Wouldn't a Web portal be a better idea?
on
TheOpenCD 1.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm thinking that an easy to use Web portal to this kind of software would be a better idea. That way the user can get the most up-to-date version of the software and any new software deemed "worthy" of the list could be distributed to everyone by updating a Web page.
We've had this for years at Control.
on
Directed Sound
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· Score: 1
I hate to tell you guys but directional sound and the cone of silence is nothing new. Back in the late 60s the Chief, Agent 86, and I...
Oh wait, nevermind. There is no Control. We don't have a large cone of silence. I've never heard of this "directional sound" business.
No that's not a phone ringing. That's just my shoe.
I do agree that not all of the famous games have good storylines, but Zelda DID have a pretty good story line. It might not be Oscar material, but it is lightyears above some of its contemporaries like "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?" and "The 3 Stooges must go out and perform ridiculous jobs to save a Orphanage."
I think Microsocft is a bit full of themselves here. Do they really think that a high selling FPS game (Medal of Honor: Rising Sun) that is largely set in and around Japan is selling well IN Japan because they sold 75000 units of Halo over there? (see excerpt below)
from the article: "I feel like we tipped open the door to FPS gaming on consoles with 'Halo,'" said Mike Fischer, Xbox director of marketing in Japan. "So Electronic Arts comes in with 'Medal of Honor,' and they sell 200,000 units in two weeks. I do not believe that, and a lot of people feel the same, that they would have sold any at all if "Halo" had not opened that door to that new genre."
Looking from a software admin's perspective, if I haven't upgraded to a supported MS Office I probably don't care to. That's assuming I have plenty of older MS Office licenses.
The real opportunity I can see for running OpenOffice and ditching MS Office is where we have X computers running MS Office and we have expanded to where we now need 2X computers running some Office software. If upper management wants to get out of that one cheap, I could probably strongarm them into adopting OO.
The users would probably complain at first that they can't use Open Office because of a few small differences between it and MS Office. I got that a lot when we went from Office 97 to Office XP. I usually just remind them at that point how adept they are at running Browser-based games, P2P apps, and AOL IM while I'm not looking. A few new format/location changes in their office product won't kill them.
It's nice to see AOL taking an active approach to regaining some lost revenue. They are trying to find out what consumers want and give it to them instead of crying to big brother to try to inhibit growth in broadband. It looks like there is another industry that could learn from this example (cough, cough, music).
10,000 times faster than the average broadband connection, but even the article states that that kind of bandwidth is not useful to home users yet. Then why mention it? How about this: This new transmission is 2,796,206 times faster than a 2400 baud modem!
That's an equally useless comparison but at least the number is higher. You don't get to see a useful comparison figure until the 3rd paragraph where it says that the previous record was 4GB/second. They really should first and foremost tout the 36% increase in speed over the previous record. That's pretty impressive.
The MPAA seems to be targeting titles that are not available on video yet. That in itself is ok in my book. My biggest gripe with the RIAA is how do they know that I don't own the song? I obviously don't own a copy of Starsky and Hutch because it hasn't been released on video yet. I don't like the possibility of violating privacy rights, so I am naturally skeptical of the ACNS system. The article did nothing to relieve those fears.
Does Lucas think giving us a sneak peek of Vader's new threads will get us to go out and buy the DVD set? I'll just wait until the day after the DVD is released and find one of the many pics that will be plastered all over the Web. Or better yet, I'll just wait until the movie comes out and see the costume there. Of course, I'll probably see it on one of the movie theater patrons before I actually get into the theater.
The only thing that will get me to go out and buy the DVD set is to include the non-Special Edition versions of the movies (preferably the THX ones), but I think others have already done a very good job of making Lucas aware of my complaint.
I'm getting just a little tired of people arguing that language X has garbage collection while C does not. Garbage Collection is not built into the C language. Then again, dynamic memory allocation is not built into C! How do programmers get by without built in memory allocation? They rely on external libraries.
Likewise, Garbage Collection can be compiled into C and it is usually done by linking a garbage collection library that will replace the usual mallocs with garbage collection code and replace frees with a noop. That's it. No changing the source code, just your makefile and you too can have garbage collection in C. As an aside, if dynamic memory allocation were built into the language, this method would not be possible.
One of our computer systems at work requires a complex password that has to be changed to something new regularly. You don't even need a bar of chocolate to figure out their current password. It's usually "hidden" under their mousepad or sometimes they don't even bother to do that and just tape their password list to their monitor with a nice arrow pointing to their current password. Fortunately, most of our systems do not work this way.
Once upon a time I was an advocate of regularly changing passwords, but not anymore.
I don't know about you, but my "broadband" DSL carrier (Alltel) requires me to have a phone line hooked up to get DSL or pay a $15/month fee. I prefer DSL but don't try to paint it as cheaper than dialup because it's not. Even if you can get DSL without phone line for $50, you still don't get the phone line that you would going the dialup route. That might not be important to you, but I imagine that the crowd who is not willing to go to broadband is mostly the same crowd that doesn't want to ditch their land line.
I think this article needs to calm down from its panic mode. Disposable cars will not be the result of making cars more expensive to build. I don't think that the author has ever dealt with an insurance company.
The car mentioned throughout a good part of the article is BMW. I've owned two BMWs in the past. I also had a friend who owned a BMW. We always assumed that if one of us wrecked our car, the insurance company would total it out. It turned out to be true in his case. In my case, they didn't total it out but there was only paint damage. (Both of my BMWs died peacefully of old age.)
My point is that insurance companies will not gamble on a few thousand dollars when they can just give you the car's current value and still make money selling the car off to a surplus broker. Any car with a high resale value will a target for premature totalling out, even without expensive components because:
I can gaurantee you that if BMWs start getting totaled out over airbag costs too frequently, somebody is going to start manufacturing (relatively) cheap aftermarket airbags so that car dealers can snatch up these "totaled" cars from the insurance companies and turn a nice profit reselling them. If not, then it will be the BMW dealerships who snatch these cars back up and refit them with airbags since they get a break in price.
Also, I imagine that somebody is going to figure out how to fashion a steel bracket to hang their radiator from in new F-150s once theirs breaks and they learn that a factory replacement costs $300.
And don't forget that all of these new expensive components will come down in price over time and some car companies will not use the parts until they are cheap. Just look at Fuel Injection, Power Steering, Anti-Lock Brakes, etc...
I agree with the above poster that it is in the RIAA's interest to charge more for individual songs in order to encourage volume sales. The model that will probably prevail is the current model that albums are priced by: a difference in price due to popularity. I imagine that all newer songs will cost a considerable amount per track and then that price will go down over time as the RIAA realizes that they have run out of users willing to pay $3 per song and can make additional money by lowering the price per song of the individual track. I also imagine that there will always be some songs that keep a higher value (i.e. Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc), but the RIAA is out to maximize profits. If there are people willing to shell out $3 per track, the RIAA will gladly take that money as long as they can.
What they really need to concentrate on is bringing new music out that appeals to those who feel disenfranchised by the current music scene (fans of adult contemporary, pre-Kenny Rogers country, 80's pop, classic rock, etc). With a digital distribution method, the companies in the RIAA can afford to gamble on less popular music because there isn't as much money tied into distributing media. A digital-only music contract will cost these companies almost nothing if the artist fails and gain potential listeners and money if the artist succeeds.
One of the premises of the article is that online gaming on the PC is in decline. This premise is not justified in the article. Every example that the article cites as a failure for online gaming on the PC is based on the monthly-fee-per-game based online gaming model. The article even dismisses UT2004 by stating that it is free to play online so it is not a success. So the according to the Herald, success is achieved by making money after the initial sale of the product. That's a fair assessment, but that leaves another problem. Consoles do have a monthly-fee system, but that fee is paid to the console maker, not the software developer and it covers all titles on the console (if I understand things correctly). How is the console maker getting a monthly fee any different than the ISP getting a monthly fee? The money isn't going to the software developer (or if some of it is, it's probably insignificant) so it's just as much a failure as UT2004 according to the Herald's metric of success. People are willing to pay for a service to play many games online, but they just aren't willing to pay $10-15 per month for a single online game anymore.
I've been reading through this post and one thing irritates me. Everyone is acting like C has no garbage collection facilities. While garbage collection is not built into the language, there are several garbage collection libraries that can be linked into C. In fact, most of them merely replace malloc with some garbage collection code and replace free with a do-nothing routine. Linking the garbage collection libraries into the C code automagically sets up garbage collection and will allow you to recompile existing code with garbage collection enabled. Here's a sample library (first result searching 'garbage collector c' in Google):
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking that an easy to use Web portal to this kind of software would be a better idea. That way the user can get the most up-to-date version of the software and any new software deemed "worthy" of the list could be distributed to everyone by updating a Web page.
I hate to tell you guys but directional sound and the cone of silence is nothing new. Back in the late 60s the Chief, Agent 86, and I...
Oh wait, nevermind. There is no Control. We don't have a large cone of silence. I've never heard of this "directional sound" business.
No that's not a phone ringing. That's just my shoe.
I do agree that not all of the famous games have good storylines, but Zelda DID have a pretty good story line. It might not be Oscar material, but it is lightyears above some of its contemporaries like "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?" and "The 3 Stooges must go out and perform ridiculous jobs to save a Orphanage."
I think Microsocft is a bit full of themselves here. Do they really think that a high selling FPS game (Medal of Honor: Rising Sun) that is largely set in and around Japan is selling well IN Japan because they sold 75000 units of Halo over there? (see excerpt below)
from the article:
"I feel like we tipped open the door to FPS gaming on consoles with 'Halo,'" said Mike Fischer, Xbox director of marketing in Japan. "So Electronic Arts comes in with 'Medal of Honor,' and they sell 200,000 units in two weeks. I do not believe that, and a lot of people feel the same, that they would have sold any at all if "Halo" had not opened that door to that new genre."
Looking from a software admin's perspective, if I haven't upgraded to a supported MS Office I probably don't care to. That's assuming I have plenty of older MS Office licenses.
The real opportunity I can see for running OpenOffice and ditching MS Office is where we have X computers running MS Office and we have expanded to where we now need 2X computers running some Office software. If upper management wants to get out of that one cheap, I could probably strongarm them into adopting OO.
The users would probably complain at first that they can't use Open Office because of a few small differences between it and MS Office. I got that a lot when we went from Office 97 to Office XP. I usually just remind them at that point how adept they are at running Browser-based games, P2P apps, and AOL IM while I'm not looking. A few new format/location changes in their office product won't kill them.
It's nice to see AOL taking an active approach to regaining some lost revenue. They are trying to find out what consumers want and give it to them instead of crying to big brother to try to inhibit growth in broadband. It looks like there is another industry that could learn from this example (cough, cough, music).
10,000 times faster than the average broadband connection, but even the article states that that kind of bandwidth is not useful to home users yet. Then why mention it? How about this:
This new transmission is 2,796,206 times faster than a 2400 baud modem!
That's an equally useless comparison but at least the number is higher. You don't get to see a useful comparison figure until the 3rd paragraph where it says that the previous record was 4GB/second. They really should first and foremost tout the 36% increase in speed over the previous record. That's pretty impressive.
The MPAA seems to be targeting titles that are not available on video yet. That in itself is ok in my book. My biggest gripe with the RIAA is how do they know that I don't own the song? I obviously don't own a copy of Starsky and Hutch because it hasn't been released on video yet. I don't like the possibility of violating privacy rights, so I am naturally skeptical of the ACNS system. The article did nothing to relieve those fears.
Does Lucas think giving us a sneak peek of Vader's new threads will get us to go out and buy the DVD set? I'll just wait until the day after the DVD is released and find one of the many pics that will be plastered all over the Web. Or better yet, I'll just wait until the movie comes out and see the costume there. Of course, I'll probably see it on one of the movie theater patrons before I actually get into the theater.
The only thing that will get me to go out and buy the DVD set is to include the non-Special Edition versions of the movies (preferably the THX ones), but I think others have already done a very good job of making Lucas aware of my complaint.
I'm getting just a little tired of people arguing that language X has garbage collection while C does not. Garbage Collection is not built into the C language. Then again, dynamic memory allocation is not built into C! How do programmers get by without built in memory allocation? They rely on external libraries.
Likewise, Garbage Collection can be compiled into C and it is usually done by linking a garbage collection library that will replace the usual mallocs with garbage collection code and replace frees with a noop. That's it. No changing the source code, just your makefile and you too can have garbage collection in C. As an aside, if dynamic memory allocation were built into the language, this method would not be possible.
One of our computer systems at work requires a complex password that has to be changed to something new regularly. You don't even need a bar of chocolate to figure out their current password. It's usually "hidden" under their mousepad or sometimes they don't even bother to do that and just tape their password list to their monitor with a nice arrow pointing to their current password. Fortunately, most of our systems do not work this way.
Once upon a time I was an advocate of regularly changing passwords, but not anymore.
I don't know about you, but my "broadband" DSL carrier (Alltel) requires me to have a phone line hooked up to get DSL or pay a $15/month fee. I prefer DSL but don't try to paint it as cheaper than dialup because it's not. Even if you can get DSL without phone line for $50, you still don't get the phone line that you would going the dialup route. That might not be important to you, but I imagine that the crowd who is not willing to go to broadband is mostly the same crowd that doesn't want to ditch their land line.
I think this article needs to calm down from its panic mode. Disposable cars will not be the result of making cars more expensive to build. I don't think that the author has ever dealt with an insurance company.
The car mentioned throughout a good part of the article is BMW. I've owned two BMWs in the past. I also had a friend who owned a BMW. We always assumed that if one of us wrecked our car, the insurance company would total it out. It turned out to be true in his case. In my case, they didn't total it out but there was only paint damage. (Both of my BMWs died peacefully of old age.)
My point is that insurance companies will not gamble on a few thousand dollars when they can just give you the car's current value and still make money selling the car off to a surplus broker. Any car with a high resale value will a target for premature totalling out, even without expensive components because:
$pay_you_off_money - $get_from_wholesale_buyer > $cost_to_fix_car
I can gaurantee you that if BMWs start getting totaled out over airbag costs too frequently, somebody is going to start manufacturing (relatively) cheap aftermarket airbags so that car dealers can snatch up these "totaled" cars from the insurance companies and turn a nice profit reselling them. If not, then it will be the BMW dealerships who snatch these cars back up and refit them with airbags since they get a break in price.
Also, I imagine that somebody is going to figure out how to fashion a steel bracket to hang their radiator from in new F-150s once theirs breaks and they learn that a factory replacement costs $300.
And don't forget that all of these new expensive components will come down in price over time and some car companies will not use the parts until they are cheap. Just look at Fuel Injection, Power Steering, Anti-Lock Brakes, etc...
I agree with the above poster that it is in the RIAA's interest to charge more for individual songs in order to encourage volume sales. The model that will probably prevail is the current model that albums are priced by: a difference in price due to popularity. I imagine that all newer songs will cost a considerable amount per track and then that price will go down over time as the RIAA realizes that they have run out of users willing to pay $3 per song and can make additional money by lowering the price per song of the individual track. I also imagine that there will always be some songs that keep a higher value (i.e. Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc), but the RIAA is out to maximize profits. If there are people willing to shell out $3 per track, the RIAA will gladly take that money as long as they can.
What they really need to concentrate on is bringing new music out that appeals to those who feel disenfranchised by the current music scene (fans of adult contemporary, pre-Kenny Rogers country, 80's pop, classic rock, etc). With a digital distribution method, the companies in the RIAA can afford to gamble on less popular music because there isn't as much money tied into distributing media. A digital-only music contract will cost these companies almost nothing if the artist fails and gain potential listeners and money if the artist succeeds.
...the car drives you.
Oh, come on! Somebody had to say it.
One of the premises of the article is that online gaming on the PC is in decline. This premise is not justified in the article. Every example that the article cites as a failure for online gaming on the PC is based on the monthly-fee-per-game based online gaming model. The article even dismisses UT2004 by stating that it is free to play online so it is not a success. So the according to the Herald, success is achieved by making money after the initial sale of the product. That's a fair assessment, but that leaves another problem. Consoles do have a monthly-fee system, but that fee is paid to the console maker, not the software developer and it covers all titles on the console (if I understand things correctly). How is the console maker getting a monthly fee any different than the ISP getting a monthly fee? The money isn't going to the software developer (or if some of it is, it's probably insignificant) so it's just as much a failure as UT2004 according to the Herald's metric of success. People are willing to pay for a service to play many games online, but they just aren't willing to pay $10-15 per month for a single online game anymore.
I've been reading through this post and one thing irritates me. Everyone is acting like C has no garbage collection facilities. While garbage collection is not built into the language, there are several garbage collection libraries that can be linked into C. In fact, most of them merely replace malloc with some garbage collection code and replace free with a do-nothing routine. Linking the garbage collection libraries into the C code automagically sets up garbage collection and will allow you to recompile existing code with garbage collection enabled. Here's a sample library (first result searching 'garbage collector c' in Google):
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/