For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
I like Google as much as the next geek, but I don't know if I'd call them a revolutionary technology company -- more a company that has done things that others had already done, better.
If anything that proves the GP poster's point -- as far as I know, people didn't make a lot of money investing in WebCrawler.
A MS app store will pretty much be for PCs and maybe XBoxes -- but it'll be because they can't make a decent device for any other market before someone else completely owns that market, not because they're too blind to want to sell on those platforms as well.
See that's what's great about Microsoft. There so damn timely. I mean search engines come out and BAM! It only took them like nearly 10 years to come up with one.
Hey, be fair, MSN search came out back in the 1900s. It just seems like they were slower than that because almost no one wanted to use it.
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past, how bad will it be now that they are, presumably, trying to beat Apple at their own game of a walled-garden app store? And on the desktop no less?
Eh. The scenario in which that comparison's valid is really only possible IF this store is the "only" way to put software on a Windows machine. (I quote only because the app store is likewise the only sanctioned way to get software on an iPhone, but, jailbreaking, etc.)
I just don't see that happening soon, if ever. It's (apparently) easy to tell someone buying their first smartphone that they can only gets apps from your store; it's a lot harder to tell someone who's had a Windows machine for decades, perhaps their whole life, that they now can only buy apps from your store.
I would think the most obvious thing to compare this to would be not Apple's App Store but MS's own XBox Live Marketplace.
I doubt this would be the only way to buy software for a Windows 8 machine, just as buying stuff on Live isn't the only way to get games and stuff for your XBox. (Although obviously MS has some control of the 'buy a game on DVD and stick it in' vector on the XBox as well.)
I wouldn't call this move innovative, but it isn't a terrible idea either. If it's too locked down or not good enough in some way, people will keep buying/downloading/pirating/etc. software for their Windows boxen the same ways they always have.
I understand and believe that many people have never had problems getting Steam games to run offline. Most of my friends who game on Steam are in this boat.
It's also true that, for whatever reason of vagaries of system specs or environment, this is not true for everyone. I am in this boat. (Sometimes, Steam also seemingly-randomly refuses to authorize some of my games even with an internet connection. This isn't every time or even most of the time, but it's enough to piss you off.)
Steam won't keep me from buying Civ 5, and it certainly is a better choice than many of the alternatives, but it is not a perfect system and the the poster you're replying to is correct in saying that in many ways the pirates will have a better experience than at least some paying customers.
Most of my extended family are Catholic Democrats.
I haven't exhaustively interrogated them to discover exactly why that is, but probably, they think different parts of each are important than you seem to think they should.
You might give Civ 4 a try if you haven't already -- I loved the hell out of AC and Civ 4 is the first game in the series to hold my attention the same way. Even if I can't commit atrocities against my own people.
That being said, I too would deperately like to see AC2, but I gather the intellectual property rights for it are all tangled up in an ugly way. The AC user interface has not aged well but overall that was such a great game. I think the biggest thing for me is how differently you needed to play each of the AC factions even though on paper they weren't all that different -- you don't really need to do this to as great a degree in a Civ game, which is realistic but not always as much fun. I would say a number of the better Civ 4 mods have captured this bit of the spirit of AC, if not all of the things that made it fun.
I have to think the point is the scenarios and mods... there's a LOT of that out there for Civ 4. They obviously hope that people will create that much stuff new for Civ 5, but it's not a bad selling point if they can say: "There's already more player-created content for this game than you'll live long enough to experience."
That being said, I can't think of a lot of good ones that wouldn't be very heavily broken by other announced Civ 5 changes. For example, removing religion.
I've never understood people who buy a phone based on the service provider. They all generally suck, so why not get a nice phone instead?
They may not all suck equally in a given geographical area, though. If I know that, for the places I want to make calls, Sprint gets great reception and AT&T gets terrible reception, wouldn't it make sense for me to favor a Sprint phone?
You'd think that wouldn't still be the case in 2010, but in some areas it definitely is.
The population of Windows apps indeed is larger than Apple. The category of smartphone apps was barely created, then Apple hijacked it quite successfully. Windows Mobile is in the ditch.
All true; my point is just, I don't think you can use the volume of the App Store as the justification for why Apple is owning the smartphone market (even though I agree that in a sense they are, and certainly Microsoft isn't even in the running) but also say that Apple's ahead of Microsoft in terms of desktop operating systems when Microsoft's been giving Apple a decades-long whipping in terms of app variety/number/availability in that platform. In other words, apps are either an argument for superiority or they're not; they can't be for one bullet point and be irrelevant for a second bullet point.
I'll totally give you (and was not trying to contest) the tablet / reader / music player points -- supposedly the latest Zune is technically pretty good, but who will ever know? That's long been Apple's game to lose.
This, on the other hand:
-The XBox has its lunch eaten by the Wii, PS3, etc. It's still likely losing money; another Microsoft come-lately travesty
is a more interesting item, and could really be a huge discussion in its own rights.
There's no question that Nintendo, by almost any reasonable metric, completely owns this generation of console gaming. If you asked me who won, I'd say Nintendo without hesitation. It also has dominated handled gaming for a long, long time, and while I expect the iPhone and devices like it to eat up part of the very casual market for a handheld gaming system, I think the DS is still going to be making a ton of money for Nintendo at it for a very long time -- if nothing else, damn near every grade school kid I know has a DS, and I don't see its ubiquity in that market going anywhere.
The tricky or interesting thing is that I think to some degree Sony and Microsoft have different goals in the console gaming market, or at least, additional goals. (As an aside, I think Microsoft's done pretty well for itself as someone who only jumped into a saturated console market a generation ago, and I also think it's really too soon to call second place in this generation for Sony, though I believe it might ultimately be deserved.)
Sony: Sure, they sold a lot less PS3s than they would have liked, for less money than they would have liked. It took a lot longer than they would have liked for it to gain traction, and Nintendo ate their lunch in a bad way. But! In no small part due to the PS3, the Blu-ray format won out over HD-DVD in the market. I'm not saying the PS3 was an intentional loss leader or strategic sacrifice fly for Sony -- certainly they intended to dominate as a video game system if they could. But who can say how big of a win it is to own the winning video etc. storage medium for the next generation?
Microsoft: It's seemed clear for a while that Microsoft also meant for the XBox to be more than just a video game system -- they wanted it to be a kind of media device that hasn't really existed before. Microsoft really innovated in terms of what Live offered, especially in terms of things like Netflix. (The Wii and PS3 have caught on a lot of this, so definitely this is an area where MS would have to keep innovating / pushing forward to stay ahead.)
Because it's so easy to get video etc. from a desktop PC to an XBox on the same network, a lot of people who never would have the interest or drive to build a MythTV box or even get video output from their desktop/laptop onto their TV have watched shows this way via the XBox. Certainly all of this is technically doable for a PS3 or Wii as well, but the XBox has the lead here and it's MS's race to lose. (Not that I'd be all that surprised if it did.)
Finally, don't forget that the relative ease of porting an XBox game to the PC or vice versa has probably resulted in titles being available for one that might otherwise have remained only on the other. I se
... you know that there's a lot more to.NET than web development, just as there's a lot more to Java than web development, right?
I only have my own anecdotal experience to go on, but damn near all of my profressional Java projects have involved web development, whereas less than half of my.NET projects have.
If the large number of apps in the Apple app store is evidence that Apple's beating Microsoft in that space (and I would agree they are, incidentally), the ridiculously larger number of apps that run on Windows but not OS X are certainly evidence that Apple is not beating Microsoft in the consumer operating system space.
Similarly, it's a little disingenuous to point out that a game machine outperforms an XBox -- certainly just about any PC, even just about any netbook, outperforms the smartphone of your choice, but that's not really the point -- there's a large market in both cases for a more stripped down device that performs its chosen task well.
Fair enough. I respect you for not having any illusions about that.
I don't know that I'd say.NET adoption is 1/10 of Java's -- in some markets (e.g. phones), definitely, and in the open source world, probably, but in general that doesn't jive with what I've seen in the market. But then, the work I mostly do is of the "writing custom apps (sometimes web, sometimes console, sometimes services, etc.) for business" and I don't have great knowledge of adoption outside of that space.
If nothing else, you have to love that competition with.NET -- in terms of features if not adoption -- has helped force Java to improve.
To me, at this point what you're saying is technically true but in any practical sense... not really.
Kind of like saying that people don't need to breathe to live -- technically, they could get their blood oxygenated any number of ways.
Probably, 99.9%+ of people writing C# code today are using.NET. For any practical purpose it's not unreasonable to assume that if someone knows more C# devs than Java devs, they also know more.NET devs than Java devs.
Microsoft eventually wants.NET to be competitive with the Java platform.
I'm curious by what standard you think it isn't. Certainly each has its advantages and disadvantages, and there's a lot of work for both out there.
But that being said, as someone who's spent years developing professionally with each, I'd say the list in your.sig is largely slanted/inaccurate/dubious, so, maybe you're just a guy who really likes Java.
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For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
I like Google as much as the next geek, but I don't know if I'd call them a revolutionary technology company -- more a company that has done things that others had already done, better.
If anything that proves the GP poster's point -- as far as I know, people didn't make a lot of money investing in WebCrawler.
I think you're overly optimistic; beyond that, can use a spreadsheet != will use one to keep a monthly budget.
Oh, absolutely.
A MS app store will pretty much be for PCs and maybe XBoxes -- but it'll be because they can't make a decent device for any other market before someone else completely owns that market, not because they're too blind to want to sell on those platforms as well.
See that's what's great about Microsoft. There so damn timely. I mean search engines come out and BAM! It only took them like nearly 10 years to come up with one.
Hey, be fair, MSN search came out back in the 1900s. It just seems like they were slower than that because almost no one wanted to use it.
Microsoft is still thinking PC.
Not really -- TFA says 'any Windows device.'
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past, how bad will it be now that they are, presumably, trying to beat Apple at their own game of a walled-garden app store? And on the desktop no less?
Eh. The scenario in which that comparison's valid is really only possible IF this store is the "only" way to put software on a Windows machine. (I quote only because the app store is likewise the only sanctioned way to get software on an iPhone, but, jailbreaking, etc.)
I just don't see that happening soon, if ever. It's (apparently) easy to tell someone buying their first smartphone that they can only gets apps from your store; it's a lot harder to tell someone who's had a Windows machine for decades, perhaps their whole life, that they now can only buy apps from your store.
I would think the most obvious thing to compare this to would be not Apple's App Store but MS's own XBox Live Marketplace.
I doubt this would be the only way to buy software for a Windows 8 machine, just as buying stuff on Live isn't the only way to get games and stuff for your XBox. (Although obviously MS has some control of the 'buy a game on DVD and stick it in' vector on the XBox as well.)
I wouldn't call this move innovative, but it isn't a terrible idea either. If it's too locked down or not good enough in some way, people will keep buying/downloading/pirating/etc. software for their Windows boxen the same ways they always have.
it was civ 3 with some window dressing. and i don't care whether you believe that i played it.
It absolutely wasn't. Only in the most superficial examination is what you said true.
Unless you also think that chess is checkers with some window dressing.
ATMs are a mere convenience. They are far from a neccessity of life.
Sure -- but so is using your web browser of choice.
I understand and believe that many people have never had problems getting Steam games to run offline. Most of my friends who game on Steam are in this boat.
It's also true that, for whatever reason of vagaries of system specs or environment, this is not true for everyone. I am in this boat. (Sometimes, Steam also seemingly-randomly refuses to authorize some of my games even with an internet connection. This isn't every time or even most of the time, but it's enough to piss you off.)
Steam won't keep me from buying Civ 5, and it certainly is a better choice than many of the alternatives, but it is not a perfect system and the the poster you're replying to is correct in saying that in many ways the pirates will have a better experience than at least some paying customers.
Most of my extended family are Catholic Democrats.
I haven't exhaustively interrogated them to discover exactly why that is, but probably, they think different parts of each are important than you seem to think they should.
You might give Civ 4 a try if you haven't already -- I loved the hell out of AC and Civ 4 is the first game in the series to hold my attention the same way. Even if I can't commit atrocities against my own people.
That being said, I too would deperately like to see AC2, but I gather the intellectual property rights for it are all tangled up in an ugly way. The AC user interface has not aged well but overall that was such a great game. I think the biggest thing for me is how differently you needed to play each of the AC factions even though on paper they weren't all that different -- you don't really need to do this to as great a degree in a Civ game, which is realistic but not always as much fun. I would say a number of the better Civ 4 mods have captured this bit of the spirit of AC, if not all of the things that made it fun.
I have to think the point is the scenarios and mods... there's a LOT of that out there for Civ 4. They obviously hope that people will create that much stuff new for Civ 5, but it's not a bad selling point if they can say: "There's already more player-created content for this game than you'll live long enough to experience."
That being said, I can't think of a lot of good ones that wouldn't be very heavily broken by other announced Civ 5 changes. For example, removing religion.
I've never understood people who buy a phone based on the service provider. They all generally suck, so why not get a nice phone instead?
They may not all suck equally in a given geographical area, though. If I know that, for the places I want to make calls, Sprint gets great reception and AT&T gets terrible reception, wouldn't it make sense for me to favor a Sprint phone?
You'd think that wouldn't still be the case in 2010, but in some areas it definitely is.
The population of Windows apps indeed is larger than Apple. The category of smartphone apps was barely created, then Apple hijacked it quite successfully. Windows Mobile is in the ditch.
All true; my point is just, I don't think you can use the volume of the App Store as the justification for why Apple is owning the smartphone market (even though I agree that in a sense they are, and certainly Microsoft isn't even in the running) but also say that Apple's ahead of Microsoft in terms of desktop operating systems when Microsoft's been giving Apple a decades-long whipping in terms of app variety/number/availability in that platform. In other words, apps are either an argument for superiority or they're not; they can't be for one bullet point and be irrelevant for a second bullet point.
I'll totally give you (and was not trying to contest) the tablet / reader / music player points -- supposedly the latest Zune is technically pretty good, but who will ever know? That's long been Apple's game to lose.
This, on the other hand:
-The XBox has its lunch eaten by the Wii, PS3, etc. It's still likely losing money; another Microsoft come-lately travesty
is a more interesting item, and could really be a huge discussion in its own rights.
There's no question that Nintendo, by almost any reasonable metric, completely owns this generation of console gaming. If you asked me who won, I'd say Nintendo without hesitation. It also has dominated handled gaming for a long, long time, and while I expect the iPhone and devices like it to eat up part of the very casual market for a handheld gaming system, I think the DS is still going to be making a ton of money for Nintendo at it for a very long time -- if nothing else, damn near every grade school kid I know has a DS, and I don't see its ubiquity in that market going anywhere.
The tricky or interesting thing is that I think to some degree Sony and Microsoft have different goals in the console gaming market, or at least, additional goals. (As an aside, I think Microsoft's done pretty well for itself as someone who only jumped into a saturated console market a generation ago, and I also think it's really too soon to call second place in this generation for Sony, though I believe it might ultimately be deserved.)
Sony: Sure, they sold a lot less PS3s than they would have liked, for less money than they would have liked. It took a lot longer than they would have liked for it to gain traction, and Nintendo ate their lunch in a bad way. But! In no small part due to the PS3, the Blu-ray format won out over HD-DVD in the market. I'm not saying the PS3 was an intentional loss leader or strategic sacrifice fly for Sony -- certainly they intended to dominate as a video game system if they could. But who can say how big of a win it is to own the winning video etc. storage medium for the next generation?
Microsoft: It's seemed clear for a while that Microsoft also meant for the XBox to be more than just a video game system -- they wanted it to be a kind of media device that hasn't really existed before. Microsoft really innovated in terms of what Live offered, especially in terms of things like Netflix. (The Wii and PS3 have caught on a lot of this, so definitely this is an area where MS would have to keep innovating / pushing forward to stay ahead.)
Because it's so easy to get video etc. from a desktop PC to an XBox on the same network, a lot of people who never would have the interest or drive to build a MythTV box or even get video output from their desktop/laptop onto their TV have watched shows this way via the XBox. Certainly all of this is technically doable for a PS3 or Wii as well, but the XBox has the lead here and it's MS's race to lose. (Not that I'd be all that surprised if it did.)
Finally, don't forget that the relative ease of porting an XBox game to the PC or vice versa has probably resulted in titles being available for one that might otherwise have remained only on the other. I se
... you know that there's a lot more to .NET than web development, just as there's a lot more to Java than web development, right?
I only have my own anecdotal experience to go on, but damn near all of my profressional Java projects have involved web development, whereas less than half of my .NET projects have.
Your post isn't logically consistent with itself.
If the large number of apps in the Apple app store is evidence that Apple's beating Microsoft in that space (and I would agree they are, incidentally), the ridiculously larger number of apps that run on Windows but not OS X are certainly evidence that Apple is not beating Microsoft in the consumer operating system space.
Similarly, it's a little disingenuous to point out that a game machine outperforms an XBox -- certainly just about any PC, even just about any netbook, outperforms the smartphone of your choice, but that's not really the point -- there's a large market in both cases for a more stripped down device that performs its chosen task well.
I'm biased as fuck.
Fair enough. I respect you for not having any illusions about that.
I don't know that I'd say .NET adoption is 1/10 of Java's -- in some markets (e.g. phones), definitely, and in the open source world, probably, but in general that doesn't jive with what I've seen in the market. But then, the work I mostly do is of the "writing custom apps (sometimes web, sometimes console, sometimes services, etc.) for business" and I don't have great knowledge of adoption outside of that space.
If nothing else, you have to love that competition with .NET -- in terms of features if not adoption -- has helped force Java to improve.
To me, at this point what you're saying is technically true but in any practical sense... not really.
Kind of like saying that people don't need to breathe to live -- technically, they could get their blood oxygenated any number of ways.
Probably, 99.9%+ of people writing C# code today are using .NET. For any practical purpose it's not unreasonable to assume that if someone knows more C# devs than Java devs, they also know more .NET devs than Java devs.
Microsoft eventually wants .NET to be competitive with the Java platform.
I'm curious by what standard you think it isn't. Certainly each has its advantages and disadvantages, and there's a lot of work for both out there.
But that being said, as someone who's spent years developing professionally with each, I'd say the list in your .sig is largely slanted/inaccurate/dubious, so, maybe you're just a guy who really likes Java.
I've met a lot more people who know Java than .NET - Though on top of that, I've seen even more C#.
I'm confused by this. You do know that C# is .NET, right?
FYI, apostraphes aren't just for quoting words for no apparent reason, they're also used in contractions.
How about find 4-5 other people in the class, split the cost, and share?
GPP post says he's forced to buy the product.
Your solution is still buying the product.
A lot of you guys have iPhone envy that's just oozing from your orifices.
Also, your husband only beats you because he loves you, and anyone who says otherwise is just jealous that he's yours.
Not that a patched security vulnerability is anywhere near on the same order of magnitude, but the logic in the argument is as bad.