THE EX-HUGHES MINING BARGE (HMB-1), COVERED SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE DECK CARGO BARGE/FLOATING DRY-DOCK (WITH DOCKED EX-SEA SHADOW (IX-529) ON BOARD.) HMB-1 â" LIGHT DISPLACEMENT: 4,585 TONS, LENGTH OVER ALL): 324 FEET, BREATH: 106.8 FEET, DEPTH: 18.8 FEET, HEIGHT OF WING WALLS ABOVE MAIN DECK: 62 FEET, LENGTH INSIDE WING WALLS: 276 FEET, WIDTH INSIDE WING WALLS: 76.6 FEET, YEAR BUILT: 1972, DRAFT: FORWARD: 8 FEET, AFT: 9 FEET, AIR DRAFT: 97.7 FEET, BUILDER: NATIONAL STEEL SHIP BUILDING COMPANY, SAN DIEGO, CA., CONSTRUCTION: WELDED STEEL, SPOON BOW AND FLAT BOTTOM WITH 18 INCH DEAD RISE, AND RADIUS BILGE PLATING.
I guess the HMB-1 is what is really interesting for legit buyers. Lots of old-fashioned steel for melting down there, or maybe the buyer has use for the floating dock (there is no requirement to scrap the HMB-1).
Several years ago, Baen Books (ahref=http://www.baen.com/rel=url2html-25847http://www.baen.com/>) started to make some of their books available as e-books for free, with approval from the respective authors.
Reportedly, those authors actually saw an increase in sales of their paper books as a result. Maybe TOR is betting on a similar outcome (besides saving the trouble of supporting a DRM system).
I have a somewhat "softer" approach to that (but I bet the games industry won't like it either;-)
- Game I'm really interested in, without any DRM: up to 60 Euros - The same game with a not too annoying form of DRM (e. g. Steam): up to half of the above, that is up to 30 Euros - The same game with highly annoying (or known to destabilize the OS) DRM: NO SALE
In short, I'll accept some degree of DRM if I get the game for half the price. That is my "compensation in advance" for buying a game that may disappear one day or may be incompatible with future hardware and/or OS versions, because of some quirk of the DRM.
Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.
Moving to a touchscreen interface without adapting the GUI is not going to work well. And the legacy apps will not adapt themselves.
I've recently (most of 2011) worked on creating a tablet application that is running on Windows7. Initially, we tried to go with legacy-style (normal size) controls. It soon turned out that using a finger on the touchscreen, most users would hit the wrong controls much of the time. Simply because the accuracy was way inferior to using a mouse. Using a stylus was somewhat better, but not fully satisfying either.
Our GUI guy ended up reprogramming things like edit boxes and checkboxes in double size. After that, the usability of the application was OK. Before, it was a usability nightmare, which most legacy apps will be too if moved to a tablet without changing the GUI.
You have some good points (and so have those who speculated that porting to ARM was more difficult/time consuming than expected).
But what I have not seen mentioned so far, is that existing x86 applications won't run on ARM and that this might be a major problem for the enterprise. Emulation does not look promising either, as ARM CPUs are somewhat on the weak side in terms of performance and emulation "costs extra". Neither have I seen tablet - adapted versions of Microsoft Outlook and Office yet (would that even make sense for stuff like Word and Excel??).
So even if Microsoft manages to offer a Windows version on ARM that works with domains and other networky stuff like Exchange, it would still lack the applications that are most likely to make it attractive for the enterprise. Of course, Microsoft could pull an XBox and pour some billion $ into creating the most important of those applications. But so far I see no signs of that.
And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.
Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.
One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that.
I think the main reasons are much simpler (even if I would not trust Microsoft to abstain from meddling): 1) Low market share of Linux on the desktop. That means far fewer potential customers. 2) For fast 3D graphics (which are important to "AAA"games), the driver situation on Linux is still a bit unsatisfactory. You either have to run the binary drivers from the vendor, which have a lousy reputation in case of AMD, or the Open Source drivers which are still inferior in terms of performance (check the benchmarks on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home). For the Open Source drivers, the situation in the field is probably worse than the Phoronix benchmarks suggest: Phoronix usually tests the latest developments, which will then take some months more to go into the next kernel version and some months on top of that to land in the distros. Not so long ago, the Open Source drivers were struggling not only with performance but also with correct rendering. I suspect a lot of those broken drivers are still out there.
Oh, I would agree that most applications seem to run these days. But if I look at the app database (filtered for fairly new WINE releases) I still see a bunch of "silver" and "bronze" ratings. Which means "minor issues" (silver) or "runs, but poorly" (bronze).
Maybe I should have written "as in everything runs well"
Now that is a more interesting case than Motorola vs. Microsoft, because in this case, the injunction was against people and companies outside the US.
And it seems that the injunction did not stop the sale for long: The news about the injunction was from 13 Oct 2010, two days later there were news about the sale being complete: http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/liverpool-fc-sold-to-nesv
Often enough, the "improvement" includes small but intentional changes that serves only one purpose: Make 3rd party products unable to interact with Microsoft products.
Microsoft then relies on its ubiquity (as in, most businesses rely on Microsoft products and if your product cannot interact with those, it is a big disadvantage) to make those 3rd party products unattractive. And that is what people complain about.
After reading the article, it seems the US court is ordering Motorola not to use the German legal system to block sales of Windows in Germany. So if Motorola were to do it anyway, I guess German customs would still enforce the injunction, but Motorola mangement in the US would risk punishment.
If you want a vendor you can blame if things go wrong, Red Hat claims "Each major release of Red Hat software is supported for up to 10 years". Which matches Microsoft's normal procuct life cycle (14 years for XP is an exception).
That might be one of the reasons Red Hat is popular with business customers.
Your #4 may help, depending on the reason the user wants to keep the old Windows version around.
-No money for upgrading, and you just want to do some web surfing:
By all means, switch to Linux. Firefox on Linux works as well as on Windows:-)
-No money for upgrading, and you have some applications for Windows that you really need:
WINE on Linux may help you, but it is not guaranteed. IMHO WINE will need a few more years to become a reliable (as in everything runs) Windows replacement.
-You have some applications for Windows that you really need and those applications rely on some strange quirk of XP that is no longer present in Vista or Win7:
Again, you can try Linux & WINE, but I guess your chances are not so good, as you are starting out with an application that is known to be problematic.
Chess programs usually score a position in "pawn equivalents". Having one pawn more is a +1, unless your opponent has compensation in position. Having one less would be a -1. Other examples are: -a knight or bishop is worth roughly 3 points -a rook is worth roughly 5 points
In practice, skilled players will win a +5 position reliably. A +3 is usually enough as well. So even if Rybka's evaluation is a bit off, I would not see much chances to win the match from the inferior position.
According to various articles on Phoronix.com, the 2D functions of the Radeon OSS driver are quite good these days. So stuff like windows managers runs fine - good for an office desktop.
But 3D is still far behind Catalyst in terms of performance. The benchmarks on Phoronix.com show this on a regular basis.
Well, I would not trust Sony with anything that has a processor and might need a firmware update at some point.
They have, however, made some pretty decent analog equipment in the past. I still have an old set of walkman headphones that works fine and sounds good after 20 years. The only thing I had to replace at some point were the ear pads.
We would have to change the file extensions in order to send.exe's and.mp3's. Fun times, when it took so little to feel like a hacker.
It is still the same for Outlook and.exe at my place of work. When we developers need to send someone an.exe, it usually goes out in an encrypted.zip file (Outlook will scan the contents of non-encrypted.zips).
Such crap is one of the reasons I prefer non-Microsoft products @home (except for Windows - I'm still tooo much of a gaming junkie to do without Windows).
So is my understanding. But I hope that will break down some day (as in, eventually enough people will be bored by it that Call Of Duty 11 is no longer a success).
In my experience, either Windows or Linux can be easier, depending on hardware.
I've had Ubuntu Lucid Lynx install and run without any additional work on my self-assembled PC from 2007. That clearly beats installing Windows on the same (or my current) PC, where I have to manually install drivers for at least -the graphics card -and onboard audio
On the other hand, getting a Soundblaster Audigy to run under Linux on my current PC required fiddling with the settings in Alsamixer, and it was not well documented at all thet you have to "switch off" the "Analog/Digital Jack". That cost me some time digging through forums and made it a more annoying experience than installing Windows.
But overall, if you have to install from scratch I think the non.geeks would not be happy with either Windows or Linux. What works in favor of Windows is that it comes preinstalled on so many PCs.
Of course, and it happens a lot. In other fields too BTW (e. g., being a young teacher in Germany pays not so well. Beyond 40 things look much better due to the nice benefits). But recently, it seems there are not enough of those idealists to make all greedy CEOs happy. Hence the alleged shortages quoted in the submission.
Private contracting by yourself? That does require some skill at marketing yourself, which is something that not every nerd has. Fortunately, there are also larger contracting firms which actually hire engineers to use them in customer projects. At the age of 45 I'm working for one of those myself (in Germany). The pay does not reach the level of the guys you described, but is reasonable for a "normal" employee. Which you are if you work for one of those larger contracting firms.
That said, 50-60 for a CD in your hand isn't unreasonable as long as it works OFFLINE, and doesn't live in a fucking tray!
I can agree to that, if the game has some decent replayability. I mean games like X3 or Civilization, where you don't have a linear plot that gets boring on playing the second time.
If the same game comes with unobtrusive and known to work well DRM like Steam, I might pay 25-30. That is 50% off for the risk that the DRM system might go offline some day and take my games with it. But by cutting out the brick-and-mortar stores as middlemen, this may still be worthwhile to the developers.
But if the DRM scheme has a reputation for being a major pain in the ass, that's no sale in my case. Anything from Ubisoft comes under that;-)
That's mostly true. But there are exceptions, especially in the genres I like. That is, simulations and FPS games with really large maps.
As an example, take All Points Bulletin: It is a sort of multiplayer GTA, with maps that are several 100 meters across, plenty of detail and no real limitations on going to any part of the map at any time. Up to late 2011, I had a dual core PC with Windows XP and 2 GByte RAM. After a few minutes, APB would run out of memory. I don''t think that either the XBox 360 or the PS3 could handle the memory requirements of that game. My new PC with 4 GByte RAM can handle it though.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a second item included:
THE EX-HUGHES MINING BARGE (HMB-1), COVERED SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE DECK CARGO BARGE/FLOATING DRY-DOCK (WITH DOCKED EX-SEA SHADOW (IX-529) ON BOARD.) HMB-1 â" LIGHT DISPLACEMENT: 4,585 TONS, LENGTH OVER ALL): 324 FEET, BREATH: 106.8 FEET, DEPTH: 18.8 FEET, HEIGHT OF WING WALLS ABOVE MAIN DECK: 62 FEET, LENGTH INSIDE WING WALLS: 276 FEET, WIDTH INSIDE WING WALLS: 76.6 FEET, YEAR BUILT: 1972, DRAFT: FORWARD: 8 FEET, AFT: 9 FEET, AIR DRAFT: 97.7 FEET, BUILDER: NATIONAL STEEL SHIP BUILDING COMPANY, SAN DIEGO, CA., CONSTRUCTION: WELDED STEEL, SPOON BOW AND FLAT BOTTOM WITH 18 INCH DEAD RISE, AND RADIUS BILGE PLATING.
I guess the HMB-1 is what is really interesting for legit buyers. Lots of old-fashioned steel for melting down there, or maybe the buyer has use for the floating dock (there is no requirement to scrap the HMB-1).
Several years ago, Baen Books (ahref=http://www.baen.com/rel=url2html-25847http://www.baen.com/>) started to make some of their books available as e-books for free, with approval from the respective authors.
Reportedly, those authors actually saw an increase in sales of their paper books as a result. Maybe TOR is betting on a similar outcome (besides saving the trouble of supporting a DRM system).
I have a somewhat "softer" approach to that (but I bet the games industry won't like it either ;-)
- Game I'm really interested in, without any DRM: up to 60 Euros
- The same game with a not too annoying form of DRM (e. g. Steam): up to half of the above, that is up to 30 Euros
- The same game with highly annoying (or known to destabilize the OS) DRM: NO SALE
In short, I'll accept some degree of DRM if I get the game for half the price. That is my "compensation in advance" for buying a game that may disappear one day or may be incompatible with future hardware and/or OS versions, because of some quirk of the DRM.
Hey, that's an improvement!
In ye olden days it was Service Pack 3 that made Microsoft products OK.
Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.
Moving to a touchscreen interface without adapting the GUI is not going to work well. And the legacy apps will not adapt themselves.
I've recently (most of 2011) worked on creating a tablet application that is running on Windows7. Initially, we tried to go with legacy-style (normal size) controls. It soon turned out that using a finger on the touchscreen, most users would hit the wrong controls much of the time. Simply because the accuracy was way inferior to using a mouse. Using a stylus was somewhat better, but not fully satisfying either.
Our GUI guy ended up reprogramming things like edit boxes and checkboxes in double size. After that, the usability of the application was OK. Before, it was a usability nightmare, which most legacy apps will be too if moved to a tablet without changing the GUI.
You have some good points (and so have those who speculated that porting to ARM was more difficult/time consuming than expected).
But what I have not seen mentioned so far, is that existing x86 applications won't run on ARM and that this might be a major problem for the enterprise. Emulation does not look promising either, as ARM CPUs are somewhat on the weak side in terms of performance and emulation "costs extra". Neither have I seen tablet - adapted versions of Microsoft Outlook and Office yet (would that even make sense for stuff like Word and Excel??).
So even if Microsoft manages to offer a Windows version on ARM that works with domains and other networky stuff like Exchange, it would still lack the applications that are most likely to make it attractive for the enterprise. Of course, Microsoft could pull an XBox and pour some billion $ into creating the most important of those applications. But so far I see no signs of that.
And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.
Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.
One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that.
I think the main reasons are much simpler (even if I would not trust Microsoft to abstain from meddling):
1) Low market share of Linux on the desktop. That means far fewer potential customers.
2) For fast 3D graphics (which are important to "AAA"games), the driver situation on Linux is still a bit unsatisfactory. You either have to run the binary drivers from the vendor, which have a lousy reputation in case of AMD, or the Open Source drivers which are still inferior in terms of performance (check the benchmarks on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home).
For the Open Source drivers, the situation in the field is probably worse than the Phoronix benchmarks suggest:
Phoronix usually tests the latest developments, which will then take some months more to go into the next kernel version and some months on top of that to land in the distros. Not so long ago, the Open Source drivers were struggling not only with performance but also with correct rendering. I suspect a lot of those broken drivers are still out there.
Oh, I would agree that most applications seem to run these days. But if I look at the app database (filtered for fairly new WINE releases) I still see a bunch of "silver" and "bronze" ratings. Which means "minor issues" (silver) or "runs, but poorly" (bronze).
Maybe I should have written "as in everything runs well"
Now that is a more interesting case than Motorola vs. Microsoft, because in this case, the injunction was against people and companies outside the US.
And it seems that the injunction did not stop the sale for long:
The news about the injunction was from 13 Oct 2010, two days later there were news about the sale being complete: http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/liverpool-fc-sold-to-nesv
Often enough, the "improvement" includes small but intentional changes that serves only one purpose:
Make 3rd party products unable to interact with Microsoft products.
Microsoft then relies on its ubiquity (as in, most businesses rely on Microsoft products and if your product cannot interact with those, it is a big disadvantage) to make those 3rd party products unattractive. And that is what people complain about.
After reading the article, it seems the US court is ordering Motorola not to use the German legal system to block sales of Windows in Germany. So if Motorola were to do it anyway, I guess German customs would still enforce the injunction, but Motorola mangement in the US would risk punishment.
If you want a vendor you can blame if things go wrong, Red Hat claims "Each major release of Red Hat software is supported for up to 10 years". Which matches Microsoft's normal procuct life cycle (14 years for XP is an exception).
That might be one of the reasons Red Hat is popular with business customers.
Your #4 may help, depending on the reason the user wants to keep the old Windows version around.
-No money for upgrading, and you just want to do some web surfing: :-)
By all means, switch to Linux. Firefox on Linux works as well as on Windows
-No money for upgrading, and you have some applications for Windows that you really need:
WINE on Linux may help you, but it is not guaranteed. IMHO WINE will need a few more years to become a reliable (as in everything runs) Windows replacement.
-You have some applications for Windows that you really need and those applications rely on some strange quirk of XP that is no longer present in Vista or Win7:
Again, you can try Linux & WINE, but I guess your chances are not so good, as you are starting out with an application that is known to be problematic.
Chess programs usually score a position in "pawn equivalents". Having one pawn more is a +1, unless your opponent has compensation in position. Having one less would be a -1. Other examples are:
-a knight or bishop is worth roughly 3 points
-a rook is worth roughly 5 points
In practice, skilled players will win a +5 position reliably. A +3 is usually enough as well. So even if Rybka's evaluation is a bit off, I would not see much chances to win the match from the inferior position.
According to various articles on Phoronix.com, the 2D functions of the Radeon OSS driver are quite good these days. So stuff like windows managers runs fine - good for an office desktop.
But 3D is still far behind Catalyst in terms of performance. The benchmarks on Phoronix.com show this on a regular basis.
Well, I would not trust Sony with anything that has a processor and might need a firmware update at some point.
They have, however, made some pretty decent analog equipment in the past. I still have an old set of walkman headphones that works fine and sounds good after 20 years. The only thing I had to replace at some point were the ear pads.
Unlikely. That company is pretty rigid in its usage rules for IT. I've tried to negotiate a similar point before and got nowhere.
We would have to change the file extensions in order to send .exe's and .mp3's. Fun times, when it took so little to feel like a hacker.
It is still the same for Outlook and .exe at my place of work. When we developers need to send someone an .exe, it usually goes out in an encrypted .zip file (Outlook will scan the contents of non-encrypted .zips).
Such crap is one of the reasons I prefer non-Microsoft products @home (except for Windows - I'm still tooo much of a gaming junkie to do without Windows).
So is my understanding. But I hope that will break down some day (as in, eventually enough people will be bored by it that Call Of Duty 11 is no longer a success).
It's only optional if it is
-clearly stated by T-Mobile it is there (or clearly indicated when the filter kicks in)
-and can easily be turned off
According to TFA, the first condition is not met.
In my experience, either Windows or Linux can be easier, depending on hardware.
I've had Ubuntu Lucid Lynx install and run without any additional work on my self-assembled PC from 2007. That clearly beats installing Windows on the same (or my current) PC, where I have to manually install drivers for at least
-the graphics card
-and onboard audio
On the other hand, getting a Soundblaster Audigy to run under Linux on my current PC required fiddling with the settings in Alsamixer, and it was not well documented at all thet you have to "switch off" the "Analog/Digital Jack". That cost me some time digging through forums and made it a more annoying experience than installing Windows.
But overall, if you have to install from scratch I think the non.geeks would not be happy with either Windows or Linux. What works in favor of Windows is that it comes preinstalled on so many PCs.
Of course, and it happens a lot. In other fields too BTW (e. g., being a young teacher in Germany pays not so well. Beyond 40 things look much better due to the nice benefits).
But recently, it seems there are not enough of those idealists to make all greedy CEOs happy. Hence the alleged shortages quoted in the submission.
Private contracting by yourself? That does require some skill at marketing yourself, which is something that not every nerd has.
Fortunately, there are also larger contracting firms which actually hire engineers to use them in customer projects. At the age of 45 I'm working for one of those myself (in Germany). The pay does not reach the level of the guys you described, but is reasonable for a "normal" employee. Which you are if you work for one of those larger contracting firms.
That said, 50-60 for a CD in your hand isn't unreasonable as long as it works OFFLINE, and doesn't live in a fucking tray!
I can agree to that, if the game has some decent replayability. I mean games like X3 or Civilization, where you don't have a linear plot that gets boring on playing the second time.
If the same game comes with unobtrusive and known to work well DRM like Steam, I might pay 25-30. That is 50% off for the risk that the DRM system might go offline some day and take my games with it. But by cutting out the brick-and-mortar stores as middlemen, this may still be worthwhile to the developers.
But if the DRM scheme has a reputation for being a major pain in the ass, that's no sale in my case. Anything from Ubisoft comes under that ;-)
That's mostly true. But there are exceptions, especially in the genres I like. That is, simulations and FPS games with really large maps.
As an example, take All Points Bulletin:
It is a sort of multiplayer GTA, with maps that are several 100 meters across, plenty of detail and no real limitations on going to any part of the map at any time.
Up to late 2011, I had a dual core PC with Windows XP and 2 GByte RAM. After a few minutes, APB would run out of memory. I don''t think that either the XBox 360 or the PS3 could handle the memory requirements of that game.
My new PC with 4 GByte RAM can handle it though.