It's a first step towards breaking your dependence on windows... If you use citrix or similar for those apps that require windows, then you can gradually replace them. Sooner or later you won't be able to continue using XP because it will be totally out of support, by then only buying a much smaller number of windows licenses will be a considerable saving.
Breaking a dependence on a single supplier is a big win, even if it costs you money in the short term it will benefit you greatly long term.
Any companies who migrated to linux a few years ago should be saving a lot of money now when they need to.
Try playing the windows versions of some games on comparable hardware to an xbox (easier with the first xbox), the xbox will runs rings around windows on similar hardware - which just goes to show how inefficient it is, and therefore an absolutely terrible gaming platform.
There is no place for a commercial OS on generic hardware... Windows survives due to inertia, all the others have pretty much failed while some never really got started. OSX only really exists because it comes as part of a complete package bundled with hardware, for the same reason that AIX/HPUX are still around while SCO and BSDi are dead. Releasing OSX will not get them many sales, and most of those sales will be from people who would otherwise have bought apple hardware, but it will increase their workload significantly due to having to support masses of new hardware... Windows benefits from it's installed base, hardware makers pretty much have no choice but to write drivers, OSX doesn't have that advantage so Apple would have to do all the work.
It will be a slow process because it's an uphill battle against the lock-in of proprietary apps... Once it reaches a certain level, third party vendors will have no choice but to support linux, the negatives rapidly disappear and the use of linux will expand very rapidly.
That's where citrix comes in... Give people Linux desktops for their general use, and operate a citrix server for those windows only apps. In the highly likely event that not everyone needs the windows specific apps all the time, you save money by only licensing for concurrent users. You can also separate your core business applications from machines which talk to the outside world (web/mail), which will improve security.
The reason is that the barrier to entry for someone wanting to develop apps on the iphone is much lower than the ds, similarly the distribution costs are a lot lower and the cost for users to acquire games is generally much lower too.
Not really... If the government is powerful enough, and makes the population feel that they are not powerless (even if they are), then those in power can go around doing pretty much anything they want, and cover it all up so people never find out, and if a small number of people do find out they can easily be branded insane and locked up.
I often work away on business, i take my laptop along for entertainment, and often cant justify using the overpriced internet access in the hotel... I could be away from home for up to a month in some cases.
And not long ago, a storm took down the telephone cables near our house... Because so many were damaged, it took them quite some time to get everything working again.
Years ago, games were released in a working state and didn't require heaps of patches... The ability to distribute patches after the fact just makes the publishers lazy, they are quite happy to release an unfinished game and use paying customers as beta testers.
Only this guy has already bought copies of a game which he can't play... Do you think it unethical for him to download a pirate copy so he can play the game he paid for? For that matter, do you think it ethical for a DRM scheme to remove access to your games at any time? That's an incredibly shaky purchase...
If you don't have a data plan on your phone, then this either won't work at all, or you will be charged a hefty fee per kilobyte for your trouble...
A better option is piracy, pirate the games and you don't have DRM problems. Buy them as well if it makes you feel better, then you can play the pirate copies when the legit ones screw you over.
I hate artificial restrictions like this... Software should perform to the best of it's ability. The fact they spent time and effort to REDUCE functionality is just absolutely farcical. Wouldn't that development effort have been better spent trying to improve functionality instead?
And why did they create exFAT, a completely new and not compatible with anything else filesystem at all? There are hundreds of filesystems out there, it is absolutely insane and quite insulting that they would create a new proprietary one. Why not just use one of the ones that already exists?
Depends whether their games target the Wii and PS2/PS3 systems as well... The install base of PS2 systems is huge and new games are still being made, and the Wii is selling very well. If they target OpenGL then everything but the xbox is an easier port.
I did that, and got caught with a copy of it... We had a very good chemistry teacher, who thought it was good i was taking an interest in chemistry. She gave us a lecture about how dangerous these things could be, and how we should only follow the recipes in controlled environments and small quantities, ie chemistry class... Then she demonstrated a few of them, and regularly demonstrated more in other lessons.
The fact the class was teaching something many of the kids were actually interested in meant that attendance to her class and resulting grades were way above the average for the school.
If this was any other company, a product like this, overpriced and massively inferior to the competition would be completely ignored... Because it's MS they're likely to market it heavily and get people using it despite it's inferiority...
Personally i wouldn't touch this service with a barge pole... More expensive than competitors... Restrictive DRM which the competitors don't have... From a vendor who cannot be trusted (they left customers of their previous music service up shit creek)...
Because culling the lowest 5-10% performing staff is good for the overall business, and now is the perfect time to do that because the story of your job cuts will get lost among all the other stories about job cuts and not cause you as much bad publicity.
"This Court's findings amply establish that Microsoft's agreements "significantly discourage[d]" consumers from actually adopting Navigator. "
and more... it was part of the original case that microsoft sought to prevent OEMs from providing netscape, either instead of or as well as ie, and there's plenty of information available from google...
Microsoftâ(TM)s campaign to foreclose Netscape from the OEM channel involved a âoemassive and multifarious investmentâ in a âoecomplementary set of tacticsâ: (1) contractual restrictions forcing OEMs to take IE with Windows 95 and 98 and for-bidding them from removing or obscuring it; (2) âoeadditional technical restrictions to increase the cost of promoting Navigatorâ; (3) exchanging valuable incentives for OEMsâ(TM) commitments to promote IE exclusively; and (4) threats to âoepenalize individual OEMs that insisted on pre-installing and promoting Navigator.â
Specifically the "penalize individual OEMs" - effectively threatening to harm them if they provide netscape...
Wordperfect is also pretty poor at importing MSO files... Microsoft's own applications are too, for instance mspublisher makes a complete pigs ear of importing or exporting word files...
You also have strange problems between different versions of the same MS apps, and even different configurations of the same version...
OpenOffice actually comes out pretty well considering how difficult the task is... MS worked hard to make their office formats difficult to reverse engineer.
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It's a first step towards breaking your dependence on windows... If you use citrix or similar for those apps that require windows, then you can gradually replace them.
Sooner or later you won't be able to continue using XP because it will be totally out of support, by then only buying a much smaller number of windows licenses will be a considerable saving.
Breaking a dependence on a single supplier is a big win, even if it costs you money in the short term it will benefit you greatly long term.
Any companies who migrated to linux a few years ago should be saving a lot of money now when they need to.
It's called the Xbox firmware...
Try playing the windows versions of some games on comparable hardware to an xbox (easier with the first xbox), the xbox will runs rings around windows on similar hardware - which just goes to show how inefficient it is, and therefore an absolutely terrible gaming platform.
There is no place for a commercial OS on generic hardware...
Windows survives due to inertia, all the others have pretty much failed while some never really got started.
OSX only really exists because it comes as part of a complete package bundled with hardware, for the same reason that AIX/HPUX are still around while SCO and BSDi are dead.
Releasing OSX will not get them many sales, and most of those sales will be from people who would otherwise have bought apple hardware, but it will increase their workload significantly due to having to support masses of new hardware...
Windows benefits from it's installed base, hardware makers pretty much have no choice but to write drivers, OSX doesn't have that advantage so Apple would have to do all the work.
It will be a slow process because it's an uphill battle against the lock-in of proprietary apps...
Once it reaches a certain level, third party vendors will have no choice but to support linux, the negatives rapidly disappear and the use of linux will expand very rapidly.
If MS lets you activate a new install of XP in 5 years time...
That's where citrix comes in...
Give people Linux desktops for their general use, and operate a citrix server for those windows only apps. In the highly likely event that not everyone needs the windows specific apps all the time, you save money by only licensing for concurrent users. You can also separate your core business applications from machines which talk to the outside world (web/mail), which will improve security.
I'm concerned with getting them from non pirated media...
The reason is that the barrier to entry for someone wanting to develop apps on the iphone is much lower than the ds, similarly the distribution costs are a lot lower and the cost for users to acquire games is generally much lower too.
52% on Leopard with an nVidia 8600M GT (late 2007 macbook pro)...
Not really...
If the government is powerful enough, and makes the population feel that they are not powerless (even if they are), then those in power can go around doing pretty much anything they want, and cover it all up so people never find out, and if a small number of people do find out they can easily be branded insane and locked up.
I often work away on business, i take my laptop along for entertainment, and often cant justify using the overpriced internet access in the hotel... I could be away from home for up to a month in some cases.
And not long ago, a storm took down the telephone cables near our house... Because so many were damaged, it took them quite some time to get everything working again.
Years ago, games were released in a working state and didn't require heaps of patches...
The ability to distribute patches after the fact just makes the publishers lazy, they are quite happy to release an unfinished game and use paying customers as beta testers.
Only this guy has already bought copies of a game which he can't play...
Do you think it unethical for him to download a pirate copy so he can play the game he paid for?
For that matter, do you think it ethical for a DRM scheme to remove access to your games at any time? That's an incredibly shaky purchase...
If you don't have a data plan on your phone, then this either won't work at all, or you will be charged a hefty fee per kilobyte for your trouble...
A better option is piracy, pirate the games and you don't have DRM problems. Buy them as well if it makes you feel better, then you can play the pirate copies when the legit ones screw you over.
I hate artificial restrictions like this...
Software should perform to the best of it's ability.
The fact they spent time and effort to REDUCE functionality is just absolutely farcical. Wouldn't that development effort have been better spent trying to improve functionality instead?
And why did they create exFAT, a completely new and not compatible with anything else filesystem at all?
There are hundreds of filesystems out there, it is absolutely insane and quite insulting that they would create a new proprietary one. Why not just use one of the ones that already exists?
Depends whether their games target the Wii and PS2/PS3 systems as well... The install base of PS2 systems is huge and new games are still being made, and the Wii is selling very well. If they target OpenGL then everything but the xbox is an easier port.
Because of a bug in the script which made it error...
I did that, and got caught with a copy of it...
We had a very good chemistry teacher, who thought it was good i was taking an interest in chemistry.
She gave us a lecture about how dangerous these things could be, and how we should only follow the recipes in controlled environments and small quantities, ie chemistry class... Then she demonstrated a few of them, and regularly demonstrated more in other lessons.
The fact the class was teaching something many of the kids were actually interested in meant that attendance to her class and resulting grades were way above the average for the school.
If this was any other company, a product like this, overpriced and massively inferior to the competition would be completely ignored...
Because it's MS they're likely to market it heavily and get people using it despite it's inferiority...
Personally i wouldn't touch this service with a barge pole...
More expensive than competitors...
Restrictive DRM which the competitors don't have...
From a vendor who cannot be trusted (they left customers of their previous music service up shit creek)...
Because culling the lowest 5-10% performing staff is good for the overall business, and now is the perfect time to do that because the story of your job cuts will get lost among all the other stories about job cuts and not cause you as much bad publicity.
How did you acquire the media that the OS came on?
If you downloaded and burned it, why couldn't you download and burn a browser at the same time?
If you bought it, why couldn't you have bought a browser at the same time?
Or maybe you think the system should come with a browser in it's firmware so that you can download the OS installation files...
Sure, from a quick google search see:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f218100/218164.htm#ic
"This Court's findings amply establish that Microsoft's agreements "significantly discourage[d]" consumers from actually adopting Navigator. "
and more... it was part of the original case that microsoft sought to prevent OEMs from providing netscape, either instead of or as well as ie, and there's plenty of information available from google...
Also see:
http://www.eskimo.com/~mighetto/lsmonop.htm
Microsoftâ(TM)s campaign to foreclose Netscape from the OEM channel involved a âoemassive and multifarious investmentâ in a âoecomplementary set of tacticsâ: (1) contractual restrictions forcing OEMs to take IE with Windows 95 and 98 and for-bidding them from removing or obscuring it; (2) âoeadditional technical restrictions to increase the cost of promoting Navigatorâ; (3) exchanging valuable incentives for OEMsâ(TM) commitments to promote IE exclusively; and (4) threats to âoepenalize individual OEMs that insisted on pre-installing and promoting Navigator.â
Specifically the "penalize individual OEMs" - effectively threatening to harm them if they provide netscape...
Your professor didn't demand you typeset the thesis with latex?
Wordperfect is also pretty poor at importing MSO files...
Microsoft's own applications are too, for instance mspublisher makes a complete pigs ear of importing or exporting word files...
You also have strange problems between different versions of the same MS apps, and even different configurations of the same version...
OpenOffice actually comes out pretty well considering how difficult the task is... MS worked hard to make their office formats difficult to reverse engineer.