OOXML has been so politicized that it is dangerous to even bring the topic up.
And why do you suppose this is? And who started politicising it?
Microsoft pulled out of the OASIS ODF working group during the creation of ODF. Instead of working for a standard, they decided to go their own way. As the giant in the industry, they have the clout to do so. When it seemed they didn't have a sure vote for fast-track of their own single-vendor standard, they are the ones who gamed the system, strongly urging their close partners in member countries to join and vote in the ISO process.
Microsoft has arrogantly assumed the industry will follow them. It is this arrogance, and a good memory, that has produced this resistance to their market push. Microsoft has twisted standards to funnel customers their way (Kerberos, IMAP/MAPI, etc). They have shown they have no interest in playing well with others, which is the entire point of a standard.
As far as Jody hacking in support to import cells from a spreadsheet: good for him. But how is the display and print and graph fidelity? Will it look the same as it does when printed from Microsoft Office? Will cell styles look the same on-screen? Or does Gnumeric only do about as well as it does with.xls files-- only moderately okay?
Support for reading in cell data is one thing. For that, the OOXML-published spec is a godsend. But that isn't the real test-case here. ODF is designed for disparate word processors to operate on the same files with equal fidelity. It's designed with internationalization in mind, including dates and times (something at which I hear OOXML isn't so great, though maybe I'm just swilling the FUD-aid.)
If OOXML is such an excellent spec, then Novell should be able to create a filter that will be able to import and export moderately-complex OOXML files that look almost identical (in print and on screen) in MS-Office and some other non-Microsoft product. (Sorry about that sentence.) If it's as good as you claim, we should see this product before ISO voting begins in February. And if it is to make a good standard, I should be able to download the filter from anywhere, hack it, and redistribute it without fear of patent litigation.
Do you imagine this is doable? Are you willing to back up your claims with some promises (not as a Novell employee, but as Miguel the hacker)?
Actually, I don't think even Microsoft can claim I will be able to download it, hack it, and redistribute it without permission from Microsoft. And that right there is reason enough for me to fight it.
If people/society/the rich/the poor were not so fucking evil then we wouldn't need government - however it appears mankind cannot peacefully coexist in some magical commune.
I believe you mean, "It appears mankind cannot peacefully coexist."
Full stop.
That way, it's both truthful, and you don't need to invoke magic. Let's keep this discussion rational.
The biggest complaint so far in the reviews is the awful control scheme.
Yeah. I remember when we went from the single-joystick, four-button controllers to the scheme both Microsoft and Sony use, and Nintendo used on the Gamecube. Everybody complained about how complex it was.
I played Lair for the first time tonight, and after just a few minutes, I could do things with the combination motion-control and joystick/buttons that you couldn't dream of without the motion control. I can assure you, the control scheme is *not* awful.
My only complaint is, the control scheme is different for one-on-one fights, as opposed to the general melee fighting. Both control schemes are decent (though I prefer the melee controls). I found myself getting used to it after about an hour, though. A few more hours, and it'll be second nature to switch back and forth.
I really enjoyed it, and found the control scheme very nice. It's substantially more complex than Warhawk, but it's also way cooler.
Forcing people to use tilt and gestures for flying with no alternate conventional control scheme was a TERRIBLE IDEA.
Let's see-- "Forcing people to use *two joysticks* (one under each thumb) and two sets of crazy buttons, with *extra buttons under each index finger* is just insane!"
The point is, the gameplay was built around the sixaxis controller. That's one of the things Sure, you could fly around, but you couldn't do much else. The shear variety of attack sequences available would be prohibitive. It'd be a button-mashing nightmare.
The control scheme for flying is intuitive, easy-to-use, and makes for amazing gameplay.
But, if you want a different controller scheme, you can always use your PSP.
The Cell processor definitely has a raw horsepower advantage over the rather standard PowerPC in the 360. 8 cores beats 2 any day.
Now, whether the game developers are savvy enough to take advantage of the cell is a different question entirely.
Don't discount the whole multiple-DVDs vs. 1 BlueRay, either. Or the fact that the PS3 comes standard with a hard drive, allowing game manufacturers to cache textures to disk before they are needed ("streaming textures"), making gameplay smoother, with richer visuals.
Then there's the sixaxis controller, which gives some interesting gameplay possibilities. For instance, in the upcoming Ratchet & Clank game, one of the weapons produces a tornado, which you control with the sixaxis, while using the more traditional controls as per usual. You can't do that on a 360.
So, I think a more interesting question is, what technically can't be done on a PS3 that you can do on a 360? ("Halo III" is not an appropriate answer here, since that's a marketing thing, not a technical thing. A good point, but not technical.)
In what way has the US been unable to adapt to globalism?
How do we portray outsourcing? Corporations embrace outsourcing, often for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way; but how is it portrayed in the media, even here on/.?
How does the US handle H1B visas? Not very well.
US corporations are embracing globalisation. The US political and social systems are not. And even the corporations manage to fuck it all up, outsourcing because they can pollute in Mexico, or because Russian/Indian/Chinese programmers are cheaper, or what-have-you, exploiting local economic weaknesses, rather than expanding into global markets to bring the world up to a single standard of living.
Granted, there are lots of good globalisation stories, as you point out. The company for which I work writes software for a Thai telecom corporation, along with companies from Norway and Isreal. So in that respect, America *is* globalizing, just as you say.
From a socialogical standpoint, the US has handled globalisation very poorly. At the moment, most citizens see globalisation as, "The middle-east produces terrorists, and all Mexicans are illegal immegrants," without bothering to understand the source of their viewpoints. The government (which is where Libertarianism ties in) has done everything to *promote* this viewpoint, rather than educate about the realities of the global world.
We *are* influencing other countries, but that's mostly because of our success at branding American culture in TV, movies, and song.
It just happens that Americans are very good at [doing things in their best interest]... and to bring this back on topic I would say that is due in large part to a libertarian mindset that says we the people can do that without waiting for help from the government to take action.
True, that.
Double true.
And that is both good and bad.
I don't think we disagree on this issue. I guess I'm just focusing on the failures, rather than the successes.
I know it's been said here a million times in this discussion.
But.
If you license your code under the BSD license, *you don't give a fuck what happens with your code.* Otherwise, you wouldn't license it under the BSD license, would you?
You don't care if a big corporation takes your code and sells it as part of their own multi-billion-dollar product. You don't care if I print it to toilet paper and use it wipe my ass while singing along with Britney to, "Oops, I Did it Again." The point is, you licensed it under the BSD license, which means you might as well have put it in the public domain.
If you *really* cared how people used your code, you would've used the GPL, which offers restrictions, meaning the code isn't as free (though I note I can still use it while belting out a chorus of "I'm a Slave 4 U").
But its pure implementation would be as disastrous to it as communism has been...
Or pure capitalism.
Or pure *anything*, for that matter.
There's nothing pure about humanity. We're brilliant and violent and hateful and ugly and beautiful and, above all, fucking selfish. There's no one system that can perfectly govern us.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" -- Walt Whitman
Humanity contains multitudes, but we continually try to govern as if we were all homogenous, as if we can reach consensus, or we will accept the rule of an overlord, or we are all greedy and ruthless, or all selfless and loving and logical. In the end, there is no one way to effectively govern. There is no best social or political structure.
Communism and democracy both suffer from the idea that a group of people can govern themselves better than a small group of dedicated and selfless individuals; monarchism and dictatorships suffer from the idea that one can govern better than many; and fascism and capitalism suffer from the idea that "war" and "survival of the fittest" are good ideas to apply to society.
We will never live together peacefully. We love to hate too much. Look at sports teams, or console fanbois, or black vs. white vs black, or any other social aspect of "teamism," (in which you choose a team to support, and all others to hate). It's there in many fundamentalist religions, whether it's Christianity of Islam or Judaism or Zoanastrianism, there's a certain amount of "us vs. them."
So there's every reason to assume that *every* form of government is doomed to failure. Take a look at the United States, very recently the "greatest nation on earth." We have, so far, been completely unable to adapt to the emerging globalism. This takes shape as "us vs. them," whether in the whole false dichotomy of terrorism, or the very synthetic illegal immigration debate.
We are, as a society, doomed to hobson's choice. From a male standpoint, we must choose whether to cut off our nuts or our dick. (From a female standpoint, to choose between giving head and swallowing, or taking it in the ass.) (Or in general [and thanks to South Park], choosing between a shit sandwich or a douchebag.) It's not even clear that we'll ever be able to move beyond that choice, as long as we concentrate on idealogical purity ("Liberal" vs. "Conservative," of which neither ideology is truly practiced in the US).
Of course, that's just my own ignorant ramblings. Your own might lead you elsewhere.
So a rational, analytical nerd who sees vast suffering caused by circumstances and accidents of birth, and thinks that it can be addressed effectively through marginal collective action like taxes paying for health care for all is, what, deluded? Wrong?
Of course. Everybody knows that individual suffering is caused by choices, not circumstance.
I mean, if you're born into a poor neighborhood (which receives little money for school thanks to the way US schools are funded), it's your parent's fault for choosing to live in a poor neighborhood. They should move to Beverly Hills, where they have an excellent school system. If they can't afford excellent health care coverage (like about 33% of the nation can't afford) because they work at Wal*Mart, they should get a better job, say as a DBA or programmer/analyst. If they can't get a decent-paying job because of education, they should've gone to college. If they can't afford college, they should've gotten a better job to pay for college, or been born into a rich family living in Beverly Hills.
I mean, poor people are always trying to blame someone other than themselves.
(In case you miss the irony: a child in daycare generally costs 75% as much per hour as a person working a minimum wage job takes home in an hour. That means working a minimum wage job leaves almost nothing for the niceties of life, such as food or shelter. You figure out which end of the political spectrum on which I fall.)
I agree that G. W. Bush isn't truly evil. Cheney is evil, but that's not surprising, as he's a cyborg necropedophiliac from the future, sent back in time to destroy the world for his flesh-eating overlords.
But.
Like the head of a corporation, President Bush is ultimately responsible for the actions of his underlings, toad-like cyborgs or not. He's the captain at the helm, the jockey on the horse, the push in the shove. Whether he is a mere tool or simply incompetent or a supervillain mastermind behind the whole thing, it is his show.
Every eroded civil liberty, every fabricated or misrepresented piece of evidence leading to war, every tortured captive, every unjustified war, every person held without habeas corpus is his responsibility.
The judgement of President Bush is how well he's handled those most dire responsibilities. And so far (6.5 years in), it's not looking good.
It isn't so much about perfect systems, it about governmental oversight. Technology like this is scary when put in modern context, in which oversight of the government is methodically being stripped, leaving nothing but unchecked power.
The checks and balances are being removed, one by one, and *that* is the scary part.
As for the P2P, there's a huge difference between the citizens of a nation, and the government of a nation. Also, I wouldn't mind of the government violated copyright, so why should I care if a citizen does?
What's up with all the anonymous cowards defending intrusive governmental programs?
That's hardly telling at all. The original Playstation outsold the PS2 for quite a while, too, yet the PS2 is still the console to beat (in terms of total sales).
The Wii might make it, as it *is* strangely fun, kind of like the NES when it was first introduced.
I think everyone is counting out the PS3 *way* too early. It's a damned good console, with a lot of room to grow, both in size of games (Bluray) and in technical ability (CBE).
Plus, Ratchet & Clank will be out for it in October. I can't wait. (R&C is *way* more fun than should be legal, if you ask me.)
There are two important things that set the PS3 above the 360: Bluray and processing power.
The Bluray is an absolute win. It's not about HD video-- it's about game content. As it is, media-heavy games eat up a lot of space, and game manufacturers are already compressing textures and dropping the size of their levels just to squeeze everything onto a DVD. Bluray allows for better textures and bigger worlds. Game designers no longer have to worry about the DVD limit.
The processing power is a double-edged sword. There's a certain point when there is "enough" processing power. After that, it's all just wasted. And the cell broadband engine is quite different from standard programming-- you can't just create more threads to take advantage of the additional processors.
However, for game engines designed from the ground up to take advantage of the platform, the PS3 has substantially more power than the 360. The 360 has a slightly better GPU, but the PS3 has more than enough extra power to make up for it, and then some.
The 360 isn't a bad game machine (unlike the original Xbox, which was a PC in an ugly case), it isn't "comparable in almost every important way to the PS3," though it is considerably cheaper.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand, where companies or individuals create the supply to fill the demands of the customer. It is as simple as that. (Okay, it's never as simple as that.)
As soon as you support powerful corporations manipulating the market in any way, you are not longer a capitalist. You are a corporatist.
Supporters of open standards wish for Microsoft to adhere to a true standard, one that is well-documented, easily implemented, and available for all. Currently, ODF does all that.
OOXML, on the other hand, is obtuse, hard to implement (even for Microsoft), leaves much unspecified, and is Microsoft-centric, rather than document-centric.
The problem is actually with Microsoft. They have rigged the system to favor their platform above all others, rather than risk losing their stranglehold on your documents. If Microsoft were to support ODF, and participate in the OASIS working group once again, their office suite would have to compete entirely on merit. A person or company could use the office suite of their choice, and exchange documents with no difficulty.
The place to make money is in the friction. The more friction there is-- that is, the more painful *not* using your product or service is-- the more money you can charge. Microsoft is great at increasing friction by manipulating the market.
Microsoft is ensuring they are able to keep up the friction.
Didn't you read the original article? Haven't you been following the OOXML story at all? There is every evidence that Microsoft has not changed, and works hard to pervert standards and processes to favor their platform over any other. Not just here, but in other areas, as well. Name one major Microsoft product that follows open, published standards without proprietary deviation. Just one. I dare you.
Also important to note, Bill Gates isn't running MS anymore.
No. Ballmer is. Bill Gates is a very smart guy (in business, at least). Ballmer is vicious, and even more cold-blooded than Gates (if that can be possible). And the corporation idolizes Gates. His influence will remain long after he's completely retired from the company.
Slashdot Mirror
OOXML has been so politicized that it is dangerous to even bring the topic up.
.xls files-- only moderately okay?
And why do you suppose this is? And who started politicising it?
Microsoft pulled out of the OASIS ODF working group during the creation of ODF. Instead of working for a standard, they decided to go their own way. As the giant in the industry, they have the clout to do so. When it seemed they didn't have a sure vote for fast-track of their own single-vendor standard, they are the ones who gamed the system, strongly urging their close partners in member countries to join and vote in the ISO process.
Microsoft has arrogantly assumed the industry will follow them. It is this arrogance, and a good memory, that has produced this resistance to their market push. Microsoft has twisted standards to funnel customers their way (Kerberos, IMAP/MAPI, etc). They have shown they have no interest in playing well with others, which is the entire point of a standard.
As far as Jody hacking in support to import cells from a spreadsheet: good for him. But how is the display and print and graph fidelity? Will it look the same as it does when printed from Microsoft Office? Will cell styles look the same on-screen? Or does Gnumeric only do about as well as it does with
Support for reading in cell data is one thing. For that, the OOXML-published spec is a godsend. But that isn't the real test-case here. ODF is designed for disparate word processors to operate on the same files with equal fidelity. It's designed with internationalization in mind, including dates and times (something at which I hear OOXML isn't so great, though maybe I'm just swilling the FUD-aid.)
If OOXML is such an excellent spec, then Novell should be able to create a filter that will be able to import and export moderately-complex OOXML files that look almost identical (in print and on screen) in MS-Office and some other non-Microsoft product. (Sorry about that sentence.) If it's as good as you claim, we should see this product before ISO voting begins in February. And if it is to make a good standard, I should be able to download the filter from anywhere, hack it, and redistribute it without fear of patent litigation.
Do you imagine this is doable? Are you willing to back up your claims with some promises (not as a Novell employee, but as Miguel the hacker)?
Actually, I don't think even Microsoft can claim I will be able to download it, hack it, and redistribute it without permission from Microsoft. And that right there is reason enough for me to fight it.
Sure we have our favorite tools, but most of them suck at one thing or another.
So, you're telling me there's no magic bullet? I want my magic bullet!
Now. Where's that flying car I've been promised?
If people/society/the rich/the poor were not so fucking evil then we wouldn't need government - however it appears mankind cannot peacefully coexist in some magical commune.
I believe you mean, "It appears mankind cannot peacefully coexist."
Full stop.
That way, it's both truthful, and you don't need to invoke magic. Let's keep this discussion rational.
Have you been hanging out with The Sphinx again?
The biggest complaint so far in the reviews is the awful control scheme.
Yeah. I remember when we went from the single-joystick, four-button controllers to the scheme both Microsoft and Sony use, and Nintendo used on the Gamecube. Everybody complained about how complex it was.
I played Lair for the first time tonight, and after just a few minutes, I could do things with the combination motion-control and joystick/buttons that you couldn't dream of without the motion control. I can assure you, the control scheme is *not* awful.
My only complaint is, the control scheme is different for one-on-one fights, as opposed to the general melee fighting. Both control schemes are decent (though I prefer the melee controls). I found myself getting used to it after about an hour, though. A few more hours, and it'll be second nature to switch back and forth.
I really enjoyed it, and found the control scheme very nice. It's substantially more complex than Warhawk, but it's also way cooler.
Forcing people to use tilt and gestures for flying with no alternate conventional control scheme was a TERRIBLE IDEA.
Let's see-- "Forcing people to use *two joysticks* (one under each thumb) and two sets of crazy buttons, with *extra buttons under each index finger* is just insane!"
The point is, the gameplay was built around the sixaxis controller. That's one of the things Sure, you could fly around, but you couldn't do much else. The shear variety of attack sequences available would be prohibitive. It'd be a button-mashing nightmare.
The control scheme for flying is intuitive, easy-to-use, and makes for amazing gameplay.
But, if you want a different controller scheme, you can always use your PSP.
The Cell processor definitely has a raw horsepower advantage over the rather standard PowerPC in the 360. 8 cores beats 2 any day.
Now, whether the game developers are savvy enough to take advantage of the cell is a different question entirely.
Don't discount the whole multiple-DVDs vs. 1 BlueRay, either. Or the fact that the PS3 comes standard with a hard drive, allowing game manufacturers to cache textures to disk before they are needed ("streaming textures"), making gameplay smoother, with richer visuals.
Then there's the sixaxis controller, which gives some interesting gameplay possibilities. For instance, in the upcoming Ratchet & Clank game, one of the weapons produces a tornado, which you control with the sixaxis, while using the more traditional controls as per usual. You can't do that on a 360.
So, I think a more interesting question is, what technically can't be done on a PS3 that you can do on a 360? ("Halo III" is not an appropriate answer here, since that's a marketing thing, not a technical thing. A good point, but not technical.)
The fact that OOXML is a hundred times worse does not make ODF a good standard.
Good point.
It *does* mean this whole OOXML thing is another method of Microsoft cramming their products down the collective throats of the world, though.
Then again, the world would have been better off if the word processor had never been invented.
Even better point.
Add "presentation software" to that list of things that should never have been invented.
How do we portray outsourcing? Corporations embrace outsourcing, often for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way; but how is it portrayed in the media, even here on
How does the US handle H1B visas? Not very well.
US corporations are embracing globalisation. The US political and social systems are not. And even the corporations manage to fuck it all up, outsourcing because they can pollute in Mexico, or because Russian/Indian/Chinese programmers are cheaper, or what-have-you, exploiting local economic weaknesses, rather than expanding into global markets to bring the world up to a single standard of living.
Granted, there are lots of good globalisation stories, as you point out. The company for which I work writes software for a Thai telecom corporation, along with companies from Norway and Isreal. So in that respect, America *is* globalizing, just as you say.
From a socialogical standpoint, the US has handled globalisation very poorly. At the moment, most citizens see globalisation as, "The middle-east produces terrorists, and all Mexicans are illegal immegrants," without bothering to understand the source of their viewpoints. The government (which is where Libertarianism ties in) has done everything to *promote* this viewpoint, rather than educate about the realities of the global world.
We *are* influencing other countries, but that's mostly because of our success at branding American culture in TV, movies, and song.
True, that.
Double true.
And that is both good and bad.
I don't think we disagree on this issue. I guess I'm just focusing on the failures, rather than the successes.
I know it's been said here a million times in this discussion.
But.
If you license your code under the BSD license, *you don't give a fuck what happens with your code.* Otherwise, you wouldn't license it under the BSD license, would you?
You don't care if a big corporation takes your code and sells it as part of their own multi-billion-dollar product. You don't care if I print it to toilet paper and use it wipe my ass while singing along with Britney to, "Oops, I Did it Again." The point is, you licensed it under the BSD license, which means you might as well have put it in the public domain.
If you *really* cared how people used your code, you would've used the GPL, which offers restrictions, meaning the code isn't as free (though I note I can still use it while belting out a chorus of "I'm a Slave 4 U").
So, why is this on Slashdot? Again?
But its pure implementation would be as disastrous to it as communism has been...
Or pure capitalism.
Or pure *anything*, for that matter.
There's nothing pure about humanity. We're brilliant and violent and hateful and ugly and beautiful and, above all, fucking selfish. There's no one system that can perfectly govern us.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" -- Walt Whitman
Humanity contains multitudes, but we continually try to govern as if we were all homogenous, as if we can reach consensus, or we will accept the rule of an overlord, or we are all greedy and ruthless, or all selfless and loving and logical. In the end, there is no one way to effectively govern. There is no best social or political structure.
Communism and democracy both suffer from the idea that a group of people can govern themselves better than a small group of dedicated and selfless individuals; monarchism and dictatorships suffer from the idea that one can govern better than many; and fascism and capitalism suffer from the idea that "war" and "survival of the fittest" are good ideas to apply to society.
We will never live together peacefully. We love to hate too much. Look at sports teams, or console fanbois, or black vs. white vs black, or any other social aspect of "teamism," (in which you choose a team to support, and all others to hate). It's there in many fundamentalist religions, whether it's Christianity of Islam or Judaism or Zoanastrianism, there's a certain amount of "us vs. them."
So there's every reason to assume that *every* form of government is doomed to failure. Take a look at the United States, very recently the "greatest nation on earth." We have, so far, been completely unable to adapt to the emerging globalism. This takes shape as "us vs. them," whether in the whole false dichotomy of terrorism, or the very synthetic illegal immigration debate.
We are, as a society, doomed to hobson's choice. From a male standpoint, we must choose whether to cut off our nuts or our dick. (From a female standpoint, to choose between giving head and swallowing, or taking it in the ass.) (Or in general [and thanks to South Park], choosing between a shit sandwich or a douchebag.) It's not even clear that we'll ever be able to move beyond that choice, as long as we concentrate on idealogical purity ("Liberal" vs. "Conservative," of which neither ideology is truly practiced in the US).
Of course, that's just my own ignorant ramblings. Your own might lead you elsewhere.
So a rational, analytical nerd who sees vast suffering caused by circumstances and accidents of birth, and thinks that it can be addressed effectively through marginal collective action like taxes paying for health care for all is, what, deluded? Wrong?
Of course. Everybody knows that individual suffering is caused by choices, not circumstance.
I mean, if you're born into a poor neighborhood (which receives little money for school thanks to the way US schools are funded), it's your parent's fault for choosing to live in a poor neighborhood. They should move to Beverly Hills, where they have an excellent school system. If they can't afford excellent health care coverage (like about 33% of the nation can't afford) because they work at Wal*Mart, they should get a better job, say as a DBA or programmer/analyst. If they can't get a decent-paying job because of education, they should've gone to college. If they can't afford college, they should've gotten a better job to pay for college, or been born into a rich family living in Beverly Hills.
I mean, poor people are always trying to blame someone other than themselves.
(In case you miss the irony: a child in daycare generally costs 75% as much per hour as a person working a minimum wage job takes home in an hour. That means working a minimum wage job leaves almost nothing for the niceties of life, such as food or shelter. You figure out which end of the political spectrum on which I fall.)
Dick Cheney doesn't have a heart.
Did you just coin that phrase?
I'm just asking, so I know who to attribute when I quote it.
I agree that G. W. Bush isn't truly evil. Cheney is evil, but that's not surprising, as he's a cyborg necropedophiliac from the future, sent back in time to destroy the world for his flesh-eating overlords.
But.
Like the head of a corporation, President Bush is ultimately responsible for the actions of his underlings, toad-like cyborgs or not. He's the captain at the helm, the jockey on the horse, the push in the shove. Whether he is a mere tool or simply incompetent or a supervillain mastermind behind the whole thing, it is his show.
Every eroded civil liberty, every fabricated or misrepresented piece of evidence leading to war, every tortured captive, every unjustified war, every person held without habeas corpus is his responsibility.
The judgement of President Bush is how well he's handled those most dire responsibilities. And so far (6.5 years in), it's not looking good.
It isn't so much about perfect systems, it about governmental oversight. Technology like this is scary when put in modern context, in which oversight of the government is methodically being stripped, leaving nothing but unchecked power.
The checks and balances are being removed, one by one, and *that* is the scary part.
As for the P2P, there's a huge difference between the citizens of a nation, and the government of a nation. Also, I wouldn't mind of the government violated copyright, so why should I care if a citizen does?
What's up with all the anonymous cowards defending intrusive governmental programs?
Some of you fear the government a little too much... as in it makes you irrational.
And some of you trust the government a little too much... as in it makes you blind.
I have nothing to hide.
Of course you don't, Anonymous Coward.
That's hardly telling at all. The original Playstation outsold the PS2 for quite a while, too, yet the PS2 is still the console to beat (in terms of total sales).
The Wii might make it, as it *is* strangely fun, kind of like the NES when it was first introduced.
I think everyone is counting out the PS3 *way* too early. It's a damned good console, with a lot of room to grow, both in size of games (Bluray) and in technical ability (CBE).
Plus, Ratchet & Clank will be out for it in October. I can't wait. (R&C is *way* more fun than should be legal, if you ask me.)
There are two important things that set the PS3 above the 360: Bluray and processing power.
The Bluray is an absolute win. It's not about HD video-- it's about game content. As it is, media-heavy games eat up a lot of space, and game manufacturers are already compressing textures and dropping the size of their levels just to squeeze everything onto a DVD. Bluray allows for better textures and bigger worlds. Game designers no longer have to worry about the DVD limit.
The processing power is a double-edged sword. There's a certain point when there is "enough" processing power. After that, it's all just wasted. And the cell broadband engine is quite different from standard programming-- you can't just create more threads to take advantage of the additional processors.
However, for game engines designed from the ground up to take advantage of the platform, the PS3 has substantially more power than the 360. The 360 has a slightly better GPU, but the PS3 has more than enough extra power to make up for it, and then some.
The 360 isn't a bad game machine (unlike the original Xbox, which was a PC in an ugly case), it isn't "comparable in almost every important way to the PS3," though it is considerably cheaper.
You're describing corporatism, not capitalism.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand, where companies or individuals create the supply to fill the demands of the customer. It is as simple as that. (Okay, it's never as simple as that.)
As soon as you support powerful corporations manipulating the market in any way, you are not longer a capitalist. You are a corporatist.
Not exactly.
Supporters of open standards wish for Microsoft to adhere to a true standard, one that is well-documented, easily implemented, and available for all. Currently, ODF does all that.
OOXML, on the other hand, is obtuse, hard to implement (even for Microsoft), leaves much unspecified, and is Microsoft-centric, rather than document-centric.
The problem is actually with Microsoft. They have rigged the system to favor their platform above all others, rather than risk losing their stranglehold on your documents. If Microsoft were to support ODF, and participate in the OASIS working group once again, their office suite would have to compete entirely on merit. A person or company could use the office suite of their choice, and exchange documents with no difficulty.
The place to make money is in the friction. The more friction there is-- that is, the more painful *not* using your product or service is-- the more money you can charge. Microsoft is great at increasing friction by manipulating the market.
Microsoft is ensuring they are able to keep up the friction.
Can you show us any evidence he hasn't?
Yes.
Didn't you read the original article? Haven't you been following the OOXML story at all? There is every evidence that Microsoft has not changed, and works hard to pervert standards and processes to favor their platform over any other. Not just here, but in other areas, as well. Name one major Microsoft product that follows open, published standards without proprietary deviation. Just one. I dare you.
Also important to note, Bill Gates isn't running MS anymore.
No. Ballmer is. Bill Gates is a very smart guy (in business, at least). Ballmer is vicious, and even more cold-blooded than Gates (if that can be possible). And the corporation idolizes Gates. His influence will remain long after he's completely retired from the company.
Anything from C++ to VisualBasic to SQL Server.
Uhm... you're not convincing me. Name one *good* thing.
Unit of Productivity = 1 / (hours of down time)
Bad choice. In a well run shop, you'd get a "division by zero" error.