...he's got it right. C= did lots of stupid things, managementwise. To add a few more: the a300 (oops, a600), AGA (when AAA could have been there a year earlier), snubbing Sun (when they wanted to use Amiga hardware for their UNIX workstations). I'm sure other people can think of other things too.
Basically C= was stuck in a business model where you sold a product until it stopped selling, and _then_ you started looking for something new. Anything that looked like research and development was considered dangerous and subversive, and a threat to a model that has obviously worked out very well (not). Meanwhile the competition was going faster, bigger, better.
Could C= have kept up had they invested in R&D? Some people said it was impossible, that no one manufacturer can possibly have the ability to have a superior video, audio, CPU, OS, etc. solution. However, consider that C= didn't make the CPU anyway, and NVidia now pretty much all other hardware to superior standards. And they already had a worldclass OS. In a nutshell, I believe under proper management C= could not only have kept up, but could in fact have been a leader.
Let me assure you that just about _noone_ outside the Netherlands cares about this, and the vast majority inside doesn't care either. Only a few highly frustrated provincials seem to be bothered by the fact that Holland and the Netherlands are technically not the same, the rest of us use the words interchangeably when speaking English.
Of course, the whole mess doesn't exist in the Dutch language anyway. We live in Nederland, we speak Nederlands, and we call ourselves Nederlanders - all perfectly regular. If I called myself a "Hollander" in Dutch, I would be indicating I was from either South Holland or North Holland. If I do the same in English people understand I'm from the Netherlands.
Oh, and if the audience is American, they know I'm from the capital of a country known as Kopenhagen;-) Sorry about that, but you must understand that American tourists who are not only lost, but in fact at least two entire countries removed from where they think they are, are the stuff of legend in Europe;-)
You know, whenever someone explains the incredible virtues of real file protection to me I'm inclined to ask for a shell and type "rm -rf/". Sure, it won't kill the operating system, but anything that looks like personal files for the individual in question will be gone...
So what do you care about? Your operating system, which can easily be installed from a CD anyway? Or your personal files, that you spend a lot of time creating?
But I forget. Everyone keeps perfect backups, so this is not an issue...
On the other hand, if they had watched Robot Wars they would have known how to build a basic self-righting mechanism...
On a more serious note, I witnessed a demonstration of a legged robot recently that could just as easily function upside down. It had a thin central body with four legs on each side, and the hinges for raising and lowering the legs could flip all the way around to allow them to work when the robot had its back to the floor.
The thing was pretty fast too, scaring a few people by charging them. It was only about a meter long, but it looks a bit like a giant spider, and instinct takes over when you see a giant spider come at you at speed;-)
Clearly it was still at the technology demonstrator stage (it carried no useful payload, and it had a power cable - that is impractical when you are on the surface of Mars), but it will be interesting to see what this evolves into.
If those companies really cared about power they would be buying Arm or Transmeta, not Intel. But in reality, what they care about is using a vendor whose name they've heard about, and that is Intel, despite the fact that they make the hottest, most power hungry CPU's available on the desktop today.
Before you start flaming people for a perceived opinion they may not even have, read the fine article. It says he invented those basic principles some 20 years before CD's came onto the market. That means any patent he might have had would have expired by then.
Well, it is still unofficial, but the UK will be applying for membership of the US in the near future. It is all part of a greater plan in which Canada becomes part of the EU.
Currently there are still some practical considerations (how do we move Canada to join up with continental Europe?), but once the polar ice has melted there should be nothing to stop us from sawing Canada free and towing it to its new location.
The benefits to everyone are obvious: the EU is currently extremely crowded, but it will get a lot of extra land through this deal. The Canadians finally get a neighbour that respects them. The UK is finally rid of that damn EU, and the US... Well, I guess not everyone wins but the UK is only a small country anyway, most of you won't notice any changes...
Oooh, I complain about some utterly unrealistic crap in Halo 2 and now I am on the list of people who hate the game and Microsoft!
Let me be perfectly honest with you: I played Halo and thought it was ok, but rather boring (the same room again and again and again got old after a while). Based on the strength of that game I would certainly not have bought Halo 2, even if I owned an XBox (which I don't). So based on this I largely feel indifference towards Halo 2.
The fact that two million copies of Halo 2 were allegedly sold before anyone had a chance to hear the word of mouth, or read a decent review, is just plain sad. I guess like so many XBox owners you think that Halo was the first FPS ever, and are unaware of the many, many alternatives that exist on PC and other platforms. The fact that you mention a five year old game as your point of reference at the very least suggests you are not aware of recent developments.
Also, if you're dual wielding, the right trigger fires the gun in the right hand, and the left trigger fires the gun in the left hand, so effectively you can fire with one gun only until the ammo in it depletes, and while its reloading, fire with the other gun.
...because, as we all know, humans have three arms: one for aiming and shooting, one for holding a weapon, and one for inserting a new clip. Sure, it takes a little bit of concentration, but otherwise...
Hey, if you give up on the idea of reloading during a fight you could even use that third arm to triple-wield! Yes, an incredible new innovation, and you read it first here on slashdot!
And there are rumours that Halo 3 will also feature the possibility to dual-drive! That means you get to drive not one, but two vehicles at the same time (and different vehicles too!). So you can be parking your warthog while simultaneously using your scorpion to lay down suppressing fire!
Live does a great job of matching you with people of your own skill so you never feel overpowered in any single game, which means you're having fun playing and not dying 10 seconds after respawning.
On the other hand, you'll never 0wnx0r a game since everybody in the level is as good as you are. That's Microsoft alright: mediocrity rules.
What else can I say? If you don't like it, try taking out your Halo 2 disc and cross out the 'Microsoft' logo with a marker. See if you'll like it better then;).
Ahh, people don't like Halo because it is from Microsoft! Surely it had nothing to do with the fact that it is essentially a four-hour game stretched to ten, by repeating levels again and again and again and again...
Imagine what could have been done if Linus Torvalds had spent his energy on developing a new paradigm for operating systems instead of just cloning the existing Unices.
He would have been unable to copy _any_ idea that had been created before. Multitasking? Nah, is patented. Commandline? Same. GUI? Same. Memory protection? Virtual devices? Filing system? All patented. Good luck coming up with alternatives to some of these. And don't tell me a poor finnish student could have afforded licensing fees for hundreds of diverse technologies.
Imagine if Bill Gates had used his genius to code more and clone/buy less.
For Bill Gates very little changes. He just needs to spend some money on patents _and_ software.
But if software patents had been in effect since the early 1980s, the market would've had a lot less simple repetition and much more true innovation or actual improvements on existing products.
I strongly disagree. The first guy to realize that he owned a vital piece of the action (just imagine a patent on "interactive IO") would (or at least, *could*) have leveraged it to own the computer world. Simple software would bear pricetags comparable to cars (to pay off all the patent holders).
For any class of application, only one version would exist, unchanging no matter how bad it is for the first twenty years. Computers would never even have entered the home, since noone could afford them and there would no interesting software anyway.
And the same would be true for the tools we use to work with computers. There would be no Java or Perl or C++ (who could afford to develop a language when the compiler-patent is still valid?). In all likelyhood we would be program in assembler, _maybe_ using a terminal, but possibly still using punchcards. Which is no big deal - computers would only be available in specialized environments such as research institutions. I'll leave the knock-on effect to other technologies (cars, planes, telecommunication, etc.) to your imagination, but it will be huge.
In other words, we would be at the same technological level of development that we were in the sixties. Some people would no doubt consider that a good thing, but frankly I like our current level of development. At least now I can engage in stimulating discussion about various subjects with people from other continents (ok, that was a euphemism;-) ).
Since we are hearing so much about this story, and considering that most of us won't ever have an opportunity to play the game for ourselves, would it be possible for someone to post a short synopsis?
Yeah, same here. Although there was one case... I had a keyboard (I think Compaq, but I'm not sure) that had a split spacebar. No problem, right? Except that the right-hand part of this particular spacebar was actually configured to be backspace. I guess people who cannot type need that a lot. But I can type, and I learned that day that I type space with my right hand. Imagine every single space you are typing turning into a backspace...
Eventually it reached a point where I closed my eyes and imagined throwing the keyboard against the wall. In my minds' eye, I could see it happen in slow motion: the case splitting as it hit the wall head on, and keys and bits of plastic flying out in all directions... Ahh, that felt *good*.
But in the end I persevered with the damn broken keyboard, and after that made sure I never worked on that machine again.
The Dutch government has an unhealthy need to support american companies. That's why we are in the JSF project, instead of the Eurofighter, and that's why we were having secret talks with Microsoft about long-term contracts for a quarter of a million government desktops. Personally I would _very much_ prefer that such money would be spent on the local economy, creating European jobs instead of sending ever more money over the atlantic.
Anyway, I still STRONGLY believe that Microsoft is currently in the process of building up patent legislation around the globe. Once this is in place in the major markets, it will then come out and utterly crush specific open source projects: Apache, Open Office, Mozilla, and Samba, to name just a few likely candidates.
And as I said before, chances are they will actually leave Linux alone. They will just make sure you won't have any software to run on it...
The timing of events appears to be fortuitous for people who do not want to see this happen, and bad for Microsoft, but the threat remains real. Meanwhile, Microsoft is on a tight schedule, since eventually Open Source will destroy them. Before that happens they must set their patent attack in motion, limiting themselves to just the US (and other territories that allow software patents) if necessary. We need to hold on until then - once the attack starts we will be safer since the destructive effect of software patents will be far easier to see.
You make an insightful point and I sure hope you are right, but the EU never had software patents, so surely this pressure existed before as well? If so, it doesn't seem to have had any success...
What's to stop someone from making an audio "device" that simply writes everything it gets to disk...?
Palladium and driver signing. Microsoft will never sign a driver that does this, and Palladium will stop access to that content for unsigned drivers. So now you know what it is _really_ for.
On most any computer, you have an audio out jack, and a microphone (or line in jack).
In Microsofts' preferred future, also Palladium. There is a reason why there is a guaranteed encrypted path all the way from the CD to the display / speakers - to stop people from doing precisely this. Unless of course you can think of a better way to encrypt outgoing audio / video signals...?
As long as it can be heard (or seen), it can be re-recoreded at near identical quality.
Not necessarily. If the output device (i.e. monitor, speakers) itself is responsible for decryption you can only intercept encrypted signals which are by themselves useless to you.
300k is about the price of my current 80m2 apartment. But that's the price I pay for living in the fourth most densely populated country in the world...
At least mine rotates as well. The rotation is synchronized to the planet, so I get changing light intensity levels throughout the day. There is also a second, more subtle rotation, that causes temperature shifts throughout the year. It is actually quite spectacular!
Slashdot Mirror
Basically C= was stuck in a business model where you sold a product until it stopped selling, and _then_ you started looking for something new. Anything that looked like research and development was considered dangerous and subversive, and a threat to a model that has obviously worked out very well (not). Meanwhile the competition was going faster, bigger, better.
Could C= have kept up had they invested in R&D? Some people said it was impossible, that no one manufacturer can possibly have the ability to have a superior video, audio, CPU, OS, etc. solution. However, consider that C= didn't make the CPU anyway, and NVidia now pretty much all other hardware to superior standards. And they already had a worldclass OS. In a nutshell, I believe under proper management C= could not only have kept up, but could in fact have been a leader.
Bier, bratwurst, spass, kultur, ...
You forgot to tell us what happens in Soviet Russia.
The Spanish flu of 1918, which killed between 20 and 40 _million_ people across the world? For more details see here...
Of course, the whole mess doesn't exist in the Dutch language anyway. We live in Nederland, we speak Nederlands, and we call ourselves Nederlanders - all perfectly regular. If I called myself a "Hollander" in Dutch, I would be indicating I was from either South Holland or North Holland. If I do the same in English people understand I'm from the Netherlands.
Oh, and if the audience is American, they know I'm from the capital of a country known as Kopenhagen ;-) Sorry about that, but you must understand that American tourists who are not only lost, but in fact at least two entire countries removed from where they think they are, are the stuff of legend in Europe ;-)
So what do you care about? Your operating system, which can easily be installed from a CD anyway? Or your personal files, that you spend a lot of time creating?
But I forget. Everyone keeps perfect backups, so this is not an issue...
On a more serious note, I witnessed a demonstration of a legged robot recently that could just as easily function upside down. It had a thin central body with four legs on each side, and the hinges for raising and lowering the legs could flip all the way around to allow them to work when the robot had its back to the floor.
The thing was pretty fast too, scaring a few people by charging them. It was only about a meter long, but it looks a bit like a giant spider, and instinct takes over when you see a giant spider come at you at speed ;-)
Clearly it was still at the technology demonstrator stage (it carried no useful payload, and it had a power cable - that is impractical when you are on the surface of Mars), but it will be interesting to see what this evolves into.
If those companies really cared about power they would be buying Arm or Transmeta, not Intel. But in reality, what they care about is using a vendor whose name they've heard about, and that is Intel, despite the fact that they make the hottest, most power hungry CPU's available on the desktop today.
Currently there are still some practical considerations (how do we move Canada to join up with continental Europe?), but once the polar ice has melted there should be nothing to stop us from sawing Canada free and towing it to its new location.
The benefits to everyone are obvious: the EU is currently extremely crowded, but it will get a lot of extra land through this deal. The Canadians finally get a neighbour that respects them. The UK is finally rid of that damn EU, and the US... Well, I guess not everyone wins but the UK is only a small country anyway, most of you won't notice any changes...
Let me be perfectly honest with you: I played Halo and thought it was ok, but rather boring (the same room again and again and again got old after a while). Based on the strength of that game I would certainly not have bought Halo 2, even if I owned an XBox (which I don't). So based on this I largely feel indifference towards Halo 2.
The fact that two million copies of Halo 2 were allegedly sold before anyone had a chance to hear the word of mouth, or read a decent review, is just plain sad. I guess like so many XBox owners you think that Halo was the first FPS ever, and are unaware of the many, many alternatives that exist on PC and other platforms. The fact that you mention a five year old game as your point of reference at the very least suggests you are not aware of recent developments.
Hey, if you give up on the idea of reloading during a fight you could even use that third arm to triple-wield! Yes, an incredible new innovation, and you read it first here on slashdot!
And there are rumours that Halo 3 will also feature the possibility to dual-drive! That means you get to drive not one, but two vehicles at the same time (and different vehicles too!). So you can be parking your warthog while simultaneously using your scorpion to lay down suppressing fire!
Live does a great job of matching you with people of your own skill so you never feel overpowered in any single game, which means you're having fun playing and not dying 10 seconds after respawning.
On the other hand, you'll never 0wnx0r a game since everybody in the level is as good as you are. That's Microsoft alright: mediocrity rules.
What else can I say? If you don't like it, try taking out your Halo 2 disc and cross out the 'Microsoft' logo with a marker. See if you'll like it better then ;).
Ahh, people don't like Halo because it is from Microsoft! Surely it had nothing to do with the fact that it is essentially a four-hour game stretched to ten, by repeating levels again and again and again and again...
He would have been unable to copy _any_ idea that had been created before. Multitasking? Nah, is patented. Commandline? Same. GUI? Same. Memory protection? Virtual devices? Filing system? All patented. Good luck coming up with alternatives to some of these. And don't tell me a poor finnish student could have afforded licensing fees for hundreds of diverse technologies.
Imagine if Bill Gates had used his genius to code more and clone/buy less.
For Bill Gates very little changes. He just needs to spend some money on patents _and_ software.
But if software patents had been in effect since the early 1980s, the market would've had a lot less simple repetition and much more true innovation or actual improvements on existing products.
I strongly disagree. The first guy to realize that he owned a vital piece of the action (just imagine a patent on "interactive IO") would (or at least, *could*) have leveraged it to own the computer world. Simple software would bear pricetags comparable to cars (to pay off all the patent holders).
For any class of application, only one version would exist, unchanging no matter how bad it is for the first twenty years. Computers would never even have entered the home, since noone could afford them and there would no interesting software anyway.
And the same would be true for the tools we use to work with computers. There would be no Java or Perl or C++ (who could afford to develop a language when the compiler-patent is still valid?). In all likelyhood we would be program in assembler, _maybe_ using a terminal, but possibly still using punchcards. Which is no big deal - computers would only be available in specialized environments such as research institutions. I'll leave the knock-on effect to other technologies (cars, planes, telecommunication, etc.) to your imagination, but it will be huge.
In other words, we would be at the same technological level of development that we were in the sixties. Some people would no doubt consider that a good thing, but frankly I like our current level of development. At least now I can engage in stimulating discussion about various subjects with people from other continents (ok, that was a euphemism ;-) ).
Since we are hearing so much about this story, and considering that most of us won't ever have an opportunity to play the game for ourselves, would it be possible for someone to post a short synopsis?
Are you attempting to prove that Mac is a viable gaming platform by posting a list of just _eleven_ games? The mind boggles...
Turing machines use an _infinite_ tape. Your puny 100TB tape doesn't quite cut it.
At least, if he is speaking the truth about this ;-)
Eventually it reached a point where I closed my eyes and imagined throwing the keyboard against the wall. In my minds' eye, I could see it happen in slow motion: the case splitting as it hit the wall head on, and keys and bits of plastic flying out in all directions... Ahh, that felt *good*.
But in the end I persevered with the damn broken keyboard, and after that made sure I never worked on that machine again.
Anyway, I still STRONGLY believe that Microsoft is currently in the process of building up patent legislation around the globe. Once this is in place in the major markets, it will then come out and utterly crush specific open source projects: Apache, Open Office, Mozilla, and Samba, to name just a few likely candidates.
And as I said before, chances are they will actually leave Linux alone. They will just make sure you won't have any software to run on it...
The timing of events appears to be fortuitous for people who do not want to see this happen, and bad for Microsoft, but the threat remains real. Meanwhile, Microsoft is on a tight schedule, since eventually Open Source will destroy them. Before that happens they must set their patent attack in motion, limiting themselves to just the US (and other territories that allow software patents) if necessary. We need to hold on until then - once the attack starts we will be safer since the destructive effect of software patents will be far easier to see.
Hey, I'm just curious! ;-)
You make an insightful point and I sure hope you are right, but the EU never had software patents, so surely this pressure existed before as well? If so, it doesn't seem to have had any success...
Gamma world!
Palladium and driver signing. Microsoft will never sign a driver that does this, and Palladium will stop access to that content for unsigned drivers. So now you know what it is _really_ for.
On most any computer, you have an audio out jack, and a microphone (or line in jack).
In Microsofts' preferred future, also Palladium. There is a reason why there is a guaranteed encrypted path all the way from the CD to the display / speakers - to stop people from doing precisely this. Unless of course you can think of a better way to encrypt outgoing audio / video signals...?
As long as it can be heard (or seen), it can be re-recoreded at near identical quality.
Not necessarily. If the output device (i.e. monitor, speakers) itself is responsible for decryption you can only intercept encrypted signals which are by themselves useless to you.
At least mine rotates as well. The rotation is synchronized to the planet, so I get changing light intensity levels throughout the day. There is also a second, more subtle rotation, that causes temperature shifts throughout the year. It is actually quite spectacular!
So you would rather have private entities kicking down your door, looking for ill-doing on your part? Talk about scary...