"If they don't offer Opteron servers (especially now that the dual-cores are coming out), they're going to take a nasty hit to their server sales."
Server sales to whom? All those IT shops out there where the sysadmins decide what hardware to buy based on performance reviews they read on the web? Big IT decisions regarding vendors aren't made by people who give a damn about the nerd cred of running customized open-source apps on kewl AMD gear, they're made by CTOs and bean counters concerned with getting low prices and support contracts. Unless Gartner, Oracle, and Microsoft partner up on a series of high-profile reports about dual-core Opteron chips offering signifigant cost/performance savings over Dell's intel servers, Dell is still going to be the king of the x86 server world.
Re:They just want better pricing from Intel
on
Dell Might do AMD
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· Score: 1
Agreed. I was planning to post the same thing, but not need to get redundant.
Did anyone really expect this to work out well? I personally expected any future guide movies to be horrid as soon as I found out Adams had died. Why should anyone expected an American movie industry that has taken comedy into the bowels of sophomoric garbage to do anything good with a decades-old witty British novel?
Last year's big indie comedy based on a book fashioned after a teen road-trip sex comedy, with middle-aged actors and a lot of pretentious wine references, but there was nothing intellectual about it. Expecting Hollywood to risk releasing a big-budget movie targeted at the high-IQ crowd is moronic at this point.
On the upside, at least Hollywood can only keep up this trend a few more years before they have to come up a new trend - let's just hope that this time it isn't yet another lowering of standards. Going from disaster movies to an endless string of sexual and scatalogical jokes was pretty awful, so maybe we can expect redemption if the rest of Hollywood decides to follow the lead of Peter Jackson in doing movies that don't aim for idiocy.
IMHO, Blizzard's biggest problem that will lead to subscription losses is simply having too many customers. Blizz has stated on more than once occasion that they never expected WoW to do as well as it did in any market. Now, four months after launch, Blizz is faced with several time the number of players they were planning to have racked up in the first year. Instead of having a host of casual RPG players sitting around waiting for typical Blizzard PVP stuff, Blizzard has a huge variety of players clamoring for different kinds of action, and almost no hope of keeping them all happy. The best thing for Blizzard to do now is just make the best game they can with whatever staff they have, see what part of the player base is retained after a few months, and then consider changes to the development plan if they still have millions of players worldwide.
1. The most important part is to hire a *good* web designer who can design a web site that does a good job promoting the band and not the designer. Too many bands have web sites that do more to promote the designer's ability to do inane things with flash and not the band.
2. If you're going to give your music away, just put it on your web site. Don't waste time with P2P stuff - the only people who use P2P for music are pirates and stoners swapping Phish shows. If you want to sell music online, just use iTunes - setting up your own system won't likely be worth the bother.
Maybe the folks at Vivendi are experiencing the same problem that EA identified earlier in the week - World of Warcraft is so damned popular that it wrecked everyone else's holiday sales, and is continuing to hold the interest of gamers, who continue to not buy new games. VU is certainly no stranger to this problem - Starcraft and Half-Life (Well, Countrstrike anyway), both VU distributed titles, have been biting into sales for years. Everquest has also been noted as a title that eats away at the market for years.
Perhaps the reason VU is pushing WoW so hard, both in the US and internationally, while cutting funds to other games, is that the execs have realized that VUs most successful games will continue to cannibalize other game sales, so it's better to just push on with a guaranteed cash cow.
Debian leaders once again went out and pretended that their distro is still relevant. "All we have to do is keep the/. editors happy - as long as those guys have a hard-on for Debian we'll be able to keep acting relevant until someone realizes that there aren't any more Debian users as they have all converted to OS X.
How about designing games with large amounts of detailed, high-definition content is a lot more expensive then it was in the days when textures and models just couldn't be very detailed? Or the added cost of developing, testing, and supporting online multiplayer content? Not to mention that American corporations now have to actually make money instead of just cooking their books and going into stupid amounts of debt to keep the SEC off their backs. And don't forget payouts to superstar developers, movies, sports franchises/organizations, etc. that eat into game profits.
Gamers demand more, the games are going to cost more. That's life.
"If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand."
Who exactly would be supporting it? Spend some time rooting through the thousands of F/OSS projects that haven't been updated in years and you'll realize that F/OSS != supported, unless the customer plans to do the support himself by hiring programmers to keep it going, which is not something most VB customers are going to bother with.
If a commercial software vendor doesn't support linux people bitch. If a commercial software vendor does support it people bitch that the software isn't GPL. If the software gets GPL'd, people bitch that it hasn't been ported to their distros of choice.
And then the linux community wonders why so few companies bother to code for linux.
Why not OpenOffice? How about because lawyers need a Word Processor with features designed for them, and not one with features added in because some guy wrote the code and uploaded it?
OpenOffice is bloatware, and lawyers get paid WAY too much money for them to have to spend time learning to navigate around all of cruft that has accumulated over the years.
Will OpenOffice 2.0 be less of a pig? I'm being serious here - ever since StarOffice 5.1 it's been getting bigger and slower, sort of like Mozilla did. Is there any attempt underway to "Firefox" OpenOffice into something a lot less bloated?
The reason people constantly point out problems like this is that they just keep happening in US Aerospace programs. Regardless of government agency, if you want to do anything with space in the US government, you're going to have to deal with once of a few contractors. These contractors have screwed up stuff like this dozens of times in the history of our space program, and the government keeps giving them more contracts, and never demands recompense for screwups that range from miscalibrations that can be dealt with to screwed up launch vehicles blowing up on the launchpad and taking payloads out in the process; in the former case it was an NRO satellite and the NRO hired the guy who had been running the program at Lockheed after Lockheed threw him out.
When companies like Lockheed Martin finally have to start paying for all of their multi-billion dollar screwups in space, then this stuff will stop happening. Until then, people will continue to make a fuss because we're sick of a corrupt system allowing this crap to continue.
Now I don't feel so bad about losing my phone yesterday. Of course, it will be a year before a US phone company offers one of these, and they'll disable all the native music software in place of software with a crap interface that runs splash screens every time it loads and uses airtime for *everything* but... um...
If you spend more time being pissed off about your job, or wishing you were doing another job, it's time to go find a new job. When an employer announces changes that will put you in such a position and you can quit on the spot without having to worry about ending up broke then do so.
Up until December I was a very well-paid and very sought-after UNIX administrator working as a contractor for various 3 letter agencies in the US. After spending most of the previous two years sitting on my ass waiting for inept managers to stop holding pointless meetings and actually give me some work to do that didn't involve something screwed up by clueless admins/DBAs I walked away from the entire career.
Now I'm in my freshman year of art school. It isn't going smoothly, the money situation scares the crap out of me, and I have no idea where it will work out. But today I stopped and reminded myself where I was a year before, smiled, and realized how glad I am that I walked away from a field only a devoted masochist could love.
I've never been more productive than I have since I switched from Linux to OS X. I never have to mess with any configuration for the OS and included apps. Keyboard shortcuts, menu options, buttons, and the terminal give me the option to do things the fastest way I feel like at any given moment. Add in the huge amount of free/open-source software available saving me from actually having to go out and buy software and there just isn't any better OS option.
TiVo has a market cap of $300 million, so buying TiVo outright would cost Apple a little more than that, along with a few million dollars in merger-related legal fees. Given that Apple seems to like adopting open-source projects for use as components of OS X, doesn't it seem like Apple would be better off to just spend a few million dollars picking up existing open-source PVR code, porting it to OS X, and adding a slick GUI? It would be a great way to push iMac Mini sales, and most buyers would likely pick up an Airport express card to go with it since few of us have CAT5 running to the entertainment center. Apple would probably be able to then offer the service for free, or at least at a very low cost, and integrate it into.Mac to encourage more people to pay for.Mac.
Doing any or all of the above would cost many times less than buying TiVo, and Apple would be able to spend all of the extra money on marketing.
ICANN doesn't do a bad enough job - so let's hand control over to a group of bickering diplomats dominated by five allies with different interests who each have the power to veto anything that they feel like. How is that a good idea? Anyone who thinks that giving the UN control over ANYTHING, in particular any form of commerce, is a fool at best.
"The US R&D expenditure is bigger than the next five countries put together, and India is nowhere in the picture."
Dollars spent on R&D per nation is a pretty misleading statistic. China and India have done a great job over the last decade of showing that they can do great R&D for a lot less money than the USA. The USA, on the other hand, has shown that when a bloated bureacray wraps everything in red tape and allows contractors to get away with numerous multi-billion-dollar failures without penalty, things go right down the tubes. As long as India doesn't flush money down the toilet by giving R&D contracts to companies like Lockheed Martin, it will never need to spend remotely near what the US does to get better results.
There's a simple rule of thumb to follow when it comes to games released from Mid-November through the third week of December - unless you have already played it enough to know damned well that the game is done and good, don't buy it, because it was probably rushed to pick up holiday sales. The best example that comes to mind is Gran Turismo 2, which had to be recalled because unfinished features (Such as a drag racing mode) described in the manual and advertisements had to be dropped at the last minute to get the game out.
Somehow I get the feeling that Steve would have been more positive about this if XM had been knocking on his door and not Sirius. The biggest problem with Sirius is that is has a terrible signal -- on my last two vacations we rented cars with Sirius systems, and were regularly frustrated by not getting a signal when driving in forests, under light cloud cover, fog around the San Francisco bay, or clear skys in Napa Valley. XM radio on the other hand, has an excellent signal - I have used it inside of brick buildings with no trouble.
The only thing Sirius has going for it is Howard Stern, who won't be on for a few years yet. They had better launch a decent satellite first, or all he'll talk about for the length of his contract is how much Sirius sucks.
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"If they don't offer Opteron servers (especially now that the dual-cores are coming out), they're going to take a nasty hit to their server sales."
Server sales to whom? All those IT shops out there where the sysadmins decide what hardware to buy based on performance reviews they read on the web? Big IT decisions regarding vendors aren't made by people who give a damn about the nerd cred of running customized open-source apps on kewl AMD gear, they're made by CTOs and bean counters concerned with getting low prices and support contracts. Unless Gartner, Oracle, and Microsoft partner up on a series of high-profile reports about dual-core Opteron chips offering signifigant cost/performance savings over Dell's intel servers, Dell is still going to be the king of the x86 server world.
Agreed. I was planning to post the same thing, but not need to get redundant.
Did anyone really expect this to work out well? I personally expected any future guide movies to be horrid as soon as I found out Adams had died. Why should anyone expected an American movie industry that has taken comedy into the bowels of sophomoric garbage to do anything good with a decades-old witty British novel?
Last year's big indie comedy based on a book fashioned after a teen road-trip sex comedy, with middle-aged actors and a lot of pretentious wine references, but there was nothing intellectual about it. Expecting Hollywood to risk releasing a big-budget movie targeted at the high-IQ crowd is moronic at this point.
On the upside, at least Hollywood can only keep up this trend a few more years before they have to come up a new trend - let's just hope that this time it isn't yet another lowering of standards. Going from disaster movies to an endless string of sexual and scatalogical jokes was pretty awful, so maybe we can expect redemption if the rest of Hollywood decides to follow the lead of Peter Jackson in doing movies that don't aim for idiocy.
Leases are 99% about tax tricks. The person to talk to is your accountant.
IMHO, Blizzard's biggest problem that will lead to subscription losses is simply having too many customers. Blizz has stated on more than once occasion that they never expected WoW to do as well as it did in any market. Now, four months after launch, Blizz is faced with several time the number of players they were planning to have racked up in the first year. Instead of having a host of casual RPG players sitting around waiting for typical Blizzard PVP stuff, Blizzard has a huge variety of players clamoring for different kinds of action, and almost no hope of keeping them all happy. The best thing for Blizzard to do now is just make the best game they can with whatever staff they have, see what part of the player base is retained after a few months, and then consider changes to the development plan if they still have millions of players worldwide.
1. The most important part is to hire a *good* web designer who can design a web site that does a good job promoting the band and not the designer. Too many bands have web sites that do more to promote the designer's ability to do inane things with flash and not the band.
2. If you're going to give your music away, just put it on your web site. Don't waste time with P2P stuff - the only people who use P2P for music are pirates and stoners swapping Phish shows. If you want to sell music online, just use iTunes - setting up your own system won't likely be worth the bother.
Maybe the folks at Vivendi are experiencing the same problem that EA identified earlier in the week - World of Warcraft is so damned popular that it wrecked everyone else's holiday sales, and is continuing to hold the interest of gamers, who continue to not buy new games. VU is certainly no stranger to this problem - Starcraft and Half-Life (Well, Countrstrike anyway), both VU distributed titles, have been biting into sales for years. Everquest has also been noted as a title that eats away at the market for years.
Perhaps the reason VU is pushing WoW so hard, both in the US and internationally, while cutting funds to other games, is that the execs have realized that VUs most successful games will continue to cannibalize other game sales, so it's better to just push on with a guaranteed cash cow.
Debian leaders once again went out and pretended that their distro is still relevant. "All we have to do is keep the /. editors happy - as long as those guys have a hard-on for Debian we'll be able to keep acting relevant until someone realizes that there aren't any more Debian users as they have all converted to OS X.
"Any refutements or evidence in this one?"
How about designing games with large amounts of detailed, high-definition content is a lot more expensive then it was in the days when textures and models just couldn't be very detailed? Or the added cost of developing, testing, and supporting online multiplayer content? Not to mention that American corporations now have to actually make money instead of just cooking their books and going into stupid amounts of debt to keep the SEC off their backs. And don't forget payouts to superstar developers, movies, sports franchises/organizations, etc. that eat into game profits.
Gamers demand more, the games are going to cost more. That's life.
"If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand."
Who exactly would be supporting it? Spend some time rooting through the thousands of F/OSS projects that haven't been updated in years and you'll realize that F/OSS != supported, unless the customer plans to do the support himself by hiring programmers to keep it going, which is not something most VB customers are going to bother with.
If a commercial software vendor doesn't support linux people bitch. If a commercial software vendor does support it people bitch that the software isn't GPL. If the software gets GPL'd, people bitch that it hasn't been ported to their distros of choice.
And then the linux community wonders why so few companies bother to code for linux.
The catch is pretty obvious - keeping budding game developers on Windows.
Why not OpenOffice? How about because lawyers need a Word Processor with features designed for them, and not one with features added in because some guy wrote the code and uploaded it?
OpenOffice is bloatware, and lawyers get paid WAY too much money for them to have to spend time learning to navigate around all of cruft that has accumulated over the years.
Will OpenOffice 2.0 be less of a pig? I'm being serious here - ever since StarOffice 5.1 it's been getting bigger and slower, sort of like Mozilla did. Is there any attempt underway to "Firefox" OpenOffice into something a lot less bloated?
The reason people constantly point out problems like this is that they just keep happening in US Aerospace programs. Regardless of government agency, if you want to do anything with space in the US government, you're going to have to deal with once of a few contractors. These contractors have screwed up stuff like this dozens of times in the history of our space program, and the government keeps giving them more contracts, and never demands recompense for screwups that range from miscalibrations that can be dealt with to screwed up launch vehicles blowing up on the launchpad and taking payloads out in the process; in the former case it was an NRO satellite and the NRO hired the guy who had been running the program at Lockheed after Lockheed threw him out.
When companies like Lockheed Martin finally have to start paying for all of their multi-billion dollar screwups in space, then this stuff will stop happening. Until then, people will continue to make a fuss because we're sick of a corrupt system allowing this crap to continue.
Now I don't feel so bad about losing my phone yesterday. Of course, it will be a year before a US phone company offers one of these, and they'll disable all the native music software in place of software with a crap interface that runs splash screens every time it loads and uses airtime for *everything* but... um...
I hate this country.
If you spend more time being pissed off about your job, or wishing you were doing another job, it's time to go find a new job. When an employer announces changes that will put you in such a position and you can quit on the spot without having to worry about ending up broke then do so.
Up until December I was a very well-paid and very sought-after UNIX administrator working as a contractor for various 3 letter agencies in the US. After spending most of the previous two years sitting on my ass waiting for inept managers to stop holding pointless meetings and actually give me some work to do that didn't involve something screwed up by clueless admins/DBAs I walked away from the entire career.
Now I'm in my freshman year of art school. It isn't going smoothly, the money situation scares the crap out of me, and I have no idea where it will work out. But today I stopped and reminded myself where I was a year before, smiled, and realized how glad I am that I walked away from a field only a devoted masochist could love.
I've never been more productive than I have since I switched from Linux to OS X. I never have to mess with any configuration for the OS and included apps. Keyboard shortcuts, menu options, buttons, and the terminal give me the option to do things the fastest way I feel like at any given moment. Add in the huge amount of free/open-source software available saving me from actually having to go out and buy software and there just isn't any better OS option.
TiVo has a market cap of $300 million, so buying TiVo outright would cost Apple a little more than that, along with a few million dollars in merger-related legal fees. Given that Apple seems to like adopting open-source projects for use as components of OS X, doesn't it seem like Apple would be better off to just spend a few million dollars picking up existing open-source PVR code, porting it to OS X, and adding a slick GUI? It would be a great way to push iMac Mini sales, and most buyers would likely pick up an Airport express card to go with it since few of us have CAT5 running to the entertainment center. Apple would probably be able to then offer the service for free, or at least at a very low cost, and integrate it into .Mac to encourage more people to pay for .Mac.
Doing any or all of the above would cost many times less than buying TiVo, and Apple would be able to spend all of the extra money on marketing.
ICANN doesn't do a bad enough job - so let's hand control over to a group of bickering diplomats dominated by five allies with different interests who each have the power to veto anything that they feel like. How is that a good idea? Anyone who thinks that giving the UN control over ANYTHING, in particular any form of commerce, is a fool at best.
"The US R&D expenditure is bigger than the next five countries put together, and India is nowhere in the picture."
Dollars spent on R&D per nation is a pretty misleading statistic. China and India have done a great job over the last decade of showing that they can do great R&D for a lot less money than the USA. The USA, on the other hand, has shown that when a bloated bureacray wraps everything in red tape and allows contractors to get away with numerous multi-billion-dollar failures without penalty, things go right down the tubes. As long as India doesn't flush money down the toilet by giving R&D contracts to companies like Lockheed Martin, it will never need to spend remotely near what the US does to get better results.
There's a simple rule of thumb to follow when it comes to games released from Mid-November through the third week of December - unless you have already played it enough to know damned well that the game is done and good, don't buy it, because it was probably rushed to pick up holiday sales. The best example that comes to mind is Gran Turismo 2, which had to be recalled because unfinished features (Such as a drag racing mode) described in the manual and advertisements had to be dropped at the last minute to get the game out.
Verizon, MCI, Cingular, T-Mobile, and Virgin all announced plans to disable this feature before selling the phones to customers.
To me this implies that Oracle's competitors are so far behind that Oracle can get away with charging multi-CPU licenses for dual-core chips.
Somehow I get the feeling that Steve would have been more positive about this if XM had been knocking on his door and not Sirius. The biggest problem with Sirius is that is has a terrible signal -- on my last two vacations we rented cars with Sirius systems, and were regularly frustrated by not getting a signal when driving in forests, under light cloud cover, fog around the San Francisco bay, or clear skys in Napa Valley. XM radio on the other hand, has an excellent signal - I have used it inside of brick buildings with no trouble.
The only thing Sirius has going for it is Howard Stern, who won't be on for a few years yet. They had better launch a decent satellite first, or all he'll talk about for the length of his contract is how much Sirius sucks.