He is not saying that Morse code should not be used. Rather that the users should not be required to LEARN morse code. Morse code can remain the encoding for transmission but the device can provide the a less arcane interface like a keyboard and a small display for the operator. Sort of like compilers and machine code these days. Small processors to handle this now cost peanuts unlike back then. Or I don't know what I am talking about. As a kid, 20 years ago, I made a brief attempt to acquire one but never ended up laying my hands on one.
> Unless they're all still in business that's probably 3 failures on record.
Why? Do companies have to run forever? He founded InfoSeek. It ran well enough in the 90s. Disney bought it.
> But he got out before the ship sank and with a bundle of cash too. I wonder what his ex-employees got...
Again, does it mean that every entrepreneur be considered sly if he sold his company on a good bid?
> How philosophical...So he's going to cure himself single handedly of a rare disease in 4 years, because medical research is as easy (and cheap) as writing software or tinkering with a home engineering project. I think he's been watching Crusade and sniffing glue.
Sure. He may not be able to get through it. But can't a man with terminal illness be irrationally optimistic (at least, as long as he remains asymptomatic)? What do you think he ought to say?
>> Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years. > Don't even know where to start on this one.
Homepage: http://www.skirsch.com/ His argument: http://www.skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/Extinction.htm I am not equipped to evaluate it but he is putting his money where his mouth is. Like you, I don't accept that statement. But then again he need not be right on everything and I need not make sweeping judgments on him based on his few beliefs. Just like you and me, he puts many of his opinions on the web. Some of them will be out of expertise, and others out of emotion. That's all OK since he is not selling anything based on that.
Information Retrieval research community works on spam problems. They have research tracks on it. I don't know about this guy but he has enough presence in the community to be a keynote in one of their conferences. I also consequently expect him to know the body of research already available on it.
His solution may or may not work. But what he certainly is not is a crackpot or a snake-oil salesman you interpret him as.
First, are you certain that your lead copied from the said web site? It could also be that they both copied from a common source, hopefully in public domain. Although you probably have other context information to judge that, your post itself does not address that possibility.
I recall a similar argument in the SCO case where the code they claimed infringed was available as public domain in a text book.
It allows off-line use for one thing. They will be releasing an MS Office plugin soon. This is a big deal for me. I would like to access my documents from anywhere but I also like the richness of desktop tools. Google talked about it but nothing concrete so far as I know.
A killer app is what makes people who would not other wise buy a console, buy it. That in turn opens up a wide install base so that other game developers can take advantage. When a console is selling at the rate of Wii (not to mention its low price which does not require big justifications), it is a moot point. It just needs to be a console that has a little something for everyone, which it already seems to be doing. Naturally, when that happens, not everyone gets spades of what they like in the beginning. This is unlike other consoles which have a more focussed audience.
> Swing is actually a really freakin' awesome toolkit for creating the building blocks of a GUI and for creating new components. It's just really bad at being an application GUI since your application code is running in the same mix as all the little details of a component.
This is unfortunately true of all of Java. At one end it tried to provide a low level virtual "machine" and the framework accordingly, and at the same time pretends to be a business class, high level framework. Likewise, the language is fine as a base but unsuitable for productivity. Java language (as opposed to the VM and the framework) should take a backseat similar to how C is regarded everywhere else. It should be a language for the tools, for performance and to provide a standard interface (cf: C data types and the OOP flavor in this case) and then step out of the way. JVM languages should respect this interface but take over what exactly goes on in the methods. Much of this has already been realized in made-for-JVM languages such as Groovy. They just need to get the same love from Sun.
Java badly needs a REAL framework on top of the present API that can provide productivity in level with Delphi and.NET. I don't mean something along the lines of Swing Application Framework. A proper framework should be flexible and yet simple enough for a VB developer to pick it up in a weekend. Delphi's VCL fits this bill well. With respect to framework design in terms of developer usability, Java has been a step backwards from what was available in 1996. Of course, there are a lot of nice things about Java when compared to the tools then but the disadvantages seem unwarranted.
> Unless Japan can increase the birth rate, they will diminish.
You are only looking at the growth rates (or the lack of). The actual numbers tell a different story. Japan still has 10 times the population density than US and ranks 23 overall and still has over-crowded cities. They import a lot of their food. Coming from a similarly over-populated country, I would see that as progress with them moving to a number more reasonable for their land to support. Granted, it will effect the economy negatively for a while.
> How's its support for non standard frameworks though?
Nowhere as good as Eclipse. But then Eclipse is exceptionally good in this respect. Netbeans position is not bad compared to IDEs other than Eclipse.
> Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.
There is a Spring plugin for Netbeans but it is not anywhere close to the feature set of the standard plugin.
> Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot:-)
You are not. That's the whole reason for having projects like EasyEclipse and commercial offerings such as MyEclipseIDE. Callisto and Europa distributions solved some problems but not all. Hopefully it will mature in this direction in the future.
Use whatever works for you. You can use them both in the same project if you partition your code with this goal. Besides, they are both free. But in your case, Netbeans may not have much to offer as it did for me.
> runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.
While Netbeans is not winning any performance awards, its performance is quite acceptable. I upgraded my processor only because I was unhappy with Netbeans performance. But mine should still be 3 times slower than a Q6600 and I think the performance is OK now. Perhaps there is something wrong with your VM memory settings or such?
> I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell.
The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. Swing and J2EE tools are still ahead of Eclipse offerings. If you can, use both. But if you are using a code only app such as your JOGL project, Netbeans does not offer a whole lot.
> Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.
Netbeans is catching up with all that and exposes a rich client framework just like Eclipse.
How so? The covenant were some of the most enjoyable enemies to fight. I came to console games after I decided that I played too many FPS, RTS games and wanted to try different genres. Halo is the only shooter I enjoyed on the console since and I probably played it more than any other single shooter on the PC.
I think Halo has fantastic replay value in Solo alone. It can get quite addictive if you give it a chance. I think the constant weapon switching and duck for shield recharging mechanic keeps a player quite well engaged than the shooters before it. The AI enemies have much more distinct combat personalities too. Halo looks "sub par" to you only because, they focussed on gameplay. Halo 3 was very well funded and took enough time. They certainly did not lack the skill or money to produce better textures.
> the story even more contrived than usual
Somehow, contrived stories are common in "Sagas". Take Soul Reaver series for instance.
> the graphics always sub-par
But always very acceptable at the time of release. Don't we see good gameplay past the graphics.
> It's a simple trend of console kiddies having never seen or played a truly polished FPS before.
Turns out that Halo is the official game of my gym class (everyone over 27). Everyone with an XBox plays Halo and almost nothing else on it. We don't play online. But 4 player death matches are a norm at our socials.
How about the USPTO is held culpable every time a law suit finds prior art and expect them to reimburse the legal fee. After all, they did not do the job and the outcome was predictable. That should make them less enthusiastic about dishing them out for profit.
> This is a piece of backlash that should have happened when XP replaced Win2K. Seriously, what did XP add that Win2K didn't have
It's more important a question now since this is a new release after 5 years. XP and Win2K were 18 months apart. For 18 months, XP had enough enhancements.
> Obviously, you are not in sales then. Every CEO I have ever met, every really successful sales guy I ever met, says that over and over and over, that cost and value are two entirely different things. How much you charge for something has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs. If you can get a markup of %200, then go for it, because, its the value that you bring to the client, if they are willing to fork over that money.
Perhaps, I was not clear in that short sentence. There, I was referring to cost to the consumer, not cost to manufacture (which I did later on).
> I personally don't think Linux has -everything- a regular user would need, but, I do also think that you are vastly understating the value of that Linux distribution.
I wasn't trying to provide a comprehensive list of everything one gets from a distro.
> Linux adds thousands of dollars in value to a PC.
Sure. Especially depending on who is using it.
> C# crushes Java hands down, and Visual Studio is the best IDE out there period for desktop forms development, and is pretty damned good for web development as well. I'd take C#/VS2007 over Eclipse/Java any day of the week.
C#,.NET and VS are better designed for sure. But crushes Java hands down? I am not so sure about that. This is coming from someone who hated Java design passionately till recently. Just this weekend, I reviewed the popular UI toolkits (Swing, WinForms, VCL/VCL.NET) with proper IDE support for rapid development of a UI prototype where I will need to experiment with a lot of interactions for a single task. I finally decided that for this particular project, C#, WinForms and VS did indeed provide the best development experience. The final deliverable may not end up in.NET but the prototype will. That said, the difference is not "crushing" as you say from my view point. MS tools are more intuitive and seem to have under gone more usability testing. However, the alternatives offer other advantages and more choices through more mature and passionate communities. I usually tend to use multiple dev platforms in the same project to take advantage of each tool/community strength.
Anyone without a challenge will not grow. Java is getting better because of.NET. And I would like MS to be better because of Linux just like IE is getting better because of FireFox.
> WTL is a better app framework than anything in the Linux world.
If you compare to MFC, sure. WTL is not even good compared to VCL (available for Borland C++ Builder although not written in C++). For native applications, there just isn't a better framework than VCL. A good part of it has cross platform implementation both by Borland and by community.
> It's not like when Standard Oil used to go around and blow up the oil refineries of its competitors, or buy up all the rail access to a rival oil field.
That's a wee bit more than monopoly, don't you think? There are criminal laws to address that.
> Has anyone read the SDK for what the Vista API... Plus, there's a lot of stuff in there to support threadpools, kernel queues, all of which Linux still lacks.. You need to really look at the SDK documentation changes for Vista to see where 6 billion went
Glad to hear that. No, I did not look at the SDK yet.
> Ah, but what's the proportional value of the software? See, you need to think more like a salesperson. Cost is irrelevant. It's the value that is added. And, look at all the value Windows adds to a PC.
First, cost is not irrelevant. Value is important. Granted, Windows comes with a certain unique feature set. But seriously, you are not comparing that value to a Linux desktop distro that has just about every software a regular user would need? The pieces that are missing are mostly because there is a monopoly OS out there (Third party proprietary software, driver, formats).
a) You have Direct X 10, for games. And, there are a ton of games for Windows.
Hard to argue. But without the monopoly status, DirectX cannot maintain as much lead. It still is better than OpenGL alternatives though.
b) You.NET, for business applications development
Not compelling. Too many other alternatives now.
c) You have a pretty good web browser. Yeah, IE has its flaws, but it works pretty good for most people. That is, I can go to the baseball site, get the scores, and it works.
Every desktop OS now comes with an browser. IE works for most people because that is all they know. Once they understand taking advantage of FireFox plugins, they never go back. That has been the case with every IE user who has watched me use my browser more than a few minutes.
d) You have interfaces to a whole bunch of consumer appliances, from digital cameras and video players, and more.
So do Linux distros. Windows market status attracts driver support from appliance makers, but not as much of an advantage of the software architecture per se.
e) Vista has a really cool sound model that I am eager to play with.
I don't know much about it. I will skip that.
f) Unicode (UTF-16) is built in from the ground up. NTFS stacks up well against Reiser and ExtN for most applications. Remote Desktop and Terminal Services for Windows work really well...
Don't know about UTF-16 enhancements. RDP is a good but remoting X and Linux Terminal Server work quite well too. Don't forget though that to have these features you have to pay quite a bit more too. Sure, but NTFS is good enough. But good enough is not what we are talking about. We are talking about what they offer to justify 95% market share and making computers cost significantly higher when they barely manage to go up against free alternatives. I expect 6 billion in productions costs to do a lot more.
And this is not a new argument. This has all played out before. When IE won the browser wars, MS froze all further development on it (the team was disbanded as I recall), after all it made no business sense to spend any more money on it. The only reason that we even have an updated IE7 is because of FireFox. That is the price of a monopoly.
> There's absolutely no reason a consumer could not benefit from that offering, and its not Microsoft's fault.
Did you read that article at all? It says, the proportional cost of bundled software climbed from 5% to 50%. How is the consumer benefiting? Windows would cost a lot less with competition and they would make software a lot more efficiently too. Last I heard, they spent 6 years and 6 billions on Vista... for what?
> it's much easier to do clean my kid's room than to get the kid to clean it.
Not a good analogy. "Clean" is a concept that all can easily appreciate and agree. Some, including the said kid may not care much for it but recognize it nevertheless.
It's not as if there is only one religion either. Now choose your concept of "clean". Trick is, one clean is unclean from another clean's perspective.
> Running any current game on a PC requires relatively high-end hardware which means that consumers have to continue to invest more money for upgrades to continue buying new games. I'm ignoring those that restrict themselves to older releases who can stay with the same hardware for longer.
I find PC gaming a lot cheaper but then again I fall into the category you ignore. I don't buy a PC for games. I buy it for my work. I do need/fancy a decent one. I don't factor the basic PC price into cost of gaming. A reasonable graphics card is only $80-$150 to run current games on a very decent 19 inch monitor. My last $60 card (rebates) gave me a mileage of 2 years forward on a 17 inch monitor.
Does console gaming really end up cheaper? At $500 a console and $10 extra per game - it is cheaper for me to buy PC games. Also, I stick to older games. The purchases are usually classics and inexpensive too. I do have a couple of last gen consoles that I bought used. Now there are enough good games for them that don't charge a premium price. This makes more sense for me since I am more of a casual gamer who likes to explore several games than commit to any single one.
I have not gotten Skype-In (or kept rather) for precisely that reason (proprietary). I currently use Gizmo. But I am not very happy with it. I had a few problems too. They had been slow to respond to my problems by email. But when they did, they gave a fair compensation. I am not happy with the call quality at times. But it has likely to do with the carriers handling my calls than Gizmo itself. I talked my neighbor into getting Gizmo as well and he is quite happy about it. So your mileage may vary.
As for Gizmo, get a short account and give it a whirl. It is not that expensive. I am happier with the quality of Skype out and otherwise (Skype to Skype) use it for talking to family overseas. There are other SIP providers such as OpenWengo. I may try them. If all else fails, I will move to Skype.
It would be curious to see if these journalists are actually gamers themselves. These sound more like culture shocks than anything else. Journalists don't need to be experts in every fields they write about. But I do expect them to be quite well informed for very widespread phenomena such as gaming. It would be silly like expecting someone who knows nothing about about football covering a game.
Not Halo 3. You can wreck mayhem as the alien as well as human. And flood is not a very race based society. They are pluralistic and open minded. They subsume any race.
Re:screw games anyway
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> i'll probably check out grand theft auto 4. i think i'm too old for this sh1t
What are you trying to do? Establish your adulthood for the rest of us? On Slashdot?
> I like Perl. Is there a tool that converts Python scripts to Perl, or compiles them into the opcodes that Perl's interpreter actually executes? That could let Python scripts run on lots of other machines, possibly avoiding all those architecture limitations that the Perl engine has already solved.
There are plenty of ways to make Python and Perl talk to each other but there is NO tool that compiles either to each others byte code directly. You can embed the interpreters of each other. Inline::Python and PyPerl come to mind, not including cross language communication as in COM, CORBA etc. Of course, this means that you will still need to use the other interpreter but you could distribute that yourself. But all that is often not worth it for some minute advantages that are gained except as an interim solution.
Slashdot Mirror
He is not saying that Morse code should not be used. Rather that the users should not be required to LEARN morse code. Morse code can remain the encoding for transmission but the device can provide the a less arcane interface like a keyboard and a small display for the operator. Sort of like compilers and machine code these days. Small processors to handle this now cost peanuts unlike back then. Or I don't know what I am talking about. As a kid, 20 years ago, I made a brief attempt to acquire one but never ended up laying my hands on one.
> Unless they're all still in business that's probably 3 failures on record.
Why? Do companies have to run forever? He founded InfoSeek. It ran well enough in the 90s. Disney bought it.
> But he got out before the ship sank and with a bundle of cash too. I wonder what his ex-employees got...
Again, does it mean that every entrepreneur be considered sly if he sold his company on a good bid?
> How philosophical...So he's going to cure himself single handedly of a rare disease in 4 years, because medical research is as easy (and cheap) as writing software or tinkering with a home engineering project. I think he's been watching Crusade and sniffing glue.
Sure. He may not be able to get through it. But can't a man with terminal illness be irrationally optimistic (at least, as long as he remains asymptomatic)? What do you think he ought to say?
>> Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years.
> Don't even know where to start on this one.
Homepage: http://www.skirsch.com/
His argument: http://www.skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/Extinction.htm
I am not equipped to evaluate it but he is putting his money where his mouth is. Like you, I don't accept that statement. But then again he need not be right on everything and I need not make sweeping judgments on him based on his few beliefs. Just like you and me, he puts many of his opinions on the web. Some of them will be out of expertise, and others out of emotion. That's all OK since he is not selling anything based on that.
Information Retrieval research community works on spam problems. They have research tracks on it. I don't know about this guy but he has enough presence in the community to be a keynote in one of their conferences. I also consequently expect him to know the body of research already available on it.
His solution may or may not work. But what he certainly is not is a crackpot or a snake-oil salesman you interpret him as.
First, are you certain that your lead copied from the said web site? It could also be that they both copied from a common source, hopefully in public domain. Although you probably have other context information to judge that, your post itself does not address that possibility.
I recall a similar argument in the SCO case where the code they claimed infringed was available as public domain in a text book.
> And how is that different from Google Docs
It allows off-line use for one thing. They will be releasing an MS Office plugin soon. This is a big deal for me. I would like to access my documents from anywhere but I also like the richness of desktop tools. Google talked about it but nothing concrete so far as I know.
A killer app is what makes people who would not other wise buy a console, buy it. That in turn opens up a wide install base so that other game developers can take advantage. When a console is selling at the rate of Wii (not to mention its low price which does not require big justifications), it is a moot point. It just needs to be a console that has a little something for everyone, which it already seems to be doing. Naturally, when that happens, not everyone gets spades of what they like in the beginning. This is unlike other consoles which have a more focussed audience.
> Swing is actually a really freakin' awesome toolkit for creating the building blocks of a GUI and for creating new components. It's just really bad at being an application GUI since your application code is running in the same mix as all the little details of a component.
.NET. I don't mean something along the lines of Swing Application Framework. A proper framework should be flexible and yet simple enough for a VB developer to pick it up in a weekend. Delphi's VCL fits this bill well. With respect to framework design in terms of developer usability, Java has been a step backwards from what was available in 1996. Of course, there are a lot of nice things about Java when compared to the tools then but the disadvantages seem unwarranted.
This is unfortunately true of all of Java. At one end it tried to provide a low level virtual "machine" and the framework accordingly, and at the same time pretends to be a business class, high level framework. Likewise, the language is fine as a base but unsuitable for productivity. Java language (as opposed to the VM and the framework) should take a backseat similar to how C is regarded everywhere else. It should be a language for the tools, for performance and to provide a standard interface (cf: C data types and the OOP flavor in this case) and then step out of the way. JVM languages should respect this interface but take over what exactly goes on in the methods. Much of this has already been realized in made-for-JVM languages such as Groovy. They just need to get the same love from Sun.
Java badly needs a REAL framework on top of the present API that can provide productivity in level with Delphi and
> Unless Japan can increase the birth rate, they will diminish.
You are only looking at the growth rates (or the lack of). The actual numbers tell a different story. Japan still has 10 times the population density than US and ranks 23 overall and still has over-crowded cities. They import a lot of their food. Coming from a similarly over-populated country, I would see that as progress with them moving to a number more reasonable for their land to support. Granted, it will effect the economy negatively for a while.
> How's its support for non standard frameworks though?
:-)
Nowhere as good as Eclipse. But then Eclipse is exceptionally good in this respect. Netbeans position is not bad compared to IDEs other than Eclipse.
> Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.
There is a Spring plugin for Netbeans but it is not anywhere close to the feature set of the standard plugin.
> Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot
You are not. That's the whole reason for having projects like EasyEclipse and commercial offerings such as MyEclipseIDE. Callisto and Europa distributions solved some problems but not all. Hopefully it will mature in this direction in the future.
Use whatever works for you. You can use them both in the same project if you partition your code with this goal. Besides, they are both free. But in your case, Netbeans may not have much to offer as it did for me.
> runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.
While Netbeans is not winning any performance awards, its performance is quite acceptable. I upgraded my processor only because I was unhappy with Netbeans performance. But mine should still be 3 times slower than a Q6600 and I think the performance is OK now. Perhaps there is something wrong with your VM memory settings or such?
> I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell.
The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. Swing and J2EE tools are still ahead of Eclipse offerings. If you can, use both. But if you are using a code only app such as your JOGL project, Netbeans does not offer a whole lot.
> Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.
Netbeans is catching up with all that and exposes a rich client framework just like Eclipse.
> The gameplay is stale
How so? The covenant were some of the most enjoyable enemies to fight. I came to console games after I decided that I played too many FPS, RTS games and wanted to try different genres. Halo is the only shooter I enjoyed on the console since and I probably played it more than any other single shooter on the PC.
I think Halo has fantastic replay value in Solo alone. It can get quite addictive if you give it a chance. I think the constant weapon switching and duck for shield recharging mechanic keeps a player quite well engaged than the shooters before it. The AI enemies have much more distinct combat personalities too. Halo looks "sub par" to you only because, they focussed on gameplay. Halo 3 was very well funded and took enough time. They certainly did not lack the skill or money to produce better textures.
> the story even more contrived than usual
Somehow, contrived stories are common in "Sagas". Take Soul Reaver series for instance.
> the graphics always sub-par
But always very acceptable at the time of release. Don't we see good gameplay past the graphics.
> It's a simple trend of console kiddies having never seen or played a truly polished FPS before.
Turns out that Halo is the official game of my gym class (everyone over 27). Everyone with an XBox plays Halo and almost nothing else on it. We don't play online. But 4 player death matches are a norm at our socials.
How about the USPTO is held culpable every time a law suit finds prior art and expect them to reimburse the legal fee. After all, they did not do the job and the outcome was predictable. That should make them less enthusiastic about dishing them out for profit.
> This is a piece of backlash that should have happened when XP replaced Win2K. Seriously, what did XP add that Win2K didn't have
It's more important a question now since this is a new release after 5 years. XP and Win2K were 18 months apart. For 18 months, XP had enough enhancements.
And here I was, thinking that solving spousal tech problems was a bonding thing.
> Obviously, you are not in sales then. Every CEO I have ever met, every really successful sales guy I ever met, says that over and over and over, that cost and value are two entirely different things. How much you charge for something has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs. If you can get a markup of %200, then go for it, because, its the value that you bring to the client, if they are willing to fork over that money.
.NET and VS are better designed for sure. But crushes Java hands down? I am not so sure about that. This is coming from someone who hated Java design passionately till recently. Just this weekend, I reviewed the popular UI toolkits (Swing, WinForms, VCL/VCL.NET) with proper IDE support for rapid development of a UI prototype where I will need to experiment with a lot of interactions for a single task. I finally decided that for this particular project, C#, WinForms and VS did indeed provide the best development experience. The final deliverable may not end up in .NET but the prototype will. That said, the difference is not "crushing" as you say from my view point. MS tools are more intuitive and seem to have under gone more usability testing. However, the alternatives offer other advantages and more choices through more mature and passionate communities. I usually tend to use multiple dev platforms in the same project to take advantage of each tool/community strength.
.NET. And I would like MS to be better because of Linux just like IE is getting better because of FireFox.
... Plus, there's a lot of stuff in there to support threadpools, kernel queues, all of which Linux still lacks .. You need to really look at the SDK documentation changes for Vista to see where 6 billion went
Perhaps, I was not clear in that short sentence. There, I was referring to cost to the consumer, not cost to manufacture (which I did later on).
> I personally don't think Linux has -everything- a regular user would need, but, I do also think that you are vastly understating the value of that Linux distribution.
I wasn't trying to provide a comprehensive list of everything one gets from a distro.
> Linux adds thousands of dollars in value to a PC.
Sure. Especially depending on who is using it.
> C# crushes Java hands down, and Visual Studio is the best IDE out there period for desktop forms development, and is pretty damned good for web development as well. I'd take C#/VS2007 over Eclipse/Java any day of the week.
C#,
Anyone without a challenge will not grow. Java is getting better because of
> WTL is a better app framework than anything in the Linux world.
If you compare to MFC, sure. WTL is not even good compared to VCL (available for Borland C++ Builder although not written in C++). For native applications, there just isn't a better framework than VCL. A good part of it has cross platform implementation both by Borland and by community.
> It's not like when Standard Oil used to go around and blow up the oil refineries of its competitors, or buy up all the rail access to a rival oil field.
That's a wee bit more than monopoly, don't you think? There are criminal laws to address that.
> Has anyone read the SDK for what the Vista API
Glad to hear that. No, I did not look at the SDK yet.
> Ah, but what's the proportional value of the software? See, you need to think more like a salesperson. Cost is irrelevant. It's the value that is added. And, look at all the value Windows adds to a PC.
.NET, for business applications development
First, cost is not irrelevant. Value is important. Granted, Windows comes with a certain unique feature set. But seriously, you are not comparing that value to a Linux desktop distro that has just about every software a regular user would need? The pieces that are missing are mostly because there is a monopoly OS out there (Third party proprietary software, driver, formats).
a) You have Direct X 10, for games. And, there are a ton of games for Windows.
Hard to argue. But without the monopoly status, DirectX cannot maintain as much lead. It still is better than OpenGL alternatives though.
b) You
Not compelling. Too many other alternatives now.
c) You have a pretty good web browser. Yeah, IE has its flaws, but it works pretty good for most people. That is, I can go to the baseball site, get the scores, and it works.
Every desktop OS now comes with an browser. IE works for most people because that is all they know. Once they understand taking advantage of FireFox plugins, they never go back. That has been the case with every IE user who has watched me use my browser more than a few minutes.
d) You have interfaces to a whole bunch of consumer appliances, from digital cameras and video players, and more.
So do Linux distros. Windows market status attracts driver support from appliance makers, but not as much of an advantage of the software architecture per se.
e) Vista has a really cool sound model that I am eager to play with.
I don't know much about it. I will skip that.
f) Unicode (UTF-16) is built in from the ground up. NTFS stacks up well against Reiser and ExtN for most applications. Remote Desktop and Terminal Services for Windows work really well...
Don't know about UTF-16 enhancements. RDP is a good but remoting X and Linux Terminal Server work quite well too. Don't forget though that to have these features you have to pay quite a bit more too. Sure, but NTFS is good enough. But good enough is not what we are talking about. We are talking about what they offer to justify 95% market share and making computers cost significantly higher when they barely manage to go up against free alternatives. I expect 6 billion in productions costs to do a lot more.
And this is not a new argument. This has all played out before. When IE won the browser wars, MS froze all further development on it (the team was disbanded as I recall), after all it made no business sense to spend any more money on it. The only reason that we even have an updated IE7 is because of FireFox. That is the price of a monopoly.
> There's absolutely no reason a consumer could not benefit from that offering, and its not Microsoft's fault.
... for what?
Did you read that article at all? It says, the proportional cost of bundled software climbed from 5% to 50%. How is the consumer benefiting? Windows would cost a lot less with competition and they would make software a lot more efficiently too. Last I heard, they spent 6 years and 6 billions on Vista
> it's much easier to do clean my kid's room than to get the kid to clean it.
Not a good analogy. "Clean" is a concept that all can easily appreciate and agree. Some, including the said kid may not care much for it but recognize it nevertheless.
It's not as if there is only one religion either. Now choose your concept of "clean". Trick is, one clean is unclean from another clean's perspective.
> Running any current game on a PC requires relatively high-end hardware which means that consumers have to continue to invest more money for upgrades to continue buying new games. I'm ignoring those that restrict themselves to older releases who can stay with the same hardware for longer.
I find PC gaming a lot cheaper but then again I fall into the category you ignore. I don't buy a PC for games. I buy it for my work. I do need/fancy a decent one. I don't factor the basic PC price into cost of gaming. A reasonable graphics card is only $80-$150 to run current games on a very decent 19 inch monitor. My last $60 card (rebates) gave me a mileage of 2 years forward on a 17 inch monitor.
Does console gaming really end up cheaper? At $500 a console and $10 extra per game - it is cheaper for me to buy PC games. Also, I stick to older games. The purchases are usually classics and inexpensive too. I do have a couple of last gen consoles that I bought used. Now there are enough good games for them that don't charge a premium price. This makes more sense for me since I am more of a casual gamer who likes to explore several games than commit to any single one.
Huh? Both Skype and Gizmo list them.
I have not gotten Skype-In (or kept rather) for precisely that reason (proprietary). I currently use Gizmo. But I am not very happy with it. I had a few problems too. They had been slow to respond to my problems by email. But when they did, they gave a fair compensation. I am not happy with the call quality at times. But it has likely to do with the carriers handling my calls than Gizmo itself. I talked my neighbor into getting Gizmo as well and he is quite happy about it. So your mileage may vary.
As for Gizmo, get a short account and give it a whirl. It is not that expensive. I am happier with the quality of Skype out and otherwise (Skype to Skype) use it for talking to family overseas. There are other SIP providers such as OpenWengo. I may try them. If all else fails, I will move to Skype.
It would be curious to see if these journalists are actually gamers themselves. These sound more like culture shocks than anything else. Journalists don't need to be experts in every fields they write about. But I do expect them to be quite well informed for very widespread phenomena such as gaming. It would be silly like expecting someone who knows nothing about about football covering a game.
Not Halo 3. You can wreck mayhem as the alien as well as human. And flood is not a very race based society. They are pluralistic and open minded. They subsume any race.
> i'll probably check out grand theft auto 4. i think i'm too old for this sh1t
What are you trying to do? Establish your adulthood for the rest of us? On Slashdot?
Unfortunately for you, video game playing geeks are actually cool there.
"They shriek and cheer when the two teams walk on stage. In South Korea, pro gaming has attained the status of rock and roll."
> I like Perl. Is there a tool that converts Python scripts to Perl, or compiles them into the opcodes that Perl's interpreter actually executes? That could let Python scripts run on lots of other machines, possibly avoiding all those architecture limitations that the Perl engine has already solved.
There are plenty of ways to make Python and Perl talk to each other but there is NO tool that compiles either to each others byte code directly. You can embed the interpreters of each other. Inline::Python and PyPerl come to mind, not including cross language communication as in COM, CORBA etc. Of course, this means that you will still need to use the other interpreter but you could distribute that yourself. But all that is often not worth it for some minute advantages that are gained except as an interim solution.