...a long delayed sequel (prequel, whatever) to a popular movie (or series of movies) that didn't suck horribly and completely diappoint everyone, ever? I really am curious, if someone can come up with one - maybe it's just impossible to do that.
Godfather Part III. Part I was 1972, Part II was 1974, Part III was 1990. That's a good chunk of time in between II and III. While it's debatable whether Part III did or did not horribly suck, and I'm sure it disappointed a lot of people, I still enjoyed it and I'm sure lots of other people did as well. Of course, when I can't think of any other series that has had such a large amount of time between sequels and managed to not suck, it's likely GF3 is the exception that proves the rule.
Ok. So how about a radio button box that upon OS install / first boot. You get to choose the programs you want to use for a specific task?
You do realize that radio buttons are for mutually exclusive selections, right? Your idea would be better implemented using a bunch of checkboxes, not radio buttons.
Yes, I'm nitpicking. But misconceptions about common UI elements like this are why we have so many applications with horrendous interfaces. By picking nits, I'm educating as well.
You need to go back in time, to a day when people purchased software. when netscape made money off there browser, and it was in every software store. The MS said "Holy Cow, we missed this whole Internet thing, lets slap together a product like netscape, and givit it away. That will get rid of the competition, then we can charge!"
How about a little history lesson for you, as well? Microsoft released IE 1.0 for free. It was crap (little more than a rebranded Mosaic). Netscape was not affected. Microsoft released IE 2.0 for free. It was better, but still crap. Netscape was not affected. Microsoft released IE 3.0 for free. Again, it was better. This time, it was much less crap than previously. Netscape started to lose some market share, but not much. Microsoft released IE 4.0 for free. This was the turning point. While IE 4.0 did have its downsides, it was a much better browser than Netscape's Communicator products. And Netscape lost market share. And they lost, and they lost, and they lost. And Netscape didn't like that, but they couldn't compete with their Communicator product, so they litigated. Meanwhile, Microsoft released IE 5.0, which slimmed down quite a bit from IE 4, while also getting faster and more compliant. And then 5.5. And now 6.0. And what has Netscape done? They took two years off to develop Mozilla, which still isn't finished, and released several buggy "6.x" versions of their browser product.
Now, I'm not going to dispute that Microsoft may have used poor tactics by pressuring OEMs. I disagree that bundling IE with the OS was bad (the bundling charge was thrown out, if you recall). However, blaming Netscape's demise solely on that is ignoring all those people that used to use Netscape, yet switched to IE for some reason. I don't believe that they switched to IE simply because they bought a new PC and Netscape wasn't preinstalled. If they used Netscape before, and felt it was a worthwhile product, they would have reinstalled it on their new PC. They did not. Netscape is dead, AOL bought them, and now they have a bad case of sour grapes.
It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation(I don't have to say the name of the Beast, do I?).
I'm sorry, but Microsoft is not the single largest corporation. Microsoft employs roughly 40,000 people worldwide. That's tiny compared to companies like IBM and GE. Sure, Microsoft carries no debt, and they have large cash reserves, and make a healthy profit off their earnings. But to say that they're the single largest corporation is just being dumb. AOL is bigger than Microsoft, even!
How can you talk about bias! You don't even know the specs of the benchmark, and already you assume that they have been stacked against your personal favorite, i.e. it's simply impossible that WinXP would be slower, so the benchmark must have been rigged.
Or perhaps he assumed from the lack of information that the Register had something to hide? For instance, they did not say what video drivers they were using (yes, this can make a huge difference), and as the previous poster mentioned, they said nothing of what else was running in the background. Not to mention the fact that while they were using an nVidia GPU, and obviously had to be using nVidia's drivers (else they'd not get any 3D acceleration, and Q3 wouldn't run), they claimed that they couldn't get X to do better than 16bpp or 1024x768. Could it be that Windows XP performed better in 32bpp? We'll never know, because the Register didn't say.
Anyway, the point here is not that the previous poster automatically assumed the benchmarks were flawed because they went against XP, but that they were flawed because the Register declined to give as much information as possible about how the systems were set up (yes, they gave some info, but not much), why exactly they couldn't use 32bpp, or even what demo they were using to test Quake3.
So Napster just wanted to give back to the music community right? That's why they went to court to fight it right? The truth is, Napster was hoping to make a buck off of artists without compensating them in pretty much the same way that those parasites the RIAA do. If they'd gone the gnutella model, I would have no issue with it.
It seems that once again, by neglecting my <sarcasm/> tags, I failed to get my point across. Of course Napster was out to get money. That's why they existed. However, I don't think your gnutella statement is right. Gnutella is about stealing just as much as Napster is/was. It's just harder to prosecute. If you're interested in "giving back to the community", you won't do so by stealing from others.
If you want to "support the artists" (which everyone claims they do) go to a concert and/or buy a t-shirt. Everything else (CD's, MTV videos, etc) just goes to pay the parasitic middle men.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. For most large bands, all their merchandising and touring is handled through the same people who do the CD distribution, and thus they still get only a small cut. But if you're talking about an independent band, it's often better to buy a CD. Especially if they did a small (10,000 CDs) run on their own. It cost them very little to make the CDs, and they can sell them for $10-$15. Alternatively, bands rarely get even a 50/50 cut of show profits, and T-shirts have their own overhead, especially in smaller bulks. The moral of the story? When you go to a show for an independent band, if you enjoy the show then buy a CD and maybe a t-shirt, rather than a t-shirt and maybe a CD.
Is there not a general concensus that P2P sharing programs promote a healthy interest in music, specifically, the obscure artists (those who often deserve acclaim 1000x more than the most of the mainstream crap).
That is a concensus among P2P users, true, though I'd suggest your sampling method is biased. Anyway, acclaim doesn't put food on the artist's table, nor do most P2P apps. At least with major labels, the artists get some cut, even if it's not all that much. I can understand an independent artist putting music on something like mp3.com, where they can offer free tracks and yet still easily sell CDs. No such thing can be done with the current P2P clients. Nor is it feasible with most P2P clients.
Here's a thought -- maybe if he hadn't tried to make a buck out it and he released it to the world, everyone would have been a little better off. But I guess he wouldn't have been on the cover of Business 2.0 (or whatever) then...
Because we all know that making a buck to put clothes on your back and food on the table is evil. Evil, dammit, EVIL! I can think of a number of things that would make the world a little better off than stolen music and broken copyrights. How about a genuine understanding of copyright law? How about compensation for the artists who create the music (in this case. replace music with art, movies, software, TV shows, books, plays, you name it)? How about the knowledge that if you create some art, it's not just going to be blatantly stolen from you? I'm sorry, but no. Napster was wrong to make it trivial to steal music in the first place. The least they could do is make a buck off of it. That way, well, there's at least a small possibility of the original artists getting some sort of recompense.
People speak of Napster as if it was something better than shoplifting made simple. I argue that while it did bring awareness of crap the RIAA has pulled, wouldn't it have been better if Napster had rather been an alternative label for publishing music? Acquire the rights to the music legally, don't shaft the artists like the major labels, and possibly offer up cheap CDs for sale as well as downloads. That would've been a major breakthrough. Napster was just stealing.
I didn't say that. What I said is that open source software doesn't "Just Work". The two are not mutually exclusive. To be complete, let me say that no software "Just Works" (well, for various values of "no". The majority of software projects fall into that category, however). Especially not software running various services. The point here was that open source software is not maintenance free, and just because you don't pay anything up front doesn't mean you never pay anything.
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to this, but here I go anyway. Goodbye karma.
blockquote> Try showing Todd some compassion. He is not an elitist ass, his parents could only afford state school! We all know that EVERYONE has $16,000 a year to spend on higher education (estimated annual cost to attend UIUC in 2001/2002).
Considering I didn't attend UIUC in the 2001/2002 school year, those numbers don't apply. When I was there, tuition averaged $9000 for in-state students, plus another couple thou for room&board (pick what you want -- dorms could cost upwards of $5000/year with meal plans. Apartments were much cheaper. Certified public housing (frats/sororities, various independent dorms) ran anywhere from cheaper than an apartment to more expensive than the dorms). So, that's what, $14000, assuming an average of $5000 room&board? So my parents could afford it. Good for me. That doesn't mean others can't afford it with scholarships, government grants, low-interest loans, work/study programs, getting a job, etc. Higher education is easily available and affordable to those who apply themselves. Sure, if you can't afford university without help, and you don't seek out help, then of course you're not going to be able to afford it. But that's laziness.
There is no such thing as inequality in America... we all go to excellent suburban public schools, no? Can't EVERYBODY's parents make enough to cough up a measly $16,000 a year so that their child can earn a decent salary? Sure, as long as they don't make minimum wage. With the current federal minimum wage of $5.15, annual income is only $10,300...
See above about getting money for college. I'm all for the government using my tax dollars to help other people educate themselves. As for minimum wage, I think it would help if you went back and understood the history of minimum wage.. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which (among other things) created the minimum wage during the Great Depression as part of FDR's Second New Deal program, was meant to succeed where the NRA (National Industry Recovery Act, not National Rifle Association) failed. In fact, the NRA was struck down as unconstitutional (or near enough as makes no difference). What many people conveniently forget is that the New Deal programs were not intended to run indefinitely. The goal was to get out of the depression and back to a more normal economy and then resume a classic Laissez-Faire approach to the market. Sadly, that did not happen. We took the first steps towards a socialist country in the 1930's, and have never backtracked. The point here? Minimum wage was meant to force a wage increase in a time of deep economic depression. It was not meant to continue perpetually as a "living wage". Yes, it sucks if a family has only one wage earner making minimum wage. Do I feel bad for that family? Sure. Would I be willing to help that family? It depends. Use my tax dollars to help the main wage earner improve his or her education so s/he can get a better job. Use my tax dollars to subsidize the family's housing while the wage earner goes and gets a second job (two minimum wage jobs, at 40 hours per week, $5.15 per hour, no vacations, will net $21424. That's non-taxed. Meaning the earner gets to keep every penny). Do not just hand out my money willy-nilly to anybody who holds out their hands. If you want my money, you have to be willing to get off your ass and try to better yourself. (as with everything, there are exceptions. Disabled veterans that cannot work and have no wage-earning family should receive special compensation. But that's because they performed a service for the country, and the country should reward them in turn.) Now, let's assume you come from a minimum wage family. Does that automatically mean you have no chance at a good education? Absolutely not. Public school for grades K-12 is free, for all intents and purposes. You may say that public schools "suck", and you might be right, but I say that anyone with the dedication can get a good education at any public school. It may mean seeking out extra work or help from teachers, but it's available. Use it. Now, after high school, it's college time. Again, you aren't left out in the cold. Financial aid is widely available and anyone from a low-income family easily qualifies for large amounts of help.
Unfortunately, based on his anti-socialism diatribe, Todd firmly believes that success is based purely on personal merit. After all, President George W. Bush Jr. is the best human in the United States, isn't he?
To a large extent, success is based on personal merit. You do well in high school, you get accepted to a good university. You do well at university, you get a good job. If you do nothing but smoke pot and slack off, you have no right to success. Socialism is fundamentally flawed because it makes the underlying assumption that everybody is equal. The problem is that people are not equal, and do not deserve equal opportunities for everything simply by virtue of being born. A college graduate that worked his/her ass off for a useful degree has more opportunities than a pot smoking high school slacker who'll probably drop out before he graduates. Should the slacker be considered for the same opportunities as the college graduate? Socialism says yes. I say no. You reap what you sow, so to speak. Obviously, blocking people from opportunities based on their race, creed, color, gender, or sexual preference is bad. But based on merit? Oh yeah. Happens all the time. It's supposed to happen that way. Oh, and I never mentioned George W. Bush Jr. at all.
However, the main issue here is a flaw in the modern assumption of what a government should do for its people. A government is a social contract, wherein the people give up self rule in order to be guaranteed such things as safety and freedom by the government. That does not include the right to a nice house, or the right to eat cake and watch circuses, or even the right to $5.15/hr for a job.
Find a way to lower, or at least not increase, taxes. Open source solutions are free. Maintenance of such systems, contrary to what M$ heads would have you believe, is about the same cost, maybe even less (because once it's running, it JUST WORKS.)
Several points here that need to be addressed.
Open Source does not necessarily mean "free". Especially in a situation like the original question poster's, I could definitely see wanting to buy software from a "respected" distributor like Redhat so that he will at least get some minimal amount of support. Okay, sure you can just grab everything you need and roll it all yourself, but that's actually more expensive in the long run. Which brings us to...
You're deluding yourself and doing a great disservice by insinuating that open source software always "just works". That couldn't be farther from the truth. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, whatever open source operating system you happen to choose, still requires at least one administrator if it's used in a production scenario. You need someone to keep track of system events (ie, check the logs periodically for break-in attempts, make sure the hardware's not failing, make sure the software is all up and running and within good operating parameters, stay on top of security patches and upgrades, etc). These do not take care of themselves. As well, UNIX administrators are generally NOT cheap, compared to a standard MCSE. Yes, the UNIX admin will be much better than your normal MCSE, but the MCSE will be "good enough", and if a company needs somebody better, they can hire somebody better (and still possibly pay less than the price of a good UNIX admin...).
The voters will automatically imply that your action of reducing costs will lead to lowered taxes and BAM!! you're elected.
Personally, I'd rather see my taxes reduced by getting rid of government pork barrel projects. Switching to Linux will save miniscule amounts of money compared with killing welfare so we no longer have to pay the crackwhore baby factories (yes, I know, the original discussion was a city government and I'm bringing federal government into it). Let's see some of these socialist safety nets go by the wayside. It's not how this government was meant to work, and it's sickening to see this country slide farther and farther into socialism. Before you know it, everything will be nationalized, minimum wage will be $15/hr, and we'll all be paying 75% taxes. Count me out.
it would have been quite a travesty for the aggrieved to have gotten no compensation.
"The aggrieved"? Right. These lawsuits are being brought by a bunch of lawyers that, like sharks, smelled Microsoft's blood in the water (in this case, "blood" == "money"). These are not people with faces, families, jobs, and what-not -- these are class action suits brought by lawyers that want to take 90% of any settlement amount and distribute the remaining 10% to the supposedly-aggrieved. You speak as if this is a criminal trial for murder.
Sympathy for the money-hungry lawyers (note: this does not mean all lawyers. Many lawyers are good, upstanding people. I'm talking about the opportunists that never fail to pounce when there are pockets to be picked). What a concept.
Like the software costs them anything beyond the manufacturing cost (what is it, a small fraction of a penny for each CD pressed?)
Okay, sure, if all of Microsoft's programmers worked for free, developing Microsoft's software for a total outlay of $0 up front (including everything from not paying salaries, to not spending money on research, to forcing "employees" to purchase their own equipment), then sure, Microsoft's cost in this case would only be the price of pressing a CD. However, that's not the case. Each piece of software given away has an associated price that indicates the amount lost by not selling that software. It's not the media that's the scarce factor here, it's the purchasing public. Let's play some numbers. Say Microsoft were to give away a copy of Windows to 1 million people. Now, let's also assume that of those 1 million people, half of them would've purchased a new PC with Windows included (say, $50 for the OEM license). That's 500,000 * $50 = $25 million that Microsoft "lost". Now, let's assume another 25% of those people would've purchased a Windows Upgrade version ($90). That's another 250,000 * $90 = $22.5 million lost. And lastly, say 10% of those people would've bought a full version of Windows ($200). That's yet another 100,000 * $200 = $20 million lost. In total, that's $25 mil + $22.5 mil + $20 mil = $67.5 million. Okay, so now let's knock the profit out of that and see what Microsoft actually lost. Assume Microsoft makes 50% profit on everything they sell (that's damn high, but they're a Monopoly, and I have to pander to the Slashdot crowd). That means of that $67.5 million they "lost", they only truly lost $33.75 million.
And none of that is even considering the price of hardware. Let's assume Microsoft could get a hell of a deal on decent hardware, say $500 per PC. That's 1 million * $500 = $500 million right out of Microsoft's pocket for hardware. So, we come to a grand total of $533.75 million. While the software losses are less than 7% of that total loss, it's still a good deal more than "a small fraction of a penny for each CD pressed".
That concludes the economics lesson for today. I hope you learned something.
Or, you could lose the conspiracy theory and enter the real world. nVidia will not release the source to their drivers for one simple reason -- they have a lot of intellectual property tied up into those drivers, property they developed by spending millions in R&D funds. Opening the drivers is simply an invitation for their competitors to steal all their hard work. Maybe that's fine if you subscribe to RMS's unreachable utopia where no proprietary software exists (and nobody goes hungry, and nobody shits, and we all sit around singing filk songs at morale meetings...), but here in the real world that's the perfect way to bankruptcy.
So, you say, why don't they just give us the specs to the boards, if they won't open the drivers? The answer here is two-fold. First, it can easily be dismissed by the IP argument above. But that's a cop-out. The real reason is because nVidia uses a unified architecture that allows them to write drivers that will work on any of their cards, from the oldest Riva TNT (not the Riva128 or earlier) to the latest GeForce 3 ti500. Releasing register-level information would undermine that process, and generate many different, incompatible drivers. I for one like to know that regardless of what nVidia-based graphics card I have, I can always go to www.nvidia.com and get drivers that will work. So why don't they release the specs to the layer above the register-level hardware? Intellectual property:) (hey, you knew it was coming.)
As for underperforming drivers, that's a by-product of nVidia's aggressive production cycles (where they generally try to have a new product or a refresh of the last product out every six months). They learned their lesson way back in the day, after nearly going under because they took so long on the nv1 (oddly enough, Sega bailed them out by contracting nVidia to do the graphics in the Saturn, and now Sega is the one in financial trouble and nVidia has moved to a different console manufacturer...). If you only have six months to get your new hardware or hardware refresh out the door, you don't have much time to work on drivers. However, driver development is always happening (just look at the frequency of "leaked" alpha and beta drivers). And on top of all that, and as a by-product of the above unified design, all owners of nVidia products (well, again, anything RivaTNT1 or newer, anyway) benefit from these driver advances. Two years after buying a TNT2 Ultra board, I was still able to get a performance increase simply by downloading the latest drivers (well, I run a GF3 now, but because of nVidia's aggressive driver development, my TNT2 latested much longer than a comparable 3dfx board for example).
Point: You need to learn how nVidia runs their business (and it's a good lesson to learn, as nVidia went from near-bankruptcy to insanely successful in only a few short years) before you go promoting conspiracy theories with no basis in reality.
Sounds like Bleemcast! (the old PSX emulator for Dreamcast). Their approach was exactly the same, "make a few games work well, and then move on to other games". It didn't work well for them, though. The Bleemcast! CDs were originally supposed to support something like 5-10 games per disk. The three CDs that were released supported one game each. If you guys can do better than that, great. Good luck, because you're going to need it.
The windows chase won't last very long. If they 'break' the API's they break them for previous versions of windows-oops.
And that's why, after 5+ years, WINE is 100% perfect, right? Oh, wait... The point is, Microsoft doesn't need to break the APIs. The size of the necessary APIs (Win32 as a bare minimum, COM, MFC, VB runtimes, the.NET CLR, etc) is the prohibitive factor here. And don't forget, most of those APIs are still growing. It's easy to add new functionality without breaking the old. That's where the chase is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So if Lindows can run those apps, then I think the majority of people will be happy. And that is called market share.
The majority of a minority may be its own market, but certainly not a very big one. Add to that the RMS-loving lemmings that don't think they have to pay for anything, and you cut your small market down even more. It's simple economics -- if your target market is not large enough to support your business, then you're either in the wrong business or the wrong market. But don't take my word for it. Just watch, wait, and see.
Maybe the gnome developers have stuff to do that is actually useful, instead of spending time on eyecandy.
Hrm. Last I checked, decent-looking text wasn't exactly eye-candy. GNOME is the only existing desktop for any modern system that doesn't have anti-aliasing. Even dead operating systems like BeOS had anti-aliased fonts years ago. KDE has anti-aliased fonts, and it runs on the same systems as GNOME. Support is available in XFree86 4.x via the XRender interface, it's now just a matter of the GNOME and/or GTK developers adding the support to their widgets.
DIY if you want it.
While DIY is the core of open source, it's also one of open source's major faults. D'ing IY is not an acceptable answer to feature requests by users. The GNOME development team is developing GNOME for people to use, right? If not, why bother? In fact, Ximian has commercial interest in GNOME, so you'd think they would at least listen to user feedback and make corresponding changes, even if the core non-Ximian GNOME developers don't. Instead, people are told to DIY, and they do -- they do migrate to KDE (or even farther -- back to Windows, or over to MacOS) themselves, thus taking care of the "problem".
How come the people who actually use the Xbox controller generally say it feels great unless you have the hands of someone under 12?
I'm more concerned about the detractors, like the parent post. These people go to the store and play the demo units with the stationary controllers, and then bitch because they don't feel right. Well, news flash -- you generally don't play console games standing up, nor do you keep the controller at waist level (or lower, depending on what store the demo unit is in -- those machines are often sized so younger people can access them, which means it's awkward for adults). Find a friend with an XBox, go play with the system for an hour or two. Hold the controller in a comfortable position (which very likely is different than the fixed position on the demo units), and see what you think. I can personally say that I've not experienced any problems reaching buttons (I'll agree that the black and white buttons are a little out of the way, but they're also smaller, and not meant as main action buttons), nor have I had any cramping during long hours of play (I can't say as much about either my PSOne or my Dreamcast, or my NES or SNES from years earlier. Since the PS2 controller is the same as the PS1, and the Gamecube controller is roughly the same form factor, I expect to experience cramping from those as well after long periods of play).
The vast majority of the people who hate the Xbox controller tend to be PS2 and Gamecube fanboys who are used to smaller controllers. Once you actually spend some time with it, your opinion may just change. Try it sometime.
If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
Pure, unadulterated genious, I say! So many development teams (in games or otherwise) tend to ignore this. They implement it one way, and then maybe perf test and tweak that implementation, but rarely do they ever try two approaches at once to see which is better. I can only assume this is learned behavior, probably pounded into our brains from that CS degree -- that empirical evidence is rarely correct, and we should find a real answer through mathematical mumbo jumbo rather than just trying out some assumptions and seeing what works. That's great in academia, but it's folly in the Real World (tm, MTV).
Would that we had more Carmacks out there in the world, not necessarily just in game programming (or even programming at all).
They did support G3 processors, which was of very little use considering Apple under Jobs changed the motherboard and withheld the necessary engineering info from Be. The last (9500/9600? MP?) revision of Apple 604 motherboards didn't work properly either, but a support motherboard with a G3 upgrade card would work.
You know, I knew this, but I wasn't thinking when I posted. My intended statement was that Apple cut them out of later-generation macs, and they obviously did so at the motherboard level (since they don't control the PPC CPU design). But I didn't say that, so I was wrong.
Could you please point out some GUI problems?
It's been so long since I used BeOS that I likely can't make a convincing argument. I do remember being less than impressed with Be's anti-aliased text (they seemed just a little too blurry for my tastes), but that's hardly a major gripe (well, except that you couldn't turn off anti-aliasing, as I remember). The mouse felt sluggish, even at higher sensitivity and acceleration levels, but that's more personal preference than anything and I'm likely too used to Windows (mouse response in MacOS feels sluggish to me, as well). I seem to recall a distinct lack of keyboard access to gui elements, hindering accessibility, but maybe because I'm not handicapped I didn't go searching out the necessary settings or tools.
But can you point out some of the significant share of problems to me? Just about every one I have seen (other than marketshare, obviously) has been fixed.
Well, you already pointed out the distinct lack of drivers. That's not really an OS design flaw, but it's still a bad thing. A number of drivers were flakey, as well (again, not the OS team's fault, just as flakey drivers in Windows are not the fault of the Windows kernel team, but just as Windows gets the blame, so does Be). Printing support was very poor all around, and the network stack had its own share of problems (I hear both of these were fixed, to some extent, but not when I was using 4.5). Otherwise, microkernel designs have never been as good when applied practically as they're made out to be in theory. The HURD is still bungling along, NT moved from its microkernel origins for performance reasons, and Be's pretty much dead. Mach is still kicking, but it's not the most performant of beasts. I'm sure there are other microkernel-based systems out there, but they're likely in small niche markets like embedded systems (which is a large market, yes, but can be subdivided into many niche markets that make up the whole).
I wasn't trying to be overly critical. I just wanted to point out that nothing is perfect, and neither is BeOS. It had a good number of interesting ideas and innovations that I'm sure we'll see reinvented in the coming years, and it's sad to see Be go away, but them's the breaks.
Valve was able to pull off Half-Life on the Quake II engine
Let's make that statement both more impressive and true, all at the same time. How about "Valve was able to pull off Half-Life by starting with the original Quake I engine"? Half-Life was not based on Quake 2. There's no way it could've been (the two were released too close together for Valve to have had time to modify the Q2 engine). Valve did have a license to some of the Q2 code, and thus brought some of that into their engine, but the majority of the code began life as Quake 1. Just to prove my point, here is a quote from id's Technology Licensing Program:
For teams that don't want to operate under the GPL, we're now offering a "non-GPL" QUAKE engine license for a flat fee of $10,000 per title... Remember this engine is the foundation for what Valve did with Half-Life...
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, that sexy John Romero chick cut her hair. Now it's all short and butch-looking. And to think, she used to be hot!
Godfather Part III. Part I was 1972, Part II was 1974, Part III was 1990. That's a good chunk of time in between II and III. While it's debatable whether Part III did or did not horribly suck, and I'm sure it disappointed a lot of people, I still enjoyed it and I'm sure lots of other people did as well. Of course, when I can't think of any other series that has had such a large amount of time between sequels and managed to not suck, it's likely GF3 is the exception that proves the rule.
You do realize that radio buttons are for mutually exclusive selections, right? Your idea would be better implemented using a bunch of checkboxes, not radio buttons.
Yes, I'm nitpicking. But misconceptions about common UI elements like this are why we have so many applications with horrendous interfaces. By picking nits, I'm educating as well.
How about a little history lesson for you, as well? Microsoft released IE 1.0 for free. It was crap (little more than a rebranded Mosaic). Netscape was not affected. Microsoft released IE 2.0 for free. It was better, but still crap. Netscape was not affected. Microsoft released IE 3.0 for free. Again, it was better. This time, it was much less crap than previously. Netscape started to lose some market share, but not much. Microsoft released IE 4.0 for free. This was the turning point. While IE 4.0 did have its downsides, it was a much better browser than Netscape's Communicator products. And Netscape lost market share. And they lost, and they lost, and they lost. And Netscape didn't like that, but they couldn't compete with their Communicator product, so they litigated. Meanwhile, Microsoft released IE 5.0, which slimmed down quite a bit from IE 4, while also getting faster and more compliant. And then 5.5. And now 6.0. And what has Netscape done? They took two years off to develop Mozilla, which still isn't finished, and released several buggy "6.x" versions of their browser product.
Now, I'm not going to dispute that Microsoft may have used poor tactics by pressuring OEMs. I disagree that bundling IE with the OS was bad (the bundling charge was thrown out, if you recall). However, blaming Netscape's demise solely on that is ignoring all those people that used to use Netscape, yet switched to IE for some reason. I don't believe that they switched to IE simply because they bought a new PC and Netscape wasn't preinstalled. If they used Netscape before, and felt it was a worthwhile product, they would have reinstalled it on their new PC. They did not. Netscape is dead, AOL bought them, and now they have a bad case of sour grapes.
Yes, this story is a duplicate. At best, it should be under slashback, as it does add a bit more information to a previous story.
I'm sorry, but Microsoft is not the single largest corporation. Microsoft employs roughly 40,000 people worldwide. That's tiny compared to companies like IBM and GE. Sure, Microsoft carries no debt, and they have large cash reserves, and make a healthy profit off their earnings. But to say that they're the single largest corporation is just being dumb. AOL is bigger than Microsoft, even!
Or perhaps he assumed from the lack of information that the Register had something to hide? For instance, they did not say what video drivers they were using (yes, this can make a huge difference), and as the previous poster mentioned, they said nothing of what else was running in the background. Not to mention the fact that while they were using an nVidia GPU, and obviously had to be using nVidia's drivers (else they'd not get any 3D acceleration, and Q3 wouldn't run), they claimed that they couldn't get X to do better than 16bpp or 1024x768. Could it be that Windows XP performed better in 32bpp? We'll never know, because the Register didn't say.
Anyway, the point here is not that the previous poster automatically assumed the benchmarks were flawed because they went against XP, but that they were flawed because the Register declined to give as much information as possible about how the systems were set up (yes, they gave some info, but not much), why exactly they couldn't use 32bpp, or even what demo they were using to test Quake3.
It seems that once again, by neglecting my <sarcasm /> tags, I failed to get my point across. Of course Napster was out to get money. That's why they existed. However, I don't think your gnutella statement is right. Gnutella is about stealing just as much as Napster is/was. It's just harder to prosecute. If you're interested in "giving back to the community", you won't do so by stealing from others.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. For most large bands, all their merchandising and touring is handled through the same people who do the CD distribution, and thus they still get only a small cut. But if you're talking about an independent band, it's often better to buy a CD. Especially if they did a small (10,000 CDs) run on their own. It cost them very little to make the CDs, and they can sell them for $10-$15. Alternatively, bands rarely get even a 50/50 cut of show profits, and T-shirts have their own overhead, especially in smaller bulks. The moral of the story? When you go to a show for an independent band, if you enjoy the show then buy a CD and maybe a t-shirt, rather than a t-shirt and maybe a CD.
That is a concensus among P2P users, true, though I'd suggest your sampling method is biased. Anyway, acclaim doesn't put food on the artist's table, nor do most P2P apps. At least with major labels, the artists get some cut, even if it's not all that much. I can understand an independent artist putting music on something like mp3.com, where they can offer free tracks and yet still easily sell CDs. No such thing can be done with the current P2P clients. Nor is it feasible with most P2P clients.
Because we all know that making a buck to put clothes on your back and food on the table is evil. Evil, dammit, EVIL! I can think of a number of things that would make the world a little better off than stolen music and broken copyrights. How about a genuine understanding of copyright law? How about compensation for the artists who create the music (in this case. replace music with art, movies, software, TV shows, books, plays, you name it)? How about the knowledge that if you create some art, it's not just going to be blatantly stolen from you? I'm sorry, but no. Napster was wrong to make it trivial to steal music in the first place. The least they could do is make a buck off of it. That way, well, there's at least a small possibility of the original artists getting some sort of recompense.
People speak of Napster as if it was something better than shoplifting made simple. I argue that while it did bring awareness of crap the RIAA has pulled, wouldn't it have been better if Napster had rather been an alternative label for publishing music? Acquire the rights to the music legally, don't shaft the artists like the major labels, and possibly offer up cheap CDs for sale as well as downloads. That would've been a major breakthrough. Napster was just stealing.
I didn't say that. What I said is that open source software doesn't "Just Work". The two are not mutually exclusive. To be complete, let me say that no software "Just Works" (well, for various values of "no". The majority of software projects fall into that category, however). Especially not software running various services. The point here was that open source software is not maintenance free, and just because you don't pay anything up front doesn't mean you never pay anything.
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to this, but here I go anyway. Goodbye karma.
blockquote> Try showing Todd some compassion. He is not an elitist ass, his parents could only afford state school! We all know that EVERYONE has $16,000 a year to spend on higher education (estimated annual cost to attend UIUC in 2001/2002).
Considering I didn't attend UIUC in the 2001/2002 school year, those numbers don't apply. When I was there, tuition averaged $9000 for in-state students, plus another couple thou for room&board (pick what you want -- dorms could cost upwards of $5000/year with meal plans. Apartments were much cheaper. Certified public housing (frats/sororities, various independent dorms) ran anywhere from cheaper than an apartment to more expensive than the dorms). So, that's what, $14000, assuming an average of $5000 room&board? So my parents could afford it. Good for me. That doesn't mean others can't afford it with scholarships, government grants, low-interest loans, work/study programs, getting a job, etc. Higher education is easily available and affordable to those who apply themselves. Sure, if you can't afford university without help, and you don't seek out help, then of course you're not going to be able to afford it. But that's laziness.
See above about getting money for college. I'm all for the government using my tax dollars to help other people educate themselves. As for minimum wage, I think it would help if you went back and understood the history of minimum wage.. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which (among other things) created the minimum wage during the Great Depression as part of FDR's Second New Deal program, was meant to succeed where the NRA (National Industry Recovery Act, not National Rifle Association) failed. In fact, the NRA was struck down as unconstitutional (or near enough as makes no difference). What many people conveniently forget is that the New Deal programs were not intended to run indefinitely. The goal was to get out of the depression and back to a more normal economy and then resume a classic Laissez-Faire approach to the market. Sadly, that did not happen. We took the first steps towards a socialist country in the 1930's, and have never backtracked. The point here? Minimum wage was meant to force a wage increase in a time of deep economic depression. It was not meant to continue perpetually as a "living wage". Yes, it sucks if a family has only one wage earner making minimum wage. Do I feel bad for that family? Sure. Would I be willing to help that family? It depends. Use my tax dollars to help the main wage earner improve his or her education so s/he can get a better job. Use my tax dollars to subsidize the family's housing while the wage earner goes and gets a second job (two minimum wage jobs, at 40 hours per week, $5.15 per hour, no vacations, will net $21424. That's non-taxed. Meaning the earner gets to keep every penny). Do not just hand out my money willy-nilly to anybody who holds out their hands. If you want my money, you have to be willing to get off your ass and try to better yourself. (as with everything, there are exceptions. Disabled veterans that cannot work and have no wage-earning family should receive special compensation. But that's because they performed a service for the country, and the country should reward them in turn.) Now, let's assume you come from a minimum wage family. Does that automatically mean you have no chance at a good education? Absolutely not. Public school for grades K-12 is free, for all intents and purposes. You may say that public schools "suck", and you might be right, but I say that anyone with the dedication can get a good education at any public school. It may mean seeking out extra work or help from teachers, but it's available. Use it. Now, after high school, it's college time. Again, you aren't left out in the cold. Financial aid is widely available and anyone from a low-income family easily qualifies for large amounts of help.
To a large extent, success is based on personal merit. You do well in high school, you get accepted to a good university. You do well at university, you get a good job. If you do nothing but smoke pot and slack off, you have no right to success. Socialism is fundamentally flawed because it makes the underlying assumption that everybody is equal. The problem is that people are not equal, and do not deserve equal opportunities for everything simply by virtue of being born. A college graduate that worked his/her ass off for a useful degree has more opportunities than a pot smoking high school slacker who'll probably drop out before he graduates. Should the slacker be considered for the same opportunities as the college graduate? Socialism says yes. I say no. You reap what you sow, so to speak. Obviously, blocking people from opportunities based on their race, creed, color, gender, or sexual preference is bad. But based on merit? Oh yeah. Happens all the time. It's supposed to happen that way. Oh, and I never mentioned George W. Bush Jr. at all.
However, the main issue here is a flaw in the modern assumption of what a government should do for its people. A government is a social contract, wherein the people give up self rule in order to be guaranteed such things as safety and freedom by the government. That does not include the right to a nice house, or the right to eat cake and watch circuses, or even the right to $5.15/hr for a job.
Several points here that need to be addressed.
Personally, I'd rather see my taxes reduced by getting rid of government pork barrel projects. Switching to Linux will save miniscule amounts of money compared with killing welfare so we no longer have to pay the crackwhore baby factories (yes, I know, the original discussion was a city government and I'm bringing federal government into it). Let's see some of these socialist safety nets go by the wayside. It's not how this government was meant to work, and it's sickening to see this country slide farther and farther into socialism. Before you know it, everything will be nationalized, minimum wage will be $15/hr, and we'll all be paying 75% taxes. Count me out.
"The aggrieved"? Right. These lawsuits are being brought by a bunch of lawyers that, like sharks, smelled Microsoft's blood in the water (in this case, "blood" == "money"). These are not people with faces, families, jobs, and what-not -- these are class action suits brought by lawyers that want to take 90% of any settlement amount and distribute the remaining 10% to the supposedly-aggrieved. You speak as if this is a criminal trial for murder.
Sympathy for the money-hungry lawyers (note: this does not mean all lawyers. Many lawyers are good, upstanding people. I'm talking about the opportunists that never fail to pounce when there are pockets to be picked). What a concept.
Okay, sure, if all of Microsoft's programmers worked for free, developing Microsoft's software for a total outlay of $0 up front (including everything from not paying salaries, to not spending money on research, to forcing "employees" to purchase their own equipment), then sure, Microsoft's cost in this case would only be the price of pressing a CD. However, that's not the case. Each piece of software given away has an associated price that indicates the amount lost by not selling that software. It's not the media that's the scarce factor here, it's the purchasing public. Let's play some numbers. Say Microsoft were to give away a copy of Windows to 1 million people. Now, let's also assume that of those 1 million people, half of them would've purchased a new PC with Windows included (say, $50 for the OEM license). That's 500,000 * $50 = $25 million that Microsoft "lost". Now, let's assume another 25% of those people would've purchased a Windows Upgrade version ($90). That's another 250,000 * $90 = $22.5 million lost. And lastly, say 10% of those people would've bought a full version of Windows ($200). That's yet another 100,000 * $200 = $20 million lost. In total, that's $25 mil + $22.5 mil + $20 mil = $67.5 million. Okay, so now let's knock the profit out of that and see what Microsoft actually lost. Assume Microsoft makes 50% profit on everything they sell (that's damn high, but they're a Monopoly, and I have to pander to the Slashdot crowd). That means of that $67.5 million they "lost", they only truly lost $33.75 million.
And none of that is even considering the price of hardware. Let's assume Microsoft could get a hell of a deal on decent hardware, say $500 per PC. That's 1 million * $500 = $500 million right out of Microsoft's pocket for hardware. So, we come to a grand total of $533.75 million. While the software losses are less than 7% of that total loss, it's still a good deal more than "a small fraction of a penny for each CD pressed".
That concludes the economics lesson for today. I hope you learned something.
Or, you could lose the conspiracy theory and enter the real world. nVidia will not release the source to their drivers for one simple reason -- they have a lot of intellectual property tied up into those drivers, property they developed by spending millions in R&D funds. Opening the drivers is simply an invitation for their competitors to steal all their hard work. Maybe that's fine if you subscribe to RMS's unreachable utopia where no proprietary software exists (and nobody goes hungry, and nobody shits, and we all sit around singing filk songs at morale meetings ...), but here in the real world that's the perfect way to bankruptcy.
So, you say, why don't they just give us the specs to the boards, if they won't open the drivers? The answer here is two-fold. First, it can easily be dismissed by the IP argument above. But that's a cop-out. The real reason is because nVidia uses a unified architecture that allows them to write drivers that will work on any of their cards, from the oldest Riva TNT (not the Riva128 or earlier) to the latest GeForce 3 ti500. Releasing register-level information would undermine that process, and generate many different, incompatible drivers. I for one like to know that regardless of what nVidia-based graphics card I have, I can always go to www.nvidia.com and get drivers that will work. So why don't they release the specs to the layer above the register-level hardware? Intellectual property :) (hey, you knew it was coming.)
As for underperforming drivers, that's a by-product of nVidia's aggressive production cycles (where they generally try to have a new product or a refresh of the last product out every six months). They learned their lesson way back in the day, after nearly going under because they took so long on the nv1 (oddly enough, Sega bailed them out by contracting nVidia to do the graphics in the Saturn, and now Sega is the one in financial trouble and nVidia has moved to a different console manufacturer ...). If you only have six months to get your new hardware or hardware refresh out the door, you don't have much time to work on drivers. However, driver development is always happening (just look at the frequency of "leaked" alpha and beta drivers). And on top of all that, and as a by-product of the above unified design, all owners of nVidia products (well, again, anything RivaTNT1 or newer, anyway) benefit from these driver advances. Two years after buying a TNT2 Ultra board, I was still able to get a performance increase simply by downloading the latest drivers (well, I run a GF3 now, but because of nVidia's aggressive driver development, my TNT2 latested much longer than a comparable 3dfx board for example).
Point: You need to learn how nVidia runs their business (and it's a good lesson to learn, as nVidia went from near-bankruptcy to insanely successful in only a few short years) before you go promoting conspiracy theories with no basis in reality.
Sounds like Bleemcast! (the old PSX emulator for Dreamcast). Their approach was exactly the same, "make a few games work well, and then move on to other games". It didn't work well for them, though. The Bleemcast! CDs were originally supposed to support something like 5-10 games per disk. The three CDs that were released supported one game each. If you guys can do better than that, great. Good luck, because you're going to need it.
And that's why, after 5+ years, WINE is 100% perfect, right? Oh, wait ... The point is, Microsoft doesn't need to break the APIs. The size of the necessary APIs (Win32 as a bare minimum, COM, MFC, VB runtimes, the .NET CLR, etc) is the prohibitive factor here. And don't forget, most of those APIs are still growing. It's easy to add new functionality without breaking the old. That's where the chase is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The majority of a minority may be its own market, but certainly not a very big one. Add to that the RMS-loving lemmings that don't think they have to pay for anything, and you cut your small market down even more. It's simple economics -- if your target market is not large enough to support your business, then you're either in the wrong business or the wrong market. But don't take my word for it. Just watch, wait, and see.
Hrm. Last I checked, decent-looking text wasn't exactly eye-candy. GNOME is the only existing desktop for any modern system that doesn't have anti-aliasing. Even dead operating systems like BeOS had anti-aliased fonts years ago. KDE has anti-aliased fonts, and it runs on the same systems as GNOME. Support is available in XFree86 4.x via the XRender interface, it's now just a matter of the GNOME and/or GTK developers adding the support to their widgets.
While DIY is the core of open source, it's also one of open source's major faults. D'ing IY is not an acceptable answer to feature requests by users. The GNOME development team is developing GNOME for people to use, right? If not, why bother? In fact, Ximian has commercial interest in GNOME, so you'd think they would at least listen to user feedback and make corresponding changes, even if the core non-Ximian GNOME developers don't. Instead, people are told to DIY, and they do -- they do migrate to KDE (or even farther -- back to Windows, or over to MacOS) themselves, thus taking care of the "problem".
I'm more concerned about the detractors, like the parent post. These people go to the store and play the demo units with the stationary controllers, and then bitch because they don't feel right. Well, news flash -- you generally don't play console games standing up, nor do you keep the controller at waist level (or lower, depending on what store the demo unit is in -- those machines are often sized so younger people can access them, which means it's awkward for adults). Find a friend with an XBox, go play with the system for an hour or two. Hold the controller in a comfortable position (which very likely is different than the fixed position on the demo units), and see what you think. I can personally say that I've not experienced any problems reaching buttons (I'll agree that the black and white buttons are a little out of the way, but they're also smaller, and not meant as main action buttons), nor have I had any cramping during long hours of play (I can't say as much about either my PSOne or my Dreamcast, or my NES or SNES from years earlier. Since the PS2 controller is the same as the PS1, and the Gamecube controller is roughly the same form factor, I expect to experience cramping from those as well after long periods of play).
Agreed.
I see theRomero is still sticking with the frog theme captured so well by Daikatana ....
Nothing makes a game more fun like frogs!
Pure, unadulterated genious, I say! So many development teams (in games or otherwise) tend to ignore this. They implement it one way, and then maybe perf test and tweak that implementation, but rarely do they ever try two approaches at once to see which is better. I can only assume this is learned behavior, probably pounded into our brains from that CS degree -- that empirical evidence is rarely correct, and we should find a real answer through mathematical mumbo jumbo rather than just trying out some assumptions and seeing what works. That's great in academia, but it's folly in the Real World (tm, MTV).
Would that we had more Carmacks out there in the world, not necessarily just in game programming (or even programming at all).
You should be careful around Jason Hall, King of the Monstars. He might eat you, RAAAAARRRRRR!
You know, I knew this, but I wasn't thinking when I posted. My intended statement was that Apple cut them out of later-generation macs, and they obviously did so at the motherboard level (since they don't control the PPC CPU design). But I didn't say that, so I was wrong.
It's been so long since I used BeOS that I likely can't make a convincing argument. I do remember being less than impressed with Be's anti-aliased text (they seemed just a little too blurry for my tastes), but that's hardly a major gripe (well, except that you couldn't turn off anti-aliasing, as I remember). The mouse felt sluggish, even at higher sensitivity and acceleration levels, but that's more personal preference than anything and I'm likely too used to Windows (mouse response in MacOS feels sluggish to me, as well). I seem to recall a distinct lack of keyboard access to gui elements, hindering accessibility, but maybe because I'm not handicapped I didn't go searching out the necessary settings or tools.
Well, you already pointed out the distinct lack of drivers. That's not really an OS design flaw, but it's still a bad thing. A number of drivers were flakey, as well (again, not the OS team's fault, just as flakey drivers in Windows are not the fault of the Windows kernel team, but just as Windows gets the blame, so does Be). Printing support was very poor all around, and the network stack had its own share of problems (I hear both of these were fixed, to some extent, but not when I was using 4.5). Otherwise, microkernel designs have never been as good when applied practically as they're made out to be in theory. The HURD is still bungling along, NT moved from its microkernel origins for performance reasons, and Be's pretty much dead. Mach is still kicking, but it's not the most performant of beasts. I'm sure there are other microkernel-based systems out there, but they're likely in small niche markets like embedded systems (which is a large market, yes, but can be subdivided into many niche markets that make up the whole).
I wasn't trying to be overly critical. I just wanted to point out that nothing is perfect, and neither is BeOS. It had a good number of interesting ideas and innovations that I'm sure we'll see reinvented in the coming years, and it's sad to see Be go away, but them's the breaks.
Let's make that statement both more impressive and true, all at the same time. How about "Valve was able to pull off Half-Life by starting with the original Quake I engine"? Half-Life was not based on Quake 2. There's no way it could've been (the two were released too close together for Valve to have had time to modify the Q2 engine). Valve did have a license to some of the Q2 code, and thus brought some of that into their engine, but the majority of the code began life as Quake 1. Just to prove my point, here is a quote from id's Technology Licensing Program: