to work with non-Sony hardware.
I once considered buying an Sony MP3 player that used Memory Stick, but it was just way too expensive for what it did. I do own a digital recorder that uses Memory Stick. At the time I bought I also owned a Sony laptop with a memory stick slot. But that wasn't a big factor in my decision to buy that particular recorder -- USB downloads are not that big a hassle. The recorder just seemed to be the best for what I wanted to do with it (recording meetings).
So where were these cartels when CD-R was invented? Mind you, I'm not scoffing at the idea that media monopolies don't like freely copiable digital formats. I just think that you overestimate their ability to supress those formats. If they had that kind of power, there'd be no Internet! Instead, they go for restrictive copyright laws and legal harassment of anybody who enables mass copying.
Sony tends to fail on format because it has always squeezed to hard on royalties and the end consumer selected the cheaper formats. With the current and still growing consumer base of DVD I see the new high definition formats struggling against the existing format. Should they prove in any way unreliable (balance problems, damage easily, players thinks properly purchased media is pirated as a result of minor damage to the media etc.) they will fail.
That's a nice summary.
All of a sudden I'm sceptical that either HD format will catch on. DVD caught on quickly because retailers realized they could sell a lot of units, and practically blackmailed manufacturers into bringing them to market quickly. With the result that after-rebate costs of some DVD players don't match those of a cheap boom box! Nothing like that is going to happen with HD formats — there's no way they can bring down the price quickly, and there's the additional cost of HD monitors. It would be a hard sell in the overprivileged 90s, never mind now, with most consumer counting their pennies. Anyway, DVD is perfectly adequate for most people's needs.
Thanks for pointing that out. As I said, Sony doesn't know how to make consumer accept a format. Perhaps the culprit is Sony America rather than the main company, since its mainly in the U.S. market that Sony's formats so consistently fail.
OK, the guy who told me "everybody knows that" didn't even understand what I was saying. So here goes.
A lot of military custom and nomenclature dates from the Renaissance, when most soldier were mercenaries. Which is why low ranking soldiers are still called "private soldiers". Passing in Review was invented so that the people hiring mercenaries could see that they were getting all the soldiers they had paid for, and that they were all sober, healthy, and properly equipped. There are other bits of trivia like that, but you get the idea.
Now, mercenaries operated in mercenary companies. Configurations varied, but companies were typically led by three men called (in England of course, though there's similar usage in other countries, more on this later) the Captain (a word that has meant "leader" since ancient times) the Lieutenant (from an old French word for "Deputy") and the Sargent.
The word "Sargent" ("servant") is particularly important here. In the middle ages, the Sargentry was a social class consisting of commoners who had a lot of status, due to wealth or professional skills. This class was the top level before you hit the glass ceiling that separated commoners from the nobility. In medieval armies, the Sargentry led the infantry (then a low-status service consisting mostly of untrained peasants) into battle.
The relationship of the sergentry to the nobility was complicated and inconsistent. In theory, you had to be born into the nobility. In practice, high-ranking commoners often rose into the nobility, and this infusion of new families did a lot to keep Europe's ruling classes vital. As time went by, class structures became more rigid and inflexible; it became harder for Sergentry to become nobles, and many nobles preferred to deny their humble origins.
Back to the Renaissance mercenary company. (Somebody into military history could describe this better than me, but I think I can give the basics.) This entity actually had fewer class distinctions than the outside world, and they didn't have the rigid officer-enlisted barrier modern armies have. The sergent then had much the same role he has now: in charge of day-to-day discipline, low-level management, and representing the grunts to the leaders. But the social and legal boundaries between him and his officers weren't anything like what we now have.
Mercenary companies varied a lot in size — they were business outfits, not standardized military units. When mercenary companies started turning into units of permanent armies, they were standardized in different ways. That's why "Captain" is a high rank in some countries, and is still a moderately senior rank in English-speaking navies. But in English armies, the company was standardized as a low-level outfit.
That meant they needed new ranks for higher-level units, like regiments and armies. For regiments, they borrowed Spanish word, Colonel ("column leader") for the top job, assisted by a Lieutenant-Colonel ("deputy Colonel") and Sergent Major ("big sergent"). An army was led by a Captain-General or Colonel-General, assisted by a Lieutenant-General and a Sergent-Major General. As these job titles turned into ranks and were simplified (and, I suspect, high-ranking officers objected to titles that had the low-class word "sergent" in them), these became General, Lieutenant-General, and Major-General. And there you are.
Somebody's going to say, "You should turn that into a Wikipedia article." And if I were a typical Wikipedia contributor, I would. But while I don't mind sharing my magpie reading in a forum like this, I'm loath to put this mental regurgitation into a reference work. It's just stuff I've picked up that I can't give sources for, and I'm sure I've gotten many crucial facts wrong.
Jeez, what a jerk you are. You didn't even understand my statement. Yeah, everybody knows what the ranks are in the military. That has nothing to do with what I said.
"Saying in the CS industry"? I never heard it before. The essay you pointed to is basically sour grapes by somebody whose pet ideas didn't catch on. Lisp didn't lose out because it was "better" or "worse" — there were just other languages that didn't require people to make a major paradigm shift to learn them.
I was sort of joking. But you have to admit that Sony has a terrible track record with getting consumer to accept its formats: Betamax, 8MM video, DAT, MD, Memory Stick. All of which have distinct advantages over competing formats.
Against that the lone exception is CD. Not a compelling one, since it's just one exception, and because Sony let Phillips handle the licensing.
I'll take it as a given that Blu-ray is a good format, since Sony doesn't seem to involve itself with any other kind. But no matter how good the format, or how good its partners are, Sony seems to have a unique ability to keep its formats from being accepted.
I seem to recall people complaining about licensing issues with the MD format. This is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps Sony let Phillips do the licensing in Europe. They were always smarter that way.
Memory stick is a great format. I use it myself, and much prefer it to smaller memory modules that are harder to manipulate.
But my point (which I guess I didn't make clear) was not that Sony formats were bad. Their problem is they never get accepted. A lot of people thought Betamax was superior to VHS, and for all I know it was. (Embedding time codes in the signal seems like a really good idea.) But Sony failed to get it accepted. Sony also backed DATs and 8MM video, both of which were viewed as superior formats, and neither of which gained much consumer acceptance.
As you point out, Sony made money off of commercial Betamax users. And I assume they also did well off of DATs (widely used for offline data storage) and 8MM video tape (in its Hi8 form, the standard format for newscasters). But they would have made a lot more if these formats could have displaced competing formats in the consumer marketplace.
I can't explain why the CD avoided the Sony Format Curse. Maybe because they let Philips do the licensing!
We should have realized that Blu-Ray was doomed the moment Sony backed it. Their track record for formats is appalling. Betamax, MD, a couple more whose names escape me. Plus, they're on a serious PI kick, which is why I'll never buy another Sony laptop. They just don't grasp the concept interoperability.
Of course, for Bill Gates to get all righteous about interoperability is just a little ironic!
Where does it say that? TFA specifically says that you can write Java for.NET/Mono, using third-party IL generators. Many programmers already do that on Windows. They have various reasons for having to support.NET, but don't want to abandon their Java toolset.
You and easily anyone whos been in the armed forces knows.
Really? That suprises me. With all the technical stuff a modern service person has to learn, I'm suprised they have time for stuff like word etymologies. In general (no pun intended), people tend to take words for granted, even (especially!) their professional jargon. Only trivia geeks like me worry about where words come from.
I've already been asked to explain. But I think you should go first.
You have to keep in mind too that Wikipedia is very young. As its popularity has exploded recently, a lot of new content is being added to the site.
True. But I don't see any mechanism in place that guarantees the quality of the information will improve over time. I think that eventually there will have to be some comprimise with the idea that on the planet being allowed to modify the document.
I don't think anyone is arguing that you should take every word you read on the site as fact without a credible source, but isn't that the beauty of the site? It basically forces you to challenge and evaluate every piece of information you read and then gives you the opportunity to do something about it.
I absolutely agree. And that's why I say that Wikipedia's long term value has more to do with educating its contributers than with informing its readers.
I was going to answer the first person who said that. But then somebody else posted a message saying that anybody who's been in the service knows that one. So I'm going to wait for a vet to take first stab.
I use Wikipedia, I contribute to it — but I'm also damned critical of it. It has one big strength it has a lot of articles on obscure topics that you can't read about elsewhere. It has a lot of weakeness: too much trivia, almost no fact checking, and a lot of badly written articles.
Yes, there are also well-written articles. And, despite the lack of fact-checking, there are relatively few glaring errors. But even the the good stuff/crap ratio is suprisingly high, there's still a lot of crap.
I'm one of those factoid geeks who read reference books for pleasure. (Do you know why a Major ranks a Lieutenant, but a Lieutenant-General ranks a Major-General? I do, God help me!) I'll never do that with Wikipedia, because I never know in advance whether the article I'm about to read will educate and inspire me or confuse and nauseate me. It's a reference I find useful, but unlike many other reference works, I can never really fall in love with.
I think Wikipedia's long-term value will be less in its ability to inform its readers than it's ability to educate its contributers. It's teaching them how hard it is to put together a useful reference work, which is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Maybe someday there're be a Wikipedia 2.0 that harnesses all that effort but offers better crap filters.
It's true. But so what? Microsoft doesn't get credit for the things they do right because of all the things they do wrong. Like shoddy products and monopolistic practices. Besides, their marketing is mostly about how fucking brilliant they are — and that practically guaranteed to make people discount their accomplishment.
There's also the fact that they don't play well with other. People at Microsoft deserve a big share of the credit for inventing XSL — and it would be hard to overstate the importance of that. But, as they always do with any activity they can't control, Microsoft gradually withdrew from the XSL working group. So whenever you hear about XSLT or XSL:FO, it's in connection with somebody else.
The web page isn't that bad, although it's certainly not that good.
You have got to be kidding. Almost no actual information, eye-numbing use of colors, screaming fonts. There may be worse web pages out there, but they're all by people who don't actually know HTML.
It's something that's been widely covered [google.com] in the tech press, so it's reasonable to assume that people know what it's basically about.
Wrong. Lots of people have never heard of it.
An important part of good writing or editing is to figure out what kind of background facts your readers might need. It's hard to do well, and I could forgive the Slashdot editors if they slipped up now and then. But lately they don't even try.
And don't say "RTFA!". The purpose of the Slashdot summary is to help me decide if I want to RTFA. If that weren't true, all Slashdot stories would consist of the same text: "Read this, it's interesting".
This partitioning is a problem because any [single-homed] computers that are connected through Cogent Co, can not connect to [single-homed] computers connected through Level 3.
In other words, a server shouldn't be singled-homed. Any other questions?
Oh please. When you rent a building, you're helping to pay taxes on the building. Just as when you buy a hamburger, you're helping to pay the farmer who raised the cow. The fact that you don't own the building or the farm is neither here nor there.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the Walkman — yes, it was bold, innovative, clever, groundbreaking, much imitated product. I never said that Sony couldn't do good products. I never even said they couldn't do good formats. As far as I can tell all their formats are superior. But all except one or two have failed to be accepted by consumers.
When a company does so much good stuff, they're obviously doing something very right. But when they consistently fail to get their stuff accepted as a standard, they're doing something very, very wrong.
You wish. Hardware companies have always hated region controls. But Sony isn't just a hardware company — it owns movie studios and record companies.
I once considered buying an Sony MP3 player that used Memory Stick, but it was just way too expensive for what it did. I do own a digital recorder that uses Memory Stick. At the time I bought I also owned a Sony laptop with a memory stick slot. But that wasn't a big factor in my decision to buy that particular recorder -- USB downloads are not that big a hassle. The recorder just seemed to be the best for what I wanted to do with it (recording meetings).
So where were these cartels when CD-R was invented? Mind you, I'm not scoffing at the idea that media monopolies don't like freely copiable digital formats. I just think that you overestimate their ability to supress those formats. If they had that kind of power, there'd be no Internet! Instead, they go for restrictive copyright laws and legal harassment of anybody who enables mass copying.
All of a sudden I'm sceptical that either HD format will catch on. DVD caught on quickly because retailers realized they could sell a lot of units, and practically blackmailed manufacturers into bringing them to market quickly. With the result that after-rebate costs of some DVD players don't match those of a cheap boom box! Nothing like that is going to happen with HD formats — there's no way they can bring down the price quickly, and there's the additional cost of HD monitors. It would be a hard sell in the overprivileged 90s, never mind now, with most consumer counting their pennies. Anyway, DVD is perfectly adequate for most people's needs.
Thanks for pointing that out. As I said, Sony doesn't know how to make consumer accept a format. Perhaps the culprit is Sony America rather than the main company, since its mainly in the U.S. market that Sony's formats so consistently fail.
A lot of military custom and nomenclature dates from the Renaissance, when most soldier were mercenaries. Which is why low ranking soldiers are still called "private soldiers". Passing in Review was invented so that the people hiring mercenaries could see that they were getting all the soldiers they had paid for, and that they were all sober, healthy, and properly equipped. There are other bits of trivia like that, but you get the idea.
Now, mercenaries operated in mercenary companies. Configurations varied, but companies were typically led by three men called (in England of course, though there's similar usage in other countries, more on this later) the Captain (a word that has meant "leader" since ancient times) the Lieutenant (from an old French word for "Deputy") and the Sargent.
The word "Sargent" ("servant") is particularly important here. In the middle ages, the Sargentry was a social class consisting of commoners who had a lot of status, due to wealth or professional skills. This class was the top level before you hit the glass ceiling that separated commoners from the nobility. In medieval armies, the Sargentry led the infantry (then a low-status service consisting mostly of untrained peasants) into battle.
The relationship of the sergentry to the nobility was complicated and inconsistent. In theory, you had to be born into the nobility. In practice, high-ranking commoners often rose into the nobility, and this infusion of new families did a lot to keep Europe's ruling classes vital. As time went by, class structures became more rigid and inflexible; it became harder for Sergentry to become nobles, and many nobles preferred to deny their humble origins.
Back to the Renaissance mercenary company. (Somebody into military history could describe this better than me, but I think I can give the basics.) This entity actually had fewer class distinctions than the outside world, and they didn't have the rigid officer-enlisted barrier modern armies have. The sergent then had much the same role he has now: in charge of day-to-day discipline, low-level management, and representing the grunts to the leaders. But the social and legal boundaries between him and his officers weren't anything like what we now have.
Mercenary companies varied a lot in size — they were business outfits, not standardized military units. When mercenary companies started turning into units of permanent armies, they were standardized in different ways. That's why "Captain" is a high rank in some countries, and is still a moderately senior rank in English-speaking navies. But in English armies, the company was standardized as a low-level outfit.
That meant they needed new ranks for higher-level units, like regiments and armies. For regiments, they borrowed Spanish word, Colonel ("column leader") for the top job, assisted by a Lieutenant-Colonel ("deputy Colonel") and Sergent Major ("big sergent"). An army was led by a Captain-General or Colonel-General, assisted by a Lieutenant-General and a Sergent-Major General. As these job titles turned into ranks and were simplified (and, I suspect, high-ranking officers objected to titles that had the low-class word "sergent" in them), these became General, Lieutenant-General, and Major-General. And there you are.
Somebody's going to say, "You should turn that into a Wikipedia article." And if I were a typical Wikipedia contributor, I would. But while I don't mind sharing my magpie reading in a forum like this, I'm loath to put this mental regurgitation into a reference work. It's just stuff I've picked up that I can't give sources for, and I'm sure I've gotten many crucial facts wrong.
Jeez, what a jerk you are. You didn't even understand my statement. Yeah, everybody knows what the ranks are in the military. That has nothing to do with what I said.
"Saying in the CS industry"? I never heard it before. The essay you pointed to is basically sour grapes by somebody whose pet ideas didn't catch on. Lisp didn't lose out because it was "better" or "worse" — there were just other languages that didn't require people to make a major paradigm shift to learn them.
Against that the lone exception is CD. Not a compelling one, since it's just one exception, and because Sony let Phillips handle the licensing.
I'll take it as a given that Blu-ray is a good format, since Sony doesn't seem to involve itself with any other kind. But no matter how good the format, or how good its partners are, Sony seems to have a unique ability to keep its formats from being accepted.
Which goes along with what I said before: Sony is good at inventing cool new formats, but bad at getting people to accept them.
I seem to recall people complaining about licensing issues with the MD format. This is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps Sony let Phillips do the licensing in Europe. They were always smarter that way.
But my point (which I guess I didn't make clear) was not that Sony formats were bad. Their problem is they never get accepted. A lot of people thought Betamax was superior to VHS, and for all I know it was. (Embedding time codes in the signal seems like a really good idea.) But Sony failed to get it accepted. Sony also backed DATs and 8MM video, both of which were viewed as superior formats, and neither of which gained much consumer acceptance.
As you point out, Sony made money off of commercial Betamax users. And I assume they also did well off of DATs (widely used for offline data storage) and 8MM video tape (in its Hi8 form, the standard format for newscasters). But they would have made a lot more if these formats could have displaced competing formats in the consumer marketplace.
I can't explain why the CD avoided the Sony Format Curse. Maybe because they let Philips do the licensing!
Of course, for Bill Gates to get all righteous about interoperability is just a little ironic!
Where does it say that? TFA specifically says that you can write Java for .NET/Mono, using third-party IL generators. Many programmers already do that on Windows. They have various reasons for having to support .NET, but don't want to abandon their Java toolset.
I've already been asked to explain. But I think you should go first.
I was going to answer the first person who said that. But then somebody else posted a message saying that anybody who's been in the service knows that one. So I'm going to wait for a vet to take first stab.
Yes, there are also well-written articles. And, despite the lack of fact-checking, there are relatively few glaring errors. But even the the good stuff/crap ratio is suprisingly high, there's still a lot of crap.
I'm one of those factoid geeks who read reference books for pleasure. (Do you know why a Major ranks a Lieutenant, but a Lieutenant-General ranks a Major-General? I do, God help me!) I'll never do that with Wikipedia, because I never know in advance whether the article I'm about to read will educate and inspire me or confuse and nauseate me. It's a reference I find useful, but unlike many other reference works, I can never really fall in love with.
I think Wikipedia's long-term value will be less in its ability to inform its readers than it's ability to educate its contributers. It's teaching them how hard it is to put together a useful reference work, which is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Maybe someday there're be a Wikipedia 2.0 that harnesses all that effort but offers better crap filters.
In other words, you agree with the rest of us that the home page sucks turds. So what are we arguing about?
There's also the fact that they don't play well with other. People at Microsoft deserve a big share of the credit for inventing XSL — and it would be hard to overstate the importance of that. But, as they always do with any activity they can't control, Microsoft gradually withdrew from the XSL working group. So whenever you hear about XSLT or XSL:FO, it's in connection with somebody else.
An important part of good writing or editing is to figure out what kind of background facts your readers might need. It's hard to do well, and I could forgive the Slashdot editors if they slipped up now and then. But lately they don't even try.
And don't say "RTFA!". The purpose of the Slashdot summary is to help me decide if I want to RTFA. If that weren't true, all Slashdot stories would consist of the same text: "Read this, it's interesting".
Oh please. When you rent a building, you're helping to pay taxes on the building. Just as when you buy a hamburger, you're helping to pay the farmer who raised the cow. The fact that you don't own the building or the farm is neither here nor there.