Well, there's other examples like the Atari 7800. The hardware is well known enough that it isn't a problem, but there is some sort of DES authentication sequence required to get the the thing working. Of course all keys and documentation for this system have been lost.
There's lots of people who would love to develop 7800 games, however, until the thing is cracked it's not going to happen.
Speaking as someone who ran both NTS 4.0 and W2KS on a P-133/176MB/SCSI-2 machine, I can attest that Windows 2000 really is no slower for interactive use than NT4 + ActiveDesktop add-on, and both setups are certainly usable for the normal MSOffice/web/mail type tasks.
Intel got Microsoft to put some ridiculous min CPU spec on the side of the W2K box of 350Mhz. They then went out in public and moaned about all the internal Pentium Pro workstations they had to upgrade. But the MIS public didn't buy their shit, because secretly the wished they had 1000s of PPros running W2K and not the low-end Pentium crap that was there, and no mass-upgrade occurred.
Now Microsoft was getting into some deep trouble here and decided to steal some ideas from the Open Source community. The most effective project at stealing CPU cycles to date has been Mozilla.
Microsoft thought about it and said "Ah Ha! Screw the browser window, What if we implement the entire Windows shell in DHTML, XML, and JavaScript! We've already got this "IE shell integration" -- time to crank up the flashing doo-dads and start using it. That ought to steal enough CPU cycles and make Intel happy (unfortunately, the IE rendering engine team had done their job a little too well, so a new major version was in order) And lo, Windows XP was borne.
Face it man, if you have to say "Don't do that", YHL. The entire point of Mozilla is to be a platform for the standards-based dynamic web of the future. There's absolutely no point in treating it like Netscape 3, because you can still download Netscape 3 and use it if you want to.
Tons of people here hate Flash. Well, the only reason Flash exists is because (ahem) Netscape refused to work with the W3C on standards-based DHTML. So people chose a proprietary solution because at least it works in every supported browser. (And I am 100% aware that Flash and DHTML are not the exact same thing.) If and when the browser features converge, Flash and most uses of Java as a doo-dad generator will go away.
And it's easy to point at lame sites with a Flash splashscreen that you can't get past without having the plug-in installed. That doesn't mean that Flash can't be used very effectively for blinkenlights or navigation on web-pages. Face it, the average American luser is on the WWW, and he wants the web to be as flashy as possible. Enjoy your HTML2 Linux HOWTO sites.
Yeah, we used to get software and mix CDs (D-A-D) through unauthrorized use of the company's $2000 CD-Burner and $10 media. It was possible in the old days, even if difficult for an individual.
There was also the Panasonic 650MB MO/CDROM drive and later the Iomega Jazz - both reasonably affordable alternatives to CD burning.
In the average American viewpoint, the suburban highschool would be *worse* than the World Trade Center.
Everyone knows the World Trade Center is in the middle of a piss-soaked metropolis and is surrounded by strange foreigners 24x7. Something like that was bound to happen, and everyone who goes there knows it. The guys who committed the crime had no idea they were attacking an anti-icon.
On the other hand people believe bad things don't happen in "nice neighborhoods like ours", and when they do, it totally shakes their sense of security. That's why Columbine and OK City are in respective order, worse tragedies than normal inner city violence and the World Trade bombings.
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus_ finland_period.shtml is a fairly detailed story about the beginnings of Linux and the problems that folks were having getting a PC version of BSD out.
I just want to point out that you are exactly Loki's market. Not because you hate Windows, but because you are a Unix user, and get all of your real work done with Linux.
Generally, these Linux game threads are filled with lots of misguided advocacy - "Buy Loki to 'support' them!" and "Why would a 'gamer' use Linux?". And all of this rather misses the point -- if a desktop user base materializes on Linux (and it is), the games will follow and will be purchased by practical Linux users.
You know of a Windows app where the retardo IBM-style cut/copy/paste strokes don't work?
The original CUA doc was from something like 1988. By the time Word 2.0 shipped in 1990, it already was advertising the Ctrl-X/C/V sequences on the edit menu.
(Since we're harping on this topic, I actually though Apple's alternative support for F1/F2/F3 was one of the best ideas, especially when mousing. They might have dropped it though.)
Late reply, but yes, registry permissions are the main problem with Netscape 4 as an uprivledged user. (It will not launch even if you are running on FAT.)
I've read that it's some deep registry thing. People have gotten it to run as User, but only by using a monitor to keep track of reg and file access and then make dozens of modifications.
I just haven't bothered to do this, and can't find a howto. Mozilla appears to have fixed the problem.
Geeks don't have any clue what "marketing" really is. It's just an easy scapegoat (Classic example: Microsoft has good marketing. IBM OS/2 had bad marketing. End of story) or something that is superficially seen as only the quality or amount of the advertising.
The real heart of 'marketing' is product positioning, product tying, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, and so on. For example, IBM spent far more money promoting OS/2 than Microsoft spent promoting Windows. But IBM got almost all of the above factors wrong, and Microsoft got it right. But everyone saw a stupid IBM commercial with nuns in it, and therefore they can point their finger at that instead of the numerous strategic fuckups that IBM made.
There's a similar argument to be made about Apple in the mid-90s. Their product line up was a confusing, overpriced mess, the clone licencees weren't helping them, they had huge production planning problems, and they had no clue who their primary markets were. Yet the Mac faithful was bitching about the quality of the advertising.
On topic, in Sega's case, their marketing failure was that they designed hardware that required a huge loss to get it out at the $199 price point. Note that the feature set and price point are almost purely marketing decisions. They didn't have the capital to sustain these losses endlessly until the market was mature and the production costs were cheaper. Boom - they had to fold their tent.
I've been running pretty successfully as a Power User on NT4/5 for a number of years now.
Big hint: use the RUNAS command (shift-rightclick), and NT4 had a similar facility on the resource kit cd. This will work for every thing but explorer.exe
Really, the medium-privledge Power User login is pretty useful. You can stop-start services (such as mySQL). You can install programs that were designed for W2K into your personal space. There's also some privledge-escalation bugs, so I'd love to run as a plain ol' User, but certain software (ahhm - Netscape) doesn't like those file permissions.
Furthermore it's probably quite possible to have an Administrator-enabled NT trojan that uses the disk manager API to search for and destroy ext2 partitions.
Since you are on the beta program, I'll kvetch by proxy -- What I'd like to see is the \WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\services file updated with modern services (Napster, Quake, Unreal, etc), and that this is the file is used for the Firewall config GUI. That would make it easier for vendors to support adding their protocols to people's firewalls, and maybe actually attach some functionality to this file.
Actually, your double-click cookies are probably pretty much close to worthless.
Let's say that through cookies, they determine that you read Slashdot and 10 other IT-related sites. And that they've somehow associated your name and address.
Great. They know you are probably in the IT business. Except for the fact that "they" probably *already* know that from that free Infoworld subscription you asked for in 1996, and that conference you went to last year. Even if this is new information to them, it's probably only worth 5 cents to somone who wants to snail mail spam you with MCSE training opportunities and no-name XML conferences.
But, in the aggregate, Doubleclick-type information can be very useful. Let's say that 50% of the people who reload Slashdot 50 times a day also view at least 20 pages of porn a day. That's information that OSDN can take to the bank by selling ad space to "Hot Teen Anal Virgins".
IIRC, locking that down was a new feature in NT4 SP4 or something. There's probably very good reasons that it isn't enabled in firewalled environments.
Look at it this way, unless there is some other braindamage in there, they've just cut the price of the client OS by $100, *except* for the few users with two CPUs. (This is assuming Personal is priced at WinME and Professional is priced as 2KP/NTW)
I'm one of those users, but $100 more for a handful of machines is not going affect their bottom line at all. In fact the cost of packaging and promoting this special 2 CPU workstation version is probably going to cost them more money than they make!
Maybe they think they can get corporations to buy the "Professional" instead of the "Personal" edition, but unless they start removing some key features from Personal, or put a nasty licence clause in there, it ain't gonna happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's other examples like the Atari 7800. The hardware is well known enough that it isn't a problem, but there is some sort of DES authentication sequence required to get the the thing working. Of course all keys and documentation for this system have been lost.
There's lots of people who would love to develop 7800 games, however, until the thing is cracked it's not going to happen.
Speaking as someone who ran both NTS 4.0 and W2KS on a P-133/176MB/SCSI-2 machine, I can attest that Windows 2000 really is no slower for interactive use than NT4 + ActiveDesktop add-on, and both setups are certainly usable for the normal MSOffice/web/mail type tasks.
Intel got Microsoft to put some ridiculous min CPU spec on the side of the W2K box of 350Mhz. They then went out in public and moaned about all the internal Pentium Pro workstations they had to upgrade. But the MIS public didn't buy their shit, because secretly the wished they had 1000s of PPros running W2K and not the low-end Pentium crap that was there, and no mass-upgrade occurred.
Now Microsoft was getting into some deep trouble here and decided to steal some ideas from the Open Source community. The most effective project at stealing CPU cycles to date has been Mozilla.
Microsoft thought about it and said "Ah Ha! Screw the browser window, What if we implement the entire Windows shell in DHTML, XML, and JavaScript! We've already got this "IE shell integration" -- time to crank up the flashing doo-dads and start using it. That ought to steal enough CPU cycles and make Intel happy (unfortunately, the IE rendering engine team had done their job a little too well, so a new major version was in order) And lo, Windows XP was borne.
Face it man, if you have to say "Don't do that", YHL. The entire point of Mozilla is to be a platform for the standards-based dynamic web of the future. There's absolutely no point in treating it like Netscape 3, because you can still download Netscape 3 and use it if you want to.
Tons of people here hate Flash. Well, the only reason Flash exists is because (ahem) Netscape refused to work with the W3C on standards-based DHTML. So people chose a proprietary solution because at least it works in every supported browser. (And I am 100% aware that Flash and DHTML are not the exact same thing.) If and when the browser features converge, Flash and most uses of Java as a doo-dad generator will go away.
And it's easy to point at lame sites with a Flash splashscreen that you can't get past without having the plug-in installed. That doesn't mean that Flash can't be used very effectively for blinkenlights or navigation on web-pages. Face it, the average American luser is on the WWW, and he wants the web to be as flashy as possible. Enjoy your HTML2 Linux HOWTO sites.
Yeah, we used to get software and mix CDs (D-A-D) through unauthrorized use of the company's $2000 CD-Burner and $10 media. It was possible in the old days, even if difficult for an individual.
There was also the Panasonic 650MB MO/CDROM drive and later the Iomega Jazz - both reasonably affordable alternatives to CD burning.
In the average American viewpoint, the suburban highschool would be *worse* than the World Trade Center.
Everyone knows the World Trade Center is in the middle of a piss-soaked metropolis and is surrounded by strange foreigners 24x7. Something like that was bound to happen, and everyone who goes there knows it. The guys who committed the crime had no idea they were attacking an anti-icon.
On the other hand people believe bad things don't happen in "nice neighborhoods like ours", and when they do, it totally shakes their sense of security. That's why Columbine and OK City are in respective order, worse tragedies than normal inner city violence and the World Trade bombings.
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus_ finland_period.shtml is a fairly detailed story about the beginnings of Linux and the problems that folks were having getting a PC version of BSD out.
I just want to point out that you are exactly Loki's market. Not because you hate Windows, but because you are a Unix user, and get all of your real work done with Linux.
Generally, these Linux game threads are filled with lots of misguided advocacy - "Buy Loki to 'support' them!" and "Why would a 'gamer' use Linux?". And all of this rather misses the point -- if a desktop user base materializes on Linux (and it is), the games will follow and will be purchased by practical Linux users.
Novell 3.x was introduced about 1990. It was generally a crashy piece of shit until about 1994, just in time for nearly everyone to stop using it.
Sure, it's been nearly flawless since then, but it did take a while.
You know of a Windows app where the retardo IBM-style cut/copy/paste strokes don't work?
The original CUA doc was from something like 1988. By the time Word 2.0 shipped in 1990, it already was advertising the Ctrl-X/C/V sequences on the edit menu.
(Since we're harping on this topic, I actually though Apple's alternative support for F1/F2/F3 was one of the best ideas, especially when mousing. They might have dropped it though.)
Late reply, but yes, registry permissions are the main problem with Netscape 4 as an uprivledged user. (It will not launch even if you are running on FAT.)
Re:The Japanese. (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28, @09:36AM PDT (#87)
This is the common perception in US and Japan, but this is wrong.
The Japanese were kicking ass in the 80's because they had access to almost free capitol.
As soon as the recession hit, and the (essentially ) free money dried up, they looked as tough as wet sack of sh*t
Not offtopic at all. Posted at 2 for your pleasure, moderators. BTW, If people don't want to read AC posts, they don't need moderation help.
Doesn't Linux fix the kernel at some known place on the filesystem (known to LILO anyway)?
If so, it might be possible to trojan the Linux kernel from a duelboot system without any specific knowledge of the filesystem layout.
Yeah, it's a streach - but the point is that any duel-boot system is by defintion less secure than a single OS installation.
I've read that it's some deep registry thing. People have gotten it to run as User, but only by using a monitor to keep track of reg and file access and then make dozens of modifications.
I just haven't bothered to do this, and can't find a howto. Mozilla appears to have fixed the problem.
Geeks don't have any clue what "marketing" really is. It's just an easy scapegoat (Classic example: Microsoft has good marketing. IBM OS/2 had bad marketing. End of story) or something that is superficially seen as only the quality or amount of the advertising.
The real heart of 'marketing' is product positioning, product tying, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, and so on. For example, IBM spent far more money promoting OS/2 than Microsoft spent promoting Windows. But IBM got almost all of the above factors wrong, and Microsoft got it right. But everyone saw a stupid IBM commercial with nuns in it, and therefore they can point their finger at that instead of the numerous strategic fuckups that IBM made.
There's a similar argument to be made about Apple in the mid-90s. Their product line up was a confusing, overpriced mess, the clone licencees weren't helping them, they had huge production planning problems, and they had no clue who their primary markets were. Yet the Mac faithful was bitching about the quality of the advertising.
On topic, in Sega's case, their marketing failure was that they designed hardware that required a huge loss to get it out at the $199 price point. Note that the feature set and price point are almost purely marketing decisions. They didn't have the capital to sustain these losses endlessly until the market was mature and the production costs were cheaper. Boom - they had to fold their tent.
What's important about those 'franchise' characters is brand identification for the under 12 year old set.
Since there hasn't been a real popular Sonic game in a number of years, I wonder if the kids even remember who the hedgehog is.
I've been running pretty successfully as a Power User on NT4/5 for a number of years now.
Big hint: use the RUNAS command (shift-rightclick), and NT4 had a similar facility on the resource kit cd. This will work for every thing but explorer.exe
Really, the medium-privledge Power User login is pretty useful. You can stop-start services (such as mySQL). You can install programs that were designed for W2K into your personal space. There's also some privledge-escalation bugs, so I'd love to run as a plain ol' User, but certain software (ahhm - Netscape) doesn't like those file permissions.
Furthermore it's probably quite possible to have an Administrator-enabled NT trojan that uses the disk manager API to search for and destroy ext2 partitions.
Since you are on the beta program, I'll kvetch by proxy -- What I'd like to see is the \WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\services file updated with modern services (Napster, Quake, Unreal, etc), and that this is the file is used for the Firewall config GUI. That would make it easier for vendors to support adding their protocols to people's firewalls, and maybe actually attach some functionality to this file.
Actually 286 and even 8086/8 computers were being sold by major vendors like IBM and Compaq until Windows 3 started to get popular in the early 90s.
There was a time when you could see both a 486 and a 8086 on the same price sheet. For DOS programs, the 486 really wasn't that compelling.
I'm curious if they are doing port filtering, or if your whole town is just one big NetBIOS broadcast storm.
Actually, your double-click cookies are probably pretty much close to worthless.
Let's say that through cookies, they determine that you read Slashdot and 10 other IT-related sites. And that they've somehow associated your name and address.
Great. They know you are probably in the IT business. Except for the fact that "they" probably *already* know that from that free Infoworld subscription you asked for in 1996, and that conference you went to last year. Even if this is new information to them, it's probably only worth 5 cents to somone who wants to snail mail spam you with MCSE training opportunities and no-name XML conferences.
But, in the aggregate, Doubleclick-type information can be very useful. Let's say that 50% of the people who reload Slashdot 50 times a day also view at least 20 pages of porn a day. That's information that OSDN can take to the bank by selling ad space to "Hot Teen Anal Virgins".
IIRC, locking that down was a new feature in NT4 SP4 or something. There's probably very good reasons that it isn't enabled in firewalled environments.
NT Perfmon has always allowed you display multiple computers in the same window.
The windows 2000 version really is annoying, but that's mostly because of that POS &#$(# management console thing. I pray that they'll fix that.
SQL Logs will be cool -- hopefully they'll be a way to play back the results.
Look at it this way, unless there is some other braindamage in there, they've just cut the price of the client OS by $100, *except* for the few users with two CPUs. (This is assuming Personal is priced at WinME and Professional is priced as 2KP/NTW)
I'm one of those users, but $100 more for a handful of machines is not going affect their bottom line at all. In fact the cost of packaging and promoting this special 2 CPU workstation version is probably going to cost them more money than they make!
Maybe they think they can get corporations to buy the "Professional" instead of the "Personal" edition, but unless they start removing some key features from Personal, or put a nasty licence clause in there, it ain't gonna happen.
I just ran Minesweeper for the first time in about 7 years, and it seemed exacty the same to me.