In this case, wouldn't the better word be "more familiar" though, since we all have used those "not-so-innovative" interfaces before, and while we still await a truly innovative paradigm, saving on training for an environment trying to attract users is a worthwhile use of developer time.
Considering the demographics, a company without the resources to produce a french version, should just go where there are more people who speak english(we are talking about an 85% francophone market). Also, the language laws, also mandate productions over a certain size to be displayed in both languages... How does this help anyone? As for smaller outfits... Most (local) smaller outfits are already french, so anything that involves not just throwing the US version(local productions tend to outproduce, and outsell English Canadian productions, as the Academy Awards showed this year) as-is helps our economy.
Importing culture never really helps your own culture. Importing a product, and integrating it with your culture works better, as Japan as shown(they keep control of the process of integration).
But my point was that the law wouldn't make necessarily people wait longer for the english version(it's already ready, so there's a commercial incentive to release it soon), but would actually encourage local translation(get it translated in North America as used to be the case about 10 years ago, in Montreal to be specific), instead of send the movie to Europe, get it translated to French over there, and wait for it to come back before release. Until about ten years ago, translation delays were shorter(I think what started happening was translation going to the lowest International bidder, instead of "pick someone who can respect deadlines" which tended to be local firms(some owned by local tv channels, who had scale economies from the volume they handled)
Discrimination it's not, technically(not giving a multi-lingual person an advantage is arguably, not discrimination, since it's not a disadvantage...). Well I'm sure it's being argued that way, someplace.
But the real reason is probably that if it worked in Japanese, people might export your version to Japan, where it likely is much more expensive, and Sony would lose revenue(let's not get into the ethics of that shall we?). It's arguably why some Francophone markets(I'm from Quebec) have to wait longer than others to get their version of a DVD, even it's its already available. (Sometimes I really wish Quebec would go back to it's "release in both official languages at the same time, by law.) Because european-french releases usually are much more tardy than North American ones, we have to wait for software, until it's released over there, even if it's translated here(and ready by the same time the North-American English version is).
Now I wasn't aware they charged extra for the fr_FR version, but I'm sure a grey market copy would inflate in value in France, if it was available before everyone else can get a copy.
In your case, I'd strongly suspect that the english/multilingual copy to be cheaper than the Japanese version. Oddly enough, lots of software will install in english on a french computer, so I suspect it's not a technical "deny" but more of an administrative/marketing one in your case. (Yes I know, there are also issues about input methods, but I doubt it's the problem here, as you mention a driver...)
Depending on the applications you need to have redundant, you might be able to just use a compactpci server, with redundant hardware in it(this technology, while expensive, even allows removal of failed cpus during operation of the machine, it was developed for telecom carriers, and is rather expensive). That would protect you from component failures, but not from power outages without redundant power, nor from os failures.
This is a hard problem(NP-Hard perhaps, I'm not sure), and you need to have a:
List of applications you want to protect
Budgeted amount
What threats you are trying to protect from
What kind of failures you will tolerate(do you need 99.9% uptime? or better? worse?
You could, for simple applications, like web service, bump up a pair of linux machines, gimmick some replication between the two, and hope nothing goes wrong, if you have a very low budget, and you'd probably spend a fair amount of work debugging later on, "synchronisation problems". But for redundant storage. The openssi project is working on highly-available single-image clusters for linux, in an open source model, they might be your first place to look. It's not however, something for the unprepared to do, nor is it something that I'd recommend if you do other tasks for this company. Maintaining such a beast will require a significant implantation investment. The good news is that once everything works to your satisfaction, you can probably take a 4 week vacation somewhere with golden beaches and much sun, and let it take care of itself. I can't stress this enough, this is a hard problem, if you really want to do this right, you'll want to surround yourself with qualified people with experience in this field, it's non-trivial, and mistakes can lead to severe data-loss.
You might want to look at wondershaper(a linux-based traffic-optimisation script) for your ping-times. Even if you aren't running linux, the descriptions, in plain english, of why it's a very bad idea to try (on most dsl/cable networks available today) to do a response-based task(online game) and a large, block-based transfer (bit-torrent, p2p, large downloads, windows update, etc...) are well worth the visit wondershaper
development firms that are starting usually collaborate with larger firms, there's a local outfit that was shown on tv for its work on ports, at least until they release their own material. Considering the amounts of money involved, and the types of expertise required to develop/release/distribute a game, requiring an apprenticeship of sorts might not be such a bad idea.
The only problem is that large ownership consortiums have too much power over some ideas, but gaming is hardly the only market where that's a problem.
Why would ATI or NVIDIA sell them on-board chips with the same quality?
They'd lose money. As long as you buy the external card, they can get more money. Now, obviously, the solution is to convince everyone to stop buying addon cards, and then ATI/NVIDIA will put serious cards on-board. Of course, that is also harder to do(less room on the mobo for a chip, more heat generation, different airflow, power is however, better). Maybe the solution is to buy one of the few mobos without on-board video?(SOYO I believe has some) Then you'd be happy, you wouldn't pay extra for something you don't use.
Oh, because mobos with on-board video sell more, they have lower margins, and end up somewhat less expensive, you say? Well that's the market for you, since you have only a small percentage of buyers with a clue, you end up having a market driven by the clueless, who pay extra for things that they really need, and think they end up saving on things they shouldn't have bought anyways. Educate those you can, and maybe by 2035, we will have a critical mass of clueful.
"People are lazy", and yes, that's why they use BIND, but not the kind of laziness you think.
You're thinking of "ease of use" not "least amount of perceived work". Looking for a software that does a particular task is considered "work"!!!! by many people(I'm shocked myself) which is why laziness is why more people use IE (not necessarily because it's easier to use or makes your tasks easier) but because there's little work "up front" in installing/integrating. And yes, the fact that many distros include graphical admin tools that depend on bind, and only really work on bind does not help. I'm a powerdns addict myself.
An airport traffic control system is just a computer with strange dials after all. What they tested on was likely a duplicate of the hardware, but obviously, other factors in play here threw the test off.
If nothing else, they just proved Finagle's Law... If something can go wrong, it will...
Unfortunately, the innards for windows 98 are a lot simpler/less secure than for 2k(they take shortcuts) and that makes windows 98 not such a good idea to emulate.
Window's "graphic" parts have been known as a shell(the executable is even called shell.exe), and working as such for years(the documents for litestep and other replacements are clearly marked as "replacing your shell". That the shell doesn't have protection from the other layers is a design decision(imho a bad one). A lot of the improvements in win2k and xp(stability-wise) appear to be a strenghtening of the memory protection models, and isolation of the different layers, when accessed through the apis, a wise move by Microsoft, if a bit late(I remember when they were discussing those, originally, when the OS was code-named Cairo). That OS was slotted to become the successor to windows nt workstation 4.0 I believe, and ended up becoming XP, almost 10 years later...
If you look at the list of improvements to win2000 as a target, you'll see a lot of the ideas were incorporated. (Prebinding, journaling, etc...) That they don't make the system as much faster as with apple might have to do with the Apple Engineer Skillset vs Microsoft Engineers Skillset difference after all(I said difference, not superiority/inferiority, because even difference would be enough in this case)
A "DRM-extreme" Bios could deny any transfer without an explicit authorisation, making the reading of a jpg file an illegal instruction. Granted TCPA isn't expected that bad, but nothingsays it can't be that bad either... In fact, many laws work in this exact way, and legal advice usually goes "If you're not explicitely sure you can, don't." That you have to justify your ownership of files to your computers when restoring a 3 year old backup of hundreds of thousands of files might become problematic.
You're right, but prior experiences in this field have been fraught with peril, partly because Microsoft(among others) felt that any data that didn't have a clear owner automatically belonged to it, and partly because the trust management implicit in proper DRM functions requires more work from already over-worked, understaffed IT departments who already have trouble with getting users to change passwords every six months. These same IT departments are going to be able to keep the tangle of DRM ownership and the proper trust relationships inherent in such clear and unobfuscated ?
You obviously have great faith in the human race's potential to avoid problems, instead of just running into them smack on, and grinding them down by force of numbers...
Their definition of dumping comes from the fact that dumping was invented by
Producers in market X who feel that when the rest of the world is selling product A below what it costs to make in market X, they are doing something illegal.
Without taking into account a lot more factors than most treaties ever cover, I'm certain a case could be made that there is one product that is being "dumped" by every country on the planet, to one particular market, simply because the complexity of the entire situation that "dumping laws" are supposed to prevent is too great.
When competition forced the bell company out of a monopoly, and it had to reduce costs. The ILEC had to reduce the cost components of your phone line to compete with the CLECs, that meant including the rent of the phone, and free phone wiring repairs(because, at one point, they were trying to argue the phone wiring in your walls, belonged to them, so they had to fix it, but they also could monitor and limit just how much use you could get out of your equipment, for a consumer market, this ended up costing them less, until competition emerged) became prohibitively expensive. The "services included with your subscription" went down because consumers didn't want to pay extra to get them, and with the monopoly, they paid extra for it, but didn't know about it. The new model is a bit more self-sustainable, in that you own the phone equipment and there is a clear demarc between your responsability and the phone company's. That means your house is now "carrier-neutral" to use the term in the web hosting colocation industry, which is good for you, in the long term.
I second your distinction between "free" and "gratis" and also would like to point out that (in enterprise environments, and larger IT shops) there is a lot of renting going on, and Sun would rather you pay them for their software(and the hardware to run it on, some licenses fees can EASILY cover the difference), and not have to split the fee with the credit company(or at least, get a bigger slice of the fee)
Some of it would be a "financing by any other name"
there's a commercial, and I believe, several free versions of "ext2fs for windows" you might wish to google for that. You would be able to share your ext2fs file system with your linux install. However, they aren't "install" options. Only fat32 fat16 and ntfs qualify as "install" options on windows operating systems, and I doubt there is a bare-metal recovery kit in existance that would allow you to "backup ntfs install", reformat to ext2fs, "restore from bare metal onto ext2fs" and voila, without blue screens galore.
errr you might like kde-cygwin or vmware then;) at least until those problems are fixed. kde-cygwin might be a bit slower than kde-native on linux, but at least, you get to keep some kde-goodness
"Friendly" for me has less to do with a sugar coated install than it does being able to handle wierd installation issues. 2 summers ago I had a pair of 486 laptops I wanted to install a minimal system on to use them as X terminals.
if I may, sounds like you're confusing "robust" with "friendly". i.e. handling weird "issues" would be robustness. Not requiring prior knowledge would be friendliness. And yes, robustness in an installer is much more important than friendliness, but few people realize it. Not all "modern" distros even consider 486 or below "supported" installs, so YMMV.
Anyone ever notice how it's always about the non-urban power sources vs the renewable ones?
Why do we seem to have mental blocks against putting power generation for urban needs, in urban areas(solar and wind power could conceivably be put on top of skyscrapers). Whereas nuclear, tide power, dams, and coal/gas/oil generators tend to be out-of-the-busy areas power generation? (Hint: when's the last time a power plant was built on the Island of Manhattan?)
Wouldn't it make more sense to increase power generation in Urban areas, and try to make those self-sufficient, instead of subsidising rural power generation, which eventually means the rural area taxes just subsidize the big city? (I do live in a 1 mil agglomeration, but I'm not sure I like what they're doing to wilder outlying areas for power).
Is there a speculator's market for power plants? Is that a hidden lobbying arm in play here? I'd really like to know why you can't just say: Urban area X, you're responsible for your 80 MegaWatt power needs, and for list of other needs, but you're tax free, as far as X random higher authority taxes are concerned. Of course that's probably it, taxing an urban area is an easier task, lots of businesses, lots of dense people, lots of high tech use, computers, and a captive audience. Taxing outlying areas more heavily would reverse the donut effect.
I'm not sure I'd say it that way. I've had fewer problems with sid (I'll admit it's not proof, more like a counter example) than with several versions of redhat(the release ones).
Slashdot Mirror
the funny part is that they just may have been slashdotted worse the second time...
most effective? at what would be a good question.
In this case, wouldn't the better word be "more familiar" though, since we all have used those "not-so-innovative" interfaces before, and while we still await a truly innovative paradigm, saving on training for an environment trying to attract users is a worthwhile use of developer time.
The fact that Microsoft never innovated before, doesn't mean they couldn't, if they wanted to. That they don't want to is part of the problem.
Pressing the "play" button Finding Nemo for the 12th time in the last three days, Daddy really got fed up with this lunacy.
It will also spell disaster for those people who buy DVD libraries together aka the custody battle: who gets which DVD, news at eleven!
Considering the demographics, a company without the resources to produce a french version, should just go where there are more people who speak english(we are talking about an 85% francophone market). Also, the language laws, also mandate productions over a certain size to be displayed in both languages... How does this help anyone? As for smaller outfits... Most (local) smaller outfits are already french, so anything that involves not just throwing the US version(local productions tend to outproduce, and outsell English Canadian productions, as the Academy Awards showed this year) as-is helps our economy.
Importing culture never really helps your own culture. Importing a product, and integrating it with your culture works better, as Japan as shown(they keep control of the process of integration).
But my point was that the law wouldn't make necessarily people wait longer for the english version(it's already ready, so there's a commercial incentive to release it soon), but would actually encourage local translation(get it translated in North America as used to be the case about 10 years ago, in Montreal to be specific), instead of send the movie to Europe, get it translated to French over there, and wait for it to come back before release. Until about ten years ago, translation delays were shorter(I think what started happening was translation going to the lowest International bidder, instead of "pick someone who can respect deadlines" which tended to be local firms(some owned by local tv channels, who had scale economies from the volume they handled)
Discrimination it's not, technically(not giving a multi-lingual person an advantage is arguably, not discrimination, since it's not a disadvantage...). Well I'm sure it's being argued that way, someplace.
But the real reason is probably that if it worked in Japanese, people might export your version to Japan, where it likely is much more expensive, and Sony would lose revenue(let's not get into the ethics of that shall we?). It's arguably why some Francophone markets(I'm from Quebec) have to wait longer than others to get their version of a DVD, even it's its already available. (Sometimes I really wish Quebec would go back to it's "release in both official languages at the same time, by law.) Because european-french releases usually are much more tardy than North American ones, we have to wait for software, until it's released over there, even if it's translated here(and ready by the same time the North-American English version is).
Now I wasn't aware they charged extra for the fr_FR version, but I'm sure a grey market copy would inflate in value in France, if it was available before everyone else can get a copy.
In your case, I'd strongly suspect that the english/multilingual copy to be cheaper than the Japanese version. Oddly enough, lots of software will install in english on a french computer, so I suspect it's not a technical "deny" but more of an administrative/marketing one in your case. (Yes I know, there are also issues about input methods, but I doubt it's the problem here, as you mention a driver...)
This is a hard problem(NP-Hard perhaps, I'm not sure), and you need to have a:
List of applications you want to protect
Budgeted amount
What threats you are trying to protect from
What kind of failures you will tolerate(do you need 99.9% uptime? or better? worse?
You could, for simple applications, like web service, bump up a pair of linux machines, gimmick some replication between the two, and hope nothing goes wrong, if you have a very low budget, and you'd probably spend a fair amount of work debugging later on, "synchronisation problems". But for redundant storage. The openssi project is working on highly-available single-image clusters for linux, in an open source model, they might be your first place to look. It's not however, something for the unprepared to do, nor is it something that I'd recommend if you do other tasks for this company. Maintaining such a beast will require a significant implantation investment. The good news is that once everything works to your satisfaction, you can probably take a 4 week vacation somewhere with golden beaches and much sun, and let it take care of itself. I can't stress this enough, this is a hard problem, if you really want to do this right, you'll want to surround yourself with qualified people with experience in this field, it's non-trivial, and mistakes can lead to severe data-loss.
You might want to look at wondershaper(a linux-based traffic-optimisation script) for your ping-times. Even if you aren't running linux, the descriptions, in plain english, of why it's a very bad idea to try (on most dsl/cable networks available today) to do a response-based task(online game) and a large, block-based transfer (bit-torrent, p2p, large downloads, windows update, etc...) are well worth the visit wondershaper
development firms that are starting usually collaborate with larger firms, there's a local outfit that was shown on tv for its work on ports, at least until they release their own material. Considering the amounts of money involved, and the types of expertise required to develop/release/distribute a game, requiring an apprenticeship of sorts might not be such a bad idea.
The only problem is that large ownership consortiums have too much power over some ideas, but gaming is hardly the only market where that's a problem.
Why would ATI or NVIDIA sell them on-board chips with the same quality?
They'd lose money. As long as you buy the external card, they can get more money. Now, obviously, the solution is to convince everyone to stop buying addon cards, and then ATI/NVIDIA will put serious cards on-board. Of course, that is also harder to do(less room on the mobo for a chip, more heat generation, different airflow, power is however, better). Maybe the solution is to buy one of the few mobos without on-board video?(SOYO I believe has some) Then you'd be happy, you wouldn't pay extra for something you don't use.
Oh, because mobos with on-board video sell more, they have lower margins, and end up somewhat less expensive, you say? Well that's the market for you, since you have only a small percentage of buyers with a clue, you end up having a market driven by the clueless, who pay extra for things that they really need, and think they end up saving on things they shouldn't have bought anyways. Educate those you can, and maybe by 2035, we will have a critical mass of clueful.
"People are lazy", and yes, that's why they use BIND, but not the kind of laziness you think.
You're thinking of "ease of use" not "least amount of perceived work". Looking for a software that does a particular task is considered "work"!!!! by many people(I'm shocked myself) which is why laziness is why more people use IE (not necessarily because it's easier to use or makes your tasks easier) but because there's little work "up front" in installing/integrating. And yes, the fact that many distros include graphical admin tools that depend on bind, and only really work on bind does not help. I'm a powerdns addict myself.
An airport traffic control system is just a computer with strange dials after all. What they tested on was likely a duplicate of the hardware, but obviously, other factors in play here threw the test off.
If nothing else, they just proved Finagle's Law... If something can go wrong, it will...
Unfortunately, the innards for windows 98 are a lot simpler/less secure than for 2k(they take shortcuts) and that makes windows 98 not such a good idea to emulate.
Window's "graphic" parts have been known as a shell(the executable is even called shell.exe), and working as such for years(the documents for litestep and other replacements are clearly marked as "replacing your shell". That the shell doesn't have protection from the other layers is a design decision(imho a bad one). A lot of the improvements in win2k and xp(stability-wise) appear to be a strenghtening of the memory protection models, and isolation of the different layers, when accessed through the apis, a wise move by Microsoft, if a bit late(I remember when they were discussing those, originally, when the OS was code-named Cairo). That OS was slotted to become the successor to windows nt workstation 4.0 I believe, and ended up becoming XP, almost 10 years later...
If you look at the list of improvements to win2000 as a target, you'll see a lot of the ideas were incorporated. (Prebinding, journaling, etc...) That they don't make the system as much faster as with apple might have to do with the Apple Engineer Skillset vs Microsoft Engineers Skillset difference after all(I said difference, not superiority/inferiority, because even difference would be enough in this case)
You've greatly underestimated the power of laziness, happens to all of us, unfortunately...
A "DRM-extreme" Bios could deny any transfer without an explicit authorisation, making the reading of a jpg file an illegal instruction. Granted TCPA isn't expected that bad, but nothingsays it can't be that bad either... In fact, many laws work in this exact way, and legal advice usually goes "If you're not explicitely sure you can, don't." That you have to justify your ownership of files to your computers when restoring a 3 year old backup of hundreds of thousands of files might become problematic.
You're right, but prior experiences in this field have been fraught with peril, partly because Microsoft(among others) felt that any data that didn't have a clear owner automatically belonged to it, and partly because the trust management implicit in proper DRM functions requires more work from already over-worked, understaffed IT departments who already have trouble with getting users to change passwords every six months. These same IT departments are going to be able to keep the tangle of DRM ownership and the proper trust relationships inherent in such clear and unobfuscated ?
You obviously have great faith in the human race's potential to avoid problems, instead of just running into them smack on, and grinding them down by force of numbers...
Their definition of dumping comes from the fact that dumping was invented by
Producers in market X who feel that when the rest of the world is selling product A below what it costs to make in market X, they are doing something illegal.
Without taking into account a lot more factors than most treaties ever cover, I'm certain a case could be made that there is one product that is being "dumped" by every country on the planet, to one particular market, simply because the complexity of the entire situation that "dumping laws" are supposed to prevent is too great.
When competition forced the bell company out of a monopoly, and it had to reduce costs. The ILEC had to reduce the cost components of your phone line to compete with the CLECs, that meant including the rent of the phone, and free phone wiring repairs(because, at one point, they were trying to argue the phone wiring in your walls, belonged to them, so they had to fix it, but they also could monitor and limit just how much use you could get out of your equipment, for a consumer market, this ended up costing them less, until competition emerged) became prohibitively expensive. The "services included with your subscription" went down because consumers didn't want to pay extra to get them, and with the monopoly, they paid extra for it, but didn't know about it. The new model is a bit more self-sustainable, in that you own the phone equipment and there is a clear demarc between your responsability and the phone company's. That means your house is now "carrier-neutral" to use the term in the web hosting colocation industry, which is good for you, in the long term.
I second your distinction between "free" and "gratis" and also would like to point out that (in enterprise environments, and larger IT shops) there is a lot of renting going on, and Sun would rather you pay them for their software(and the hardware to run it on, some licenses fees can EASILY cover the difference), and not have to split the fee with the credit company(or at least, get a bigger slice of the fee)
Some of it would be a "financing by any other name"
there's a commercial, and I believe, several free versions of "ext2fs for windows" you might wish to google for that. You would be able to share your ext2fs file system with your linux install. However, they aren't "install" options. Only fat32 fat16 and ntfs qualify as "install" options on windows operating systems, and I doubt there is a bare-metal recovery kit in existance that would allow you to "backup ntfs install", reformat to ext2fs, "restore from bare metal onto ext2fs" and voila, without blue screens galore.
errr you might like kde-cygwin or vmware then ;) at least until those problems are fixed. kde-cygwin might be a bit slower than kde-native on linux, but at least, you get to keep some kde-goodness
if I may, sounds like you're confusing "robust" with "friendly". i.e. handling weird "issues" would be robustness. Not requiring prior knowledge would be friendliness. And yes, robustness in an installer is much more important than friendliness, but few people realize it.
Not all "modern" distros even consider 486 or below "supported" installs, so YMMV.
Anyone ever notice how it's always about the non-urban power sources vs the renewable ones?
Why do we seem to have mental blocks against putting power generation for urban needs, in urban areas(solar and wind power could conceivably be put on top of skyscrapers). Whereas nuclear, tide power, dams, and coal/gas/oil generators tend to be out-of-the-busy areas power generation? (Hint: when's the last time a power plant was built on the Island of Manhattan?)
Wouldn't it make more sense to increase power generation in Urban areas, and try to make those self-sufficient, instead of subsidising rural power generation, which eventually means the rural area taxes just subsidize the big city? (I do live in a 1 mil agglomeration, but I'm not sure I like what they're doing to wilder outlying areas for power).
Is there a speculator's market for power plants? Is that a hidden lobbying arm in play here? I'd really like to know why you can't just say: Urban area X, you're responsible for your 80 MegaWatt power needs, and for list of other needs, but you're tax free, as far as X random higher authority taxes are concerned. Of course that's probably it, taxing an urban area is an easier task, lots of businesses, lots of dense people, lots of high tech use, computers, and a captive audience. Taxing outlying areas more heavily would reverse the donut effect.
I'm not sure I'd say it that way. I've had fewer problems with sid (I'll admit it's not proof, more like a counter example) than with several versions of redhat(the release ones).