...has made a number of bad business decisions in the last couple decades, most notably selling their souls to Windows/DOS, something they've paid for (literally) in the long run.
Last year in a newspaper article, the esteemed Mr. Michael Crichton commented on the fact that for years, he's been covering and writing about world disasters that have been fortold by scientists, the government , and news media, and that in all of that time not a single predicted catastrophe has come to pass. Global warming is just the latest in a series of liberal media scare tactics to get back viewers and regain lost ratings/subscriptions. (Cough... Dan Rather, CBS News... Cough...)
Step 1: Sell software at lower prices than those of your competitors. Step 2: Outlast your competitors with your vast funds garnered from years of market dominance and a certain bad budsiness decision by IBM. Step 3: Once competition falters, snap up their company and slap a "Microsoft" logo on it. Resell to consumers at inflated prices. Step 4: Profit! "Billyuns and billyuns" of dollars, to borrow a phrase from a certain Mr. Carl Sagan.
...the best choice that Microsoft could make right now would be to completely take apart IE and redesign it from the ground up as a Firefox/Netscape variant with the Microsoft logo stuck on the cover. Better yet, Microsoft could package Firefox with new versions of Windows right out of the box, thereby eliminating all complaints of IE being too slow or too vulnerable. Of course, this new Microsoft browser would still probably include ActiveX support, Microsoft-only features and all that other proprietary jazz, but it would be a vast improvement on what Microsoft has going for them now.
Intel must have not been using a laptop with "Intel Integrated Extreme Graphics", because otherwise it would have been far outclassed by any PC with a decent Radeon 9200 or equivalent. A nice clockspeed means nothing if your video card isn't up to snuff.
No, no no... a class action suit was never part of the plan. Step 3 is actually created to prevent this, where they market the product with buttons so tightly clumped together that users get so frustrated after five minutes of usage (and after the purchase, of course) that they throw their "R-Gage" down in disgust and walk away long before any carpal tunnel hads a chance to develop.
You gotta pity the guys over at SOE... WoW having so many players that their servers overflow, while many EQ II servers are still ghost towns in most areas... also, I would guess that EQ II servers have a higher load/client ratio since EQ II is a much more hardware intensive game than WoW, most notably in terms of graphical stress on your PC's video card.
Don't worry, SOE, will still love ya... and thats why we haven't Slashdotted you and crashed your servers:)
Lance Bass fell into legal trouble with the Russians from whom he recieved expensive Cosmunaut training in preparation for a flight that *never happened*. Also, two or three customers is never enough to support a commercial enterprise that is doomed to failure, whether it be condemned by a shoddy product (ex. the N-Gage) or lack of public interest (ex. EQ II getting wiped by WoW, despite EQ II having better... never mind, I don't need to go off topic and get flamed to death:)
I never said IE was better than Netscape, I just said that IE had bad legacy code issues... but yeah, had Netsacpe not been stomped out by Bill & Co., it would doubtlessly be the browser that we'd be using to browse/. at this very moment. Because if IE hadn't killed of Netscape, there'd have been no reason to have a Firefox in the first place;)
I have listened to a member IE dev team about the IE source, and he was very friendly and talked to me about the fact that most of IE's current problems stem from legacy code from when IE and all browsers were new and inexperienced. As people on the IE dev team have come and gone, parts of the code have been forgotten as to their original intentions and how they work with other segments/modules. Trust me, the IE source code is huge and confusing, and it wouldn't be fair to blame the current dev team on mistakes made by dev teams of the past. All of this information was provided to me by a credible source, and if you doubt its validity... well, I have no way to verify the information, since its about MS's intillectual property:)
The linked article mentioned the "rebel billionaire" buying a new fleet of SpaceShipTwos for commercial trips to the upper stratosphere and back, which in my opinion is a prety foolish way for him to waste his accquired wealth. Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down. There are easier and cheaper ways to obtain the thrills of floating in null-g that have been around for years, and not many people have expressed much interest in those, so why would anyone feel differently about the SpaceShipTwos? Don't get me wrong, I am excited about SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize (which it won), I just don't feel that this would be the correct application of the current technology.
I want to hear everyones' thoughts... please post comments!
Nah, no flaming on Slashdot, some of us are actually caring and considerate people:)
Yes, I recognize what you say and I know it to be true. I am still just a lowly comp sci student who has had minimal coding experince on a large scale, but I do know that XML is a pain and that my C/C++/Python apps run *way* faster than their Java equivalents... my programs generally aren't too challenging to debug, but I guess a thousand-line app would be pretty impossible to debug using a language such as C. However, I do believe that if you are taught C early on in your education, any object-oriented language that you learn later (such as C++ or Java) will be a breeze.
People need to go back to using lower-level assembler code and other such near-machine-code basic (but not BASIC basic) languages and master those before they try to create a whole bevy of new languages that are so far removed from the binary that it takes the computer 5 minutes just to render "Hello World" in a pretty-looking XML formatted stlye. C, in particular, has been abandoned by many teaching institutions, including my own (we learned JKarel using Java). This is a dangerous trend that teachers bad programming habits and needs to be stopped before it becomes widespread.
I myself use both Linux and Windows XP on a regular basis, and so speaking from experience I would agree that the Windows XP GUI is very childish looking and that the Linux GUI looks much smarter and handles much more efficiently.
However, most people who look at XP see something new and visually appealing (at least at first), and the same people who look at Gnome or Fluxbox see something that looks similar to older/recent versions of MacOS (OSX is awesome but we wont go into that at this time). Also, I know that there are many different window managers out there with different graphical styles, and you all know that too, as evidenced by your posts, but the general consumer doesn't know what we know and Microsoft and others want to keep it that way.
Again, I use both XP/Linux and IMHO Li ux is vastly preferreable to XP, but this is just my opinion and I'm not trying to force it upon anybody.
Yes, it does look much better than the previous release, but it still doesn't look as snazzy or as futuristic as XP, and unfortuanately for all of those Linux user out there, the common non-tech-savvy person often will choose a version of Windows over a distro of Linux simply because XP just looks nicer and easier to use. I won't get into an argument of which OS is better over the other since I don't want to get flamed to death, but I do think that how nice the GUI looks is (sadly) a big factor as to whether or not Joe User from Suburbia USA will pick one OS over the other for his day-to-day Net surfing, gaming, emailing, or whatever.
Most people out there will end up judging a book by its cover if they can't figure out whats actually inside.
Well, don't worry everyone, I am sure that ActiveX isn't nearly as bad as Brian described it... after all, it's just another fine Microsoft product. Plus, since it's closed source, none of those mean nasty hackers will be able to open it up and use it to blow up your computer....right? What, you mean that isn't true?!? Closed source is insecure?!? And Bill Gates isn't a supporter of free net culture deep down inside?
I myself own one of the more recently manufactured TI-84s, and I notice that it is the only TI graphing calculator not listed on this fellow's site of otherwise great technical suggestions....
I would also be quick to remind everyone that http://www.ticalc.org/ has an extensive library of TI apps as well as links to other calc sites with more detailed overclocking hints and instructions.
I think that what the industry should focus on in this point in time should be the miniturization of such memory storage devices so as to fit them into smaller devices such as cell phones, PocketPCs (ugh), etc... most of the technology is already out there, it just hasn't been utilized to its full potential on a widespread commercial level. The most notable exception that comes to mind would be Apple, with their 40gb iPod.... if only we had as much storage on our Palms as well!
...how could economists create a truly accurate model of people's feelings towards, for example, changes in the USA's federal reserve interest rates, without having to take costly (and time-consuming) scans of large portions of the population? All people are different in their reactions to economic change, and I think that it would be therefore impossbile to create an accurate analysis of such a large group of individuals such as a the national US population.
The same basic flaw exsists in national surveys and all methods of statistical analysis: your results may end up close to the actual figures for which you search, but the reults will never be 100% on point, adn when you're talking about matters dealing with a nation's economy, you need accurate and detailed information so that you don't make mistakes which may influence the lives of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people.
Edit:Anonymous Coward would be *an appropriate desgination. Sure, my spelling is bad, but it's not as bad as knowing that people are out there who use the Internet as an anonymous forum for thoughtless flamings and verbal assaults.
For all those interested in free online FPS's, there is a free game similar to Counter-Strike called "Americas Army: Special Forces" which is put out as a srecruiting tool by the US military, and can be downloaded here: http://www.americasarmy.com/
AA:SF is great fun, and Linux and Mac clients are on the official site as well. The graphical quality on most missions is not as good as HL2, but still decent nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
...Dory the fish, who suffered from the same condition as HM in the Scientific Americ...Ameri... umm...
Sorry... have we met?
...has made a number of bad business decisions in the last couple decades, most notably selling their souls to Windows/DOS, something they've paid for (literally) in the long run.
If it were more geekier than Firefox, then wouldn't it run on LInux, not Windows?
Last year in a newspaper article, the esteemed Mr. Michael Crichton commented on the fact that for years, he's been covering and writing about world disasters that have been fortold by scientists, the government , and news media, and that in all of that time not a single predicted catastrophe has come to pass. Global warming is just the latest in a series of liberal media scare tactics to get back viewers and regain lost ratings/subscriptions. (Cough... Dan Rather, CBS News... Cough...)
Step 1: Sell software at lower prices than those of your competitors.
Step 2: Outlast your competitors with your vast funds garnered from years of market dominance and a certain bad budsiness decision by IBM.
Step 3: Once competition falters, snap up their company and slap a "Microsoft" logo on it. Resell to consumers at inflated prices.
Step 4: Profit! "Billyuns and billyuns" of dollars, to borrow a phrase from a certain Mr. Carl Sagan.
...the best choice that Microsoft could make right now would be to completely take apart IE and redesign it from the ground up as a Firefox/Netscape variant with the Microsoft logo stuck on the cover. Better yet, Microsoft could package Firefox with new versions of Windows right out of the box, thereby eliminating all complaints of IE being too slow or too vulnerable. Of course, this new Microsoft browser would still probably include ActiveX support, Microsoft-only features and all that other proprietary jazz, but it would be a vast improvement on what Microsoft has going for them now.
Intel must have not been using a laptop with "Intel Integrated Extreme Graphics", because otherwise it would have been far outclassed by any PC with a decent Radeon 9200 or equivalent. A nice clockspeed means nothing if your video card isn't up to snuff.
No, no no... a class action suit was never part of the plan. Step 3 is actually created to prevent this, where they market the product with buttons so tightly clumped together that users get so frustrated after five minutes of usage (and after the purchase, of course) that they throw their "R-Gage" down in disgust and walk away long before any carpal tunnel hads a chance to develop.
Setp 1: Make rotary dial cell phone.
Step 2: Add games, internet, and email access.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Because everyone is sitting in front of their computer with their IM client of choice.
You gotta pity the guys over at SOE... WoW having so many players that their servers overflow, while many EQ II servers are still ghost towns in most areas... also, I would guess that EQ II servers have a higher load/client ratio since EQ II is a much more hardware intensive game than WoW, most notably in terms of graphical stress on your PC's video card.
:)
Don't worry, SOE, will still love ya... and thats why we haven't Slashdotted you and crashed your servers
Lance Bass fell into legal trouble with the Russians from whom he recieved expensive Cosmunaut training in preparation for a flight that *never happened*. Also, two or three customers is never enough to support a commercial enterprise that is doomed to failure, whether it be condemned by a shoddy product (ex. the N-Gage) or lack of public interest (ex. EQ II getting wiped by WoW, despite EQ II having better... never mind, I don't need to go off topic and get flamed to death :)
I never said IE was better than Netscape, I just said that IE had bad legacy code issues... but yeah, had Netsacpe not been stomped out by Bill & Co., it would doubtlessly be the browser that we'd be using to browse /. at this very moment. Because if IE hadn't killed of Netscape, there'd have been no reason to have a Firefox in the first place ;)
I have listened to a member IE dev team about the IE source, and he was very friendly and talked to me about the fact that most of IE's current problems stem from legacy code from when IE and all browsers were new and inexperienced. As people on the IE dev team have come and gone, parts of the code have been forgotten as to their original intentions and how they work with other segments/modules. Trust me, the IE source code is huge and confusing, and it wouldn't be fair to blame the current dev team on mistakes made by dev teams of the past. All of this information was provided to me by a credible source, and if you doubt its validity... well, I have no way to verify the information, since its about MS's intillectual property :)
The linked article mentioned the "rebel billionaire" buying a new fleet of SpaceShipTwos for commercial trips to the upper stratosphere and back, which in my opinion is a prety foolish way for him to waste his accquired wealth. Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down. There are easier and cheaper ways to obtain the thrills of floating in null-g that have been around for years, and not many people have expressed much interest in those, so why would anyone feel differently about the SpaceShipTwos? Don't get me wrong, I am excited about SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize (which it won), I just don't feel that this would be the correct application of the current technology.
I want to hear everyones' thoughts... please post comments!
Nah, no flaming on Slashdot, some of us are actually caring and considerate people :)
Yes, I recognize what you say and I know it to be true. I am still just a lowly comp sci student who has had minimal coding experince on a large scale, but I do know that XML is a pain and that my C/C++/Python apps run *way* faster than their Java equivalents... my programs generally aren't too challenging to debug, but I guess a thousand-line app would be pretty impossible to debug using a language such as C. However, I do believe that if you are taught C early on in your education, any object-oriented language that you learn later (such as C++ or Java) will be a breeze.
People need to go back to using lower-level assembler code and other such near-machine-code basic (but not BASIC basic) languages and master those before they try to create a whole bevy of new languages that are so far removed from the binary that it takes the computer 5 minutes just to render "Hello World" in a pretty-looking XML formatted stlye. C, in particular, has been abandoned by many teaching institutions, including my own (we learned JKarel using Java). This is a dangerous trend that teachers bad programming habits and needs to be stopped before it becomes widespread.
I myself use both Linux and Windows XP on a regular basis, and so speaking from experience I would agree that the Windows XP GUI is very childish looking and that the Linux GUI looks much smarter and handles much more efficiently.
However, most people who look at XP see something new and visually appealing (at least at first), and the same people who look at Gnome or Fluxbox see something that looks similar to older/recent versions of MacOS (OSX is awesome but we wont go into that at this time). Also, I know that there are many different window managers out there with different graphical styles, and you all know that too, as evidenced by your posts, but the general consumer doesn't know what we know and Microsoft and others want to keep it that way.
Again, I use both XP/Linux and IMHO Li ux is vastly preferreable to XP, but this is just my opinion and I'm not trying to force it upon anybody.
Yes, it does look much better than the previous release, but it still doesn't look as snazzy or as futuristic as XP, and unfortuanately for all of those Linux user out there, the common non-tech-savvy person often will choose a version of Windows over a distro of Linux simply because XP just looks nicer and easier to use. I won't get into an argument of which OS is better over the other since I don't want to get flamed to death, but I do think that how nice the GUI looks is (sadly) a big factor as to whether or not Joe User from Suburbia USA will pick one OS over the other for his day-to-day Net surfing, gaming, emailing, or whatever.
Most people out there will end up judging a book by its cover if they can't figure out whats actually inside.
Well, don't worry everyone, I am sure that ActiveX isn't nearly as bad as Brian described it... after all, it's just another fine Microsoft product. Plus, since it's closed source, none of those mean nasty hackers will be able to open it up and use it to blow up your computer....right? What, you mean that isn't true?!? Closed source is insecure?!? And Bill Gates isn't a supporter of free net culture deep down inside?
:)
The truth can be a bitter pill to swallow...
I myself own one of the more recently manufactured TI-84s, and I notice that it is the only TI graphing calculator not listed on this fellow's site of otherwise great technical suggestions....
I would also be quick to remind everyone that http://www.ticalc.org/ has an extensive library of TI apps as well as links to other calc sites with more detailed overclocking hints and instructions.
I think that what the industry should focus on in this point in time should be the miniturization of such memory storage devices so as to fit them into smaller devices such as cell phones, PocketPCs (ugh), etc... most of the technology is already out there, it just hasn't been utilized to its full potential on a widespread commercial level. The most notable exception that comes to mind would be Apple, with their 40gb iPod.... if only we had as much storage on our Palms as well!
...how could economists create a truly accurate model of people's feelings towards, for example, changes in the USA's federal reserve interest rates, without having to take costly (and time-consuming) scans of large portions of the population? All people are different in their reactions to economic change, and I think that it would be therefore impossbile to create an accurate analysis of such a large group of individuals such as a the national US population.
The same basic flaw exsists in national surveys and all methods of statistical analysis: your results may end up close to the actual figures for which you search, but the reults will never be 100% on point, adn when you're talking about matters dealing with a nation's economy, you need accurate and detailed information so that you don't make mistakes which may influence the lives of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people.
Just my 2c, take/leave whatever you want.
Edit:Anonymous Coward would be *an appropriate desgination. Sure, my spelling is bad, but it's not as bad as knowing that people are out there who use the Internet as an anonymous forum for thoughtless flamings and verbal assaults.
For all those interested in free online FPS's, there is a free game similar to Counter-Strike called "Americas Army: Special Forces" which is put out as a srecruiting tool by the US military, and can be downloaded here: http://www.americasarmy.com/
AA:SF is great fun, and Linux and Mac clients are on the official site as well. The graphical quality on most missions is not as good as HL2, but still decent nonetheless.