The really, REALLY big flaw I see in this plan is that large parts of the web are coded to IE bugs. I'm also not convinced there's anything fundamentally wrong with IE, beyond the fact they've coded themselves into a corner, because if they start fixing bugs/improving standards support, sites will start breaking, and that everything works in IE is one of the most popular reasons I've heard, for people using it.
If IE is that much of a problem, wouldn't they be better off discontinuing updates for it, and shipping Firefox by default, which is at least getting enough momentum that sites are fixing themselves to work with, not to mention it wouldn't cost them anything?
Microsoft buying Opera would be terrible, we need more competition in the browser market, not less!
Also, I can just imagine them releasing Vista, and once everyone figures out that the blue-e has become a red-O, they then discover that half their favourite websites don't work any more (and in many cases, tell them to get lost because they're not running IE). Even if Microsoft gets ActiveX working with Opera, and lets assume that doing so is less time consuming than fixing the major problems with IE, there are still plenty of sites that work to bugs in IE (ranging from layout, to HTML parsing, to character set management on submission).
You would be much better off buying a console like this. The 360, starting at 300$, will be more powerful than any 2000$ gaming PC can be for many years. The video card itself is mower powerful than anything on the PC market, plus each game utilizes all 3 3.2ghz processors.
The graphics card appears to be a slightly boosted Radeon X1800, and can be expected to be beaten by top of the range PC cards in another 3-4 months. As for games using all three processors, not the launch games according to:
And, even if they were, did you miss the last decade of people screaming "Megahertz myth!
Don't get me wrong, the XBox 360 is a damn impressive system, and incredible value for money, but I don't think it's going to be staying ahead of top of the range PCs for more than 6-12 months...
for a nice simple example. Googling for "SVG example" is also a good start. Strangely, can't get any of the examples from carto.net that use JS to work...
> If you specify font sizes in points and image sizes in pixels then your web pages will look different at different screen resolutions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Web pages are meant to be designed to look good at a variety of resolutions (ideally, all, but in reality it's very hard not to have a minimum workable resolution around 100x100-ish). The problem is that a lot of web page designers are used to mediums where they specify how something is rendered, in comparison to HTML, where you specify what something is, and leave the client to figure out the rendering.
Although, if you're going to insist on resizing images, can I recommend Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)? Support isn't quite there yet (I think Firefox 1.5 supports it out of the box, while everything else needs an Adobe plugin), but it's the ideal way to have variable size graphics!
I'd be more convinced it's artificial if they'd managed to come even close to filling all the pre-orders here in the UK. As it is, my late October pre-order will probably get to me in early February, and anyone trying to get one at the moment is basically stuck risking eBay...
I've seen several hundred UKP of stuff disappear into the postal service. Worst was probably a set of Dreamcast games I'd bought, because they weren't insured and the company ended up posting them out again, but I've seen a dead processor disappear out of the post, only to be mysteriously delivered two weeks later, and a dead laptop outright disappear.
If it's worth something, insure it. Really big mail-order companies may find it most cost effective to replace small items that disappear, rather than insure them, but otherwise...
You forgot "...and asynchronous updates are useful". For example, one of the major applications I work on is a course management system. We could update the display of which students have uploaded work, in real time, but it would only be of use for those courses where submission has a short window (for example, lab-based courses), and even then I'm not convinced it would be used as a feature. Much of the system is like this; rarely updated data, which isn't that helpful to watch change in realtime anyway.
On the writing to the server side, there are a few more uses (particularly backing up work in progress), but everything I can think of is best only written back when delibrately saved...
That's exactly my position on Sony products at the moment.
A lot of people are likely to say "Well, that was Sony's music people, this is the cameras division, they're seperate", but until I see evidence that the higher-ups don't support the music division's use of DRM (or at least DRM rootkits with large holes in them that install irrespective of whether you accept the terms and conditions), I'm treating them the same.
And "We're really upset you caught us rootkitting your computer, and our sales have dropped through the floor, so we're going to stop until we think you've forgotten" is not my idea of repentent...
I'd more read it as targetted to the/.ers with severe long-term problems with their love/sex lives, than a serious "Are you bright enough to be getting laid frequently". Maybe that's just me, though...
I'm actually suggesting they tested them a little over-optimistically. Maybe at too low an ambient temperature, maybe not with realistic loads, not a clue, but I think at the end of the day there's a bunch of XBox 360s out there that are border-line on their heat output. Some of them will be sent back, some will end up in houses cold enough for it not to be an issue.
If those aren't being replaced/repaired, there's an issue, but so far I haven't heard anyone say they've sent an XBox 360 back and not had it replaced...
A responsible company would recall defective hardware, which seems to be the main thrust of the lawsuit.
I think the issue is that a lot of people are assuming every XBox 360 will have exactly the same heat output. This is fairly obviously not true - the CPU cores, GPU, and memory can vary in their heat output. The real problem seems to be Microsoft has been a little over-optimistic about what heat output maximum they'll accept. End result, they get a lot of returns, which is going to be costing them a fortune anyway.
If there's an issue with people following the instructions (don't put on carpet, leave space around it), it overheating and Microsoft not replacing it, okay, but this just sounds like the guy is hoping he can make himself some more money...
$200 sounds promising, and I'd be amazed at any release version above $300.
As for the controller... I'm wondering that too. I think it will be very pick up and play, but for those of us who have been using mice, keyboards and joypads for the last decade or two, I don't think a controller that's easy to learn to use, is anything special. Beyond that, I've heard suggestions it would be great for sword fighting, golf and fishing.
So... it's good for sword fighting? Don't get me wrong, I think this will rock for anyone that's picking up a console controller for the first time, and it's good that Nintendo are trying new things, but I don't think this is some miracle controller that we'll wonder how ever did without...
Maybe that's just what they want you to believe. In fact, CmdrTaco is an FBI agent, carefully manipulating stories on/. to give the impression that the FBI is incompetent, but not so incompetent that you become suspicious.
Clients can request individual packets are resent to them alone (works well if packet loss is very low).
Server continuously re-broadcasts data for a few days, so if you miss it the first time, you can get it the second/third/fourth/whateverth time (generally referred to as carousel).
If you want a secure browser, can I recommend Lynx?
Seriously though, the IE devs could either spend their time working on shiny new features, or they could work on security testing it, and as much as I hate to say it, most people will go for the version with more features and less security.
If you fancy a compromise though, disabling scripting will give you a lot more security (how many exploits in browers, over the last few years at least, haven't required Javascript/Active X?)...
Certainly, here in the UK, there are numerous stores selling XBox 360s by themselves (Game, Gameplay.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Play.com, Simply Games, etc.)...
Nobody could understand what sort of a house he must live in that he was unaware of how the box was actually likely to be used.
If you've got the money and space (and it's not even all that much money), there are some very nice TV racks that would provide plenty of space for a DVD player, set top box and games console beneath the TV, each of them with clear space around them for ventilation. On the other hand, as project manager, he _really_ should have looked into actual use case scenarios, rather than assuming whatever he had at home was typical...
(Should add, people assuming available space is pretty much a non-issue drives me up the wall, because it really is an issue here)
I'm quite happy to pay for good customer service, but I live in a town with a population of under 20,000, local shops have an extremely limited range. I shop online because it's a hell of a lot easier than having to do all my shopping at lunchtime or at the weekend (everything except the supermarkets is closed by 5:30pm, and most of them by 5pm). If I want more of a selection, I have to spend over an hour travelling (including return journey) to get to the nearest city.
Personally, I've had continually good experiences with Amazon, having been buying from them for over 7 years now. There's been a couple of times games haven't shipped in time to arrive on day of release, and I buy from a more reliable but also more expensive online shop if that's likely to bother me, but that's it...
Could you define flat file precisely? If you're thinking of storing your data in CSV format, for example, then no way is it even close to being a replacement for MySQL, for us.
We have 40-odd different tables, which have to be joined together for most queries. Several of them have over a hundred megabytes of data, meaning that without indexes searching the data would take an unspeakable amount of time. The ability to store UTF-8 in text fields is also a definite requirement for us. Thread safety is of course also an issue. If you really need the speed so much that it's worth writing all the code to handle UTF-8 safe, indexed, thread safe data, go for it, but for most of us it would be more or less re-inventing the wheel.
Beyond that, if we at some point decide we want to, say, use PostgreSQL, there is very little work beyond changing the URLs JDBC uses to connect to the database server, and changing the table LOCK/UNLOCK code to be transactional instead (which is on the to-do list anyway)...
Slashdot Mirror
The really, REALLY big flaw I see in this plan is that large parts of the web are coded to IE bugs. I'm also not convinced there's anything fundamentally wrong with IE, beyond the fact they've coded themselves into a corner, because if they start fixing bugs/improving standards support, sites will start breaking, and that everything works in IE is one of the most popular reasons I've heard, for people using it.
If IE is that much of a problem, wouldn't they be better off discontinuing updates for it, and shipping Firefox by default, which is at least getting enough momentum that sites are fixing themselves to work with, not to mention it wouldn't cost them anything?
Microsoft buying Opera would be terrible, we need more competition in the browser market, not less!
Also, I can just imagine them releasing Vista, and once everyone figures out that the blue-e has become a red-O, they then discover that half their favourite websites don't work any more (and in many cases, tell them to get lost because they're not running IE). Even if Microsoft gets ActiveX working with Opera, and lets assume that doing so is less time consuming than fixing the major problems with IE, there are still plenty of sites that work to bugs in IE (ranging from layout, to HTML parsing, to character set management on submission).
The graphics card appears to be a slightly boosted Radeon X1800, and can be expected to be beaten by top of the range PC cards in another 3-4 months. As for games using all three processors, not the launch games according to:
http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000890065328/
And, even if they were, did you miss the last decade of people screaming "Megahertz myth!
Don't get me wrong, the XBox 360 is a damn impressive system, and incredible value for money, but I don't think it's going to be staying ahead of top of the range PCs for more than 6-12 months...
FreakY with JS, I meant
I've always looked at the gore warning at the start and thought "That's not a warning, that's an advert!"
The Adobe test seems to be doing something freaking with JS... try:
t ml
http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/samples/shapes.sh
for a nice simple example. Googling for "SVG example" is also a good start. Strangely, can't get any of the examples from carto.net that use JS to work...
> If you specify font sizes in points and image sizes in pixels then your web pages will look different at different screen resolutions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Web pages are meant to be designed to look good at a variety of resolutions (ideally, all, but in reality it's very hard not to have a minimum workable resolution around 100x100-ish). The problem is that a lot of web page designers are used to mediums where they specify how something is rendered, in comparison to HTML, where you specify what something is, and leave the client to figure out the rendering.
Although, if you're going to insist on resizing images, can I recommend Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)? Support isn't quite there yet (I think Firefox 1.5 supports it out of the box, while everything else needs an Adobe plugin), but it's the ideal way to have variable size graphics!
I'd be more convinced it's artificial if they'd managed to come even close to filling all the pre-orders here in the UK. As it is, my late October pre-order will probably get to me in early February, and anyone trying to get one at the moment is basically stuck risking eBay...
I've seen several hundred UKP of stuff disappear into the postal service. Worst was probably a set of Dreamcast games I'd bought, because they weren't insured and the company ended up posting them out again, but I've seen a dead processor disappear out of the post, only to be mysteriously delivered two weeks later, and a dead laptop outright disappear.
If it's worth something, insure it. Really big mail-order companies may find it most cost effective to replace small items that disappear, rather than insure them, but otherwise...
You forgot "...and asynchronous updates are useful". For example, one of the major applications I work on is a course management system. We could update the display of which students have uploaded work, in real time, but it would only be of use for those courses where submission has a short window (for example, lab-based courses), and even then I'm not convinced it would be used as a feature. Much of the system is like this; rarely updated data, which isn't that helpful to watch change in realtime anyway.
On the writing to the server side, there are a few more uses (particularly backing up work in progress), but everything I can think of is best only written back when delibrately saved...
That's exactly my position on Sony products at the moment.
A lot of people are likely to say "Well, that was Sony's music people, this is the cameras division, they're seperate", but until I see evidence that the higher-ups don't support the music division's use of DRM (or at least DRM rootkits with large holes in them that install irrespective of whether you accept the terms and conditions), I'm treating them the same.
And "We're really upset you caught us rootkitting your computer, and our sales have dropped through the floor, so we're going to stop until we think you've forgotten" is not my idea of repentent...
Hadn't expected everyone to think this is so funny, but as they are, should point out that's my flatmate's joke originally...
Oh, oh, and:
What happens if I haven't set my computer up in such a dumb way as to delibrately allow web sites to scan my HD.
I'm twitchy enough about letting Javascript run on my system, I avoid Active X like the plague...
"Your registry has 42 errors!"
:)
Yikes, I'm on a Mac, I'm suprised it's only 42
I'd more read it as targetted to the /.ers with severe long-term problems with their love/sex lives, than a serious "Are you bright enough to be getting laid frequently". Maybe that's just me, though...
More or less.
I'm actually suggesting they tested them a little over-optimistically. Maybe at too low an ambient temperature, maybe not with realistic loads, not a clue, but I think at the end of the day there's a bunch of XBox 360s out there that are border-line on their heat output. Some of them will be sent back, some will end up in houses cold enough for it not to be an issue.
If those aren't being replaced/repaired, there's an issue, but so far I haven't heard anyone say they've sent an XBox 360 back and not had it replaced...
I think the issue is that a lot of people are assuming every XBox 360 will have exactly the same heat output. This is fairly obviously not true - the CPU cores, GPU, and memory can vary in their heat output. The real problem seems to be Microsoft has been a little over-optimistic about what heat output maximum they'll accept. End result, they get a lot of returns, which is going to be costing them a fortune anyway.
If there's an issue with people following the instructions (don't put on carpet, leave space around it), it overheating and Microsoft not replacing it, okay, but this just sounds like the guy is hoping he can make himself some more money...
$200 sounds promising, and I'd be amazed at any release version above $300.
0 01P4YN
As for the controller... I'm wondering that too. I think it will be very pick up and play, but for those of us who have been using mice, keyboards and joypads for the last decade or two, I don't think a controller that's easy to learn to use, is anything special. Beyond that, I've heard suggestions it would be great for sword fighting, golf and fishing.
Fishing controllers are nothing new:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
Same for golf:
http://www.qmotions.com/
So... it's good for sword fighting? Don't get me wrong, I think this will rock for anyone that's picking up a console controller for the first time, and it's good that Nintendo are trying new things, but I don't think this is some miracle controller that we'll wonder how ever did without...
Maybe that's just what they want you to believe. In fact, CmdrTaco is an FBI agent, carefully manipulating stories on /. to give the impression that the FBI is incompetent, but not so incompetent that you become suspicious.
:)
</tinfoilhat>
Various possible solutions:
Clients can request individual packets are resent to them alone (works well if packet loss is very low).
Server continuously re-broadcasts data for a few days, so if you miss it the first time, you can get it the second/third/fourth/whateverth time (generally referred to as carousel).
Forward Error Codes: http://rfc3453.x42.com/
If you want a secure browser, can I recommend Lynx?
Seriously though, the IE devs could either spend their time working on shiny new features, or they could work on security testing it, and as much as I hate to say it, most people will go for the version with more features and less security.
If you fancy a compromise though, disabling scripting will give you a lot more security (how many exploits in browers, over the last few years at least, haven't required Javascript/Active X?)...
Certainly, here in the UK, there are numerous stores selling XBox 360s by themselves (Game, Gameplay.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Play.com, Simply Games, etc.)...
If you've got the money and space (and it's not even all that much money), there are some very nice TV racks that would provide plenty of space for a DVD player, set top box and games console beneath the TV, each of them with clear space around them for ventilation. On the other hand, as project manager, he _really_ should have looked into actual use case scenarios, rather than assuming whatever he had at home was typical...
(Should add, people assuming available space is pretty much a non-issue drives me up the wall, because it really is an issue here)
I'm quite happy to pay for good customer service, but I live in a town with a population of under 20,000, local shops have an extremely limited range. I shop online because it's a hell of a lot easier than having to do all my shopping at lunchtime or at the weekend (everything except the supermarkets is closed by 5:30pm, and most of them by 5pm). If I want more of a selection, I have to spend over an hour travelling (including return journey) to get to the nearest city.
Personally, I've had continually good experiences with Amazon, having been buying from them for over 7 years now. There's been a couple of times games haven't shipped in time to arrive on day of release, and I buy from a more reliable but also more expensive online shop if that's likely to bother me, but that's it...
Could you define flat file precisely? If you're thinking of storing your data in CSV format, for example, then no way is it even close to being a replacement for MySQL, for us.
We have 40-odd different tables, which have to be joined together for most queries. Several of them have over a hundred megabytes of data, meaning that without indexes searching the data would take an unspeakable amount of time. The ability to store UTF-8 in text fields is also a definite requirement for us. Thread safety is of course also an issue. If you really need the speed so much that it's worth writing all the code to handle UTF-8 safe, indexed, thread safe data, go for it, but for most of us it would be more or less re-inventing the wheel.
Beyond that, if we at some point decide we want to, say, use PostgreSQL, there is very little work beyond changing the URLs JDBC uses to connect to the database server, and changing the table LOCK/UNLOCK code to be transactional instead (which is on the to-do list anyway)...