How can they fall for it ? It's not like they already taking orders or selling it.
Many people bought a new top of the line video card they didn't really need late 2003 because it came with a Half-Life 2 coupon. If they would have waited until it is actually released that $400 card would only cost $150.
You seem to forget that Microsoft has a monopoly and Apple doesn't.
Seeing how they are both in the OS business makes this comment pretty hilarious. How can it be a monopoly if they have competition ? Apple probbaly has more of a monopoly position regarding running an OS on Apple hardware.
Sure, MS has market dominance, but you are always free to choose Linux.
programmers need to stop thinking about themselves as some sort of "upper" class. yes, we have some very specialized knowledge and create things that have great value... but so do carpenters and electricians.
I think the difference between electricians and programmers is that electricians don't give away their work for free.
Suppose people were given a choice between paying an electrician to install wiring and lights and choosing a free hacker that just experiments with some new cool ideas he just though of, does a pisspoor job, wastes 100 hours on a 8-hour job installing all kinds of extra's that you didn't ask for and starting from scratch again at a whim, and then abandones it at 80% complete with a comment that he cannot be bothered to spend more time on it and that you should learn to understand electricity if you cannot appreciate it, and that you should go back to coal if electricity is too difficult for you. After all, you cannot complain at all or suggest improvements because it's free.
I think people would choose the professional every time. Just getting what you want is much better than relying on an unreliable person, who things he is great and fucks up the job on purpose so you need him to come back for repairs every week. He might think people think he's a God just because his chaotic work is too complex to be understood by layman, and that he is unmissable so he can waste time at work instead of working, in reality he is an amateur that adds no value to anything.
Do they really think everyone's going to download the PDF and print out their magazine on their inkjet? Geez. When will people learn that HTML is for on-screen documents, and PDF is for ones to print.
Slow down, nerdboy. Why print when you can read on screen ?
Nerds are antisocial and only think about themselves. And whenever someone does something in a different way, they start insisting that others needs to 'learn'. It's been the same song for 10 years at least. Most people grow out of that when they get out of their teen years.
Re:It was the best of advice, and the worst of adv
on
Real Problems
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· Score: 1
Only losers install stuff like Nemo's codec pack. Anyone with a brain would just install the filter/codec he needs. Nemo's blasts all known filters on your system. Losers who choose 'install all' then find that the Matrox G400 filter causes all AVI's to play upside down. Fuck em, I say. They should have installed FFDshow instead.
The world spends about $800 billion on arms annually.
If we spent half that much per year on developing fusion power it would be worth it, considering the returns that we would get (and I don't just mean monetary).
That is a naive view of the economy, but one used often by left-wing activists. "use the money to buy food for the third world" they shout, and similar phrases.
A large part of that money is used to pay the salaries needed to employ a few hundredthousand people. Those people spend, giving the money back to the economy. Weapons get bought from local companies, who employ people and pass profits to shareholders, so it's a money cycle that doesn't really cost the government $800 billion, just a fraction of that.
You could spend $800 billion on research, but employing 500.000 persons is impossible, it's like putting 1000 people on a small programming project, it only slows it down. So it would produce massive unemployment. Such a project probably relies on the few dozen smartest scientists, and I doubt that this kind of money would produce different results than spending $800 million
Even worse is spending $800 billion on food for the third world, the money disappears from the economy and is spent in another country, and gives the local population nothing.
Have we forgotten mp3.com so quickly? They succeeded pretty well at selling music online, before the RIAA decided they didn't like anybody proving for certain that the RIAA's business model sucks.
It must be nice to have such a selective memory. mp3 music was becoming an enormous force when somebody got the mp3.com domainname and started profiting from something they contributed absolutely nothing to.
mp3.com will always be known as the site with crap free music that nobody wanted.
Then they launched a service where you could download the mp3's of a CD you possessed. That was just a stupid move.
Minix still exists, and there is a Minix usenet group that gets traffic. It was never intended to be anything like what Linux became. It's a pedagogical OS whose main method of distribution is a CD in the back cover of a textbook. It 'inspired' Linus to go off and do something of his own. It's wrong to act like it 'died' or in any way is a failure because it's still primarily a pedagogical OS.
I once used Minix 1.3. It was an OK operating system, but its limits of 64K for data and 64K for executable meant that there was no software except stripped basic commands. GNU tools optimized for speed while BSD optimized for memory use back then.
Its big problem of course was that it was a commercial OS, sold together with Andrew Tanenbaum's book on Operating Systems.
There were patches to 1.5 available, but that was so much trouble it tooks days just to compile part of it. I got an account on mugnet.nl (or.org), a minux user group, and found out all the executables were chmodded 111 to prevent people from downloading them.
By the way, I don't think it was on CD in 1990, I remember having it on 3-4 360K floppys.
Dude I think you got your history all wrong. When Apple announced the Newton in 1992, everyone wanted to jump onto the same boat. Several companies rushed development of similar devices, including Microsoft, Go, and several others.
Dude you got your history all wong. Read the book "Startup" that they talk about in the article. The idea for the pen computer that became the Newton started when Apple made a counter offer to one of the co-founders of Go. He ended up staying at Apple, instead of leaving to start Go, and heading the Newton project. Apple even tryed to covince Go to drop their product and support the Newton.
I know that Go were already working on it for a few years, slowly. The increased competition of Apple announcing to get into the game meant that everyone tried to grab a piece of the share. Back then people believed the market was going to boom and make everyone rich. When the Newton failed (maybe not technically, but certainly commercially) it was the same as the dotcom bubble bursting, once-generously-funded startup companies suddenly found their investers lose interest. That happened to Go.
In 1993 Microsoft made a modest income on selling DOS, yes using bundling deals, but there was no alternative anyway in the 80s. And Windows 3.11 sold OK but wasn't considered an OS, but an extra. No way was Microsoft considered a monopoly back then.
==== Take a look here... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=MSFT
You'll see MS's Market Cap is close to $300B. Let that number sink in.
If you look here... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual You'll see annual revenue is about $33B, they had a operating margin of $13B and a net margin of about $10B.
So you see, this fine is approximately 2-3 weeks of profits. Sweet deal for Microsoft.
==== You are a fool. Market cap is the number of outstanding shares multiplies by today's stock price. Those shares are the ones bought by ordinary people. It means nothing.
Also, revenue and profits mean little for a listed company, as they pay a big part of that profit as dividend to stockholders.
A good analogy. Suppose I am a TV remote control manufacturer and there's one big TV company. I could sue the TV company for dominating the market and giving away free remotes that they massproduce in china for $3 cost price. With a bit of luck, if the company is impopular I could win and everyone who buys a TV will get it without a remote, and they'll have to buy an extra $49.99 remote. I make money and Joe Customer loses money.
The EU decision is a scam, populism. Who gains anything from fining a company and makes them remove a random product ? It's not like the media player market is a highly competitive market with many competitors. There is one product (Real) that is despised by everyone, and several others (powerdvd, windvd) that offer features (dvd playing) that media player doesn't. So people buy PowerDVD anyway, with or without WMP installed with windows. Others (Bink) sell only to other companies and doesn't even do players.
If you want a media player, you have 3 choices. First, buy one for $50. Second, get a free one from an internet company that tries to generate revenue with unwanted pop under ads while you watch, subscribes you to channels, pops up its own website in all open browser windows whenever you start it and occupies most of the screen because there are banner ads above and below the output window. Third, use the OS' included simple player. Thanks to the EU, it's now either use Real or pay for PowerDVD or WMP.
After all, windows media player is just the tip of the iceberg, an application using the DirectShow API with all its filters, streams, etc. A programmer can write his own media player in half an hour just calling various API functions. That's what most free players like divxplayer, bsplayer, mplayer etc. do, just a user interface layer on top of it.
In late 1993, Go was sold to AT&T where it was ultimately merged into the company's portable computer subsidiary. In 1994 the phone company shut down the effort in portable computing. Three months later Microsoft canceled its PenWindows project"
As if this doesn't make it obvious what M$ was doing! They were only in the game to keep somebody else from innovating new technology. As soon as a potential competitor closed down, they stopped attempting to "provide a better solution for the customer."
Dude I think you got your history all wrong. When Apple announced the Newton in 1992, everyone wanted to jump onto the same boat. Several companies rushed development of similar devices, including Microsoft, Go, and several others.
When the Newton was released in 1993, and proved to be a fiasco, many companies put their projects on hold or sold them off. That's why Go was sold, and that's why MS stopped development.
The humiliating failure of the Apple Newton put mobile computers on hold for a few years, until Palm revitalized the once dead market.
Sorry but Java games will never be more than nice applets and puzzle games. Fast access to the screen, more direct keyboard/mouse input and sound are essential. Java offers just kludges and workarounds.
If you want to make a serious game C# is a much better option.
MS's versioning is so bizarre that IE5 and IE5.5 are different in more than minor version number, while IE6 is pretty much IE5.5.1
So what ??
Borland did the same with Turbo Pascal. 4.0 was a text-mode windowed environment. 5.0 was basically more of the same. Then with 5.5 they introduced Object Pascal, pascal with classes, a huge difference.
That is indeed what is missing. With the 'power' of open source 100 projects to implement this will be started on sourceforge, 20 of which will actually publish source, the other 80 just have an IRC channel where they chat all day on how cool it will be once they get in the mood to start programming and to recruit other 14-year olds to join them. Of those 20 maybe 5 will produce something useful after a few years, after which progress slows down while fanboys who spontaneously became supporters of a product flame endlessly on various forums. A prediction: all version numbers of those products will always start with '0.'
Ogg will never be popular with portable mp3 players. A hardware decoder was developed some time ago but the power consumption (about 4x that of decoding mp3, 2x that of decoding wma) will probably scare the customers.
Maybe there is confusion about the naming and what the article means exactly. Surround sound is the technique to make stereo come from different directions. Either using virtual surround by splitting by frequency range or using additional information, like Dolby Surround with its phase encoding. DTS and dolby digital 5.1 shouldn't be called surround, they are multichannel sound. Ogg and WMA 9 both support multichannel sound. Of course all stereo formats support surround (dolby) as long as the phase information hasn't been lost (some modes of joint stereo do this).
Well the point to the Quake series is to sell the engines. And to have people have some fun with some mindless neverending deathmatching. But Quake gets released to demo the new engine, and to make a few bucks at the same time.
But gamewise anyone must admin the games suck. It's a general problem with ID. Take for instance Return to castle Wolfenstein. Nice game in the beginning but the difficulty ramps up quickly so after walking through the first levels you come to a point where you get stuck. The storyline with those lame zombies was also moronic. A lot of details just felt wrong with this game. It starts right at the beginning. When you escape the cell and walk down the corridor, you notice that the doorknobs on the door are just above eye height. WTF ? Are you playing a midget ?
Now compare this to Medal of Honor, released a month later. That was a great game, balanced, good levels, great multiplayer and a decent storyline.
It actually had. The story was in a.txt file in the directory where you had installed it. Apart from that, it wasn't in the game or mentioned in the package you got when you bought it.
I bet only a few people actually noticed and read this file...
Yeah, Scott Miller has no right to critisize anyone. Much less spout a vague 'managers know nothing about games'. Maybe if he himself approached game making more professionally, then things would actually get done. The game making business is one of the most unprofessional software development businesses. Starting with too optimistic planning, vague design documents, a project typically relies on developers gut feeling, adding features when someone things of them instead of following the technical design. They all end in missing the deadline and making all employees work 18 hours/day for 7 days/week for a month and still ship with known bugs. All this because some designers feel that any management imposes on their creativity.
You should read the postmortems on Gamasutra, at least half of them admit afterwards to have worked without a decent design document. For Tropico eg. the lead designer found out after a year that his designers all had different ideas about what the game should be about and were implementing all kinds of features and interfaces they thought were 'cool'. This was because the design document was too vague and general.
Daikatana failed in two ways, first because it wasn't that good. It had been in production for too long and by the time it was ready it was not technically advanced anymore. But more importantly, because its creators had such a big mouth in the press (nonsense about making you his bitch) the press were sceptical about the game, which is their right. You can't pretend to be mr. know-it-all and critisize everyone but yourself and expect to get respect for it, if you don't have any achievements to go with it.
In order for this to work, it might need changes in the OS level. Imagine you access a block/char device or an NFS mounted directory and the device driver never returns from the system call. Your script would hang, and a kill would produce a zombie process. If you want fault tolerance, you'd have to have a timeout mechanism for all device drivers. But if you read from/dev/mt0 and the tape needs rewinding and it takes 6 minutes, you don't want to have your script aborted after 5 minutes.
What games are missing ? No One Lives Forever was game of the year, I think it should be included. Along with Star Trek Elite Force of course. Those were solid FPS adventure games.
Duke Nukem 3D was OK at the time, but only 2.5D when 3D was arriving. It also sucked at multiplayer, the levels were too big and multiplayer just wasn't any fun. I don't know why it is on the list, maybe because it's old and came after doom, but the list is the top 10 greatest FPS'es, not top 10 FPS corrected with a release date factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people bought a new top of the line video card they didn't really need late 2003 because it came with a Half-Life 2 coupon. If they would have waited until it is actually released that $400 card would only cost $150.
Seeing how they are both in the OS business makes this comment pretty hilarious. How can it be a monopoly if they have competition ? Apple probbaly has more of a monopoly position regarding running an OS on Apple hardware.
Sure, MS has market dominance, but you are always free to choose Linux.
I think the difference between electricians and programmers is that electricians don't give away their work for free.
Suppose people were given a choice between paying an electrician to install wiring and lights and choosing a free hacker that just experiments with some new cool ideas he just though of, does a pisspoor job, wastes 100 hours on a 8-hour job installing all kinds of extra's that you didn't ask for and starting from scratch again at a whim, and then abandones it at 80% complete with a comment that he cannot be bothered to spend more time on it and that you should learn to understand electricity if you cannot appreciate it, and that you should go back to coal if electricity is too difficult for you. After all, you cannot complain at all or suggest improvements because it's free.
I think people would choose the professional every time. Just getting what you want is much better than relying on an unreliable person, who things he is great and fucks up the job on purpose so you need him to come back for repairs every week. He might think people think he's a God just because his chaotic work is too complex to be understood by layman, and that he is unmissable so he can waste time at work instead of working, in reality he is an amateur that adds no value to anything.
You get what you pay for.
No it is not.
Do they really think everyone's going to download the PDF and print out their magazine on their inkjet? Geez. When will people learn that HTML is for on-screen documents, and PDF is for ones to print. Slow down, nerdboy. Why print when you can read on screen ?
Nerds are antisocial and only think about themselves. And whenever someone does something in a different way, they start insisting that others needs to 'learn'. It's been the same song for 10 years at least. Most people grow out of that when they get out of their teen years.
Only losers install stuff like Nemo's codec pack. Anyone with a brain would just install the filter/codec he needs.
Nemo's blasts all known filters on your system. Losers who choose 'install all' then find that the Matrox G400 filter causes all AVI's to play upside down.
Fuck em, I say. They should have installed FFDshow instead.
If we spent half that much per year on developing fusion power it would be worth it, considering the returns that we would get (and I don't just mean monetary).
That is a naive view of the economy, but one used often by left-wing activists. "use the money to buy food for the third world" they shout, and similar phrases.
A large part of that money is used to pay the salaries needed to employ a few hundredthousand people. Those people spend, giving the money back to the economy. Weapons get bought from local companies, who employ people and pass profits to shareholders, so it's a money cycle that doesn't really cost the government $800 billion, just a fraction of that.
You could spend $800 billion on research, but employing 500.000 persons is impossible, it's like putting 1000 people on a small programming project, it only slows it down. So it would produce massive unemployment. Such a project probably relies on the few dozen smartest scientists, and I doubt that this kind of money would produce different results than spending $800 million
Even worse is spending $800 billion on food for the third world, the money disappears from the economy and is spent in another country, and gives the local population nothing.
It must be nice to have such a selective memory. mp3 music was becoming an enormous force when somebody got the mp3.com domainname and started profiting from something they contributed absolutely nothing to.
mp3.com will always be known as the site with crap free music that nobody wanted.
Then they launched a service where you could download the mp3's of a CD you possessed. That was just a stupid move.
If you can sell stock immediately for hard cash, then the stock itself is real money. Explain that fanboy.
Its big problem of course was that it was a commercial OS, sold together with Andrew Tanenbaum's book on Operating Systems.
There were patches to 1.5 available, but that was so much trouble it tooks days just to compile part of it. I got an account on mugnet.nl (or .org), a minux user group, and found out all the executables were chmodded 111 to prevent people from downloading them.
By the way, I don't think it was on CD in 1990, I remember having it on 3-4 360K floppys.
Dude you got your history all wong. Read the book "Startup" that they talk about in the article. The idea for the pen computer that became the Newton started when Apple made a counter offer to one of the co-founders of Go. He ended up staying at Apple, instead of leaving to start Go, and heading the Newton project. Apple even tryed to covince Go to drop their product and support the Newton.
I know that Go were already working on it for a few years, slowly. The increased competition of Apple announcing to get into the game meant that everyone tried to grab a piece of the share. Back then people believed the market was going to boom and make everyone rich.
When the Newton failed (maybe not technically, but certainly commercially) it was the same as the dotcom bubble bursting, once-generously-funded startup companies suddenly found their investers lose interest. That happened to Go. In 1993 Microsoft made a modest income on selling DOS, yes using bundling deals, but there was no alternative anyway in the 80s. And Windows 3.11 sold OK but wasn't considered an OS, but an extra. No way was Microsoft considered a monopoly back then.
====
...
Take a look here... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=MSFT
You'll see MS's Market Cap is close to $300B. Let that number sink in.
If you look here
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual
You'll see annual revenue is about $33B, they had a operating margin of $13B and a net margin of about $10B.
So you see, this fine is approximately 2-3 weeks of profits. Sweet deal for Microsoft.
====
You are a fool. Market cap is the number of outstanding shares multiplies by today's stock price. Those shares are the ones bought by ordinary people. It means nothing.
Also, revenue and profits mean little for a listed company, as they pay a big part of that profit as dividend to stockholders.
A good analogy. Suppose I am a TV remote control manufacturer and there's one big TV company. I could sue the TV company for dominating the market and giving away free remotes that they massproduce in china for $3 cost price. With a bit of luck, if the company is impopular I could win and everyone who buys a TV will get it without a remote, and they'll have to buy an extra $49.99 remote. I make money and Joe Customer loses money.
The EU decision is a scam, populism. Who gains anything from fining a company and makes them remove a random product ? It's not like the media player market is a highly competitive market with many competitors. There is one product (Real) that is despised by everyone, and several others (powerdvd, windvd) that offer features (dvd playing) that media player doesn't. So people buy PowerDVD anyway, with or without WMP installed with windows. Others (Bink) sell only to other companies and doesn't even do players.
If you want a media player, you have 3 choices.
First, buy one for $50.
Second, get a free one from an internet company that tries to generate revenue with unwanted pop under ads while you watch, subscribes you to channels, pops up its own website in all open browser windows whenever you start it and occupies most of the screen because there are banner ads above and below the output window.
Third, use the OS' included simple player. Thanks to the EU, it's now either use Real or pay for PowerDVD or WMP.
After all, windows media player is just the tip of the iceberg, an application using the DirectShow API with all its filters, streams, etc. A programmer can write his own media player in half an hour just calling various API functions. That's what most free players like divxplayer, bsplayer, mplayer etc. do, just a user interface layer on top of it.
As if this doesn't make it obvious what M$ was doing! They were only in the game to keep somebody else from innovating new technology. As soon as a potential competitor closed down, they stopped attempting to "provide a better solution for the customer." Dude I think you got your history all wrong. When Apple announced the Newton in 1992, everyone wanted to jump onto the same boat. Several companies rushed development of similar devices, including Microsoft, Go, and several others.
When the Newton was released in 1993, and proved to be a fiasco, many companies put their projects on hold or sold them off. That's why Go was sold, and that's why MS stopped development.
The humiliating failure of the Apple Newton put mobile computers on hold for a few years, until Palm revitalized the once dead market.
Sorry but Java games will never be more than nice applets and puzzle games. Fast access to the screen, more direct keyboard/mouse input and sound are essential. Java offers just kludges and workarounds.
If you want to make a serious game C# is a much better option.
So what ?? Borland did the same with Turbo Pascal. 4.0 was a text-mode windowed environment. 5.0 was basically more of the same. Then with 5.5 they introduced Object Pascal, pascal with classes, a huge difference.
That is indeed what is missing. With the 'power' of open source 100 projects to implement this will be started on sourceforge, 20 of which will actually publish source, the other 80 just have an IRC channel where they chat all day on how cool it will be once they get in the mood to start programming and to recruit other 14-year olds to join them.
Of those 20 maybe 5 will produce something useful after a few years, after which progress slows down while fanboys who spontaneously became supporters of a product flame endlessly on various forums.
A prediction: all version numbers of those products will always start with '0.'
Ogg will never be popular with portable mp3 players. A hardware decoder was developed some time ago but the power consumption (about 4x that of decoding mp3, 2x that of decoding wma) will probably scare the customers.
Maybe there is confusion about the naming and what the article means exactly.
Surround sound is the technique to make stereo come from different directions. Either using virtual surround by splitting by frequency range or using additional information, like Dolby Surround with its phase encoding.
DTS and dolby digital 5.1 shouldn't be called surround, they are multichannel sound.
Ogg and WMA 9 both support multichannel sound. Of course all stereo formats support surround (dolby) as long as the phase information hasn't been lost (some modes of joint stereo do this).
Well the point to the Quake series is to sell the engines. And to have people have some fun with some mindless neverending deathmatching. But Quake gets released to demo the new engine, and to make a few bucks at the same time.
But gamewise anyone must admin the games suck. It's a general problem with ID. Take for instance Return to castle Wolfenstein. Nice game in the beginning but the difficulty ramps up quickly so after walking through the first levels you come to a point where you get stuck. The storyline with those lame zombies was also moronic. A lot of details just felt wrong with this game. It starts right at the beginning. When you escape the cell and walk down the corridor, you notice that the doorknobs on the door are just above eye height. WTF ? Are you playing a midget ?
Now compare this to Medal of Honor, released a month later. That was a great game, balanced, good levels, great multiplayer and a decent storyline.
It actually had. The story was in a .txt file in the directory where you had installed it. Apart from that, it wasn't in the game or mentioned in the package you got when you bought it. ...
I bet only a few people actually noticed and read this file
Yeah, Scott Miller has no right to critisize anyone. Much less spout a vague 'managers know nothing about games'. Maybe if he himself approached game making more professionally, then things would actually get done. The game making business is one of the most unprofessional software development businesses. Starting with too optimistic planning, vague design documents, a project typically relies on developers gut feeling, adding features when someone things of them instead of following the technical design. They all end in missing the deadline and making all employees work 18 hours/day for 7 days/week for a month and still ship with known bugs. All this because some designers feel that any management imposes on their creativity.
You should read the postmortems on Gamasutra, at least half of them admit afterwards to have worked without a decent design document. For Tropico eg. the lead designer found out after a year that his designers all had different ideas about what the game should be about and were implementing all kinds of features and interfaces they thought were 'cool'. This was because the design document was too vague and general.
Daikatana failed in two ways, first because it wasn't that good. It had been in production for too long and by the time it was ready it was not technically advanced anymore. But more importantly, because its creators had such a big mouth in the press (nonsense about making you his bitch) the press were sceptical about the game, which is their right. You can't pretend to be mr. know-it-all and critisize everyone but yourself and expect to get respect for it, if you don't have any achievements to go with it.
In order for this to work, it might need changes in the OS level. /dev/mt0 and the tape needs rewinding and it takes 6 minutes, you don't want to have your script aborted after 5 minutes.
Imagine you access a block/char device or an NFS mounted directory and the device driver never returns from the system call. Your script would hang, and a kill would produce a zombie process.
If you want fault tolerance, you'd have to have a timeout mechanism for all device drivers. But if you read from
Why not remake Pirates Gold ? It was a much better game.
What games are missing ?
No One Lives Forever was game of the year, I think it should be included. Along with Star Trek Elite Force of course. Those were solid FPS adventure games.
Duke Nukem 3D was OK at the time, but only 2.5D when 3D was arriving. It also sucked at multiplayer, the levels were too big and multiplayer just wasn't any fun. I don't know why it is on the list, maybe because it's old and came after doom, but the list is the top 10 greatest FPS'es, not top 10 FPS corrected with a release date factor.