Personally, I think there was something about the people at Sierra that failed to keep up with the times. They were great at making command-line games, back when that was the thing. When graphics came to the forefront, command lines went away, and everything was mouse-driven, they started to fall apart. The conventions changed, the market changed, the audience changed, and the people there didn't seem suited to do the new things.
I'm guessing there. From the point of view of a fan, the games just started getting worse when they moved to the mouse interface, and worse again when they started trying to do 3D. The last Kings Quest was one of the worst games I've ever seen. I'd love to see the characters and stories make a return, and I wouldn't mind some of the original writers contributing, but it seems to me that they really need some new blood.
Actually, I was thinking about this when playing Twilight Princess. I was surprised at how much Twilight Princess felt to me like, "What a modern Quest for Glory game should have been like." I figure if you got the Zelda team together with the Coles, you'd have a hit.
Ads for the iPod is what those are. That's where Apple is making money: selling hardware. Selling music is iPod marketing. It's all about selling iPods.
No, I don't think so. Jobs (or whoever) seems to understand that online distribution won't work if it's a frustrating experience. Apple has made it easy end-to-end, from browsing to buying to playing to putting it on your iPod. They understand that if DRM is very restrictive, no one will buy this stuff. From the consumer perspective, online distribution is all about ease and convenience. If you take that away, the business will flop.
Seriously, I wish what's left of Sierra would work on moving their Quest game series into this century. If nothing else, I think Hero's Quest (aka Quest for Glory) has enough RPG/Action elements that the transition to a modern game could be accomplished.
I don't think it's a case of Jobs suddenly realizing DRM is bad and becoming a generous benefactor by disregarding his greedy interests. First, he's been against DRM from the beginning. It's come up again and again, and I don't know whether any public statements have been made before, but by all accounts Steve Jobs did not want DRM on iTMS. The record companies just required it.
Second, by most accounts, Apple doesn't make much money off of the iTMS anyhow. They roughly break even. It's a marketing issue, to promote the iPod, and that's pretty much it. Third, even if Apple did make money from the sales, they don't need to make much. While record companies are spending money to actually produce the music, Apple only needs to make enough to cover their costs of running the store. Therefore, Apple doesn't need to worry very much about piracy.
So even if Apple took a small loss on the iTMS, it might be worth it for marketing purposes. However, keeping the DRM hurts their PR, and it's probably a nightmare to manage, keep up-to-date, etc. Plus, they've lost the business of people who might have purchased from iTMS, but who won't because of the DRM. DRM is a net loss for them, I'm sure.
Without Apple, the studios still have CD sales and Zune sales.
Do they? I thought part of the issue is that a lot of people want digital downloads, and Apple is the only company that's doing it in a way that's profitable for the record labels. I know I feel guilty buying CDs-- all that plastic and paper when I'm just going to rip the CD and keep it on my computer anyway. On a side note, I feel more guilty for the waste of physical resources of buying a CD than I feel about "stealing" music by downloading it from P2P.
But really, how long do you think CD sales will last? Not forever. Internet connections are getting faster, hard drives are getting bigger, and people are getting more and more used to the idea that music is delivered to their homes instantaneously. And I don't think the two people who bought Zunes are going to make up for the loss of volume for iTunes sales.
That's... dumb. First of all, the weather forecasts aren't always totally accurate, so there goes your point right there. But also... conditions change. Duh. It could be that you have fog so think that it's just dangerous to drive, and then an hour later it's cleared up. You might have snow too thick to drive through, and an hour later it's been plowed.
Geeze, shit happens. Is it better to fail to show up, rather than being a little late?
It's also worth noting that [supposedly] Apple had been working on the iPhone for years. It's not like they just came up with the idea a year ago. However, Microsoft does have a habit of throwing unfinished crap out onto the market and letting users beta-test, so who knows.
The problem with letting go of Exchange/Outlook is that it really has some nifty features for calendaring, contact management, and mobile devices. I've worked in a few offices where each of these features was heavily used, and removing them or even changing them would drastically change the company's workflow.
If Exchange were just the Microsoft software for making an IMAP/POP/Webmail server, then I'd agree that Exchange isn't better than other solutions. But there's more going on than that.
Your "unsupported widget" example is very telling, in my opinion. In fact, I believe that the whole problem comes down to the issue of the unsupported widget, and Exchange/Office are really almost just different versions of this same problem: A company built there business on some piece of technology, and that technology won't migrate perfectly to Linux.
For example, you can have shared calendars and contacts using other operating systems, but it won't operate the same as in Outlook. You can use OpenOffice for all sorts of things, but it won't always have the same functionality that you've come to rely on.
In many ways, it might be easier to start with Linux and build your business processes in such a way that you never rely on functionality that Linux doesn't have. I'm sure there are many businesses that could have accomplished that. However, if you start with Windows, you reach a point where all of your managers are using Outlook's calendars, all your admin assistants know there Word shortcuts, all the finance people are used to Excel, and all of your IT people are Windows guys. Transitioning away from Windows, at that point, is going to be tough.
Also, what do you mean by "Push email" and "mobile operators"?
Newer versions of Exchange has built-in support for push e-mail to mobile devices. The result is that, in short, you can get good e-mail, contact management, and calendaring support on your Windows-based cellphone through Exchange.
Actually, I do find Evolution to be a generally good replacement for Outlook. It's not a perfect replication of Outlook, so it's possible that a given person might not be able to switch over. However, I've spent months at a time using Evolution for e-mail and contact/calendar sharing with an Exchange server without a problem. In fact, I really wish that they had good working OSX/Windows ports of Evolution.
I'm not sure there's anything on the server side, though, that's quite ready to replace Exchange.
As I said, I think your static IP trick is acceptable. Charge me a little extra, open the ports, and give me a static IP. I'm just annoyed with ISPs that don't even offer that option.
Does that judgement still have force? I don't really mean "technically, legally," but "actually". Last I heard, nothing was being done to regulate Microsoft anymore. I don't know for a fact, but it's my understanding that there are current deals with major OEMs that if they don't advertise Windows in certain ways, or if they give alternatives equal billing, then they don't qualify as some sort of "favored partner" to receive special pricing.
Also, I'm not sure of the cause, but there is the strange case of Dell. They sell systems without operating systems, but those systems cost more than identical systems with Windows installed. It seems awfully suspicious.
Yes, sure, of course, if the market is big enough. Honestly, I'd really like to see an OEM (or maybe a partnership of multiple OEMs) take a play from Apple's book and make their own distro for their own hardware. I'm of the personal belief that the software monoculture that Microsoft represents has taken us as far as it can, and we need instead to move towards open standards and cross-platform development. OEMs should become "system-integrators" again, selling computer systems instead of computer hardware with a Microsoft OS. This time, everything can be Unix-y and generally interoperable if not compatible.
Bah... If you ask me all PC operating systems are a bit crappy. If only we could have something which combined the development speed and hackability of Linux, the reliability and security of *BSD, the beauty of OSX and the consistency of behaviour and range of desktop programs of Windows. All running on commodity hardware. Maybe one day ?
It seems to me that things are better than you think. Maybe Linux isn't quite as secure and reliable as some of the BSDs, but it's pretty close. I'm not sure why *BSD doesn't have, in your estimation, the development speed and hackability of Linux, but admittedly I'm not a developer. Gnome and KDE are getting prettier and better all the time, available on Linux, BSDs, and OSX. Finally, OSX is a variant of BSD, is as pretty as OSX, has a wide range of software and consistent behavior, and from what I've heard has nice development tools (again, I'm not a developer). The only thing OSX seems to be lacking is the non-free GUI and inability to run that GUI on commodity hardware.
If you ask me, the single thing hurting the desktop OS ecosystem is the lack of truly cross-platform development. The operating systems themselves are fine (though perhaps the real strength of Windows is for games, with DirectX and all).
The fact is that a lack of CMYK support means a lot of pros simply can't use the GIMP. It's not an option. The conversion between RGB and CMYK changes colors, and printers work in CMYK, so if designers want accurate color, they need to be using CMYK.
Even when you ignore the interface of the GIMP and the big lack of CMYK, there are still little things like-- well, for example, JPEG compression. If you take the same image and compress it to the same file size using GIMP and Photoshop, the Photoshop file will look better. Is the difference huge? No. In most cases, it wouldn't be a big enough difference to matter in the slightest. Still, Photoshop can still produce a picture with visibly higher quality, and if you're in a case where you have a file-size limitation and need to produce the highest-quality JPEG possible for that size, I've not yet seen a program that can best Photoshop.
And believe me, that makes me sad. I'd love it if I could do all my conversions through imagemagick without sacrificing quality, but I can't.
The problem is that the marginal cost of delivering another OS is not zero. According to the deals that Microsoft has struck with OEMs, if OEMs offer machines with an alternative OS or no OS depending on how they offer it and advertise it, Microsoft will increase the price per copy of Windows. Therefore, the price of production for every Windows machine they produce will increase.
Nevertheless, virtual hosting is quite cheap. 1U hosting can be had for under $100/month now. ISPs almost always offer hosting options as well, as do registrars. There's a plethora of hosting options out there. People don't have to run services from their residential connection for any real reason.
Virtual hosting is cheap, but you also end up restricted to what your host will allow (no system level access, for example). There are smaller size/volume limits on all sorts of things. Sometimes the limits of a virtual host aren't acceptable for a person/business. 1U hosting is much cheaper than it used to be, but it still isn't quite cheap. That $100 a month can add up over a few years. A lot of these issues depend on you needs and your budget.
I've already said this, but I agree that port 25 should probably be blocked by default. However, there should be a cheap/free method for disabling this block for those people who know enough to secure their own system (which will roughly work out to be the same people who know enough to ask you to stop blocking port 25).
Personally, I hate the fact that my ISP blocks port 25 and 80, and I'm considering changing my ISP because of it. I didn't know before I signed up. Port 80 is an annoyance for certain things, but blocking port 25 is just a PITA. The ISP offers it's own SMTP without authentication as long as your on their service, but doesn't allow access to it if you're coming from the outside. The problem: I have a laptop. If I'm at home, I can only use 1 SMTP server, and I can't use that server if I'm not at home. So I have to keep switching servers all the time because my ISP is looking to collect another $15 just to allow ports 25 and 80 (still no static IP).
And the problem is not that I can't secure my own machine. I work in IT, and though I'm not an uber-geek that knows how to do everything, I can sure as hell run a network and keep it virus-free. I can produce paperwork to that effect if that's what it took, but it's more like they know the broadband options in my neighborhood are limited, and they're just trying to squeeze out every last penny.
I feel a bit sad about this, since there was something wickedly fun about google bombs.
I agree that it almost doesn't seem worth it to get rid of Google-bombing. Most of the effects were pretty harmless. Like you search of "miserable failure" and you get a political figure, or you search for "worst band ever" and you get Creed. Nobody is hurt by it. Oh, what, you're offended? The internet is often an offensive place. Get over it.
What I find more worrisome is the manipulations of rankings for economic purposes, i.e. "SEO". It's sometimes valid, but often it just seems like rigging the system.
The first thing I wondered when I read this was, "Did they learn their lesson?" They standardized their entire country on a closed system, and when the vendor of that closed system initiates an arbitrary change, they're pretty much screwed and forced to rebuild things. In my mind, the smart thing would be to bite the bullet, drop Active X, and switch to Firefox and have a true multi-platform solution. Hell, if they can't do everything they require in an extension, they can go as far as making their own fork, and they'll retain that option in the future.
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Personally, I think there was something about the people at Sierra that failed to keep up with the times. They were great at making command-line games, back when that was the thing. When graphics came to the forefront, command lines went away, and everything was mouse-driven, they started to fall apart. The conventions changed, the market changed, the audience changed, and the people there didn't seem suited to do the new things.
I'm guessing there. From the point of view of a fan, the games just started getting worse when they moved to the mouse interface, and worse again when they started trying to do 3D. The last Kings Quest was one of the worst games I've ever seen. I'd love to see the characters and stories make a return, and I wouldn't mind some of the original writers contributing, but it seems to me that they really need some new blood.
Actually, I was thinking about this when playing Twilight Princess. I was surprised at how much Twilight Princess felt to me like, "What a modern Quest for Glory game should have been like." I figure if you got the Zelda team together with the Coles, you'd have a hit.
Ads for the iPod is what those are. That's where Apple is making money: selling hardware. Selling music is iPod marketing. It's all about selling iPods.
No, I don't think so. Jobs (or whoever) seems to understand that online distribution won't work if it's a frustrating experience. Apple has made it easy end-to-end, from browsing to buying to playing to putting it on your iPod. They understand that if DRM is very restrictive, no one will buy this stuff. From the consumer perspective, online distribution is all about ease and convenience. If you take that away, the business will flop.
Seriously, I wish what's left of Sierra would work on moving their Quest game series into this century. If nothing else, I think Hero's Quest (aka Quest for Glory) has enough RPG/Action elements that the transition to a modern game could be accomplished.
I don't think it's a case of Jobs suddenly realizing DRM is bad and becoming a generous benefactor by disregarding his greedy interests. First, he's been against DRM from the beginning. It's come up again and again, and I don't know whether any public statements have been made before, but by all accounts Steve Jobs did not want DRM on iTMS. The record companies just required it.
Second, by most accounts, Apple doesn't make much money off of the iTMS anyhow. They roughly break even. It's a marketing issue, to promote the iPod, and that's pretty much it. Third, even if Apple did make money from the sales, they don't need to make much. While record companies are spending money to actually produce the music, Apple only needs to make enough to cover their costs of running the store. Therefore, Apple doesn't need to worry very much about piracy.
So even if Apple took a small loss on the iTMS, it might be worth it for marketing purposes. However, keeping the DRM hurts their PR, and it's probably a nightmare to manage, keep up-to-date, etc. Plus, they've lost the business of people who might have purchased from iTMS, but who won't because of the DRM. DRM is a net loss for them, I'm sure.
Do they? I thought part of the issue is that a lot of people want digital downloads, and Apple is the only company that's doing it in a way that's profitable for the record labels. I know I feel guilty buying CDs-- all that plastic and paper when I'm just going to rip the CD and keep it on my computer anyway. On a side note, I feel more guilty for the waste of physical resources of buying a CD than I feel about "stealing" music by downloading it from P2P.
But really, how long do you think CD sales will last? Not forever. Internet connections are getting faster, hard drives are getting bigger, and people are getting more and more used to the idea that music is delivered to their homes instantaneously. And I don't think the two people who bought Zunes are going to make up for the loss of volume for iTunes sales.
That's... dumb. First of all, the weather forecasts aren't always totally accurate, so there goes your point right there. But also... conditions change. Duh. It could be that you have fog so think that it's just dangerous to drive, and then an hour later it's cleared up. You might have snow too thick to drive through, and an hour later it's been plowed.
Geeze, shit happens. Is it better to fail to show up, rather than being a little late?
It's also worth noting that [supposedly] Apple had been working on the iPhone for years. It's not like they just came up with the idea a year ago. However, Microsoft does have a habit of throwing unfinished crap out onto the market and letting users beta-test, so who knows.
I'm sorry, was this supposed to reinforce the "OMG YAHOO IS EVIL" slant of this /. post?
Seems more like an ad to me. "Yahoo is evil. Oh, by the way, on a totally unrelated topic, I have a competing product...."
Oh, I'm sure something as good or better could be built. Getting someone to actually build it isn't so easy a task, though.
The problem with letting go of Exchange/Outlook is that it really has some nifty features for calendaring, contact management, and mobile devices. I've worked in a few offices where each of these features was heavily used, and removing them or even changing them would drastically change the company's workflow.
If Exchange were just the Microsoft software for making an IMAP/POP/Webmail server, then I'd agree that Exchange isn't better than other solutions. But there's more going on than that.
Your "unsupported widget" example is very telling, in my opinion. In fact, I believe that the whole problem comes down to the issue of the unsupported widget, and Exchange/Office are really almost just different versions of this same problem: A company built there business on some piece of technology, and that technology won't migrate perfectly to Linux.
For example, you can have shared calendars and contacts using other operating systems, but it won't operate the same as in Outlook. You can use OpenOffice for all sorts of things, but it won't always have the same functionality that you've come to rely on.
In many ways, it might be easier to start with Linux and build your business processes in such a way that you never rely on functionality that Linux doesn't have. I'm sure there are many businesses that could have accomplished that. However, if you start with Windows, you reach a point where all of your managers are using Outlook's calendars, all your admin assistants know there Word shortcuts, all the finance people are used to Excel, and all of your IT people are Windows guys. Transitioning away from Windows, at that point, is going to be tough.
Newer versions of Exchange has built-in support for push e-mail to mobile devices. The result is that, in short, you can get good e-mail, contact management, and calendaring support on your Windows-based cellphone through Exchange.
Actually, I do find Evolution to be a generally good replacement for Outlook. It's not a perfect replication of Outlook, so it's possible that a given person might not be able to switch over. However, I've spent months at a time using Evolution for e-mail and contact/calendar sharing with an Exchange server without a problem. In fact, I really wish that they had good working OSX/Windows ports of Evolution.
I'm not sure there's anything on the server side, though, that's quite ready to replace Exchange.
As I said, I think your static IP trick is acceptable. Charge me a little extra, open the ports, and give me a static IP. I'm just annoyed with ISPs that don't even offer that option.
Does that judgement still have force? I don't really mean "technically, legally," but "actually". Last I heard, nothing was being done to regulate Microsoft anymore. I don't know for a fact, but it's my understanding that there are current deals with major OEMs that if they don't advertise Windows in certain ways, or if they give alternatives equal billing, then they don't qualify as some sort of "favored partner" to receive special pricing.
Also, I'm not sure of the cause, but there is the strange case of Dell. They sell systems without operating systems, but those systems cost more than identical systems with Windows installed. It seems awfully suspicious.
Yes, sure, of course, if the market is big enough. Honestly, I'd really like to see an OEM (or maybe a partnership of multiple OEMs) take a play from Apple's book and make their own distro for their own hardware. I'm of the personal belief that the software monoculture that Microsoft represents has taken us as far as it can, and we need instead to move towards open standards and cross-platform development. OEMs should become "system-integrators" again, selling computer systems instead of computer hardware with a Microsoft OS. This time, everything can be Unix-y and generally interoperable if not compatible.
I'm not holding my breath.
It seems to me that things are better than you think. Maybe Linux isn't quite as secure and reliable as some of the BSDs, but it's pretty close. I'm not sure why *BSD doesn't have, in your estimation, the development speed and hackability of Linux, but admittedly I'm not a developer. Gnome and KDE are getting prettier and better all the time, available on Linux, BSDs, and OSX. Finally, OSX is a variant of BSD, is as pretty as OSX, has a wide range of software and consistent behavior, and from what I've heard has nice development tools (again, I'm not a developer). The only thing OSX seems to be lacking is the non-free GUI and inability to run that GUI on commodity hardware.
If you ask me, the single thing hurting the desktop OS ecosystem is the lack of truly cross-platform development. The operating systems themselves are fine (though perhaps the real strength of Windows is for games, with DirectX and all).
The fact is that a lack of CMYK support means a lot of pros simply can't use the GIMP. It's not an option. The conversion between RGB and CMYK changes colors, and printers work in CMYK, so if designers want accurate color, they need to be using CMYK.
Even when you ignore the interface of the GIMP and the big lack of CMYK, there are still little things like-- well, for example, JPEG compression. If you take the same image and compress it to the same file size using GIMP and Photoshop, the Photoshop file will look better. Is the difference huge? No. In most cases, it wouldn't be a big enough difference to matter in the slightest. Still, Photoshop can still produce a picture with visibly higher quality, and if you're in a case where you have a file-size limitation and need to produce the highest-quality JPEG possible for that size, I've not yet seen a program that can best Photoshop.
And believe me, that makes me sad. I'd love it if I could do all my conversions through imagemagick without sacrificing quality, but I can't.
The problem is that the marginal cost of delivering another OS is not zero. According to the deals that Microsoft has struck with OEMs, if OEMs offer machines with an alternative OS or no OS depending on how they offer it and advertise it, Microsoft will increase the price per copy of Windows. Therefore, the price of production for every Windows machine they produce will increase.
On the plus side, this makes it illegal for telemarketers to call you on your cell phone.
Nevertheless, virtual hosting is quite cheap. 1U hosting can be had for under $100/month now. ISPs almost always offer hosting options as well, as do registrars. There's a plethora of hosting options out there. People don't have to run services from their residential connection for any real reason.
Virtual hosting is cheap, but you also end up restricted to what your host will allow (no system level access, for example). There are smaller size/volume limits on all sorts of things. Sometimes the limits of a virtual host aren't acceptable for a person/business. 1U hosting is much cheaper than it used to be, but it still isn't quite cheap. That $100 a month can add up over a few years. A lot of these issues depend on you needs and your budget.
I've already said this, but I agree that port 25 should probably be blocked by default. However, there should be a cheap/free method for disabling this block for those people who know enough to secure their own system (which will roughly work out to be the same people who know enough to ask you to stop blocking port 25).
Personally, I hate the fact that my ISP blocks port 25 and 80, and I'm considering changing my ISP because of it. I didn't know before I signed up. Port 80 is an annoyance for certain things, but blocking port 25 is just a PITA. The ISP offers it's own SMTP without authentication as long as your on their service, but doesn't allow access to it if you're coming from the outside. The problem: I have a laptop. If I'm at home, I can only use 1 SMTP server, and I can't use that server if I'm not at home. So I have to keep switching servers all the time because my ISP is looking to collect another $15 just to allow ports 25 and 80 (still no static IP).
And the problem is not that I can't secure my own machine. I work in IT, and though I'm not an uber-geek that knows how to do everything, I can sure as hell run a network and keep it virus-free. I can produce paperwork to that effect if that's what it took, but it's more like they know the broadband options in my neighborhood are limited, and they're just trying to squeeze out every last penny.
I feel a bit sad about this, since there was something wickedly fun about google bombs.
I agree that it almost doesn't seem worth it to get rid of Google-bombing. Most of the effects were pretty harmless. Like you search of "miserable failure" and you get a political figure, or you search for "worst band ever" and you get Creed. Nobody is hurt by it. Oh, what, you're offended? The internet is often an offensive place. Get over it.
What I find more worrisome is the manipulations of rankings for economic purposes, i.e. "SEO". It's sometimes valid, but often it just seems like rigging the system.
Do you think it's possible to come up with a system that isn't subject to abuse?
The first thing I wondered when I read this was, "Did they learn their lesson?" They standardized their entire country on a closed system, and when the vendor of that closed system initiates an arbitrary change, they're pretty much screwed and forced to rebuild things. In my mind, the smart thing would be to bite the bullet, drop Active X, and switch to Firefox and have a true multi-platform solution. Hell, if they can't do everything they require in an extension, they can go as far as making their own fork, and they'll retain that option in the future.
Really, this should be a lesson for everyone.