Nintendo, Sega, Sony and maybe one or two others essentially created this market from scratch; MS was able to enter it only because they had such huge cash reserves that they could afford to buy their way into it. Very few other companies would be in this position.
The days of the likes of Coleco and Atari coming up with big innovations in consoles are well and truly past.
I wasn't thinking of a come from behind success that comes roaring out of someone's garage. It's just that Sony at least isn't going away. Nintendo may not be #1 but they're making money. And who knows, a mobile phone company could drop something out of nowhere.
MS always seems to enter markets with the expectation of owning them in a few years at most. It seems they spend all of their time and energy trying to expand the boundries of their monopoly. This costs them financially when it doesn't work. It draws unwanted attention from antitrust regulators when it does. Sooner or later the law of averages will catch up with them and they'll get an antitrust action they can't wriggle out of.
MS is like the ancient large empires. The only way those empires could maintain their economies was by continual expansion. The larger they got, the harder it got to maintain what they already had. Each new conquest would only temporarily pump up the economy before dragging it down again. That is a classic vicious cycle. Of course, some factor like another empire or badass barbarians would check the expansion and then the implosion would begin. If the analogy holds, expanding a monopoly is ultimately counterproductive. Other empires? Check. There's IBM, Oracle, and that minor power Novell. Barbarian hordes? We all know who those are. Geographic limits? There's the overall size of markets and those pesky antitrust laws.
There is a sane way for them to maintain themselves though. They could diversify into many businesses. They don't have to utterly own a few markets. That just rapidly brings on growth limit problems. They just need to have a little piece of a lot of markets. But there is nothing that will give them the growth they've enjoyed the past twenty years.
people will buy the xbox for the joy of hacking the xbox
That may not be the best idea. I have no doubt that MS is trying out schemes to lock down PC hardware. The Xbox hackers are doing penetration testing for them.
That said, I look forward to gen1 Xboxes showing up in the thrifts for $20 or $30. With a Linux port, thats quite the handy cheap PC.
I don't think MS can ever hope to do in gaming what they've done with Windows and Office. They could get on top for a generation of machines. They could even figure out how to do some things better and make money even if they aren't the best selling console. But every four or five years, there will be a competitor or two with credible competition. Any dominance they win will be under continual threat. Nintendo found out the hard way and Sega REALLY found out the hard way.
Many gamers don't even commit to one console. And gaming platforms aren't like business platforms. They go stale after a few years. Gamers always want to be the first kid on the block with the hot toy. Technical superiority isn't enough either. "Intellivision basketball is much more like real basketball." only worked once when console gaming was getting off the ground. As long as the graphics are the next obvious step up from the last console it will come down to the controllers and the GAMES. The graphics being a little bit better won't mean jack.
I only point this out because MS seems to be badly addicted to having monopolies. Having one in gaming is a completely different kettle of fish. The closest thing to a monopoly in gaming was Atari back in the day. They weren't invincible and neither was Nintendo. The real danger is that an also-ran console is a deep money pit. MS currently has the second place console and I'd guess they're just breaking even. It's a big risk and lot of money just for the chance be number one for a generation.
Fine, closed drivers are encrusted with other companies' sooper-sekret-stuff. Where is the threat to just handing out the bare register level documentation? I wouldn't mind solid DRI drivers for these cards that I could count on working on any platform I care to use. I would even lose a feature or two in the short term to get that. I'll also mention that I've had to put up with various forms of flakiness induced by the Nvidia drivers. (Don't start. I need OGL to work....Although what the opensource nv driver does it does well and with stability.) Yeah, my old G400 was slow but those drivers were tight.
Actually, we would want drivers released under the same license that x.org is. Otherwise, we go through the PITA of compiling them ourselves. The DRI and agpgart infrastructure make it possible to create drivers that don't need a piece linked into the kernel. Everything isn't GPL ya know.
Code like this seems to call for a new class of debugger. How hard would be to write a "debugger" that functions as a state monitor of a virtual machine? The virtual machine could even do things like maintain the appearance of real time even if it is being single stepped. I suppose the debugger could even have "personalities". Basically, you'll need to ability to tie into arbitrary API and ABIs on the OS that is running in the debugger. This means the debugger would have to know quite a bit about the structure of OS it's hosting.
I suspect this sort of thing would be easier to do for FOSS OSes than Windows. But even on Windows, all sorts of known entry points and returns could be monitored. This could be a case where things like Palladium reduce security. A piece of malware would otherwise have no way of detecting it isn't running on a real machine. Palladium or NGSCB or whatever they're calling it this week of course includes measures to detect and frustrate virtual machine attacks.
Most black hats would NOT want IE replaced. The past few years have been a real party for them. Of course, a few of them had too much fun ruined it a bit for the rest. Either MS will find a way to fix IE or IE will be replaced. One of the two has to happen, the current situation is just ridiculous.
I understand that it will allow whitelisting sites on an individual basis. That isn't a panacea but at least we'll have for those few retarded sites that employ it and our bosses force us to use.
If the day job is internal software for an organization, then the answer is that nothing happens to his job. If anything, the developer gave himself a present to use at work. The point that has been beat to death already is that FOSS is only a threat to shrinkwrapped software.
If you really, really, really, need to run crufty old software then you have many options. You can use a chroot with all the old binaries and dependency libraries in that. You can use LD_PRELOAD in a script to give $OLDAPP whatever it needs to be happy. You could even run an old distro like RedHat in a virtual machine. It may not be utterly and completely convienient but allows this stuff to run without putting the albatross of backward compatibility on current developers.
But what it can't do is apply that information to solve problems. That is what I do, that is where I'm important.
This is what humans were touted to have over computers when I was a young sprat and it seems the line hasn't changed much. It isn't even necessary for computers to gain sentience and start passing turing tests to meet this standard. Computers can be setup to at least solve certain classes of problems. These precanned solutions are stacking up one on top of the other. At the moment, it seems that hot skill is finding the precanned solution. More than once, I've got a bug up my ass to write code at work. I always check Google, Freshmeat, and Sourceforge first though. It usually isn't necessary. My thoughts on the subject weren't original.
So just what are we supposed to do when some piece of tech we've built starts thinking for itself? This thing of having a big picture view that the computers don't have won't cut it anymore.
Isaac Asimov addressed this point in the foreword to one of his essays. Paraphrased roughly, what he was getting at was that parents and teachers were dismayed with the amount of time kids spent reading pulp fiction and comic books. "They were still reading." was the way he put it. Even the ability to read a pulp comic requires a level of competence that TV does not require. TV is an attempt to create a highsided version of the reality that comes in through your eyes and ears. There is no reading ability required to consume this form of entertainment. The only real way to improve on what TV is to make it more immersive, more "real". "High definition" TV is an obvious first start. They may even try for 3D or "smellovision" again if new tech allows for feasible economics. The only reason advertisers and executives would want this is that it would require even less effort to consume.
Kids reading genre fiction (even better if we throw lots of genres in) and discussing it would be infinitely better than just throwing the X-Men movie in the DVD player. The paperbacks would at least require the ability to read and comprehend the written word. I'd be a lot happier if kids were discussing fun pap like the Stainless Steel Rat books rather than watching movies in school all day.
When I do spoof, I find that I can usually chide the offending website in the agent string itself. The web servers don't seem to be looking for particular strings. They just want to see those magic words "IE" and "Windows". I'll have those in the correct places as well as something like www.w3c.org - hint hint. I figure it gets into some their logs at least. I don't blanket spoof. I only do it for retarded sites that won't otherwise let me in.
Now if we could just do something about javascript based browser checks.
Quanta is getting there. The last time I tried it, it was too crashy for real use. The latest changelogs for Quanta all seem to be bugfixes so it looks like a viable 90% of the commercial competition software is just around the corner.
I think a lot of the problem is that interface isn't exactly-wacktly like Photoshop. Yeah it's probably a little rough here and there and it for sure doesn't have features necessary for prepress work. But Photoshop fanboys...oh what the hell Photoshop zealots would have you think that it does less than MS Paint and was coded by two fourteen year olds in their garage. What they miss is the Gimp is suitable for quite a few jobs. You can be legal for $600 a pop with Photoshop. You may be able to get off for $150 with PSP. If don't have either, the Gimp isn't some hair shirt those damn hippies made for you.
The rise in revenue is due solely to increased ticket prices, not because more people are seeing movies. In fact, movie attendance has dropped in three of the last five years.
Gee, and I thought that when demand drops that prices were supposed to follow. I can't see the point of downloading either. I have a cable modem and after hours of searching and failed downloads, I might be able to get a crappy looking divx that is complete.
The prices sure as hell keep me out of the theatres. I go to one or two "big" movies a year. The Return of the King was the last one I saw and The Two Towers was the one before that. It justs costs too damn much to go to the movies. I buy more DVDs but not more than 5 or 6 a year. That isn't a price issue as much as it is finding something I want to watch that the movie channels haven't already played to death.
Yeah, maybe downloading takes a little bite out of them but the MPAA is barking up the wrong tree if they think that is the heart of their problems.
Think lineage of image here. If you're making a new image or install, it will still be easier to start from an image you made 9 months ago than to start from an XP cd. All the little desktop tweaks will be the way you like them and you'll only have 12 or so patches and 3 reboots rather than 47 or so and 7 reboots. Not only that, a good deal of your software won't have changed. You'll be saved some work there as well.
I finished new OS 9 images for some Macs I maintain (I know, I know but it has to be this way.) I didn't start from an OS 9.0 cd and patch it up to 9.2.2 + add a boatload of apps. I installed last year's image, made changes and then created a new image. I still saved a considerable amount of work and thumb twiddling watching progess bars.
The Bastille Linux of which the grandparent spoke is not a distribution. It is a hardening script that is designed to implement the Linux Security HOWTO. There are versions of it for all major distributions. Bastille gives you sane security base on which to starting building a server or workstation.
What you're asking for isn't all that reasonable. Linux can be used for a myriad of purposes so all that stuff wouldn't necessarily be installed. It is possible to automate quite a bit of security for say home desktop users but a server admin will always have to be aware of the ramifications his choices have. This is true regardless of the OS you're using.
Security isn't something you can just throw in a box and install with a couple of clicks after inserting a CD. Security means different things in different contexts and increasing security ALWAYS entails tradeoffs vs. functionality and convienience.
The closest thing I know of to "integrated security" is OpenBSD whose security is mainly a function of conscious best practices. One thing it does not do is hold your hand.
Well God this fellow is apparantly laboring under the delusion that he's one your boys. Hows about a lightning bolt or two to disabuse him of the notion? Nothing fatal mind you, just a "sign" that even he can't miss.
If that doesn't work, those cartoon trapdoors that lead straight to the hotplace are pretty funny. Let him hover a second or two over it so the paprazzi can get a nice wild take shot.
Ah just forget it. The devil would probably toss him back out the trapdoor for being a takeover risk.
Mega dittos but I'll add one thing to it. It almost always isn't stupidity or the inability to learn the basics. They simply aren't motivated to learn basic computer hygiene. A major reason they aren't motivated is because someone like us is giving them free tech support and bailing them out everytime they mess the damn thing up.
I help motivate them by not giving more than one tech support freebie. If I give advice on avoiding worms, malware, and general stupidity and it is ignored then they can pay me or someone else to fix any future hoseups (or even buying a new computer).
I'm going to head the pedantic smartasses off by pointing out I don't extend this attitude to co-workers. I'm already being paid to put up with them.
Going back to your car analogy, most people don't abuse their cars to that extent. Most people are moderately sane drivers who at pay somebody once a year to change the oil. The consequences of not doing so are expensive. Mind you, nobody understands cars either but it is understood that you don't do certain things and have to do others. You aren't being a mean antisocial person by making the same thing apply to your friends and families computers. There is a difference between occaisional helpfulness and being used. A lot of tough love is called for.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo, Sega, Sony and maybe one or two others essentially created this market from scratch; MS was able to enter it only because they had such huge cash reserves that they could afford to buy their way into it. Very few other companies would be in this position.
The days of the likes of Coleco and Atari coming up with big innovations in consoles are well and truly past.
I wasn't thinking of a come from behind success that comes roaring out of someone's garage. It's just that Sony at least isn't going away. Nintendo may not be #1 but they're making money. And who knows, a mobile phone company could drop something out of nowhere.
MS always seems to enter markets with the expectation of owning them in a few years at most. It seems they spend all of their time and energy trying to expand the boundries of their monopoly. This costs them financially when it doesn't work. It draws unwanted attention from antitrust regulators when it does. Sooner or later the law of averages will catch up with them and they'll get an antitrust action they can't wriggle out of.
MS is like the ancient large empires. The only way those empires could maintain their economies was by continual expansion. The larger they got, the harder it got to maintain what they already had. Each new conquest would only temporarily pump up the economy before dragging it down again. That is a classic vicious cycle. Of course, some factor like another empire or badass barbarians would check the expansion and then the implosion would begin. If the analogy holds, expanding a monopoly is ultimately counterproductive. Other empires? Check. There's IBM, Oracle, and that minor power Novell. Barbarian hordes? We all know who those are. Geographic limits? There's the overall size of markets and those pesky antitrust laws.
There is a sane way for them to maintain themselves though. They could diversify into many businesses. They don't have to utterly own a few markets. That just rapidly brings on growth limit problems. They just need to have a little piece of a lot of markets. But there is nothing that will give them the growth they've enjoyed the past twenty years.
people will buy the xbox for the joy of hacking the xbox
That may not be the best idea. I have no doubt that MS is trying out schemes to lock down PC hardware. The Xbox hackers are doing penetration testing for them.
That said, I look forward to gen1 Xboxes showing up in the thrifts for $20 or $30. With a Linux port, thats quite the handy cheap PC.
I don't think MS can ever hope to do in gaming what they've done with Windows and Office. They could get on top for a generation of machines. They could even figure out how to do some things better and make money even if they aren't the best selling console. But every four or five years, there will be a competitor or two with credible competition. Any dominance they win will be under continual threat. Nintendo found out the hard way and Sega REALLY found out the hard way.
Many gamers don't even commit to one console. And gaming platforms aren't like business platforms. They go stale after a few years. Gamers always want to be the first kid on the block with the hot toy. Technical superiority isn't enough either. "Intellivision basketball is much more like real basketball." only worked once when console gaming was getting off the ground. As long as the graphics are the next obvious step up from the last console it will come down to the controllers and the GAMES. The graphics being a little bit better won't mean jack.
I only point this out because MS seems to be badly addicted to having monopolies. Having one in gaming is a completely different kettle of fish. The closest thing to a monopoly in gaming was Atari back in the day. They weren't invincible and neither was Nintendo. The real danger is that an also-ran console is a deep money pit. MS currently has the second place console and I'd guess they're just breaking even. It's a big risk and lot of money just for the chance be number one for a generation.
I have one of those slapped into my homebuilt firewall. It's basically there to make the BIOS happy.
Fine, closed drivers are encrusted with other companies' sooper-sekret-stuff. Where is the threat to just handing out the bare register level documentation? I wouldn't mind solid DRI drivers for these cards that I could count on working on any platform I care to use. I would even lose a feature or two in the short term to get that. I'll also mention that I've had to put up with various forms of flakiness induced by the Nvidia drivers. (Don't start. I need OGL to work....Although what the opensource nv driver does it does well and with stability.) Yeah, my old G400 was slow but those drivers were tight.
Actually, we would want drivers released under the same license that x.org is. Otherwise, we go through the PITA of compiling them ourselves. The DRI and agpgart infrastructure make it possible to create drivers that don't need a piece linked into the kernel. Everything isn't GPL ya know.
Code like this seems to call for a new class of debugger. How hard would be to write a "debugger" that functions as a state monitor of a virtual machine? The virtual machine could even do things like maintain the appearance of real time even if it is being single stepped. I suppose the debugger could even have "personalities". Basically, you'll need to ability to tie into arbitrary API and ABIs on the OS that is running in the debugger. This means the debugger would have to know quite a bit about the structure of OS it's hosting.
I suspect this sort of thing would be easier to do for FOSS OSes than Windows. But even on Windows, all sorts of known entry points and returns could be monitored. This could be a case where things like Palladium reduce security. A piece of malware would otherwise have no way of detecting it isn't running on a real machine. Palladium or NGSCB or whatever they're calling it this week of course includes measures to detect and frustrate virtual machine attacks.
Most black hats would NOT want IE replaced. The past few years have been a real party for them. Of course, a few of them had too much fun ruined it a bit for the rest. Either MS will find a way to fix IE or IE will be replaced. One of the two has to happen, the current situation is just ridiculous.
I understand that it will allow whitelisting sites on an individual basis. That isn't a panacea but at least we'll have for those few retarded sites that employ it and our bosses force us to use.
If the day job is internal software for an organization, then the answer is that nothing happens to his job. If anything, the developer gave himself a present to use at work. The point that has been beat to death already is that FOSS is only a threat to shrinkwrapped software.
Perhaps not, but I'll bet that you still had to reinstall your bootloader when you got finished.
If you really, really, really, need to run crufty old software then you have many options. You can use a chroot with all the old binaries and dependency libraries in that. You can use LD_PRELOAD in a script to give $OLDAPP whatever it needs to be happy. You could even run an old distro like RedHat in a virtual machine. It may not be utterly and completely convienient but allows this stuff to run without putting the albatross of backward compatibility on current developers.
It already exists:
. or g/%257Ecalver/pictures/oldpics/opensource1.gif
http://www.localhost.nl/stuff/images/unix.rulez
It's kinda of an old gag.
But what it can't do is apply that information to solve problems. That is what I do, that is where I'm important.
This is what humans were touted to have over computers when I was a young sprat and it seems the line hasn't changed much. It isn't even necessary for computers to gain sentience and start passing turing tests to meet this standard. Computers can be setup to at least solve certain classes of problems. These precanned solutions are stacking up one on top of the other. At the moment, it seems that hot skill is finding the precanned solution. More than once, I've got a bug up my ass to write code at work. I always check Google, Freshmeat, and Sourceforge first though. It usually isn't necessary. My thoughts on the subject weren't original.
So just what are we supposed to do when some piece of tech we've built starts thinking for itself? This thing of having a big picture view that the computers don't have won't cut it anymore.
Isaac Asimov addressed this point in the foreword to one of his essays. Paraphrased roughly, what he was getting at was that parents and teachers were dismayed with the amount of time kids spent reading pulp fiction and comic books. "They were still reading." was the way he put it. Even the ability to read a pulp comic requires a level of competence that TV does not require. TV is an attempt to create a highsided version of the reality that comes in through your eyes and ears. There is no reading ability required to consume this form of entertainment. The only real way to improve on what TV is to make it more immersive, more "real". "High definition" TV is an obvious first start. They may even try for 3D or "smellovision" again if new tech allows for feasible economics. The only reason advertisers and executives would want this is that it would require even less effort to consume.
Kids reading genre fiction (even better if we throw lots of genres in) and discussing it would be infinitely better than just throwing the X-Men movie in the DVD player. The paperbacks would at least require the ability to read and comprehend the written word. I'd be a lot happier if kids were discussing fun pap like the Stainless Steel Rat books rather than watching movies in school all day.
When I do spoof, I find that I can usually chide the offending website in the agent string itself. The web servers don't seem to be looking for particular strings. They just want to see those magic words "IE" and "Windows". I'll have those in the correct places as well as something like www.w3c.org - hint hint. I figure it gets into some their logs at least. I don't blanket spoof. I only do it for retarded sites that won't otherwise let me in.
Now if we could just do something about javascript based browser checks.
Quanta is getting there. The last time I tried it, it was too crashy for real use. The latest changelogs for Quanta all seem to be bugfixes so it looks like a viable 90% of the commercial competition software is just around the corner.
I think a lot of the problem is that interface isn't exactly-wacktly like Photoshop. Yeah it's probably a little rough here and there and it for sure doesn't have features necessary for prepress work. But Photoshop fanboys...oh what the hell Photoshop zealots would have you think that it does less than MS Paint and was coded by two fourteen year olds in their garage. What they miss is the Gimp is suitable for quite a few jobs. You can be legal for $600 a pop with Photoshop. You may be able to get off for $150 with PSP. If don't have either, the Gimp isn't some hair shirt those damn hippies made for you.
The rise in revenue is due solely to increased ticket prices, not because more people are seeing movies. In fact, movie attendance has dropped in three of the last five years.
Gee, and I thought that when demand drops that prices were supposed to follow. I can't see the point of downloading either. I have a cable modem and after hours of searching and failed downloads, I might be able to get a crappy looking divx that is complete.
The prices sure as hell keep me out of the theatres. I go to one or two "big" movies a year. The Return of the King was the last one I saw and The Two Towers was the one before that. It justs costs too damn much to go to the movies. I buy more DVDs but not more than 5 or 6 a year. That isn't a price issue as much as it is finding something I want to watch that the movie channels haven't already played to death.
Yeah, maybe downloading takes a little bite out of them but the MPAA is barking up the wrong tree if they think that is the heart of their problems.
Think lineage of image here. If you're making a new image or install, it will still be easier to start from an image you made 9 months ago than to start from an XP cd. All the little desktop tweaks will be the way you like them and you'll only have 12 or so patches and 3 reboots rather than 47 or so and 7 reboots. Not only that, a good deal of your software won't have changed. You'll be saved some work there as well.
I finished new OS 9 images for some Macs I maintain (I know, I know but it has to be this way.) I didn't start from an OS 9.0 cd and patch it up to 9.2.2 + add a boatload of apps. I installed last year's image, made changes and then created a new image. I still saved a considerable amount of work and thumb twiddling watching progess bars.
The Bastille Linux of which the grandparent spoke is not a distribution. It is a hardening script that is designed to implement the Linux Security HOWTO. There are versions of it for all major distributions. Bastille gives you sane security base on which to starting building a server or workstation.
What you're asking for isn't all that reasonable. Linux can be used for a myriad of purposes so all that stuff wouldn't necessarily be installed. It is possible to automate quite a bit of security for say home desktop users but a server admin will always have to be aware of the ramifications his choices have. This is true regardless of the OS you're using.
Security isn't something you can just throw in a box and install with a couple of clicks after inserting a CD. Security means different things in different contexts and increasing security ALWAYS entails tradeoffs vs. functionality and convienience.
The closest thing I know of to "integrated security" is OpenBSD whose security is mainly a function of conscious best practices. One thing it does not do is hold your hand.
Even on a campus LAN, you can make a heavily firewalled segment for doing things like configuring freshly installed Windows machines.
Well God this fellow is apparantly laboring under the delusion that he's one your boys. Hows about a lightning bolt or two to disabuse him of the notion? Nothing fatal mind you, just a "sign" that even he can't miss.
If that doesn't work, those cartoon trapdoors that lead straight to the hotplace are pretty funny. Let him hover a second or two over it so the paprazzi can get a nice wild take shot.
Ah just forget it. The devil would probably toss him back out the trapdoor for being a takeover risk.
Mega dittos but I'll add one thing to it. It almost always isn't stupidity or the inability to learn the basics. They simply aren't motivated to learn basic computer hygiene. A major reason they aren't motivated is because someone like us is giving them free tech support and bailing them out everytime they mess the damn thing up.
I help motivate them by not giving more than one tech support freebie. If I give advice on avoiding worms, malware, and general stupidity and it is ignored then they can pay me or someone else to fix any future hoseups (or even buying a new computer).
I'm going to head the pedantic smartasses off by pointing out I don't extend this attitude to co-workers. I'm already being paid to put up with them.
Going back to your car analogy, most people don't abuse their cars to that extent. Most people are moderately sane drivers who at pay somebody once a year to change the oil. The consequences of not doing so are expensive. Mind you, nobody understands cars either but it is understood that you don't do certain things and have to do others. You aren't being a mean antisocial person by making the same thing apply to your friends and families computers. There is a difference between occaisional helpfulness and being used. A lot of tough love is called for.