They're not blaming Access for not upgrading, but since they're going to continue to run Access 2.0, they don't have incentive to pay for an "upgrade" besides, Windows 3.11 was probably the most stable Windows ever. It does what they need, so why should they spend money?
Well, in a real democracy, you need the majority, getting "most" is not enough
Look in a dictionary. A democracy is "Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people." (Websters). No majority required.
There are win32 libraries available for Windows 3.11. They're made by microsoft. They work. If you don't believe me, you should try it out. Most stuff just works.
What do majorities have to do with elections in the US? You need the *most* votes, not the majority of votes. In the case of the presidential election it's not even the most votes from the people, it's the most votes from the electorate. In a good percentage of US elections where there were more then two candidates, the winner did not have the majority.
I know of companies that still use Windows 3.11. They have custom software written for Access, and microsoft broke compatability when they released Access 97, so they stay with Windows 3.11. It always amazes me how blazingly fast windows 3.11 is on newer hardware. Almost all non DirectX windows 98 and 2000 software works in Windows 3.11 still, so they're in no rush to upgrade.
I'd like to point out that for $79 I could either upgrade to a 1.5ghz processor, or "upgrade" to Windows XP home edition. First of all, Windows XP Professional is required if you don't want to loose some functionality over win98 SE, second of all the $79 from purchasing XP slows my system down, while the processor speeds it up. Third, I'd have digital rights management shoved down my throat. Finally, I'd get a bloated ugly slow interface, and I'd still have to reboot just as often. (I work in Linux, so I reboot once a day regardless when I switch from work to gaming. Grandma would be in the same situation because she (like most people) turns her computer off when she's not using it. She never sees Win98 crash.
So, in summary: Money is the primary factor, and lack of tangable benifit is the other factor.
Excuse me, but why should I shell out any more cash when 98 works just fine. The additional stability can't justify the over $100 price tag for the upgrade. Perhaps you have lots of cast buring a hole in your pocket (or perhaps you warez your OS), but until I absolutely have to upgrade, then I'll spend my money on better things.
Question: Why would you think it shouldn't? Ethernet (10baseT andyway) can go a very long distance over the correct cables. 100 meters is the spec if I remember correctly, but I've personally done 3000 feet and it worked just fine (This connection I'm using now goes through a 1000ft spool!). If you 're only going a few hundred feet, and you're using a lower gague cable. You may be more easily effected by interference then if you were using twisted pair, but if you're not running the wires near anything that would create interference, then it should work.
USB is another story. I don't remember completely off the top of my head, but I think that the signals have to arrive within a certain (short) window. That limits the potential length of the cable.
One has to wonder wether we would have moved on to asyncronous computing by now, at least inside the core, if marketing didn't need to push the clock speed.
We've already seen that this silly chase for faster clocks has caused certain processor makers to abandon computational efficiency in favor of getting to 3ghz as soon as possible. What other engineering breakthroughs have we missed out on because we're too obsessed with fast clocks?
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Preview should do a spell check. It can't possibly be more then 30 or so lines of code. Highlight the potential misspellings, and provide a list of suggestions below the comment. They wouldn't even have to do the hard part, since there are great scriptable spell checkers already available for free. I'm tired of cutting and pasting my posts through ispell
If they had specified such in the "Termination" Section of the license, then they might have been able to get away with it, but they explicitly list only a single cause for termination:
Microsoft may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA.
Unfortunatly I don't still have the original archive that I acquired the fonts in, so I cannot redistribute my copy. I'm sure there's an archive somewhere though.
I've publicly praised Microsoft on multiple occations for making these fonts available. It's one of the few things they've actually done that truly helped web standards. Technically I don't blame then for pulling the fonts, as I would be unhappy if somebody was violating the license of some of my software as well, however if these fonts were truly to acomplish what Microsoft said they were for then they would have had a more favorable (Perhaps BSD like) license for them in the first place. Well, so much for there being one great thing I could say about Microsoft. I guess now I can move on to unilateral contempt.
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The Dreamcast, the PS2, the XBox and the GameCube all also lost money per sale at their initial releases.
At this point, after the price drop, Sony is making almost $100 per unit. Nintendo claims to be able to produce the gamecube for ~$100.
Also, the market conditions have never been better for video games. In fact, Sony has sold 30 million PS2s in less then 2 years, and expects to sell another 8 million by christmas (19 million for the whole of 2002). The only console doing poorly right now is the Xbox, which has sold just over 3 million and is expected to sell just 2-3 million additional machines by christmas (5 million for the whole of 2002).
Re:Summary of functionality
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That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Lying about your financials is a crime. Microsoft has done some shady things in the past, but I don't think they'd stoop that low.
Besides, it is well publicized by their vendors what it costs microsoft for parts. If you add it up you can tell that they're loosing money. (That's before you count packaging and marketing too) Are you implying a vast conspiracy amongst some of the largest hardware vendors? I wounldn't believe it for a second. Nvidia and Intel are #1 and #2 in the graphics market respectively, and lately Nvidia has been nosing into Intel's precious north bridge market as well. They couldn't get along for long enough to work something like that out. Especially since microsoft would be the sole benificiary of such a conspiracy.
Re:Summary of functionality
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that's how it's been with all the consoles in the last few years. Sell the hardware at a loss and recoup via licensing costs
False. All the other vendors make money on the hardware sale. Sony was making $175 per console before the price cut. The Dreamcast was the first console to loose money per sale.
It is true that the other vendors make money from the sale of third party games however.
Re:Summary of functionality
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This is simple business.
This is stupid business. Selling at a loss only makes sense if the purchaser can't use the product without a recuring cost. Nobody is forcing people to keep buying games for the xbox, so it's s stupid business model.
any halfway decent businessperson would have designed the XBox in the way it is.
Perhaps, but not for the reasons you give. Any halfway decent business person would have made profitability a design requirement for their product. If they hadn't insisted on using PC components in their system, then they could have made some money. ex: Sony & Nintendo. It arguably could have been a good idea to sell at a loss to catch up in the market share game, and then adopt a more sensable model, but obviously that was dumb too, since there are 10 times as many PS2s sold then xboxes.
Second, the nice comment about "free software and ideas" is great but please move out of America or Canada if you are currently subscribing to this impossible reality.
That's funny. I make a good living writing open source software, and I have no need for the government to feed me. It doesn't seem that impossible to me. In many situations, Open Source just makes more sense. If you are looking to make money form a product, it is generally a good idea to let the customer USE the product. This is why operating systems, libraries and utilites should be Open Source. Of course that doesn't work if you want to make money by leaching off of 3rd party developers profits, but nobody is forcing you to adopt that business model. It is questionable how well that business model actually works without a monopoly anyway. Most companies can't get away with it, which microsoft is finding out as they bleed money throught their xbox division.
There is more then one way to make money, and change is only bad it you're the one that is left obsolete after the change. Don't buy into the propaganda of established businesses that are afraid of a changing market. If you're not part of their little group, then they're against you too; even if you spout the same crap that they do.
By the same reasoning people shouldn't be allowed to drive with children in the back seat, or listening to a talk show on the radio. Maybe you should take the CB radios away from cops and truckers. Some people can handle themselves properly when on the phone, and others can not. Everybody should have to use a headset though. I've seen people holding the phone with one hand, and a cigarette and a beverage in the other. I don't even want to think about how they would respond to an emergency situation.
There are way more dangerous things happening on the road then cell phone useage. For example, people with regular passenger car licences driving enormous vehicles. (I don't just mean Ford Excursions, either. I'm talking about those people with the mobile homes too) Driving large vehicles requires special knowledge that is common sense to most people, but not to everybody. We shouldn't be letting any old soccer mom with $38,000 worth of credit drive those things on our highways without getting training first.
Offtopic, yes. Overrated? Perhaps. Troll? I think not. I must have offended some ignorant "The Register" lover out there. God forbid that I should reply to somebody's stupid comment designed to brag to everybody that he reads some low quality web rag. Hell, there's probably like 2 stories a day from "Wired" or "Salon" on the front page, but nobody makes comments like that about those sites. I guess "The Register's" readers are less mature then the readers from those other sites..
(Now that's a real troll, Mr. Moderator. Please take note.)
Book publishing isn't about "wasting paper." It's about providing information in a printed form so that others may use it for entertainment or reference. I can definitely see some people needing IE for Dummies...
You probably are joking, but the point was that everything you need to know about internet explorer can be printed on an oversized quick reference card. IE for Dummies may be a worthwhile pursuit, but if it's longer then 2 pages the rest is landfill.
First of all, with most more expensive software it is easy to obtain a copy of the license agreement before you purchase the software.
Secondly, the inability to return software is a choice of the retailer, and if you are bound by this restriction perhaps you should choose a different one. There are plenty of software stores that allow returns even after the software has been opened.
You're going to be working too hard. While you're doing all this, I'll be laughing my way to retirement. I'm just waiting for the replies to all the information I sent out responding to the "Unclaimed Funds" opportunities I've been recieving through a friend I met on the internet.
That, and I know this guy in Nigeria. I gave him $10,000 to cover some legal bills he had, and when he's finished he's going to let me have 10% of a huge fortune that he's filtering through my checking account! I should go check with my bank now to see if the wire transfer has gone through.
With my two pronged approach to quick riches, I can't go wrong!
The difference is that legally we've already figured out how books work. We've made special laws that deal with it. With software it was new territory, but with books this isn't "starting out". The rights you have when you own a book are already well documented.
Besides, the idea of licensing software isn't stupid. The fact that people will agree to any licence that's put in front of them is what's stupid. You don't accept the AOL software license because an AOL CD showed up in your mailbox. It works the same way as with the book. You can do whatever you want with the bits on the disk as long as you don't violate the copyright (or any of the new laws that apply to software, but not to books), and you don't execute and then click through the part that contains the license agreement.
The book came unsolicited in the mail. The only rights the person who sent it may have are what is afforded by standard copyright. The physical object, the book, belongs to the recipient to use in a fair manner consistant with the local copyright laws no matter what the meaningless piece of paper says. They cannot give themselves the right to take the book away at a later date. The stuff about not being able to share the information with anybody is crap too.
Basically this is an article about a publisher being stupid and wasting paper; probably not nearly as much paper as the company that publishes "Internet Explorer for Dummies," so if you want to harrass somebody, you'd be better off harassing them.
People already have filesystems with files that would suddenly overlap because they were made when there was case sensitivity. There are probably programs out there that are written to take advantage of a case sensitive filesystem, and would fail if that feature were removed. Imagine a program that names files *.file, but when you are editing the file stores an auto-backup in *.FILE. I'm not saying it's smart, but the feature was there for years, so there are almost certainly programs that take advantage of it.
Making a filesystem case-insensitive after it has been case-sensitive for years is removing functionality. There would be something the system used to do that it is not able to any more. You don't have the same probelm going the other way because adding case-sensitivity would be increasing the functionality.
The difference between slashdot and The Register is more that The Register claims to be a ligitimate news source, while slashdot acknowledges that it posts somebody else's stories.
On slashdot when a story is incorrect or misquoted, you can look at the comments and find out that the poster/editor is an idiot. The Register will make shit up, then run stories based on the initial false presumption for months. Then, you have no way to tell that they are idiots if they're your primnary news source.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not blaming Access for not upgrading, but since they're going to continue to run Access 2.0, they don't have incentive to pay for an "upgrade" besides, Windows 3.11 was probably the most stable Windows ever. It does what they need, so why should they spend money?
Well, in a real democracy, you need the majority, getting "most" is not enough
Look in a dictionary. A democracy is "Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people." (Websters). No majority required.
There are win32 libraries available for Windows 3.11. They're made by microsoft. They work. If you don't believe me, you should try it out. Most stuff just works.
I just copied a friend's disk, and it cost me
about $0.40 for the CD-R.
I'd prefer not to obtain my software illegaly.
What do majorities have to do with elections in the US? You need the *most* votes, not the majority of votes. In the case of the presidential election it's not even the most votes from the people, it's the most votes from the electorate. In a good percentage of US elections where there were more then two candidates, the winner did not have the majority.
I know of companies that still use Windows 3.11. They have custom software written for Access, and microsoft broke compatability when they released Access 97, so they stay with Windows 3.11. It always amazes me how blazingly fast windows 3.11 is on newer hardware. Almost all non DirectX windows 98 and 2000 software works in Windows 3.11 still, so they're in no rush to upgrade.
I'd like to point out that for $79 I could either upgrade to a 1.5ghz processor, or "upgrade" to Windows XP home edition. First of all, Windows XP Professional is required if you don't want to loose some functionality over win98 SE, second of all the $79 from purchasing XP slows my system down, while the processor speeds it up. Third, I'd have digital rights management shoved down my throat. Finally, I'd get a bloated ugly slow interface, and I'd still have to reboot just as often. (I work in Linux, so I reboot once a day regardless when I switch from work to gaming. Grandma would be in the same situation because she (like most people) turns her computer off when she's not using it. She never sees Win98 crash.
So, in summary: Money is the primary factor, and lack of tangable benifit is the other factor.
Excuse me, but why should I shell out any more cash when 98 works just fine. The additional stability can't justify the over $100 price tag for the upgrade. Perhaps you have lots of cast buring a hole in your pocket (or perhaps you warez your OS), but until I absolutely have to upgrade, then I'll spend my money on better things.
but then they wouldn't have been able to throw that "non-commercial" bit in there.
That's not really promoting "Web standards" then, is it?
Question: Why would you think it shouldn't? Ethernet (10baseT andyway) can go a very long distance over the correct cables. 100 meters is the spec if I remember correctly, but I've personally done 3000 feet and it worked just fine (This connection I'm using now goes through a 1000ft spool!). If you 're only going a few hundred feet, and you're using a lower gague cable. You may be more easily effected by interference then if you were using twisted pair, but if you're not running the wires near anything that would create interference, then it should work.
USB is another story. I don't remember completely off the top of my head, but I think that the signals have to arrive within a certain (short) window. That limits the potential length of the cable.
One has to wonder wether we would have moved on to asyncronous computing by now, at least inside the core, if marketing didn't need to push the clock speed.
We've already seen that this silly chase for faster clocks has caused certain processor makers to abandon computational efficiency in favor of getting to 3ghz as soon as possible. What other engineering breakthroughs have we missed out on because we're too obsessed with fast clocks?
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Preview should do a spell check. It can't possibly be more then 30 or so lines of code. Highlight the potential misspellings, and provide a list of suggestions below the comment. They wouldn't even have to do the hard part, since there are great scriptable spell checkers already available for free. I'm tired of cutting and pasting my posts through ispell
If they had specified such in the "Termination" Section of the license, then they might have been able to get away with it, but they explicitly list only a single cause for termination:
Microsoft may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA.
Unfortunatly I don't still have the original archive that I acquired the fonts in, so I cannot redistribute my copy. I'm sure there's an archive somewhere though.
I've publicly praised Microsoft on multiple occations for making these fonts available. It's one of the few things they've actually done that truly helped web standards. Technically I don't blame then for pulling the fonts, as I would be unhappy if somebody was violating the license of some of my software as well, however if these fonts were truly to acomplish what Microsoft said they were for then they would have had a more favorable (Perhaps BSD like) license for them in the first place. Well, so much for there being one great thing I could say about Microsoft. I guess now I can move on to unilateral contempt.
The Dreamcast, the PS2, the XBox and the GameCube all also lost money per sale at their initial releases.
This is not true. Sony and nintendo both let the public believe that they were getting more then they paid for, but Sony broke even on the PS2 initially, and Nintendo has admitted that they've never sold a machine they haven't made a profit on.
At this point, after the price drop, Sony is making almost $100 per unit. Nintendo claims to be able to produce the gamecube for ~$100.
Also, the market conditions have never been better for video games. In fact, Sony has sold 30 million PS2s in less then 2 years, and expects to sell another 8 million by christmas (19 million for the whole of 2002). The only console doing poorly right now is the Xbox, which has sold just over 3 million and is expected to sell just 2-3 million additional machines by christmas (5 million for the whole of 2002).
That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Lying about your financials is a crime. Microsoft has done some shady things in the past, but I don't think they'd stoop that low.
Besides, it is well publicized by their vendors what it costs microsoft for parts. If you add it up you can tell that they're loosing money. (That's before you count packaging and marketing too) Are you implying a vast conspiracy amongst some of the largest hardware vendors? I wounldn't believe it for a second. Nvidia and Intel are #1 and #2 in the graphics market respectively, and lately Nvidia has been nosing into Intel's precious north bridge market as well. They couldn't get along for long enough to work something like that out. Especially since microsoft would be the sole benificiary of such a conspiracy.
that's how it's been with all the consoles in the last few years. Sell the hardware at a loss and recoup via licensing costs
False. All the other vendors make money on the hardware sale. Sony was making $175 per console before the price cut. The Dreamcast was the first console to loose money per sale.
It is true that the other vendors make money from the sale of third party games however.
This is simple business.
This is stupid business. Selling at a loss only makes sense if the purchaser can't use the product
without a recuring cost. Nobody is forcing people to keep buying games for the xbox, so it's s stupid business model.
any halfway decent businessperson would have designed the XBox in the way it is.
Perhaps, but not for the reasons you give. Any halfway decent business person would have made profitability a design requirement for their product. If they hadn't insisted on using PC components in their system, then they could have made some money. ex: Sony & Nintendo. It arguably could have been a good idea to sell at a loss to catch up in the market share game, and then adopt a more sensable model, but obviously that was dumb too, since there are 10 times as many PS2s sold then xboxes.
Second, the nice comment about "free software and ideas" is great but please move out of America or Canada if you are currently subscribing to this impossible reality.
That's funny. I make a good living writing open source software, and I have no need for the government to feed me. It doesn't seem that impossible to me. In many situations, Open Source just makes more sense. If you are looking to make money form a product, it is generally a good idea to let the customer USE the product. This is why operating systems, libraries and utilites should be Open Source. Of course that doesn't work if you want to make money by leaching off of 3rd party developers profits, but nobody is forcing you to adopt that business model. It is questionable how well that business model actually works without a monopoly anyway. Most companies can't get away with it, which microsoft is finding out as they bleed money throught their xbox division.
There is more then one way to make money, and change is only bad it you're the one that is left obsolete after the change. Don't buy into the propaganda of established businesses that are afraid of a changing market. If you're not part of their little group, then they're against you too; even if you spout the same crap that they do.
By the same reasoning people shouldn't be allowed to drive with children in the back seat, or listening to a talk show on the radio. Maybe you should take the CB radios away from cops and truckers. Some people can handle themselves properly when on the phone, and others can not. Everybody should have to use a headset though. I've seen people holding the phone with one hand, and a cigarette and a beverage in the other. I don't even want to think about how they would respond to an emergency situation.
There are way more dangerous things happening on the road then cell phone useage. For example, people with regular passenger car licences driving enormous vehicles. (I don't just mean Ford Excursions, either. I'm talking about those people with the mobile homes too) Driving large vehicles requires special knowledge that is common sense to most people, but not to everybody. We shouldn't be letting any old soccer mom with $38,000 worth of credit drive those things on our highways without getting training first.
Offtopic, yes. Overrated? Perhaps. Troll? I think not. I must have offended some ignorant "The Register" lover out there. God forbid that I should reply to somebody's stupid comment designed to brag to everybody that he reads some low quality web rag. Hell, there's probably like 2 stories a day from "Wired" or "Salon" on the front page, but nobody makes comments like that about those sites. I guess "The Register's" readers are less mature then the readers from those other sites..
(Now that's a real troll, Mr. Moderator. Please take note.)
Book publishing isn't about "wasting paper." It's about providing information in a printed form so that others may use it for entertainment or reference. I can definitely see some people needing IE for Dummies...
You probably are joking, but the point was that everything you need to know about internet explorer can be printed on an oversized quick reference card. IE for Dummies may be a worthwhile pursuit, but if it's longer then 2 pages the rest is landfill.
First of all, with most more expensive software it is easy to obtain a copy of the license agreement before you purchase the software.
Secondly, the inability to return software is a choice of the retailer, and if you are bound by this restriction perhaps you should choose a different one. There are plenty of software stores that allow returns even after the software has been opened.
You're going to be working too hard. While you're doing all this, I'll be laughing my way to retirement. I'm just waiting for the replies to all the information I sent out responding to the "Unclaimed Funds" opportunities I've been recieving through a friend I met on the internet.
That, and I know this guy in Nigeria. I gave him $10,000 to cover some legal bills he had, and when he's finished he's going to let me have 10% of a huge fortune that he's filtering through my checking account! I should go check with my bank now to see if the wire transfer has gone through.
With my two pronged approach to quick riches, I can't go wrong!
The difference is that legally we've already figured out how books work. We've made special laws that deal with it. With software it was new territory, but with books this isn't "starting out". The rights you have when you own a book are already well documented.
Besides, the idea of licensing software isn't stupid. The fact that people will agree to any licence that's put in front of them is what's stupid. You don't accept the AOL software license because an AOL CD showed up in your mailbox. It works the same way as with the book. You can do whatever you want with the bits on the disk as long as you don't violate the copyright (or any of the new laws that apply to software, but not to books), and you don't execute and then click through the part that contains the license agreement.
The book came unsolicited in the mail. The only rights the person who sent it may have are what is afforded by standard copyright. The physical object, the book, belongs to the recipient to use in a fair manner consistant with the local copyright laws no matter what the meaningless piece of paper says. They cannot give themselves the right to take the book away at a later date. The stuff about not being able to share the information with anybody is crap too.
Basically this is an article about a publisher being stupid and wasting paper; probably not nearly as much paper as the company that publishes "Internet Explorer for Dummies," so if you want to harrass somebody, you'd be better off harassing them.
People already have filesystems with files that would suddenly overlap because they were made when there was case sensitivity. There are probably programs out there that are written to take advantage of a case sensitive filesystem, and would fail if that feature were removed. Imagine a program that names files *.file, but when you are editing the file stores an auto-backup in *.FILE. I'm not saying it's smart, but the feature was there for years, so there are almost certainly programs that take advantage of it.
Making a filesystem case-insensitive after it has been case-sensitive for years is removing functionality. There would be something the system used to do that it is not able to any more. You don't have the same probelm going the other way because adding case-sensitivity would be increasing the functionality.
The difference between slashdot and The Register is more that The Register claims to be a ligitimate news source, while slashdot acknowledges that it posts somebody else's stories.
On slashdot when a story is incorrect or misquoted, you can look at the comments and find out that the poster/editor is an idiot. The Register will make shit up, then run stories based on the initial false presumption for months. Then, you have no way to tell that they are idiots if they're your primnary news source.