Wouldn't you be concerned if the vendor of the OS you're dependent on suddenly comes along and decides to push their own store with it? You end up like IE6, one dominant platform for the OS. And given that Microsoft has very obvious goals of deprecating Win32 in favor of WinRT, which requires software using it come from the store, yes Valve has every reason to be worried. As does every other software vendor out there, because this gives Microsoft an overwhelming amount of power, over both them and you.
Pushing to make Linux a viable platform is good for everyone.
You mean Microsoft, who maintained support for Windows XP for 12 years while Linux drops support nearly every major release and Apple drops it on every OS X upgrade? Apple maintains a dictatorship like control over your OS and devices yet people buy millions of their product...
Overall Microsoft has been the least intrusive OS for compatibility out there yet people still cry after 12 years when they want to drop support IE6. 12 years!!!
They know that microsoft know how important gaming is long term.
they also know how much more leverage they have if they ever need to negotiate with microsoft if there's alternative systems.
To be honest, Valve is only good for the games they produce. Sure they have thousands of titles but they distribute games months after they are available from the other portals. They have tons of indy games but most of they are absolute garbage. Valve will be irrelevant if people start to distribute through the MS portal instead.
No surprise there. The same applies to many different areas where Linux is way more efficient than Windows is. Everybody knows Windows is bloated beyond comprehension. I use Linux for my primary machine, and also use Windows machines daily and in comparison the Linux desktop smokes Windows. Everything from data processing, running virtual machines, LAN performance, you name it. Windows has a monopoly and since it has close to 90% of the market, software companies will continue to develop for it. If Linux had more market share, more companies would develop commercial software for it. So, even though Windows has a majority of the market share, it is definitely not the best OS. It's simply the most popular OS, for now.
Until Linux stops all their internal bickering and decides on one native standard for all gaming they will never been seen as better. The reason Microsoft dominates is because they standardized the market on Directx. Write once, work on all. For Linux it's not that easy yet and 3% performance doesn't outweigh the headaches.
They don't need to - there are plentiful reserves of rare earths in the US.
I'm wondering if you are serious, though, or just trolling? Attacking a nuclear power is risky all by itself, but China has enough missiles pointed at Taiwan to annihilate the place conventionally, and they could do a number on Japan and Korea as well. Military aside, they are a vital trading partner with a co-dependent economy.
There's plenty of oil in the US also but we export it to other countries and import ours from the Middle East. More money for oil companies, more expensive for consumers. So your example of plenty of supply in the US really has no bearing on where we get our stuff.
Because the MicroUSB connectors are ridiculously flimsy and prone to failure by mechanical stress?
Seriously, they are. I've gone through a handful of MicroUSB phone chargers trying to find the one that fits just right in my Android phone with a MicroUSB charging port. Bump the phone ever so slightly and the battery stops charging. And before you say "get a new phone", it's happened before on other phones. It does this because MicroUSB is terribly designed and terribly built. Maybe Apple wanted something that would actually stand the test of time. I have an iPod and various iPod cables from 6 years ago that still make a perfect connection despite thousands of insertions.
That can still be ambiguous. Sure, after using it for a bit, users would learn by feel which way is the right way. But how do you know which way connector should go into the device without trial and error?
There may be an arrow on the device to help you align it, but that's still only part-way there (especially with how many people put their mobile devices in cases).
Apple has you by the balls. They make you believe that it's so inconvenient to spend an extra 2 seconds looking at your device that you should spend an additional $30 an adapter rather than using a standard.
Yeah, the problem is getting people to actually buy the high-mileage cars. Here's U.S. car and light truck sales data since 1931. Light trucks are a separate category under CAFE, and don't have to get as high MPG. Consequently they can be built bigger (relatively) and with more powerful engines. From 1931 to the 1970s (when CAFE was first implemented), light truck sales represented about 15%-20% of passenger vehicle sales. Since CAFE was implemented, light truck sales have climbed to over 50%.
People in general want the big, powerful "cars" and don't care if they get crappy mileage. Forcing the manufacturers to improve mileage isn't going to change that. It makes me think CAFE is partially based on the conspiracy theory that automakers could make 100 MPG cars, but are all in cahoots with oil companies to keep mileage low. That simply isn't the case - consumers are the ones favoring low mileage cars because of the advantages they offer: extra space, extra safety, more power.
If you want to encourage increased average vehicle mileage, this supply-side market manipulation just doesn't work that well. It needs to be done via demand-side market manipulation. Jack up fuel taxes to make gasoline more expensive. Then people will start to favor fuel economy more over size, safety, and power.
If you can show me a hybrid van/sport utility that can hold 7+ people for around 25k then I'm sure the rest of the world will upgrade. Because right now the cost I would save in gas versus paying more for a Hybrid won't break even until I hit 100k miles. That's a pretty fair look into the future.
What is with Java and all these exploits? It's the most exploited piece of software on planet. I think they should learn something from Microsoft's.NET runtime. It's installed on pretty much every Windows computer out there. Still there are no exploits against it! Microsoft seems to know what they're doing much better than Oracle
All of the present exploits have come from Sun, prior to being acquired by Oracle. Did you expect Oracle to go back and regression test for exploits? I thought the code being open source would allow these things to be found?
I saw the story prominently covered on Sina Weibo. The Foxconn workers held a contest to see who was the happiest. The winner won the right to shake the Foxconn chairman's hand. So many Foxconn workers wanted to shake the chairman's hand, they all surged forward and broke a fence. Smiling security workers were dispatched to assist the few who received minor injuries.
So now that you posted the edited version, let's see the real details.
The fact that this news like this actually got out is news in itself.
Word. It's china. They control the media and the internet. They will kill before allowing bad press to make it out of their communist regime. When something does slip they discredit them and the source disappears if they happen to still be alive.
We make fun of democracy in the US but at least we can say bad things about companies/government without going to jail.
But the 1.13 billion people have a much higher GDP than the 1.35 billion. More than four times as much in 2011. What this really seems to be saying is that Alibaba is considerably more dominant in China than Amazon and eBay are in the US and Europe. They also may be saying that online retail is more dominant in China, which doesn't have the brick and mortar retail infrastructure that the US and Europe have.
It's unlikely that China will pass the US and Europe in GDP per capita. They will likely hit a wall like Japan did. There is nothing particularly brilliant about their development plan. The biggest benefit is that they are behind, so they simply have to copy what the others are doing to advance. Once they stop being behind, they will have to retool to stop copying and start innovating if they want to proceed. This is painful, so it is likely to take some time.
China has never been good at innovation. Most of their stuff is a joke. But they are brilliant at copying. They have replica's of nearly everything sold in America but they can't sell it outside China. Eventually that will become a problem.
His response is the FoxConn isn't forcing anyone to work and that it complies with local Chinese law. He said nothing to rebut the criticism that the students are being forced to work. He's got his political speech down, talking about all the unrelated aspects rather than addressing the key point that students are being forced to work.
So from your response you can draw the following conclusions. The students ARE being forced to work, the people doing the forcing are the schools and local government officials, Foxconn is likely involved in pressuring or enticing these entities to do the forcing but isn't actually rounding the people up at gun point themselves.
Yea, not so nice when you take it out of the political speech.
You can draw whatever conclusion you want but the truth will never come out. This is a communist regime and if someone posts something legit that shames China they will disappear. If they post it anonymously, they will be discredited. China is out to win and they will lie, cheat and steal their way to the top at any cost.
Uhm, no. "Junk" DNA is really junk. It consists of repeating regions, transposons, inactive and decaying retroviruses, etc. It has no direct functions, and its indirect usability is questionable. For example, pufferfish has almost no junk DNA while some plants (corn, for example) have lots of it without any visible effects on mutation rates or cell viability.
So if this is 100% true. Let's remove all this dna and see if you continue breathing. Unfortunately you don't know for sure what's its used for so you determine it to be junk.
It's sexist in that if a very talented woman programmer was going around hacking in the kernel and found it, it might make her feel uncomfortable. As such, it contributes to the feeling that Linux kernel development is an area in which women aren't welcome... And believe it or not, sort of thing is the reason why there are so few female programmers. Our "tiny female brains" can cope with the actual work *just fine*.:)
Intellectually you can cope with it, but not psychologically. Women can't stand being told no.
Google and others think the user experience of a product is confined only to the actual use of it. But that's only one part pf a user experience, and forgets walking into the store (or using the online store), buying, unboxing, first start and setup, support, and eventual recycling.
Apple does everything in its power to make all aspects of the user experience perfect. Apple does unboxing tests for products, even did store mock-ups instead of just slapping up the usual crowded aisles. That's their brand strategy, and it's popular with consumers and profitable.
If you're buying an Apple product you're probably spoiled anyways so of course you need your phone NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. Otherwise you might think about why you paid $200 more for the same product offered by Google. Spending an extra minute opening a box could cause your phone to be eaten by a black hole created by the LHC.
Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms.
Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?
You don't see any other software vendors saying windows 7 only. They actually value their paying customers.
Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU
Whats this got to do with office?
nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro.
This is really great. Windows 7 has more DRM. Let me run out and upgrade right away.
Yeah like Apple who drops support the previous version of the OS immediately after their updated one comes out! Oh wait....
There's no reason to buy Office 2013 just to buy it. But if you're going to upgrade you need to use a modern day OS. It's not rocket science.
XP is going on 12 years. Microsoft has easily held up their end of the support bargain compared to any company. Probably doubled it.
So... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."
A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.
Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).
Most orgs wil be jumping on Win7/8 sooner than you think. With XP losing official support now after 12 years companies will be forced to migrate or risk getting compromised due to a unpatched security risk.
Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.
The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.
There's a reason why Oracle dumped it back to opensource and it's not because it's a great alternative. They evaluated it as an internal replacement for MS office and decided against it.
What exactly in the iPhone is new or novel? Everything done in it has been done in other phones before it, all they did was package up everyone else's innovations make it pretty and slap a logo on it and claim they invented the phone market.
Yep, that's why the iPhone sold like hotcakes and has been pretty much credited with jump starting the smart phone market, even at the supposed "premium" price for "substandard hardware" someone else claimed previously.
Slide to unlock was as obvious as it gets when your dealing with a touch screen. How would you propose you unlock a smart phone?
I guess they need to listen to their same line of not stealing others tech, because that's precisely what they did when they made the iPhone.
Yep, apparently everything in the iPhone was obvious, which is why so many different iPhone clones existed prior to the iPhone, since the smartphone market dates back more than a decade, and the iPhone was a late-comer.
Because a touchscreen with a slide unlock is so ground breaking...
Blackberry's were extremely popular and became a government standard years after the iPhone was released on the market. The only reason the iPhone truly took off was because it integrated with iTunes which had major success. All the other features were no more ground breaking than any phone. They found something that stuck and went with it.
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Wouldn't you be concerned if the vendor of the OS you're dependent on suddenly comes along and decides to push their own store with it? You end up like IE6, one dominant platform for the OS. And given that Microsoft has very obvious goals of deprecating Win32 in favor of WinRT, which requires software using it come from the store, yes Valve has every reason to be worried. As does every other software vendor out there, because this gives Microsoft an overwhelming amount of power, over both them and you.
Pushing to make Linux a viable platform is good for everyone.
You mean Microsoft, who maintained support for Windows XP for 12 years while Linux drops support nearly every major release and Apple drops it on every OS X upgrade? Apple maintains a dictatorship like control over your OS and devices yet people buy millions of their product... Overall Microsoft has been the least intrusive OS for compatibility out there yet people still cry after 12 years when they want to drop support IE6. 12 years!!!
They know that microsoft know how important gaming is long term.
they also know how much more leverage they have if they ever need to negotiate with microsoft if there's alternative systems.
To be honest, Valve is only good for the games they produce. Sure they have thousands of titles but they distribute games months after they are available from the other portals. They have tons of indy games but most of they are absolute garbage. Valve will be irrelevant if people start to distribute through the MS portal instead.
Nope. But if Microsoft continues this nonsense and major game developers switch to Linux, 2014 will be.
Versus Apple or Sony or Linux? HAAHHAHAAHAH. I'll stick with Microsoft.
No surprise there. The same applies to many different areas where Linux is way more efficient than Windows is. Everybody knows Windows is bloated beyond comprehension. I use Linux for my primary machine, and also use Windows machines daily and in comparison the Linux desktop smokes Windows. Everything from data processing, running virtual machines, LAN performance, you name it. Windows has a monopoly and since it has close to 90% of the market, software companies will continue to develop for it. If Linux had more market share, more companies would develop commercial software for it. So, even though Windows has a majority of the market share, it is definitely not the best OS. It's simply the most popular OS, for now.
Until Linux stops all their internal bickering and decides on one native standard for all gaming they will never been seen as better. The reason Microsoft dominates is because they standardized the market on Directx. Write once, work on all. For Linux it's not that easy yet and 3% performance doesn't outweigh the headaches.
They don't need to - there are plentiful reserves of rare earths in the US.
I'm wondering if you are serious, though, or just trolling? Attacking a nuclear power is risky all by itself, but China has enough missiles pointed at Taiwan to annihilate the place conventionally, and they could do a number on Japan and Korea as well. Military aside, they are a vital trading partner with a co-dependent economy.
There's plenty of oil in the US also but we export it to other countries and import ours from the Middle East. More money for oil companies, more expensive for consumers. So your example of plenty of supply in the US really has no bearing on where we get our stuff.
Because the MicroUSB connectors are ridiculously flimsy and prone to failure by mechanical stress? Seriously, they are. I've gone through a handful of MicroUSB phone chargers trying to find the one that fits just right in my Android phone with a MicroUSB charging port. Bump the phone ever so slightly and the battery stops charging. And before you say "get a new phone", it's happened before on other phones. It does this because MicroUSB is terribly designed and terribly built. Maybe Apple wanted something that would actually stand the test of time. I have an iPod and various iPod cables from 6 years ago that still make a perfect connection despite thousands of insertions.
Replace the cable. It's not the port.
That can still be ambiguous. Sure, after using it for a bit, users would learn by feel which way is the right way. But how do you know which way connector should go into the device without trial and error?
There may be an arrow on the device to help you align it, but that's still only part-way there (especially with how many people put their mobile devices in cases).
Apple has you by the balls. They make you believe that it's so inconvenient to spend an extra 2 seconds looking at your device that you should spend an additional $30 an adapter rather than using a standard.
Why the hell couldn't they go with Micro-USB like everyone else?
That's not the Apple way.
If people would stop making more people, there would be a lot more to go around for those of us already stuck here!
There's *tons* of oil to be drilled. The problem is the oil companies lobby so the US government won't let us. Keep the prices nice and high.
Yeah, the problem is getting people to actually buy the high-mileage cars. Here's U.S. car and light truck sales data since 1931. Light trucks are a separate category under CAFE, and don't have to get as high MPG. Consequently they can be built bigger (relatively) and with more powerful engines. From 1931 to the 1970s (when CAFE was first implemented), light truck sales represented about 15%-20% of passenger vehicle sales. Since CAFE was implemented, light truck sales have climbed to over 50%. People in general want the big, powerful "cars" and don't care if they get crappy mileage. Forcing the manufacturers to improve mileage isn't going to change that. It makes me think CAFE is partially based on the conspiracy theory that automakers could make 100 MPG cars, but are all in cahoots with oil companies to keep mileage low. That simply isn't the case - consumers are the ones favoring low mileage cars because of the advantages they offer: extra space, extra safety, more power. If you want to encourage increased average vehicle mileage, this supply-side market manipulation just doesn't work that well. It needs to be done via demand-side market manipulation. Jack up fuel taxes to make gasoline more expensive. Then people will start to favor fuel economy more over size, safety, and power.
If you can show me a hybrid van/sport utility that can hold 7+ people for around 25k then I'm sure the rest of the world will upgrade. Because right now the cost I would save in gas versus paying more for a Hybrid won't break even until I hit 100k miles. That's a pretty fair look into the future.
What is with Java and all these exploits? It's the most exploited piece of software on planet. I think they should learn something from Microsoft's .NET runtime. It's installed on pretty much every Windows computer out there. Still there are no exploits against it! Microsoft seems to know what they're doing much better than Oracle
All of the present exploits have come from Sun, prior to being acquired by Oracle. Did you expect Oracle to go back and regression test for exploits? I thought the code being open source would allow these things to be found?
This is China. There won't be any news.
Typical western elitist propaganda.
I saw the story prominently covered on Sina Weibo. The Foxconn workers held a contest to see who was the happiest. The winner won the right to shake the Foxconn chairman's hand. So many Foxconn workers wanted to shake the chairman's hand, they all surged forward and broke a fence. Smiling security workers were dispatched to assist the few who received minor injuries.
So now that you posted the edited version, let's see the real details.
The fact that this news like this actually got out is news in itself.
Word. It's china. They control the media and the internet. They will kill before allowing bad press to make it out of their communist regime. When something does slip they discredit them and the source disappears if they happen to still be alive. We make fun of democracy in the US but at least we can say bad things about companies/government without going to jail.
So uh what are the charges?
He could be a terrorist technically and rot in Guantanamo for a couple years before being released.
But the 1.13 billion people have a much higher GDP than the 1.35 billion. More than four times as much in 2011. What this really seems to be saying is that Alibaba is considerably more dominant in China than Amazon and eBay are in the US and Europe. They also may be saying that online retail is more dominant in China, which doesn't have the brick and mortar retail infrastructure that the US and Europe have.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
It's unlikely that China will pass the US and Europe in GDP per capita. They will likely hit a wall like Japan did. There is nothing particularly brilliant about their development plan. The biggest benefit is that they are behind, so they simply have to copy what the others are doing to advance. Once they stop being behind, they will have to retool to stop copying and start innovating if they want to proceed. This is painful, so it is likely to take some time.
China has never been good at innovation. Most of their stuff is a joke. But they are brilliant at copying. They have replica's of nearly everything sold in America but they can't sell it outside China. Eventually that will become a problem.
His response is the FoxConn isn't forcing anyone to work and that it complies with local Chinese law. He said nothing to rebut the criticism that the students are being forced to work. He's got his political speech down, talking about all the unrelated aspects rather than addressing the key point that students are being forced to work.
So from your response you can draw the following conclusions. The students ARE being forced to work, the people doing the forcing are the schools and local government officials, Foxconn is likely involved in pressuring or enticing these entities to do the forcing but isn't actually rounding the people up at gun point themselves.
Yea, not so nice when you take it out of the political speech.
You can draw whatever conclusion you want but the truth will never come out. This is a communist regime and if someone posts something legit that shames China they will disappear. If they post it anonymously, they will be discredited. China is out to win and they will lie, cheat and steal their way to the top at any cost.
Uhm, no. "Junk" DNA is really junk. It consists of repeating regions, transposons, inactive and decaying retroviruses, etc. It has no direct functions, and its indirect usability is questionable. For example, pufferfish has almost no junk DNA while some plants (corn, for example) have lots of it without any visible effects on mutation rates or cell viability.
So if this is 100% true. Let's remove all this dna and see if you continue breathing. Unfortunately you don't know for sure what's its used for so you determine it to be junk.
It's sexist in that if a very talented woman programmer was going around hacking in the kernel and found it, it might make her feel uncomfortable. As such, it contributes to the feeling that Linux kernel development is an area in which women aren't welcome... And believe it or not, sort of thing is the reason why there are so few female programmers. Our "tiny female brains" can cope with the actual work *just fine*. :)
Intellectually you can cope with it, but not psychologically. Women can't stand being told no.
Google and others think the user experience of a product is confined only to the actual use of it. But that's only one part pf a user experience, and forgets walking into the store (or using the online store), buying, unboxing, first start and setup, support, and eventual recycling.
Apple does everything in its power to make all aspects of the user experience perfect. Apple does unboxing tests for products, even did store mock-ups instead of just slapping up the usual crowded aisles. That's their brand strategy, and it's popular with consumers and profitable.
If you're buying an Apple product you're probably spoiled anyways so of course you need your phone NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. Otherwise you might think about why you paid $200 more for the same product offered by Google. Spending an extra minute opening a box could cause your phone to be eaten by a black hole created by the LHC.
Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms.
Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?
You don't see any other software vendors saying windows 7 only. They actually value their paying customers.
Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU
Whats this got to do with office?
nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro.
This is really great. Windows 7 has more DRM. Let me run out and upgrade right away.
Yeah like Apple who drops support the previous version of the OS immediately after their updated one comes out! Oh wait.... There's no reason to buy Office 2013 just to buy it. But if you're going to upgrade you need to use a modern day OS. It's not rocket science. XP is going on 12 years. Microsoft has easily held up their end of the support bargain compared to any company. Probably doubled it.
Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?
Anything you can offload to an idle graphics processor is a good thing.
So ... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."
A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.
Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).
Most orgs wil be jumping on Win7/8 sooner than you think. With XP losing official support now after 12 years companies will be forced to migrate or risk getting compromised due to a unpatched security risk.
Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.
The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.
There's a reason why Oracle dumped it back to opensource and it's not because it's a great alternative. They evaluated it as an internal replacement for MS office and decided against it.
France will make mistake and bomb itself.
What exactly in the iPhone is new or novel? Everything done in it has been done in other phones before it, all they did was package up everyone else's innovations make it pretty and slap a logo on it and claim they invented the phone market.
Yep, that's why the iPhone sold like hotcakes and has been pretty much credited with jump starting the smart phone market, even at the supposed "premium" price for "substandard hardware" someone else claimed previously.
Slide to unlock was as obvious as it gets when your dealing with a touch screen. How would you propose you unlock a smart phone?
I guess they need to listen to their same line of not stealing others tech, because that's precisely what they did when they made the iPhone.
Yep, apparently everything in the iPhone was obvious, which is why so many different iPhone clones existed prior to the iPhone, since the smartphone market dates back more than a decade, and the iPhone was a late-comer.
Because a touchscreen with a slide unlock is so ground breaking... Blackberry's were extremely popular and became a government standard years after the iPhone was released on the market. The only reason the iPhone truly took off was because it integrated with iTunes which had major success. All the other features were no more ground breaking than any phone. They found something that stuck and went with it.