I think the adventure game is a front end for it, not in the actual code itself.
Re:How does it play DVD's?
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
From what I understand you have to buy an extra DVD remote control to unlock the DVD feature. I think all the firmware is built into the base unit, but it needs the IR dongle to be plugged into a controler port to make it function. I guess the Remote is only $30 so its not that bad. Kinda crappy to make you buy one thought (admittedly the DVD on the PS2 is better with a remote.. no wires hanging around. But at least you can use it without one)
...lack a modern-day business model. The RIAA is a cookie cutter example. I'd say that they petro industry is similar.
That has to be one of the funniest things I've read today. The Petroleum Industry has no business model. Yeah, and monkeys fly out of my butt. Sure, they may lobby like everyone else, but there's nothing artificial about the demand for hydrocarbons.... Unless, of course, you're one of those that thinks that "big oil" has hidden engines that run on water from the pubic, stifle research into the electric car, etc. In which case I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you that you can drive your 100000000 mpg car over when you throw off the shackles of the big, bad, oppresive oil companies.
Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 1
Based on MS history, the X-Box will flop...
But the X-box 3 (or would that be the Z-Box) will actually be playable. Just in time for X-mas 2006
Well, either they are or they expect to in the near future... otherwise they wouldn't be pumping $1Bn into it. They have shareholder to answer to. I doubt they're doing this on a whim.
That depends on the definition of work. If by work you mean "make a profitable company who's sole business is selling open software" then you have a point.
But considering Linus et al (not to mention the Apache folks along with the Samba team, etc) have been giving away IP from day one and their software is still being used, I'd say that by that definition it works.
My take: you make $$$ off of Free Software when its one of the tools in your arsenal, a'la IBM.
Which takes us down a whole other path (and a whole other huge arguement). Just exactly what do we do. According to the Washington Post we've shown the Taliban evidence of bin Landen and his boys' involvement in the Cole bombings, as well as the African embassey bombings, yet they haven't turned him over. I'd guess it would be safe to say that they would take the same tact this time. So the few choices I see are keep asking "pretty please", try some sort of embargo and put political pressure on Afghanistan (but since no one in the international community except the likes Saudi and Pakistan have even recognized them as a governing body I seriously doubt that would work), or you take action to smoke the guy out.
Of course, the orig statement from which I replied was the one equating bombing Afghanistan with airport security (or the lack there of), which is a bogus argument. Airport security and the actions in Afghanistan are orthogonal.
You're preaching to the choir. I've had huge reservations about Pakistan from day one.
Having said that, I don't believe the "break the circle of violence" line either. That assumes that the other side is rational and wouldn't have done a damn thing had America not a) been in bed with Israel, b) been full of heathen Christians/Jews/Muslims who aren't *real* muslims, etc.
Funny how people assume the worst of us and the best of them. Sorry if you don't like it, but for the most part I'm for extracting bin Laden, and unfortunatly that's going to have a price, in terms of world politics and civilian deaths. Not the greatest of choices, but the best that could be expected.
Anyone who says something even vaguely against the war effort is accused of advocating pacifism and letting terrorists walk all over us.
Talk about putting words in mouth... The post said that bombing Afghanistan didn't make us safe. Well, duh.. I don't think anyone thought that bombing afghanistan made us safe. That's comparing apples to oranges. Looking at airport security might make us safer... bombing Afghanistan might produce the number one suspect.
To paraphrase... Anyone who says something even vaguely for getting bin Laden is accused of advocating war mongering.
Winning the land battle in Afghanistan does nothing to make us safer
Not to open a can of worm here, but neither does doing nothing. I'd rather go after the guy who did it than not.
Re:No Silver Bullet....
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 2
Someone else also mentioned this and its a very good point: software engineering doesn't quite have the discipline of other engineering fields. You *need* to do all of the prepwork up front if you want to have control over costs and schedule. I used to work in a company that measured capital projects in the oil and gas industry. The amount of time and effort you skip on the up front / higher up stuff manifests itself in longer schedules, higher costs and crappier operability.
The IT industry is really lacking in such discipline (although it is getting better). Now I code for a living I hate doing all the upfront work (I just wanna code code code) but I realize that it is incredibly important.
The lynchpin to all of this is, of course, the ever rising price of their stock. As long as folks' stock prices were rising no one cared that MS issued new stock like Charmin issues toilet paper. And there in lies the rub.
Once the price of the stock no longer goes up and levels off its a whole new ballgame. Those institutional investers are going to want to see some return on investment. MS has a killer revenue source due to their entrenchment of Windows/MSOffice. But stock price is corrolated with growth, and there's stagnation in the market where MS dominates. If the stock price also stagnates then large investors are going to demand a piece of the revenue pie (in the form of dividends) or are going to get the hell out of dodge.
Companies that pay dividends are essentially saying "we can't think of anything better to do with this cash we've generated
Well, afaik MS can't think of anything better either. They're just sitting on a mountain of cash. So, if they're not going to do anything better with it then the investors should get it. An investor only invests to make money. MS is no longer on the rapid upward growth they were. That's not a bad reflection on them, they've just become "big." They're a big, extablished company, and their stock price is going to reflect that from now on. I'd wager the days of its valuaton doubling every 18 months or so are GONE. So, if I've got $$$ in MS, and their growth is at a pedestrian level (and thus their stock price) AND they're just sitting on a mountain of cash, then they better a) use that cash to rekindle double digit growth (which at their size ain't going to last too long anyway) or b) start handing it over.
Yeah, I was wondering exactly how and IBM mainframe was the same platform as a StrongArm PDA:)
Weren't these the folks who took credit for TrueType fonts? Who now claim they were hip to the internet back in 95 when they were really banking on CDRom subscriptions and a closed MSN?
And when the hell did MS demand an open platform? In the history of the PC I remember I don't recall MS being in the design meetings with the IBM guys.
I often wonder if those boneheads actually believe their PR.
Forget all the anti-trust stuff and "we don't play well with other" crap for a minute. In terms of "investment relations" what MS needs to do is pay out a god damn dividend. They're sitting on a pile of cash, and the days of constant double digit growth are behind them. They are going to have to face up to the fact that they are a grown, mature company and their stock price is going to act accordingly.
That's what's driving their licensing debacle, BSA audits, etc. They've hit the wall in terms of market penitration on the desktop, they never achieved the "slam dunk/home run" domination of the server market they thought they would (not to mention where they do dominate there-- small print, file, web servers they've got linux/BSD nipping at their heels) and the X-box is going to put a hit on revenues for the next few years even if its a runaway success. Other than Web Sevices, which at best are a few years away, they have no room for massive growth.
So, if the stockprice ain't going up all that much they better start paying out on all that cash they're sitting on, or some investers are going to be none too happy.
(then again, I'm a code jockey, what the f**k do I know about finance)
I guess I'm one of the few that has actually had really, really good luck with broadband. I've got Verizon's DSL and it's reliability has been great, and they haven't raised prices like I thought they would. Unless they jack the price up or it starts dying all the time I'm sticking with it.
Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'?
Yes it does (at least so far). Due to the aforementioned memory blowup I took the opportunity to do a fresh install of Debian and upgraded to woody. Some things don't work (like the go-gnome script) but I have gotten Ximian Gnome to install via the appropriate/etc/apt/source.list entry:
deb http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian stable main
Doing an apt-get install task-ximian-gnome *won't* work though. It pitches a fit about some package it cannot install (sorry, but at my work NT box and can't remember which one makes it puke). BUT, if you already have a vanilla version of gnome on the system and you do an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade it should pull down the Ximian replacements. You may also have to pull down some other Ximian goodies one by one via apt-get install. Evolution works but I have heard Red Carpet doesn't (I haven't tested that... still waiting for replacement memory from Micron). Other than that everything works peachy.
I like Evolution a lot, and its become my e-mail client of choice as of late (well, when my machine's memory isn't going up in smoke that is) but I was wondering if anyone has done any evalutions of Evolution on a large scale basis.
I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)? How well does it play with others? Which features does it not play with well? Where does it need more work? Ect.
Small is beautiful"? These people are programming a machine with a 200MHz RISC chip with 32Mbytes of memory. That isn't small, that's high-end desk-top performance of a few years ago.
Its not the iPaq they're crowing about, its the fact that they can squeeze it onto a cellphone like platform where you don't have a speedy cpu or gobs of memory. Apparently thier platform is quite svelt.
Require open standards? That's like telling Coke they need to open up their formula for their trademark beverage so that Pepsi and RC can compete more fairly.
Actually, not a bad analogy is Coke was convicted of being a monopoly that abused its position to keep Pepsi and RC from producing soda.
Coke play hard, as do Pepsi and anyone in the sugar water business (or any other business). But monopolies are a different beast alltogether (in legal terms). Monopolies can be restricted from doing things that would be legal for a non-monopoly company. Lots of people forget this.
Now, you may disagree that MS is a monopoly; I've heard compelling evidence for both sides. But the judicial branch of the gov't spoke, and (barring some weird ass legal turnaround) they found MS to a) be a monopoly and b) have illegally maintained it. Thus, the penalties they could have imposed on them may not allow them to do certain things that the likes of Apple, Sun, HP, Compaq, et al will still be allowed to do.
I fear that MS is betting that with fiscal conservatives in power and a economy going from bad to worse there would be a ton of pressure on the judicial branch to go easy on MS.
Except that branches of the govenment HATE being pressured by other branches. That's a sure fire way to backfire your plan. And idiology doesn't mean squate. Remember, Judge Jackson was considered a conservitive judge, and he hammered MS more than anyone.
I was just using it for an example. You're right, mips is pretty low power and cheap.
I don't know if you could emulate more than one chip's instruction set on one of Transmetta's chips at once, but I could see how that could be useful. As a company you've got some code that worked on a MIPS, you had some other code that worked on an ARM and instead of rewriting one or the other you just bung it on a Caruso. Of course, that may be wishful thinking.
Granted I am not an MBA nor a chip engineer, so this may be just wishful thinking, but I always wondered why Transmetta didn't play to the strength of their chip: i.e. you could make it act like other chips thru firm/software. I realize that x86 was where the market was, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't expect Intel to counter them in the marketplace (as they did).
I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.
Like I said, I'm but a mere code jockey, so what do I know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the adventure game is a front end for it, not in the actual code itself.
From what I understand you have to buy an extra DVD remote control to unlock the DVD feature. I think all the firmware is built into the base unit, but it needs the IR dongle to be plugged into a controler port to make it function. I guess the Remote is only $30 so its not that bad. Kinda crappy to make you buy one thought (admittedly the DVD on the PS2 is better with a remote.. no wires hanging around. But at least you can use it without one)
It's not that they have secret super-engines... rather that they stifle research upon such stuff.
Any good concrete evidence of this? Sources?
...lack a modern-day business model. The RIAA is a cookie cutter example. I'd say that they petro industry is similar.
That has to be one of the funniest things I've read today. The Petroleum Industry has no business model. Yeah, and monkeys fly out of my butt. Sure, they may lobby like everyone else, but there's nothing artificial about the demand for hydrocarbons.... Unless, of course, you're one of those that thinks that "big oil" has hidden engines that run on water from the pubic, stifle research into the electric car, etc. In which case I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you that you can drive your 100000000 mpg car over when you throw off the shackles of the big, bad, oppresive oil companies.
Based on MS history, the X-Box will flop...
But the X-box 3 (or would that be the Z-Box) will actually be playable. Just in time for X-mas 2006
Well, either they are or they expect to in the near future... otherwise they wouldn't be pumping $1Bn into it. They have shareholder to answer to. I doubt they're doing this on a whim.
but giving away IP just doesn't work.
That depends on the definition of work. If by work you mean "make a profitable company who's sole business is selling open software" then you have a point.
But considering Linus et al (not to mention the Apache folks along with the Samba team, etc) have been giving away IP from day one and their software is still being used, I'd say that by that definition it works.
My take: you make $$$ off of Free Software when its one of the tools in your arsenal, a'la IBM.
Which takes us down a whole other path (and a whole other huge arguement). Just exactly what do we do. According to the Washington Post we've shown the Taliban evidence of bin Landen and his boys' involvement in the Cole bombings, as well as the African embassey bombings, yet they haven't turned him over. I'd guess it would be safe to say that they would take the same tact this time. So the few choices I see are keep asking "pretty please", try some sort of embargo and put political pressure on Afghanistan (but since no one in the international community except the likes Saudi and Pakistan have even recognized them as a governing body I seriously doubt that would work), or you take action to smoke the guy out.
Of course, the orig statement from which I replied was the one equating bombing Afghanistan with airport security (or the lack there of), which is a bogus argument. Airport security and the actions in Afghanistan are orthogonal.
You're preaching to the choir. I've had huge reservations about Pakistan from day one.
Having said that, I don't believe the "break the circle of violence" line either. That assumes that the other side is rational and wouldn't have done a damn thing had America not a) been in bed with Israel, b) been full of heathen Christians/Jews/Muslims who aren't *real* muslims, etc.
Funny how people assume the worst of us and the best of them. Sorry if you don't like it, but for the most part I'm for extracting bin Laden, and unfortunatly that's going to have a price, in terms of world politics and civilian deaths. Not the greatest of choices, but the best that could be expected.
Anyone who says something even vaguely against the war effort is accused of advocating pacifism and letting terrorists walk all over us.
Talk about putting words in mouth... The post said that bombing Afghanistan didn't make us safe. Well, duh.. I don't think anyone thought that bombing afghanistan made us safe. That's comparing apples to oranges. Looking at airport security might make us safer... bombing Afghanistan might produce the number one suspect.
To paraphrase... Anyone who says something even vaguely for getting bin Laden is accused of advocating war mongering.
Winning the land battle in Afghanistan does nothing to make us safer
Not to open a can of worm here, but neither does doing nothing. I'd rather go after the guy who did it than not.
Someone else also mentioned this and its a very good point: software engineering doesn't quite have the discipline of other engineering fields. You *need* to do all of the prepwork up front if you want to have control over costs and schedule. I used to work in a company that measured capital projects in the oil and gas industry. The amount of time and effort you skip on the up front / higher up stuff manifests itself in longer schedules, higher costs and crappier operability.
The IT industry is really lacking in such discipline (although it is getting better). Now I code for a living I hate doing all the upfront work (I just wanna code code code) but I realize that it is incredibly important.
Ah.. I didn't realize this. Very interesting. Does anyone know how much buyback MS does on an annual basis?
The lynchpin to all of this is, of course, the ever rising price of their stock. As long as folks' stock prices were rising no one cared that MS issued new stock like Charmin issues toilet paper. And there in lies the rub.
Once the price of the stock no longer goes up and levels off its a whole new ballgame. Those institutional investers are going to want to see some return on investment. MS has a killer revenue source due to their entrenchment of Windows/MSOffice. But stock price is corrolated with growth, and there's stagnation in the market where MS dominates. If the stock price also stagnates then large investors are going to demand a piece of the revenue pie (in the form of dividends) or are going to get the hell out of dodge.
Companies that pay dividends are essentially saying "we can't think of anything better to do with this cash we've generated
Well, afaik MS can't think of anything better either. They're just sitting on a mountain of cash. So, if they're not going to do anything better with it then the investors should get it. An investor only invests to make money. MS is no longer on the rapid upward growth they were. That's not a bad reflection on them, they've just become "big." They're a big, extablished company, and their stock price is going to reflect that from now on. I'd wager the days of its valuaton doubling every 18 months or so are GONE. So, if I've got $$$ in MS, and their growth is at a pedestrian level (and thus their stock price) AND they're just sitting on a mountain of cash, then they better a) use that cash to rekindle double digit growth (which at their size ain't going to last too long anyway) or b) start handing it over.
Yeah, I was wondering exactly how and IBM mainframe was the same platform as a StrongArm PDA :)
Weren't these the folks who took credit for TrueType fonts? Who now claim they were hip to the internet back in 95 when they were really banking on CDRom subscriptions and a closed MSN?
And when the hell did MS demand an open platform? In the history of the PC I remember I don't recall MS being in the design meetings with the IBM guys.
I often wonder if those boneheads actually believe their PR.
Forget all the anti-trust stuff and "we don't play well with other" crap for a minute. In terms of "investment relations" what MS needs to do is pay out a god damn dividend. They're sitting on a pile of cash, and the days of constant double digit growth are behind them. They are going to have to face up to the fact that they are a grown, mature company and their stock price is going to act accordingly.
That's what's driving their licensing debacle, BSA audits, etc. They've hit the wall in terms of market penitration on the desktop, they never achieved the "slam dunk/home run" domination of the server market they thought they would (not to mention where they do dominate there-- small print, file, web servers they've got linux/BSD nipping at their heels) and the X-box is going to put a hit on revenues for the next few years even if its a runaway success. Other than Web Sevices, which at best are a few years away, they have no room for massive growth.
So, if the stockprice ain't going up all that much they better start paying out on all that cash they're sitting on, or some investers are going to be none too happy.
(then again, I'm a code jockey, what the f**k do I know about finance)
I guess I'm one of the few that has actually had really, really good luck with broadband. I've got Verizon's DSL and it's reliability has been great, and they haven't raised prices like I thought they would. Unless they jack the price up or it starts dying all the time I'm sticking with it.
Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'?
/etc/apt/source.list entry:
Yes it does (at least so far). Due to the aforementioned memory blowup I took the opportunity to do a fresh install of Debian and upgraded to woody. Some things don't work (like the go-gnome script) but I have gotten Ximian Gnome to install via the appropriate
deb http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian stable main
Doing an apt-get install task-ximian-gnome *won't* work though. It pitches a fit about some package it cannot install (sorry, but at my work NT box and can't remember which one makes it puke). BUT, if you already have a vanilla version of gnome on the system and you do an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade it should pull down the Ximian replacements. You may also have to pull down some other Ximian goodies one by one via apt-get install. Evolution works but I have heard Red Carpet doesn't (I haven't tested that... still waiting for replacement memory from Micron). Other than that everything works peachy.
Hope that helps.
I like Evolution a lot, and its become my e-mail client of choice as of late (well, when my machine's memory isn't going up in smoke that is) but I was wondering if anyone has done any evalutions of Evolution on a large scale basis.
I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)? How well does it play with others? Which features does it not play with well? Where does it need more work? Ect.
Small is beautiful"? These people are programming a machine with a 200MHz RISC chip with 32Mbytes of memory. That isn't small, that's high-end desk-top performance of a few years ago.
Its not the iPaq they're crowing about, its the fact that they can squeeze it onto a cellphone like platform where you don't have a speedy cpu or gobs of memory. Apparently thier platform is quite svelt.
Require open standards? That's like telling Coke they need to open up their formula for their trademark beverage so that Pepsi and RC can compete more fairly.
Actually, not a bad analogy is Coke was convicted of being a monopoly that abused its position to keep Pepsi and RC from producing soda.
Coke play hard, as do Pepsi and anyone in the sugar water business (or any other business). But monopolies are a different beast alltogether (in legal terms). Monopolies can be restricted from doing things that would be legal for a non-monopoly company. Lots of people forget this.
Now, you may disagree that MS is a monopoly; I've heard compelling evidence for both sides. But the judicial branch of the gov't spoke, and (barring some weird ass legal turnaround) they found MS to a) be a monopoly and b) have illegally maintained it. Thus, the penalties they could have imposed on them may not allow them to do certain things that the likes of Apple, Sun, HP, Compaq, et al will still be allowed to do.
I fear that MS is betting that with fiscal conservatives in power and a economy going from bad to worse there would be a ton of pressure on the judicial branch to go easy on MS.
Except that branches of the govenment HATE being pressured by other branches. That's a sure fire way to backfire your plan. And idiology doesn't mean squate. Remember, Judge Jackson was considered a conservitive judge, and he hammered MS more than anyone.
I was just using it for an example. You're right, mips is pretty low power and cheap.
I don't know if you could emulate more than one chip's instruction set on one of Transmetta's chips at once, but I could see how that could be useful. As a company you've got some code that worked on a MIPS, you had some other code that worked on an ARM and instead of rewriting one or the other you just bung it on a Caruso. Of course, that may be wishful thinking.
Granted I am not an MBA nor a chip engineer, so this may be just wishful thinking, but I always wondered why Transmetta didn't play to the strength of their chip: i.e. you could make it act like other chips thru firm/software. I realize that x86 was where the market was, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't expect Intel to counter them in the marketplace (as they did).
I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.
Like I said, I'm but a mere code jockey, so what do I know.