I had these sorts of "Joe Jobs" against my domain for 2 years. The last straw was when I actually had a client upset at me over spam sent on my behalf from a different server. I explored a lot of different ways of stopping it, and ultimately arrived at moving my MX records to Google servers as part of the above Google Apps for your Domain. It uses SPF, and presumably Google's other tools they use to protect core Gmail users. The Joe Job emails stopped (I'd repeatedly get emails about send failures sent to me in regards to the Joe Jobs prior, and the occasional complaint). Not 1 more complaint or send failure notification.
I tend to find with most AV questions, if I just cruise AVSforum long enough I find the best of breed and a long list of posts praising it. Such is the case here.
Microsoft got slammed with a massive Antitrust case. The implication is that if they had more than one lobbyist, and had spent the millions they now spend, that case would not have happened.
You're kidding me right? The mere use of lobbyists is enough for you to decide Google's an evil company?
Have a look at the blog, you can read about what those lobbyists are up to. That's a major difference. The RIAA is evil - when they were busy turning singing into an act for hire, so they could own an artist indefinitely, do you think they were blogging about their intentions and notifying the American people? No. In fact, they did everything they could to hide it so it could torpedo its way into law before it was too late.
Evil companies and organizations like the RIAA are out there buying their way into legislation that gives them an unfair lock on all sorts of things. It's a broken system that works on money. Google is paying to keep it fair - the way it should be. It sucks it takes lobbyists to do it, but Google is working to keep the very worst ideas out of Congress. Or did you think Net Neutrality would just solve itself?
There will always be a cheaper method that gets there on the broken back of the environment. What you're asking for is essentially unreachable - after gas is exhausted there will be other polluting fuels, etc etc and on it goes. If cost is your sole decider it won't happen before you're dead, or your kids, or theirs - there will always be someone with a novel way to make a buck that harms the environment. Legal incentives are needed to encourage green alternatives.
The argument that cost is the sole factor is a lot of bull anyway - I've got a $23000 Prius on the road that cost less than the gas guzzling SUVs and trucks beside me on the highway. I've got better resale value than any of them as well - so clearly, it's not "just cost." At least some people throwing that excuse out use it to avoid feeling guilty about not having even looked into being environmentally responsible - or not admitting they could care less.
HD isn't mentioned and given the constraints of phone lines I'll bet it's not part of the plans. Interactive features could be stronger than cable, however.
This is not "The US's opinion" and too many people confuse this with Bush in office. The guy has an Approval rating of low 30%'s and has made clear anyone who doesn't agree with him can go dip their balls in lava (credit: Daily Show). His decisions don't represent me nor the majority of the US people, not by a long shot. This isn't the US's stance, it's one guy who'd be out of power if the US had a means to dispose of removing bad mistakes from power.
Sunlight exposure before the age of 16 has also been linked to occurence of Multiple Sclerosis. It's not clear whether this is because of Vitamin D production/regulation though.
I actually do this on a regular basis - Outlook Mobile can receive Word docs in email, I can edit them and make changes right on my phone and send them off. It's useful for basic document editing, like sending off an invoice or fixing up documentation. Having an entire laptop with you can be cumbersome, but it's nice to pass otherwise bored time waiting for this or that by getting some work done by opening up your phone for a few minutes.
If you had a phone that could do this, and tied Outlook to your main email account, I bet you'd be doing the same thing within a month. It's a natural step.
It's striking how little criticism the iPhone is getting on Slashdot just because Apple made it. Have you ever tried developing an app for Pocket PC? Microsoft has gone out of their way to simplify Windows Mobile development - debugging on device can be done by a novice programmer in a couple of minutes. Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move. Buying an iPhone is going to go like this:
Oh boy my iPhone is here! It was $600 but it sure was worth it!... It integrates so well with my Mac!... That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.... I wish this thing played videos.... Will this thing ever support Flash?... I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support. I'm so tired of them ignoring me. I wish I could just buy a 3rd party app to view the occasional presentation.... Forget this! Windows Mobile can do everything I need this iPhone to do and an MDA is $300 instead of $600. Time to sell this thing to the next sucker.
If you don't believe me, look at the Hiptop/Sidekick - http://hiptop.com/forums/ A bunch of Apple employees left and made that platform which is mostly closed. The result? Every long-time user is tired of the same old lackings and no progress, because without competition there's no motivation to improve. The iPhone will be more locked-down and WORSE than that.
This is more or less the case. I was watching CSpan as a bill considering the use of laptops which connect over the cell network on airplanes was debated, and the debate got straight to the point: We should allow laptops because they are not intrusive, but no one likes a cell phone call on an airplane so the nuisance should continue to be banned. At no point during the Senate debate did anyone show proof of serious harm to the airplane or cell network from cell phone use, and it's interesting that no one had any serious objections to laptops connecting wirelessly over that same network.
Although the cell network concern is somewhat legitimate, the truth is it's a simple software problem of anticipating this kind of broad network access and handling it appropriately. It's not a serious technical challenge, it's just a limitation of SOME cell networks, for now. If the law changes, so will the software, so it can't be taken seriously.
There is also some legitimate technical concern of radiation affecting internal plane signals. However, this kind of interference is only possible on unshielded cable on the plane, which presents a problem whether a cell phone is on or not.
There are many reasons rumored (even by the FAA!) for the cell phone ban and the above are the only 2 with any technical basis, and even they just take a little more investigation to reveal their lack of merit. What was enjoyable was that the Senate debate didn't spend more than a few minutes pondering the technical concerns - they accepted them all as crap and moved directly to the nuisance issue, and focused primarily on that for the entire debate.
Managers who think they can own your soul just because you work for them do have something to worry about in Open Source: If you get your boss to open source the project you're working on, when you quit, it walks with you.
The email is Quarantined - meaning you can get it back unharmed - not Deleted.
This is being misreported all across the Web even though the linked article in every case makes it clear.
It's a serious flaw certainly and still more bad press for Vista, but this one is not nearly as severe as issues like DRM and Certificate-only drivers in Vista - it doesn't deserve the same level of press.
If someone associates it with Socialism or Communism they're mistaken; the closer you get to Open Source the more you realize it's got very little to do with it.
I also don't think the right and left have any direct correllation with Open Source in either direction... these are delusions of grandeur I'd say.
If Open Source has a relation to an economic philosophy, it's to Capitalism - and companies that want to be good stewards of the communities their products are involved in.
Exactly. From the article: "I am not aware of any anti-DRM guru protesting the use of DRM (protection) in GSM or avoiding its use because it employs DRM, maybe because a part of the DRM used by GSM is to avoid eavesdropping in the radio link, a very consumer-friendly use of DRM"
This is above-all the reason GSM's DRM is widely accepted and successful: It benefits the user. Pretty much the entire rest of the article is a waste of time because the entire problem revolves around this one statement, referenced 2 or 3 other times within.
No DRM scheme for music currently in use benefits the user, because the MP3 cat is long out of the bag. Users have been able to obtain DRM-free music, for free, conveniently, for a long time. The tool that designed Napster unleashed that fact on the world - probably unfairly - but it is now out of the bag. Any DRM scheme needs to IMPROVE on that situation, rather than take something away.
His stated desire here is to find a successful DRM scheme for music and it rests entirely upon offering this increased benefit to the CONSUMER. And music is unique here because there are in fact 2 obstacles standing in the way:
1) That's really difficult to do. How do you possibly make pay-for music more convenient and enjoyable than stolen music? For example, stealing is a click. Buying is a click and a credit card form. But this and the many other challenges can be overcome or minimized - for example, entering your credit card just once, buying songs with free "credits" loaned to you before needing to enter your credit card so you're into the system before you buy into it, etc.
But another of these complications is offering the user features of a DRM scheme they cannot achieve now with free music. What could that be? One attempt here by both Apple and Microsoft has been offering "higher quality," encoding at 192kbps instead of 128. However, this edge has been quickly eliminated as people tend to rip their MP3s at 192kbps or higher now - and some argue that most people can't really tell the difference in quality anyway. So what can you possibly offer? Well one possible way to sell Digital Rights to consumers is to make them benefit, similar to the way YouTube and other video sites are slowly realizing (their Flash players and proprietary video formats ARE a form of DRM... and now they reward content posters with 50% of the profits). That is, tie in a special license to DRM'd music that lets the content purchaser freely "mashup" the music they just bought, and offer an online service where these mashups can be listened to or purchased themselves - rewarding many (in consumers' minds, "any") small content producers with money, that can keep flowing only if the DRM continues to work.
2) The RIAA is greedy, and probably evil. The above proposed solution is probably workable, but not as long as the RIAA holds the keys. I think this is the main reason music has become uniquely impossible to solve on the DRM front. Many uninformed people hate the RIAA because they think it's evil. But many well-informed people also hate them because of what the RIAA has done to consumer rights: degrade them every chance they've gotten, buying politicians and sneaking riders into unrelated bills overnight. This causes 2 unique problems for the music industry: The RIAA is simply too greedy to allow MORE consumer rights just to get DRM to work (they allow only DRM that offers less), and the consuming public generally does not trust or accept the music industry authority's initiatives.
Newspaper articles regularly run about the RIAA jealously trying to eliminate the embarassment Apple has made of them - a complete newcomer to the music industry has stepped in, played authority, and won far more trust from consumers (even convincing them to pay for DRM'd music!) than the RIAA has been able to assume since the introduction of Napster. Microsoft has its enemies in the consumer market, but they remain the authority in the field: Internet Explorer is the majority browser because most user
I've learned to always wait 3 years - a minimum of 2 years - before buying a new Microsoft OS. Hotfix and patch and Service Pack and Driver Architecture releases later, it's finally worth considering - or dead as a doornail as was the case with Windows ME.
I'm a dedicated Windows user and Vista just like any other OS needs at least 2 years of sitting on the market before anyone should buy it, or they're just getting hosed with buggy, unoptimized software. The gaming benchmarks this round are no different than when XP came out - Windows 98 hosed XP in gaming benchmarks left and right. Two years later, I moved to XP and performance was comparable. And, I didn't have to download Service Pack 1 - it came on the disc.
Maybe in 2 years everything will be optimized, the new Aero features will scale up and down depending on real application needs, and most importantly, the aggressive DRM will be relaxed. Or maybe in 2 years even dedicated Windows users like myself will have moved to other OS's. Whatever happens, give it those 2 years or you'll be spending hundreds of dollars to play guinea pig to a technological mess. Don't waste your time.
Agreed. I was almost shocked when I saw how much StarDock had done to improve on Windows' aging UI. They've done a lot that people ask for in Windows all the time, but their marketing is so poor, few people realize and even fewer will pay the $10 or $20 registration fee for it. But now people are going to move to Vista for between $100 and $500 for the software alone? Unbelievable.
I liked Windows 95 and XP a lot. I'm not your usual anti-Microsoft Slashdot troll. But Vista is just bad news from every angle so far it seems.
He's not complaining about having to use multithreading - Carmack's games are unoriginal but they're always technologically brilliant - disliking multithreading has nothing to do with it. Have a look at the Q3 source - which he's made freely available - and see all the threading going on. This is not laziness talking - this guy loves technology. The issue is the approach Sony and Microsoft take in their dev kits. This is the first Playstation to even have a graphics card or basic graphics engine built-in - the vector coprocessor in PS2 and the Cell processor in PS3 amount to "Here's a bunch of cpu power... good luck." Microsoft on the other hand has powerful dev tools that considered these are more than basic hardware - they're meant to run 3D games. They have a graphics engine and pipeline already in place that's tweakable in a million ways and code libraries to get you past all the trivia of game development. On the PS2 and now to a similar degree the PS3 the coder has to rewrite all these silly libraries themselves - and every single game company has to get past this trivia just to get a single game out the door.
So of course he's tired of writing that trivia - his gripe is the PS3 is a big complicated piece of hardware more suited to a new web server than a game system, with practically nothing to get you started. And now that MS has their well-regarded IDE to compare to, Sony just looks behind the times.
There will be companies coming along to fix this just like they did on PS2 - Renderware's cross-platform engine for example - but they aren't ready yet. And when they are they'll be closed source so Carmack can't tweak and play like an engine coder loves to do. The Stream engine and Geometry Shaders of the Xbox 360 give you nearly infinite number of engine tweak options on the other hand and they're available today.
Basically he's lamenting having to write his own Stream engine in Cell instructions for the PS3. I would too.
The Wii has a cute dev kit that doesn't hold a candle to the Stream engine, but no one expects it to - it's basically an Xbox/2004 gamer PC graphics engine, which has no mystery to it, nor high expectations.
So, tying many stories together, what are the chances of.Net Compact Framework apps running on the iPhone? It appears for now Codeweavers/Wine have abandoned.Net and to some degree given Mono the cold shoulder... . But it would be quite cool to use such a high level framework to write apps for Windows Mobile phones (Blackberry, MDA, Treo...) and iPhone and its derivatives. The most obvious role Wine/CodeWeavers could play is in running Win32 Invoke parts of the phone, like the ConnectionManager to monitor and manage the phone's net connection.
I really doubt Hybrids will be as markedly impacted by the new tests as suggested in the EPA's discussion. Rapid accelleration is a reason many car buyers buy their car - I own a Prius and I can't even list for you how many times someone told me about its 0-60 performance while I was considering buying it - as a selling point for buying the car! Even over on GreenHybrid.com where fuel efficiency is the point of the entire website, people made endless claims about the Prius' ability to take off off the line.
So bravo for these changes being added. Toyota and Honda are obviously the leaders in this field and they'll either make no change to their strategy and just keep having the highest EPA numbers, or adjust their strategy slightly to keep high EPA numbers but handle rapid accelleration with good mileage numbers - something that, by the way, the current Prius does not do, regardless of how many claims salesmen and Prius enthusiasts made. It gets its great numbers when cruising, or starting and stopping at low speeds - which is just what the old EPA standards tested.
Any environmentalist worried about the Prius dropping from 60mpg EPA to 44mpg should keep in mind 2 things:
The Hummer will probably drop from 11mpg to 9. Single digits won't improve sales. They might harm them. Might.
The 2008/2009 Prius has been claimed by Toyota to get 75mpg under the current standards - so it's entirely possible the new EPA measure will put it at... 60mpg.
So even if the new tests somehow favored gas guzzlers, which I doubt, Honda and Toyota have the technological lead and their MPG numbers are only going to continue to run away from the rest of the pack leaving GM and Ford's "hybrid" sub-30mpg numbers further and further behind.
Yes, to be fair, the "GigaGamez" site the original article comes from is a little bit Wii-biased. Not a lot, but at a minimum their least favorite system is the PS3 if you just pass over the past few months' articles. They seem to have some love for the Xbox 360 though.
So... it is newsworthy that anyone would trade a hard-won PS3 for a Wii if you think only of effort and cost - I'll give you that - but the article is exaggerating a little.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider migrating your mail servers to Gmail for your Domain:
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new
I had these sorts of "Joe Jobs" against my domain for 2 years. The last straw was when I actually had a client upset at me over spam sent on my behalf from a different server. I explored a lot of different ways of stopping it, and ultimately arrived at moving my MX records to Google servers as part of the above Google Apps for your Domain. It uses SPF, and presumably Google's other tools they use to protect core Gmail users. The Joe Job emails stopped (I'd repeatedly get emails about send failures sent to me in regards to the Joe Jobs prior, and the occasional complaint). Not 1 more complaint or send failure notification.
OnAir HDTV Creator:9 5589
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=6
I tend to find with most AV questions, if I just cruise AVSforum long enough I find the best of breed and a long list of posts praising it. Such is the case here.
Did you read the article...?
Microsoft got slammed with a massive Antitrust case. The implication is that if they had more than one lobbyist, and had spent the millions they now spend, that case would not have happened.
You're kidding me right? The mere use of lobbyists is enough for you to decide Google's an evil company?
Have a look at the blog, you can read about what those lobbyists are up to. That's a major difference. The RIAA is evil - when they were busy turning singing into an act for hire, so they could own an artist indefinitely, do you think they were blogging about their intentions and notifying the American people? No. In fact, they did everything they could to hide it so it could torpedo its way into law before it was too late.
Evil companies and organizations like the RIAA are out there buying their way into legislation that gives them an unfair lock on all sorts of things. It's a broken system that works on money. Google is paying to keep it fair - the way it should be. It sucks it takes lobbyists to do it, but Google is working to keep the very worst ideas out of Congress. Or did you think Net Neutrality would just solve itself?
There will always be a cheaper method that gets there on the broken back of the environment. What you're asking for is essentially unreachable - after gas is exhausted there will be other polluting fuels, etc etc and on it goes. If cost is your sole decider it won't happen before you're dead, or your kids, or theirs - there will always be someone with a novel way to make a buck that harms the environment. Legal incentives are needed to encourage green alternatives.
The argument that cost is the sole factor is a lot of bull anyway - I've got a $23000 Prius on the road that cost less than the gas guzzling SUVs and trucks beside me on the highway. I've got better resale value than any of them as well - so clearly, it's not "just cost." At least some people throwing that excuse out use it to avoid feeling guilty about not having even looked into being environmentally responsible - or not admitting they could care less.
You pretty much just described maple syrup.
HD isn't mentioned and given the constraints of phone lines I'll bet it's not part of the plans. Interactive features could be stronger than cable, however.
This is not "The US's opinion" and too many people confuse this with Bush in office. The guy has an Approval rating of low 30%'s and has made clear anyone who doesn't agree with him can go dip their balls in lava (credit: Daily Show). His decisions don't represent me nor the majority of the US people, not by a long shot. This isn't the US's stance, it's one guy who'd be out of power if the US had a means to dispose of removing bad mistakes from power.
In other news: French physician sets record with 352 online girlfriends. "I just really like a good web strip tease," said the Frenchman.
Seriously though, bravo to the guy for improving driver support in Linux, it's more or less the one big lacking Linux needs to overcome.
Sunlight exposure before the age of 16 has also been linked to occurence of Multiple Sclerosis. It's not clear whether this is because of Vitamin D production/regulation though.
I actually do this on a regular basis - Outlook Mobile can receive Word docs in email, I can edit them and make changes right on my phone and send them off. It's useful for basic document editing, like sending off an invoice or fixing up documentation. Having an entire laptop with you can be cumbersome, but it's nice to pass otherwise bored time waiting for this or that by getting some work done by opening up your phone for a few minutes.
If you had a phone that could do this, and tied Outlook to your main email account, I bet you'd be doing the same thing within a month. It's a natural step.
It's striking how little criticism the iPhone is getting on Slashdot just because Apple made it. Have you ever tried developing an app for Pocket PC? Microsoft has gone out of their way to simplify Windows Mobile development - debugging on device can be done by a novice programmer in a couple of minutes. Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move. Buying an iPhone is going to go like this:
... ... ... ... ... ...
Oh boy my iPhone is here! It was $600 but it sure was worth it!
It integrates so well with my Mac!
That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
I wish this thing played videos.
Will this thing ever support Flash?
I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support. I'm so tired of them ignoring me. I wish I could just buy a 3rd party app to view the occasional presentation.
Forget this! Windows Mobile can do everything I need this iPhone to do and an MDA is $300 instead of $600. Time to sell this thing to the next sucker.
If you don't believe me, look at the Hiptop/Sidekick - http://hiptop.com/forums/ A bunch of Apple employees left and made that platform which is mostly closed. The result? Every long-time user is tired of the same old lackings and no progress, because without competition there's no motivation to improve. The iPhone will be more locked-down and WORSE than that.
This is more or less the case. I was watching CSpan as a bill considering the use of laptops which connect over the cell network on airplanes was debated, and the debate got straight to the point: We should allow laptops because they are not intrusive, but no one likes a cell phone call on an airplane so the nuisance should continue to be banned. At no point during the Senate debate did anyone show proof of serious harm to the airplane or cell network from cell phone use, and it's interesting that no one had any serious objections to laptops connecting wirelessly over that same network.
Although the cell network concern is somewhat legitimate, the truth is it's a simple software problem of anticipating this kind of broad network access and handling it appropriately. It's not a serious technical challenge, it's just a limitation of SOME cell networks, for now. If the law changes, so will the software, so it can't be taken seriously.
There is also some legitimate technical concern of radiation affecting internal plane signals. However, this kind of interference is only possible on unshielded cable on the plane, which presents a problem whether a cell phone is on or not.
There are many reasons rumored (even by the FAA!) for the cell phone ban and the above are the only 2 with any technical basis, and even they just take a little more investigation to reveal their lack of merit. What was enjoyable was that the Senate debate didn't spend more than a few minutes pondering the technical concerns - they accepted them all as crap and moved directly to the nuisance issue, and focused primarily on that for the entire debate.
Managers who think they can own your soul just because you work for them do have something to worry about in Open Source: If you get your boss to open source the project you're working on, when you quit, it walks with you.
The email is Quarantined - meaning you can get it back unharmed - not Deleted.
This is being misreported all across the Web even though the linked article in every case makes it clear.
It's a serious flaw certainly and still more bad press for Vista, but this one is not nearly as severe as issues like DRM and Certificate-only drivers in Vista - it doesn't deserve the same level of press.
If someone associates it with Socialism or Communism they're mistaken; the closer you get to Open Source the more you realize it's got very little to do with it.
I also don't think the right and left have any direct correllation with Open Source in either direction... these are delusions of grandeur I'd say.
If Open Source has a relation to an economic philosophy, it's to Capitalism - and companies that want to be good stewards of the communities their products are involved in.
Does no one read the news?
Don't... Leave... Your... Laptop... Plugged... In... All... Day
Exactly. From the article:
"I am not aware of any anti-DRM guru protesting the use of DRM (protection) in GSM or avoiding its use because it employs DRM, maybe because a part of the DRM used by GSM is to avoid eavesdropping in the radio link, a very consumer-friendly use of DRM"
This is above-all the reason GSM's DRM is widely accepted and successful: It benefits the user. Pretty much the entire rest of the article is a waste of time because the entire problem revolves around this one statement, referenced 2 or 3 other times within.
No DRM scheme for music currently in use benefits the user, because the MP3 cat is long out of the bag. Users have been able to obtain DRM-free music, for free, conveniently, for a long time. The tool that designed Napster unleashed that fact on the world - probably unfairly - but it is now out of the bag. Any DRM scheme needs to IMPROVE on that situation, rather than take something away.
His stated desire here is to find a successful DRM scheme for music and it rests entirely upon offering this increased benefit to the CONSUMER. And music is unique here because there are in fact 2 obstacles standing in the way:
1) That's really difficult to do. How do you possibly make pay-for music more convenient and enjoyable than stolen music? For example, stealing is a click. Buying is a click and a credit card form. But this and the many other challenges can be overcome or minimized - for example, entering your credit card just once, buying songs with free "credits" loaned to you before needing to enter your credit card so you're into the system before you buy into it, etc.
But another of these complications is offering the user features of a DRM scheme they cannot achieve now with free music. What could that be? One attempt here by both Apple and Microsoft has been offering "higher quality," encoding at 192kbps instead of 128. However, this edge has been quickly eliminated as people tend to rip their MP3s at 192kbps or higher now - and some argue that most people can't really tell the difference in quality anyway. So what can you possibly offer? Well one possible way to sell Digital Rights to consumers is to make them benefit, similar to the way YouTube and other video sites are slowly realizing (their Flash players and proprietary video formats ARE a form of DRM... and now they reward content posters with 50% of the profits). That is, tie in a special license to DRM'd music that lets the content purchaser freely "mashup" the music they just bought, and offer an online service where these mashups can be listened to or purchased themselves - rewarding many (in consumers' minds, "any") small content producers with money, that can keep flowing only if the DRM continues to work.
2) The RIAA is greedy, and probably evil. The above proposed solution is probably workable, but not as long as the RIAA holds the keys. I think this is the main reason music has become uniquely impossible to solve on the DRM front. Many uninformed people hate the RIAA because they think it's evil. But many well-informed people also hate them because of what the RIAA has done to consumer rights: degrade them every chance they've gotten, buying politicians and sneaking riders into unrelated bills overnight. This causes 2 unique problems for the music industry: The RIAA is simply too greedy to allow MORE consumer rights just to get DRM to work (they allow only DRM that offers less), and the consuming public generally does not trust or accept the music industry authority's initiatives.
Newspaper articles regularly run about the RIAA jealously trying to eliminate the embarassment Apple has made of them - a complete newcomer to the music industry has stepped in, played authority, and won far more trust from consumers (even convincing them to pay for DRM'd music!) than the RIAA has been able to assume since the introduction of Napster. Microsoft has its enemies in the consumer market, but they remain the authority in the field: Internet Explorer is the majority browser because most user
I've learned to always wait 3 years - a minimum of 2 years - before buying a new Microsoft OS. Hotfix and patch and Service Pack and Driver Architecture releases later, it's finally worth considering - or dead as a doornail as was the case with Windows ME.
I'm a dedicated Windows user and Vista just like any other OS needs at least 2 years of sitting on the market before anyone should buy it, or they're just getting hosed with buggy, unoptimized software. The gaming benchmarks this round are no different than when XP came out - Windows 98 hosed XP in gaming benchmarks left and right. Two years later, I moved to XP and performance was comparable. And, I didn't have to download Service Pack 1 - it came on the disc.
Maybe in 2 years everything will be optimized, the new Aero features will scale up and down depending on real application needs, and most importantly, the aggressive DRM will be relaxed. Or maybe in 2 years even dedicated Windows users like myself will have moved to other OS's. Whatever happens, give it those 2 years or you'll be spending hundreds of dollars to play guinea pig to a technological mess. Don't waste your time.
Agreed. I was almost shocked when I saw how much StarDock had done to improve on Windows' aging UI. They've done a lot that people ask for in Windows all the time, but their marketing is so poor, few people realize and even fewer will pay the $10 or $20 registration fee for it. But now people are going to move to Vista for between $100 and $500 for the software alone? Unbelievable.
I liked Windows 95 and XP a lot. I'm not your usual anti-Microsoft Slashdot troll. But Vista is just bad news from every angle so far it seems.
He's not complaining about having to use multithreading - Carmack's games are unoriginal but they're always technologically brilliant - disliking multithreading has nothing to do with it. Have a look at the Q3 source - which he's made freely available - and see all the threading going on. This is not laziness talking - this guy loves technology. The issue is the approach Sony and Microsoft take in their dev kits. This is the first Playstation to even have a graphics card or basic graphics engine built-in - the vector coprocessor in PS2 and the Cell processor in PS3 amount to "Here's a bunch of cpu power... good luck." Microsoft on the other hand has powerful dev tools that considered these are more than basic hardware - they're meant to run 3D games. They have a graphics engine and pipeline already in place that's tweakable in a million ways and code libraries to get you past all the trivia of game development. On the PS2 and now to a similar degree the PS3 the coder has to rewrite all these silly libraries themselves - and every single game company has to get past this trivia just to get a single game out the door.
So of course he's tired of writing that trivia - his gripe is the PS3 is a big complicated piece of hardware more suited to a new web server than a game system, with practically nothing to get you started. And now that MS has their well-regarded IDE to compare to, Sony just looks behind the times.
There will be companies coming along to fix this just like they did on PS2 - Renderware's cross-platform engine for example - but they aren't ready yet. And when they are they'll be closed source so Carmack can't tweak and play like an engine coder loves to do. The Stream engine and Geometry Shaders of the Xbox 360 give you nearly infinite number of engine tweak options on the other hand and they're available today.
Basically he's lamenting having to write his own Stream engine in Cell instructions for the PS3. I would too.
The Wii has a cute dev kit that doesn't hold a candle to the Stream engine, but no one expects it to - it's basically an Xbox/2004 gamer PC graphics engine, which has no mystery to it, nor high expectations.
So, tying many stories together, what are the chances of .Net Compact Framework apps running on the iPhone? It appears for now Codeweavers/Wine have abandoned .Net and to some degree given Mono the cold shoulder... . But it would be quite cool to use such a high level framework to write apps for Windows Mobile phones (Blackberry, MDA, Treo...) and iPhone and its derivatives. The most obvious role Wine/CodeWeavers could play is in running Win32 Invoke parts of the phone, like the ConnectionManager to monitor and manage the phone's net connection.
I really doubt Hybrids will be as markedly impacted by the new tests as suggested in the EPA's discussion. Rapid accelleration is a reason many car buyers buy their car - I own a Prius and I can't even list for you how many times someone told me about its 0-60 performance while I was considering buying it - as a selling point for buying the car! Even over on GreenHybrid.com where fuel efficiency is the point of the entire website, people made endless claims about the Prius' ability to take off off the line.
So bravo for these changes being added. Toyota and Honda are obviously the leaders in this field and they'll either make no change to their strategy and just keep having the highest EPA numbers, or adjust their strategy slightly to keep high EPA numbers but handle rapid accelleration with good mileage numbers - something that, by the way, the current Prius does not do, regardless of how many claims salesmen and Prius enthusiasts made. It gets its great numbers when cruising, or starting and stopping at low speeds - which is just what the old EPA standards tested.
Any environmentalist worried about the Prius dropping from 60mpg EPA to 44mpg should keep in mind 2 things:
The Hummer will probably drop from 11mpg to 9. Single digits won't improve sales. They might harm them. Might.
The 2008/2009 Prius has been claimed by Toyota to get 75mpg under the current standards - so it's entirely possible the new EPA measure will put it at... 60mpg.
So even if the new tests somehow favored gas guzzlers, which I doubt, Honda and Toyota have the technological lead and their MPG numbers are only going to continue to run away from the rest of the pack leaving GM and Ford's "hybrid" sub-30mpg numbers further and further behind.
Yes, to be fair, the "GigaGamez" site the original article comes from is a little bit Wii-biased. Not a lot, but at a minimum their least favorite system is the PS3 if you just pass over the past few months' articles. They seem to have some love for the Xbox 360 though.
So... it is newsworthy that anyone would trade a hard-won PS3 for a Wii if you think only of effort and cost - I'll give you that - but the article is exaggerating a little.
And it'd get me, a long-time Windows user, to switch to Linux.