investors can live with little or no growth in revenues in a mature company that dominates it's market, earns $40 billion a year and remains debt-free with $50-$60 billion in liquid reserves.
Not when it has 11 billion shares oustanding and a P/E over 30.
I do not see MS losing a huge market share anytime soon
It is not necessary for Microsoft to lose huge market share in order to hurt the company a great deal. Even losing a small amount of market share will cut Microsoft's revenue growth to nothing and send Microsoft stock into a tailspin.
The increase in TCO due to this latest "get them coming and going" scheme will be just the thing to push the next large batch of Microsoft users over to more reliable alternatives like Linux and Apple.
They could have made a niche for themselves in the embedded market. There's plenty of room for fast, low-power x86 despite the ARM's and Power PC's. The problem is that they didn't go after it.
x86 compatibility isn't important in the embedded market.
Actually, one of the things I noticed about this Giant-Antispyware is the number of false positives. On some systems it found a half dozen of them (things like VNC and such). Also the slowest, high memory usage, and last I tried, cancelling a scan doesn't let you delete what was found on the partial scan.
This is going to be comical. Microsoft users will spend all their time scanning for spyware from now on. The false positives should be especially entertaining in terms of Microsoft users learning to hate Microsoft more than they already do. And some spyware is still going to get through. No, let me correct that, tons of spyware is going to get through because it's just so profitable for the spammers to find ways of getting it through.
One problem is that OpenGL (pre 2.0, haven't looked at that yet) is horrible to work with if you actually want to get stuff done. I'm using it in a game right now, and let me tell you, using a library with a stateful API is no fun.
OpenGL is stateful because 3D hardware is, and OpenGL always tried to be a thin layer on top of the hardware. Unfortunately, as you've noticed, state leakage becomes a real problem as soon as you start trying to build anything beyond a single static scene. It's just too much bother to keep track of all the state variables you have to save and restore as you traverse render nodes, particularly when the traversal order isn't predetermined. That is why SGI developed Inventor, which takes care of managing the details of state variables so you don't have to. You specify which state you want to carry over between render nodes and Inventor takes care of making sure that's the only state that carries over. Inventor isn't open source, but Coin is, sort of (the license seems to imply the GPLed version can't be sold, which would be an "additional restriction", incompatible with GPL).
Anyway, there's Open Scene Graph which is entirely open, and considerably advanced beyond Inventor.
Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out.
Well, as usual, Microsoft demonstrates its magical ability to turn gold into feces. Buzz is, Halo 2 is a a big disappointment. Of course there's no need to trust just one opinion
25 of the top 100 products on the Amazon.com Software sales chart are from Microsoft, with Student Teacher Office 2003 currently in third place. Christmas rebates bringing the price down to $99.
Christmas rebates bring the price of Openoffice down to, um, free:-)
"Student Teacher Office 2003" from Amazon probably doesn't even come close to Openoffice's million downloads a month totalling over 35 million.
"The killer feature for me is searching. I hate the wasted real estate in Firefox from having a separate location and search box, and ease of use is dramatically better in Mozilla than in Firefox. In Mozilla, I just hit Ctrl-L, type my search commands, hit up arrow and enter. I haven't found any way of achieving the same thing in Firefox, and I hate the small size of the box I'm given to enter my search terms."
Exactly. I just hate the separate search box. After a couple of months using Firefox every day, I'm still constantly typing my search into the location bar, then I either notice and correct it by Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X, Tab, Ctrl-V (a real pain) or fail to notice and Firefox automagically googles to the first match and throws away my search text, never to be seen again. How hard would it be to enter the search text into the url history instead of discarding it, anyway?
Is it a namespace bug? What if I have one web server that accesses stuff on another web server? So I have my one site, site A, which has one set of content. And I have another site, site B, which has another set of content and passes some info back to site A.
Currently, from site A I can open a window to site B, do a little something, get some data back, and continue with more stuff on site A.
It amounts to a question of business requirements.
No, it amounts to a question of what is impossible to secure. If you want to share namespaces (or privileges) across sites, there needs to be an explicit mechanism, not "come one, come all" by default.
Now what? Of course, even if you figure out you don't want to do this, what are you going to key on to figure out whether sites are on the same server?
Straw man argument. You fell off the tracks when you started thinking in terms of having Javascript check things. Partitioning the namespace means there is no need to check. Now you need a mechanism to export trust when required, which probably already exists.
By the way, as I've said elsewhere, if they can get you to click an email link, they don't NEED all this popup magic. All they have to do is show you a spoof site. And that's not just easier, it's more reliable, too.
What you missed is, the real site looks real because it is real, it's not just a very good copy. And it acts real too. This greatly increases the victim's level of trust in the malicious popup.
You have a Pollyanna view of the world. People _are_ going to follow malicious links to trusted sites. They'll see the link in an email, it will be wrapped in some convincing text, and we're off the the races.
There is no getting away from the fact that there is a namespace bug here. The offsite link should run in a separate namespace. You appear to be arguing in favor of leaving this obvious brokenness the way it is.
AFAICT, the 'window' object is defacto (Netscape) standard and was never standardized by the W3C.
Traditionally, windows weren't private to sites, but this is just a variation of the "cross-frame scripting" bugs that have been patched over time.
A stupifyingly dumb design decision in the first place. The above poster's namespace comment is dead on, and there is obviously no choice but to implement per-site namespace properly.
This design bug, however, is the fault of _all_ of us, for not reviewing the design of Javascript and making corrections years ago.
It might not be a gamer's card, but without OpenGL 2.0, you wouldn't even be able to use it for serious graphics either.
Not so. Plenty of serious graphics doesn't involve pixel shaders. Quake 3 works just fine on OpenGL 1.4 and lower, as do the vast majority of games more than a year or so old. This card is specifically not intended to run Doom III. I can live with that, after all, I've got half a dozen machines here, only one needs a high end gaming card.
Why is this card sounding more and more like a Virge?
The Xilinx 1500 is considerably more powerful than a virge ever was. And you get to play with the programmable array, that's worth the price of admission.
I looked very hard at the Intel FPUs while designing the Athlon FPU.
OK, I guess I couldn't ask for better credentials. They've got 32 multipliers at a 384 MHz clock, I didn't check how many cycles per multiply though. I hope it's one. It should be enough, with a nice N-R divide, to run a decent resolution with perspecfive divides, if software takes out the overdraw first. Unfortunately, the initial specs show they only plan to go for linear texture interpolation. Sigh. Well, when they see how much it sucks, I guess they'll have a lot of resources to dwell on by that time.
"I think for a new card which would be released in 2005 or later, you would have to expect OpenGL 2.0 at bare minimum."
Not really. The key feature in OGL 2 is pixel shaders, the FPGA just isn't powerful enough to do a respectable job. But Quake 3 looks great without pixel shaders, I think I can live with it. This is, after all, explicitly not a gamer's card. (Should be fine for Tuxracer though)
If you'd read-up on this subject, you'd have seen that these folk *do* know their hardware. They are also not being overly ambitious. While they expect to be able to develop a card which has 3D accelleration for desktop applications, they make no bold claims about gaming.
Falling anywhere short of, say, OpenGL 1.4 support would make it pretty much useless. In other words, it doesn't have to have pixel shaders, but it has to have good, filtered texture mapping, lighting, alpha, quite a bag of stuff. The Spartan 3 (not III as the tech spec suggests) has 1.5 million gates and 384 MHz, which ought to be enough for a decent 3D core, with one catch: it's got 32 18x18 multipliers, no dividers. Don't even think about floating point, obviously, but without dividers, perspective interpolation is going to be pretty tough. Without perspective interpolation... well, think "1970's".
I just hope there's a standard way of getting around this. Any hardware hacks out there?
I do agree with you that managing a large collection of Linux desktops would probably be pure hell. It's awful to even think about, frankly, especially upgrades. *shudder*.
It's perfectly easy with any Debian-based distribution or Gentoo.
I wonder what would happen to, say, Linux boxes if they had 60,000 and they applied an incomplete kernel patch? Maybe some... thing... would panic?
No, the patch would fail. And by the way, that's not how it's done, the new kernel is compiled (and tested!) in a controlled environment, and only the binary is downloaded. Plus, the old kernel stays around so that if there's a problem, you can go straight back to the kernel that works.
Slashdot Mirror
investors can live with little or no growth in revenues in a mature company that dominates it's market, earns $40 billion a year and remains debt-free with $50-$60 billion in liquid reserves.
Not when it has 11 billion shares oustanding and a P/E over 30.
I do not see MS losing a huge market share anytime soon
It is not necessary for Microsoft to lose huge market share in order to hurt the company a great deal. Even losing a small amount of market share will cut Microsoft's revenue growth to nothing and send Microsoft stock into a tailspin.
The increase in TCO due to this latest "get them coming and going" scheme will be just the thing to push the next large batch of Microsoft users over to more reliable alternatives like Linux and Apple.
They get exponentially heavier as they get larger.
Ahem, cubicly.
They could have made a niche for themselves in the embedded market. There's plenty of room for fast, low-power x86 despite the ARM's and Power PC's. The problem is that they didn't go after it.
x86 compatibility isn't important in the embedded market.
Well most people use PVR's to watch TV and record shows like a VCR on steriods. Not hack.
Most Linux users use Linux to browse the internet and send email. Not hack.
But that small minority that is able to, and does hack Linux is very important.
Actually, one of the things I noticed about this Giant-Antispyware is the number of false positives. On some systems it found a half dozen of them (things like VNC and such). Also the slowest, high memory usage, and last I tried, cancelling a scan doesn't let you delete what was found on the partial scan.
This is going to be comical. Microsoft users will spend all their time scanning for spyware from now on. The false positives should be especially entertaining in terms of Microsoft users learning to hate Microsoft more than they already do. And some spyware is still going to get through. No, let me correct that, tons of spyware is going to get through because it's just so profitable for the spammers to find ways of getting it through.
Microsoft is its own worst enemy.
Did it ever occur to you that they might have modified code other than the UI?
Frankly, no. It would be entirely out of character for Microsoft.
One problem is that OpenGL (pre 2.0, haven't looked at that yet) is horrible to work with if you actually want to get stuff done. I'm using it in a game right now, and let me tell you, using a library with a stateful API is no fun.
OpenGL is stateful because 3D hardware is, and OpenGL always tried to be a thin layer on top of the hardware. Unfortunately, as you've noticed, state leakage becomes a real problem as soon as you start trying to build anything beyond a single static scene. It's just too much bother to keep track of all the state variables you have to save and restore as you traverse render nodes, particularly when the traversal order isn't predetermined. That is why SGI developed Inventor, which takes care of managing the details of state variables so you don't have to. You specify which state you want to carry over between render nodes and Inventor takes care of making sure that's the only state that carries over. Inventor isn't open source, but Coin is, sort of (the license seems to imply the GPLed version can't be sold, which would be an "additional restriction", incompatible with GPL).
Anyway, there's Open Scene Graph which is entirely open, and considerably advanced beyond Inventor.
Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out.
Well, as usual, Microsoft demonstrates its magical ability to turn gold into feces. Buzz is, Halo 2 is a a big disappointment. Of course there's no need to trust just one opinion
25 of the top 100 products on the Amazon.com Software sales chart are from Microsoft, with Student Teacher Office 2003 currently in third place. Christmas rebates bringing the price down to $99.
:-)
Christmas rebates bring the price of Openoffice down to, um, free
"Student Teacher Office 2003" from Amazon probably doesn't even come close to Openoffice's million downloads a month totalling over 35 million.
get over it and stop whining. Besides, I like them separated personally
Do you like the teesy weensy little search box where you typically only see a fraction of your search? Come on, be honest.
Right click on a toolbar in Firefox, and you can add/remove/re-arrange all you want. Don't want a search? Remove it.
Great, but what if I want to have location and search in the same text box?
"It seems if we could dedicate more developers to a single development tree, it would be more efficient?"
Sure, that's why nature only ever puts one species in each evolutionary niche, right? Oh wait...
"The killer feature for me is searching. I hate the wasted real estate in Firefox from having a separate location and search box, and ease of use is dramatically better in Mozilla than in Firefox. In Mozilla, I just hit Ctrl-L, type my search commands, hit up arrow and enter. I haven't found any way of achieving the same thing in Firefox, and I hate the small size of the box I'm given to enter my search terms."
Exactly. I just hate the separate search box. After a couple of months using Firefox every day, I'm still constantly typing my search into the location bar, then I either notice and correct it by Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X, Tab, Ctrl-V (a real pain) or fail to notice and Firefox automagically googles to the first match and throws away my search text, never to be seen again. How hard would it be to enter the search text into the url history instead of discarding it, anyway?
Is it a namespace bug? What if I have one web server that accesses stuff on another web server? So I have my one site, site A, which has one set of content. And I have another site, site B, which has another set of content and passes some info back to site A.
Currently, from site A I can open a window to site B, do a little something, get some data back, and continue with more stuff on site A.
It amounts to a question of business requirements.
No, it amounts to a question of what is impossible to secure. If you want to share namespaces (or privileges) across sites, there needs to be an explicit mechanism, not "come one, come all" by default.
Now what? Of course, even if you figure out you don't want to do this, what are you going to key on to figure out whether sites are on the same server?
Straw man argument. You fell off the tracks when you started thinking in terms of having Javascript check things. Partitioning the namespace means there is no need to check. Now you need a mechanism to export trust when required, which probably already exists.
By the way, as I've said elsewhere, if they can get you to click an email link, they don't NEED all this popup magic. All they have to do is show you a spoof site. And that's not just easier, it's more reliable, too.
What you missed is, the real site looks real because it is real, it's not just a very good copy. And it acts real too. This greatly increases the victim's level of trust in the malicious popup.
You have a Pollyanna view of the world. People _are_ going to follow malicious links to trusted sites. They'll see the link in an email, it will be wrapped in some convincing text, and we're off the the races.
There is no getting away from the fact that there is a namespace bug here. The offsite link should run in a separate namespace. You appear to be arguing in favor of leaving this obvious brokenness the way it is.
AFAICT, the 'window' object is defacto (Netscape) standard and was never standardized by the W3C.
Traditionally, windows weren't private to sites, but this is just a variation of the "cross-frame scripting" bugs that have been patched over time.
A stupifyingly dumb design decision in the first place. The above poster's namespace comment is dead on, and there is obviously no choice but to implement per-site namespace properly.
This design bug, however, is the fault of _all_ of us, for not reviewing the design of Javascript and making corrections years ago.
It might not be a gamer's card, but without OpenGL 2.0, you wouldn't even be able to use it for serious graphics either.
Not so. Plenty of serious graphics doesn't involve pixel shaders. Quake 3 works just fine on OpenGL 1.4 and lower, as do the vast majority of games more than a year or so old. This card is specifically not intended to run Doom III. I can live with that, after all, I've got half a dozen machines here, only one needs a high end gaming card.
Why is this card sounding more and more like a Virge?
The Xilinx 1500 is considerably more powerful than a virge ever was. And you get to play with the programmable array, that's worth the price of admission.
I looked very hard at the Intel FPUs while designing the Athlon FPU.
OK, I guess I couldn't ask for better credentials. They've got 32 multipliers at a 384 MHz clock, I didn't check how many cycles per multiply though. I hope it's one. It should be enough, with a nice N-R divide, to run a decent resolution with perspecfive divides, if software takes out the overdraw first. Unfortunately, the initial specs show they only plan to go for linear texture interpolation. Sigh. Well, when they see how much it sucks, I guess they'll have a lot of resources to dwell on by that time.
Thanks.
"I think for a new card which would be released in 2005 or later, you would have to expect OpenGL 2.0 at bare minimum."
Not really. The key feature in OGL 2 is pixel shaders, the FPGA just isn't powerful enough to do a respectable job. But Quake 3 looks great without pixel shaders, I think I can live with it. This is, after all, explicitly not a gamer's card. (Should be fine for Tuxracer though)
"if n is not a constant, or a small group of constants, then external calulations of its value will slow things down dramatically"
It's not a constant. For perspective interpolation, both numerator and denominator are linearly interpolated per-pixel.
If you'd read-up on this subject, you'd have seen that these folk *do* know their hardware. They are also not being overly ambitious. While they expect to be able to develop a card which has 3D accelleration for desktop applications, they make no bold claims about gaming.
Falling anywhere short of, say, OpenGL 1.4 support would make it pretty much useless. In other words, it doesn't have to have pixel shaders, but it has to have good, filtered texture mapping, lighting, alpha, quite a bag of stuff. The Spartan 3 (not III as the tech spec suggests) has 1.5 million gates and 384 MHz, which ought to be enough for a decent 3D core, with one catch: it's got 32 18x18 multipliers, no dividers. Don't even think about floating point, obviously, but without dividers, perspective interpolation is going to be pretty tough. Without perspective interpolation... well, think "1970's".
I just hope there's a standard way of getting around this. Any hardware hacks out there?
I do agree with you that managing a large collection of Linux desktops would probably be pure hell. It's awful to even think about, frankly, especially upgrades. *shudder*.
It's perfectly easy with any Debian-based distribution or Gentoo.
I wonder what would happen to, say, Linux boxes if they had 60,000 and they applied an incomplete kernel patch? Maybe some... thing... would panic?
No, the patch would fail. And by the way, that's not how it's done, the new kernel is compiled (and tested!) in a controlled environment, and only the binary is downloaded. Plus, the old kernel stays around so that if there's a problem, you can go straight back to the kernel that works.
Next question?
It was the losers they had working with them.
Not quite. Microsoft and EDS operate the system as a joint venture