"Never risk a sale today for a sale tomorrow." A salesman will always make a sale today. I wouldn't say a bad salesman is devoiding of speculating. Instead of being a salesman, they are acting as a broker which is riding the supply as a commidity market. As a broker they have different goals than a salesman mostly which servicing the consumer is secondary to making sure you maximize your distribution pool.
In previous cases with Apple, Sony, Nintendo, etc is that they were honestly out of product and production couldn't ramp up immediately. UPS would show up with a delivery of 10 units which where automatically sold. 10 more units would not show up till next week. There were simply no more units to buy no matter how long you stood in front of the electronics store or how many times you clicked refresh on Apple.com. What the article is suggesting is that MS doing is putting an artifical ceiling on supply (otherwise known as rationing). Is it a good thing to put rationing on a non-essential item?
I would perferably see a spike than to have MS trying to artifically monkey around with the market. In one case the worst they are accused is that they misjudged demand (hey it happens). In the other case there is something more meleviant is going on. I think that if they artificially hold back warehouses full of product they are looney. Make a sale today you have cash they can use now to reinvest. What would they possibly reinvest in you ask? Something wacky like increase production? If you bank on a sale tomorrow you might have twice as much cash...or they might go off and buy something else.
Only Half Of The Battle
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes if Disney bought Pixar they would receive a company full of talented, driven artists but that is only half of the reason why Pixar movies do so well. The other half is that management and producers protects the production. The classic story about Toy Story is that Disney fronted the money and was unhappy about the "juvenile" nature of the story and wanted to make it "modern", edgy, or whatever kids call being "cool" these day, they proceeded to hack it up. The result was crappy, no one liked it, everyone was unhappy, and Disney was moments from pulling the plug. It wasn't until Lasseter stepped in and said 'enough is enough' and fixed it by going back to their way that the project showed promise. The rest is history. Award winning history no less.
So unless Disney takes a hands off approach if they buy up Pixar (I still doubt this would happen...would Job's ego allow it?) it will go the way of their ill fated Disney Orlando Animation Studio (which made Lilo). It isn't that Pixar has talented people (go figure...Disney has them too). It is the fact that the rank and file management all the way up to Lasseter understands they need to "protect the baby". Reguardless of whether or the story is stellar, interferrence will definately rob it any chances it had of being so.
Oh The Other Hand...
on
Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Bliz seems to like integrating "real world" cultural themes into their games. Dwaves are somewhat Scottish (in speach and faciniation with alcohol;)). Trolls have a touch of Jamacian. Tuaren definately have that Naitive American tribal thing going. Why not have a strongly eastern themed race like the Panderan?
Besides I bet a Pandaren Warrior can fend for itself and doesn't need the WWF (that is not the wrestling guys!) to help out. I personally hold out the Allience race is our favorite anthrophoric pandas but the other strong rumor are those creapy ET looking guys you find in Blasted Lands (name of which I'm drawing a blank at the moment).
Again I don't see a merge module for this piece of software.
This has always been perplexing: Why is there no merge module for the.Net Framework to build installs around? Admittedly MS's packaging system isn't portable while.Net strives to be (how much it is a subject of debate). So if a true merge module is not possible how about providing a "dummy" merge module instead that doesn't provide the distributable but provides install time information?? If I have to make an install for.Net application it requires a bunch of "hoop jumping" to not only determine if the.Net Framework is installed but if the version/patch level is the target. This is informaton the package system should be providing instead of the installer hunting for evidence of the installed components!!
If MS really wants the.Net Framework to be adopted by the end user (note I didn't write 'developers'), they should make any installation issues a breeze.
I would also consider it embarassing that Google searches Microsoft's content better than they do.
Consider as a developer I'm looking for reference documentation, in this case information on System.Xml namespace for the.Net Framework. I could plunk it into MSDN's search or Google:
Google gives me the first link as the right place in MSDN and too boot the second link is the other important related namespace System.Xml.Serialization. MSDN itself doesn't come close. I do acknowledge that MSDN search isn't the same as search.msn.com (nor is the TechNet search) but that makes me wonder why they aren't just automatically using it instead?
An interesting side note: Google didn't show me ads either using the main site or the "http://www.google.com/microsoft" subsearch while MSN was more than happy to recommend Xml editing tools.
Rocket science is easy. Predicting the behavior of the/. editors (will they triple dupe post the today??) let alone the fickle click behavior of the community is hellva hard. I don't think the greatest minds in the universe could predict slashdotting.
As altrustic Wikipedia is, the problem is the machines have physical monetary resources. Someone has to be paid to do the maintance. Someone has to be paid to do the bug fixing. Someone has to front the cash for the lifecycle of the hardware or whatever plan they have for deployment.
Unless people come forward to do this stuff for free they need to raise cash from somewhere to pay for all of this stuff. And unlike your "contributions" to Wikipedia, these things are hardly easy to do by a guy in his spare time.
As for "profit" I don't think Wikipedia has a profit motive but lets do the Devil's Advocate. What is wrong with a profit model based upon information mining in Wikipedia? The information is freely available for anyone to use as they chose. If I come up with a clever app that mines choice information out of it then do you still want your piece? The information should be free for anyone to find. For you, me, and Google. Hey wait...why aren't you harping on Google for your piece?
I'm perfectly happy for Wikipedia to find some sort of revenue stream to keep the thing going. Its either ads or donations/merchandise. Given my choice I would rather do donations and merchandise but I can't understand the financials on whether or not this is reasonable. Or maybe they can get lucky and find out they have a rich uncle who died and left them a fortune the size of the GNP of a small country?
Linux community is often misorganized; programs and information is hard to find. Slashdots sister site, freshmeat, is hard to use.
I find this an amusing complaint because what has Microsoft given us? Is Freshmeat hard to use say compared to MSDN or TechNet? If I particular piece of software (say something like an OGG tag editor) I hit Google which indexes SourceForge and Freshmeat fairly accurately. If I try that searching MS's web site I get next to nothing. In fact I get *better* results using Google to search MS's stuff for me.
Beyond this, anytime I spy an error in a piece of software on Linux and I want to find out more I drop it in Google and see what comes up. On Windows I'm using MSDN or TechNet. Just my causual observations I have better luck finding out not only the problem behind error messages but a solution with Google and the mountain of information out there on the net than with MSDN and TechNet (again using Google to search their stuff for me).
So what exactly does MS do better when providing online help and documentation?
There is to many distributions available. The choices of distributions and programs are boundless to the point where it confuses the consumer. Confuse the consumer and it will run the other direction.
This is a funny complaint. Most ISV targeting the "modern desktop" are faced with this install targets:
- Windows 2000 - Windows Server 2000 (there are a couple of versions of this, 3?) - Windows XP Home - Windows XP Professional - Windows Server 2003 (I believe there are 7 versions of this if my counting off the top of my head is correct)
Plus some Service Packs radically change the behavior of some of these versions and almost count as a full version on their own. If you ever have the "enjoyment" of writing installers on Windows you sometimes wonder why there are so many versions out there. The bigger sin is that Windows Server 2003 has some hard limitations on some types of software: some software is found on one version but not on another.
With all of these versions of Windows the consumer is not confused so why are they confused with Linux? What is a good number of distros to have anyway? Heck I claim there should be more very refined Linux distros than there are now.
Moving right along, it is also gaming industry that hinders Linux growth. The popular games like The Sims, Battlefield, Total Wars, Doom, and Madden 2k6 are not developed on Linux. WINE and Emulation software not the answer. It is only a temporary fix to the larger problem. Linux needs the game publishers and developers behind it.
Beyond this I find it funny that XP is considered a gaming OS. There is all sorts of services and features that can interfere with gaming performance. In my opinion, MS would be better off selling a stripped down Windows that installs in 5 minutes that does nothing but handles playing games instead of trying to make their generic desktop system work for this.
Linux community should stop bashing Windows or OSX and focus on it's own areas of concern.
Forget Linux...as a consumer of Microsoft products why can't I critize it? There are plenty of things that Windows simply doesn't do well that other systems seem to handle more gracefully. All of us spent a surprisingly large amount of money to get Windows installed on machines but we can't ask for something better?
If the registry was only a location to store/fetch various program settings then that is pretty unremarkable and of value. However as it is implemented, Windows makes use of the registry to not only store settings but to modify and run programs. Heck you can store a binary *inside* a registry key. It is not a place for settings any more.
One of the reasons why Windows is weakened in security is because of the registry. It is used as a pointer for ActiveX and COM components. It is used for locating various components. If you want to easily infiltrate system components the first place too look is in the registry.
In short, the registry as conceived is a mechanism for programmers to allow hooks into the operating system. Unfortunately without thinking about higher security issues, this just means that people who code malicious stuff have the same easy access too.
Bad users will find a way to screw up any system, regardless of OS.
Isn't this the fault of the engineering in the product then? If this was "something else", like a manufactured product, we'd be screaming blood murder that the part failed due to bad engineering. A properly engineered thing takes into account, as much as feasibly possible, the ways it will be stressed and abused to make it as robust as possible. People buy manufactured things assuming most of the time it is going "to work until it is broken". But not on Windows! We assume the brokenness is built in. In fact we plan on it by buying up all of these security products. What in the world??! How did we end up here?!?
What a loopy situation: We as consumers are happily buying something that is expected to not work as described. Why can't Microsoft engineer Windows to be far more fault tollerant? Heck why are we even assuming they can build a security product if they can't make Windows more fault tollerant??
Abuse is knowingly using the system in a way that is destructive. If someone accidently clicks a link in an email and downloads who knows what, that is not abuse unless anyone wants to show how "click links" is outside the normal course of actions on a modern desktop OS. So why is this the user's fault instead of Microsofts?
Haven't you evern noticed if you search for some technical information you get web pages and PDFs? The buisness world runs on MS Office so why aren't there more DOC, XLS, and Power Point showing up in Google searches? It isn't that Google can chew threw a.doc file found on a web page. The problem seems to be that the meta-information to build up relavence and change seems to be constantly moving or is hidden in MS Office files. It has gotten bad enough that you are better off exporting Office data to something else (Html, PDF) to make it appear on search enginges.
From MS's side, if MS were smart(er) they should leverage this advantage. Google can't seem to understand Office format documents (or at least they are no better than any other 3rd Party ISV) so why not turn this weakness into a strength?
From Google's side, there is a bunch of closed documents they will never fully understand. Their options seem to be keep hacking on the format from the outisde (which they are doing now with limited success), ignore them (not something no one would recommend), or push formats they can understand.
What the parent is wringing their hands over is the idea that any open document can be disected by "the bad people". This is the same bogus idea in security. Data "security through obscurity" is erronious: making the data format a "black box" doesn't make a document any more "secure" than an open one. If you want a security mechanism, you use a security mechanism instead of praying "the bad guys" are unable to undrestand the data.
In the end, "the bad people" will hack the format anyway and get the information they need out of any ill gotten files. while users are left wondering why they can't use 3rd party tools (or build their own!!) to help them manage their data. I want Google to find more documents. I want Google to understand documents I create without having to go through another process to transform the data. I don't see how either of these are a bad thing because "the bad guys" are going to do it anyway with Google's help.
SELinux is a great idea but really complex to the point of obscurity. I couldn't come up on my own policy rules for SELinux to make Samba run in a more secure manner. I am the first to agree OpenBSD is the king of secure policy but really bites at allowing an administrator to manipulate them. This is where RH comes in and does very well with their push into SELinux. It is sufficiently complex but in most cases the way RH uses SELinux the user never notices.
Ever since they've introduced SELinux in the default install they've claimed it is incomplete but are adding rules every chance they get. And even better, there is nearly transparent to the "uninterested user". There is a seperate SELinux package that merges in every time they update it so my interaction (and the chance for me to break it) is minimized. And I'm constantly surprised by the settings they do work out as well (for instance some of their Samba settings are really good security policy anyway).
Red Hat's support for things like SELinux is stellar but it needs to be better and they are the first admit it needs more work. Isn't this what Open Source is all about?
The alternative seems to be subject to the whim of the vendor. If they fold/close down buisness you are done. If they ignore you, you are done. If you have the source and need something to be fixed you can, as a last resort, fix it yourself. Without the source you have less options. Which is more desirable?
If Longhorn/Vista is "enchanced" with this VoIP software, this will mean every future desktop will have this. If it works anything like the way MSN "hides" accounts be prepared for random "audio spam" from bots. If you thought getting a racey email at work from a pr0n site because they somehow got ahold of your work email address is bad or embarassing just wait till you have a "perky girl" asking you to "help them with their problem".
If MS goes through with this, I hope they handle it a lot better than MSN. If it is anything like it then be prepared for another technology scourge that will cause users to scramble for a solution.
This is the kind of stuff that appears to be information and informative but really has no information. After all MS Office 2003 products have had a slip in usage (this has been mentioned on/.) but I doubt anyone will believe Office is anywhere but #1 for office productivity software. The truth about where FireFox is doesn't lie with usage statistics alone.
As for FireFox itself, I am pleasantly happy with it. I don't see the problems many others see. In any applicaiton framework the problems usually come up in the modules not the framework. I suspect most of the problems users see lie either in the plugins many use or the way plugins interact with everything else.
If I had any suggestion for the developers steering FireFox (and Thunderbird) it would be further isolating plugins. The developers should strive to have a framework that survives not only a catastrophic plugin failure (ie. a plugin crashes) but a plugin that is errant (ie. a plugin that malfunctions never handling memory correctly) without screwing up the core browser.
You are actually agreeing with what Michael Moore presents. Moore doesn't think guns, video games, violent media are to blame for Columbine any more than bowling did. Sure it has been shown that Klebold and Harris were not bowling but the effect is still in place. Saying Doom makes kids go homicidal is about as reasonable as suggesting bowling will do the same. Seeking to blame things irrationally is woven into our culture as a double whammy.
A theme in "Bowling for Columbine" is that people seeking answers are going to lash out at things they liked and gravitated towards. Violent games, guns, anti-social behavior, etc. What Moore tries to do is say its all BS. Along the way he shows some people doing and saying some odd if not funny things. Both kids like playing Doom/Quake so these things are coruptive and evil and we should stop impressionable youth from playing such things. Both kids like explosives and weapondry which is corruptive and evil and we should stop other kids from playing with such things. But wait, they both may be pretty good bowlers. Why is no one up in arms about how corruptive and destructive bowling is on impressionable youth? The truth is that Klebold and Harris liked to many things yet only a sliver is deemed destructive and evil and must be done away with to "save the kids" by a select few "leaders". Its all BS and Moore wants you to decide for yourself what the problem is instead of going along with the status quo which wants to blame the usual suspects: guns, games, media...
The real problem in the US is a high level of mistrust which permiates the entire culture all the way through highschool where it manifests itself into harsh cliques. A combination of events made a "perfect storm" of opportunity, motive, and culture which resulted in Klebold and Harris to take out their frustrations on the school. To read anything more into it is of dubious value.
I use bt a lot to sample stuff fresh from Japan. Even admiting this there are a lot of shows I don't watch partially or completely simply due to a lack of hours in the day to download let alone watch. Offering sample epsiodes by bittorrent is a great idea because hey I may have not seen it the first time around.
One issue the US side has is a lack of advertising. The facts are there are a limited number of ways to advertise your licensed material. Given the way Anime pricing works, its very cut throat and you need to keep it cheap or you eat into any profit you could have had.
The best way to advertise a show like MadLax is to show it on TV (think [adult swim]). There is not enough hours in the day to do this for every show so only a select few make it there. At the moment I can't imagine how much it costs for a shot a midnight Saturday time slot.
The next way to advertise is to buy another ADV show and watch the previews they always include. This represents a small bootstrap problem: how did they find the other show in the first place?
One of the last ways to advertise unfortunately is on the shelf. Competition is feirce here so there is no gain by anyone at this point. In fact its so brutal that someone might not buy Anime at all if a cheaper mainstream US movie is just down the isle for half the price.
What the US side has been trying to do is include "sampler" DVD disks in the mags like US version of "NewType" but this can get cost prohibited and the circulation numbers are down.
Enter this idea from Williams on how to get the word out to more people on the US release cheaper(*) and wider than showing it on [adult swim] or by stuffing mags with disks. I think giving out the sampler episodes on torrent is a great idea if they can figure out how to seed sources cheaply. It sure beats using Netflix or praying it shows up on TV.
Why doesn't AMD release their *own* compiler? On a AMD tuned compiler I bet the performance isn't so great for on an Intel processor.
This is a case where a compiler can go "if it is a 'processor-type-a' use these instructions otherwise use something else". I don't see any fault here. Intel has created a compiler that uses their chip's optimal settings. An efficient instruction set of instructions for a P4 will not be the same for an Athlon anyway due to internals of both chips being different. Why would anyone believe otherwise?
Unless Intel is pushing their compiler as the end all be all compiler for AMD there is nothing goofy going on. It is just like using GCC and C code with a bunch of carefully chosen extensions. Expecting these extensions and assembly modifications to work the same on every x86 chip is a pipedream.
My general complaint about Doom 3 is that although one of the most breath taking pieces of technology available, it is an entirely unfun game. If a game is unfun what is the point of playing it?
Doom 3 suffers from many of the problems stated in the article as well as too many other games are trying to follow suit. It is not fun to be constantly assulted by strange noises. It is not fun to die to things you can't see. It is not fun to die when when the player does nothing wrong. Players like to rise to a challenge but when a game so ludicras that you can count on being attacked from behind after you enter a room that you open the door and walk in backwards that just shows how idiotic the design turned out to be.
I think id got too enamored by making the best looking game possible which they did in spades. They forgot to make the game fun. I shouldn't be too surprised though...game producers fell for the same trap Hollywood movie producers has for years now. Hollywood and the game industry know they can make some of the best SFX with the tools and talent available. The problem is they both seemed to have forgotten the story along the way.
We should take what is written in The National Review as fact because...?
Why is an expansionist view of judical power bad? In Common Law and in particular in the US, one of the few things that keeps the Legistlature in check is judicial review. The fact the far elements in Congress want things like a Flag Burning amendment is because the restraints the judiciary puts on them.
What Mr Franck should have said is that he is disappointed because O'Conner kept deciding against things he liked instead of trying to pull the "flip flop" card. Being mad a judge for deciding against what they desire does not make that judge bad.
Given such a small pool, asking for a 6 vote majority for an affirming decision means that many harder decisions are no-decisions which are meaningless when seeking a arbitration on the difficult issues. Just because a question is hard and needs to be decided carefully means a decision needs to be rendered, not put off.
Spyware is a technology problem so why fight it with anything else? Seems to just reward the spyware crowd. "Get big enough and MS will buy you out!"
There are plenty of people out there in the OS field that can tell you exactly where Window's problems lie. But I guess that ignoring them is right along with this logic where you buy out your problems instead of fix the system that created them.
I had exactly the same ephimamy as the parent's parent. I was given a choice in 1995 on what to run on a spare machine. I went to the Uni's computer lab with a box full of floppys and started downloading BSD, went home and started installing.
Well part of the installation worked. Once I got past some of the quirky installation issues BSD (I don't recall why but partitioning hard drives seemed to be a bitch), some hardware simply didn't work the most glaring was the video card and network card. VESA was supported but it was clearly lacking in performance and without a network card what is the point? I poked around on Yahoo on another machine (what is Google?) for more information and even tried a BSD irc channel. I was basically told in so many words "if you aren't a hardcore coder, you don't deserve our help". That is just "great" since my interest was getting the machine working not coding and their elitist attitude finally caused me to give up.
So back to the lab to download another piece of software called Linux (Slackware I believe!). The rest is history because it just worked. When it came to configuration questions, for instance X had to be configured by hand, I found people willing to give me hints. I worked through it and ended up with a functional machine video, NIC, and all.
To this day I point to this initial impression of BSD as the reason why I shy away from BSD as my first choice in machine deployment. The attitude of the BSD community has probably changed a lot in 10 years but I still can't shake the feeling I'm going to be slapped with elitism again if I run into a problem with a BSD installation.
It should also be noted that Torvalds isn't unduly harsh about Windows either. On a couple of occations he has claimed an apathetic view of Windows. Torvalds works on Linux because of Linux and not because of Windows.
Is this stuff really what TdR said or is it Forbes trying to generate click-through by scandal? I can let some of it slide but I would be worried if the leader of an OSS project has a lot of venom for another project. It clouds their decision making.
Slashdot Mirror
"Never risk a sale today for a sale tomorrow." A salesman will always make a sale today. I wouldn't say a bad salesman is devoiding of speculating. Instead of being a salesman, they are acting as a broker which is riding the supply as a commidity market. As a broker they have different goals than a salesman mostly which servicing the consumer is secondary to making sure you maximize your distribution pool.
In previous cases with Apple, Sony, Nintendo, etc is that they were honestly out of product and production couldn't ramp up immediately. UPS would show up with a delivery of 10 units which where automatically sold. 10 more units would not show up till next week. There were simply no more units to buy no matter how long you stood in front of the electronics store or how many times you clicked refresh on Apple.com. What the article is suggesting is that MS doing is putting an artifical ceiling on supply (otherwise known as rationing). Is it a good thing to put rationing on a non-essential item?
I would perferably see a spike than to have MS trying to artifically monkey around with the market. In one case the worst they are accused is that they misjudged demand (hey it happens). In the other case there is something more meleviant is going on. I think that if they artificially hold back warehouses full of product they are looney. Make a sale today you have cash they can use now to reinvest. What would they possibly reinvest in you ask? Something wacky like increase production? If you bank on a sale tomorrow you might have twice as much cash...or they might go off and buy something else.
Yes if Disney bought Pixar they would receive a company full of talented, driven artists but that is only half of the reason why Pixar movies do so well. The other half is that management and producers protects the production. The classic story about Toy Story is that Disney fronted the money and was unhappy about the "juvenile" nature of the story and wanted to make it "modern", edgy, or whatever kids call being "cool" these day, they proceeded to hack it up. The result was crappy, no one liked it, everyone was unhappy, and Disney was moments from pulling the plug. It wasn't until Lasseter stepped in and said 'enough is enough' and fixed it by going back to their way that the project showed promise. The rest is history. Award winning history no less.
So unless Disney takes a hands off approach if they buy up Pixar (I still doubt this would happen...would Job's ego allow it?) it will go the way of their ill fated Disney Orlando Animation Studio (which made Lilo). It isn't that Pixar has talented people (go figure...Disney has them too). It is the fact that the rank and file management all the way up to Lasseter understands they need to "protect the baby". Reguardless of whether or the story is stellar, interferrence will definately rob it any chances it had of being so.
Bliz seems to like integrating "real world" cultural themes into their games. Dwaves are somewhat Scottish (in speach and faciniation with alcohol ;)). Trolls have a touch of Jamacian. Tuaren definately have that Naitive American tribal thing going. Why not have a strongly eastern themed race like the Panderan?
Besides I bet a Pandaren Warrior can fend for itself and doesn't need the WWF (that is not the wrestling guys!) to help out. I personally hold out the Allience race is our favorite anthrophoric pandas but the other strong rumor are those creapy ET looking guys you find in Blasted Lands (name of which I'm drawing a blank at the moment).
Again I don't see a merge module for this piece of software.
.Net Framework to build installs around? Admittedly MS's packaging system isn't portable while .Net strives to be (how much it is a subject of debate). So if a true merge module is not possible how about providing a "dummy" merge module instead that doesn't provide the distributable but provides install time information?? If I have to make an install for .Net application it requires a bunch of "hoop jumping" to not only determine if the .Net Framework is installed but if the version/patch level is the target. This is informaton the package system should be providing instead of the installer hunting for evidence of the installed components!!
.Net Framework to be adopted by the end user (note I didn't write 'developers'), they should make any installation issues a breeze.
This has always been perplexing: Why is there no merge module for the
If MS really wants the
I would also consider it embarassing that Google searches Microsoft's content better than they do.
.Net Framework. I could plunk it into MSDN's search or Google:
m .Xml+Namespace
i ew=msdn&st=b&na=82&qu=System.Xml+Namespace&s=1
Consider as a developer I'm looking for reference documentation, in this case information on System.Xml namespace for the
http://www.google.com/microsoft?hl=en&lr=&q=Syste
vs
http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?v
Google gives me the first link as the right place in MSDN and too boot the second link is the other important related namespace System.Xml.Serialization. MSDN itself doesn't come close. I do acknowledge that MSDN search isn't the same as search.msn.com (nor is the TechNet search) but that makes me wonder why they aren't just automatically using it instead?
An interesting side note: Google didn't show me ads either using the main site or the "http://www.google.com/microsoft" subsearch while MSN was more than happy to recommend Xml editing tools.
Rocket science is easy. Predicting the behavior of the /. editors (will they triple dupe post the today??) let alone the fickle click behavior of the community is hellva hard. I don't think the greatest minds in the universe could predict slashdotting.
As altrustic Wikipedia is, the problem is the machines have physical monetary resources. Someone has to be paid to do the maintance. Someone has to be paid to do the bug fixing. Someone has to front the cash for the lifecycle of the hardware or whatever plan they have for deployment.
Unless people come forward to do this stuff for free they need to raise cash from somewhere to pay for all of this stuff. And unlike your "contributions" to Wikipedia, these things are hardly easy to do by a guy in his spare time.
As for "profit" I don't think Wikipedia has a profit motive but lets do the Devil's Advocate. What is wrong with a profit model based upon information mining in Wikipedia? The information is freely available for anyone to use as they chose. If I come up with a clever app that mines choice information out of it then do you still want your piece? The information should be free for anyone to find. For you, me, and Google. Hey wait...why aren't you harping on Google for your piece?
I'm perfectly happy for Wikipedia to find some sort of revenue stream to keep the thing going. Its either ads or donations/merchandise. Given my choice I would rather do donations and merchandise but I can't understand the financials on whether or not this is reasonable. Or maybe they can get lucky and find out they have a rich uncle who died and left them a fortune the size of the GNP of a small country?
I find this an amusing complaint because what has Microsoft given us? Is Freshmeat hard to use say compared to MSDN or TechNet? If I particular piece of software (say something like an OGG tag editor) I hit Google which indexes SourceForge and Freshmeat fairly accurately. If I try that searching MS's web site I get next to nothing. In fact I get *better* results using Google to search MS's stuff for me.
Beyond this, anytime I spy an error in a piece of software on Linux and I want to find out more I drop it in Google and see what comes up. On Windows I'm using MSDN or TechNet. Just my causual observations I have better luck finding out not only the problem behind error messages but a solution with Google and the mountain of information out there on the net than with MSDN and TechNet (again using Google to search their stuff for me).
So what exactly does MS do better when providing online help and documentation?
This is a funny complaint. Most ISV targeting the "modern desktop" are faced with this install targets:
- Windows 2000
- Windows Server 2000 (there are a couple of versions of this, 3?)
- Windows XP Home
- Windows XP Professional
- Windows Server 2003 (I believe there are 7 versions of this if my counting off the top of my head is correct)
Plus some Service Packs radically change the behavior of some of these versions and almost count as a full version on their own. If you ever have the "enjoyment" of writing installers on Windows you sometimes wonder why there are so many versions out there. The bigger sin is that Windows Server 2003 has some hard limitations on some types of software: some software is found on one version but not on another.
With all of these versions of Windows the consumer is not confused so why are they confused with Linux? What is a good number of distros to have anyway? Heck I claim there should be more very refined Linux distros than there are now.
Beyond this I find it funny that XP is considered a gaming OS. There is all sorts of services and features that can interfere with gaming performance. In my opinion, MS would be better off selling a stripped down Windows that installs in 5 minutes that does nothing but handles playing games instead of trying to make their generic desktop system work for this.
Forget Linux...as a consumer of Microsoft products why can't I critize it? There are plenty of things that Windows simply doesn't do well that other systems seem to handle more gracefully. All of us spent a surprisingly large amount of money to get Windows installed on machines but we can't ask for something better?
If the registry was only a location to store/fetch various program settings then that is pretty unremarkable and of value. However as it is implemented, Windows makes use of the registry to not only store settings but to modify and run programs. Heck you can store a binary *inside* a registry key. It is not a place for settings any more.
One of the reasons why Windows is weakened in security is because of the registry. It is used as a pointer for ActiveX and COM components. It is used for locating various components. If you want to easily infiltrate system components the first place too look is in the registry.
In short, the registry as conceived is a mechanism for programmers to allow hooks into the operating system. Unfortunately without thinking about higher security issues, this just means that people who code malicious stuff have the same easy access too.
Isn't this the fault of the engineering in the product then? If this was "something else", like a manufactured product, we'd be screaming blood murder that the part failed due to bad engineering. A properly engineered thing takes into account, as much as feasibly possible, the ways it will be stressed and abused to make it as robust as possible. People buy manufactured things assuming most of the time it is going "to work until it is broken". But not on Windows! We assume the brokenness is built in. In fact we plan on it by buying up all of these security products. What in the world??! How did we end up here?!?
What a loopy situation: We as consumers are happily buying something that is expected to not work as described. Why can't Microsoft engineer Windows to be far more fault tollerant? Heck why are we even assuming they can build a security product if they can't make Windows more fault tollerant??
Abuse is knowingly using the system in a way that is destructive. If someone accidently clicks a link in an email and downloads who knows what, that is not abuse unless anyone wants to show how "click links" is outside the normal course of actions on a modern desktop OS. So why is this the user's fault instead of Microsofts?
Haven't you evern noticed if you search for some technical information you get web pages and PDFs? The buisness world runs on MS Office so why aren't there more DOC, XLS, and Power Point showing up in Google searches? It isn't that Google can chew threw a .doc file found on a web page. The problem seems to be that the meta-information to build up relavence and change seems to be constantly moving or is hidden in MS Office files. It has gotten bad enough that you are better off exporting Office data to something else (Html, PDF) to make it appear on search enginges.
From MS's side, if MS were smart(er) they should leverage this advantage. Google can't seem to understand Office format documents (or at least they are no better than any other 3rd Party ISV) so why not turn this weakness into a strength?
From Google's side, there is a bunch of closed documents they will never fully understand. Their options seem to be keep hacking on the format from the outisde (which they are doing now with limited success), ignore them (not something no one would recommend), or push formats they can understand.
What the parent is wringing their hands over is the idea that any open document can be disected by "the bad people". This is the same bogus idea in security. Data "security through obscurity" is erronious: making the data format a "black box" doesn't make a document any more "secure" than an open one. If you want a security mechanism, you use a security mechanism instead of praying "the bad guys" are unable to undrestand the data.
In the end, "the bad people" will hack the format anyway and get the information they need out of any ill gotten files. while users are left wondering why they can't use 3rd party tools (or build their own!!) to help them manage their data. I want Google to find more documents. I want Google to understand documents I create without having to go through another process to transform the data. I don't see how either of these are a bad thing because "the bad guys" are going to do it anyway with Google's help.
SELinux is a great idea but really complex to the point of obscurity. I couldn't come up on my own policy rules for SELinux to make Samba run in a more secure manner. I am the first to agree OpenBSD is the king of secure policy but really bites at allowing an administrator to manipulate them. This is where RH comes in and does very well with their push into SELinux. It is sufficiently complex but in most cases the way RH uses SELinux the user never notices.
Ever since they've introduced SELinux in the default install they've claimed it is incomplete but are adding rules every chance they get. And even better, there is nearly transparent to the "uninterested user". There is a seperate SELinux package that merges in every time they update it so my interaction (and the chance for me to break it) is minimized. And I'm constantly surprised by the settings they do work out as well (for instance some of their Samba settings are really good security policy anyway).
Red Hat's support for things like SELinux is stellar but it needs to be better and they are the first admit it needs more work. Isn't this what Open Source is all about?
The alternative seems to be subject to the whim of the vendor. If they fold/close down buisness you are done. If they ignore you, you are done. If you have the source and need something to be fixed you can, as a last resort, fix it yourself. Without the source you have less options. Which is more desirable?
If Longhorn/Vista is "enchanced" with this VoIP software, this will mean every future desktop will have this. If it works anything like the way MSN "hides" accounts be prepared for random "audio spam" from bots. If you thought getting a racey email at work from a pr0n site because they somehow got ahold of your work email address is bad or embarassing just wait till you have a "perky girl" asking you to "help them with their problem".
If MS goes through with this, I hope they handle it a lot better than MSN. If it is anything like it then be prepared for another technology scourge that will cause users to scramble for a solution.
This is the kind of stuff that appears to be information and informative but really has no information. After all MS Office 2003 products have had a slip in usage (this has been mentioned on /.) but I doubt anyone will believe Office is anywhere but #1 for office productivity software. The truth about where FireFox is doesn't lie with usage statistics alone.
As for FireFox itself, I am pleasantly happy with it. I don't see the problems many others see. In any applicaiton framework the problems usually come up in the modules not the framework. I suspect most of the problems users see lie either in the plugins many use or the way plugins interact with everything else.
If I had any suggestion for the developers steering FireFox (and Thunderbird) it would be further isolating plugins. The developers should strive to have a framework that survives not only a catastrophic plugin failure (ie. a plugin crashes) but a plugin that is errant (ie. a plugin that malfunctions never handling memory correctly) without screwing up the core browser.
You are actually agreeing with what Michael Moore presents. Moore doesn't think guns, video games, violent media are to blame for Columbine any more than bowling did. Sure it has been shown that Klebold and Harris were not bowling but the effect is still in place. Saying Doom makes kids go homicidal is about as reasonable as suggesting bowling will do the same. Seeking to blame things irrationally is woven into our culture as a double whammy.
A theme in "Bowling for Columbine" is that people seeking answers are going to lash out at things they liked and gravitated towards. Violent games, guns, anti-social behavior, etc. What Moore tries to do is say its all BS. Along the way he shows some people doing and saying some odd if not funny things. Both kids like playing Doom/Quake so these things are coruptive and evil and we should stop impressionable youth from playing such things. Both kids like explosives and weapondry which is corruptive and evil and we should stop other kids from playing with such things. But wait, they both may be pretty good bowlers. Why is no one up in arms about how corruptive and destructive bowling is on impressionable youth? The truth is that Klebold and Harris liked to many things yet only a sliver is deemed destructive and evil and must be done away with to "save the kids" by a select few "leaders". Its all BS and Moore wants you to decide for yourself what the problem is instead of going along with the status quo which wants to blame the usual suspects: guns, games, media...
The real problem in the US is a high level of mistrust which permiates the entire culture all the way through highschool where it manifests itself into harsh cliques. A combination of events made a "perfect storm" of opportunity, motive, and culture which resulted in Klebold and Harris to take out their frustrations on the school. To read anything more into it is of dubious value.
I use bt a lot to sample stuff fresh from Japan. Even admiting this there are a lot of shows I don't watch partially or completely simply due to a lack of hours in the day to download let alone watch. Offering sample epsiodes by bittorrent is a great idea because hey I may have not seen it the first time around.
One issue the US side has is a lack of advertising. The facts are there are a limited number of ways to advertise your licensed material. Given the way Anime pricing works, its very cut throat and you need to keep it cheap or you eat into any profit you could have had.
The best way to advertise a show like MadLax is to show it on TV (think [adult swim]). There is not enough hours in the day to do this for every show so only a select few make it there. At the moment I can't imagine how much it costs for a shot a midnight Saturday time slot.
The next way to advertise is to buy another ADV show and watch the previews they always include. This represents a small bootstrap problem: how did they find the other show in the first place?
One of the last ways to advertise unfortunately is on the shelf. Competition is feirce here so there is no gain by anyone at this point. In fact its so brutal that someone might not buy Anime at all if a cheaper mainstream US movie is just down the isle for half the price.
What the US side has been trying to do is include "sampler" DVD disks in the mags like US version of "NewType" but this can get cost prohibited and the circulation numbers are down.
Enter this idea from Williams on how to get the word out to more people on the US release cheaper(*) and wider than showing it on [adult swim] or by stuffing mags with disks. I think giving out the sampler episodes on torrent is a great idea if they can figure out how to seed sources cheaply. It sure beats using Netflix or praying it shows up on TV.
Why doesn't AMD release their *own* compiler? On a AMD tuned compiler I bet the performance isn't so great for on an Intel processor.
This is a case where a compiler can go "if it is a 'processor-type-a' use these instructions otherwise use something else". I don't see any fault here. Intel has created a compiler that uses their chip's optimal settings. An efficient instruction set of instructions for a P4 will not be the same for an Athlon anyway due to internals of both chips being different. Why would anyone believe otherwise?
Unless Intel is pushing their compiler as the end all be all compiler for AMD there is nothing goofy going on. It is just like using GCC and C code with a bunch of carefully chosen extensions. Expecting these extensions and assembly modifications to work the same on every x86 chip is a pipedream.
My general complaint about Doom 3 is that although one of the most breath taking pieces of technology available, it is an entirely unfun game. If a game is unfun what is the point of playing it?
Doom 3 suffers from many of the problems stated in the article as well as too many other games are trying to follow suit. It is not fun to be constantly assulted by strange noises. It is not fun to die to things you can't see. It is not fun to die when when the player does nothing wrong. Players like to rise to a challenge but when a game so ludicras that you can count on being attacked from behind after you enter a room that you open the door and walk in backwards that just shows how idiotic the design turned out to be.
I think id got too enamored by making the best looking game possible which they did in spades. They forgot to make the game fun. I shouldn't be too surprised though...game producers fell for the same trap Hollywood movie producers has for years now. Hollywood and the game industry know they can make some of the best SFX with the tools and talent available. The problem is they both seemed to have forgotten the story along the way.
We should take what is written in The National Review as fact because...?
Why is an expansionist view of judical power bad? In Common Law and in particular in the US, one of the few things that keeps the Legistlature in check is judicial review. The fact the far elements in Congress want things like a Flag Burning amendment is because the restraints the judiciary puts on them.
What Mr Franck should have said is that he is disappointed because O'Conner kept deciding against things he liked instead of trying to pull the "flip flop" card. Being mad a judge for deciding against what they desire does not make that judge bad.
Given such a small pool, asking for a 6 vote majority for an affirming decision means that many harder decisions are no-decisions which are meaningless when seeking a arbitration on the difficult issues. Just because a question is hard and needs to be decided carefully means a decision needs to be rendered, not put off.
Spyware is a technology problem so why fight it with anything else? Seems to just reward the spyware crowd. "Get big enough and MS will buy you out!"
There are plenty of people out there in the OS field that can tell you exactly where Window's problems lie. But I guess that ignoring them is right along with this logic where you buy out your problems instead of fix the system that created them.
I had exactly the same ephimamy as the parent's parent. I was given a choice in 1995 on what to run on a spare machine. I went to the Uni's computer lab with a box full of floppys and started downloading BSD, went home and started installing.
Well part of the installation worked. Once I got past some of the quirky installation issues BSD (I don't recall why but partitioning hard drives seemed to be a bitch), some hardware simply didn't work the most glaring was the video card and network card. VESA was supported but it was clearly lacking in performance and without a network card what is the point? I poked around on Yahoo on another machine (what is Google?) for more information and even tried a BSD irc channel. I was basically told in so many words "if you aren't a hardcore coder, you don't deserve our help". That is just "great" since my interest was getting the machine working not coding and their elitist attitude finally caused me to give up.
So back to the lab to download another piece of software called Linux (Slackware I believe!). The rest is history because it just worked. When it came to configuration questions, for instance X had to be configured by hand, I found people willing to give me hints. I worked through it and ended up with a functional machine video, NIC, and all.
To this day I point to this initial impression of BSD as the reason why I shy away from BSD as my first choice in machine deployment. The attitude of the BSD community has probably changed a lot in 10 years but I still can't shake the feeling I'm going to be slapped with elitism again if I run into a problem with a BSD installation.
It should also be noted that Torvalds isn't unduly harsh about Windows either. On a couple of occations he has claimed an apathetic view of Windows. Torvalds works on Linux because of Linux and not because of Windows.
Is this stuff really what TdR said or is it Forbes trying to generate click-through by scandal? I can let some of it slide but I would be worried if the leader of an OSS project has a lot of venom for another project. It clouds their decision making.