As for the backstabbing, etc. -- that is a problem that management needs to address. That sort of thing usually becomes pretty obvious after a short time and it shouldn't be tolerated.
I have to say that the company I work for also uses 1-5 rankings (I'm not sure if they're forced into certain distributions of the numbers, though), and the primary way in which they address backstabbing is by giving teamwork some weight in the scale. Of course, when I relocated 2 years ago my numbers bombed, primarily because I don't get accustomed to new people quickly, but also because the workload has increased significantly, with the work being more challenging (causing delays and overruns).
My numbers this past January were looking better, but really don't seem to reflect the improvements of the last year. Then again, I tend to look at it as a direct result of my own movement towards an area in which most of my work is no longer directly supervised. My manager, being mostly unfamiliar with my work habits, simply gave me average ratings because there had been no complaints (and probably little to no praise) and the work was getting done in a timely manner. Sometimes the size of a place can really work against you in these sorts of things, but at the same time they're working against most of the others in the shop equally.
I was addressing the fairly frequent accusation that Microsoft doesn't know games. If it didn't, it wouldn't have pursued Valve and Sega. Who did the developing doesn't really matter, imo. What matters is that Microsoft was sitting at the top of the decision making process, and thus their ability to identify value was tested.
Except that MS publishes a lot of titles on the XBox, and in the end opening it up to publishing brings in a much higher percentage of bad titles than simply sticking to 1st and 2nd party titles, which MS either developed or had significant input. Sega needed a platform to continue their title, although at the moment Shenmue's future is on shaky ground. It only made sense for Shenmue to continue on either the XBox or the GameCube, as development on the PS2 would have been significantly harder just to meet the graphical quality of the first Shenmue title. As for Counterstrike, it seems an obvious choice given that Valve was started by an ex-MS employee, and Valve generally has a strong history of only allowing publishers the input on whether or not a Valve-approved release is ready to ship, given that the company is self-funded (as opposed to publisher-funded like many developers).
As for the yearly updates - Microsoft could easily carve a niche for themselves by simply issuing roster updates and gameplay patches over XBL several times each season, and only selling updated sports games based on actual improvements. EA and madden have been getting fat off essentially selling expansion packs each year, for full price. There is quite a bit of gamer animosity against them for it.
I agree that it would be nice to see this, or even annual roster updates for a minor charge (like $5), with mid-season updates free of charge to those that have the current season's roster. I don't know if they're actually looking at doing something like that, but it'd definitely be a strong point for the titles already available, as well as the eventual 2005 releases (which should, based on this article, be significant upgrades). At the same time, among the people that really enjoy these games and buy the yearly updates, I don't see quite as much animosity as I do among the people that are more general gamers which might buy more sports games if they didn't do this.
But my point was simply that: Microsoft can and does identify quality titles and deliver them to their customers. They know good games, and they (demonstratively) have the balls to hold back games that aren't going to be top-of-the-line. (E.g. the well-documented delay of Crimson Skies until it was great, the delay of this sports lineup, and one is left to assume: the delay of halo2.)
I agree with that on all counts. MS has shown no reluctance to pour more money into a game they believe can be a strong title, even if they have to sack most of the team and replace them (as they did with Crimson Skies) to push the title in another direction. They've also sacked plenty of titles that they saw no potential in, and released a few titles here and there that did very well on most technical grounds, but were missing a market or something important to their market. Hopefully this delay on the sports franchises will mean fewer of the last type of game. I can't really say I'll miss an annual rehash of a set of sports titles, especially since every sports title on my shelf right now has 2003 (or 2k3, 20-03, whatever) in the title.
(probably a joke but) They didn't abandon them. They stated that they have yet to discuss an end-of-life for the current titles, and that the yearly titles will resume in 2005. In other words, they're taking a year to focus on improving the technical and gameplay aspects of these titles rather than releasing another rehash with updated rosters that won't pan out with the critics when up against Sega and EA.
Shenmue is a Sega title, Counter-Strike is a Valve title. As far as I know, the rest of those are in-house or 2nd party titles, so I have no issues there.
What most people really seem to be missing here is that Microsoft cut the titles to work on the next year's titles, rather than cutting their sports line completely. They also make it fairly clear in the interview that the most well-received titles (Top Spin and Amped) were never considered yearly titles, and were therefore not part of the cut (though sequels may not have been in the works yet).
Microsoft has a lot of solid code in their sports titles, especially with the number of code bases they have to derive from in some areas (like baseball titles). All they are doing now is giving their developers more time to make their titles competetive with EA and Sega titles. They seemed to be close their first year out, but their latest run definitely fell flat. This was probably the only way to save these titles, even if it means they won't have a new series on the shelves for a year (and isn't one of the biggest complaints about these types of games the fact that they don't improve much in a year anyway?).
This is not due to having enough food, however. It's due to ecconomic factors. The countries that have the ecconomic strength to keep all their people fed are the same countries with adequate police coverage, transportation infrastructure, something that resembles a passable excuse for an education system, unemployment and inflation mostly under control most of the time, adequate communications infrastructure, enough hospitals, and so on.
As history has shown us in many countries, including the US, most of these things start to fail when food production drops to levels below those needed to sustain the local population. Once people are freed from the daily struggle to feed themselves, they can contribute to the country's economy in other ways. Of course, that is generally where the political issues come in, as others have pointed out, because not every government wants its people to be motivated to do anything other than find their next meal.
All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it?
Remember a few months ago when a handful of countries were refusing food shipments for fear that some percentage of the crops were genetically engineered? Those are the types of controversies that come from modern farming techniques (though most of what he's talking about is 50+-year old techniques, he does discuss food adapted for the environments). Beyond that, he also points out how much misinformation is widely believed about increasing food production, and the issues with local crops and people wanting to preserve those crops rather than plant higher-yield crops.
But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
He is talking specifically about increasing production on land already in use, in third world nations. This gets food to the people specifically by making the production point closer to the people, and by increasing the yields of those local points of production already being used, and depleted, by these people. The efficient use of resources comes from increasing the yields of these farms and decreasing deforestation and other problems (like stripping the nutrients from the soil) that could eventually lead to the farms not producing at all.
Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas?
Much of that is not needed when you consider that he was addressing part of the reason for the government's involvment in that food supply. If the US weren't supplying food to half the world, we would have little need to have so much involvment in securing that supply. On the other hand, some level of involvment tends to be good to secure our own supply. There's a lot of weird crap going on with that whole system, and pulling the burden off of that system would help with reforms.
Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs?
Probably because cows, chickens, and pigs are somewhat less likely to be used as large controlled food sources in third world countries, but will instead be used to supplement the diet, being kept by families or communities and allowed much less land than they would be in the US. Vegetarian diets themselves lend problems, as most people that make that choice need to keep a strict eye (at least moreso than someone with a more balanced diet, though it seems most people in the US would be better served seeing a nutritionist regularly) on their own health and diet to prevent malnutrition. Besides, what good is a vegitarian diet in a country where you can not get the vegetables in the first place, even to feed your starving chickens?
Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?
I think you might find that most of those farmers choose to grow drug crops because they find it to be the only way they can keep their farms and their lives, rather than because it's more profitable. Dealing with those situations is often a matter of politics, trying to handle not only the politicians in government, but the real power in those countries, which often lies in the hands of men that will kill farmers that grow food crops until the land falls into their hands.
Most of your questions seem to fall into the realm of politics. The point was simply that, despite how simple it seems to "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticieds", there is a sig
By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share.
Poor distribution can be solved by increasing production in the areas that pose distribution problems, or near those areas to create a shorter distance for distribution (if not clearing all obstacles to the distribution). People don't go without food just because someone chooses to eat 3 Big Macs a day. After all, the US (and other "1st world" countries) is still throwing food out every day.
At the same time, if more third world countries produced enough food for their own people (and possibly more than enough in order to help supply their neighbors), the US would simply be shipping the same food somewhere else or paying more farmers to produce less food (or maybe eventually let farming become less of a welfare system and shut some farms down, forcing people to find other work).
make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people.
However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing the population 10-fold.
Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The moral obligation referred to in the article is that of reducing or maintaining the amount of land needed for food production in order to preserve as many acres of land not currently used for this purpose as possible. In other words, there is a moral obligation NOT to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.
You're right, they have little to do with an overall lack of food, but rather with a localized lack of food in third world countries. Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. They also aren't using proper crop rotations, so the land is losing most of its nutrients. In other worlds, areas in which people are already starving are also moving rapidly towards their own equivalent of the US' dust-bowl.
The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own. As long as they're not paying for the food we ship to them now (which most aren't), the long-term costs of improving their farming methods is significantly lower than sending them food every year. The added benefit is that better farm yields can lead to economic improvements, which lead to more imports of other goods and possibly, eventually, improvements in other areas of production within those countries, pulling them out of third world status.
Not to mention that to be "hardly awake 80-90 hours a week" means that you'd have to sleep 12+ hours a day, which is hardly normal, unless, of course, one were to count a week as only being 5 days.
Personally, I only work a 40 hour week (unless you count unpaid lunch and driving to and from work, all of which accounts for another 2-3 hours a day), and I average 6 hours of sleep per day during the work-week (which is an improvement for me, though still less than "normal"), leaving me with about 90 hours awake from Monday to Friday, not counting long nights on Friday. This means that I have about 50 hours that I'm not getting paid for, and roughly 35 of them are actually mine to do as I wish. Beyond that, there's a 48 hour weekend with 12-20 hours of sleep.
my current machine is a celeron 2.4, 512ram DDR+ radeon 8500 is more than enough to work... but not for gaming...
I know Celerons are slower than the P4s in many cases, and that the Radeon 8500 isn't top of the line, but what games are actually not performing at playable levels?
I have a 2GHz P4 w/ 512MB DDR and a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (bought it recently to replace a Ti4600 that took a dive, because it was fairly cheap and used the same drivers), and haven't found a game yet that isn't playable at good framerates.
I found that I can keep playing games on both platforms while only doing minor system upgrades on the PC every 2 years or so, with most of the money I used to spend on upgrades going to a new console or more games. Then again, with the fairly low number of interesting PC games coming out over the last year or so, I really don't have a lot of new games to test my system out with, either. On the other hand, I'll probably pick up UT2004 tonite and see how it goes (given that UT2k3 didn't run at all when I bought it after the demo worked great).
I understand the preference for console gaming based on the stable platform, but the idea that a gaming PC needs to be top-of-the-line is antiquated for all but the most die-hard PC gamers looking for the absolute top framerates at all times. I'm certainly not worried about losing a match online because my framerate is only as high as my refresh rate.
Personally, I use a USB thumbdrive for any music I want to listen to at work. I found that it was pretty much my only option other than carting around MP3 CDs once my hard drive started filling up, and as long as I change out the music every couple of days it's fine. Of course, I'm already planning on buying a bigger thumbdrive just so I won't have to change the music around as often, and the 512MB and 1GB models are coming down in price pretty quickly.
Of course, if you don't have access to a USB port, that's pretty useless. On the other hand, I'd get in a bit of trouble for putting streaming audio on our incoming bandwidth here at work, or complaining about a full hard drive when I have 1GB or so of MP3 files on it.
As an added bonus, with a little encryption software in case it gets stolen, I can take work back and forth with me without dealing with email and filesize limits.
I was using a 200 mhz pentium, playing games on my Playstation 1, and surfing the internet on a 28.8 baud modem, and I think I had a Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator card.
6 years from now.. who knows what I will be doing. But there is no way I will be sitting around playing a PS2.
In 1998 I had a 400MHz P2 and was within a few months of stripping my Voodoo 2 cards out of my system (and had already replaced one that fried from the heat of the SLI setup). I had cable internet access, and had only been using 28.8 before that because my parents' ISP didn't support 33.6.
On the other hand, I still play PS1 games almost as much as PS2 games, though I play them on a PS2. I've probably bought more PS1 games since the PS2 was released, but I can't say for sure because I sold a lot of my PS1 games with my PS1 (most of them were pretty horrible games).
I'm not sure about the annotations (because I don't watch it), but I know they show the Thunderbirds for at least an hour on weekend mornings (right after they stop the infomercials).
I agree. Although some of the points that the DOJ was making in their case against Microsoft seemed irrelevent, I was one of many people I knew who were looking forward to some kind of real penalty. Then, out of the blue, it was as if the case just disappeared and we never heard about it again.
Many of the points were irrelevant, and when it went to appeals the points were thrown out because they had no relevance, or, at least, were not properly tied by the DoJ's lawyers to the case they were trying to make. The case "disappeared" because the judge that received the case after appeals forced all parties into long settlement talks.
They were talking about breaking up the company into different divisions or separating products or imposing massive fines, and yet did any of these things really happen? It seems like the DOJ really failed in that regard, and I'm glad that somebody stood up and sent a wake up call to MS.
The DoJ failed to make their case, and the judge that originally handled the case failed to follow proper procedure before putting forth his remedies. To say the least, the DoJ was lucky the appeals court didn't throw the whole case out, but instead chose to go through the transcripts, findings, and judgments, as well as the appeals and counters filed with the appeals court and decide where Microsoft had been found guilty without proper evidence and where there was enough evidence to uphold that finding of guilt. Then they threw out the original judge for his mishandling of the case and "appearance of bias" and remanded it to another judge to handle. By that time, the DoJ's case was full of holes like a block of swiss cheese, and the settlement they came to was probably better than they could've gotten if the judge had allowed them to restart the case (which took something like 5 years the first time around).
All of the important filings are available online, and though it can be a dry read at times, the appeals court's findings especially can be very enlightening as to why the DoJ settled for the remedies they did.
More than likely this is the case (minus special function keys and some mouse features). However, I was trying to say something more along the lines of Microsoft possibly shipping them with the proper connectors for both the XBox and the PC, rather than having to find some obscure adapter.
Standard sets of game controllers between computers and consoles don't sound bad either, altho those have existed for some time.
Though they've existed mostly as converters to make the non-standard USB connectors on consoles work in the standard USB connectors on PCs, along with some driver hooks in some cases.
Of course, certain games will always remain best suited to a particular platform. i.e., playing an FPS with anything but a mouse and keyboard is just sick. Quit trying to make those damn things for consoles, will you?;-)
Of course who says the game controllers will only go one way? As it stands, MS already has converters to use keyboards with the XBox, it's only a small step to make their entire line of keyboards and mice work on the XBox, and helps with the whole convergence of the PC in the living room if you can just use the XBox as a pass-through to your Windows-based computer sitting in whatever you have for an office space in your home. As it stands now, I'm looking at building a Linux box to hook up to the TV which will hold all of my media files and be accessed by my Windows-based gaming PC, which is certainly something MS should see as a failure on their part to provide something the customer wants (since XP Media Center doesn't do everything I want to do on my TV).
If MS were forced to split into an OS company, and an applications/peripherals/xbox/etc company then it would NOT be like the Bells. They had this huge infrastructure to break apart and share. MS has code. The point is they should not be able to have preferred access to the OS code (or application code).
In computers, software is an infrastructure, and in the business world, the OS and Office suite are definitely a major (though not the whole) part of that infrastructure. Additionally, you have the problem of where the break should be made. With the Bells, the break was made at the point of local vs. long distance calling, then the local calling was broken up into several companies (most of which we all know and hate as our local phone company: Pac Bell, Verizon, Bell South, etc). Does MS' mobile businesses go to the OS company? How about the XBox? In both cases everything but the OS is farmed out, though in the latter case the hardware design was MS'.
Whatever would happen under a breakup, the side that gets straddled with everything other than the OS, tools and server, and applications divisions would be best served by dropping a lot of products really fast, which could very well lead to companies that already have strong holds on other markets gaining monopoly status simply because they no longer have to compete against MS (interesting how that works, but MS tends to think there's a future in any market they don't have a part of in which one company is doing extremely well).
As product manager of Microsoft Applications, Inc. a sound business decision would be to offer Office on other platforms than just XP and OS X. Likewise, the Microsoft OS, Inc. PM would need to find new ways of legally encouraging product purchase - e.g. INNOVATION in the OS!
Again, though, the question comes down to what constitutes an OS. The best decision the MS Applications Inc. product manager could make would be to remove support for OS X and work towards making the single code base more platform agnostic (since Office X is a seperate code base). Then, when someone rises over 5% of the market (or more, depending on the estimates for cost vs earnings), they could spend a minimal amount of money to make the software available in that market. Alternatively, if MS Applications Inc somehow got the.Net Framework, their efforts would be best spent porting every application to the framework, and then porting the framework to every OS conceivable, and shipping it with the Applications.
My guess is that in the long term either the MS OS corporation would gain a stranglehold on the market simply because the OS and Applications would remain largely with the market share they have today, or the OS would completely sink and no one would make a profit on operating systems any longer, simply because applications could be built to one of any number of cross-platform frameworks (.Net, Java VM, etc), and the OS people are running would no longer matter. If such a framework were to become streamlined enough that desktop environments could be built on it, it'd be an even bigger blow to anyone trying to sell an OS (Apple, Sun, etc).
If the emulation is good enough, in theory you could emulate the PS1 emulation in the PS2 emulation. That would be rather interesting, and probably a fun exercise, but leads to the question of why, and would it cause more compatability problems with PS1 games than already exist with the PS2's emulation of the PS1?
Despite the claim of the article, some level of the PS2's emulation of the PS1 is done by hardware in the PS2's I/O chip, as this contains most of the hardware in a PSOne console. Therefore, simple emulation of the PS2 could easily function for all (or most) PS2 games without replicating the hardware portion that allows PS1 emulation (because you could replicate the I/O system without the PS1 portion). Without the bit of hardware in the I/O system, or emulation of that hardware, the emulation that runs on the PS2 would not function on an emulation of the PS2.
So then is it illegal for them to keep the media player libraries so you get thumbnailed video previews?
That's hard to say because so far none of the articles have been very specific, and have not provided links to the actual ruling, if it is even available online.
I think the easiest thing would be for them to remove WMP and offer it completley seperate from windows so as to comply with both rulings.
Then they'd have to offer it up in a manner that can be shown as fairly competing with RealPlayer and QuickTime/ITunes, which may mean that they'd have to charge for some features. It also means that they'd have to remove any integration they've done with the OS, which has increased in Windows XP (especially with features like viewing and editing MP3 tag information in Explorer, viewing/playing files from the side panel, and all of the features of Windows and IE that Media Player hooks into). In comparison, ITunes completely replaces the CD-ROM interface with someone else's software rather than hooking into the Windows API, and uses a seperate service for interfacing with the iPod rather than creating a hook into the system's interface, because that hook would automatically be usable from WMP.
I really think it would be easier for them to stop shipping Windows in EU countries than to comply with the ruling, but I'm sure they pay their lawyers enough to come up with a way to comply with both rulings and still derive some income from the European market.
So because there is a loophole in US that allowed them to cary on with anti competitve mesures they wan't to apeal the EU decision
No, they'll appeal the EU decision regardless of US law simply because the judgment went against them. In almost any case that allows appeal it's almost a given.
The point that I was trying to make is that the US and EU have defined "anti-competetive practices" when it comes to Microsoft in opposing manners. In the US, it's illegal for Microsoft to "bundle" software with Windows, they must show that it's "integrated" with Windows, and provides basic functionality to the OS that makes it hard or impossible to remove without reducing functionality of the system.
In the EU, they're forcing Microsoft to make the software seperate and bundled, which would put them in violation of their US settlements. What MS has done to comply with US law has apparently put them in conflict with EU law, and compliance with EU law may put them in conflict with US law. It's not a matter of loopholes, it's a matter of opposing judgments from different parts of the world.
It's about 1/6th of Microsoft's income from international (meaning outside the US) business for last year. It is quite possible that the fine would eliminate any profit from operating in the EU for the year (or at least a quarter or two), except that it will be accounted for seperately in their SEC filings.
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As for the backstabbing, etc. -- that is a problem that management needs to address. That sort of thing usually becomes pretty obvious after a short time and it shouldn't be tolerated.
I have to say that the company I work for also uses 1-5 rankings (I'm not sure if they're forced into certain distributions of the numbers, though), and the primary way in which they address backstabbing is by giving teamwork some weight in the scale. Of course, when I relocated 2 years ago my numbers bombed, primarily because I don't get accustomed to new people quickly, but also because the workload has increased significantly, with the work being more challenging (causing delays and overruns).
My numbers this past January were looking better, but really don't seem to reflect the improvements of the last year. Then again, I tend to look at it as a direct result of my own movement towards an area in which most of my work is no longer directly supervised. My manager, being mostly unfamiliar with my work habits, simply gave me average ratings because there had been no complaints (and probably little to no praise) and the work was getting done in a timely manner. Sometimes the size of a place can really work against you in these sorts of things, but at the same time they're working against most of the others in the shop equally.
I was addressing the fairly frequent accusation that Microsoft doesn't know games. If it didn't, it wouldn't have pursued Valve and Sega. Who did the developing doesn't really matter, imo. What matters is that Microsoft was sitting at the top of the decision making process, and thus their ability to identify value was tested.
Except that MS publishes a lot of titles on the XBox, and in the end opening it up to publishing brings in a much higher percentage of bad titles than simply sticking to 1st and 2nd party titles, which MS either developed or had significant input. Sega needed a platform to continue their title, although at the moment Shenmue's future is on shaky ground. It only made sense for Shenmue to continue on either the XBox or the GameCube, as development on the PS2 would have been significantly harder just to meet the graphical quality of the first Shenmue title. As for Counterstrike, it seems an obvious choice given that Valve was started by an ex-MS employee, and Valve generally has a strong history of only allowing publishers the input on whether or not a Valve-approved release is ready to ship, given that the company is self-funded (as opposed to publisher-funded like many developers).
As for the yearly updates - Microsoft could easily carve a niche for themselves by simply issuing roster updates and gameplay patches over XBL several times each season, and only selling updated sports games based on actual improvements. EA and madden have been getting fat off essentially selling expansion packs each year, for full price. There is quite a bit of gamer animosity against them for it.
I agree that it would be nice to see this, or even annual roster updates for a minor charge (like $5), with mid-season updates free of charge to those that have the current season's roster. I don't know if they're actually looking at doing something like that, but it'd definitely be a strong point for the titles already available, as well as the eventual 2005 releases (which should, based on this article, be significant upgrades). At the same time, among the people that really enjoy these games and buy the yearly updates, I don't see quite as much animosity as I do among the people that are more general gamers which might buy more sports games if they didn't do this.
But my point was simply that: Microsoft can and does identify quality titles and deliver them to their customers. They know good games, and they (demonstratively) have the balls to hold back games that aren't going to be top-of-the-line.
(E.g. the well-documented delay of Crimson Skies until it was great, the delay of this sports lineup, and one is left to assume: the delay of halo2.)
I agree with that on all counts. MS has shown no reluctance to pour more money into a game they believe can be a strong title, even if they have to sack most of the team and replace them (as they did with Crimson Skies) to push the title in another direction. They've also sacked plenty of titles that they saw no potential in, and released a few titles here and there that did very well on most technical grounds, but were missing a market or something important to their market. Hopefully this delay on the sports franchises will mean fewer of the last type of game. I can't really say I'll miss an annual rehash of a set of sports titles, especially since every sports title on my shelf right now has 2003 (or 2k3, 20-03, whatever) in the title.
(probably a joke but)
They didn't abandon them. They stated that they have yet to discuss an end-of-life for the current titles, and that the yearly titles will resume in 2005. In other words, they're taking a year to focus on improving the technical and gameplay aspects of these titles rather than releasing another rehash with updated rosters that won't pan out with the critics when up against Sega and EA.
Shenmue is a Sega title, Counter-Strike is a Valve title. As far as I know, the rest of those are in-house or 2nd party titles, so I have no issues there.
What most people really seem to be missing here is that Microsoft cut the titles to work on the next year's titles, rather than cutting their sports line completely. They also make it fairly clear in the interview that the most well-received titles (Top Spin and Amped) were never considered yearly titles, and were therefore not part of the cut (though sequels may not have been in the works yet).
Microsoft has a lot of solid code in their sports titles, especially with the number of code bases they have to derive from in some areas (like baseball titles). All they are doing now is giving their developers more time to make their titles competetive with EA and Sega titles. They seemed to be close their first year out, but their latest run definitely fell flat. This was probably the only way to save these titles, even if it means they won't have a new series on the shelves for a year (and isn't one of the biggest complaints about these types of games the fact that they don't improve much in a year anyway?).
This is not due to having enough food, however. It's due to ecconomic factors.
The countries that have the ecconomic strength to keep all their people fed are
the same countries with adequate police coverage, transportation infrastructure,
something that resembles a passable excuse for an education system, unemployment
and inflation mostly under control most of the time, adequate communications
infrastructure, enough hospitals, and so on.
As history has shown us in many countries, including the US, most of these things start to fail when food production drops to levels below those needed to sustain the local population. Once people are freed from the daily struggle to feed themselves, they can contribute to the country's economy in other ways. Of course, that is generally where the political issues come in, as others have pointed out, because not every government wants its people to be motivated to do anything other than find their next meal.
All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it?
Remember a few months ago when a handful of countries were refusing food shipments for fear that some percentage of the crops were genetically engineered? Those are the types of controversies that come from modern farming techniques (though most of what he's talking about is 50+-year old techniques, he does discuss food adapted for the environments). Beyond that, he also points out how much misinformation is widely believed about increasing food production, and the issues with local crops and people wanting to preserve those crops rather than plant higher-yield crops.
But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
He is talking specifically about increasing production on land already in use, in third world nations. This gets food to the people specifically by making the production point closer to the people, and by increasing the yields of those local points of production already being used, and depleted, by these people. The efficient use of resources comes from increasing the yields of these farms and decreasing deforestation and other problems (like stripping the nutrients from the soil) that could eventually lead to the farms not producing at all.
Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas?
Much of that is not needed when you consider that he was addressing part of the reason for the government's involvment in that food supply. If the US weren't supplying food to half the world, we would have little need to have so much involvment in securing that supply. On the other hand, some level of involvment tends to be good to secure our own supply. There's a lot of weird crap going on with that whole system, and pulling the burden off of that system would help with reforms.
Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs?
Probably because cows, chickens, and pigs are somewhat less likely to be used as large controlled food sources in third world countries, but will instead be used to supplement the diet, being kept by families or communities and allowed much less land than they would be in the US. Vegetarian diets themselves lend problems, as most people that make that choice need to keep a strict eye (at least moreso than someone with a more balanced diet, though it seems most people in the US would be better served seeing a nutritionist regularly) on their own health and diet to prevent malnutrition. Besides, what good is a vegitarian diet in a country where you can not get the vegetables in the first place, even to feed your starving chickens?
Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?
I think you might find that most of those farmers choose to grow drug crops because they find it to be the only way they can keep their farms and their lives, rather than because it's more profitable. Dealing with those situations is often a matter of politics, trying to handle not only the politicians in government, but the real power in those countries, which often lies in the hands of men that will kill farmers that grow food crops until the land falls into their hands.
Most of your questions seem to fall into the realm of politics. The point was simply that, despite how simple it seems to "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticieds", there is a sig
By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share.
Poor distribution can be solved by increasing production in the areas that pose distribution problems, or near those areas to create a shorter distance for distribution (if not clearing all obstacles to the distribution). People don't go without food just because someone chooses to eat 3 Big Macs a day. After all, the US (and other "1st world" countries) is still throwing food out every day.
At the same time, if more third world countries produced enough food for their own people (and possibly more than enough in order to help supply their neighbors), the US would simply be shipping the same food somewhere else or paying more farmers to produce less food (or maybe eventually let farming become less of a welfare system and shut some farms down, forcing people to find other work).
make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people.
However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing the population 10-fold.
Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The moral obligation referred to in the article is that of reducing or maintaining the amount of land needed for food production in order to preserve as many acres of land not currently used for this purpose as possible. In other words, there is a moral obligation NOT to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.
You're right, they have little to do with an overall lack of food, but rather with a localized lack of food in third world countries. Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. They also aren't using proper crop rotations, so the land is losing most of its nutrients. In other worlds, areas in which people are already starving are also moving rapidly towards their own equivalent of the US' dust-bowl.
The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own. As long as they're not paying for the food we ship to them now (which most aren't), the long-term costs of improving their farming methods is significantly lower than sending them food every year. The added benefit is that better farm yields can lead to economic improvements, which lead to more imports of other goods and possibly, eventually, improvements in other areas of production within those countries, pulling them out of third world status.
Not to mention that to be "hardly awake 80-90 hours a week" means that you'd have to sleep 12+ hours a day, which is hardly normal, unless, of course, one were to count a week as only being 5 days.
Personally, I only work a 40 hour week (unless you count unpaid lunch and driving to and from work, all of which accounts for another 2-3 hours a day), and I average 6 hours of sleep per day during the work-week (which is an improvement for me, though still less than "normal"), leaving me with about 90 hours awake from Monday to Friday, not counting long nights on Friday. This means that I have about 50 hours that I'm not getting paid for, and roughly 35 of them are actually mine to do as I wish. Beyond that, there's a 48 hour weekend with 12-20 hours of sleep.
my current machine is a celeron 2.4, 512ram DDR+ radeon 8500 is more than enough to work... but not for gaming...
I know Celerons are slower than the P4s in many cases, and that the Radeon 8500 isn't top of the line, but what games are actually not performing at playable levels?
I have a 2GHz P4 w/ 512MB DDR and a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (bought it recently to replace a Ti4600 that took a dive, because it was fairly cheap and used the same drivers), and haven't found a game yet that isn't playable at good framerates.
I found that I can keep playing games on both platforms while only doing minor system upgrades on the PC every 2 years or so, with most of the money I used to spend on upgrades going to a new console or more games. Then again, with the fairly low number of interesting PC games coming out over the last year or so, I really don't have a lot of new games to test my system out with, either. On the other hand, I'll probably pick up UT2004 tonite and see how it goes (given that UT2k3 didn't run at all when I bought it after the demo worked great).
I understand the preference for console gaming based on the stable platform, but the idea that a gaming PC needs to be top-of-the-line is antiquated for all but the most die-hard PC gamers looking for the absolute top framerates at all times. I'm certainly not worried about losing a match online because my framerate is only as high as my refresh rate.
Personally, I use a USB thumbdrive for any music I want to listen to at work. I found that it was pretty much my only option other than carting around MP3 CDs once my hard drive started filling up, and as long as I change out the music every couple of days it's fine. Of course, I'm already planning on buying a bigger thumbdrive just so I won't have to change the music around as often, and the 512MB and 1GB models are coming down in price pretty quickly.
Of course, if you don't have access to a USB port, that's pretty useless. On the other hand, I'd get in a bit of trouble for putting streaming audio on our incoming bandwidth here at work, or complaining about a full hard drive when I have 1GB or so of MP3 files on it.
As an added bonus, with a little encryption software in case it gets stolen, I can take work back and forth with me without dealing with email and filesize limits.
6 years ago was 1998.
I was using a 200 mhz pentium, playing games on my Playstation 1, and surfing the internet on a 28.8 baud modem, and I think I had a Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator card.
6 years from now.. who knows what I will be doing. But there is no way I will be sitting around playing a PS2.
In 1998 I had a 400MHz P2 and was within a few months of stripping my Voodoo 2 cards out of my system (and had already replaced one that fried from the heat of the SLI setup). I had cable internet access, and had only been using 28.8 before that because my parents' ISP didn't support 33.6.
On the other hand, I still play PS1 games almost as much as PS2 games, though I play them on a PS2. I've probably bought more PS1 games since the PS2 was released, but I can't say for sure because I sold a lot of my PS1 games with my PS1 (most of them were pretty horrible games).
I'm not sure about the annotations (because I don't watch it), but I know they show the Thunderbirds for at least an hour on weekend mornings (right after they stop the infomercials).
I agree. Although some of the points that the DOJ was making in their case against Microsoft seemed irrelevent, I was one of many people I knew who were looking forward to some kind of real penalty. Then, out of the blue, it was as if the case just disappeared and we never heard about it again.
Many of the points were irrelevant, and when it went to appeals the points were thrown out because they had no relevance, or, at least, were not properly tied by the DoJ's lawyers to the case they were trying to make. The case "disappeared" because the judge that received the case after appeals forced all parties into long settlement talks.
They were talking about breaking up the company into different divisions or separating products or imposing massive fines, and yet did any of these things really happen? It seems like the DOJ really failed in that regard, and I'm glad that somebody stood up and sent a wake up call to MS.
The DoJ failed to make their case, and the judge that originally handled the case failed to follow proper procedure before putting forth his remedies. To say the least, the DoJ was lucky the appeals court didn't throw the whole case out, but instead chose to go through the transcripts, findings, and judgments, as well as the appeals and counters filed with the appeals court and decide where Microsoft had been found guilty without proper evidence and where there was enough evidence to uphold that finding of guilt. Then they threw out the original judge for his mishandling of the case and "appearance of bias" and remanded it to another judge to handle. By that time, the DoJ's case was full of holes like a block of swiss cheese, and the settlement they came to was probably better than they could've gotten if the judge had allowed them to restart the case (which took something like 5 years the first time around).
All of the important filings are available online, and though it can be a dry read at times, the appeals court's findings especially can be very enlightening as to why the DoJ settled for the remedies they did.
Windows or Solaris only.
If it runs on Solaris, why not a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!
ok, I know, it was bad, but it had to be said.
More than likely this is the case (minus special function keys and some mouse features). However, I was trying to say something more along the lines of Microsoft possibly shipping them with the proper connectors for both the XBox and the PC, rather than having to find some obscure adapter.
Standard sets of game controllers between computers and consoles don't sound bad either, altho those have existed for some time.
;-)
Though they've existed mostly as converters to make the non-standard USB connectors on consoles work in the standard USB connectors on PCs, along with some driver hooks in some cases.
Of course, certain games will always remain best suited to a particular platform. i.e., playing an FPS with anything but a mouse and keyboard is just sick. Quit trying to make those damn things for consoles, will you?
Of course who says the game controllers will only go one way? As it stands, MS already has converters to use keyboards with the XBox, it's only a small step to make their entire line of keyboards and mice work on the XBox, and helps with the whole convergence of the PC in the living room if you can just use the XBox as a pass-through to your Windows-based computer sitting in whatever you have for an office space in your home. As it stands now, I'm looking at building a Linux box to hook up to the TV which will hold all of my media files and be accessed by my Windows-based gaming PC, which is certainly something MS should see as a failure on their part to provide something the customer wants (since XP Media Center doesn't do everything I want to do on my TV).
If MS were forced to split into an OS company, and an applications/peripherals/xbox/etc company then it would NOT be like the Bells. They had this huge infrastructure to break apart and share. MS has code. The point is they should not be able to have preferred access to the OS code (or application code).
.Net Framework, their efforts would be best spent porting every application to the framework, and then porting the framework to every OS conceivable, and shipping it with the Applications.
In computers, software is an infrastructure, and in the business world, the OS and Office suite are definitely a major (though not the whole) part of that infrastructure. Additionally, you have the problem of where the break should be made. With the Bells, the break was made at the point of local vs. long distance calling, then the local calling was broken up into several companies (most of which we all know and hate as our local phone company: Pac Bell, Verizon, Bell South, etc). Does MS' mobile businesses go to the OS company? How about the XBox? In both cases everything but the OS is farmed out, though in the latter case the hardware design was MS'.
Whatever would happen under a breakup, the side that gets straddled with everything other than the OS, tools and server, and applications divisions would be best served by dropping a lot of products really fast, which could very well lead to companies that already have strong holds on other markets gaining monopoly status simply because they no longer have to compete against MS (interesting how that works, but MS tends to think there's a future in any market they don't have a part of in which one company is doing extremely well).
As product manager of Microsoft Applications, Inc. a sound business decision would be to offer Office on other platforms than just XP and OS X. Likewise, the Microsoft OS, Inc. PM would need to find new ways of legally encouraging product purchase - e.g. INNOVATION in the OS!
Again, though, the question comes down to what constitutes an OS. The best decision the MS Applications Inc. product manager could make would be to remove support for OS X and work towards making the single code base more platform agnostic (since Office X is a seperate code base). Then, when someone rises over 5% of the market (or more, depending on the estimates for cost vs earnings), they could spend a minimal amount of money to make the software available in that market. Alternatively, if MS Applications Inc somehow got the
My guess is that in the long term either the MS OS corporation would gain a stranglehold on the market simply because the OS and Applications would remain largely with the market share they have today, or the OS would completely sink and no one would make a profit on operating systems any longer, simply because applications could be built to one of any number of cross-platform frameworks (.Net, Java VM, etc), and the OS people are running would no longer matter. If such a framework were to become streamlined enough that desktop environments could be built on it, it'd be an even bigger blow to anyone trying to sell an OS (Apple, Sun, etc).
If the emulation is good enough, in theory you could emulate the PS1 emulation in the PS2 emulation. That would be rather interesting, and probably a fun exercise, but leads to the question of why, and would it cause more compatability problems with PS1 games than already exist with the PS2's emulation of the PS1?
Despite the claim of the article, some level of the PS2's emulation of the PS1 is done by hardware in the PS2's I/O chip, as this contains most of the hardware in a PSOne console. Therefore, simple emulation of the PS2 could easily function for all (or most) PS2 games without replicating the hardware portion that allows PS1 emulation (because you could replicate the I/O system without the PS1 portion). Without the bit of hardware in the I/O system, or emulation of that hardware, the emulation that runs on the PS2 would not function on an emulation of the PS2.
So then is it illegal for them to keep the media player libraries so you get thumbnailed video previews?
That's hard to say because so far none of the articles have been very specific, and have not provided links to the actual ruling, if it is even available online.
I think the easiest thing would be for them to remove WMP and offer it completley seperate from windows so as to comply with both rulings.
Then they'd have to offer it up in a manner that can be shown as fairly competing with RealPlayer and QuickTime/ITunes, which may mean that they'd have to charge for some features. It also means that they'd have to remove any integration they've done with the OS, which has increased in Windows XP (especially with features like viewing and editing MP3 tag information in Explorer, viewing/playing files from the side panel, and all of the features of Windows and IE that Media Player hooks into). In comparison, ITunes completely replaces the CD-ROM interface with someone else's software rather than hooking into the Windows API, and uses a seperate service for interfacing with the iPod rather than creating a hook into the system's interface, because that hook would automatically be usable from WMP.
I really think it would be easier for them to stop shipping Windows in EU countries than to comply with the ruling, but I'm sure they pay their lawyers enough to come up with a way to comply with both rulings and still derive some income from the European market.
So because there is a loophole in US that allowed them to cary on with anti competitve mesures they wan't to apeal the EU decision
No, they'll appeal the EU decision regardless of US law simply because the judgment went against them. In almost any case that allows appeal it's almost a given.
The point that I was trying to make is that the US and EU have defined "anti-competetive practices" when it comes to Microsoft in opposing manners. In the US, it's illegal for Microsoft to "bundle" software with Windows, they must show that it's "integrated" with Windows, and provides basic functionality to the OS that makes it hard or impossible to remove without reducing functionality of the system.
In the EU, they're forcing Microsoft to make the software seperate and bundled, which would put them in violation of their US settlements. What MS has done to comply with US law has apparently put them in conflict with EU law, and compliance with EU law may put them in conflict with US law. It's not a matter of loopholes, it's a matter of opposing judgments from different parts of the world.
It's about 1/6th of Microsoft's income from international (meaning outside the US) business for last year. It is quite possible that the fine would eliminate any profit from operating in the EU for the year (or at least a quarter or two), except that it will be accounted for seperately in their SEC filings.
Microsoft Exchange
As far as I know, Exchange doesn't interoperate with Windows, but rather Outlook.
The rest, however, appear accurate, and there are probably many more (such as documenting much of what Samba has had to reverse engineer).
You bring up very good points however it does increase overhead and support costs if ever so slightly.
This also increases the costs of the stores that have to carry them, including stores selling pre-installed computers.