Actually, if I know what page I'm looking for (ie, I've been there), Google is 98% successful with my searches. The Via Technologies example is a very good one. There are lots of other (mostly asian technology;) companies that don't have the benifit of www.theirname.com domains, and Google will get me the right page on "theirname homepage" almost every time.
Obviously, if you don't know/what/ you're looking for (ie, you know what you want, but not where it is), obviously, Google is not going to be as effective in this case, since you probably don't know a unique set of words appearing on the page on which you'll eventually find what you want (or maybe it doesn't exist!)
Also, I think the "google" effect is more of a Kleenex thing (where a brand name becomes a common slang for the generalized technology) than it is credit, although I also use opera and have configured it such that I only have the google search box on my toolbar. Google's all/I/ need, although I realize there are some other kick ass search engines out there too.
>It remains to be seen how well this translates to US & European markets.
Indeed! But good point.. a guy who I worked with had an docomo phone from japan. Color screen, etc, I can see the attraction. It was a very cool thing, and frusterating, because there is no docomo service here of course, so I couldn't check it in action.
Weeeellll, let me hedge my comment.. I should have said handheld. I just meant that the price to sell a product on gaming suitability is way below that of the handheld market. I didn't mean to imply that gaming platforms must be leading edge, but simply that the focus on heldhelds is how to achieve more without splurging on super-powered solutions, where as something like the GameBoy advance is designed with gaming suitability in mind, and thus will always enjoy a much better cost/performance ratio with respect to its gaming capabilities.
I understand that the mass market doesn't require cutting edge performance, but that doesn't mean that raw floating point performance is a big priority in handhelds; rather their price, size, power consumption and storage capacity are... I just kinda meant to say that if games become popular on handhelds, I think it will be more by coincidence or accident (or killer apps by developers) rather than by design.:) But I see and appreciate your points...
Pocket PCs gotta multitask. Gaming isn't so much about power but about the garauntee of being able to stay relatively real-time. DOOM ran on a 486 where NOTHING ELSE was going on at the time.
But I do see your point. I still maintain that 80% of the suitability of a gaming platform must also be game-friendly controls.. even with the power, if you can't interact with a game comfortably and painlessly, you probably wont play it much.
Aand helds are computers that are designed to be as small and cheap as possible while still useful for simple tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, etc... nothing too numbercrunching or exciting.
Gaming platforms are super-efficient customized hardware solutions with well thought out ergonomics and a psysical interface that is designed, from the ground up, for gaming.
I think the engineering requirements of either platforms are so at odds with each other that gaming on handhelds will never really catch on. Or at least until such a time that handhelds are far closer in terms of performance/price as desktop systems; or, to put it another way, low-end desktop systems become the size of handhelds.;) Only then do you have enough computing power left around accidentally by the engineering team that designed the hand held to accomdate enough gaming power for the platform to become a viable enough selling point to the average consumer.
Dude, I hear you! I totally agree that the method itself is dangerous. And I didn't know that EVERYONE had to take it (although I'd suggest that tons of people failing would make them HAVE to remove that requirement, rather than people who cant make the grade cheating, thus leading the uni to conclude that the course is important for every student.) I was just trying to illutrate to the parent poster that they arn't so interestined in making sure people dont have to work with pseudo-grads, but rather preserving their academic rep, even if they unfortunately feel that relying on technological solutions to social problems is the most benificial course of action.
I agree. I think it does a great disservice to the movement, as it is hard enough getting people interested in the issues in the first place, nevermind that the semantics are head-spinning. Funny, that RMS.. you know his heart is in a good place, but he really kinda goes about converting people (and being stubborn) in ways that are just as self-righteous as any well worded MS press release. I also support the use of another term other than free. Non-Propriatary works for me... NP. NPNPNPNPNP. Oh well, doubt we have much choice by now...
No, but they have this little process called 'firing'.
Anyhow, the employment market will vet real workers from pretend ones. I think the motivation in this case, from the universities perspective, is to not have their degree and academic rep devalued. Obviously, the better the grads, the more money and brains go into the school... so I can't really blame them for what they're doing. I think their heart is in the right place, even if this solution does strike me as somewhat dangerous.
I'd just like to say that this is a grossly unqualified statement. If anyone can shed some light as to SGI's true financial situation, I'd be interested to know if MS could claim something along the lines of what I suggested above.
The XBox runs on Direct X, OpenGL's direct competition and nemesis. I mean, we've gotten to the point where even MS can go around saying, "Yeah, we did this so we can kick some ass and make some money for our stock holders.", which is true, legal, and widely accepted.
I don't think sinister is the word - it's standard operating procedure for MS, along with lots of other large corperations. The Real beauty of it is that MS also has an alibi - they kept SGI in business (maybe), thus ensuring they still have competitors. MS is to the market now what the US is to the world - they are taking things over via a dependance on existance. That is to say, they can keep companies alive and in buiness as a kind of bribe. This is so they cannot be accussed of being so successfully [anti-competative/innovative] (take your pick, doesn't matter for the sake of argument) as to have killed off all of their competitors!
It'd be a very incestuous market with not much new to show for itself very often...
... which is to say that the MS in that scenario would never invent anything, and that all the other fish would want to stop living, cause everytime they had a new idea, it'd just be bought from them and bastardized for the masses. People don't do stuff just for money; people want to see their innovative babies through to customer satisfaction. If ideas keep getting snatched up and implemented by the guy who likes to ejaculate his products prematurely on the market, it ruins it for everyone. This is why I don't support the scenario you described as a particularly healthy one in the long term.
Often, these types of purchases are made just to run the newly bought foobar through the shredder. It's the easiest and most reliable way to win a competition. (On that note, I won't argue that its not competative.. just, in a bad way.) MS doesn't have much to gain from OpenGL, IMHO, and since the XBox, and Windows, etc is all DirectX'ed, I suspect they'd be more interested in running OpenGL into the ground than learning anything from it, incorperating it into DirectX, and then letting OpenGL go out in the middle of a large sunny grassy field so that they will meet on the market battlefield again. I mean really, I can't think of many companies that would do that in the first place, but MS would be the last company to do it.
>If Microsoft adapted many of the good technologies..
What if they just bought every software company, and released a product that incorperated all the good technologies? We'd all die, cause what you like is different than what I like, so I don't mind having a choice and choosing differently than you. The notion of a 'right' solution is BS, so ensuring that fish A doesn't nibble on every other fish in the pond is critical to maintaining consumer confidence and a healthy economic ecosystem (nevermind encouraging competition and innovation). It'd be a very incestuous market with not much new to show for itself very often...
I dont know why this whole debate seems to be centering around total and absolute liability.
It's not Hondas fault that you car keeps getting stolen until they start selling them without locks at all. Honda has done a/reasonable/ job in securing the vehicle, as evidenced by what the laws state, and that the market keeps buying these slimjim-vulnerable vehicles.
However, should Vendor X be held accountable for shipping software with a backdoor, 35 different possible buffer overrun exploits, and for storing your password in a cleartext file who's default location is the document root of the webserver running on your OS? Hell yeah.
I'm all for some reasonable levels of liability, where the cost of testing and ensuring complience is minimal compared to the possible damages and likelyhood of exploitation of the kind of obvious design flaws I mentioned above.
No one can be perfect, but the way people seem to be painting it, even being pretty good, or even not retarded would be prohibitivly costly to any given software company. I think thats BS.:)
I think I said they should be held accoutable for software that they write and charge for.
So telling me they dont charge for software doesn't bring anything new to the table. I'm saying, if they/do/ sell some (ie, if any of their software is not GPL'd), they should be held accountable. That's the beauty of this approach tho; the market determines what level of accountability that the vendors should be held to. If people don't buy RedHat because RedHat could not be held accountable in terms of a failure, I'd suggest (and I'm a big proponant of OSS, so dont get the wrong idea) that they would have to look into ways of making sure the consumer confidence is there. If thats by providing an EULA that points out that they will hold themselves accoutable for certain problems, so be it.
As it stands, the whole supply and demand thing has no say in liability, because vendors are not being forced to accept it. Should they be forced to accept some level of liability, the market could more easily dictate what terms those should be, or whether anyone ever cared about it in the first place (ie, people might keep buying RedHat, cause they wern't interested in being able to hold the vendor/developer liable in the first place.)
Well, if 10$ is enough to develop and test the product, your decision to go 'into business' should also involve you accepting responsibility as to the damages that could be caused by your software. If a 10$ asking price doesn't provide enough moolah to test a product to a degree in which you are comfortable that it is relatively secure (I say relatively, because I do not think that these types of liability clauses should be absolute.. they should cover just some general easily implemented and tested possible sources for exploits, like buffer overruns, backdoors, etc), then ask for more money.
Otherwise, you shouldn't be in business; so give it away for free. You cannot have your cake and eat it to. If you're in business, you have to be serious. Otherwise we end up with companies who are only interested in fooling people, as once the sale is made, their responsibility is null and void. This is what happened in the.com boom, to some degree. Consumers became disillusioned, as software vendors (and asp providers, etc) placed the blame and responsibility of non-functioning software and services on the consumer. So the consumer got scared, and stopped spending shit loads of money on stuff that they could not garauntee would give a favourable Return on Investment.
Compare this to industries where companies can be held accoutable for obvious design flaws (car companies), and you have the reason we now have safety features like airbags, and a generally more reasonable attitude from the consumer base about what constitutes a company's level of liability.
I guess the idea is.. if you dont want to be held accoutable for your errors, you cant expect to be able to profit from your work. Traditional manufactures know this; software vendors are working hard not to have to accept responsibility, for obvious reasons. But really, it would ensure that in the very least, commercial software was held up to at least some rudimentary standards in terms of security.
Engineers have to go through all kinds of hoops, cause people and money go over their bridges. Explain to me why the makers of.Net, or whatever, the next big thing in services that shuttles all our data around, shouldn't be held by law up to these standards as well? The cost in terms of failures could be just as bad, if not even more catastrophic.
Read the comments above. I dont have a choice in using IE. It's tied to the OS; Microsoft admits it. You pay for the OS, so you pay for IE. So it'd better work. Same with Office. NOT the same for freeware I get from download.com, as it is my/choice/ to run that software, and I am not contributing to the resources that go into developing and testing it; ergo, in that scenario, I should be on my own.
Really now. People equate OSS with guys at home working for free. I support RedHat being held liable for software they write if they are making money off of it.
But software that is free, free as in free beer, should not be liable. I've always felt that if you are providing something for free, and you don't force it into people's hands, those people should understand the risks of using it.
However, if you're making money off of it, that money should go to making sure the software is stable and secure, and that people get what they pay for. So, in that case, I think the idea of certain reasonable guidelines on security and realiability should and could be held up by consumer protection laws. I think there are certain things, such as vulnerabilities of running servers and such being on by default in shipped software, that should be illegal. The way some software vendors ship products with 40 outside-facing services to the novice user who will never ps aux or check out the services control panel is, to me, an unneccessary and easily preventable and pluggable hole, especially considering the number of people who use them and the value of the data that gets thrown on these systems.
> I am not saying my boxes are uncrackable, or that I am all knowing, or even that great at securing systems.... Anyways.
So what are you saying?:) That you havn't been cracked? Hehe, reminds me of my giraffe scarecrow.. works like a charm, I havn't ever seen any giraffes around my lawn.;)
Considering what things MS leaves on by default in Windows when it ships, you could buy their software for 200$, and then get a $20,000 lawsuit-fueled mail-in rebate! Talk about savings!
> Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Since when did secure go hand in hand with ease?
We stick with FreeBSD.. ease is a matter of context, and security (akas: kernal/security mailing-list anality) is about as good as it gets. Can you point me towards a non-slackware-biased source that can break it down for me?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if I know what page I'm looking for (ie, I've been there), Google is 98% successful with my searches. The Via Technologies example is a very good one. There are lots of other (mostly asian technology ;) companies that don't have the benifit of www.theirname.com domains, and Google will get me the right page on "theirname homepage" almost every time.
/what/ you're looking for (ie, you know what you want, but not where it is), obviously, Google is not going to be as effective in this case, since you probably don't know a unique set of words appearing on the page on which you'll eventually find what you want (or maybe it doesn't exist!)
/I/ need, although I realize there are some other kick ass search engines out there too.
Obviously, if you don't know
Also, I think the "google" effect is more of a Kleenex thing (where a brand name becomes a common slang for the generalized technology) than it is credit, although I also use opera and have configured it such that I only have the google search box on my toolbar. Google's all
>It remains to be seen how well this translates to US & European markets.
.. a guy who I worked with had an docomo phone from japan. Color screen, etc, I can see the attraction. It was a very cool thing, and frusterating, because there is no docomo service here of course, so I couldn't check it in action.
Indeed! But good point
> Screw a Segway, ...
...
If the exoskeletons are anotomically correct enough, you just might be able to do that
Weeeellll, let me hedge my comment .. I should have said handheld. I just meant that the price to sell a product on gaming suitability is way below that of the handheld market. I didn't mean to imply that gaming platforms must be leading edge, but simply that the focus on heldhelds is how to achieve more without splurging on super-powered solutions, where as something like the GameBoy advance is designed with gaming suitability in mind, and thus will always enjoy a much better cost/performance ratio with respect to its gaming capabilities.
... I just kinda meant to say that if games become popular on handhelds, I think it will be more by coincidence or accident (or killer apps by developers) rather than by design. :) But I see and appreciate your points ...
I understand that the mass market doesn't require cutting edge performance, but that doesn't mean that raw floating point performance is a big priority in handhelds; rather their price, size, power consumption and storage capacity are
Point taken, but another difference:
.. even with the power, if you can't interact with a game comfortably and painlessly, you probably wont play it much.
Pocket PCs gotta multitask. Gaming isn't so much about power but about the garauntee of being able to stay relatively real-time. DOOM ran on a 486 where NOTHING ELSE was going on at the time.
But I do see your point. I still maintain that 80% of the suitability of a gaming platform must also be game-friendly controls
Aand helds are computers that are designed to be as small and cheap as possible while still useful for simple tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, etc ... nothing too numbercrunching or exciting.
;) Only then do you have enough computing power left around accidentally by the engineering team that designed the hand held to accomdate enough gaming power for the platform to become a viable enough selling point to the average consumer.
Gaming platforms are super-efficient customized hardware solutions with well thought out ergonomics and a psysical interface that is designed, from the ground up, for gaming.
I think the engineering requirements of either platforms are so at odds with each other that gaming on handhelds will never really catch on. Or at least until such a time that handhelds are far closer in terms of performance/price as desktop systems; or, to put it another way, low-end desktop systems become the size of handhelds.
Dude, I hear you! I totally agree that the method itself is dangerous. And I didn't know that EVERYONE had to take it (although I'd suggest that tons of people failing would make them HAVE to remove that requirement, rather than people who cant make the grade cheating, thus leading the uni to conclude that the course is important for every student.) I was just trying to illutrate to the parent poster that they arn't so interestined in making sure people dont have to work with pseudo-grads, but rather preserving their academic rep, even if they unfortunately feel that relying on technological solutions to social problems is the most benificial course of action.
I agree. I think it does a great disservice to the movement, as it is hard enough getting people interested in the issues in the first place, nevermind that the semantics are head-spinning. Funny, that RMS .. you know his heart is in a good place, but he really kinda goes about converting people (and being stubborn) in ways that are just as self-righteous as any well worded MS press release. I also support the use of another term other than free. Non-Propriatary works for me ... NP. NPNPNPNPNP. Oh well, doubt we have much choice by now ...
Who said I was laughing man, I believe it! :)
No, but they have this little process called 'firing'.
... so I can't really blame them for what they're doing. I think their heart is in the right place, even if this solution does strike me as somewhat dangerous.
Anyhow, the employment market will vet real workers from pretend ones. I think the motivation in this case, from the universities perspective, is to not have their degree and academic rep devalued. Obviously, the better the grads, the more money and brains go into the school
Throw a packet sniffer down before the traffic hits microsoft.com, and I wonder how many you'll see per second ... ;)
kept SGI in business (maybe)
I'd just like to say that this is a grossly unqualified statement. If anyone can shed some light as to SGI's true financial situation, I'd be interested to know if MS could claim something along the lines of what I suggested above.
The XBox runs on Direct X, OpenGL's direct competition and nemesis. I mean, we've gotten to the point where even MS can go around saying, "Yeah, we did this so we can kick some ass and make some money for our stock holders.", which is true, legal, and widely accepted.
I don't think sinister is the word - it's standard operating procedure for MS, along with lots of other large corperations. The Real beauty of it is that MS also has an alibi - they kept SGI in business (maybe), thus ensuring they still have competitors. MS is to the market now what the US is to the world - they are taking things over via a dependance on existance. That is to say, they can keep companies alive and in buiness as a kind of bribe. This is so they cannot be accussed of being so successfully [anti-competative/innovative] (take your pick, doesn't matter for the sake of argument) as to have killed off all of their competitors!
It'd be a very incestuous market with not much new to show for itself very often ...
... which is to say that the MS in that scenario would never invent anything, and that all the other fish would want to stop living, cause everytime they had a new idea, it'd just be bought from them and bastardized for the masses. People don't do stuff just for money; people want to see their innovative babies through to customer satisfaction. If ideas keep getting snatched up and implemented by the guy who likes to ejaculate his products prematurely on the market, it ruins it for everyone. This is why I don't support the scenario you described as a particularly healthy one in the long term.
3. As a result, company A's product is improved.
.. just, in a bad way.) MS doesn't have much to gain from OpenGL, IMHO, and since the XBox, and Windows, etc is all DirectX'ed, I suspect they'd be more interested in running OpenGL into the ground than learning anything from it, incorperating it into DirectX, and then letting OpenGL go out in the middle of a large sunny grassy field so that they will meet on the market battlefield again. I mean really, I can't think of many companies that would do that in the first place, but MS would be the last company to do it.
..
...
Often, these types of purchases are made just to run the newly bought foobar through the shredder. It's the easiest and most reliable way to win a competition. (On that note, I won't argue that its not competative
>If Microsoft adapted many of the good technologies
What if they just bought every software company, and released a product that incorperated all the good technologies? We'd all die, cause what you like is different than what I like, so I don't mind having a choice and choosing differently than you. The notion of a 'right' solution is BS, so ensuring that fish A doesn't nibble on every other fish in the pond is critical to maintaining consumer confidence and a healthy economic ecosystem (nevermind encouraging competition and innovation). It'd be a very incestuous market with not much new to show for itself very often
I dont know why this whole debate seems to be centering around total and absolute liability.
/reasonable/ job in securing the vehicle, as evidenced by what the laws state, and that the market keeps buying these slimjim-vulnerable vehicles.
:)
It's not Hondas fault that you car keeps getting stolen until they start selling them without locks at all. Honda has done a
However, should Vendor X be held accountable for shipping software with a backdoor, 35 different possible buffer overrun exploits, and for storing your password in a cleartext file who's default location is the document root of the webserver running on your OS? Hell yeah.
I'm all for some reasonable levels of liability, where the cost of testing and ensuring complience is minimal compared to the possible damages and likelyhood of exploitation of the kind of obvious design flaws I mentioned above.
No one can be perfect, but the way people seem to be painting it, even being pretty good, or even not retarded would be prohibitivly costly to any given software company. I think thats BS.
I think I said they should be held accoutable for software that they write and charge for.
/do/ sell some (ie, if any of their software is not GPL'd), they should be held accountable. That's the beauty of this approach tho; the market determines what level of accountability that the vendors should be held to. If people don't buy RedHat because RedHat could not be held accountable in terms of a failure, I'd suggest (and I'm a big proponant of OSS, so dont get the wrong idea) that they would have to look into ways of making sure the consumer confidence is there. If thats by providing an EULA that points out that they will hold themselves accoutable for certain problems, so be it.
So telling me they dont charge for software doesn't bring anything new to the table. I'm saying, if they
As it stands, the whole supply and demand thing has no say in liability, because vendors are not being forced to accept it. Should they be forced to accept some level of liability, the market could more easily dictate what terms those should be, or whether anyone ever cared about it in the first place (ie, people might keep buying RedHat, cause they wern't interested in being able to hold the vendor/developer liable in the first place.)
Well, if 10$ is enough to develop and test the product, your decision to go 'into business' should also involve you accepting responsibility as to the damages that could be caused by your software. If a 10$ asking price doesn't provide enough moolah to test a product to a degree in which you are comfortable that it is relatively secure (I say relatively, because I do not think that these types of liability clauses should be absolute .. they should cover just some general easily implemented and tested possible sources for exploits, like buffer overruns, backdoors, etc), then ask for more money.
.com boom, to some degree. Consumers became disillusioned, as software vendors (and asp providers, etc) placed the blame and responsibility of non-functioning software and services on the consumer. So the consumer got scared, and stopped spending shit loads of money on stuff that they could not garauntee would give a favourable Return on Investment.
.. if you dont want to be held accoutable for your errors, you cant expect to be able to profit from your work. Traditional manufactures know this; software vendors are working hard not to have to accept responsibility, for obvious reasons. But really, it would ensure that in the very least, commercial software was held up to at least some rudimentary standards in terms of security.
.Net, or whatever, the next big thing in services that shuttles all our data around, shouldn't be held by law up to these standards as well? The cost in terms of failures could be just as bad, if not even more catastrophic.
Otherwise, you shouldn't be in business; so give it away for free. You cannot have your cake and eat it to. If you're in business, you have to be serious. Otherwise we end up with companies who are only interested in fooling people, as once the sale is made, their responsibility is null and void. This is what happened in the
Compare this to industries where companies can be held accoutable for obvious design flaws (car companies), and you have the reason we now have safety features like airbags, and a generally more reasonable attitude from the consumer base about what constitutes a company's level of liability.
I guess the idea is
Engineers have to go through all kinds of hoops, cause people and money go over their bridges. Explain to me why the makers of
Read the comments above. I dont have a choice in using IE. It's tied to the OS; Microsoft admits it. You pay for the OS, so you pay for IE. So it'd better work. Same with Office. NOT the same for freeware I get from download.com, as it is my /choice/ to run that software, and I am not contributing to the resources that go into developing and testing it; ergo, in that scenario, I should be on my own.
Really now. People equate OSS with guys at home working for free. I support RedHat being held liable for software they write if they are making money off of it.
But software that is free, free as in free beer, should not be liable. I've always felt that if you are providing something for free, and you don't force it into people's hands, those people should understand the risks of using it.
However, if you're making money off of it, that money should go to making sure the software is stable and secure, and that people get what they pay for. So, in that case, I think the idea of certain reasonable guidelines on security and realiability should and could be held up by consumer protection laws. I think there are certain things, such as vulnerabilities of running servers and such being on by default in shipped software, that should be illegal. The way some software vendors ship products with 40 outside-facing services to the novice user who will never ps aux or check out the services control panel is, to me, an unneccessary and easily preventable and pluggable hole, especially considering the number of people who use them and the value of the data that gets thrown on these systems.
> I am not saying my boxes are uncrackable, or that I am all knowing, or even that great at securing systems.... Anyways.
:) That you havn't been cracked? Hehe, reminds me of my giraffe scarecrow .. works like a charm, I havn't ever seen any giraffes around my lawn. ;)
So what are you saying?
Considering what things MS leaves on by default in Windows when it ships, you could buy their software for 200$, and then get a $20,000 lawsuit-fueled mail-in rebate! Talk about savings!
> Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
.. ease is a matter of context, and security (akas: kernal/security mailing-list anality) is about as good as it gets. Can you point me towards a non-slackware-biased source that can break it down for me?
Since when did secure go hand in hand with ease?
We stick with FreeBSD
AC's are strictly forbidden from making informing posts. Don't you know that? ;)