Yeah, looking back at it... config.sys and autoexec.bat were mystererious and bothersome... but my thirst for wolfenstein forced me to tinker with it until it finally worked.
Ironically, it also fueled my passion to get a pentium (and play things like X-Wing).
Ah those were the days... everything was mysterious, new stuff came out so fast, and 11-13 year olds comparing CPU speed was analogous to adults discussing penis size.
True that.... You can download Linux for free and get all of your power applications (evolution, open office, dia, gimp, [the list goes on...]). Do some security configuration and then you don't have to buy virus scanners, or adware removal tools, or spyware detectors, or pop-up blockers, or any of that shit.
If you want games, it's cheaper to just play on the console -- yes, give MS some money for Xbox becaues Xbox live rules, but that is certainly better than to having to constantly upgrade video cards, and new versions of windows, and directX versions that may screw things up.
If you want to take it a step further and theme windows, then there's more money to get a decent theme desktop program (and even then it starts to slow things down).
I grew up with MS DOS, and let me tell you... the days of editing config.sys to free up memory to play wolfenstein are over!
Now there are tons of little options all over the place. Spyware/adware/viri install themselves in places you don't even know about. The bloat is incredible... one thing hangs, everything hangs.
Luckily, I got a unix shell account from my local ISP when I was 15 and started to mud. So, I got to learn both really easy.
Ok, the reason I use Linux primarily [at home] is just the options it provides (for free).
- Evolution for getting all of my personal mail and OO-ximian for all of my office needs (very simple at home). - Gentoo to compile and make my old hardware still useful - Less chance for viri/worms and it's easier to see what's going on, or what was installed. Same goes for adware and spyware. - Theme options are much better, much more choices and all for free. All windows themes require clunky third party packages that are slow, and some of them cost money (i.e. the ones you would really want to use).
For a development environment, I don't see a big difference other then that Linux is our production system and developing on Windows just means more testing. There are some nice development tools, but work won't even pay for them so that's not a reason to use linux over windows (or vise versa).
At work, I do use Windows -- because everyone else does, and every time I try to switch (OO, ximian connector, etc).... there are always little wrinkles that I don't have time to deal with. At home, I have more flexibility.
Oh yes, I also now use Xbox for all my gaming so I don't care if linux game support isn't that great.
Alien vs Predator... now there's a great non-mainstream comic concept that should be a really great movie to watch.
I always thought predator was a great concept and they should make more movies
You know, I have to wonder about warez/copyright music and what it really affects. As for warez, the only people who are going to use warez are individuals who can't afford your product anyway. If they like it, they will probably hype it to your friends and freely promote your product OR delete it after bungling around anyway. Legitimate businesses will always be forced to buy licensed software because now we're talking about massive distribution and something that is used for business. Going after an individual just doesn't seem like a good economical practice -- lawyer fees just to retrieve a theoretical few hundred dollars of lost revenue.
On the other hand, music is a different premise all together. As pointed out many times before, signing a record contract is not the number 1 way for an artist to make money. It does provide some money, but after a while concerts, merchandising, endorsements are the bread and butter. In fact, I would venture so far as to say the only value a recording contract gives to an artist is initial marketing and distribution. If you ignored the many tentacles of the music industry with other industries/media, artists would probably make more money distributing it online themselves.
That's like saying because I have a safe I store crack in it. But yes, when the men of power get together to spin something to their advantage, the gorts will eat that shit up -- it's scary on how public opinion is so easily swayed.
What kind of logic is this? I have a gun, I wave it around in front of your face with the safety off, and it goes off in your face. Oops, maybe you should have prevented me from using that gun like a dumbass.
People take cars for granted way too much. The way people drive these days, I'm amazed they can stay on the right side of the road. Of course, traffic safety is a common misconception. I drive like at any second that car is going to swerve just a few inches and smack in to me.
Seems to be that this whole XUL/XAML/DHTML craze is all about creating more interactive web applications, not about rewriting the destkop system.
After all, the C++ code that implements the scrollbar, or button, or whatever isn't going away, it's just being described in a standard manner. I guess that gives the application more portability, in theory.
To switch gears with some thoughts on XUL (and XUL like technologies)... The other day I was reading how interesting XUL was on phpPatterns and using it to build a web-based desktop-like application. The one example people like to point to is that AmazonBrowser. Perhaps the greatest potential for these XUL like languages is for those web features we have a tough time building today.
Whoever thought of HTML frames probably wanted XUL, but knew that nothing like it could be done right now, so frames were a cheap navigational system that could provide a semi-familiar GUI to end users in that only the "content pane" gets updated.
HTML interfaces will still be around. Not only because they're still a great mechanism for internet information display, but because people are used to them. They're used to website design, they like the way it is. XUL-like apps will probably be most used as embedded application interfaces for managing devices... at least in the beginning.
I get that on laptops a lot, especially this one Windows laptop. I get various feedback in the sound system based on what's happening (harddrive access vs CPU)
With the introduction of IP telephony, one of the first things people are going to want is encryption or people could just sniff packets and record your phone conversation. So telecomm equipment vendors like Avaya, Alcatel, Nortel, etc must allow for wire taps (as per the FCC).
UT is a great example. Everyone fell in love with the first UT and it ran on just about any computer you put it on at the time. UT 2003 had a laggy frame rate on a new high end Sony laptop I bought (after UT 2003 had come out no less), and at that point I was like WTF.
The last computer game I played was Dark Ages of Camelot. Now I have an xbox and I play counterstrike as my first person shooter of choice. If Xbox/PS[2|3] get a keyboard module to plugin to the controller, you can kiss the PC game market good bye.
I'm waiting for xbox to be able to do things like play networked quake[1|2|3], UT[2003|2004], and I'll be set.
Sounds like you need to get your act together and pirate more songs haha!
Most mainstream songs (i.e. ones on the radio) have a large fake song:real song ratio. The methods of 'fakeness' vary:
Beeps - nothing like some high volume beeps to destroy your speakers/headphones/ear drum
Intro, then silence - Looks like a valid song, sounds like a valid song, but after 15-30 seconds it goes silent
Varied Silence/feedback play: I don't know how they do it, but seems like some of the fake songs will play no matter where you start playing them from, but after a few seconds they will either give the feedback sound or go to silence
Repeat the Chorus: This one is sometimes a hidden treasure. Most songs have a chorus that's normally sung/played over and over in the song. BUt the fake mp3 just repeats the chorus for the entire song! The good news is that if you like the song for its chorus, you may be lucky enough to find a pure chorus version of it, WOOHOO!
Mysterious WMA files: try and play these on windows and it just sends you to an MSDN site. I never play an mp3 file with a valid proxy setting though, just incase they check those logs...
Lately, I don't see many valid songs at all. All the fake ones are on servers with tons of bandwith, so they download almost immediately. The good news is that fake songs usually have the standard format: "Artist - Song Name", where real songs have something that someone might have actually done themselves "01-Artist_Song_Name' or '[Rock]-Artist_(Album)-Song-Name'... but not many people share that, and the one guy that does seems to transfer at 3-5kb/s:(
This is true in both P2P networks as well as a challenge for large distributed systems. In fact, global operations are always a difficulty. Searching an entire P2P network is a hit or miss operation since you never know when one of your peers will be online/offline. Sometimes that's solved in the protocol, sometimes you need a global system with the protocol.
One thing about P2P that I've found interesting is how P2P internet phones never really caught on yet. With something like Linphone and SIP, you can have a phone that looks like AIM/Yahoo/MSN. You just double click on a buddy and make a call. No toll charges, no centralized server keeping records of your phone call, pure communication at its best.
Selling software is all about markups. Even with a good sized and well paid development team, you only need to make a few million before you cover the cost of R&D. Through in marketing, support, training, etc and you've maybe at most doubled (5mil to 10mil lets say). For all software giants, this is probably a drop in the bucket. They probably have their bread and butter products that gross in the hundreds of millions. That's all US owned development. Imagine if 90% of your development was outsourced, you just grow your profit margin even more. But hey, that's just business as usual...
The real rip, as you point out, is the surround support that Windows brings. It takes SO much to get a productive system, and even then you can experience disaster..... here's one scenario I'm sure you or someone you know has been through:
You call up Dell and have a spanky new PC delivered. But, you don't dare plug it into the network because you didn't get the latest virus scanner with it. So you go out, buy the virus scanner, hook everything up and start to surf the web. Assuming that you don't pickup a new virus between when you connect and when your virus scanner updates itself, you are probably 'OK' for a while.
Now of course there are almost no applicatons on your new computer. Minesweep, Word Pad, Paint... bleh. So you go get Office, buy a handful of fun computer games, PhotoShop, Quicken, Turbo Tax and you're finally starting to get use out of your computer.
As time goes on you use your computer as normal. Sometimes it hangs, sometimes a program crashes, but hey that's ok as long as there isn't a blue screen of death. At some point, you start to notice pop-ups. First a couple, then like 4 or 5 whenever you open up IE. Maybe your virus scanner didn't find them! One of your techie friends say that you got 'adware' or 'spyware' or something that's like a virus, but not harmful -- just annoying.
You find something like PestPatrol and download the free version. To your suprise you have 50-100 adware/spyware programs on your computer. Oh wait, you can't clean them unless you pay another 60 for the registered version. You buy it, you clean it, but for some reason things just keep coming back.
As time goes on you probably end up doing 1 of 2 things. First, someone might tell you it's good to reinstall Windows every year or so to "clean things out." Another option is that you just oculdn't get rid of that last virus/adware/spyware. Not being a techie, you find some directions, execute them wrong, and the system won't boot anymore. Tech support (you did get the 3 year warranty right?) says they will have to reload your systme.
Depending on if your re-install was planned or un-planned you might have saved data or not. The worst case scenario is of course that you do your re-install but you are missing all your applications! You downloaded the software instead of getting the CD... You didn't buy the upgrade service, you don't have your old license key, they don't offer the old version, and no discount on the new version....
Moral of the story, Windows seems to be a good way to pay a lot of money for things just to get a system that is actually useful to you. Also, with a system prone to re-installations you open yourself up to upgrade package fees or buying the same software multiple times. This whole scenario could have easiy been a Linux user, but the difference is the availability of free software and initial costs.
You know, I have to wonder where the line is drawn between new features/performance and usability. What I mean is a nice 6GHZ/2GB/1TB machine sounds like it'd be great for 'next generation' applications, but hey what kind of applications are those? More specifically how much cool new stuff can you cram in together before using the computer becomes unmanagable?
Here's a good example. Arguably I could go out and replace my old 1GHZ laptop with a nice spanky new one. What would this get me... I might be able to play a few more games. I might be able to keep more applications open at once. I might be able to have tons of tabs in Firefox open.... but there is a limit to all of this stuff. More than 10 tabs open and the labels of the tabs become un-readable in Mozilla. More then a few word documents open and you have to search through the list in the panel. Why not just open/close documents from the filesystem?
As it stands today, I can run outlook, have a few word documents open, an IDE, some business apps, and winamp running and my computer does fine. I'm highly productive and I have little desire to get a new computer. (Caveat: I gave up gaming on PCs a while ago, it was always a loosing battle for keeping up with the latest graphics card, and I like laptops -- now I just do Xbox).
Let me wrap up my rant with some trolling... IE hangs today and lags the hell out of Windows. Outlook gets slow/crashes and Word crashes. Maybe 6GHZ/2GB/1TB is a precaution for all the havoc from xaml/avalon.
Also check out Mojavi a PHP MVC Framework. It is arguably the best MVC framework for PHP. The for PHP part is the qualifier because all the other PHP MVC frameworks I've seen are a direct port of Struts and do things bad for php (like load XML definition files on every request -- that's bad, mm'kay?).
Slashdot Mirror
DNS is a bad example.
How about IIS setup and security versus Apache?
Yeah, looking back at it... config.sys and autoexec.bat were mystererious and bothersome... but my thirst for wolfenstein forced me to tinker with it until it finally worked.
Ironically, it also fueled my passion to get a pentium (and play things like X-Wing).
Ah those were the days... everything was mysterious, new stuff came out so fast, and 11-13 year olds comparing CPU speed was analogous to adults discussing penis size.
True that.... You can download Linux for free and get all of your power applications (evolution, open office, dia, gimp, [the list goes on...]). Do some security configuration and then you don't have to buy virus scanners, or adware removal tools, or spyware detectors, or pop-up blockers, or any of that shit.
If you want games, it's cheaper to just play on the console -- yes, give MS some money for Xbox becaues Xbox live rules, but that is certainly better than to having to constantly upgrade video cards, and new versions of windows, and directX versions that may screw things up.
If you want to take it a step further and theme windows, then there's more money to get a decent theme desktop program (and even then it starts to slow things down).
I grew up with MS DOS, and let me tell you... the days of editing config.sys to free up memory to play wolfenstein are over!
Now there are tons of little options all over the place. Spyware/adware/viri install themselves in places you don't even know about. The bloat is incredible... one thing hangs, everything hangs.
Luckily, I got a unix shell account from my local ISP when I was 15 and started to mud. So, I got to learn both really easy.
Ok, the reason I use Linux primarily [at home] is just the options it provides (for free).
- Evolution for getting all of my personal mail and OO-ximian for all of my office needs (very simple at home).
- Gentoo to compile and make my old hardware still useful
- Less chance for viri/worms and it's easier to see what's going on, or what was installed. Same goes for adware and spyware.
- Theme options are much better, much more choices and all for free. All windows themes require clunky third party packages that are slow, and some of them cost money (i.e. the ones you would really want to use).
For a development environment, I don't see a big difference other then that Linux is our production system and developing on Windows just means more testing. There are some nice development tools, but work won't even pay for them so that's not a reason to use linux over windows (or vise versa).
At work, I do use Windows -- because everyone else does, and every time I try to switch (OO, ximian connector, etc).... there are always little wrinkles that I don't have time to deal with. At home, I have more flexibility.
Oh yes, I also now use Xbox for all my gaming so I don't care if linux game support isn't that great.
Alien vs Predator... now there's a great non-mainstream comic concept that should be a really great movie to watch. I always thought predator was a great concept and they should make more movies
You know, I have to wonder about warez/copyright music and what it really affects. As for warez, the only people who are going to use warez are individuals who can't afford your product anyway. If they like it, they will probably hype it to your friends and freely promote your product OR delete it after bungling around anyway. Legitimate businesses will always be forced to buy licensed software because now we're talking about massive distribution and something that is used for business. Going after an individual just doesn't seem like a good economical practice -- lawyer fees just to retrieve a theoretical few hundred dollars of lost revenue.
On the other hand, music is a different premise all together. As pointed out many times before, signing a record contract is not the number 1 way for an artist to make money. It does provide some money, but after a while concerts, merchandising, endorsements are the bread and butter. In fact, I would venture so far as to say the only value a recording contract gives to an artist is initial marketing and distribution. If you ignored the many tentacles of the music industry with other industries/media, artists would probably make more money distributing it online themselves.
That's like saying because I have a safe I store crack in it. But yes, when the men of power get together to spin something to their advantage, the gorts will eat that shit up -- it's scary on how public opinion is so easily swayed.
third rule, no pants!
True that.... have you seen this?
What kind of logic is this? I have a gun, I wave it around in front of your face with the safety off, and it goes off in your face. Oops, maybe you should have prevented me from using that gun like a dumbass.
People take cars for granted way too much. The way people drive these days, I'm amazed they can stay on the right side of the road. Of course, traffic safety is a common misconception. I drive like at any second that car is going to swerve just a few inches and smack in to me.
Check this out.... use cell phone + WLAN + enterprise phone system!
This is some good stuff, thanks for the info!
Seems to be that this whole XUL/XAML/DHTML craze is all about creating more interactive web applications, not about rewriting the destkop system.
After all, the C++ code that implements the scrollbar, or button, or whatever isn't going away, it's just being described in a standard manner. I guess that gives the application more portability, in theory.
To switch gears with some thoughts on XUL (and XUL like technologies)... The other day I was reading how interesting XUL was on phpPatterns and using it to build a web-based desktop-like application. The one example people like to point to is that AmazonBrowser. Perhaps the greatest potential for these XUL like languages is for those web features we have a tough time building today.
Whoever thought of HTML frames probably wanted XUL, but knew that nothing like it could be done right now, so frames were a cheap navigational system that could provide a semi-familiar GUI to end users in that only the "content pane" gets updated.
HTML interfaces will still be around. Not only because they're still a great mechanism for internet information display, but because people are used to them. They're used to website design, they like the way it is. XUL-like apps will probably be most used as embedded application interfaces for managing devices... at least in the beginning.
+1, Response will be Informative
Check this one out:
(score: 3, splendid discernment)
I get that on laptops a lot, especially this one Windows laptop. I get various feedback in the sound system based on what's happening (harddrive access vs CPU)
With the introduction of IP telephony, one of the first things people are going to want is encryption or people could just sniff packets and record your phone conversation. So telecomm equipment vendors like Avaya, Alcatel, Nortel, etc must allow for wire taps (as per the FCC).
UT is a great example. Everyone fell in love with the first UT and it ran on just about any computer you put it on at the time. UT 2003 had a laggy frame rate on a new high end Sony laptop I bought (after UT 2003 had come out no less), and at that point I was like WTF.
The last computer game I played was Dark Ages of Camelot. Now I have an xbox and I play counterstrike as my first person shooter of choice. If Xbox/PS[2|3] get a keyboard module to plugin to the controller, you can kiss the PC game market good bye.
I'm waiting for xbox to be able to do things like play networked quake[1|2|3], UT[2003|2004], and I'll be set.
Most mainstream songs (i.e. ones on the radio) have a large fake song:real song ratio. The methods of 'fakeness' vary:
Lately, I don't see many valid songs at all. All the fake ones are on servers with tons of bandwith, so they download almost immediately. The good news is that fake songs usually have the standard format: "Artist - Song Name", where real songs have something that someone might have actually done themselves "01-Artist_Song_Name' or '[Rock]-Artist_(Album)-Song-Name'... but not many people share that, and the one guy that does seems to transfer at 3-5kb/s
This is true in both P2P networks as well as a challenge for large distributed systems. In fact, global operations are always a difficulty. Searching an entire P2P network is a hit or miss operation since you never know when one of your peers will be online/offline. Sometimes that's solved in the protocol, sometimes you need a global system with the protocol.
One thing about P2P that I've found interesting is how P2P internet phones never really caught on yet. With something like Linphone and SIP, you can have a phone that looks like AIM/Yahoo/MSN. You just double click on a buddy and make a call. No toll charges, no centralized server keeping records of your phone call, pure communication at its best.
These people must suffer discommondation.... they will have to fight the RIAA using a batleth to regain their honor.
Selling software is all about markups. Even with a good sized and well paid development team, you only need to make a few million before you cover the cost of R&D. Through in marketing, support, training, etc and you've maybe at most doubled (5mil to 10mil lets say). For all software giants, this is probably a drop in the bucket. They probably have their bread and butter products that gross in the hundreds of millions. That's all US owned development. Imagine if 90% of your development was outsourced, you just grow your profit margin even more. But hey, that's just business as usual...
The real rip, as you point out, is the surround support that Windows brings. It takes SO much to get a productive system, and even then you can experience disaster..... here's one scenario I'm sure you or someone you know has been through:
You call up Dell and have a spanky new PC delivered. But, you don't dare plug it into the network because you didn't get the latest virus scanner with it. So you go out, buy the virus scanner, hook everything up and start to surf the web. Assuming that you don't pickup a new virus between when you connect and when your virus scanner updates itself, you are probably 'OK' for a while.
Now of course there are almost no applicatons on your new computer. Minesweep, Word Pad, Paint... bleh. So you go get Office, buy a handful of fun computer games, PhotoShop, Quicken, Turbo Tax and you're finally starting to get use out of your computer.
As time goes on you use your computer as normal. Sometimes it hangs, sometimes a program crashes, but hey that's ok as long as there isn't a blue screen of death. At some point, you start to notice pop-ups. First a couple, then like 4 or 5 whenever you open up IE. Maybe your virus scanner didn't find them! One of your techie friends say that you got 'adware' or 'spyware' or something that's like a virus, but not harmful -- just annoying.
You find something like PestPatrol and download the free version. To your suprise you have 50-100 adware/spyware programs on your computer. Oh wait, you can't clean them unless you pay another 60 for the registered version. You buy it, you clean it, but for some reason things just keep coming back.
As time goes on you probably end up doing 1 of 2 things. First, someone might tell you it's good to reinstall Windows every year or so to "clean things out." Another option is that you just oculdn't get rid of that last virus/adware/spyware. Not being a techie, you find some directions, execute them wrong, and the system won't boot anymore. Tech support (you did get the 3 year warranty right?) says they will have to reload your systme.
Depending on if your re-install was planned or un-planned you might have saved data or not. The worst case scenario is of course that you do your re-install but you are missing all your applications! You downloaded the software instead of getting the CD... You didn't buy the upgrade service, you don't have your old license key, they don't offer the old version, and no discount on the new version....
Moral of the story, Windows seems to be a good way to pay a lot of money for things just to get a system that is actually useful to you. Also, with a system prone to re-installations you open yourself up to upgrade package fees or buying the same software multiple times. This whole scenario could have easiy been a Linux user, but the difference is the availability of free software and initial costs.
You know, I have to wonder where the line is drawn between new features/performance and usability. What I mean is a nice 6GHZ/2GB/1TB machine sounds like it'd be great for 'next generation' applications, but hey what kind of applications are those? More specifically how much cool new stuff can you cram in together before using the computer becomes unmanagable?
Here's a good example. Arguably I could go out and replace my old 1GHZ laptop with a nice spanky new one. What would this get me... I might be able to play a few more games. I might be able to keep more applications open at once. I might be able to have tons of tabs in Firefox open.... but there is a limit to all of this stuff. More than 10 tabs open and the labels of the tabs become un-readable in Mozilla. More then a few word documents open and you have to search through the list in the panel. Why not just open/close documents from the filesystem?
As it stands today, I can run outlook, have a few word documents open, an IDE, some business apps, and winamp running and my computer does fine. I'm highly productive and I have little desire to get a new computer. (Caveat: I gave up gaming on PCs a while ago, it was always a loosing battle for keeping up with the latest graphics card, and I like laptops -- now I just do Xbox).
Let me wrap up my rant with some trolling... IE hangs today and lags the hell out of Windows. Outlook gets slow/crashes and Word crashes. Maybe 6GHZ/2GB/1TB is a precaution for all the havoc from xaml/avalon.
Also check out Mojavi a PHP MVC Framework. It is arguably the best MVC framework for PHP. The for PHP part is the qualifier because all the other PHP MVC frameworks I've seen are a direct port of Struts and do things bad for php (like load XML definition files on every request -- that's bad, mm'kay?).