Being an avid KDE user generally, I think the problem has more to do with the memory footprint of the big two window managers as well as some bloat on the part of the most commonly used applications.
I use a four year old Pentium III 500MHZ laptop running KDE 3.2 with no problems, but I do have 320 megs of RAM.
Programs like OO.o, Mozilla, and a lot of the other stuff that the average Linux desktop user uses take up a lot of resources. It will be interesting to see how stuff like the QT port of OO.o develop. By sharing embedded libraries into the WM programs like that can run faster.
I think this is ultimately one of the biggest programs with Linux is the fact that there are GTK and QT factions and development for one will mean performance in the opposing WM is weaker.
The other thing worth noting about the memory footprint is a lot of end users start services they don't really want or need at boot resulting in slower boot times and more strain on the CPU and available memory. I think if desktop oriented distros took a more minimalist approach towards services started at boot in the default installation that might improve the problem.
Ultimately though, we know damn well Mozilla, OO.o running on top of Gnome or KDE on a machine with less than 128 megs of RAM is going to be too little memory.
A solution for some users might be if you're a KDE user for example, try out Konqueror, try Kmail, try Koffice and only use Mozilla, OO.o or whatever else if you are having some sort of a compatibility problem.
A QT style license that requires purchasing tools and rights from Sun for commercial use, while allowing free software (under an acceptable license) to be developed for free would be the best idea in my opinion. I'm sure there will be great debate at Sun over how profitable this will be, but in the long run this is definitely the way to go.
I remember some (though not all) of the FTP sites had CD 4 available with the community release (it was later taken down). Has anyone else come across it?
Times have changed since the 1950s when this movie was start of the art, I really do wonder how many people will bring Robotic puppets with them and make comments about the movie.
Their argument appears to be "These companies didn't want to pay us, so they used a competiting product. So we're sueing to make up the money we didn't make from not trying to be competitive in the open market."
and you won't ever have to pay SCO licensing fees for OSX
The way McBride and company are going on and on filing lawsuits, it wouldn't suprise me if they tried:P
They're appealing the judgement and it could be several years before a "final" decision is made over whether or not they have to change their name. It's unlikely they'll be doing so any time soon. I personally think the lawsuit is ridiculous as Mandrake the Magician isn't the only use of the word.
It's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. As many of you know, Microsoft continues to loose a marginal amount of money on every Xbox system sold. A lot of the problem is the hard drive along with a lot of individual components that can only be bought or provided by a single vendor ( the Nforce video chip and Celron CPU for example).
When Microsoft designed the Xbox they looked at the usual cost drop trends of game systems in the past. Usually console makers take a small loss on systems and then within a few years are able to make a profit on hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft because of the complex nature of the Xbox this hasn't been the case. Costs for the Nforce GPU haven't changed and in fact Nviia sued trying to get out of their contract as they were loosing money producing the chips. The hard drives are also a big expense for Microsoft.
While Microsoft did not expect to be making money on the current generation of the Xbox, the system has greatly surpassed loss expectations thus far and if the Xbox 2 is not a financial success it may cause serious questions about the companies long term chances in the console race. Their plan was to get their foot in the door take some losses during the first generation and generate some support for their second generation system. Thus far many of the all important Japanese third party licensees are still disinterested and several have dropped Xbox support altogether after initially being "onboard". The system is a miserable failure in Japan and Asia in general and is in third place worldwide a ways back from the Nintendo Game Cube.
Microsoft needs to turn the ship around in generation 2 or else it may already be too late. By taking out the hard drive as widely rumored beforehand it will greatly reduce the manufacturing costs of the system. I see it as a positive move by Microsoft.
IGN and Gamespot make mistakes, or their sources make mistakes. That happens quite a bit, a lot of the publications I've worked for or provided content for have made mistakes, and much to my dismay we've failed to correct it due to embarssment.
Anyway, Nintendo never had an official date for the Dolphin but the plan was always to release it after Sony (basically to have better technology available to them). They didn't announce an official time frame until Spaceworld 2000 which was in August 2000.
Anyway, a lot of other things that got picked up by large organizations with regard to Nintendo for example were that the Game Cube's discs were mini-DVDs (they are actually matsushita optical discs using an optical lens). A number of LEGITIMATE publications continue to call them mini-DVDs due to a few sources misinformation that started it all. A lot of times it can be hard to get urban legends out of the legitimate information system.
IGN jumped the gun in guessing the release time, Nintendo was just giving tenatives dates and lots of large publications made guesses based on that.
If I remember correctly the Nihon Shizbun (sp) a large Japanese newspaper incorrectly stated that Nintendo was planning a late 2000 Japanese release and the story got carried over to other media outsides.
Also, it's worth noting that by late 2000 (as you mentioned in your original post) The Game Cube was scheduled for a 2001 release (as officially announced at SpaceWorld 2000 held in August 2000).
Anyway, I've been working on the media end of the gaming industry for around 5 years, I don't actually work for a publisher or developer though.
Re:DS not meant as competition to the PSP?
on
Sony Delays PSP To 2005
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The DS is a companion product to the GameCube and Gameboy lines and isn't the "next generation" gameboy. Nintendo will probably wait out the GBA a bit longer before releasing a new system. The thing a lot of people here seem to be forgetting about how Nintendo became so domainant to begin with in handhelds is that the Gameboy has backward compatibility. The GameBoy Advance SP can play games I bought 15 years ago for the original Gameboy in most cases without a hitch (yes, a few games have bugs when running on GBAs).
I work in the games industry, Nintendo NEVER claimed that. The Dolphin as it was called at the time (based on the ATI "flipper" chip was always planned for a release around 2001. The system was first shown off at Spaceworld 2000 and before that had a tenative release date of 2001.
I meant the comment in the sense that a lot of what Microsoft compares their "TCO" savings to is external support over in house support. For example they compare the cost of their server packages with it's limited support to Red Hat or SUSE server packages and support. And anyone with a well trained and hard working internal IT department can be a lot better off and more cost effective running Linux then running Windows based servers. Part of the problem is people look at his comments and relate them exclusively to server packages. In the Linux world you don't NEED to pay to use your software. The argument that other people have been making is essentially the cost is made up for in paying for windows by the added support which I was essentially disagreeing with.
Free as in not paying for licensing.
I'm not denying the existance of other costs associated with it, but if you have an IT department that can keep packages up to date and you designed a solid infastructure you don't need proprietary software or commericial backing.
CRN: On the face of it, one could conclude that interest in Linux is the market's way of telling Microsoft that Windows pricing needs to change. What message do you think the market is trying to send?
TAYLOR: I would actually look at a similar construct but a different answer. You have to ask one of two questions. Is it either a) Windows is priced too high, or b) are we offering the right product at the right price point? We position Windows server as a multifunction server that does a variety of things. So in some ways, we've got a McDonald's No. 5 super-size offering that costs $2.99 and someone just wants a Diet Coke that costs 99 cents. So do we cut the entire super-size No. 5 down to 98 cents, or do we try to find a way to just give somebody the Diet Coke if that's what they want?
So Linux servers can't do a number of things and for a lower cost? For free I can turn a Linux box into a webserver, domain server, ftp server, irc server, database server and such. How exactly is Microsoft offering more value? All they are doing is charging more for their product.
What about the blind? People who use colored or distorted contacts (IE shaded contacts, contacts with designs on them), or other abnormalities of the eye. There might be a lot of ways people could potentially bypass a system like that.
Well, lower might work if Linux weren't free, as I said they are tracking sales figures for most of their research. Most of the Linux desktops aren't necessarily in the hands of consumers but are in the hands of business's that are using broadband anyway. Besides, there are quite a few winmodens that ARE supported out of the box these days. br> Also, think about all the people who have dual-boot systems, I know more then my fair share of them. Are those counted as Linux or Windows users?
It's worth noting that IDC #s are based heavily on sales figures. IE sales of box sets of Linux aimed at desktops (Lindows, Mandrake, Red Hat person, Suse) or systems preinstalled with the OS and not necessarily people downloading it for free, making copies of copies and such. The reality is that there is a high possibility the number of Linux desktops is SUBSTANCIALLY higher then their sales based estimates.
I am speaking mostly on the console end of things but many games are made in a cookie cutter fashion, often re-using the same game engines and trying to cash in on a popular title or genre already.
Games are like any other art form, be it a good movie, book, or song there is some inspiration involved in it. However, many games are just made because "Game X is popular, so if our game sells hald as well we'll make a fortune", the reality is that a lot of companies bank on a constant stream of rarely improved sequels and copycats of popular titles. This is really flooding the marketplace and has been for quite some time.
This combined with the insistance of publishers to have their games out right around the holiday season results in rushed and often bad games flooding the market. While it may sound like this is limited to smaller publishers, it is becoming an industry-wide epidemic with only a few very large publishers being unaffected.
I actually think that more games should be delayed. Having worked on that side of the industry for quite a few years now (I am speaking almost strictly on the console side). As the transition into fully 3D games especially in the console arena has become complete the number of quality titles, and the quality of the overall marketplace has weakened significantly.
There are a number of reasons for this, first and for most is developers insistance on 3D games. Back in the previous generation of games there was still a good number of 2D, 2.5D and polygonal but not fully 3D games out. Companies spend far too much time trying to make fully 3D engines that look good while paying now attention to how they play. This is mainly with regards to adventure games, platformers, and first person style games. There is a big emphasis on reusing the same already flawed 3D engines rather then improving upon them.
Very few companies have the resources to release a "great" game in say an 18 month development perioid. The result is that many companies try and rather then miss their holiday season deadline rush bad games to the market.
And yes I do realize it was written in the Java developers section. But it is very possible to improve the development of large projects using existing languages. Which is what the general scope of the interview touched on.
Opera is a nice browser, but honestly how many people do you know that actually regged it?
Most people are using the ad supported version. With the company going public it makes me wonder about how many ads and to what level the ads will be showing up in future releases. Instead of just a banner at the top maybe pop ups FROM Opera? Perhaps I'm just seeing things negatively but this certainly makes me wonder about the product. I will say it is nice to use on a Zaurus though.
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Being an avid KDE user generally, I think the problem has more to do with the memory footprint of the big two window managers as well as some bloat on the part of the most commonly used applications. I use a four year old Pentium III 500MHZ laptop running KDE 3.2 with no problems, but I do have 320 megs of RAM. Programs like OO.o, Mozilla, and a lot of the other stuff that the average Linux desktop user uses take up a lot of resources. It will be interesting to see how stuff like the QT port of OO.o develop. By sharing embedded libraries into the WM programs like that can run faster. I think this is ultimately one of the biggest programs with Linux is the fact that there are GTK and QT factions and development for one will mean performance in the opposing WM is weaker. The other thing worth noting about the memory footprint is a lot of end users start services they don't really want or need at boot resulting in slower boot times and more strain on the CPU and available memory. I think if desktop oriented distros took a more minimalist approach towards services started at boot in the default installation that might improve the problem. Ultimately though, we know damn well Mozilla, OO.o running on top of Gnome or KDE on a machine with less than 128 megs of RAM is going to be too little memory. A solution for some users might be if you're a KDE user for example, try out Konqueror, try Kmail, try Koffice and only use Mozilla, OO.o or whatever else if you are having some sort of a compatibility problem.
A QT style license that requires purchasing tools and rights from Sun for commercial use, while allowing free software (under an acceptable license) to be developed for free would be the best idea in my opinion. I'm sure there will be great debate at Sun over how profitable this will be, but in the long run this is definitely the way to go.
I remember some (though not all) of the FTP sites had CD 4 available with the community release (it was later taken down). Has anyone else come across it?
Times have changed since the 1950s when this movie was start of the art, I really do wonder how many people will bring Robotic puppets with them and make comments about the movie.
Their argument appears to be "These companies didn't want to pay us, so they used a competiting product. So we're sueing to make up the money we didn't make from not trying to be competitive in the open market."
and you won't ever have to pay SCO licensing fees for OSX The way McBride and company are going on and on filing lawsuits, it wouldn't suprise me if they tried :P
They're appealing the judgement and it could be several years before a "final" decision is made over whether or not they have to change their name. It's unlikely they'll be doing so any time soon. I personally think the lawsuit is ridiculous as Mandrake the Magician isn't the only use of the word.
It's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. As many of you know, Microsoft continues to loose a marginal amount of money on every Xbox system sold. A lot of the problem is the hard drive along with a lot of individual components that can only be bought or provided by a single vendor ( the Nforce video chip and Celron CPU for example).
When Microsoft designed the Xbox they looked at the usual cost drop trends of game systems in the past. Usually console makers take a small loss on systems and then within a few years are able to make a profit on hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft because of the complex nature of the Xbox this hasn't been the case. Costs for the Nforce GPU haven't changed and in fact Nviia sued trying to get out of their contract as they were loosing money producing the chips. The hard drives are also a big expense for Microsoft.
While Microsoft did not expect to be making money on the current generation of the Xbox, the system has greatly surpassed loss expectations thus far and if the Xbox 2 is not a financial success it may cause serious questions about the companies long term chances in the console race. Their plan was to get their foot in the door take some losses during the first generation and generate some support for their second generation system. Thus far many of the all important Japanese third party licensees are still disinterested and several have dropped Xbox support altogether after initially being "onboard". The system is a miserable failure in Japan and Asia in general and is in third place worldwide a ways back from the Nintendo Game Cube.
Microsoft needs to turn the ship around in generation 2 or else it may already be too late. By taking out the hard drive as widely rumored beforehand it will greatly reduce the manufacturing costs of the system. I see it as a positive move by Microsoft.
IGN and Gamespot make mistakes, or their sources make mistakes. That happens quite a bit, a lot of the publications I've worked for or provided content for have made mistakes, and much to my dismay we've failed to correct it due to embarssment.
Anyway, Nintendo never had an official date for the Dolphin but the plan was always to release it after Sony (basically to have better technology available to them). They didn't announce an official time frame until Spaceworld 2000 which was in August 2000.
Anyway, a lot of other things that got picked up by large organizations with regard to Nintendo for example were that the Game Cube's discs were mini-DVDs (they are actually matsushita optical discs using an optical lens). A number of LEGITIMATE publications continue to call them mini-DVDs due to a few sources misinformation that started it all. A lot of times it can be hard to get urban legends out of the legitimate information system.
IGN jumped the gun in guessing the release time, Nintendo was just giving tenatives dates and lots of large publications made guesses based on that. If I remember correctly the Nihon Shizbun (sp) a large Japanese newspaper incorrectly stated that Nintendo was planning a late 2000 Japanese release and the story got carried over to other media outsides.
Also, it's worth noting that by late 2000 (as you mentioned in your original post) The Game Cube was scheduled for a 2001 release (as officially announced at SpaceWorld 2000 held in August 2000).
Anyway, I've been working on the media end of the gaming industry for around 5 years, I don't actually work for a publisher or developer though.
The DS is a companion product to the GameCube and Gameboy lines and isn't the "next generation" gameboy. Nintendo will probably wait out the GBA a bit longer before releasing a new system. The thing a lot of people here seem to be forgetting about how Nintendo became so domainant to begin with in handhelds is that the Gameboy has backward compatibility. The GameBoy Advance SP can play games I bought 15 years ago for the original Gameboy in most cases without a hitch (yes, a few games have bugs when running on GBAs).
I work in the games industry, Nintendo NEVER claimed that. The Dolphin as it was called at the time (based on the ATI "flipper" chip was always planned for a release around 2001. The system was first shown off at Spaceworld 2000 and before that had a tenative release date of 2001.
There's nothing wrong with it at all.
I meant the comment in the sense that a lot of what Microsoft compares their "TCO" savings to is external support over in house support. For example they compare the cost of their server packages with it's limited support to Red Hat or SUSE server packages and support. And anyone with a well trained and hard working internal IT department can be a lot better off and more cost effective running Linux then running Windows based servers. Part of the problem is people look at his comments and relate them exclusively to server packages. In the Linux world you don't NEED to pay to use your software. The argument that other people have been making is essentially the cost is made up for in paying for windows by the added support which I was essentially disagreeing with.
Free as in not paying for licensing.
I'm not denying the existance of other costs associated with it, but if you have an IT department that can keep packages up to date and you designed a solid infastructure you don't need proprietary software or commericial backing.
It depends on the organization. For example a number of large univerisities use debian with no commericial backing support. In that case, it IS free.
CRN: On the face of it, one could conclude that interest in Linux is the market's way of telling Microsoft that Windows pricing needs to change. What message do you think the market is trying to send?
TAYLOR: I would actually look at a similar construct but a different answer. You have to ask one of two questions. Is it either a) Windows is priced too high, or b) are we offering the right product at the right price point? We position Windows server as a multifunction server that does a variety of things. So in some ways, we've got a McDonald's No. 5 super-size offering that costs $2.99 and someone just wants a Diet Coke that costs 99 cents. So do we cut the entire super-size No. 5 down to 98 cents, or do we try to find a way to just give somebody the Diet Coke if that's what they want?
So Linux servers can't do a number of things and for a lower cost? For free I can turn a Linux box into a webserver, domain server, ftp server, irc server, database server and such. How exactly is Microsoft offering more value? All they are doing is charging more for their product.
What about the blind? People who use colored or distorted contacts (IE shaded contacts, contacts with designs on them), or other abnormalities of the eye. There might be a lot of ways people could potentially bypass a system like that.
So know we now know what Lucas was drinking when casting Hayden Christainsen.
Well, lower might work if Linux weren't free, as I said they are tracking sales figures for most of their research. Most of the Linux desktops aren't necessarily in the hands of consumers but are in the hands of business's that are using broadband anyway. Besides, there are quite a few winmodens that ARE supported out of the box these days.
br> Also, think about all the people who have dual-boot systems, I know more then my fair share of them. Are those counted as Linux or Windows users?
It's worth noting that IDC #s are based heavily on sales figures. IE sales of box sets of Linux aimed at desktops (Lindows, Mandrake, Red Hat person, Suse) or systems preinstalled with the OS and not necessarily people downloading it for free, making copies of copies and such. The reality is that there is a high possibility the number of Linux desktops is SUBSTANCIALLY higher then their sales based estimates.
I am speaking mostly on the console end of things but many games are made in a cookie cutter fashion, often re-using the same game engines and trying to cash in on a popular title or genre already.
Games are like any other art form, be it a good movie, book, or song there is some inspiration involved in it. However, many games are just made because "Game X is popular, so if our game sells hald as well we'll make a fortune", the reality is that a lot of companies bank on a constant stream of rarely improved sequels and copycats of popular titles. This is really flooding the marketplace and has been for quite some time.
This combined with the insistance of publishers to have their games out right around the holiday season results in rushed and often bad games flooding the market. While it may sound like this is limited to smaller publishers, it is becoming an industry-wide epidemic with only a few very large publishers being unaffected.
I actually think that more games should be delayed. Having worked on that side of the industry for quite a few years now (I am speaking almost strictly on the console side). As the transition into fully 3D games especially in the console arena has become complete the number of quality titles, and the quality of the overall marketplace has weakened significantly.
There are a number of reasons for this, first and for most is developers insistance on 3D games. Back in the previous generation of games there was still a good number of 2D, 2.5D and polygonal but not fully 3D games out. Companies spend far too much time trying to make fully 3D engines that look good while paying now attention to how they play. This is mainly with regards to adventure games, platformers, and first person style games. There is a big emphasis on reusing the same already flawed 3D engines rather then improving upon them.
Very few companies have the resources to release a "great" game in say an 18 month development perioid. The result is that many companies try and rather then miss their holiday season deadline rush bad games to the market.
And yes I do realize it was written in the Java developers section. But it is very possible to improve the development of large projects using existing languages. Which is what the general scope of the interview touched on.
I found it to be fairly interesting but is it just me or were there a few too many shameless plugs for Java in her "interview"?
Opera is a nice browser, but honestly how many people do you know that actually regged it? Most people are using the ad supported version. With the company going public it makes me wonder about how many ads and to what level the ads will be showing up in future releases. Instead of just a banner at the top maybe pop ups FROM Opera? Perhaps I'm just seeing things negatively but this certainly makes me wonder about the product. I will say it is nice to use on a Zaurus though.