PSFT offers its apps suite on Linux (albeit very recently). Oracle, AFAIK, does not. SAP does. JD Edwards does not.
Open source is not a real issue. Business applications (aka enterprise applications) are built over a long period by people with intimate business experience. Or at least experience they think is intimate with business.
There is little technical challenge associated with writing an accounts recievable package. But, in theory at least, understaning AR (i.e. being an accountant) is important.
So, there has been little OSS work in this area. And as almost all enterprise applications are customised to high heaven, I can't see many businesses wanting to go the high road with this software.
If everyone could sned their $50 (cash, PayPal, cheques, postal orders, etc accepted) to me, then I promise that (just as soon as I have all the money needed) I will buy SCO and release the source code.
Unfortunately, if I don't recieve all the cash, I won't be able to return it, because of ummm.. the errrr.. hassle of doing so. And legal issues and the like.
Please don't slashdot my little Linux box, but amoral.org (my website, not I promise, a pornsite) just fell off the planet. A WhoIs still shows it as mine, but when I go to it, it shows up with a screen from new.net. (The Quick! "Search service" comes up, and I suddenly seem to have gotten TopText installed, hmmmm.) Also, the IP it points to has now (miraculously) changed to 217.155.19.97. Hmmmm.
Frabkly that's a bit bleeding heart liberal, isn't it?
We'll use this to spy on foreign nations and corporations and make sure they're not stealing our secrets.
And if we do a little insider trading, that's only fair given that we - American taxpayers - have to bear the financial burden of doing all this spying.
I studied Philosophy at Cambridge University, and the last exam you took every year was called "Essay". You were expected to pontificate for three hours on one of a number of topics. So, the question paper would be:
1) Justice 2) Truth... 20) Happiness
Generally it was a great opportunity to blather on. Anyway, when I arrived there was this great fuss. Apparently, in the previous year one of the questions had been simply "Courage", to which one student had written "This is." The story - true or not - is that he was given perfect marks for the essay, and got to doodle for the remaining two hours and 59 minutes...
I was a stock analyst at Goldman Sachs for years..
on
Wall Street Meat
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
.. on the top-rated European technology research team. And while I haven't (yet) read the book, the criticisms ring true.
Lets not forget, if an investment bank is hiring someone to analyse - say - the enterprise software sector, they can choose someone just our of business school with an MBA or a seasoned manager from a s/ware company. Because the MBA demands $175,000 starting package against $100,000 for manager, he must be the better analyst.
I've covered software for almost ten years as an analyst. I've worked in a software company. I've produced some really bad code. But at least I have some idea of how a software company works, and why people buy software.
Anyway: why did the investment banks churn out such sh*t for so long? How come they got away with lying to investors? How come they knew little to nothing about the industries they covered?
1. Knowing your industry could be a real downer for the bank. If you took what CEOs said at face value, and repeated it, with lovely phrases such as "management assured us...", "a recovery looks imminent", "margins are set to improve", and worst of all "top-quality management" the companies would be happy. If companies were happy, then they might use your bank for corporate finance work, where the fees were astronomical. (A small tech IPO could net $7 of fees. According to the Spitzer papers on Grubman, he generated $400m of fees in one year alone.) Good research, on the other hand, doesn't generate much in commissions.
2. Investors weren't much better than brokers. They bought crap knowing it was crap. Many just wanted access to "hot" IPOs - 'cause getting access to these means you outperformed the index. Too many mutual funds were run by "momentum players" who believed in "efficient markets" - if a stock was going up, then business must be good (someone must know something I don't!) therefore the stock must be bought. The more people played this momentum game, the more a rising stock caused a rising stock. Until the end, of course.
3. Most research wasn't worthy of the name. Companies told analysts what their earnings estimates should be through "guidance". They the companies used accounting trickery (see Enron, WorldCom, Lernout & Hauspie, etc.) to beat these estimates "by a penny." Rarely did "analysts" analyse the rising number of obvious red-flags on company balance sheets: rising recievables, intangibles, use of "EBITDA" numbers, and the dread pro-forma etc. On conference calls following results those analysts who were bullish (i.e. most of them) would say - and I kid you not - "great quarter guys". The most insightful question would be "can you give us some guidance on the margins going forward." As recently as last week, an investor told me that I was still practically the only analyst she talked to who read 10Qs!
Anyway. In Dec '99, myself and my colleagues got sick of being asked to do dumb IPOs for shitty companies. We left, and started our own independent research company. We're profitable and having a great time!
Knuth [stanford.edu] says that computer programming is an art, but I dare you to read his books and claim they are devoid of science.
Ummm... I have his Fundamental Algorithms Volume I. I think the "and claim they are devoid of science" part of the sentance is redundant.
Only the truly masochistic would manage to pull themselve through the end of Knuth. Not that the work isn't brilliant in its own way; but the prose isn't exactly sparkling.
I'm sorry, but it's impossible to have a business that is *entirely* open source. Any large company will want to have some expensive enterprise applications that manages inventory, accounts receivable, payroll, etc. These packages are just not exciting technically, and can't (unless I'm very much mistaken) be found in the open source world.
So, unless you want your company to write its own general ledger software (not a good idea) you will have to buy it from someone. So, dealing with vendors is inevitable.
If its any consolation, the enterprise application vendors (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle) are increasingly supporting OSS. You can run SAP on Linux (and it is increasingly popular) for instance.
Now, what I want to know is when these big (expensive) enterprise software systems will support PostgreSQL...
It's funny you should mention this, because I just got my 3G phone working yesterday. It sucks.
(For the record I am using Hutchinson's three service in the UK with the NEC e606 phone.)
Compared to WLAN access (even at its slowest), 3G crawls. And - frankly - you've got a better chance of finding a WLAN access point than consistent 3G coverage.
WLAN does, however, have to jump through a few hurdles before it can approach what the cell phone networks do. Firstly, it needs some kind of rationing. At CeBIT my laptop could always see about 20 WLAN networks at any time. Surprise, surprise: none of them worked as they all interfered. At least with cell-phones, one person has a working service.
Secondly, there is no support for "handing-off" between base stations. Given the limited range of an AP, this is a must. (It's also not simple: you need to maintain your IP address as you jumo between APs, which requires a unified backbone network - which 3G has, but WLAN does not.)
Thirdly, it needs various WLAN access point owners and cell-phone operators to communicate. And this is where I break down laughing.
I wish, I wish WLAN could come and allow me to throw away my terrible NEC e606. But I just don't see it.
When I was at college, ohhhhh way back in '94 or '95, some of the kids created a Doom WAD of Trinity College. You can probably find it, if you Google for it.
The best bit was the way the porters' office was full of those hairy monsters who threw fireballs. Beautiful.
But I do know a fair amount about the Bosnian conflict. Or at least I know the region pretty well. I've been to Bosnia, to Slovenia and to Crotia. I've met Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative of the UN. I know local journalists. My best friend was in Sarajevo last weekend. Please don't tell me I know nothing about it.
I am not saying the US is or was perfect, heck they make mistakes all the time. But they intervened in Bosnia for reasons that had nothing to do with oil, or money. They intervened to save further needless bloodshed. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. But you can't maintain they put Americans live on the line for narrow nationalistic purpose, or out of a desire to gain power, prestige or money.
Re:And it all could have been avoided...
on
Updates on War in Iraq
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
OK. I've been pretty sceptical of the motivation behind this "war", but your post was simply offensive.
"I hope you get a new Vietnam" - do you know how many innocent Vietnamese lost their lives? Do you have any idea idea how many 100,000s of thousands died? No. The best thing for the Iraqi people now is for the war to be over as soon as possible with as few as possible casualities.
And - as a Brit - your knee-jerk anti-Americanism irritates me beyond belief. It is so fashionable to hate America and claim that it is horrible place run by a madman. America is a liberal democracy where freedom of speech is respected. By and large, citizens are not tortured (something you can't say for China or Russia) and public dissent is allowed. Best of all, citizens are allowed to force a "regime change" every four years.
America (and this was never meant to come across as a homily) has been remarkably un-territorial in its behaviour. When did it last attack a country to gain its territory? When did it last extract reperations from defeated countries?
The last two times the US has used force were:
* Afghanistan - where an incredibly illiberal and un-democratic regime (which banned women from being educated, which had no freedom of religion, which allowed its citizens few rights) was gotten rid-off. Ask yourself, would you rather live in Afghanistan following US intervension, or before?
* Bosnia - in a, not sactioned by the UN move, the US protected Muslims from being ethnically cleansed. Would rather have been a Muslim in Greater Serbia or in (UN run) Bosnia?
I would have happily have given Saddam six more months to dis-arm. But it's too late for that. Lets hope as few people as possible die in the current conflict, and the Iraqi people end up with a propserous, secular, liberal democracy at the end of this.
I was quite amused to read this story and the follow-ups.
Two days ago I put my personal web-site up. It's sitting on a linux box (Apache) behind my firewall, which only lets incoming connections initiated on port 80 through.
In two days I have had maybe 100 hack attempts. All using variations on "GET/something/cmd.exe" or "GET/something/dir.exe". I'm amused, 'cause my Linux box ain't going to get hacked that way.
But, WTF... they're using up MY bandwidth. Why can't ISPs take some responsibility for detecting script kiddies. There can be exactly no un-patched useless WinNT boxen out there. Why shouldn't Mr ScriptKiddy be asked to pay for the bandwidth?
In telephones (in the UK, at least), calling party pays. If someone is hammering my bandwidth malicously (or at least dumbly) why should they pay?
And why can't get an ISP that "traps" stupid requests, and reports them to the users ISP. Too many issues and that ISP is blocked.
Why not?
(I'm thinking about setting up a DDOS system on anybody that tries to 'hack' my server. Just for a laugh, obviously.)
That's true and not true. Lets not forget that the Baby Bells (which grew out of old Ma Bell) were a government regulated monopoly. So, they never really had to face competition.
The case for deregulation is simple "You guys effectively had massive hidden subsidies for a long time, which meant there were no effective competitors, we'd like to open the market up to others."
Re:Experimental Noise Has Been Here Already
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have MP3s of these, and haven't noticed a thing.;-)
In England we have a lot of this technology already.
(Amazingly, too, English people seem convinced their country is heading backwards at full speed towards the ice age, but that's another story.)
In central London all the bus stops contain LED displays showihng how long you'll have to wait for each bus. Likewise, on the tube (underground, subway) their are simialr displays. Normally they say things like "Baker Street 3minutes; Chancery Lane you'll be lucky" but hey...
There are companies like Kizoom (sp?) that offer these same services over WAP so you can make sure that when you leave your home/office then you *will* make your bus, metro, etc.
Oh pu'lease. I'm as anti-Microsoft as the next man, but don't tell me Vivendi Interactive have been paragons of video gaming virtue. They have released truly appalling games, just as Micosoft have published truly great ones (Halo, Project Gotham... Xbox I know, but still).
And Vivendi drag down Microsoft, increasing their debt load? I mean, is this a troll? Microsoft has $41bn dollars of cash. Even VIE isn't going to dent that. (Not that Vivendi is going to get $2bn for VIE.)
This is ridiculous. Thomson stopped manufacturing TiVos in the middle of last year. This is not news.
It has been all but impossible to buy a TiVo in the UK for the last few months. This is not news.
Equally, the idea that TiVo will pull the plug on the UK market is ridiculous.
They have 35,000 subscribers paying £10 ($15) per month, and just two employees. So... £350,000 revenues a month, two staff, a couple of servers, a few phone calls. They must have some pretty expensive offices for the UK operation not to be profitable.
My forecast: when TiVo the company (ticker: TIVO) becomes profitable in the back half of '03, then management will again turn their eyes to other markets: Canada, Australia, UK, etc.
OK; I'm not a technical expert, I'm a finance guy who like to play with tech, so don't expect perfection.
1. Buttons. I played for two minutes, the buttons seemed fine. Using the keypad to "do stuff" felt a little odd, but the directional controller felt just like the GBA.
2. The game I saw (called Pandamonium - or something like that) was not in real 3D, it was more of a side-scroller. (Indeed, it could probably be desribed as Super Mario-esque.) So, I can't comment on its 3D rendering capabilities.
3. Yes, the screen size is a little strange but it didn't feel any narrower than the original GB.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that but (and I speak as a 3 subscriber myself)...
* You can get picture messaging on 2G phones. It works well, and there is (some) interoperability between networks.
* The Internet access speed is LOWER than 2G's GPRS. I mean, what?
* The picture call feature is useless. The picture lags the voice by several seconds, making it almost completely unusable. Aaaarggghh.
Just my thoughts...
Robert
I just sent him $50 - that's the least I can do.
(Down with the RIAA!)
No.
Sorry.
PSFT offers its apps suite on Linux (albeit very recently). Oracle, AFAIK, does not. SAP does. JD Edwards does not.
Open source is not a real issue. Business applications (aka enterprise applications) are built over a long period by people with intimate business experience. Or at least experience they think is intimate with business.
There is little technical challenge associated with writing an accounts recievable package. But, in theory at least, understaning AR (i.e. being an accountant) is important.
So, there has been little OSS work in this area. And as almost all enterprise applications are customised to high heaven, I can't see many businesses wanting to go the high road with this software.
If everyone could sned their $50 (cash, PayPal, cheques, postal orders, etc accepted) to me, then I promise that (just as soon as I have all the money needed) I will buy SCO and release the source code.
Unfortunately, if I don't recieve all the cash, I won't be able to return it, because of ummm.. the errrr.. hassle of doing so. And legal issues and the like.
Remember - send me money, save Linux.
(That ought to work.... Mwaaaa ha ha ha haaaaaa)
Glad you can see me, at least. I'm still having problems, but I suspect they'll work themselves out.
Oh - I'm not going to tell you my TiVo password, I'm afraid. I don't want you to see how sad and derivative my choie in TV programmes is.
Hello all,
Please don't slashdot my little Linux box, but amoral.org (my website, not I promise, a pornsite) just fell off the planet. A WhoIs still shows it as mine, but when I go to it, it shows up with a screen from new.net. (The Quick! "Search service" comes up, and I suddenly seem to have gotten TopText installed, hmmmm.) Also, the IP it points to has now (miraculously) changed to 217.155.19.97. Hmmmm.
How do I get my domian back?
Thanks,
Robert
Scary?
Frabkly that's a bit bleeding heart liberal, isn't it?
We'll use this to spy on foreign nations and corporations and make sure they're not stealing our secrets.
And if we do a little insider trading, that's only fair given that we - American taxpayers - have to bear the financial burden of doing all this spying.
I studied Philosophy at Cambridge University, and the last exam you took every year was called "Essay". You were expected to pontificate for three hours on one of a number of topics. So, the question paper would be:
...
1) Justice
2) Truth
20) Happiness
Generally it was a great opportunity to blather on. Anyway, when I arrived there was this great fuss. Apparently, in the previous year one of the questions had been simply "Courage", to which one student had written "This is." The story - true or not - is that he was given perfect marks for the essay, and got to doodle for the remaining two hours and 59 minutes...
.. on the top-rated European technology research team. And while I haven't (yet) read the book, the criticisms ring true.
Lets not forget, if an investment bank is hiring someone to analyse - say - the enterprise software sector, they can choose someone just our of business school with an MBA or a seasoned manager from a s/ware company. Because the MBA demands $175,000 starting package against $100,000 for manager, he must be the better analyst.
I've covered software for almost ten years as an analyst. I've worked in a software company. I've produced some really bad code. But at least I have some idea of how a software company works, and why people buy software.
Anyway: why did the investment banks churn out such sh*t for so long? How come they got away with lying to investors? How come they knew little to nothing about the industries they covered?
1. Knowing your industry could be a real downer for the bank. If you took what CEOs said at face value, and repeated it, with lovely phrases such as "management assured us...", "a recovery looks imminent", "margins are set to improve", and worst of all "top-quality management" the companies would be happy. If companies were happy, then they might use your bank for corporate finance work, where the fees were astronomical. (A small tech IPO could net $7 of fees. According to the Spitzer papers on Grubman, he generated $400m of fees in one year alone.) Good research, on the other hand, doesn't generate much in commissions.
2. Investors weren't much better than brokers. They bought crap knowing it was crap. Many just wanted access to "hot" IPOs - 'cause getting access to these means you outperformed the index. Too many mutual funds were run by "momentum players" who believed in "efficient markets" - if a stock was going up, then business must be good (someone must know something I don't!) therefore the stock must be bought. The more people played this momentum game, the more a rising stock caused a rising stock. Until the end, of course.
3. Most research wasn't worthy of the name. Companies told analysts what their earnings estimates should be through "guidance". They the companies used accounting trickery (see Enron, WorldCom, Lernout & Hauspie, etc.) to beat these estimates "by a penny." Rarely did "analysts" analyse the rising number of obvious red-flags on company balance sheets: rising recievables, intangibles, use of "EBITDA" numbers, and the dread pro-forma etc. On conference calls following results those analysts who were bullish (i.e. most of them) would say - and I kid you not - "great quarter guys". The most insightful question would be "can you give us some guidance on the margins going forward." As recently as last week, an investor told me that I was still practically the only analyst she talked to who read 10Qs!
Anyway. In Dec '99, myself and my colleagues got sick of being asked to do dumb IPOs for shitty companies. We left, and started our own independent research company. We're profitable and having a great time!
Regards,
Robert
Knuth [stanford.edu] says that computer programming is an art, but I dare you to read his books and claim they are devoid of science.
Ummm... I have his Fundamental Algorithms Volume I. I think the "and claim they are devoid of science" part of the sentance is redundant.
Only the truly masochistic would manage to pull themselve through the end of Knuth. Not that the work isn't brilliant in its own way; but the prose isn't exactly sparkling.
When I was at college there was the ultimate (genuine) C club name...
Corpus Christi College Cambridge Cross Country Cycling Club.
C8... but genuine... nice...
I'm sorry, but it's impossible to have a business that is *entirely* open source. Any large company will want to have some expensive enterprise applications that manages inventory, accounts receivable, payroll, etc. These packages are just not exciting technically, and can't (unless I'm very much mistaken) be found in the open source world.
So, unless you want your company to write its own general ledger software (not a good idea) you will have to buy it from someone. So, dealing with vendors is inevitable.
If its any consolation, the enterprise application vendors (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle) are increasingly supporting OSS. You can run SAP on Linux (and it is increasingly popular) for instance.
Now, what I want to know is when these big (expensive) enterprise software systems will support PostgreSQL...
Cheers,
Robert
It's funny you should mention this, because I just got my 3G phone working yesterday. It sucks.
(For the record I am using Hutchinson's three service in the UK with the NEC e606 phone.)
Compared to WLAN access (even at its slowest), 3G crawls. And - frankly - you've got a better chance of finding a WLAN access point than consistent 3G coverage.
WLAN does, however, have to jump through a few hurdles before it can approach what the cell phone networks do. Firstly, it needs some kind of rationing. At CeBIT my laptop could always see about 20 WLAN networks at any time. Surprise, surprise: none of them worked as they all interfered. At least with cell-phones, one person has a working service.
Secondly, there is no support for "handing-off" between base stations. Given the limited range of an AP, this is a must. (It's also not simple: you need to maintain your IP address as you jumo between APs, which requires a unified backbone network - which 3G has, but WLAN does not.)
Thirdly, it needs various WLAN access point owners and cell-phone operators to communicate. And this is where I break down laughing.
I wish, I wish WLAN could come and allow me to throw away my terrible NEC e606. But I just don't see it.
When I was at college, ohhhhh way back in '94 or '95, some of the kids created a Doom WAD of Trinity College. You can probably find it, if you Google for it.
The best bit was the way the porters' office was full of those hairy monsters who threw fireballs. Beautiful.
OK, I know this is getting a little offtopic.
But I do know a fair amount about the Bosnian conflict. Or at least I know the region pretty well. I've been to Bosnia, to Slovenia and to Crotia. I've met Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative of the UN. I know local journalists. My best friend was in Sarajevo last weekend. Please don't tell me I know nothing about it.
I am not saying the US is or was perfect, heck they make mistakes all the time. But they intervened in Bosnia for reasons that had nothing to do with oil, or money. They intervened to save further needless bloodshed. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. But you can't maintain they put Americans live on the line for narrow nationalistic purpose, or out of a desire to gain power, prestige or money.
OK. I've been pretty sceptical of the motivation behind this "war", but your post was simply offensive.
"I hope you get a new Vietnam" - do you know how many innocent Vietnamese lost their lives? Do you have any idea idea how many 100,000s of thousands died? No. The best thing for the Iraqi people now is for the war to be over as soon as possible with as few as possible casualities.
And - as a Brit - your knee-jerk anti-Americanism irritates me beyond belief. It is so fashionable to hate America and claim that it is horrible place run by a madman. America is a liberal democracy where freedom of speech is respected. By and large, citizens are not tortured (something you can't say for China or Russia) and public dissent is allowed. Best of all, citizens are allowed to force a "regime change" every four years.
America (and this was never meant to come across as a homily) has been remarkably un-territorial in its behaviour. When did it last attack a country to gain its territory? When did it last extract reperations from defeated countries?
The last two times the US has used force were:
* Afghanistan - where an incredibly illiberal and un-democratic regime (which banned women from being educated, which had no freedom of religion, which allowed its citizens few rights) was gotten rid-off. Ask yourself, would you rather live in Afghanistan following US intervension, or before?
* Bosnia - in a, not sactioned by the UN move, the US protected Muslims from being ethnically cleansed. Would rather have been a Muslim in Greater Serbia or in (UN run) Bosnia?
I would have happily have given Saddam six more months to dis-arm. But it's too late for that. Lets hope as few people as possible die in the current conflict, and the Iraqi people end up with a propserous, secular, liberal democracy at the end of this.
Robert
I was quite amused to read this story and the follow-ups.
/something/cmd.exe" or "GET /something/dir.exe". I'm amused, 'cause my Linux box ain't going to get hacked that way.
Two days ago I put my personal web-site up. It's sitting on a linux box (Apache) behind my firewall, which only lets incoming connections initiated on port 80 through.
In two days I have had maybe 100 hack attempts. All using variations on "GET
But, WTF... they're using up MY bandwidth. Why can't ISPs take some responsibility for detecting script kiddies. There can be exactly no un-patched useless WinNT boxen out there. Why shouldn't Mr ScriptKiddy be asked to pay for the bandwidth?
In telephones (in the UK, at least), calling party pays. If someone is hammering my bandwidth malicously (or at least dumbly) why should they pay?
And why can't get an ISP that "traps" stupid requests, and reports them to the users ISP. Too many issues and that ISP is blocked.
Why not?
(I'm thinking about setting up a DDOS system on anybody that tries to 'hack' my server. Just for a laugh, obviously.)
You're right you know; if I recieve just three "enlarge your penis" emails, I'll actually be able to do it!
That's true and not true. Lets not forget that the Baby Bells (which grew out of old Ma Bell) were a government regulated monopoly. So, they never really had to face competition.
The case for deregulation is simple "You guys effectively had massive hidden subsidies for a long time, which meant there were no effective competitors, we'd like to open the market up to others."
I have MP3s of these, and haven't noticed a thing. ;-)
In England we have a lot of this technology already.
(Amazingly, too, English people seem convinced their country is heading backwards at full speed towards the ice age, but that's another story.)
In central London all the bus stops contain LED displays showihng how long you'll have to wait for each bus. Likewise, on the tube (underground, subway) their are simialr displays. Normally they say things like "Baker Street 3minutes; Chancery Lane you'll be lucky" but hey...
There are companies like Kizoom (sp?) that offer these same services over WAP so you can make sure that when you leave your home/office then you *will* make your bus, metro, etc.
FYI: 35,000 is the number with monthly subs. There are 44,000 total subs, of which 9,000 have lifetime.
Oh pu'lease. I'm as anti-Microsoft as the next man, but don't tell me Vivendi Interactive have been paragons of video gaming virtue. They have released truly appalling games, just as Micosoft have published truly great ones (Halo, Project Gotham... Xbox I know, but still).
And Vivendi drag down Microsoft, increasing their debt load? I mean, is this a troll? Microsoft has $41bn dollars of cash. Even VIE isn't going to dent that. (Not that Vivendi is going to get $2bn for VIE.)
This is ridiculous. Thomson stopped manufacturing TiVos in the middle of last year. This is not news.
It has been all but impossible to buy a TiVo in the UK for the last few months. This is not news.
Equally, the idea that TiVo will pull the plug on the UK market is ridiculous.
They have 35,000 subscribers paying £10 ($15) per month, and just two employees. So... £350,000 revenues a month, two staff, a couple of servers, a few phone calls. They must have some pretty expensive offices for the UK operation not to be profitable.
My forecast: when TiVo the company (ticker: TIVO) becomes profitable in the back half of '03, then management will again turn their eyes to other markets: Canada, Australia, UK, etc.
Anyone care to bet I'm wrong?
OK; I'm not a technical expert, I'm a finance guy who like to play with tech, so don't expect perfection.
1. Buttons. I played for two minutes, the buttons seemed fine. Using the keypad to "do stuff" felt a little odd, but the directional controller felt just like the GBA.
2. The game I saw (called Pandamonium - or something like that) was not in real 3D, it was more of a side-scroller. (Indeed, it could probably be desribed as Super Mario-esque.) So, I can't comment on its 3D rendering capabilities.
3. Yes, the screen size is a little strange but it didn't feel any narrower than the original GB.