It is true that Windows became immensely popular because Microsoft pressured its in-house development teams to make applications for it. BOB didn't get as much of that 'privilege'.
The thing is, both the MS Office and MS Home (Encarta, Money, etc.) suites of programs were really good at the time of their first releases (admit it, it was Microsoft who first did an office suite right) and thus people started using Windows because of these nifty applications.
The same thing will happen to the X-Box, as long as the games on the X-Box turn out to be innovative. For the office and casual home markets, Microsoft got their 'innovation' by combining ease-of-use and functionality (although both were present on competitors' products, they were the ones who achieved the right mix first). You can also get that same kind of 'innovation' on consoles by combining games with outstanding gameplay factor with cutting-edge graphics/sound/input technology.
IHMO, however, I don't think the X-Box will achieve that just yet. Although DirectX is a proven technology for game development (amidst all its COM quirks), Microsoft still lacks innovative gameplay, unlike PS2 and GameCube (Luigi's Mansion sure looks like a very fun game!). Just licensing/buying up a few game companies and tell them to produce games for the X-Box simply Doesn't Work.
What Microsoft has to do is to focus on their in-house titles and strive for perfection, like what Nintendo did with its NES/Famicom system back in the 80's. Whether Microsoft even has good in-house titles in store remains to be seen, however.
Or maybe they're doing just that for the Japan release (which probably would have caused the announcement of the delay), especially since the Japanese are extremely stringent when it comes to games and will not buy the X-Box at all if they found out that its games were crappy.
My best friend and I talk in e-mail (and sometimes IRL) with tags like , , , , , etc. without using smileys. It's about time they've standardized these stuff!
But now that this is going to be standard fare, we lose our unique vocabulary to the rest of the world. What will become of us geeks?
Oh well... <sob>... at least we still have the jargon file.
... but it certainly hasn't stopped the one going on within my country (Philippines). We just had two back-to-back "people power" revolutions, one of which led to the ouster of former President Estrada, and the other one (interestingly enough) seeked to bring him back to power.
What's this got to do with the corporations' effects on society? You see, one of the main proponents of Estrada's ouster were the corporate giants of Manila, citing that the Philippines' business sector has been severely hampered by Estrada's relatively poor performance, the jueteng gambling lord scandal late last year, and the way he handled (yet another) war going on here versus the bandit elements in Mindanao. And the Estrada economy also saw the sudden rise of "crony" capitalism, where the government is actively taking part, for better or for worse, in the success of key corporations, leaving the other small players behind. In fact, these so-called multinational corporations also played a part in the recent slump of economic growth in the Philippines and in the Southeast Asian region in general, details of which would take me forever to elaborate.
What does this all mean?
The rise of multinational corporations and westernization does not necessarily translate to development and peace. Who knows, this crony capitalism thing might become a global phenomenon once governments all over the world start accepting capitalism as the norm and ignore all the checks that have been set into place (think the American Great Depression). And then it would bring about conflict, just as it did here.
p.s. Sorry I deviated a bit from the technology issues =)... Hmm, how about... well, the Love Bug worm came from us.;) (Not that I would even be proud about that...:/)
You never know how many times I've tracked bugs down to semicolon-terminated if statements. IMHO, bugs resulting from different tab stops are easier to find than inherent logic problems like this. Besides, most editors have the option to visually differentiate tabs from spaces.
Also, the idea is to let other people see the structure of your code faster. That means no more debates with regards to indentation styles. A programmer friend of mine used to have a very different way of putting braces around code blocks, and we eventually found it so difficult to read after a while that we had to make a custom pretty-printer to visualize her code. She has since changed her evil ways.
This is a huge step towards standardizing open source code. Since everyone will be forced to use the same indentation, all code would theoretically look the same from this point on.
Other steps toward this standardization include Hungarian notation (probably one of the few features I actually like about Microsoft code) and enforcing modularization (like the Java rule of one file per public class). I would like to see more of this in future programming languages.
> AMD: I'd rather get an SMP chipset out of you than Yet Another "Fastest" Processor.
Taking the idea further, it would be nice if we put more research into engineering better n-processor systems instead of simply focusing on faster single-processor speeds. A 1600Mhz computer is all well and good, but think of what you can do with a 4-processor system with each processor running at 1Ghz...
Or better yet, a thousand 8086-class processors working together to produce virtually the same effect! =) (OK, maybe too much of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.)
Granted, there's always a point of diminishing returns with n-processor systems; that is, the speed of n processors at m megahertz would never really match the speed of a single nxm megahertz processor unless the particular application is "embarrasingly parallel" (one subtask does not need to know the details/results of other subtasks in order to complete itself).
Surprisingly enough, world simulation is one of those problems that approach an embarrasingly parallel solution. =)
A friend of mine used CBCPNet as her ISP before. She was busy searching for articles on computer security and ended up being banned from one.
As CBCPNet relies on filtering technology to restrict access to websites, it may also hinder innocent people from conducting their own researches. =)
Not to ignite some sort of religious debate here, but the question that this issue really raises is: Is is ethical for any agency, the Catholic Church included, to ban people from gaining access to information, no matter how potentially harmful it would be? (Never mind the morality, I know fully well that religious organizations treats morality as one of their highest pillars and all that...)
I don't know, but I would definitely not get an ISP which restricts my access to anything. Especially not when I'm faced with a term paper deadline. =P
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that Windows became immensely popular because Microsoft pressured its in-house development teams to make applications for it. BOB didn't get as much of that 'privilege'.
The thing is, both the MS Office and MS Home (Encarta, Money, etc.) suites of programs were really good at the time of their first releases (admit it, it was Microsoft who first did an office suite right) and thus people started using Windows because of these nifty applications.
The same thing will happen to the X-Box, as long as the games on the X-Box turn out to be innovative. For the office and casual home markets, Microsoft got their 'innovation' by combining ease-of-use and functionality (although both were present on competitors' products, they were the ones who achieved the right mix first). You can also get that same kind of 'innovation' on consoles by combining games with outstanding gameplay factor with cutting-edge graphics/sound/input technology.
IHMO, however, I don't think the X-Box will achieve that just yet. Although DirectX is a proven technology for game development (amidst all its COM quirks), Microsoft still lacks innovative gameplay, unlike PS2 and GameCube (Luigi's Mansion sure looks like a very fun game!). Just licensing/buying up a few game companies and tell them to produce games for the X-Box simply Doesn't Work.
What Microsoft has to do is to focus on their in-house titles and strive for perfection, like what Nintendo did with its NES/Famicom system back in the 80's. Whether Microsoft even has good in-house titles in store remains to be seen, however.
Or maybe they're doing just that for the Japan release (which probably would have caused the announcement of the delay), especially since the Japanese are extremely stringent when it comes to games and will not buy the X-Box at all if they found out that its games were crappy.
My best friend and I talk in e-mail (and sometimes IRL) with tags like , , , , , etc. without using smileys. It's about time they've standardized these stuff!
... <sob> ... at least we still have the jargon file.
But now that this is going to be standard fare, we lose our unique vocabulary to the rest of the world. What will become of us geeks?
Oh well
What's this got to do with the corporations' effects on society? You see, one of the main proponents of Estrada's ouster were the corporate giants of Manila, citing that the Philippines' business sector has been severely hampered by Estrada's relatively poor performance, the jueteng gambling lord scandal late last year, and the way he handled (yet another) war going on here versus the bandit elements in Mindanao. And the Estrada economy also saw the sudden rise of "crony" capitalism, where the government is actively taking part, for better or for worse, in the success of key corporations, leaving the other small players behind. In fact, these so-called multinational corporations also played a part in the recent slump of economic growth in the Philippines and in the Southeast Asian region in general, details of which would take me forever to elaborate.
What does this all mean?
The rise of multinational corporations and westernization does not necessarily translate to development and peace. Who knows, this crony capitalism thing might become a global phenomenon once governments all over the world start accepting capitalism as the norm and ignore all the checks that have been set into place (think the American Great Depression). And then it would bring about conflict, just as it did here.
p.s. Sorry I deviated a bit from the technology issues =)... Hmm, how about... well, the Love Bug worm came from us. ;) (Not that I would even be proud about that... :/)
You never know how many times I've tracked bugs down to semicolon-terminated if statements. IMHO, bugs resulting from different tab stops are easier to find than inherent logic problems like this. Besides, most editors have the option to visually differentiate tabs from spaces. Also, the idea is to let other people see the structure of your code faster. That means no more debates with regards to indentation styles. A programmer friend of mine used to have a very different way of putting braces around code blocks, and we eventually found it so difficult to read after a while that we had to make a custom pretty-printer to visualize her code. She has since changed her evil ways. This is a huge step towards standardizing open source code. Since everyone will be forced to use the same indentation, all code would theoretically look the same from this point on. Other steps toward this standardization include Hungarian notation (probably one of the few features I actually like about Microsoft code) and enforcing modularization (like the Java rule of one file per public class). I would like to see more of this in future programming languages.
(Of course you probably meant it for effect, but I can't really tell...)
Taking the idea further, it would be nice if we put more research into engineering better n-processor systems instead of simply focusing on faster single-processor speeds. A 1600Mhz computer is all well and good, but think of what you can do with a 4-processor system with each processor running at 1Ghz...
Or better yet, a thousand 8086-class processors working together to produce virtually the same effect! =) (OK, maybe too much of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.)
Granted, there's always a point of diminishing returns with n-processor systems; that is, the speed of n processors at m megahertz would never really match the speed of a single nxm megahertz processor unless the particular application is "embarrasingly parallel" (one subtask does not need to know the details/results of other subtasks in order to complete itself).
Surprisingly enough, world simulation is one of those problems that approach an embarrasingly parallel solution. =)
A friend of mine used CBCPNet as her ISP before. She was busy searching for articles on computer security and ended up being banned from one. As CBCPNet relies on filtering technology to restrict access to websites, it may also hinder innocent people from conducting their own researches. =) Not to ignite some sort of religious debate here, but the question that this issue really raises is: Is is ethical for any agency, the Catholic Church included, to ban people from gaining access to information, no matter how potentially harmful it would be? (Never mind the morality, I know fully well that religious organizations treats morality as one of their highest pillars and all that...) I don't know, but I would definitely not get an ISP which restricts my access to anything. Especially not when I'm faced with a term paper deadline. =P