Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets.
Mobile - False. It's just that their previous entries in the mobile market sucked.
Search - True.
Media - Er... what exactly is this supposed to mean? Are we referring to things like mp3 players or desktop software? Yes, they were late to market for portable media devices. No, they were not late to the market with desktop media playing software... except for playing DVDs. And I mean old, original DVDs, not Blu-Ray.
Gaming - Now you're just making shit up. Not only has MS been keeping DirectX ahead of OpenGL, but the Xbox 360 is the top selling console in North America and (as I recall) Europe. The area they're failing nearly completely in is Japan... who are very Xenophobic.
Tablet - False. It's just that their previous entries in the table market never caught on.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that they aren't an advertising company, which is something Apple excels at... and face it, this article is clearly comparing them to Apple and Google only.
What I really hate is what other commenters have noted: online play. When Q3 did it they had a good reason: it was a FPS with no story and the bots weren't that great. But today, it's an excuse to make less content. It's an excuse to make a buggy game. It's an excuse to try to force me to buy an XBox Live subscription. I almost never care. The only times I've really enjoyed online games where when I ended up stumbling upon a server I could play on all the time, with people I knew who would take care of griefers and generally played the game.
My current game of the... well, several years now, is Team Fortress 2.
Having said that, I also, along with 10 other people, run our own server. Not surprisingly, we crack down on griefers and other douchebags, even if we do sometimes disagree on how the server should be run.
In TF2, when you first get the game, you are sort of at a disadvantage, in two different ways: 1. You won't have any of the random-drop or achievement-unlocked weaponry. (All classes have 3 weapon/item slots, which have a default weapon in them. You also start with all 3 weapons and full ammo when you respawn.) 2. TF2 also puts a lot of emphasis in learning the layouts of maps.
Having said that, #1 isn't all that important as the original weapons are some of the most balanced (and least gimmicky) in the game. There are certain dropped weapons that give a clear advantage though. The largest offenders here are: 1. The Soldier's Equalizer. Increases damage and run speed as you take damage. Prevents healing from a Medic. Last I checked TF2Stats, 92% or so of players used it. 2. The Medic's Uber-saw. 25% slower than the Bone Saw it replaces, but builds up your Healing Gun's Uber-Charge meter 25% on each hit. This meter is used by the Medic Gun and Kritzkrieg to make the Medic and their patient invulnerable or have critical hits for the next 8 or so seconds. 3. The Spy's Cloak and Dagger cloaking device. A cloaking device that has a shorter cloaking time than the Invisibility Watch, but standing still while cloaked recharges it. Less likely to be used by "pro" spies.
I've been a fan of RTS games for a long time but nothing kills my interest in a game more than seeing something five or ten times shinier than the last RTS I played with AI and pathfinding every bit as awful as the last one.
So, now that you've told us how much you dislike StarCraft II, what's your opinion on R.U.S.E.?
I couldn't remember getting my hands on a computer till I was 15.
Exactly how old are you grandpa?
I used a computer when I was very young. I don't remember the exact age, but 5-6 sounds right, as it was before we had an NES.
The computer? A Commodore 64. The same one my mother used to kick my brother and I off to type up papers when she was working on her Master's degree in the early 80s.
When I installed my Java update from Apple this morning, I noticed that the wording was similar for Java 1.4 on leopard. Apple may be just announcing that this is the end of the line for Java 6 SE, and only expect future support for Java 7 SE in the next version of OS X.
Unlike Oracle, Apple disables the previous version of Java platform and gives the user the option of re-enabling it by jumping through hoops.
Java 7 isn't finalized yet, let alone having a stable implementation rolled out.
I use the dynamic index but classic discussion (the new one sucks ass)... sometime yesterday, I had to go into my preferences which had changed one of my previously checked settings.
Can't remember which one it was, though.
It might have been that D2 discussions were forced on (Under Help & Preferences, Discussion on the right side, click the Slashdot Classic Discussion System radio button).
In many ways, Apple is helping to move old tech out. Java, some will say, is still quite relevant. Apparently Apple does not agree. The push for getting everyone into HTML 5 using Javascript and all of those technologies necessitates getting rid of the old ways.
You do know that 'Java' is to 'JavaScript' as 'car' is to 'carpet'. Beyond a few shared letters for early buzzword compliance, and things like the Rhino interpreter, there is no real relationship between the two.
(Quoted a larger section of the GP post to make a point)
Where did the GP confuse Java and JavaScript? The GP is making the statement that Apple considers Java (desktop apps) "old tech" and that they are pushing HTML5/JavaScript.
All those sexy HTML5/JavaScript apps have to be written in programming languages and hosted on servers. And plenty of people are building on top of the JVM. Large chunks of both Twitter and Foursquare are written in Scala, a JVM language. Why? Oh, something about how it is good for long-running processes due to something ridiculous like a million engineer-hours going into JVM development.
Apple makes a server OS, but afaik, the percentage of that market is even more minuscule than their share of the desktop market is. Web Servers are dominated by Linux and Windows (with the percentages of each varying wildly depending on whose stats you're reading), which combined control at least 90% of the market regardless of which survey you believe... and in Netcraft's 2009 survey, the only one where OSX is enumated, it is counted as part of the 3.45% of "Other non-UNIX" OSes.
What Apple thinks and does is irrelevant to the server market.
If Microsoft wrote iTunes people would point at it as a symbol of everything that is wrong with Microsoft.
If Microsoft wrote iTunes, corporations would point at it and get the European Union to pursue anti-trust action against Microsoft by "forcing" everyone to use iTMS.
Err, the quote was that Windows and Office were bloated(which directly translates to bad performance on older hardware), not about UI consistency of layout. You're the one setting up a straw man here.
No, setting up a strawman is taking what someone said and misrepresenting it.
For instance, you just did it by referring to "bloated" and ignoring the "and underwhelming, while Apple's are almost always wonderful experiences" part that followed it that would most certainly refer to the UI as well.
Xbox was a huge fail; Xbox 360, on the other hand (while having been released under Gates and not doing that well during that time) has seen steady improvements over it's long life - and is still considered 'premiere' by many after 5 long years (since when, the PS3 and Wii have been released - to limited impact).
360 has been the same money-loser as the original. Have you forgotten the red ring of death debacle, which happened under Ballmer? You seem to think "steady improvements" is going to keep Microsoft on the edge of technology.
You mean the red ring of death debacle caused by the hardware decisions made while the 360 was under development... when Gates was still in charge?
And then there's Windows 2008 R2... While I applaud the decision to go 64-bit only as a way to try and push developers into finally writing for 64-bit systems (after all, the capabilities have been around for what, a decade or so?), I think it may backfire on Microsoft the same way that UAC did in Vista. Users will be most unhappy that their legacy application that they've been running their entire business on for the last eight or twelve years and that can't be updated or is no longer available won't work on the new server they just bought. Of course, Server 2003 & 32-bit Server 2008 will reach their end-of-life eventually as well, and that's the point when things will really change.
You are aware that Server 2008 R2 ships with the 32-bit compatibility layer disabled by default, not totally removed?
The version of the Source engine that TF2 ran on and the version that CSS ran on were not the same until about a month ago. Valve released several changes to the Source engine to go along with the Orange Box. CSS wasn't updated to run on that version of the engine until recently. Benefit the changes were probably not to drastic so the port work to either update CSS or port the old engine shouldn' t have been to extreme, but it would not be trivial.
The version HL2 ran on until 6 months ago was the same as the one CS:S ran on, and that one runs just fine on the PS3.
No, the real reason is because Valve hated the PS3. Valve's CEO Gabe Newell said that the PS3 is "a total disaster" in 2007. Orange Box PS3 was ported from the 360 version by EA.
Valve changed its tune at E3 2010, announcing that their first official PS3 game is Portal 2, due out in February*.
*June or July if you take Valve Time into account.
Xbox is a money loser for MS. They may make some money on the titles and licensing and Xbox Live, but they're in a big hole for the hardware. Financially, Xbox is not successful.
2005 called. It wants its statistics back.
The Gaming division has been making a profit since 2008. While the article doesn't say how much of that is on the hardware, I seem to recall seeing another article (that I can't find now), from either late 2007 or early 2008, that stated MS was finally making money off of each 360 sold.
Then again, as long as suckers keep paying money for Xbox Live subscriptions, even if the hardware was still losing money, its infrastructure would be making it back. That is, now that the models that had the ludicrously high failure rate are off the market.
I'll address some of your points based on Valve's past history and current behavior:
hosted by a single central authority
While Valve will require you to have DotA 2 installed to a Steam account, none of their games so far force you to use Valve servers.
In fact, Valve only runs game servers for Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Windows and Linux dedicated server binaries are available for all multiplayer games except Alien Swam, which forces one of the player to host the game.
requires a monthly fee to play
None of Valve's games have a monthly fee. Perhaps you're confusing them with Blizzard, who has World of Warcraft?
subjects you to "reputation" requirements before you can enter good games
The closest you get here is the L4D/L4D2 matchmaker. I'm not sure how it works, since I've never used it... all the L4D/L4D2 games I've played have been against friends or others in the Steam communities I'm in. (Have I mentioned I suck at L4D/L4D2?)
Since this is valve-based I'm presuming that means steam, and I hate steam in general.
Why?
Will there be LAN play? Will we be able to host our own servers?
I really hope this isn't the reason you hate Steam. Every multi-player Valve game to date has had LAN play. All their multi-player games (save one) have dedicated Windows/Linux server binaries. Alien Swarm is the exception; it forces one of the players to host.
The Steam servers have a cvar (console variable) that can be set in server.cfg to host lan games: sv_lan 1. This causes the server to not list itself on the master server list and possibly several other changes.
The closest Valve has come to a LAN hostile game is Team Fortress 2, where if the server and clients don't have access to the Steam central servers (which host the TF2 inventory), players will be forced to use the default weapons rather than the unlockable weapons introduced since April 2008. The second closest is Alien Swarm, which also deals with unlockable weapons. For all other games, the experience is exactly the same, but without stat logging on the central Steam servers.
TF2's inventory restriction can be gotten around using server plugins, such as SourceMod with the Unlock Replacer plugin, although it may not have been updated since the last major update two weeks ago.
What other game and game engine made so long ago has a solid following, and allows you to join a 10 man-game at any time of day for over 5 or 6 years? WC3 DoTA is rare.... (ok, ok, Everquest deadheads)....
The GoldSrc and Source engines, for one. Counter-Strike (GoldSrc engine, from 12 years ago) still has something like 40,000-60,000 concurrent players at any given time, according to Valve's Steam stats. Its remake, Counter-Strike: Source (Source engine, from 6 years ago updated to use the 2009 version of the engine) has roughly the same number of concurrent players.
Guess what! The DOTA remake is going to use the same game engine the latter is based on, albeit a newer version of it (likely similar to the one Alien Swarm used).
this happened to me on land lines. Being a kid, I knew that I needed to use an area code to call long distance. So I figured that any number that was in my area code was not long distance. So I set about dialing every BBS in my area code. Oops.
Turns out, and I still don't understand why, that quite a few of the numbers I called were not considered local. How was I supposed to know? My dad ended up getting a bill for a couple hundred dollars.
You didn't specify what country you're in. I'm assuming United States...
I don't know about where you lived, but where I lived as a child (in the 80s), any "local long distance" numbers required you to dial 1 first. That changed in the 90s to require you to dial one and the area code first, presumably around the same time they changed area codes so that the middle number wasn't always 0 or 1.
I assume the phone switch knew whether you were dialing an area code or not using that same logic... 1-676-1234 would be local long distance, 1-212-1234 would be long distance including area code (for New York City) with the last 3 digits missing.
Having to pay to NOT receive a service that you DON'T want to receive should be banned.
I agree. When I talked to my parents earlier this week, they mentioned that they couldn't cancel long distance service on their land-line phone because AT&T would charge them an additional fee not to have it... that was the same price as having long distance service.
Since they use their cellphones for long distance, and only keep their landline because they've had the same phone number for 21 years...
Bottom line: My parents are looking into canceling their AT&T phone service, despite meaning they'll lose their old number.
Seriously. If I was Google, I would block all of Oracle's IP space from accessing any Google service. And, hell, IBM's too, for good measure. Then I would threaten to block the IPs of all of Oracle's big customers.
Oracle and IBM have a lot of pull with most Fortune 500 companies. Starting a war with them would be a serious mistake, particularly for a company whose major source of income is advertisements.
Given that this project is only just starting, why can't they just port everything that they need from Harmony into OpenJDK and change over in V4?
At a guess, licensing. OpenJDK uses the GPLv2 (GPLv2+Classpath exception for some files). The Apache 2.0 license isn't compatible with GPLv2, only GPLv3.
The Classpath exception covers the linking of any files covered by it in other software projects without requiring said projects becoming GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Mobile - False. It's just that their previous entries in the mobile market sucked.
Search - True.
Media - Er... what exactly is this supposed to mean? Are we referring to things like mp3 players or desktop software? Yes, they were late to market for portable media devices. No, they were not late to the market with desktop media playing software... except for playing DVDs. And I mean old, original DVDs, not Blu-Ray.
Gaming - Now you're just making shit up. Not only has MS been keeping DirectX ahead of OpenGL, but the Xbox 360 is the top selling console in North America and (as I recall) Europe. The area they're failing nearly completely in is Japan... who are very Xenophobic.
Tablet - False. It's just that their previous entries in the table market never caught on.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that they aren't an advertising company, which is something Apple excels at... and face it, this article is clearly comparing them to Apple and Google only.
You really trust this source?
I believe it when Netcraft says it!
My current game of the... well, several years now, is Team Fortress 2.
Having said that, I also, along with 10 other people, run our own server. Not surprisingly, we crack down on griefers and other douchebags, even if we do sometimes disagree on how the server should be run.
In TF2, when you first get the game, you are sort of at a disadvantage, in two different ways:
1. You won't have any of the random-drop or achievement-unlocked weaponry. (All classes have 3 weapon/item slots, which have a default weapon in them. You also start with all 3 weapons and full ammo when you respawn.)
2. TF2 also puts a lot of emphasis in learning the layouts of maps.
Having said that, #1 isn't all that important as the original weapons are some of the most balanced (and least gimmicky) in the game. There are certain dropped weapons that give a clear advantage though. The largest offenders here are:
1. The Soldier's Equalizer. Increases damage and run speed as you take damage. Prevents healing from a Medic. Last I checked TF2Stats, 92% or so of players used it.
2. The Medic's Uber-saw. 25% slower than the Bone Saw it replaces, but builds up your Healing Gun's Uber-Charge meter 25% on each hit. This meter is used by the Medic Gun and Kritzkrieg to make the Medic and their patient invulnerable or have critical hits for the next 8 or so seconds.
3. The Spy's Cloak and Dagger cloaking device. A cloaking device that has a shorter cloaking time than the Invisibility Watch, but standing still while cloaked recharges it. Less likely to be used by "pro" spies.
So, now that you've told us how much you dislike StarCraft II, what's your opinion on R.U.S.E.?
When I was young, I had to walk 2 miles to school uphill both ways in the snow! Now get off my lawn!
Sincerely,
Every Old Person Ever
Exactly how old are you grandpa?
I used a computer when I was very young. I don't remember the exact age, but 5-6 sounds right, as it was before we had an NES.
The computer? A Commodore 64. The same one my mother used to kick my brother and I off to type up papers when she was working on her Master's degree in the early 80s.
For reference, I'm 31.
Java 7 isn't finalized yet, let alone having a stable implementation rolled out.
I use the dynamic index but classic discussion (the new one sucks ass)... sometime yesterday, I had to go into my preferences which had changed one of my previously checked settings.
Can't remember which one it was, though.
It might have been that D2 discussions were forced on (Under Help & Preferences, Discussion on the right side, click the Slashdot Classic Discussion System radio button).
I don't know about Real, but Adobe (Flash) uses common video codecs, such as H.264.
(Quoted a larger section of the GP post to make a point)
Where did the GP confuse Java and JavaScript? The GP is making the statement that Apple considers Java (desktop apps) "old tech" and that they are pushing HTML5/JavaScript.
Apple makes a server OS, but afaik, the percentage of that market is even more minuscule than their share of the desktop market is. Web Servers are dominated by Linux and Windows (with the percentages of each varying wildly depending on whose stats you're reading), which combined control at least 90% of the market regardless of which survey you believe... and in Netcraft's 2009 survey, the only one where OSX is enumated, it is counted as part of the 3.45% of "Other non-UNIX" OSes.
What Apple thinks and does is irrelevant to the server market.
If Microsoft wrote iTunes, corporations would point at it and get the European Union to pursue anti-trust action against Microsoft by "forcing" everyone to use iTMS.
No, setting up a strawman is taking what someone said and misrepresenting it.
For instance, you just did it by referring to "bloated" and ignoring the "and underwhelming, while Apple's are almost always wonderful experiences" part that followed it that would most certainly refer to the UI as well.
You mean the red ring of death debacle caused by the hardware decisions made while the 360 was under development... when Gates was still in charge?
No, no, no... Apollo brought .NET to Bill Gates in a dream.
Well... Sun did at any rate.
You are aware that Server 2008 R2 ships with the 32-bit compatibility layer disabled by default, not totally removed?
The version HL2 ran on until 6 months ago was the same as the one CS:S ran on, and that one runs just fine on the PS3.
No, the real reason is because Valve hated the PS3. Valve's CEO Gabe Newell said that the PS3 is "a total disaster" in 2007. Orange Box PS3 was ported from the 360 version by EA.
Valve changed its tune at E3 2010, announcing that their first official PS3 game is Portal 2, due out in February*.
*June or July if you take Valve Time into account.
I didn't know Maverick Meerkat did that. Now, if you'd said Dealing Duck or Gibbering Gecko, then it'd make sense.
2005 called. It wants its statistics back.
The Gaming division has been making a profit since 2008. While the article doesn't say how much of that is on the hardware, I seem to recall seeing another article (that I can't find now), from either late 2007 or early 2008, that stated MS was finally making money off of each 360 sold.
Then again, as long as suckers keep paying money for Xbox Live subscriptions, even if the hardware was still losing money, its infrastructure would be making it back. That is, now that the models that had the ludicrously high failure rate are off the market.
I'll address some of your points based on Valve's past history and current behavior:
While Valve will require you to have DotA 2 installed to a Steam account, none of their games so far force you to use Valve servers.
In fact, Valve only runs game servers for Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Windows and Linux dedicated server binaries are available for all multiplayer games except Alien Swam, which forces one of the player to host the game.
None of Valve's games have a monthly fee. Perhaps you're confusing them with Blizzard, who has World of Warcraft?
The closest you get here is the L4D/L4D2 matchmaker. I'm not sure how it works, since I've never used it... all the L4D/L4D2 games I've played have been against friends or others in the Steam communities I'm in. (Have I mentioned I suck at L4D/L4D2?)
Why?
I really hope this isn't the reason you hate Steam. Every multi-player Valve game to date has had LAN play. All their multi-player games (save one) have dedicated Windows/Linux server binaries. Alien Swarm is the exception; it forces one of the players to host.
The Steam servers have a cvar (console variable) that can be set in server.cfg to host lan games: sv_lan 1. This causes the server to not list itself on the master server list and possibly several other changes.
The closest Valve has come to a LAN hostile game is Team Fortress 2, where if the server and clients don't have access to the Steam central servers (which host the TF2 inventory), players will be forced to use the default weapons rather than the unlockable weapons introduced since April 2008. The second closest is Alien Swarm, which also deals with unlockable weapons. For all other games, the experience is exactly the same, but without stat logging on the central Steam servers.
TF2's inventory restriction can be gotten around using server plugins, such as SourceMod with the Unlock Replacer plugin, although it may not have been updated since the last major update two weeks ago.
The GoldSrc and Source engines, for one. Counter-Strike (GoldSrc engine, from 12 years ago) still has something like 40,000-60,000 concurrent players at any given time, according to Valve's Steam stats. Its remake, Counter-Strike: Source (Source engine, from 6 years ago updated to use the 2009 version of the engine) has roughly the same number of concurrent players.
Guess what! The DOTA remake is going to use the same game engine the latter is based on, albeit a newer version of it (likely similar to the one Alien Swarm used).
Unfortunately, both parents have established cell phone numbers that they don't want to give up.
You didn't specify what country you're in. I'm assuming United States...
I don't know about where you lived, but where I lived as a child (in the 80s), any "local long distance" numbers required you to dial 1 first. That changed in the 90s to require you to dial one and the area code first, presumably around the same time they changed area codes so that the middle number wasn't always 0 or 1.
I assume the phone switch knew whether you were dialing an area code or not using that same logic... 1-676-1234 would be local long distance, 1-212-1234 would be long distance including area code (for New York City) with the last 3 digits missing.
I agree. When I talked to my parents earlier this week, they mentioned that they couldn't cancel long distance service on their land-line phone because AT&T would charge them an additional fee not to have it... that was the same price as having long distance service.
Since they use their cellphones for long distance, and only keep their landline because they've had the same phone number for 21 years...
Bottom line: My parents are looking into canceling their AT&T phone service, despite meaning they'll lose their old number.
Oracle and IBM have a lot of pull with most Fortune 500 companies. Starting a war with them would be a serious mistake, particularly for a company whose major source of income is advertisements.
At a guess, licensing. OpenJDK uses the GPLv2 (GPLv2+Classpath exception for some files). The Apache 2.0 license isn't compatible with GPLv2, only GPLv3.
The Classpath exception covers the linking of any files covered by it in other software projects without requiring said projects becoming GPL.