How? I said, "In virtually every context, it's completely unnecessary." That means I had in mind contexts where it was necessary, and thus understood its meaning! That means you don't need to explain that use to me. How hard is that to understand?
If you don't see how that can be misunderstood, then I can't help you.
Now, if you go back and read the replies, you'll see that some people did understand me: [1], [2].
Two replies. Both of which may or may not have understood you correctly. Nevermind all the other responses which continued on the idea that you didn't understand the difference. Nevermind that I was polite to you. Nevermind that I just apologized for any perceived transgressions. Never mind any of that. I was obviously a complete and total jerk to you. And I obviously deserve your disdain, because I have been rude to you this entire thread!
If you're really interested in helping increase the signal to noise ration, I recommend not replying to my posts in future stories.
And let's not forget that this thread was started by replying to your post. Oh wait. *snaps fingers* That's right! I didn't. You replied to me. With your seven month old pent up anger over a complete non-issue.
True... but you hit two submit buttons. And you didn't forget to include information... you forgot to check if your information was relevant.
I didn't forget anything. You forgot to explain what your problem was.
At least you corrected yourself after I explained the error, since you realized what a jerk that made you look like.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't understand what your problem was then. I wasn't going to respond when I didn't understand what you were getting at. But now that I know, I think I agree with the AC who responded to you.
The problem isn't that we don't get it, it's that you don't get it. Precision is a very important part of any serious conversation. So the term "price point" was used to be precise. For those of us who are used to being picked apart when we're imprecise, precision is a necessary (Nay! CRITICAL!) evil. That's something you appear to miss in your conquest to rage against the man.
But hey, be angry at me. I'm obviously "the man" to be raged against. I was such a jerk, I deserved the down-mod I got for it.
[...]
Wait. I wasn't the one downmodded, now was I?
"You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." --Matthew 7:5
as I recall, you replied AGAIN to repeat the same information, AFTER I reclarified my already-clear question.
You remember incorrectly. I did not respond to you once you clarified what you meant. I only responded in the first place because I thought I was being helpful. The mods, however, were extremely harsh with your posts. Perhaps unjustifiably so.
You need to understand. You said nothing more than "Why do people say "price point" instead of "price"? Just to sound smart? In virtually every context, it's completely unnecessary." This suggested to everyone that you did not understand the difference between a 'price' and a 'price point'. If you go back and read the replies, you may notice that several other folks responded in a similar manner. In short, no one understood your original point due to a lack of information. When you expressed that you were upset that no one understood you, the mods retaliated. (Probably because they hadn't understood you, either.)
You shouldn't worry about it so much. It happens to us all. I'm constantly bitten by information I forget to include in a post before hitting the submit button. It simply one of the perils in using a time-sensitive bulletin board like Slashdot.
Looks like your corporatespeak problem is more far-reaching.
Sounds like you take things too personally. I remember that conversation, and as it so happens, I was not trying to be "condescending". You asked an open ended question, so I gave a best attempt at an informative, open-ended answer. I'm truly sorry if you were offended, but I can't control if read something into text that isn't there.
The scary thing is that this phenomenon is well documented, yet it continues to pose a problem.:-(
Anyway, I'm sorry for any offense; whether it be real or perceived.
Indexes only optimize some types of queries. To get the absolute maximum performance out of your database, you have to make sure that there is a specific index for each query you run, and that your indexes are properly rebuilt and optimized for least-time search. Suffice it to say, this rarely happens in the real world. So there's almost always some scanning, even after the indexes narrow things down a bit. By going with a column-oriented storage design, the scan can be streamed at higher levels of thoroughput than is possible with row-oriented databases.
The downside is that you're sacrificing the time to access individual rows, so if you're pulling and processing millions of rows of data, this might actually be slower than a traditional row-oriented database. Updates are almost guaranteed to be slower as you have to write to several column-oriented data stores rather than a single row-oriented store.
Still, column orientation makes a lot of sense for a variety of today's database applications. So if you're in need of querying a multi-terrabyte table, this product may be just what the (senior database) administrator ordered.
It's basically an optimization of the current data access patterns. Databases have been row-oriented for decades, because they evolved from fixed width flat files. Once we eliminated COBOL-style accesses to databases, the full row data became less important. It became far more important to be able to scan a column as fast as possible. For example:
select * from names where lastname LIKE '%son'
The above query might have an index available to find what it needs. But it's just as likely that the database will need to do a table-scan. Since table-scans involve looking through every record in the database, you can imagine that it would be faster to just load the lastname column rather than loading every row in the database just to discard 90% of that data.
i was a little surprised by hp - since they have been trying to get the word out about their own data warehousing and bi stuff.
It's called "hedging your bets". If the little company doesn't work out, no big deal. If it does, then HP is in a position to either benefit from contractual relations, acquire it, or squash it. Whichever happens to be their fancy.
Never assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence. In this case, I've been spending way too much time around the corporate types.:-/
Really, I'm honestly not trying to sound cool or "hip". I was trying to communicate my honest opinion. It was not my intention to have it sound like a marketing brochure. Then again, I'm apparently your "enemy", so I doubt you'll believe me anyway.
No, I just mostly rolled my eyes at it. Difficult or not, they've done it before and can do it again. When your entire business is riding on how much money you make off of sales, the "difficulty" of retail is tantamount to nonsense. You only eliminate that channel if you can make more money through a different channel. Being that these will be addon song packs to an existing game, I don't see that happening. They'd make a lot more money by selling the same game 10 times over.
Besides, they're going to have to get the Guitar Hero/Controller combo out there somehow. It's not like you can just download a controller over the Internet. (At least, not yet anyway.)
More or less, but I don't think it will make them as much money. Online content doesn't has as much intrinsic value to players as a physical, shrink-wrapped, boxed frisbee. As a result, they're going to get a lot less money for the downloads than they would for the physical packages. There will also be fewer options for expensive bundles open to them.
I'll grant you that downloads remove the marketing & distribution overhead, as well as the retail markup, but it won't change the royalty situation any. So in my highly untrained professional opinion, they'd do better in retail than they will on the 360 Live! service.
Granted, modern consoles allow for more complex effects in 2D (all you're really doing is ignoring the Z axis), but that doesn't make the gameplay any less 2D.:)
Sonic Adventure ushered in re-branded "Dr. Eggman" [...] once Sonic went into 3D, Sega felt that Sonic was better suited on Earth
Just to clarify, the move toward Dr. Eggman vs. Robotnik and Earth vs. Mobius was a move toward how the Sonic story was told in its original Japanese. The elements we Americans are used to were localization and translation issues. That being said, I think we Americans liked the way Sonic was localized. Trying to cram a version better suited to Japanese culture down our throats is silly, especially since the early Sonic games supposedly sold better in the U.S. than they did in Japan.
IMHO, the Sonic Team should have used the SatAM show as its source material rather than coming up with the screwy Sonic X series. The result would have been far more appealing to the majority of American fans.
Last but not least, Sega should really consider reworking the Sonic XTreme concept. There's a lot of demand for that game out there. Enough to suggest that the direction it was going is actually where fans want to go. Yes, it was basically a straight-up translation of 2D Sonic into 3D Sonic. But what's wrong with that?
In case anyone is wondering why the article calls "Blast Processing" a sham, it's because more processing power is not necessary for Sonic's "speed". Speed is an illusion. As long as the frame rate is high enough to prevent choppiness (consoles are limited to the TV's 60 FPS anyway), you can move the playfield and characters as much or as little as you want per frame. This gives the illusion of speed. In cases where the actual speed exceeds the sampling rate of the television, motion blur tricks can be used to fool the eye further. For example, Sonic's legs weren't really a blur. The sprite was already blurred, then played back at a far lower framerate.
If I'm not mistaken, a lot of the cost in producing a game like Guitar Hero is in licensing the tracks themselves.
There are a few different pricing structures, but usually you're talking about royalties. Royalties suck because you pay something for every copy you sell. On the other hand, royalties rock because you only pay for the copies you sell. In this case, they'd only need to pay royalties for the version that contains the song. It would make accounting a bit more difficult, but it's perfectly doable. That's why having different versions can work, despite all the licensing issues.
A game like Guitar Hero lends itself well to different editions. Rather than releasing a single game with a wide array of music, they should release several titles with a focus on each type of music. The game engine could be the same in each, with only the songs differing. Some examples:
Guitar Hero: Hard Rock Guitar Hero: 80's Pop Guitar Hero: Rock of the 60's Guitar Hero: Spanish Licks Guitar Hero: Heavy Metal
Since only the song content would differ, it would be less costly for Harmonix/Red Octane to produce the different versions than it is to release an entirely new game. Not only will they open up doors to new customers, but their existing customers will have a chance to purchase new compilations as they get tired of their existing ones. Yet they won't necessarily feel like they're getting gyped as each disc is a full-up game unto itself.
The best part is that six months after release (or around the holiday season, whichever comes first) they can release a special compilation of ALL the discs in one package. (A bit like DVDs of TV Seasons.) They could then charge a pretty penny for the special edition compilation while incurring only minor manufacturing and distribution costs. Or in other words, they'd have a license to print money.;)
It takes virtually no extra work to write stuff cross browser (or at least close enough), and if you think it does take too much work then your skills aren't what they should be. Just use web standards.
Correction: It takes virtually no extra work to write stuff for all browsers except when you need to support IE for non-trivial work. Getting things working in IE is a pain due to its lack of standards support, and shouldn't be necessary. Thankfully, it's possible to maintain a small list of Javascript and CSS patches that can take care of 95% of the issues. The rest can be fudged so that IE works "ok". It's just that it's not pleasant to do things like maintain an IE-specific style sheet.
If the grocery store had a guy set aside specifically to work with the pirate to help make him a millionaire, then I'd say you have some kind of comparison.
That's not a very good analogy. A better one is that a fellow comes into the grocery store every so often and makes exceptionally large purchases. The store manager talks with the fellow a bit about his grocery purchasing habits. The fellow replies that he needs the food for his "crew". The store manager then says that he'll help by assigning a special employee to expidite the fellow's shopping trips.
Six months later, the press walks in and says, "How can you provide such service to a known pirate!?"
Is the manager expected to work so closely to the employee, that they see every transaction that takes place?
No, they're expecting the manager to "take care" of the problem before his boss or corp ever hears about it. By adding this threat, they're hoping to get the managers to take their job seriously. Which means communicating how critical this rule is, as well as enforcing it if they do become aware of a violation. If a manager fails to take it seriously, the matter will eventually get back to the powers-that-be through either "mystery shoppers" or parental complaints.
Interesting. Actually, they can't be forgiven if that's true. Web Start allows a tiny bit of XML in the descriptor that's supposed to limit the versions of the JVM, and automatically upgrade if the user is behind.
In any case, Java 6 has been officially released. Here you go:
Ok maybe '94 or so, it was a long time ago. You are right; this was a Linux box I was running it on.
Java wasn't available to the public until '95. And it wasn't available on Linux until sometime around '98 or '99. So Java wasn't the problem. StarOffice was perfectly capable of being installed without Java.
I also sincerely doubt you had a Linux machine with 128MB of memory in 1994. Seeing as how the adolescent Linux 1.0 was published that year, you would have had to spend a fortune (as in, enough to buy a high-end Sun, HP, or IBM workstation) just to run an untested operating system. Unless you were a developer for Linux, I sincerely doubt your company would have given you the machine for those purposes. Not to mention that no port of StarOffice was available for Linux at that time. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first port.
The "problem" with StarOffice was that it was written for the Big Boy Workstations running CDE. It was intended to be a complete desktop replacement tool, and thus loaded a tremendous number of components at startup. Those components included a Windows-like desktop interface and a web browser in addition to the entire suite of Office applications. StarDivision seemed to feel that users would be more productive with their Office software completely replacing the underlying desktop interface.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a critical error in the long term. Once it was ported to systems like Windows and Linux, its monolithic nature stood out as an unwanted feature. StarDivision was able to sell the product to Sun, however, who eventually released the source code. The first task of the OpenOffice team was to break the applications back apart so that they'd better fit in with modern desktop environments.
As for Sun, they had previously been happy running Microsoft Office. This was accomplished through a variety of techniques. The first was emulation of the Win16 subsystem. When Microsoft moved to Win32, Sun followed with an expansion card that ran Windows inside a Solaris CDE window. Sun eventually realized that this was not a scalable solution, so they went shopping. The rest is history.
128MB? In 1986? What was this running on, a supercomputer?
You might want to recheck those figures. Not to mention the date that Java was released to the public.:-/
If we were talking about 1996, then you'd be right about the memory. But there was not a heck of a lot of Java in StarOffice in those days. Not to mention that StarOffice wasn't even an integrated Office environment until 1994...
Your comment is neither here nor there. I said that military technology is falling behind, not that it was never useful or that it isn't superior in some situations. In the example I listed, GPS RECEIVERS were replaced with consumer models because the comsumer models are easier to acquire and use. That's despite the fact that they provide inferior information. The military may eventually provide hardened units that are as feature rich as the consumer models, but the consumer models will work just fine until that happens.
The problem is that military technology is falling behind consumer technology. For example, many troops are carrying consumer GPS units because the military units (which can actually be more accurate) are too difficult to acquire and use. It's a lot easier for the troops to get large shipments of consumer GPS units w/spares that do what they need them to rather than waiting for the contracter to finish building an improved model after the war is over.
Another way of thinking of the situation is like this: Is it better to have a piece of equipment that might break rather than having no equipment at all?
If the answer is "yes", then a stopgap solution like the one in the article needs to be deployed immediately. If the answer is "no, it would be worse than having nothing" then the troops should make due without.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't see how that can be misunderstood, then I can't help you.
Two replies. Both of which may or may not have understood you correctly. Nevermind all the other responses which continued on the idea that you didn't understand the difference. Nevermind that I was polite to you. Nevermind that I just apologized for any perceived transgressions. Never mind any of that. I was obviously a complete and total jerk to you. And I obviously deserve your disdain, because I have been rude to you this entire thread!
And let's not forget that this thread was started by replying to your post. Oh wait. *snaps fingers* That's right! I didn't. You replied to me. With your seven month old pent up anger over a complete non-issue.
I didn't forget anything. You forgot to explain what your problem was.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't understand what your problem was then. I wasn't going to respond when I didn't understand what you were getting at. But now that I know, I think I agree with the AC who responded to you.
The problem isn't that we don't get it, it's that you don't get it. Precision is a very important part of any serious conversation. So the term "price point" was used to be precise. For those of us who are used to being picked apart when we're imprecise, precision is a necessary (Nay! CRITICAL!) evil. That's something you appear to miss in your conquest to rage against the man.
But hey, be angry at me. I'm obviously "the man" to be raged against. I was such a jerk, I deserved the down-mod I got for it.
[...]
Wait. I wasn't the one downmodded, now was I?
"You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." --Matthew 7:5
You remember incorrectly. I did not respond to you once you clarified what you meant. I only responded in the first place because I thought I was being helpful. The mods, however, were extremely harsh with your posts. Perhaps unjustifiably so.
You need to understand. You said nothing more than "Why do people say "price point" instead of "price"? Just to sound smart? In virtually every context, it's completely unnecessary." This suggested to everyone that you did not understand the difference between a 'price' and a 'price point'. If you go back and read the replies, you may notice that several other folks responded in a similar manner. In short, no one understood your original point due to a lack of information. When you expressed that you were upset that no one understood you, the mods retaliated. (Probably because they hadn't understood you, either.)
You shouldn't worry about it so much. It happens to us all. I'm constantly bitten by information I forget to include in a post before hitting the submit button. It simply one of the perils in using a time-sensitive bulletin board like Slashdot.
Sounds like you take things too personally. I remember that conversation, and as it so happens, I was not trying to be "condescending". You asked an open ended question, so I gave a best attempt at an informative, open-ended answer. I'm truly sorry if you were offended, but I can't control if read something into text that isn't there.
The scary thing is that this phenomenon is well documented, yet it continues to pose a problem.
Anyway, I'm sorry for any offense; whether it be real or perceived.
You *do* realize you're saying the exact same things I did, right?
Yes! No! Sort of!
Indexes only optimize some types of queries. To get the absolute maximum performance out of your database, you have to make sure that there is a specific index for each query you run, and that your indexes are properly rebuilt and optimized for least-time search. Suffice it to say, this rarely happens in the real world. So there's almost always some scanning, even after the indexes narrow things down a bit. By going with a column-oriented storage design, the scan can be streamed at higher levels of thoroughput than is possible with row-oriented databases.
The downside is that you're sacrificing the time to access individual rows, so if you're pulling and processing millions of rows of data, this might actually be slower than a traditional row-oriented database. Updates are almost guaranteed to be slower as you have to write to several column-oriented data stores rather than a single row-oriented store.
Still, column orientation makes a lot of sense for a variety of today's database applications. So if you're in need of querying a multi-terrabyte table, this product may be just what the (senior database) administrator ordered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS
It's basically an optimization of the current data access patterns. Databases have been row-oriented for decades, because they evolved from fixed width flat files. Once we eliminated COBOL-style accesses to databases, the full row data became less important. It became far more important to be able to scan a column as fast as possible. For example:
select * from names where lastname LIKE '%son'
The above query might have an index available to find what it needs. But it's just as likely that the database will need to do a table-scan. Since table-scans involve looking through every record in the database, you can imagine that it would be faster to just load the lastname column rather than loading every row in the database just to discard 90% of that data.
It's called "hedging your bets". If the little company doesn't work out, no big deal. If it does, then HP is in a position to either benefit from contractual relations, acquire it, or squash it. Whichever happens to be their fancy.
Never assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence. In this case, I've been spending way too much time around the corporate types. :-/
Really, I'm honestly not trying to sound cool or "hip". I was trying to communicate my honest opinion. It was not my intention to have it sound like a marketing brochure. Then again, I'm apparently your "enemy", so I doubt you'll believe me anyway.
Sounds like a question to submit to the new Everybody Votes Channel.
"Which is more romantic? a) Carving your name on a tree; or b) Writing your name on the side of a spaceship?"
Hmm... I wonder which way the vote will swing?
No, I just mostly rolled my eyes at it. Difficult or not, they've done it before and can do it again. When your entire business is riding on how much money you make off of sales, the "difficulty" of retail is tantamount to nonsense. You only eliminate that channel if you can make more money through a different channel. Being that these will be addon song packs to an existing game, I don't see that happening. They'd make a lot more money by selling the same game 10 times over.
Besides, they're going to have to get the Guitar Hero/Controller combo out there somehow. It's not like you can just download a controller over the Internet. (At least, not yet anyway.)
More or less, but I don't think it will make them as much money. Online content doesn't has as much intrinsic value to players as a physical, shrink-wrapped, boxed frisbee. As a result, they're going to get a lot less money for the downloads than they would for the physical packages. There will also be fewer options for expensive bundles open to them.
I'll grant you that downloads remove the marketing & distribution overhead, as well as the retail markup, but it won't change the royalty situation any. So in my highly untrained professional opinion, they'd do better in retail than they will on the 360 Live! service.
Too bad no one was trying to be hip.
Unless it's hip to be a square?
Speak for yourself. I'm waiting for Super Paper Mario to come out. And if I had a Nintendo DS, I'd be all over the New Super Mario Bros.
Granted, modern consoles allow for more complex effects in 2D (all you're really doing is ignoring the Z axis), but that doesn't make the gameplay any less 2D.
Just to clarify, the move toward Dr. Eggman vs. Robotnik and Earth vs. Mobius was a move toward how the Sonic story was told in its original Japanese. The elements we Americans are used to were localization and translation issues. That being said, I think we Americans liked the way Sonic was localized. Trying to cram a version better suited to Japanese culture down our throats is silly, especially since the early Sonic games supposedly sold better in the U.S. than they did in Japan.
IMHO, the Sonic Team should have used the SatAM show as its source material rather than coming up with the screwy Sonic X series. The result would have been far more appealing to the majority of American fans.
Last but not least, Sega should really consider reworking the Sonic XTreme concept. There's a lot of demand for that game out there. Enough to suggest that the direction it was going is actually where fans want to go. Yes, it was basically a straight-up translation of 2D Sonic into 3D Sonic. But what's wrong with that?
In case anyone is wondering why the article calls "Blast Processing" a sham, it's because more processing power is not necessary for Sonic's "speed". Speed is an illusion. As long as the frame rate is high enough to prevent choppiness (consoles are limited to the TV's 60 FPS anyway), you can move the playfield and characters as much or as little as you want per frame. This gives the illusion of speed. In cases where the actual speed exceeds the sampling rate of the television, motion blur tricks can be used to fool the eye further. For example, Sonic's legs weren't really a blur. The sprite was already blurred, then played back at a far lower framerate.
There are a few different pricing structures, but usually you're talking about royalties. Royalties suck because you pay something for every copy you sell. On the other hand, royalties rock because you only pay for the copies you sell. In this case, they'd only need to pay royalties for the version that contains the song. It would make accounting a bit more difficult, but it's perfectly doable. That's why having different versions can work, despite all the licensing issues.
A game like Guitar Hero lends itself well to different editions. Rather than releasing a single game with a wide array of music, they should release several titles with a focus on each type of music. The game engine could be the same in each, with only the songs differing. Some examples:
;)
Guitar Hero: Hard Rock
Guitar Hero: 80's Pop
Guitar Hero: Rock of the 60's
Guitar Hero: Spanish Licks
Guitar Hero: Heavy Metal
Since only the song content would differ, it would be less costly for Harmonix/Red Octane to produce the different versions than it is to release an entirely new game. Not only will they open up doors to new customers, but their existing customers will have a chance to purchase new compilations as they get tired of their existing ones. Yet they won't necessarily feel like they're getting gyped as each disc is a full-up game unto itself.
The best part is that six months after release (or around the holiday season, whichever comes first) they can release a special compilation of ALL the discs in one package. (A bit like DVDs of TV Seasons.) They could then charge a pretty penny for the special edition compilation while incurring only minor manufacturing and distribution costs. Or in other words, they'd have a license to print money.
Correction: It takes virtually no extra work to write stuff for all browsers except when you need to support IE for non-trivial work. Getting things working in IE is a pain due to its lack of standards support, and shouldn't be necessary. Thankfully, it's possible to maintain a small list of Javascript and CSS patches that can take care of 95% of the issues. The rest can be fudged so that IE works "ok". It's just that it's not pleasant to do things like maintain an IE-specific style sheet.
That's not a very good analogy. A better one is that a fellow comes into the grocery store every so often and makes exceptionally large purchases. The store manager talks with the fellow a bit about his grocery purchasing habits. The fellow replies that he needs the food for his "crew". The store manager then says that he'll help by assigning a special employee to expidite the fellow's shopping trips.
Six months later, the press walks in and says, "How can you provide such service to a known pirate!?"
No, they're expecting the manager to "take care" of the problem before his boss or corp ever hears about it. By adding this threat, they're hoping to get the managers to take their job seriously. Which means communicating how critical this rule is, as well as enforcing it if they do become aware of a violation. If a manager fails to take it seriously, the matter will eventually get back to the powers-that-be through either "mystery shoppers" or parental complaints.
Interesting. Actually, they can't be forgiven if that's true. Web Start allows a tiny bit of XML in the descriptor that's supposed to limit the versions of the JVM, and automatically upgrade if the user is behind.
:)
In any case, Java 6 has been officially released. Here you go:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
Java wasn't available to the public until '95. And it wasn't available on Linux until sometime around '98 or '99. So Java wasn't the problem. StarOffice was perfectly capable of being installed without Java.
I also sincerely doubt you had a Linux machine with 128MB of memory in 1994. Seeing as how the adolescent Linux 1.0 was published that year, you would have had to spend a fortune (as in, enough to buy a high-end Sun, HP, or IBM workstation) just to run an untested operating system. Unless you were a developer for Linux, I sincerely doubt your company would have given you the machine for those purposes. Not to mention that no port of StarOffice was available for Linux at that time. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first port.
The "problem" with StarOffice was that it was written for the Big Boy Workstations running CDE. It was intended to be a complete desktop replacement tool, and thus loaded a tremendous number of components at startup. Those components included a Windows-like desktop interface and a web browser in addition to the entire suite of Office applications. StarDivision seemed to feel that users would be more productive with their Office software completely replacing the underlying desktop interface.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a critical error in the long term. Once it was ported to systems like Windows and Linux, its monolithic nature stood out as an unwanted feature. StarDivision was able to sell the product to Sun, however, who eventually released the source code. The first task of the OpenOffice team was to break the applications back apart so that they'd better fit in with modern desktop environments.
As for Sun, they had previously been happy running Microsoft Office. This was accomplished through a variety of techniques. The first was emulation of the Win16 subsystem. When Microsoft moved to Win32, Sun followed with an expansion card that ran Windows inside a Solaris CDE window. Sun eventually realized that this was not a scalable solution, so they went shopping. The rest is history.
128MB? In 1986? What was this running on, a supercomputer?
:-/
You might want to recheck those figures. Not to mention the date that Java was released to the public.
If we were talking about 1996, then you'd be right about the memory. But there was not a heck of a lot of Java in StarOffice in those days. Not to mention that StarOffice wasn't even an integrated Office environment until 1994...
Man oh man, was that a long time ago...
Anyone know what he's been up to?
Your comment is neither here nor there. I said that military technology is falling behind, not that it was never useful or that it isn't superior in some situations. In the example I listed, GPS RECEIVERS were replaced with consumer models because the comsumer models are easier to acquire and use. That's despite the fact that they provide inferior information. The military may eventually provide hardened units that are as feature rich as the consumer models, but the consumer models will work just fine until that happens.
Nothing you said changes that point.
The problem is that military technology is falling behind consumer technology. For example, many troops are carrying consumer GPS units because the military units (which can actually be more accurate) are too difficult to acquire and use. It's a lot easier for the troops to get large shipments of consumer GPS units w/spares that do what they need them to rather than waiting for the contracter to finish building an improved model after the war is over.
Another way of thinking of the situation is like this: Is it better to have a piece of equipment that might break rather than having no equipment at all?
If the answer is "yes", then a stopgap solution like the one in the article needs to be deployed immediately. If the answer is "no, it would be worse than having nothing" then the troops should make due without.