And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies.
You mean like PARC's development of the laser printer, introduced in 1977 as a commercial product and making $1 billion a year for Xerox by 1986?
What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
This "new cultural revolution" you're talking about is not the Cultural Revolution event in the 60's. A new cultural revolution does not erase history. And it does not somehow make paper and compasses inventions of Modern China's culture.
The US government appointing delegates with huge powers to regulate and oversee entire swaths of industry with very little personal accountability (heaven forbid!), and the irony in calling them tsars.
Wait a sec. Oversee and regulate entire swatch of industry? Really? How?
Seems to me the post is more about going "say guys - this would be a really Good Idea if we all did it this way." To which some will agree and adjust accordingly. Others will go "a mighty fine idea you got there" and continue trudging along in the same direction as always. And most won't even be aware that any of this is going on.
Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.
I used to dual boot. Then I got a few games working on the Linux side. I didn't have to reboot to play. I could just flip over to a new virtual desktop, goof off for awhile, then go back to what I was doing. I didn't have to interupt anything on my Linux system. I didn't have to waste drive space for a "game" partition. And eventually, the Windows partition went away and never came back.
Those times that I do need Windows for work involves a VM. I don't play games in Windows. But then, the days of being a "heavy gamer" are behind me. Now I burn spare cycles in WoW.:P
Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.
Just for giggles, I fired up the 'ole Castle Wolfenstein version of Enemy Territory. Popped up, full sound. No biggie. Most other old stuff is archived or OSS that's been updated - I'll have to dig around for the older stuff and see what it does.
I wonder how well Doom would work on a WinXP box? Not that I'm trying to obscure Linux's faults by pointing at Windows. However, Windows is the PC gaming platform of choice at this point so it represents what the industry and players are used to.
Having said all that - I'm probably just lucky. I know Linux's sound environment has been horribly lacking for so very long. There's great support on various forums to make things work. But one shouldn't have to jump through hoops to do so. Now days, I rarely have to jump through a hoop. Unless, of course, I'm dealing with an app that's from the Bad Old Days of OSS-is-the-only-choice.
Yet oddly enough, my copies of NWN, Q3, and UT2004 didn't have problems. Weird. Maybe they know something others don't? (heck - even Bioware needed to learn a few more things).
Actually - my attitude was to get you moving along to your point. Baiting for imaginary numbers seems silly. Thanks for getting on track.
You're right that I took a cheap shot at CEOs. Let me rephrase. If I pay X% more to "buy American", will it really go to American paychecks or to the company's profit margin?
As an aside, the CEO compensation is still interesting. The impetus is being placed on the American consumer. Yet the CEO's salary (in our admittedly inaccurate example) is worth the salary of another 2,000 employees. How much do consumers have to pay to make up that kind of paycheck power?
If I pay the price of an American made product, will that extra expense make it back to my pocket on my paycheck? Or will it end up in the CEO's pocket?
I know what you mean. Here I am stationed in Iraq, I've got people going out every day who are possibly going to get really killed. We find explosives, get shot at, you name it. It's all VERY real. But there are enough people who are so totally insulated from this sort of thing that the EVE Online game is vastly more important to them.
If all the Eve players involved found themselves in a melt-down of their country's society, they'd likely find the mechanisms of the game suddenly a lot less important / interesting. They would adjust to what's going on around them. But thankfully for them, they're not in Iraq or a situation like it. And so for them, life goes on. Conflict is simulated; emulated stress to feed whatever wiring that makes us crave these things while living our safe lives.
It's all a matter of perspective.
During my deployment in Kuwait, we had steaks every Wed. Steak Night. We got out our self-made BBQ grills. The NCOs kicked out the TCN cooks and did the honors themselves. If you wanted A-1 sauce, you came early. But everyone got a steak.
We counted how many weeks we had left in our tour by Steak Nights. When MLK Day fell on a Steak Night and the Chaplin announced a special meal of fried chicken (kid you not) - there was a feeling of mutiny. The Squadron Commander addressed us the following Friday to assure us that never again would we miss a Steak Night as long as steaks were available. There was cheering.
Back in the real world, I realized that the steaks weren't all that good. And while I still like a good steak on occasion - my life doesn't revolve around them.
But you never conquer Orgrimmar. Or Stormwind. Or anywhere. You just kind of thrash around in someone's area for awhile until they kick you out or you get bored. And by "someone's area", I mean people from whatever faction is from that city. Nothing in Classic WoW is ever owned. Nothing in WoW is player built.
Miguel has smacked around this stupid argument before. Mono is a relatively small effort. There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba and the myriad Exchange clients, which are a far bigger threat to Microsoft's revenue streams. Mono, if anything, improves their revenue streams, because it makes.NET more feasible for some developers who otherwise wouldn't consider it.
In the past, Microsoft has "cut off the air supply" of competitors. That's difficult to do with Linux as it is less a single-sourced product line than amorphous multi-vendor entity. Microsoft's strategy then has been to try and pigeon-hole Linux. But how to do that? You need to become a gate-keeper.
That's the fear over Mono. Gain developers. Gain support. Develop a dependency. Pull out the patents and seize the keys to that dependency. You are now the gatekeeper.
So what about SAMBA 4 and Exchange compatible clients? Don't they also support Microsoft products? That's win-win too, right? Surely they wouldn't go after those. Or would they? Who knows. Ballmer's threats lack detail.
And there's the key. You want to make your "everybody wins" technology widely accepted? Stifle the threats from a CEO who's continues to generate distrust in your company. No tin foil hat required.
Silverlight isn't that common though. Yeah - Microsoft got a coup with the 2008 Olympic games. But these are still few and far between. It might be different sometime in the future. But it's hardly a requirement here and now.
I'd think the Vegas odds would be in the direction you say. But it's no given. And for right now, putting Silverlight in your requirements is simply drinking MS' Kool-aid.
Since when is Silverlight a requirement for web browsing? Wishful thinking on Microsoft's part aside, I can see someone demanding Flash. But really... Silverlight?
Take a strong leader with vision and deprive him of the people that can deliver the technology to realize that vision and you also have an unworkable situation.
I'm not saying one is any better than the other. I see the partnership of Jobs and Woz as very symbiotic; Apple wouldn't have existed without either of them. And the computer world could have been drastically different (although debatable - if it weren't for the Apple II would the TRS-80 or Commodore PET been the "VisiCalc Machine"? They were inferior to the AppleII.). But if you're going to pass out credit for doing things, best to be sure you're handing the right credit to the right folks.
Well - Woz's stuff worked. Jobs was able to bring it to the world (and realized it was something the world should be interested in - whether they were aware at the time or not). Apple was really Jobs' thing that he had to talk Woz in to. Of course, Jobs would have nothing to work with if Woz didn't design the stuff in the first place. Very symbiotic.
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You mean like the actual fucking person the article is about? Oh wait, Wikipedia doesn't consider the actual fucking person to be a "primary source"!
And therein lies Wikipedia's problem.
Because people never lie. Not even about themselves.
If you want a well-researched and well-written encyclopedia, go buy the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Whether the quality of the Encyclopedia Britannica is to the level you claim (there's been doubts raised before), it's still an encyclopedia.
And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies.
You mean like PARC's development of the laser printer, introduced in 1977 as a commercial product and making $1 billion a year for Xerox by 1986?
What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
This "new cultural revolution" you're talking about is not the Cultural Revolution event in the 60's. A new cultural revolution does not erase history. And it does not somehow make paper and compasses inventions of Modern China's culture.
Didn't all these things happen before the Cultural Revolution?
A chair. With a hand-written note saying "Gonna fucking kill you." All very valuable IP.
The US government appointing delegates with huge powers to regulate and oversee entire swaths of industry with very little personal accountability (heaven forbid!), and the irony in calling them tsars.
Wait a sec. Oversee and regulate entire swatch of industry? Really? How?
Seems to me the post is more about going "say guys - this would be a really Good Idea if we all did it this way." To which some will agree and adjust accordingly. Others will go "a mighty fine idea you got there" and continue trudging along in the same direction as always. And most won't even be aware that any of this is going on.
And that's just in Government IT.
Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.
I used to dual boot. Then I got a few games working on the Linux side. I didn't have to reboot to play. I could just flip over to a new virtual desktop, goof off for awhile, then go back to what I was doing. I didn't have to interupt anything on my Linux system. I didn't have to waste drive space for a "game" partition. And eventually, the Windows partition went away and never came back.
Those times that I do need Windows for work involves a VM. I don't play games in Windows. But then, the days of being a "heavy gamer" are behind me. Now I burn spare cycles in WoW. :P
Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.
Just for giggles, I fired up the 'ole Castle Wolfenstein version of Enemy Territory. Popped up, full sound. No biggie. Most other old stuff is archived or OSS that's been updated - I'll have to dig around for the older stuff and see what it does.
I wonder how well Doom would work on a WinXP box? Not that I'm trying to obscure Linux's faults by pointing at Windows. However, Windows is the PC gaming platform of choice at this point so it represents what the industry and players are used to.
Having said all that - I'm probably just lucky. I know Linux's sound environment has been horribly lacking for so very long. There's great support on various forums to make things work. But one shouldn't have to jump through hoops to do so. Now days, I rarely have to jump through a hoop. Unless, of course, I'm dealing with an app that's from the Bad Old Days of OSS-is-the-only-choice.
Yet oddly enough, my copies of NWN, Q3, and UT2004 didn't have problems. Weird. Maybe they know something others don't? (heck - even Bioware needed to learn a few more things).
Actually - my attitude was to get you moving along to your point. Baiting for imaginary numbers seems silly. Thanks for getting on track.
You're right that I took a cheap shot at CEOs. Let me rephrase. If I pay X% more to "buy American", will it really go to American paychecks or to the company's profit margin?
As an aside, the CEO compensation is still interesting. The impetus is being placed on the American consumer. Yet the CEO's salary (in our admittedly inaccurate example) is worth the salary of another 2,000 employees. How much do consumers have to pay to make up that kind of paycheck power?
One can spend all day coming up with guessed percentages and averages to support an argument. If you've got real numbers, produce them.
If I pay the price of an American made product, will that extra expense make it back to my pocket on my paycheck? Or will it end up in the CEO's pocket?
I know what you mean. Here I am stationed in Iraq, I've got people going out every day who are possibly going to get really killed. We find explosives, get shot at, you name it. It's all VERY real. But there are enough people who are so totally insulated from this sort of thing that the EVE Online game is vastly more important to them.
If all the Eve players involved found themselves in a melt-down of their country's society, they'd likely find the mechanisms of the game suddenly a lot less important / interesting. They would adjust to what's going on around them. But thankfully for them, they're not in Iraq or a situation like it. And so for them, life goes on. Conflict is simulated; emulated stress to feed whatever wiring that makes us crave these things while living our safe lives.
It's all a matter of perspective.
During my deployment in Kuwait, we had steaks every Wed. Steak Night. We got out our self-made BBQ grills. The NCOs kicked out the TCN cooks and did the honors themselves. If you wanted A-1 sauce, you came early. But everyone got a steak.
We counted how many weeks we had left in our tour by Steak Nights. When MLK Day fell on a Steak Night and the Chaplin announced a special meal of fried chicken (kid you not) - there was a feeling of mutiny. The Squadron Commander addressed us the following Friday to assure us that never again would we miss a Steak Night as long as steaks were available. There was cheering.
Back in the real world, I realized that the steaks weren't all that good. And while I still like a good steak on occasion - my life doesn't revolve around them.
But you never conquer Orgrimmar. Or Stormwind. Or anywhere. You just kind of thrash around in someone's area for awhile until they kick you out or you get bored. And by "someone's area", I mean people from whatever faction is from that city. Nothing in Classic WoW is ever owned. Nothing in WoW is player built.
How has this post impacted that hobby?
Small clarification: they're keen on OSS that's licensed in a way that it can be a gift to them.
Miguel has smacked around this stupid argument before. Mono is a relatively small effort. There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba and the myriad Exchange clients, which are a far bigger threat to Microsoft's revenue streams. Mono, if anything, improves their revenue streams, because it makes .NET more feasible for some developers who otherwise wouldn't consider it.
In the past, Microsoft has "cut off the air supply" of competitors. That's difficult to do with Linux as it is less a single-sourced product line than amorphous multi-vendor entity. Microsoft's strategy then has been to try and pigeon-hole Linux. But how to do that? You need to become a gate-keeper.
That's the fear over Mono. Gain developers. Gain support. Develop a dependency. Pull out the patents and seize the keys to that dependency. You are now the gatekeeper.
So what about SAMBA 4 and Exchange compatible clients? Don't they also support Microsoft products? That's win-win too, right? Surely they wouldn't go after those. Or would they? Who knows. Ballmer's threats lack detail.
And there's the key. You want to make your "everybody wins" technology widely accepted? Stifle the threats from a CEO who's continues to generate distrust in your company. No tin foil hat required.
Silverlight isn't that common though. Yeah - Microsoft got a coup with the 2008 Olympic games. But these are still few and far between. It might be different sometime in the future. But it's hardly a requirement here and now.
I'd think the Vegas odds would be in the direction you say. But it's no given. And for right now, putting Silverlight in your requirements is simply drinking MS' Kool-aid.
Since when is Silverlight a requirement for web browsing? Wishful thinking on Microsoft's part aside, I can see someone demanding Flash. But really... Silverlight?
Naw - there's more than one. So you have to line them up single file and deal with them one at a time.
Wait a minute. Are you implying that the drug trade isn't an equal opportunity employer?
Take a strong leader with vision and deprive him of the people that can deliver the technology to realize that vision and you also have an unworkable situation.
I'm not saying one is any better than the other. I see the partnership of Jobs and Woz as very symbiotic; Apple wouldn't have existed without either of them. And the computer world could have been drastically different (although debatable - if it weren't for the Apple II would the TRS-80 or Commodore PET been the "VisiCalc Machine"? They were inferior to the AppleII.). But if you're going to pass out credit for doing things, best to be sure you're handing the right credit to the right folks.
Well - Woz's stuff worked. Jobs was able to bring it to the world (and realized it was something the world should be interested in - whether they were aware at the time or not). Apple was really Jobs' thing that he had to talk Woz in to. Of course, Jobs would have nothing to work with if Woz didn't design the stuff in the first place. Very symbiotic.