This is not the first time this has happened to Disney.
Back around 1980, Disney was having trouble. They hadn't had a hit movie in years, and the newly opened EPCOT Center wasn't the big tourist draw that had been anticipated. The sharks on Wall Street were beginning to circle. A speculative investor named Saul Steinberg attempted a leveraged buy-out of Disney. Disney tried many strategies to fend him off, and ultimately ended up paying him to go away by buying back his shares at a premium price (known on Wall Street as, "greenmail").
Realizing that there was nothing preventing this from happening again, the board took drastic measures. They discharged the CEO of Disney, Ron Miller, and replaced him with... Michael Eisner. Eisner, together with Frank Wells, rebuilt Disney into the powerhouse that, paradoxically, was always there.
Today, we find that Disney hasn't had a hit movie (of its own) in years, and Disneyland California Adventure hasn't been the big tourist draw that was anticipated. And while a third-rate cable company with delusions of grandeur hardly conjures up the same sordid imagery as a soulless Wall Street raider, the similarities between Disney's situation in the early 1980's and now are eerie. Right down to Roy Disney's displeasure with the whole situation.
For a more complete story of what happened, go find yourself a copy of the book Storming The Magic Kingdom. Sounds like Eisner could use a copy right now...
BMP may very well have been created by a math enthusiast.
Mathematicians working with computers have long chafed at the fact that computer displays place pixel coordinate (0,0) at the upper left corner of the display, with positive Y pointing downwards. Every proper math student knows that (0,0) is in the center of the page, with positive Y pointing upwards (but they'll usually settle for (0,0) at the lower-left corner). This convention in Cartesian coordinates is reflected in OpenGL's coordinate system ((0,0) at lower-left, Y points up), whose first vigorous users were mathemeticians.
So I speculate that BMP's designer was also a math enthusiast, and tried to codify the Y-points-up convention in his file format.
There's a lot of other, better reasons to hate BMP, though...
I am not going to argue the policy of whether this is a good or bad thing. I am just here to tell you that this is the current state of the law in the United States.
And you're okay with that? You sleep well at night knowing you're a willing participant in this defective system?
Schwab
Re:Not only cost, but what about security?
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have to agree; this is a small disaster in the making.
This service will be used mostly by business travellers, who will more than likely be doing business-related activities, including pulling down email and shuttling documents back and forth. POP/IMAP passwords are transmitted in the clear, and can be trivially sniffed. Your file server credentials can also be fairly easily sniffed out, allowing someone else to connect as you and start pulling down documents.
Crypto needs to be standard in such environments, but it's clear that's not going to happen soon. WEP is worthless, and 802.1x isn't in wide deployment, which leaves VPN (kinda ugly and deployed ad hoc), SSH tunnels (better, but still unwieldy), and IPSec (even better, but not very common). So there's going to be a lot of sensitive data floating around in the clear.
If you're not using crypto, or not certain you're using crypto, change your passwords before and after you use a public 802.11 node.
Trust me to screw up something so basic... The correct name is the Atari 520ST. The 'XL' moniker belonged to their second-generation 6502-based systems (which were pretty darned good).
One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable.
Uh, no.
The other company was Atari, headed by Jack "Business is War" Tramiel. He had just left Commodore to head up Atari, and was in negotiations with Amiga, Inc. to buy and develop their machine. In anticipation of closing the deal, Atari gave Amiga a $750K "advance", to be repaid if negotiations fell through.
Well, Tramiel is a soundrel of the first rank, and used this "advance" as a lever against Amiga to try and buy the company cheap. Meanwhile, Dave Morris was also negotiating the sale of Amiga to Commodore, and managed to secure a better deal. (Commodore were also interested in annoying Tramiel.) After closing the deal, he flew back to California and, to their utter shock, repaid Atari.
Tramiel was furious, and ordered his people to develop a competing machine. Thus was born the Atari 520XL, which was significantly cheaper, had a slightly faster CPU, no graphics accaleration, marginal sound, and a crap operating system. He positioned it directly against the Amiga and ran "attack" ads against it.
This was back in the day when I was trying like mad to get Pixar to port Photorealistic Renderman to the Amiga, even getting them to go to a couple of Amiga-worlds...but I guess they saw the writing on the wall.
They also saw the unicycle on the monitor, and that was my fault. I don't think they ever thought well of the Amiga or its people after that.
First off, the details of such business agreements are always secret. Someone would have to violate an NDA and/or trade secret laws to tell you the precise contents of MS's agreement with SCO. The only way someone would be willing to reveal the contents of such an agreement is if the agreement itself violated the law, and that someone felt an attack of conscience. (However, everyone at MS has their conscience surgically removed when joining the company, so no hope there:-).)
Secondly, anything actually written down between MS and SCO will detail a perfectly ordinary licensing transaction. Any meta-issues or hidden agenda -- such as a plot to destroy Linux -- would be handled on a strictly verbal basis, so that there's no record.
But you don't really need to look for an overt conspiracy. People of like mind will tend to act toward the same sets of goals without ever communicating with each other. If you step back, you might declare, "Hey, they're acting in concert!" when in fact that's not the case. Despite the fact that millions of people patronize McDonalds every day, mostly between the hours of 12:00 and 13:00, there is no conspiracy among them to do so.
SCO and MS clearly share some goals, but establishing collusion, if it exists at all, would be nearly impossible.
Yeah, but when the file is labeled "Britney Spears, J-Lo, Laetitia Casta--steamy lesbian sex orgy.exe" [... ]
.EXE means, "EXEcutable program." That means it's software, not media. If you receive what you're told is a video file, but its extension is.EXE, then it is by definition not a video file.
Media files have well-known MIME types and file extensions. If the file does not have one of these extensions, then it's not media, and is therefore suspicious.
Contrary to popular belief, this isn't hard for users to learn.
Actually, there's circumstantial proof that the responsible party isn't a Linux advocate.
Consider: A Linux proselyte with an axe this big to grind would not, on principle, inflict upon themselves enough knowledge of the crippling braindamage that is the Windows OS/API, including exploitable security holes, to write an effective combination virus/DoS zombie.
This was clearly written by someone who knows Windows programming. Ergo, not a Linux enthusiast. QED.
Because clicking on an attachment shouldn't do anything. Only a fascist pig with a read-only mind would think it even a remotely good idea for an email client (note: "email client", as in handles email. The term, "program launcher" isn't expressed or implied anywhere in there) to load and launch an attachment.
There are very narrow cases where it's okay to do something. If its MIME type is text/plain, it's okay to display it. If it's MIME type is text/html, it might be okay to display it (providing you block JavaScript execution). If it's a media file (image/whatever, audio/whatever), then it's probably okay to launch a viewer or display it inline. If it's a compressed archive, it's probably okay to display a listing of its contents (automatically unpacking it is right out). And finally, if it's executable, a warning should be displayed before you allow the user to save -- not launch, save -- the attachment.
Always believe the MIME type. If the filename extension and the MIME type conflict, and you are saddled with an OS designed by orangutans where the three character extension of the filename determines its type, then append to the filename the OS's local extension representing that MIME type before handing off for subsequent interpretation.
Despite how many times The Finest Engineers Working In The Industry have fscked this up, this is not, and never has been, rocket science.
I'm sorry; I'm going to have to disagree with you. But that's only because I know a bit more about Night Trap's history.
Night Trap was originally conceived for a never-released gaming system based on a multiplexed pre-recorded videotape. That is, the tape contained multiple independent channels of video, stored every N'th field. Thus, you could have four channels of 15 FPS video by writing one field from each channel successively. Then, on playback, just pull out every fourth field. It's choppy, but it works. All the controller really did was switch you between multiplexed channels.
Anyway, the machine thankfully died, but the "promise" of Full-Motion Video games lived on into The Great Media Convergence Circle-Jerk of the mid 1990's. When more powerful consoles came out, Tom Zito dug out the master tapes, and Night Trap was re-born.
Now, understand: The "promise" of full-motion video games was a more immersive and more realistic experience for the gamer: Better visuals, better sound, more like television. A world full of intricate depth rich for exploration... And all you get to explore it with is a cheap plastic six-button joypad.
Yeah, right.
But this was why, IMHO, Night Trap was an absolutely brilliant design. They constructed a game which plausibly justified you having this crap controller in your hand. You had jury-rigged, limited remote access to the house's security and trapping systems. Hey! All that will fit on a joypad.
I'm not saying Night Trap was a good game. Certainly the quality of the acting and production values make it a prime candidate for screening in the Mystery Science Theater. But given the outrageous promises made for the Full-Motion Video medium contrasted with its crippling realities, Night Trap, as a game, probably represents one of the finest expressions of its genre.
As for the political fallout, there's more to that story as well...
the Bay Star / Royal Bank of Canada PIPE investment in SCO is treated as a derivative in SCO's books, such that if the stock goes down by a dollar, SCO books it as a million dollar *profit*. If the stock goes up by a dollar, it gets booked as a million dollar loss.
Um, could you explain to this unwashed prole exactly how that's supposed to work? It seems to defy logic.
With respect to SCO's claims on errno.h, perhaps copyright historians/experts can help me out here:
Since when did the association of a number (e.g. 12) and its specific meaning in a specific context (EACCES: Permission denied when accessing a file) become copyrightable?
Does this mean I can assert copyrights over/etc/X11/rgb.txt?
Developers were right ticked about the rampant piracy with the PS1. I've heard very reasonable estimates of a 10% sales loss due to piracy on that platform, and piracy there required soldering.
Yeah, and that unsanctioned copying completely destroyed the platform. I can't walk into a GameStop without seeing thousands of unsanctioned PS1 discs piled in great heaping bins selling for $5/pound... Oh, wait, that isn't actually true. In fact, titles are still profitably published for the PS1, and all I've ever been able to find are sanctioned copies.
Any executive that doesn't sweat those lost sales shouldn't be heading your team.
Incorrect.
Any executive wasting valuable company time worrying about unsanctioned copying should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who can keep their attention focused on factors they can control.
Unsanctioned copying is like the weather; it is going to happen whether you want it to or not. If the weather forecast predicts ten inches of rain for the year, but only nine actually fell, launching into histrionics about how someone must have "stolen" the other inch merely makes you look foolish. Likewise, it is the fundamental nature of computers to copy data. If you're an executive in this industry, you really ought to have figured that out by now. Stop bitching about the weather and focus instead on strategies to help your company survive the occasional slightly dry season.
But Activision is large enough to take over all responsibilities in-house.
And that's a problem because...?
Electronic Arts will probably create a consulting service better than what the console makers offers, and for less money.
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!
Forgive my <strong> reaction, but I've been a recurrent victim of EA's "support" in the past, first with the Amiga (absolute crap IFF parser code; Stu Ferguson and I eventually released a replacement that beat the tar out of it), and second with the 3DO (3DODebug didn't, and 3DO Animator was the most preposterously pathetic excuse for a paint program it has ever been my misfortune to encounter). Indeed, it's in EA's interests to screw other developers so they can enjoy a market advantage.
So, yeah, let EA try. It'd be a hell of a laugh to see who falls for it.
Now RedHat/Cygnus, on the other hand...
The IBM PC platform is arguably the creation of IBM, but do the millions of programmers out there flock to big blue when they're writing software?
You neglect to consider a couple of things:
IBM was the entity to approach when IBM was still doing platform development (from original PC to PC-AT to PS/2). Even for the justly-maligned PC Jr., IBM was where you went for development tools and support. When IBM stopped innovating on the platform, they lost their place of prominence.
IBM had outsourced software development to a college drop-out, which gave him the opportunity to leverage that expertise for his own company. Maybe you've heard of it...
Face it, without lock-in no XBox developer would be paying Microsoft's exhorbitant console developer fees... they would buy a copy of Visual C++ and put in the effort to change some function calls.
Well, make up your mind: Would people go to Microsoft for tools and support, or wouldn't they?
I think you've made my point for me. Visual Studio is cacophany of half-assed ideas and a lame editor, all bolted together so you can't easily tease out the important and/or usable bits and junk the rest. Yet people still drop over $1000/copy for the damn thing. Why, when you can get the Proton compiler from Intel, or the MetroWerks package, or even get DJGPP or Cygwin for free? B
The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
"The OS will not be locked down." A critical key to the success of any console is publisher support, and publishers will not support a console that does not have reasonable copy-protection. If the OS is not locked down, then copy-protection goes out the window.
Here's an experiment for you to try some time: When your next-gen console comes out, claim it has anti-copying technology in it, but don't actually put any in (just stick in a delay loop for checkDiskIsValid()). See if anyone notices.
I'm betting they won't. Because the fact of the matter is, whatever effect anti-copying support has on sales, those effects are completely swamped out by larger issues, such as sales and marketing efforts, distribution deals, "network effects," and the vagaries of the buying public. If you have a successful platform, no one will much care that discs can be copied. And if you have a crap platform, copy protection won't save anyone's ass.
Get the fsck over it.
An open OS also screws up the business model of all console manufacturers, which is to get royalties from licensed publishers. Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?
Because the tech support is better? Because they can get a turnkey development system rather than have to locate and pay for expertise to cobble one together? Because they can get co-marketing support? Because "outsourcing" is still a buzzword among executive circles?
I can download a complete GNU-based development environment for the GameBoy Advance. But the documentation is uneven and incomplete. And I also don't get access to Nintendo's subroutine library (a valuable thing if you've ever tried to get the bloody network link to work). "Free as in beer," doesn't always win. There are tradeoffs.
Normally, bad grammar and malformed words just roll off me. But for some reason this one really gets my back up:
"Incentivize"
The verb form of "incentive", presumably intended to mean, "to provide incentives for," which is another way of saying 'encourage' or 'influence'.
...Except that "incentive" is itself the noun form of the verb "incent", which means to encourage or influence. So you could use an actual word, save five letters, and not look like a pretentious twit.
'a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals' [emphasis mine]
Hate to be a nitpicker, but buying a company's product, taking it apart, and learning how it works is not stealing. It doesn't matter if you're the company's competitor, it still isn't stealing. You have a perfect right to do this, and employ the knowledge gained to your own advantage.
Now, if the technologies in the product are patented, and you built and sold your own products based on them, then you'd have a case of patent infringement. Which still isn't stealing.
Seconded. I've had a Victorinox WebSeries 2.0 WebPak for a something over a year. I carry it nearly everywhere, and it's served me very well, with no hints of wear.
This is what it looks like (Victorinox don't appear to have it listed on their own site). While it's not cheap, it's not overpriced, either, if you shop around. It's also quite clear that a fair amount of thought went into its design. It has thoughtful little extras, such as two carrying straps; one for over a single shoulder, and another for over both shoulders backpack-style. There's plenty of room for most laptop peripherals, as well as pockets for pens, business cards, etc. I have the nylon version; a leather version is also available.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the first time this has happened to Disney.
Back around 1980, Disney was having trouble. They hadn't had a hit movie in years, and the newly opened EPCOT Center wasn't the big tourist draw that had been anticipated. The sharks on Wall Street were beginning to circle. A speculative investor named Saul Steinberg attempted a leveraged buy-out of Disney. Disney tried many strategies to fend him off, and ultimately ended up paying him to go away by buying back his shares at a premium price (known on Wall Street as, "greenmail").
Realizing that there was nothing preventing this from happening again, the board took drastic measures. They discharged the CEO of Disney, Ron Miller, and replaced him with... Michael Eisner. Eisner, together with Frank Wells, rebuilt Disney into the powerhouse that, paradoxically, was always there.
Today, we find that Disney hasn't had a hit movie (of its own) in years, and Disneyland California Adventure hasn't been the big tourist draw that was anticipated. And while a third-rate cable company with delusions of grandeur hardly conjures up the same sordid imagery as a soulless Wall Street raider, the similarities between Disney's situation in the early 1980's and now are eerie. Right down to Roy Disney's displeasure with the whole situation.
For a more complete story of what happened, go find yourself a copy of the book Storming The Magic Kingdom . Sounds like Eisner could use a copy right now...
Schwab
BMP may very well have been created by a math enthusiast.
Mathematicians working with computers have long chafed at the fact that computer displays place pixel coordinate (0,0) at the upper left corner of the display, with positive Y pointing downwards. Every proper math student knows that (0,0) is in the center of the page, with positive Y pointing upwards (but they'll usually settle for (0,0) at the lower-left corner). This convention in Cartesian coordinates is reflected in OpenGL's coordinate system ((0,0) at lower-left, Y points up), whose first vigorous users were mathemeticians.
So I speculate that BMP's designer was also a math enthusiast, and tried to codify the Y-points-up convention in his file format.
There's a lot of other, better reasons to hate BMP, though...
Schwab
Poor sod who wrote a BMP reader
And you're okay with that? You sleep well at night knowing you're a willing participant in this defective system?
Schwab
I have to agree; this is a small disaster in the making.
This service will be used mostly by business travellers, who will more than likely be doing business-related activities, including pulling down email and shuttling documents back and forth. POP/IMAP passwords are transmitted in the clear, and can be trivially sniffed. Your file server credentials can also be fairly easily sniffed out, allowing someone else to connect as you and start pulling down documents.
Crypto needs to be standard in such environments, but it's clear that's not going to happen soon. WEP is worthless, and 802.1x isn't in wide deployment, which leaves VPN (kinda ugly and deployed ad hoc), SSH tunnels (better, but still unwieldy), and IPSec (even better, but not very common). So there's going to be a lot of sensitive data floating around in the clear.
If you're not using crypto, or not certain you're using crypto, change your passwords before and after you use a public 802.11 node.
Schwab
...Unless the platform is Windows, in which case your only hope is to go out and grab a copy of Petzold.
Schwab
Trust me to screw up something so basic... The correct name is the Atari 520ST. The 'XL' moniker belonged to their second-generation 6502-based systems (which were pretty darned good).
Schwab
Uh, no.
The other company was Atari, headed by Jack "Business is War" Tramiel. He had just left Commodore to head up Atari, and was in negotiations with Amiga, Inc. to buy and develop their machine. In anticipation of closing the deal, Atari gave Amiga a $750K "advance", to be repaid if negotiations fell through.
Well, Tramiel is a soundrel of the first rank, and used this "advance" as a lever against Amiga to try and buy the company cheap. Meanwhile, Dave Morris was also negotiating the sale of Amiga to Commodore, and managed to secure a better deal. (Commodore were also interested in annoying Tramiel.) After closing the deal, he flew back to California and, to their utter shock, repaid Atari.
Tramiel was furious, and ordered his people to develop a competing machine. Thus was born the Atari 520XL, which was significantly cheaper, had a slightly faster CPU, no graphics accaleration, marginal sound, and a crap operating system. He positioned it directly against the Amiga and ran "attack" ads against it.
Someone should write a book about this...
Schwab
They also saw the unicycle on the monitor, and that was my fault. I don't think they ever thought well of the Amiga or its people after that.
*sigh*,
Schwab
So, where can I download a Windows binary of the Open Source Helix player?
Schwab
Been done. (Well, just about.)
Schwab
First off, the details of such business agreements are always secret. Someone would have to violate an NDA and/or trade secret laws to tell you the precise contents of MS's agreement with SCO. The only way someone would be willing to reveal the contents of such an agreement is if the agreement itself violated the law, and that someone felt an attack of conscience. (However, everyone at MS has their conscience surgically removed when joining the company, so no hope there :-).)
Secondly, anything actually written down between MS and SCO will detail a perfectly ordinary licensing transaction. Any meta-issues or hidden agenda -- such as a plot to destroy Linux -- would be handled on a strictly verbal basis, so that there's no record.
But you don't really need to look for an overt conspiracy. People of like mind will tend to act toward the same sets of goals without ever communicating with each other. If you step back, you might declare, "Hey, they're acting in concert!" when in fact that's not the case. Despite the fact that millions of people patronize McDonalds every day, mostly between the hours of 12:00 and 13:00, there is no conspiracy among them to do so.
SCO and MS clearly share some goals, but establishing collusion, if it exists at all, would be nearly impossible.
Schwab
What is XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), and what about it can be used to compromise site security?
Schwab
.EXE means, "EXEcutable program." That means it's software, not media. If you receive what you're told is a video file, but its extension is .EXE, then it is by definition not a video file.
Media files have well-known MIME types and file extensions. If the file does not have one of these extensions, then it's not media, and is therefore suspicious.
Contrary to popular belief, this isn't hard for users to learn.
Schwab
Actually, there's circumstantial proof that the responsible party isn't a Linux advocate.
Consider: A Linux proselyte with an axe this big to grind would not, on principle, inflict upon themselves enough knowledge of the crippling braindamage that is the Windows OS/API, including exploitable security holes, to write an effective combination virus/DoS zombie.
This was clearly written by someone who knows Windows programming. Ergo, not a Linux enthusiast. QED.
Schwab
Because clicking on an attachment shouldn't do anything. Only a fascist pig with a read-only mind would think it even a remotely good idea for an email client (note: "email client", as in handles email. The term, "program launcher" isn't expressed or implied anywhere in there) to load and launch an attachment.
There are very narrow cases where it's okay to do something. If its MIME type is text/plain, it's okay to display it. If it's MIME type is text/html, it might be okay to display it (providing you block JavaScript execution). If it's a media file (image/whatever, audio/whatever), then it's probably okay to launch a viewer or display it inline. If it's a compressed archive, it's probably okay to display a listing of its contents (automatically unpacking it is right out). And finally, if it's executable, a warning should be displayed before you allow the user to save -- not launch, save -- the attachment.
Always believe the MIME type. If the filename extension and the MIME type conflict, and you are saddled with an OS designed by orangutans where the three character extension of the filename determines its type, then append to the filename the OS's local extension representing that MIME type before handing off for subsequent interpretation.
Despite how many times The Finest Engineers Working In The Industry have fscked this up, this is not, and never has been, rocket science.
Schwab
I'm sorry; I'm going to have to disagree with you. But that's only because I know a bit more about Night Trap's history.
Night Trap was originally conceived for a never-released gaming system based on a multiplexed pre-recorded videotape. That is, the tape contained multiple independent channels of video, stored every N'th field. Thus, you could have four channels of 15 FPS video by writing one field from each channel successively. Then, on playback, just pull out every fourth field. It's choppy, but it works. All the controller really did was switch you between multiplexed channels.
Anyway, the machine thankfully died, but the "promise" of Full-Motion Video games lived on into The Great Media Convergence Circle-Jerk of the mid 1990's. When more powerful consoles came out, Tom Zito dug out the master tapes, and Night Trap was re-born.
Now, understand: The "promise" of full-motion video games was a more immersive and more realistic experience for the gamer: Better visuals, better sound, more like television. A world full of intricate depth rich for exploration... And all you get to explore it with is a cheap plastic six-button joypad.
Yeah, right.
But this was why, IMHO, Night Trap was an absolutely brilliant design. They constructed a game which plausibly justified you having this crap controller in your hand. You had jury-rigged, limited remote access to the house's security and trapping systems. Hey! All that will fit on a joypad.
I'm not saying Night Trap was a good game. Certainly the quality of the acting and production values make it a prime candidate for screening in the Mystery Science Theater. But given the outrageous promises made for the Full-Motion Video medium contrasted with its crippling realities, Night Trap, as a game, probably represents one of the finest expressions of its genre.
As for the political fallout, there's more to that story as well...
Schwab
Um, could you explain to this unwashed prole exactly how that's supposed to work? It seems to defy logic.
Schwab
With respect to SCO's claims on errno.h, perhaps copyright historians/experts can help me out here:
Since when did the association of a number (e.g. 12) and its specific meaning in a specific context (EACCES: Permission denied when accessing a file) become copyrightable?
Does this mean I can assert copyrights over /etc/X11/rgb.txt?
Schwab
Yeah, and that unsanctioned copying completely destroyed the platform. I can't walk into a GameStop without seeing thousands of unsanctioned PS1 discs piled in great heaping bins selling for $5/pound... Oh, wait, that isn't actually true. In fact, titles are still profitably published for the PS1, and all I've ever been able to find are sanctioned copies.
Incorrect.
Any executive wasting valuable company time worrying about unsanctioned copying should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who can keep their attention focused on factors they can control.
Unsanctioned copying is like the weather; it is going to happen whether you want it to or not. If the weather forecast predicts ten inches of rain for the year, but only nine actually fell, launching into histrionics about how someone must have "stolen" the other inch merely makes you look foolish. Likewise, it is the fundamental nature of computers to copy data. If you're an executive in this industry, you really ought to have figured that out by now. Stop bitching about the weather and focus instead on strategies to help your company survive the occasional slightly dry season.
And that's a problem because...?
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!
Forgive my <strong> reaction, but I've been a recurrent victim of EA's "support" in the past, first with the Amiga (absolute crap IFF parser code; Stu Ferguson and I eventually released a replacement that beat the tar out of it), and second with the 3DO (3DODebug didn't, and 3DO Animator was the most preposterously pathetic excuse for a paint program it has ever been my misfortune to encounter). Indeed, it's in EA's interests to screw other developers so they can enjoy a market advantage.
So, yeah, let EA try. It'd be a hell of a laugh to see who falls for it.
Now RedHat/Cygnus, on the other hand...
You neglect to consider a couple of things:
Well, make up your mind: Would people go to Microsoft for tools and support, or wouldn't they?
I think you've made my point for me. Visual Studio is cacophany of half-assed ideas and a lame editor, all bolted together so you can't easily tease out the important and/or usable bits and junk the rest. Yet people still drop over $1000/copy for the damn thing. Why, when you can get the Proton compiler from Intel, or the MetroWerks package, or even get DJGPP or Cygwin for free? B
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
Here's an experiment for you to try some time: When your next-gen console comes out, claim it has anti-copying technology in it, but don't actually put any in (just stick in a delay loop for checkDiskIsValid()). See if anyone notices.
I'm betting they won't. Because the fact of the matter is, whatever effect anti-copying support has on sales, those effects are completely swamped out by larger issues, such as sales and marketing efforts, distribution deals, "network effects," and the vagaries of the buying public. If you have a successful platform, no one will much care that discs can be copied. And if you have a crap platform, copy protection won't save anyone's ass.
Get the fsck over it.
Because the tech support is better? Because they can get a turnkey development system rather than have to locate and pay for expertise to cobble one together? Because they can get co-marketing support? Because "outsourcing" is still a buzzword among executive circles?
I can download a complete GNU-based development environment for the GameBoy Advance. But the documentation is uneven and incomplete. And I also don't get access to Nintendo's subroutine library (a valuable thing if you've ever tried to get the bloody network link to work). "Free as in beer," doesn't always win. There are tradeoffs.
Schwab
Normally, bad grammar and malformed words just roll off me. But for some reason this one really gets my back up:
"Incentivize"
The verb form of "incentive", presumably intended to mean, "to provide incentives for," which is another way of saying 'encourage' or 'influence'.
...Except that "incentive" is itself the noun form of the verb "incent", which means to encourage or influence. So you could use an actual word, save five letters, and not look like a pretentious twit.
Don't get me started...
Schwab
Where's the entry for Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf?
Schwab
Hate to be a nitpicker, but buying a company's product, taking it apart, and learning how it works is not stealing. It doesn't matter if you're the company's competitor, it still isn't stealing. You have a perfect right to do this, and employ the knowledge gained to your own advantage.
Now, if the technologies in the product are patented, and you built and sold your own products based on them, then you'd have a case of patent infringement. Which still isn't stealing.
Schwab
Seconded. I've had a Victorinox WebSeries 2.0 WebPak for a something over a year. I carry it nearly everywhere, and it's served me very well, with no hints of wear.
This is what it looks like (Victorinox don't appear to have it listed on their own site). While it's not cheap, it's not overpriced, either, if you shop around. It's also quite clear that a fair amount of thought went into its design. It has thoughtful little extras, such as two carrying straps; one for over a single shoulder, and another for over both shoulders backpack-style. There's plenty of room for most laptop peripherals, as well as pockets for pens, business cards, etc. I have the nylon version; a leather version is also available.
A fine investment I'm very pleased with.
Schwab
Sounds like someone read my fictitious news story and mistook it for a good idea.
*sigh*,
Schwab