Because there's no economies of scale in software. The other version of packaging just costs a few bucks.
People have different needs, and don't want to pay a ton for something full-featured. I own a copy of Textpad because it's what I need. Don't need Office.
If it were too much to justify the expense, they'd use open source (or paper and pencil). It's not like Open Source is still a secret. I use it in my tiny retail business because it IS worth the big price tag. I need software that works out of the box. No tweaking, no configuring. I need software that requires no more than 5 minutes of training. I need software that is backed up by a company that I can call, and that other people are going to support and write add-ons for that I can easily find.
We don't buy software because someone has a gun to our heads! We buy it because it has value. It's that simple.
Doesn't commerical software work even better as a meritocracy? You make something only if you think it'll be useful, and people vote with their wallets. To me, people willing to pay for a product says *much* more about the quality of a product than if it's given away for free. It's a difference between "Yeah, I'll pay money for that" versus "Eh. Well, it's free."
Try doing that in any non-Microsoft operating system. THAT'S what's different. You can get Gecko for nearly anything.
Non-MS OS's isn't a realistic concern for user products (as opposed to server products). Whether you develop for consumers or even internally for corporations, multiple OS's on the desktop is a moot point. Browsers aren't used on servers.
I've done this several times with IE. All you gotta do is drop the COM object into a VB project. You can literally have your "own" browser in about 30 seconds. How's this any different? If anything, making your own browser with IE seems a hell of a lot easier than using Mozilla. In VB, you can do the whole thing visually, and add code behind the objects and events.
I don't know who's doing the counting, but my servers got slammed last week with probes from this damn worm. There are a hell of a lot more than 11,000 machines infected. The traffic I'm seeing from this worm is significantly higher than I saw from Code Red.
If they buy Rockstar, THAT would be impressive. I'd consider an X-Box if they did that. Instead, they're buying Rare, who's hot new game sounds like some really, really horrible, drug-induced nightmare belonging to a 5 year old, combined with every other generic Japanimation-type game ever made.
Re:If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Call me nuts, but no matter how great the graphics are, if they don't have any games I want to play, I don't really care.
I'm willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of graphics quality for games with good gameplay, stories, variety, etc.
And as far as having a hard drive, that's a main reason that I didn't buy an X-Box. Your X-Box is gonna die loooong before my PS2. In case you've never owned a computer, the hard drive is *always* the weakest point.
What's wrong with rebooting a web server? Very rarely are web servers mission critical. Hell, the biggest web servers go down for longer than an occasional reboot takes to do. Hell, Slashdot probably only has like 95% uptime, and that's supposedly managed by the super-ultra-mega Apache gurus. A web server reboot takes like a minute. The chances of that being a serious problem are slim. If it is a problem, don't use W2K. IF you can live with it, W2K works just fine.
... all of the fucking dick comparisons. "I have a 64 MB Super mega ultra speedy card" "Yeah, well, I have the 128 MB super destructor blah blah". You know what? Any fucking idiot can walk into Best Buy and buy the best fucking video card. Hell, my father can barely turn on his computer and he buys the newest graphics card every few months for playing games. Big fucking deal.
I'm impressed by people who can get by with old, "outdated" hardware. That's REAL geekdom. Anyone who can make their old shit work and is proud of it is a real geek. People who buy the newest just to buy the newest are nothing but the new yuppies. How fucking boring.
OK, I just checked and I was wrong... I do have a 4 MB card. But really, the damn thing goes up to 1280x1024... a shitload more than I need. I generally only run it at 800x600 on my 15" monitor. So actually, if I had a 2 MB card, that would probably be just fine, too.
Like I said, without foreign keys and subselects, I'd have a mess. Stored procedures came too late, also. Thus, I'm not using MySQL. I looked at it briefly, but featurewise, it wasn't much better than a flat file and faking it with an OLE DB Provider.
Speed on something as small as a website (even one that gets 100K+ hits a day) is really pretty irrelevant. Anything will work fine.
I don't run games. 2 meg is good for me. I didn't even *know* that video cards came with 64 MB on them. I can't imagine what 64 mb is used for. All I need is for windows to be painted in W2K. Hell, I don't have any clue as to howe much video memory my laptop has. Unless you play cutting edge games, really *any* VGA card works just fine.
if you live on the East Coast, forget about it. Mail takes 5 business days, coming and going, making Netflix not all that cheap. If you get the basic service (3 movies at a time), if you watch the movies THE DAY you get them and send them back immediately, you still can't realistically get more than say, 6 movies a month. If Netflix opened a warehouse on the East Coast, shit, I'd get the best damn service they've got. If not for that huge mail lag for us on the East Coast, their service is fucking fantastic.
I wish is was that fast. 1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection. Not that I'd ever know, since I'd *never* download anything that big, [cough]Episode1and2overKazaainAVI[cough]
Also, unless you get the newest HOSTS file from kazaalite.com, the "home page" for Kazaalite is still the official Kazaa page, which DOES cause the popups. So, just get the hosts file at kazaalite.com which will redirect the kazaa home page (hardcoded in the program) to the kazaalite home page (no popups of any kind). Also, it's a really good hosts file that kills a LOT of ads (including some here on Slashdot)
They still do not handle subselects or foreign keys, both of which become very useful when dealing with large databases.
Large? Heck, I use both on my porn site (See below). And, I wouldn't call 65K recs in one table very large, either. But to structure my data otherwise would be a fucking mess.
If you're still getting ads after removing Kazaa and using Kazaalite, then you have something else still installed on your box. I've checked Kazaalite, and it's very clean. Don't badmouth Kazaa Lite when the culprit is your own machine.
Kazaa has a HUGE advantage over Gnutella. Kazaa has many, many more times the number of users and number of files that Gnutella has. And, that difference is only going to grow. Somebody downloads both, sees that Kazaa has a hell of a lot more, they use Kazaa, and share their files on Kazaa, thus improving Kazaa.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have written some open source software in the time you took to read the article and post.
Prior to Win 95? Actually, I consider everything up to and including Win ME to be DOS-based shells.
Because there's no economies of scale in software. The other version of packaging just costs a few bucks.
People have different needs, and don't want to pay a ton for something full-featured. I own a copy of Textpad because it's what I need. Don't need Office.
If it were too much to justify the expense, they'd use open source (or paper and pencil). It's not like Open Source is still a secret.
I use it in my tiny retail business because it IS worth the big price tag. I need software that works out of the box. No tweaking, no configuring. I need software that requires no more than 5 minutes of training. I need software that is backed up by a company that I can call, and that other people are going to support and write add-ons for that I can easily find.
We don't buy software because someone has a gun to our heads! We buy it because it has value. It's that simple.
Anyone who's ever used it has got to agree. It's just that simple.
Doesn't commerical software work even better as a meritocracy? You make something only if you think it'll be useful, and people vote with their wallets. To me, people willing to pay for a product says *much* more about the quality of a product than if it's given away for free. It's a difference between "Yeah, I'll pay money for that" versus "Eh. Well, it's free."
Try doing that in any non-Microsoft operating system. THAT'S what's different. You can get Gecko for nearly anything.
Non-MS OS's isn't a realistic concern for user products (as opposed to server products). Whether you develop for consumers or even internally for corporations, multiple OS's on the desktop is a moot point. Browsers aren't used on servers.
I've done this several times with IE. All you gotta do is drop the COM object into a VB project. You can literally have your "own" browser in about 30 seconds. How's this any different? If anything, making your own browser with IE seems a hell of a lot easier than using Mozilla. In VB, you can do the whole thing visually, and add code behind the objects and events.
I don't know who's doing the counting, but my servers got slammed last week with probes from this damn worm. There are a hell of a lot more than 11,000 machines infected. The traffic I'm seeing from this worm is significantly higher than I saw from Code Red.
If they buy Rockstar, THAT would be impressive. I'd consider an X-Box if they did that. Instead, they're buying Rare, who's hot new game sounds like some really, really horrible, drug-induced nightmare belonging to a 5 year old, combined with every other generic Japanimation-type game ever made.
Call me nuts, but no matter how great the graphics are, if they don't have any games I want to play, I don't really care.
I'm willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of graphics quality for games with good gameplay, stories, variety, etc.
And as far as having a hard drive, that's a main reason that I didn't buy an X-Box. Your X-Box is gonna die loooong before my PS2. In case you've never owned a computer, the hard drive is *always* the weakest point.
What's wrong with rebooting a web server? Very rarely are web servers mission critical. Hell, the biggest web servers go down for longer than an occasional reboot takes to do. Hell, Slashdot probably only has like 95% uptime, and that's supposedly managed by the super-ultra-mega Apache gurus. A web server reboot takes like a minute. The chances of that being a serious problem are slim. If it is a problem, don't use W2K. IF you can live with it, W2K works just fine.
... all of the fucking dick comparisons. "I have a 64 MB Super mega ultra speedy card" "Yeah, well, I have the 128 MB super destructor blah blah". You know what? Any fucking idiot can walk into Best Buy and buy the best fucking video card. Hell, my father can barely turn on his computer and he buys the newest graphics card every few months for playing games. Big fucking deal.
I'm impressed by people who can get by with old, "outdated" hardware. That's REAL geekdom. Anyone who can make their old shit work and is proud of it is a real geek. People who buy the newest just to buy the newest are nothing but the new yuppies. How fucking boring.
OK, I just checked and I was wrong... I do have a 4 MB card. But really, the damn thing goes up to 1280x1024... a shitload more than I need. I generally only run it at 800x600 on my 15" monitor.
So actually, if I had a 2 MB card, that would probably be just fine, too.
Like I said, without foreign keys and subselects, I'd have a mess. Stored procedures came too late, also. Thus, I'm not using MySQL. I looked at it briefly, but featurewise, it wasn't much better than a flat file and faking it with an OLE DB Provider.
Speed on something as small as a website (even one that gets 100K+ hits a day) is really pretty irrelevant. Anything will work fine.
I don't run games. 2 meg is good for me. I didn't even *know* that video cards came with 64 MB on them. I can't imagine what 64 mb is used for. All I need is for windows to be painted in W2K. Hell, I don't have any clue as to howe much video memory my laptop has. Unless you play cutting edge games, really *any* VGA card works just fine.
Very cool. I should've known better than to be an early adopter....
Now, the only question is how big of a membership I need!
if you live on the East Coast, forget about it. Mail takes 5 business days, coming and going, making Netflix not all that cheap. If you get the basic service (3 movies at a time), if you watch the movies THE DAY you get them and send them back immediately, you still can't realistically get more than say, 6 movies a month. If Netflix opened a warehouse on the East Coast, shit, I'd get the best damn service they've got. If not for that huge mail lag for us on the East Coast, their service is fucking fantastic.
I wish is was that fast. 1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection. Not that I'd ever know, since I'd *never* download anything that big, [cough]Episode1and2overKazaainAVI[cough]
Also, unless you get the newest HOSTS file from kazaalite.com, the "home page" for Kazaalite is still the official Kazaa page, which DOES cause the popups. So, just get the hosts file at kazaalite.com which will redirect the kazaa home page (hardcoded in the program) to the kazaalite home page (no popups of any kind). Also, it's a really good hosts file that kills a LOT of ads (including some here on Slashdot)
They still do not handle subselects or foreign keys, both of which become very useful when dealing with large databases.
Large? Heck, I use both on my porn site (See below). And, I wouldn't call 65K recs in one table very large, either. But to structure my data otherwise would be a fucking mess.
Assuming that the Fasttrack network CAN be killed..
I installed Kazaalite on a clean box. No ads. I run it on 5 PC's now. No ads.
If you're still getting ads after removing Kazaa and using Kazaalite, then you have something else still installed on your box. I've checked Kazaalite, and it's very clean. Don't badmouth Kazaa Lite when the culprit is your own machine.
Kazaa has a HUGE advantage over Gnutella. Kazaa has many, many more times the number of users and number of files that Gnutella has. And, that difference is only going to grow. Somebody downloads both, sees that Kazaa has a hell of a lot more, they use Kazaa, and share their files on Kazaa, thus improving Kazaa.