MS succeeds at taking other peoples' good ideas, making them palatable to customers, and selling them in a manner that works for corporate purchasing departments. Like the article says, the product you're selling really doesn't matter; how many times have you seen an inferior product take the lead in a market simply because MS has more marketing and sales guys?
MS has a good distribution network and their products work reasonably well (if you think MS software is crap, you haven't tried a lot of software from smaller companies. MS stuff is often flawless in comparison.)
It's great that they're all about open source and "freeness," but at this point Debian is more of a political statement than a user-focused distribution. Not exactly something I want to use.
I can think of at least one more: Metroid Prime. That game was unfailingly awesome. I bought my gamecube specifically for Metroid Prime and I don't regret it at all.
Why are these machines still running Windows 98? Because their owners are too lazy to upgrade them. More than likely, when the machine breaks, it will be thrown away. Why the hell would they take the time to install Linux on it?
Most large public universities host mirrors of the major linux distros somewhere on campus. Besides, it's faster to grab it over 100 mbit ethernet from a machine on campus than it is to download from a kernel.org mirror.
Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers. They probably will do so once Vista is officially released. It's not really worthy of a news posting; maybe as a footnote in a larger review of Vista itself.
I don't really want to work on my PVR. I have enough servers at work I have to work on. I have built a MythTV box and it is most certainly not cheaper than a Tivo. Yes, the service is 'free' (more like annoy-ware, you have to fill out a survey online once every 3 months) but it is just listings.
So in the end, you're just paying up front for hardware, and it ends up costing more in the end anyway. With the number of cable companies who are giving away PVR service with digital cable, MythTV doesn't make a lot of sense if you're just wanting it for the PVR functions. If you use the other pieces of the puzzle, you end up with a pretty featureful PVR in exchange for babysitting the databases and hard drives (over 5 years, you're going to have some software failures and want to upgrade, and the KnoppMyth "Upgrade" feature doesn't work well with SATA drives.)
I love MythTV, but I have to agree with you to a point. The main reason I love MythTV is for the streaming and web interface, meaning I can watch any of my recorded shows from work. The normal interface is not so hot though, and if all I used it for were time shifting, I would probably have a Tivo instead of Myth.
MythTV is also considerably more expensive than a Tivo. You can't just build a good MythTV box out of spare parts; the tuner cards alone are often more expensive than a Tivo. If you want HD quality video... it's doable, but you're going to end up spending $2000-3000 on a workable system (you need a monster CPU, lots of RAM and some HD tuner cards, not to mention the HD space.)
Sorry, KnoppMyth is nice, but it still doesn't fix the "support" problem. Will your neighbor know how to open an X terminal / SSH session and repair a MySQL database when it is corrupted (this happens a lot with Myth)? Will he know how to properly partition a hard drive? Will he know how to get LibDVDCSS to play commercial DVDs? What about when his Zap2It listing subscription runs out?
As nice as KnoppMyth is for a sysadmin type (I use it and love it) it is still decidedly not for the general public. Some knowledge of linux administration is still required to maintain the damn thing, whereas most end users have a rudimentary knowledge of Windows and can fix small things when they break.
Continued revenue growth for recording companies is not ensured if you are only buying new music. They need you to buy the things you already own but lost in order to keep their shareholders happy. That's why they seem to feel that when they sell you music, they are really selling you a license to use the music, unmodified, in whatever format it has been distributed. That business model won't work with the ease of format conversion now, and I think they are slowly figuring that out. On Wall Street, if you're not growing, you're dying.
Erm, too bad I already have a DVD player that does 720p. I don't really care about 1080p anyway, which is the only real advantage of BluRay. I suspect anyone with a TV that does 1080p already has a really nice DVD player. For HD gaming, well, I can hook a PC up to my TV with DVI and play with a wireless keyboard and trackball at 1280x900. It's actually a pretty comfortable rig.
Screw the PS3, the reason I want a Wii is because it actually has games I'm interested in. No fanboy crap here (ok, I'm a Zelda fanboy, blame it on the shiny gold cart I got for my 8th birthday...)
IGN isn't a hardware site, so when they review a piece of hardware, you've got to be a bit suspect. This looks like a carefully planted "review" to prove to people they "need" a TOE network card. If you do, just buy an old 10/100 Intel ToE card off eBay for like $20. No need to drop tons of cash on this junk.
Consider for a moment that many small business don't have dedicated IT staff; they have a friends kid who came in and set everything up for a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, this high school kid probably doesn't know proper security procedures, but he made the internet work wirelessly at their office and it didn't cost them a whole lot of money, and that's all they care about.
The problem is that many schools are chronically underfunded and can't afford books or enough teachers, let alone a competent network admin qualified to manage a 1000 user network, who can easily pull down the salary of 4 experienced teachers in the corporate world. As a result, most admins know less than some of the students at the school, which inevitably leads to problems.
It doesn't matter, Sony can't make enough of them for it to be successful anyway. They'll sell out the initial batch of PS3s well into next year simply because of the limited supply. I bet that once they get their manufacturing worked out, we'll see the PS3 drop down to $300. Right now all they're trying to do is cash in on the $1200 eBay sales and take a slice of that for themselves because they know they can't make enough to meet demand.
They're only releasing the PS3 right now for marketing purposes so they don't 2 holiday seasons without a next gen console to compete with the X360. If the PS3 fails, it will have as much to do with Microsoft outmaneuvering Sony as it does with Sony's blunders.
"Experience" does not necessarily mean "paid experience."
There is plenty of work in the tech industry for almost-entry level positions. The catch is that so many kids are good with computers that they grow into already-trained young adults. The projects you were wasting time in high school and college on might end up being more relevant than the high school or college degree (not that having either of these hurts your chances at all.:) If you have no experience whatsoever though, don't expect on-the-job training.
Kids going into gaming have probably worked on a couple games, or at least developed mods for an existing game. In the gaming industry especially, companies want to see that you're really interested in being a game developer, as opposed to just being really interested in playing videogames (most people who think they want to develop fall into the latter category.)
Companies expect you to have a portfolio of your work. If you don't have one, get to work. Make a mod for Half-Life or Quake 1. Write a Donkey Kong clone from scratch. Odds are, if you wouldn't do it for fun, it's probably not for you.
Sony's BluRay/PS3 strategy is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what they are thinking. Ironically, due to the percieved failure of the PS3, BluRay will probably fail as well. Even "normal" gamers I know are more excited about the Wii and X360 than they are the PS3. Most people have already decided they won't be buying one until the price comes down around $200.
The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is much like the difference between a church and a cult: the only difference is in how popular they are.
The telecom industry in this country is cockblocked by several factors:
1. There is an existing infrastructure. It works. Not very well, but well enough. This isn't the case in a lot of recently developed (last 20 years) nations with infrastructures designed for modern telecom. 2. The US is much larger in land mass than any European/SE Asian country. This means fixing #1 is very expensive. 3. It was a regulated monopoly for much of its existence, and the infrastructure that was built up isn't really efficiently managable without an AT&T style monopoly. Oh, wait, you mean AT&T is back?
None of these is easily fixed. The only alternative is to lay a bunch of fiber and build a new network, which won't happen as long as our current one works.
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MS succeeds at taking other peoples' good ideas, making them palatable to customers, and selling them in a manner that works for corporate purchasing departments. Like the article says, the product you're selling really doesn't matter; how many times have you seen an inferior product take the lead in a market simply because MS has more marketing and sales guys?
MS has a good distribution network and their products work reasonably well (if you think MS software is crap, you haven't tried a lot of software from smaller companies. MS stuff is often flawless in comparison.)
It's great that they're all about open source and "freeness," but at this point Debian is more of a political statement than a user-focused distribution. Not exactly something I want to use.
I can think of at least one more: Metroid Prime. That game was unfailingly awesome. I bought my gamecube specifically for Metroid Prime and I don't regret it at all.
GTA, Tekken, and Gran Turismo sold a lot of copies.
Final Fantasy sold a lot of PSXs and PS2s. Therein lies the difference.
Why are these machines still running Windows 98? Because their owners are too lazy to upgrade them. More than likely, when the machine breaks, it will be thrown away. Why the hell would they take the time to install Linux on it?
Most large public universities host mirrors of the major linux distros somewhere on campus. Besides, it's faster to grab it over 100 mbit ethernet from a machine on campus than it is to download from a kernel.org mirror.
Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers. They probably will do so once Vista is officially released. It's not really worthy of a news posting; maybe as a footnote in a larger review of Vista itself.
I don't really want to work on my PVR. I have enough servers at work I have to work on. I have built a MythTV box and it is most certainly not cheaper than a Tivo. Yes, the service is 'free' (more like annoy-ware, you have to fill out a survey online once every 3 months) but it is just listings.
So in the end, you're just paying up front for hardware, and it ends up costing more in the end anyway. With the number of cable companies who are giving away PVR service with digital cable, MythTV doesn't make a lot of sense if you're just wanting it for the PVR functions. If you use the other pieces of the puzzle, you end up with a pretty featureful PVR in exchange for babysitting the databases and hard drives (over 5 years, you're going to have some software failures and want to upgrade, and the KnoppMyth "Upgrade" feature doesn't work well with SATA drives.)
I love MythTV, but I have to agree with you to a point. The main reason I love MythTV is for the streaming and web interface, meaning I can watch any of my recorded shows from work. The normal interface is not so hot though, and if all I used it for were time shifting, I would probably have a Tivo instead of Myth.
MythTV is also considerably more expensive than a Tivo. You can't just build a good MythTV box out of spare parts; the tuner cards alone are often more expensive than a Tivo. If you want HD quality video... it's doable, but you're going to end up spending $2000-3000 on a workable system (you need a monster CPU, lots of RAM and some HD tuner cards, not to mention the HD space.)
Sorry, KnoppMyth is nice, but it still doesn't fix the "support" problem. Will your neighbor know how to open an X terminal / SSH session and repair a MySQL database when it is corrupted (this happens a lot with Myth)? Will he know how to properly partition a hard drive? Will he know how to get LibDVDCSS to play commercial DVDs? What about when his Zap2It listing subscription runs out?
As nice as KnoppMyth is for a sysadmin type (I use it and love it) it is still decidedly not for the general public. Some knowledge of linux administration is still required to maintain the damn thing, whereas most end users have a rudimentary knowledge of Windows and can fix small things when they break.
Continued revenue growth for recording companies is not ensured if you are only buying new music. They need you to buy the things you already own but lost in order to keep their shareholders happy. That's why they seem to feel that when they sell you music, they are really selling you a license to use the music, unmodified, in whatever format it has been distributed. That business model won't work with the ease of format conversion now, and I think they are slowly figuring that out. On Wall Street, if you're not growing, you're dying.
It will take corporate customers 3 to 5 years to make the transition. Many companies have just recently phased out all their Windows 2000 boxes.
Erm, too bad I already have a DVD player that does 720p. I don't really care about 1080p anyway, which is the only real advantage of BluRay. I suspect anyone with a TV that does 1080p already has a really nice DVD player. For HD gaming, well, I can hook a PC up to my TV with DVI and play with a wireless keyboard and trackball at 1280x900. It's actually a pretty comfortable rig.
Screw the PS3, the reason I want a Wii is because it actually has games I'm interested in. No fanboy crap here (ok, I'm a Zelda fanboy, blame it on the shiny gold cart I got for my 8th birthday...)
IGN isn't a hardware site, so when they review a piece of hardware, you've got to be a bit suspect. This looks like a carefully planted "review" to prove to people they "need" a TOE network card. If you do, just buy an old 10/100 Intel ToE card off eBay for like $20. No need to drop tons of cash on this junk.
Consider for a moment that many small business don't have dedicated IT staff; they have a friends kid who came in and set everything up for a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, this high school kid probably doesn't know proper security procedures, but he made the internet work wirelessly at their office and it didn't cost them a whole lot of money, and that's all they care about.
The problem is that many schools are chronically underfunded and can't afford books or enough teachers, let alone a competent network admin qualified to manage a 1000 user network, who can easily pull down the salary of 4 experienced teachers in the corporate world. As a result, most admins know less than some of the students at the school, which inevitably leads to problems.
It doesn't matter, Sony can't make enough of them for it to be successful anyway. They'll sell out the initial batch of PS3s well into next year simply because of the limited supply. I bet that once they get their manufacturing worked out, we'll see the PS3 drop down to $300. Right now all they're trying to do is cash in on the $1200 eBay sales and take a slice of that for themselves because they know they can't make enough to meet demand.
They're only releasing the PS3 right now for marketing purposes so they don't 2 holiday seasons without a next gen console to compete with the X360. If the PS3 fails, it will have as much to do with Microsoft outmaneuvering Sony as it does with Sony's blunders.
"Experience" does not necessarily mean "paid experience."
:) If you have no experience whatsoever though, don't expect on-the-job training.
There is plenty of work in the tech industry for almost-entry level positions. The catch is that so many kids are good with computers that they grow into already-trained young adults. The projects you were wasting time in high school and college on might end up being more relevant than the high school or college degree (not that having either of these hurts your chances at all.
Kids going into gaming have probably worked on a couple games, or at least developed mods for an existing game. In the gaming industry especially, companies want to see that you're really interested in being a game developer, as opposed to just being really interested in playing videogames (most people who think they want to develop fall into the latter category.)
Companies expect you to have a portfolio of your work. If you don't have one, get to work. Make a mod for Half-Life or Quake 1. Write a Donkey Kong clone from scratch. Odds are, if you wouldn't do it for fun, it's probably not for you.
Sony's BluRay/PS3 strategy is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what they are thinking. Ironically, due to the percieved failure of the PS3, BluRay will probably fail as well. Even "normal" gamers I know are more excited about the Wii and X360 than they are the PS3. Most people have already decided they won't be buying one until the price comes down around $200.
The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is much like the difference between a church and a cult: the only difference is in how popular they are.
I dunno, it's kind of missing the point to have to speak numbers into a system where you have a full number pad in front of you.
They've probably been working on it for at least a year.
Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010. And I'm not kidding about that, actually.
Ehh, you're wrong about this.
The telecom industry in this country is cockblocked by several factors:
1. There is an existing infrastructure. It works. Not very well, but well enough. This isn't the case in a lot of recently developed (last 20 years) nations with infrastructures designed for modern telecom.
2. The US is much larger in land mass than any European/SE Asian country. This means fixing #1 is very expensive.
3. It was a regulated monopoly for much of its existence, and the infrastructure that was built up isn't really efficiently managable without an AT&T style monopoly. Oh, wait, you mean AT&T is back?
None of these is easily fixed. The only alternative is to lay a bunch of fiber and build a new network, which won't happen as long as our current one works.
You already can.. Check eBay, I have found every GC game I've ever wanted in good shape for under $10.