*laugh* Ballmer only seems to see things in terms of money. It should be painfully obvious that Linux didn't start off "bankrupt", it started off free, which is hardly the same thing.
Which was exactly his point, and why he said 'in a way' rather than just leaving it as 'started off bankrupt'. You can't stop Linux the way Novell was stopped (assuming Novell was, in some markets their software is still used), because there's no company controlling it. All of the Linux companies in the world could go bankrupt and Linux would still be there.
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's.
Most gamers seem to be happy with mid-range CPUs now, preferring to spend their money on the graphics card. What games are being played makes a difference here, but in most cases a new video card will give you more improvement than a new CPU.
Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
I think that if you looked a little closer you'd realize that there was a lot of the same thing going on back then, too. The most major difference today is that there are a lot more games coming out, and the innovative games don't always get the best coverage. As for Quake 1 vs Quake 3 specifically, I think you'd have a hard time really comparing them, because id software was going for a different purpose with Quake 3, basically trying to design a multiplayer game from the start, rather than a single player game with the multiplayer tacked on (so badly, I might add, that they basically redid the whole multiplayer subsystem). I didn't particularly like Q3, but at least I can see that they had a fundamentally different design for the game from it's previous incarnations. We do get a lot of repetition through the wonders of increased marketing, and it's been that way at least since Doom came along and everyone started making FPS games. However, if I really looked at it, I'd say that before that we had a lot of side-scrollers that didn't really have much difference between them, and before that was the top-down style of games, some of which were also the scrollers that pre-dated the side-scrollers.
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
The UT2003 demo seems to run very well on my system, which, although it has the 2GHz CPU, is running a quite old GeForce2 GTS (old for a video card anyway). Since game performance really depends on that card for most of the games I play, it will probably be my next upgrade. There's certainly nothing in any existing game pushing me towards the 2.8GHz processors currently available or the 3+GHz CPUs on the horizon. I'm sure Ill eventually buy a faster processor, but it'll probably be something like the reason I upgraded to the 2GHz CPU as well, it made sense with the amount of money I was going to spend anyway.
As for why Zork and the like may have been more immersive to you, perhaps it had a lot to do with the level of imagination it takes for those games. A lot of people are just as easily engrossed in a good book as in a good movie. Your mind supplies most of the details, so you don't get limited by the machines capabilities or knocked out of the illusion by something the designers used that doesn't mesh with your vision of the game world. Many game companies have even considered developing text-based games again for many of those same reasons, but usually there's little demand for them at anything other than the lowest price points.
That analogy is flawed because Jaguars and Porsches are a lot faster than the average car.
Actually, they're not, but that perception is part of why they sell. The reality is that there's a perception that the Porsche or Jaguar is a better car, for whatever reason, just as some people have a perception that the Mac is a better computer, for whatever reason. Because of that perception, they're willing to pay more. Apple has significantly better margins than any other PC OEM. Their sales estimates and so on are based on their actual market, not on the total PC market. Much like Alienware and other small PC OEMs do much better than Dell or HP on a per-unit basis, and manage to survive despite having a significantly smaller user base. In other words, if the company does well on it's current user base, they don't have to take extreme measures (such as changing architectures and pissing off their users and developers) to build that user base. They need growth, but not to the point of having a greater overall market share than Dell or HP.
Apple is always on the hairy edge. If there were fewer Mac titles, they'd lose market share. Then there would be fewer Macs and the incentive to develop Mac titles would be less -- which would mean even fewer titles. I think you see where this is going.
In some ways that's true, but primarily Apple has been doing very well since Jobs came back. They make a lot of money, despite their small market share, and in the end all they need to do is continue slow growth.
I wish Apple well, but the only way that I think they have a chance in the long run is to bit the bullet, change CPU families, and create Macs that perform as well as PCs at similar price points.
Changing CPU families when software is still catching up with the last major OS changes could very well lose a great deal of the developer support they already have. Otherwise, they'd have to do extensive work to limit the amount of work developers have to do on the platform change, which would probably include emulating the current platform on the x86 for existing apps, which wouldn't be pretty.
If they try to become a software house like Microsoft by selling OS-X for generic x86 PCs, they will probably be destroyed by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually viewed Apple as a competitor (rather than a faux competitor that keeps the FTC off of their backs), life would get ugly at Apple. Microsoft would likely not produce a version of Office for OS-x86 (clever name, eh?). Microsoft would discourage Windows developers from creating titles for OS-x86. Microsoft could withold support or even actively sabotage titles with "service packs" to punish software publishers who released OS-x86 titles.
The real loss, though, if Apple went to generic hardware, would be on Apple's bottom line. By far they make most of their money on hardware. This is most blatantly obvious when you look at parts they sell with a new Mac purchase which are available for the PC as well (such as the SuperDrive, and their prices for RAM and hard drives). They make a killing on the hardware, and most of their standard software is cheap relative to x86 equivalents (though their upgrade pricing on the OS is a little steep, since essentially all OS purchases are upgrades). If they're making any money on software right now, it's not much in the consumer market. Microsoft might be able to sit back and do nothing if Apple made that decision, because the increased support costs and decresed revenue (from lack of hardware sales) would kill them without intervention.
ns, most of the pictures from the nVidia visit were of things discussed in the ATI visit. Even if they had gotten an equal amount of information from nVidia, it would've been the same thing with minor details changed.
3dfx might still be around because they won a lawsuit against NVIDIA, but NVIDIA bought out 3dfx and killed support for people that had recent 3dfx hardware.
nVidia didn't buy 3dfx, they just bought most of their IP and remaining chip inventory. The company (3dfx Interactive) itself shut down their manufacturing and cut off their users from downloading existing drivers.
If it were me, I'd look at the architecture of DNS and copy the strengths of its distributed design. Then again, DNS is borne of scientists aiming for an open internet, not corporations looking to lock it down.
That still doesn't negate the problem of the single-point of failure in a passport-type system. That is, once someone has your single user name and password to log in to passport, they have everything that goes with that passport. Just like if you can hijack someone's DNS resolution, you can send them wherever you want for anything (thereby hijacking all of their website passwords if you're patient enough and those passwords aren't encrypted well enough).
That's basically why I only use passport for a couple of things, and store nothing in it. Hotmail and MSN Messenger? Fine. My credit card numbers? Hell no.
Heck, right now, if I bought a console, I'd also have to buy a TV to hook it up to!
Buy a VGA Adapter instead. I played most of my consoles on my 19" monitor until very recently because I only had a 13" TV. Now that I've got a 27" TV I've finally got all of my consoles and DVD player hooked up to that and freed up some of the clutter on my desk.
They just gave a slap in the face to StarCraft fans, adding insult to injury. I think most StarCraft fans are disgusted at this announcement, as am I (And judging from the outcry on sclegacy).
Gee, is that anything like StarCraft was a slap in the face to WarCraft fans, who had to wait until very recently to play WarCraft 3 (let's see, I first played WarCraft 2 in 1996...)? Get over it, there's little chance that there won't be a StarCraft 2, it's just a matter of time. Personally, I'd hate to see any Blizzard game rushed, and I'm sure the many WarCraft Adventure fans would hate to see Blizzard dump another possibly cool game just because it isn't another rehash of a previous title, but instead extends the story behind those titles.
I have a hard time with some of the console versions of PC games. After all the Doom and Duke Nukem versions were just flat out pathetic. Blizzard is just doing this for the almighty dollar.
I think the differences in games that are really suitable for the console vs. the PC (mainly available controls and what needs to be done to make a type of game work on one vs the other) is exactly why they've chosen to put this game on a console instead of the PC. It's not an RTS game, or an FPS game (the two hardest genres to do right on consoles from looking at past games, also part of the reason Halo was so cool, they did a great job getting that to work on a console).
Then again, Blizzard sells 7 million copies of any game just by releasing it in Korea, I'm sure they really need the money that comes with their stellar name in the console industry.
Yeah, I have Warcraft 3, I like Warcraft 3 -- yet, I am more interested in Starcraft than I am in Warcraft, and so I am disappointed that the next Starcraft game is not available for the PC (yet). That's all I was saying.
In my opinion, this game is quite a departure from what Blizzard's been doing (since they changed their name to Blizzard practically). I'd expect that if it were another RTS game, they'd release it on PC first and maybe port to console later, like they've done with many of their other games. Perhaps we'll see it on the PC sometime, but I'm not particularly worried about this becoming a trend for Blizzard, nor am I thinking of it as anything other than a StarCraft spin-off.
Thats where your argument falls apart. Although with PC games a software company can release patches to their hearts content, on a console the rules change drastically
I think the 6-9 months referred to the fact that almost every Blizzard game is delayed about that long for the reason stated. No need for patches. Hopefully they can get the game part done properly if they don't have to focus on the various hardware platforms.
That is a clear violation. They have developed code that depends on IE. The fact that they provide alternate, separate code to do the same thing is irrelevent. They obviously want to play "use nice version A to do X if you have IE or use crappy version B to do X if you use something else". Version A must comply with the settlement, which means it cannot depend on IE specific functionality to install or run. It does, end of story.
Actually, it doesn't depend on IE, it depends on a valid host capable of containing an ActiveX control. As far as I know, IE is the only browser capable of doing that, but there's nothing (that I'm aware of) preventing other browsers from doing so, and you could always simply develop a small piece of software that accesses and displays the site. You also don't have to go to Windows Update to get the service pack, as the download link here points directly to the installation exe file.
No it doesn't. What defines what the shipped software is "supposed" to do? Nothing: there's no documentation. The user who executes documented, supported functionality cannot do anything with this software.
I thought the settlement proposal defined what this piece of software had to do. As far as I've been able to tell it does allow me to set access to the associated programs. What functionality is missing?
Fine, it's an oversight. It is an oversight that results in noncompliance with the proposed settlement agreement. (See below)... Somebody above pointed out that one of the conditions for the DOJ to agree to support the proposed settlement was that MS agree to be compliant with it immediately. You assert that they haven't signed "anything" yet, which contradicts this. Who is correct?
MS has gone before the Court and said that they agree that the proposed settlement will remedy their anticompetitive behavior. If they then turn around and issue software that doesn't comply with THEIR OWN position, while they simultaneously and wrongly assert that it does, then doesn't that mean that A) they are acting in bad faith and B) greater enforcement oversight is needed.
Acting in bad faith usually means that they intended not to comply with the proposal. So far as I have seen at least 1 of the items mentioned in the article is provably false (the start menu item) and most of them do not appear to be clear violations, but rather differences of interpretation at best (and at worst simply ill-will on the part of MS' competitors). If it is found that they are not in compliance, however, then I do agree that there needs to be greater enforcement oversight. If it is also true that this group had the oppurtunity to speak out regarding these things during beta testing of this control as Microsoft has said they did, then I'd also question why MS should be expected to have read their minds.
The other main problem mentioned is this: people know that they use ControlPanel->Add/Remove to add or remove programs. So how do you add or remove IE/OutlookExpress? Simple, you use "Set Program Access and Defaults" of course. Couldn't have been made more obvious for people to use. Especially when it's not in the start menu, doesn't have any help files, doesn't tell you what alternative products (browsers etc.) you have to choose from, and can screw up your system completely if you use it incorrectly.
I think it's interesting that you point these things out since: 1) It's in the Add/Remove Programs app that you access from the control panel
2)There are already some items for which you have to select the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' section of this same app (actually IE and Outlook Express are listed there in Win2k, which IS somewhat confusing)
Other than that, I'd be interested to know what exactly this thing can do to 'screw up your system completely', considering that changing the selections back to the way they were before should reverse any changes you made. The fact that alternative applications are not listed simply points out that other application vendors haven't had time (or the desire) to modify their applications to be listed here. Certainly you don't intend for MS to keep a list of all 3rd party software that might replace a Microsoft app and put those apps in there themselves?
I also liked the mention of it not being accessable from the start menu, as, strangely enough, both my Win2k and WinXP machines do have this icon in the start menu, and I personally moved them to less visible locations (like I do most applications that install shortcuts at highly visible locations of the start menu).
And seeing how many cover bands there are out there traveling the countryside, it can't be that hard to get permission to play all sorts of copyrighted material. Where's the damned problem?
Actually, considering all of the RIAA's drivel about protecting the artists from copyright infringement by Napster users, they generally don't keep track of what songs bands play live (even huge multi-platinum bands) in the US. This means that even though artists are supposed to get royalties for performances of their songs, many times they never see them, or never even know their songs are being performed by other artists in the first place. As soon as someone releases a CD, though, I'm sure someone takes notice.
So write your own damn material. This glomming on to the creative and hard work of others under the guide of "free speech" is disgusting.
I tend to agree with you. However, there is some legitimacy to the argument when you consider the history of covers in music and transitioning pieces from one art form to another. While the vast majority of covers are just the same thing done by a different band, there are definite examples of people truly being creative with someone else's piece (though the original writer doesn't always like the results). Personally, if I had never heard Jimi Hendrix, I could absolutely say that I disliked everything Bob Dylan's ever done. Hendrix made it clear to me that Dylan was a good writer, though not a good performer (and, obviously, not everyone agrees with me).
It gets a little trickier when we consider "Hunchback"... V. Hugo wasn't that long ago, but it is pretty clear that that stuff belongs in the public domain. I'm just not sure yet about Mickey & Donald.
Certainly copyrights can't be *forever*. But I do suggest people are making too much of this Disney business.
The vast majority of Disney's movies are on controlled release schedules, often not available for up to 20 years at a time. Some people consider this a good thing, but ultimately it's just a company milking old material for all it's worth (or more than it's worth if you really think about it). In fact, much of what Disney's done in my lifetime has simply been rehashing old characters for new series/movies. Is it really any different because Disney's doing it than if someone else was doing it? It's not like the original creators of most of these characters are still there.
My English teacher was pretty cool about it, gave me the final mark of 98%, but my Math teacher was a jerk, and told me that because of my absences, he was only going to give me 85%..
Because it was still an A, I didn't care too much, but it kind of bugs me now.. I should have gone to the principal
That's ok, an 85% is a fairly solid mid-level B in every class I've ever taken, and no math teacher worth taking a class from would've rounded it up. The fact that either of them let you pass their courses shows that your school was very lenient to begin with, because there's a 30 day cap on absences (per semester) in most school districts in the area where I grew up.
It abridges your right to perform copyrighted material (songs and plays for instance), to reproduce a copyrighted work in another form (freedom of press and possibly speech), and so on. The article points out that Disney used a great deal of public domain literature as the basis for some of it's most profitable works (and let's not forget the music in Fantasia), yet none of Disney's work has gone to public domain despite the long timeframe since their original creator's death (never mind the time from creation). What someone might have done with that work we'll most likely never know, though returning the copyright terms to their previous state will at least allow people to utilize those works that were about to lose their copyright protection when the law was passed.
They point out quite a few good examples, such as publishing public domain texts online, which if not a form of speech is most likely a form of press in which the retroactive nature of the law forced people to stop work that they had already begun in anticipation of those pieces going into the public domain.
Well gee thanks. I didn't know that if you are able to rationalize and justify a crime with a bunch of useless rhetoric in the form of 4 massive paragraphs that this is an indication of a thought process.
It's always nice to know that people understand that just because it's a law doesn't mean it's morally and ethically right. After all, I currently live in an area of the US where slavery was accepted and legally protected, where racial segregation was legally enforced (the Pentagon was built with separate bathrooms for whites and 'colored people', they were desegregated by a federal order to remove the state requirement for that particular building shortly before the building opened for business), and where laws still sit on the books preventing you from having sex with your partner in particular ways (such as the woman on top). Most people clearly see the first two as morally wrong, and most people laugh at the third, though apparently at one time there was enough moral support to put these laws on the books in the first place.
If people don't analyze the laws in place then we'll never know if they're a reflection of our morals or if they're simply the reflection of the wishes of a particular group which wishes to impose it's own views on others. The law is supposed to protect the minority while enforcing the beliefs of the majority, but that balance is one that's hard to maintain, especially when some have more influence than others.
why was he charged with copyright violation, and not with theft?
The bonus was that he wasn't even charged with that, he was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, which seems like a rather lofty charge, but what it comes down to is that he helped people use bandwidth and disk space on government servers (which is theft of service). Too many people seem focused on what they used that space and bandwidth for, though. Basically what it comes down to is that if they had used p2p or legally available space and bandwidth it's unlikely that anyone involved would have done any time, because everyone that was only charged with copyright violations got penalties that didn't include jail time.
How is this an "illegal extension of their monopoly powers"? I'm intrigued
Some people believe that by giving computers (and software) to schools Microsoft is extending their monopoly into another market. The reason, of course, is simply because in the past Apple has dominated that market, and it was viewed that this was one of the few ways Microsoft could actually gain market share there.
Of course, the implication is that the market actually exists in the first place. In my experience schools (other than colleges anyway) rarely actually buy any computers or software. They simply use what's been donated to them until it stops working. The grade school I went to had a lab full of Apple II computers for at least 10 years.
However, a surprisingly large percentage of people (I wish I had the actual numbers, but I recall it being far higher than I would have expected) buy custom-built machines from neighborhood computer stores, where, assuming the store does not use a pirated copy of Windows, they would likely have to pay a lot closer to the full cost of the OS.
In my experience (having bought all of my computer parts in mom & pop shops, though putting them together myself rather than having them put one together for me) most shops go through MS' OEM program and sell the OS for about half the cost of retail price, with the proper hardware purchases. Some of them will fudge a bit (sell you Windows at OEM price with almost any hardware, rather than just the stuff required by the normal MS agreement), but most, at least in larger areas, tend to shy away from anything that might have the slightest chance of getting them busted. Then again, I saw more things that looked like possible piracy back in the Win9x days before we had product activation and all the rest of this crap.
Also, I'm not sure if this has been significantly improved with 2k/XP, but I know that most 9x users would be happy to hear that they don't have to worry about rebooting their machines with every change they make. I recently helped someone format their hard drive and reinstall Win98, and it must have taken at least 9 or 10 reboots before we had the machine at a good state.
2k improved some things in this regard and XP improved some more. It still takes a reboot or two to get XP up and running, but, for the most part, there's little you would install after that which requires a reboot. There are a LOT of software installs that tell you to reboot, yet don't actually require it to work properly (because they were written for 98/Me or even 2k), and there are a couple of hardware items that require a reboot. Network cards, specifically, do not require a reboot, as XP will just restart the network stack (2k did require a reboot for this). I probably wouldn't have noticed that one if Intel hadn't released 2 or 3 driver updates for my NIC since XP was released. My SBLive requires a reboot as well, but I think that might have something to do with Creative's driver installation routines rather than with an actual requirement of Windows (it seems that the SBLive doesn't perform quite as well under XP as it did under 2k, I suspect that Creative is yet again trying to get users to upgrade to the newest hardware by not supporting it correctly under the newest OS, the same type of thing (only much more drastic, my old card barely worked at all; at least for the majority of things the SBLive is still as good a card as it was under any other OS) happened when moving to 2k).
Personally, I'll always have issues with certain things under each version of Windows, but I can't complain about stability or having to reboot to do this or that. My 2k and XP machines generally run for weeks or months at a time without a lockup or a requirement for a restart (though occasionally a Windows update will prompt to reboot, I'd like to see them do as much as possible to limit that). They're not servers, though, so that kind of uptime isn't necessarily a requirement, I just feel it's a waste of my time to go through the process that I face when I shut my computer down every morning and boot it up every evening (or vice versa at work). I shouldn't have to leave my computer or sit and wait just to get my email when I get home and get some music going. Instead the thing runs and Ill have messages waiting in IRC and my email and everything's ready to go when I am, instead of me waiting on the computer (of course, with XP's boot time it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still don't want to wait for the damned thing, or for Outlook to connect to the email server and download 12-16 hours worth of email).
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*laugh* Ballmer only seems to see things in terms of money. It should be painfully obvious that Linux didn't start off "bankrupt", it started off free, which is hardly the same thing.
Which was exactly his point, and why he said 'in a way' rather than just leaving it as 'started off bankrupt'. You can't stop Linux the way Novell was stopped (assuming Novell was, in some markets their software is still used), because there's no company controlling it. All of the Linux companies in the world could go bankrupt and Linux would still be there.
bah I missed one closing tag, but it was at the very beginning...
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's.
Most gamers seem to be happy with mid-range CPUs now, preferring to spend their money on the graphics card. What games are being played makes a difference here, but in most cases a new video card will give you more improvement than a new CPU.
Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
I think that if you looked a little closer you'd realize that there was a lot of the same thing going on back then, too. The most major difference today is that there are a lot more games coming out, and the innovative games don't always get the best coverage. As for Quake 1 vs Quake 3 specifically, I think you'd have a hard time really comparing them, because id software was going for a different purpose with Quake 3, basically trying to design a multiplayer game from the start, rather than a single player game with the multiplayer tacked on (so badly, I might add, that they basically redid the whole multiplayer subsystem). I didn't particularly like Q3, but at least I can see that they had a fundamentally different design for the game from it's previous incarnations. We do get a lot of repetition through the wonders of increased marketing, and it's been that way at least since Doom came along and everyone started making FPS games. However, if I really looked at it, I'd say that before that we had a lot of side-scrollers that didn't really have much difference between them, and before that was the top-down style of games, some of which were also the scrollers that pre-dated the side-scrollers.
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
The UT2003 demo seems to run very well on my system, which, although it has the 2GHz CPU, is running a quite old GeForce2 GTS (old for a video card anyway). Since game performance really depends on that card for most of the games I play, it will probably be my next upgrade. There's certainly nothing in any existing game pushing me towards the 2.8GHz processors currently available or the 3+GHz CPUs on the horizon. I'm sure Ill eventually buy a faster processor, but it'll probably be something like the reason I upgraded to the 2GHz CPU as well, it made sense with the amount of money I was going to spend anyway.
As for why Zork and the like may have been more immersive to you, perhaps it had a lot to do with the level of imagination it takes for those games. A lot of people are just as easily engrossed in a good book as in a good movie. Your mind supplies most of the details, so you don't get limited by the machines capabilities or knocked out of the illusion by something the designers used that doesn't mesh with your vision of the game world. Many game companies have even considered developing text-based games again for many of those same reasons, but usually there's little demand for them at anything other than the lowest price points.
That analogy is flawed because Jaguars and Porsches are a lot faster than the average car.
Actually, they're not, but that perception is part of why they sell. The reality is that there's a perception that the Porsche or Jaguar is a better car, for whatever reason, just as some people have a perception that the Mac is a better computer, for whatever reason. Because of that perception, they're willing to pay more. Apple has significantly better margins than any other PC OEM. Their sales estimates and so on are based on their actual market, not on the total PC market. Much like Alienware and other small PC OEMs do much better than Dell or HP on a per-unit basis, and manage to survive despite having a significantly smaller user base. In other words, if the company does well on it's current user base, they don't have to take extreme measures (such as changing architectures and pissing off their users and developers) to build that user base. They need growth, but not to the point of having a greater overall market share than Dell or HP.
Apple is always on the hairy edge. If there were fewer Mac titles, they'd lose market share. Then there would be fewer Macs and the incentive to develop Mac titles would be less -- which would mean even fewer titles. I think you see where this is going.
In some ways that's true, but primarily Apple has been doing very well since Jobs came back. They make a lot of money, despite their small market share, and in the end all they need to do is continue slow growth.
I wish Apple well, but the only way that I think they have a chance in the long run is to bit the bullet, change CPU families, and create Macs that perform as well as PCs at similar price points.
Changing CPU families when software is still catching up with the last major OS changes could very well lose a great deal of the developer support they already have. Otherwise, they'd have to do extensive work to limit the amount of work developers have to do on the platform change, which would probably include emulating the current platform on the x86 for existing apps, which wouldn't be pretty.
If they try to become a software house like Microsoft by selling OS-X for generic x86 PCs, they will probably be destroyed by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually viewed Apple as a competitor (rather than a faux competitor that keeps the FTC off of their backs), life would get ugly at Apple. Microsoft would likely not produce a version of Office for OS-x86 (clever name, eh?). Microsoft would discourage Windows developers from creating titles for OS-x86. Microsoft could withold support or even actively sabotage titles with "service packs" to punish software publishers who released OS-x86 titles.
The real loss, though, if Apple went to generic hardware, would be on Apple's bottom line. By far they make most of their money on hardware. This is most blatantly obvious when you look at parts they sell with a new Mac purchase which are available for the PC as well (such as the SuperDrive, and their prices for RAM and hard drives). They make a killing on the hardware, and most of their standard software is cheap relative to x86 equivalents (though their upgrade pricing on the OS is a little steep, since essentially all OS purchases are upgrades). If they're making any money on software right now, it's not much in the consumer market. Microsoft might be able to sit back and do nothing if Apple made that decision, because the increased support costs and decresed revenue (from lack of hardware sales) would kill them without intervention.
That depends on how the compiler resolves 1,000,000
Chances are it won't compile to get to the for loop in the first place.
ns, most of the pictures from the nVidia visit were of things discussed in the ATI visit. Even if they had gotten an equal amount of information from nVidia, it would've been the same thing with minor details changed.
3dfx might still be around because they won a lawsuit against NVIDIA, but NVIDIA bought out 3dfx and killed support for people that had recent 3dfx hardware.
nVidia didn't buy 3dfx, they just bought most of their IP and remaining chip inventory. The company (3dfx Interactive) itself shut down their manufacturing and cut off their users from downloading existing drivers.
If it were me, I'd look at the architecture of DNS and copy the strengths of its distributed design. Then again, DNS is borne of scientists aiming for an open internet, not corporations looking to lock it down.
That still doesn't negate the problem of the single-point of failure in a passport-type system. That is, once someone has your single user name and password to log in to passport, they have everything that goes with that passport. Just like if you can hijack someone's DNS resolution, you can send them wherever you want for anything (thereby hijacking all of their website passwords if you're patient enough and those passwords aren't encrypted well enough).
That's basically why I only use passport for a couple of things, and store nothing in it. Hotmail and MSN Messenger? Fine. My credit card numbers? Hell no.
or this ;)
Heck, right now, if I bought a console, I'd also have to buy a TV to hook it up to!
Buy a VGA Adapter instead. I played most of my consoles on my 19" monitor until very recently because I only had a 13" TV. Now that I've got a 27" TV I've finally got all of my consoles and DVD player hooked up to that and freed up some of the clutter on my desk.
They just gave a slap in the face to StarCraft fans, adding insult to injury. I think most StarCraft fans are disgusted at this announcement, as am I (And judging from the outcry on sclegacy).
Gee, is that anything like StarCraft was a slap in the face to WarCraft fans, who had to wait until very recently to play WarCraft 3 (let's see, I first played WarCraft 2 in 1996...)? Get over it, there's little chance that there won't be a StarCraft 2, it's just a matter of time. Personally, I'd hate to see any Blizzard game rushed, and I'm sure the many WarCraft Adventure fans would hate to see Blizzard dump another possibly cool game just because it isn't another rehash of a previous title, but instead extends the story behind those titles.
I have a hard time with some of the console versions of PC games. After all the Doom and Duke Nukem versions were just flat out pathetic. Blizzard is just doing this for the almighty dollar.
I think the differences in games that are really suitable for the console vs. the PC (mainly available controls and what needs to be done to make a type of game work on one vs the other) is exactly why they've chosen to put this game on a console instead of the PC. It's not an RTS game, or an FPS game (the two hardest genres to do right on consoles from looking at past games, also part of the reason Halo was so cool, they did a great job getting that to work on a console).
Then again, Blizzard sells 7 million copies of any game just by releasing it in Korea, I'm sure they really need the money that comes with their stellar name in the console industry.
Yeah, I have Warcraft 3, I like Warcraft 3 -- yet, I am more interested in Starcraft than I am in Warcraft, and so I am disappointed that the next Starcraft game is not available for the PC (yet). That's all I was saying.
In my opinion, this game is quite a departure from what Blizzard's been doing (since they changed their name to Blizzard practically). I'd expect that if it were another RTS game, they'd release it on PC first and maybe port to console later, like they've done with many of their other games. Perhaps we'll see it on the PC sometime, but I'm not particularly worried about this becoming a trend for Blizzard, nor am I thinking of it as anything other than a StarCraft spin-off.
Thats where your argument falls apart. Although with PC games a software company can release patches to their hearts content, on a console the rules change drastically
I think the 6-9 months referred to the fact that almost every Blizzard game is delayed about that long for the reason stated. No need for patches. Hopefully they can get the game part done properly if they don't have to focus on the various hardware platforms.
That is a clear violation. They have developed code that depends on IE. The fact that they provide alternate, separate code to do the same thing is irrelevent. They obviously want to play "use nice version A to do X if you have IE or use crappy version B to do X if you use something else". Version A must comply with the settlement, which means it cannot depend on IE specific functionality to install or run. It does, end of story.
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Actually, it doesn't depend on IE, it depends on a valid host capable of containing an ActiveX control. As far as I know, IE is the only browser capable of doing that, but there's nothing (that I'm aware of) preventing other browsers from doing so, and you could always simply develop a small piece of software that accesses and displays the site. You also don't have to go to Windows Update to get the service pack, as the download link here points directly to the installation exe file.
No it doesn't. What defines what the shipped software is "supposed" to do? Nothing: there's no documentation. The user who executes documented, supported functionality cannot do anything with this software.
I thought the settlement proposal defined what this piece of software had to do. As far as I've been able to tell it does allow me to set access to the associated programs. What functionality is missing?
Fine, it's an oversight. It is an oversight that results in noncompliance with the proposed settlement agreement. (See below)
Somebody above pointed out that one of the conditions for the DOJ to agree to support the proposed settlement was that MS agree to be compliant with it immediately. You assert that they haven't signed "anything" yet, which contradicts this. Who is correct?
MS has gone before the Court and said that they agree that the proposed settlement will remedy their anticompetitive behavior. If they then turn around and issue software that doesn't comply with THEIR OWN position, while they simultaneously and wrongly assert that it does, then doesn't that mean that A) they are acting in bad faith and B) greater enforcement oversight is needed.
Acting in bad faith usually means that they intended not to comply with the proposal. So far as I have seen at least 1 of the items mentioned in the article is provably false (the start menu item) and most of them do not appear to be clear violations, but rather differences of interpretation at best (and at worst simply ill-will on the part of MS' competitors). If it is found that they are not in compliance, however, then I do agree that there needs to be greater enforcement oversight. If it is also true that this group had the oppurtunity to speak out regarding these things during beta testing of this control as Microsoft has said they did, then I'd also question why MS should be expected to have read their minds.
The other main problem mentioned is this: people know that they use ControlPanel->Add/Remove to add or remove programs. So how do you add or remove IE/OutlookExpress? Simple, you use "Set Program Access and Defaults" of course. Couldn't have been made more obvious for people to use. Especially when it's not in the start menu, doesn't have any help files, doesn't tell you what alternative products (browsers etc.) you have to choose from, and can screw up your system completely if you use it incorrectly.
I think it's interesting that you point these things out since:
1) It's in the Add/Remove Programs app that you access from the control panel
2)There are already some items for which you have to select the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' section of this same app (actually IE and Outlook Express are listed there in Win2k, which IS somewhat confusing)
Other than that, I'd be interested to know what exactly this thing can do to 'screw up your system completely', considering that changing the selections back to the way they were before should reverse any changes you made. The fact that alternative applications are not listed simply points out that other application vendors haven't had time (or the desire) to modify their applications to be listed here. Certainly you don't intend for MS to keep a list of all 3rd party software that might replace a Microsoft app and put those apps in there themselves?
I also liked the mention of it not being accessable from the start menu, as, strangely enough, both my Win2k and WinXP machines do have this icon in the start menu, and I personally moved them to less visible locations (like I do most applications that install shortcuts at highly visible locations of the start menu).
The VB runtime is part of the .Net framework now ;)
typing stupid shit because it doesn't take 20 seconds to type the above comment
And seeing how many cover bands there are out there traveling the countryside, it can't be that hard to get permission to play all sorts of copyrighted material. Where's the damned problem?
Actually, considering all of the RIAA's drivel about protecting the artists from copyright infringement by Napster users, they generally don't keep track of what songs bands play live (even huge multi-platinum bands) in the US. This means that even though artists are supposed to get royalties for performances of their songs, many times they never see them, or never even know their songs are being performed by other artists in the first place. As soon as someone releases a CD, though, I'm sure someone takes notice.
So write your own damn material. This glomming on to the creative and hard work of others under the guide of "free speech" is disgusting.
I tend to agree with you. However, there is some legitimacy to the argument when you consider the history of covers in music and transitioning pieces from one art form to another. While the vast majority of covers are just the same thing done by a different band, there are definite examples of people truly being creative with someone else's piece (though the original writer doesn't always like the results). Personally, if I had never heard Jimi Hendrix, I could absolutely say that I disliked everything Bob Dylan's ever done. Hendrix made it clear to me that Dylan was a good writer, though not a good performer (and, obviously, not everyone agrees with me).
It gets a little trickier when we consider "Hunchback" ... V. Hugo wasn't that long ago, but it is pretty clear that that stuff belongs in the public domain. I'm just not sure yet about Mickey & Donald.
Certainly copyrights can't be *forever*. But I do suggest people are making too much of this Disney business.
The vast majority of Disney's movies are on controlled release schedules, often not available for up to 20 years at a time. Some people consider this a good thing, but ultimately it's just a company milking old material for all it's worth (or more than it's worth if you really think about it). In fact, much of what Disney's done in my lifetime has simply been rehashing old characters for new series/movies. Is it really any different because Disney's doing it than if someone else was doing it? It's not like the original creators of most of these characters are still there.
My English teacher was pretty cool about it, gave me the final mark of 98%, but my Math teacher was a jerk, and told me that because of my absences, he was only going to give me 85%..
Because it was still an A, I didn't care too much, but it kind of bugs me now.. I should have gone to the principal
That's ok, an 85% is a fairly solid mid-level B in every class I've ever taken, and no math teacher worth taking a class from would've rounded it up. The fact that either of them let you pass their courses shows that your school was very lenient to begin with, because there's a 30 day cap on absences (per semester) in most school districts in the area where I grew up.
How does copyright stomp on my freedom of speech?
It abridges your right to perform copyrighted material (songs and plays for instance), to reproduce a copyrighted work in another form (freedom of press and possibly speech), and so on. The article points out that Disney used a great deal of public domain literature as the basis for some of it's most profitable works (and let's not forget the music in Fantasia), yet none of Disney's work has gone to public domain despite the long timeframe since their original creator's death (never mind the time from creation). What someone might have done with that work we'll most likely never know, though returning the copyright terms to their previous state will at least allow people to utilize those works that were about to lose their copyright protection when the law was passed.
They point out quite a few good examples, such as publishing public domain texts online, which if not a form of speech is most likely a form of press in which the retroactive nature of the law forced people to stop work that they had already begun in anticipation of those pieces going into the public domain.
Well gee thanks. I didn't know that if you are able to rationalize and justify a crime with a bunch of useless rhetoric in the form of 4 massive paragraphs that this is an indication of a thought process.
It's always nice to know that people understand that just because it's a law doesn't mean it's morally and ethically right. After all, I currently live in an area of the US where slavery was accepted and legally protected, where racial segregation was legally enforced (the Pentagon was built with separate bathrooms for whites and 'colored people', they were desegregated by a federal order to remove the state requirement for that particular building shortly before the building opened for business), and where laws still sit on the books preventing you from having sex with your partner in particular ways (such as the woman on top). Most people clearly see the first two as morally wrong, and most people laugh at the third, though apparently at one time there was enough moral support to put these laws on the books in the first place.
If people don't analyze the laws in place then we'll never know if they're a reflection of our morals or if they're simply the reflection of the wishes of a particular group which wishes to impose it's own views on others. The law is supposed to protect the minority while enforcing the beliefs of the majority, but that balance is one that's hard to maintain, especially when some have more influence than others.
why was he charged with copyright violation, and not with theft?
The bonus was that he wasn't even charged with that, he was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, which seems like a rather lofty charge, but what it comes down to is that he helped people use bandwidth and disk space on government servers (which is theft of service). Too many people seem focused on what they used that space and bandwidth for, though. Basically what it comes down to is that if they had used p2p or legally available space and bandwidth it's unlikely that anyone involved would have done any time, because everyone that was only charged with copyright violations got penalties that didn't include jail time.
How is this an "illegal extension of their monopoly powers"? I'm intrigued
Some people believe that by giving computers (and software) to schools Microsoft is extending their monopoly into another market. The reason, of course, is simply because in the past Apple has dominated that market, and it was viewed that this was one of the few ways Microsoft could actually gain market share there.
Of course, the implication is that the market actually exists in the first place. In my experience schools (other than colleges anyway) rarely actually buy any computers or software. They simply use what's been donated to them until it stops working. The grade school I went to had a lab full of Apple II computers for at least 10 years.
However, a surprisingly large percentage of people (I wish I had the actual numbers, but I recall it being far higher than I would have expected) buy custom-built machines from neighborhood computer stores, where, assuming the store does not use a pirated copy of Windows, they would likely have to pay a lot closer to the full cost of the OS.
In my experience (having bought all of my computer parts in mom & pop shops, though putting them together myself rather than having them put one together for me) most shops go through MS' OEM program and sell the OS for about half the cost of retail price, with the proper hardware purchases. Some of them will fudge a bit (sell you Windows at OEM price with almost any hardware, rather than just the stuff required by the normal MS agreement), but most, at least in larger areas, tend to shy away from anything that might have the slightest chance of getting them busted. Then again, I saw more things that looked like possible piracy back in the Win9x days before we had product activation and all the rest of this crap.
Also, I'm not sure if this has been significantly improved with 2k/XP, but I know that most 9x users would be happy to hear that they don't have to worry about rebooting their machines with every change they make. I recently helped someone format their hard drive and reinstall Win98, and it must have taken at least 9 or 10 reboots before we had the machine at a good state.
2k improved some things in this regard and XP improved some more. It still takes a reboot or two to get XP up and running, but, for the most part, there's little you would install after that which requires a reboot. There are a LOT of software installs that tell you to reboot, yet don't actually require it to work properly (because they were written for 98/Me or even 2k), and there are a couple of hardware items that require a reboot. Network cards, specifically, do not require a reboot, as XP will just restart the network stack (2k did require a reboot for this). I probably wouldn't have noticed that one if Intel hadn't released 2 or 3 driver updates for my NIC since XP was released. My SBLive requires a reboot as well, but I think that might have something to do with Creative's driver installation routines rather than with an actual requirement of Windows (it seems that the SBLive doesn't perform quite as well under XP as it did under 2k, I suspect that Creative is yet again trying to get users to upgrade to the newest hardware by not supporting it correctly under the newest OS, the same type of thing (only much more drastic, my old card barely worked at all; at least for the majority of things the SBLive is still as good a card as it was under any other OS) happened when moving to 2k).
Personally, I'll always have issues with certain things under each version of Windows, but I can't complain about stability or having to reboot to do this or that. My 2k and XP machines generally run for weeks or months at a time without a lockup or a requirement for a restart (though occasionally a Windows update will prompt to reboot, I'd like to see them do as much as possible to limit that). They're not servers, though, so that kind of uptime isn't necessarily a requirement, I just feel it's a waste of my time to go through the process that I face when I shut my computer down every morning and boot it up every evening (or vice versa at work). I shouldn't have to leave my computer or sit and wait just to get my email when I get home and get some music going. Instead the thing runs and Ill have messages waiting in IRC and my email and everything's ready to go when I am, instead of me waiting on the computer (of course, with XP's boot time it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still don't want to wait for the damned thing, or for Outlook to connect to the email server and download 12-16 hours worth of email).