The big problem with that list is they are mostly rebranded or "wrapped" browsers, meaning they take the Trident or Gecko rendering engine, put their own chrome around it and pass it off as their own. Maxthon and Avant, for example, were at least slightly more popular back in the days of IE 5/6, as they offered tabbed browsing, enhanced ActiveX security and a few other creature comforts long before IE7 was ever announced.
Flock is a Firefox wrapper with a bunch of (proprietary) addons for social media sites. Now, I'm not too big on social media so I can't really offer valid critique, but the idea seemed a bit goofy and the whole project seems like a weak attempt to cash in on the MySpace/Facebook buzz. YMMV
So in the end, you really have four choices, each with a few trim options: IE, Firefox, Webkit, Opera. No one really has the patience to write a new engine anyway, the web is such a clusterfuck of broken standards and copy-paste web "designers" that it's near-impossible to get anywhere by starting from scratch.
Looked more like an Asus, but yeah... real computers take way longer than that to assemble. This was more like a kindergarten Lego competition. The guy looked like he was one of those Geek Squad half-wits who'd never used a screwdriver his whole life. You want a real competition ? Give them a pile of boxed parts, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Timer starts the moment they touch anything.
As someone who used to run a store and has built tens of thousands of PCs, I had gotten to a point where my entry-level boxes took less than 5 minutes from sale to delivery. That included pulling parts from the shelves, assembling the damned thing, running a short diagnostic suite and putting the finished machine back into the padded box. Gaming rigs took around 20-30 minutes, mostly due to the fiddly drive cages and cable routing. Rack servers can take an hour or more, especially if you're mounting a dozen hard drives on hot-swap sleds and routing all those SAS cables around the absolutely un-ergonomic cases. Obviously there was more testing involved with bigger systems, but the nice thing about the el-cheapo kit was that I could pre-assemble a ton of them over the weekend. The guy in the video ? He'd have assembled me out of business... people aren't buying $3000 PCs anymore, they're buying $299 PCs where your margin is maybe $25, so the tech has to be extremely quick to be worth the money. It's not like you can realistically charge an $80 assembly fee on such a cheap machine.
The problem with unions, from my perspective as a non-unionized employee, is that their collective bargaining usually amounts to empty threats and whining: "We unskilled laborers want more money, so we're going on strike", and "You can't fire me for being a useless sexually-abusive thief, my union will sue you".
Unions are, in theory, a good thing, however the bell curve applies so you wind up with a group of average (read: stupid) people bending their employer over and reaming them with overprotective laws. The net result is an inflation treadmill that leaves non-union workers screwed.
Have you ever watched a small child play with a water pistol or nerf gun ? If they're not strong enough to point and shoot, what they almost always do (once) is lay the weapon in their lap, pointing up at their face, and use both thumbs to push the trigger down with more force. They get squirted, or bonked in the face with a nerf dart, and learn to not do that again (unless they're American...). In this case, instead of a nerf dart it was live ammo.
Here's a not-so-deep thought for the day: why is it that the dumber people are, the more likely they are to own guns ?
I was under the impression that most peripherals from the same platform would work across both the Guitar Hero series and the Rock Band series. At the very least, my USB guitar controller from the PC version seems to work fine with all the Xbox 360 music games I've tried, and the compatibility matrix on Rockband.com suggests that most drum sets are also compatible.
That said, Activision took a huge crap all over the franchise, starting with GH3. The engine, as you explained, is utter garbage. On my Crysis-enabled beast of a bleeding-edge gaming rig, GH3 stutters and loses sync at random times. The song lists are very slap-dash, particularly with GH5 where a bunch of the songs, I've played before in other Harmonix titles, and about half of the new ones are boring bottom-40 pop crap. Maybe GH6 will add a dildo controller and fellatio track, to simulate how these awful bands actually got signed.
In the end though, these games only need one engine. Ideally, they should release a final Rock Band title with a massive online music store, work out a deal wherein any tunes you purchase for the game, you also get as MP3 for your portable player. The disc is obsolete. Why go to the store and spend $70 on a disc with 5-6 good tunes and a bunch of filler, when there's more money to be made with DLC ? Just because the music industry is run by idiots, doesn't mean the game industry should follow suit.
I'm hoping someone can find this link, somehow I must have lost the bookmark. Anyway I think it's from this BFG or XFX tech, posting pictures of all the wacky things people did to graphics cards to try and defraud the vendor via the RMA process. Ancient AGP cards hacksawed, duct-taped, painted and mounted behind a Geforce 9800 GTX heatsink.
Customers indeed have tons of time on their hands, and statistically speaking there's no shortage of stupid in this world. After all, if they had any brains they'd be doing your job, right ?
No, because, if you're going to counterfeit $100k worth of merch, I expect you to spend the $300 and buy a real one so you can copy it accurately. It's like those assclowns selling burned copies of Windows 7 at full price... in a regular DVD case with inkjet labels:P For fuck's sake, buy a goddamned color laser printer at the very least! If I were going to counterfeit stuff, I'd put some hearty effort to make it undetectable.
It always blows my mind how stupid the counterfeiters always turn out to be. They shouldn't be jailed for fraud, they should be jailed for criminal stupidity. It should be a felony to be that retarded.
The real question is: why is a distributor involved in the first place ? You'd think Newegg gets enough volume to buy direct from Intel, why bother making some useless (and now unreliable) middleman rich ?
The problem with Windows pricing is in how it relates to the rest of a PC's cost.
Back in the 80's and 90's, computers cost $5k or more. $99 for software was a drop in the bucket back then.
Today, I can (but choose not to) build a $250 office PC. If you add Windows and Office to that, those two basic software packages end up costing twice more than the hardware, and that, to me is upside-down. Intel is a multi-billion dollar company, most of that money is spent on R&D, not unlike a software shop, yet Intel's prices continue to drop, while Microsoft's are relatively stable, after you account for inflation. Conversely, Intel's per-unit manufacturing costs are quite high, while Microsoft's per-unit cost is extremely low - so low, in fact, that they can almost give it away to OEMs such as Dell and HP, who provide their own media and support.
In a weird socialist kind of logic, one would expect that as the cost of hardware decreases, so should the cost of software, and that illusory "loss of income" supplanted by the ever-increasing number of users. MS might make less profit per sale, but overall they would sell more copies, and since the unit cost is so low, profit would be maximized.
Do you really think so many people would pirate Windows and Office if these were priced more aggressively ? How do you define reasonable ? What if Windows was $50 and Windows + Office was $100 ?
So what you're insinuating is that Steve Jobs is at the heart of all this developer-hating ecosystem ? I couldn't agree more. All that matters is that it works for them, from a business perspective. I don't care how Apple manages their product lines, because I have the freedom to not use them if they don't suit my needs and tastes, as a software developer and tinkerer. I like my gadgets to be hackable, so if Apple doesn't want to sell hackable gadgets, I'm quite content to not buy Apple's gadgets.
Why that trivial "agreement to disagree" gets blown up into its own/. topic, well that's the true mystery to me. Do people complain about McDonalds for not selling the Double Whopper ? No, they stfu and go to Burger King across the street.
Except the iPod/iPhone sucks as a gaming platform, and costs four times more than the Nintendo or Sony devices. Sure, I have games on my iPhone, they're the 5-minute-break-type games like Bejeweled and friends. I don't think of it of a gaming device, I think of it as a time-killing device to avoid eye contact with the sketchpads on the bus ride home. Much the same as I used my ancient Palm Tungsten back in the day.
Much like game DRM, if Win 8 does that idiotic "rent-a-feature" licensing, someone will come out with full-featured hack before the thing is even released to manufacturing. Illegal ? Sure. Better than the official pay-per-view way ? Definitely. If we are to learn anything from the past, we should know that in most cases the hacked/pirated solution works better than the real thing, because the people designing and building DRM schemes are, by definition, not the sharpest tools in the shed.
I like that scale. If a user can't do the math, and end up buying a more wasteful vehicle which ends up costing them a chunk more in fuel, that's fine by me.
We need to stop pandering to the mentally lazy. "Oh noes, i see numbers! Brain off!"
If we continue to dumb down every piece of data for mass consumption, the only logical result is a mass of illiterate fools who can't think for themselves. The way things are looking, we're already halfway there.
Do you always counter reasonable statements with pointless pedantry ?
People, at least those outside the US, don't tend to burn an entire tank of fuel while parked. They also don't live in a world where you measure a car's efficiency in rolling downhill with no engine. They also acknowledge that there is no such thing as "infinite energy", a base geophysical fact America has yet to integrate. Even your beloved science fiction adheres to the concept of limited energy and the budgeting thereof.
It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever.
True, it has been around forever. It's been written by the same no-talent assclowns who have been waiting out their clocks and covering their asses since the dawn of time. My experience with all these "migration easing" tools is that they are a bigger pain than just writing your own damned code. That's why almost all my migrations are done with a few trivial bits of C++ or PHP.
Just let time take its toll on you. Young people think they can do anything, wise people know they can't. I'm still in that transitional phase.
Most of the time, it's easier to get a new smarter dog (or business), than to teach an old one new tricks. Sometimes you just have to let the big guy collapse under his own weight, then rise up with a new solution.
Transparency is worthless without control. We can (and do) whine all day long, but nothing gets done and they are always quick to throw unions and half-baked policies up as a smokescreen.
The problem isn't so much the teenagers/college kids actually delivering the junk - they are part of the problem yes, but the fight should be taken to the source: idiotic advertisers. Door-to-door is wasteful and inefficient.
Around here, we have a little semi-legit print shop that distributes a take-out/delivery menu quarterly. They get a bunch of local restaurants to submit their menus and flyers, work them into a small laminated leaflet and deliver that within a 10 block radius. I find those exceptionally handy, we keep it next to the phone (yes, I fail at cooking). Way better than getting two dozen pieces of folded paper each week. And those real-estate, beautician and duct-cleaning flyers ? Fuck em. If I need a real estate agent, I'll find one in the yellow pages. I don't need some sleazy pant-suit-wearing divorcee bragging about how many houses she sold last year, particularly if I'm living in an apartment building:P
The ad "industry" is a very competitive one. Old-world practices such as mailbox stuffing are obsolete, and should be actively punished.
Didn't VRML look and behave kind of like Second Life ? I still think both are equally stupid, but obviously some people thought it was worth taking semi-seriously. SL brought much better, dumbed-down tools to build this 3D web, but it's more or less the same thing.
Back in the good old days, we had MFM drives. These things were huge stupid spindles that required a separate controller board. If you had one of those, you could design your own minimalist controller chip (as an FPGA or fast PIC), and access the MFM platters directly. That was, oh, 15-20 years ago. Today the controller is built right into the drive, that's that little board on the underside. Today's controllers are quite a bit more complex than the old ones, with much tighter tolerances to support modern bit densities. The short version is that if you're on Ask Slashdot, you do not have anywhere near the level of skill and topical expertise to design your own controller. Either find yourself a hard drive engineer, or hide your porn in the Recycle Bin like everyone else.
They're both "old" companies that had a decent foothold in the LAN market, back in tha day. Very different products, but they were the two names you were almost sure to find in any network.
Sure, it's portable, as long as the you have an EE engine for your preferred platform. It's portable because the platform specifics have been displaced to the VM, but if your particular VM is shite, you're still up a creek. And then you run into VM-specific bugs.
I see nothing that Java does, that couldn't be done better with a real compiler and a stable library. In essence, that's what the EE platform provides: a big standard library.
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem with that list is they are mostly rebranded or "wrapped" browsers, meaning they take the Trident or Gecko rendering engine, put their own chrome around it and pass it off as their own. Maxthon and Avant, for example, were at least slightly more popular back in the days of IE 5/6, as they offered tabbed browsing, enhanced ActiveX security and a few other creature comforts long before IE7 was ever announced.
Flock is a Firefox wrapper with a bunch of (proprietary) addons for social media sites. Now, I'm not too big on social media so I can't really offer valid critique, but the idea seemed a bit goofy and the whole project seems like a weak attempt to cash in on the MySpace/Facebook buzz. YMMV
So in the end, you really have four choices, each with a few trim options: IE, Firefox, Webkit, Opera. No one really has the patience to write a new engine anyway, the web is such a clusterfuck of broken standards and copy-paste web "designers" that it's near-impossible to get anywhere by starting from scratch.
Looked more like an Asus, but yeah... real computers take way longer than that to assemble. This was more like a kindergarten Lego competition. The guy looked like he was one of those Geek Squad half-wits who'd never used a screwdriver his whole life. You want a real competition ? Give them a pile of boxed parts, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Timer starts the moment they touch anything.
As someone who used to run a store and has built tens of thousands of PCs, I had gotten to a point where my entry-level boxes took less than 5 minutes from sale to delivery. That included pulling parts from the shelves, assembling the damned thing, running a short diagnostic suite and putting the finished machine back into the padded box. Gaming rigs took around 20-30 minutes, mostly due to the fiddly drive cages and cable routing. Rack servers can take an hour or more, especially if you're mounting a dozen hard drives on hot-swap sleds and routing all those SAS cables around the absolutely un-ergonomic cases. Obviously there was more testing involved with bigger systems, but the nice thing about the el-cheapo kit was that I could pre-assemble a ton of them over the weekend. The guy in the video ? He'd have assembled me out of business... people aren't buying $3000 PCs anymore, they're buying $299 PCs where your margin is maybe $25, so the tech has to be extremely quick to be worth the money. It's not like you can realistically charge an $80 assembly fee on such a cheap machine.
The problem with unions, from my perspective as a non-unionized employee, is that their collective bargaining usually amounts to empty threats and whining: "We unskilled laborers want more money, so we're going on strike", and "You can't fire me for being a useless sexually-abusive thief, my union will sue you".
Unions are, in theory, a good thing, however the bell curve applies so you wind up with a group of average (read: stupid) people bending their employer over and reaming them with overprotective laws. The net result is an inflation treadmill that leaves non-union workers screwed.
Bah, whatever. They will just make another baby... isn't that what dumb folk do?
Have you ever watched a small child play with a water pistol or nerf gun ? If they're not strong enough to point and shoot, what they almost always do (once) is lay the weapon in their lap, pointing up at their face, and use both thumbs to push the trigger down with more force. They get squirted, or bonked in the face with a nerf dart, and learn to not do that again (unless they're American...). In this case, instead of a nerf dart it was live ammo.
Here's a not-so-deep thought for the day: why is it that the dumber people are, the more likely they are to own guns ?
Not exactly compatible peripherals among games
I was under the impression that most peripherals from the same platform would work across both the Guitar Hero series and the Rock Band series. At the very least, my USB guitar controller from the PC version seems to work fine with all the Xbox 360 music games I've tried, and the compatibility matrix on Rockband.com suggests that most drum sets are also compatible.
That said, Activision took a huge crap all over the franchise, starting with GH3. The engine, as you explained, is utter garbage. On my Crysis-enabled beast of a bleeding-edge gaming rig, GH3 stutters and loses sync at random times. The song lists are very slap-dash, particularly with GH5 where a bunch of the songs, I've played before in other Harmonix titles, and about half of the new ones are boring bottom-40 pop crap. Maybe GH6 will add a dildo controller and fellatio track, to simulate how these awful bands actually got signed.
In the end though, these games only need one engine. Ideally, they should release a final Rock Band title with a massive online music store, work out a deal wherein any tunes you purchase for the game, you also get as MP3 for your portable player. The disc is obsolete. Why go to the store and spend $70 on a disc with 5-6 good tunes and a bunch of filler, when there's more money to be made with DLC ? Just because the music industry is run by idiots, doesn't mean the game industry should follow suit.
I'm hoping someone can find this link, somehow I must have lost the bookmark. Anyway I think it's from this BFG or XFX tech, posting pictures of all the wacky things people did to graphics cards to try and defraud the vendor via the RMA process. Ancient AGP cards hacksawed, duct-taped, painted and mounted behind a Geforce 9800 GTX heatsink.
Customers indeed have tons of time on their hands, and statistically speaking there's no shortage of stupid in this world. After all, if they had any brains they'd be doing your job, right ?
No, because, if you're going to counterfeit $100k worth of merch, I expect you to spend the $300 and buy a real one so you can copy it accurately. It's like those assclowns selling burned copies of Windows 7 at full price... in a regular DVD case with inkjet labels :P For fuck's sake, buy a goddamned color laser printer at the very least! If I were going to counterfeit stuff, I'd put some hearty effort to make it undetectable.
It always blows my mind how stupid the counterfeiters always turn out to be. They shouldn't be jailed for fraud, they should be jailed for criminal stupidity. It should be a felony to be that retarded.
The real question is: why is a distributor involved in the first place ? You'd think Newegg gets enough volume to buy direct from Intel, why bother making some useless (and now unreliable) middleman rich ?
The problem with Windows pricing is in how it relates to the rest of a PC's cost.
Back in the 80's and 90's, computers cost $5k or more. $99 for software was a drop in the bucket back then.
Today, I can (but choose not to) build a $250 office PC. If you add Windows and Office to that, those two basic software packages end up costing twice more than the hardware, and that, to me is upside-down. Intel is a multi-billion dollar company, most of that money is spent on R&D, not unlike a software shop, yet Intel's prices continue to drop, while Microsoft's are relatively stable, after you account for inflation. Conversely, Intel's per-unit manufacturing costs are quite high, while Microsoft's per-unit cost is extremely low - so low, in fact, that they can almost give it away to OEMs such as Dell and HP, who provide their own media and support.
In a weird socialist kind of logic, one would expect that as the cost of hardware decreases, so should the cost of software, and that illusory "loss of income" supplanted by the ever-increasing number of users. MS might make less profit per sale, but overall they would sell more copies, and since the unit cost is so low, profit would be maximized.
Do you really think so many people would pirate Windows and Office if these were priced more aggressively ? How do you define reasonable ? What if Windows was $50 and Windows + Office was $100 ?
So what you're insinuating is that Steve Jobs is at the heart of all this developer-hating ecosystem ? I couldn't agree more. All that matters is that it works for them, from a business perspective. I don't care how Apple manages their product lines, because I have the freedom to not use them if they don't suit my needs and tastes, as a software developer and tinkerer. I like my gadgets to be hackable, so if Apple doesn't want to sell hackable gadgets, I'm quite content to not buy Apple's gadgets.
Why that trivial "agreement to disagree" gets blown up into its own /. topic, well that's the true mystery to me. Do people complain about McDonalds for not selling the Double Whopper ? No, they stfu and go to Burger King across the street.
Except the iPod/iPhone sucks as a gaming platform, and costs four times more than the Nintendo or Sony devices. Sure, I have games on my iPhone, they're the 5-minute-break-type games like Bejeweled and friends. I don't think of it of a gaming device, I think of it as a time-killing device to avoid eye contact with the sketchpads on the bus ride home. Much the same as I used my ancient Palm Tungsten back in the day.
Much like game DRM, if Win 8 does that idiotic "rent-a-feature" licensing, someone will come out with full-featured hack before the thing is even released to manufacturing. Illegal ? Sure. Better than the official pay-per-view way ? Definitely. If we are to learn anything from the past, we should know that in most cases the hacked/pirated solution works better than the real thing, because the people designing and building DRM schemes are, by definition, not the sharpest tools in the shed.
I like that scale. If a user can't do the math, and end up buying a more wasteful vehicle which ends up costing them a chunk more in fuel, that's fine by me.
We need to stop pandering to the mentally lazy. "Oh noes, i see numbers! Brain off!"
If we continue to dumb down every piece of data for mass consumption, the only logical result is a mass of illiterate fools who can't think for themselves. The way things are looking, we're already halfway there.
Do you always counter reasonable statements with pointless pedantry ?
People, at least those outside the US, don't tend to burn an entire tank of fuel while parked. They also don't live in a world where you measure a car's efficiency in rolling downhill with no engine. They also acknowledge that there is no such thing as "infinite energy", a base geophysical fact America has yet to integrate. Even your beloved science fiction adheres to the concept of limited energy and the budgeting thereof.
It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever.
True, it has been around forever. It's been written by the same no-talent assclowns who have been waiting out their clocks and covering their asses since the dawn of time. My experience with all these "migration easing" tools is that they are a bigger pain than just writing your own damned code. That's why almost all my migrations are done with a few trivial bits of C++ or PHP.
Just let time take its toll on you. Young people think they can do anything, wise people know they can't. I'm still in that transitional phase.
Most of the time, it's easier to get a new smarter dog (or business), than to teach an old one new tricks. Sometimes you just have to let the big guy collapse under his own weight, then rise up with a new solution.
Your backwards logic fascinates me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Transparency is worthless without control. We can (and do) whine all day long, but nothing gets done and they are always quick to throw unions and half-baked policies up as a smokescreen.
The problem isn't so much the teenagers/college kids actually delivering the junk - they are part of the problem yes, but the fight should be taken to the source: idiotic advertisers. Door-to-door is wasteful and inefficient.
Around here, we have a little semi-legit print shop that distributes a take-out/delivery menu quarterly. They get a bunch of local restaurants to submit their menus and flyers, work them into a small laminated leaflet and deliver that within a 10 block radius. I find those exceptionally handy, we keep it next to the phone (yes, I fail at cooking). Way better than getting two dozen pieces of folded paper each week. And those real-estate, beautician and duct-cleaning flyers ? Fuck em. If I need a real estate agent, I'll find one in the yellow pages. I don't need some sleazy pant-suit-wearing divorcee bragging about how many houses she sold last year, particularly if I'm living in an apartment building :P
The ad "industry" is a very competitive one. Old-world practices such as mailbox stuffing are obsolete, and should be actively punished.
That would take away "jobs", aka the overpaid uneducated contractors who do these thing for the municipalities.
To a government bean counter, jail is a much more saleable proposition because it increments a bunch of line items.
Didn't VRML look and behave kind of like Second Life ? I still think both are equally stupid, but obviously some people thought it was worth taking semi-seriously. SL brought much better, dumbed-down tools to build this 3D web, but it's more or less the same thing.
Back in the good old days, we had MFM drives. These things were huge stupid spindles that required a separate controller board. If you had one of those, you could design your own minimalist controller chip (as an FPGA or fast PIC), and access the MFM platters directly. That was, oh, 15-20 years ago. Today the controller is built right into the drive, that's that little board on the underside. Today's controllers are quite a bit more complex than the old ones, with much tighter tolerances to support modern bit densities. The short version is that if you're on Ask Slashdot, you do not have anywhere near the level of skill and topical expertise to design your own controller. Either find yourself a hard drive engineer, or hide your porn in the Recycle Bin like everyone else.
They're both "old" companies that had a decent foothold in the LAN market, back in tha day. Very different products, but they were the two names you were almost sure to find in any network.
Sure, it's portable, as long as the you have an EE engine for your preferred platform. It's portable because the platform specifics have been displaced to the VM, but if your particular VM is shite, you're still up a creek. And then you run into VM-specific bugs.
I see nothing that Java does, that couldn't be done better with a real compiler and a stable library. In essence, that's what the EE platform provides: a big standard library.