Could you please remind me of the profitability rates of Microsoft Xbox division?...
That doesn't matter at all to this article. This about Sony profits for the entire company dropping 94% from the same quarter last year. We all know the Xbox division at Microsoft currently loses money. We also expect the games division from Sony to lose money during the R&D phase of PS3. We don't expect Microsoft as a whole to do 94% worse, nor do we expect the same to happen to Sony. But, it did, and it may have a broad impact depending on the volatility of the market and whether or not it was a one-time thing (battery recall costs coupled with heavy PS3 research costs that won't be reflected in the same quarter next year).
Thanks for this new piece of Sony bashing, but I am quite fed up already.
So you thought you'd even it out with some Microsoft bashing?
Anyway, this is not Sony bashing. It's just presenting the facts. Sony bashing would be, "Kutaragi is a retard. The PS3 is a huge piece of crap. Betamax sucked, Minidisc sucked, Memory Stick sucks, UMD sucked, and Blu-Ray will suck. Sony A/V equipment sucks for the price premium you pay for the Sony name. Their PCs are overpriced crap that simply serve as an extension of their media arm to try to promote usage of Memory Stick and Blu-Ray. Do not buy Sony. Sony is crap."
Also, learn how and when to use a relational database, at least at the MySQL call level.
I would suggest that if you're going to take the time to learn a relational database, pick one that will cover all of the core functionality without introducing its own idiosyncracies. PostgreSQL is free, SQL Server Express is free, and you can get trial versions of Oracle and DB2 for free as well. Once you've learned on a real database (with proper transactions and foreign key support without having to monkey around with different table engines, SQL-language stored procedures, user-defined table and scalar functions, more compliant ANSI-standard language constructs, etc) you should have no problem picking up MySQL if a job or application requires it. However, learning on MySQL will lead to bad habits that will be difficult to break when you move to a proper relational database.
Just because MySQL is used everywhere doesn't mean it's good. I would think Slashdotters would understand that, given the attitude towards Windows around here...:)
my CD Drive trips a copy protection on Civ 4, causing a switch to low priority on my machine. I can reset it to normal, but it doesn't stay for long. It's incredibly frustrating. All tech support could say is "update your CD drive drivers" but apparently my drive's company doesn't support this drive anymore. This drives' not even supposed to work on XP!
Rather than spending $50 to buy the game again on Steam, why not spend $30 and get a new CD-ROM (DVD-ROM/CD-R/RW). Or see if you can find a no-cd hack and use that.
I was in Santa Barbara, when California went no smoking. All the bars I hung out at just opened up a small section out the back door. The bar was free of smoke and of patrons. Everyone was in the back. I am a non smoker, and at that time a non drinker. I still hung out in the outdoor area with everyone else and consumed more smoke due to it being a smaller area full of a great number of people all squashed together. There was no real way around trying to network at my school without heading into the smoke.
Seattle tried to prevent that by adding a 25-foot rule: No smoking 25 feet from any door or window. One of the local news stations figured out that in one area of the city, the only "legal" place you could smoke was in the median of the road because the businesses were packed so close together there was nowhere you could go to be 25 feet away. Of course, nobody bothers with this. Go downtown on a Friday or Saturday night and you'll see mostly empty clubs with huge clusters of people right outside the door.
Now here in Springfield, IL, the smoking ban recently went into effect. I still do not smoke, but I drink a bit. Only a few bars before now had a beergarden outdoors. Most of the bars are trying to build one or work something out. Problem is downtown there is no real room for anyone to open a back door like they did in California years ago. From what I am being told most of the downtown bars are practically empty and the ones that already had beergardens are having to turn people away. Even ones that added little beergardens appear to be more empty than before. My observations regarding the empty bars are from cars in the parking lot or views through the large glass-plate windows that some of the downtown bars have. Plus the statements I overhear from people at random while at work or just out around town. Just imagine what will happen when winter really kicks in around here. The county around here is still allowing smoking, but if they have not already voted in the ordinance it will be soon. For now many people are heading out to the county bars only a few minutes out of town. That cannot be good with the large number of deer around here, not to mention the ones I see running through town late at night. Accidents waiting to happen.
I grew up in the Springfield, IL, area (haven't been back for a couple years). You do not want to be hanging around outside once winter kicks into full gear. As for people travelling to bars in the county, I'd wager that for many people that's an improvement -- all the people from the surrounding towns and suburbs who would've otherwise made the trip into Springfield won't have to make the trip anymore. If Sangamon county does implement a full smoking ban, Macoupin county is just a short drive to the south. I'm sure the bars in Virden would love the patronage.
As for people running into deer? That happened more often than you'd expect, and we all knew it was a euphemism for, "I was driving drunk, hit a tree, and 'trying to avoid a deer' was a handy excuse."
But more seriously, this system seems like a good trade. Everyone giving up freedom for miniscule gain because 3000 people died... eh not so good (BTW I am aware that this article is UK). But lets be honest and admit that there's a lot of assholish behavior that goes on when people drink at bars... and furthermore a lot of people get killed when that irresponsible behavior extends itself to motor vehicles. Maybe alcohol causes enough trouble that oversight is overall a benefit to society.
Hey, why don't we just ban alcohol outright? What a swell idea!
I hear there's a lot of assholish behavior that goes on when people play video games. Furthermore, a lot of people get killed when that irresponsible behavior extends itself to real life. Maybe video games cause enough trouble that oversight is overall a benefit to society.
Having a drink at a bar is not "irresonpsible behavior". I'd argue that it's irresponsible on your part to assume that everyone who ever has a drink at a bar (restaurant, club, social function, etc) is some criminal miscreant who's just waiting to plaster a kid with his car in a drunky frenzy. Maybe you should have a beer and lighten up.
Yes, a common argument. I dunno, I bought a TV in 2001 that does 1080p for $2k. It's lasted me for 5 years, it's not the best. However, even Oblivion looks good at 1024x768. It's sometimes not the quantity of pixels that matters but the quality that matters. My same TV plays the PS2 and Gamecube at 1080p but the 360 looks better. Same TV.
What TV is this that was doing 1080p years before the first 1080p sets hit the market (2003) that actually accepts a 1080p signal, and has HDMI+HDCP connections years before HDMI 1.1 was even released (2004)? Perhaps you meant 1080i?
Also, PS2 and Gamecube don't do 1080p, so your TV is either switching to a 480p mode (for a CRT) or scaling them to the native resolution (LCD, DLP, LCoS, Plasma) at the risk of introducing lag.
I state that I won't buy their stuff because they're going to try to establish a monopoly in the video game market (using funds generated by their operating system and office suites), just as they previously tried with the browser market.
First, all firms strive towards monopoly. It's the end-goal of a capitalist market. It rarely works, though, because most goods are elastic enough that multiple firms can successfully compete. That said, of course Microsoft is going to try to build a monopoly in the console market. That's Sony's goal, too. It's also Nintendo's goal, to the point where they're trying to define a brand new market where they'd be the only player (a bit of an artificial monopoly, but a still a monopoly). Using funds from their other monopolies is not illegal. It would be illegal if they were dumping the console (selling it at a vast loss, not the modest "razor blade" model loss they take now, or giving it away completely free) or if they were bundling it to their OS or otherwise tying it to their OS monopoly, but using funds from their OS monopoly to enter other markets is not illegal at all.
If you refuse to buy products because a company has monopolistic ambitions, you're probably not going to buy much (not that there's anything wrong with that).
That aside, I think brand/system politics can be a very good thing. Microsoft has a history illegally establishing monopolies and doing everything it can to maintain complete control of a market (note I'm not saying generating a profit - Microsoft actively attempts to destroy it's competitors).
Ah, you suffer from a fundamental lack of economic knowledge. Let me try to fix that. Building a monopoly is not illegal. In fact, maintaining a monopoly is not even illegal, though it's frowned upon. What is illegal is using a legally built and maintained monopoly (say, Windows) to build yourself another monopoly in another market (Internet Explorer). Had Microsoft simply not bundled IE with Windows, there would never have been a problem (okay, Netscape still would've sued, but Microsoft wouldn't have lost). That's also why the EU forced Microsoft to unbundle Windows Media Player. There's nothing wrong with having the Windows monopoly, and there's nothing wrong with providing a free media player, but when you provide a free media player bundled in your monopolized OS, you're leveraging the one monopoly to create another.
Now, having estabilished one monopoly, it is in theory much harder for the same firm to establish a second one due to increased scrutiny. Linux and Apple can bundle web browsers and media players and office suites and whatever else they want in their OS because they're not monopolies. Microsoft must be very careful about what it includes and what it doesn't to avoid even the appearance of trying to leverage their existing monopoly again.
If I recall correctly, one of the ways they said the Gamecube would fail was, it's inability to hold as much data as games would need/it's competition had, well, they've gone the same route by sticking to DVD. The Wii also could've gone another route, but I really expected more out of the company who really gave Nintendo hell about such a thing.
Two out of three wins it. Last time, two out of the three consoles used DVD media, so Nintendo was given crap for being the odd man out. This time, two out of the three consoles still use DVD media, but now Sony's the odd man out. The difference is that Nintendo went with their mini disc for two reasons -- load time (smaller disk means less seeking) and piracy. Considering the problems with piracy we eventually saw on the Xbox and PS2, that seems to have paid off for Nintendo. Nintendo wasn't trying to launch a new generic media format, and it didn't add significantly to the cost of the console (if anything, it made it cheaper by avoiding licensing fees to act as a DVD player).
As for Microsoft limiting the HD-DVD add-on to movies, that just makes sense. The last thing they should do is divide their customer base even more. They already have Core vs. Premium issues, but because no game really requires a hard drive (yeah, right!) anybody can go buy a 360 game and it'll work on their console. If they started shipping HD-DVD games, you can bet there would be tons of pissed off customers who bought a "360 game" without seeing the "HD-DVD required" logo and found out they can't play the game without spending another $200. Pissing off customers is bad, as Sony will find out.
If you get the result you want with a minimum of effort then why be snarky about the toolchain?
Because opening two tools is more effort than opening one, and thus isn't minimum effort.
Also, I'm not being snarky. I agree that it's great that he was able to do what he wanted to do. I'm simply saying that having to go through multiple applications for something relatively simple like a business card is not "ideal", when those two tools are similar. Had he said he used a vector app from one of the suites to draw his logo, and then used the word processor from the other suite to lay it out, that'd be one thing (because no one expects a word processor to also do vector image editing). Instead, he implied that he had to use both word processors ("both editors"). That means that both word processors are missing features. If I read it wrong and he meant that he used a tool in one suite without an equivalent in the other and then vice versa, I take back what I said (though that does still mean that both suites are missing useful tools).
In particular, this past weekend, I did some business cards. I ended up using both editors at various times. It was ideal.
"Ideal" would be that you could have used either editor by itself and done all of your work in a single environment. Opening up two word processors to modify a single document is nowhere near "ideal", as far as I'm concerned.
In fact, my biggest complaint is that if you use it to develop for the 360, only other XNA users can play your games (so if you make a game for the 360 and you want your friend to be able to download it and try it, they have to have an XNA subscription too). That limitation seems VERY arbitrary to me. Otherwise it seems quite well done.
Give it time. The current beta can't even target games for Xbox 360, so when V1 releases with 360 support (for subscribers) that'll be huge. And surely there are plans to do much more with this. The thing is, this is really new to Microsoft. They know how to manage development communities (been doing it for years with Windows), and they know how to monetize a platform (again, been doing it for years with Windows), but what's new is allowing their development community into a tightly controlled platform (Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade) without jeopardizing the existing monetization efforts. I'm sure they'll get there, perhaps with something like a $5/mo "XNA User" subscription that will let you play community-created games (a subset of the $100/year "XNA developer" subscription that allows you to develop games as well). I think this is one area where you can safely bet on Microsoft doing well.
My biggest complaint is that the 360-centric focus of XNA means that you're forced into using shader code that is widely unsupported outside of the Xbox 360 or higher-end video cards. My relatively powerful year-old laptop chokes on XNA games at 1-2fps. I can understand the limitation, but it means that I can't build my own games until I upgrade my laptop (it's my main development environment, and I don't have a desktop with a more powerful video card anyway).
However, have you *ever* used a valid credit card with your affinity card?
You should've just said that in the first place. Of course, you can shorten it to, "Have you ever used a valid credit card?" Because if you have (and yes, I use credit cards), any privacy you think you may have had is completely gone.
Cash rules the day for the privacy-conscious, but as with everything else, it's just not as convenient as using a credit card. All that counting and folding and making change! I just *swipe* and I'm out the door!
If I use my affinity card, then I get 2% cash back on my porn and sex toy purchases *and* 10 cents per gallon off gasoline for that month!
Who said that your affinity card has to have valid information? I have discount cards at three different grocery chains, and all three have different information (at least one has no information at all -- they gave me an activated card and a piece of paper to fill out "later". The paper went in the trash and the card still works years later). It's not foolish to use affinity cards to get discounts. It's foolish to give them real information.
The bubble is, indeed, back, but it doesn't look like the last bubble. There is a lot of capital flowing into really dumb, clearly unprofitable ideas. But there are no IPOs, which was the center of the last.
If the goal of the last bubble was to go public, the goal of the new bubble is to be purchased by Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.
I was complaining that residential high-speed Internet access providers tend to want a commitment to a year of service up front. They charge $480 for the first day and $0 for the next 364 days, and spread that payment of $480 over twelve monthly installments. Such an arrangement is not practical for, say, university students home on summer break.
I've never heard of this. I've seen some places that do offer yearly charges rather than monthly as paying everything up front will often be a bit cheaper (Xbox Live, for example -- you can pay $50/year or $5/mo which works out to $60/year). However, those same places also offer a monthly plan.
If you're referring to contract length, yes, most places will lock you into a year or two, but there are ways out (tell them you're moving to a location where you can't get their service). Even then, you're still not paying up front.
But are you locked into a multiple month commitment?
Nope. A cell phone is probably a better comparison. I pay $40/mo (actually a little less than that due to discounts), not $480/year, even though I'm locked into a 2 year contract (actually, I'm not -- my 2 year contract was up three years ago and I've been month-to-month on the same plan ever since). Yes, I do end up paying $480 over the whole year, but it's broken up into 12 chunks of $40, not a single lump sum of $480.
Do you really expect to change broadband providers often enough that a multi-month contract commitment is a problem? Read the contracts. They have wording that gives you ways out if you have troubles with the service, for example, so you're not going to get locked into paying for something you can't use. It sounds to me like you just want to hop introductory plans. A better way to do that is to call your provider and threaten to switch if they don't give you the introductory rate (worded nicely so that they want to help you rather than get rid of a problem customer, of course).
A cup of coffee a week? Ok, admit it you either are not a nerd or you are a coffee snob with a secret Starbucks addiction.
I'm probably just weird. I'll hang out at Starbucks for a bit on Saturdays, reading and drinking a latte. The rest of the week, I'm just too busy to get out for coffee, and the stuff at work isn't much worth drinking. Coffee for me is more of a social thing than a caffeine thing.
$480/year is $40/mo which is a generally reasonable price for broadband. If you were implying that they require $480 up front for a year of service, that's different than charging $480 over a year.
Maybe other services should quote in yearly prices. I don't pay $15/mo for Netflix. I pay $180/year! I don't pay ~$90/mo to the power company. I pay $1080/year! I don't have a $3 cup of coffee once a week. I pay Starbucks $144/year!
But why would Ballmer be concerned about that? If it's true, then that's good news for Microsoft. I think his concerns may be that it is actually a successful deal which may affect Microsoft's plans for video.
Because he was talking in terms of why Microsoft didn't try to buy YouTube (too expensive, not worth the legal troubles) and/or as a generic point of view on Google's purchase. From Microsoft's point of view bad for Google is good, but from a more generic point of view he's just pointing out what may be bad. Besides, bad for Google could end up also being bad for Microsoft, depending on the circumstances. In this case, "concerns" means "items of interest" rather than "items causing anxiousness".
the point of having different GNOME and KDE interfaces, was so that you could have different interfaces. Now someone wants to unite them, so why even bother having one over the other?
Looks like you got caught up in the overloaded use of the word "interface". You're thinking in terms of the GUI, but this is about application interfaces. KDE and GNOME will still look as different as always, but now applications can use a single interface to install menu items for either KDE or GNOME. This is good. It's one step on the long road to wooing commercial ISVs onto Linux.
The only open question is whether or not this will work in the long run. For example, at one point the LSB was supposed to standardize filesystem locations across distros so that installers wouldn't have to know if your distro uses "/etc/http.conf" or "/etc/apache/httpd.conf" (LSB appears to have dropped that pipe dream). If distros and developers don't pick up and use these new interfaces, it doesn't much matter that they exist.
That's a paraphrase but essentially Ballmer delivered that message. Then sometime later MS decides to release its Zune player and to say to its former music partners. I guess I could fill in the blanks here, "Sorry that you didn't realize MS+'Anyone' = MS." Namely that your interests are not ever really a consideration.
Apple allowed other companies to build Mac clones for a short while. Then they pulled the rug out from under their white box partners. Sometimes you have to be willing to sacrifice a partnership if it's just not working out.
MS actually started its down video site. So if Mr. Ballmer feels so strongly, the question is, why? I know the answer by and large.
As I understood from the article, Ballmer's two main concerns are that YouTube may not be worth $1.6B, and that Google's in for a copyright fight of epic proportions. That's not to say that there's no business in shared video downloads. Building their own (MSN Soapbox) makes sense if they can do it for significantly less than $1.6B while mitigating copyright issues. Of course, that $1.6B buys 80% of the market as well as the company, so in that respect it may be worth every penny. Time will tell, and maybe Steve's wrong.
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That doesn't matter at all to this article. This about Sony profits for the entire company dropping 94% from the same quarter last year. We all know the Xbox division at Microsoft currently loses money. We also expect the games division from Sony to lose money during the R&D phase of PS3. We don't expect Microsoft as a whole to do 94% worse, nor do we expect the same to happen to Sony. But, it did, and it may have a broad impact depending on the volatility of the market and whether or not it was a one-time thing (battery recall costs coupled with heavy PS3 research costs that won't be reflected in the same quarter next year).
So you thought you'd even it out with some Microsoft bashing?
Anyway, this is not Sony bashing. It's just presenting the facts. Sony bashing would be, "Kutaragi is a retard. The PS3 is a huge piece of crap. Betamax sucked, Minidisc sucked, Memory Stick sucks, UMD sucked, and Blu-Ray will suck. Sony A/V equipment sucks for the price premium you pay for the Sony name. Their PCs are overpriced crap that simply serve as an extension of their media arm to try to promote usage of Memory Stick and Blu-Ray. Do not buy Sony. Sony is crap."
I would suggest that if you're going to take the time to learn a relational database, pick one that will cover all of the core functionality without introducing its own idiosyncracies. PostgreSQL is free, SQL Server Express is free, and you can get trial versions of Oracle and DB2 for free as well. Once you've learned on a real database (with proper transactions and foreign key support without having to monkey around with different table engines, SQL-language stored procedures, user-defined table and scalar functions, more compliant ANSI-standard language constructs, etc) you should have no problem picking up MySQL if a job or application requires it. However, learning on MySQL will lead to bad habits that will be difficult to break when you move to a proper relational database.
Just because MySQL is used everywhere doesn't mean it's good. I would think Slashdotters would understand that, given the attitude towards Windows around here ... :)
Rather than spending $50 to buy the game again on Steam, why not spend $30 and get a new CD-ROM (DVD-ROM/CD-R/RW). Or see if you can find a no-cd hack and use that.
Seattle tried to prevent that by adding a 25-foot rule: No smoking 25 feet from any door or window. One of the local news stations figured out that in one area of the city, the only "legal" place you could smoke was in the median of the road because the businesses were packed so close together there was nowhere you could go to be 25 feet away. Of course, nobody bothers with this. Go downtown on a Friday or Saturday night and you'll see mostly empty clubs with huge clusters of people right outside the door.
I grew up in the Springfield, IL, area (haven't been back for a couple years). You do not want to be hanging around outside once winter kicks into full gear. As for people travelling to bars in the county, I'd wager that for many people that's an improvement -- all the people from the surrounding towns and suburbs who would've otherwise made the trip into Springfield won't have to make the trip anymore. If Sangamon county does implement a full smoking ban, Macoupin county is just a short drive to the south. I'm sure the bars in Virden would love the patronage.
As for people running into deer? That happened more often than you'd expect, and we all knew it was a euphemism for, "I was driving drunk, hit a tree, and 'trying to avoid a deer' was a handy excuse."
Hey, why don't we just ban alcohol outright? What a swell idea!
I hear there's a lot of assholish behavior that goes on when people play video games. Furthermore, a lot of people get killed when that irresponsible behavior extends itself to real life. Maybe video games cause enough trouble that oversight is overall a benefit to society.
Having a drink at a bar is not "irresonpsible behavior". I'd argue that it's irresponsible on your part to assume that everyone who ever has a drink at a bar (restaurant, club, social function, etc) is some criminal miscreant who's just waiting to plaster a kid with his car in a drunky frenzy. Maybe you should have a beer and lighten up.
What TV is this that was doing 1080p years before the first 1080p sets hit the market (2003) that actually accepts a 1080p signal, and has HDMI+HDCP connections years before HDMI 1.1 was even released (2004)? Perhaps you meant 1080i?
Also, PS2 and Gamecube don't do 1080p, so your TV is either switching to a 480p mode (for a CRT) or scaling them to the native resolution (LCD, DLP, LCoS, Plasma) at the risk of introducing lag.
You say that like it means something.
First, all firms strive towards monopoly. It's the end-goal of a capitalist market. It rarely works, though, because most goods are elastic enough that multiple firms can successfully compete. That said, of course Microsoft is going to try to build a monopoly in the console market. That's Sony's goal, too. It's also Nintendo's goal, to the point where they're trying to define a brand new market where they'd be the only player (a bit of an artificial monopoly, but a still a monopoly). Using funds from their other monopolies is not illegal. It would be illegal if they were dumping the console (selling it at a vast loss, not the modest "razor blade" model loss they take now, or giving it away completely free) or if they were bundling it to their OS or otherwise tying it to their OS monopoly, but using funds from their OS monopoly to enter other markets is not illegal at all.
If you refuse to buy products because a company has monopolistic ambitions, you're probably not going to buy much (not that there's anything wrong with that).
N3 was published by Microsoft, though. But yes, the comparison is silly since the article was talking about Microsoft-published games.
Maybe they'll make up for it by bringing Forza 2 back into the Holiday timeframe ...
It's vegonomics. Mr. Kutarchini knows what he's doing!
Ah, you suffer from a fundamental lack of economic knowledge. Let me try to fix that. Building a monopoly is not illegal. In fact, maintaining a monopoly is not even illegal, though it's frowned upon. What is illegal is using a legally built and maintained monopoly (say, Windows) to build yourself another monopoly in another market (Internet Explorer). Had Microsoft simply not bundled IE with Windows, there would never have been a problem (okay, Netscape still would've sued, but Microsoft wouldn't have lost). That's also why the EU forced Microsoft to unbundle Windows Media Player. There's nothing wrong with having the Windows monopoly, and there's nothing wrong with providing a free media player, but when you provide a free media player bundled in your monopolized OS, you're leveraging the one monopoly to create another.
Now, having estabilished one monopoly, it is in theory much harder for the same firm to establish a second one due to increased scrutiny. Linux and Apple can bundle web browsers and media players and office suites and whatever else they want in their OS because they're not monopolies. Microsoft must be very careful about what it includes and what it doesn't to avoid even the appearance of trying to leverage their existing monopoly again.
Two out of three wins it. Last time, two out of the three consoles used DVD media, so Nintendo was given crap for being the odd man out. This time, two out of the three consoles still use DVD media, but now Sony's the odd man out. The difference is that Nintendo went with their mini disc for two reasons -- load time (smaller disk means less seeking) and piracy. Considering the problems with piracy we eventually saw on the Xbox and PS2, that seems to have paid off for Nintendo. Nintendo wasn't trying to launch a new generic media format, and it didn't add significantly to the cost of the console (if anything, it made it cheaper by avoiding licensing fees to act as a DVD player).
As for Microsoft limiting the HD-DVD add-on to movies, that just makes sense. The last thing they should do is divide their customer base even more. They already have Core vs. Premium issues, but because no game really requires a hard drive (yeah, right!) anybody can go buy a 360 game and it'll work on their console. If they started shipping HD-DVD games, you can bet there would be tons of pissed off customers who bought a "360 game" without seeing the "HD-DVD required" logo and found out they can't play the game without spending another $200. Pissing off customers is bad, as Sony will find out.
Because opening two tools is more effort than opening one, and thus isn't minimum effort.
Also, I'm not being snarky. I agree that it's great that he was able to do what he wanted to do. I'm simply saying that having to go through multiple applications for something relatively simple like a business card is not "ideal", when those two tools are similar. Had he said he used a vector app from one of the suites to draw his logo, and then used the word processor from the other suite to lay it out, that'd be one thing (because no one expects a word processor to also do vector image editing). Instead, he implied that he had to use both word processors ("both editors"). That means that both word processors are missing features. If I read it wrong and he meant that he used a tool in one suite without an equivalent in the other and then vice versa, I take back what I said (though that does still mean that both suites are missing useful tools).
"Ideal" would be that you could have used either editor by itself and done all of your work in a single environment. Opening up two word processors to modify a single document is nowhere near "ideal", as far as I'm concerned.
Give it time. The current beta can't even target games for Xbox 360, so when V1 releases with 360 support (for subscribers) that'll be huge. And surely there are plans to do much more with this. The thing is, this is really new to Microsoft. They know how to manage development communities (been doing it for years with Windows), and they know how to monetize a platform (again, been doing it for years with Windows), but what's new is allowing their development community into a tightly controlled platform (Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade) without jeopardizing the existing monetization efforts. I'm sure they'll get there, perhaps with something like a $5/mo "XNA User" subscription that will let you play community-created games (a subset of the $100/year "XNA developer" subscription that allows you to develop games as well). I think this is one area where you can safely bet on Microsoft doing well.
My biggest complaint is that the 360-centric focus of XNA means that you're forced into using shader code that is widely unsupported outside of the Xbox 360 or higher-end video cards. My relatively powerful year-old laptop chokes on XNA games at 1-2fps. I can understand the limitation, but it means that I can't build my own games until I upgrade my laptop (it's my main development environment, and I don't have a desktop with a more powerful video card anyway).
Wrong forum, dude. Besides, Paula's more enterprisey than ajaxy.
You should've just said that in the first place. Of course, you can shorten it to, "Have you ever used a valid credit card?" Because if you have (and yes, I use credit cards), any privacy you think you may have had is completely gone.
Cash rules the day for the privacy-conscious, but as with everything else, it's just not as convenient as using a credit card. All that counting and folding and making change! I just *swipe* and I'm out the door!
Who said that your affinity card has to have valid information? I have discount cards at three different grocery chains, and all three have different information (at least one has no information at all -- they gave me an activated card and a piece of paper to fill out "later". The paper went in the trash and the card still works years later). It's not foolish to use affinity cards to get discounts. It's foolish to give them real information.
If the goal of the last bubble was to go public, the goal of the new bubble is to be purchased by Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.
I've never heard of this. I've seen some places that do offer yearly charges rather than monthly as paying everything up front will often be a bit cheaper (Xbox Live, for example -- you can pay $50/year or $5/mo which works out to $60/year). However, those same places also offer a monthly plan.
If you're referring to contract length, yes, most places will lock you into a year or two, but there are ways out (tell them you're moving to a location where you can't get their service). Even then, you're still not paying up front.
Nope. A cell phone is probably a better comparison. I pay $40/mo (actually a little less than that due to discounts), not $480/year, even though I'm locked into a 2 year contract (actually, I'm not -- my 2 year contract was up three years ago and I've been month-to-month on the same plan ever since). Yes, I do end up paying $480 over the whole year, but it's broken up into 12 chunks of $40, not a single lump sum of $480.
Do you really expect to change broadband providers often enough that a multi-month contract commitment is a problem? Read the contracts. They have wording that gives you ways out if you have troubles with the service, for example, so you're not going to get locked into paying for something you can't use. It sounds to me like you just want to hop introductory plans. A better way to do that is to call your provider and threaten to switch if they don't give you the introductory rate (worded nicely so that they want to help you rather than get rid of a problem customer, of course).
I'm probably just weird. I'll hang out at Starbucks for a bit on Saturdays, reading and drinking a latte. The rest of the week, I'm just too busy to get out for coffee, and the stuff at work isn't much worth drinking. Coffee for me is more of a social thing than a caffeine thing.
$480/year is $40/mo which is a generally reasonable price for broadband. If you were implying that they require $480 up front for a year of service, that's different than charging $480 over a year.
Maybe other services should quote in yearly prices. I don't pay $15/mo for Netflix. I pay $180/year! I don't pay ~$90/mo to the power company. I pay $1080/year! I don't have a $3 cup of coffee once a week. I pay Starbucks $144/year!
Because he was talking in terms of why Microsoft didn't try to buy YouTube (too expensive, not worth the legal troubles) and/or as a generic point of view on Google's purchase. From Microsoft's point of view bad for Google is good, but from a more generic point of view he's just pointing out what may be bad. Besides, bad for Google could end up also being bad for Microsoft, depending on the circumstances. In this case, "concerns" means "items of interest" rather than "items causing anxiousness".
Looks like you got caught up in the overloaded use of the word "interface". You're thinking in terms of the GUI, but this is about application interfaces. KDE and GNOME will still look as different as always, but now applications can use a single interface to install menu items for either KDE or GNOME. This is good. It's one step on the long road to wooing commercial ISVs onto Linux.
The only open question is whether or not this will work in the long run. For example, at one point the LSB was supposed to standardize filesystem locations across distros so that installers wouldn't have to know if your distro uses "/etc/http.conf" or "/etc/apache/httpd.conf" (LSB appears to have dropped that pipe dream). If distros and developers don't pick up and use these new interfaces, it doesn't much matter that they exist.
Apple allowed other companies to build Mac clones for a short while. Then they pulled the rug out from under their white box partners. Sometimes you have to be willing to sacrifice a partnership if it's just not working out.
As I understood from the article, Ballmer's two main concerns are that YouTube may not be worth $1.6B, and that Google's in for a copyright fight of epic proportions. That's not to say that there's no business in shared video downloads. Building their own (MSN Soapbox) makes sense if they can do it for significantly less than $1.6B while mitigating copyright issues. Of course, that $1.6B buys 80% of the market as well as the company, so in that respect it may be worth every penny. Time will tell, and maybe Steve's wrong.