The music industry wanted a system that is draconian in control, that "permanently" tied music to specific systems, that can't transfer control easily. Congrats, they got it! Oh but wait, the music industry really didn't want it to be draconian against them. Now they are claiming that they can't control it because it is draconian, permanently ties music to systems, and they can't get control. It seems to me that it isn't Apple/Steve Job's fault at all. The industry got exactly what they begged for.
Sounds like they made their bed, now they got to sleep in it. Pleasant dreams.
I've always claimed that Window's problems are purely an engineering issue where performing normal operations involves an unreasonable amount of risk. People who claim "It is the user's fault" miss the fact that many attack vectors are from normal user activities.
It is like claiming "cars can never be safe because people drive them" which is true but fallacious. Under normal operation, a car is safe because it is engineered to be safe. If however you purposely act reckless there isn't a whole lot of engineering in a car that can stop someone from driving off a cliff into the ocean.
What is going on in Windows is that people are performing normal operations that involve either a large amount of unnecessary knowledge to perform correctly or are tricked into thinking important system altering actions are trivial and harmless (or maybe both). For instance:
- Browsing the Internet is a normal user operation. The system may "own" the hardware and software driver for system facilities like the NIC but there should be no reason why it should require anything more than the user having permissions to run an executable. The reason why a scanner is needed on Windows is to make sure IE is behaving properly and isn't subverted because it can invoke any number of other OS functions which it probably should have never been designed too in the first place. The reason why AV software scans traffic on each transaction is that it is impossible for humans to correctly determine if query/responses are going to make IE behave badly or not. This sounds like an engineering flaw in IE more than anything else. - People want to install "gadgets" like toolbars. It shouldn't require system modification to install a toolbar, desktop applet, or any other gadget. It shouldn't require an elevation of privileges to run them either. It is questionable engineering to require any of these things and requires extra knowledge to do it right. There are specialized pieces of software that do require system modification and they should behave and install differently so there is no confusion. Treating a driver install like a toolbar install is a huge engineering issue. - It is entirely possible that someone is purposely or accidentally installing something bad, but it shouldn't bring down the entire machine doing it. The user, using user permissions, should not be able to wreck the system no matter what they try on purpose or on accident. They might succeed in ruining their own private stuff but never anything outside their sandbox. Windows doesn't do this and Vista has still not properly addressed the engineering issue if they put up many more "Allow or Deny?" dialogs. Or to put it another way, the user should never be faced with an "Allow or Deny?" dialog in the first place. Asking the user "Operation could break your system. Allow or Deny?" is a silly question to pose. The system needs to be engineered to avoid posing the user with questions just like that.
People interact with hundreds of machines everyday and yet are designed for some misuse. It seems disproportional that Windows has been engineered in such a way it can't take missteps or abuse very well. Accidents happen. Users can be silly. Windows should be engineered better because it doesn't seem to protect against breaking very well nor does it allow for easy recovery.
Believing that "user education" will fix things is like believing intensive driver training will stop people from running their cars into things on accident. The trick is that accidents are just that, a happenstance that results in a bad result. Even with solid training the formula 1 driver who is an expert of driving their car on their favorite track will occasionally crash.
"User Education" on its own simply doesn't work. If "user education" was the solution, after 30 years of desktop computing and teaching people how to use their computers we should have seen results right? It isn't so much a user problem but an engineering problem. Windows is frankly not engineered correctly where Vista's behavior is just another symptom of it. Wagging our finger at users saying "you should know better!" is silly.
It sounds like they do have versions of their software that works "perfectly" under Vista instead of being "unsupported". They just don't want to release the version yet, for whatever reason is part of the speculation.
The cynic in me thinks that there is something fishy going on from both Microsoft and Apple. And I know for a fact many older games which ran fine on XP won't exactly be "Vista Supported" either so why the hate? This is just the usual bumps and hiccups for any upgrade rollout.
Because if "educating the users" had a chance of work, it would have had an effect some 30 years after computers started to become interconnected which initially opened this risk. There is no excuse for irresponsible usage but to lay the blame on the users for being dumb is erroneously placing the fault because there is an equal amount of blame on the vendor for allowing the situation to arise easily. Simply put, systems should be engineered to avoid destroying themselves from normal usage. Many infection vectors come from "normal usage" where we should be yelling at the vendor to fix it instead of scolding the user.
I just did a retro-fit upgrade and an install on two machines and neither went to the "yum" repository mirrors to do an update till after they finished their first reboot where I had to activate the update manually (and get the gpg keys installed).
- I remember that "install" at some point gave me an option to install against latest package in the "yum" repositories, which I do not do for speed. - I remember the "upgrade" and "install" screens from Anaconda being different. The "upgrade" never asked me to update against the "yum" repositories.
"pup", which is the graphical tool analog to "yum", handles rotating through the mirrors properly as far as I remember where it just fails over to the next if the current one can't be reached. I've had my Internet die while trying to do this, I don't recall it ever crashing on me and this is doing many installs and upgrades across every version of Fedora.
I don't blame you for switching to something else given these problems. I'm just stumped how you got these problems.
So called "User Education" is a silly idea. Simply put as the editorial highlights, if it was going to work, it would have worked by now. On the other hand this seems like an issue with IE itself where IE should never be asking "Is this okay?" in the first place.
On the one hand, users shouldn't be doing this and falling prey to phishing. On the other hand, why is IE enabling it to happen? Throwing up another "Do you want to do this? Yes/No" is not security nor is it a secure process.
"...backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games..."
At release, too many supported XBox games where not "top-selling" at all and too many real sellers were ignored. They way they've handled BC at every step since then has been a joke with updates full of games I'm surprised anyone bought. Maybe they were right to hedge bets but at that point they shouldn't have promised any BC support. In essence, Microsoft seemed to promise nothing.
On the other hand, only a handful of PS1 and PS2 games don't work on the PS3 and mostly because of hardware constraints (light gun games, 4 way control taps, etc). In general, you put a PS1 or PS2 game into the PS3 and it works. I have one game that won't work and only because I can't plug the special controller into the PS3. But the issue is the way the PS3 rendering engine works doesn't handle what PS1/2 requires so it does some funky scaling to make it match up which leaves some less than desirable artifacts. Going way way way back, games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy 7 work out of the box, no patching, no more requirements than the disk and a PS3. This patch appears to fix up the graphics so the artifacts are much less noticeable but anyone who has been playing PS2 games on a HD display knows, these games just don't look great no matter how your TV is setup. You've taken SD games and blown them up to fit a HD display.
So comparing Microsoft and Sony promises on this issue is apples to oranges. They may not look clean but least games worked in the PS3 while on the XBox 360 you had to wait to whenever someone gets around to looking into what it takes to make a game work.
(This is something Microsoft should do as well.) They can cram as much crap into the "high end package" and charge whatever they want for it. The problem Microsoft and Sony face is that their "Basic Package", which is supposed to be the bargain version, really isn't a bargain at all. Both of these consoles have a "Basic Package" that is too expensive and is reflected in their sluggish sales. Even though Microsoft can claim some sort of victory in shoving 10 million units out the door, neither of these are even close to where the PS2 and XBox where a year later. I see Sony heading down this same sluggish sales path unless the drop the price of their supposedly cheaper unit soon.
This is all a reflection of how horribly expensive console gaming has gotten. We might as well be spending our money on gaming computers instead.
Although interesting, there are plenty of games that simply will not work well on the Wii. Probably games Carmack are very interested in working in. Besides, the "bleeding edge" on the Wii is the HMI where the rest of the hardware is old and somewhat undesirable to work on.
Carmack strikes me as the kind of guy who wants to make a crazy car for 2008. Working on the Wii is like trying to retrofit a 1990 with a bunch of modern features. Some like the challenge but he may simply not.
You still bought a copy of Windows though even if you were successful in getting a refund in exchange for the media. The fact you had to request this by doing extra work is still an issue. The fact that the option isn't available is still an issue.
Even with the nicest return policy in the world doens't excuse the problem: You still can't buy a Dell in the US without Windows. If you are going to call "shanigans!" point it at the loopy OEM deals.
Back in the day, when Microsoft wasn't sure what DirectX should be doing let alone how to do it, there was a lot of grief generated each major revision. The nightmares of having a project core change from the DirectX 2 to DirectX 3 was brutual mostly due to the disperate OS support. A similar transition happened from DX5 to DX6 but from there on out it got much smoother with easier to predict changes as well as the backwards compatibility got better. Sometimes we'd wonder what exactly was the difference between various version beyond "no longer supported on Windows XX"...
DirectX 10 however seems to go back an make the old mistakes made those early days where it was supported on one version but not the other, or support was improper due to hardware/driver issues. I can't blame many who do not look fondly at on those days where the QA cycle was spent trying to figure out why one platform has a different set of problems than the other. DirectX 10 seems to be the most radical change to DX in awhile so prepare for a little rocking. In fact I won't be surprised if your game makes specific calls for the DX8 interface it may simply not work right.
Why Microsoft can't sell a copy of Windows XP to anyone for $52. I'm not sure why "volume discount" or OEM relationships are exactly a satisfactory answer either.
After all, people are gushing over XBox 360 and a bunch of XBL functionality when it comes form the same company that has been abusive before. As long as the XBox 360 produces "derblinkenlites", many will be distracted from many of their practices that are dubious. That isn't to say Microsoft never does anything good or worthwhile but it falls into line with what is going on here with Sony. Doing some things right doesn't seem like a good excuse for any company to get away with things.
So just like Microsoft, if Sony gets to a point where their games produce enough distracting "derblinkenlites" that is entertaining people will forget a bunch of stuff Sony has done wrong. No one seems to remember how horrible Microsoft misteped in the XBox 360 release nor will I be surprised if Sony follow the same route they'll end up in the same place.
Does this mean that if there is a huge "flaw" (euphamism for rampaging and attacking) in Xrobot (Xs in the name of your product appeals to the young hip crowd) that we have to wait patiently for Patch Tuesday no matter how dire the consequences and how much people scream (literially) for it to be fixed?
Fedora is supposed to be a bleeding edge distro of Red Hat technology that is frequently rebuilt and released. Fedora Legacy, although well intentioned was sort of misplaced for this technology Why would you want legacy support for a very experimental software distribution. If you need real enterprise stablity you should be using true Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS. I would never use Fedora for any server or workstation that I wouldn't want to manage rigorously.
Fedora does a lot of good for the Open Source Community as well as Red Hat itself but lets not mistake it for a long term solution to enterprise technology. If Fedora Legacy wants to learn anything I think there is a place for a Fedora that has less agressive upgrade path. They should do what Red Hat does with Fedora which is build from the best of Fedora. Maybe they something try for a distro that mimics an "even release" sort of way.
The history behind this game was that it was more or less Gran Turismo 4 on the PS3. Of course it was drawn out trying to figure out what else they could do with GT4 plus some more bells and whistles when someone realized that this was a dumb idea. Instead of putting more time into this game which would just be recycling, they stopped work on the game at this demo level and proceeded forward on a completely redesigned stuff that will be Gran Turismo 5.
The subtext in all of this is that "concepts" like this which are "stillborn" are often just squirreled away into servers and backup and never see the light of day. This stuff however was just quickly turned around into a great little demo that not only shows off the PS3 but gives a taste of what the future holds for GT5. The fact that it is *free* also goes a ways to generating good will. A win-win for all.
Oh you are right, but then you must realize many companies out there are still going along with Office 2000 servers and services. Email is one of those things you really need to be careful about upgrading. Especially if maintaince and availablity is high, upgrading these servers is a huge issue.
Many companies have VPN implemented and deployed to the right people. The risk and cost of mokeying with Exchange servers is kind of high. I'm never surprised when I see a small to medium company using Exchange 2000 in this configuration using Gmail as a surrogate. Exchange 2000 works now (and still works with Office 2003 clients), VPN works now, Gmail works now and is free. I have mentioned that they can upgrade to Office 2003 server tools but then balk at the prices.
Once again Microsoft instead of recognizing a bug decides unplanned behavior is trying to treat it like a feature. Most other designers would call this a bug but but there is something else beyond the definition. What possibly earthly reason would there be for a server to request the content of client's clipboard?? I'm having an extremely hard time imagining a use case for such an event even with Ajax web applications.
So instead of fixing the bug, they treat it like a feature and ask for confirmation. This behavior by default should never be allowed in any context let alone a web/internet one. Asking for user confirmation on an action not allowed is silly and yet another scary dialog where the user won't bother reading or understanding the warning and just click "Yes" to dismiss and continue on their browsing.
I hate sounding negative when talking about Microsoft's technology but it is stances like this that make it so hard to avoid.
From my observations, the current state of "mobile computers" (ie your laptops and other machines that don't sit anywhere for too long) is that support is kind of wonky. Even if you can configure our enterprise to handle VPN connectings from the outside to the inside, when you arrive at the customer's location their enterprise might not be configured to allow VPN connections. The whole idea that one machine can bridge two very different networks isn't very feasible at the moment.
This isn't a knock against Exchange but this is a well known issue with Exchange itself. It tightly binds itself to a network and intranet and becomes very inflexible when you need it from another network/intranet. The reality of buisness today is that people and their machines are sometimes moving over many networks and intranets where Exchange simply will not be enough.
This leaves those out there now having to work around this. OWA simply doesn't work well enough especially in some configurations where trying to access Exchange by an exposed web portal may introduce a security risk and sometimes doesn't work at all. Gmail becomes a great workaround and is a surrogate conduit for office to office communication because unlike Exchange, HTTP is nearly universal and very well understood. Simply put, getting access to Gmail has a much higher rate of success than trying to negotiate VPN and domain access through multiple networks.
It is like comparing DirectX to WinCE. One is a API that ogranizes various OS functions in away to facilitate creating of media content. The other is Operating System level for user processes to build any application on. Although one can build a game without XNA/DirectX right on the OS(WinCE/Linux), it isn't as pleasant or extendable. You can't build a device driver in XNA. It is much more "hands on" to OpenGL routines with just the OS and GL/GLX let alone a make a full blown game.
There appears to be different goals between XNA and PS3 Linux. I would fully expect toy games from XNA while on PS3 Linux I expect more toy apps. Keep in mind that neither of these are for serious product development. If you or your company want to make a real product for XBox 360 or PS3 you need a different set of hardware and software tools.
for security, you have already lost the battle. Staying(relatively) secure involves a few simple steps that most people still won't listen to:
1. Run a firewall and only open what you need to be opened 2. Most importantly: DONT CLICK ON STUPID SHIT! Don't run seedy programs etc. It's amazed how many Windows users get infected like that
Those obviously won't protect against 100% of threats, but very few things in life are guarenteed.Emphisis is mine where I find it unbelievable people think that this is "advice". The way the modern computer operating system HMI works is "users click on things". Windows and MacOS are designed to present the user with an interface to click on things. What in the world kind of advice is it is to say "don't click on stuff!"??
Browsing files is normal operation. Browsing web pages is normal user activity. Looking at email is a normal user activity. Clicking on objects presented by the shell is a normal user activity. All of these activites are things users do normally and yet are "dangerous by default" in some systems and require a high level of diligence or more (sometimes expensive) software to handle. Stating stuff like "don't click on bad stuff" shifts the blame away from the vendor and onto the user. I'm not saying the user isn't to fault but lets not forget the vendor here since they are equally culpable.
How about this instead: Your computer shouldn't self destruct doing normal user activies. If your computer does self destruct doing normal user activities then it is a bug. Bugs happen in any complex piece of software. What isn't excusable is when the vendor refuses to address the issue. The vendor should fix the flaw. And before you ask, no amount of confirmation dialogs counts as a fix. No amount of "blame the user" is sufficient either.
More specifically: The operating system should handle browsing files without destroying itself. The operating system should be able to handle browsing to web pages without destroying itself. Your operating system should handle looking at email without destroying itself. Your operating system should handle "clicking on stupid stuff" without destroying itself. If the operating system can't handle these nominal activies without a high degree of confidence then it needs to be redesigned and engineered to do. This is not an issue with "users being stupid" but a flaw in the design and engineering.
Baring things like "wear", most people would consider a machine that breaks from normal usage as "flawed". But all too often in Operating Systems when the machine breaks down when the user performances a normal activity it isn't the system but the user's fault. How in the world did we get to this state where the responsibility for function is not on the system designer but on the users??
I do get what you mean in that there should be some "common sense" but on the other hand lets not let the vendors get off the hook because of a lack thereof. The user should have some common sense **and** the vendor should provide a system that is robust, just in case the user's judgement slips.
For User Interface, the best option is to let the user decide. When the user feels like they are in control, they embrace the application. If a user can make sense of this "ribbon style" of application control, why shouldn't Open Office give it to them? Even saying that this feature shouldn't come at the cost of hosing over those who think that a minimalist, classic style menu works best for them. A user should be able to use Open Office in either style but the goal is still the same: being productive.
One of the big points of Open Source is to empower the user. Instead of making draconian decisions about this sort of stuff as edicts handed down from the mountain at Redmond, Open Office should be allowing users to pick any style. Their is value in making Open Office look and behave like Office 2007 or like Lotus 1-2-3 or like any number of other configurations out there. Being able to give the users a choice is what is supposed to be an advantage against Microsoft.
Although it will freak out many of the "hard core" Final Fantasy fans, this is a solid game and gives me a good feeling on the general direction of the franchise.
The reason why the "old guard players" balk at FF12 is that unlike the games before it, this one doesn't want you to micromanage the battles which gives these "old guard players" the sense they aren't doing anything. The trick is that previous games the tatics where actually fairly limited where you ended up duplicating what Gambit ends up automating. You tell your melee attackers to attack. You tell your healers to heal occationally. You tell your spell casters to zap stuff. Difference between FF12 and the others is that the game automates this for you instead of "rinse repeat" of the previous games. In the end it just degenerated to a lot of repeat actions anyway which is what computers are actually good at doing.
Gambits in themselves are interesting because it tickles the programmer in me. Given the API and resitrictions, what is the best way to "program" your party? There are several of solutions to some of the issues your party will face because just like software there are often different ways to tackle the same problem. A certain beauty can come from the correct Gambit strategy where they just do the right thing when they run into a challenging fight where it would be frantic if not hard handling the fighting yourself using the old fashion "Turn Base" or "ATB". A good Gambit order is like whiping up a good algorithm to solve a complex, somewhat losely defined problem.
This isn't a perfect game mind you. Just like FF9 it strattles "generations" and becomes an example of "what could have been". This is a glorious game pushing the envelope for PS2 where the problem is it screams for HD treatment on a more powerful machine. The weakness in the Gambit System is that it doesn't handle "one shot" actions easily. When the situation does change, you are often force to take over in an emergency situation.
Overall I'm very pleased with this game and I'm glad it is one of the "swan songs" for the PS2. From the way FF12 looks I can't wait for the next one even though most of it will be an entirely different game anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
*zoom in on UAC terminal on Mars dealing with UAC...*
"Running ArchiveSerach.exe. Cancel or Allow?"
*click 'Allow'*
"Opening file TPSReports.doc. Cancel or Allow?"
*click 'Allow'*
"Attempting to access database. Cancel or Allow?"
*click 'Allow'*
"Opening site "calendar://dutyroster". Cancel or Allow?"
*click 'Allow'*
"Sending a mail message "Subject: Conflict in schedule". Cancel or Allow?"
*click 'Allow'*
"Opening a portal to hell. Cancel or Allow?"
The music industry wanted a system that is draconian in control, that "permanently" tied music to specific systems, that can't transfer control easily. Congrats, they got it! Oh but wait, the music industry really didn't want it to be draconian against them. Now they are claiming that they can't control it because it is draconian, permanently ties music to systems, and they can't get control. It seems to me that it isn't Apple/Steve Job's fault at all. The industry got exactly what they begged for.
Sounds like they made their bed, now they got to sleep in it. Pleasant dreams.
I've always claimed that Window's problems are purely an engineering issue where performing normal operations involves an unreasonable amount of risk. People who claim "It is the user's fault" miss the fact that many attack vectors are from normal user activities.
It is like claiming "cars can never be safe because people drive them" which is true but fallacious. Under normal operation, a car is safe because it is engineered to be safe. If however you purposely act reckless there isn't a whole lot of engineering in a car that can stop someone from driving off a cliff into the ocean.
What is going on in Windows is that people are performing normal operations that involve either a large amount of unnecessary knowledge to perform correctly or are tricked into thinking important system altering actions are trivial and harmless (or maybe both). For instance:
- Browsing the Internet is a normal user operation. The system may "own" the hardware and software driver for system facilities like the NIC but there should be no reason why it should require anything more than the user having permissions to run an executable. The reason why a scanner is needed on Windows is to make sure IE is behaving properly and isn't subverted because it can invoke any number of other OS functions which it probably should have never been designed too in the first place. The reason why AV software scans traffic on each transaction is that it is impossible for humans to correctly determine if query/responses are going to make IE behave badly or not. This sounds like an engineering flaw in IE more than anything else.
- People want to install "gadgets" like toolbars. It shouldn't require system modification to install a toolbar, desktop applet, or any other gadget. It shouldn't require an elevation of privileges to run them either. It is questionable engineering to require any of these things and requires extra knowledge to do it right. There are specialized pieces of software that do require system modification and they should behave and install differently so there is no confusion. Treating a driver install like a toolbar install is a huge engineering issue.
- It is entirely possible that someone is purposely or accidentally installing something bad, but it shouldn't bring down the entire machine doing it. The user, using user permissions, should not be able to wreck the system no matter what they try on purpose or on accident. They might succeed in ruining their own private stuff but never anything outside their sandbox. Windows doesn't do this and Vista has still not properly addressed the engineering issue if they put up many more "Allow or Deny?" dialogs. Or to put it another way, the user should never be faced with an "Allow or Deny?" dialog in the first place. Asking the user "Operation could break your system. Allow or Deny?" is a silly question to pose. The system needs to be engineered to avoid posing the user with questions just like that.
People interact with hundreds of machines everyday and yet are designed for some misuse. It seems disproportional that Windows has been engineered in such a way it can't take missteps or abuse very well. Accidents happen. Users can be silly. Windows should be engineered better because it doesn't seem to protect against breaking very well nor does it allow for easy recovery.
Believing that "user education" will fix things is like believing intensive driver training will stop people from running their cars into things on accident. The trick is that accidents are just that, a happenstance that results in a bad result. Even with solid training the formula 1 driver who is an expert of driving their car on their favorite track will occasionally crash.
"User Education" on its own simply doesn't work. If "user education" was the solution, after 30 years of desktop computing and teaching people how to use their computers we should have seen results right? It isn't so much a user problem but an engineering problem. Windows is frankly not engineered correctly where Vista's behavior is just another symptom of it. Wagging our finger at users saying "you should know better!" is silly.
It sounds like they do have versions of their software that works "perfectly" under Vista instead of being "unsupported". They just don't want to release the version yet, for whatever reason is part of the speculation.
The cynic in me thinks that there is something fishy going on from both Microsoft and Apple. And I know for a fact many older games which ran fine on XP won't exactly be "Vista Supported" either so why the hate? This is just the usual bumps and hiccups for any upgrade rollout.
Because if "educating the users" had a chance of work, it would have had an effect some 30 years after computers started to become interconnected which initially opened this risk. There is no excuse for irresponsible usage but to lay the blame on the users for being dumb is erroneously placing the fault because there is an equal amount of blame on the vendor for allowing the situation to arise easily. Simply put, systems should be engineered to avoid destroying themselves from normal usage. Many infection vectors come from "normal usage" where we should be yelling at the vendor to fix it instead of scolding the user.
I just did a retro-fit upgrade and an install on two machines and neither went to the "yum" repository mirrors to do an update till after they finished their first reboot where I had to activate the update manually (and get the gpg keys installed).
- I remember that "install" at some point gave me an option to install against latest package in the "yum" repositories, which I do not do for speed.
- I remember the "upgrade" and "install" screens from Anaconda being different. The "upgrade" never asked me to update against the "yum" repositories.
"pup", which is the graphical tool analog to "yum", handles rotating through the mirrors properly as far as I remember where it just fails over to the next if the current one can't be reached. I've had my Internet die while trying to do this, I don't recall it ever crashing on me and this is doing many installs and upgrades across every version of Fedora.
I don't blame you for switching to something else given these problems. I'm just stumped how you got these problems.
http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/ed itorials/dumb/
So called "User Education" is a silly idea. Simply put as the editorial highlights, if it was going to work, it would have worked by now. On the other hand this seems like an issue with IE itself where IE should never be asking "Is this okay?" in the first place.
On the one hand, users shouldn't be doing this and falling prey to phishing. On the other hand, why is IE enabling it to happen? Throwing up another "Do you want to do this? Yes/No" is not security nor is it a secure process.
At release, too many supported XBox games where not "top-selling" at all and too many real sellers were ignored. They way they've handled BC at every step since then has been a joke with updates full of games I'm surprised anyone bought. Maybe they were right to hedge bets but at that point they shouldn't have promised any BC support. In essence, Microsoft seemed to promise nothing.
On the other hand, only a handful of PS1 and PS2 games don't work on the PS3 and mostly because of hardware constraints (light gun games, 4 way control taps, etc). In general, you put a PS1 or PS2 game into the PS3 and it works. I have one game that won't work and only because I can't plug the special controller into the PS3. But the issue is the way the PS3 rendering engine works doesn't handle what PS1/2 requires so it does some funky scaling to make it match up which leaves some less than desirable artifacts. Going way way way back, games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy 7 work out of the box, no patching, no more requirements than the disk and a PS3. This patch appears to fix up the graphics so the artifacts are much less noticeable but anyone who has been playing PS2 games on a HD display knows, these games just don't look great no matter how your TV is setup. You've taken SD games and blown them up to fit a HD display.
So comparing Microsoft and Sony promises on this issue is apples to oranges. They may not look clean but least games worked in the PS3 while on the XBox 360 you had to wait to whenever someone gets around to looking into what it takes to make a game work.
(This is something Microsoft should do as well.) They can cram as much crap into the "high end package" and charge whatever they want for it. The problem Microsoft and Sony face is that their "Basic Package", which is supposed to be the bargain version, really isn't a bargain at all. Both of these consoles have a "Basic Package" that is too expensive and is reflected in their sluggish sales. Even though Microsoft can claim some sort of victory in shoving 10 million units out the door, neither of these are even close to where the PS2 and XBox where a year later. I see Sony heading down this same sluggish sales path unless the drop the price of their supposedly cheaper unit soon.
This is all a reflection of how horribly expensive console gaming has gotten. We might as well be spending our money on gaming computers instead.
Although interesting, there are plenty of games that simply will not work well on the Wii. Probably games Carmack are very interested in working in. Besides, the "bleeding edge" on the Wii is the HMI where the rest of the hardware is old and somewhat undesirable to work on.
Carmack strikes me as the kind of guy who wants to make a crazy car for 2008. Working on the Wii is like trying to retrofit a 1990 with a bunch of modern features. Some like the challenge but he may simply not.
You still bought a copy of Windows though even if you were successful in getting a refund in exchange for the media. The fact you had to request this by doing extra work is still an issue. The fact that the option isn't available is still an issue.
Even with the nicest return policy in the world doens't excuse the problem: You still can't buy a Dell in the US without Windows. If you are going to call "shanigans!" point it at the loopy OEM deals.
Back in the day, when Microsoft wasn't sure what DirectX should be doing let alone how to do it, there was a lot of grief generated each major revision. The nightmares of having a project core change from the DirectX 2 to DirectX 3 was brutual mostly due to the disperate OS support. A similar transition happened from DX5 to DX6 but from there on out it got much smoother with easier to predict changes as well as the backwards compatibility got better. Sometimes we'd wonder what exactly was the difference between various version beyond "no longer supported on Windows XX"...
DirectX 10 however seems to go back an make the old mistakes made those early days where it was supported on one version but not the other, or support was improper due to hardware/driver issues. I can't blame many who do not look fondly at on those days where the QA cycle was spent trying to figure out why one platform has a different set of problems than the other. DirectX 10 seems to be the most radical change to DX in awhile so prepare for a little rocking. In fact I won't be surprised if your game makes specific calls for the DX8 interface it may simply not work right.
Why Microsoft can't sell a copy of Windows XP to anyone for $52. I'm not sure why "volume discount" or OEM relationships are exactly a satisfactory answer either.
After all, people are gushing over XBox 360 and a bunch of XBL functionality when it comes form the same company that has been abusive before. As long as the XBox 360 produces "derblinkenlites", many will be distracted from many of their practices that are dubious. That isn't to say Microsoft never does anything good or worthwhile but it falls into line with what is going on here with Sony. Doing some things right doesn't seem like a good excuse for any company to get away with things.
So just like Microsoft, if Sony gets to a point where their games produce enough distracting "derblinkenlites" that is entertaining people will forget a bunch of stuff Sony has done wrong. No one seems to remember how horrible Microsoft misteped in the XBox 360 release nor will I be surprised if Sony follow the same route they'll end up in the same place.
Does this mean that if there is a huge "flaw" (euphamism for rampaging and attacking) in Xrobot (Xs in the name of your product appeals to the young hip crowd) that we have to wait patiently for Patch Tuesday no matter how dire the consequences and how much people scream (literially) for it to be fixed?
Fedora is supposed to be a bleeding edge distro of Red Hat technology that is frequently rebuilt and released. Fedora Legacy, although well intentioned was sort of misplaced for this technology Why would you want legacy support for a very experimental software distribution. If you need real enterprise stablity you should be using true Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS. I would never use Fedora for any server or workstation that I wouldn't want to manage rigorously.
Fedora does a lot of good for the Open Source Community as well as Red Hat itself but lets not mistake it for a long term solution to enterprise technology. If Fedora Legacy wants to learn anything I think there is a place for a Fedora that has less agressive upgrade path. They should do what Red Hat does with Fedora which is build from the best of Fedora. Maybe they something try for a distro that mimics an "even release" sort of way.
The history behind this game was that it was more or less Gran Turismo 4 on the PS3. Of course it was drawn out trying to figure out what else they could do with GT4 plus some more bells and whistles when someone realized that this was a dumb idea. Instead of putting more time into this game which would just be recycling, they stopped work on the game at this demo level and proceeded forward on a completely redesigned stuff that will be Gran Turismo 5.
The subtext in all of this is that "concepts" like this which are "stillborn" are often just squirreled away into servers and backup and never see the light of day. This stuff however was just quickly turned around into a great little demo that not only shows off the PS3 but gives a taste of what the future holds for GT5. The fact that it is *free* also goes a ways to generating good will. A win-win for all.
Oh you are right, but then you must realize many companies out there are still going along with Office 2000 servers and services. Email is one of those things you really need to be careful about upgrading. Especially if maintaince and availablity is high, upgrading these servers is a huge issue.
Many companies have VPN implemented and deployed to the right people. The risk and cost of mokeying with Exchange servers is kind of high. I'm never surprised when I see a small to medium company using Exchange 2000 in this configuration using Gmail as a surrogate. Exchange 2000 works now (and still works with Office 2003 clients), VPN works now, Gmail works now and is free. I have mentioned that they can upgrade to Office 2003 server tools but then balk at the prices.
Once again Microsoft instead of recognizing a bug decides unplanned behavior is trying to treat it like a feature. Most other designers would call this a bug but but there is something else beyond the definition. What possibly earthly reason would there be for a server to request the content of client's clipboard?? I'm having an extremely hard time imagining a use case for such an event even with Ajax web applications.
So instead of fixing the bug, they treat it like a feature and ask for confirmation. This behavior by default should never be allowed in any context let alone a web/internet one. Asking for user confirmation on an action not allowed is silly and yet another scary dialog where the user won't bother reading or understanding the warning and just click "Yes" to dismiss and continue on their browsing.
I hate sounding negative when talking about Microsoft's technology but it is stances like this that make it so hard to avoid.
From my observations, the current state of "mobile computers" (ie your laptops and other machines that don't sit anywhere for too long) is that support is kind of wonky. Even if you can configure our enterprise to handle VPN connectings from the outside to the inside, when you arrive at the customer's location their enterprise might not be configured to allow VPN connections. The whole idea that one machine can bridge two very different networks isn't very feasible at the moment.
This isn't a knock against Exchange but this is a well known issue with Exchange itself. It tightly binds itself to a network and intranet and becomes very inflexible when you need it from another network/intranet. The reality of buisness today is that people and their machines are sometimes moving over many networks and intranets where Exchange simply will not be enough.
This leaves those out there now having to work around this. OWA simply doesn't work well enough especially in some configurations where trying to access Exchange by an exposed web portal may introduce a security risk and sometimes doesn't work at all. Gmail becomes a great workaround and is a surrogate conduit for office to office communication because unlike Exchange, HTTP is nearly universal and very well understood. Simply put, getting access to Gmail has a much higher rate of success than trying to negotiate VPN and domain access through multiple networks.
It is like comparing DirectX to WinCE. One is a API that ogranizes various OS functions in away to facilitate creating of media content. The other is Operating System level for user processes to build any application on. Although one can build a game without XNA/DirectX right on the OS(WinCE/Linux), it isn't as pleasant or extendable. You can't build a device driver in XNA. It is much more "hands on" to OpenGL routines with just the OS and GL/GLX let alone a make a full blown game.
There appears to be different goals between XNA and PS3 Linux. I would fully expect toy games from XNA while on PS3 Linux I expect more toy apps. Keep in mind that neither of these are for serious product development. If you or your company want to make a real product for XBox 360 or PS3 you need a different set of hardware and software tools.
for security, you have already lost the battle. Staying(relatively) secure involves a few simple steps that most people still won't listen to:
1. Run a firewall and only open what you need to be opened
2. Most importantly: DONT CLICK ON STUPID SHIT! Don't run seedy programs etc. It's amazed how many Windows users get infected like that
Those obviously won't protect against 100% of threats, but very few things in life are guarenteed.Emphisis is mine where I find it unbelievable people think that this is "advice". The way the modern computer operating system HMI works is "users click on things". Windows and MacOS are designed to present the user with an interface to click on things. What in the world kind of advice is it is to say "don't click on stuff!"??
Browsing files is normal operation. Browsing web pages is normal user activity. Looking at email is a normal user activity. Clicking on objects presented by the shell is a normal user activity. All of these activites are things users do normally and yet are "dangerous by default" in some systems and require a high level of diligence or more (sometimes expensive) software to handle. Stating stuff like "don't click on bad stuff" shifts the blame away from the vendor and onto the user. I'm not saying the user isn't to fault but lets not forget the vendor here since they are equally culpable.
How about this instead: Your computer shouldn't self destruct doing normal user activies. If your computer does self destruct doing normal user activities then it is a bug. Bugs happen in any complex piece of software. What isn't excusable is when the vendor refuses to address the issue. The vendor should fix the flaw. And before you ask, no amount of confirmation dialogs counts as a fix. No amount of "blame the user" is sufficient either.
More specifically: The operating system should handle browsing files without destroying itself. The operating system should be able to handle browsing to web pages without destroying itself. Your operating system should handle looking at email without destroying itself. Your operating system should handle "clicking on stupid stuff" without destroying itself. If the operating system can't handle these nominal activies without a high degree of confidence then it needs to be redesigned and engineered to do. This is not an issue with "users being stupid" but a flaw in the design and engineering.
Baring things like "wear", most people would consider a machine that breaks from normal usage as "flawed". But all too often in Operating Systems when the machine breaks down when the user performances a normal activity it isn't the system but the user's fault. How in the world did we get to this state where the responsibility for function is not on the system designer but on the users??
I do get what you mean in that there should be some "common sense" but on the other hand lets not let the vendors get off the hook because of a lack thereof. The user should have some common sense **and** the vendor should provide a system that is robust, just in case the user's judgement slips.
For User Interface, the best option is to let the user decide. When the user feels like they are in control, they embrace the application. If a user can make sense of this "ribbon style" of application control, why shouldn't Open Office give it to them? Even saying that this feature shouldn't come at the cost of hosing over those who think that a minimalist, classic style menu works best for them. A user should be able to use Open Office in either style but the goal is still the same: being productive.
One of the big points of Open Source is to empower the user. Instead of making draconian decisions about this sort of stuff as edicts handed down from the mountain at Redmond, Open Office should be allowing users to pick any style. Their is value in making Open Office look and behave like Office 2007 or like Lotus 1-2-3 or like any number of other configurations out there. Being able to give the users a choice is what is supposed to be an advantage against Microsoft.
Although it will freak out many of the "hard core" Final Fantasy fans, this is a solid game and gives me a good feeling on the general direction of the franchise.
The reason why the "old guard players" balk at FF12 is that unlike the games before it, this one doesn't want you to micromanage the battles which gives these "old guard players" the sense they aren't doing anything. The trick is that previous games the tatics where actually fairly limited where you ended up duplicating what Gambit ends up automating. You tell your melee attackers to attack. You tell your healers to heal occationally. You tell your spell casters to zap stuff. Difference between FF12 and the others is that the game automates this for you instead of "rinse repeat" of the previous games. In the end it just degenerated to a lot of repeat actions anyway which is what computers are actually good at doing.
Gambits in themselves are interesting because it tickles the programmer in me. Given the API and resitrictions, what is the best way to "program" your party? There are several of solutions to some of the issues your party will face because just like software there are often different ways to tackle the same problem. A certain beauty can come from the correct Gambit strategy where they just do the right thing when they run into a challenging fight where it would be frantic if not hard handling the fighting yourself using the old fashion "Turn Base" or "ATB". A good Gambit order is like whiping up a good algorithm to solve a complex, somewhat losely defined problem.
This isn't a perfect game mind you. Just like FF9 it strattles "generations" and becomes an example of "what could have been". This is a glorious game pushing the envelope for PS2 where the problem is it screams for HD treatment on a more powerful machine. The weakness in the Gambit System is that it doesn't handle "one shot" actions easily. When the situation does change, you are often force to take over in an emergency situation.
Overall I'm very pleased with this game and I'm glad it is one of the "swan songs" for the PS2. From the way FF12 looks I can't wait for the next one even though most of it will be an entirely different game anyway.