I know that the Disney-Pixar deal lasts through the Incredibles (also Cars?) but unless there's some 11th hour deal to bring Pixar and Disney back together, one has to wonder what Disney is doing. Pixar is beating them to the punch with good characters and stories, and Polar Express looks pretty cool from a technology point of view (I can't comment on the story as I never read the book).
My guess is that Disney is either in deep denial, and will let Pixar slip away and then truly be SOL, they'll resolve their differences (at which point Disney is happy that they don't have to put out their own stuff to counter-act Pixar, which would probably put some unfinished and poorly thought out stuff (think Treasure Planet), or they're really honestly working on something very cool that will come out of left field a la Toy Story, and everyone will say that "Disney has found the magic again", and "Who needs Pixar when you've got Disney's... "
Disney had a pretty long dry period until they hit it with Little Mermaid. Seeing how they were progressing (albiet slowly) from the ballroom scene in B&tB to the rather cool herd technology of Lion King (years before RotK), I'm actually pretty shocked that they've been unable to link good technology to a good story, being content to let Pixar do both jobs for them. My guess is that the Pixar-Disney deal never mentioned sharing source code, so Disney presumably will have to figure it all out for themselves.
OTOH, maybe they're abandoning animation altogether so they can put out more "Old Yellar" movies. In a few years, they may not have much choice.
According to their website, the developers had... issues... with the sole Windows developer, including the belief that he would own the source code. They got rid of him and started over. Thus the delay.
The reason why it's news now is because its release is Monday, instead of next year or the infamous "real soon now..."
I, for one, welcome our new widget overlords. I love the Mac version and can't wait to use it on Windows too.
I interviewed a guy back in '96 I think for a VB job. The company that recommended him even flew him out from his current job in Iowa to NJ to talk to us. I was impressed...his resume was 4 pages long and talked about all the technologies he had worked on. One got the impression that this was a VB/SQL Server guru, who would be everything and more that we needed.
When I met him, he was visibly nervous, and I figured it was just the usual interview stress plus he had just flown in a snowstorm. As we were trying to get out of there ourselves (it turned out to be a *huge* snowstorm), we got down to business, and I asked him a couple of difficult VB questions that would have been winners if he could answer. Well, he couldn't.
Okay, so ask a few easier questions. Nada. I drop it down to *extremely* easy questions (max value of int in VB3, how to do arrays, etc.). Zip. My partner asked a *very* simple sql question ("how do you update a table?") and he came up blank.
Now I'm starting to really *read* his resume, instead of skimming it, and I came upon this little gem: He had put into production some huge program written in VB 4 back in 1995 (not a typo, as it also mentioned being 32-bit). I excused myself for a second, got my beta copy of VB 4 dated 1996 and returned. I dropped the disc on the table and said, in effect, that he had lied on his resume, that there was no way he could have done this and here's the proof.
He was silent and said "Please don't make me go back to Iowa." I then was able to use the famous bartender line of "Well, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
That was the only person I've ever interviewed that had to be escorted out by security.
I think a proper comparison would be a Porsche to a Ford. There are some beautiful Fords. There are Fords that are a work of art. It's not denegrating to Ford, it's just that Porsche's have that certain look and appeal. It's not for everyone, but those who are "into" Porsche's are *really* into them. I think it's safe to say that with Porsche and Mac, there is very little middle ground. Sure, to some Porsche owners it's "just a car", but on the other hand, they still are concious of the fact that it's a Porsche, even when driving it to the store.
I remember helping people in the labs when I was in college with this mac-only program called Karl the Robot...it was basically a way to learn algorithms as you had to come up with ways to move Karl around mazes and such. I believe it used Pascal as the underlying code, though it was pretty limited to just moving Karl around. While I myself disliked Pascal as a language (weened on C), I thought Karl was a pretty clever program.
I've been worried about my dad and this for awhile...he's very trusting and has been an "easy sell" for years (to the point where I have to go with him to electronic stores, etc., lest he walk out with a ton of stuff he doesn't need but was sold to him by the "nice salesperson."
So it was to my relief that he says he never opens his email account (AOL) because it's just full of spam. I checked and sure enough he had about 200 unread messages, all but one was straight spam. The other was a 419 scam, which I deleted just in case...
Something I've discovered that is *really* *really* slick is that it versions the pages...so I can go back and see a previous version of the file a la VMS, disk space be damned.
I've had this thing installed for all of a day and it's already saved me a lot of work, as I needed to look at a previous version I'd been working on and my undo buffer didn't have it.
I agree with you, but I've been thinking about it some more and think the idea really does have potential.
A 2D list of names is just that, 2D. Today what we have is the equivilant of an infinitely changing piece of paper where it suddenly updates to indicate Joe is online, and you can chat it up with him in a 2D window.
But in a 3D environment, Joe appears as an avatar and you can, in addition to chatting with him using voice and video (hey, let's be totally futuristic here), you can then actually walk him over to one of the portals and either work on the issue du jour with him, show it off, whatever.
In the end we're talking about using Doom3 at work to get stuff done that doesn't involve rockets.
I read some of the FAQ and looked at all the pretty screenshots, and I'm impressed and excited by the possibilities; this is the first 3d-space idea that "works" for me in that it doesn't seem (completely) gratuitous and looks like it would work quite well in a sharing-based environment.
But what I'm looking for is, well, more. For example, they don't tackle (or I didn't understand it) storage or organization of multiple portals (storage meaning "where do you find it in the space", not where is it on a disk). And then, if I have multiple portals for different things, how can I arrange them and subsequently, find them quickly in the space. All those floating windows gotta live somewhere.:)
Somehow, I have never heard of this, and on Sunday went to the Apple store and bought a Griffin analog-to-usb converter so I could hook up my radio. And since the included software is barebones (no scheduled recording, etc.) I was trying to write an AppleScript for it, and getting absolutely nowhere. And I just threw the damn receipt away too.
*Sigh*...this is *exactly* what I wanted, and didn't know it. Maybe for Christmas...
If they don't recoup their R&D cost, then there's no profit. If I can make something for $10 and then sell it for $100, but I had to invest $1,000,000+ to develop it, I'm still in the hole for awhile. The x86 arch has been around long enough to justify whatever it cost to develop, and now they're making money on it.
On the other hand, I doubt the order of magnitude is as great as you think between Intel and AMD...AMD didn't have to do the R&D of the x86 arch. Sure they've done a lot of R&D themselves for AMD features (hello Opteron), but the actual startup cost of making an x86 arch was borne by Intel alone. Also, I believe AMD uses IBM for the actual fabs, whereas Intel does it themselves. IBM already had the fabs for all the other chips they make, so it probably doesn't cost either IBM or, subsequently, AMD, to also make theirs.
My guess is that it costs AMD a whole lot less per chip to make than Intel.
...but I needed a floppy drive just last week. I had built a P4 box and had thrown in a floppy drive for pretty much the reasons the article points out... nostalgia and the "well, maybe I'll need it" excuse.
Last week I needed it. And I discovered that it was broken.
I was trying to install, of all things, Win95 with VMWare to test something. Since the disc isn't bootable, I had to use the floppy drive just to put dos on it first. First I had to *find* a copy of dos...luckily a coworker still had a set. Then I discovered the drive was busted. And for some reason, VMWare wouldn't acknowledge the new USB floppy drive as "B:". Lots of cursing and threats, and finally got it working by *networking* the floppy drive off my Linux machine, which I couldn't spare to swap the drive from.
In short, it's 2004, and not only are floppies *not* completely removed from my geek life, neither is dos!
The only upshot is that I could play nibbles.bas again.
...on Linux. IIRC, the whole point of WinFS is not so much the "find anything anywhere" stuff but that a version of SQL Server was going to be a part of the file system, so that, if I read it right, your receipes can be indexed and catagorized in the context of a rdms instead of folders and such on a "real" filesystem. At the end of the day, NTFS is still doing the actual heavy lifting of saying what block on what platter belongs to what file.
I admit to thinking this was kind of a cool idea...a big information store instead of a bazillion files. The actual implementation, I would think, wouldn't actually be that hard...again, you're not dealing with files per se, but with data.
The *nightmare* is probably in how you're supposed to interact with it. When your whole world is made up of the file/folder/cabinet metaphor, trying to define what an "information store" is, and how a user is going to interact with it in some seamless fashion, must be mind boggling complex because the only way it will work is if you have the relationships correctly set up. Photography cataloging programs do it by giving the user dozens of fields for him or her to fill in, and only on those fields that there is data is it useful to search on.
Back to Linux...I think that implementing this, presumably using a Reiser4 plugin + some RDMS, and then have the correct way to interact with it, would show Microsoft up to no end. "Information at your fingertips" is more likely to get the attention of a PHB than "10,000 node cluster" and anything to show how the Linux community delivered when MS couldn't, is obviously a Good Thing.
This idea, while it sounds neat, also suggests that it's trying to keep up with the Spotlight feature of OSX Tiger and Longhorn's whatever-you-call-it. I'm not at all bashing the project, but what I'm curious about is why we haven't seen Linux leading in more advanced features, stuff that would be really advanced out-of-this-world concepts that will, eventually, someday, really advance our idea of computing.
I'm sure that it's being done to some extent, I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want.
While Linux is the natural choice to use for the breakthrough concepts, I really don't know of any. While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies. It's said that everyone waits for Apple to come up with something so that it can be copied. Well, why wait for them?
Maybe there isn't as much research going on as I would think (not being in Academia), or it's more of the "faster-smaller" variety, but when the "next big thing" happens in computing, I hope it is on Linux *first*.
When SCO talks about Unix, what, exactly, are they talking about? Is there a "Unix" anymore? I know of AIX, Solaris, and the BSDs as the last remaining operating systems that are, I believe, Unix-derived (some of the AT&T code, some of the BSD stuff). I don't think even SCO's own products (Unixware, SCO) are so close to SysV that they can truly say to be the true "Unix" operating system.
So when they say Linux is an unauthorized Unix, what Unix are they talking about? Besides, doesn't the original email from Linux talk about how Linux is a "Minix" clone, which in turn is a much scaled down version of Unix? Why doesn't SCO go after Minix too while they're at it. Or Plan9...that's very Unix-like.
Or Windows...oops, no, not that one. Besides, that's more VMS than Unix.:)
So with a plugin, could you make a Reiser4 fs work like VMS' file system (i.e. foo.c;1, foo.c;2, etc.)? To me this is the holy grail of file systems...built in versioning by the file system itself, not a 3rd-party app like CVS.
At this bookstore I used to go to, they had all the Mac programming manuals...took up a whole shelf. One of the slimmest volumes was one devoted entirely to internationalizing an application.
What I remember more than anything was that they had a whole chapter, I believe, on symbols and their meanings throughout the world. They suggested that if your app was going to be sold in the Middle East, it would be a bad idea to use a pig as an icon (that's the one I explicitly remember).
All in all it made for facinating reading to a 15yo non-programmer (at the time). It was really slim and really seemed more interested in getting the app more culturally-aware, instead of just harping on dealing with Unicode (or whatever they used then) strings.
I was building a box for a friend and though I'm behind a firewall, etc., it turned out that the dhcp server gave the new box the dmz address. Oops...forgot about that one. But, in the few minutes it was up and running (first thing was to start to download service packs, etc.) suddenly I had blaster on there. Since it was a new machine, I decided to just wipe it and reinstall, this time remembering to turn the damn DMZ off.
I would easily say that the time between the machine starting up for the first time post-installation, and getting infected, was less than 2 minutes.
Limitations in such that expansion is difficult or requires hacks. Same thing with the original Mac versus the "open-ness" of the Apple 2. For example, the original PC had several versions of video cards, the monochrome one, the cga one, Hercules and Paradise also made 'em. The PCJr had that one slot that was totally different than ISA and IIRC, only IBM ever made a card for it (which obviously they would have to).
Everything can be modded, but the difficulty in doing so is related to whether the company wanted to allow it. I'm sure someone can come up with a good hack to get around the 3 program limitation in this version of XP, but the point is, why should they have to? Why make someone jump through hoops because of artificial, marketing-based reasons?
This seems like it's going to be Microsoft's PCjr...give them something that *seems* like a good bargain at first, but you run up against the limitations pretty much immediately. Then you realize you've been had and swear you'll never buy a product from this company again.
Not that this ever happened to me *cough*.
It's also very demeaning to the countries involved, piracy issues or not. You can imagine the box as saying: "If you see this box in a store, it's because we have 'issues' with your country as a whole." Frankly, I hope people are offended and swear off MS entirely.
...that anyone ever played more than 30 seconds of it before dying.
Seriously. I considered myself something of a hard core coin-op gamer back-in-the-day, and just when I was getting bored with Ms. Pac Man and Galiga, along comes Dragons Lair, placed right in the middle of the place. I think, if I remember correctly, while every other machine in the place took $0.25, this thing took a full dollar. Well, look at the graphics...it's probably worth it.
I dutifily lined up like everyone else to give it a go, and that game retired each and every one of us. I actually brought a book, thinking I'd be waiting for an hour while somebody mastered it, but all of a sudden I was at the front of the line and within 30 seconds I was toast, watching Dirk turn into a skeleton.
I gave it a few more tries, as did every one else, but it soon became the game that no one played, and it was like this isle of desolation in a rather full arcade.
In short, it was the first game that I truly *hated*, because it made me feel like a complete idiot for "not getting it". Of course, I was in good company as no one seemed to "get it". I think it was finally removed when the first Mortal Kombat came in. Even though I didn't get that either, I could still button-mash some good moves once in awhile!
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I know that the Disney-Pixar deal lasts through the Incredibles (also Cars?) but unless there's some 11th hour deal to bring Pixar and Disney back together, one has to wonder what Disney is doing. Pixar is beating them to the punch with good characters and stories, and Polar Express looks pretty cool from a technology point of view (I can't comment on the story as I never read the book).
... "
My guess is that Disney is either in deep denial, and will let Pixar slip away and then truly be SOL, they'll resolve their differences (at which point Disney is happy that they don't have to put out their own stuff to counter-act Pixar, which would probably put some unfinished and poorly thought out stuff (think Treasure Planet), or they're really honestly working on something very cool that will come out of left field a la Toy Story, and everyone will say that "Disney has found the magic again", and "Who needs Pixar when you've got Disney's
Disney had a pretty long dry period until they hit it with Little Mermaid. Seeing how they were progressing (albiet slowly) from the ballroom scene in B&tB to the rather cool herd technology of Lion King (years before RotK), I'm actually pretty shocked that they've been unable to link good technology to a good story, being content to let Pixar do both jobs for them. My guess is that the Pixar-Disney deal never mentioned sharing source code, so Disney presumably will have to figure it all out for themselves.
OTOH, maybe they're abandoning animation altogether so they can put out more "Old Yellar" movies. In a few years, they may not have much choice.
According to their website, the developers had ... issues ... with the sole Windows developer, including the belief that he would own the source code. They got rid of him and started over. Thus the delay.
The reason why it's news now is because its release is Monday, instead of next year or the infamous "real soon now..."
I, for one, welcome our new widget overlords. I love the Mac version and can't wait to use it on Windows too.
I interviewed a guy back in '96 I think for a VB job. The company that recommended him even flew him out from his current job in Iowa to NJ to talk to us. I was impressed...his resume was 4 pages long and talked about all the technologies he had worked on. One got the impression that this was a VB/SQL Server guru, who would be everything and more that we needed.
When I met him, he was visibly nervous, and I figured it was just the usual interview stress plus he had just flown in a snowstorm. As we were trying to get out of there ourselves (it turned out to be a *huge* snowstorm), we got down to business, and I asked him a couple of difficult VB questions that would have been winners if he could answer. Well, he couldn't.
Okay, so ask a few easier questions. Nada. I drop it down to *extremely* easy questions (max value of int in VB3, how to do arrays, etc.). Zip. My partner asked a *very* simple sql question ("how do you update a table?") and he came up blank.
Now I'm starting to really *read* his resume, instead of skimming it, and I came upon this little gem: He had put into production some huge program written in VB 4 back in 1995 (not a typo, as it also mentioned being 32-bit). I excused myself for a second, got my beta copy of VB 4 dated 1996 and returned. I dropped the disc on the table and said, in effect, that he had lied on his resume, that there was no way he could have done this and here's the proof.
He was silent and said "Please don't make me go back to Iowa." I then was able to use the famous bartender line of "Well, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
That was the only person I've ever interviewed that had to be escorted out by security.
I think a proper comparison would be a Porsche to a Ford. There are some beautiful Fords. There are Fords that are a work of art. It's not denegrating to Ford, it's just that Porsche's have that certain look and appeal. It's not for everyone, but those who are "into" Porsche's are *really* into them. I think it's safe to say that with Porsche and Mac, there is very little middle ground. Sure, to some Porsche owners it's "just a car", but on the other hand, they still are concious of the fact that it's a Porsche, even when driving it to the store.
Yep...that's it, sorry about the spelling, it's going on 14 years since I last worked with it.
As a sign of the times, I noticed that they mention that it's now based on C/C++ instead of Pascal.
I remember helping people in the labs when I was in college with this mac-only program called Karl the Robot...it was basically a way to learn algorithms as you had to come up with ways to move Karl around mazes and such. I believe it used Pascal as the underlying code, though it was pretty limited to just moving Karl around. While I myself disliked Pascal as a language (weened on C), I thought Karl was a pretty clever program.
I've been worried about my dad and this for awhile...he's very trusting and has been an "easy sell" for years (to the point where I have to go with him to electronic stores, etc., lest he walk out with a ton of stuff he doesn't need but was sold to him by the "nice salesperson."
So it was to my relief that he says he never opens his email account (AOL) because it's just full of spam. I checked and sure enough he had about 200 unread messages, all but one was straight spam. The other was a 419 scam, which I deleted just in case...
Something I've discovered that is *really* *really* slick is that it versions the pages...so I can go back and see a previous version of the file a la VMS, disk space be damned.
I've had this thing installed for all of a day and it's already saved me a lot of work, as I needed to look at a previous version I'd been working on and my undo buffer didn't have it.
It indexes C/C++ files! Google wins!
I agree with you, but I've been thinking about it some more and think the idea really does have potential.
A 2D list of names is just that, 2D. Today what we have is the equivilant of an infinitely changing piece of paper where it suddenly updates to indicate Joe is online, and you can chat it up with him in a 2D window.
But in a 3D environment, Joe appears as an avatar and you can, in addition to chatting with him using voice and video (hey, let's be totally futuristic here), you can then actually walk him over to one of the portals and either work on the issue du jour with him, show it off, whatever.
In the end we're talking about using Doom3 at work to get stuff done that doesn't involve rockets.
I read some of the FAQ and looked at all the pretty screenshots, and I'm impressed and excited by the possibilities; this is the first 3d-space idea that "works" for me in that it doesn't seem (completely) gratuitous and looks like it would work quite well in a sharing-based environment.
:)
But what I'm looking for is, well, more. For example, they don't tackle (or I didn't understand it) storage or organization of multiple portals (storage meaning "where do you find it in the space", not where is it on a disk). And then, if I have multiple portals for different things, how can I arrange them and subsequently, find them quickly in the space. All those floating windows gotta live somewhere.
Somehow, I have never heard of this, and on Sunday went to the Apple store and bought a Griffin analog-to-usb converter so I could hook up my radio. And since the included software is barebones (no scheduled recording, etc.) I was trying to write an AppleScript for it, and getting absolutely nowhere. And I just threw the damn receipt away too.
*Sigh*...this is *exactly* what I wanted, and didn't know it. Maybe for Christmas...
You obviously have never used a game console.
If they don't recoup their R&D cost, then there's no profit. If I can make something for $10 and then sell it for $100, but I had to invest $1,000,000+ to develop it, I'm still in the hole for awhile. The x86 arch has been around long enough to justify whatever it cost to develop, and now they're making money on it.
On the other hand, I doubt the order of magnitude is as great as you think between Intel and AMD...AMD didn't have to do the R&D of the x86 arch. Sure they've done a lot of R&D themselves for AMD features (hello Opteron), but the actual startup cost of making an x86 arch was borne by Intel alone. Also, I believe AMD uses IBM for the actual fabs, whereas Intel does it themselves. IBM already had the fabs for all the other chips they make, so it probably doesn't cost either IBM or, subsequently, AMD, to also make theirs.
My guess is that it costs AMD a whole lot less per chip to make than Intel.
...but I needed a floppy drive just last week. I had built a P4 box and had thrown in a floppy drive for pretty much the reasons the article points out ... nostalgia and the "well, maybe I'll need it" excuse.
Last week I needed it. And I discovered that it was broken.
I was trying to install, of all things, Win95 with VMWare to test something. Since the disc isn't bootable, I had to use the floppy drive just to put dos on it first. First I had to *find* a copy of dos...luckily a coworker still had a set. Then I discovered the drive was busted. And for some reason, VMWare wouldn't acknowledge the new USB floppy drive as "B:". Lots of cursing and threats, and finally got it working by *networking* the floppy drive off my Linux machine, which I couldn't spare to swap the drive from.
In short, it's 2004, and not only are floppies *not* completely removed from my geek life, neither is dos!
The only upshot is that I could play nibbles.bas again.
...on Linux. IIRC, the whole point of WinFS is not so much the "find anything anywhere" stuff but that a version of SQL Server was going to be a part of the file system, so that, if I read it right, your receipes can be indexed and catagorized in the context of a rdms instead of folders and such on a "real" filesystem. At the end of the day, NTFS is still doing the actual heavy lifting of saying what block on what platter belongs to what file.
I admit to thinking this was kind of a cool idea...a big information store instead of a bazillion files. The actual implementation, I would think, wouldn't actually be that hard...again, you're not dealing with files per se, but with data.
The *nightmare* is probably in how you're supposed to interact with it. When your whole world is made up of the file/folder/cabinet metaphor, trying to define what an "information store" is, and how a user is going to interact with it in some seamless fashion, must be mind boggling complex because the only way it will work is if you have the relationships correctly set up. Photography cataloging programs do it by giving the user dozens of fields for him or her to fill in, and only on those fields that there is data is it useful to search on.
Back to Linux...I think that implementing this, presumably using a Reiser4 plugin + some RDMS, and then have the correct way to interact with it, would show Microsoft up to no end. "Information at your fingertips" is more likely to get the attention of a PHB than "10,000 node cluster" and anything to show how the Linux community delivered when MS couldn't, is obviously a Good Thing.
This idea, while it sounds neat, also suggests that it's trying to keep up with the Spotlight feature of OSX Tiger and Longhorn's whatever-you-call-it. I'm not at all bashing the project, but what I'm curious about is why we haven't seen Linux leading in more advanced features, stuff that would be really advanced out-of-this-world concepts that will, eventually, someday, really advance our idea of computing.
I'm sure that it's being done to some extent, I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want.
While Linux is the natural choice to use for the breakthrough concepts, I really don't know of any. While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies. It's said that everyone waits for Apple to come up with something so that it can be copied. Well, why wait for them?
Maybe there isn't as much research going on as I would think (not being in Academia), or it's more of the "faster-smaller" variety, but when the "next big thing" happens in computing, I hope it is on Linux *first*.
When SCO talks about Unix, what, exactly, are they talking about? Is there a "Unix" anymore? I know of AIX, Solaris, and the BSDs as the last remaining operating systems that are, I believe, Unix-derived (some of the AT&T code, some of the BSD stuff). I don't think even SCO's own products (Unixware, SCO) are so close to SysV that they can truly say to be the true "Unix" operating system.
:)
So when they say Linux is an unauthorized Unix, what Unix are they talking about? Besides, doesn't the original email from Linux talk about how Linux is a "Minix" clone, which in turn is a much scaled down version of Unix? Why doesn't SCO go after Minix too while they're at it. Or Plan9...that's very Unix-like.
Or Windows...oops, no, not that one. Besides, that's more VMS than Unix.
So with a plugin, could you make a Reiser4 fs work like VMS' file system (i.e. foo.c;1, foo.c;2, etc.)? To me this is the holy grail of file systems...built in versioning by the file system itself, not a 3rd-party app like CVS.
At this bookstore I used to go to, they had all the Mac programming manuals...took up a whole shelf. One of the slimmest volumes was one devoted entirely to internationalizing an application.
What I remember more than anything was that they had a whole chapter, I believe, on symbols and their meanings throughout the world. They suggested that if your app was going to be sold in the Middle East, it would be a bad idea to use a pig as an icon (that's the one I explicitly remember).
All in all it made for facinating reading to a 15yo non-programmer (at the time). It was really slim and really seemed more interested in getting the app more culturally-aware, instead of just harping on dealing with Unicode (or whatever they used then) strings.
I was building a box for a friend and though I'm behind a firewall, etc., it turned out that the dhcp server gave the new box the dmz address. Oops...forgot about that one. But, in the few minutes it was up and running (first thing was to start to download service packs, etc.) suddenly I had blaster on there. Since it was a new machine, I decided to just wipe it and reinstall, this time remembering to turn the damn DMZ off.
I would easily say that the time between the machine starting up for the first time post-installation, and getting infected, was less than 2 minutes.
Limitations in such that expansion is difficult or requires hacks. Same thing with the original Mac versus the "open-ness" of the Apple 2. For example, the original PC had several versions of video cards, the monochrome one, the cga one, Hercules and Paradise also made 'em. The PCJr had that one slot that was totally different than ISA and IIRC, only IBM ever made a card for it (which obviously they would have to).
Everything can be modded, but the difficulty in doing so is related to whether the company wanted to allow it. I'm sure someone can come up with a good hack to get around the 3 program limitation in this version of XP, but the point is, why should they have to? Why make someone jump through hoops because of artificial, marketing-based reasons?
This seems like it's going to be Microsoft's PCjr...give them something that *seems* like a good bargain at first, but you run up against the limitations pretty much immediately. Then you realize you've been had and swear you'll never buy a product from this company again.
Not that this ever happened to me *cough*.
It's also very demeaning to the countries involved, piracy issues or not. You can imagine the box as saying: "If you see this box in a store, it's because we have 'issues' with your country as a whole." Frankly, I hope people are offended and swear off MS entirely.
Viva Linux!
1. Printing. They've never fixed the problem of text overflowing the right margin and getting cut off, leaving a worthless print.
2. While it's a minor thing, how is it that IE can eventually forget every site icon? I mean, really...come on guys....
...that anyone ever played more than 30 seconds of it before dying.
Seriously. I considered myself something of a hard core coin-op gamer back-in-the-day, and just when I was getting bored with Ms. Pac Man and Galiga, along comes Dragons Lair, placed right in the middle of the place. I think, if I remember correctly, while every other machine in the place took $0.25, this thing took a full dollar. Well, look at the graphics...it's probably worth it.
I dutifily lined up like everyone else to give it a go, and that game retired each and every one of us. I actually brought a book, thinking I'd be waiting for an hour while somebody mastered it, but all of a sudden I was at the front of the line and within 30 seconds I was toast, watching Dirk turn into a skeleton.
I gave it a few more tries, as did every one else, but it soon became the game that no one played, and it was like this isle of desolation in a rather full arcade.
In short, it was the first game that I truly *hated*, because it made me feel like a complete idiot for "not getting it". Of course, I was in good company as no one seemed to "get it". I think it was finally removed when the first Mortal Kombat came in. Even though I didn't get that either, I could still button-mash some good moves once in awhile!