Considering FF is making games for the PS2, and FF:CC for the GC, throwing the other console into the mix would be spreading themselves too thin.
Add that to the fact that a small minority of people in Japan actually own XBoxes, and it is hardly them shooting themselves in the foot: in fact, it is a sound business decision.
One final note: the PS2 and GC are run by Japanese companies. The XBox is not. Square has nothing to gain by developing for a non-Japanese company, and everything to lose (they would most likely alienate Sony and Nintendo by doing so).
The first article sounds like any other grant program to educational programs. Very rarely is anyone going to give money with no strings attached. In fact, you may want to look into the history of the internet, since both TCP/IP and UNIX were developed using grant money.
In case you dont know, grants generally specify how the money is to be spent, and, as in cases like this, what is going to be researched. As I said, nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.
The second sounds like an ordinary business deal. Since MS is out to make money just like every other business, why should they ignore the bottom line? If they *had* donated the resources AS WAS REQUESTED, you would be complaining that MS was giving away stuff in order to replace Linux.
Sounds like yet another of those 'cant win' situations you guys keep writing up for MS. Post-.bomb companies need to make money, in case you hadnt heard.
my question was regarding the donation of something, not what was being donated. I could also cite Cisco, who has donated a lot of equipment and trainers for a group of courses at some of the local junior colleges around here.
Does that help familiarize people with Cisco products? Sure. Is that bad? Not in any way I can figure out.
IMO, if it doesnt benefit a company, they have no business doing it. These companies naming sports arenas should kill their CEOs for wasting millions of dollars. And I also highly question the value of advertising.
Why is it that when Sun or IBM (or even Apple) give large donations to schools, its viewed as great and benevolent, but when MS does the same thing, its seen as a slick marketting ploy?
Feel free to mod me down for asking an accurate, pointed question: Im used to it.
Street vendor sells me car stereo, and repeatedly assures me it is his stereo to sell. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?
I wish I were getting paid by anyone, much less MS. Now go back to being a good little anonymous troll, and hose down your rubber mattress.
And, you guys like to tote around the 'convicted monopolist' like they got sentenced on a rape charge. Wow, MS is a really big, influential company. Real surprise there... obviously the only one surprised by that one was the US Government.
And you can cry all you want about the evils of bundling, court cases, etc, but I dont care. Im not an anarchist or communist like yourself, I just wanted a program which didnt crash all the time. Like Nutscrape.
recall that installing early versions of MSIE broke Netscape. So suddenly a software conflict is a conspiracy theory... interesting. I troubleshoot software conflicts all the time (or rather, I did), and IMO the problem wasnt MS, but rather Netscape trying to circumvent the Windows APIs. So when MSIE or a service pack updated one of those APIs, it screwed up Netscape's patchwork way of working.
Dont blame MS for Netscape's shoddy programming. Their browser was a buggy piece of shit long before IE was released.
Mac 'servers', and I use the term very loosely in this case, come with, at best, RAID-0. Since you probably dont understand what Im talking about, thats mirroring.
BTW, I dont consider something to be a server unless it has hardware RAID-5 with hotswap drivers. Something you wont see on OS X 'servers' (more like workstations).
I try going into an arcade every few years. Aside from Virtual Cop, I cant recall a single arcade game which was entertaining and didnt require at least $.25 per minute, or requiring me to learn some complex string of motions.
Most of the successful arcades in the area (including kids places like Chucky Cheese) still have a lot of these 'old nostalgia' games. I would say it has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with quality; a child can still be entertained by a game of PacMan, same as they could have twenty years ago.
Is there any reason for the next generation of game consoles to also be DVD movie players? If you bought a PS2 or Xbox, you have a DVD player. DVD players can be purchased for very little nowadays. Most everyone who wants one, has one.
This would be true if the world were white suburbia. However, in Japan most people only have the PS2 for a DVD player, and likewise people with low incomes in this country (and, I would imagine, other countries as well).
IMO, integration of devices is a great thing. Consider the XBox; nothing aside from a few electronics separates it from a PVR. If they can add some value to the device, more power to them.
This sentiment isnt for people who can afford to own whatever they want. The majority of people are forced to decide on one platform, and stick with it.
I dont know how many times this fact needs to be repeated, but NOBODY 'dumped' consoles to the market (ie. took an initial loss on the hardware) before the XBox. And the only reason the XBox is being dumped is because they arent recouping the R and D costs; thus, the price just takes hardware costs into consideration. Since the cost to make is falling, but the sale price is remaining the same, they will eventaully recoup all the costs; it just isnt being included on the front end (a risky gamble by MS, since this only works if the console is successful).
With the large number of PS/PS2's that blowout, do you really think they are spending much on components? Also, consider for a moment that Sony MAKES the cd/dvd drive components. The only thing they go outside for is the graphics chip.
I liked how Sony made that uberpass thing, where you can play all their MMOGs for one flat fee. Unfortunately, this doesnt apply to a licensed title like SWG (since they have to pay royalties to Luc-ass, I would imagine).
or, like Netscape, because it finds itself in the path of that mighty wrecker, Microsoft?
Netscape's problem wasnt MS. If they had put out a better product (more stable, mostly), they could have retained their lead. I personally switched because I was tired of Netscape crashing every five minutes, and taking all my other browser windows with it.
Add to that its unwillingness to use many of the Windows-native APIs (printing is a good example), and you have a recipe for disaster. MS built those APIs for a reason; just because Netscape sought to reinvent the wheel doesnt mean other people need to finance it.
Their innovation stopped with Mosaic; Mozilla was them relinquishing control because they were personally beyond the limits of their skill.
And Apple really is doing a good job: I've seriously considered bringing Mac OS X (and the related hardware) in as a replacement for aging Sun hardware running Solaris. Sun seems to be falling apart, and (especially with the G5) Apple seems to be a reasonable replacement in the mid-range compute + high I/O line of work without the vendor/service problems you get from Linux (which isn't so hot on the I/O front, since it's hampered by the IA32 architecture's crappy I/O design... other architectures don't matter, because Red Hat doesn't support them commercially).
If somebody would design a tablet device that uses 802.11b, is simple to network config (easy WEP interface, DHCP), and costs ~$200, they will rule the world.
From the sounds of it, your consulting at some poor locations. I personally have done some work in government offices (state and city) and I've not seen any 9x clients. NT4 yes, but almost all have leveraged MS into 2k or XP.
Its not for want of spending money; they have a huge contract with Unisys, for which they are getting absolutely nothing. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars, for which Unisys is providing a helpless desk, a handful of desktop support people, sub-par email services, and WAN support. The WAN guys are good. All told, I could set up a department to provide the same level of support for maybe two million. *Somebody* high up must be getting pretty nice kickbacks.
In the real world corporate clients I've been to, the only people that even bark (or notice) not having admin rights are developers. For the most part, users just need to run what they need (outlook, word, etc) and if an admin loads it beforhand they don't/won't notice not missing the rights.
Some people do, but there are too many people who want to waste time with customized screensavers, desktop themes, and other such shit. Needless to say, they are not the productive people.
There are a few users who I would actually say need it, because they deal with outside companies which have custom applications. In a perfect situation, however, they would need a support person to install it and give the application the appropriate level of rights. This suggestion of mine was shot down, because it raised the bar on the desktop support people's required level of competance (which is pretty low). The only people they had who knew what they were doing were two consultants (who have since been laid off), and the dept manager (who was reorganized to another city department).
I recently took a small law office from 9x to XP. That was the first time in about 6 years I saw a 9x box in a business. Its just too damn unreliable and unsupported for anyone to do business critical applications in this day and age.
Nobody wants to spend any money. The problem is that, in this area, most management people have no idea what is going on with IT, nor do they care. Most CIOs have accounting backgrounds, and dont care for computers.
Admittedly, I usually work at larger companies and this law office was the first that didn't have a domain/directory. I can't believe a sysadmin would tolerate an environment where resources (both local machines and bandwidth) would be wasted.
Hey, if they dont want to spend the money, what more can I do? I had to pester them for over a year just to get an autoloader for backups. Fortunately, my manager started attaching stuff on to other budgetted projects, so we were finally able to update a lot of equipment. Unfortunately, I was never able to set all of it up before I was laid off (I think they only have one consultant left there, out of about ten or so). I guess that was a big problem, even though I was doing all the LAN/WAN support for the department (not the City), I had no pull because I was a consultant.
Even in office politics, which I sometimes may not understand, who's going to side with wasting resources?
"This is a nice and fairly complete 'first look' at Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), but author Chris Gulker, who I happen to know was an Apple PR guy years ago, spends a lot of time comparing the Mac 'Panther' release to Linux, which he seems to use most of the time these days. He obviously likes a lot about Panther, but he doesn't think many Linux users will switch to it, and that a lot of 'Classic' Mac OS users may not want to move to it, either."
Slashdot Mirror
Add that to the fact that a small minority of people in Japan actually own XBoxes, and it is hardly them shooting themselves in the foot: in fact, it is a sound business decision.
One final note: the PS2 and GC are run by Japanese companies. The XBox is not. Square has nothing to gain by developing for a non-Japanese company, and everything to lose (they would most likely alienate Sony and Nintendo by doing so).
In case you dont know, grants generally specify how the money is to be spent, and, as in cases like this, what is going to be researched. As I said, nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.
The second sounds like an ordinary business deal. Since MS is out to make money just like every other business, why should they ignore the bottom line? If they *had* donated the resources AS WAS REQUESTED, you would be complaining that MS was giving away stuff in order to replace Linux.
Sounds like yet another of those 'cant win' situations you guys keep writing up for MS. Post- .bomb companies need to make money, in case you hadnt heard.
Does that help familiarize people with Cisco products? Sure. Is that bad? Not in any way I can figure out.
IMO, if it doesnt benefit a company, they have no business doing it. These companies naming sports arenas should kill their CEOs for wasting millions of dollars. And I also highly question the value of advertising.
we need to send Van Damme after this guy.
Feel free to mod me down for asking an accurate, pointed question: Im used to it.
Street vendor sells me car stereo, and repeatedly assures me it is his stereo to sell. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?
Hex editing is not a crime!
Now all they need is a NOS.
who gives a fuck. If it isnt striping with parity, I dont want to hear about it.
Film at 11.
And, you guys like to tote around the 'convicted monopolist' like they got sentenced on a rape charge. Wow, MS is a really big, influential company. Real surprise there... obviously the only one surprised by that one was the US Government.
And you can cry all you want about the evils of bundling, court cases, etc, but I dont care. Im not an anarchist or communist like yourself, I just wanted a program which didnt crash all the time. Like Nutscrape.
recall that installing early versions of MSIE broke Netscape. So suddenly a software conflict is a conspiracy theory... interesting. I troubleshoot software conflicts all the time (or rather, I did), and IMO the problem wasnt MS, but rather Netscape trying to circumvent the Windows APIs. So when MSIE or a service pack updated one of those APIs, it screwed up Netscape's patchwork way of working.
Dont blame MS for Netscape's shoddy programming. Their browser was a buggy piece of shit long before IE was released.
BTW, I dont consider something to be a server unless it has hardware RAID-5 with hotswap drivers. Something you wont see on OS X 'servers' (more like workstations).
Most of the successful arcades in the area (including kids places like Chucky Cheese) still have a lot of these 'old nostalgia' games. I would say it has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with quality; a child can still be entertained by a game of PacMan, same as they could have twenty years ago.
When is somebody going to port the greatest of the rogue-likes (Omega) to the Palm?
This would be true if the world were white suburbia. However, in Japan most people only have the PS2 for a DVD player, and likewise people with low incomes in this country (and, I would imagine, other countries as well).
IMO, integration of devices is a great thing. Consider the XBox; nothing aside from a few electronics separates it from a PVR. If they can add some value to the device, more power to them.
This sentiment isnt for people who can afford to own whatever they want. The majority of people are forced to decide on one platform, and stick with it.
With the large number of PS/PS2's that blowout, do you really think they are spending much on components? Also, consider for a moment that Sony MAKES the cd/dvd drive components. The only thing they go outside for is the graphics chip.
I liked how Sony made that uberpass thing, where you can play all their MMOGs for one flat fee. Unfortunately, this doesnt apply to a licensed title like SWG (since they have to pay royalties to Luc-ass, I would imagine).
Since when does Slashdot care about overloading webservers?
Most people dont like answering questions that can be easily found by searching Technet first.
Between Technet, EventID.net, Google, and newsgroups (and pretty much in that order), there isnt one problem I havent solved.
"Is there a way to log the IP address of PCs connecting to the Terminal Server without using third-party software?"
Its called a logon script.
Netscape's problem wasnt MS. If they had put out a better product (more stable, mostly), they could have retained their lead. I personally switched because I was tired of Netscape crashing every five minutes, and taking all my other browser windows with it.
Add to that its unwillingness to use many of the Windows-native APIs (printing is a good example), and you have a recipe for disaster. MS built those APIs for a reason; just because Netscape sought to reinvent the wheel doesnt mean other people need to finance it.
Their innovation stopped with Mosaic; Mozilla was them relinquishing control because they were personally beyond the limits of their skill.
Ya, who the hell needs RAID-5?
Since its Apogee, does it come with Duke Nukem?
If somebody would design a tablet device that uses 802.11b, is simple to network config (easy WEP interface, DHCP), and costs ~$200, they will rule the world.
Its not for want of spending money; they have a huge contract with Unisys, for which they are getting absolutely nothing. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars, for which Unisys is providing a helpless desk, a handful of desktop support people, sub-par email services, and WAN support. The WAN guys are good. All told, I could set up a department to provide the same level of support for maybe two million. *Somebody* high up must be getting pretty nice kickbacks.
In the real world corporate clients I've been to, the only people that even bark (or notice) not having admin rights are developers. For the most part, users just need to run what they need (outlook, word, etc) and if an admin loads it beforhand they don't/won't notice not missing the rights.
Some people do, but there are too many people who want to waste time with customized screensavers, desktop themes, and other such shit. Needless to say, they are not the productive people.
There are a few users who I would actually say need it, because they deal with outside companies which have custom applications. In a perfect situation, however, they would need a support person to install it and give the application the appropriate level of rights. This suggestion of mine was shot down, because it raised the bar on the desktop support people's required level of competance (which is pretty low). The only people they had who knew what they were doing were two consultants (who have since been laid off), and the dept manager (who was reorganized to another city department).
I recently took a small law office from 9x to XP. That was the first time in about 6 years I saw a 9x box in a business. Its just too damn unreliable and unsupported for anyone to do business critical applications in this day and age.
Nobody wants to spend any money. The problem is that, in this area, most management people have no idea what is going on with IT, nor do they care. Most CIOs have accounting backgrounds, and dont care for computers.
Admittedly, I usually work at larger companies and this law office was the first that didn't have a domain/directory. I can't believe a sysadmin would tolerate an environment where resources (both local machines and bandwidth) would be wasted.
Hey, if they dont want to spend the money, what more can I do? I had to pester them for over a year just to get an autoloader for backups. Fortunately, my manager started attaching stuff on to other budgetted projects, so we were finally able to update a lot of equipment. Unfortunately, I was never able to set all of it up before I was laid off (I think they only have one consultant left there, out of about ten or so). I guess that was a big problem, even though I was doing all the LAN/WAN support for the department (not the City), I had no pull because I was a consultant.
Even in office politics, which I sometimes may not understand, who's going to side with wasting resources?
You would be surprised.
Nice to see they defined their target audience...