I agree. The tech (and thus, gaming) world is filled with self fulling prophecies, and for once, with the Wii, that wasn't completly the case... so EA is annoyed, and want to make their own prophecy. If they'd just shut up and develop GOOD games for the Wii, they could make a bundle too.
Im not very good at fonts (I use Vista, and I only had noticed 2 font changes), but I know that the PDF is not doing the fonts I do know justice. Consolas looked like crap in that PDF compared to what im seeing on my screen right now. I can't explain why however, so who knows.
Thats the whole point. If you don't set the font, then the default fonts will be used. That means in Vista, the fonts from this pack will be used, and that can affect the look of your web site, especially if its a high end designer web site.
If you were to specify the fonts in your stylesheets, and used fonts that were available pre-Vista, well, Vista -still- has em, and it will use em...so you wouldn't even need to test with the new fonts. So this is exactly for your situation.
One thing thats great with Consolas, is if you`re NOT in an environment that limits the length of a line of code. Consolas is very compact horizontally too. I have a widescreen monitor, so you can fit quite a lot on one line.
Can't abuse it of course, but if you use Eclipse, the odds are good you do Java (even though it doesn't garentee it), and you probably seen the random 3rd party API that has classes like SomeObjectThatDoesSomeStuffTranslatingFromOneClassToTheOtherAndStuff.
Consolas helps a lot in these cases. Also totally wonderful for HTML and XML.
It was with the old package, so I wouldn't be surprised if the EULA stated that it was for testing and development purpose (testing results... in MS's EULAs its pretty clear that dev purposes means for testing what the end user will get, so you can't use, let say, SQL Server Developer to host your internal development sharepoint for example).
But everyone and their brothers were distributing the old fonts, sometimes even directly in some Linux repository, and they never said anything... so I guess its one of those closes where its a "as long as you don't abuse it, we'll shut up" deal. Enjoy Consolas, it seriously is the best programming font I had the chance of trying so far (and I tried a lot...when Consolas came out, which was a decently long time ago, before Vista came out I beleive, a lot of people listed fonts they thought were better than Consolas....I still prefer Consolas to all of em, hehe).
Just one thing, did you try them with cleartype on, on a windows box? Because the Vista fonts are optimized for cleartype, and some (like consolas), are unusable without it.
Then again, I guess you did, since you said consolas is decent, and no one would say consolas is good if they were not using cleartype or equivalent, but just making sure.
My guess is that very few people normally type the exact same tags... so all it takes, is, let say, 250 bored students in a very large lecture room talking to each other before class starts and bang!
Ok, so devs having a difference stance than Ballmer now becomes "devs doing 2 very specific things, including one that even hardcore open source zealots don't all agree on" now that I called you on it?
And if I found a link of someone from Microsoft praising the GPL, what would you do? Ask for one that praises the GPL 3.0 specifically, and says they want a mod for Half-Life where the final boss is Ballmer within 2 paragraphs of each other?
No, I can't answer your "dare" (I don't see someone touching the later, thats better left to lawyers, and the former I'd have to google a bit more than I'd want to spend time on). Things still are, quite a bit is done by MS' employes thinking on their own. You think ASP.NET AJAX would support Opera if it was just for the execs? That MS would have given Moonlight their blessing? That Codeplex would exist? Yeah, right.
lemme guess. You are either still in college or have never worked for a company with over 1000 employes yet. And you'll see tons of those employes. Just look at any of MS top dogs dev blog posts. They happily go around pushing open source, open standards, helping some open source projects, defending competing technologies, implementing stuff that works in Firefox before it works in IE, rave about Macs, etc.
Overall they end up being pro-MS (else they wouldn't -work- there... these people could get a job almost anywhere within 24 hours), obviously, but they definately don't agree with everything, and will move their own agenda whenever its humanly possible.
Fortunately, it is not a show-stopper in that case, since my desktop has several millions files and last time I copied the entire thing to backup it didn't so much as hiccup (On Vista). Maybe it is triggerable by some software, but i guess I dont have any of em (and I have hundreds of gigs of various software and crap, since I tend to try every dev tools, servers, etc I can get my hands on).
Man, looking at my poster history it looks like Im such a huge pro-Vista bozo or something... Vista definately has its flaws...but man do Slashdot articles go far for them sometimes.
I don't think the poster meant they didn't want it ripped off. What they didn't want, was to spend time making it "contributor friendly", only to have people download it but never look at the code, in which case they might as well release it as is.
I completly agree with you. However, I've rarely read people put it that way (even though it is the only logical way of seeing it). Its always "OMG! Vista is so much worse than XP! Its slower and more expensive!!!". And no, it isn't.
As a sidenote, MacOSX would be a heck of a good deal, and worth every freagin cents, if the price of the OS wasn't "hidden" in the hardware. Sure you can upgrade and upgrade and upgrade, but Apple makes money on the hardware, thats why the software can be cheap. The day it is possible (read: easy) and "legal" (read: not against their EULA) to run MacOSX on most pieces of random hardware, is the day MS will have to heavily consider slashing their price to oblivion to be able to compete. MacOSX is for all practical purpose "free" (200$ for 5 computers upgrade is for all practical purpose insignificant to most people who can afford that many Macs, thats why I say free).
Totally agree with Linux, but Vista Home and Linux are in markets that virtually don't compete whatsoever.
well, some of the features you mentionned werent there at launch (for example the firewall). Though thats more "under the hood" features, and for a lot of users (especially for those LOOKING to trash Windows, or for averahe home users, obviously), it doesn't count. Vista has a completly crazy amount of those (a lot more than XP has over 2k), but when comparing OSs in a list like that, usually (not saying I agree), only the major, obvious changes count.
Actually, Home Premium is the equivalent of Windows Media Center and Tablet PC edition combined. Ultimate is Premium + Business (log on to domains, remote desktop, Fax) + Enterprise (encrypt whole drive, Services for Unix).
Yeah, I was more going by how they were marketed. Home premium is missing some of the business features, while Media Center was Pro + The media software (so it had everything or almost), which is like how Ultimate is.
I agree though that you're more accurate, though that strenghten my points more than anything.
No, actually. "I can't find XYZ because the icon is different" is literally 90% of the complains I've heard face to face (as in, not online). Oh, and I heard "You need 2 gigs of RAM!" ONCE, from someone who used multiple instances of visual studios and sql management, along with douzans of other programs at the same time (don't know how they lived on XP).
Thats really the totality of the complains I heard. Oh, also "MacOSX is prettier!", once. Which is more a fact than anything, can't argue there.
Yup. The only issue with Vista is they took too long to get it out of the door. The amount of people I hear complaining about Vista is indeed great, and its NEVER about how bad this or that feature is. Its always about "I can't find Add/Remove programs anymore!!!!", or some such.
XP was sure as hell a MUCH bigger difference from Windows 98/ME of back then (assuming a lot of people didn't jump by NT and 2k), and people did complain, but not quite as much. Now that computers are much more mainstream (I don't know numbers, but I doubt even 50% of Windows users of today even KNOW of anything before the MacOSX and Windows XP era), XP is all they know, so you change that, and they're screwed. People who remember previous upgrades probably remember how they were a lot, lot worse. (Windows XP before SP1 was completly non-viable for me, I stayed with 2k until 2 months before SP2 if I remember well).
What amuse me though is people complaining about the price, when its no different at all than XP's, if you take out the Ultimate Edition (which is the equivalent of Media Center of XP, which was not available retail, only OEM). Home Premium has a lot more features than XP Home had, Business more features than XP pro, and its all the same price XP was 5 years ago (and thus, adjusting to inflation, is a lot cheaper).
I'm not amazingly informed on the matter, but Electronic Art is also a publisher, is it not? In that case, Bioware would be rid of Atari from this point and on (not counting their older, Atari-exclusive franchises). That can only mean good things. As bad as EA is, Atari was worse.
While waiting for it to fail is pretty extreme, "early optimization is the root of all evil".
The problem is poor requirement specifications. I worked for so many companies that had all the pretty UML architecture and usecases down, but no requirement specifications.
Uptime requirements, response time, security requirements (so all around QOS), maintenance requirements, support, ANYTHING would help, but they don't. So when the application (web or otherwise) is slow, the developers don't know if its "good enough" or not. Especially in extremely large applications, in very large teams, a random dev won't know which goals they have to achieve... they can go by what THEY would like, but that may or may not be a waste of time (spending a week optimizing a page that will be requested once per month is a serious waste of cash).
If there were requirements written down by the analysts (or whatever) at the begging, like "This section needs a response time of X in conditions Y, up to Z amount of concurrent users", then it becomes very easy to choose when you should optimize or not. In smaller, "agile" shops, communication and brainstormings should be happening on the subject. Ask the customers, the target audience what they need. "As fast as possible!" is too vague.
I don't disagree with you, but one has to realise that servers are not all the big mission critical machines in datacenters we tend to picture them as. There are probably as many "non-mission-critical" servers as there are the others, and for those, a "Server for Dummy" install probably is cost effective in the long run.
Case in point: the company I work for offers a relatively advanced web solution. The software doesn't actually deal with mission critical data, it is used for projections and on the fly analytic operations, on a user per user basis. So each user has a copy of the data and basically mess with it the way they bloody want until they get an acceptable result, print a report, then go to their primary system (which isn't by us, and is totally independant in every ways, shape and form) and perform mission critical operations THERE.
For our servers, we can toss the app on anything, passwords can be in plain text (well, could if users didn't reuse passwords all over, which isn't the case so I guess they can't!), the machine can be tossed and kicked around, it doesn't really matter if the system's down for a day, or a week, as long as it comes back and it "works".
This is actually an incredibly common scenario, and more and more as a lot of software is moved to simple web apps (because of the Web 2.0 overhype) and other such things, especially since hardware is so cheap (I've seen servers running cache engines made with less than 300 lines of code, including comments, in a farm... hardly mission critical either), so there's IS a pretty high demand for "dumb-friendly" servers that don't even require the sysadmin intervention when they screw up.
In such cases, something like Ubuntu Server probably fits the bill amazingly nicely. If the machine screws up BAD, you call the sysadmin...but the rest of the time, let said professional handle the important stuff, and have the junior manage the non-critical, novice friendly environments. Saves time and money for everyone.
The cost would be passed to the customer. If the customers kept paying, then you wouldn't see any decrease in dell sales of Windows. So yes, its all customer demand (-especially- on servers).
In the end, the "microsoft business practices" problem is a lot more part of the field, and, in a lot of cases, human nature, than anything else. Go ahead, break Microsoft in 3, hell, -destroy- Microsoft. Watch whats gonna happen. Steve Jobs is going to take Bill Gates/Balmers' place, and he's probably a lot worse (considering what we've seen so far). Then you'll have to break Apple too. Then for a while Linux will rise, until either someone finds a way around the license and Tivo(tm) it up (even with GPL3, somehow... people always find a way) and you'll have to break em too, until there's so many laws and rules and regulations and you broke so many, that 100 years from now, finally, there's no more monopoly.
However then, you'll be stuck in a world where software is like the pharma/biotech world, and you need an army of lawyers and 50 million up front just to make a shareware. The way around MS' monopoly that will work, is educating the newer generations, and MAKING GOOD COMPETING PRODUCTS. Something with the mindshare and quality of Apple, that can be thrown on most hardware categories like Linux, and has the enterprise management and dev tools of Windows.
Sounds too hard to do? Well, then maybe Windows' monopoly isn't just because of their predatory business practices:) (and if you DON'T think its too hard to do, then it just means someone needs to do it, not that we need to artifically break Microsoft)
I think in the end that Microsoft calculates the "repurchases" into their OEM cost, so technically you're not (always) paying for multiple installs... That is, if they ask 5$ for an OEM (which is probably not far from the truth right now) for -every- purchase, or 10$ the first time, transferable, well, its the same thing unless you buy 3 PCs... Even if you purchase separately:
Looking on Tiger Direct, an OEM (that is, tied to hardware) license of Windows is almost -exactly- half the price of a non-OEM one. So you pay less (much less) for a non-transferable license... I almost always purchase OEM, because I normally dont replace my motherboard (or something) more often than I change windows version (I upgraded from Win2k to XP about 2 years ago, I keep my PCs 3 years or so...).
Its no difference from how when I purchase a plane ticket, I can bring the price down (a LOT) by choosing it to be non-cancellable/transferable.
And routinely being abused... the "windows tax" on PCs is less than the freagin -tax- (in most states/countries, not all obviously) you pay on the darn computer. Much less in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. The tech (and thus, gaming) world is filled with self fulling prophecies, and for once, with the Wii, that wasn't completly the case... so EA is annoyed, and want to make their own prophecy. If they'd just shut up and develop GOOD games for the Wii, they could make a bundle too.
Im not very good at fonts (I use Vista, and I only had noticed 2 font changes), but I know that the PDF is not doing the fonts I do know justice. Consolas looked like crap in that PDF compared to what im seeing on my screen right now. I can't explain why however, so who knows.
Thats the whole point. If you don't set the font, then the default fonts will be used. That means in Vista, the fonts from this pack will be used, and that can affect the look of your web site, especially if its a high end designer web site.
If you were to specify the fonts in your stylesheets, and used fonts that were available pre-Vista, well, Vista -still- has em, and it will use em...so you wouldn't even need to test with the new fonts. So this is exactly for your situation.
One thing thats great with Consolas, is if you`re NOT in an environment that limits the length of a line of code. Consolas is very compact horizontally too. I have a widescreen monitor, so you can fit quite a lot on one line.
Can't abuse it of course, but if you use Eclipse, the odds are good you do Java (even though it doesn't garentee it), and you probably seen the random 3rd party API that has classes like SomeObjectThatDoesSomeStuffTranslatingFromOneClassToTheOtherAndStuff.
Consolas helps a lot in these cases. Also totally wonderful for HTML and XML.
It was with the old package, so I wouldn't be surprised if the EULA stated that it was for testing and development purpose (testing results... in MS's EULAs its pretty clear that dev purposes means for testing what the end user will get, so you can't use, let say, SQL Server Developer to host your internal development sharepoint for example).
But everyone and their brothers were distributing the old fonts, sometimes even directly in some Linux repository, and they never said anything... so I guess its one of those closes where its a "as long as you don't abuse it, we'll shut up" deal. Enjoy Consolas, it seriously is the best programming font I had the chance of trying so far (and I tried a lot...when Consolas came out, which was a decently long time ago, before Vista came out I beleive, a lot of people listed fonts they thought were better than Consolas....I still prefer Consolas to all of em, hehe).
Just one thing, did you try them with cleartype on, on a windows box? Because the Vista fonts are optimized for cleartype, and some (like consolas), are unusable without it.
Then again, I guess you did, since you said consolas is decent, and no one would say consolas is good if they were not using cleartype or equivalent, but just making sure.
My guess is that very few people normally type the exact same tags... so all it takes, is, let say, 250 bored students in a very large lecture room talking to each other before class starts and bang!
Ok, so devs having a difference stance than Ballmer now becomes "devs doing 2 very specific things, including one that even hardcore open source zealots don't all agree on" now that I called you on it?
And if I found a link of someone from Microsoft praising the GPL, what would you do? Ask for one that praises the GPL 3.0 specifically, and says they want a mod for Half-Life where the final boss is Ballmer within 2 paragraphs of each other?
No, I can't answer your "dare" (I don't see someone touching the later, thats better left to lawyers, and the former I'd have to google a bit more than I'd want to spend time on). Things still are, quite a bit is done by MS' employes thinking on their own. You think ASP.NET AJAX would support Opera if it was just for the execs? That MS would have given Moonlight their blessing? That Codeplex would exist? Yeah, right.
lemme guess. You are either still in college or have never worked for a company with over 1000 employes yet. And you'll see tons of those employes. Just look at any of MS top dogs dev blog posts. They happily go around pushing open source, open standards, helping some open source projects, defending competing technologies, implementing stuff that works in Firefox before it works in IE, rave about Macs, etc. Overall they end up being pro-MS (else they wouldn't -work- there... these people could get a job almost anywhere within 24 hours), obviously, but they definately don't agree with everything, and will move their own agenda whenever its humanly possible.
Fortunately, it is not a show-stopper in that case, since my desktop has several millions files and last time I copied the entire thing to backup it didn't so much as hiccup (On Vista). Maybe it is triggerable by some software, but i guess I dont have any of em (and I have hundreds of gigs of various software and crap, since I tend to try every dev tools, servers, etc I can get my hands on).
Man, looking at my poster history it looks like Im such a huge pro-Vista bozo or something... Vista definately has its flaws...but man do Slashdot articles go far for them sometimes.
I don't think the poster meant they didn't want it ripped off. What they didn't want, was to spend time making it "contributor friendly", only to have people download it but never look at the code, in which case they might as well release it as is.
I completly agree with you. However, I've rarely read people put it that way (even though it is the only logical way of seeing it). Its always "OMG! Vista is so much worse than XP! Its slower and more expensive!!!". And no, it isn't.
As a sidenote, MacOSX would be a heck of a good deal, and worth every freagin cents, if the price of the OS wasn't "hidden" in the hardware. Sure you can upgrade and upgrade and upgrade, but Apple makes money on the hardware, thats why the software can be cheap. The day it is possible (read: easy) and "legal" (read: not against their EULA) to run MacOSX on most pieces of random hardware, is the day MS will have to heavily consider slashing their price to oblivion to be able to compete. MacOSX is for all practical purpose "free" (200$ for 5 computers upgrade is for all practical purpose insignificant to most people who can afford that many Macs, thats why I say free).
Totally agree with Linux, but Vista Home and Linux are in markets that virtually don't compete whatsoever.
well, some of the features you mentionned werent there at launch (for example the firewall). Though thats more "under the hood" features, and for a lot of users (especially for those LOOKING to trash Windows, or for averahe home users, obviously), it doesn't count. Vista has a completly crazy amount of those (a lot more than XP has over 2k), but when comparing OSs in a list like that, usually (not saying I agree), only the major, obvious changes count.
Make of that what you will.
No, actually. "I can't find XYZ because the icon is different" is literally 90% of the complains I've heard face to face (as in, not online). Oh, and I heard "You need 2 gigs of RAM!" ONCE, from someone who used multiple instances of visual studios and sql management, along with douzans of other programs at the same time (don't know how they lived on XP).
Thats really the totality of the complains I heard. Oh, also "MacOSX is prettier!", once. Which is more a fact than anything, can't argue there.
Yup. The only issue with Vista is they took too long to get it out of the door. The amount of people I hear complaining about Vista is indeed great, and its NEVER about how bad this or that feature is. Its always about "I can't find Add/Remove programs anymore!!!!", or some such.
XP was sure as hell a MUCH bigger difference from Windows 98/ME of back then (assuming a lot of people didn't jump by NT and 2k), and people did complain, but not quite as much. Now that computers are much more mainstream (I don't know numbers, but I doubt even 50% of Windows users of today even KNOW of anything before the MacOSX and Windows XP era), XP is all they know, so you change that, and they're screwed. People who remember previous upgrades probably remember how they were a lot, lot worse. (Windows XP before SP1 was completly non-viable for me, I stayed with 2k until 2 months before SP2 if I remember well).
What amuse me though is people complaining about the price, when its no different at all than XP's, if you take out the Ultimate Edition (which is the equivalent of Media Center of XP, which was not available retail, only OEM). Home Premium has a lot more features than XP Home had, Business more features than XP pro, and its all the same price XP was 5 years ago (and thus, adjusting to inflation, is a lot cheaper).
I'm not amazingly informed on the matter, but Electronic Art is also a publisher, is it not? In that case, Bioware would be rid of Atari from this point and on (not counting their older, Atari-exclusive franchises). That can only mean good things. As bad as EA is, Atari was worse.
While waiting for it to fail is pretty extreme, "early optimization is the root of all evil".
The problem is poor requirement specifications. I worked for so many companies that had all the pretty UML architecture and usecases down, but no requirement specifications.
Uptime requirements, response time, security requirements (so all around QOS), maintenance requirements, support, ANYTHING would help, but they don't. So when the application (web or otherwise) is slow, the developers don't know if its "good enough" or not. Especially in extremely large applications, in very large teams, a random dev won't know which goals they have to achieve... they can go by what THEY would like, but that may or may not be a waste of time (spending a week optimizing a page that will be requested once per month is a serious waste of cash).
If there were requirements written down by the analysts (or whatever) at the begging, like "This section needs a response time of X in conditions Y, up to Z amount of concurrent users", then it becomes very easy to choose when you should optimize or not. In smaller, "agile" shops, communication and brainstormings should be happening on the subject. Ask the customers, the target audience what they need. "As fast as possible!" is too vague.
I don't disagree with you, but one has to realise that servers are not all the big mission critical machines in datacenters we tend to picture them as. There are probably as many "non-mission-critical" servers as there are the others, and for those, a "Server for Dummy" install probably is cost effective in the long run.
Case in point: the company I work for offers a relatively advanced web solution. The software doesn't actually deal with mission critical data, it is used for projections and on the fly analytic operations, on a user per user basis. So each user has a copy of the data and basically mess with it the way they bloody want until they get an acceptable result, print a report, then go to their primary system (which isn't by us, and is totally independant in every ways, shape and form) and perform mission critical operations THERE.
For our servers, we can toss the app on anything, passwords can be in plain text (well, could if users didn't reuse passwords all over, which isn't the case so I guess they can't!), the machine can be tossed and kicked around, it doesn't really matter if the system's down for a day, or a week, as long as it comes back and it "works".
This is actually an incredibly common scenario, and more and more as a lot of software is moved to simple web apps (because of the Web 2.0 overhype) and other such things, especially since hardware is so cheap (I've seen servers running cache engines made with less than 300 lines of code, including comments, in a farm... hardly mission critical either), so there's IS a pretty high demand for "dumb-friendly" servers that don't even require the sysadmin intervention when they screw up.
In such cases, something like Ubuntu Server probably fits the bill amazingly nicely. If the machine screws up BAD, you call the sysadmin...but the rest of the time, let said professional handle the important stuff, and have the junior manage the non-critical, novice friendly environments. Saves time and money for everyone.
The cost would be passed to the customer. If the customers kept paying, then you wouldn't see any decrease in dell sales of Windows. So yes, its all customer demand (-especially- on servers).
In the end, the "microsoft business practices" problem is a lot more part of the field, and, in a lot of cases, human nature, than anything else. Go ahead, break Microsoft in 3, hell, -destroy- Microsoft. Watch whats gonna happen. Steve Jobs is going to take Bill Gates/Balmers' place, and he's probably a lot worse (considering what we've seen so far). Then you'll have to break Apple too. Then for a while Linux will rise, until either someone finds a way around the license and Tivo(tm) it up (even with GPL3, somehow... people always find a way) and you'll have to break em too, until there's so many laws and rules and regulations and you broke so many, that 100 years from now, finally, there's no more monopoly.
:) (and if you DON'T think its too hard to do, then it just means someone needs to do it, not that we need to artifically break Microsoft)
However then, you'll be stuck in a world where software is like the pharma/biotech world, and you need an army of lawyers and 50 million up front just to make a shareware. The way around MS' monopoly that will work, is educating the newer generations, and MAKING GOOD COMPETING PRODUCTS. Something with the mindshare and quality of Apple, that can be thrown on most hardware categories like Linux, and has the enterprise management and dev tools of Windows.
Sounds too hard to do? Well, then maybe Windows' monopoly isn't just because of their predatory business practices
I think in the end that Microsoft calculates the "repurchases" into their OEM cost, so technically you're not (always) paying for multiple installs... That is, if they ask 5$ for an OEM (which is probably not far from the truth right now) for -every- purchase, or 10$ the first time, transferable, well, its the same thing unless you buy 3 PCs... Even if you purchase separately:
Looking on Tiger Direct, an OEM (that is, tied to hardware) license of Windows is almost -exactly- half the price of a non-OEM one. So you pay less (much less) for a non-transferable license... I almost always purchase OEM, because I normally dont replace my motherboard (or something) more often than I change windows version (I upgraded from Win2k to XP about 2 years ago, I keep my PCs 3 years or so...).
Its no difference from how when I purchase a plane ticket, I can bring the price down (a LOT) by choosing it to be non-cancellable/transferable.
And routinely being abused... the "windows tax" on PCs is less than the freagin -tax- (in most states/countries, not all obviously) you pay on the darn computer. Much less in many cases.