I've been thinking that since 1995. I mean look at the huge jump in viruses between DOS and Windows 95.
Wasn't there also a huge jump in the number of users who discovered the Internet around the time that Windows 95 came out? Don't you think that new MSIE users randomly downloading crap off the web might have anything to do with the explosion in number of viruses and trojan horses to infect the average machine, and a couple of years later widespread broadband giving crackers the ability to create botnets?
Nah, it couldn't be that. It could be those eebil virus companies who are the tools of the debil!;)
There is a huge drawback to that line of thinking, however.
Let's consider say, Office suites. It is possible for Microsoft and, say. Softmaker (a non-evil office application company) to both fear OpenOffice.org/Staroffice and Apple's upcoming Office suite. So, they patent a certain new type of office component that does foo. Businesses quickly discover that the new, novel idea of foo is the new mousetrap they have been waiting for in an office suite, and it immediately becomes a de-facto requirement for office suites. Softmaker and Microsoft agree to exclusively cross-license their patents to each other exclusively. No one else will be allowed to license those patents, or the price will be high because it is such a novel innovation. Of course, open source suites wou;d not be able to afford the patent licenses, so they would have to forego the de-facto standard feature that businesses now mandate in their purchase requirements.
It would effectively be legal collusion, bypassing antitrust issues because it would be Constitutional, government-sanctioned enforcement of a monopoly. What could the government do to stop this? They could declare the patent invalid, which is possibly unconstitutional because foo IS so novel and non-obvious, or they could force the company to offer the suite without foo. but aside from home and possibly SOHO customers who would want an office suite without foo? They could "force" the companies to license their patents to others, but even if it were to become an eminent domain issue, the companies would be (rightfully so) entitled to the fair market value for foo.
One game I'd love to see is Hexen III. For the time, the graphics in Hexen II were incredible and the gameplay was great - there was more focus on solving the puzzles (how the heck do I get out of this level) than there was on killing. Sure, there were plenty of monsters to kill but the, er, mazes seemed more intricate in Hexen. I don't recall whether that was just due to the different visuals or if it actually was the case. I've actually been playing the old Id games again in order (Doom, Doom II, Final Doom, Heretic, Hexen, etc) and find Heretic and Hexen more entertaining than Doom.
I know some folks are surprised that S3 is still around, if you read many forums you'll find that people seem to think that there are only two video chip manufacturers still in business anymore. I knew S3 were still around but from my point of view, they are the SiS of video chipset manufacturers - best to be avoided unless you want headaches. The reason I had that impression was I haven't seen any positive reviews of S3 based video cards in quite a few years, and no gaming or workstation cards proclaiming S3 video chipsets, and when looking through distributor pricelists, see S3 listed among the cheapest of the cheap video cards.
What is surprising to me at first glance is S3 outperforming NVidia. however when you consider that this S3 video card is pitted against ATI's and NVidia's cheapest (current) offerings, and that the S3 achieves its performance by going with the older DirectX technologies, it's really not so surprising that it would benchmark so well. Think of the S3 as the atom car of sportscars; you get incredible performance, but at the expense of quality and features. Thanks, but I'd rather pay a little more and get a Porsche or Corvette.
Actually, if you put aside the Microsoft-bashing, MSN's search engine is actually pretty good. It's no google, but for certain competitive industries prone to blackhat SEO tactics, MSN is not so polluted because the blackhats utilize cloaking and feed their spam to Googlebot and Google's IP range, and pretty much ignore the rest. So, sometimes when I can't find what I'm looking for on Google after drilling down to 12-13 pages I'll turn to MSN or Yahoo and find what I need within a couple of pages' worth of results.
To be fair, it may not be MSN's being superior in any way, but largely ignored by scumbag blackhats. Plus, with MSN being the home page for 90% or so of the desktop market when users first boot up their new computers, it is not a search engine that you should disregard.
Ah, yes, but don't forget that the government is largely immune to patent litigation, and so are government contractors if it suits the politicians' pet projects well to do so. Check out the fibre optic flexible waterproof splice incident reported in recent months. The owner of the design would have been due several million from the contractor who raided his patent were the government and its contractors were actually required to obey the law as the Constitution demands. I know your post was meant to be a "funny" but the whole patent and government immunity thing rubs me the wrong way.
The big surprise is this: the HTML that is generated is actually not that bad.
I'll believe it when I see it. Microsofts HTML printer filter, all of the office components, and even their "web development" products (Frontpage, frontpage express, etc.) all generate the worst HTML known to man. I don't mean to come across as cynical (really, at least not this time;)) but based on Microsoft's track record, this is just something I will have to see to believe. I've used Frontpage in a pinch, but only in the source/HTML view. Using the WYSIWYG editor is a surefire way to generate a page that not only renders well only in MSIE, but which is the antithesis of good design for maintainability and for searchability (is searchability a word? Well, it is now). If you have a client who is complaining about not showing up in Google at all and they're so proud because they designed their first site themselves, the very best SEO tactic you can use is to remove all the extraneous crap that Microsoft's HTML generators like to wrap around every fugging character in the document. HTML output by Microsoft's tools vs. everyone else's results in what is easily a 5x larger file.
I have a related question: will the next Office still produce bloated documents, such that a few rows in a spreadsheet or a couple pages in a Word document will approach a megabyte in size after a few edit sessions, without even turning tracking on, or is it designed more intelligently this time around?
Instead of changing the interface (which will alienate many customers and eliminate "training cost" reasons for not switching to OpenOffice, StarOffice, koffice, or other) why haven't they been focusing on fixing major defects clients have been complaining about, specifically the file size, storing edit history even when tracking is turned off, along with other personal information? If this claim about the HTML output is true it's a huge step in the right direction, but still: priorities, priorities, priorities.
But for trolls, where is the fun in that? For them, it's more fun for them to play the pseudo-intellectual rather than actually reading, learning, and thinking for themselves.:)
Actually only 59% even bother to register to vote, and out of those, just over half actually get around to voting. Is it any wonder that this shit is going on? All the "special interests" manage to get out to vote, and because the majority is so damn lazy, every special interest-sponsored bit of legislation gets passed and corporations are more easily able to buy our politicians, because it's obvious that as a whole we collectively just don't care.
It is already unlawful to use social security for dealing with anything other than govermental issues (e.g., social security), and has been ever since the social security system was incepted. What good will a new law that essentially says "using social security numbers for any purpose other than social security is DoublePlusUnGood" achieve?
Congress: Why bother voting? Obviously only terrorists are interested in a change of regieme so we'll just decide who your next president will be for you. After all, only about 66% of eligible adults are registered to vote, and out of those, only 54% of registered voters and bother to vote, which means that only about one third of citizens of voting age even care about our electon process. Clearly the majority of citizens want us to tell them what is good for them, regardless of the Constitution's limiting our power on paper. After all, the Constitution is a "living document" and rules are made to be broken. Therefore, we are immediately declaring Duhbya to be our dictator and we will be extending our Representative and Senatorial terms to lifetime, and the next generation of congressmen shall be appointed by us. It was a nice experiement while it lasted, but because you citizens have squandered your first, second, and fourth amendment rights away in exchange for a little temporary safety, we have decided on your behalf that this is the best course of action for all concerned.
Too bad I can't get a landline through them here, but when we go VOIP I'll be going with Qwest because they refuse to engage in illegal covert activities with the NSA. Why the hell the government is engaging in this process when there are already procedures in place for dealing with likely terrorist suspects (e.g., warrants, probable cause) is quite beyond me, unless it's exactly what our forefathers set our inalienable-yet-lost rights in the fourth, second, and first amendments to the Constitution of The united States of America, e.g,, tyranny.
Anyone who isn't a communist but works in a unionized shop quickly grows to resent unions. If IT were unionized here is what will happen:
- The union workers who have a decent work ethic will quickly become disgruntled when they find their raises are limited to 1.5% COLA increases, and yet the slackers who do the absolute minimum required (as bargained by the union) spend most of their day smoking in the back room and harassing the people who actually EARN a living, complaining that hard workers make them look bad
- If you are say, an architect, and accidentally kicked out your mouse cable and you go under your desk to plug it back in, and a unionized MIS employee sees you do that, you'll have a grievence filed against you
- If you're an architect and you need, say, Visio or Kivio installed to quickly build some conceptual diagrams, you know you'll have a grievance filed against you because the union has dictated that installing software belongs strictly to the MIS department, not engineering. So you ask a nearby MIS worker, and he tells you "it's not my job, all I do is plug in mouses and keyboards" and to submit a requisition. Of course, the fellow who is the only employee authorized to install flowcharting and diagramming programs is not in today (he called in sick and even though another employee spotted him at the beach there is nothing that can be done because he's unionized) so you'll have to wait.
- You find you don't like the placement of your workstation so you rearrange your desk. What happens? Yes, another grievance because it's not your job to move your computer equipment around. The union requires that you file a requisition with the MIS department so the individual responsible for rearranging workspaces will be assigned to that union-protected job's task.
Meanwhile, you've been working 65 hours a week and although you're union, you're salaried. You're still at the office at 8:00pm and your wife is pregnant and busy with two toddlers, and you want to get home. You have been working so much that you believe you deserve a raise. You go to your supervisor and discuss a raise or promotion with him because not only are you prompt and courteous (not abusing sick time, etc.) but you get more work done than your peers plus your rearchitecting of the server component increased performance by 85% while at the same time fixing all confirmed defects present in the previous release, resulting in grabbing 45% more market share in the last three months compared to your two largest competitors (who were previously each ahead of you) combined. Your boss, with whom you have a great rapport and have earned his respect and share a common disdain for communist Unions, apologetically explains that the union dictates that all you are eligible for is a 1.5% COLA at the end of the year and an additional 1.5 personal day, and as far as promotions are concerned, John, a slacker who writes extremely buggy code (in fact the very module you just rearchitected) comes in 15 minutes late every day and leaves at 4:55pm, who has used every sick day for the year by March (after bragging about his new skis and ski lodge timeshare in Maine to all of his unionized coworkers) has three months' seniority and will be the one who will be taking the Senior Architect position when the current unionized Senior Architect is promoted or retires. When you mention John's skillset he reluctantly replies "Oh, I know John has no experience in software design but only programming, but sorry, that's what the union contract requires."
Why the hell is a funny relevant movie quote modded troll?
Mod up, not down, and if you don't know the reference, pass it by. Sheesh. Your mod points could be put to better use modding up an insightful post someplace.
They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.
read: let's throw some buzzword names of bad evil stuff like viruses and poor quality. Funny, MPEG4 is visually just as good as a DVD for a lot of material. Oh, and when was the last time someone actually executed a video file? I can't speak for others but I know I haven't. Good luck getting a virus from a video file.
Peer-to-peer connections enable people to quickly swap files between their computers without having to go via an internet server.
Oh really? So in a peer-peer setup there is no server, but only clients? When did this breakthrough in network technology happen? Are the files served up via wormholes or something? Semantics, I know, but let's look through the marketing doublespeak, shall we?
The truth of the matter is that Warner Brothers wants to not just reduce, but eliminate distribution costs by using customers' machines as servers, and yet have a portion of the file be a key which is tied to a single playback device, while charging the same price as for the packaged movie.
Sorry, I'll stick to BitTorrent for checking out a movie and purchasing DVDs via either Amazon or at a brick-and-mortar store. You can keep your DRMFest to yourself, Warner Brothers.
(Yeah I know DVDs have DRM, but playback is not tied to a single device, allowing for easy resale if I decide I no longer like a movie. Also, the DRM on a DVD is inconsequential.)
vim is bloated. Why can't they skip the fancy-shmancy keystrokes and other bloat no one needs, and make it more like edlin? hell, edlin will even run in 640K, which ought to be enough for everyone!;)
SGI did'nt belive in "3D-for-everyone" and I believe that would be the main reason for their demise.
No, the problem was SGI DID take on "3D For Everyone" trying to compete with Dell, etc. head-on rather than maintaining the "We're the BEST at 3D and Video production, bar none. I scoff at thee, puny Amiga-based video Toaster!"
The problem is, Dell, HP, etc. (barely) survive on razor-thin margins and by not only packaging commodity technologies, but by contracting Asus, Quanta, and the other handful of motherboard and notebook chassis builders to make the boards yet cheaper. Yes, they bring "3D to everyone" but at the cost of reliability and performance.
Back when SGI was undeniably the best at what they did, and oh by the way just happened to offer network servers whose throughput no one else in the industry could match, even the PHBs could understand that quality is worth the price. They lost their edge when they started offering PCs. Thank GOD they abandoned the Windows NT market, but by then it was far too late.
When they shifted to commodity PC parts using ATI video cards, PHBs, with good reason, say "SGI? Why would I buy SGI at 3-4x the price of a Dell or HP? 1.8Ghz? I just bought a $599 Dell (P.O.S.) with a 3.4 jiggahertz PeeCee for home, and it says IT can do 3D. No way am I approving this P.O."
Doesn't Nvidia already employ the majority of the engineers who put SGI on the map? What good would buying SGI's video assets do, especially considering that in the last ten years:
- They quit focusing on the visualization workstation market and tried to become just another PC vendor offering Windows NT(family) workstations
- They bought Cray in effort to capture more of the supercomputer market, diluting their own Onyx offerings
- They abandoned the Windows NT market, too late, after it finally dawned on them that PC buyers buy based on price, not quality (for the most part)
- After realizing that being a ho-hum PC vendor is a low-margin market, they turned to Linux instead (thanks for the great contributions to the GNU/Linux/Xorg projects SGI), aother difficult market to compete in (e.g., PHBs saying "Linux? What's that?"
- They sold Cray long after it became apparant they were diluting their own brand (which supercomputer do we sell? Why continue Onyx development since we own cray and Cray offers low-end supercomputers? I'm sure their own sales force couldn't figure out what to tell customers)
- MIPS development stagnated
- They now use ATI video chipsets (ugh!)
- Adobe quit compiling Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. for IRIX eons ago
- IRIX and MIPS, which made SGI unique, are pretty much dead. What's up with choosing Itanic over the Opteron?
I used to really like SGI and hope they pull through and return to their core attraction: really, really fast custom video chipsets, a really neat GUI (I love the thumbwheel-zoom thingy in their file browser for graphics previews), and ultra-responsive RISC processors. They were pretty much the king of 3D modeling and video production when they were at their peak and I hope they pull through Chapter 11 and regain the throne in that arena. It's pretty sad that one can build a PC which outperforms their lower-end visualization workstations. No, not just any joe can buy a 16-GPU ATI board, but then again, if SGI limited their offerings to workhorse render farms and premier, 3D modeling workstations, and (relatively) inexpensive supercomputers, they'd regain at least some of the market they've lost. The key would be to make modeling VERY easy, 3rd party development VERY easy, and make their processing options more cost-efficient than say, running a Maya, Blemder or Povray farm on commodity PCs.
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
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· Score: 5, Funny
And here is the event which spawned NASA:
Truman: "Whistlin dixy! I want this sent to Area 51 for study!" General: "But Sir! That's where we're building our fake moon landing set." Truman: "Then we'll have to really land on the moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't there also a huge jump in the number of users who discovered the Internet around the time that Windows 95 came out? Don't you think that new MSIE users randomly downloading crap off the web might have anything to do with the explosion in number of viruses and trojan horses to infect the average machine, and a couple of years later widespread broadband giving crackers the ability to create botnets?
Nah, it couldn't be that. It could be those eebil virus companies who are the tools of the debil!
There is a huge drawback to that line of thinking, however.
Let's consider say, Office suites. It is possible for Microsoft and, say. Softmaker (a non-evil office application company) to both fear OpenOffice.org/Staroffice and Apple's upcoming Office suite. So, they patent a certain new type of office component that does foo. Businesses quickly discover that the new, novel idea of foo is the new mousetrap they have been waiting for in an office suite, and it immediately becomes a de-facto requirement for office suites. Softmaker and Microsoft agree to exclusively cross-license their patents to each other exclusively. No one else will be allowed to license those patents, or the price will be high because it is such a novel innovation. Of course, open source suites wou;d not be able to afford the patent licenses, so they would have to forego the de-facto standard feature that businesses now mandate in their purchase requirements.
It would effectively be legal collusion, bypassing antitrust issues because it would be Constitutional, government-sanctioned enforcement of a monopoly. What could the government do to stop this? They could declare the patent invalid, which is possibly unconstitutional because foo IS so novel and non-obvious, or they could force the company to offer the suite without foo. but aside from home and possibly SOHO customers who would want an office suite without foo? They could "force" the companies to license their patents to others, but even if it were to become an eminent domain issue, the companies would be (rightfully so) entitled to the fair market value for foo.
Niiiice. Thanks for the link! You're my hero! :)
I claim prior art, based on my use of crayons on colouring books when I was two years old.
One game I'd love to see is Hexen III. For the time, the graphics in Hexen II were incredible and the gameplay was great - there was more focus on solving the puzzles (how the heck do I get out of this level) than there was on killing. Sure, there were plenty of monsters to kill but the, er, mazes seemed more intricate in Hexen. I don't recall whether that was just due to the different visuals or if it actually was the case. I've actually been playing the old Id games again in order (Doom, Doom II, Final Doom, Heretic, Hexen, etc) and find Heretic and Hexen more entertaining than Doom.
I know some folks are surprised that S3 is still around, if you read many forums you'll find that people seem to think that there are only two video chip manufacturers still in business anymore. I knew S3 were still around but from my point of view, they are the SiS of video chipset manufacturers - best to be avoided unless you want headaches. The reason I had that impression was I haven't seen any positive reviews of S3 based video cards in quite a few years, and no gaming or workstation cards proclaiming S3 video chipsets, and when looking through distributor pricelists, see S3 listed among the cheapest of the cheap video cards.
What is surprising to me at first glance is S3 outperforming NVidia. however when you consider that this S3 video card is pitted against ATI's and NVidia's cheapest (current) offerings, and that the S3 achieves its performance by going with the older DirectX technologies, it's really not so surprising that it would benchmark so well. Think of the S3 as the atom car of sportscars; you get incredible performance, but at the expense of quality and features. Thanks, but I'd rather pay a little more and get a Porsche or Corvette.
Actually, if you put aside the Microsoft-bashing, MSN's search engine is actually pretty good. It's no google, but for certain competitive industries prone to blackhat SEO tactics, MSN is not so polluted because the blackhats utilize cloaking and feed their spam to Googlebot and Google's IP range, and pretty much ignore the rest. So, sometimes when I can't find what I'm looking for on Google after drilling down to 12-13 pages I'll turn to MSN or Yahoo and find what I need within a couple of pages' worth of results.
To be fair, it may not be MSN's being superior in any way, but largely ignored by scumbag blackhats. Plus, with MSN being the home page for 90% or so of the desktop market when users first boot up their new computers, it is not a search engine that you should disregard.
Ah, yes, but don't forget that the government is largely immune to patent litigation, and so are government contractors if it suits the politicians' pet projects well to do so. Check out the fibre optic flexible waterproof splice incident reported in recent months. The owner of the design would have been due several million from the contractor who raided his patent were the government and its contractors were actually required to obey the law as the Constitution demands. I know your post was meant to be a "funny" but the whole patent and government immunity thing rubs me the wrong way.
I'll believe it when I see it. Microsofts HTML printer filter, all of the office components, and even their "web development" products (Frontpage, frontpage express, etc.) all generate the worst HTML known to man. I don't mean to come across as cynical (really, at least not this time
I have a related question: will the next Office still produce bloated documents, such that a few rows in a spreadsheet or a couple pages in a Word document will approach a megabyte in size after a few edit sessions, without even turning tracking on, or is it designed more intelligently this time around?
Instead of changing the interface (which will alienate many customers and eliminate "training cost" reasons for not switching to OpenOffice, StarOffice, koffice, or other) why haven't they been focusing on fixing major defects clients have been complaining about, specifically the file size, storing edit history even when tracking is turned off, along with other personal information? If this claim about the HTML output is true it's a huge step in the right direction, but still: priorities, priorities, priorities.
Could be, I used the 1996 stats because I could not find 2000 stats quickly.
But for trolls, where is the fun in that? For them, it's more fun for them to play the pseudo-intellectual rather than actually reading, learning, and thinking for themselves. :)
Actually only 59% even bother to register to vote, and out of those, just over half actually get around to voting. Is it any wonder that this shit is going on? All the "special interests" manage to get out to vote, and because the majority is so damn lazy, every special interest-sponsored bit of legislation gets passed and corporations are more easily able to buy our politicians, because it's obvious that as a whole we collectively just don't care.
To serve as "consumers" of course.
You disagree with Duhbya? You are either for or against him, and you, sir, are clearly against him, and therefore, are a ter'rist!
It is already unlawful to use social security for dealing with anything other than govermental issues (e.g., social security), and has been ever since the social security system was incepted. What good will a new law that essentially says "using social security numbers for any purpose other than social security is DoublePlusUnGood" achieve?
The next step in the fight against terrorism:
Congress: Why bother voting? Obviously only terrorists are interested in a change of regieme so we'll just decide who your next president will be for you. After all, only about 66% of eligible adults are registered to vote, and out of those, only 54% of registered voters and bother to vote, which means that only about one third of citizens of voting age even care about our electon process. Clearly the majority of citizens want us to tell them what is good for them, regardless of the Constitution's limiting our power on paper. After all, the Constitution is a "living document" and rules are made to be broken. Therefore, we are immediately declaring Duhbya to be our dictator and we will be extending our Representative and Senatorial terms to lifetime, and the next generation of congressmen shall be appointed by us. It was a nice experiement while it lasted, but because you citizens have squandered your first, second, and fourth amendment rights away in exchange for a little temporary safety, we have decided on your behalf that this is the best course of action for all concerned.
Kind regards,
Your tyrants in Washington.
Too bad I can't get a landline through them here, but when we go VOIP I'll be going with Qwest because they refuse to engage in illegal covert activities with the NSA. Why the hell the government is engaging in this process when there are already procedures in place for dealing with likely terrorist suspects (e.g., warrants, probable cause) is quite beyond me, unless it's exactly what our forefathers set our inalienable-yet-lost rights in the fourth, second, and first amendments to the Constitution of The united States of America, e.g,, tyranny.
Anyone who isn't a communist but works in a unionized shop quickly grows to resent unions. If IT were unionized here is what will happen:
- The union workers who have a decent work ethic will quickly become disgruntled when they find their raises are limited to 1.5% COLA increases, and yet the slackers who do the absolute minimum required (as bargained by the union) spend most of their day smoking in the back room and harassing the people who actually EARN a living, complaining that hard workers make them look bad
- If you are say, an architect, and accidentally kicked out your mouse cable and you go under your desk to plug it back in, and a unionized MIS employee sees you do that, you'll have a grievence filed against you
- If you're an architect and you need, say, Visio or Kivio installed to quickly build some conceptual diagrams, you know you'll have a grievance filed against you because the union has dictated that installing software belongs strictly to the MIS department, not engineering. So you ask a nearby MIS worker, and he tells you "it's not my job, all I do is plug in mouses and keyboards" and to submit a requisition. Of course, the fellow who is the only employee authorized to install flowcharting and diagramming programs is not in today (he called in sick and even though another employee spotted him at the beach there is nothing that can be done because he's unionized) so you'll have to wait.
- You find you don't like the placement of your workstation so you rearrange your desk. What happens? Yes, another grievance because it's not your job to move your computer equipment around. The union requires that you file a requisition with the MIS department so the individual responsible for rearranging workspaces will be assigned to that union-protected job's task.
Meanwhile, you've been working 65 hours a week and although you're union, you're salaried. You're still at the office at 8:00pm and your wife is pregnant and busy with two toddlers, and you want to get home. You have been working so much that you believe you deserve a raise. You go to your supervisor and discuss a raise or promotion with him because not only are you prompt and courteous (not abusing sick time, etc.) but you get more work done than your peers plus your rearchitecting of the server component increased performance by 85% while at the same time fixing all confirmed defects present in the previous release, resulting in grabbing 45% more market share in the last three months compared to your two largest competitors (who were previously each ahead of you) combined. Your boss, with whom you have a great rapport and have earned his respect and share a common disdain for communist Unions, apologetically explains that the union dictates that all you are eligible for is a 1.5% COLA at the end of the year and an additional 1.5 personal day, and as far as promotions are concerned, John, a slacker who writes extremely buggy code (in fact the very module you just rearchitected) comes in 15 minutes late every day and leaves at 4:55pm, who has used every sick day for the year by March (after bragging about his new skis and ski lodge timeshare in Maine to all of his unionized coworkers) has three months' seniority and will be the one who will be taking the Senior Architect position when the current unionized Senior Architect is promoted or retires. When you mention John's skillset he reluctantly replies "Oh, I know John has no experience in software design but only programming, but sorry, that's what the union contract requires."
Why the hell is a funny relevant movie quote modded troll?
Mod up, not down, and if you don't know the reference, pass it by. Sheesh. Your mod points could be put to better use modding up an insightful post someplace.
Whoosh.
re-read my post. Did it state or even imply that edlin requires 640K?
read: let's throw some buzzword names of bad evil stuff like viruses and poor quality. Funny, MPEG4 is visually just as good as a DVD for a lot of material. Oh, and when was the last time someone actually executed a video file? I can't speak for others but I know I haven't. Good luck getting a virus from a video file.
Oh really? So in a peer-peer setup there is no server, but only clients? When did this breakthrough in network technology happen? Are the files served up via wormholes or something? Semantics, I know, but let's look through the marketing doublespeak, shall we?
The truth of the matter is that Warner Brothers wants to not just reduce, but eliminate distribution costs by using customers' machines as servers, and yet have a portion of the file be a key which is tied to a single playback device, while charging the same price as for the packaged movie.
Sorry, I'll stick to BitTorrent for checking out a movie and purchasing DVDs via either Amazon or at a brick-and-mortar store. You can keep your DRMFest to yourself, Warner Brothers.
(Yeah I know DVDs have DRM, but playback is not tied to a single device, allowing for easy resale if I decide I no longer like a movie. Also, the DRM on a DVD is inconsequential.)
vim is bloated. Why can't they skip the fancy-shmancy keystrokes and other bloat no one needs, and make it more like edlin? hell, edlin will even run in 640K, which ought to be enough for everyone! ;)
No, the problem was SGI DID take on "3D For Everyone" trying to compete with Dell, etc. head-on rather than maintaining the "We're the BEST at 3D and Video production, bar none. I scoff at thee, puny Amiga-based video Toaster!"
The problem is, Dell, HP, etc. (barely) survive on razor-thin margins and by not only packaging commodity technologies, but by contracting Asus, Quanta, and the other handful of motherboard and notebook chassis builders to make the boards yet cheaper. Yes, they bring "3D to everyone" but at the cost of reliability and performance.
Back when SGI was undeniably the best at what they did, and oh by the way just happened to offer network servers whose throughput no one else in the industry could match, even the PHBs could understand that quality is worth the price. They lost their edge when they started offering PCs. Thank GOD they abandoned the Windows NT market, but by then it was far too late.
When they shifted to commodity PC parts using ATI video cards, PHBs, with good reason, say "SGI? Why would I buy SGI at 3-4x the price of a Dell or HP? 1.8Ghz? I just bought a $599 Dell (P.O.S.) with a 3.4 jiggahertz PeeCee for home, and it says IT can do 3D. No way am I approving this P.O."
Doesn't Nvidia already employ the majority of the engineers who put SGI on the map? What good would buying SGI's video assets do, especially considering that in the last ten years:
- They quit focusing on the visualization workstation market and tried to become just another PC vendor offering Windows NT(family) workstations
- They bought Cray in effort to capture more of the supercomputer market, diluting their own Onyx offerings
- They abandoned the Windows NT market, too late, after it finally dawned on them that PC buyers buy based on price, not quality (for the most part)
- After realizing that being a ho-hum PC vendor is a low-margin market, they turned to Linux instead (thanks for the great contributions to the GNU/Linux/Xorg projects SGI), aother difficult market to compete in (e.g., PHBs saying "Linux? What's that?"
- They sold Cray long after it became apparant they were diluting their own brand (which supercomputer do we sell? Why continue Onyx development since we own cray and Cray offers low-end supercomputers? I'm sure their own sales force couldn't figure out what to tell customers)
- MIPS development stagnated
- They now use ATI video chipsets (ugh!)
- Adobe quit compiling Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. for IRIX eons ago
- IRIX and MIPS, which made SGI unique, are pretty much dead. What's up with choosing Itanic over the Opteron?
I used to really like SGI and hope they pull through and return to their core attraction: really, really fast custom video chipsets, a really neat GUI (I love the thumbwheel-zoom thingy in their file browser for graphics previews), and ultra-responsive RISC processors. They were pretty much the king of 3D modeling and video production when they were at their peak and I hope they pull through Chapter 11 and regain the throne in that arena. It's pretty sad that one can build a PC which outperforms their lower-end visualization workstations. No, not just any joe can buy a 16-GPU ATI board, but then again, if SGI limited their offerings to workhorse render farms and premier, 3D modeling workstations, and (relatively) inexpensive supercomputers, they'd regain at least some of the market they've lost. The key would be to make modeling VERY easy, 3rd party development VERY easy, and make their processing options more cost-efficient than say, running a Maya, Blemder or Povray farm on commodity PCs.
And here is the event which spawned NASA:
Truman: "Whistlin dixy! I want this sent to Area 51 for study!"
General: "But Sir! That's where we're building our fake moon landing set."
Truman: "Then we'll have to really land on the moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"