But Microsoft has always done this. Every OS version they've ever released was preceded by years of promises, many of which ended up being completely false and misleading, or at the least, poorly-thought-out or overly optimistic.
Let's face it: Microsoft's best product, from a marketing point of view, has always been the version they haven't released yet.
Meanwhile, other companies, in and out of the open-source world have already delivered everything in Vista, and everything that Microsoft promised but will fail to deliver in Vista, but you know there are many, many vendors and customers who are holding out for Vista based on Microsoft's promises.
At this point, it seems Vista has been reduced to bug fixes and eye candy. Now, that's not bad, but it sure isn't worth $200 or whatever they are going to charge. Based on what you will get, it should be called XP 1.1 and cost $25. (Of course, based on what it cost to make it should cost about $5000, but that's not the customers' fault...)
You really want Vista? Install Linux or buy a Mac and then run 2000 or XP in Parallels or VMWare for those Windows apps you can't live without (there are some good ones). It will be cheaper and you can do it now.
You know, you try to be patient. After all, a lot of people are not native English speakers, but this "loose" thing has become extremely common, and it's only been in the last two years or so. I've been seeing "alot" and "rediculous" all my life, but the "loose" thing is some kind of evil meme-virus which is spreading because, and this is the only reason I can imagine, the people who spread it don't read anything that's not written by some other semi-literate luser on the Internet.
I'm hardly the most well-read person on the planet, but the general level of spelling and grammar around places like/. and digg is ridiculous. The scary thing is that I would imagine a high proportion of these kinds of folks, being computer nerds and all, are reasonably well-educated, yet they still write like Mrs. Tuberglotter's 6th grade remedial reading class.
I've used Google Earth since it was version 1 by Keyhole and only worked on nVidia cards... and you had to pay for it. It's a cool piece of software, but of course version 4 wassn't actually released, it's a beta.
Knowing Google, however, version 3 probably never left beta.
In fact, is anything Google makes besides the search engine NOT beta? Google Groups has been beta since what, 2001? Their use of the word has completely lost any meaning, other than the obvious lawyerese intent of absolving them of any responsibility in case the stuff doesn't work. Like anyone ever takes that responsibility anyway (Microsoft?).
"Loose" rhymes with "Goose". It can be used as a verb, but it means something different than "lose".
Geez, doesn't anybody read any frickin' books any more?! If you read books once in a while, you would actually learn to spell.
OK, you can mod me down, I'm done.
Re:It's not as bad as Dilbert.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I work for a large organization, and I think Dilbert is right on. In fact, most companies I've worked for that weren't startups were very much like Dilbert.
If your company isn't that way, consider yourself lucky.
my little brain can't understand why record companies and the RIAA think that making their product hard to acquire is good for business...
Because the RIAA members' entire business model is based upon having a monopoly on distribution. That's the mental block they can't get past. They want to be able to charge an indefinite markup on every format of music you use. They do not want you to have any choice on how you purchase your music (e.g., buying one track instead of one track and a bunch of filler material, although I personally almost never have that problem (maybe it has something to do with listening to actual music rather than just RIAA-excreted pabulum, or maybe I'm just not picky (although, to be fair, my favorite record label, Inside-Out, is in fact, an RIAA member).
Essentially, they've lost their free ride: the ability to print money by controlling the only means for people to get the music the musicians have recorded. Today, a musician can create, record, master and sell music with less investment than it takes to start a small business, in fact, you could literally do it with a computer, a couple hundred dollars worth of software, plus what you need to actually play and record the music. This doesn't count promotion of course, but promotion these days only gets you whatever prefab gimmick du jour the marketing types want to force down your throat anyway.
It all boils down to this, the RIAA are the horse-and-buggy manufacturers and it's 1910. The difference is that the real horse-and-buggy people weren't able to convince (i.e., buy) Congress' protection for an obsolete business model.
I have a Brownie Hawkeye I got from my grandmother when I was a kid. You hold it at waist-level and look through a little glass window on top that shows the view, using a mirror and lens. Nice little camera that I used quite a bit, although I imagine it would be hard to get film for it now.
In fact, wasn't the President simply elected by the House of Represenatives at first? I don't think the whole idea of citizens voting for the President (however indirectly, since we still don't technically vote for the President), even started until some time in the 19th centrury.
I also expect we'll still be hearing about the 2000 election in 2040, because politics breeds sore losers. (Recall that 9/11 was in part payback for the Poles bailing out the Viennese at the siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. I've seen warnings that if we are to understand Muslims we need to be mindful of September 11, and this was written in the 1930's, even more interesting was the protests in Greece when Pope John Paul II visited stemming from things that happened in the early 1200's... regardless of the reason, people hold grudges for a loooong time).
Yeah, the consumers should upgrade to new technology and take the gamble that it will be around in 2 years or their $3000 bleeding-edge foobob becomes a doorstop.
There's a big difference between consumer choice and a standard. Imagine if we had this problem with cars being incompatible with roads. Depending on whether Honda's or Toyota's new technology gets more widely adapted will determine how roads are built in the future.
Now watching movies is a little les simportant and expensive than driving, but who wants to take a jump and risk having to replace hardware in a couple years because you can't get any new movies on BluRay or HD-DVD, whichever one wins out.
ObTopic: Why aren't there many same-screen multiplayer games planned for Windows XP or its successor Windows Vista?
Because computers don't normally have multiple inputs. That's why networking is where it's at.
I've played a few multiplayer games where each player has a few keys on the keyboard. It doesn't work.
Even if there is a device for attaching multiple joysticks to a PC, and I'm sure there is... somewhere... no one is going to have one, so there's a chicken and egg problem for such a game to even be created.
But since everyone has a computer... why bother? You could still do Gauntlet over the network. It's not the same as when I play Gauntlet Legends on the Dreamcast with my kids, but it's all we're going to have without using consoles.
Without even RTFA'ing, my first reaction to this is: Well, gee, Microsoft, how in the world did you ever get Word to work on a feeble '386 in the first place? I mean you didn't have gigahertz and megabytes of RAM?
MS has no problems delivering megabits a second of video processed by highly sophisticated compression algorithms, but they can't parse XML fast?
Even for MS, this is a feeble excuse. But of course, their real reason is that they want their own XML-based document format that can embed executable code that is hooked directly into the kernel. It wouldn't be a MS application unless you could be remotely pwned.
I don't believe for a minute that real functionality that real people would use and get real benefit from requires a spec that compares in size to the U.S. tax code (4000 pages vs. 10000 pages). Heck the first version of Word probably didn't have that much source code.
MS, like most software developers, are working so hard to make things more sophisticated, that they keep forgetting that they should be making things better. But better doesn't perpetuate the biennial Office upgrade cycle, more complex does.
One of the reasons my employer is moving from Tcl to another development platform for Web infrastructure, probably Java, is because they claim they can get more Java programmers than Tcl programmers. While this might be true, I would argue that they will get exactly as many competent, effective Java programmers as they get Tcl programmers, in other words, very few. Any programmer worth the appellation can do his job regardless of the tool.
Equating "literacy" with the ability to use Microsoft Office (or something similar) is like equating mathematics knowledge by memorizing the times tables up to 100. Useful for a very specific, narrow range of tasks, but completely worthless when presented with a new type of problem.
Unfortunately, it is far easier to test for memorization than for actual thinking, and this is the route of least resistance our education system likes to take.
The current plan 'yeah, we'll have first real plant producing electricity by 2040' just sounds so damn unambitious. *34 years*. People went from 0 to moon in less than 10... and that was in the sixties!
Well, since they've been trying to develop fusion power since the 50's, that sounds about right. If it was so darn easy to make, we'd have one by now. Fusion power would have all the advantages of fission power, but far fewer disadvantages. Even the environmentalists could like it.
Interesting factoid: Philo Farnsworth, widely recognized as the inventor of electronic television in the 20's was a bigshot in fusion research in the 50's. He helped develop a device called the "fusor", but as we all know, while they did get fusion, they were never able to reach the break-even point.
The funny thing is that with older versions of Windows, the minimum hardware requirements were way underpowered. If this is true for Vista (which I actually doubt) then that would be scary.
I seem to recall the minimum recommended memory for NT 4.0 was 32MB, although I do recall that you could actually boot NT 4.0 with 12MB of memory, but you couldn't do much with it. Those were the days. Windows 2000 was usable with 64MB if you didn't get carried away with what you loaded, but 256MB was the reasonable minimum for decent performance. But I prefer no less than 1GB for XP... of course I tend to have a lot of programs running at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the license agreement says, in effect, Microsoft reserves the right to do anything they want.
So how many years have they been promising to eliminate DLL Hell? Has _any _ progress been made in this direction?
But Microsoft has always done this. Every OS version they've ever released was preceded by years of promises, many of which ended up being completely false and misleading, or at the least, poorly-thought-out or overly optimistic.
Let's face it: Microsoft's best product, from a marketing point of view, has always been the version they haven't released yet.
Meanwhile, other companies, in and out of the open-source world have already delivered everything in Vista, and everything that Microsoft promised but will fail to deliver in Vista, but you know there are many, many vendors and customers who are holding out for Vista based on Microsoft's promises.
At this point, it seems Vista has been reduced to bug fixes and eye candy. Now, that's not bad, but it sure isn't worth $200 or whatever they are going to charge. Based on what you will get, it should be called XP 1.1 and cost $25. (Of course, based on what it cost to make it should cost about $5000, but that's not the customers' fault...)
You really want Vista? Install Linux or buy a Mac and then run 2000 or XP in Parallels or VMWare for those Windows apps you can't live without (there are some good ones). It will be cheaper and you can do it now.
No kidding. Musta implanted a tennis ball in that one knee.
Computers were more fun in the old days.
Plus, he misspelled "definite".
You tell 'im, CR.
Like I read recently, "Beta means never having to say you're sorry."
Google does a lot of good stuff, but this "beta" thing is really annoying.
You know, you try to be patient. After all, a lot of people are not native English speakers, but this "loose" thing has become extremely common, and it's only been in the last two years or so. I've been seeing "alot" and "rediculous" all my life, but the "loose" thing is some kind of evil meme-virus which is spreading because, and this is the only reason I can imagine, the people who spread it don't read anything that's not written by some other semi-literate luser on the Internet.
/. and digg is ridiculous. The scary thing is that I would imagine a high proportion of these kinds of folks, being computer nerds and all, are reasonably well-educated, yet they still write like Mrs. Tuberglotter's 6th grade remedial reading class.
I'm hardly the most well-read person on the planet, but the general level of spelling and grammar around places like
I've used Google Earth since it was version 1 by Keyhole and only worked on nVidia cards... and you had to pay for it. It's a cool piece of software, but of course version 4 wassn't actually released, it's a beta.
Knowing Google, however, version 3 probably never left beta.
In fact, is anything Google makes besides the search engine NOT beta? Google Groups has been beta since what, 2001? Their use of the word has completely lost any meaning, other than the obvious lawyerese intent of absolving them of any responsibility in case the stuff doesn't work. Like anyone ever takes that responsibility anyway (Microsoft?).
Still, it's cool software.
Yeah, but I bet they'll never fix the compatibility for Chocalate Star Wars.
That's OK, I can never find a retailer that carries it.
It's "LOSING"! L-O-S-I-N-G! One "O". Just one.
The opposite of "win" or "gain" is "lose".
"Loose" rhymes with "Goose". It can be used as a verb, but it means something different than "lose".
Geez, doesn't anybody read any frickin' books any more?! If you read books once in a while, you would actually learn to spell.
OK, you can mod me down, I'm done.
I work for a large organization, and I think Dilbert is right on. In fact, most companies I've worked for that weren't startups were very much like Dilbert.
If your company isn't that way, consider yourself lucky.
Hey, I have a wife. And kids. And they're not even imaginary. Of course they're all almost as nerdy as I am.
Why, I heard that Bush is in league with the Martians in a plot to detonate the Sun!!!!!!!!
You don't know how right you are! See here.
my little brain can't understand why record companies and the RIAA think that making their product hard to acquire is good for business...
Because the RIAA members' entire business model is based upon having a monopoly on distribution. That's the mental block they can't get past. They want to be able to charge an indefinite markup on every format of music you use. They do not want you to have any choice on how you purchase your music (e.g., buying one track instead of one track and a bunch of filler material, although I personally almost never have that problem (maybe it has something to do with listening to actual music rather than just RIAA-excreted pabulum, or maybe I'm just not picky (although, to be fair, my favorite record label, Inside-Out, is in fact, an RIAA member).
Essentially, they've lost their free ride: the ability to print money by controlling the only means for people to get the music the musicians have recorded. Today, a musician can create, record, master and sell music with less investment than it takes to start a small business, in fact, you could literally do it with a computer, a couple hundred dollars worth of software, plus what you need to actually play and record the music. This doesn't count promotion of course, but promotion these days only gets you whatever prefab gimmick du jour the marketing types want to force down your throat anyway.
It all boils down to this, the RIAA are the horse-and-buggy manufacturers and it's 1910. The difference is that the real horse-and-buggy people weren't able to convince (i.e., buy) Congress' protection for an obsolete business model.
I have a Brownie Hawkeye I got from my grandmother when I was a kid. You hold it at waist-level and look through a little glass window on top that shows the view, using a mirror and lens. Nice little camera that I used quite a bit, although I imagine it would be hard to get film for it now.
In fact, wasn't the President simply elected by the House of Represenatives at first? I don't think the whole idea of citizens voting for the President (however indirectly, since we still don't technically vote for the President), even started until some time in the 19th centrury.
I also expect we'll still be hearing about the 2000 election in 2040, because politics breeds sore losers. (Recall that 9/11 was in part payback for the Poles bailing out the Viennese at the siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. I've seen warnings that if we are to understand Muslims we need to be mindful of September 11, and this was written in the 1930's, even more interesting was the protests in Greece when Pope John Paul II visited stemming from things that happened in the early 1200's... regardless of the reason, people hold grudges for a loooong time).
Yeah, the consumers should upgrade to new technology and take the gamble that it will be around in 2 years or their $3000 bleeding-edge foobob becomes a doorstop.
There's a big difference between consumer choice and a standard. Imagine if we had this problem with cars being incompatible with roads. Depending on whether Honda's or Toyota's new technology gets more widely adapted will determine how roads are built in the future.
Now watching movies is a little les simportant and expensive than driving, but who wants to take a jump and risk having to replace hardware in a couple years because you can't get any new movies on BluRay or HD-DVD, whichever one wins out.
ObTopic: Why aren't there many same-screen multiplayer games planned for Windows XP or its successor Windows Vista?
Because computers don't normally have multiple inputs. That's why networking is where it's at.
I've played a few multiplayer games where each player has a few keys on the keyboard. It doesn't work.
Even if there is a device for attaching multiple joysticks to a PC, and I'm sure there is... somewhere... no one is going to have one, so there's a chicken and egg problem for such a game to even be created.
But since everyone has a computer... why bother? You could still do Gauntlet over the network. It's not the same as when I play Gauntlet Legends on the Dreamcast with my kids, but it's all we're going to have without using consoles.
I know this is OT, but:
:-)
Misconception #552: "Multiplayer console game means split screen."
Fact: It doesn't.
So who has had this misconception since, oh, say, 1986?
Sure, I've seen a few split screen games on fairly recent hardware, but when I think "multiplayer console game", I think of something like "Gauntlet."
Anyhow, your sig always bugged me, that's all.
Without even RTFA'ing, my first reaction to this is: Well, gee, Microsoft, how in the world did you ever get Word to work on a feeble '386 in the first place? I mean you didn't have gigahertz and megabytes of RAM?
MS has no problems delivering megabits a second of video processed by highly sophisticated compression algorithms, but they can't parse XML fast?
Even for MS, this is a feeble excuse. But of course, their real reason is that they want their own XML-based document format that can embed executable code that is hooked directly into the kernel. It wouldn't be a MS application unless you could be remotely pwned.
I don't believe for a minute that real functionality that real people would use and get real benefit from requires a spec that compares in size to the U.S. tax code (4000 pages vs. 10000 pages). Heck the first version of Word probably didn't have that much source code.
MS, like most software developers, are working so hard to make things more sophisticated, that they keep forgetting that they should be making things better. But better doesn't perpetuate the biennial Office upgrade cycle, more complex does.
... it's about how to think.
One of the reasons my employer is moving from Tcl to another development platform for Web infrastructure, probably Java, is because they claim they can get more Java programmers than Tcl programmers. While this might be true, I would argue that they will get exactly as many competent, effective Java programmers as they get Tcl programmers, in other words, very few. Any programmer worth the appellation can do his job regardless of the tool.
Equating "literacy" with the ability to use Microsoft Office (or something similar) is like equating mathematics knowledge by memorizing the times tables up to 100. Useful for a very specific, narrow range of tasks, but completely worthless when presented with a new type of problem.
Unfortunately, it is far easier to test for memorization than for actual thinking, and this is the route of least resistance our education system likes to take.
So it detects improper pluralization? Cool, but how does it do on viruses?
The current plan 'yeah, we'll have first real plant producing electricity by 2040' just sounds so damn unambitious. *34 years*. People went from 0 to moon in less than 10... and that was in the sixties!
Well, since they've been trying to develop fusion power since the 50's, that sounds about right. If it was so darn easy to make, we'd have one by now. Fusion power would have all the advantages of fission power, but far fewer disadvantages. Even the environmentalists could like it.
Interesting factoid: Philo Farnsworth, widely recognized as the inventor of electronic television in the 20's was a bigshot in fusion research in the 50's. He helped develop a device called the "fusor", but as we all know, while they did get fusion, they were never able to reach the break-even point.
Seems to me, he'd be living "la vida lodo".
The funny thing is that with older versions of Windows, the minimum hardware requirements were way underpowered. If this is true for Vista (which I actually doubt) then that would be scary.
I seem to recall the minimum recommended memory for NT 4.0 was 32MB, although I do recall that you could actually boot NT 4.0 with 12MB of memory, but you couldn't do much with it. Those were the days. Windows 2000 was usable with 64MB if you didn't get carried away with what you loaded, but 256MB was the reasonable minimum for decent performance. But I prefer no less than 1GB for XP... of course I tend to have a lot of programs running at once.