The company I work for has been using all online docs for the last 7 years. Around 4 million documents and a few hundred thousand dollars saved later, I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea.
About a year in, we added a plug-in to store backup versions of the docs on the user's hard disk to supplement the auto-save (in the case of a lost connection during editing, which of course does happen occasionally) - but other than that things have pretty much "just worked". Honestly, the docs have caused less problems than we used to have with Word: there's nothing to configure incorrectly, there's no choice about where to save, there's nothing to install, and there's far fewer features to abuse. It's much easier to protect the user from themselves and to enforce business rules in documents. As a bonus, users can work from home without buying their own software, or having compatibility hassles.
Pretty much everything our users do is done using a browser and hosted centrally; it has been an unqualified success and an IT dream. I can't imagine how much pain we've avoided by missing 5 generations of new Word problems. I think back to the time when we had to install apps on every machine, and I shudder.
Many of these points have already been made, but I'll chime in. I remember the move to XP well. I didn't think it was an amazing upgrade, but:
1. It didn't break any of our internal apps. Vista breaks a few and requires different support procedures for others. Stepping back again, 2000 didn't break any of our apps moving from NT 4. 2. XP had somewhat of a killer app (for a corporate environment) with Remote Assist, which has been a real boon to our support staff. 3. We still didn't jump on in any kind of hurry.
I guess I should have realized the PS3 would be a little cramped inside with a regular size HD (and I didn't realize laptop HD prices/sizes were so different).
If we look at the PC space, increasing hard disk size isn't terribly expensive. The difference between a 100GB drive and a 400GB drive might only be $10-$20 over a $60-$70 base price. Not insignificant, but not terribly large either.
Are the economics significantly different on the console side? If not, wouldn't it be a bit of a coup for Sony (or, conversely, MS) to trumpet a 300GB or 500GB drive? At least as an option? It's a very visible number - and making it 20 times as big as your competitor's "20GB" would be quite the snub. And a future sales boon when - like MS - you're selling media downloads.
Anyways, I've just always been curious why the console HD numbers seem so small.
I don't think there's anything to "very expensive cables" - but there's certainly bad cables, and cables that are more or less susceptible to interference. My brother and I played around with this for a while with a variety of cables - we even borrowed some fairly expensive ones from a high-end stereo dealer.
We got the best results out of some bulky network cable we stole from work. Not in some vague musical-flavor sort of way, but in a very noticeable improvement in quality over our worst cables (some very thin Radio Shack stuff).
I'd certainly agree that audiophiles swallow some ridiculous garbage, but the converse isn't true. It isn't all garbage - and I'll never understand the people who believe that all equipment sounds the same (or that their ridiculous, quiet, tinny little Bose speakers are the best speakers on the planet).
As if someone wants a 4WD vehicle in which they would have to wait 30 minutes for the front axle to start pulling. "Automatic" would be a more appropriate word, but it doesn't have the buzzword effect that "real-time" does.
In my old truck you had to stop, get out, go over to the front wheels, and lock the hubs in order to get 4WD.
It didn't usually take me a half-hour, and I wouldn't say that someone "wanted" this "feature" - but that used to be the norm for 4WD vehicles (and many probably still work this way).
While we have made tremendous investments in Windows Vista to ensure backwards compatibility, some of the system enhancements, such as User Account Control, changes to the networking stack, and the new graphics model, make Windows Vista behave differently from previous versions of Windows.
The changes impact Visual Studio and thus we're unable to support Visual Studio.NET 2002 or Visual Studio.NET 2003 on Windows Vista.
Spore isn't going to be one more disappointing game. From my grasp of the demo it's going to be 9 more disappointing games and some loose connective tissue.
Indeed. I'm guessing our users will trust the company e-mail saying "Vista is not supported. Do not buy it." more than they'll trust whatever MS says.
Beyond our own app not working, I've noticed a few things about Vista that are just confusing. Like, out of the box, XP will play most random movie files (I've found). I was playing with Aero and wanted to see it play a movie all tilted or whatever - I couldn't find one movie file (including the AVIs from my digital camera) that it would play right? WTF?
I don't really understand this perspective, though I hear it a lot. I understand not everyone has an HDTV, but it's not like they're exclusive toys for the insanely rich. For years I've been using a $900 720p projector. In my last house I had it in a theatre style room (in the basement) together with probably $500 worth of stereo equipment.
Does the fact that I had $1400 worth of theater equipment mean that $600 is chump change?
I hadn't thought of that - it should be doable assuming the content isn't signed as well (and I wouldn't think it would be). This sort of cheating should be reasonably easy to detect via forced updates (easier than the drive firmware sneakiness at least), but it's sad anyway.
As far as I know, the mod in question only allows users to play "backups" of games - not to run arbitrary code (including cheats). So the concerns of people cheating are a little off the mark. As is the idea that the detection could really be moved to the server side - any detection regimen is going to have to look at the drive's firmware or some characteristic of the disk and this looking is going to be done at the client end.
Free development in Flash has been around for a while. I particularly like working in Haxe.
To me, I had never been interested in Flash development because the dev environments I saw always seemed semi-hostile to something other than timeline-based animation. With haxe, it's just you and your text editor - the way programming should be.
it's only $10 but still, if this thing sells so well why do they need to jack up the price?
I think the proper question is "Why aren't they jacking up the price way, way more?"
Businesses set prices to make money. Sometimes lowering prices will result in making more money (by selling more units or something). However, if you're selling out continuously then raising prices seems pretty dang reasonable. Now you might have some reason why you think they shouldn't raise prices. And maybe they shouldn't (for good will or something), but the default desire of a business to raise prices shouldn't require much explanation.
We have a DS that we've really enjoyed (lately we've been playing Hotel Dusk while driving on road trips) - but I bought a GBA Micro as a Christmas present for my wife. It was $30, it's ridiculously tiny, and cute as a button. Great buy. We already had her favorite games on the GBA (Bust-A-Move, Klax) - but our "original" GBA seems like a dark, bulky monstrosity now. Even a DS Lite seems like a tank next to a GBA Micro.
Anyways, with the prices (and form factor) they can produce these at I'm not surprised the original GBA still has some legs.
Yes there are solutions that might work for other people, but as I mentioned in my original post they're not going to work well for us and are going to be a significant task to implement.
In terms of reasoning, they say they're doing it to improve security (without citing any actual current concerns - just general surface area). They want to avoid the work of making this control secure. I think that's sad that they can't make the control work properly and securely (especially given how much it shares with the solution they're suggesting now) - but if they needed to leave it out of the default install then that's fine. Whatever.
But let us install the control manually. Even if it's marked as unsafe for scripting we could get it working on trusted sites. But apparently their perusal of public websites suggests that even this isn't worth the bother.
We'll come up with a workaround. We always do. It would just be nice if MS left us with a little more control over our own destiny here instead of writing us off with a labor-intensive, incomplete workaround.
Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Such cards were typically capable of addressing only 256K of local memory and displaying 256 colors at 640x480
My VGA card had 256k of RAM, and it did 640x480 at 16 colors. I wonder why...
640*480=307200 256k=262144 bytes
That's also why most early "VGA" games ran at 320x200x256. I understand that 640x480 is sometimes referred to as VGA regardless of color depth, but that doesn't seem to be what he's doing here.
What total nonsense. In terms of threats, bio, nuclear and chem, in that order, outweigh any robotic threat by a great deal (discounting Turing machines, which are a far different class than that discussed here).
Yes, a Turing machine adapted for war would be pretty scary. Imagine the symbols it could leave on a man! Imagine the countryside devastated by layers of its infinitely long tape!
Only Schrodinger's cat is powerful enough to stop it!
Slashdot Mirror
The company I work for has been using all online docs for the last 7 years. Around 4 million documents and a few hundred thousand dollars saved later, I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea.
About a year in, we added a plug-in to store backup versions of the docs on the user's hard disk to supplement the auto-save (in the case of a lost connection during editing, which of course does happen occasionally) - but other than that things have pretty much "just worked". Honestly, the docs have caused less problems than we used to have with Word: there's nothing to configure incorrectly, there's no choice about where to save, there's nothing to install, and there's far fewer features to abuse. It's much easier to protect the user from themselves and to enforce business rules in documents. As a bonus, users can work from home without buying their own software, or having compatibility hassles.
Pretty much everything our users do is done using a browser and hosted centrally; it has been an unqualified success and an IT dream. I can't imagine how much pain we've avoided by missing 5 generations of new Word problems. I think back to the time when we had to install apps on every machine, and I shudder.
Except in England, where it's: 0118-999-881-999-119-7253.
Many of these points have already been made, but I'll chime in. I remember the move to XP well. I didn't think it was an amazing upgrade, but:
1. It didn't break any of our internal apps. Vista breaks a few and requires different support procedures for others. Stepping back again, 2000 didn't break any of our apps moving from NT 4.
2. XP had somewhat of a killer app (for a corporate environment) with Remote Assist, which has been a real boon to our support staff.
3. We still didn't jump on in any kind of hurry.
I guess I should have realized the PS3 would be a little cramped inside with a regular size HD (and I didn't realize laptop HD prices/sizes were so different).
If we look at the PC space, increasing hard disk size isn't terribly expensive. The difference between a 100GB drive and a 400GB drive might only be $10-$20 over a $60-$70 base price. Not insignificant, but not terribly large either.
Are the economics significantly different on the console side? If not, wouldn't it be a bit of a coup for Sony (or, conversely, MS) to trumpet a 300GB or 500GB drive? At least as an option? It's a very visible number - and making it 20 times as big as your competitor's "20GB" would be quite the snub. And a future sales boon when - like MS - you're selling media downloads.
Anyways, I've just always been curious why the console HD numbers seem so small.
I don't think there's anything to "very expensive cables" - but there's certainly bad cables, and cables that are more or less susceptible to interference. My brother and I played around with this for a while with a variety of cables - we even borrowed some fairly expensive ones from a high-end stereo dealer.
We got the best results out of some bulky network cable we stole from work. Not in some vague musical-flavor sort of way, but in a very noticeable improvement in quality over our worst cables (some very thin Radio Shack stuff).
I'd certainly agree that audiophiles swallow some ridiculous garbage, but the converse isn't true. It isn't all garbage - and I'll never understand the people who believe that all equipment sounds the same (or that their ridiculous, quiet, tinny little Bose speakers are the best speakers on the planet).
I'm patenting my own method of box checking:
1. Cut a hole in the box.
2. Put your check in that box.
3. Make her open the box.
In my old truck you had to stop, get out, go over to the front wheels, and lock the hubs in order to get 4WD.
It didn't usually take me a half-hour, and I wouldn't say that someone "wanted" this "feature" - but that used to be the norm for 4WD vehicles (and many probably still work this way).
HH
Sm Wnrit
A while back my wife was playing a game like this online with our niece. On the screen were a flower, some corn plants, a tree, and a rabbit.
My wife clicked the corn, because the other 3 things were pretty.
I remember this game from Sesame Street. They showed 4 things - 3 were different and one was the same. Same as... uh..
From Microsoft:
Vista breaks a lot of stuff. MS stuff included.
Spore isn't going to be one more disappointing game. From my grasp of the demo it's going to be 9 more disappointing games and some loose connective tissue.
Indeed. I'm guessing our users will trust the company e-mail saying "Vista is not supported. Do not buy it." more than they'll trust whatever MS says.
Beyond our own app not working, I've noticed a few things about Vista that are just confusing. Like, out of the box, XP will play most random movie files (I've found). I was playing with Aero and wanted to see it play a movie all tilted or whatever - I couldn't find one movie file (including the AVIs from my digital camera) that it would play right? WTF?
Dungeon Siege: The Movie
I don't really understand this perspective, though I hear it a lot. I understand not everyone has an HDTV, but it's not like they're exclusive toys for the insanely rich. For years I've been using a $900 720p projector. In my last house I had it in a theatre style room (in the basement) together with probably $500 worth of stereo equipment.
Does the fact that I had $1400 worth of theater equipment mean that $600 is chump change?
I hadn't thought of that - it should be doable assuming the content isn't signed as well (and I wouldn't think it would be). This sort of cheating should be reasonably easy to detect via forced updates (easier than the drive firmware sneakiness at least), but it's sad anyway.
As far as I know, the mod in question only allows users to play "backups" of games - not to run arbitrary code (including cheats). So the concerns of people cheating are a little off the mark. As is the idea that the detection could really be moved to the server side - any detection regimen is going to have to look at the drive's firmware or some characteristic of the disk and this looking is going to be done at the client end.
Free development in Flash has been around for a while. I particularly like working in Haxe.
To me, I had never been interested in Flash development because the dev environments I saw always seemed semi-hostile to something other than timeline-based animation. With haxe, it's just you and your text editor - the way programming should be.
it's only $10 but still, if this thing sells so well why do they need to jack up the price?
I think the proper question is "Why aren't they jacking up the price way, way more?"
Businesses set prices to make money. Sometimes lowering prices will result in making more money (by selling more units or something). However, if you're selling out continuously then raising prices seems pretty dang reasonable. Now you might have some reason why you think they shouldn't raise prices. And maybe they shouldn't (for good will or something), but the default desire of a business to raise prices shouldn't require much explanation.
We have a DS that we've really enjoyed (lately we've been playing Hotel Dusk while driving on road trips) - but I bought a GBA Micro as a Christmas present for my wife. It was $30, it's ridiculously tiny, and cute as a button. Great buy. We already had her favorite games on the GBA (Bust-A-Move, Klax) - but our "original" GBA seems like a dark, bulky monstrosity now. Even a DS Lite seems like a tank next to a GBA Micro.
Anyways, with the prices (and form factor) they can produce these at I'm not surprised the original GBA still has some legs.
Yes there are solutions that might work for other people, but as I mentioned in my original post they're not going to work well for us and are going to be a significant task to implement.
In terms of reasoning, they say they're doing it to improve security (without citing any actual current concerns - just general surface area). They want to avoid the work of making this control secure. I think that's sad that they can't make the control work properly and securely (especially given how much it shares with the solution they're suggesting now) - but if they needed to leave it out of the default install then that's fine. Whatever.
But let us install the control manually. Even if it's marked as unsafe for scripting we could get it working on trusted sites. But apparently their perusal of public websites suggests that even this isn't worth the bother.
We'll come up with a workaround. We always do. It would just be nice if MS left us with a little more control over our own destiny here instead of writing us off with a labor-intensive, incomplete workaround.
Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.
Such cards were typically capable of addressing only 256K of local memory and displaying 256 colors at 640x480
My VGA card had 256k of RAM, and it did 640x480 at 16 colors. I wonder why...
640*480=307200
256k=262144 bytes
That's also why most early "VGA" games ran at 320x200x256. I understand that 640x480 is sometimes referred to as VGA regardless of color depth, but that doesn't seem to be what he's doing here.
Yes, a Turing machine adapted for war would be pretty scary. Imagine the symbols it could leave on a man! Imagine the countryside devastated by layers of its infinitely long tape!
Only Schrodinger's cat is powerful enough to stop it!