The things you list are not as relevant as trying to own a monopoly on software in general. Of course various companies use children as cheap labour, but they are hardly held at gunpoint. It's also mostly a problem for the kids involved, while Microsoft's reign is a problem for the information technology as a whole. Supressing technology is more evil than lousy working conditions in some third world country.
I don't buy into the notion that Microsoft is suppressing an entire industry... In the markets MS is dominant, MS is still delivering fresh technology. As long as _someone_ does, I'm happy.
What really strikes me is that you seem to have adopted this idea that Microsoft really is the worst problem facing the human race. Before AIDS? Global warming? No, it really is Microsoft? I could be wrong, but that's the message I'm reading underneath your words.
Your 10 year-old cousing couldn't build the custom graphics chip the XBox uses. Nonetheless, a mediocre PC makes a pretty kick-ass console. The PS2 only has a 4 mb video buffer, 32 mb of main memory, no hard drive for virtual memory, and an system architecture that is rather difficult to grok and optimize for. So the XBox, by _console_ standards, is very amazing. From an engineering perspective, it enables quite a bit more oomph for games.
It's nothing new in the PC world, except that it:
- hooks up to the TV
- is brain-dead simple to operate
- never needs upgrading or maintainence
- is more reliable than most PC's
- is cheap
- has a rather incredible and simple networking infrastructure (XBox Live)
The engineering and technical problems around turning an off-the-shelf PC into such a system isn't trivial.
Because something is proprietary doesn't mean it isn't a standard. There's lots and lots of examples of standards that are proprietary--GIFs, PDF, MSWord, the Philips CD, Intel's Audio Codec. That's the way things work.
So what you're saying is I can produce Xbox games without any specific licensing?
You can build and run it on a PC. Once you want to publish it to XBox, there is a licensing fee, but if I recall correctly, it's quite a bit less than Sony's or Nintendo's fee. The port from your PC version to the XBox is relatively trivial, as such things go.
I wonder how many folks that refuse to give money to Microsoft based on moral reasons evenly apply their morality to other purchases. Do they make sure they buy fair-trade coffee? Refuse Nike shoes? Purchase food that wasn't grown by a factory-farming corporation? Buy 'dolphin-safe' tuna?
Microsoft is fiercely competitive, but I'd hesitate to call it _evil_. Microsoft doesn't have an army of children it's exploiting, and doesn't destroy the environment to make it's millions.
Pick and choose your battles I guess. Personally, Microsoft can have my $100 or whatever for Windows, because the convenience and price is better than the competition. They're gonna use that money to make a better version of Windows and hawk it--big deal. My peronal beef is with big media companies such as Disney and Clear Channel. I could rant a long time about the injustices of big media, but it's off topic.
My point is that maybe you'd (not you, the general 'you') want to investigate if your antiestablishment energy would be more productive elsewhere. Fretting about Microsoft can be good, but maybe it's better to help out here, here, or here?
Except that Microsoft's tools are easily accessed and digested. All you need to know is on msdn.microsoft.com. The IDE is widely available (cheap for academic versions, free for upcoming Express versions), and the SDK is free. A person can learn DirectX on his/her own, rather easily, and that knowledge is directly applicable to the production of an XBox game.
No other gaming platform (except the PC) has anything at all like that. I googled for "sony playstation 2 sdk" and the only SDK-like tool I found was this link. You must become licensed as a PlayStation developer to even purchase the product. Metroworks didn't list any prices, but I'd be surprised if it was less than $5000.
Those stats are just Japan. XBox owns a considerably larger portion of the market in the States and Europe.
Several posts have suggested that if XBox can't win Japan, they can't really compete in the console market. That's crap: Nokia phones are nearly unknown in Japan, but they sell more wireless phones than anyone else in the world. Japan is just a market, like anywhere else.
Set windows to auto-apply critical patches at 4:00am. There's no point in manually doing it for your TV box: there's no critical applications on your media box that would break.
Is it that tough for editors to figure out that a site isn't capable of handling the traffic? This is a waste of everyone's time, and some poor sod's webserver is now gone.
That impression is cultivated because those who are vocal use linux. Of folks I personally know that read slashdot, maybe 20 people or so, I'm the only one who posts with any frequency. 17 or 18 of those folks (including me) run Windows. I'm something of a minority here--the majority of people who pipe up aren't pro-Microsoft.
I don't remember the location of the statistics, but slashdot gets millions of views a day, and only thousands of posts. The posts are skewed to linux.
- For many years, the Smithsonian Institution's Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC had the actual filming model of the Enterprise hanging from the ceiling. (I think this is the only time it ever hung by wires.) Alas, the exhibit was taken down several years ago. It was one of my favorites.
I was there about a week ago. The model is still there, but not suspended on wires. It's on a stand, downstairs, in the middle of the gift shop. It was curious that only one side of hit was actually fully detailed (painted and such).
You can get away with packaging everything up into one nice executable for college projects and applications of limited scope (perhaps apps to serve html from servers). Client applications need to reuse code, dynamically link libraries to save on code size (page faults will kill you way more than loose loops), and interoperate with binaries made by different people (it helps if they're allowed to use languages to suit their needs). COM is a very nice way to accomplish all that.
Realize that COM is, for programmers, a means to define a strict interface to an object. People can re-implement that object, improve it, fix bugs and swap it out with the existing one without having to send you a new.cpp file,.lib or even a recompile. It's the benefit of abstraction with a.h file, with none of the pain.
This SDK provides header files, documentation, and sample JScript files demonstrating how to use the iTunes for Windows COM interface. COM is the Microsoft technology, similar to AppleScript on Mac OS, that allows programmatic control of iTunes from languages like JScript, Visual Basic, C#, and C++. This SDK requires iTunes for Windows version 4.5 or later.
Because it bugs me, I'm going to clarify this. COM is mainly a binary specification on how function tables should be laid out in objects. If various languages comply to that specification, then magically language A can create and call into objects programmed in language B. Apple could've provided a URL to an article talking about COM (a non-Microsoft article even), rather than define it as "similar to AppleScript on Mac OS, that allows programmatic control of iTunes". If this SDK is intended for real developers, they probably don't want such a dumbed-down description (assuming they've never heard of COM).
I did actually (go subscribers). I came away thinking that it was really talking about eGovernance, and how Linux was condusive to making it work. Everything mentioned could've been implemented on top of Windows (and since the Delixus website says eGovernance runs on Windows as well, I assume it has). I think it should've been "Is Technology Improving Life of Poor in India?", because it wasn't unique to Linux.
The Delixus website is quite scant on information on eGovernance. See here. It mentions that eGovernance runs on Windows as well as Linux. With that in mind, the article only boils down to the same benefits of Linux mentioned everywhere else. (Whether the specific benefits mentioned are actual or merely popular perceptions is often debated). I could easily see someone writing a similar Windows-version of the article, quoting the merits of Windows and saying "Windows is Helping the Poor Folk in India".
I think the article would've been better spent on what eGovernance really is, and why it benefits poor people. I'd find it more interesting, anyway.
I would argue that it is one thing to acknowledge trends in the industry and utilize those concepts in your software and quite another thing to go through a product, dialog by dialog, and clone it. The notion of a graphical interface is an evolutionary idea, given that it's a more natural interface for humans. PARC may have demonstrated it first, but I don't berate Microsoft for deciding that windowed operating systems was the future.
Windows has never been a near copy of anything else, unlike our dear PlanMaker under discussion.
Like the XML format Excel ships with today? Not trying to be a smart ass, but given that Microsoft already ships XML-format Office, I don't really see how open source alternatives could use a different XML format to best Microsoft.
Now that's innovation. Originality at its best. If only I had the ability to think up features like that.
I guess it'll probably be cheaper than Excel proper. One reason is they didn't have to pay any designers or usability experts. Thanks, Microsoft, for doing all that.
This is conjecture, as their server seems already dead.
Independent scrutiny. A subtle but important difference. The people who audit Open Source software aren't in the pockets of the people who wrote it, and won't stand to lose anything if they give it a panning.
I'll concede that. Financial pressure can lead to poor design, or much more often, implementation decisions.
The fact that you know complete strangers are going to be able to read your code should make you automatically more careful when you write it.
Perhaps, but I don't think it's a stronger motivator than seen in the commercial world. If I work for a company and I write shitty code, I lose my job.
South African fruit prior to 27 April 1994 was a foodstuff, just like any other country's fruit. Good for you that you were so ideologic before 1994, but realise that you were refusing to eat something based on dogmatic reasons, instead of pragmatic ones.
My point was: you've decided to exclude a tool from your toolset based on some personal bias. That's fine--it's your prerogative. However, when your boss asks you why you shouldn't go with a Windows solution, your answer will be "because I don't like Microsoft" and not "because I've evaluated all of our options and the Microsoft offering is deficient for these X reasons." If I were your boss, I'd think that was very lame.
IMHO, you should evaluate your options for a problem as it comes up, and pick your best option for that task. Sometimes that's Microsoft.
Don't blame the script kiddies for this. They are just kids, after all..... kids are by nature explorers and experimentalists, and this is pretty much hard-coded into the human firmware.
Bullshit. Your average kid doesn't burn down houses just because he's exploring and experimenting. You show me an honest-to-god child who didn't know the consequences of his actions, and I'll be lenient. I think finding such innocence in the script kiddie community is going to be difficult, however. Writing viruses and releasing them onto the internet requires a certain amount of knowledge--having enough knowledge to pass that bar of entry while maintaining an ignorance about the consequences of those actions seems very implausible to me. If someone reads bugtraq and MS security bulletins so they can exploit the latest vulnerability, they sure as hell read CNN and slashdot.
This is an excellent opportunity to sow seeds of change. Open people's minds to the possibility that there might be an alternative to Windows. Ask questions. Did they know there were vulnerabilities? Well, did they not look at the source code? [the what?] The source code -- you know, the human-readable form of the code that can be examined and modified. What scrutiny did you subject the source code to? [but that's a secret!] What -- you bought a locked box that you knew you weren't going to be allowed to look inside, and you didn't get even the tiniest little bit suspicious that somebody might be trying to hide something from you?
Again, bullshit. The overwhelming majority of people who deploy linux do not read the source code. The developers of linux do. Do you seriously think that Microsoft developers don't do security reviews? Is code auditing a phenomenon only seen in open source?
This notion that linux is open, and therefore everyone will read the code and find problems is a myth. It is open, and a lot of folks look at that code, but bugs are still there. Bugs are a fact of life, open source or not.
For my part, I have pledged never again to work with Windows, ever. At all. The only repair I will ever again do to a Windows box is to install Linux on it -- barring that, I will simply unplug the power cable, leave it unplugged and consider that an improvement. The time has already come when I would sooner forego a computer altogether than touch Windows.
Windows is a tool, just like any other software. Good for you that you're so ideologic, but realize that you're refusing to use something based on dogmatic reasons, instead of pragmatic ones.
Slashdot Mirror
The things you list are not as relevant as trying to own a monopoly on software in general. Of course various companies use children as cheap labour, but they are hardly held at gunpoint. It's also mostly a problem for the kids involved, while Microsoft's reign is a problem for the information technology as a whole. Supressing technology is more evil than lousy working conditions in some third world country.
I don't buy into the notion that Microsoft is suppressing an entire industry... In the markets MS is dominant, MS is still delivering fresh technology. As long as _someone_ does, I'm happy.
What really strikes me is that you seem to have adopted this idea that Microsoft really is the worst problem facing the human race. Before AIDS? Global warming? No, it really is Microsoft? I could be wrong, but that's the message I'm reading underneath your words.
Your 10 year-old cousing couldn't build the custom graphics chip the XBox uses. Nonetheless, a mediocre PC makes a pretty kick-ass console. The PS2 only has a 4 mb video buffer, 32 mb of main memory, no hard drive for virtual memory, and an system architecture that is rather difficult to grok and optimize for. So the XBox, by _console_ standards, is very amazing. From an engineering perspective, it enables quite a bit more oomph for games.
It's nothing new in the PC world, except that it:
- hooks up to the TV
- is brain-dead simple to operate
- never needs upgrading or maintainence
- is more reliable than most PC's
- is cheap
- has a rather incredible and simple networking infrastructure (XBox Live)
The engineering and technical problems around turning an off-the-shelf PC into such a system isn't trivial.
Because something is proprietary doesn't mean it isn't a standard. There's lots and lots of examples of standards that are proprietary--GIFs, PDF, MSWord, the Philips CD, Intel's Audio Codec. That's the way things work.
So what you're saying is I can produce Xbox games without any specific licensing?
You can build and run it on a PC. Once you want to publish it to XBox, there is a licensing fee, but if I recall correctly, it's quite a bit less than Sony's or Nintendo's fee. The port from your PC version to the XBox is relatively trivial, as such things go.
I wonder how many folks that refuse to give money to Microsoft based on moral reasons evenly apply their morality to other purchases. Do they make sure they buy fair-trade coffee? Refuse Nike shoes? Purchase food that wasn't grown by a factory-farming corporation? Buy 'dolphin-safe' tuna?
Microsoft is fiercely competitive, but I'd hesitate to call it _evil_. Microsoft doesn't have an army of children it's exploiting, and doesn't destroy the environment to make it's millions.
Pick and choose your battles I guess. Personally, Microsoft can have my $100 or whatever for Windows, because the convenience and price is better than the competition. They're gonna use that money to make a better version of Windows and hawk it--big deal. My peronal beef is with big media companies such as Disney and Clear Channel. I could rant a long time about the injustices of big media, but it's off topic.
My point is that maybe you'd (not you, the general 'you') want to investigate if your antiestablishment energy would be more productive elsewhere. Fretting about Microsoft can be good, but maybe it's better to help out here, here, or here?
Except that Microsoft's tools are easily accessed and digested. All you need to know is on msdn.microsoft.com. The IDE is widely available (cheap for academic versions, free for upcoming Express versions), and the SDK is free. A person can learn DirectX on his/her own, rather easily, and that knowledge is directly applicable to the production of an XBox game.
No other gaming platform (except the PC) has anything at all like that. I googled for "sony playstation 2 sdk" and the only SDK-like tool I found was this link. You must become licensed as a PlayStation developer to even purchase the product. Metroworks didn't list any prices, but I'd be surprised if it was less than $5000.
Those stats are just Japan. XBox owns a considerably larger portion of the market in the States and Europe.
Several posts have suggested that if XBox can't win Japan, they can't really compete in the console market. That's crap: Nokia phones are nearly unknown in Japan, but they sell more wireless phones than anyone else in the world. Japan is just a market, like anywhere else.
Set windows to auto-apply critical patches at 4:00am. There's no point in manually doing it for your TV box: there's no critical applications on your media box that would break.
I don't reboot my MCE box. It probably auto-reboots to apply critical security patches at 4am from time to time, but that doesn't confront me :)
Is it that tough for editors to figure out that a site isn't capable of handling the traffic? This is a waste of everyone's time, and some poor sod's webserver is now gone.
That impression is cultivated because those who are vocal use linux. Of folks I personally know that read slashdot, maybe 20 people or so, I'm the only one who posts with any frequency. 17 or 18 of those folks (including me) run Windows. I'm something of a minority here--the majority of people who pipe up aren't pro-Microsoft.
I don't remember the location of the statistics, but slashdot gets millions of views a day, and only thousands of posts. The posts are skewed to linux.
- For many years, the Smithsonian Institution's Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC had the actual filming model of the Enterprise hanging from the ceiling. (I think this is the only time it ever hung by wires.) Alas, the exhibit was taken down several years ago. It was one of my favorites.
I was there about a week ago. The model is still there, but not suspended on wires. It's on a stand, downstairs, in the middle of the gift shop. It was curious that only one side of hit was actually fully detailed (painted and such).
You can get away with packaging everything up into one nice executable for college projects and applications of limited scope (perhaps apps to serve html from servers). Client applications need to reuse code, dynamically link libraries to save on code size (page faults will kill you way more than loose loops), and interoperate with binaries made by different people (it helps if they're allowed to use languages to suit their needs). COM is a very nice way to accomplish all that.
.cpp file, .lib or even a recompile. It's the benefit of abstraction with a .h file, with none of the pain.
Realize that COM is, for programmers, a means to define a strict interface to an object. People can re-implement that object, improve it, fix bugs and swap it out with the existing one without having to send you a new
There exists a Windows Media Player SDK. Nothing stopping Apple from using it in iTunes.
Yep. I didn't want the non-windows-programmers here at Slashdot to come away thinking COM was a special technology just to control iTunes :)
Apologies for replying to my own post, but in case you're curious about COM:
A technical overview about COM
Comprehensive COM site
I did actually (go subscribers). I came away thinking that it was really talking about eGovernance, and how Linux was condusive to making it work. Everything mentioned could've been implemented on top of Windows (and since the Delixus website says eGovernance runs on Windows as well, I assume it has). I think it should've been "Is Technology Improving Life of Poor in India?", because it wasn't unique to Linux.
The Delixus website is quite scant on information on eGovernance. See here. It mentions that eGovernance runs on Windows as well as Linux. With that in mind, the article only boils down to the same benefits of Linux mentioned everywhere else. (Whether the specific benefits mentioned are actual or merely popular perceptions is often debated). I could easily see someone writing a similar Windows-version of the article, quoting the merits of Windows and saying "Windows is Helping the Poor Folk in India".
I think the article would've been better spent on what eGovernance really is, and why it benefits poor people. I'd find it more interesting, anyway.
No.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
I think you and the author are talking about totally different markets. The desktop world couldn't care less about running on PPC big iron.
I would argue that it is one thing to acknowledge trends in the industry and utilize those concepts in your software and quite another thing to go through a product, dialog by dialog, and clone it. The notion of a graphical interface is an evolutionary idea, given that it's a more natural interface for humans. PARC may have demonstrated it first, but I don't berate Microsoft for deciding that windowed operating systems was the future.
Windows has never been a near copy of anything else, unlike our dear PlanMaker under discussion.
Like the XML format Excel ships with today? Not trying to be a smart ass, but given that Microsoft already ships XML-format Office, I don't really see how open source alternatives could use a different XML format to best Microsoft.
Now that's innovation. Originality at its best. If only I had the ability to think up features like that.
I guess it'll probably be cheaper than Excel proper. One reason is they didn't have to pay any designers or usability experts. Thanks, Microsoft, for doing all that.
This is conjecture, as their server seems already dead.
Independent scrutiny. A subtle but important difference. The people who audit Open Source software aren't in the pockets of the people who wrote it, and won't stand to lose anything if they give it a panning.
I'll concede that. Financial pressure can lead to poor design, or much more often, implementation decisions.
The fact that you know complete strangers are going to be able to read your code should make you automatically more careful when you write it.
Perhaps, but I don't think it's a stronger motivator than seen in the commercial world. If I work for a company and I write shitty code, I lose my job.
South African fruit prior to 27 April 1994 was a foodstuff, just like any other country's fruit. Good for you that you were so ideologic before 1994, but realise that you were refusing to eat something based on dogmatic reasons, instead of pragmatic ones.
My point was: you've decided to exclude a tool from your toolset based on some personal bias. That's fine--it's your prerogative. However, when your boss asks you why you shouldn't go with a Windows solution, your answer will be "because I don't like Microsoft" and not "because I've evaluated all of our options and the Microsoft offering is deficient for these X reasons." If I were your boss, I'd think that was very lame.
IMHO, you should evaluate your options for a problem as it comes up, and pick your best option for that task. Sometimes that's Microsoft.
Don't blame the script kiddies for this. They are just kids, after all ..... kids are by nature explorers and experimentalists, and this is pretty much hard-coded into the human firmware.
Bullshit. Your average kid doesn't burn down houses just because he's exploring and experimenting. You show me an honest-to-god child who didn't know the consequences of his actions, and I'll be lenient. I think finding such innocence in the script kiddie community is going to be difficult, however. Writing viruses and releasing them onto the internet requires a certain amount of knowledge--having enough knowledge to pass that bar of entry while maintaining an ignorance about the consequences of those actions seems very implausible to me. If someone reads bugtraq and MS security bulletins so they can exploit the latest vulnerability, they sure as hell read CNN and slashdot.
This is an excellent opportunity to sow seeds of change. Open people's minds to the possibility that there might be an alternative to Windows. Ask questions. Did they know there were vulnerabilities? Well, did they not look at the source code? [the what?] The source code -- you know, the human-readable form of the code that can be examined and modified. What scrutiny did you subject the source code to? [but that's a secret!] What -- you bought a locked box that you knew you weren't going to be allowed to look inside, and you didn't get even the tiniest little bit suspicious that somebody might be trying to hide something from you?
Again, bullshit. The overwhelming majority of people who deploy linux do not read the source code. The developers of linux do. Do you seriously think that Microsoft developers don't do security reviews? Is code auditing a phenomenon only seen in open source?
This notion that linux is open, and therefore everyone will read the code and find problems is a myth. It is open, and a lot of folks look at that code, but bugs are still there. Bugs are a fact of life, open source or not.
For my part, I have pledged never again to work with Windows, ever. At all. The only repair I will ever again do to a Windows box is to install Linux on it -- barring that, I will simply unplug the power cable, leave it unplugged and consider that an improvement. The time has already come when I would sooner forego a computer altogether than touch Windows.
Windows is a tool, just like any other software. Good for you that you're so ideologic, but realize that you're refusing to use something based on dogmatic reasons, instead of pragmatic ones.