Yes, Win95 sold a zillion copies, but how many of those were pre-installs on the hordes of desktop and laptops that were sold during the big PC boom of the 90's? Ask Intel and the box makers... PCs are not booming now; how will *that* affect the sales of this new OS?
Microsoft has not existed during a prolonged recession (the one in the early 90's is historically considered a mild one). How many spare PCs do you have around your desk at work? Here, in a relatively poor company, I'd say we have two boxes per cube on average. It's a recession now, and not likely a light one either; that has purchasing managers look around at all the extra hardware, and asking, "Do we need more PCs right now, and if not, do we need an OS upgrade on the ones we have?"
Similar forces are in play at home, too; laid off workers don't buy upgrades they can't afford and/or don't need. I believe all of this will leave XP behind the sales numbers of the previous OSes.
Ah, yes, I have seen the light of Alpha Centauri, and its offspring, Alien Crossfire... so in some sense I have been playing 'the real Civ' for the past few years. Thanks for clearing that up, folks.
Going to get a well-padded chair and the computer room fridge stocked up in preparation;)
This (and the above discussion of the settlement) assumes that there is motivated enforcement in place to deal with infractions against this settlement. But now that there is a Republican administration in place, they just want to get this thing off their desks and forget about it. So what will likely happen is that MS will do the basics of the agreement, but push the limits on the things that keep it in monopoly mode. JMHO.
I had played CivII to death back when it came out, then dropped it. Now recently, I've seen a coworker playing an expansion or variation called Civ II - Call to Power, which appears to have nicely updated graphics and some changes in logic.
So, my question is, is Civ 3 even all that different from Civ II - CtP, or just an add-on to it?
There are slight variations in the way the Sun moves and rotates, mostly due to the fact that it is not a rigid body, but rather a big ball of gas (very densely packed gas, to be sure). Variations of the magnitude that would be observable across light-years of space, however, can only be credibly explained by orbital (read: companion body) interaction.
And the dust argument... sheesh... Q: what happens to particulate matter of most any sort when it sits long enough? A: it accretes to the solid surface around it. Result: it is no longer dust. The depth at any given point could be attributed to the rate of addition of the particulate, minus the rate at which it accretes and leaves the 'dust' state.
Never much liked talk.origins... it's misnamed, it should be talk.beliefs instead.
Sheesh, even I can't get it right... the Indiana bill defined pi as 16/5 = 3.2. (roughly 10.01211 in ternary.)
Fractions in ternary... yet another hassle to implementation. Yucko.
Check out this article, which cites the bill you refer to. Indiana rounded it down to 3, not up to 4. They also come up with 'creative' ways of defining the square root of two... must have been some extremely bored Hoosiers back in 1897.
I wore out the manual on Turbo Pascal in those days (ca. 1984? maybe 85)... a full language with built-in editor, all in a 49K.COM file! And the programs ran great, too.
I've been tempted to load DOS on a modern machine (say a cheaper 800Mhz Duron) and see how the old programs fly without Winblows holding them back. But then I think of all the hacks that were needed (the concept of 'high memory', HIMEM vs. 'expanded memory', EMM386, the horrors of setting up a CD-ROM drive, faux multitasking with Desqview, and a host of others) and I say mmmm, nope, been there done that, I like what I have now better. Ultima II in CGA graphics was cool for me back then, but I'd rather beat up on BG2 in full glorious color and sound, thanks.
Ah, yeah, well, taking a wide shot at the SW movies is probably best described as doing a Ben-Franklin-kite-job in a lightning storm...
Specific gripes, of course, all the SW fans have to some degree... I rile up my friends with bad JarJar impressions in email; the midi-chlorians? Well hopefully they're explained more in the next movie; treating TPM as a stand-alone movie, that part certainly was left hanging.
Hmm, maybe she'll act a few years older this time... she's supposed to in this one.
Possible Trailer:
(cue Terminator music... bah dum dum da dum)
(voice over) "He's back... and this time, he's..."
[Cut to JarJar] "wooo-ed!"
(voice over) "JarJar Binks, as the Gungan, in 'Fistful of Clone'!!!"
[JarJar] "Meessa tinking you gonna make my day, yousa punk-sa!!"
(voice over) "Now in theatres all over the universe."
Or some such nonsense... it'll either be great or dreadful...
Now, be fair... only the Ewok-riddled third one was crap, and then only parts of it... given the choice between the latest two movies, and a 'Notting Hill/Wedding Planner' double feature (or insert your favorite inane chick-flick titles here), you can bet I'm ready to overlook the shortcomings of the SW movies;)
Hehe... well, let's see: the heat sink on the K-class CPUs (180/240Mhz) is a big metal plate, essentially, with some sort of cooling channel in it; the 550Mhz PA-8600s in our N class have a square-socket style stack heat sink, amid a bunch of high-volume fans... that sink is about 3-4 times as tall as an Intel/AMD socket chip. So this new one would have to be a big beastie... active cooling this time? Maybe?
Ever been married, zmooc? Forget auto-washers; I can see this task coming up in the 'Honey-Do' list at home;... "and when you're done with the trash, go wash the roof". Ick.
Mass production creates lower costs. In one sense that's the way that Russia could afford to keep up in the space race, by creating a bunch of sats all the same (which is one reason why low Earth orbit has a lot of junk in it these days). Mass produce the probes, the launch vehicles, everything. So the solar panels will cost a million now? So what? I'm not talking about now; the space industry of now is screwed up, mostly by itself. If you can only talk about *now*, you're doing no better than Goldin did. (And yes, the numbers I tossed out were low, but it's the notion of building something at a fraction of what we are paying now. $30 or $40 million would still be a fraction of what the two lost Mars missions cost.)
BTW, the cheap probe idea isn't even mine, it's that of author and futurist Freeman Dyson, who called the probes 'Space chickens' or some such name. I'd prefer the term 'Model T', as a nod to the commoditization of their production, but the idea is the same.
First of all, I'd say that based on what I've read of the guy, good riddance. (If someone from NASA knows better, let's hear about it.)
Manned exploration is costly, but necessary; to get the roadwork done before we put people up there, we need more cheap probes. $1 to $10 million variety each, so that if we lose one a la the Mars Polar Lander and Climate Orbiters, it's not a show-stopper.
What SQL features you need depends on how your developers code... ours, according to our DBA, are still doing horrible stuff like counting records with 'SELECT * FROM'.;)
On my end, I'm not a SQL coder, but I recently picked another DB for a trivial side project because it had more select and update features.
Daikatana's a good example of letting the market speak on what it will or won't accept in games... last I saw Daikatana on the shelves (about a month ago), it was going for $2.99 a copy. A relatively anonymous FPS, 'Mortyr', was on the shelf next to it selling for $0.99. My buddy picked up Mortyr, saying, 'wow, at that price, I can make a coaster out of it!'.
Meanwhile, the only organized part of my computer room at home is my jealously guarded stack of Bioware games...
Great, now we have (or will have) commercially available continent-crossing payload-delivery vehicles for every 3rd-World whack with enough cash to buy one. Kinda wish that Rutan had stuck with his old hobby, building small planes that could fly around the world... which could be considered another continent-crossing payload-delivery vehicle... cough never mind...
Yahoo Serious started at the wrong end of the scale... he should have gone for the obvious personal-image encroachment by American comic Carrot Top. That is, unless Yahoo has changed his appearance since the Einstein movie.
Buckeyeguy then decided, in a flash of inspiration, to change his name to Google Bullpuckey.
At the GeekFests we have (that's what we call 'em) the one friend who is willing to host this silliness has a duplex with a basement; half the people set up upstairs, half in the basement. Naturally, this works great for team games, like 'capture the flag' in your favorite shooter, teams in Tiberian Sun, etc.
But the side effect is that no circuit breaker has more than about 4 PCs on it, and usually less. If ya don't have a basement, try setting up in separate rooms, long cables and all;)
But it's not because there's some great indie music scene where I live (there isn't), it's because there are so few acts anywhere that appeal to my industrial/metal/tech tastes, that it's more economical for me to buy the original CDs than it is for me to spend spare time that I don't have ripping new CDs.
Now, having left that flame-bait out there, it should be said that the last umpteen CDs I bought were of bands that I heard on KNAC.com, or NetRadio, or other net-enabled means. Full songs, not fragmented bits that shows up on band web sites. If the RIAA would get the message that full demos sell CDs, maybe they.... nahh, forget it, they'll never get a grip, will they?
BUT, Sinatra did perform songs that many people have performed (by well-known, popular composers), and he did them well enough that they 'became his' (if one believes the old K-Tel commercials). Same for Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak, etc. as mentioned in the other post. Think Frank didn't feel something when he sang 'New York, New York'???
Now, compare that with 'NSync, whose music will be covered by... ? (Britney doesn't count for this answer.)
It's not just who wrote it, it's a matter of taste... and 'NSync is musical Zima.
Can't recall the very first email I sent, but in college in 1982, I do recall the first email relationship I had... a friend worked as a co-op in a EE lab, and his female coworker and I sent each other many emails, from nice to naughty. Local email, of course... This went on for months. We finally met at the end of spring semester... being the classic nerd that I was (am), I must have been a great disappointment to her, because the emails stopped after that!;)
Come to think of it, I've probably ruined more relationships with email than preserved them.
If we assume that a spammer would have an automated program to generate the emails, as is done today, consider that the spammer's mailing lists would probably have been stored on punch cards; that would have been one hell of a stack of cards for each email the guy sent out. True, they could have stored the list on tape, but considering the availability of a card reader vs. tape drives (in an academic or research environment), I'd bet on the cards. And, each address would have to be hand -entered at some point, vs. the address scanning/mining of today. Ah, the good old days;)
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Fundamentalism: Government based on religious fanaticism is no longer an option.
Think that's kinda our governments' policy at this point, too
Microsoft has not existed during a prolonged recession (the one in the early 90's is historically considered a mild one). How many spare PCs do you have around your desk at work? Here, in a relatively poor company, I'd say we have two boxes per cube on average. It's a recession now, and not likely a light one either; that has purchasing managers look around at all the extra hardware, and asking, "Do we need more PCs right now, and if not, do we need an OS upgrade on the ones we have?"
Similar forces are in play at home, too; laid off workers don't buy upgrades they can't afford and/or don't need. I believe all of this will leave XP behind the sales numbers of the previous OSes.
Going to get a well-padded chair and the computer room fridge stocked up in preparation ;)
This (and the above discussion of the settlement) assumes that there is motivated enforcement in place to deal with infractions against this settlement. But now that there is a Republican administration in place, they just want to get this thing off their desks and forget about it. So what will likely happen is that MS will do the basics of the agreement, but push the limits on the things that keep it in monopoly mode. JMHO.
So, my question is, is Civ 3 even all that different from Civ II - CtP, or just an add-on to it?
And the dust argument... sheesh... Q: what happens to particulate matter of most any sort when it sits long enough? A: it accretes to the solid surface around it. Result: it is no longer dust. The depth at any given point could be attributed to the rate of addition of the particulate, minus the rate at which it accretes and leaves the 'dust' state.
Never much liked talk.origins... it's misnamed, it should be talk.beliefs instead.
Sheesh, even I can't get it right... the Indiana bill defined pi as 16/5 = 3.2. (roughly 10.01211 in ternary.)
Fractions in ternary... yet another hassle to implementation. Yucko.
Either way, it's 10 in ternary ;)
I've been tempted to load DOS on a modern machine (say a cheaper 800Mhz Duron) and see how the old programs fly without Winblows holding them back. But then I think of all the hacks that were needed (the concept of 'high memory', HIMEM vs. 'expanded memory', EMM386, the horrors of setting up a CD-ROM drive, faux multitasking with Desqview, and a host of others) and I say mmmm, nope, been there done that, I like what I have now better. Ultima II in CGA graphics was cool for me back then, but I'd rather beat up on BG2 in full glorious color and sound, thanks.
Specific gripes, of course, all the SW fans have to some degree... I rile up my friends with bad JarJar impressions in email; the midi-chlorians? Well hopefully they're explained more in the next movie; treating TPM as a stand-alone movie, that part certainly was left hanging.
Possible Trailer: (cue Terminator music... bah dum dum da dum)
(voice over) "He's back... and this time, he's..."
[Cut to JarJar] "wooo-ed!"
(voice over) "JarJar Binks, as the Gungan, in 'Fistful of Clone'!!!"
[JarJar] "Meessa tinking you gonna make my day, yousa punk-sa!!"
(voice over) "Now in theatres all over the universe."
Or some such nonsense... it'll either be great or dreadful...
Now, be fair... only the Ewok-riddled third one was crap, and then only parts of it... given the choice between the latest two movies, and a 'Notting Hill/Wedding Planner' double feature (or insert your favorite inane chick-flick titles here), you can bet I'm ready to overlook the shortcomings of the SW movies ;)
Hehe... well, let's see: the heat sink on the K-class CPUs (180/240Mhz) is a big metal plate, essentially, with some sort of cooling channel in it; the 550Mhz PA-8600s in our N class have a square-socket style stack heat sink, amid a bunch of high-volume fans... that sink is about 3-4 times as tall as an Intel/AMD socket chip. So this new one would have to be a big beastie... active cooling this time? Maybe?
Ever been married, zmooc? Forget auto-washers; I can see this task coming up in the 'Honey-Do' list at home;... "and when you're done with the trash, go wash the roof". Ick.
BTW, the cheap probe idea isn't even mine, it's that of author and futurist Freeman Dyson, who called the probes 'Space chickens' or some such name. I'd prefer the term 'Model T', as a nod to the commoditization of their production, but the idea is the same.
Manned exploration is costly, but necessary; to get the roadwork done before we put people up there, we need more cheap probes. $1 to $10 million variety each, so that if we lose one a la the Mars Polar Lander and Climate Orbiters, it's not a show-stopper.
On my end, I'm not a SQL coder, but I recently picked another DB for a trivial side project because it had more select and update features.
Meanwhile, the only organized part of my computer room at home is my jealously guarded stack of Bioware games...
Great, now we have (or will have) commercially available continent-crossing payload-delivery vehicles for every 3rd-World whack with enough cash to buy one. Kinda wish that Rutan had stuck with his old hobby, building small planes that could fly around the world... which could be considered another continent-crossing payload-delivery vehicle... cough never mind...
Buckeyeguy then decided, in a flash of inspiration, to change his name to Google Bullpuckey.
But the side effect is that no circuit breaker has more than about 4 PCs on it, and usually less. If ya don't have a basement, try setting up in separate rooms, long cables and all ;)
Now, having left that flame-bait out there, it should be said that the last umpteen CDs I bought were of bands that I heard on KNAC.com, or NetRadio, or other net-enabled means. Full songs, not fragmented bits that shows up on band web sites. If the RIAA would get the message that full demos sell CDs, maybe they.... nahh, forget it, they'll never get a grip, will they?
Now, compare that with 'NSync, whose music will be covered by... ? (Britney doesn't count for this answer.)
It's not just who wrote it, it's a matter of taste... and 'NSync is musical Zima.
Come to think of it, I've probably ruined more relationships with email than preserved them.
If we assume that a spammer would have an automated program to generate the emails, as is done today, consider that the spammer's mailing lists would probably have been stored on punch cards; that would have been one hell of a stack of cards for each email the guy sent out. True, they could have stored the list on tape, but considering the availability of a card reader vs. tape drives (in an academic or research environment), I'd bet on the cards. And, each address would have to be hand -entered at some point, vs. the address scanning/mining of today. Ah, the good old days ;)