I'm just thinking that if this update is making Registry changes, then the plug-in is Windows-only, and it means that Firefox users on Windows will now have a different browsing experience than Firefox users of other platforms.
So, the plug-in accomplishes two things for Microsoft: 1) it promotes the.NET platform to a wider audience, and 2) it promotes Windows as being the superior OS to run Firefox in.
It's a win-win scenario for Microsoft. Firefox can continue to gain marketshare, but Microsoft will have their tentacles in it, making sure that the adoption of Firefox does not lead to a platform-agnostic world. And it rewards the.NET developers for investing in Microsoft-only technologies.
Visicalc defintely deserves to be on the list. It was initially released on the Apple ][, and drove a LOT of hardware sales for Apple. This was back when customers were asking sales people, "What the hell do I need a computer for?"
QuarkXpress was dominant in its industry for a long time, but it was Aldus Pagemaker and the introduction of the first affordable laser printer with PostScript (Apple's first LaserWriter) that created the DTP market. Having only seen low resolution dot matrix and thermal printing at the time, I remember being blown away the first time I saw pages from a LaserWriter in 1985.
The problem with the CAFE standard is that it fails to address the most fundamental problem with oil prices -- the fact that the oil industry is run by a cartel, and they control the output.
Overall, cars have become significantly more efficient over the last 30 years -- so why are we paying so much more per gallon than we did in the 70's and 80's? (Inflation, sure, but oil prices have well outpaced inflation.)
Obama can raise the CAFE standard to 42 MPG, and the oil industry will scale back production to increase the price.
I agree; rumors are abounding that Microsoft will release the Zune Phone this year. Apple sold almost 4.5 million iPhones in the fourth quarter last year, compared with Microsoft selling about 6 million XBox 360's... it's a segment that Microsoft will not ignore any longer.
No doubt they will treat a Zune Phone like the original XBox... force the establishment of the brand by sinking an ungodly amount of money into the division, and hope to become profitable in succeeding generations of the device.
I've seen others echoing the criticism of Kirk being made captain, so I just want to say...
The entire series of sequences between Kirk and Pike was that Pike believed that Kirk was a different caliber of man, and therefore worthy of bypassing the traditional "climbing of the ladder". Kirk had a battlefield promotion to First Officer, and then to Captain.
Pike's promotion to admiral obviously put him in a position where he could defend Kirk's continued existence as captain of the Enterprise.
You also had Nimoy's Spock deciding not to live in obscurity in this new timeline, so no doubt he debriefed Starfleet on his knowledge of James T. Kirk.
Hmmm... that makes me think of another interesting point... Spock also brings vast and detailed knowledge of future tech back with him, which he displayed a willingness to share; that gives the rebooted franchise a tremendous loophole to make use of any technology seen in any of the Trek franchises.
I agree, I thought Wolverine was a decent flick. It's taking a lot of crap from the critics... but, you get to see Hugh Jackman running around with the claws and the sideburns one more time.
I think people are most upset with how Deadpool was treated. However, considering that a Deadpool movie is in the works, I'm sure that Marvel will just "reboot" the character at some point like they did with the Hulk.
Trust me on this -- see it now, while it's in theaters. Preferably in an Imax, if there's one in your area. The audience I saw it with cheered when the credits rolled; that doesn't happen often.
Yes, it's a reboot of the franchise, and a much-needed refresh. But keep in mind that this is movie-Star Trek, not TV-Star Trek. TV shows plod along and can deal with very deep issues; movies have to move along at a much faster clip.
Re:What do you get combining Apple + gaming compan
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
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· Score: 1
I agree, it doesn't make sense for Apple to purchase EA. EA will continue to make iPhone and Mac games regardless of whether Apple owns them or not.
The only reason it would make sense for Apple to purchase a game company is to ensure exclusive A-list games for their platform. That's why Microsoft acquired Bungie, so that they could have the Halo games exclusively on the XBox for two years before they ported them to the PC and Mac. Bungie, who was a Mac developer at the time, had originally planned to release all versions simultaneously, IIRC.
The Bungie acquisition was an easy choice for Microsoft to spot. Bungie was greatly under-appreciated for their talents because they were cranking out A-list games for the minority platform.
What exclusive title EA might have for Apple, I have no idea. It would be a mistake for EA to take established franchises and suddenly make them iPhone-only or Mac-only.
If Apple wants an in-house game company, they need to look at up-and-coming developers or other opportunities. The collapse of 3D Realms presents a unique opportunity for someone to buy their IP assets and crank out the long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever (but Duke may be a little too controversial for Apple's tastes).
With the advent of web-based office solutions, does OO really matter that much any more?
More and more I find myself working with Word documents in Google Docs. Granted, Google Docs has a long, long way to go to be considered a serious contender, but in terms of convenience, it's second to none. I work with very basic documents, so once I open them they are stored on Google's servers, and I can access them wherever I am -- home, office, yacht club, city morgue, etc.
I created a website for my daughter when she was born 10 years ago to show pictures to family and friends, and was one of the first websites that I built. And it wasn't just a bunch of pictures on a page; I actually spent time on the concept and design to ramp the cuteness factor up to 11.
I haven't touched it since then, but my daughter and I have looked at it from time to time. I think it's absolutely wonderful that the website has survived this long without any need for maintenance or intervention. There was no Flickr back then, so I would have paid a small fortune in hosting fees over the past decade to keep it up for the past decade if I had used commercial hosting.
Are you gonna rent a movie once on Pay-Per-View when you can buy it on iTunes for roughly the same price? Or maybe you like watching TV shows on Hulu and similar sites, which provide zero advertising revenue for TWC.
Because this is who is being targeted with this price restructuring, the people who download a lot of video.
I'm going to venture a guess that these price increases aren't really about increased costs. This is primarily about revenue growth.
In the corporate world, you can have a business that is raking in huge profits, but if the market analysts don't see year-over-year revenue growth, that business is perceived to be floundering.
Realistically, what can TWC add as a new or increased revenue stream on the internet side of their business? They are already offering a premium bandwidth package, but the 7 Mbps they offer now as the standard service is pretty damn fast for the average household.
And their broadband service is actually eating into their TV service, as more people opt to buy movies from iTunes than to buy Pay-Per-View, or spend more time surfing the web than watching TV.
The only thing they can do to grind out more profit and to reclaim/protect TV revenues is to radically restructure their broadband pricing structure.
Wow, not only does xs4all's broadband offering blow away what I'm getting from TWC at the same price point, they also throw in a free mini-laptop.
While I have read lots of posts that talk about the theory of raising prices, I have yet to see any posts that actually demonstrate that TWC's dramatic price increases are based on dramatic cost increases. And in fact, I've read articles that hardware upgrades for TWC are actually relatively cheap.
What it would have taken for HyperCard to compete with the Mosaic browser would have been nothing short of a tear-down/rebuild of HyperCard from scratch. Interlinking stacks would have been difficult (how do you link to a single page in someone else's stack?), plus the issue of bandwidth (downloading whole stacks vs. downloading single pages) for dial-up users. The demands of HyperCard as an internet application would seem to have been radically different from the animal that is was.
It's fun to think about, but unless Bill Atkinson was a total visionary about the internet, I don't see how Apple could have possibly positioned HyperCard to compete with the web.
Connecting stacks through dial-up modems was probably the logical development path, and I think there was a commercial extension for HyperCard that negotiated a modem connection. However, it only sent text across the modem connection (rather than an entire stack). And, of course, modem speeds were a limiting factor because the stacks tended to bloat rather quickly once you started adding images to it. Web pages only had to load one at a time, whereas a HyperCard application might require the whole stack to load at once. Even LocalTalk would have choked, since LocalTalk's speed is equivalent to a 28.8k modem.
IIRC, there was a HyperCard-based BBS server available, but since it was only serving up text and file downloads, it wasn't truly delivering the HyperCard experience.
There's still no one tool that replaces everything that HyperCard did. The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
I was back in college in the early 90's, and taking a couple of language courses (not computer language). I would download stacks that would quiz me on my vocabulary. When I needed something more specific, in one evening I sat down and put together my own drill stack and, as a bonus, inserted the MacinTalk speech synthesizer to correctly pronounce the words.
HyperCard filled in the software gap for what you couldn't purchase off-the-shelf. When my PC friends used to point out how many thousands more titles were available for the PC, I used to point out that HyperCard filled the gap; if you couldn't find the HyperCard stack you were looking for on a Mac-friendly BBS (and there were tons of stacks out there), then it was a simple matter to author a stack.
Apple never understood HyperCard. At first they gave it away, and then they tried to sell it, which was a mistake. The beauty of it was that everyone had it on their Mac, and everyone eventually opened it up and said, "What the hell is this?" and started poking around with it. Once Apple/Claris shrinkwrapped it, you had to already be sold on the concept of what it was in order to purchase it.
HyperCard encapsulated a lot of pieces that are separate today. It could have been the first web browser because of the hypertext links that allowed you to move between pages within the stack. It was a great animation program, as a precursor to Flash. It was a database. It was the first introduction to scripting that most Mac users had, and professional developers could write extension modules for their stacks to push them further.
It's interesting that SuperCard, the competitor to HyperCard which gained popularity when HyperCard development languished, is still available for the Mac and still being developed. However, at $179, it's not exactly "for the masses".
However, the soundtrack was a near-total misfire. If ever a movie cried out for an all-metal soundtrack, this one was it.
I couldn't believe how weak the score was during the first Iron Man fight. Instead of building the moment, it brought the scene down. They should have played "Iron Man" right there instead of at the end.
1) There may be Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, but it's the Democrats that are firmly in control; the Republicans are just along for the ride.
2) You can't impugn a group for something they DIDN'T do. Whether the Republicans on the committee would do this, I don't know, but the fact is that THEY DIDN"T DO IT.
Technically, we're all "capable" of committing heinous acts; does that mean we shouldn't prosecute people who actually commit those acts?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just thinking that if this update is making Registry changes, then the plug-in is Windows-only, and it means that Firefox users on Windows will now have a different browsing experience than Firefox users of other platforms.
So, the plug-in accomplishes two things for Microsoft: 1) it promotes the .NET platform to a wider audience, and 2) it promotes Windows as being the superior OS to run Firefox in.
It's a win-win scenario for Microsoft. Firefox can continue to gain marketshare, but Microsoft will have their tentacles in it, making sure that the adoption of Firefox does not lead to a platform-agnostic world. And it rewards the .NET developers for investing in Microsoft-only technologies.
Visicalc defintely deserves to be on the list. It was initially released on the Apple ][, and drove a LOT of hardware sales for Apple. This was back when customers were asking sales people, "What the hell do I need a computer for?"
QuarkXpress was dominant in its industry for a long time, but it was Aldus Pagemaker and the introduction of the first affordable laser printer with PostScript (Apple's first LaserWriter) that created the DTP market. Having only seen low resolution dot matrix and thermal printing at the time, I remember being blown away the first time I saw pages from a LaserWriter in 1985.
It's completely forked.
But now, who's forked more, the software or the users?
Well, fork me, I don't have a forking clue.
The problem with the CAFE standard is that it fails to address the most fundamental problem with oil prices -- the fact that the oil industry is run by a cartel, and they control the output.
Overall, cars have become significantly more efficient over the last 30 years -- so why are we paying so much more per gallon than we did in the 70's and 80's? (Inflation, sure, but oil prices have well outpaced inflation.)
Obama can raise the CAFE standard to 42 MPG, and the oil industry will scale back production to increase the price.
Kindle in a doctor's waiting room?
Gah! I wouldn't touch that thing, knowing that every germy hand had picked it up and played around with it.
Windows "double-oh" 7?
I agree; rumors are abounding that Microsoft will release the Zune Phone this year. Apple sold almost 4.5 million iPhones in the fourth quarter last year, compared with Microsoft selling about 6 million XBox 360's... it's a segment that Microsoft will not ignore any longer.
No doubt they will treat a Zune Phone like the original XBox... force the establishment of the brand by sinking an ungodly amount of money into the division, and hope to become profitable in succeeding generations of the device.
SPOILERS
I've seen others echoing the criticism of Kirk being made captain, so I just want to say...
The entire series of sequences between Kirk and Pike was that Pike believed that Kirk was a different caliber of man, and therefore worthy of bypassing the traditional "climbing of the ladder". Kirk had a battlefield promotion to First Officer, and then to Captain.
Pike's promotion to admiral obviously put him in a position where he could defend Kirk's continued existence as captain of the Enterprise.
You also had Nimoy's Spock deciding not to live in obscurity in this new timeline, so no doubt he debriefed Starfleet on his knowledge of James T. Kirk.
Hmmm... that makes me think of another interesting point... Spock also brings vast and detailed knowledge of future tech back with him, which he displayed a willingness to share; that gives the rebooted franchise a tremendous loophole to make use of any technology seen in any of the Trek franchises.
I agree, I thought Wolverine was a decent flick. It's taking a lot of crap from the critics... but, you get to see Hugh Jackman running around with the claws and the sideburns one more time.
I think people are most upset with how Deadpool was treated. However, considering that a Deadpool movie is in the works, I'm sure that Marvel will just "reboot" the character at some point like they did with the Hulk.
Trust me on this -- see it now, while it's in theaters. Preferably in an Imax, if there's one in your area. The audience I saw it with cheered when the credits rolled; that doesn't happen often.
Yes, it's a reboot of the franchise, and a much-needed refresh. But keep in mind that this is movie-Star Trek, not TV-Star Trek. TV shows plod along and can deal with very deep issues; movies have to move along at a much faster clip.
I agree, it doesn't make sense for Apple to purchase EA. EA will continue to make iPhone and Mac games regardless of whether Apple owns them or not.
The only reason it would make sense for Apple to purchase a game company is to ensure exclusive A-list games for their platform. That's why Microsoft acquired Bungie, so that they could have the Halo games exclusively on the XBox for two years before they ported them to the PC and Mac. Bungie, who was a Mac developer at the time, had originally planned to release all versions simultaneously, IIRC.
The Bungie acquisition was an easy choice for Microsoft to spot. Bungie was greatly under-appreciated for their talents because they were cranking out A-list games for the minority platform.
What exclusive title EA might have for Apple, I have no idea. It would be a mistake for EA to take established franchises and suddenly make them iPhone-only or Mac-only.
If Apple wants an in-house game company, they need to look at up-and-coming developers or other opportunities. The collapse of 3D Realms presents a unique opportunity for someone to buy their IP assets and crank out the long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever (but Duke may be a little too controversial for Apple's tastes).
That's what Star Office was... it was the more polished version of Open Office that Sun was selling.
With the advent of web-based office solutions, does OO really matter that much any more?
More and more I find myself working with Word documents in Google Docs. Granted, Google Docs has a long, long way to go to be considered a serious contender, but in terms of convenience, it's second to none. I work with very basic documents, so once I open them they are stored on Google's servers, and I can access them wherever I am -- home, office, yacht club, city morgue, etc.
I created a website for my daughter when she was born 10 years ago to show pictures to family and friends, and was one of the first websites that I built. And it wasn't just a bunch of pictures on a page; I actually spent time on the concept and design to ramp the cuteness factor up to 11.
I haven't touched it since then, but my daughter and I have looked at it from time to time. I think it's absolutely wonderful that the website has survived this long without any need for maintenance or intervention. There was no Flickr back then, so I would have paid a small fortune in hosting fees over the past decade to keep it up for the past decade if I had used commercial hosting.
This is more about protecting existing profit.
Are you gonna rent a movie once on Pay-Per-View when you can buy it on iTunes for roughly the same price? Or maybe you like watching TV shows on Hulu and similar sites, which provide zero advertising revenue for TWC.
Because this is who is being targeted with this price restructuring, the people who download a lot of video.
I'm going to venture a guess that these price increases aren't really about increased costs. This is primarily about revenue growth.
In the corporate world, you can have a business that is raking in huge profits, but if the market analysts don't see year-over-year revenue growth, that business is perceived to be floundering.
Realistically, what can TWC add as a new or increased revenue stream on the internet side of their business? They are already offering a premium bandwidth package, but the 7 Mbps they offer now as the standard service is pretty damn fast for the average household.
And their broadband service is actually eating into their TV service, as more people opt to buy movies from iTunes than to buy Pay-Per-View, or spend more time surfing the web than watching TV.
The only thing they can do to grind out more profit and to reclaim/protect TV revenues is to radically restructure their broadband pricing structure.
Wow, not only does xs4all's broadband offering blow away what I'm getting from TWC at the same price point, they also throw in a free mini-laptop.
While I have read lots of posts that talk about the theory of raising prices, I have yet to see any posts that actually demonstrate that TWC's dramatic price increases are based on dramatic cost increases. And in fact, I've read articles that hardware upgrades for TWC are actually relatively cheap.
What it would have taken for HyperCard to compete with the Mosaic browser would have been nothing short of a tear-down/rebuild of HyperCard from scratch. Interlinking stacks would have been difficult (how do you link to a single page in someone else's stack?), plus the issue of bandwidth (downloading whole stacks vs. downloading single pages) for dial-up users. The demands of HyperCard as an internet application would seem to have been radically different from the animal that is was.
It's fun to think about, but unless Bill Atkinson was a total visionary about the internet, I don't see how Apple could have possibly positioned HyperCard to compete with the web.
Connecting stacks through dial-up modems was probably the logical development path, and I think there was a commercial extension for HyperCard that negotiated a modem connection. However, it only sent text across the modem connection (rather than an entire stack). And, of course, modem speeds were a limiting factor because the stacks tended to bloat rather quickly once you started adding images to it. Web pages only had to load one at a time, whereas a HyperCard application might require the whole stack to load at once. Even LocalTalk would have choked, since LocalTalk's speed is equivalent to a 28.8k modem.
IIRC, there was a HyperCard-based BBS server available, but since it was only serving up text and file downloads, it wasn't truly delivering the HyperCard experience.
There's still no one tool that replaces everything that HyperCard did. The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
I was back in college in the early 90's, and taking a couple of language courses (not computer language). I would download stacks that would quiz me on my vocabulary. When I needed something more specific, in one evening I sat down and put together my own drill stack and, as a bonus, inserted the MacinTalk speech synthesizer to correctly pronounce the words.
HyperCard filled in the software gap for what you couldn't purchase off-the-shelf. When my PC friends used to point out how many thousands more titles were available for the PC, I used to point out that HyperCard filled the gap; if you couldn't find the HyperCard stack you were looking for on a Mac-friendly BBS (and there were tons of stacks out there), then it was a simple matter to author a stack.
Apple never understood HyperCard. At first they gave it away, and then they tried to sell it, which was a mistake. The beauty of it was that everyone had it on their Mac, and everyone eventually opened it up and said, "What the hell is this?" and started poking around with it. Once Apple/Claris shrinkwrapped it, you had to already be sold on the concept of what it was in order to purchase it.
HyperCard encapsulated a lot of pieces that are separate today. It could have been the first web browser because of the hypertext links that allowed you to move between pages within the stack. It was a great animation program, as a precursor to Flash. It was a database. It was the first introduction to scripting that most Mac users had, and professional developers could write extension modules for their stacks to push them further.
It's interesting that SuperCard, the competitor to HyperCard which gained popularity when HyperCard development languished, is still available for the Mac and still being developed. However, at $179, it's not exactly "for the masses".
I agree, it was a great movie.
However, the soundtrack was a near-total misfire. If ever a movie cried out for an all-metal soundtrack, this one was it.
I couldn't believe how weak the score was during the first Iron Man fight. Instead of building the moment, it brought the scene down. They should have played "Iron Man" right there instead of at the end.
I'm not worried... I have Old Glory Insurance. I'm covered.
Quick, somebody hold down Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse while I get the syringe...
Tanarus is a great tank game that Sony recently opened up as a freebie:
Tanarus Home Page
1) There may be Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, but it's the Democrats that are firmly in control; the Republicans are just along for the ride.
2) You can't impugn a group for something they DIDN'T do. Whether the Republicans on the committee would do this, I don't know, but the fact is that THEY DIDN"T DO IT.
Technically, we're all "capable" of committing heinous acts; does that mean we shouldn't prosecute people who actually commit those acts?