Exactly what I was thinking. What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.
I do have to say I like your idea of Tigerboxes to keep people out of network, but it makes me think of Ghost in the Shell TV series. In that series they had a concept called an "Attack Barrier" that would attack anyone that dived too deep into something they weren't supposed to be in. It could do anything from kill their connection to killing the person doing the dive.
But who's fault is that "hardware X" is not supported on Vista? OSes change over time and sometimes drivers need to be updated to support a new OS. I'd say the blame for incompatible hardware falls in the hands of both Microsoft and Hardware vendors. MS screwed up and didn't give people a backwards compatibility mode, as well, they didn't give hardware companies enough time/warning to fix the problems.
But at the same time, it's been over 1.5 years since software houses have known that the driver stack in Vista was changing. If they wanted to support their older hardware, they should have put out new drivers by now.
I was at the presentation, and rather disappointed as many other people were. I ended up leaving the interview before the "revolt" happened, I just couldn't take anymore of it. As my friend described it "That interview felt like awkward sex."
She kept rambling on and not asking straight-forward questions (they were more statements than questions). Advertising herself and telling her own stories rather than interview the person we were there to hear from. And her response afterwards (seen in one of the youtube links in these comments) is even more appalling. It seems she did no research about the crowd she was interviewing in front of, which caused a huge problem. And to add the comment about how SXSW won't get another big person. Does she realize that last years keynotes were Dan Rather and William Wright (both of with were awesome interviews/presentations). She may be a good writer, but doesn't have a clue how to run a proper live interview.
And not to put all the blame on her, Mark did not help the situation at all. He repeated the same statements over and over, felt like he just kept repeating himself. He also didn't see like the best public speaker (not to say I'm good at it), but he didn't seem ready for what he was thrown into. He could have done some work to steer the presentation in a way that he wanted, but I don't believe he's had enough experience to do this.
Eh, the murderer was twisted, but at least he was protecting his kid. This goes with the whole idea of "a good defense is a good offense", which doesn't seem like the proper way to run a society. Who knows if this guy would have done anything after he got out of jail. It's not anyones right to pass judgment on someone who hasn't committed a crime yet. And he already paid his debt for his first crimes.
it would be interesting to hear the numbers as a breakdown by country. I bet the US is about the same as 4 months ago, if not less. But China and other countries around the world are up.
The nice thing with the model Blizzard has created with Expansions of WoW, when WotLK is released they can completely change the way end-game is played. I don't expect the next expanions end-game to be the same as the current end-game. Increasing the level cap lets them introduce new concepts and remove broken ones.
Personally, I love end-game in WoW right now. You don't need to dedicate yourself to end-game raiding unless you are going for the high-end stuff. 10-man instances are a great way to raid 2 nights a week and still feel like you are acomplishing something. If you want to see the high-end instances you still have to do the 4-5 nights a week.
I think the Arena needs some serious tweaking for the time/gear rewards you get from it. I love the concept, but the gear you get from it is amazing for PvP and overpowered for PvE. I'm normally one of the top DPSers in my guild (we only run Karazhan) and I'm geared almost entirely with Arena pieces. A system where you can completely gear yourself from PvP to make PvE easy seems a little broken to me. It would be nice for a mix (or having the gear transfer over poorly between the 2 end-game activities).
Some game companies wait until a project is ready to release before actually releasing it (Blizzard has a good record of doing this). There will be nay-sayers saying that the game must suck *blah blah blah* because they are pushing back the release date. But in reality, the company realizes that they don't want to disappoint their fans and are hoping to make an excellent game.
Things are run differently in different countries.
As fro Korea and WoW, that isn't completed unexpected. Korea got WoW 2 months after it arived in the states. I'm guessing the beta for Korea started after it went live in the US, meaning the game was basically release candidate quality already, they were just testing localization. I don't think Korean players being able to keep their WoW beta characters is that big of a deal.
Gotta love how the news got leaked out. This was supposed to be covered by the NDA but it escaped from the forums (and it was emailed to testers as well).
It's a lot easier to deal with an internal test team than a large external one. Don't have to worry about supporting the end-users (testers) as much. Don't need to worry about server downtimes and preparing/serving up patches. If Mythic feels they need to do this, it may be good. I still have a lot of faith in the company because of DAoC.
Listening to the audio version of the story, I found a few key points:
* US programmers are still much more expensive than programmers in other countries. * Wipro has software houses in multiple countries around the world, their is their first Software house in the US though. * US programmers know about the culture and idioms of this country, which is needed for some jobs. * Any defense contracts must be worked on my US based developers.
Definitely. PuTTY is some of my favorite small applications for Windows. Serial/Telnet/RLogin/SSH all in a single executable (and I use all 4 of those). SSH Tunneling and lots of other goodies make it an amazing application.
Intel and AMD have some nice agreements between one another where they are allowed to share information about x86 processor extensions and the like. This means if one company designs a cool new extension, the other can pick it up with little hassle.
Nope, it asks if you watch to patch, you don't have to. From what I can tell, you are more than welcome to keep running 1.0.0 version of the iPhone firmware.
Sounds like you've had some bad luck with the products... and you know what, that happens sometimes. I know a lot of people with Apple products in their homes and I hear only good things about them. I've got a Powerbook that I've had for almost 2 years now and it's still functioning fairly well. I've got an iPod Nano that has treated me very well.
Apple doesn't create a lot of hype for most of their products. The iPhone is one of the first products (in a long while) from them where they did a full advertising campaign before a product release. Much of the "hype" that you hear are other Mac/Apple users talking about their computers/toys.
The Poll that Engadget had about the service problems was fairly badly put together. The only way to be able to see results is to vote first. For for all the people that don't even have iPhones, they had to choose 1 of the 3 options before they could see the results. Since there was no "I Don't have an iPhone" options, it severally screwed with the results.
We see Intel mainly as a CPU/chipset maker, but don't pay much attention to their software side. I believe they are one of the largest software development companies in the world. Between drivers, compilers, and all the other goodies to support all their hardware, they spend a lot of time doing software development.
And as much as they develop compilers to optimize code for Intel CPUs, the code most of the time will also see a speed increase on AMD CPUs as well. Who else do you want developing a compiler but the people who made the hardware it's running on.
My office (of 50 people) has been using Cisco phones for 4 years now, and they have been wonderful to us. Well, corporate (9000 people) decided that we are going to move to a full Nortel phone system. As the phones were being installed, we started complaining how much the new system sucks (our old phones were so much better). Well, the Nortel contractors that were installing our phones come over to us and proceeds to tell us how almost every single company they have helped move from Cisco to Nortel phones does nothing but complain how bad the Nortel system is.
Screw you Nortel, learn to make some phones that don't suck.
That's the advantage of working a big company. Some things move slowly and you don't have much control over, but everything I've ever seen within my company is by-the-book. I have never heard of anyone pirating software or doing any of that sort of stuff. If you can make a case for software you need, the company will normally buy it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what I was thinking. What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.
This sounds like a horrid idea.
I do have to say I like your idea of Tigerboxes to keep people out of network, but it makes me think of Ghost in the Shell TV series. In that series they had a concept called an "Attack Barrier" that would attack anyone that dived too deep into something they weren't supposed to be in. It could do anything from kill their connection to killing the person doing the dive.
But who's fault is that "hardware X" is not supported on Vista? OSes change over time and sometimes drivers need to be updated to support a new OS. I'd say the blame for incompatible hardware falls in the hands of both Microsoft and Hardware vendors. MS screwed up and didn't give people a backwards compatibility mode, as well, they didn't give hardware companies enough time/warning to fix the problems.
But at the same time, it's been over 1.5 years since software houses have known that the driver stack in Vista was changing. If they wanted to support their older hardware, they should have put out new drivers by now.
I was at the presentation, and rather disappointed as many other people were. I ended up leaving the interview before the "revolt" happened, I just couldn't take anymore of it. As my friend described it "That interview felt like awkward sex."
She kept rambling on and not asking straight-forward questions (they were more statements than questions). Advertising herself and telling her own stories rather than interview the person we were there to hear from. And her response afterwards (seen in one of the youtube links in these comments) is even more appalling. It seems she did no research about the crowd she was interviewing in front of, which caused a huge problem. And to add the comment about how SXSW won't get another big person. Does she realize that last years keynotes were Dan Rather and William Wright (both of with were awesome interviews/presentations). She may be a good writer, but doesn't have a clue how to run a proper live interview.
And not to put all the blame on her, Mark did not help the situation at all. He repeated the same statements over and over, felt like he just kept repeating himself. He also didn't see like the best public speaker (not to say I'm good at it), but he didn't seem ready for what he was thrown into. He could have done some work to steer the presentation in a way that he wanted, but I don't believe he's had enough experience to do this.
it would be interesting to hear the numbers as a breakdown by country. I bet the US is about the same as 4 months ago, if not less. But China and other countries around the world are up.
The nice thing with the model Blizzard has created with Expansions of WoW, when WotLK is released they can completely change the way end-game is played. I don't expect the next expanions end-game to be the same as the current end-game. Increasing the level cap lets them introduce new concepts and remove broken ones.
Personally, I love end-game in WoW right now. You don't need to dedicate yourself to end-game raiding unless you are going for the high-end stuff. 10-man instances are a great way to raid 2 nights a week and still feel like you are acomplishing something. If you want to see the high-end instances you still have to do the 4-5 nights a week.
I think the Arena needs some serious tweaking for the time/gear rewards you get from it. I love the concept, but the gear you get from it is amazing for PvP and overpowered for PvE. I'm normally one of the top DPSers in my guild (we only run Karazhan) and I'm geared almost entirely with Arena pieces. A system where you can completely gear yourself from PvP to make PvE easy seems a little broken to me. It would be nice for a mix (or having the gear transfer over poorly between the 2 end-game activities).
Some game companies wait until a project is ready to release before actually releasing it (Blizzard has a good record of doing this). There will be nay-sayers saying that the game must suck *blah blah blah* because they are pushing back the release date. But in reality, the company realizes that they don't want to disappoint their fans and are hoping to make an excellent game.
Things are run differently in different countries.
As fro Korea and WoW, that isn't completed unexpected. Korea got WoW 2 months after it arived in the states. I'm guessing the beta for Korea started after it went live in the US, meaning the game was basically release candidate quality already, they were just testing localization. I don't think Korean players being able to keep their WoW beta characters is that big of a deal.
Gotta love how the news got leaked out. This was supposed to be covered by the NDA but it escaped from the forums (and it was emailed to testers as well).
It's a lot easier to deal with an internal test team than a large external one. Don't have to worry about supporting the end-users (testers) as much. Don't need to worry about server downtimes and preparing/serving up patches. If Mythic feels they need to do this, it may be good. I still have a lot of faith in the company because of DAoC.
Conan already give Apple a bunch of wonderful ideas for the iPhone:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1xXNoB3t8vM
Listening to the audio version of the story, I found a few key points:
* US programmers are still much more expensive than programmers in other countries.
* Wipro has software houses in multiple countries around the world, their is their first Software house in the US though.
* US programmers know about the culture and idioms of this country, which is needed for some jobs.
* Any defense contracts must be worked on my US based developers.
Definitely. PuTTY is some of my favorite small applications for Windows. Serial/Telnet/RLogin/SSH all in a single executable (and I use all 4 of those). SSH Tunneling and lots of other goodies make it an amazing application.
Intel and AMD have some nice agreements between one another where they are allowed to share information about x86 processor extensions and the like. This means if one company designs a cool new extension, the other can pick it up with little hassle.
(Or at least that's how I remember it working)
Nope, it asks if you watch to patch, you don't have to. From what I can tell, you are more than welcome to keep running 1.0.0 version of the iPhone firmware.
You have to press the "Check for Updates" button in iTunes to get it. iTunes only auto-checks for updates every 7 days or so.
Sounds like you've had some bad luck with the products... and you know what, that happens sometimes. I know a lot of people with Apple products in their homes and I hear only good things about them. I've got a Powerbook that I've had for almost 2 years now and it's still functioning fairly well. I've got an iPod Nano that has treated me very well.
Apple doesn't create a lot of hype for most of their products. The iPhone is one of the first products (in a long while) from them where they did a full advertising campaign before a product release. Much of the "hype" that you hear are other Mac/Apple users talking about their computers/toys.
The Poll that Engadget had about the service problems was fairly badly put together. The only way to be able to see results is to vote first. For for all the people that don't even have iPhones, they had to choose 1 of the 3 options before they could see the results. Since there was no "I Don't have an iPhone" options, it severally screwed with the results.
Wow, I think you did have a bad day. haha.
Seeing that the person I was replying to is a friend of mine, it was more joking around as I thought he was going to be modded down.
You are always welcome to startup your own Slashdot like site. You can even you Slashcode if you want to do it.
We see Intel mainly as a CPU/chipset maker, but don't pay much attention to their software side. I believe they are one of the largest software development companies in the world. Between drivers, compilers, and all the other goodies to support all their hardware, they spend a lot of time doing software development.
And as much as they develop compilers to optimize code for Intel CPUs, the code most of the time will also see a speed increase on AMD CPUs as well. Who else do you want developing a compiler but the people who made the hardware it's running on.
Since the website is already starting to die:4 8f67896ca8f/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/32d28c3271b0bc44f012
My office (of 50 people) has been using Cisco phones for 4 years now, and they have been wonderful to us. Well, corporate (9000 people) decided that we are going to move to a full Nortel phone system. As the phones were being installed, we started complaining how much the new system sucks (our old phones were so much better). Well, the Nortel contractors that were installing our phones come over to us and proceeds to tell us how almost every single company they have helped move from Cisco to Nortel phones does nothing but complain how bad the Nortel system is.
Screw you Nortel, learn to make some phones that don't suck.
Why are Sun and IBM collaborating on something like this? They tend to be direct competitors in many markets...
That's the advantage of working a big company. Some things move slowly and you don't have much control over, but everything I've ever seen within my company is by-the-book. I have never heard of anyone pirating software or doing any of that sort of stuff. If you can make a case for software you need, the company will normally buy it for you.