Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, I should have caveated that by saying that it's not legal if you're *NOT* affiliated with a university. If you are student, faculty or staff, though, it's a great deal. I'm not sure what the restrictions are WRT producing commercially released code w/ it, though, so I'd look into that before buying.
I ordered my copy from Genesis. You have to send them proof that you work at or attend a university, but they seem legit.
Re:Mod parent up
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Microsoft is trying REAL hard not to make it seem like they are re-inventing Java, whereas in fact they are reinventing Java.
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
Secondly, the real advantage of.NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your.NET programs. Those are hardly minor advances. Java has had a six-year head start, not to mention a vast amount of hype, and if it's the better technology, it'll hang in there. If developers like the.NET stuff better, they'll use that. In all likelihood, there will be a lot of different competing languages which will be good at different things. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.
Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I ordered an academic copy of VS Professional for $99. If you're a student, have one in your family or can find a way to finagle a student ID (or take a class at a local university), it's an excellent way to get a legit copy for a very competitive price. The individual languages are cheaper still.
Yeah, but that's not the point. You only get one controller with the GC as well, and the remote isn't necessary to play games.
Yes, the memory cards for both consoles do cost money, but my point is that you don't *need* them for the XBox unless you want to take a save game with you which, let's face it, most of us can do without. The HDD speed is nice as well.
I'm not saying that the price differential is nil -- all I'm saying is that it's a bit overblown to say that a GameCube is complete at $199 while the XBox costs "twice as much" (as some people have claimed). They're both very cool, but expensive, toys.
Cost of a GameCube: $199
Cost of two memory cards: $50
Cost of an XBox: $299
No memory cards necessary
Point is, those are really requirements for game playing. If you want to buy the remote, you can, but it's not required to make the unit functional as a game machine. GameCube doesn't give you a DVD option. Ergo, the price differential to use the machines for games is about $50.
"Einstein"... very clever... you come up with that yourself? Can't wait to hear what you come up with next.
(the Coleco dual controllers ([pic here [atarihq.com]] ruled, you could put your hand INTO the controller and use all your fingers and your palms too... but those were the days).
Dear god, did you ever use those things? You had to have monster hands and Pinkies of Steel(tm) just to manipulate them. I had receivers in Super Action Football who never saw a pass because my preteen pinkies couldn't get the button mashed down hard enough (and "mash" is the only word to describe the play in those buttons).
Dunno... a friend of mine bought a GC and had to buy two of those teeny 512Mb memory cards just for the four games he had (Madden is quite the memory card hog). That brought his purchase to $250. So for $50 more you can have a more powerful system that has ethernet built-in and can play DVDs AND outputs true Dolby 5.1 audio (not Pro Logic II) and doesn't require memory cards. Hmmmmm....
I'm not saying the GC isn't a very powerful system. It's just that the price differential isn't as great as people make it out to be once you add in those $%#^@ memory cards.
Linux users wouldn't stand for a browser that had to be built into the kernel. Except for Red Hat and Mandrake idiots, but then again I don't classify them as 'Linux users'.
IE isn't built into the kernel. It's built into explorer.exe, which isn't dissimilar from having Konquerer built into KDE.
You need to go back in time, to a day when people purchased software. when netscape made money off there browser, and it was in every software store.
Oh, come now... Netscape NEVER made money of of its browser. Their business model was predicated on people getting the browser for "free" (even though they asked for money, you could always download it for "educational" use) and increasing the market for Web servers which they DID sell for a tidy sum.
Netscape's trying to revise history here. They got to 80+% marketshare by giving away their product, then went for two years without updating it and are now trying to blame Microsoft because their marketshare has taken a nosedive. This case has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with cash.
The Unbreakable Database
Can't break it. Can't break in. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails. What's more, Oracle holds 14 international security evaluations. IBM DB2 has none. Microsoft SQL Server has only one.
If you *can* break it, which clearly you can, their marketing campaign is untrue. Saying "read the fine print" is making excuses for typical marketingese (or, more likely, Ellisonese). If they still try to say that 9i is "unbreakable," they'll be a laughingstock.
GF3 has been a BTO PowerMac option for a whole year now (that card was actually DEBUTED on the Mac)
Not true. Like the Pioneer DVD-R drive, the GeForce3 was ANNOUNCED first on the Mac, but both shipped first on the PC. Compaq had their DVD-R PC shipping well before Apple did, and I could go to the CompUSA and buy a GeForce3 off the shelf before Apple's machines ever shipped.
No, the reason hardware prices go down is because hardware companies have competition
That's part of it, sure, but don't oversimplify. You can't really compare a manufacturing cost with an intellectual capital cost. Maintaining a stable of good programmers is a fixed -- or growing -- expense. Physical goods get cheaper to produce as demand goes down and manufacturing becomes more refined.
Competition is part of it, but you can't very easily compare the cost of a physical good with the time of a programmer. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. That's all I'm saying.
It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want.
So Microsoft is responsible because people are satisfied with their computers? I don't think that's really what you were getting at.
As for the interview, where's the beef? It's fine to sit and grouse about how Microsoft has "killed" the PC market (whatevah), but promising set-top boxes and interactive hoo-hah isn't going to impress anyone these days. Bigger companies than Red Hat have Ahab-ed that whale, and he doesn't strike me as particularly visionary.
It's interesting to see how prices for hardware continually drops while software prices (Non-free as in beer software) maintain or increase in price.
This argument gets thrown around all the time, and it's never made much sense to me.
Obviously, the reason hardware prices have gone down is because the cost of building computer components goes down over time. On the other hand the cost of expert software programmers has tended to go up because you're paying for a salary rather than a physical component. You really can't compare physical processes to intellectual resources.
The point is that anybody who happens to think that "I wish I could change function X in Word, because it isn't powerful enough for me" is in no way allowed to do that. Just because you will never exercise a liberty does not mean that it's okay to take that liberty away. Slippery slope, and all that.
Sure you can. You just have to use VBA rather than hacking the source of the program itself. People have made all kinds of modifications to Word via a robust and well-documented API. I'd argue that's more useful for most people than monkeying around with the source code (which makes the software unsupportable, from a Microsoft point of view -- "Yeah, I've been getting fonky crashes since I tweaked the spell-check algorithm....").
MS has a 30 day return policy on anything you buy. I bought Office XP, didn't like it, sent it back to MS, got a check. Even got to keep the free Iomega CD-RW and Zip Drive that Staples was packing with it.
You have to send it back to them, but you can get your money back if you buy it at retail.
Er... that's really open minded. Why don't you go see the movie if you want to, or don't go see it if you don't want to?
Why does everything on/. have to become some kind of political crusade where everything is either genius or drek?
It'll probably be a decent movie, but it probably won't live up to your expectations. It'll probably be better than some movies you've seen and worse than others. It's a movie, deal with it.
"Organize a planned flop"? Pleeeeze. Organize it with yourself.
Sure it SOUNDS similar, but that's not the issue in copywrites.
Sure it is. Copyright protects against potential confusion over a registered name. Just because a piece of graphics editing software is named Fotoshoppe doesn't mean Adobe isn't fully within its rights to sue you something wicked.
Tell you what: why don't you open up a restaurant called MacDunnulds and see how many milliseconds it takes for Mac the Knife to haul your I'm-so-clever ass into the courtroom.
The latest Media Player won't play MP3s at anything better than 56kbps, which sounds something like singing underwater over a telephone.
Uh... bullshit. As much as you'd like to believe otherwise, the latest Media Player will play any MP3 you want. If you install a third party MP3 encoder, it'll encode any MP3 you want at any data rate the encoder supports. Might want to recheck the facts there.
SmartSuite Millennium Edition came with a laptop I just bought.. and you can still buy it at retail.
Plus, this is from the Lotus Web site: The next release of SmartSuite for Windows will be SmartSuite Millennium Edition R9.7 (available in international English late this year, with other language versions to follow). This release will work with Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows ME, and Windows XP. SmartSuite 9.7 for Windows will include an improved installation module, and numerous quality improvements. In early 2002 we will also offer SmartSuite 1.7 for OS/2, which will also include numerous quality improvements.
I am really interested in this because for three years or so there were four office products you could choose from: Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works.
Yeah, today there's only Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office, StarOffice, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works. Where's the government when you need 'em?
$129 for OS X is, by definition, an upgrade. You can only install it on Macintoshes and you can't buy a Macintosh without OS n, so anything you'd buy in the store would have to qualify as an upgrade.
Invalid argument. The $99 price is for an upgrade. In order to qualify for it, you already have to have software that runs your hardware, that browses the Web, that provides your networking, etc. Is it your position that only an outrageous cheapskate wouldn't pay $200 to acquire these things for the first time? Show me how upgrading from WinME to WinXP is obviously worth $100 to all but the outrageous cheapskates among us.
I think you're just being a bit pedantic there. Almost no one pays $200 to acquire the software the first time -- it's usually amortized into the cost of a new PC (and, no, it doesn't add $200 to the cost -- Dell machines with Linux cost about the same as those with Windows). Just about everyone who purchases Windows buys the upgrade copy which is $100, and if they don't want the new features (listen carefully...) they don't have to upgrade.
Now, listen to what you've just said, and imagine only paying half of what you paid or even gettting all that for free. That's what competition can do for the consumer.
Just because something's free doesn't mean that it's superior. In the real world, developers demand to be (and should be) paid for their services and the only way to reliably do that is charge for software. It's the only software business model that has been proven to work profitably over time.
You wouldn't depend purely on the kindness of others for your food or your shelter, nor should you do so for your software.
Besides, we've seen what happens when competition drives prices below what the market will sustain: companies go out of business and the whole cycle starts over again.
Getting everything for free isn't the answer... getting it for what it's worth is what drives our economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I should have caveated that by saying that it's not legal if you're *NOT* affiliated with a university. If you are student, faculty or staff, though, it's a great deal. I'm not sure what the restrictions are WRT producing commercially released code w/ it, though, so I'd look into that before buying.
I ordered my copy from Genesis. You have to send them proof that you work at or attend a university, but they seem legit.
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
Secondly, the real advantage of .NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your .NET programs. Those are hardly minor advances. Java has had a six-year head start, not to mention a vast amount of hype, and if it's the better technology, it'll hang in there. If developers like the .NET stuff better, they'll use that. In all likelihood, there will be a lot of different competing languages which will be good at different things. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.
I ordered an academic copy of VS Professional for $99. If you're a student, have one in your family or can find a way to finagle a student ID (or take a class at a local university), it's an excellent way to get a legit copy for a very competitive price. The individual languages are cheaper still.
Just to clarify, the ti4600 is $399, while the ti4400 is $299. The 4600 has DDR RAM at 650MHz while the 4200 is non-DDR at 550MHz.
Yeah, but that's not the point. You only get one controller with the GC as well, and the remote isn't necessary to play games.
Yes, the memory cards for both consoles do cost money, but my point is that you don't *need* them for the XBox unless you want to take a save game with you which, let's face it, most of us can do without. The HDD speed is nice as well.
I'm not saying that the price differential is nil -- all I'm saying is that it's a bit overblown to say that a GameCube is complete at $199 while the XBox costs "twice as much" (as some people have claimed). They're both very cool, but expensive, toys.
Cost of a GameCube: $199
Cost of two memory cards: $50
Cost of an XBox: $299
No memory cards necessary
Point is, those are really requirements for game playing. If you want to buy the remote, you can, but it's not required to make the unit functional as a game machine. GameCube doesn't give you a DVD option. Ergo, the price differential to use the machines for games is about $50.
"Einstein"... very clever... you come up with that yourself? Can't wait to hear what you come up with next.
Dear god, did you ever use those things? You had to have monster hands and Pinkies of Steel(tm) just to manipulate them. I had receivers in Super Action Football who never saw a pass because my preteen pinkies couldn't get the button mashed down hard enough (and "mash" is the only word to describe the play in those buttons).
Now the Epyx 500xj... now THAT was a joystick...
Dunno... a friend of mine bought a GC and had to buy two of those teeny 512Mb memory cards just for the four games he had (Madden is quite the memory card hog). That brought his purchase to $250. So for $50 more you can have a more powerful system that has ethernet built-in and can play DVDs AND outputs true Dolby 5.1 audio (not Pro Logic II) and doesn't require memory cards. Hmmmmm....
I'm not saying the GC isn't a very powerful system. It's just that the price differential isn't as great as people make it out to be once you add in those $%#^@ memory cards.
IE isn't built into the kernel. It's built into explorer.exe, which isn't dissimilar from having Konquerer built into KDE.
Oh, come now... Netscape NEVER made money of of its browser. Their business model was predicated on people getting the browser for "free" (even though they asked for money, you could always download it for "educational" use) and increasing the market for Web servers which they DID sell for a tidy sum.
Netscape's trying to revise history here. They got to 80+% marketshare by giving away their product, then went for two years without updating it and are now trying to blame Microsoft because their marketshare has taken a nosedive. This case has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with cash.
From http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/ index.html?content.html
The Unbreakable Database Can't break it. Can't break in. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails. What's more, Oracle holds 14 international security evaluations. IBM DB2 has none. Microsoft SQL Server has only one.
If you *can* break it, which clearly you can, their marketing campaign is untrue. Saying "read the fine print" is making excuses for typical marketingese (or, more likely, Ellisonese). If they still try to say that 9i is "unbreakable," they'll be a laughingstock.
Not true. Like the Pioneer DVD-R drive, the GeForce3 was ANNOUNCED first on the Mac, but both shipped first on the PC. Compaq had their DVD-R PC shipping well before Apple did, and I could go to the CompUSA and buy a GeForce3 off the shelf before Apple's machines ever shipped.
Don't believe the hype!
That's part of it, sure, but don't oversimplify. You can't really compare a manufacturing cost with an intellectual capital cost. Maintaining a stable of good programmers is a fixed -- or growing -- expense. Physical goods get cheaper to produce as demand goes down and manufacturing becomes more refined.
Competition is part of it, but you can't very easily compare the cost of a physical good with the time of a programmer. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. That's all I'm saying.
So Microsoft is responsible because people are satisfied with their computers? I don't think that's really what you were getting at.
As for the interview, where's the beef? It's fine to sit and grouse about how Microsoft has "killed" the PC market (whatevah), but promising set-top boxes and interactive hoo-hah isn't going to impress anyone these days. Bigger companies than Red Hat have Ahab-ed that whale, and he doesn't strike me as particularly visionary.
This argument gets thrown around all the time, and it's never made much sense to me.
Obviously, the reason hardware prices have gone down is because the cost of building computer components goes down over time. On the other hand the cost of expert software programmers has tended to go up because you're paying for a salary rather than a physical component. You really can't compare physical processes to intellectual resources.
Sure you can. You just have to use VBA rather than hacking the source of the program itself. People have made all kinds of modifications to Word via a robust and well-documented API. I'd argue that's more useful for most people than monkeying around with the source code (which makes the software unsupportable, from a Microsoft point of view -- "Yeah, I've been getting fonky crashes since I tweaked the spell-check algorithm....").
So buy one and demand that Apple give you back $129 for the OS you're not using.
MS has a 30 day return policy on anything you buy. I bought Office XP, didn't like it, sent it back to MS, got a check. Even got to keep the free Iomega CD-RW and Zip Drive that Staples was packing with it.
You have to send it back to them, but you can get your money back if you buy it at retail.
Er... that's really open minded. Why don't you go see the movie if you want to, or don't go see it if you don't want to?
/. have to become some kind of political crusade where everything is either genius or drek?
Why does everything on
It'll probably be a decent movie, but it probably won't live up to your expectations. It'll probably be better than some movies you've seen and worse than others. It's a movie, deal with it.
"Organize a planned flop"? Pleeeeze. Organize it with yourself.
Sure it is. Copyright protects against potential confusion over a registered name. Just because a piece of graphics editing software is named Fotoshoppe doesn't mean Adobe isn't fully within its rights to sue you something wicked.
Tell you what: why don't you open up a restaurant called MacDunnulds and see how many milliseconds it takes for Mac the Knife to haul your I'm-so-clever ass into the courtroom.
Uh... bullshit. As much as you'd like to believe otherwise, the latest Media Player will play any MP3 you want. If you install a third party MP3 encoder, it'll encode any MP3 you want at any data rate the encoder supports. Might want to recheck the facts there.
Plus, this is from the Lotus Web site: The next release of SmartSuite for Windows will be SmartSuite Millennium Edition R9.7 (available in international English late this year, with other language versions to follow). This release will work with Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows ME, and Windows XP. SmartSuite 9.7 for Windows will include an improved installation module, and numerous quality improvements. In early 2002 we will also offer SmartSuite 1.7 for OS/2, which will also include numerous quality improvements.
Yeah, today there's only Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office, StarOffice, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works. Where's the government when you need 'em?
Invalid argument. The $99 price is for an upgrade. In order to qualify for it, you already have to have software that runs your hardware, that browses the Web, that provides your networking, etc. Is it your position that only an outrageous cheapskate wouldn't pay $200 to acquire these things for the first time? Show me how upgrading from WinME to WinXP is obviously worth $100 to all but the outrageous cheapskates among us.
I think you're just being a bit pedantic there. Almost no one pays $200 to acquire the software the first time -- it's usually amortized into the cost of a new PC (and, no, it doesn't add $200 to the cost -- Dell machines with Linux cost about the same as those with Windows). Just about everyone who purchases Windows buys the upgrade copy which is $100, and if they don't want the new features (listen carefully...) they don't have to upgrade.
Just because something's free doesn't mean that it's superior. In the real world, developers demand to be (and should be) paid for their services and the only way to reliably do that is charge for software. It's the only software business model that has been proven to work profitably over time.
You wouldn't depend purely on the kindness of others for your food or your shelter, nor should you do so for your software.
Besides, we've seen what happens when competition drives prices below what the market will sustain: companies go out of business and the whole cycle starts over again.
Getting everything for free isn't the answer... getting it for what it's worth is what drives our economy.