In theory, it would be easier to port a Windows app to a Windows cluster.
I can see that reasoning working for smaller scale applications running on a single machine and moving up to a smallish cluster of just a few boxes so you can spread the various processes out amongst the different boxen . . . but once you want to scale up to dozens of individual machines, I don't see how an ap that was originally built for Windows would necessarily be any easier to port to a Windows cluster than a Linux/*nix cluster.
The hard part usually isn't getting the code to run on any one machine/os, it's parallelizing the code so it's efficiently 'divied up' amongst the individual machines.
And in the absence of GWA enabling Automatic Updates and blindly accepting all patches Microsoft deems "critical" [i]isn't[/i] allowing Microsoft to execute arbitrary code on your machine?
And a game console can't use compressed data on its media? An install to HD isn't necessary either. Modern hardware is more than up to the task of decompressing on the fly.
Why spend hundreds of hours making a game that no one can/would use. Seems like alot of work for no gain. Stick to computers for homebrews and cellphones for portables, easier and much bigger audiences.
"Because it's there."
Why spend hours installing a source-based OS distribution when quicker pre-compiled "ready-to-eat" versions are readily available? Why tinker with anything that works well enough and risk breaking it? Because it's fun! Lots of people have hobbies. Whether it's hacking a console to see how it all works, porting a different platform's games or writing new ones from scratch . . . heck, even knitting a sweater is a long tedious process when there are countless ready-made alternatives. (I can't believe I actually just compared console homebrewing and knitting . . . on Slashdot.) Some people enjoy this stuff. Even if the results turn out kind of crappy, we can still beam with "yeah, well, I *made* that!" pride.
but I think people will quickly wise up and switch ISPs if that happens.
There's the rub. Many people *can't* switch ISPs, as only one company offers broadband in their area. These companies effectively have government-granted monopolies, they get to build their lines and equipment on public land . . . and now they get to dictate speeds of access for particular sites and services. [Sarcasm] Thank you congress for yet again protecting the desires of the consumer from those who would abuse them . . . [/Sarcasm]
Physics. CD, DVD and future format drives are (mechanically) about fast as they're going to get. If they spun much faster, there'd be a serious risk of a disc shattering in the drive and wrecking it. Read speed is going to be largely dependant on how densely packed the data is. So, more pits over the same physical area of identically sized discs = faster data transfer.
# They've stolen plenty of technology before - it wouldn't be hard for them to put Acrobat-reading code into Office without permission, then drag things out in the court for a few decades until it becomes irrelevant.
# They could also modify Windows to make running Acrobat impossible (it worked in killing DR-DOS) or impractical (their method of disembowling Netscape).
I don't see either of those options working. Flat-out stealing Acrobat opens them up for an injunction early in the litigation process--Adobe could conceivably block Vista or Office 2007 from hitting store shelves until the matter was resolved. Microsoft can't afford to be forced to sit still on either of those fronts--FOSS and Apple certainly won't be.
MS was able to attack DR-DOS by modifying Windows to break on anything but MS-DOS. Changing the Windows APIs to break Acrobat is something else entirely--it would screw up many more apps than just Acrobat.
Isn't it illegal (in the U.S. at least) to use discriminatory pricing like that, especially if you're doing so to deliberately exclude competitors? I thought this was one of the complaints in the MS anti trust suits as well as the basis for other suits (AMD vs. Intel, Pepsi vs. Coke, etc.)
To steal a bit from Arthur C. Clarke . . . Privacy is one of those things that only works when either everyone has it, or no one does. If everyone had access to their own personal spy satellites then we're all on equal footing. (well . . a little more equal footing, anyway)
Why? All it's doing is serving up files via Samba shares. I have 20 clients connected to a Debian/Samba box with a 1 ghz P3, 1 gig Ram, and a couple 80 gig IDE drives (no RAID or anythign) . . . not under much strain at all, actually. I know intensive IDE transactions need a lot of CPU, but we're talking about shared office docs. I can't imagine drive operations getting all that intensive when the major bottleneck in this case is going to be to 100mbit ethernet card.
You can set up a light linux distro on an older machine, like DSL, the whole thing can run in RAM after booting from the network or a live CD, and have it fire up a browser like a kiosk or VNC/RDP into your server of choice that does all the real work. Voila, old PC becomes diskless thin client.
Why do you feel that installing software is difficult on Linux?
Most distros I've seen have a graphical software tool--search for what you want, and it downloads and installs automagically. Others have simple command lines (apt-get install firefox) that take care of it all.
I agree that things get a bit trickier when you want to browse to some random website and install software by downloading it from there. It's more in line with the Windows model, but if you think about it, it's kindof a silly way of acquiring new software. How many viruses and spyware apps would cease to be if end users didn't download double-clickable binary installers from SomeRandomWebsite(tm) or an e-mail attachment?
Even though you generally can't double click to install such things in Linux, it'll still let you install out-of-package-manager software if you really want to with a simple command or two. (heck, often times even compiling from source is as simple as "make" and "make install")
I pay for my bandwidth--granted, it's not dedicated, but I have a certain max bandwidth. Meanwhile, content providers usually pay for dedicated lines to server their customers and that's usually priced on total data transferred and bandwidth. So a provider sending tons of streaming HD content is going to be paying much more for hosting and their connection than a smallish blog host or something.
If the telcos want to add surcharges to end users, (or the content providers, which will only be passed on to end users--plus a modest mark up, of course) they're double-dipping.
I don't see why Sony thinks it can pull an N64-esque move and price the system like this. What's the point of having a 20 GB hard-drive? Why don't they have a base model with only 5 gigs or something?
There won't be much price difference between manufacturing a 5 gig drive vs. a 20 gig hard drive these days. As you go down in capacity, the drives don't get all that much cheaper to make, so it wouldn't affect PS3's sticker price much.
Yup. They're called quantum fluctuations, or the "Quantum Foam." All kinds of exotic particles can pop in and out of existance all the time, they just balance each other out on larger scales.
There are some theories on how one might interrupt the balance and use this effect as as an enormous energy source. Check out the Casimir effect and Zero Point Energy. Although right now the only things vacuum energy has been effectively powering are Sci-Fi stories and quackery.
Robert Hewett Wolfe's original ideas for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda had a similar theme. Unfortunately, he was let go and replaced early in the show's history so what wound up on screen was . . . perhaps not as interesting. You can read his original plan here.
Have any of the content industries tried trusting their customers?
Downloading and burning a DVD is going to be too big of a pain for lots of people. For it to work in most DVD players, it's gotta be MPEG2 which means downloads of several gigs per title. They could cut that down a lot w/ an MPEG4 variant, but then the customer will have to transcode to MPEG2 which can take hours . . . so from their perspective, no time saved.
Why not release the whole library for pay-per-minte streaming, and offer an option to download the title (DRM-free) for an extra fee? Customers get to browse pr0n to their heart's content, and can download and burn titles they especially like. The studios get more revenue because it's cheap and quick on the streaming side, and they'll probably curb a lot of piracy--why bother wading through usenet and p2p networks when you can preview and download whatever you want much more efficiently for reasonable rates?
God forbid someone downloads a DVD, burns it, gives a zillion copies to their friends, etc. Because . . . you know . . . I'm *sure* that *never* happens with rented porn DVDs already . . .
There has always been and always will be piracy. The best way to minimize it is to offer your consumers what they want, how they want it, and at prices that make for a better value and less effort than going out and getting it illegally.
Well she could always download bootcamp and install WindowsXP on her MacBook too. That way she won't miss out on all the viruses (mass forwarded.exe's! WTF?!) and other crap you send her.
I couldn't agree more. I especially abhor MS's licensing structure . . . they do so many of these things to supposedly thwart pirates, but only a monopoly could get away with this crap:
-Full retail edition of XP Pro costs $300.
-OEM can be had for half of that, as low as $80.00 if you dig a little bit
-The OEM EULA says its non-transferrable and lives and dies on the same machine. (dubious if M$ can actually enforce that . . . First Sale has trumped EULAs in court cases before . ..)
-MS claims that the OEM discount is precisely because it's non-transferrable. If you want to be able to move it to a new machine, you need a full retail version.
-Even if you bought full retail, you still probably get to pay for windows again when you buy a new machine from a major vendor because MS pressures its vendors to only sell PCs with an OS because of the filthy theiving pirates. The only option is to get a "freedos" or whatever machine that usually isn't any cheaper, or building one yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the command "man woman" still doesn't work. How long till we get good a good man page, doggonit?
Probably as soon as a man learns how to write about the correct operation of a woman. Don't hold your breath.
I can see that reasoning working for smaller scale applications running on a single machine and moving up to a smallish cluster of just a few boxes so you can spread the various processes out amongst the different boxen . . . but once you want to scale up to dozens of individual machines, I don't see how an ap that was originally built for Windows would necessarily be any easier to port to a Windows cluster than a Linux/*nix cluster.
The hard part usually isn't getting the code to run on any one machine/os, it's parallelizing the code so it's efficiently 'divied up' amongst the individual machines.
Obviously, it's because Solaris is one of many Linux-like operating systems.
And in the absence of GWA enabling Automatic Updates and blindly accepting all patches Microsoft deems "critical" [i]isn't[/i] allowing Microsoft to execute arbitrary code on your machine?
And a game console can't use compressed data on its media? An install to HD isn't necessary either. Modern hardware is more than up to the task of decompressing on the fly.
Why spend hundreds of hours making a game that no one can/would use. Seems like alot of work for no gain. Stick to computers for homebrews and cellphones for portables, easier and much bigger audiences.
"Because it's there."
Why spend hours installing a source-based OS distribution when quicker pre-compiled "ready-to-eat" versions are readily available? Why tinker with anything that works well enough and risk breaking it? Because it's fun! Lots of people have hobbies. Whether it's hacking a console to see how it all works, porting a different platform's games or writing new ones from scratch . . . heck, even knitting a sweater is a long tedious process when there are countless ready-made alternatives. (I can't believe I actually just compared console homebrewing and knitting . . . on Slashdot.) Some people enjoy this stuff. Even if the results turn out kind of crappy, we can still beam with "yeah, well, I *made* that!" pride.
but I think people will quickly wise up and switch ISPs if that happens.
There's the rub. Many people *can't* switch ISPs, as only one company offers broadband in their area. These companies effectively have government-granted monopolies, they get to build their lines and equipment on public land . . . and now they get to dictate speeds of access for particular sites and services. [Sarcasm] Thank you congress for yet again protecting the desires of the consumer from those who would abuse them . . . [/Sarcasm]
Physics. CD, DVD and future format drives are (mechanically) about fast as they're going to get. If they spun much faster, there'd be a serious risk of a disc shattering in the drive and wrecking it. Read speed is going to be largely dependant on how densely packed the data is. So, more pits over the same physical area of identically sized discs = faster data transfer.
# They've stolen plenty of technology before - it wouldn't be hard for them to put Acrobat-reading code into Office without permission, then drag things out in the court for a few decades until it becomes irrelevant. # They could also modify Windows to make running Acrobat impossible (it worked in killing DR-DOS) or impractical (their method of disembowling Netscape).
I don't see either of those options working. Flat-out stealing Acrobat opens them up for an injunction early in the litigation process--Adobe could conceivably block Vista or Office 2007 from hitting store shelves until the matter was resolved. Microsoft can't afford to be forced to sit still on either of those fronts--FOSS and Apple certainly won't be.
MS was able to attack DR-DOS by modifying Windows to break on anything but MS-DOS. Changing the Windows APIs to break Acrobat is something else entirely--it would screw up many more apps than just Acrobat.
Isn't it illegal (in the U.S. at least) to use discriminatory pricing like that, especially if you're doing so to deliberately exclude competitors? I thought this was one of the complaints in the MS anti trust suits as well as the basis for other suits (AMD vs. Intel, Pepsi vs. Coke, etc.)
This is better than Johnny 5 making breakfast!
To steal a bit from Arthur C. Clarke . . . Privacy is one of those things that only works when either everyone has it, or no one does. If everyone had access to their own personal spy satellites then we're all on equal footing. (well . . a little more equal footing, anyway)
Why? All it's doing is serving up files via Samba shares. I have 20 clients connected to a Debian/Samba box with a 1 ghz P3, 1 gig Ram, and a couple 80 gig IDE drives (no RAID or anythign) . . . not under much strain at all, actually. I know intensive IDE transactions need a lot of CPU, but we're talking about shared office docs. I can't imagine drive operations getting all that intensive when the major bottleneck in this case is going to be to 100mbit ethernet card.
You can set up a light linux distro on an older machine, like DSL, the whole thing can run in RAM after booting from the network or a live CD, and have it fire up a browser like a kiosk or VNC/RDP into your server of choice that does all the real work. Voila, old PC becomes diskless thin client.
Why do you feel that installing software is difficult on Linux?
Most distros I've seen have a graphical software tool--search for what you want, and it downloads and installs automagically. Others have simple command lines (apt-get install firefox) that take care of it all.
I agree that things get a bit trickier when you want to browse to some random website and install software by downloading it from there. It's more in line with the Windows model, but if you think about it, it's kindof a silly way of acquiring new software. How many viruses and spyware apps would cease to be if end users didn't download double-clickable binary installers from SomeRandomWebsite(tm) or an e-mail attachment?
Even though you generally can't double click to install such things in Linux, it'll still let you install out-of-package-manager software if you really want to with a simple command or two. (heck, often times even compiling from source is as simple as "make" and "make install")
I pay for my bandwidth--granted, it's not dedicated, but I have a certain max bandwidth. Meanwhile, content providers usually pay for dedicated lines to server their customers and that's usually priced on total data transferred and bandwidth. So a provider sending tons of streaming HD content is going to be paying much more for hosting and their connection than a smallish blog host or something.
If the telcos want to add surcharges to end users, (or the content providers, which will only be passed on to end users--plus a modest mark up, of course) they're double-dipping.
I don't see why Sony thinks it can pull an N64-esque move and price the system like this. What's the point of having a 20 GB hard-drive? Why don't they have a base model with only 5 gigs or something?
There won't be much price difference between manufacturing a 5 gig drive vs. a 20 gig hard drive these days. As you go down in capacity, the drives don't get all that much cheaper to make, so it wouldn't affect PS3's sticker price much.
15.5 Million Japenese kids who would buy anything from a Japanese company to prove it is better than its American counterpart
Ummmm . . . Nintendo's a Japanese company too.
Yup. They're called quantum fluctuations, or the "Quantum Foam." All kinds of exotic particles can pop in and out of existance all the time, they just balance each other out on larger scales.
There are some theories on how one might interrupt the balance and use this effect as as an enormous energy source. Check out the Casimir effect and Zero Point Energy. Although right now the only things vacuum energy has been effectively powering are Sci-Fi stories and quackery.
Robert Hewett Wolfe's original ideas for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda had a similar theme. Unfortunately, he was let go and replaced early in the show's history so what wound up on screen was . . . perhaps not as interesting. You can read his original plan here.
Are the spoofed packets' evil bits set to 1?
As long as you don't encrypt files, you can use a bootdisk to reset a forgotten windows password pretty easily.
Have any of the content industries tried trusting their customers?
Downloading and burning a DVD is going to be too big of a pain for lots of people. For it to work in most DVD players, it's gotta be MPEG2 which means downloads of several gigs per title. They could cut that down a lot w/ an MPEG4 variant, but then the customer will have to transcode to MPEG2 which can take hours . . . so from their perspective, no time saved.
Why not release the whole library for pay-per-minte streaming, and offer an option to download the title (DRM-free) for an extra fee? Customers get to browse pr0n to their heart's content, and can download and burn titles they especially like. The studios get more revenue because it's cheap and quick on the streaming side, and they'll probably curb a lot of piracy--why bother wading through usenet and p2p networks when you can preview and download whatever you want much more efficiently for reasonable rates?
God forbid someone downloads a DVD, burns it, gives a zillion copies to their friends, etc. Because . . . you know . . . I'm *sure* that *never* happens with rented porn DVDs already . . .
There has always been and always will be piracy. The best way to minimize it is to offer your consumers what they want, how they want it, and at prices that make for a better value and less effort than going out and getting it illegally.
Well she could always download bootcamp and install WindowsXP on her MacBook too. That way she won't miss out on all the viruses (mass forwarded .exe's! WTF?!) and other crap you send her.
I couldn't agree more. I especially abhor MS's licensing structure . . . they do so many of these things to supposedly thwart pirates, but only a monopoly could get away with this crap:
-Full retail edition of XP Pro costs $300.
-OEM can be had for half of that, as low as $80.00 if you dig a little bit
-The OEM EULA says its non-transferrable and lives and dies on the same machine. (dubious if M$ can actually enforce that . . . First Sale has trumped EULAs in court cases before . . .)
-MS claims that the OEM discount is precisely because it's non-transferrable. If you want to be able to move it to a new machine, you need a full retail version.
-Even if you bought full retail, you still probably get to pay for windows again when you buy a new machine from a major vendor because MS pressures its vendors to only sell PCs with an OS because of the filthy theiving pirates. The only option is to get a "freedos" or whatever machine that usually isn't any cheaper, or building one yourself.
Grrrrr . . .