So would you like to show me where this "Office 98 for Windows" exists? As I stated before, it only exists on the Macintosh. (Note: Outlook 98 != Office 98)
Office 98 never existed for the Windows market. It was released for the macintosh, and was essentially an updated Office 97.
... along with the 5 winsucks only specalty apps we have here at the office. (emphasis added by me)
This lends no credence to your arguments. If you ever want to be thought of as anything other than a mindless zealot whose ideas and opinions are unimportant, you'd do well to drop the whole "winblows", "windoze", "losedos", "winsucks", "Micro$oft", etc crap.
Why is it so acceptable in this "community" to use such derogatory terms, when if someone were to use "Linsux" everybody would be up in arms and crying foul?
The XBox is also getting a Metal Gear Solid game (MGS X, I think it's called, not MGS 2). I haven't seen any screenshots yet, but considering the hoops developers have to jump through to get decent looking games on the PS2, expect mind-blowing graphics and gameplay from the XBox version (which just happens to be much easier to program, and extremely more powerful than the PS2...).
And of course, megacorporation Sony, which has its fingers in many different pies and is also taking an average of $100-$150 hit on the PS2 (or more, if they drop the price to $199), is not dumping. Right. Clue: As much as you'd like to believe it, not everything Microsoft does is monopoly-oriented.
Gaming consoles are a loss-leader market. Everybody takes a loss, not just the monopolist trying to drive the little guys away. And history proves that entry into the market is relatively easy -- build a good console, get developers on your side. If XBox were to somehow become the sole existing console (not likely), and then increased prices as a good monopolist does (doubly unlikely, considering Microsoft's past history of NOT RAISING PRICES once they've attained a monopoly situation), new competitors would sprout up quicker than you can say, "Help me, DOJ, I can't compete!"
The XBox will ship on November 8th, just as Windows XP will ship October 25th. Microsoft has been pretty consistent when they give actual days. Prior slippage has been mainly when they gave a quarter or season ("Windows XP will be released in Fall 2001").
Microsoft gave an exact date for the release of Win2k, and hit it. They gave a release date for Office 2k, and hit it. They gave a release date for Office XP, and are on their way to hitting it (Office XP RTM'ed a month ago, and will be in stores end of May). They've given a release date for Windows XP, and now for XBox, and there's little reason to expect them to slip.
This whole anti-Microsoft stuff gets annoying and monotonous, after a while. Regardless of politics or anything else, the XBox is going to be a Good Thing (tm) for the game industry -- It'll basically take up the slack left by Sony with their dismal PS2.
And on top of all that, the Win2k score has stood since last July. One would expect Compaq (or others) to run another set of benchmarks for Win2k on beefier hardware, just to get back that top spot.
I do find it rather interesting that the top Win2k slots are all running SQL Server. I'd have expected to see at least one Oracle server, and maybe a db2 in the list as well, running on Win2k.
I think you missed the part about "intelligence != success". You may be quite bright, sure, but that doesn't mean much if you can't stay focused, or follow orders (believe what you want, but very few people start out on the top, and thus have to learn to take orders from superiors). If you can't work well with others, your intelligence level doesn't matter one bit in anything outside of an academic research context. Grading systems have their problems, but this is not one of them.
It's more difficult to run code remotely on NT? How so? Sure, NT ships with fewer services. It's about the same as if you install Red Hat with the workstation option... no inetd, so no telnetd, ftpd, etc. Surely any good admin will eliminate unwanted services anyway.
I'll allow that more people use unices as workstation machines these days, and thus most network services will be disabled. However, out of the box, Windows is more secure in this area -- just how many default redhat installs have been exploited due to installing (and running) BIND by default when the user selects "everything"? Note that I said "more difficult", not "impossible", and I still stand by that. I grant that your arguments are valid. I just believe that in an out-of-box scenario, Windows (NT/2000) is more secure (as a worksxtation).
How many Windows users operate with the equivalent of Administrator privileges, so they can write to C:\WINNT, their boot sector, etc? Most of them, compared to Linux users, I'd bet.
You'd be surprised how many people run as root all the time, or make themselves a new user and then change that user's id to 0 or just run su - upon logging in. Too many people do that these days, just as too many people run win2k as Administrator (or with admin privileges). Try to explain to mom or dad why they have to login as a different user when they need to install Office.
And both Windows and Linux have achieved critical mass to propogate a worm or virus quickly, whenever a vulnerability becomes widely known.
I wrote my first "free software"... free software creds, ok?
Meaningless masturbation. Why bother listing all of that? Do any of us really care? Does it somehow make you more knowledgeable about Microsoft or the Windows market?
Virii. The system is inherently insecure. Everybody bitches about it, in fact it's the number one complaint of the pro Linux crowd that Windows is insecure, and rightfully so. *System* security is a *system* problem.
Uhh... no. Windows (NT and 2000 -- I'm not even considering Win9x here) can actually be considered more secure than Linux (assuming both machines are properly setup by knowledgeable administrators), as it's more difficult to run code remotely on an NT box. As for the virus problem, the only reason it exists is because Windows is vastly more popular than pretty much anything else. As we've seen in the past few months, even Linux can have "virii" (well, worms, but still...).
System tools, configuration, install and uninstall, etc., are criminally in short supply or, where they exist, of poor quality. The very idea that I need to purchase an aftermarket uninstaller is criminal, as is the fact that I have to pay a license fee, ( built into the price of my software), to companies such as InstallShield to get the install and uninstall processes at least somewhat properly done. It's criminal that I have to pay money to an aftermarket software company such as Norton simply to secure and configure and maintain my Windows system.
By "system tools", what do you mean? Seems to me like all the Administrative Tools and the Control Panel would be considered "system tools". On top of that, you have standard stuff like ping, tracert, nslookup, and so on. And if you want stuff like perl, python, or bash to do some scripting (and you don't want to use the Windows Scripting Host), you can get them just fine. As for the installer situation, I guess you haven't heard about this nifty little thing called "Microsoft Installer". Released slighlty prior to Windows 2000, and available for 95, 98, NT4, and Me (shipped with Me), the Microsoft Installer gets rid of the whole Installshield dependency (though Installshield has built a tool to make it easier to generate an msi. You should don't have to use it). I won't even bother to mention how fragmented Linux's whole installer systems are.
It's criminal that I have to pay money to Adaptec/Roxio * to make an I/O device function properly!* CD burning is an OPERATING SYSTEM function, just as much as writing to floppy or HD is.
I agree, to an extent. The low-level I/O functionality should be in the OS. however, that doesn't mean Adaptec can't go and make a nice gui on top of it. If these companies would get their heads our of their asses and start working rather than bitching, they'd see they're not so screwed as they think they are.
For that matter, as far as I'm concerned, all development tools and MS Office ought to come with the OS at no additional charge as well, * just as they do with most Linux distros*.
And you want to be able to buy all that for $99. Yeah, right. Remember, Microsoft's software is written by professionals, not volunteers writing in their free time. For them to continue to be able to produce software, they need to charge the proper amount for their products (and whether you like Microsoft or not, I think you'd agree that they should be allowed to continue writing software and let the market get rid of them if it will, rather than forcing them out by pricing caps). On top of that, I'd rather pay money for a quality office suite like Microsoft Office, rather than suffer with a free suite like Star Office.
Ok, and how about this, *ISN'T* Linux a valid, open, standards based alternative to Windows? Hmmmmmm?
MY desktop says it is.
And MY desktop says it isn't. Woah, anecdotal evidence! That's no better than the "Linux is more stable because I had my computer stay up for three years straight, once" argument. Linux may well be more stable, but that kind of anecdotal evidence means less than nothing.
There are several possible solutions to this problem, as I see it. If you want to go the commercial route, Visual Source Safe is the normal standby, or any other commercial source code repository systems would work. VSS has poor merging capabilities, but when you're dealing with Word files or PowerPoint slides, that's not so much a problem (as Office can "version" the files for you -- though make sure to strip the file before releasing it to customers). Also, the upcoming Office XP has Sharepoint capabilities, and is very easy to use (easy enough for your pointy-haired boss to figure out, even).
On the other hand, you could setup CVS anyway, even though you said you'd rather not. There are a few nice win32 GUIs for CVS, so the end-user experience shouldn't be too bad. On top of that, if you use CVS for your documentation, you can keep that in your source tree. One less tree to manage, and you'll always know where the documentation is. And CVS can handle binary files just fine. Just don't expect to be able to merge changes.
Of course, another (less likely) option would be to move all your documents to HTML, or XML with a set of defined XSLs to transform them. That way, you could do merging just fine. However, that's most likely not a workable solution if you deal with anything but Word documents (since word can save to HTML instead of.doc).
In 3 months time, NV will announce the "upcoming" GEF4, every Tom, Dick & Harry will be saying "Ahh man I gotta wait for the new NV, the GEF3 is just outdated", prices will plummet and in 12 months time you won't be able to give away your spanking new tech GEF3.
Actually, nVidia tends to work on 6-8 month refresh cycles. the "fall refresh" for the GF3 (if we see one this year, considering that the GF3 is only now becoming available for purchase by the masses) would be a GF3 Ultra, or GF3 Pro. As well, you'll see GF3 MX (neutered like all the other MX cards -- cut out half the rendering pipelines), Quadra (high-end workstation version), and GO (mobile) versions.
However, unless you love to live on the bleeding edge (which admittedly many people do, and those that do should know what they're getting into), there's no point in upgrading your card with every refresh. If you've got a GeForce 256, or any MX card, the GF3 might be a good buy for you in a few months. If you're running a GF2 (anything but MX), you shouldn't bother with the GF3. If you're still on a TNT2 or older, the GF3 is the board to get. Amortize the $400 price over three years of not buying a video card ($125 for the GF 256 you didn't buy, $125 for the GF2 you also didn't buy, $150 for the GF3) and it becomes easily palatable.
That being said, I think 3dfx getting killed was about the worst thing that could happen to the 3D industry. Competition is much less now, and 3dfx always showed a very strong commitment to Open source.
Bah. 3dfx had sucked for quite a while prior to their death. Half-assed competition is not competition at all. However, believe it or not, there's still competition in the 3D accelerator market. ATi's Radeon line is going strong, and a new rev is expected later this year. The upcoming Kyro II board (boards? Or is Hercules the only board manufacturer?) looks to really push nVidia on the low end, as well.
With that said, you'd have to be blind not to acknowledge that nVidia is currently the leader in high-end, gaming, mid-market, low-end, and even moving into mobile video for a reason -- damn good technology. The GeForce 3 continues along that line. The only problem is that we've currently hit a bandwidth bottleneck, so you're not going to see ever-increasing frame rates. What you are going to see are higher framerates at higher detail levels when developers begin taking advantage of the new features.
As for 3dfx being "good" because they supported Open Source, all I can say to that is "bah". If you want to make your purchasing decisions based on something so ephemeral, that's fine by me. I'll continue to purchase top of the line hardware because I like getting the most for my money, all philosophical differences aside.
Re:Half the ram and twice as fast?
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But I really like it! Better interface (still some weird issues, like size of objects, 1 pixel misalignment, etc. I'm also getting odd lines around some images, and other graphical glitches
I assume by "better interface", you mean in comparison to Internet Explorer. I know it's personal preference, but I think IE's interface on the mac is pretty slick. Certainly better than Mozilla's two standard themes (though I guess a different theme might change that). On top of that the mac version of IE is the premier browser for standards compliance. You shouldn't have any weird rendering issues with it at all.
would like the ability to make the back buttons, etc smaller... didn't see a prefs option for that.
That's the price of using themes for the interface. If you want smaller icons, you need a different theme. To my knowledge, Mozilla doesn't allow embedding multiple image sizes in a theme to allow such customization.
But this is why it's so likely it is false. Wow a memo that perfectly states the outsider's view of the situation. Spectacular!
Why is it that when a supposed internal mail from Microsoft gets leaked, everybody simply assumes it's authentic, yet if internal memos from other companies get leaked, they're assumed to be fake? Bit of a double standard, doncha think?
Oddly enough, Microsoft helped write the standard.
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The GPL 'infects' your code by allowing you to take is WITHOUT financial recompense, which it would be perfectly within the rights of the author to demand, and asks only that if you modify the code to give those modifications back under the same terms that you obtained the original code * for free.*
What you're missing is the case where you simply want to link against a GPL'ed library, or embed a GPL'ed component, without making any changes. Under the GPL, that doesn't matter -- you still have to adopt the GPL for your own code, and distribute the source for it.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation for a moment to see what the problem is. First off, let's assume that there's a widely-used widget library that's unfortunately licensed under the GPL, let's call it HTK (Hypothetical Tool Kit) (aside: I know the LGPL exists for just this reason, and I also realize that few useful libraries are GPLed anymore, in favor of the LGPL, but this is a hypothetical situation, so we're ignoring that for now since the article was really only talking about the GPL). Now, let's also assume that public demand has caused Microsoft to realize that they need to port their software to linux, starting with Office. Since the HTK is so popular in our imaginary world, and thus is guaranteed to be on roughly 90%+ of all linux installations, Microsoft decides to use the HTK for their port. But wait! To do so means that all of Office's source code must be opened up, which is unaccetable. Thus, Microsoft is given a poor set of choices:
Continue on using our hypothetical widget set, and living with the consequences (forced open-sourcing of one of their major cash cow products)
Use a different, less ubiquitous widget set with a more forgiving license
Develop their own widget set
Give up on linux development
Which do you think they'd choose?
The irony is that MS is bashing a license that is * totally in keeping* with its own from a legal standpoint, and only exists BECAUSE of such intellectual property laws as protect MS's rights
Taking a narrow view of the two licenses, you're correct -- both "protect" IP rights, though in vastly different ways. However, ignoring all the supposed benefits of an open source license and the fact that you have to pay for most Microsoft products, Microsoft's typical license is much more forgiving than the GPL. You're allowed to use any of Microsoft's published objects in any manner you wish, with the exception that some objects may require you to purchase a different licensing agreement if you plan to sell your product for lots of money. You can embed internet explorer's html rendering engine, the msxml XML parser, or even Word's document rendering engine, and you're not forced to change the license of your application. You can very well give away your source code, or not, but it's your choice whether or not to do so, not Microsoft's choice or RMS's choice.. Doing the same with the GPL requires that you license your code under the GPL as well.
Besides, if you spend too much time trying to listen to gamers' suggestions and not enough time on being creative, you're going to end up with recycled games. There's only so many iterations of Mortal Kombat you can make before it gets old. Nobody was asking for FPSes until somebody got creative and made Wolfenstein.
I was talking about the XBox hardware team, not any of the gaming groups. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I'm not familiar with the Madness games
I'm referring to Monster Truck Madness, Motocross Madness, Midtown Madness, and the sequels thereof. Sure, you'll just reply with, "Whee, racing games. More of the same," and there's little I can say to prove otherwise, except that the games are all great fun to play (which is what matters, when you think about it).
MechWarrior 3 & 4: Microsoft only bought the rights to the BattleTech line after the success of MechWarriors 1 & 2, Activision titles. I also have the feeling that FASA got screwed over somewhere in that deal, too...
Yes, Microsoft bought the FASA license after Activision made a set of good games (Mech2, Mech2: Mercennaries, and the addons for each). I wouldn't go so far as to say that Mech1 was a hit, though. But, even so, Microsoft has done a much better job with the license than Activision ever did (IMHO, of course).
All I'm seeing here is the trend of Microsoft trying to get into some pre-existing action. If Microsoft REALLY knew what gamers wanted, they wouldn't have to play catch-up to publish their own works in a pre-existing genre.
I'll be the first to admit that Microsoft doesn't often break new ground. However, what Microsoft does do extremely well is take an existing concept (app type, game genre, what have you), and really improve upon it. Sure, Flight Simulator can be considered "just another flight sim", but it has a host of well-done features that, while they have been copied by other games, are still first-class implementations (real-time weather, radio chatter, air traffic control, extreme customizability, etc). To go along with that, Microsoft more often acts as a publisher, rather than a developer, when dealing with games (along the lines of what Sierra is doing these days). With their marketing muscle and excellent distribution network, many game developers could do much worse than being published by Microsoft.
All the companies you named (except maybe Epic) are signing on for all three systems. It makes business sense to spread the love, making sure you have as wide a customer base as possible. Heck, even id has seen its titles on the SNES and N64.
Epic has already released Unreal Tournament for DC and PS2, so they're no different from the others I mentioned. What I didn't say is that those developers were signed on exclusively for the XBox. Few are. In fact, there are very few third-party development houses that do anything exclusively, anymore (SquareSoft is one of the few remaining). That's not necessarily a bad thing. With that said, the XBox will have its share of exclusive titles, such as the new Oddworld game, and Halo (which is not 100% exlcusive, as it'll be released for the PC as well, but it's exclusive as far as consoles are concerned). Yes, Microsoft is publishing those games. So? It's the same way Rare develops games for Nintendo to publish exclusively.
From where I sit, the majority of new gaming innovation will take place on either the GameCube or the PS2. Xbox players will just be getting sloppy seconds from Microsoft Publishing as new territory is explored on the other two systems.
Can you back that up with examples? As of right now, I haven't seen anything that I'd call truly "revolutionary" for the PS2. Yes, Metal Gear Solid 2 is going to look great and play well, but it's just the next step in the evolution of Metal Gear (Plus, Konami is making a Metal Gear Solid game for the XBox, though not MGS2...). Sure, FFX will also look great, and is supposedly going to be the first FF with a voice track, but is it really going to be anything so revolutionary over what's come before in the series? Now, to use your own argument above against you, many development houses are going to be targetting multiple consoles. That means we'll see Super Hyper Impact Street Fighter 3 ex Alpha 2 for the XBox and the PS2, and probably even the GameCube. Sega is also going to be developing for multiple platforms (including the GBA). Because of the importance of third-party titles, I think what this next console "war" is going to come down to is the ease of development. The PS2 has already lost smaller development houses (which, btw, are oftentimes the ones that come up with the more unique games, like Chu Chu Rocket), due to the extremely steep learning curve (learning a new console costs money, and the steeper the curve, the more expensive it gets). In that respect, I think the XBox will be able to pull a major coup, in that Microsoft has always provided excellent developer support.
Looking at how Microsoft relies more on marketing, hype, and copy-cat tactics than actually trying to figure out what the gamers want, I'm guessing it's the second one.:)
So I take it the fact that the XBox design team toured the States, visiting gamers' homes, getting input on what gamers want, is just a copycat move, that every company does that during the research and design period? Or the fact that a number of Microsoft-written and Microsoft-published games have been great games, often topping many gaming top-10 lists (Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, the * Madness games, Mechwarrior games, and more) is just hype? And I guess the 150+ third-party developers that have already signed on (including big names, like Sega, Capcom, and Konami from the console side, and Epic and id from the PC side) are just marketing?
XFCE, like Blackbox and other "minimal" window managers, uses a very small number of pixmaps, compared to stuff like Enlightenment, Sawfish, KDE, and even Window Maker (depending on your theme). As was stated in the interview, XFCE's "theme" support is more of a "border-drawing plugin" thing (where it's not really a plugin yet, but most likely will end up being so), rather than "draw a bunch of pixmaps, and stretchblit them onto the window borders". Pixmaps eat up RAM, and depending on the quality and implementation of 2D acceleration for your video card, using native drawing primitives is faster than blitting pixmaps around (especially when you have to do transformations on the pixmaps, like stretching or rotations).
I don't have any benchmark numbers, but I'm sure if you dig around on Google you can find a few comparisons.
Ion takes it a bit further and forces all windows to maximize to fit a fix sized box (frame). You can have multiple programs in a given frame and can navigate thru them or move from frame to frame with mouse or keystrokes. It's truly odd and a big departure from traditional CDE or Windows knockoffs.
Tiling window management has been around since forever. Hell, Windows 1.0 didn't have the concept of overlapped windows, but instead "forced all windows to maximize to fit a fix sized box" (aka, tiled the windows). What Ion, and other tiling managers do is nothing new. They're just adding some new features, just like all the overlapping managers have been doing since the Macintosh.
Pretty much everything's been done before, in some form or another. This is no exception.
I know it doesn't have the widespread appeal of your typical first person shooter, but it is a far superior game.
I think this is a very common misperception. Gameplay is all about how easily the gamer loses himself in the game, encompassing everything from input, to graphical representation (which doesn't need to be utilizing the very latest in 3D rendering, thus requiring a GeForce 3. For the type of game, an ascii interface is perfectly fine for nethack (I know there are tile-based guis for it, as well)), to story and plot, and so on. Not all factors always matter. For instance, graphics have little to do with nethack, and story has little to do with Quake 3 Arena. However, Quake 3 has gameplay that is just as good as, if not better than, nethack, in terms of a hack'n'slash type game (pure action). It's not even fair to hold up (arguably) the best roguelike game to your "average" or worse FPS (say, Daikatana). That'd be like holding up Half-life to the crudest roguelike out there, and thus claiming that Half-Life is a far superior game (and by saying so, also inferring that all roguelikes are poo).
Judge gameplay by context. It's pretty hard to compare an average FPS to an average roguelike, except that the "average" games typically fall short in the "gameplay" department, regardless of genre.
I think gameplay needs to come before flashy effects. People will notice quality in the long run, so if you can do this you CAN make something that competes.
The goal is balance. There's no point in pushing for the best graphics in the world if you have no game to back it up, but the converse is true as well -- a game with an interface that was clearly neglected, added on as an after thought, is not a good game, no matter how promising the gameplay. Now, going back to the roguelike games, that doesn't mean you have to have a deformable 3D world with dynamic LOD and a state-of-the-art terrain engine. It simply means that spending time and thought on your "graphics" (such as they are) is necessary, and shouldn't be simply tacked on at the end.
The chief way to get into the gaming industry these days is a combination of modding and schooling. Many of today's "Gaming Gods" (for lack of a less-lame term) got their start doing mods. The TeamFortress people, now working at Valve; Steven Polge, the guy who wrote the first real bot for Quake1, the Reaper Bot, now working for Epic Games; GreenMarine, LeveLord, Stevie Case, and so on. Mods in the gaming industry have become the equivalent of an artist's portfolio. They give you game the creation experience you need to get a game design job.
At the same time, don't forget that schooling is important. Ignore what all the high school drop-outs turned IT bigshot turned homeless bum on the dole say about schooling being useless. It's far from it, if you take the time to apply yourself and actually learn something. Depending on what type or role you want to play, many different majors would be useful. Want to be more involved in the design of a game? Get a business major, with an English minor and an emphasis in a graphic art. Want to be an engine programmer? Take all the math you can. And once you think you have enough math, take some more. A CS degree is also useful, to help teach you proper coding and design discipline and algorithmic analysis. Want to be an artist? Attend a good design school. Want to be a sound engineer? Get a music degree. Your education shouldn't stop with a college degree, but you're that far ahead of those without one (and that gives you a slight edge against those without when applying for a job, which is very nice to have in today's economy).
Above all, though, don't forget to have fun. If you're not having fun, trying to pump out a mod or a tetris clone or whatever because you feel that you have to rather than because you want to, then you're on the wrong track. Take a step back, look at where you're at, and re-evaluate what you want to do with your life.
Try the FreeSpace series. Really very good (and the "Descent:" part on the first one is a misnomer, and only exists because Interplay originially didn't think FreeSpace could do well on its own).
King's Quest 4-7
Dagger of Amon-Ra, Gabriel Knight 1
Loom, Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max
While it's true there's little left in the way of adventure gaming these days, why not try out Gabriel Knight 3, Escape From Monkey Island, and The Longest Journey?
Ultima 4-7
Try the first two Fallout games (yes, they're post-apolcalyptic, not fantasy, but they're good role-playing games), or the Baldur's Gate games and expansions. Or on the console front, check out Final Fantasy IX.
As you see, there are plenty of current games that fit the bill. Sure, they may not be King's Quest 26, or Wing Commander 18, or Ultima 10, but that's okay -- I'm of the opinion that a series can only go so long without getting stale and unimaginative.
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So would you like to show me where this "Office 98 for Windows" exists? As I stated before, it only exists on the Macintosh. (Note: Outlook 98 != Office 98)
Or maybe he didn't condone piracy in his article, thus making it not worth the editors' time?
Could be, could be ...
Office 98 never existed for the Windows market. It was released for the macintosh, and was essentially an updated Office 97.
This lends no credence to your arguments. If you ever want to be thought of as anything other than a mindless zealot whose ideas and opinions are unimportant, you'd do well to drop the whole "winblows", "windoze", "losedos", "winsucks", "Micro$oft", etc crap.
Why is it so acceptable in this "community" to use such derogatory terms, when if someone were to use "Linsux" everybody would be up in arms and crying foul?
The XBox is also getting a Metal Gear Solid game (MGS X, I think it's called, not MGS 2). I haven't seen any screenshots yet, but considering the hoops developers have to jump through to get decent looking games on the PS2, expect mind-blowing graphics and gameplay from the XBox version (which just happens to be much easier to program, and extremely more powerful than the PS2 ...).
And of course, megacorporation Sony, which has its fingers in many different pies and is also taking an average of $100-$150 hit on the PS2 (or more, if they drop the price to $199), is not dumping. Right. Clue: As much as you'd like to believe it, not everything Microsoft does is monopoly-oriented.
Gaming consoles are a loss-leader market. Everybody takes a loss, not just the monopolist trying to drive the little guys away. And history proves that entry into the market is relatively easy -- build a good console, get developers on your side. If XBox were to somehow become the sole existing console (not likely), and then increased prices as a good monopolist does (doubly unlikely, considering Microsoft's past history of NOT RAISING PRICES once they've attained a monopoly situation), new competitors would sprout up quicker than you can say, "Help me, DOJ, I can't compete!"
The XBox will ship on November 8th, just as Windows XP will ship October 25th. Microsoft has been pretty consistent when they give actual days. Prior slippage has been mainly when they gave a quarter or season ("Windows XP will be released in Fall 2001").
Microsoft gave an exact date for the release of Win2k, and hit it. They gave a release date for Office 2k, and hit it. They gave a release date for Office XP, and are on their way to hitting it (Office XP RTM'ed a month ago, and will be in stores end of May). They've given a release date for Windows XP, and now for XBox, and there's little reason to expect them to slip.
This whole anti-Microsoft stuff gets annoying and monotonous, after a while. Regardless of politics or anything else, the XBox is going to be a Good Thing (tm) for the game industry -- It'll basically take up the slack left by Sony with their dismal PS2.
And on top of all that, the Win2k score has stood since last July. One would expect Compaq (or others) to run another set of benchmarks for Win2k on beefier hardware, just to get back that top spot.
I do find it rather interesting that the top Win2k slots are all running SQL Server. I'd have expected to see at least one Oracle server, and maybe a db2 in the list as well, running on Win2k.
Actually, Data Center only does up to 32 CPUs (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/datacenter/e valuation/business/overview/default.asp). However, that's still pretty impressive for x86 hardware.
I think you missed the part about "intelligence != success". You may be quite bright, sure, but that doesn't mean much if you can't stay focused, or follow orders (believe what you want, but very few people start out on the top, and thus have to learn to take orders from superiors). If you can't work well with others, your intelligence level doesn't matter one bit in anything outside of an academic research context. Grading systems have their problems, but this is not one of them.
I'll allow that more people use unices as workstation machines these days, and thus most network services will be disabled. However, out of the box, Windows is more secure in this area -- just how many default redhat installs have been exploited due to installing (and running) BIND by default when the user selects "everything"? Note that I said "more difficult", not "impossible", and I still stand by that. I grant that your arguments are valid. I just believe that in an out-of-box scenario, Windows (NT/2000) is more secure (as a worksxtation).
You'd be surprised how many people run as root all the time, or make themselves a new user and then change that user's id to 0 or just run su - upon logging in. Too many people do that these days, just as too many people run win2k as Administrator (or with admin privileges). Try to explain to mom or dad why they have to login as a different user when they need to install Office.
Amen.
Meaningless masturbation. Why bother listing all of that? Do any of us really care? Does it somehow make you more knowledgeable about Microsoft or the Windows market?
Uhh ... no. Windows (NT and 2000 -- I'm not even considering Win9x here) can actually be considered more secure than Linux (assuming both machines are properly setup by knowledgeable administrators), as it's more difficult to run code remotely on an NT box. As for the virus problem, the only reason it exists is because Windows is vastly more popular than pretty much anything else. As we've seen in the past few months, even Linux can have "virii" (well, worms, but still ...).
By "system tools", what do you mean? Seems to me like all the Administrative Tools and the Control Panel would be considered "system tools". On top of that, you have standard stuff like ping, tracert, nslookup, and so on. And if you want stuff like perl, python, or bash to do some scripting (and you don't want to use the Windows Scripting Host), you can get them just fine. As for the installer situation, I guess you haven't heard about this nifty little thing called "Microsoft Installer". Released slighlty prior to Windows 2000, and available for 95, 98, NT4, and Me (shipped with Me), the Microsoft Installer gets rid of the whole Installshield dependency (though Installshield has built a tool to make it easier to generate an msi. You should don't have to use it). I won't even bother to mention how fragmented Linux's whole installer systems are.
I agree, to an extent. The low-level I/O functionality should be in the OS. however, that doesn't mean Adaptec can't go and make a nice gui on top of it. If these companies would get their heads our of their asses and start working rather than bitching, they'd see they're not so screwed as they think they are.
And you want to be able to buy all that for $99. Yeah, right. Remember, Microsoft's software is written by professionals, not volunteers writing in their free time. For them to continue to be able to produce software, they need to charge the proper amount for their products (and whether you like Microsoft or not, I think you'd agree that they should be allowed to continue writing software and let the market get rid of them if it will, rather than forcing them out by pricing caps). On top of that, I'd rather pay money for a quality office suite like Microsoft Office, rather than suffer with a free suite like Star Office.
And MY desktop says it isn't. Woah, anecdotal evidence! That's no better than the "Linux is more stable because I had my computer stay up for three years straight, once" argument. Linux may well be more stable, but that kind of anecdotal evidence means less than nothing.
There are several possible solutions to this problem, as I see it. If you want to go the commercial route, Visual Source Safe is the normal standby, or any other commercial source code repository systems would work. VSS has poor merging capabilities, but when you're dealing with Word files or PowerPoint slides, that's not so much a problem (as Office can "version" the files for you -- though make sure to strip the file before releasing it to customers). Also, the upcoming Office XP has Sharepoint capabilities, and is very easy to use (easy enough for your pointy-haired boss to figure out, even).
On the other hand, you could setup CVS anyway, even though you said you'd rather not. There are a few nice win32 GUIs for CVS, so the end-user experience shouldn't be too bad. On top of that, if you use CVS for your documentation, you can keep that in your source tree. One less tree to manage, and you'll always know where the documentation is. And CVS can handle binary files just fine. Just don't expect to be able to merge changes.
Of course, another (less likely) option would be to move all your documents to HTML, or XML with a set of defined XSLs to transform them. That way, you could do merging just fine. However, that's most likely not a workable solution if you deal with anything but Word documents (since word can save to HTML instead of .doc).
Actually, nVidia tends to work on 6-8 month refresh cycles. the "fall refresh" for the GF3 (if we see one this year, considering that the GF3 is only now becoming available for purchase by the masses) would be a GF3 Ultra, or GF3 Pro. As well, you'll see GF3 MX (neutered like all the other MX cards -- cut out half the rendering pipelines), Quadra (high-end workstation version), and GO (mobile) versions.
However, unless you love to live on the bleeding edge (which admittedly many people do, and those that do should know what they're getting into), there's no point in upgrading your card with every refresh. If you've got a GeForce 256, or any MX card, the GF3 might be a good buy for you in a few months. If you're running a GF2 (anything but MX), you shouldn't bother with the GF3. If you're still on a TNT2 or older, the GF3 is the board to get. Amortize the $400 price over three years of not buying a video card ($125 for the GF 256 you didn't buy, $125 for the GF2 you also didn't buy, $150 for the GF3) and it becomes easily palatable.
Bah. 3dfx had sucked for quite a while prior to their death. Half-assed competition is not competition at all. However, believe it or not, there's still competition in the 3D accelerator market. ATi's Radeon line is going strong, and a new rev is expected later this year. The upcoming Kyro II board (boards? Or is Hercules the only board manufacturer?) looks to really push nVidia on the low end, as well.
With that said, you'd have to be blind not to acknowledge that nVidia is currently the leader in high-end, gaming, mid-market, low-end, and even moving into mobile video for a reason -- damn good technology. The GeForce 3 continues along that line. The only problem is that we've currently hit a bandwidth bottleneck, so you're not going to see ever-increasing frame rates. What you are going to see are higher framerates at higher detail levels when developers begin taking advantage of the new features.
As for 3dfx being "good" because they supported Open Source, all I can say to that is "bah". If you want to make your purchasing decisions based on something so ephemeral, that's fine by me. I'll continue to purchase top of the line hardware because I like getting the most for my money, all philosophical differences aside.
I assume by "better interface", you mean in comparison to Internet Explorer. I know it's personal preference, but I think IE's interface on the mac is pretty slick. Certainly better than Mozilla's two standard themes (though I guess a different theme might change that). On top of that the mac version of IE is the premier browser for standards compliance. You shouldn't have any weird rendering issues with it at all.
That's the price of using themes for the interface. If you want smaller icons, you need a different theme. To my knowledge, Mozilla doesn't allow embedding multiple image sizes in a theme to allow such customization.
Why is it that when a supposed internal mail from Microsoft gets leaked, everybody simply assumes it's authentic, yet if internal memos from other companies get leaked, they're assumed to be fake? Bit of a double standard, doncha think?
Oddly enough, Microsoft helped write the standard.
What you're missing is the case where you simply want to link against a GPL'ed library, or embed a GPL'ed component, without making any changes. Under the GPL, that doesn't matter -- you still have to adopt the GPL for your own code, and distribute the source for it.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation for a moment to see what the problem is. First off, let's assume that there's a widely-used widget library that's unfortunately licensed under the GPL, let's call it HTK (Hypothetical Tool Kit) (aside: I know the LGPL exists for just this reason, and I also realize that few useful libraries are GPLed anymore, in favor of the LGPL, but this is a hypothetical situation, so we're ignoring that for now since the article was really only talking about the GPL). Now, let's also assume that public demand has caused Microsoft to realize that they need to port their software to linux, starting with Office. Since the HTK is so popular in our imaginary world, and thus is guaranteed to be on roughly 90%+ of all linux installations, Microsoft decides to use the HTK for their port. But wait! To do so means that all of Office's source code must be opened up, which is unaccetable. Thus, Microsoft is given a poor set of choices:
- Continue on using our hypothetical widget set, and living with the consequences (forced open-sourcing of one of their major cash cow products)
- Use a different, less ubiquitous widget set with a more forgiving license
- Develop their own widget set
- Give up on linux development
Which do you think they'd choose?Taking a narrow view of the two licenses, you're correct -- both "protect" IP rights, though in vastly different ways. However, ignoring all the supposed benefits of an open source license and the fact that you have to pay for most Microsoft products, Microsoft's typical license is much more forgiving than the GPL. You're allowed to use any of Microsoft's published objects in any manner you wish, with the exception that some objects may require you to purchase a different licensing agreement if you plan to sell your product for lots of money. You can embed internet explorer's html rendering engine, the msxml XML parser, or even Word's document rendering engine, and you're not forced to change the license of your application. You can very well give away your source code, or not, but it's your choice whether or not to do so, not Microsoft's choice or RMS's choice.. Doing the same with the GPL requires that you license your code under the GPL as well.
I was talking about the XBox hardware team, not any of the gaming groups. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I'm referring to Monster Truck Madness, Motocross Madness, Midtown Madness, and the sequels thereof. Sure, you'll just reply with, "Whee, racing games. More of the same," and there's little I can say to prove otherwise, except that the games are all great fun to play (which is what matters, when you think about it).
Yes, Microsoft bought the FASA license after Activision made a set of good games (Mech2, Mech2: Mercennaries, and the addons for each). I wouldn't go so far as to say that Mech1 was a hit, though. But, even so, Microsoft has done a much better job with the license than Activision ever did (IMHO, of course).
I'll be the first to admit that Microsoft doesn't often break new ground. However, what Microsoft does do extremely well is take an existing concept (app type, game genre, what have you), and really improve upon it. Sure, Flight Simulator can be considered "just another flight sim", but it has a host of well-done features that, while they have been copied by other games, are still first-class implementations (real-time weather, radio chatter, air traffic control, extreme customizability, etc). To go along with that, Microsoft more often acts as a publisher, rather than a developer, when dealing with games (along the lines of what Sierra is doing these days). With their marketing muscle and excellent distribution network, many game developers could do much worse than being published by Microsoft.
Epic has already released Unreal Tournament for DC and PS2, so they're no different from the others I mentioned. What I didn't say is that those developers were signed on exclusively for the XBox. Few are. In fact, there are very few third-party development houses that do anything exclusively, anymore (SquareSoft is one of the few remaining). That's not necessarily a bad thing. With that said, the XBox will have its share of exclusive titles, such as the new Oddworld game, and Halo (which is not 100% exlcusive, as it'll be released for the PC as well, but it's exclusive as far as consoles are concerned). Yes, Microsoft is publishing those games. So? It's the same way Rare develops games for Nintendo to publish exclusively.
Can you back that up with examples? As of right now, I haven't seen anything that I'd call truly "revolutionary" for the PS2. Yes, Metal Gear Solid 2 is going to look great and play well, but it's just the next step in the evolution of Metal Gear (Plus, Konami is making a Metal Gear Solid game for the XBox, though not MGS2 ...). Sure, FFX will also look great, and is supposedly going to be the first FF with a voice track, but is it really going to be anything so revolutionary over what's come before in the series? Now, to use your own argument above against you, many development houses are going to be targetting multiple consoles. That means we'll see Super Hyper Impact Street Fighter 3 ex Alpha 2 for the XBox and the PS2, and probably even the GameCube. Sega is also going to be developing for multiple platforms (including the GBA). Because of the importance of third-party titles, I think what this next console "war" is going to come down to is the ease of development. The PS2 has already lost smaller development houses (which, btw, are oftentimes the ones that come up with the more unique games, like Chu Chu Rocket), due to the extremely steep learning curve (learning a new console costs money, and the steeper the curve, the more expensive it gets). In that respect, I think the XBox will be able to pull a major coup, in that Microsoft has always provided excellent developer support.
So I take it the fact that the XBox design team toured the States, visiting gamers' homes, getting input on what gamers want, is just a copycat move, that every company does that during the research and design period? Or the fact that a number of Microsoft-written and Microsoft-published games have been great games, often topping many gaming top-10 lists (Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, the * Madness games, Mechwarrior games, and more) is just hype? And I guess the 150+ third-party developers that have already signed on (including big names, like Sega, Capcom, and Konami from the console side, and Epic and id from the PC side) are just marketing?
XFCE, like Blackbox and other "minimal" window managers, uses a very small number of pixmaps, compared to stuff like Enlightenment, Sawfish, KDE, and even Window Maker (depending on your theme). As was stated in the interview, XFCE's "theme" support is more of a "border-drawing plugin" thing (where it's not really a plugin yet, but most likely will end up being so), rather than "draw a bunch of pixmaps, and stretchblit them onto the window borders". Pixmaps eat up RAM, and depending on the quality and implementation of 2D acceleration for your video card, using native drawing primitives is faster than blitting pixmaps around (especially when you have to do transformations on the pixmaps, like stretching or rotations).
I don't have any benchmark numbers, but I'm sure if you dig around on Google you can find a few comparisons.
Tiling window management has been around since forever. Hell, Windows 1.0 didn't have the concept of overlapped windows, but instead "forced all windows to maximize to fit a fix sized box" (aka, tiled the windows). What Ion, and other tiling managers do is nothing new. They're just adding some new features, just like all the overlapping managers have been doing since the Macintosh.
Pretty much everything's been done before, in some form or another. This is no exception.
I think this is a very common misperception. Gameplay is all about how easily the gamer loses himself in the game, encompassing everything from input, to graphical representation (which doesn't need to be utilizing the very latest in 3D rendering, thus requiring a GeForce 3. For the type of game, an ascii interface is perfectly fine for nethack (I know there are tile-based guis for it, as well)), to story and plot, and so on. Not all factors always matter. For instance, graphics have little to do with nethack, and story has little to do with Quake 3 Arena. However, Quake 3 has gameplay that is just as good as, if not better than, nethack, in terms of a hack'n'slash type game (pure action). It's not even fair to hold up (arguably) the best roguelike game to your "average" or worse FPS (say, Daikatana). That'd be like holding up Half-life to the crudest roguelike out there, and thus claiming that Half-Life is a far superior game (and by saying so, also inferring that all roguelikes are poo).
Judge gameplay by context. It's pretty hard to compare an average FPS to an average roguelike, except that the "average" games typically fall short in the "gameplay" department, regardless of genre.
The goal is balance. There's no point in pushing for the best graphics in the world if you have no game to back it up, but the converse is true as well -- a game with an interface that was clearly neglected, added on as an after thought, is not a good game, no matter how promising the gameplay. Now, going back to the roguelike games, that doesn't mean you have to have a deformable 3D world with dynamic LOD and a state-of-the-art terrain engine. It simply means that spending time and thought on your "graphics" (such as they are) is necessary, and shouldn't be simply tacked on at the end.
The chief way to get into the gaming industry these days is a combination of modding and schooling. Many of today's "Gaming Gods" (for lack of a less-lame term) got their start doing mods. The TeamFortress people, now working at Valve; Steven Polge, the guy who wrote the first real bot for Quake1, the Reaper Bot, now working for Epic Games; GreenMarine, LeveLord, Stevie Case, and so on. Mods in the gaming industry have become the equivalent of an artist's portfolio. They give you game the creation experience you need to get a game design job.
At the same time, don't forget that schooling is important. Ignore what all the high school drop-outs turned IT bigshot turned homeless bum on the dole say about schooling being useless. It's far from it, if you take the time to apply yourself and actually learn something. Depending on what type or role you want to play, many different majors would be useful. Want to be more involved in the design of a game? Get a business major, with an English minor and an emphasis in a graphic art. Want to be an engine programmer? Take all the math you can. And once you think you have enough math, take some more. A CS degree is also useful, to help teach you proper coding and design discipline and algorithmic analysis. Want to be an artist? Attend a good design school. Want to be a sound engineer? Get a music degree. Your education shouldn't stop with a college degree, but you're that far ahead of those without one (and that gives you a slight edge against those without when applying for a job, which is very nice to have in today's economy).
Above all, though, don't forget to have fun. If you're not having fun, trying to pump out a mod or a tetris clone or whatever because you feel that you have to rather than because you want to, then you're on the wrong track. Take a step back, look at where you're at, and re-evaluate what you want to do with your life.
Try the FreeSpace series. Really very good (and the "Descent:" part on the first one is a misnomer, and only exists because Interplay originially didn't think FreeSpace could do well on its own).
While it's true there's little left in the way of adventure gaming these days, why not try out Gabriel Knight 3, Escape From Monkey Island, and The Longest Journey?
Try the first two Fallout games (yes, they're post-apolcalyptic, not fantasy, but they're good role-playing games), or the Baldur's Gate games and expansions. Or on the console front, check out Final Fantasy IX.
As you see, there are plenty of current games that fit the bill. Sure, they may not be King's Quest 26, or Wing Commander 18, or Ultima 10, but that's okay -- I'm of the opinion that a series can only go so long without getting stale and unimaginative.