Which means they'll sell the Voodoo line-up at a bargain price to whoever's slightly interested, and give the creditors the customary pennies-on-the-dollar.
3Dfx screwed up, so it's hard to feel sorry for them. But it sucks to seem one company essentially just pay another to go out-of-business. (There might be some lawsuits that go away too, I dunno.)
Right -- There are three kinds of "servers" of interest:
1) Cheap web clusters. Generic Celeron or K7 works. Cheap.
2) (so called) Workgroup Servers. Otherwise known as desktops turned on their side with a SCSI controller. The Pentium IV will do as well as the PIII and PII here, by default.
3) Real Servers. As you've mentioned, the P4 has nothing to offer here yet. My theory is that's intentional with the Itanium due soon, but maybe there's hope for some future SMP P4-Xeon setup.
Your suspicion is probably correct. Fat Ballmer said recently that he 'hated' the idea of selling hardware under cost. They won't be able to grok the business anyway.
Or they're just being SOBs because Sony is hyping the PS2 as a "platform", making a PalmOS handheld, or just not selling as many home video editing machines as Apple is, so they though they'd stick a stick in their eye.
Meanwhile, the X-Box lineup (paid for or not) looks like it will be a bunch of low res Windows ports three months late. Real exciting. Personally, I'm waiting for the first XBox game to boot Win98 and then launch the game from the WIN.INI.
Just another reason Microsoft is great company. I'm sure their filling file cabinets down at the DOJ, just in case the anti-trust ruling is upheld and they needs to be some regulatory actions taken...
Excellent description of the worst of the bad ol' days. Well, maybe not the worst... there was always "Swordquest: Earthworld".
Re:Reminds me of another crash...Short memory huh?
on
Gaming Crash up Ahead
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· Score: 1
IIRC, the PS2 went down to $200 right after the XMas rush, and before the N64 shipped. (Although, everyone knew the N64 would ship at $200.)
Compare this to the Sega Saturn that shipped at $600, and eventually went down the same $150 as everyone else. Some people got the big shaft on that one. (Although the people that imported Saturns for $900 before the US release got the bigger one.)
The video game industry passed up the motion picture industry in terms of revenues for the first time in 1982 or 83. (It didn't get back there until the early 90s.) So, while it was relatively smaller than today, it was still HUGE.
Also, from a cultural perspective, video games were the shit in the early 80s. They were the biggest new thing to ever happen to entertainment (think in terms of the Internet hype of 1994-7), where as today they are more just a staple in the toy store. Of course all of the cultural hype was one of the things that contributed to the explosive downfall of video games in 1984.
My theory is that one of the biggest reasons for the "crash", besides cheap home computers, was Warner/Atari's shafting of the retailers by making them eat old stock, like ET and various lamers from the 1970s (those $10 games the other poster mentioned, soon to be reduced to 99cents).
Not to mention the problems with selling a $300 (which would be around $600 in today's dollars ) "SuperSystem" like the ColecoVision and the 5200 to a broad market. Another scary parallel to the PS2.
The video game industry never died, and the money never went away. Nintendo was back in the saddle, making tons of money within a couple years.
You think that they wouldn't have required PPT4 compatibility if they didn't have thousands of PowerPoint files laying around? Or is that not important?
The whole "missing patch" thing makes me chuckle. Back in those days, WordPerfect Suite was big hairy ball of poorly-QA'd DLL hell. There was probably about 32 other patches and INI file hacks needed to get shit working almost properly. (Maybe WP is still this way, who knows since nobody uses it anymore, for some reason.) No Microsoft consipircy either, because Lotus has always worked fine.
Who would have paid for those "stable systems"? The law firm? Right...
Law firms are cheap bastards when it comes to IT. They bill everyone in the office out by-the-hour, so what the fuck do they care about efficiency. Flashing "MS Junk" makes them money.
That is, if they even spring for the flashing MS Junk. Most of them are standardized on WordPerfect... WordPerfect version 5 or 6. Current shipping version is 10, BTW.
WP/Novell/Corel have tried to sell suite software to these people. They won't buy. Hell, more often than not, they're using a 5 year old version of the mission-critical software (WP), bugs and all*, so write them off as worthless as a sales strategy.
* The Starr Report, written with WP6, had some scandlous deleted footnotes reappear when opened in WP9 or whatever.
OK, Mr "Higher Authority", you forgot to mention that YANAL, because you are more than obviously moronically ignorant about US trademark law. Head, ass, remove, please.
The Microsoft XSL included in IE 5.5 is not quite standard. However, I've heard that the latest versions (which you can download) are very close to standards compliant. (XML Schema is not quite a standard yet, of course.)
My elaboration is that you attacked me for doing nothing more than attempting to correct a politically-motivated moderation. Which means you find me guilty by association and/or you support politically motivated moderation. Either way, it's brownshirt tactics.
Which brings up the greater point of how stupid the tradename "JavaScript" is. The whole Java!=JavaScript thing confuses people (AFC?) even here on Slashdot, which is supposedly a nerd site.
I'd be happy if Netscape went back to calling it "LiveScript", Microsoft can keep calling it "JScript", and us supposed nerds started calling it by it's proper name: "ECMAScript".
Your example comes off as an argument against your case.
The fact that your computer can't understand "irregular and ambigous" commands and instead forces the user to bang his head against the considerable syntax of 'find' pretty much seals the case that it is not the "most natural" way to communicate. Not that pointing and dragging at things is either.
Since someone incorrectly modded the above AC post down as Offtopic, when it is clearly on-topic (Yahoo, France), here it is:
Should we also not teach children about the Hollocust? After all, talking about Nazi's is not good! Should we burn all the war-films and propoganda material from both the Axis and Allied forces, what with all those harrowing scenes of Jews, Gays etc. being murdered?
Personally, i'm inclined to believe that France simply doesn't want to face upto it's past involvment and cooperation with the Nazi's during WWII, much easier to hide it all and pretend it didn't happen isn't it?
"Cellular One" is/was a generic brandname that was used by different owners in different markets. You never could get nationwide roaming or billing or service from "Cellular One", because the individual units were not connected with each other on an operaitonal level
At one time it must have represented something, but over time the real owners have been re-establishing their real brandnames. So, in the Bay Area, Cellular One (real name was something like Bay Area Cellular Telephone Company) turned into AT+T Wireless, but it's believable that some other Cellular One turned into Verizon.
Slashdot Mirror
You're speaking of the high end at the local Radio Shack, I assume? Hint
You haven't noticed the i810 chipset? I certainly have -- there's a stack of Dells at work up to the ceiling, all with 810 video.
Agreed about the drivers, although the new version seems to at least display 2D correctly.
Which means they'll sell the Voodoo line-up at a bargain price to whoever's slightly interested, and give the creditors the customary pennies-on-the-dollar.
3Dfx screwed up, so it's hard to feel sorry for them. But it sucks to seem one company essentially just pay another to go out-of-business. (There might be some lawsuits that go away too, I dunno.)
AMD is the dominant player with all of 25% of the market?
And, in the big IBM-Microsoft split of 1989, most folks picked IBM to crush MS (even though most PC users were in the MS corner...)
"Generation Worthy"?
Don't forget that the first gen of Pentium chips underperformed top end 486-DX2/66 systems.
The Pentium Pro also got ragged on for being slower than the Pentium for desktop (16-bit) applicaitons when it shipped.
In both cases, 6 months down the road Intel had shrunk the die and new software was shipping that was 'optimised' for the new chip, and all was OK.
Right -- There are three kinds of "servers" of interest:
1) Cheap web clusters. Generic Celeron or K7 works. Cheap.
2) (so called) Workgroup Servers. Otherwise known as desktops turned on their side with a SCSI controller. The Pentium IV will do as well as the PIII and PII here, by default.
3) Real Servers. As you've mentioned, the P4 has nothing to offer here yet. My theory is that's intentional with the Itanium due soon, but maybe there's hope for some future SMP P4-Xeon setup.
You have just made the most fatal Slashdot error:
The only thing that matters is Quake benchmarks.
Keep telling yourself that, or we'll send you to the re-education camp.
Porn sites make tons of money. They are vast stores of something, but I'm not sure if it's "information".
Your suspicion is probably correct. Fat Ballmer said recently that he 'hated' the idea of selling hardware under cost. They won't be able to grok the business anyway.
Or they're just being SOBs because Sony is hyping the PS2 as a "platform", making a PalmOS handheld, or just not selling as many home video editing machines as Apple is, so they though they'd stick a stick in their eye.
Meanwhile, the X-Box lineup (paid for or not) looks like it will be a bunch of low res Windows ports three months late. Real exciting. Personally, I'm waiting for the first XBox game to boot Win98 and then launch the game from the WIN.INI.
Just another reason Microsoft is great company. I'm sure their filling file cabinets down at the DOJ, just in case the anti-trust ruling is upheld and they needs to be some regulatory actions taken...
Excellent description of the worst of the bad ol' days. Well, maybe not the worst ... there was always "Swordquest: Earthworld".
IIRC, the PS2 went down to $200 right after the XMas rush, and before the N64 shipped. (Although, everyone knew the N64 would ship at $200.)
Compare this to the Sega Saturn that shipped at $600, and eventually went down the same $150 as everyone else. Some people got the big shaft on that one. (Although the people that imported Saturns for $900 before the US release got the bigger one.)
The video game industry passed up the motion picture industry in terms of revenues for the first time in 1982 or 83. (It didn't get back there until the early 90s.) So, while it was relatively smaller than today, it was still HUGE.
Also, from a cultural perspective, video games were the shit in the early 80s. They were the biggest new thing to ever happen to entertainment (think in terms of the Internet hype of 1994-7), where as today they are more just a staple in the toy store. Of course all of the cultural hype was one of the things that contributed to the explosive downfall of video games in 1984.
My theory is that one of the biggest reasons for the "crash", besides cheap home computers, was Warner/Atari's shafting of the retailers by making them eat old stock, like ET and various lamers from the 1970s (those $10 games the other poster mentioned, soon to be reduced to 99cents).
Not to mention the problems with selling a $300 (which would be around $600 in today's dollars ) "SuperSystem" like the ColecoVision and the 5200 to a broad market. Another scary parallel to the PS2.
The video game industry never died, and the money never went away. Nintendo was back in the saddle, making tons of money within a couple years.
You think that they wouldn't have required PPT4 compatibility if they didn't have thousands of PowerPoint files laying around? Or is that not important?
The whole "missing patch" thing makes me chuckle. Back in those days, WordPerfect Suite was big hairy ball of poorly-QA'd DLL hell. There was probably about 32 other patches and INI file hacks needed to get shit working almost properly. (Maybe WP is still this way, who knows since nobody uses it anymore, for some reason.) No Microsoft consipircy either, because Lotus has always worked fine.
Who would have paid for those "stable systems"? The law firm? Right...
... WordPerfect version 5 or 6. Current shipping version is 10, BTW.
Law firms are cheap bastards when it comes to IT. They bill everyone in the office out by-the-hour, so what the fuck do they care about efficiency. Flashing "MS Junk" makes them money.
That is, if they even spring for the flashing MS Junk. Most of them are standardized on WordPerfect
WP/Novell/Corel have tried to sell suite software to these people. They won't buy. Hell, more often than not, they're using a 5 year old version of the mission-critical software (WP), bugs and all*, so write them off as worthless as a sales strategy.
* The Starr Report, written with WP6, had some scandlous deleted footnotes reappear when opened in WP9 or whatever.
OK, Mr "Higher Authority", you forgot to mention that YANAL, because you are more than obviously moronically ignorant about US trademark law. Head, ass, remove, please.
The Microsoft XSL included in IE 5.5 is not quite standard. However, I've heard that the latest versions (which you can download) are very close to standards compliant. (XML Schema is not quite a standard yet, of course.)
My elaboration is that you attacked me for doing nothing more than attempting to correct a politically-motivated moderation. Which means you find me guilty by association and/or you support politically motivated moderation. Either way, it's brownshirt tactics.
Plus, you know it's true.
For someone who couldn't identify a troll account if it wacked them between the eyes, congratulations. Have a nice day.
I enjoy your pro-France posting history, Mr. Collaborationist. Have fun playing out in the yard, flamebaby!
For someone with a 5-digit UID, that was a pretty lame troll.
Thanks for bashing on the VR Hippies. Anyone remember "Mondo 2000" from about 1992?
M2000: So, Todd Rundgren, you like smoking dope and posting on Usenet. What do you think of VR?
TR: Way cool dude!
M2000: Yes, VR and Cybersex is the future, thanks for that insight Todd. Too bad all the software sucks right now.
Sort of correct -- Netscape owns the tech, Sun owns the name. From the Nutscrape 4.74 about: screen.
Contains JavaScript software technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications Corporation. Copyright © 1994-2000 Netscape Communications Corporation. The JavaScript name is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries and is used under license.
Which brings up the greater point of how stupid the tradename "JavaScript" is. The whole Java!=JavaScript thing confuses people (AFC?) even here on Slashdot, which is supposedly a nerd site.
I'd be happy if Netscape went back to calling it "LiveScript", Microsoft can keep calling it "JScript", and us supposed nerds started calling it by it's proper name: "ECMAScript".
Your example comes off as an argument against your case.
The fact that your computer can't understand "irregular and ambigous" commands and instead forces the user to bang his head against the considerable syntax of 'find' pretty much seals the case that it is not the "most natural" way to communicate. Not that pointing and dragging at things is either.
Since someone incorrectly modded the above AC post down as Offtopic, when it is clearly on-topic (Yahoo, France), here it is:
Should we also not teach children about the Hollocust? After all, talking about Nazi's is not good! Should we burn all the war-films and propoganda material from both the Axis and Allied forces, what with all those harrowing scenes of Jews, Gays etc. being murdered?
Personally, i'm inclined to believe that France simply doesn't want to face upto it's past involvment and cooperation with the Nazi's during WWII, much easier to hide it all and pretend it didn't happen isn't it?
"Cellular One" is/was a generic brandname that was used by different owners in different markets. You never could get nationwide roaming or billing or service from "Cellular One", because the individual units were not connected with each other on an operaitonal level
At one time it must have represented something, but over time the real owners have been re-establishing their real brandnames. So, in the Bay Area, Cellular One (real name was something like Bay Area Cellular Telephone Company) turned into AT+T Wireless, but it's believable that some other Cellular One turned into Verizon.