I don't know about you, but working for a company with that much cash laying around can't be ALL bad. If Microsoft is determined to do retail right (and I honestly have no idea if they're in it for the long haul...), they'll spend whatever money it takes to get it done.
See Xbox for a prior example of something Microsoft "couldn't possibly do as well as the other guys" that turned out to be lucrative for the employees involved. They've got the cash, so if you can get in on that gravy train, I say, more power to you.
The only addon that's ever been installed in my Firefox is the.NET Framework Configuration Assistant. That's a damn far cry from a search toolbar. One is made to help you. The other is made to get money for Sun. One is a tool. The other is an ad.
Yeah, there's wireless broadband too. It's slow, extremely unreliable, and has monthly usage caps that would make dialup cry.
You're absolutely correct that it's market failure, but when it's cheaper to purchase a medium-sized country than it is to "swoop up a lot of customers", well, it just doesn't happen.
And when I download the JRE (Sun's) I get to install the Yahoo! toolbar! Thanks, Sun! Oh, and I get to watch ads for Sun's other software! It's such a fantastic experience.
As long as there's competition between ISPs, and consumers who want something better, networks should get better.
Yeah, nice in theory, but in practice, well, it breaks down. Comcast and Qwest compete in my neighborhood, but Comcast has awful service and raises the prices every year, and Qwest offers all of 1.5 mbit DSL to my neighborhood. And it rarely works.
I would figure that any game with more complex visuals than, say, Tetris, is likely to hover closer to "peak" than it is to "much smaller use of bandwidth [than peak]".
Think about it... you're sending video, and most games nowdays are pretty graphically intense (think about it... that's the major selling point of these services: "play your graphically intense game on your system that can't support it!"). People aren't going to be playing freecell on this system.
What makes you think that paying GaiKai a monthly subscription will save you from having to pay Blizzard for your WoW account? From the video, clearly you still need a WoW account to play.
If after the third volume we can see that the three volumes were filled with needless fluff, then sure, we can say Brandon was making the books longer than necessary to get more money.
If after the third volume, we can see that the three were filled with needless fluff, then all we can say is that they're just like the previous six or seven books.
Ah, but you've probably tested fewer drivers than Microsoft has. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying you're working with a smaller set of data than they are.
It's not that the developers refuse to implement the "obliterate" feature (that's what they refer to it as), it's that noone's come up with a workable design for the feature yet, and noone's offered to do the work to implement it. If you really want it, put your money where your mouth is, and I'd be willing to bet you could get it implemented in short order.
Anyway, in all seriousness, there is a whole world of features that revision control tools should have. If there weren't, we'd all still be using RCS. P4 isn't the pinnacle of software design, and neither is any other revision control system that exists today.
For example: Windows users who blame the user for getting spyware. Windows users who complain that Apple updates OS X too often. Windows users who always say, "if *MS* did it, we'd all be up in arms!", and so on.
Wait, what? You're saying it's my operating system's job to understand the purpose and intent of all the software that I run (explicitly or implicitly)? I don't think even MacOS does that.
I got smart and stopped doing webpages. HTML, Flash, Silverlight, all of it.
But you're still lying. There's no "magical technique" that makes IE5 (remember, you said IE5) render pages the same as modern less-bug-ridden browsers (you mentioned FF3). Sorry, anyone who's doing it for real knows that. You can get approximations, but not correctness. The more "RIA" your webpage, the more broken it's going to be in this-or-that browser. It's why "RIA" frameworks exist such as Flash and Silverlight.
Of course, you might be the guy who's writing godaddy.com's parking pages and the semi-contextually-relevant expired-domain ad-lists. In which case, yeah, you probably can get that to look right in all your target browsers, because there's no real design going into it.
works just as well in Internet Explorer 5, IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera, Safari, Chrome and other browsers without having to update them whenever a new browser, browser version or layout engine is released
I call BS. Having done this for over a decade now, it's clear to me you have no idea what you're talking about. The set of all pages that display correctly in both IE5 and FireFox 3 is, for all practical purposes, empty. And that's the entire point of Flash and Silverlight.
It's the property of being controlled by exactly one company that makes them VALUABLE. You never have to wonder whether your crap will look right, because there's only ONE PLATFORM. No ambiguous interpretations of "standards". No moving targets.
It's funny. People like to talk about "DLL Hell" on windows, but they fixed it over there, everyone just keeps a copy of everything they need in their folder.
Linux, on the other hand, has "lib Hell" where you have to be really careful about upgrading an app because it might bust another one, and maybe your old app won't compile right against the new lib, and maybe the dependency tree is 12 deep, and maybe your package manager works right, or maybe not. It's much more fun this way.
I wrote an application that uses an MSSQL server to implement a message bus (with ACID), and even on old hardware (mid-range desktop P4, 1GB memory, singe disk), running the app and the database on the same machine, I saw rates in the ~250/second range.
Lots of games (maybe all of them) already include graphics-vendor-specific rendering engines. It's just that nowadays your graphics API isn't your whole game development toolset (glide), so it's easy to include support for both (all) vendors.
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If you say that money can't buy happiness, I say you're shopping at the wrong store.
You've been hanging out at Apple stores again! Haven't you!
Um,
I don't know about you, but working for a company with that much cash laying around can't be ALL bad. If Microsoft is determined to do retail right (and I honestly have no idea if they're in it for the long haul...), they'll spend whatever money it takes to get it done.
See Xbox for a prior example of something Microsoft "couldn't possibly do as well as the other guys" that turned out to be lucrative for the employees involved. They've got the cash, so if you can get in on that gravy train, I say, more power to you.
The only addon that's ever been installed in my Firefox is the .NET Framework Configuration Assistant. That's a damn far cry from a search toolbar. One is made to help you. The other is made to get money for Sun. One is a tool. The other is an ad.
Your comparison fails.
Explain to me why I need to opt out of Yahoo's crapware when I install Sun's JRE?
Microsoft OWNS the crapware, they have plenty of that stuff, and they never tried to install any of it when I installed the .NET framework.
See the difference?
Yeah, there's wireless broadband too. It's slow, extremely unreliable, and has monthly usage caps that would make dialup cry.
You're absolutely correct that it's market failure, but when it's cheaper to purchase a medium-sized country than it is to "swoop up a lot of customers", well, it just doesn't happen.
What reasons would Blizzard have for giving us a discount through GaiKai?
And when I download the JRE (Sun's) I get to install the Yahoo! toolbar! Thanks, Sun! Oh, and I get to watch ads for Sun's other software! It's such a fantastic experience.
Seriously, Sun should be ashamed.
As long as there's competition between ISPs, and consumers who want something better, networks should get better.
Yeah, nice in theory, but in practice, well, it breaks down. Comcast and Qwest compete in my neighborhood, but Comcast has awful service and raises the prices every year, and Qwest offers all of 1.5 mbit DSL to my neighborhood. And it rarely works.
This is progress?
I would figure that any game with more complex visuals than, say, Tetris, is likely to hover closer to "peak" than it is to "much smaller use of bandwidth [than peak]".
Think about it... you're sending video, and most games nowdays are pretty graphically intense (think about it... that's the major selling point of these services: "play your graphically intense game on your system that can't support it!"). People aren't going to be playing freecell on this system.
What makes you think that paying GaiKai a monthly subscription will save you from having to pay Blizzard for your WoW account? From the video, clearly you still need a WoW account to play.
If after the third volume we can see that the three volumes were filled with needless fluff, then sure, we can say Brandon was making the books longer than necessary to get more money.
If after the third volume, we can see that the three were filled with needless fluff, then all we can say is that they're just like the previous six or seven books.
Microsoft didn't do the equivalent of giving away MP3s, they did the equivalent of giving away MP3 PLAYERS. Being a monopoly is not illegal.
Also, "Fair Use" doesn't mean the record companies have to make it EASY for you to copy things. And "Fair Use" isn't a law.
Ah, but you've probably tested fewer drivers than Microsoft has. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying you're working with a smaller set of data than they are.
It's not that the developers refuse to implement the "obliterate" feature (that's what they refer to it as), it's that noone's come up with a workable design for the feature yet, and noone's offered to do the work to implement it. If you really want it, put your money where your mouth is, and I'd be willing to bet you could get it implemented in short order.
A truck, huh? Do you just dump things on it?
Anyway, in all seriousness, there is a whole world of features that revision control tools should have. If there weren't, we'd all still be using RCS. P4 isn't the pinnacle of software design, and neither is any other revision control system that exists today.
For example: Windows users who blame the user for getting spyware. Windows users who complain that Apple updates OS X too often. Windows users who always say, "if *MS* did it, we'd all be up in arms!", and so on.
Wait, what? You're saying it's my operating system's job to understand the purpose and intent of all the software that I run (explicitly or implicitly)? I don't think even MacOS does that.
I got smart and stopped doing webpages. HTML, Flash, Silverlight, all of it.
But you're still lying. There's no "magical technique" that makes IE5 (remember, you said IE5) render pages the same as modern less-bug-ridden browsers (you mentioned FF3). Sorry, anyone who's doing it for real knows that. You can get approximations, but not correctness. The more "RIA" your webpage, the more broken it's going to be in this-or-that browser. It's why "RIA" frameworks exist such as Flash and Silverlight.
Of course, you might be the guy who's writing godaddy.com's parking pages and the semi-contextually-relevant expired-domain ad-lists. In which case, yeah, you probably can get that to look right in all your target browsers, because there's no real design going into it.
works just as well in Internet Explorer 5, IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera, Safari, Chrome and other browsers without having to update them whenever a new browser, browser version or layout engine is released
I call BS. Having done this for over a decade now, it's clear to me you have no idea what you're talking about. The set of all pages that display correctly in both IE5 and FireFox 3 is, for all practical purposes, empty. And that's the entire point of Flash and Silverlight.
It's the property of being controlled by exactly one company that makes them VALUABLE. You never have to wonder whether your crap will look right, because there's only ONE PLATFORM. No ambiguous interpretations of "standards". No moving targets.
You live near different wireless networks than I do...
That's not accurate at all. Windows 7 is sorta "Vista 2", or "Vista but working now". It's even rumored to be a free upgrade from Vista.
It's funny. People like to talk about "DLL Hell" on windows, but they fixed it over there, everyone just keeps a copy of everything they need in their folder.
Linux, on the other hand, has "lib Hell" where you have to be really careful about upgrading an app because it might bust another one, and maybe your old app won't compile right against the new lib, and maybe the dependency tree is 12 deep, and maybe your package manager works right, or maybe not. It's much more fun this way.
Hey, that's what I need. More LIFESTREAM TRANSACTIONS. That oughta fix me.
I wrote an application that uses an MSSQL server to implement a message bus (with ACID), and even on old hardware (mid-range desktop P4, 1GB memory, singe disk), running the app and the database on the same machine, I saw rates in the ~250/second range.
Here's a little secret:
Lots of games (maybe all of them) already include graphics-vendor-specific rendering engines. It's just that nowadays your graphics API isn't your whole game development toolset (glide), so it's easy to include support for both (all) vendors.
So, he's going to veto it then? Oh? No? Huh.
Well, I guess we really DO get change then. This time, it's going to be LEGAL when the president does it. That's a definite change!