Well, it depends on how you do version numbers. Remember Windows 3.1, and then 3.11 for work groups. Some people actually like the idea that 3.11 is less than 3.2, because, well, it is. Instead of using numbering systems that don't make any sense, like 3.1.1.
We have quite a few board games in our house. We also have video games. They are both fun in their own respects. The nice thing about board games is so little development costs. They created over 60 years ago, and are still selling it for $15 for the basic, and $45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Wouldn't the release of XP warrant a notification? Version numbers don't actually mean anything. Some vendors create a new major version every 3 months, with no modifications, while others only go from x.1 to x.11 every 3 years, yet add tons of functionality along the way.
The way things are going with a lot of products, is that a lot of items are monopolized. Let's look at game consoles. Sure there's 3 companies that sell them. But if you want an XBox, you have to get it from microsoft. Although the three consoles compete, they are not the same product. Which is why you see people buying 3 consoles. Things that don't have a monopoly are things like a fridge. You only need to buy 1 fridge. And you don't need to buy multiple fridges to get the full fridge experience. Software in highly monopolized, because only the maker of the software is allowed to sell that product. All other competing software products, while still competitors, are not the same product.
Which is really bad, because it's the exact same product. The English version sold in Canada is the same English version sold in the US for 99% of software. When we were upgrading to Visual Studio 2008, we seriously thought about just driving over the border to pick up the copies we needed. Would have saved us a few dollars. None of the US online stores we tried would ship to Canada either.
I can believe that. With just about every cell phone I've ever had, I could charge it on Sunday, have it show 3 bars on Friday, and by the time I look at it again on monday (don't use it on weekends much, if at all), the battery is usually dead.
Perhaps the output doesn't look as nice, but entering them is vastly easier in OpenOffice. At least last time I did it, which was a few years ago. In OpenOffice, you could (but didn't have to) type in the entire equation with just the keyboard. This made entering equations very quick once you figured out all the keystrokes. In MS Office (2000 I think), there was no way I could find to just type everything in. Anything more complicated then 5+5 required you to make extensive use of the mouse. Which slowed things down a lot.
In my town, they fixed things up a little (much after I left, and long after I was a paper boy). The paper boy/girl still delivers the papers, but they don't collect the money anymore. It's really too much to expect a 12 year old kid to go around collecting money from people. It works out fine when the people are home, and when they pay. However, when the people just aren't at home at any reasonable hours, and the the kid has to become a bill collector, it can get to be a pretty bad job. Especially when the kid's pay comes out of a chunk of that money.
I've been noticing this a lot with the newer Zelda. In the original, they plopped you down on the edge of Hyrule, and you had to figure out the entire game on your own. Nobody to help you. If you were lucky you were smart enough to go in that first cave so you could get the sword. Otherwise you were screwed. Now, everything is so planned out for you. Characters will walk right up to you, start talking, and tell you exactly where to go. There's still some difficult to get through dungeons, but nothing like the original Zelda in the second quest. There's certain walls you're just supposed to walk right through.
Hugo was terrible for that. My least favourites where the bullion, and the rubber bung. Also equally irritating was the screen with the elephant in the jungle. You put the cage down, open the cage door, and shoot a blow dart in the elephant before he got too far away.
Also, for about $550, you could get a new laptop, with dual core processor, 2 GB of RAM, 120 GB HD, wireless networking, and a DVD writer. Costs 4 times as much, but it's easily 4 times as useful. It's like saying you could get a Vespa for $5000. Yes, you could, but that only makes sense if you don't have to buy another car. In the same way, this computer is only cheap if you don't plan on having another computer to make up for its lack of features.
Also, how many of us programmers are currently working in jobs, where we ourselves think the product we produce is terrible, with a bunch of people who have no idea how to design software well? I think the same can be said for just about every industry. People want to work, and make money. In the end, the most that many of us can expect from a job, is that it will put food on our table. Being happy with what you produce at your job is definitely a plus, but not the first thing on most people's minds. Movies are just the result of a bunch of people doing their jobs. Is it any wonder that they don't end up being really great. The best movies have come out of the minds of a few gifted and dedicated people who had a vision. Not some big corporation with lots of money to spend. The same can be said for software.
Normal Pay? Steve Jobs only gets a $1 salary from Apple. Mind you, he's fantastically rich, and probably likes his job enough that he doesn't care if Apple pays him one way or the other.
The hard part with searching the web isn't indexing millions of pages, or returning lots of results, it's returning the relevant results. This is what Google is good at, and it's the reason they were able to surpass Yahoo in the early days. I don't care if you return 17 billion search results, if none of them are relevant. I actually don't want millions of results. I want a few results with the most relevant shown first. If I don't see what I'm looking for in the first 1 or 2 pages, I try to refine my query, go to a different search engine, or look for another way to solve my problem.
Intel has fully accelerated 3D for the features it supports. They may only have low end cards, which don't have support for more advanced features, but I'd like some assurance that my video card works now, and can continue to be supported in 10 years from now, when it's not hot stuff and the manufacturer decided they don't care about a product they no longer produce.
If every story of child porn "on the internet" can end up in the Science/Tech section of Google News, then redoing an existing invention "on the internet" certainly qualifies as a new patent.
Which would make it invalid, because the patent was filed in 1995, granted in 1997. Windows 3.1 was released to the public in 1992, which makes it 3 years before the original filing.
That's not just a problem with software patents. In every industry that exists, people patent stuff that others invented (but didn't patent) and have been using for years. I know a few people in the chemical industry, and they say this practice is pretty common. Patent something your competitors are doing, then threaten your competitors clients to not buy from you instead of your competitors, because you own the patent, and they are breaking the law.
Well, if that's not a good enough example, check out the file manager for windows 3.11, which was released around 1992. They have their own products showing prior art to when this patent was filed. It's my understanding that once you make an invention public, you no longer have the rights to a patent on it.
He probably meant that it's harder for the small time artists that don't have millions of dollars to advertise for them. Laws like these that make filesharing and distributing through alternative channels frowned upon make it harder for smaller artists. It will never be illegal to put your own stuff up on the web to give away, but when all the ISPs block all the P2P programs, and make it harder for people to find and use p2p and to share the media, it isn't much help just to put your stuff out there. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Well, in my experience XP has a nag screen, and it seems to be pretty good about staying on top. On Vista, I've actually had the computer reboot on multiple occasions, without me expecting it, because the countdown timer has a tendency to only show up in the bottom left hand corner where you aren't looking, and it also gets covered up by other windows.
Which is only 5.8 hours of film, assuming 24 frames per second. That would definitely fit the entire movie, but it would be nowhere close to all the footage that was shot. It's not like all movies are filmed like Russian Ark.
I have the best example. Turning off the "feature" that makes Windows XP reboot after installing updates. In XP Pro and up, you can do it by opening up gpedit.msc. However, in Windows XP Home, there is no group policy editor. So the only way to stop Windows XP Home from automatically rebooting with even asking, only by showing a countdown timer which the user may never see, is to edit the registry.
Well, with Windows, at some point, the registry has to get edited. And you can't expect Grandma Maybel to do that either. I've installed Mandriva many and got everything I needed working without touching the command line. The the tasks that most users do, it's no longer necessary.
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Well, it depends on how you do version numbers. Remember Windows 3.1, and then 3.11 for work groups. Some people actually like the idea that 3.11 is less than 3.2, because, well, it is. Instead of using numbering systems that don't make any sense, like 3.1.1.
We have quite a few board games in our house. We also have video games. They are both fun in their own respects. The nice thing about board games is so little development costs. They created over 60 years ago, and are still selling it for $15 for the basic, and $45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Wouldn't the release of XP warrant a notification? Version numbers don't actually mean anything. Some vendors create a new major version every 3 months, with no modifications, while others only go from x.1 to x.11 every 3 years, yet add tons of functionality along the way.
The way things are going with a lot of products, is that a lot of items are monopolized. Let's look at game consoles. Sure there's 3 companies that sell them. But if you want an XBox, you have to get it from microsoft. Although the three consoles compete, they are not the same product. Which is why you see people buying 3 consoles. Things that don't have a monopoly are things like a fridge. You only need to buy 1 fridge. And you don't need to buy multiple fridges to get the full fridge experience. Software in highly monopolized, because only the maker of the software is allowed to sell that product. All other competing software products, while still competitors, are not the same product.
Which is really bad, because it's the exact same product. The English version sold in Canada is the same English version sold in the US for 99% of software. When we were upgrading to Visual Studio 2008, we seriously thought about just driving over the border to pick up the copies we needed. Would have saved us a few dollars. None of the US online stores we tried would ship to Canada either.
I can believe that. With just about every cell phone I've ever had, I could charge it on Sunday, have it show 3 bars on Friday, and by the time I look at it again on monday (don't use it on weekends much, if at all), the battery is usually dead.
Perhaps the output doesn't look as nice, but entering them is vastly easier in OpenOffice. At least last time I did it, which was a few years ago. In OpenOffice, you could (but didn't have to) type in the entire equation with just the keyboard. This made entering equations very quick once you figured out all the keystrokes. In MS Office (2000 I think), there was no way I could find to just type everything in. Anything more complicated then 5+5 required you to make extensive use of the mouse. Which slowed things down a lot.
In my town, they fixed things up a little (much after I left, and long after I was a paper boy). The paper boy/girl still delivers the papers, but they don't collect the money anymore. It's really too much to expect a 12 year old kid to go around collecting money from people. It works out fine when the people are home, and when they pay. However, when the people just aren't at home at any reasonable hours, and the the kid has to become a bill collector, it can get to be a pretty bad job. Especially when the kid's pay comes out of a chunk of that money.
I've been noticing this a lot with the newer Zelda. In the original, they plopped you down on the edge of Hyrule, and you had to figure out the entire game on your own. Nobody to help you. If you were lucky you were smart enough to go in that first cave so you could get the sword. Otherwise you were screwed. Now, everything is so planned out for you. Characters will walk right up to you, start talking, and tell you exactly where to go. There's still some difficult to get through dungeons, but nothing like the original Zelda in the second quest. There's certain walls you're just supposed to walk right through.
Hugo was terrible for that. My least favourites where the bullion, and the rubber bung. Also equally irritating was the screen with the elephant in the jungle. You put the cage down, open the cage door, and shoot a blow dart in the elephant before he got too far away.
Also, for about $550, you could get a new laptop, with dual core processor, 2 GB of RAM, 120 GB HD, wireless networking, and a DVD writer. Costs 4 times as much, but it's easily 4 times as useful. It's like saying you could get a Vespa for $5000. Yes, you could, but that only makes sense if you don't have to buy another car. In the same way, this computer is only cheap if you don't plan on having another computer to make up for its lack of features.
Or, you could always just submerge the entire computer in mineral oil.
Also, how many of us programmers are currently working in jobs, where we ourselves think the product we produce is terrible, with a bunch of people who have no idea how to design software well? I think the same can be said for just about every industry. People want to work, and make money. In the end, the most that many of us can expect from a job, is that it will put food on our table. Being happy with what you produce at your job is definitely a plus, but not the first thing on most people's minds. Movies are just the result of a bunch of people doing their jobs. Is it any wonder that they don't end up being really great. The best movies have come out of the minds of a few gifted and dedicated people who had a vision. Not some big corporation with lots of money to spend. The same can be said for software.
Normal Pay? Steve Jobs only gets a $1 salary from Apple. Mind you, he's fantastically rich, and probably likes his job enough that he doesn't care if Apple pays him one way or the other.
The hard part with searching the web isn't indexing millions of pages, or returning lots of results, it's returning the relevant results. This is what Google is good at, and it's the reason they were able to surpass Yahoo in the early days. I don't care if you return 17 billion search results, if none of them are relevant. I actually don't want millions of results. I want a few results with the most relevant shown first. If I don't see what I'm looking for in the first 1 or 2 pages, I try to refine my query, go to a different search engine, or look for another way to solve my problem.
Intel has fully accelerated 3D for the features it supports. They may only have low end cards, which don't have support for more advanced features, but I'd like some assurance that my video card works now, and can continue to be supported in 10 years from now, when it's not hot stuff and the manufacturer decided they don't care about a product they no longer produce.
If every story of child porn "on the internet" can end up in the Science/Tech section of Google News, then redoing an existing invention "on the internet" certainly qualifies as a new patent.
Which would make it invalid, because the patent was filed in 1995, granted in 1997. Windows 3.1 was released to the public in 1992, which makes it 3 years before the original filing.
That's not just a problem with software patents. In every industry that exists, people patent stuff that others invented (but didn't patent) and have been using for years. I know a few people in the chemical industry, and they say this practice is pretty common. Patent something your competitors are doing, then threaten your competitors clients to not buy from you instead of your competitors, because you own the patent, and they are breaking the law.
Well, if that's not a good enough example, check out the file manager for windows 3.11, which was released around 1992. They have their own products showing prior art to when this patent was filed. It's my understanding that once you make an invention public, you no longer have the rights to a patent on it.
He probably meant that it's harder for the small time artists that don't have millions of dollars to advertise for them. Laws like these that make filesharing and distributing through alternative channels frowned upon make it harder for smaller artists. It will never be illegal to put your own stuff up on the web to give away, but when all the ISPs block all the P2P programs, and make it harder for people to find and use p2p and to share the media, it isn't much help just to put your stuff out there. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Well, in my experience XP has a nag screen, and it seems to be pretty good about staying on top. On Vista, I've actually had the computer reboot on multiple occasions, without me expecting it, because the countdown timer has a tendency to only show up in the bottom left hand corner where you aren't looking, and it also gets covered up by other windows.
Which is only 5.8 hours of film, assuming 24 frames per second. That would definitely fit the entire movie, but it would be nowhere close to all the footage that was shot. It's not like all movies are filmed like Russian Ark.
I have the best example. Turning off the "feature" that makes Windows XP reboot after installing updates. In XP Pro and up, you can do it by opening up gpedit.msc. However, in Windows XP Home, there is no group policy editor. So the only way to stop Windows XP Home from automatically rebooting with even asking, only by showing a countdown timer which the user may never see, is to edit the registry.
Well, with Windows, at some point, the registry has to get edited. And you can't expect Grandma Maybel to do that either. I've installed Mandriva many and got everything I needed working without touching the command line. The the tasks that most users do, it's no longer necessary.