Samba is a competitor. I don't deny that. In fact, I thought I got that across fairly well. What Samba is not is a party to the lawsuit. They're not the States Attorneys General, nor the Department of Justice, nor have the greased the pocket of said organizations as Sun and Oracle have in the past. At best, they could make a Friend of the Court brief (damned if I can't remember the Latin term for that), but those are usually accepted during the trial phase, not the remedy phase. They can lobby their respective Attorneys General, Congressmen, and whoever else they wish to lobby, but otherwise have no bearing on the case, legal or otherwise. Others have said it, and I'll finally say it as well -- they're crying over spilt milk.
Of these three groups, are any of them actually interested in protecting their businesses from this predatory monopoly? Is anyone truly acting on principle?
If this is the principle they're supposed to be acting upon, I'd really hope none of them are acting to principle. Anti-trust legislation is about protecting consumers, not competitors. In the process of protecting consumers, it may be necessary to protect competitors of the monopolist to some degree, but that should not be their first and foremost goal.
Maybe it's just me, but reading through the Samba project's analysis I didn't get the same sense of urgency that the Slashdot article gave. As I understand it, the Samba project would be no worse off if the settlement went through. They would simply not benefit from the settlement. IANAL, but it seems to me that a non-related third party to the legal action has no "right", if you will, to profit from the settlement. That's between the DoJ, the States Attorneys, and Microsoft (and potentially AOL/Netscape, Sun, and Oracle, as they were the ones that greased the pockets that got this started in the first place).
If the settlement doesn't hinder Samba any more than they currently are, I don't see where they have grounds to object to it simply because it doesn't help them either. (hint: anti-trust legislation is supposed to be designed to protect the consumer, not a monopoly's competitors. Samba's the latter, not the former. We've bastardized those laws to the point where they're just legal protection for companies that can no longer compete in a market. There's nothing illegal with going out of business.)
Unless of course, if MS keeps up the behavior that got them in hot water in the first place - and by the looks of things, they are.
That's where the "for the same issue" part would kick in. If Microsoft were to be litigated against again, it would be for a different infraction. It may very well be the same type of infraction, but the action itself would be different. The current suit, in actuality, was solely about bundling IE with Windows in an attempt to create a monopoly in a different market by leveraging a current monopoly. The issue with OEMs was only brought in due to the requirement that OEMs install IE (or not uninstall IE). That opened the can of worms wrt OEM licensing. Another suit that addresses OEM licensing would be brought about from a different issue, as the bundling of IE has already been tried. (And, btw, the bundling charge was cleared by the Appellate Court, so it doesn't really matter any more. Bundling was ruled as perfectly fine and legal, which is why as much as people may bitch, XP was not forced to decouple any of its current bundling. As part of the settlement agreement, Microsoft has chosen to offer versions of XP without as much bundling, but had they gone to a legal conclusion of the trial rather than a settlement, there would be no basis in law to disallow bundling based on the appellate court decision.)
If more states hold out, stronger restrictions may end up being imposed anyway, and perhaps it will become clear to the DoJ that settling wasn't the right thing to do.
Sorry, but that can't happen. In the real world, when two parties settle a legal suit, the plaintiff may not bring suit against the defendant again for the same issue. It's called double jeopardy, and it's not allowed. Thus, the DoJ has settled (or at the very least shown intent to settle, which will translate into actually settling soon enough). They cannot back out because they changed their minds later, and they cannot decide to impose more restrictions (unless of course both parties agree to more restrictions, but what kind of fool would do that?). The states attorneys may be able to impose restrictions within their own jurisdictions, but they don't even have a majority of the contiguous states behind them. The rest of the country, and most of the rest of the world (excepting perhaps the EU) would still be an open market to MS, restricted only to the DoJ's settlement restrictions.
Having a monopoly is illegal. Once you have the monopoly, exclusive contracts and bundling become illegal.
Having a monopoly IS NOT ILLEGAL. In many cases, it's actually desired. What is illegal is using exclusive contracts to unfairly protect your monopoly (having exclusive contracts in and of itself is not illegal, either, monopoly or not). And just to bring the point home, bundling is not illegal either. In fact, that was the one part that the appellate court threw out -- that Microsoft had acted illegally in bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It's not illegal, the appellate court said so, and the Supreme Court refused to take the case.
Now, what is illegal is using your monopoly position to move into other markets. For instance, if Microsoft used Windows to build its office suite monopoly (it did not, as Office is available for the Macintosh as well. Thus, there was never any contention about a monopoly in that market space becuase nothing illegal happened). And as far as the browser market goes, when Microsoft began bundling IE (win98 time frame), the browser market was no longer valuable, monetarily. Netscape was giving their browser away free for personal and educational use, so do you really think anybody was actually buying a copy? Netscape simply could not compete. That's not illegal. That's economics.
This actually available in OSX (duh) and in Win2k (and XP, I presume). For 2k (and prolly XP) you have to buy an addon called WindowFX that does all sort of crazy UI things, but the best reason is to be able to set transparencies. Also, virtual desktops (to allow for multiple, full-screen apps to run parallel would be great to see worked into the mainstream (I hear XP has an implementation of this, and, of course, Linux WMs have done this for ages).
There's no need to buy anything. There are a number of freeware and shareware apps out there that will manipulate alpha blending in 2K/XP, mainly due to the fact that it's pretty damned easy to do programmatically. Also, alongside the more generic, modify-every-window type of apps, there are more specifically-targetted applications of alpha blending. For instance, there's <shameless-pimpage>Lucidamp for Winamp 2.x (I'll be working on a Winamp3 version soon that will hopefully be cross-platform, leveraging XFree86 4's new XRender extensions eventually) and my hack of the PuTTY win32 ssh client.<shameless-pimpage>
Also, if you're interested in adding alpha blending support to your win32 applications (called "Layered Windows" in win32 parlance), you can check out this MSDN page. Layered windows also go well with XP Visual Styles, so if you write win32 code, make sure you leverage side-by-side CommonControls to keep everybody happy.
This is also, come to think of it, very obvious, but a comic strip doe not rely on the quality of the drawing (I like the simplistic style anyway), but the jokes. If you don't like the jokes, you have a valid complaint, go someplace else.. but don't flame about Illiad's drawing.
When the jokes are stale, lame, or just plain awful (as UF has been for the past 3+ years), there's little left to keep a person interested but the art. And UF never had that, either. However, you're right. I don't like UF, and I don't read it. I prefer to waste my online time reading better strips, like Penny Arcade, Goats, Diesel Sweeties, 8-bit Theater, Sinfest, and way too many more to list here, all of which have (IMNSHO) better jokes, better storylines, better art, better attitudes, and better execution than UF. Sure, not all of those are daily strips, but some are. Sinfest is. Tatsuya Ishida is able to pump out teh funney (no, that's not misspelled) every day, with amazing art to go along with it. I would call T's art "simplistic", in that it's generally all various lines, with just enough shading to suggest backgrounds and such. Illiad's art, on the other hand, is what i would call sloppy.
I can't really tell if this will make it easier for people to get information about the S Office file formats.
In my mind, when the various open source office suites can read and write MS Office fluently, then there will be a real choice on the business desktop. Open Office can hold a conversation, but it isn't fluent.
See, the anti-trust trial was not dealing with Microsoft Office, or their perceived monopoly in the office suite application space. Therefore, any remedy addressing Office would have been extraneous to the suit, and would not have been accepted by Microsoft. Furthermore, ther DOJ and Attorneys General know this, and thus would not have suggested such a remedy in the first place. The compromise addresses Windows (via OEM licensing practices and bundling of things like Media Player) and IE (opening of some of the source code, supposedly) because those were the two things the suit was concerned with (Microsoft leveraging its Windows monopoly via OEMs to push their internet browser to kill Netscape).
Having a monopoly IS NOT WRONG. It's not bad, and it's NOT illegal. Abusing it is. And when such an abuse occurs, you address that abuse, and that abuse only. It doesn't matter whether Microsoft happens to have a monopoly in the office suite space, because that had no bearing on the browser market. Period. Case closed.
Right now companies are busy trying to wring every penny out of what they have. They could care lessabout attracting new customers or trying anything innovative. Any game development house that hasn't researched SDL or any of the non-platform specific systems is driving the nails into their own coffin.
That's really only true for Valve (Half-Life, Half-Life GOTY, Half-Life Gold, Half-Life Platinum, Half-Life You'll Buy This Too, Even Though It's The Same As What You Already Have, etc). Most other publishers might make a GOTY edition and leave it at that. However, if by wringing "every penny out of what they have" you mean making sequel after sequel, I don't see what your argument is. Especially since the good sequels do add innovative new features or items (let's ignore the Tomb Raider franchise, shall we?). As far as not porting to other platforms, I don't see how that's really an issue. Most game houses don't seem to have problems porting back and forth from consoles (PS2, PSX mainly) and Windows. They're not going to bother with Linux because it's such a marginal market. There's no money there, so why bother? And ignoring a valueless (monetarily) market is not going to kill a company. In fact, porting to that market just might kill them instead.
I'd rather have my programmers using open source and ZERO cost tools than having to shell out several hundred thousand dollars every year for upgrades and license fees that are unneeded.
Note that
DirectX does not require a license for you to use it
Nor does it require you to use Visual Studio as your development environment
Thus, you can use Borland's free compilers (or buy the commercial versions), or use a gcc port like mingw32.
The other problem is finding programmers good enough and smart enough to be able to write software outside a GUI and IDE.
Because we all know that only poor, stupid programmers use IDEs... (btw, all the Visual Studio compilers (for C++, VB, C#, Jscript, and so on) can be used strictly from the commandline, using makefiles or build scripts, and you can use any editor you want to write the code they compile -- vim, emacs, notepad, Source Insight, Visual Studio, or whatever)
Universities today are cranking out CS degrees that can't comprehend a command line compiler let alone understand how to create a makefile by hand. and the fault lies directly in the hands of the professors.
Red Herring. It's not a University's job to produce automaton that can write a makefile or compile the latest 'sploit by hand. If that's what you expect from a CS program, you'd do better to save money and go to a tech school (or alternatively, save money buy hiring a student out of a tech school). A properly educated CS student may not know how to write a makefile or use gcc from the commandline right out of college, but I can guarantee you that s/he will be able to learn how to do that quicker than your average self-taught or tech school programmer can learn to analyze the performance considerations of various search algorithms (for instance).
M$ has yet to drop DOS, it still seems to be in WinXP after all. They simply replaced pure DOS with something that could do everything it can (including run DOS) plus some extra crap.
I'm not sure what you would call it, but I call replacing DOS and the win9x kernel with NT Loader, the NT kernel, and cmd.exe (for when you want that command prompt) "dropping DOS". As in, DOS does not exist. Sure, you can still make a DOS bootdisk, but that's just functionality added for the sake of format.exe. Make that dos bootdisk, then try to run windows (win.exe) from that command prompt. Unlike win9x, that's not going to happen with XP. XP is based on Windows 2000, which in turn is based on Windows NT 4, which... you get the picture. DOS is gone.
You do realize that Word 2002 is already available, yes? (It also goes by the name "Word XP".) Since I just happen to own a copy of Office XP, and thus have Word 2002 installed, I tried out the thesaurus on the word "terrorist". Guess what? I got the exact same list you did! Now, if you want to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, wonder what Word.NET will do, not Word 2002 (and most likely, Word.NET won't change that either).
"StarOffice (or other OSS product you proselytize) has a full English dictionary and thesaurus. Unlike Microsoft Word."
While you may be correct about the thesaurus, you're wrong with regards to the dictionary. I typed into Word 2002 the sentence, "I am an idoit," ran the spell checker, and got the suggestions of "idiot, idiots" for "idoit". (Yes, the "idiots" part would be incorrect, but the grammar checker should catch that if I actually chose it for the replacement).
Mostly because the developers were both lazy and not very good programmers. The XBox was their cop-out since they couldn't grasp the more complex systems.
Or it could be the large amounts of money Microsoft paid to Oddworld Inhabitants to make it an exclusive title
Bullshit. You can buy the plain PS2 unbundled package at EB,K-Mart and Wal-mart. It's in a blue box. The PS2 bundled package is in a red box.
Of course. What you missed, however, is that the previous poster was talking about XBox, not PS2. As well, you can (or more precisely, will be able to) buy the XBox console all by its lonesome. Many stores (Gamestop/Babbages, Software Etc) were offering only the console as a preorder in-store, even though their online preorders were bundle only. Once the XBox is released and all preorders have been filled, you will certainly be able to walk into your favorite store and buy just the console for $299.
Since when has Windows been considered cheap?? What is the source on this?? Windows hasn't dropped in price since 3.1 came out, and its only been getting more expensive since then. Just look at the retail tag for WinXP!
While it is true that the price of Windows hasn't dropped since 3.1, it has only become more expensive with the introduction of XP ($99 upgrade for XP Home, compared to $89 for win95 through winme). One rationalization for that could be that since XP is really based on NT, it's actually cheaper (standard NT upgrades run around $200). Also, that's ignoring the $49 upgrade specifically from Win98SE to WinME. On top of that, comparing the price of Windows XP Pro to Win9x is a red herring -- a better comparison would be Win2K Pro to WinXP Pro -- or roughly $200 upgrade vs. roughly $200 upgrade. And to top it all of, if you factor in inflation the prices have actually dropped.
Also, since when are buggy DLLs and undocumented DCOM features considering "making life easy" for programmers? If anything, the Windows API is buggy, confusing, and mind-numbing.
And there's never been a buggy.so released for linux? Bah, forget I asked. As far as DCOM goes, I can't comment as I've used it very little. However, for other technologies (COM, ADO, MFC, ATL, XML vis MSXML and HTML via MSHTML, SOAP, and so on), I've never had any problems finding abundant documentation via MSDN, books (MS Press and others), third-party sites (The Code Project for example), and so on. I realize that "hidden" interfaces exist in the various Windows lines, but I've rarely seen anything those hidden APIs can do that was not exposed through a win32 or set of win32 functions. As for the the win32 api itself being "mind numbing", I suggest you try something like WTL -- a template library based on ATL that provides MFC-like capabilities without the MFC-like bloat (WTL is statically linked into your binary, but is not large enough to make a significant impact on footprint).
Isn't those limitations just about which license you have? Like they do with MSSQL Server and the per-CPU licensing scheme?
Do you seriously think there's no technical difference between a OS that allows you to run uniprocessor up to 8-way SMP, and an OS that runs 8-way SMP at minimum (the minimum requirement for fault tolerance) up to 32-way SMP? It's more than just changing a license. You have to properly tune the system for such high concurrency. There's a reason DataCenter didn't ship at the same time Win2k Pro/Server/Advanced Server all shipped.
Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Datacenter Server is the most powerful and functional server operating system ever offered by Microsoft. It supports up to 32-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and up to 64 gigabytes (GB) of physical memory. It provides both 4-node clustering and load balancing services as standard features. It also provides the rich Internet and network operating system (NOS) services of all the versions of Windows 2000 Server. It is optimized for large data warehouses, econometric analysis, large-scale simulations in science and engineering, online transaction processing (OLTP), and server consolidation.
The Windows® 2000 Advanced Server operating system contains all the functionality and reliability of the standard version of Windows 2000 Server, plus additional features for applications that require higher levels of scalability and availability. This makes Advanced Server the right operating system for essential business and e-commerce applications that handle heavier workloads and high-priority processes.
Other pieces of information not listed in that blurb about AS: supports up to 8-way SMP and 8 GB of RAM (compared to DC's 32-way and 64GB).
You're obviously not going to have a DataCenter machine sitting underneath your desk at work, but it's quite possible to do so with Advanced Server.
The review doesn't say whether the Belkin KVM (which otherwise seems really nice) takes USB mice and keyboards for input (it does generate USB mice and keyboard outputs). Does anybody know?
I did some research into this a couple months back, and at the time (last spring-ish), Belkin did not have a solution for USB-only KVM switching (I actually called them up and asked). Oh, you could certainly plug a USB mouse and keyboard into the switch and use that, but you won't get any hotkey switching, and might even have other problems if you don't have at least a PS2 keyboard also plugged in. I'd suggest the IOGear boxes listed in the review (the 2-port version is very basic, with no OSD or hotkeys, but the 4-port version makes up for that).
Toss a USB expansion card into the intel box, pick up one of the IOGear USB switches in the review, and be done with it. PS/2 is outdated. USB is the way to go for these low-bandwidth input peripherals.
Quality of cabling has as much to do with it as the switch itself. If your cabling is too thin, or too long, or both, you'll obviously get ghosting. Modern KVM switches are rated for 1920x1440 or even higher. Most can handle 1600x1200@85Hz, or even 100Hz (I run 85Hz at work, 75Hz at home) without any visual artifacts, given good-quality cabling. With my IOGear, cables were provided, and of high quality imho. With the Cybexs and Belkins I've used, I needed separate cabling, but in each case used the bundled cables suggested for use by each company. I could certainly see one having a problem if s/he went out and bought just some cheap vga extension cabling rather than spending the $30 or so on decent cables.
There had to be some ghosting at 1600x1200... so talk about that stuff then.
Why would there have to be ghosting at 1600x1200? Is it not possible that all those units were capable of supporting 1600x1200 and higher without any problems? I currently use one of the switches in the article, and use Cybex and Belkin switches at work all the time, and I run in 1600x1200 on nearly every machine I use. I've never had any ghosting problems from quality switches. Perhaps it could've been mentioned that there were no visual problems, but how interesting is that when that's the expected case?
I've been using the IOGear 2-port KVM switch reviewed in the article for several months now, and I have to say I love it. I use it to share between XP and Linux, and neither machine has ever had a problem with the USB devices. I did run into a slight problem with the video causing snow and jitters in X11 (no problems at all in XP), but adjusting the modeline (dumped via xvidtune, changed the polarity of the hsync) made the problems disappear. For anybody who wants to get away from PS/2 systems, or uses Macs, I really do recommend IOGear.
The only thing I could wish for is the OSD/hotkey support of IOGear's 4-port model, but I can live without that. Also, Tom's price was a bit high. I bought mine for roughly $100 at a local computer store.
Slashdot Mirror
Samba is a competitor. I don't deny that. In fact, I thought I got that across fairly well. What Samba is not is a party to the lawsuit. They're not the States Attorneys General, nor the Department of Justice, nor have the greased the pocket of said organizations as Sun and Oracle have in the past. At best, they could make a Friend of the Court brief (damned if I can't remember the Latin term for that), but those are usually accepted during the trial phase, not the remedy phase. They can lobby their respective Attorneys General, Congressmen, and whoever else they wish to lobby, but otherwise have no bearing on the case, legal or otherwise. Others have said it, and I'll finally say it as well -- they're crying over spilt milk.
If this is the principle they're supposed to be acting upon, I'd really hope none of them are acting to principle. Anti-trust legislation is about protecting consumers, not competitors. In the process of protecting consumers, it may be necessary to protect competitors of the monopolist to some degree, but that should not be their first and foremost goal.
Maybe it's just me, but reading through the Samba project's analysis I didn't get the same sense of urgency that the Slashdot article gave. As I understand it, the Samba project would be no worse off if the settlement went through. They would simply not benefit from the settlement. IANAL, but it seems to me that a non-related third party to the legal action has no "right", if you will, to profit from the settlement. That's between the DoJ, the States Attorneys, and Microsoft (and potentially AOL/Netscape, Sun, and Oracle, as they were the ones that greased the pockets that got this started in the first place).
If the settlement doesn't hinder Samba any more than they currently are, I don't see where they have grounds to object to it simply because it doesn't help them either. (hint: anti-trust legislation is supposed to be designed to protect the consumer, not a monopoly's competitors. Samba's the latter, not the former. We've bastardized those laws to the point where they're just legal protection for companies that can no longer compete in a market. There's nothing illegal with going out of business.)
That's where the "for the same issue" part would kick in. If Microsoft were to be litigated against again, it would be for a different infraction. It may very well be the same type of infraction, but the action itself would be different. The current suit, in actuality, was solely about bundling IE with Windows in an attempt to create a monopoly in a different market by leveraging a current monopoly. The issue with OEMs was only brought in due to the requirement that OEMs install IE (or not uninstall IE). That opened the can of worms wrt OEM licensing. Another suit that addresses OEM licensing would be brought about from a different issue, as the bundling of IE has already been tried. (And, btw, the bundling charge was cleared by the Appellate Court, so it doesn't really matter any more. Bundling was ruled as perfectly fine and legal, which is why as much as people may bitch, XP was not forced to decouple any of its current bundling. As part of the settlement agreement, Microsoft has chosen to offer versions of XP without as much bundling, but had they gone to a legal conclusion of the trial rather than a settlement, there would be no basis in law to disallow bundling based on the appellate court decision.)
Sorry, but that can't happen. In the real world, when two parties settle a legal suit, the plaintiff may not bring suit against the defendant again for the same issue. It's called double jeopardy, and it's not allowed. Thus, the DoJ has settled (or at the very least shown intent to settle, which will translate into actually settling soon enough). They cannot back out because they changed their minds later, and they cannot decide to impose more restrictions (unless of course both parties agree to more restrictions, but what kind of fool would do that?). The states attorneys may be able to impose restrictions within their own jurisdictions, but they don't even have a majority of the contiguous states behind them. The rest of the country, and most of the rest of the world (excepting perhaps the EU) would still be an open market to MS, restricted only to the DoJ's settlement restrictions.
Having a monopoly IS NOT ILLEGAL. In many cases, it's actually desired. What is illegal is using exclusive contracts to unfairly protect your monopoly (having exclusive contracts in and of itself is not illegal, either, monopoly or not). And just to bring the point home, bundling is not illegal either. In fact, that was the one part that the appellate court threw out -- that Microsoft had acted illegally in bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It's not illegal, the appellate court said so, and the Supreme Court refused to take the case.
Now, what is illegal is using your monopoly position to move into other markets. For instance, if Microsoft used Windows to build its office suite monopoly (it did not, as Office is available for the Macintosh as well. Thus, there was never any contention about a monopoly in that market space becuase nothing illegal happened). And as far as the browser market goes, when Microsoft began bundling IE (win98 time frame), the browser market was no longer valuable, monetarily. Netscape was giving their browser away free for personal and educational use, so do you really think anybody was actually buying a copy? Netscape simply could not compete. That's not illegal. That's economics.
I feel as though I'm conversing with myself! IE didn't have a problem with my shameless-pimpage tags ...
There's no need to buy anything. There are a number of freeware and shareware apps out there that will manipulate alpha blending in 2K/XP, mainly due to the fact that it's pretty damned easy to do programmatically. Also, alongside the more generic, modify-every-window type of apps, there are more specifically-targetted applications of alpha blending. For instance, there's <shameless-pimpage>Lucidamp for Winamp 2.x (I'll be working on a Winamp3 version soon that will hopefully be cross-platform, leveraging XFree86 4's new XRender extensions eventually) and my hack of the PuTTY win32 ssh client.<shameless-pimpage>
Also, if you're interested in adding alpha blending support to your win32 applications (called "Layered Windows" in win32 parlance), you can check out this MSDN page. Layered windows also go well with XP Visual Styles, so if you write win32 code, make sure you leverage side-by-side Common Controls to keep everybody happy.
When the jokes are stale, lame, or just plain awful (as UF has been for the past 3+ years), there's little left to keep a person interested but the art. And UF never had that, either. However, you're right. I don't like UF, and I don't read it. I prefer to waste my online time reading better strips, like Penny Arcade, Goats, Diesel Sweeties, 8-bit Theater, Sinfest, and way too many more to list here, all of which have (IMNSHO) better jokes, better storylines, better art, better attitudes, and better execution than UF. Sure, not all of those are daily strips, but some are. Sinfest is. Tatsuya Ishida is able to pump out teh funney (no, that's not misspelled) every day, with amazing art to go along with it. I would call T's art "simplistic", in that it's generally all various lines, with just enough shading to suggest backgrounds and such. Illiad's art, on the other hand, is what i would call sloppy.
See, the anti-trust trial was not dealing with Microsoft Office, or their perceived monopoly in the office suite application space. Therefore, any remedy addressing Office would have been extraneous to the suit, and would not have been accepted by Microsoft. Furthermore, ther DOJ and Attorneys General know this, and thus would not have suggested such a remedy in the first place. The compromise addresses Windows (via OEM licensing practices and bundling of things like Media Player) and IE (opening of some of the source code, supposedly) because those were the two things the suit was concerned with (Microsoft leveraging its Windows monopoly via OEMs to push their internet browser to kill Netscape).
Having a monopoly IS NOT WRONG. It's not bad, and it's NOT illegal. Abusing it is. And when such an abuse occurs, you address that abuse, and that abuse only. It doesn't matter whether Microsoft happens to have a monopoly in the office suite space, because that had no bearing on the browser market. Period. Case closed.
That's really only true for Valve (Half-Life, Half-Life GOTY, Half-Life Gold, Half-Life Platinum, Half-Life You'll Buy This Too, Even Though It's The Same As What You Already Have, etc). Most other publishers might make a GOTY edition and leave it at that. However, if by wringing "every penny out of what they have" you mean making sequel after sequel, I don't see what your argument is. Especially since the good sequels do add innovative new features or items (let's ignore the Tomb Raider franchise, shall we?). As far as not porting to other platforms, I don't see how that's really an issue. Most game houses don't seem to have problems porting back and forth from consoles (PS2, PSX mainly) and Windows. They're not going to bother with Linux because it's such a marginal market. There's no money there, so why bother? And ignoring a valueless (monetarily) market is not going to kill a company. In fact, porting to that market just might kill them instead.
Note that
Because we all know that only poor, stupid programmers use IDEs ... (btw, all the Visual Studio compilers (for C++, VB, C#, Jscript, and so on) can be used strictly from the commandline, using makefiles or build scripts, and you can use any editor you want to write the code they compile -- vim, emacs, notepad, Source Insight, Visual Studio, or whatever)
Red Herring. It's not a University's job to produce automaton that can write a makefile or compile the latest 'sploit by hand. If that's what you expect from a CS program, you'd do better to save money and go to a tech school (or alternatively, save money buy hiring a student out of a tech school). A properly educated CS student may not know how to write a makefile or use gcc from the commandline right out of college, but I can guarantee you that s/he will be able to learn how to do that quicker than your average self-taught or tech school programmer can learn to analyze the performance considerations of various search algorithms (for instance).
I'm not sure what you would call it, but I call replacing DOS and the win9x kernel with NT Loader, the NT kernel, and cmd.exe (for when you want that command prompt) "dropping DOS". As in, DOS does not exist. Sure, you can still make a DOS bootdisk, but that's just functionality added for the sake of format.exe. Make that dos bootdisk, then try to run windows (win.exe) from that command prompt. Unlike win9x, that's not going to happen with XP. XP is based on Windows 2000, which in turn is based on Windows NT 4, which ... you get the picture. DOS is gone.
You do realize that Word 2002 is already available, yes? (It also goes by the name "Word XP".) Since I just happen to own a copy of Office XP, and thus have Word 2002 installed, I tried out the thesaurus on the word "terrorist". Guess what? I got the exact same list you did! Now, if you want to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, wonder what Word.NET will do, not Word 2002 (and most likely, Word.NET won't change that either).
While you may be correct about the thesaurus, you're wrong with regards to the dictionary. I typed into Word 2002 the sentence, "I am an idoit," ran the spell checker, and got the suggestions of "idiot, idiots" for "idoit". (Yes, the "idiots" part would be incorrect, but the grammar checker should catch that if I actually chose it for the replacement).
Or it could be the large amounts of money Microsoft paid to Oddworld Inhabitants to make it an exclusive title
Not likely this will be ported to any other platform. Munch's Oddyssey is one of the few truely exclusive XBox titles.
Of course. What you missed, however, is that the previous poster was talking about XBox, not PS2. As well, you can (or more precisely, will be able to) buy the XBox console all by its lonesome. Many stores (Gamestop/Babbages, Software Etc) were offering only the console as a preorder in-store, even though their online preorders were bundle only. Once the XBox is released and all preorders have been filled, you will certainly be able to walk into your favorite store and buy just the console for $299.
While it is true that the price of Windows hasn't dropped since 3.1, it has only become more expensive with the introduction of XP ($99 upgrade for XP Home, compared to $89 for win95 through winme). One rationalization for that could be that since XP is really based on NT, it's actually cheaper (standard NT upgrades run around $200). Also, that's ignoring the $49 upgrade specifically from Win98SE to WinME. On top of that, comparing the price of Windows XP Pro to Win9x is a red herring -- a better comparison would be Win2K Pro to WinXP Pro -- or roughly $200 upgrade vs. roughly $200 upgrade. And to top it all of, if you factor in inflation the prices have actually dropped.
And there's never been a buggy .so released for linux? Bah, forget I asked. As far as DCOM goes, I can't comment as I've used it very little. However, for other technologies (COM, ADO, MFC, ATL, XML vis MSXML and HTML via MSHTML, SOAP, and so on), I've never had any problems finding abundant documentation via MSDN, books (MS Press and others), third-party sites (The Code Project for example), and so on. I realize that "hidden" interfaces exist in the various Windows lines, but I've rarely seen anything those hidden APIs can do that was not exposed through a win32 or set of win32 functions. As for the the win32 api itself being "mind numbing", I suggest you try something like WTL -- a template library based on ATL that provides MFC-like capabilities without the MFC-like bloat (WTL is statically linked into your binary, but is not large enough to make a significant impact on footprint).
Do you seriously think there's no technical difference between a OS that allows you to run uniprocessor up to 8-way SMP, and an OS that runs 8-way SMP at minimum (the minimum requirement for fault tolerance) up to 32-way SMP? It's more than just changing a license. You have to properly tune the system for such high concurrency. There's a reason DataCenter didn't ship at the same time Win2k Pro/Server/Advanced Server all shipped.
Straight from http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/datacenter/ev aluation/business/overview/default.asp:
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/advancedserv
Other pieces of information not listed in that blurb about AS: supports up to 8-way SMP and 8 GB of RAM (compared to DC's 32-way and 64GB).
You're obviously not going to have a DataCenter machine sitting underneath your desk at work, but it's quite possible to do so with Advanced Server.
I did some research into this a couple months back, and at the time (last spring-ish), Belkin did not have a solution for USB-only KVM switching (I actually called them up and asked). Oh, you could certainly plug a USB mouse and keyboard into the switch and use that, but you won't get any hotkey switching, and might even have other problems if you don't have at least a PS2 keyboard also plugged in. I'd suggest the IOGear boxes listed in the review (the 2-port version is very basic, with no OSD or hotkeys, but the 4-port version makes up for that).
Toss a USB expansion card into the intel box, pick up one of the IOGear USB switches in the review, and be done with it. PS/2 is outdated. USB is the way to go for these low-bandwidth input peripherals.
Quality of cabling has as much to do with it as the switch itself. If your cabling is too thin, or too long, or both, you'll obviously get ghosting. Modern KVM switches are rated for 1920x1440 or even higher. Most can handle 1600x1200@85Hz, or even 100Hz (I run 85Hz at work, 75Hz at home) without any visual artifacts, given good-quality cabling. With my IOGear, cables were provided, and of high quality imho. With the Cybexs and Belkins I've used, I needed separate cabling, but in each case used the bundled cables suggested for use by each company. I could certainly see one having a problem if s/he went out and bought just some cheap vga extension cabling rather than spending the $30 or so on decent cables.
Why would there have to be ghosting at 1600x1200? Is it not possible that all those units were capable of supporting 1600x1200 and higher without any problems? I currently use one of the switches in the article, and use Cybex and Belkin switches at work all the time, and I run in 1600x1200 on nearly every machine I use. I've never had any ghosting problems from quality switches. Perhaps it could've been mentioned that there were no visual problems, but how interesting is that when that's the expected case?
I've been using the IOGear 2-port KVM switch reviewed in the article for several months now, and I have to say I love it. I use it to share between XP and Linux, and neither machine has ever had a problem with the USB devices. I did run into a slight problem with the video causing snow and jitters in X11 (no problems at all in XP), but adjusting the modeline (dumped via xvidtune, changed the polarity of the hsync) made the problems disappear. For anybody who wants to get away from PS/2 systems, or uses Macs, I really do recommend IOGear.
The only thing I could wish for is the OSD/hotkey support of IOGear's 4-port model, but I can live without that. Also, Tom's price was a bit high. I bought mine for roughly $100 at a local computer store.