Unfortunately, while this is a long overdue solution that other companies have used fine before, but it's going to prove problematic for Microsoft. Things that won't work (and Joe User will try to do anyway):
1.) Install their XP-compatible Antivirus program. "It said on the Windows 7 box that I could run old programs!" 2.) Install a printer which works on XP only. "The printer box said it works on Windows. Why can I only print from some programs (the older ones seem to work)?" 3.) Play an old game at reasonable speed. "I installed Super Hardware Killer Shooter for Windows XP and the 3D is running really slow!"
Virtualization is a great thing. I use it work all the time and love it. The public doesn't quite "get it" yet. They're going to see some things work, some things not and wonder why the hell that is. It happened when Apple moved to OS X, but the user base was much smaller so the complaints were less.
Until someone creates a hypervisor which is presented in a completely transparent way to the OS, in that things difficult to virtualize (e.g. video card hardware) run at normal speeds, it's just going to appear to the user "every time I run an old program, either it's too slow or it doesn't work".
Of what, exactly? Team-based MMO PVP is one small subset of a genre of gaming (like many other small subsets of genres). While some may be into it, there's a huge number of people that are not. Your use of the word "goal" implies a destination everyone is trying to reach. That's not the case here.
Macbook = Consumer laptop Macbook Pro = Better than consumer laptop
If you need to do particular work, you buy the tool best associated to do the job.
I wouldn't hammer a nail in with a screwdriver. I wouldn't buy a point-and-shoot POS over a SLR if I was a newspaper photographer. I wouldn't get a Macbook if I needed to do any kind of video editing.
Simple question: do you think Apple is marketing the new Macbooks for Mr. Joe Collegestudent or Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work?
Apple spends 9/10 of their time marketing. Always hasl. Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work arguably won't get the laptop marketed for its Word processing and gaming use.
Not really. Apple's marketshare has switched from Mr. Graphic Designer to Joe Collegestudent. Mr. Graphic Designer wants older matte screens because they supposedly reproduce colors better (the same reason they held onto CRTs well after LCDs debuted). Joe Collegestudent wants "popping" colors for photos, deeper blacks, etc. In other words, they want their computers to be modeled after consumer devices like LCD TVs -- they could care less about color reproduction.
Me, personally, I like the glossy screens. My laptop purchases are purely for home use where I look at photos, watch movies and play games. I think most of Apple's buyers are similar in their interests now.
If you want a matte screen, there's plenty of other laptops choose from. Apple wouldn't be selling new laptops with glossy screens if the old ones weren't selling reasonably well.
To Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft: World of Warcraft has been very successful. However, when one has success it tends to paint a bullseye on you. Besides competitors targeting you, how have you dealt with the increasing "World of Warcraft sucks" backlash? (E.g. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=world+of+warcraft+sucks)
The only issue is that they had to cut some corners to make this work. Axing sendmail? Ok, I understand that (I think was arguing that 10 years ago -- still don't wonder why that's on by default in the desktop distributions). But "The 'done booting' time did not include bringing up the network"? Um, ok... no. With the proliferation of devices solely used to read information from networks (Netbooks, those "quick-loading" Linux apps some laptop manufacturers are including so people can check their email, etc.) accessing the network is one of the main purposes for turning on the machine in the first place. It would royally piss people off to have a quick loading screen, log in and then see "Hold up, still starting up the network". (Just as frustrating as starting a Windows or Mac, getting to the desktop and still waiting while services and programs are loaded).
Come to think of it, what people really need to do is take a good look at modern OSes and determine EXACTLY what still needs to be there and what's cruft. Some of the daemons/services we're launching made sense 15-20 years ago. Does the fax daemon really need to start on my Mac? Does the Group Policy Client need to be started on my Vista box when I'm not on a domain? There's lots of stuff that at one point probably made sense to someone but now is just extraneous.
Well, if your time is worth more than $50/hour, based on a 40 hour work week you make at least $104,000 annually, so paying for something that can be done for free is worth it to you
I do, and I doubt I'm alone here in that regard. Tech has seen a resurgence -- not uncommon for people to be making 6 digits nowadays.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
For most people, this is a reasonable solution (alongside other reasonable solutions such as getting the DVR that comes from the cable/telephone company, getting a Windows Media Center box, etc). I would venture to say that a MythTV box takes a couple hours for the average user to set up (barring issues with incompatible hardware/software, which'll undoubtedly add more time). Let's say it takes 4 hours to build a reasonable MythTV box, install and configure it. $200 for this thing. $200/4 hours = $50/hour. For me personally, my time is worth way more per hour than that -- it makes more sense to go the prepackaged route.
I'm not saying it's for everything, but the fact of the matter is most people don't want to mess with their TVs. The same way they don't want to mess with their cars, microwaves, blenders and -- yes -- computers. Most people just want to watch the damn TV.
Thank f'ing god someone understands how this works.
The fact that "Anonymous" has somehow been given a group designation baffles me. It's a bunch of internet trolls (mostly males, aged 14-24) that are happy -- ecstatic -- that they are getting media attention. They're just a bunch of individuals laughing at the fact that people take them so seriously.
* "It'll be more of the same." * "You can never win an MMORPG. It's a never-ending treadmill." * "Thank God I got off that crack a year ago." * "It won't be as good as Eve/Warhammer/etc." * "Blizzard isn't going to get another one of my dollars after that DMCA bullshit." * "I'm waiting for Diablo 3/StarCraft 2." * "I hate PC games. Console games rule."
I think I've covered the major ones. On that note, I have my copy on preorder.
Looked for a rootkit on the Mac version
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Unless the couple of *nix-based rootkit detectors I've run are totally clueless, they haven't found anything. There *is* a Securom folder under:/Users/Chris/Library/Preferences/SPORE/Creature Creator/Preferences/p_drive/User/Application Data/SecuROM
but it looks more like a remnant of Cider's emulation than anything.
If all Securom does on Mac is DRM-ize Cider, I could care less. It's like getting a virus in a VM.
Oh, and the game rocks. Very enjoyable (as long as you're not looking for Civilization -- if you are I recommend FreeCIV or any number of commercial alternatives).
I'm going to take a purely myopic, personal stance on this. I got into IT because I was interested in technology. I have seen more burnout and sacrifices by coworkers in this industry than any other. I have seen people responding to Blackberry messages at 2 AM (when they work 9 to 5), spend their days freezing their bodies slowly in server rooms and watched IT managers lose their hair trying to explain that "technology" doesn't mean "magic all the time" to executives.
I always thought there were worse occupations out there. Surely the garbage man or coal miner has a less satisfying/harder job than me. However, at the end of the shift, these guys go home. The garbage man doesn't need to pick up heavy cans in his living room. The coal miner doesn't need to chip away at the walls in his bedroom. In no other industry is the disconnect between work and life non-existent like in IT. Hell, even doctors have calling services.
The joy of learning new things was quickly squashed by the nature of this industry. Even when I'm programming or building new hardware, I'm connected to the responsibility of maintaining 24/7 systems on a 24/7 schedule.
I know some are saying "You don't need to have a job like this. There are other jobs in the IT industry that don't demand this kind of schedule." Bullshit. We brought this unto ourselves. We were the ones arguing for telecommuting. We were the proponents of portable tech. And now we have to "eat the dog food". We sold people on it, we have to bow to it ourselves.
I was thinking about this the other day. I'm almost 30. The internet came about in my generation. IT has been going on much longer. How was it done before "always-on", "always-connected"? Surely it was less efficient. And yet, you hear about IT people from that time staying in their jobs for decades, loving what they do, etc. Nowadays you're surprised to see someone stick around 3 years in a "permanent" job.
What did we do to our industry? How bad have we fucked it up? Can we change it by unionizing? I'll do anything at this point.
Not that I don't appreciate the effort, but the App Store has more than held my sway over the old Installer.app-style stuff. Just about everything I want is free on there, and there's really a handful of stuff that will not be on there (emulators, as I'm assuming they count as "illegal" and pr0n -- but who needs pr0n in an app anyway)? So far, the stuff that has come out (e.g. radio apps) and what people are working on (about 5 programmers that I know of are doing VOIP apps -- and Apple already said there'd be no problem putting them up on the store).
I even downloaded the SDK and, yeah, while you can't do anything crazy with kernel or whatever in an "official" program, the API is pretty robust (pretty much any app can call one or two commands to find the GPS location -- that's pretty cool). I'm tempted to write my own apps now.
I mean, yeah, open source is cool and all. But all I wanted was the apps, and 99% of what I want is going to end up on the App store (in some cases for free). I haven't even jailbroken my phone at this point.
"It is a failure where people are expecting too much of it in its current state."
Really? Last I checked, KDE 4 was labelled "release", not "beta". Is it wrong to assume, for the average user, that "release" means "usable" and "shouldn't crash too often"?
"You are not forced to upgrade to KDE 4.x, but Vista is required for some of today's games and applications because they don't run in earlier versions."
If that was the case, developers would be in a whole heap of trouble because so few people are still running Vista. The only thing I can think of that "requires" Vista is DirectX 10, and it's only a handful of games at that. Most of them have DirectX 9 compatibility, so the point is moot. Outside that, what other apps "require" Vista? The latest version of Symantec Antivirus? Pretty sure they're still making updates for versions all the way back to Windows 95.
A first glance, it doesn't look to me like ice "melting" any more than salt or some other finely-grained material blowing away (no, I'm not saying it's salt -- just something that could move). Is there no wind in that area or something?
I also heard if you tie hundreds of horses together your cart may run as fast as a Ferrari (and it'd be cheaper too)! Oats cost nothing compared to the price of gas these days...
In reference to the bandwidth limiting efforts in particular, just because there may be a way to offset technical problems with good technology (e.g. Bittorrent for video/audio) doesn't mean it makes business sense. For an ISP, it may be more economical to simply limit the bandwidth of users (which is easy) than figure out what is really a fairly difficult problem. If:
What we're making now - Cost to implement bandwidth controls - Loss of customers that get ticked off
is greater than
What we're making now - Cost to implement good technology that handles bandwidth more efficiently
most companies are going to choose the former. It makes more business sense.
I'm reminded of a passage in "Becoming a Technical Leader" (great book btw - a commenter on Slashdot mentioned it). Anyway, it's about making the transition from techie to management, and analyzing the differences in thought processes. The author tells a story where a company was designing a system, and the requirements were "Make sure it can recover from one error per day" (or something similar). Anyway, the technical people involved with the project thought it would be better if they could get it to "Make sure it can recover from any error, ever, immediately", as they thought it was a more interesting technical problems. Turns out it cost the company something like $4 million, and in the end they had something that a) the customer didn't really need and b) they basically couldn't sell to anyone else. The moral of the story is that just because there are interesting technical problems, doesn't mean that solving them makes good business sense.
I think the (valid) concern is that once the average Wii owner has figured out how to install the Homebrew Channel, they'll realize they're only a step or two away from playing regular Wii games without paying for them. Give people the chance to not pay for something and they jump on it (e.g. Napster). Considering the bulk of Nintendo's profit is actually 1st party titles, not 3rd party, pirated games would hit them harder than MS or Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, while this is a long overdue solution that other companies have used fine before, but it's going to prove problematic for Microsoft. Things that won't work (and Joe User will try to do anyway):
1.) Install their XP-compatible Antivirus program. "It said on the Windows 7 box that I could run old programs!"
2.) Install a printer which works on XP only. "The printer box said it works on Windows. Why can I only print from some programs (the older ones seem to work)?"
3.) Play an old game at reasonable speed. "I installed Super Hardware Killer Shooter for Windows XP and the 3D is running really slow!"
Virtualization is a great thing. I use it work all the time and love it. The public doesn't quite "get it" yet. They're going to see some things work, some things not and wonder why the hell that is. It happened when Apple moved to OS X, but the user base was much smaller so the complaints were less.
Until someone creates a hypervisor which is presented in a completely transparent way to the OS, in that things difficult to virtualize (e.g. video card hardware) run at normal speeds, it's just going to appear to the user "every time I run an old program, either it's too slow or it doesn't work".
"That's what the ultimate goal is."
Of what, exactly? Team-based MMO PVP is one small subset of a genre of gaming (like many other small subsets of genres). While some may be into it, there's a huge number of people that are not. Your use of the word "goal" implies a destination everyone is trying to reach. That's not the case here.
The two OSs were similar in ray-tracing, and Vista was faster at Java OpenGL due to shortcomings with the Linux graphics driver.
I know this will be seen as a troll, but who the hell uses Java for ray-tracing or with OpenGL?
"Are there any laptops that don't suffer from terrible vertical viewing angles?"
Yes, the one right next to it. The new Macbook Pro.
Macbook = Consumer laptop
Macbook Pro = Better than consumer laptop
If you need to do particular work, you buy the tool best associated to do the job.
I wouldn't hammer a nail in with a screwdriver.
I wouldn't buy a point-and-shoot POS over a SLR if I was a newspaper photographer.
I wouldn't get a Macbook if I needed to do any kind of video editing.
Also, the Macbook screen sucks: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/IMG_4649.jpg
It's been known for quite some time that the servers that run World of Warcraft use Oracle on Linux.
Simple question: do you think Apple is marketing the new Macbooks for Mr. Joe Collegestudent or Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work?
Apple spends 9/10 of their time marketing. Always hasl. Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work arguably won't get the laptop marketed for its Word processing and gaming use.
Not really. Apple's marketshare has switched from Mr. Graphic Designer to Joe Collegestudent. Mr. Graphic Designer wants older matte screens because they supposedly reproduce colors better (the same reason they held onto CRTs well after LCDs debuted). Joe Collegestudent wants "popping" colors for photos, deeper blacks, etc. In other words, they want their computers to be modeled after consumer devices like LCD TVs -- they could care less about color reproduction.
Me, personally, I like the glossy screens. My laptop purchases are purely for home use where I look at photos, watch movies and play games. I think most of Apple's buyers are similar in their interests now.
If you want a matte screen, there's plenty of other laptops choose from. Apple wouldn't be selling new laptops with glossy screens if the old ones weren't selling reasonably well.
To Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft: World of Warcraft has been very successful. However, when one has success it tends to paint a bullseye on you. Besides competitors targeting you, how have you dealt with the increasing "World of Warcraft sucks" backlash? (E.g. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=world+of+warcraft+sucks)
To Chris Sigaty, lead producer on StarCraft II: has Blizzard ever considered making Battle.net pay to play given the success of World of Warcraft?
The only issue is that they had to cut some corners to make this work. Axing sendmail? Ok, I understand that (I think was arguing that 10 years ago -- still don't wonder why that's on by default in the desktop distributions). But "The 'done booting' time did not include bringing up the network"? Um, ok... no. With the proliferation of devices solely used to read information from networks (Netbooks, those "quick-loading" Linux apps some laptop manufacturers are including so people can check their email, etc.) accessing the network is one of the main purposes for turning on the machine in the first place. It would royally piss people off to have a quick loading screen, log in and then see "Hold up, still starting up the network". (Just as frustrating as starting a Windows or Mac, getting to the desktop and still waiting while services and programs are loaded).
Come to think of it, what people really need to do is take a good look at modern OSes and determine EXACTLY what still needs to be there and what's cruft. Some of the daemons/services we're launching made sense 15-20 years ago. Does the fax daemon really need to start on my Mac? Does the Group Policy Client need to be started on my Vista box when I'm not on a domain? There's lots of stuff that at one point probably made sense to someone but now is just extraneous.
I do, and I doubt I'm alone here in that regard. Tech has seen a resurgence -- not uncommon for people to be making 6 digits nowadays.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
For most people, this is a reasonable solution (alongside other reasonable solutions such as getting the DVR that comes from the cable/telephone company, getting a Windows Media Center box, etc). I would venture to say that a MythTV box takes a couple hours for the average user to set up (barring issues with incompatible hardware/software, which'll undoubtedly add more time). Let's say it takes 4 hours to build a reasonable MythTV box, install and configure it. $200 for this thing. $200/4 hours = $50/hour. For me personally, my time is worth way more per hour than that -- it makes more sense to go the prepackaged route.
I'm not saying it's for everything, but the fact of the matter is most people don't want to mess with their TVs. The same way they don't want to mess with their cars, microwaves, blenders and -- yes -- computers. Most people just want to watch the damn TV.
Thank f'ing god someone understands how this works.
The fact that "Anonymous" has somehow been given a group designation baffles me. It's a bunch of internet trolls (mostly males, aged 14-24) that are happy -- ecstatic -- that they are getting media attention. They're just a bunch of individuals laughing at the fact that people take them so seriously.
* "It'll be more of the same."
* "You can never win an MMORPG. It's a never-ending treadmill."
* "Thank God I got off that crack a year ago."
* "It won't be as good as Eve/Warhammer/etc."
* "Blizzard isn't going to get another one of my dollars after that DMCA bullshit."
* "I'm waiting for Diablo 3/StarCraft 2."
* "I hate PC games. Console games rule."
I think I've covered the major ones. On that note, I have my copy on preorder.
Unless the couple of *nix-based rootkit detectors I've run are totally clueless, they haven't found anything. There *is* a Securom folder under: /Users/Chris/Library/Preferences/SPORE/Creature Creator/Preferences/p_drive/User/Application Data/SecuROM
but it looks more like a remnant of Cider's emulation than anything.
If all Securom does on Mac is DRM-ize Cider, I could care less. It's like getting a virus in a VM.
Oh, and the game rocks. Very enjoyable (as long as you're not looking for Civilization -- if you are I recommend FreeCIV or any number of commercial alternatives).
I'm going to take a purely myopic, personal stance on this. I got into IT because I was interested in technology. I have seen more burnout and sacrifices by coworkers in this industry than any other. I have seen people responding to Blackberry messages at 2 AM (when they work 9 to 5), spend their days freezing their bodies slowly in server rooms and watched IT managers lose their hair trying to explain that "technology" doesn't mean "magic all the time" to executives.
I always thought there were worse occupations out there. Surely the garbage man or coal miner has a less satisfying/harder job than me. However, at the end of the shift, these guys go home. The garbage man doesn't need to pick up heavy cans in his living room. The coal miner doesn't need to chip away at the walls in his bedroom. In no other industry is the disconnect between work and life non-existent like in IT. Hell, even doctors have calling services.
The joy of learning new things was quickly squashed by the nature of this industry. Even when I'm programming or building new hardware, I'm connected to the responsibility of maintaining 24/7 systems on a 24/7 schedule.
I know some are saying "You don't need to have a job like this. There are other jobs in the IT industry that don't demand this kind of schedule." Bullshit. We brought this unto ourselves. We were the ones arguing for telecommuting. We were the proponents of portable tech. And now we have to "eat the dog food". We sold people on it, we have to bow to it ourselves.
I was thinking about this the other day. I'm almost 30. The internet came about in my generation. IT has been going on much longer. How was it done before "always-on", "always-connected"? Surely it was less efficient. And yet, you hear about IT people from that time staying in their jobs for decades, loving what they do, etc. Nowadays you're surprised to see someone stick around 3 years in a "permanent" job.
What did we do to our industry? How bad have we fucked it up? Can we change it by unionizing? I'll do anything at this point.
Not that I don't appreciate the effort, but the App Store has more than held my sway over the old Installer.app-style stuff. Just about everything I want is free on there, and there's really a handful of stuff that will not be on there (emulators, as I'm assuming they count as "illegal" and pr0n -- but who needs pr0n in an app anyway)? So far, the stuff that has come out (e.g. radio apps) and what people are working on (about 5 programmers that I know of are doing VOIP apps -- and Apple already said there'd be no problem putting them up on the store).
I even downloaded the SDK and, yeah, while you can't do anything crazy with kernel or whatever in an "official" program, the API is pretty robust (pretty much any app can call one or two commands to find the GPS location -- that's pretty cool). I'm tempted to write my own apps now.
I mean, yeah, open source is cool and all. But all I wanted was the apps, and 99% of what I want is going to end up on the App store (in some cases for free). I haven't even jailbroken my phone at this point.
"It is a failure where people are expecting too much of it in its current state."
Really? Last I checked, KDE 4 was labelled "release", not "beta". Is it wrong to assume, for the average user, that "release" means "usable" and "shouldn't crash too often"?
"You are not forced to upgrade to KDE 4.x, but Vista is required for some of today's games and applications because they don't run in earlier versions."
If that was the case, developers would be in a whole heap of trouble because so few people are still running Vista. The only thing I can think of that "requires" Vista is DirectX 10, and it's only a handful of games at that. Most of them have DirectX 9 compatibility, so the point is moot. Outside that, what other apps "require" Vista? The latest version of Symantec Antivirus? Pretty sure they're still making updates for versions all the way back to Windows 95.
"Who, if they have not already, would install Vista now?"
I heard Mac OS X 10.6 is supposed to come out next year. Who, if they have not already, would install 10.5 now?
A first glance, it doesn't look to me like ice "melting" any more than salt or some other finely-grained material blowing away (no, I'm not saying it's salt -- just something that could move). Is there no wind in that area or something?
I also heard if you tie hundreds of horses together your cart may run as fast as a Ferrari (and it'd be cheaper too)! Oats cost nothing compared to the price of gas these days...
In reference to the bandwidth limiting efforts in particular, just because there may be a way to offset technical problems with good technology (e.g. Bittorrent for video/audio) doesn't mean it makes business sense. For an ISP, it may be more economical to simply limit the bandwidth of users (which is easy) than figure out what is really a fairly difficult problem. If:
What we're making now - Cost to implement bandwidth controls - Loss of customers that get ticked off
is greater than
What we're making now - Cost to implement good technology that handles bandwidth more efficiently
most companies are going to choose the former. It makes more business sense.
I'm reminded of a passage in "Becoming a Technical Leader" (great book btw - a commenter on Slashdot mentioned it). Anyway, it's about making the transition from techie to management, and analyzing the differences in thought processes. The author tells a story where a company was designing a system, and the requirements were "Make sure it can recover from one error per day" (or something similar). Anyway, the technical people involved with the project thought it would be better if they could get it to "Make sure it can recover from any error, ever, immediately", as they thought it was a more interesting technical problems. Turns out it cost the company something like $4 million, and in the end they had something that a) the customer didn't really need and b) they basically couldn't sell to anyone else. The moral of the story is that just because there are interesting technical problems, doesn't mean that solving them makes good business sense.
I think the (valid) concern is that once the average Wii owner has figured out how to install the Homebrew Channel, they'll realize they're only a step or two away from playing regular Wii games without paying for them. Give people the chance to not pay for something and they jump on it (e.g. Napster). Considering the bulk of Nintendo's profit is actually 1st party titles, not 3rd party, pirated games would hit them harder than MS or Sony.
"Let us name our revolutionary new open product a name that'll be 1 letter away from 'dick'."
"Brilliant!"
Even if this thing were to completely take off, Slashdotters will still be giggling over its name.