And if you can remote into them with this new cool CLI tool, you won't be able to do half of the things anyways because they won't exist on those remote machines.
Roger that.. good technology is severely impeded if the software and user ecology based around it isn't really built to take advantage of it.
Ever since Windows NT 3.1, Microsoft has actually had a superior permissions/security model than Unix has had. The ability to attach full ACL's to everything in the system is a far richer model than traditional Unix owner/group/other bits.
But! It's 2005 and I'm still running into lots of software (I'm talking to you, Norton Antivirus) that are written and sold on the Windows system that can't cope with the fact that a user might just possibly not be running with Administrator privileges!
Microsoft, while being a fast follower more than an innovator, can do good software. But all the externalities (i.e., their users and developers) makes their systems fall far short in practice of the potential of what good technological decisions they've made.
BASH, ksh, and csh scripting is pretty basic, yes, but it's not like we're still stuck in the 80's on Unix.. we've got Perl and Python, which can do quite a whole heck of a lot.
Monad looks innovative (a word I rarely think to apply to anything Microsoft does) in its integral support for XML pipes, but it's pretty easy to do XML manipulation through Python scripting already, so it's not clear how much more power that will give them. The extra integration between their tools and the CLR and Monad will probably be pretty nice, though.
It seems like bringing up the "Toy Story in Real Time" thing is all some people can talk about now.. I've seen this quote brought up in forum after forum after forum.
Yes, the PS 2 was not all that it was hyped up to be. The PS 3, on the other hand, really does have a gawdawful amount of power, more power than any current game has been created to take advantage of.
Why not let it go? Comment on the current screen shots if you like, why don't you?
So long as Linux doesn't have (or is perceived not to have) the apps, Microsoft can charge as much as they can possibly get without fear of people defecting en masse.
If Linux can't run the apps, it's useless to folks.
That's why the browser and Java and all are what threatened Microsoft so very much in the 90's.
True, but PJ has had that thread in her writing for quite awhile now on her site.
I read PJ and enjoy her analyses, and I bear her no ill will. Some of the things she puts into her writings have a paranoiac/persecuted edge that has struck me as a bit odd, though.
Now, there's no doubt that Maureen O'Gara has gone over the edge..
No, I was speaking from experience manipulating XML within Python.
If I'm doing straight Python and I don't care about anything else, I'll just use pickles and shelves and call it a day. If I'm doing Perl, I'll just make something random up.
But if I'm using a file format that needs to represent any kind of complex data structures and which needs to be processed by multiple languages, I'll very cheerfully use XML.
Bob's saving much more than a few bucks. The Windows license is the biggest single cost in a PC, and it has been increasing while all the component costs have been dropping.
Well, sure, but one aspect of that investment was Bill Gates' certainty that as long as Apple was off playing in their own garden with their own hardware, Microsoft had nothing to fear.
Microsoft made the PC industry by making it multi-vendor, and the PC industry is too big to be threatened by any single hardware vendor, no matter how big.
Which is why Linux gives them kittens, of course.
Re:Microsoft Will Fail - Tales From The Inside
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Heck, I'll tell you how bad it is.
I'm a moderately geeky guy, I use the Internet for a dozen hours a day..
And I don't even know what the URL for Microsoft's search engine is. Do you? Does anyone? I never hear anyone talk about it, never hear anyone refer to it, mention it, use it.
One of the most startling things in this Fortune article (aside from the wonderfully interesting view into the Microsoft psychology) was the reminder that Microsoft actually has a search engine.
I wonder where they keep it? Maybe I could google for it.
You're mistaken..NET isn't for writing cross-platform applications, it's for giving Windows programmers an as-good-as-Java experience, in terms of ease of use and security.
Bill Gates would be perfectly happy to see other platforms choke on a big stick and die.
Python and Perl have perfectly robust XML i/o libraries these days. I don't think I'd mind very much writing the extra ten lines of Python code required to interface with XML, particularly if the transformation I want to do to the config file is simpler in terms of XML than it would be in terms of sed, etc.
I don't, oddly enough. If you know enough about the original system to make a working emulator, performance just comes down to time tuning your CPU emulator code and the like.
And Digital Eclipse, when they did the Williams Arcade pack, only emulated, like, 6 games. I know, because I own the original CD.
You forget that you can always get another license from the person/people who made it, if he/they are so inclined.
No, I didn't forget that, actually. But if you were to license MAME under other terms, someone would need to get approval for relicensing from all of the contributors to MAME, assuming that MAME does not require copyright assignment by their contributors.
I am astonished that anyone would try to replicate the amount of work that has gone into the existing emulators, though. I know that for a lot of the games that MAME supports, the original companies no longer exist, and internal technical documentation (beyond that which was used by the MAME team) is not likely to be forthcoming.
Sure, but not for 1000 different pieces of hardware. That's a hell of a lot of development (and debugging), especially when you have to be accurate down to the register level on this stuff.
Yes, but have you looked at MAME? There's a tremendous amount of development that has gone into it, and with the high number of ROMS they are promoting, they're going to need something similar.
All the commercial emulation packages I've seen have handled only a dozen or so games at most.
So how are the users to run these ROMS? MAME's current licensing allows distribution of derivative works only if the source code is freely available. If Turner made the source for their product available, it would presumably be possible to work around the DRM that they're using..?
The PowerPC cores on XBox 360 are also rumored to be in-order.
Cell will pose some interesting design challenges to programmers, no doubt about it, but Sony's talking about directly supporting a shader-enhanced version of OpenGL, which should be much easier to program for than PS2 was.
Really, it'll come down to market share. If PS3 dominates market share the way PS2 did, it won't matter all that much how hard or easy it is to program for.
Actually, I really do quite like his stuff. A lot of it does remind me of The Far Side, except with a bit more of a vicious kick in the teeth attitude.
Thumbs up on the daily schedule thing. I hope he can commit to that.
If he's really lucky, he might manage to turn his masterful Slashdot self-promotional idea into a good readership.
I like it. The jellyfish just wants to be loved and swim with other living things, but when his dream comes true, the juxtaposition between the jellyfish's naive understanding of the world and the painful experience of the human who stepped on him illuminates an absurdity that we can appreciate, but which does not penetrate the jellyfish's joyful nature and appreciation of life.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you can remote into them with this new cool CLI tool, you won't be able to do half of the things anyways because they won't exist on those remote machines.
Roger that.. good technology is severely impeded if the software and user ecology based around it isn't really built to take advantage of it.
Ever since Windows NT 3.1, Microsoft has actually had a superior permissions/security model than Unix has had. The ability to attach full ACL's to everything in the system is a far richer model than traditional Unix owner/group/other bits.
But! It's 2005 and I'm still running into lots of software (I'm talking to you, Norton Antivirus) that are written and sold on the Windows system that can't cope with the fact that a user might just possibly not be running with Administrator privileges!
Microsoft, while being a fast follower more than an innovator, can do good software. But all the externalities (i.e., their users and developers) makes their systems fall far short in practice of the potential of what good technological decisions they've made.
BASH, ksh, and csh scripting is pretty basic, yes, but it's not like we're still stuck in the 80's on Unix.. we've got Perl and Python, which can do quite a whole heck of a lot.
Monad looks innovative (a word I rarely think to apply to anything Microsoft does) in its integral support for XML pipes, but it's pretty easy to do XML manipulation through Python scripting already, so it's not clear how much more power that will give them. The extra integration between their tools and the CLR and Monad will probably be pretty nice, though.
Yeah, PhysOrg is clearly a marketing front for PR releases with any sort of science-y edge to them.
See Paul Graham's already classic The Submarine for details on how this crap works.
You're comparing Microsoft marketing professionals with Slashdot posters?
It seems like bringing up the "Toy Story in Real Time" thing is all some people can talk about now.. I've seen this quote brought up in forum after forum after forum.
Yes, the PS 2 was not all that it was hyped up to be. The PS 3, on the other hand, really does have a gawdawful amount of power, more power than any current game has been created to take advantage of.
Why not let it go? Comment on the current screen shots if you like, why don't you?
So long as Linux doesn't have (or is perceived not to have) the apps, Microsoft can charge as much as they can possibly get without fear of people defecting en masse.
If Linux can't run the apps, it's useless to folks.
That's why the browser and Java and all are what threatened Microsoft so very much in the 90's.
Unless whatever had triggered the panic had corrupted data structures to the point that it wrote to the wrong location on disk.
It's a low-probability risk, but that's what the poster was intending, I think.
True, but PJ has had that thread in her writing for quite awhile now on her site.
I read PJ and enjoy her analyses, and I bear her no ill will. Some of the things she puts into her writings have a paranoiac/persecuted edge that has struck me as a bit odd, though.
Now, there's no doubt that Maureen O'Gara has gone over the edge..
PJ's writing does tend to have a bit of that paranoic edge, though.. as this post shows.
No, I was speaking from experience manipulating XML within Python.
If I'm doing straight Python and I don't care about anything else, I'll just use pickles and shelves and call it a day. If I'm doing Perl, I'll just make something random up.
But if I'm using a file format that needs to represent any kind of complex data structures and which needs to be processed by multiple languages, I'll very cheerfully use XML.
Bob's saving much more than a few bucks. The Windows license is the biggest single cost in a PC, and it has been increasing while all the component costs have been dropping.
Well, sure, but one aspect of that investment was Bill Gates' certainty that as long as Apple was off playing in their own garden with their own hardware, Microsoft had nothing to fear.
Microsoft made the PC industry by making it multi-vendor, and the PC industry is too big to be threatened by any single hardware vendor, no matter how big.
Which is why Linux gives them kittens, of course.
Heck, I'll tell you how bad it is.
I'm a moderately geeky guy, I use the Internet for a dozen hours a day..
And I don't even know what the URL for Microsoft's search engine is. Do you? Does anyone? I never hear anyone talk about it, never hear anyone refer to it, mention it, use it.
One of the most startling things in this Fortune article (aside from the wonderfully interesting view into the Microsoft psychology) was the reminder that Microsoft actually has a search engine.
I wonder where they keep it? Maybe I could google for it.
You're mistaken. .NET isn't for writing cross-platform applications, it's for giving Windows programmers an as-good-as-Java experience, in terms of ease of use and security.
Bill Gates would be perfectly happy to see other platforms choke on a big stick and die.
Python and Perl have perfectly robust XML i/o libraries these days. I don't think I'd mind very much writing the extra ten lines of Python code required to interface with XML, particularly if the transformation I want to do to the config file is simpler in terms of XML than it would be in terms of sed, etc.
I don't, oddly enough. If you know enough about the original system to make a working emulator, performance just comes down to time tuning your CPU emulator code and the like.
And Digital Eclipse, when they did the Williams Arcade pack, only emulated, like, 6 games. I know, because I own the original CD.
So, like, bite me.
You forget that you can always get another license from the person/people who made it, if he/they are so inclined.
No, I didn't forget that, actually. But if you were to license MAME under other terms, someone would need to get approval for relicensing from all of the contributors to MAME, assuming that MAME does not require copyright assignment by their contributors.
I am astonished that anyone would try to replicate the amount of work that has gone into the existing emulators, though. I know that for a lot of the games that MAME supports, the original companies no longer exist, and internal technical documentation (beyond that which was used by the MAME team) is not likely to be forthcoming.
As for commercial emulation packages that only handle a dozen games, which are those?
The Digital Eclipse packages for Windows and Mac, the various PS2 arcade emulation discs.
Sure, but not for 1000 different pieces of hardware. That's a hell of a lot of development (and debugging), especially when you have to be accurate down to the register level on this stuff.
Yes, but have you looked at MAME? There's a tremendous amount of development that has gone into it, and with the high number of ROMS they are promoting, they're going to need something similar.
All the commercial emulation packages I've seen have handled only a dozen or so games at most.
So how are the users to run these ROMS? MAME's current licensing allows distribution of derivative works only if the source code is freely available. If Turner made the source for their product available, it would presumably be possible to work around the DRM that they're using..?
The PowerPC cores on XBox 360 are also rumored to be in-order.
Cell will pose some interesting design challenges to programmers, no doubt about it, but Sony's talking about directly supporting a shader-enhanced version of OpenGL, which should be much easier to program for than PS2 was.
Really, it'll come down to market share. If PS3 dominates market share the way PS2 did, it won't matter all that much how hard or easy it is to program for.
I would hope that the belabored over analysis of a straight-forward joke was what was funny.
Not to knock on the author of the strip at all.. I like his stuff, what there is of it.
Actually, I really do quite like his stuff. A lot of it does remind me of The Far Side, except with a bit more of a vicious kick in the teeth attitude.
Thumbs up on the daily schedule thing. I hope he can commit to that.
If he's really lucky, he might manage to turn his masterful Slashdot self-promotional idea into a good readership.
I like it. The jellyfish just wants to be loved and swim with other living things, but when his dream comes true, the juxtaposition between the jellyfish's naive understanding of the world and the painful experience of the human who stepped on him illuminates an absurdity that we can appreciate, but which does not penetrate the jellyfish's joyful nature and appreciation of life.
What's not to get?