CE division promotes the hell out of new content format.
Big Media division catches wind of new content format, and demands DRM shackles.
Accountants see how much more profit Big Media division brings in, and forces CE division to comply.
New content format lands with a thud in the marketplace.
One division or the other abandons new content format.
I say "one division or the other" because it varies. CE will hang on to formats that are useful outside of Big Media's influence. Beta lived on in professional circles, MiniDisc found new life in NetMD, and Memory Stick is still their preferred camera memory format. UMD looks like it's dead to both sides. (PSP : UMD movies:: chicken : egg) Looks like CE is already losing interest in Blu-Ray, with this non-Big-Media-compliant drive.
I love this little preemptive strike from his conclusion...
I get a lot of flak from the Mac community and no doubt this article will start another round of name-calling. (See how Apple's childish behavior rubs off on its fans?)
Gee, you conclude your column with a passive-aggressive insult. Of course, there's going to be another round of name-calling, Paul! You started it! Yeah, zealots are a fact of life when discussing operating systems, but you don't take the high road by sneering at the other guy's lack of elevation.
It's Oregon that needs the help. As it is now, we can't decide if it's California's Canada, Washington's Mexico, or Idaho's Portugal. (I always thought it was the North Pacific's Ecuador, but I'm a liberal. What do I know?)
Change it to Colbertegon, and you've got a destination! It's not anybody's anything! Of course, we'd have to move the capital to Colbervallis...
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't condone the imposition of DRM on customers, and the implicit abuse of trust that results from it. I just think there are too many hyperbolic and/or unsubstantiated claims floating around out there, and they are clouding the true issues surrounding DRM.
...the article also touches on things like DRM (which Vista heavily supports)...
DRM is imposed on operating system vendors by Big Media. OS vendors' choices are limited to compliance, getting sued for lack of compliance, or lack of support altogether. So Microsoft complied with Big Media's demands for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray in Vista. Why do people keep acting like it's some stunning revelation, when Microsoft's stance has not changed between XP and Vista? Yes, that's rhetorical. Kinda like asking why Buffalo Sabres fans hate Brett Hull.
And yes, I know I'm beating a dead horse. But every time I turn a corner, there's a carcass and a convienently-placed blunt object...
They've also always been consciously designed such that they don't fit in with other electronics in a standard rack system; the idea is to make the system the center of attention, without making it so gaudy or unreasonable that customers resist it.
True, that. I think this is one of the (many, many) things that dragged down 3DO. It looked like a regular CD player. Hell, Nuon devices were regular DVD players, with a half-assed "game console" grafted on.
Consoles are all about being trendy. In each generation, one console is just "cooler" than the others, whether it's the better one or not. Each generation reduces to a 2- or 3-horse race, so nobody wants to be the one that looks like mom's lame VCR.
Whereas the Coleco Vision was an all-American hot rod of a look, the Atari 5200 was just a big, bulky triangle of a machine.
Funny, I always looked at it the other way. The 5200, at least to my adolescent eyes, looked so futuristic, with it's sleek black wedge shape and brushed aluminum band. Colecovision, on the other hand, looked too much like an Intellivision, with it's boxy shape and top-mounted controller storage trays. (Of course, the fact that only one kid in the neighborhood had an Inty, while everybody else had 2600s, may have biased my fragile young mind.)
Atari got a lot of mileage from that wedge look, too, with the 2600 compact and 7800 in black, and the XE and ST computer lines in grey. Love it or hate it, you just knew it was an Atari on sight.
Now if we could only figure out where Jaguar went wrong...
Microsoft's EULA grants them permission to send the results to themselves and they admit to contacting your computer daily. They have also granted themselves the right to delete your files at will.
RTFA after the chart. You can still pay the upgrade price for a "downgraded" version of Vista. You just won't get the option to upgrade in-place, and will be forced to make a clean install.
No great loss, if you ask me. (Which you didn't, but this is Slashdot.) In my experience, clean installs just work better, and the time you spend post-install is a sunk cost. You're either re-installing and transferring things to the clean install, or fixing what got broke by the in-place upgrade. Just choose the option that's better for your blood pressure.
The meeting had dragged on for over two hours. Everybody was getting cross-eyed as the CFO continued to ramble on about currency fluctuations and their effects on the Windsor plant. Suddenly, Bill from Accounting felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he felt his mobile vibrate, because he had forgotten to mute the ringtone. It was already too late...
"Shipments crossing the Ambassador Bridge by truck -- " Flash! Aahhhh! Saviour of the universe! [Brian May guitar riff]
Well, there's the Freedom-valuing Linux user who respects those who don't share his/her beliefs. Then there's the Microsoft-loathing Linux user who thinks the only difference between Bill Gates and Elliot Carver is Johnathan Pryce's singing ability.
I don't recall his name but he played Rochford in the Three Musketeers movie from the mid 90's or so... That guy has the evil-like raspy voice that Raistlin needs.
That would be Michael Wincott, who also played the bad guy in The Crow. Do you really want to think "Aw, this is already boring the shit out of me. Kill him!" every time a bad guy starts making grand pronouncements?
Come to think of it, that wouldn't be a bad idea. One way to get the running time below 100 minutes.
1) ABC writes a big check to Tivo...
2) Tivo pushes "innocent" bios update
3) Suddenly you can't fast forward things recorded off channels with "ABC" associated with them.
4) Tivo's regular reports to ABC show a steady decline in recordings of their shows.
Well, if you consider the number of shitty movies Hollywood produces each year, I'm sure enough of them passed through Shake in post-production that "composting application" is right.
It's also noteworthy that Vista requires OEMs to have some kind of networking ability. While this is a given by today's standards, I find it very curious that an operating system REQUIRES me to have it.
The Vista Premium cert ensures that nobody will get complaints like: "Whaddya mean, my brand new PC can't run $ESOTERIC_VISTA_FEATURE_XYZ?!" People may be misled by the submitter's choice of link text. **cough**zonkdoyourjob**cough**
The Vista Premium OEM certification requirements are not the "true minimum requirements for Windows Vista".
The baseline requirements are an 800MHz CPU, 512MB memory, and a DirectX 9-capable video processor. (I think the DX9 requirement is more for driver compliance than hardware features, since GPUs that can't handle Aero Glass will fall back on Aero Basic, and the old Windows 2000 style is still available.) A network connection is not required, and it would be safe to presume that activation by phone will still be available. (And, given the Windows Genuine Advantage mess, that might actually be preferrable to WGA phoning it in for you.)
Let's see. On one side, we have Microsoft, singular colossus of the industry, abuser of monopoly power, left with naught but a nano-scale layer of public trust. On the other side, we have a great mass of Open Source/Free Software advocates, where the moderate voices are undermined by those whose rational distrust of Microsoft has turned to irrational paranoia and hatred.
I hope there's a Plan B, because this whole "Us vs. Them" thing isn't leading anybody anywhere.
...you could get away with saying intergalactic. But this isn't even interstellar! It's in our own solar system, for crying out loud. The word you want is "interplanetary".
You give me any of that juris-my-diction crap, and you can ram it up your ass.
I'll leave the bullet points that are not OS-specific as an exercise to the (unfortunate) reader. But I couldn't let this one go without rebuttal.
M$ [sic] incompetence contributes to the biggest US blackout ever by disrupting critical company communications and overloading network [sic]. The whole thing could have been prevented.
Wow, that's a lot of links, twitter. But where's the smoking gun that directly links Microsoft to the blackout? Oh, yeah. That's right. It doesn't exist. For the second time in two weeks, I've had to correct you when you blamed an operating system you don't like for errors in somebody else's software.
GET HELP! Seriously. You've crossed the line from zealotry to paranoia.
Some of the changes make more sense when you pair Office 2007 with Windows Vista. It took me a while to figure out the Big Office Logo Sphere Button until I saw a screenshot of Word 2007 on Vista. Vista's Start button is now a Big Windows Logo Sphere Button in the bottom left corner of the screen. So I guess that means that the Big Office Logo Sphere Button in the top left corner of the screen is Office's "Start button". See, it all makes sense in a "the designers are insufferably happy, and we get to show everybody that we kinda, sorta understand Fitts' Law" way.
Another change that only makes sense in the context of Vista is how Outlook has been dropped from the Student edition. The new Windows Calendar would take care of task and calendar functions. The oft-neglected Outlook Express has (supposedly) been given an overhaul, and is now known as Windows Mail. I still wouldn't trust it with plain-text emails from a whitelist, but that's just me.
If porting for the 360 is so straightforward, why is only a fraction of the Xbox catalog playable on a 360?
Porting would mean that the source code of the original XBox game is recompiled to target the 360's hardware. There's not much money in creating a separate SKU for last year's assets with this year's binaries.
XBox 360 runs old XBox games by emulating a Pentium III and a GeForce 4 on three PowerPC G5s and an X1900. (Broadly speaking, of course. The actual hardware is customized to varying degrees for each console.) Games are CPU- and GPU-bound, and far more time-critical than your typical word processor. (Word is bound more by hard drive and writer's block than silicon.) So Microsoft can't just throw a reverse-Rosetta on the 360 and call it a day. Each game requires custom patches to run without errors and to performance targets.
Name calling and lying do nothing for their product.
They do nothing for Linux, either.
Need I remind you of how you use "M$" and "Windoze" as a matter of course, hurl sneers and insults at anyone who dares speak well of Microsoft, rehash the same anti-Microsoft FUD over and over (even when it's been debunked), and equate Microsoft and its executives with oppressive totalitarian regimes, terrorist organizations, and murderers?
Nice choice of link. Except you missed the follow-up article from the same publication, where it was determined that Windows NT was not to blame. An uncaught DivideByZeroException in the application stack created an unintentional denial-of-service attack on the ship's network.
Perhaps you are confusing memory sticks with memory cards. They're not compatible you know. Where exactly are these vendors of which you speak? I think maybe Crucial, Kingston and the like might make knock offs...
Memory Stick media is available from Sony, SanDisk, and Lexar.
...but just to try to ruin the format even further, Sony then took a memory stick and put some sort of DRM crap on it to keep you from copying anything you put on it.
MagicGate DRM is enforced on files if and only if the write operation specifically requests it. Normal file operations on your PC/camera/whatever don't get locked. The only hardware/software combo that utilized MagicGate was the first generation of Memory Stick-based Network Walkman products with SonicStage. Funny how those tanked in the open market...
[<sarcasm>]Yeah, that really made the format take off.[</sarcasm>]
Memory Stick was hobbled by two things: One, the extravagant licensing fees (can't have a Sony format without 'em!); and two, before Memory Stick Pro, transfer speeds sucked, the largest supported capacity was 128MB, and, except a few Vaio notebooks, host devices weren't upgradable to Pro. By the time the license fees came down to earth and the Pro format permeated Sony's hardware, the ship had already sailed.
If we've been using Libraries Of Congress as a unit of measurement for the capacity of DVDs, what happens when games shipped on DVD are added to the Library of Congress, man?
Slashdot Mirror
The devil in the details is Sony's split personality:
I say "one division or the other" because it varies. CE will hang on to formats that are useful outside of Big Media's influence. Beta lived on in professional circles, MiniDisc found new life in NetMD, and Memory Stick is still their preferred camera memory format. UMD looks like it's dead to both sides. (PSP : UMD movies :: chicken : egg) Looks like CE is already losing interest in Blu-Ray, with this non-Big-Media-compliant drive.
I love this little preemptive strike from his conclusion...
Gee, you conclude your column with a passive-aggressive insult. Of course, there's going to be another round of name-calling, Paul! You started it! Yeah, zealots are a fact of life when discussing operating systems, but you don't take the high road by sneering at the other guy's lack of elevation.
It's Oregon that needs the help. As it is now, we can't decide if it's California's Canada, Washington's Mexico, or Idaho's Portugal. (I always thought it was the North Pacific's Ecuador, but I'm a liberal. What do I know?)
Change it to Colbertegon, and you've got a destination! It's not anybody's anything! Of course, we'd have to move the capital to Colbervallis...
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't condone the imposition of DRM on customers, and the implicit abuse of trust that results from it. I just think there are too many hyperbolic and/or unsubstantiated claims floating around out there, and they are clouding the true issues surrounding DRM.
(sigh) Zonk, what are we gonna do with you?
DRM is imposed on operating system vendors by Big Media. OS vendors' choices are limited to compliance, getting sued for lack of compliance, or lack of support altogether. So Microsoft complied with Big Media's demands for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray in Vista. Why do people keep acting like it's some stunning revelation, when Microsoft's stance has not changed between XP and Vista? Yes, that's rhetorical. Kinda like asking why Buffalo Sabres fans hate Brett Hull.
And yes, I know I'm beating a dead horse. But every time I turn a corner, there's a carcass and a convienently-placed blunt object...
True, that. I think this is one of the (many, many) things that dragged down 3DO. It looked like a regular CD player. Hell, Nuon devices were regular DVD players, with a half-assed "game console" grafted on.
Consoles are all about being trendy. In each generation, one console is just "cooler" than the others, whether it's the better one or not. Each generation reduces to a 2- or 3-horse race, so nobody wants to be the one that looks like mom's lame VCR.
Funny, I always looked at it the other way. The 5200, at least to my adolescent eyes, looked so futuristic, with it's sleek black wedge shape and brushed aluminum band. Colecovision, on the other hand, looked too much like an Intellivision, with it's boxy shape and top-mounted controller storage trays. (Of course, the fact that only one kid in the neighborhood had an Inty, while everybody else had 2600s, may have biased my fragile young mind.)
Atari got a lot of mileage from that wedge look, too, with the 2600 compact and 7800 in black, and the XE and ST computer lines in grey. Love it or hate it, you just knew it was an Atari on sight.
Now if we could only figure out where Jaguar went wrong...
Citation, please?
RTFA after the chart. You can still pay the upgrade price for a "downgraded" version of Vista. You just won't get the option to upgrade in-place, and will be forced to make a clean install.
No great loss, if you ask me. (Which you didn't, but this is Slashdot.) In my experience, clean installs just work better, and the time you spend post-install is a sunk cost. You're either re-installing and transferring things to the clean install, or fixing what got broke by the in-place upgrade. Just choose the option that's better for your blood pressure.
The meeting had dragged on for over two hours. Everybody was getting cross-eyed as the CFO continued to ramble on about currency fluctuations and their effects on the Windsor plant. Suddenly, Bill from Accounting felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he felt his mobile vibrate, because he had forgotten to mute the ringtone. It was already too late...
"Shipments crossing the Ambassador Bridge by truck -- " Flash! Aahhhh! Saviour of the universe! [Brian May guitar riff]
Well, there's the Freedom-valuing Linux user who respects those who don't share his/her beliefs. Then there's the Microsoft-loathing Linux user who thinks the only difference between Bill Gates and Elliot Carver is Johnathan Pryce's singing ability.
That would be Michael Wincott, who also played the bad guy in The Crow. Do you really want to think "Aw, this is already boring the shit out of me. Kill him!" every time a bad guy starts making grand pronouncements?
Come to think of it, that wouldn't be a bad idea. One way to get the running time below 100 minutes.
4) Tivo's regular reports to ABC show a steady decline in recordings of their shows.
Now, problem solved.
Well, if you consider the number of shitty movies Hollywood produces each year, I'm sure enough of them passed through Shake in post-production that "composting application" is right.
The Vista Premium cert ensures that nobody will get complaints like: "Whaddya mean, my brand new PC can't run $ESOTERIC_VISTA_FEATURE_XYZ?!" People may be misled by the submitter's choice of link text. **cough**zonkdoyourjob**cough**
The Vista Premium OEM certification requirements are not the "true minimum requirements for Windows Vista".
The baseline requirements are an 800MHz CPU, 512MB memory, and a DirectX 9-capable video processor. (I think the DX9 requirement is more for driver compliance than hardware features, since GPUs that can't handle Aero Glass will fall back on Aero Basic, and the old Windows 2000 style is still available.) A network connection is not required, and it would be safe to presume that activation by phone will still be available. (And, given the Windows Genuine Advantage mess, that might actually be preferrable to WGA phoning it in for you.)
Let's see. On one side, we have Microsoft, singular colossus of the industry, abuser of monopoly power, left with naught but a nano-scale layer of public trust. On the other side, we have a great mass of Open Source/Free Software advocates, where the moderate voices are undermined by those whose rational distrust of Microsoft has turned to irrational paranoia and hatred.
I hope there's a Plan B, because this whole "Us vs. Them" thing isn't leading anybody anywhere.
/reads HomeStar name...
(Must not make Homestar Runner joke. Must not make Homestar Runner joke.)
Hmm, the warning label says: Do not look into lens when activated. Burnination of retinas may occur.
(Oh, bloody hell!)
You give me any of that juris-my-diction crap, and you can ram it up your ass.
I'll leave the bullet points that are not OS-specific as an exercise to the (unfortunate) reader. But I couldn't let this one go without rebuttal.
Wow, that's a lot of links, twitter. But where's the smoking gun that directly links Microsoft to the blackout? Oh, yeah. That's right. It doesn't exist. For the second time in two weeks, I've had to correct you when you blamed an operating system you don't like for errors in somebody else's software.
GET HELP! Seriously. You've crossed the line from zealotry to paranoia.
Some of the changes make more sense when you pair Office 2007 with Windows Vista. It took me a while to figure out the Big Office Logo Sphere Button until I saw a screenshot of Word 2007 on Vista. Vista's Start button is now a Big Windows Logo Sphere Button in the bottom left corner of the screen. So I guess that means that the Big Office Logo Sphere Button in the top left corner of the screen is Office's "Start button". See, it all makes sense in a "the designers are insufferably happy, and we get to show everybody that we kinda, sorta understand Fitts' Law" way.
Another change that only makes sense in the context of Vista is how Outlook has been dropped from the Student edition. The new Windows Calendar would take care of task and calendar functions. The oft-neglected Outlook Express has (supposedly) been given an overhaul, and is now known as Windows Mail. I still wouldn't trust it with plain-text emails from a whitelist, but that's just me.
Porting would mean that the source code of the original XBox game is recompiled to target the 360's hardware. There's not much money in creating a separate SKU for last year's assets with this year's binaries.
XBox 360 runs old XBox games by emulating a Pentium III and a GeForce 4 on three PowerPC G5s and an X1900. (Broadly speaking, of course. The actual hardware is customized to varying degrees for each console.) Games are CPU- and GPU-bound, and far more time-critical than your typical word processor. (Word is bound more by hard drive and writer's block than silicon.) So Microsoft can't just throw a reverse-Rosetta on the 360 and call it a day. Each game requires custom patches to run without errors and to performance targets.
They do nothing for Linux, either.
Need I remind you of how you use "M$" and "Windoze" as a matter of course, hurl sneers and insults at anyone who dares speak well of Microsoft, rehash the same anti-Microsoft FUD over and over (even when it's been debunked), and equate Microsoft and its executives with oppressive totalitarian regimes, terrorist organizations, and murderers?
In short, twitter, you need to read this.
Nice choice of link. Except you missed the follow-up article from the same publication, where it was determined that Windows NT was not to blame. An uncaught DivideByZeroException in the application stack created an unintentional denial-of-service attack on the ship's network.
Memory Stick media is available from Sony, SanDisk, and Lexar.
MagicGate DRM is enforced on files if and only if the write operation specifically requests it. Normal file operations on your PC/camera/whatever don't get locked. The only hardware/software combo that utilized MagicGate was the first generation of Memory Stick-based Network Walkman products with SonicStage. Funny how those tanked in the open market...
Memory Stick was hobbled by two things: One, the extravagant licensing fees (can't have a Sony format without 'em!); and two, before Memory Stick Pro, transfer speeds sucked, the largest supported capacity was 128MB, and, except a few Vaio notebooks, host devices weren't upgradable to Pro. By the time the license fees came down to earth and the Pro format permeated Sony's hardware, the ship had already sailed.
X10 was the big bang.
If we've been using Libraries Of Congress as a unit of measurement for the capacity of DVDs, what happens when games shipped on DVD are added to the Library of Congress, man?