Anyone remember the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST/TT/Mega systems? If only they decided to port AmigaDOS/AmigaOS and TOS/GEM to the Intel platform before Windows became really really popular in the 1990's.
Those were better GUI operating systems than Windows 3.1 and 95, yes. But then again, so were NeXT, OS/2, and BeOS, and none of those did very well in convincing average users to switch away from the OS that came pre-installed on their Packard Bell.
Windows didn't end up on top because it was the best. It won out because it was already there, and users and software publishers had little motivation to seek an alternative.
I expect to go through 3 or 4 computers in vistas lifespan, which would need me to buy at least 2 licenses.
You do?
In the five years since XP came out, I've upgraded my home computer exactly once (not counting RAM or disk installs), and that now-three-year-old minitower still gives me all the power I currently need.
What are you doing to use up a computer every 12-18 months -- playing frisbee with your notebook?
1. The XP license does not place any limit on how many times the license may be transferred from one device to another. The Vista license does: only one time. Ergo, the Vista license is more restrictive.
2. The XP license did not seem to predict installation onto multiple virtual machines on a single physical piece of hardware; by its language, one is forbidden from running two or more virtual instances of XP on a single machine. The Vista license seems to be more permissive, at least for some versions.
3. I don't buy your interpretation of the Home Basic/Premium virtualization clause at all. The virtual machine on a licensed (physical) device is not separate from the device; it is a subsystem of the device. If your hardware has a Vista Basic license assigned to it, you cannot run ANY virtual copy of Vista on that hardware.
I'm not a lawyer, I don't enjoy EULA's, and I didn't spend more than 5 minutes reading the published EULA, but I can still understand English.
Lawyers don't write in Latin, you know. They use English too -- but in legal writing, many terms and phrases have specific, generally accepted meanings. Your lay interpretation of the licenses' intent after skimming over them for five minutes does not prove to me that your legal understanding of the documents is sound, and it certainly doesn't give you status to say anyone with a different interpretation has "the reading comprehension of a 5th-grader".
You're talking about format=flowed quoting as opposed to inserting line breaks. It has nothing to do with HTML.
Eudora's implementation of it does, as you'll see if you "View Source" in Eudora with a message containing quoted text. (As you'll see from the mere fact that there's an option to "View Source" on an allegedly plaintext message.)
Format=flowed may be a standard, but it's one that the RFCs say mail agents MAY implement, not that they MUST implement. Eudora should have made it a user-configurable option.
1. Don't try to sell a futuristic product that doesn't quite work yet; instead, talk about it while selling as existing product that can compete in the current market.
This one didn't work out so well when Osborne Computer Corp tried it.
But almost everyone has a degree these days, so if you want to 'set yourself aside from the pack', you shouldn't be wasting your time at university.
You don't want to set yourself aside from the pack. You want to set yourself AHEAD of the pack. And if the pack has college degrees and you don't, you're going to face an uphill battle trying to convince people that you're better than them at most things.
I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!
Like when they abandoned plaintext '>'s as quoted-text indicators, and replaced them with semi-HTML-based grey left-margin bars? Even for non-HTML, plaintext mail? And acted wonky if you tried to insert or remove any linebreaks in quoted text?
Eudora's been broken for something like five years now.
But the biggest reason that these companies are so strongly against modchips is because it allows software developers to write games for their hardware without paying a royalty to the console manufacturer.
Bullshit. The biggest reason these companies are against modchips is because they allow users to steal commercial games instead of having to spend money on them.
Unlicensed software written for game consoles is almost entirely poor quality. Look at the "games" published by Color Dreams/Learning Tree for the NES; they SUUUCK. Even Atari's Tengen Games division never did anything better average after bypassing the NES lockout chip.
The only example of an unlicensed company making a better product than legitimate licensees in the entire history of gaming would be perhaps Activision's library for the Atari VCS. Console makers have nothing to fear from homebrewers.
Saying they are controversial is acceptable, prejudging that they are unconstitutional is opinion.
It's not prejudging, it's POST-judging. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has already ruled that the program is unconstitutional, and barring any finding by a higher court that her reasoning was flawed, that means the program can reasonably be considered unconstitutional.
Seriously, when he was off the job the local gamestop manager actually was talking about how he was looking forward to the PS3, and yet go in and ask him, and suddenly he attempts to push 360 superiority.
I am shocked--SHOCKED!--that when an employee of a game store is on the clock, that he would recommend that you spend $300+ on a product that he has in stock instead of spending $0 on a product that he does not have!
I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
Because of WoW's massively-multiplayer online nature, the user's experience is constantly going to evolve. There's always something new and compelling to persuade them that the recurring subscription costs have value.
If I have a subscription to Microsoft Word, though, I'm not expecting my user experience to change from month to month. In fact, I would prefer if it didn't.
For Microsoft to succeed with the subscription software model, they need to convince customers that they offer an experience that cannot be found anywhere else. As alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice become more mature, this is going be more and more difficult.
They can also try to retain subscribers by adding value over time. A new feature every month -- wouldn't that be worth the fee? Maybe. It also leads to horrible bloat, and consumer disappointment when rollout deadlines inevitably get missed.
(There were similar, but not as successful slim redesigns of the NES and SNES toward the end of their runs.)
Not to mention the Nokia NGage, Sega Genesis/Megadrive and Master System, Atari Lynx and 2600, Gameboy Pocket and GBA Micro, and probably several others I'm forgetting.
In fact, over the course of the industry's history it seems more common than not that when a company releases a new model, they repackage their previous one to be positioned as a budget model. I'm actually kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't try anything of the sort for the 360 launch -- bundling Forza with the remaining unsold Xboxen and bumping the price back up to $180 doesn't scream "budget" to me.
This certainly seems to me to be a problem that needs to be addressed at the html standard level
I'm not following you. Why would a server-side exploit like SQL injection be addressed in a client-side display standard like HTML?
The 'type="password"' attribute of the HTML input element is nothing more than a style hint for the renderer -- characters typed into such an input should not echo back to the screen. Otherwise there's nothing that distinguishes it from a value taken from a text input, a checkbox, a file upload dialog or any other HTML form control. An HTTP POST is an HTTP POST.
And without knowing what the server plans to do with the data once submitted (which the client has no reason to need to know), how does one define what "special characters" are? A string that's going to be inserted into an SQL database has a different set of special chars than one that's going to be used as part of a filepath on a Windows box, which is different than one that's going to be used as part of a filepath on a Unix box, which is different than one that's just going to be compared against another string.
Business logic does not belong on the client side.
There are a lot of new programmers [...] who are not naturally paranoid and sensitive to the exploitation of their code. They shouldn't need to be.
The hell they shouldn't.
Programming consists of more than just typing out some PHP code that doesn't cause a fatal error when executed. A programmer needs to be conscious of the expected inputs and outputs of any piece of code he/she is responsible for, and aware of the ramifications when those expectations are not met.
A person who does not exercise such diligence should not be considered a programmer.
Yes, it's easy to make jokes about the Prequels prompting this, except for one little thing - he made buckets of money on them.
Only because they had "Star Wars" in the title, and the brand equity he built up twenty years ago with the original trilogy still counts for a lot.
Take those films, keep the same scripts, actors, and effects, but change the name of any character named "Skywalker" or "Darth" or "Fett" to something new -- I'd bet that the movies wouldn't even break even at the box office.
Vista, for better or worse, has quite a bit more to offer than just "looks".
It also has "soon you won't be able to buy or get support for previous versions anymore" going for it. Apart from that... meh.
I hear the security model is much improved, but in a well-administrated corporate network that shouldn't add all that much value. So what else besides a shiny new look for the endless parade of "Are you sure you want to run this program?" dialogs does Vista have to offer the corporate user?
"Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing
You wanted to take from the OSS community and not give anything back.
Instead you will be spending time calling your proprietary software suppliers and asking them to fix the bugs that you found. Maybe they'll even do it! Wouldn't you rather not put the fate of your company in another's hands like that?
We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock.
Turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch, huh.
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats.
Talk of "seats" leads me to believe you are only looking to use Cygwin in your development environment, and that you will not be redistributing Cygwin binaries as part of your product. You don't need a commercial Cygwin license for that.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
Again, good luck getting Microsoft to fix that show-stopping Windows SFU bug for you. I'm sure they are just as concerned about the survival of your business as you are.
I'll probably buy a PS3, but not before the price drops to something near US$200.
You may be waiting a long, long time then.
There are a rare few examples I can think of where a game console eventually sells new for less than half of its launch price. The GameCube is one: launched at $200, now on sale at around $100. Sega's Nomad portable went from $180 to $80 during its brief lifetime, and the Atari 2600, originally $200, eventually went for $50 (but it took a full decade to get there).
I don't expect the PS3 to ever drop below $250, at least not until the PS4 launches. The most likely scenario where it might would be if the PS3 turns out to be an abject failure, and Sony slashes prices in a last-ditch effort to recover marketshare. But in that scenario, would owning a PS3 even be worth it?
But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.
But the power plants are making that electricity anyway, and selling it on the cheap because the demand for electricity overnight is much less than the demand during waking hours.
In fact, if a device uses more power to cold-boot than to wake up from standby, it could actually be MORE wasteful to unplug the device when not in use.
Maybe if Bush wasn't so close with the rest of [Osama bin Laden's] family we'd be able to find him
You ARE aware that Osama isn't exactly close with the rest of the bin Laden family, either, aren't you?
Sammy's little habit of sponsoring terrorism against Western countries kind of has a harmful effect on the family's global business prospects. He was formally disowned in 1994.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST/TT/Mega systems? If only they decided to port AmigaDOS/AmigaOS and TOS/GEM to the Intel platform before Windows became really really popular in the 1990's.
Those were better GUI operating systems than Windows 3.1 and 95, yes. But then again, so were NeXT, OS/2, and BeOS, and none of those did very well in convincing average users to switch away from the OS that came pre-installed on their Packard Bell.
Windows didn't end up on top because it was the best. It won out because it was already there, and users and software publishers had little motivation to seek an alternative.
I expect to go through 3 or 4 computers in vistas lifespan, which would need me to buy at least 2 licenses.
You do?
In the five years since XP came out, I've upgraded my home computer exactly once (not counting RAM or disk installs), and that now-three-year-old minitower still gives me all the power I currently need.
What are you doing to use up a computer every 12-18 months -- playing frisbee with your notebook?
1. The XP license does not place any limit on how many times the license may be transferred from one device to another. The Vista license does: only one time. Ergo, the Vista license is more restrictive.
2. The XP license did not seem to predict installation onto multiple virtual machines on a single physical piece of hardware; by its language, one is forbidden from running two or more virtual instances of XP on a single machine. The Vista license seems to be more permissive, at least for some versions.
3. I don't buy your interpretation of the Home Basic/Premium virtualization clause at all. The virtual machine on a licensed (physical) device is not separate from the device; it is a subsystem of the device. If your hardware has a Vista Basic license assigned to it, you cannot run ANY virtual copy of Vista on that hardware.
I'm not a lawyer, I don't enjoy EULA's, and I didn't spend more than 5 minutes reading the published EULA, but I can still understand English.
Lawyers don't write in Latin, you know. They use English too -- but in legal writing, many terms and phrases have specific, generally accepted meanings. Your lay interpretation of the licenses' intent after skimming over them for five minutes does not prove to me that your legal understanding of the documents is sound, and it certainly doesn't give you status to say anyone with a different interpretation has "the reading comprehension of a 5th-grader".
You're talking about format=flowed quoting as opposed to inserting line breaks. It has nothing to do with HTML.
Eudora's implementation of it does, as you'll see if you "View Source" in Eudora with a message containing quoted text. (As you'll see from the mere fact that there's an option to "View Source" on an allegedly plaintext message.)
Format=flowed may be a standard, but it's one that the RFCs say mail agents MAY implement, not that they MUST implement. Eudora should have made it a user-configurable option.
1. Don't try to sell a futuristic product that doesn't quite work yet; instead, talk about it while selling as existing product that can compete in the current market.
This one didn't work out so well when Osborne Computer Corp tried it.
But almost everyone has a degree these days, so if you want to 'set yourself aside from the pack', you shouldn't be wasting your time at university.
You don't want to set yourself aside from the pack. You want to set yourself AHEAD of the pack. And if the pack has college degrees and you don't, you're going to face an uphill battle trying to convince people that you're better than them at most things.
I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!
Like when they abandoned plaintext '>'s as quoted-text indicators, and replaced them with semi-HTML-based grey left-margin bars? Even for non-HTML, plaintext mail? And acted wonky if you tried to insert or remove any linebreaks in quoted text?
Eudora's been broken for something like five years now.
But the biggest reason that these companies are so strongly against modchips is because it allows software developers to write games for their hardware without paying a royalty to the console manufacturer.
Bullshit. The biggest reason these companies are against modchips is because they allow users to steal commercial games instead of having to spend money on them.
Unlicensed software written for game consoles is almost entirely poor quality. Look at the "games" published by Color Dreams/Learning Tree for the NES; they SUUUCK. Even Atari's Tengen Games division never did anything better average after bypassing the NES lockout chip.
The only example of an unlicensed company making a better product than legitimate licensees in the entire history of gaming would be perhaps Activision's library for the Atari VCS. Console makers have nothing to fear from homebrewers.
Paper billing: You can't accidentaly lose paper to a drive failure or virus/malware.
No, but you can accidentally lose it to a fire or a coffee spill or letting it sit unopened beneath a stack of catalogs for a month and a half.
Pick whichever medium works best for you. Myself, I keep my email inbox a lot more organized than my physical desktop, so I choose electronic billing.
Saying they are controversial is acceptable, prejudging that they are unconstitutional is opinion.
It's not prejudging, it's POST-judging. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has already ruled that the program is unconstitutional, and barring any finding by a higher court that her reasoning was flawed, that means the program can reasonably be considered unconstitutional.
Seriously, when he was off the job the local gamestop manager actually was talking about how he was looking forward to the PS3, and yet go in and ask him, and suddenly he attempts to push 360 superiority.
I am shocked--SHOCKED!--that when an employee of a game store is on the clock, that he would recommend that you spend $300+ on a product that he has in stock instead of spending $0 on a product that he does not have!
I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
Because of WoW's massively-multiplayer online nature, the user's experience is constantly going to evolve. There's always something new and compelling to persuade them that the recurring subscription costs have value.
If I have a subscription to Microsoft Word, though, I'm not expecting my user experience to change from month to month. In fact, I would prefer if it didn't.
For Microsoft to succeed with the subscription software model, they need to convince customers that they offer an experience that cannot be found anywhere else. As alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice become more mature, this is going be more and more difficult.
They can also try to retain subscribers by adding value over time. A new feature every month -- wouldn't that be worth the fee? Maybe. It also leads to horrible bloat, and consumer disappointment when rollout deadlines inevitably get missed.
(There were similar, but not as successful slim redesigns of the NES and SNES toward the end of their runs.)
Not to mention the Nokia NGage, Sega Genesis/Megadrive and Master System, Atari Lynx and 2600, Gameboy Pocket and GBA Micro, and probably several others I'm forgetting.
In fact, over the course of the industry's history it seems more common than not that when a company releases a new model, they repackage their previous one to be positioned as a budget model. I'm actually kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't try anything of the sort for the 360 launch -- bundling Forza with the remaining unsold Xboxen and bumping the price back up to $180 doesn't scream "budget" to me.
This certainly seems to me to be a problem that needs to be addressed at the html standard level
I'm not following you. Why would a server-side exploit like SQL injection be addressed in a client-side display standard like HTML?
The 'type="password"' attribute of the HTML input element is nothing more than a style hint for the renderer -- characters typed into such an input should not echo back to the screen. Otherwise there's nothing that distinguishes it from a value taken from a text input, a checkbox, a file upload dialog or any other HTML form control. An HTTP POST is an HTTP POST.
And without knowing what the server plans to do with the data once submitted (which the client has no reason to need to know), how does one define what "special characters" are? A string that's going to be inserted into an SQL database has a different set of special chars than one that's going to be used as part of a filepath on a Windows box, which is different than one that's going to be used as part of a filepath on a Unix box, which is different than one that's just going to be compared against another string.
Business logic does not belong on the client side.
There are a lot of new programmers [...] who are not naturally paranoid and sensitive to the exploitation of their code. They shouldn't need to be.
The hell they shouldn't.
Programming consists of more than just typing out some PHP code that doesn't cause a fatal error when executed. A programmer needs to be conscious of the expected inputs and outputs of any piece of code he/she is responsible for, and aware of the ramifications when those expectations are not met.
A person who does not exercise such diligence should not be considered a programmer.
Yes, it's easy to make jokes about the Prequels prompting this, except for one little thing - he made buckets of money on them.
Only because they had "Star Wars" in the title, and the brand equity he built up twenty years ago with the original trilogy still counts for a lot.
Take those films, keep the same scripts, actors, and effects, but change the name of any character named "Skywalker" or "Darth" or "Fett" to something new -- I'd bet that the movies wouldn't even break even at the box office.
Where's the hardware (for your home theater) that makes such convergence possible?
Built into every Xbox 360 console, naturally.
Vista, for better or worse, has quite a bit more to offer than just "looks".
It also has "soon you won't be able to buy or get support for previous versions anymore" going for it. Apart from that... meh.
I hear the security model is much improved, but in a well-administrated corporate network that shouldn't add all that much value. So what else besides a shiny new look for the endless parade of "Are you sure you want to run this program?" dialogs does Vista have to offer the corporate user?
"Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing
You wanted to take from the OSS community and not give anything back.
Instead you will be spending time calling your proprietary software suppliers and asking them to fix the bugs that you found. Maybe they'll even do it! Wouldn't you rather not put the fate of your company in another's hands like that?
We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock.
Turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch, huh.
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats.
Talk of "seats" leads me to believe you are only looking to use Cygwin in your development environment, and that you will not be redistributing Cygwin binaries as part of your product. You don't need a commercial Cygwin license for that.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
Again, good luck getting Microsoft to fix that show-stopping Windows SFU bug for you. I'm sure they are just as concerned about the survival of your business as you are.
You could tell that the games were for the Sega Master System, but as to the contents of the game? The boxart offered little to no clue.
Alex Kidd was a little monkeyman, fine. But what kind of experience would I have if I bought a game with his picture on the front? Don't know.
And that's one of the BETTER examples of SMS box art.
I'll probably buy a PS3, but not before the price drops to something near US$200.
You may be waiting a long, long time then.
There are a rare few examples I can think of where a game console eventually sells new for less than half of its launch price. The GameCube is one: launched at $200, now on sale at around $100. Sega's Nomad portable went from $180 to $80 during its brief lifetime, and the Atari 2600, originally $200, eventually went for $50 (but it took a full decade to get there).
I don't expect the PS3 to ever drop below $250, at least not until the PS4 launches. The most likely scenario where it might would be if the PS3 turns out to be an abject failure, and Sony slashes prices in a last-ditch effort to recover marketshare. But in that scenario, would owning a PS3 even be worth it?
But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.
But the power plants are making that electricity anyway, and selling it on the cheap because the demand for electricity overnight is much less than the demand during waking hours.
In fact, if a device uses more power to cold-boot than to wake up from standby, it could actually be MORE wasteful to unplug the device when not in use.
Maybe if Bush wasn't so close with the rest of [Osama bin Laden's] family we'd be able to find him
You ARE aware that Osama isn't exactly close with the rest of the bin Laden family, either, aren't you?
Sammy's little habit of sponsoring terrorism against Western countries kind of has a harmful effect on the family's global business prospects. He was formally disowned in 1994.
The Wii is gonna be soooo failure...!!! I mean, really, who wants to have to draw out LOAD "*",8,1 in the air with that lame remote all the time???
I see you have mastered the meaning of the word "coincidence".
Now you can move on to the study of the word "sarcasm".
The plural of "box" is "boxes", not "boxen".
http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/boxen.html