They'd have to have like six failed consoles before they've pulled a "Sega". I say this as a proud Dreamcast owner, by the way.
Sega CD: Buggy, crashy, still only 64 colors, looked like crap compared to SNES. Sega USA helped kill it with tons of terrible Full Motion Video games that nobody liked. Sound CPU still sounded like a singing greeting card.
32X: Developed by Sega of America at the same time as the Saturn was being developed in Japan because sega of japan DIDN'T TELL SEGA USA THEY WERE MAKING A NEW CONSOLE. Never well supported, died with a handful of games.
Saturn: not a 3D system, Playstation came out, say goodbye to Saturn. Dual CPU, too hard to develop for due to lack of standard dev tools for SMP programming.
Dreamcast: Good, but too little too late. PS2 helped kill a year in advance by simply lying about how great the PS2 was going to be. Several game batches on release were bad and had to be recalled, sending sega into the hole even further.
I don't know about anyone else, but After the Sega CD, I didn't even consider Sega consoles because I knew they'd be failures. I realize this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but they really weren't that good, at least until the Dreamcast. I still have my Dreamcast, and I still love it. I miss Sega, but only since the Dreamcast, and for the Genesis, which had some great games.
Nintendo has had some failures, but they were never flagship products, and it seems they cut their losses at the right time, because no one tends to remember the Nintendo failures.
He didn't say it was a form of government, he said it placed inordinate power in the government's hands. I'm curious, how precisely do you figure things like the abolition of private property are accomplished without the legal definitions of private property (defined by the government) being established, or legally abolishing anything, a power held solely in the realm of government?
While sitting through I, Robot, my friends and I started counting product placements. We stopped when it got excessive.
My favorite part of the movie wasn't even in the movie itself. The part where Will Smith sneezes, and then says he is allergic to bullshit. There was not an iota of my being that found that funny or even witty. Everyone in the theater besides myself and my three friends laughed, causing a delayed reaction from us when we realized we were surrounded by morons.
You know what? Office 2003 probably does 20x as much stuff as Office 97. If the most complex feature you need is to be able to cut and paste an excel spreadsheet into a corporate email in Outlook, Office 97 is the most integration you are going to need.
I hate Microsoft as a company, and have a general disdain for most of their tools, but there is one thing I will grant them, which is that no one even comes close to the level of functionality and integration of the Office suite.
Currently where I work we keep all our projects in MS Project, which connects to a design document repository in Sharepoint. We do deployment and software design diagrams in Visio, which paste seamlessly into the Word documents that are stored in sharepoint, which versions the changes. You download and modify the documents directly in Word 2003 because it has perfect integration with Sharepoint's versioning system. You update your hours on Project. It sends you notifications when you are behind schedule.
I have not seen any other combination of software, proprietary or open source, come within a continent's reach of Microsoft's tools in this regard. I've learned to live with idiosyncracies of Word, and the general brain damage of Sharepoint simply because all this interconnectivity really does make my job easier. Wordperfect cannot touch this.
I'm not a Microsoft shill, either. We don't use Visual Studio or Sourcesafe, owing to the fact that almost all our software is Java apps hosted on AIX boxes.
I realize that your post was mostly addressing the backward compatibility of Office docs, but really, Office 2003 isn't even the same app anymore as Office 97. Wordperfect isn't even Office 97, it's just a word processor.
Did anyone else find this rebuttal just rambling and boring? He didn't do a lot of rebutting, just yammering all over the map about things only tangentially related to the topic.
The WDM Model in Windows 2000 and XP layers drivers, with only the lowest level actually interacting with the kernel, and drivers layered on top of it for adding for example USB bus, USB Device, and then Specific proprietary USB device extensions. Isn't this more or less what you are talking about?
I don't know the direct security aspects of this driver model (it's definitely not userland anyway), but I do know that only the lowest level actually gets unfettered access to the kernel.
Microsoft was talking about WinFS, which was described as containing all those features including network transparency, way before 1999. It was repeatedly stated that it was going to be a feature in NT 5.0. They obviously were working on it, because over the years they kept paring down the features, presumably as they figured out what they could and could not implement.
Conversely to your first rule, just because Microsoft announces it doesn't mean they are NOT working on it. Microsoft announced it first, and there is good reason to believe that they were working on it first. Apple appears to have started later and finished earlier. That's good, but it's not "innovation".
A coworker "borrowed" six brand new RS/6000 F80's loaded with CPUs (before they were put into active duty) to bump up his SETI@Home distributed computing statistics. In one day he'd bumped out everybody but some Linux supercomputer in Germany. I wish I would have thought of it.
The grandparent was saying he didn't think people should be able to write biographies without the subject's permission (therefore, he understands Jobs dumping the books.) The parent post said a free press meant you can write a book about whatever you want.
What are you even arguing about? The parent post was addressing the statement that it shouldn't even be ALLOWED for people to publish unauthorized biographies. That has a LOT do do with freedom of the press!
And then you thrash about with name calling, no less.
By the way, if internet access becomes a "right" as so many slashdotters seem to want, it could very well become illegal to restrict access to perfectly legal content.
Except that step one is a mischaracterization. Only uneducated creationists believe that one, not any reasonably sophisticated ID proponent. It should be:
1. The universe has complexity that could not happen as a result of chance in the estimated time the universe has existed.
These terms rely firmly in the realm of science! It's the conclusion that may not be scientific, someone created the universe.
What is ignored is, if you have a set of contradictory facts, at least one of your facts must be wrong. The flaw here is either the universe does not have impossible complexity, or the universe is older than normally estimated. You don't get to say "someone created it", because there is not even indirect evidence of that. If I see a junk car by the side of the road, I can assume it was built in a factory and didn't spring forth out of the earth as a junk car, because I have seen the creators (people) and I have seen cars manufactured.
These facts don't preclude a creator of the universe, but don't help it either. I've known ID proponents who believe essentially this. Their satisfaction is in knowing that science cannot disprove God, and being perfectly happy with their personal, acknowledged unscientific belief that God exists.
"Corporations in the real world don't tolerate unsecure boxen, why should the school? Students will learn VERY quick not to cross you."
If you are an annoyance at work, you just get fired. If you are an annoyance at school, you also happenin g to be paying to be there. Or more specifically, your parents. When you shut off their Internet, you suddenly get invited to go talk with the Dean and some parents about just how much they are paying for their precious children to go to this school, and how they are paying for the Internet and you're not letting them use it.
I'm not saying the problem is insurmountable, but if you are working at a private school and try to play BOFH, you will get shot down very fast. At least where I've worked.
Beta, expensive and proprietary, failed as a consumer format. Minidisc, expensive and proprietary, failed as a consumer format (in the USA) Even tried cramming MP3 on minidisc in some sort of weird conversion scheme. Pathetic. Memory Stick: expensive and proprietary, is it succeeding? Only Sony products use them. SuperStation Tape Backup. Expensive and proprietary, additionally, never actually worked as far as I can tell. Why was there never a class action lawsuit? Superbit: Does anyone actually use this? UMD: expensive and proprietary.
I'm probably missing a few formats here. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they were probably expensive and proprietary. It does not appear they will ever abandon the expensive and proprietary route.
I want to second this. Using Gentoo was simultaneously easier to use than Redhat, and I learned more. My primary motivation for moving away from redhat was constantly having compilation problems on anything not in an SRPM. I read the GREAT Gentoo install docs (they keep getting better, as I noticed on my third install) and I learned more about all those things you are talking about. That fundamental step helped me move on to more complex things, and then onto other unix versions.
The Install Guide and the chance to work directly with the tools during the installation helped me learn more than Redhat ever did.
It's not so much Gentoo, its the guides and the user base. People keep bashing them, but I will tell you, I found a lot more friendly people in #gentoo than #debian (to be fair, the more you learn, the more mellow people get in any linux IRC room, but still. There are some serious sociopaths in some of those rooms.)
True, and that explains why there are no high-speed trains in Kansas. Doesn't explain why there are no high-speed-trains in areas where the population is dense.
Could the problem then be that, unlike say Italy, a rail system in the USA is not a national issue, and is therefore not nationally funded? How are these things paid for in Europe?
GDI is supported by Windows XP, and the ABI is supported too, which means the parent was 100% correct, despite some Windows apps (which, because they were programmed outside the published API specs and either used undocumented API or native calls, don't work.) He was talking about APIs and runtime data structures, while you seem to be talking about individual application support. Linux can't offer individual application support either, if they go making calls to the hardware.
There is binary breakage in between some Linux kernel versions and some glibc versions. There is ABI breakage between some GCC versions (which is why BeOS/Haiku developers are still on 2.9x.) This is not the case in Windows (again, despite individual app breakage.)
You admit there is no graphical API on 100% of Linux systems (even X11 is an addon.) Again, GDI is supported on 100% of Windows systems. Linux has toolkits. So what? That in no way addresses his point, of what Windows has that Linux does not. Linux doesn't. Windows does. There are justified philosophy reasons behind this, but that doesn't make either app users' or app developers' lives any easier.
You claim Windows cannot run multiple versions of DLLs. Windows does in fact support multiple DLLs. That's why there is a DLL location loading order. It looks in the app directory first before searching system directories. If you've never had dependency hell in Linux (redhat was horrible for this,) you must not actually ever install anything on it.
I'm not saying Windows is perfect, I'm not saying it's better. I am saying that so far I have not seen any indication that _you_ know what you are talking about. The parent poster was correct.
In a large number of places, the old phone monopolies you are referring to haven't upgraded their last mile phone lines in decades, or even longer. DSL won't even work on them. I wonder how much this affects broadband distribution in the USA.
That doesn't affect your argument about cost effectiveness, which seems true to me, but maybe does help explain why we don't have it so much ion the USA. Just conjecture.
Those are all usable by almost everyone, at least indirectly. On the other hand, something like 80% of underprivileged homes in the USA don't even have a computer. Of homes that do have a computer (consisting of a minority of poor people and the middle and upper class), cut it down to people who have a laptop. Now cut it down again to only the people who have a laptop and wifi. That's a damn small portion of the population that will reap benefit from public wifi.
That doesn't address the communism issue directly, I guess, except that communism would have all services run by the state, while the United States theoretically will fund things like crucial infrastructure. Roads are infrastructure, public wifi, it just benefits too few people at this point to be considered crucial infrastructure.
Here's a good test. Take away roads, libraries, street lights. Society would collapse. Society will not collapse from a lack of public wifi.
"Reading the content of a web page may not be a right, but they do NOT have the right to use up my bandwidth (and if I view over my cell phone, they are CHARGING me to do it)."
Don't go back to that site.
They did NOT even warn me before making money off of my time that they were going to force me to see the ad.
Like television, in general content on the internet is either self-funded or paid for by ads. It's unreasonable to assume you won't see an ad if you visit ANY site. I suspect the time it took you to see that ad is not worth a trip to small claims court, except maybe in aggregate.
Contracts are things BOTH people agree to. There is no "implicit contract" unless both sides are acting reasonable, and the advertisers ceased to act reasonable a LONG time ago.
A social contract is a philosophical term, not a legal term. The social contract alluded to here is the fact that, if there were no ads, most content would either not exist or would not be free. You should expect that content has to be paid for by someone, and if everyone literally blocks as many ads as they can, content will eventually go away.
Knowing this, if you want content, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD you have an obligation to not just block every ad you possibly can.
You misunderstand the concept of the social contract in two ways. Firstly, it BENEFITS you by providing free content, it's not just a way to "force" you to look at ads. And secondly, that you're not under obligation to view every single ad every time.
I know what you are talking about, because I also use my cell phone to access the WWW. As a matter of fact, I block all ads when I do this. When I use the internet anywhere else, I see some ads, so I don't feel guilty. Just like I don't feel guilty going to the bathroom during commercials on TV.
If you want to make a difference, campaign for unobtrusive ads. I block all popups because advertizers took advantage of a feature that wasnt for the purpose of annoying the piss out of me. I don't feel guilty about that also. You are correct, reasonableness comes into the picture.
That most of the Canadian population is concentrated around specific geographical regions still potentially undermines your point, even if you are up front about it.
If someone calculated the population density of the specific area covered by the densest portion of 95 percent of the population of Canada and compared it to the same in the USA, I wonder how it would come out. Canada on population maps I have seen is _extremely_ concentrated along the border, so that has to throw off the numbers bigtime.
I was really disappointed when Super Mario Brothers wasn't included in Columbia House's Dennis Hopper Collection DVD set. His performance as King Koopa was _marvelous_.
Slashdot Mirror
They'd have to have like six failed consoles before they've pulled a "Sega". I say this as a proud Dreamcast owner, by the way.
Sega CD: Buggy, crashy, still only 64 colors, looked like crap compared to SNES. Sega USA helped kill it with tons of terrible Full Motion Video games that nobody liked. Sound CPU still sounded like a singing greeting card.
32X: Developed by Sega of America at the same time as the Saturn was being developed in Japan because sega of japan DIDN'T TELL SEGA USA THEY WERE MAKING A NEW CONSOLE. Never well supported, died with a handful of games.
Saturn: not a 3D system, Playstation came out, say goodbye to Saturn. Dual CPU, too hard to develop for due to lack of standard dev tools for SMP programming.
Dreamcast: Good, but too little too late. PS2 helped kill a year in advance by simply lying about how great the PS2 was going to be. Several game batches on release were bad and had to be recalled, sending sega into the hole even further.
I don't know about anyone else, but After the Sega CD, I didn't even consider Sega consoles because I knew they'd be failures. I realize this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but they really weren't that good, at least until the Dreamcast. I still have my Dreamcast, and I still love it. I miss Sega, but only since the Dreamcast, and for the Genesis, which had some great games.
Nintendo has had some failures, but they were never flagship products, and it seems they cut their losses at the right time, because no one tends to remember the Nintendo failures.
He didn't say it was a form of government, he said it placed inordinate power in the government's hands. I'm curious, how precisely do you figure things like the abolition of private property are accomplished without the legal definitions of private property (defined by the government) being established, or legally abolishing anything, a power held solely in the realm of government?
While sitting through I, Robot, my friends and I started counting product placements. We stopped when it got excessive.
My favorite part of the movie wasn't even in the movie itself. The part where Will Smith sneezes, and then says he is allergic to bullshit. There was not an iota of my being that found that funny or even witty. Everyone in the theater besides myself and my three friends laughed, causing a delayed reaction from us when we realized we were surrounded by morons.
You know what? Office 2003 probably does 20x as much stuff as Office 97. If the most complex feature you need is to be able to cut and paste an excel spreadsheet into a corporate email in Outlook, Office 97 is the most integration you are going to need.
I hate Microsoft as a company, and have a general disdain for most of their tools, but there is one thing I will grant them, which is that no one even comes close to the level of functionality and integration of the Office suite.
Currently where I work we keep all our projects in MS Project, which connects to a design document repository in Sharepoint. We do deployment and software design diagrams in Visio, which paste seamlessly into the Word documents that are stored in sharepoint, which versions the changes. You download and modify the documents directly in Word 2003 because it has perfect integration with Sharepoint's versioning system. You update your hours on Project. It sends you notifications when you are behind schedule.
I have not seen any other combination of software, proprietary or open source, come within a continent's reach of Microsoft's tools in this regard. I've learned to live with idiosyncracies of Word, and the general brain damage of Sharepoint simply because all this interconnectivity really does make my job easier. Wordperfect cannot touch this.
I'm not a Microsoft shill, either. We don't use Visual Studio or Sourcesafe, owing to the fact that almost all our software is Java apps hosted on AIX boxes.
I realize that your post was mostly addressing the backward compatibility of Office docs, but really, Office 2003 isn't even the same app anymore as Office 97. Wordperfect isn't even Office 97, it's just a word processor.
Service quality in Wal-Mart and other retailers. What? Internet 2? Not making a clear connection here.
Did anyone else find this rebuttal just rambling and boring? He didn't do a lot of rebutting, just yammering all over the map about things only tangentially related to the topic.
The WDM Model in Windows 2000 and XP layers drivers, with only the lowest level actually interacting with the kernel, and drivers layered on top of it for adding for example USB bus, USB Device, and then Specific proprietary USB device extensions. Isn't this more or less what you are talking about?
I don't know the direct security aspects of this driver model (it's definitely not userland anyway), but I do know that only the lowest level actually gets unfettered access to the kernel.
Microsoft was talking about WinFS, which was described as containing all those features including network transparency, way before 1999. It was repeatedly stated that it was going to be a feature in NT 5.0. They obviously were working on it, because over the years they kept paring down the features, presumably as they figured out what they could and could not implement.
Conversely to your first rule, just because Microsoft announces it doesn't mean they are NOT working on it. Microsoft announced it first, and there is good reason to believe that they were working on it first. Apple appears to have started later and finished earlier. That's good, but it's not "innovation".
A coworker "borrowed" six brand new RS/6000 F80's loaded with CPUs (before they were put into active duty) to bump up his SETI@Home distributed computing statistics. In one day he'd bumped out everybody but some Linux supercomputer in Germany. I wish I would have thought of it.
The grandparent was saying he didn't think people should be able to write biographies without the subject's permission (therefore, he understands Jobs dumping the books.) The parent post said a free press meant you can write a book about whatever you want.
What are you even arguing about? The parent post was addressing the statement that it shouldn't even be ALLOWED for people to publish unauthorized biographies. That has a LOT do do with freedom of the press!
And then you thrash about with name calling, no less.
By the way, if internet access becomes a "right" as so many slashdotters seem to want, it could very well become illegal to restrict access to perfectly legal content.
No, at best, guns kill for self defense of individuals and entire nations. That's more useful than some arbitrary internet protocol.
Except that step one is a mischaracterization. Only uneducated creationists believe that one, not any reasonably sophisticated ID proponent. It should be:
1. The universe has complexity that could not happen as a result of chance in the estimated time the universe has existed.
These terms rely firmly in the realm of science! It's the conclusion that may not be scientific, someone created the universe.
What is ignored is, if you have a set of contradictory facts, at least one of your facts must be wrong. The flaw here is either the universe does not have impossible complexity, or the universe is older than normally estimated. You don't get to say "someone created it", because there is not even indirect evidence of that. If I see a junk car by the side of the road, I can assume it was built in a factory and didn't spring forth out of the earth as a junk car, because I have seen the creators (people) and I have seen cars manufactured.
These facts don't preclude a creator of the universe, but don't help it either. I've known ID proponents who believe essentially this. Their satisfaction is in knowing that science cannot disprove God, and being perfectly happy with their personal, acknowledged unscientific belief that God exists.
I really dig those user mods, the apocrypha.
If you are an annoyance at work, you just get fired. If you are an annoyance at school, you also happenin g to be paying to be there. Or more specifically, your parents. When you shut off their Internet, you suddenly get invited to go talk with the Dean and some parents about just how much they are paying for their precious children to go to this school, and how they are paying for the Internet and you're not letting them use it.
I'm not saying the problem is insurmountable, but if you are working at a private school and try to play BOFH, you will get shot down very fast. At least where I've worked.
Beta, expensive and proprietary, failed as a consumer format.
Minidisc, expensive and proprietary, failed as a consumer format (in the USA) Even tried cramming MP3 on minidisc in some sort of weird conversion scheme. Pathetic.
Memory Stick: expensive and proprietary, is it succeeding? Only Sony products use them.
SuperStation Tape Backup. Expensive and proprietary, additionally, never actually worked as far as I can tell. Why was there never a class action lawsuit?
Superbit: Does anyone actually use this?
UMD: expensive and proprietary.
I'm probably missing a few formats here. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they were probably expensive and proprietary. It does not appear they will ever abandon the expensive and proprietary route.
I want to second this. Using Gentoo was simultaneously easier to use than Redhat, and I learned more. My primary motivation for moving away from redhat was constantly having compilation problems on anything not in an SRPM. I read the GREAT Gentoo install docs (they keep getting better, as I noticed on my third install) and I learned more about all those things you are talking about. That fundamental step helped me move on to more complex things, and then onto other unix versions.
The Install Guide and the chance to work directly with the tools during the installation helped me learn more than Redhat ever did.
It's not so much Gentoo, its the guides and the user base. People keep bashing them, but I will tell you, I found a lot more friendly people in #gentoo than #debian (to be fair, the more you learn, the more mellow people get in any linux IRC room, but still. There are some serious sociopaths in some of those rooms.)
Could the problem then be that, unlike say Italy, a rail system in the USA is not a national issue, and is therefore not nationally funded? How are these things paid for in Europe?
Office Apps 3-22% slower in XP SP2
GDI is supported by Windows XP, and the ABI is supported too, which means the parent was 100% correct, despite some Windows apps (which, because they were programmed outside the published API specs and either used undocumented API or native calls, don't work.) He was talking about APIs and runtime data structures, while you seem to be talking about individual application support. Linux can't offer individual application support either, if they go making calls to the hardware.
There is binary breakage in between some Linux kernel versions and some glibc versions. There is ABI breakage between some GCC versions (which is why BeOS/Haiku developers are still on 2.9x.) This is not the case in Windows (again, despite individual app breakage.)
You admit there is no graphical API on 100% of Linux systems (even X11 is an addon.) Again, GDI is supported on 100% of Windows systems. Linux has toolkits. So what? That in no way addresses his point, of what Windows has that Linux does not. Linux doesn't. Windows does. There are justified philosophy reasons behind this, but that doesn't make either app users' or app developers' lives any easier.
You claim Windows cannot run multiple versions of DLLs. Windows does in fact support multiple DLLs. That's why there is a DLL location loading order. It looks in the app directory first before searching system directories. If you've never had dependency hell in Linux (redhat was horrible for this,) you must not actually ever install anything on it.
I'm not saying Windows is perfect, I'm not saying it's better. I am saying that so far I have not seen any indication that _you_ know what you are talking about. The parent poster was correct.
In a large number of places, the old phone monopolies you are referring to haven't upgraded their last mile phone lines in decades, or even longer. DSL won't even work on them. I wonder how much this affects broadband distribution in the USA.
That doesn't affect your argument about cost effectiveness, which seems true to me, but maybe does help explain why we don't have it so much ion the USA. Just conjecture.
Those are all usable by almost everyone, at least indirectly. On the other hand, something like 80% of underprivileged homes in the USA don't even have a computer. Of homes that do have a computer (consisting of a minority of poor people and the middle and upper class), cut it down to people who have a laptop. Now cut it down again to only the people who have a laptop and wifi. That's a damn small portion of the population that will reap benefit from public wifi.
That doesn't address the communism issue directly, I guess, except that communism would have all services run by the state, while the United States theoretically will fund things like crucial infrastructure. Roads are infrastructure, public wifi, it just benefits too few people at this point to be considered crucial infrastructure.
Here's a good test. Take away roads, libraries, street lights. Society would collapse. Society will not collapse from a lack of public wifi.
Don't go back to that site.
They did NOT even warn me before making money off of my time that they were going to force me to see the ad.
Like television, in general content on the internet is either self-funded or paid for by ads. It's unreasonable to assume you won't see an ad if you visit ANY site. I suspect the time it took you to see that ad is not worth a trip to small claims court, except maybe in aggregate.
Contracts are things BOTH people agree to. There is no "implicit contract" unless both sides are acting reasonable, and the advertisers ceased to act reasonable a LONG time ago.
A social contract is a philosophical term, not a legal term. The social contract alluded to here is the fact that, if there were no ads, most content would either not exist or would not be free. You should expect that content has to be paid for by someone, and if everyone literally blocks as many ads as they can, content will eventually go away. Knowing this, if you want content, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD you have an obligation to not just block every ad you possibly can.
You misunderstand the concept of the social contract in two ways. Firstly, it BENEFITS you by providing free content, it's not just a way to "force" you to look at ads. And secondly, that you're not under obligation to view every single ad every time.
I know what you are talking about, because I also use my cell phone to access the WWW. As a matter of fact, I block all ads when I do this. When I use the internet anywhere else, I see some ads, so I don't feel guilty. Just like I don't feel guilty going to the bathroom during commercials on TV. If you want to make a difference, campaign for unobtrusive ads. I block all popups because advertizers took advantage of a feature that wasnt for the purpose of annoying the piss out of me. I don't feel guilty about that also. You are correct, reasonableness comes into the picture.
Yet disturbingly....
http://sq.4mg.com/NationIQ.htm
That most of the Canadian population is concentrated around specific geographical regions still potentially undermines your point, even if you are up front about it.
If someone calculated the population density of the specific area covered by the densest portion of 95 percent of the population of Canada and compared it to the same in the USA, I wonder how it would come out. Canada on population maps I have seen is _extremely_ concentrated along the border, so that has to throw off the numbers bigtime.
I was really disappointed when Super Mario Brothers wasn't included in Columbia House's Dennis Hopper Collection DVD set. His performance as King Koopa was _marvelous_.