I think this is horribly irresponsible, because the people who pirate are probably never going to pay for the full product.
So, what, MS is morally obligated to give their software away for free to keep the Internet secure? Please. The problem with Code Red wasn't software pirates, it was (and is) ordinary users who either don't know enough to keep their bug patches up-to-date, or don't care. If pirates were the only reason viruses spread on the Internet, we wouldn't even have a problem.
I use Yahoo! Messenger all the time on my PC. I like it, I use it, it gives me handy access to my account there.
But it's annoying because YM uses IE as its HTML rendering engine. If I uninstalled IE completely, YM wouldn't work. HomeSite has (or at least, had) similar problems; it advertised "experimental" Gecko integration, but I never did get it to work. If I wanted to preview my pages without launching a browser, IE needs to be installed.
Other third-party apps do the same thing, because IE's engine is so easy for them to integrate. It's not my fault they rely entirely on MS's browser to make their application work, but there you are.
So we keep IE installed and just deal with the memory bloat. I don't use IE anymore except for browser testing, not since Mozilla became so friendly and I convinced Windows to make it the default browser for everything. (This took some time.) But it'd be nice if third-party apps didn't agree with MS that the browser is an "integrated" part of the OS.
Oni's gameplay was remarkably similar to "The Matrix", although its visuals obviously were not. They could save themselves a lot of time by just licensing the game engine, keep the buildings, changing all the characters, and making it massively multiplayer.
(Yeah, I know Oni's fighting engine was rather simplified compared to, say, Street Fighter II, but when you're trying to go for widespread appeal, that's actually a Good Thing. Plus, Oni allowed you to pick up new moves as you advanced in levels, a feature which lends itself nicely to an MMORPG.)
When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bombarded with advertising?
When they're willing to pay the necessary price for the product. C'mon, do you really think Nat. Geographic costs only a few bucks a copy to produce? Advertisers are subsidizing the cost.
Even "public" tv and radio, supported by those who enjoy it, has to rely on sponsors to a limited degree. TV shows are largely, if not completely, free for the viewer. If I want them without the ads, I can always buy the boxed DVD when it comes out.
Billboards are a necessary evil if you want to drive on a freeway instead of a tollway. Magazine and newspaper ads keep costs down so that you can easily afford them. It's all part of the capitalist structure, in more ways than one.
And it's not all bad, you know. Advertising lets you know when a nearby store is having a big sale, or when a new restaurant opens nearby that you'd like to visit, or when your favorite musician is performing a concert in town. Most of advertising is drivel to you, but there's always somebody who feels it's useful to him or her. It's simply a fact of mass media that you have to digest everyone else's useful ads along with your own.
Don't like Ford advertising on your free posters? Go to the Nat. Geographic store or web site and buy your own, then. It's really that simple.
Today, every college bowl game (in the US, anyways) has a corporate sponsor whose logo is spray-painted right on the fifty-yard line and whose brand is mentioned in the same sentence as the game at every announcement. Other stadiums do similar things by buying logo placement in places where the TV cameras usually watch.
Movies have been featuring product placement for years now, if not decades. TV shows have done the same thing to a lesser degree, probably only because the commercials are more profitable. That can and will change because of commercial-zapping technology, whether it's outlawed or not.
And then, of course, there are informercials -- TV shows which actually are commercials, wrapped up as talk show-type entertainment. And they work, astonishingly well. (Ever notice all those George Foreman grills in your local hardware, drug, and grocery store?) Any time you see a product with an "As Seen On TV" sticker, you can bet it's been using an informercial to justify its placement in that store.
Commercials will still continue to exist, of course. But as for "alternate" advertising methods -- you must not be watching with your eyes open to have not noticed them already.
...GameCube would be Marvel: continuously re-introducing old popular titles in the hope that old fans with new incomes will buy them and restore the company's fortunes.
...Sega would be Image: beautiful graphics time after time, but slow to realize that's not enough to keep them from crashing and burning.
...Sony would be Vertigo: late to the party, but chock-full of great stories with some truly radical, if not entirely beautiful, graphics.
...Microsoft would Dark Horse: rather than creating anything great on their own, buy up everyone else's popular ideas and market the hell out of them.
Netscape's had an integrated AIM client since 6.0, so it's not a "new" feature unless you've been using Mozilla or have been waiting for ICQ integration as well.
However, it is a bit interesting to put this side-by-side with Apple's iChat announcement for the next major OS X release. This, too, integrates an AIM-compatible client with a major piece of software -- in this case, the Aqua-fied OS itself.
So I'm wondering, where are we going to see it next? AOL's already pretty universal, but for those of us who prefer direct connections, we'll have two new ways to be exposed to it.
I'm starting to wonder if someone in AOL's camp is working on adding AIM to Eudora's or someone else's e-mail client, or even a Linux distro with the AOL/AIM clients integrated right into the dialup. Why play games with Microsoft's bat and balls, when you can help your customers overwrite it entirely? (Joking, mostly.)
This is the statistical anomaly that will never happen again. M$ used their one "get to be right for free" card on knocking down realnames, so it's safe to assume they'll *never* *ever* be right again.
If you knew how to play "Monopoly," you'd know that a "Get out of jail free" card goes right back into the draw pile as soon as it's spent.
Flash, Photoshop, and even MS Office are all products not designed for ordinary consumers. They're just not. They're packed with features and tools for professionals, and those professionals are trying to make money with this software. The least they can do is ante up a few hours worth of their own fees to pay for the tools they use.
If you're a consumer, and you want a cheap product, the vendors are there for you. MS Office cost too much for your school papers? Get a copy of Works. Photoshop expensive for making web graphics and removing red-eye? Get Photoshop Elements for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, Macromedia Flash is the perfect example of a tool not targetted at consumers, period. The tutorial takes a couple of hours to get through, minimum, when you're starting from scratch, and ActionScript is hardly a walk in the park.
You say you'd buy Flash MX for $50. Well, what are you going to do with it? Goof around and build crappy animated interfaces for your web site? Or learn to use it properly and sell yourself as a Flash professional? If it's the latter, then take a class or pay for the full product, and justify the $50/hour your peers are charging. If it's the former, just learn JavaScript. It's still free.
..."Episode II" did cheat slightly by opening on a Thursday, giving it an extra day to profit that Spider-Man lacked. (OTOH, it also opened on fewer screens, although I personally find that hard to believe as my local mega-theaters gave "Spider-Man" four screens opening weekend and "Episode II" got five.)
I personally think it will be more interesting to see how business is on the second weekend, which "Spider-Man" did extremely well on, after everyone's had a chance to hear and read reviews from their friends.
Not that I'm bedrudging "Episode II", mind you. I have yet to see it, but everyone seems suitably pleased with it. I just like to keep everything in perspective, and remember Mark Twain's warning about statistics as the third basic kind of lie.
Don't underestimate the power of EA Sports's games (which are re-released with minor improvements every year, so sales for their "series" are always huge) and the multitude of developers that EA publishes for. This *could* mean trouble for M$.
Which is ironic, because Microsoft's own OS development follows almost exactly the same strategy.
And since it's a small company and not finaced by a huge corporation it can't really afford to make it's browser free, although with the advertising market what it is I can't believe they are making much.
Should I undermind Microsoft by paying for a good browser by a small company, or by using an open-source browser that doesn't cost me or the developers anything? Decisions, decisions....
Without a doubt, the BSD-base is the best thing this server has going for it. Without knowing more, I'd say that VNC is going to be a big deal for people wanting to use this thing without necessarily giving a Mac to their network admins. (Speaking of admins, has Apple figured out how to sell the major consulting companies on this thing?)
Their Web site is cleverly designed to use a minimum of text and graphics, as well as containing almost no actual information, making it very difficult to bring down by Slashdotting. They really are sneaky, aren't they?
Guess I'll just have to go do an old-fashioned DDoS instead....
I am going to have to save the parent post, because it is such a perfect example of the mindset that has made progress in aerospace so damn slow. I couldn't have said it better if I was trying to intentionally construct the stereotype. This ties directly in to the quote I had in the article -- "rocket science" has been mythologized out of all proportion to its true difficulty.
Heh. I won't take it personally -- this wasn't my best-written post by a long shot. Thanks for the breakdown of the advances and the costs involved, actually. I may forward them along to my older brother, who's far more fascinated by this sort of thing than I am.
In my haste to compose the original post, I seem to have glossed over the main point that bothered me: why anyone would want to develop private space flight. Yes, I know it's fun and hard and a challenge and everybody wants to be in orbit just once, but hear me out.
Cars are immediately useful inventions, because almost everything man builds is built on land. Air flight is a useful shortcut to get from one land-based site to another. The technology required to send people deep underwater is useful for primarily two things: research and recreation. Lots of people learn to SCUBA dive primarily to take photos of the animal life off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef.
But whither space flight? Yes, getting to float in orbit is a neat experience, and you have a spectacular view of the Earth below you. But right now, there's nowhere else to go. Even the moon is a few days of controlled flight away, and that's assuming you have the survival gear to walk on it and the ability to take off again once you're done. But it's generally agreed right now that the moon is far less recreationally exciting than the Great Barrier Reef; there's no light, no color, no movement. Earth orbit doesn't even have the grey rocks to look at. And flying to another planet is out of the question.
If we had vast space stations in orbit, then there would be a good reason to want to be able to take oneself into orbit. But right now, the ISS is too small and limited to registered users only. And all the technology to design and build a private orbital rocket won't do NASA any good so long as the components to build a space station require a space shuttle to launch.
So I'll grant you, it's soon possible to build and launch a man into orbit with relatively little capital. But unlike another poster suggested, I don't think we'll see private space flight within a decade. The technology may arrive, but even if it does, there's still nowhere for people to go. Without meaning any offense, I see private rocketry as somewhat analogous to mountain climbing: something to do just because it's there to be done, because there's sure not any other reason to do it.
This is why I still like the space elevator dream: not only can it send people into orbit with relatively little effort, but hardware as well, and it provides a fixed platform for assembling that hardware at the top and sending the workers back down for more food and oxygen. It gives us the means to get into orbit cheaply and somewhere to go once we get up there. Best of all, it wouldn't require much training to ride one.
This article keeps talking about space flight as if it were something that should be cheap, that brilliance is the only thing keeping us out of orbit.
We wish.
Space flight isn't like air flight, where a couple of bicycle repairmen from Ohio could study the basic principles and build a device on their own. Air flight can be done with an ordinary gasoline engine and the right kits. Goddard developed the first successful rockets with a combination of basic physics and lots of chemistry, but those weren't manned or orbital.
On the other hand, sending a man into space for the first time took the combined financial and intellectual resources of an entire superpower. It still does, not because the principles are too advanced but because the raw materials are hideously expensive and because the margin for error is enormous. If you're trying to fly yourself into orbit, you damned well better have your engineering right because after a certain point, even parachutes won't save you from a miscalculation.
About the only thing that could make orbital commutes cost-effective would be a successful space elevator, a tether between a geosynchronous station and the ground along which cargo and people could climb and descend. High-tech planes won't do it, rockets won't do it, all of those take too much money and have too much risk. An elevator would have an initial cost and then be relatively cheap to run and re-run. And once you had one, you could send up parts for a second one again and again.
But I'm not holding out hope for a $200 ticket on a space shuttle anytime soon.
Microsoft wants to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.
I see no reason to argue that. Microsoft is interested in what's good for Microsoft, not for Angelfire or DoubleClick or porn peddlers. Their own website doesn't use unwanted popups, and never has.
On the other hand, their software is almost universally designed for ease-of-use and large numbers of features, while also lacking security in implementing those features. So I predict that someday, IE will allow blocking of auto-popups, but they will never advertise it or turn it on by default--or make it difficult to work around.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is horribly irresponsible, because the people who pirate are probably never going to pay for the full product.
So, what, MS is morally obligated to give their software away for free to keep the Internet secure? Please. The problem with Code Red wasn't software pirates, it was (and is) ordinary users who either don't know enough to keep their bug patches up-to-date, or don't care. If pirates were the only reason viruses spread on the Internet, we wouldn't even have a problem.
I use Yahoo! Messenger all the time on my PC. I like it, I use it, it gives me handy access to my account there.
But it's annoying because YM uses IE as its HTML rendering engine. If I uninstalled IE completely, YM wouldn't work. HomeSite has (or at least, had) similar problems; it advertised "experimental" Gecko integration, but I never did get it to work. If I wanted to preview my pages without launching a browser, IE needs to be installed.
Other third-party apps do the same thing, because IE's engine is so easy for them to integrate. It's not my fault they rely entirely on MS's browser to make their application work, but there you are.
So we keep IE installed and just deal with the memory bloat. I don't use IE anymore except for browser testing, not since Mozilla became so friendly and I convinced Windows to make it the default browser for everything. (This took some time.) But it'd be nice if third-party apps didn't agree with MS that the browser is an "integrated" part of the OS.
Oni's gameplay was remarkably similar to "The Matrix", although its visuals obviously were not. They could save themselves a lot of time by just licensing the game engine, keep the buildings, changing all the characters, and making it massively multiplayer.
(Yeah, I know Oni's fighting engine was rather simplified compared to, say, Street Fighter II, but when you're trying to go for widespread appeal, that's actually a Good Thing. Plus, Oni allowed you to pick up new moves as you advanced in levels, a feature which lends itself nicely to an MMORPG.)
"What are you playing there?"
A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.
"What's the game about?"
A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.
"..."
When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bombarded with advertising?
When they're willing to pay the necessary price for the product. C'mon, do you really think Nat. Geographic costs only a few bucks a copy to produce? Advertisers are subsidizing the cost.
Even "public" tv and radio, supported by those who enjoy it, has to rely on sponsors to a limited degree. TV shows are largely, if not completely, free for the viewer. If I want them without the ads, I can always buy the boxed DVD when it comes out.
Billboards are a necessary evil if you want to drive on a freeway instead of a tollway. Magazine and newspaper ads keep costs down so that you can easily afford them. It's all part of the capitalist structure, in more ways than one.
And it's not all bad, you know. Advertising lets you know when a nearby store is having a big sale, or when a new restaurant opens nearby that you'd like to visit, or when your favorite musician is performing a concert in town. Most of advertising is drivel to you, but there's always somebody who feels it's useful to him or her. It's simply a fact of mass media that you have to digest everyone else's useful ads along with your own.
Don't like Ford advertising on your free posters? Go to the Nat. Geographic store or web site and buy your own, then. It's really that simple.
Today, every college bowl game (in the US, anyways) has a corporate sponsor whose logo is spray-painted right on the fifty-yard line and whose brand is mentioned in the same sentence as the game at every announcement. Other stadiums do similar things by buying logo placement in places where the TV cameras usually watch.
Movies have been featuring product placement for years now, if not decades. TV shows have done the same thing to a lesser degree, probably only because the commercials are more profitable. That can and will change because of commercial-zapping technology, whether it's outlawed or not.
And then, of course, there are informercials -- TV shows which actually are commercials, wrapped up as talk show-type entertainment. And they work, astonishingly well. (Ever notice all those George Foreman grills in your local hardware, drug, and grocery store?) Any time you see a product with an "As Seen On TV" sticker, you can bet it's been using an informercial to justify its placement in that store.
Commercials will still continue to exist, of course. But as for "alternate" advertising methods -- you must not be watching with your eyes open to have not noticed them already.
...GameCube would be Marvel: continuously re-introducing old popular titles in the hope that old fans with new incomes will buy them and restore the company's fortunes.
...Sega would be Image: beautiful graphics time after time, but slow to realize that's not enough to keep them from crashing and burning.
...Sony would be Vertigo: late to the party, but chock-full of great stories with some truly radical, if not entirely beautiful, graphics.
...Microsoft would Dark Horse: rather than creating anything great on their own, buy up everyone else's popular ideas and market the hell out of them.
Netscape's had an integrated AIM client since 6.0, so it's not a "new" feature unless you've been using Mozilla or have been waiting for ICQ integration as well.
However, it is a bit interesting to put this side-by-side with Apple's iChat announcement for the next major OS X release. This, too, integrates an AIM-compatible client with a major piece of software -- in this case, the Aqua-fied OS itself.
So I'm wondering, where are we going to see it next? AOL's already pretty universal, but for those of us who prefer direct connections, we'll have two new ways to be exposed to it.
I'm starting to wonder if someone in AOL's camp is working on adding AIM to Eudora's or someone else's e-mail client, or even a Linux distro with the AOL/AIM clients integrated right into the dialup. Why play games with Microsoft's bat and balls, when you can help your customers overwrite it entirely? (Joking, mostly.)
This is the statistical anomaly that will never happen again. M$ used their one "get to be right for free" card on knocking down realnames, so it's safe to assume they'll *never* *ever* be right again.
If you knew how to play "Monopoly," you'd know that a "Get out of jail free" card goes right back into the draw pile as soon as it's spent.
Flash, Photoshop, and even MS Office are all products not designed for ordinary consumers. They're just not. They're packed with features and tools for professionals, and those professionals are trying to make money with this software. The least they can do is ante up a few hours worth of their own fees to pay for the tools they use.
If you're a consumer, and you want a cheap product, the vendors are there for you. MS Office cost too much for your school papers? Get a copy of Works. Photoshop expensive for making web graphics and removing red-eye? Get Photoshop Elements for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, Macromedia Flash is the perfect example of a tool not targetted at consumers, period. The tutorial takes a couple of hours to get through, minimum, when you're starting from scratch, and ActionScript is hardly a walk in the park.
You say you'd buy Flash MX for $50. Well, what are you going to do with it? Goof around and build crappy animated interfaces for your web site? Or learn to use it properly and sell yourself as a Flash professional? If it's the latter, then take a class or pay for the full product, and justify the $50/hour your peers are charging. If it's the former, just learn JavaScript. It's still free.
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
What he forgot to mention was that, at present, the disc is roughly the size and thickness of a small kitchen table.
..."Episode II" did cheat slightly by opening on a Thursday, giving it an extra day to profit that Spider-Man lacked. (OTOH, it also opened on fewer screens, although I personally find that hard to believe as my local mega-theaters gave "Spider-Man" four screens opening weekend and "Episode II" got five.)
I personally think it will be more interesting to see how business is on the second weekend, which "Spider-Man" did extremely well on, after everyone's had a chance to hear and read reviews from their friends.
Not that I'm bedrudging "Episode II", mind you. I have yet to see it, but everyone seems suitably pleased with it. I just like to keep everything in perspective, and remember Mark Twain's warning about statistics as the third basic kind of lie.
...when they gave the university a grant to develop a new sort of web tablet.
Don't underestimate the power of EA Sports's games (which are re-released with minor improvements every year, so sales for their "series" are always huge) and the multitude of developers that EA publishes for. This *could* mean trouble for M$.
Which is ironic, because Microsoft's own OS development follows almost exactly the same strategy.
How inefficient. You can throw the first if/then clause away entirely and trust the final else clause to capture it with identical output.
Opera has the best interface. They invinted tabs and gestures. Mozilla has coppied these, though.
Actually, doesn't Adobe own the patent on tabbed windows?
And since it's a small company and not finaced by a huge corporation it can't really afford to make it's browser free, although with the advertising market what it is I can't believe they are making much.
Should I undermind Microsoft by paying for a good browser by a small company, or by using an open-source browser that doesn't cost me or the developers anything? Decisions, decisions....
In a decade these all-in-one devices are going to be laughable.
So? We still want something to use between now and then. It's not like anyone will be able to use this gizmo after ten years of steady use, anyhow.
Apple's list of venders promising support for the new server (without any actual product commitments) is at : http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/may/14quotes. html
Without a doubt, the BSD-base is the best thing this server has going for it. Without knowing more, I'd say that VNC is going to be a big deal for people wanting to use this thing without necessarily giving a Mac to their network admins. (Speaking of admins, has Apple figured out how to sell the major consulting companies on this thing?)
Their Web site is cleverly designed to use a minimum of text and graphics, as well as containing almost no actual information, making it very difficult to bring down by Slashdotting. They really are sneaky, aren't they?
Guess I'll just have to go do an old-fashioned DDoS instead....
I am going to have to save the parent post, because it is such a perfect example of the mindset that has made progress in aerospace so damn slow. I couldn't have said it better if I was trying to intentionally construct the stereotype. This ties directly in to the quote I had in the article -- "rocket science" has been mythologized out of all proportion to its true difficulty.
Heh. I won't take it personally -- this wasn't my best-written post by a long shot. Thanks for the breakdown of the advances and the costs involved, actually. I may forward them along to my older brother, who's far more fascinated by this sort of thing than I am.
In my haste to compose the original post, I seem to have glossed over the main point that bothered me: why anyone would want to develop private space flight. Yes, I know it's fun and hard and a challenge and everybody wants to be in orbit just once, but hear me out.
Cars are immediately useful inventions, because almost everything man builds is built on land. Air flight is a useful shortcut to get from one land-based site to another. The technology required to send people deep underwater is useful for primarily two things: research and recreation. Lots of people learn to SCUBA dive primarily to take photos of the animal life off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef.
But whither space flight? Yes, getting to float in orbit is a neat experience, and you have a spectacular view of the Earth below you. But right now, there's nowhere else to go. Even the moon is a few days of controlled flight away, and that's assuming you have the survival gear to walk on it and the ability to take off again once you're done. But it's generally agreed right now that the moon is far less recreationally exciting than the Great Barrier Reef; there's no light, no color, no movement. Earth orbit doesn't even have the grey rocks to look at. And flying to another planet is out of the question.
If we had vast space stations in orbit, then there would be a good reason to want to be able to take oneself into orbit. But right now, the ISS is too small and limited to registered users only. And all the technology to design and build a private orbital rocket won't do NASA any good so long as the components to build a space station require a space shuttle to launch.
So I'll grant you, it's soon possible to build and launch a man into orbit with relatively little capital. But unlike another poster suggested, I don't think we'll see private space flight within a decade. The technology may arrive, but even if it does, there's still nowhere for people to go. Without meaning any offense, I see private rocketry as somewhat analogous to mountain climbing: something to do just because it's there to be done, because there's sure not any other reason to do it.
This is why I still like the space elevator dream: not only can it send people into orbit with relatively little effort, but hardware as well, and it provides a fixed platform for assembling that hardware at the top and sending the workers back down for more food and oxygen. It gives us the means to get into orbit cheaply and somewhere to go once we get up there. Best of all, it wouldn't require much training to ride one.
Not only that, but the link has managed to crash out AnimeFu. Grumble grumble.
Those lost and confused, try this or this.
This article keeps talking about space flight as if it were something that should be cheap, that brilliance is the only thing keeping us out of orbit.
We wish.
Space flight isn't like air flight, where a couple of bicycle repairmen from Ohio could study the basic principles and build a device on their own. Air flight can be done with an ordinary gasoline engine and the right kits. Goddard developed the first successful rockets with a combination of basic physics and lots of chemistry, but those weren't manned or orbital.
On the other hand, sending a man into space for the first time took the combined financial and intellectual resources of an entire superpower. It still does, not because the principles are too advanced but because the raw materials are hideously expensive and because the margin for error is enormous. If you're trying to fly yourself into orbit, you damned well better have your engineering right because after a certain point, even parachutes won't save you from a miscalculation.
About the only thing that could make orbital commutes cost-effective would be a successful space elevator, a tether between a geosynchronous station and the ground along which cargo and people could climb and descend. High-tech planes won't do it, rockets won't do it, all of those take too much money and have too much risk. An elevator would have an initial cost and then be relatively cheap to run and re-run. And once you had one, you could send up parts for a second one again and again.
But I'm not holding out hope for a $200 ticket on a space shuttle anytime soon.
Microsoft wants to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.
I see no reason to argue that. Microsoft is interested in what's good for Microsoft, not for Angelfire or DoubleClick or porn peddlers. Their own website doesn't use unwanted popups, and never has.
On the other hand, their software is almost universally designed for ease-of-use and large numbers of features, while also lacking security in implementing those features. So I predict that someday, IE will allow blocking of auto-popups, but they will never advertise it or turn it on by default--or make it difficult to work around.
If you're going to nitpick, you should probably make sure that your subjects and verbs agree. "Someone" is singular. "They" is plural.
;-)
"They" isn't a verb, either. If you're going to nitpick, you should probably make sure your name the problem correctly.