To take better advantage of the Wii's growth, EA moved quickly to ramp up game production for the system, acquiring Headgate Studios
In other words, the biggest kid on the block, rather than doing their homework and using their brain power to stay ahead of the competition, simply went out and bought a solution in order to bring it in-house. Headgate dudes, I feel sorry for the head-up-ass rape that is sure to follow. I hope you can still crank out a few good titles before you get eaten alive by the EA machine.
Seriously, why couldn't some kind of "GOOD" botnet be created that does this? If the spammers can do it, why can't Microsoft, Yahoo, Goolge, AOL, Symantec or someone?
That's exactly what turning on Automatic Updates + Firewall protection + Antivirus software automatic updates is. You can still get 0wned even if you have Automatic Updates turned on, but it's better than nothing. Automatic Updates + Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall + AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition + a couple of spyware scan/remove apps + running Firefox instead of IE and being careful about what I click + hiding behind a NAT router keeps me pretty safe, for the most part.
That's an excellent point, but not everything sold on eBay is used. It's going to be very complicated to sort this stuff out. People selling used, depreciated goods at a loss over their original purchase price shouldn't be taxed, but people selling used appreciated goods (collector's items, antiques, etc.) and new stuff at a profit should be. The accounting for eBay selling should reflect the costs of doing business as well as the income -- people should be assessed based on their net profit, not their gross income. And small-time sellers who don't move a whole lot should probably be exempt altogether.
We're never going back to dumb terminals. That's not to say that there won't ever be uses where dumb terminals make sense -- there are and will be. But PCs will always have a niche, and I don't see their usefulness going away, ever.
Heavy processing where high latency can't be tolerated (such as 3d gaming) will always be run locally, while at some point down the road and where high latency can be tolerated, heavy processing could conceivably be moved to the server side or to distributed networked supercomputing clusters.
We're living in an age where web apps and locally run apps will henceforth always co-exist. The best of breed will integrate web services in such a way that the distinction between what is desktop and what is web app blurs and becomes meaningless or irrelevant. Take a look at Picasa's integration with Google's web galleries for an example of where the future is headed.
I agree with almost all of your points, but with a few minor quibbles toward the end:
a spring release of Leopard would have made Vista look bad.
Apple doesn't have to do anything for Microsoft to look bad with Vista. Microsoft is doing a great job of making themselves look bad all on their own. XP was released in 2001. Since then, Apple's released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4... and 10.4 is already technically superior to Vista, XP, and every other OS that's come out of Redmond. Microsoft delayed Vista numerous times over a span of something like FOUR YEARS, and delivered a stillborn, feature-gutted, annoying, buggy turd that they have to force people to buy by withdrawing XP off the market. How's Apple need to do anything to make Microsoft look bad?
by waiting another six months, this gives Microsoft some time for Vista to get used more and even release a service pack that allows them to take the lead.
OK, first, Microsoft already has the lead... in marketshare, if not in technical merit. Microsoft isn't worried about whether Vista will allow them to take the lead, they're worried about if Vista will allow them to continue to keep a stranglehold on the commodity x86 desktop OS market. Unfortunately, Apple's not competing against Microsoft directly. Apple insists on allowing their OS to run only on Apple hardware. If you don't have Apple hardware, your choices are Microsoft, or Linux/BSD, (discounting something more obscure and perpetually incomplete, like BeOS or ReactOS). If you have Apple hardware, your choice expands slightly to include the above + OS X, and you'd be pretty silly to buy Apple hardware and not run OS X on it.
Apple marketing loves to make digs at Microsoft because the only difference at this point other than chassis veneer is the operating system, but really Apple competes with other OEMs who sell complete systems, ie hardware with a preinstalled OS -- Dell, HP, etc., not really against Microsoft. It's just that the only basis these days for Apple's differentiation with the Wintel OEMs is what OS the hardware comes bundled with. So while it looks like Apple and Microsoft compete against each other, it's more like they compete in parallel markets -- like track and field runners keeping to separate lanes on a track, not like boxers going head to head beating on each other. But in any event, the current release of OS X already beats the pants off of Windows on technical merits.
Leopard failing to release in 1Q07 doesn't make me any more or less likely to wipe Tiger from my Apple hardware so I can switch to Vista, and it doesn't make me any more likely to go out and buy Leopard to install on my HP laptop. If I buy new hardware from an OEM vendor this year, my choice is likely to be between buying Apple/OS X and building a whitebox and running Ubuntu, as I simply won't consider buying a Vista system at this time, if ever.
However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements.
Well, the thing is, iPhone and AppleTV do both run OS X. And who do you get to develop OS X for these platforms but OS X developers? It's not a question of abandoning the Mac platform, it's a question of expanding the OS X installation base to encompass appliances and smartphones as well as traditional desktop systems and servers.
The only hardware update that we've received since November was the new 8-core Mac Pros.
The 8-core Mac Pro is stupendous -- you can't even run XP on an 8-core system, period -- you'd need Windows Server Enterprise Edition for that. OS X runs happily on 8 cores without any special uber-expensive edition license... as long as those 8 cores reside in hardware that came from Cupertino, of course.
The other product lines are all running Core 2 Duos at speeds which haven't changed much because clock speeds have stagnated around 3GHz for the last 3 years. So what's there to complain about? What do you envision going into the next revs for the iMac, Mini, and MacBooks that's ready go to today and anything more than a CPU speed stepping right now?
At their fundamental level, all files are essentially similar. They're encoded as 1's and 0's. So, wherever a file happens to call for a 1, you should be able to just pull that 1 from ANYWHERE. Even some random file on your local hard drive. And likewise for zeroes. All you need is a smart download algorithm to re-assemble the 1s and 0s in the correct order, and you're set.
It's an idea, but I'd recommend against it. So many legitimate license keys have been disabled by Microsoft that it would affect a huge number of innocent users who've had their key disabled because MS felt like it.
I have seen firsthand and heard countless confirmations of people re-installing XP on their OEM system using the license key from the sticker that was glued to their system case, and being rejected by Microsoft's Product Activation. I'm not sure the reason behind this, but I'd guess that most likely some keygen hacker program ended up randomly generating the same key and was used enough times that MS decided to distrust that key anymore.
In my case, I was helping out a friend of the family with getting their laptop back in service after it had been hopelessly compromised by malware. I entered the key from the sticker on the bottom of their laptop, and Product Activation failed. I called the 1-800 number that Microsoft said to call, and went through all their steps to generate a new number, but it just told me that I was rejected and that my number was in fact really no good. I had no recourse, no appeal, no live body to talk to on the phone. So I did the only thing I could do to return the system to service, and used a Corporate license key that didn't need to be run through Product Activation and would not trip of on WGA.
Now, you might say that pissing off all these legitimate users would actually be a good thing, because it will ultimately help Microsoft to shoot its foot clean off by enraging masses of legitimately licensed end users who've been disconnected from the net because they couldn't maintain their systems properly because MS couldn't validate their license even though it wasn't pirated. But I don't think it's quite fair to say that every license key that fails to pass WGA is ipso facto a pirate user. If you block everyone on suspicion of running an unpatched, compromised, pirated OS, you're going to affect a lot of screwed paying customers. As long as they rightfully blame Microsoft for being the cause of their woes, you should be in the clear. If the collateral damage is worth it, then I guess it's not a bad plan.
Probably so many XP users are on license keys that have been disabled by Microsoft Genuine Advantage so that they can't upgrade to SP2, so they're left compromised and unable to defend themselves by remaining patched by Automatic Updates.
If only... If we halved the population, the global ecology might have half a chance at rebounding before the current Mass Extinction Event claims too many species.
Nothing like childish, wild-eyed stupidity to spark another.com bubble. It was brainlessly exhuberant promises with no tangible means to deliver that caused the crash in 2000, and apparently Yahoo has learned nothing.
Well, maybe they have -- they survived the first crash, and swallowed a whole bunch of smaller companies in the process. Companies that had smart, innovative ideas but not enough capital to sustain themselves through a bleak period. Could it be that this is what Yahoo! is hoping will happen again?
But a real pirate who used to make good money at it, no longer does. Something has changed. And to quote the summary, "When you asked a customer why he wasn't buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was BitTorrent this, LimeWire that..." Seems pretty conclusive to me. Do you have some more reliable source of information you forgot to mention?
More credible than TorrentFreak? I shudder to think that such a thing could exist! Even the New York Times publishes outright lies and fiction these days.
Nope, I tried reading the agreement, and even that doesn't disable the WGA phone-homing. Back to the drawing board! I'm guessing I'll have to set up a rule on my firewall if I really want to stop this traffic...
Artificial Life rights. This is of course because it is their own organs that will eventually be replaced by machinery, until they become completely artificial people.
In all seriousness, it's great to see at least one government looking forward so far ahead. Robots sophisticated enough to assert that they have rights are beyond the horizon of technical feasibility for today, but not beyond the horizon for science fiction. I'm really happy to know that at least one government takes sci fi so seriously as to address a problem before it turns into a real crisis. If only we could have done something like this for global warming...
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You have the write to remain soylent. Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a cart of law.
In other words, the biggest kid on the block, rather than doing their homework and using their brain power to stay ahead of the competition, simply went out and bought a solution in order to bring it in-house. Headgate dudes, I feel sorry for the head-up-ass rape that is sure to follow. I hope you can still crank out a few good titles before you get eaten alive by the EA machine.
When they're not running, they use damn close to zero.
But, when they are running, they might use a certain amount... JUST LIKE A BOTNET! OMG! My analogy is flawless!
That's exactly what turning on Automatic Updates + Firewall protection + Antivirus software automatic updates is. You can still get 0wned even if you have Automatic Updates turned on, but it's better than nothing. Automatic Updates + Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall + AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition + a couple of spyware scan/remove apps + running Firefox instead of IE and being careful about what I click + hiding behind a NAT router keeps me pretty safe, for the most part.
Now I can order Crap with oldCrap installed on it! Not that crappy NewCrap! I hate NewCrap!
I've had no luck getting Thunderbird 1.5 to filter mail with .gif attachments. Is this something that's easier to do in 2.0?
That's an excellent point, but not everything sold on eBay is used. It's going to be very complicated to sort this stuff out. People selling used, depreciated goods at a loss over their original purchase price shouldn't be taxed, but people selling used appreciated goods (collector's items, antiques, etc.) and new stuff at a profit should be. The accounting for eBay selling should reflect the costs of doing business as well as the income -- people should be assessed based on their net profit, not their gross income. And small-time sellers who don't move a whole lot should probably be exempt altogether.
We're never going back to dumb terminals. That's not to say that there won't ever be uses where dumb terminals make sense -- there are and will be. But PCs will always have a niche, and I don't see their usefulness going away, ever.
Heavy processing where high latency can't be tolerated (such as 3d gaming) will always be run locally, while at some point down the road and where high latency can be tolerated, heavy processing could conceivably be moved to the server side or to distributed networked supercomputing clusters.
We're living in an age where web apps and locally run apps will henceforth always co-exist. The best of breed will integrate web services in such a way that the distinction between what is desktop and what is web app blurs and becomes meaningless or irrelevant. Take a look at Picasa's integration with Google's web galleries for an example of where the future is headed.
Apple doesn't have to do anything for Microsoft to look bad with Vista. Microsoft is doing a great job of making themselves look bad all on their own. XP was released in 2001. Since then, Apple's released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4... and 10.4 is already technically superior to Vista, XP, and every other OS that's come out of Redmond. Microsoft delayed Vista numerous times over a span of something like FOUR YEARS, and delivered a stillborn, feature-gutted, annoying, buggy turd that they have to force people to buy by withdrawing XP off the market. How's Apple need to do anything to make Microsoft look bad?
OK, first, Microsoft already has the lead... in marketshare, if not in technical merit. Microsoft isn't worried about whether Vista will allow them to take the lead, they're worried about if Vista will allow them to continue to keep a stranglehold on the commodity x86 desktop OS market. Unfortunately, Apple's not competing against Microsoft directly. Apple insists on allowing their OS to run only on Apple hardware. If you don't have Apple hardware, your choices are Microsoft, or Linux/BSD, (discounting something more obscure and perpetually incomplete, like BeOS or ReactOS). If you have Apple hardware, your choice expands slightly to include the above + OS X, and you'd be pretty silly to buy Apple hardware and not run OS X on it.
Apple marketing loves to make digs at Microsoft because the only difference at this point other than chassis veneer is the operating system, but really Apple competes with other OEMs who sell complete systems, ie hardware with a preinstalled OS -- Dell, HP, etc., not really against Microsoft. It's just that the only basis these days for Apple's differentiation with the Wintel OEMs is what OS the hardware comes bundled with. So while it looks like Apple and Microsoft compete against each other, it's more like they compete in parallel markets -- like track and field runners keeping to separate lanes on a track, not like boxers going head to head beating on each other. But in any event, the current release of OS X already beats the pants off of Windows on technical merits.
Leopard failing to release in 1Q07 doesn't make me any more or less likely to wipe Tiger from my Apple hardware so I can switch to Vista, and it doesn't make me any more likely to go out and buy Leopard to install on my HP laptop. If I buy new hardware from an OEM vendor this year, my choice is likely to be between buying Apple/OS X and building a whitebox and running Ubuntu, as I simply won't consider buying a Vista system at this time, if ever.
However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements.
Well, the thing is, iPhone and AppleTV do both run OS X. And who do you get to develop OS X for these platforms but OS X developers? It's not a question of abandoning the Mac platform, it's a question of expanding the OS X installation base to encompass appliances and smartphones as well as traditional desktop systems and servers.
The 8-core Mac Pro is stupendous -- you can't even run XP on an 8-core system, period -- you'd need Windows Server Enterprise Edition for that. OS X runs happily on 8 cores without any special uber-expensive edition license... as long as those 8 cores reside in hardware that came from Cupertino, of course.
The other product lines are all running Core 2 Duos at speeds which haven't changed much because clock speeds have stagnated around 3GHz for the last 3 years. So what's there to complain about? What do you envision going into the next revs for the iMac, Mini, and MacBooks that's ready go to today and anything more than a CPU speed stepping right now?
Will someone please take one for the team and suck his dick already so we can get on with impeachment proceedings? Please.
Maybe people will start actually caring about ReactOS.
Ancient greeks used a steam-powered LED technology, but it was regarded at the time as a mere toy.
At their fundamental level, all files are essentially similar. They're encoded as 1's and 0's. So, wherever a file happens to call for a 1, you should be able to just pull that 1 from ANYWHERE. Even some random file on your local hard drive. And likewise for zeroes. All you need is a smart download algorithm to re-assemble the 1s and 0s in the correct order, and you're set.
It's an idea, but I'd recommend against it. So many legitimate license keys have been disabled by Microsoft that it would affect a huge number of innocent users who've had their key disabled because MS felt like it.
I have seen firsthand and heard countless confirmations of people re-installing XP on their OEM system using the license key from the sticker that was glued to their system case, and being rejected by Microsoft's Product Activation. I'm not sure the reason behind this, but I'd guess that most likely some keygen hacker program ended up randomly generating the same key and was used enough times that MS decided to distrust that key anymore.
In my case, I was helping out a friend of the family with getting their laptop back in service after it had been hopelessly compromised by malware. I entered the key from the sticker on the bottom of their laptop, and Product Activation failed. I called the 1-800 number that Microsoft said to call, and went through all their steps to generate a new number, but it just told me that I was rejected and that my number was in fact really no good. I had no recourse, no appeal, no live body to talk to on the phone. So I did the only thing I could do to return the system to service, and used a Corporate license key that didn't need to be run through Product Activation and would not trip of on WGA.
Now, you might say that pissing off all these legitimate users would actually be a good thing, because it will ultimately help Microsoft to shoot its foot clean off by enraging masses of legitimately licensed end users who've been disconnected from the net because they couldn't maintain their systems properly because MS couldn't validate their license even though it wasn't pirated. But I don't think it's quite fair to say that every license key that fails to pass WGA is ipso facto a pirate user. If you block everyone on suspicion of running an unpatched, compromised, pirated OS, you're going to affect a lot of screwed paying customers. As long as they rightfully blame Microsoft for being the cause of their woes, you should be in the clear. If the collateral damage is worth it, then I guess it's not a bad plan.
Probably so many XP users are on license keys that have been disabled by Microsoft Genuine Advantage so that they can't upgrade to SP2, so they're left compromised and unable to defend themselves by remaining patched by Automatic Updates.
Has the word "fuck" been trademarked too, now? Geez!
If only... If we halved the population, the global ecology might have half a chance at rebounding before the current Mass Extinction Event claims too many species.
Nothing like childish, wild-eyed stupidity to spark another .com bubble. It was brainlessly exhuberant promises with no tangible means to deliver that caused the crash in 2000, and apparently Yahoo has learned nothing.
Well, maybe they have -- they survived the first crash, and swallowed a whole bunch of smaller companies in the process. Companies that had smart, innovative ideas but not enough capital to sustain themselves through a bleak period. Could it be that this is what Yahoo! is hoping will happen again?
Not buying Vista at all, ever, will save you the most money in the long run. Not to mention aggravation.
Why is science shaped like a donut made out of bubbles and string?
But a real pirate who used to make good money at it, no longer does. Something has changed. And to quote the summary, "When you asked a customer why he wasn't buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was BitTorrent this, LimeWire that ..." Seems pretty conclusive to me. Do you have some more reliable source of information you forgot to mention?
More credible than TorrentFreak? I shudder to think that such a thing could exist! Even the New York Times publishes outright lies and fiction these days.
This is the cornerstone of virgin sacrifice theory. Someone quick, start praying to Komona-wana-laya!
640,000 years ought to be enough for everybody.
Nope, I tried reading the agreement, and even that doesn't disable the WGA phone-homing. Back to the drawing board! I'm guessing I'll have to set up a rule on my firewall if I really want to stop this traffic...
Artificial Life rights. This is of course because it is their own organs that will eventually be replaced by machinery, until they become completely artificial people.
In all seriousness, it's great to see at least one government looking forward so far ahead. Robots sophisticated enough to assert that they have rights are beyond the horizon of technical feasibility for today, but not beyond the horizon for science fiction. I'm really happy to know that at least one government takes sci fi so seriously as to address a problem before it turns into a real crisis. If only we could have done something like this for global warming...