Office 2k and Office XP have both been just one CD for the "important" apps - the extra cds were just for ancillary junk like clipart, MS Publisher, and such.
Visual Studio is available as a DVD if you get the DVD edition of MSDN, I think.
The reason for so little DVD-ROM distribution is the relatively low penetration of DVD-ROM drives into the market. Most new machines still do not come with DVD-ROM drives standard, and the prices are still significantly higher than a CD-ROM drive.
If your personal information is so valuable, don't leave it lying around. Logging out should be just as natural as putting your credit card back in your wallet when you're done with it, or not leaving your checkbook laying around. Surely we shouldn't all stop using credit cards just because people can exploit carelessness to commit fraud.
In the US, we're instructed not to pay for anything significant with a bank/ATM (check) card, since the money is immediately transferred from consumer to merchant. There's no chance to dispute charges (in the case of faulty merchandise, for example). Credit cards also give you the option of receiving special benefits on certain purchases, like automatic insurance on airline tickets, cash back bonuses, etc - these are all things that check cards normally don't do. Also, let's not forget that check cards don't allow people to get into heaps of debt, which the credit card companies profit off of.
OpenGL supports pixel shaders and vertex shaders through vendor-specific extensions. In fact, these vendor-specific extensions in some cases expose a little bit more functionality than Direct3D does. However, if one wishes to write an OpenGL app for wide distribution (like a retail game), one would have to write several renderer backends to handle the wildly different vendor-specific shader extensions.
That, in my opinion, is a throwback to the days of DOS games, where every game had several different versions for each piece of hardware out there. It's a mess, and game development budgets simply don't have the room to do this anymore.
Petitions, lists of names, and pleas will not get you Linux games; money will. There's been a few high-profile games released with Linux versions, and their sales figures were abysmal.
True, almost all of these games had some weird circumstance that may have contributed to the poor sales figures (like release timing vs. win32 version, etc), but regardless of the circumstances, Linux games just don't sell.
And let's not forget the difficulty of deploying and supporting PC games on Linux. DirectX may not be perfect, but it's a huge, huge positive for Win32, especially in terms of installation and support -- and it's getting better all the time. OpenGL is nice as well, and cross platform to boot, but try providing a concise, clear set of instructions (or a single installer) that gets accelerated OpenGL running on Linux across a wide variety of consumer graphics cards. It's just not there. Also, I'm sure the various small differences between Linux distros can prove to be a headache as well.
A game platform needs some sort of central authority controlling the feature sets, the quality of drivers, and a consistent, usability tested installer. This central authority provides a lot of platform stability while sacrificing a small amount of absolute developer freedom. Microsoft provides this for Windows, and it works remarkably well considering the wide variety of hardware and software configurations out there. No one entity is centrally controlling and planning the gaming experience on Linux, and this is bad.
The Sony 24" widescreen flat CRT is slightly larger than the Apple Cinema Display (but same aspect ratio), and it is about the same price now. Of course, the Sony is MUCH heavier, much deeper, and higher res as well.
I'm one of the guys who hacked the CurlyCart. Fisher-Price encouraged this; they dropped off over a dozen toys to the Lab, and then everyone grabbed one, and tried to make it do something cool(er). Unfortunately, due to the New England snowstorm, their reps weren't able to make it to the lunch meeting last Monday when we presented it, but they'll get video:)
BTW, if you look real close next to my hand in the pic programmer shot, you'll see a CueCat as well. DigitalConvergence via WPP dropped those off:) All I've done with that is linked it up to some perl scripts running my personal library.
I'm looking at page 48 of the manual for my Age of Empires: The Conquerors expansion pack (which is a game, published by Microsoft).
And I quote:
...Via The Phone No-Charge:
In the U.S.: Games & Multimedia: (425) 637-9308. Regular business hours... etc, etc, etc.
Just about every commercial software product, especially games, comes with a baseline of phone tech support. It may be a long distance phone call, but at least it's there. This is even the case for Windows, except usually in that case you call the company you bought Windows from.
1) put multiple versions in the same box. The datafiles are the same. We're not talking about adding that many more bytes to the disc.
If that is a problem for some reason, fine. Let the Linux user buy the Win32 version and download the binaries.
Unfortunately, the end-user is expected to understand that everything that comes on the CD with a game is "blessed", and therefore eligible for phone tech support. If the linux binaries are on there, and someone has problems with installing them, then one phone call alone is enough to erase the profits from the box -- even if the phone call is along the lines of "that's not supported, goodbye."
So, in the end, the best deal is to offer the binaries for download. Anyone running Linux should be able to figure that out anyways...
I think there was never an issue with making a linux version. They just stated that the economics of putting a linux version box on the shelf are not that good.
I don't have a problem with turning ads off and crap like that, but from MS's point of view, it's better to let a plugin do that. A realistic company that wants to make friends and keep friends won't put in an ad blocking feature. Same reason why TiVo won't add a commercial skip feature - it's just pissing in other people's pools, and what goes around comes around. And MS knows where to put those warm and fuzzy features - in MSN Explorer, a browser for people who want that stuff. Netscape doesn't have to be everything to everyone, and truthfully they can't.
Netscape should focus on their core mission instead of trying to do everything cool. I don't need an alternative web browser to feel hip or trendy; I need a browser that will do what I need it to do, which is surf the damn web and be a good platform.:)
...or at least a better thing than the competition.
Sure, MS may consciously or subconsciously tweak IE to the likes of large corporations and media producers, but that's what they're SUPPOSED to do, at least to make money, and make a better product to boot. The fringe element of users who like to block all ads and save their porn for later is not worth designing a flagship platform for.
Netscape, and to a lesser extent, Mozilla seems to be going the complete opposite direction. If I were an IT admin for a large company, and browser A was plain and corporate, while browser B now includes a Shop button, and an instant messaging client, and the convenient ability to handle multimedia downloads more flexibly (oh, and the ability to turn off porn popups), hmm, which one would I choose?
Possibly the one that doesn't give people so many useless toys to play with, instead of doing their work... not to mention the fact that Netscape has a long list of other faults compared to IE. What's next, an eBay button, or a complimentary copy of Quake 3?
Microsoft Transcriber has the best handwriting recognition I've ever used, including the Newton. It's weird that they don't include this with the PocketPC by default.
If you're doing closed-source work, don't even look at GPL code, lest you be accused of stealing code somewhere down the line. And if someone calls you on a suspected GPL violation, how can you prove your innocence? Show them the code? Even if you are inspired by how a piece of GPL code did something, and implement something similar, that's kinda suspect as well.
Play it safe, don't invite the wrath of GPL zealots upon yourself and your project, just steer clear of GPL code altogether.
Yeah, but the PCMCIA sleeves are kinda tough to obtain (I've heard). But, while we're on that topic, you can get anything from PC Card CDPD modems to all other sorts of network paraphenalia, so networking is definitely not much trouble, especially on the iPaq. However, until there's better CompactFlash network cards (especially wireless), everything other than iPaq will probably be out of luck.
All it would take is usage of the standard Win32 network APIs, which wouldn't be that hard. A CompactFlash 802.11 card should be out soon, and CF wired Ethernet has been avaiable for some time now, so the network layer is available as well.
I've been a hard-core Palm fanatic for some time now (I'm the developer of DopeWars for PalmOS), but only recently have I realized that the Pocket PC really gives developers a lot more functionality and CPU power to work with. The Palm platform is so extremely limited...
Hmm, looks like joining W3C costs 50 grand a year for a company, nearly ten times the amount proposed by this security group. Non-profit/educational access costs $5k annually, the same price as this security group. How come nobody accuses W3C of being an "information cartel"? Simple... it's not, and neither is this group. $5k per year is nothing for a company that is interested in security issues, even a small company.
long cord.. why even bother? I don't want a cord, he talked to the wrong people.
I see, you just want to buy a fresh set of AA batteries for each of your four radio-enabled controllers every two months. Me, I prefer to flush my money down the toilet.
the DVD is a moot point, I don't care what medium they use it is of no consequence to me... The damn games better load fast. I would rather a cartridge (no scratches).
Making cartridges is way too expensive, especially if you want to allow game designers to actually produce something cool (i.e. big textures, movies, etc) The age of Nintendo using tiny texture maps and crazy compression hacks is over - the challenge nowadays is making a good game, not making a game work. Multi-gigabyte games are financially impossible with cartridges.
the Intel processor is great but it is going to cause everyone to say things like "let's hack it"
I've been to a talk by J Allard (the head xbox guy), he claims that the system would only run Microsoft-signed data on DVD-9 media, making it pretty damn difficult to hack it. He offered a job to anyone who could boot linux on it:) Regardless, I don't think we'll see anything of interest hacked onto the console; after all, what would it bring? crappy games made by 14 year olds? I can get plenty of those for my PC already...
Think about it... you're assuming that Microsoft will give out the entire source tree to Windows 2000 to dozens of universities, but won't let the US Government, a MAJOR customer, take a peek?
Get real.
The people in the US Government who need to know if Windows is secure and backdoor-free most surely have access to all the source code they need.
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Office 2k and Office XP have both been just one CD for the "important" apps - the extra cds were just for ancillary junk like clipart, MS Publisher, and such.
Visual Studio is available as a DVD if you get the DVD edition of MSDN, I think.
The reason for so little DVD-ROM distribution is the relatively low penetration of DVD-ROM drives into the market. Most new machines still do not come with DVD-ROM drives standard, and the prices are still significantly higher than a CD-ROM drive.
Tetris was an instant classic, a game that just about anyone on the street can identify, and it had no story at all.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is the best selling game of all time, and it has no story.
Story is simply one of many ways to make a game.
If your personal information is so valuable, don't leave it lying around. Logging out should be just as natural as putting your credit card back in your wallet when you're done with it, or not leaving your checkbook laying around. Surely we shouldn't all stop using credit cards just because people can exploit carelessness to commit fraud.
Bungie never promised a simultaneous PC/Mac/Xbox release for Halo. Xbox comes first, PC/Mac later.
In the US, we're instructed not to pay for anything significant with a bank/ATM (check) card, since the money is immediately transferred from consumer to merchant. There's no chance to dispute charges (in the case of faulty merchandise, for example). Credit cards also give you the option of receiving special benefits on certain purchases, like automatic insurance on airline tickets, cash back bonuses, etc - these are all things that check cards normally don't do. Also, let's not forget that check cards don't allow people to get into heaps of debt, which the credit card companies profit off of.
OpenGL supports pixel shaders and vertex shaders through vendor-specific extensions. In fact, these vendor-specific extensions in some cases expose a little bit more functionality than Direct3D does. However, if one wishes to write an OpenGL app for wide distribution (like a retail game), one would have to write several renderer backends to handle the wildly different vendor-specific shader extensions.
That, in my opinion, is a throwback to the days of DOS games, where every game had several different versions for each piece of hardware out there. It's a mess, and game development budgets simply don't have the room to do this anymore.
Petitions, lists of names, and pleas will not get you Linux games; money will. There's been a few high-profile games released with Linux versions, and their sales figures were abysmal.
True, almost all of these games had some weird circumstance that may have contributed to the poor sales figures (like release timing vs. win32 version, etc), but regardless of the circumstances, Linux games just don't sell.
And let's not forget the difficulty of deploying and supporting PC games on Linux. DirectX may not be perfect, but it's a huge, huge positive for Win32, especially in terms of installation and support -- and it's getting better all the time. OpenGL is nice as well, and cross platform to boot, but try providing a concise, clear set of instructions (or a single installer) that gets accelerated OpenGL running on Linux across a wide variety of consumer graphics cards. It's just not there. Also, I'm sure the various small differences between Linux distros can prove to be a headache as well.
A game platform needs some sort of central authority controlling the feature sets, the quality of drivers, and a consistent, usability tested installer. This central authority provides a lot of platform stability while sacrificing a small amount of absolute developer freedom. Microsoft provides this for Windows, and it works remarkably well considering the wide variety of hardware and software configurations out there. No one entity is centrally controlling and planning the gaming experience on Linux, and this is bad.
The Sony 24" widescreen flat CRT is slightly larger than the Apple Cinema Display (but same aspect ratio), and it is about the same price now. Of course, the Sony is MUCH heavier, much deeper, and higher res as well.
smartass
I'm one of the guys who hacked the CurlyCart. Fisher-Price encouraged this; they dropped off over a dozen toys to the Lab, and then everyone grabbed one, and tried to make it do something cool(er). Unfortunately, due to the New England snowstorm, their reps weren't able to make it to the lunch meeting last Monday when we presented it, but they'll get video :)
BTW, if you look real close next to my hand in the pic programmer shot, you'll see a CueCat as well. DigitalConvergence via WPP dropped those off :) All I've done with that is linked it up to some perl scripts running my personal library.
I'm looking at page 48 of the manual for my Age of Empires: The Conquerors expansion pack (which is a game, published by Microsoft).
And I quote:
...Via The Phone No-Charge:
In the U.S.: Games & Multimedia: (425) 637-9308. Regular business hours... etc, etc, etc.
Just about every commercial software product, especially games, comes with a baseline of phone tech support. It may be a long distance phone call, but at least it's there. This is even the case for Windows, except usually in that case you call the company you bought Windows from.
If that is a problem for some reason, fine. Let the Linux user buy the Win32 version and download the binaries.
Unfortunately, the end-user is expected to understand that everything that comes on the CD with a game is "blessed", and therefore eligible for phone tech support. If the linux binaries are on there, and someone has problems with installing them, then one phone call alone is enough to erase the profits from the box -- even if the phone call is along the lines of "that's not supported, goodbye."
So, in the end, the best deal is to offer the binaries for download. Anyone running Linux should be able to figure that out anyways...
I think there was never an issue with making a linux version. They just stated that the economics of putting a linux version box on the shelf are not that good.
I don't have a problem with turning ads off and crap like that, but from MS's point of view, it's better to let a plugin do that. A realistic company that wants to make friends and keep friends won't put in an ad blocking feature. Same reason why TiVo won't add a commercial skip feature - it's just pissing in other people's pools, and what goes around comes around. And MS knows where to put those warm and fuzzy features - in MSN Explorer, a browser for people who want that stuff. Netscape doesn't have to be everything to everyone, and truthfully they can't.
Netscape should focus on their core mission instead of trying to do everything cool. I don't need an alternative web browser to feel hip or trendy; I need a browser that will do what I need it to do, which is surf the damn web and be a good platform. :)
...or at least a better thing than the competition.
Sure, MS may consciously or subconsciously tweak IE to the likes of large corporations and media producers, but that's what they're SUPPOSED to do, at least to make money, and make a better product to boot. The fringe element of users who like to block all ads and save their porn for later is not worth designing a flagship platform for.
Netscape, and to a lesser extent, Mozilla seems to be going the complete opposite direction. If I were an IT admin for a large company, and browser A was plain and corporate, while browser B now includes a Shop button, and an instant messaging client, and the convenient ability to handle multimedia downloads more flexibly (oh, and the ability to turn off porn popups), hmm, which one would I choose?
Possibly the one that doesn't give people so many useless toys to play with, instead of doing their work... not to mention the fact that Netscape has a long list of other faults compared to IE. What's next, an eBay button, or a complimentary copy of Quake 3?
Since your brain has been consumed, perhaps you'll consider donating? :)
Delete all of your phone numbers (after memorizing them), and then use your PDA just to play games.
Microsoft Transcriber has the best handwriting recognition I've ever used, including the Newton. It's weird that they don't include this with the PocketPC by default.
If you're doing closed-source work, don't even look at GPL code, lest you be accused of stealing code somewhere down the line. And if someone calls you on a suspected GPL violation, how can you prove your innocence? Show them the code? Even if you are inspired by how a piece of GPL code did something, and implement something similar, that's kinda suspect as well.
Play it safe, don't invite the wrath of GPL zealots upon yourself and your project, just steer clear of GPL code altogether.
Yeah, but the PCMCIA sleeves are kinda tough to obtain (I've heard). But, while we're on that topic, you can get anything from PC Card CDPD modems to all other sorts of network paraphenalia, so networking is definitely not much trouble, especially on the iPaq. However, until there's better CompactFlash network cards (especially wireless), everything other than iPaq will probably be out of luck.
All it would take is usage of the standard Win32 network APIs, which wouldn't be that hard. A CompactFlash 802.11 card should be out soon, and CF wired Ethernet has been avaiable for some time now, so the network layer is available as well.
I've been a hard-core Palm fanatic for some time now (I'm the developer of DopeWars for PalmOS), but only recently have I realized that the Pocket PC really gives developers a lot more functionality and CPU power to work with. The Palm platform is so extremely limited...
Let's take a look at this page:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Prospectus/Joining
Hmm, looks like joining W3C costs 50 grand a year for a company, nearly ten times the amount proposed by this security group. Non-profit/educational access costs $5k annually, the same price as this security group. How come nobody accuses W3C of being an "information cartel"? Simple... it's not, and neither is this group. $5k per year is nothing for a company that is interested in security issues, even a small company.
Sega Rally uses WinCE. It runs slowly, so maybe that's not the best example :)
long cord.. why even bother? I don't want a cord, he talked to the wrong people.
I see, you just want to buy a fresh set of AA batteries for each of your four radio-enabled controllers every two months. Me, I prefer to flush my money down the toilet.
the DVD is a moot point, I don't care what medium they use it is of no consequence to me... The damn games better load fast. I would rather a cartridge (no scratches).
Making cartridges is way too expensive, especially if you want to allow game designers to actually produce something cool (i.e. big textures, movies, etc) The age of Nintendo using tiny texture maps and crazy compression hacks is over - the challenge nowadays is making a good game, not making a game work. Multi-gigabyte games are financially impossible with cartridges.
the Intel processor is great but it is going to cause everyone to say things like "let's hack it"
I've been to a talk by J Allard (the head xbox guy), he claims that the system would only run Microsoft-signed data on DVD-9 media, making it pretty damn difficult to hack it. He offered a job to anyone who could boot linux on it :) Regardless, I don't think we'll see anything of interest hacked onto the console; after all, what would it bring? crappy games made by 14 year olds? I can get plenty of those for my PC already...
Think about it... you're assuming that Microsoft will give out the entire source tree to Windows 2000 to dozens of universities, but won't let the US Government, a MAJOR customer, take a peek?
Get real.
The people in the US Government who need to know if Windows is secure and backdoor-free most surely have access to all the source code they need.