It's basically a big show for trade and consumer people to see the latest video game stuff. There's some other stuff there too, but it's 99% video games. It's what all the poor games devs have to bust a gut to get their demo ready for, hence the phrase "E3 Demo", which you usually will hear if you ever read about games development.
If you format and reinstall, then it's not 2 years or more older, is it? I'm assuming you just install, e.g. the latest version of XP from CD. As for re-installing apps, won't you have to do that on a new PC as well, unless it comes with MS Office and that's all the user wants...in which case, installing Office is not that big a deal anyway.
With the 'newer hardware, software' bit, you're straying somewhat from the original "Windows is so crap it's more cost effective to buy a new PC" hyperbole, imho.
I'm not saying that overall it's not a good strategy, but by the same token, it's more cost effective to buy a new Mac when you get problems with it, as you'll get the latest new hardware and software (especially true with the almost yearly chargeable OS X upgrades).
(Not to mention that from my point of view, pretty much anyone who will sell me a PC with Windows installed on it will also install a whole bunch of crap I don't want, so I'll end up vaping the HDD and reinstalling anyway. I once got a new laptop at work, and it had 14 icons in the system tray when I first turned it on. 14!)
If they're anything like some tool vendors I've come across, it's because they either don't have decent compilation perfomance, or don't support the features that would help, such as pre-compiled headers, etc.
So rather than fixing the problem by investing in their product, they're telling their customers to use ugly hacks to get around the product's shortcomings, and hope they won't switch to another system (I suspect).
I've certainly been on the receiving end of such tactics.
The dead giveaway is when they start saying things like "pre-compiled headers wouldn't help you anyway":-)
Good that it can find hijacked homepages, bad that they don't give you the option to set your own homepage if the program really does think your page was hijacked.
I tried it out this evening, and that's exactly what it does. It asked me if I wanted to let it monitor home pages/bookmarks, etc, and gave me a dialog with about 8 or so 'system' bookmarks for me to edit as my 'approved' bookmarks. One of these was the homepage, which you can therefore set to be what you like.
Of course, maybe they just changed this recently due to feedback.
Apple has enough money in reserve that they could turn zero profit and still continue to operate for over a decade. In fact, it's been that way since the Apple ][ days.
Oh come on, that's not fair - I'm sure they've made a profit since the Apple ][ !:-)
Re:Why would you prefer a Console over a PC?
on
Xbox 2 for $400?
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· Score: 1
while a PC is a much better choice for gaming (configurability, graphics, upgradability etc.) why do so many people prefer a console?
Actually, I suspect many people prefer consoles because they aren't configurable or upgradeable.
Case in point: when Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, I bought the PC version because the game sounded good, and the Xbox version wasn't out. After a couple of aborted installation attempts with the clearly iffy installer, I eventually got to ran the game, whereupon it told me I needed Pixel Shader 2.0 (God knows what that means to someone 'normal' - I'm a video games developer, and I wasn't even sure if my gfx card had PS2.0 or not), and then it carried on to crash immediately. It also needed ludicrous amounts of RAM (for a game that I knew also ran on Xbox, PS2 and GC - the PS2 and GC only have 32Mb of RAM, ffs)
I took back the PC version, and waited for the Xbox version - why? Because the requirements for the Xbox version were simple:
Yes, it is absolutely shocking that a beta product that was demonstrated live at a tech show crashed at all.
I think all products that do this in the beta stage should be, by law, withdrawn from development and sale/distribution.
On a related note, I once installed a release version RedHat from CD, and after the process, the RH installation could not recognise the CDROM drive at all (i.e. the one it had previously copied about 1Gb of data from). I await the withdrawal of all Linux-based distibutions from the world with excitement:)
I've tried the Windows indexing. The UI sucks. This is part of the problem. I've tried Google Desktop, and (for the file types it currently supports) it just works, and virtually instantly.
I've tried products like Enfish, but they just wanted to be this huge bloated interface to 'how I work', when what I wanted was a fast search interface. Google Desktop's interface is small and fast. It's what I and I suspect a lot of other people want.
I once read an MSDN article by the guys who started the Windows indexing service - it is a very old product, and does some very clever things, to allow you to search while the index is being updated, etc. However, this never translated into actually being useful - I was always being told I couldn't search because the index was being updated, etc. and the UI was just freaking appalling. It looked like an internal hacked up project that had got shipped by accident.
In short, I think desktop search is popular because people want to find stuff, and they don't want to dick about with bloated and misdirected or poorly designed apps to do it.
When I search, I want to type what I want, see the results, and then the search facility should just get the hell out of my way.
I got so fed up of the Windows file search that I wrote my own indexer. I used to find that with that bloody Microsoft animated dog, in the time it took it to finish animating and start responding to me typing, my own program had run, done the search, and shown me the results.
(To paraphrase a friend of mine, when Google became popular, everyone agreed that, yes, this was how search engines should work and how they should look, etc - everyone that is, apparently, except all the other companies that produce search engines.)
Although I linked to that list, I believe the Halo figures are wrong and it is closer to 5 million now. (All the news articles I can find on Halo 2 sales figures imply these sort of sales for Halo 1.)
so even 1 million pc sales would not have been bad
So you agree that it is not "much bigger" then?:)
Plus, as other people have mentioned, the PC market pretty saturated with FPS games, so Halo, while very good, would have struggled to dominate to the extent it did on Xbox.
I was going to make a joke about how you hit 'submit' before you could turn your bullet list into a coherent posting, but lets just take this point:
i think they abused it as a marketing platform for their xbox
think about how it would have hit the much bigger PC market like a bomb
I am thinking about it. I am thinking about how curious it is that people still think the PC games market is bigger than the console games market. It really isn't. Halo sold 5 million units in total (over 2 years-ish). Halo 2 sold 5 million units in less than a month or something ridiculous. (While we're on consoles, the Xbox isn't even the biggest selling console - the PS2 installed base is significantly larger.)
PC games just don't sell that well in comparison. I think many people don't realise how small the PC game market is (compared to consoles). After a year even the hugely successful Half Life had only sold just over a million units. Over the next few years, those sales climbed to 8 million (according to this top 20 list), helped by Counter-Strike, but Half Life is an exceptional game (especially in terms of sales for a PC game). The only other PC games on that list are The Sims (at 10 million - for a PC game, that is huge) and Myst (at 7 million). I don't think Halo has as wide a market as The Sims or Myst, though. Just look at the sales for Super Mario 64 - on a console that many people still refer to as 'a failure', it sold 11 million copies.
Judging from Half Life's sales figures (although bear in mind that is after 5 years of it being on sale), Half Life 2 will probably approach Halo's sales figures, but I suspect Valve might remain tight lipped about the number of copies they sell via Steam.
In short, selling a million plus units of a game on a console is not that rare. For a PC game it's pretty rare. I'll leave you to do the maths.
I'm not trying to say the PC games market is small per se, I'm just saying that describing it as 'much bigger' is really not a factual statement.
Unless there is some provision somewhere in one of the licence aggreements with the companies still using Q3 code, they should just release it like they promised damnit.
I direct you to the wisdom of Mr Torvalds:
"He who writes the code gets to choose his license, and nobody else gets to complain."
There's some other stuff in the original quote that you won't like either, but I've spared you that:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully it wasn't $200 worth of firestarters.
I'm finding it disappointing but not wholly surprising that a bunch of people are posting saying "It's the wife!" or "It's one of his kids", etc.
The guy has just been arrested and charged wrongly - does he really need people pointing the finger at his family too?
I know it's only slashdot, but even so. You're not Miss Marple, so STFU and give the guy a break.
Why would splitting MS be good? I've never particularly understood that idea. Is it just so that the companies would be smaller?
It's basically a big show for trade and consumer people to see the latest video game stuff. There's some other stuff there too, but it's 99% video games. It's what all the poor games devs have to bust a gut to get their demo ready for, hence the phrase "E3 Demo", which you usually will hear if you ever read about games development.
Really? I heard it was hidden in a giant mutant stargoat.
Er, the reviews I saw of GE: Rogue Agent didn't give it a hard time because the script was bad. It was usually because the game sucked.
Meh. Apple and Microsoft have been using video cards for 3D that isn't games related for a lot longer than 4 years.
Still not convinced :)
If you format and reinstall, then it's not 2 years or more older, is it? I'm assuming you just install, e.g. the latest version of XP from CD. As for re-installing apps, won't you have to do that on a new PC as well, unless it comes with MS Office and that's all the user wants...in which case, installing Office is not that big a deal anyway.
With the 'newer hardware, software' bit, you're straying somewhat from the original "Windows is so crap it's more cost effective to buy a new PC" hyperbole, imho.
I'm not saying that overall it's not a good strategy, but by the same token, it's more cost effective to buy a new Mac when you get problems with it, as you'll get the latest new hardware and software (especially true with the almost yearly chargeable OS X upgrades).
(Not to mention that from my point of view, pretty much anyone who will sell me a PC with Windows installed on it will also install a whole bunch of crap I don't want, so I'll end up vaping the HDD and reinstalling anyway. I once got a new laptop at work, and it had 14 icons in the system tray when I first turned it on. 14!)
Surely it would be more cost effective to format the hard drive and reinstall than pay for a whole new PC?
Or do you mean you replace it with a Mac?
If they're anything like some tool vendors I've come across, it's because they either don't have decent compilation perfomance, or don't support the features that would help, such as pre-compiled headers, etc.
:-)
So rather than fixing the problem by investing in their product, they're telling their customers to use ugly hacks to get around the product's shortcomings, and hope they won't switch to another system (I suspect).
I've certainly been on the receiving end of such tactics.
The dead giveaway is when they start saying things like "pre-compiled headers wouldn't help you anyway"
I tried it out this evening, and that's exactly what it does. It asked me if I wanted to let it monitor home pages/bookmarks, etc, and gave me a dialog with about 8 or so 'system' bookmarks for me to edit as my 'approved' bookmarks. One of these was the homepage, which you can therefore set to be what you like.
Of course, maybe they just changed this recently due to feedback.
There it is again. Why do you think a GUI subsystem is part of the kernel?
Oh come on, that's not fair - I'm sure they've made a profit since the Apple ][ ! :-)
while a PC is a much better choice for gaming (configurability, graphics, upgradability etc.) why do so many people prefer a console?
Actually, I suspect many people prefer consoles because they aren't configurable or upgradeable.
Case in point: when Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, I bought the PC version because the game sounded good, and the Xbox version wasn't out. After a couple of aborted installation attempts with the clearly iffy installer, I eventually got to ran the game, whereupon it told me I needed Pixel Shader 2.0 (God knows what that means to someone 'normal' - I'm a video games developer, and I wasn't even sure if my gfx card had PS2.0 or not), and then it carried on to crash immediately. It also needed ludicrous amounts of RAM (for a game that I knew also ran on Xbox, PS2 and GC - the PS2 and GC only have 32Mb of RAM, ffs)
I took back the PC version, and waited for the Xbox version - why? Because the requirements for the Xbox version were simple:
That sort of question is easy to answer.
Yes, it is absolutely shocking that a beta product that was demonstrated live at a tech show crashed at all.
I think all products that do this in the beta stage should be, by law, withdrawn from development and sale/distribution.
On a related note, I once installed a release version RedHat from CD, and after the process, the RH installation could not recognise the CDROM drive at all (i.e. the one it had previously copied about 1Gb of data from). I await the withdrawal of all Linux-based distibutions from the world with excitement :)
Yes. I got it. Hints not required.
The plural of Alias is not 'data'.
I've tried products like Enfish, but they just wanted to be this huge bloated interface to 'how I work', when what I wanted was a fast search interface. Google Desktop's interface is small and fast. It's what I and I suspect a lot of other people want.
I once read an MSDN article by the guys who started the Windows indexing service - it is a very old product, and does some very clever things, to allow you to search while the index is being updated, etc. However, this never translated into actually being useful - I was always being told I couldn't search because the index was being updated, etc. and the UI was just freaking appalling. It looked like an internal hacked up project that had got shipped by accident.
In short, I think desktop search is popular because people want to find stuff, and they don't want to dick about with bloated and misdirected or poorly designed apps to do it.
When I search, I want to type what I want, see the results, and then the search facility should just get the hell out of my way.
I got so fed up of the Windows file search that I wrote my own indexer. I used to find that with that bloody Microsoft animated dog, in the time it took it to finish animating and start responding to me typing, my own program had run, done the search, and shown me the results.
(To paraphrase a friend of mine, when Google became popular, everyone agreed that, yes, this was how search engines should work and how they should look, etc - everyone that is, apparently, except all the other companies that produce search engines.)
It's the sea water that does it. Damn you.
It's not working. Cut to the song.
So you agree that it is not "much bigger" then? :)
Plus, as other people have mentioned, the PC market pretty saturated with FPS games, so Halo, while very good, would have struggled to dominate to the extent it did on Xbox.
PC games just don't sell that well in comparison. I think many people don't realise how small the PC game market is (compared to consoles). After a year even the hugely successful Half Life had only sold just over a million units. Over the next few years, those sales climbed to 8 million (according to this top 20 list), helped by Counter-Strike, but Half Life is an exceptional game (especially in terms of sales for a PC game). The only other PC games on that list are The Sims (at 10 million - for a PC game, that is huge) and Myst (at 7 million). I don't think Halo has as wide a market as The Sims or Myst, though. Just look at the sales for Super Mario 64 - on a console that many people still refer to as 'a failure', it sold 11 million copies.
Judging from Half Life's sales figures (although bear in mind that is after 5 years of it being on sale), Half Life 2 will probably approach Halo's sales figures, but I suspect Valve might remain tight lipped about the number of copies they sell via Steam.
In short, selling a million plus units of a game on a console is not that rare. For a PC game it's pretty rare. I'll leave you to do the maths.
I'm not trying to say the PC games market is small per se, I'm just saying that describing it as 'much bigger' is really not a factual statement.
I direct you to the wisdom of Mr Torvalds:
There's some other stuff in the original quote that you won't like either, but I've spared you that :)
I'd go for:
/. Americans the most :-)
iv) Suggest that the US wasn't solely responsible for defeating Germany in WWII.
That always seems to hurt