We've all known for a LONG TIME that MS isn't going to make money on the XBox for YEARS. How is this news now that they've posted a loss this far into it? Didn't we already KNOW that?
MS has a history of going long-term with high-profile products, and it's paid off for them. This venture was no different, and losses were expected. Maybe if this story was posted say, 3-4 years down the road, it'd be newsworthy, since that's when MS is expected to BREAK-EVEN with the Xbox.
This sounds like editor & zealot bait - fanning the flames of hate. Woo-hoo, MS is losing money?
Woo-diddley-hoo, they knew it before we did. Get a grip.
Re:Shouldn't rant about things you don't understan
on
JWZ Reviews Video on Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why do people get off on putting other people's work down? Just because you made a quick buck in an IPO doesn't give you the right to rant about whatever you want and expect people to bow down.
1) People don't get off doing that. They're actually saying something about what they don't like. Progress, as you should remember, is not about sitting silently and taking whatever is handed to you. Progress is made by telling someone what's wrong with what they've done. So what if his tone is nasty? His words are what's important, and his words equate to: "Why is this so hard. Make it consistant, make it easy."
2) He has the right to say whatever he wants. Just like you. Besides, attacking his position or money doesn't invalidate or make less important anything he says unless he can be proven to be wrong. Opinions can be tough to validate or invalidate, but in this case, he makes some very specific points about what he thinks is good and what's not. At no point does he say "I have a lot of money, which makes my point more imporant." He has a WEBSITE which makes his voice simply HEARD.
Java is a great language, granted. Very well structured, expandable, lots of good features & functions that even MS had to copy it.
However, the problem with Java is:
Bad business execution. Garbage output performance. Attempting to be too many things to everyone and only managing to do one thing well.
For server-side execution where objects are pooled & recalled for further use in memory, it's great. But no-one, and I mean *NO-ONE*, will ever again attempt to use Java as a serious tool for a serious GUI application.
Java wasn't doomed by having a bad language model. It was doomed by everything else.
"Verizon wasn't making any sort of principled stand to protect its users' privacy, it just wanted to avoid the costs of complying with the (many) subpoenas it will now receive."
So, does that make it OK? It's OK that Verizon failed, and that the RIAA will take a bite out of people's right to privacy because, so says you, "they were greedy, evil profiteers & out for the almighty dollar anyway" ?
Wow, this sounds just like the media outlets in Atlas Shrugged. It sickens me to the core to hear about this. I mean, the REAL problem is what's going to happen to Verizon customers now and how their rights are about to be trampled on. There is NO reason you had to tell us that Verizon is evil anyway, so whatever they do they're damned.
Your digs are getting under my skin, michael, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Instead of inciting people against Verizon and fanning the fuel of hatred for profiteers, maybe you should try telling people what they should really be doing is CANCELLING THEIR VERIZON ACCOUNTS.
Vote with your dollar rather than screaming soundlessly into a dark hole.
I wish I had mod point to mod you up. Maybe another time;)
I'll take a stab at answering this whole ball of yarn: It occurs to me that TPM is more like an API, not a different design of computer. It's an add-on, much like.NET is an API sort of add-on to windows. Applications have to specifically say "I want to use TPM" in order to access any trusted-computing functionality.
In that case, a mobo with TPM will not affect anything that currently exists.
However, what must be watched for is: hardware that requires TPM (i.e. your CD burner). Software that requires TPM (for whatever reason). I believe that in the end, the goal is that while piracy may still be possible for you & me, media vendors can use TCPA-enabled applications to serve media to TCPA-enabled computers, and deny it to non-TCPA enabled systems.
Another concern: some years from now, when all hardware that deals with media is TCPA-enabled, how exactly will you (for example) rip your songs off a CD/DVD and share it over the internet?
Another concern: how can this be used to usurp your rights in the future?
The issue is not "how this will affect Linux & pirateers", but: can this be used as a sort of "Hardware-EULA" that's forced on you?
You may want to practice living without buying CD's, DVD's, and not downloading any of that media for a while to get the full effect of what TCPA is going to do to you.
incompatible how? please explain in more detail; just saying "it's incompatible" is kinda like saying "for religious reasons"... it's supposed to be a response that you can't question.
well, answer please. enlighten me, because i've never had a problem running java-anything on my ms-centric machine.
Me: hell no. Not really out of concern that my code isn't good enough or that "maybe I'm not that good", but more because of just WAITING for something unexpected to happen. Like that one bug that wasn't reported or caught.
All us developers know that slightly gut-wrenching feeling when ANYTHING we code goes up on display for the first time. We all breathe that slight sigh of relief when we exit a meeting after a completely successful display of our work.
Not to nitpick, but this dude is out in Egypt... maybe he could go beyond FCC regs? Squeeze some more power into this, get some truly long distance DSL...
*Tim Allen Grunt*
"More power..."
Re:ID hit the nail on the head on this one..
on
Doom Archive Reopened
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"In 1993, we fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world."
It happened to Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) too - he played so much Doom that it got in the way of his work. Unexpectedly, the record he put out after getting over his Doom addiction ("The Downward Spiral") turned out to be a smash multi-platinum hit. We (should) all know that he went on to do the sound effects & music soundtrack to Quake.
An aside: how many of you DIDN'T know what the "NIN" stood for on the boxes of nails in Quake? (Admit it - I've caught a few people that didn't know that.) It was another iD joke - John Carmack put a NIN graphic on the boxes during beta testing, as a joke & tribute to Trent Reznor, and it make it to the final product.
Inserted Pictures.
Office connectivity with other Office apps.
Mail Merging.
Document Templates.
VBA & Add-Ins. (blah blah virii - the functionality is a godsend for data processing and feature functionality)
If you're using plain text, use Notepad (whoa, Microsoft made that one, right? Opens 50K text files pretty damn fast if you ask me). Word doesn't fit into your rant.
I agree. If you watch First Contact (the best next-gen movie, IMO), there are a few things that seem inconsistent (even baffling; wouldn't the Borg already know that they'd failed in their first attempt? Wouldn't they have done more time-change attempts to change everything in their favor?), but it's wholly entertaining and well plotted.
I think that FC worked for several reasons:
Limited character set
More character interaction, less technical interaction (notice just how little techno-babble there was? The whole premise was really easy to accept. Nothing relied on "we have to get the starboard injectors online", everything was really, really, REALLY easy to understand. Even when they went to eject the deflector dish, they went & did it MANUALLY)
Limited sets (there's really about 4 areas of the movie's operation - on the ship, outside the ship, earth, borg ship. and they all tie together extremely well)
Well-defined goal, easily identifyable bad guy with easily identifyable motives
(This is by no-means an exhaustive list, but I think it serves to drive the point.)
All that, plus I've found that the time-travel Treks are in general the most successful. (Maybe that's another rule? Odd=Bad, Even=Good, Time Travel=Good.)
That makes me wonder if these lawyers could use the recent Verizon case as precedent - Verizon was sending out "ads" disguised as domain expiry warning bills, when in fact filling out the "bill" and sending it back would transfer your current domain to their trust. Pretty sneaky, and the courts told them "stop that".
Relatively, 1000 1-meter rocks are better than 1 1-km rock.
Actually, however, a single 1-meter rock getting through will still do a boatload of damage - it won't be a planet killer, but the damage will still be more than say, those 2 aircraft that flew into the world trade center towers.
In order for any explosive asteroid deterrant system to work well, you still have to make sure that the asteroid will be sufficiently vaporized to be eaten up in the atmosphere. You have to guarantee that the asteroid will become something more like sand. A nuclear blast will probably not do that (especially not in space, where there's no atmosphere to propagate the blast).
That's why so many systems rely more on controllable methods like redirection - we can guarantee those better.
Try not to judge him too harshly for his screwed up views on politics and society.
I have to nitpick. You can still forgive a person for being a little odd. You can forgive them for not having the same views as yourself. You can forgive them for growing up differently than yourself. You can even forgive them for their actions.
But forgiveness doesn't exclude judgement.
Judgement seems a harsh word, but your opinion of something is still a form of judgement in your own mind, a decision to think a certain way about something.
So, in my opinion: Bobby Fischer is a man that could rout the lot of us in chess, and I could be nice to him & do the whole "live & let live" bit with him if I ever met him. But I wouldn't invite him over for tea & biscuits (to put it lightly).
i don't care whether a band is local or not. i just want good music that's accessible whereever i live.
i don't want to have to dig around the underground scene to find the music i want. i want it presented to me, and i gotta say, the RIAA does that job for me just fine. i don't buy a lot of music, so the little bit i DO buy is worth the $20 CDN.
i just think that this topic isn't a good solution either. at least, not for me.
We'll stabilize population way before then, but this planet could support hundreds of billions of people.
OK, 100's of billions of people. Is it POSSIBLE? In theory, yes. In practice: I'll bet not. At the very least, it would require Godly effort on our parts, collectively, which is your point - that technology won't stay the same, it'll advance, which I believe too. However, FAITH in TECHNOLOGY doesn't help us - only progress & logic will. Chew on this:
The first thing that came to my mind upon reading that was something rather logistical that I bet VERY FEW people would think of:
Where do we put all the shit?
Seriously - where would you put all the human feces? What would you do with it, exactly? Hell, most metropolitan cities have problems with exactly that question, and the answer is that at the moment, they're STORING it. Waste departments actually press the shit they extract out of sewage systems into large rectangular slats and store it all away, because there's no cost-effective way to get rid of it. It's not really worth it to use it as fertilizer since so much of the shit really isn't good for the soil, and to be honest, there's more than enough shit to cover all those fields and then some, with STILL way more than enough left over for the next year, in which case it becomes a big stockpile, just that now you've slowed the process down...
Maybe you'd shoot it into space? Great, so now you're reducing the earth's mass by jettisoning the shit of a few hundred billion people into the solar system, when in reality it's valuable MATTER that could be recycled... just how?
You get what I'm talking about. The logistics of having that many people is rather a tough thing to get your head around.
To get back on-topic, I'll put in my 2 cents about the article: I'll assume they're talking about USABLE land, land that people can actually survive on without a large, cost-inefficient burden on society. For instance: Canada is a pretty giagantic area. Even on a fixed map, it's still the 2nd largest country in the world (land area). However, the population is a miniscule 31 million. If it's so big, why aren't there more people living there? Why is the population of Canada on the border, near oceans & lakes?
It's because most of Canada is unusable land - Ontario is mostly made up of the Canadian Shield, which = rock. Most other places are hella cold and resource-poor. Alberta has the oil, which explains it's population, Quebec is mostly centred on the St. Lawrence, and Saskatchewan is made of wheat (pretty much, that and flat land). Other parts of Canada used to be good for uranium mining, but that dried up quickly. The Maritimes are having problems with fishing, since overfishing has killed the sea-life populations over there. Other than that, it's also mostly rock (save New Brunswick, which is supposed to be pretty sweet farmland, kinda like southern Ontario).
There's a lot of land to expand onto in the world, but the cost of living there is simply too enormous to be supported, plus the fact that if it WERE all populated, the resource drain on resource-rich land would be worse than what it is now.
Maybe Big Blue actually learned a lesson from their DeathStar line of drives.
don't count on it. IBM was in the midst of cutting costs in hardware & software sales in order to improve their profit & stock margins. the one thing that's seriously popular with them right now is their services branch, the part that hires out expensive consultants to go onsite at your workplace and implement servers & transaction systems.
big blue wasn't doing it's customers a favor. it couldn't afford to. it was a result of PROPER capitalism happening: can't sell enough of something and it's a loss to the margins, so tank it. the fact that the hard-drives were a crummy deal in the first place due to their propensity to die due to overuse was just a co-incidence - PR doesn't make a company stop selling something. lack of profit does.
CNN.com has a story today about the blue-chip stock rally yesterday, and IBM was one of the main stories in that headline. check it out for yourself.
Two answers to that, depending how you choose to look at it.
1) They actually make something that the majority of people want. Many people like to use a computer the way they want; many MORE people want to be told how to use a computer. You gotta admit, MS excels at that.
2) People are too lazy to exercise their power as consumers to stop using Windows & other MS products.
Remember, MS DID have to compete early on to get acceptance in the marketplace. Their early competitors were the various other versions of DOS, Apple computers, OS/2, and to this day, *NIX. They competed with Lotus 123, Wordperfect (and their suites), they competed with Netscape, and today they're competing in server markets today. Don't accuse MS of not competing & relying on consumers, because they did and still do (even if it was questionable behaviour, they competed like mad).
Ya, and commercial software relies on free software to keep it honest enough that computers can actually remain a useful tool to the human race...
Wrong. Commercial software relies on CONSUMERS AND COMPETITION to keep it honest enough that computers can actually remain a useful tool to the human race.
Free software relies on CONSUMERS AND DEVELOPERS WITH FREE TIME TO DEDICATE to keep going.
Slashdot Mirror
MS has a history of going long-term with high-profile products, and it's paid off for them. This venture was no different, and losses were expected. Maybe if this story was posted say, 3-4 years down the road, it'd be newsworthy, since that's when MS is expected to BREAK-EVEN with the Xbox.
This sounds like editor & zealot bait - fanning the flames of hate. Woo-hoo, MS is losing money?
Woo-diddley-hoo, they knew it before we did. Get a grip.
"librsvg"
Say that twice fast.
1) People don't get off doing that. They're actually saying something about what they don't like. Progress, as you should remember, is not about sitting silently and taking whatever is handed to you. Progress is made by telling someone what's wrong with what they've done. So what if his tone is nasty? His words are what's important, and his words equate to: "Why is this so hard. Make it consistant, make it easy."
2) He has the right to say whatever he wants. Just like you. Besides, attacking his position or money doesn't invalidate or make less important anything he says unless he can be proven to be wrong. Opinions can be tough to validate or invalidate, but in this case, he makes some very specific points about what he thinks is good and what's not. At no point does he say "I have a lot of money, which makes my point more imporant." He has a WEBSITE which makes his voice simply HEARD.
However, the problem with Java is:
Bad business execution. Garbage output performance. Attempting to be too many things to everyone and only managing to do one thing well.
For server-side execution where objects are pooled & recalled for further use in memory, it's great. But no-one, and I mean *NO-ONE*, will ever again attempt to use Java as a serious tool for a serious GUI application.
Java wasn't doomed by having a bad language model. It was doomed by everything else.
So, does that make it OK? It's OK that Verizon failed, and that the RIAA will take a bite out of people's right to privacy because, so says you, "they were greedy, evil profiteers & out for the almighty dollar anyway" ?
Wow, this sounds just like the media outlets in Atlas Shrugged. It sickens me to the core to hear about this. I mean, the REAL problem is what's going to happen to Verizon customers now and how their rights are about to be trampled on. There is NO reason you had to tell us that Verizon is evil anyway, so whatever they do they're damned.
Your digs are getting under my skin, michael, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Instead of inciting people against Verizon and fanning the fuel of hatred for profiteers, maybe you should try telling people what they should really be doing is CANCELLING THEIR VERIZON ACCOUNTS.
Vote with your dollar rather than screaming soundlessly into a dark hole.
I'll take a stab at answering this whole ball of yarn: It occurs to me that TPM is more like an API, not a different design of computer. It's an add-on, much like .NET is an API sort of add-on to windows. Applications have to specifically say "I want to use TPM" in order to access any trusted-computing functionality.
In that case, a mobo with TPM will not affect anything that currently exists.
However, what must be watched for is: hardware that requires TPM (i.e. your CD burner). Software that requires TPM (for whatever reason). I believe that in the end, the goal is that while piracy may still be possible for you & me, media vendors can use TCPA-enabled applications to serve media to TCPA-enabled computers, and deny it to non-TCPA enabled systems.
Another concern: some years from now, when all hardware that deals with media is TCPA-enabled, how exactly will you (for example) rip your songs off a CD/DVD and share it over the internet?
Another concern: how can this be used to usurp your rights in the future?
The issue is not "how this will affect Linux & pirateers", but: can this be used as a sort of "Hardware-EULA" that's forced on you?
You may want to practice living without buying CD's, DVD's, and not downloading any of that media for a while to get the full effect of what TCPA is going to do to you.
well, answer please. enlighten me, because i've never had a problem running java-anything on my ms-centric machine.
2) Let IE say "You need Java. Wanna install it?"
3) Tell them to click Yes.
Oh, not using IE?
Why don't other browsers ask you to install Java then?
Let's have a court mandate that all browsers must check for a Java VM & allow users to install it.
*karma burning*
All us developers know that slightly gut-wrenching feeling when ANYTHING we code goes up on display for the first time. We all breathe that slight sigh of relief when we exit a meeting after a completely successful display of our work.
*Tim Allen Grunt*
"More power..."
It happened to Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) too - he played so much Doom that it got in the way of his work. Unexpectedly, the record he put out after getting over his Doom addiction ("The Downward Spiral") turned out to be a smash multi-platinum hit. We (should) all know that he went on to do the sound effects & music soundtrack to Quake.
An aside: how many of you DIDN'T know what the "NIN" stood for on the boxes of nails in Quake? (Admit it - I've caught a few people that didn't know that.) It was another iD joke - John Carmack put a NIN graphic on the boxes during beta testing, as a joke & tribute to Trent Reznor, and it make it to the final product.
Think:
Inserted Pictures.
Office connectivity with other Office apps.
Mail Merging.
Document Templates.
VBA & Add-Ins. (blah blah virii - the functionality is a godsend for data processing and feature functionality)
If you're using plain text, use Notepad (whoa, Microsoft made that one, right? Opens 50K text files pretty damn fast if you ask me). Word doesn't fit into your rant.
5 Moderator points, to use or lose.
I think that FC worked for several reasons:
Limited character set
More character interaction, less technical interaction (notice just how little techno-babble there was? The whole premise was really easy to accept. Nothing relied on "we have to get the starboard injectors online", everything was really, really, REALLY easy to understand. Even when they went to eject the deflector dish, they went & did it MANUALLY)
Limited sets (there's really about 4 areas of the movie's operation - on the ship, outside the ship, earth, borg ship. and they all tie together extremely well)
Well-defined goal, easily identifyable bad guy with easily identifyable motives
(This is by no-means an exhaustive list, but I think it serves to drive the point.)
All that, plus I've found that the time-travel Treks are in general the most successful. (Maybe that's another rule? Odd=Bad, Even=Good, Time Travel=Good.)
BTW, I thought Star Trek 3 was good. *shrug*
Haven't you heard of the legendary Wu-tang Clan? =P
That makes me wonder if these lawyers could use the recent Verizon case as precedent - Verizon was sending out "ads" disguised as domain expiry warning bills, when in fact filling out the "bill" and sending it back would transfer your current domain to their trust. Pretty sneaky, and the courts told them "stop that".
Relatively, 1000 1-meter rocks are better than 1 1-km rock.
Actually, however, a single 1-meter rock getting through will still do a boatload of damage - it won't be a planet killer, but the damage will still be more than say, those 2 aircraft that flew into the world trade center towers.
In order for any explosive asteroid deterrant system to work well, you still have to make sure that the asteroid will be sufficiently vaporized to be eaten up in the atmosphere. You have to guarantee that the asteroid will become something more like sand. A nuclear blast will probably not do that (especially not in space, where there's no atmosphere to propagate the blast).
That's why so many systems rely more on controllable methods like redirection - we can guarantee those better.
I have to nitpick. You can still forgive a person for being a little odd. You can forgive them for not having the same views as yourself. You can forgive them for growing up differently than yourself. You can even forgive them for their actions.
But forgiveness doesn't exclude judgement.
Judgement seems a harsh word, but your opinion of something is still a form of judgement in your own mind, a decision to think a certain way about something.
So, in my opinion: Bobby Fischer is a man that could rout the lot of us in chess, and I could be nice to him & do the whole "live & let live" bit with him if I ever met him. But I wouldn't invite him over for tea & biscuits (to put it lightly).
i don't want to have to dig around the underground scene to find the music i want. i want it presented to me, and i gotta say, the RIAA does that job for me just fine. i don't buy a lot of music, so the little bit i DO buy is worth the $20 CDN.
i just think that this topic isn't a good solution either. at least, not for me.
You're a sick prick. May the sorrow of 11 victims' family & friends fall on your tasteless head.
OK, 100's of billions of people. Is it POSSIBLE? In theory, yes. In practice: I'll bet not. At the very least, it would require Godly effort on our parts, collectively, which is your point - that technology won't stay the same, it'll advance, which I believe too. However, FAITH in TECHNOLOGY doesn't help us - only progress & logic will. Chew on this:
The first thing that came to my mind upon reading that was something rather logistical that I bet VERY FEW people would think of:
Where do we put all the shit?
Seriously - where would you put all the human feces? What would you do with it, exactly? Hell, most metropolitan cities have problems with exactly that question, and the answer is that at the moment, they're STORING it. Waste departments actually press the shit they extract out of sewage systems into large rectangular slats and store it all away, because there's no cost-effective way to get rid of it. It's not really worth it to use it as fertilizer since so much of the shit really isn't good for the soil, and to be honest, there's more than enough shit to cover all those fields and then some, with STILL way more than enough left over for the next year, in which case it becomes a big stockpile, just that now you've slowed the process down...
Maybe you'd shoot it into space? Great, so now you're reducing the earth's mass by jettisoning the shit of a few hundred billion people into the solar system, when in reality it's valuable MATTER that could be recycled... just how?
You get what I'm talking about. The logistics of having that many people is rather a tough thing to get your head around.
To get back on-topic, I'll put in my 2 cents about the article: I'll assume they're talking about USABLE land, land that people can actually survive on without a large, cost-inefficient burden on society. For instance: Canada is a pretty giagantic area. Even on a fixed map, it's still the 2nd largest country in the world (land area). However, the population is a miniscule 31 million. If it's so big, why aren't there more people living there? Why is the population of Canada on the border, near oceans & lakes?
It's because most of Canada is unusable land - Ontario is mostly made up of the Canadian Shield, which = rock. Most other places are hella cold and resource-poor. Alberta has the oil, which explains it's population, Quebec is mostly centred on the St. Lawrence, and Saskatchewan is made of wheat (pretty much, that and flat land). Other parts of Canada used to be good for uranium mining, but that dried up quickly. The Maritimes are having problems with fishing, since overfishing has killed the sea-life populations over there. Other than that, it's also mostly rock (save New Brunswick, which is supposed to be pretty sweet farmland, kinda like southern Ontario).
There's a lot of land to expand onto in the world, but the cost of living there is simply too enormous to be supported, plus the fact that if it WERE all populated, the resource drain on resource-rich land would be worse than what it is now.
don't count on it. IBM was in the midst of cutting costs in hardware & software sales in order to improve their profit & stock margins. the one thing that's seriously popular with them right now is their services branch, the part that hires out expensive consultants to go onsite at your workplace and implement servers & transaction systems.
big blue wasn't doing it's customers a favor. it couldn't afford to. it was a result of PROPER capitalism happening: can't sell enough of something and it's a loss to the margins, so tank it. the fact that the hard-drives were a crummy deal in the first place due to their propensity to die due to overuse was just a co-incidence - PR doesn't make a company stop selling something. lack of profit does.
CNN.com has a story today about the blue-chip stock rally yesterday, and IBM was one of the main stories in that headline. check it out for yourself.
that's because IBM isn't making HDD's anymore. they sold that part of the company to hitachi.
Two answers to that, depending how you choose to look at it.
1) They actually make something that the majority of people want. Many people like to use a computer the way they want; many MORE people want to be told how to use a computer. You gotta admit, MS excels at that.
2) People are too lazy to exercise their power as consumers to stop using Windows & other MS products.
Remember, MS DID have to compete early on to get acceptance in the marketplace. Their early competitors were the various other versions of DOS, Apple computers, OS/2, and to this day, *NIX. They competed with Lotus 123, Wordperfect (and their suites), they competed with Netscape, and today they're competing in server markets today. Don't accuse MS of not competing & relying on consumers, because they did and still do (even if it was questionable behaviour, they competed like mad).
Free software relies on CONSUMERS AND DEVELOPERS WITH FREE TIME TO DEDICATE to keep going.