This most certainly is not limited to games. The majority of software projects fail. It's a simple, sad fact. Why? Programmers play hero and intentionally, or ignorantly, underestimate the task. Managers think that by "pushing hard" for the impossible that they can actually achieve it. Upper management fails to give proper support and the project is waiting for D day. Etc.
The game industry actually has a very good success rate compared to the general software world.
Isn't it ironic that it's usually used to slam IIS, though? Most of the times that people see that IIS too-many-users screen they run to slashdot to expose the weakness of IIS, ignoring the fact that it's an artificial limit that the system administrator set to avoid the machine basically dying trying to accomodate too many visitors simultaneously.
Let me guess: All new music sucks too? It all never lives up to that golden era when music was great. That, of course, was in [YOUR AGE AT 16-20]. Ah, those were the days.
There are a lot of incredible games nowadays. Personally I love Operation Flashpoint, and F1 2002 is quite good. I'm really looking forward to Hidden & Dangerous 2. Are there games that suck? Yup, just as there always has been. I remember having a pirate friend with a Commodore 64 with walls of pirate games (there were, quite literally, THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS). Of those I'd say about 99% weren't worth the time it took to load them.
But just as Daikatana failed, I think, because a lot of positive hype built it up, and it couldn't meet expectations
Daikatana was a really bad game. Honestly, I tried my hardest to like it when it came out, but it almost seemed like flashing back in the past and playing Hexen (though Hexen was actually fun). I've heard from some people who grunted through it that the game actually had merit halfway through and beyond, but extremely few people made it there.
Another reason, of course, is that Romero cast himself as a cult of personality. When someone has the gumption to do that, there will be a lot of people gunning for them. Couple that with endless articles portraying his game design brilliance and... people are just waiting with baited breath for a turd to present itself for analysis. It surely did.
he reason why this was a dumb scheme, and the reason why they got caught is pure math. The track paid out more money then they took in, and immediately knew something was amiss. If the systems worked properly, that can't happen. Long shots hit all the time, even 100:1 long shots, but if your computer system adjusted the odds according to the bets made before post, you won't lose money.
Obviously you understand horse racing. Having said that, I question your claim that it's entirely pool driven. Most tracks offer multiple win wins that are many multiples the win for a single race. i.e. If this guy changed a single $1 bet for #7 in the 3rd to be a $10000000 bet, then that seems obvious. If, on the other hand, he changed a $1 bet (so $6) for #7 in the 1st, #2 in the 2nd, #4 in the 3rd, etc, for $6 races, and the track offers a mega win for six successive wins, the difference that his bets make in the win is miniscule.
I apologize: I thought ahead of the speed that I typed. It can happen when you're in a teleconference at the same time.
Having said that, I find people who feel it necessary to point out obvious mistypes/word transpositions fascinating, and perhaps mentally handicapped (I'm not trying to be mean or ostracize. Just a fascinating study). When I read most of the mutated text here on Slashdot, what actually makes it to my "reading cortex" is a demangled text: teh becomes the, etc. I suspect that it's the mildly mentally handicapped that are really thrown off by such errors as they struggle to read from word to word.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but it was my belief that they were saying that he won by winning 6 separate, probably successive, races. Most tracks have that sort of super payout, because of course the odds are successively worse and worse.
Why would he buy six of the same winning ticket? He could have just bet 6 times as much.
Sounds debatable to me. On the one hand a huge payout will garner a lot of attention, but on the other hand committing a fraud over and over every week sounds quite high on the risk scale too.
As a bit of background regarding this, these guys didn't transfer from one bank account to another, or some other thing that's caught "in the books": One purportedly made an electronic bet, and the other altered the electronic bet after the fact to match the winners. It really isn't that ridiculous of a scam as people do win every now and then. It isn't entirely inconceivable that someone one.
Having said that, it is the duty of responsibility of the operators to exercise due diligence, and truly not trust anyone: i.e. all databases have multiple layers including audit logs, in this case catching his transaction as it occurs for future analysis. In this case I presume that exactly that happened, as they obviously caught him.
Well I run win2k as a gaming OS but I'm pretty smart. The average gamer needs to run win98 or XP if they want to have a chance of playing the latest games. Linux is just not a feasable solution. Even things like WINE do not work with most games.
XP is, in all essence, Windows 2000 version 2, and is largely parallel with 2000 for gaming. 2000 wasn't a good choice for gaming in the early days because the drivers just weren't there for multimedia hardware: Soundblaster, Geforce, etc-- all of them had hackneyed, poor performance and poor compatibility drivers. As Microsoft made it clear that it was the future direction they got their ass in gear and made drivers that often exceed the speed of the 95/98/ME machines. As it stands if I were given a choice between 2000 and 98, I'd take 2000 hands down.
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
The bus and memory bandwidth has improved pretty much in lockstep with the CPU computational ability. While it might be nice on paper to have 16GB of memory bandwidth, and it might look good on a ridiculously synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark, in practicality such a imbalance would be just a monstrous waste of money: Generally processors actually do something with the data that they're processing, so the two factors have to balance: You need a system design that can keep the processor satiated. In the Athlon world such a situation was demonstrated superbly recently with the ramping up of the memory subsystem speed, DDR ramping up from 266Mhz to 400Mhz...what improvement did it demonstrate? Virtually none. The processor simply had no real need for the additional memory bandwidth, though I'm sure it will as they come out with the next generation.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
While I have spent considerable effort in the past disputing the Mhz-is-king myth (especially in regards to the P4 versus the Athlon), I think you're promoting just as false of an claim. CPU speed DOES matter. By your claims, shouldn't these benchmarks show no improvement as the CPU power ramps up, given your claims that it's starved for throughput?
Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
So you're saying that they should be increasing memory bandwidth and bus speeds? What a clever idea. You should write a letter to them because clearly they just haven't caught on...oh wait, yes they have.
If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
This is as much bullshit as claiming that only Mhz is a measure of a machine's performance. Obviously it's a combination of all of the systems in the machine, and the large CPU manufacturers aren't stupid (i.e. they want their machines to show up at the top of the benchmarks): As the need arises they increase bus and memory bandwidth accordingly, and for "cutting edge" needs they produce chips with huge L2 caches (though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU: In that case the only option they have is to increase the cache). A dual-channel RAMBUS solution isn't going to make a P4 1.4Ghz any faster than it would be with a single-channel: The CPU will never demand that memory bandwidth. Indeed, this was one of the original problems with RAMBUS: The extreme throughput it offered simply wasn't necessary for the early P4s, leading to a lot of the early naysaying about its usefulness. Of course we all know that it because the crucial point for P4 performance as the clock speed accelerated.
Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?
Some machine with hard-coded firmware is not going to make the grade.
Agreed, they shouldn't be putting their eggs in the Divx basket. MPEG 4, though, especially with the newest standard being ratified, represents the cutting edge of quality with some hope of stabilization in the codec wars. Soon... soon.
The reason that players haven't supported the new codecs is for exactly the reason that you mention: Hopping on the bandwagon for standards that aren't standards can be dangerous. Instead most manufacturers are waiting for it to settle out.
It's as simple as using a modified HTTP client. HTTP 1.1 defines a "referer" (it's actually misspelled in the spec and in usage) HTTP request header that allows clients to pass the page which forwarded it to that location. A lot of sites use referrer tag checking to ensure that people don't use their images on webpages at other domains.
Anyways, using common tools and about 10 seconds of time you can make a spider which iterates through the web, always passing your bogus referrer header.
Uh...take a train, or a bus, or a cab? I take one of those "Self driving cars" to work, and during that period of time I read the newspaper and work documents, etc.
It's foolish to blame the car companies for this, especially given that they've been working on making self-driving cars for years (haven't you ever seen one of those TLC shows?). The problem is that you can't just put a self-driving car on a highway: There is a MASSIVE regulatory machine that would impede in that, thankfully. (Imagine if every programmer decided that they could program their own car? No thanks...). The human mind is an astoundingly powerful thing as well, so simply presuming that it's a trivial action that can be taken over by computers is folly: While computers can perform the basics extremely well with absolutely precision, they can't deal with the unexpected very well (we still don't have computer vision that is anything beyond laughable). Because of this, the worldwide infrastructure would have to be modified: Be it radio pathways under each road, etc.
If you're going to bring the Newton into it, then it should be noted that Pocket PCs, such as my Toshiba e310, let you write out cursive text and it converts it to text. It does a fairly good job of it as well.
Of course I prefer the keyboard anyones. My handwriting, like most nerds brought up on a lifetime of computers and typing, is absolutely positively atrocious.
I don't understand this. What does using a BlueTooth enabled headset have to do with a ban on Cell phones while driving?
Most juristictions have only banned the use of handsets while in a car (due to the distraction of holding it to your head, looking at it to dial, etc), and usually there are loopholes for the use of headsets/handsfree.
Of the dozens or so posts so far, the majority seem to have read the headline as if it was proclaiming that there is now a ban on "Driving Bluetooth" (good thing, too. The last thing we need is wireless protocols driving cars around), rather than the true meaning of the subject, which is
Manufacturer's Interest in Bluetooth Increasing Due to Car Cellphone Ban
Because he's defending a position and is enjoying the conversation? Is it more noble to come out with arms swinging at PayPal?
I've used PayPal for over a year now, receiving several payments and making several payments. I haven't had an ounce of trouble. I don't have the ability to know the customer satisfaction numbers, but it does seem entirely possible to me that there's a small number of very vocal cadre of disenfranchised customers who now a screaming for revenge for perceived ills. There is such a thing as noble crusader, but just as real is the revenge seeking maniac who'll stop at nothing to make an organization "pay" because they got slighted in some way.
I, as a taxpayer, have already paid for the code to be written. The GPL would stop people like Microsoft taking that code - that I've already paid for - and selling it to me again and again as if it were their own.
Idiotic train of thought (are you trolling?), though it's the standard attack against the BSD, which is why I presume that you aren't a troll.
If a guy on the street corner is giving away free bagels, and a guy beside him is taking those free muffins and putting cream cheese on them, selling those cream cheesed muffins for $1.00, the cost of the cream cheesed muffins is clearly for the cream cheese- The improvements to the muffin. He COULD NOT take those muffins and then try selling them, as obviously people would just get the free ones from the guy beside him.
This same premise holds for software as well: The value of software is in comparison to what people can already get for free. If Microsoft started selling Apache as Apache.net for $999, how many sales do you think they'd get? Now if they actually went through the code and did serious porting (versus the partial porting), hooked into the plumbing of win32 to yield extreme performance, etc, and they sold THAT, then they do have something of value, and the value is measured as what is above and beyond the free Apache that people can already download.
That's fundamentally what the BSD license is: A license with virtually no restrictions (versus the highly restricitive, politically inspired GPL). One of the primary purposes of the BSD style license is to
Make people aware that you didn't "forget" the copyright notice and therefore have a natural copyright. I believe the standard is that works containing no copyright have very strict implied copyrights
Absolve you of responsibility if someone uses the code and it blows up a shuttle or derails a train. It's a responsible thing to put there if you're not explicitly being compensated to underwrite the risk of the software.
They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free.
While it might be true for IEs on alternate platforms, Microsoft has always subsidized IE as a part of the Windows platform, hence paying for Windows is paying for IE. This comes back to the whole "is it a part of the operating system", and I personally would say yes: Microsoft was trying to keep their operating systems relevant, and whether they were adding an encrypted filesystem, Super Solitaire, a disk defragmenter, or a web browser, it seems like a value add to me.
I think people have always had a problem with periodic and continuous billings, and it took many years for people to get accustomed to it for services like electricity (well, I suppose a better saying was in the years since that was the norm, people have started to think that everything is free). i.e. If the satellite maker sold only $500 receivers, but had no monthly fees, I'd bet they'd have far more customers. People hate being hen pecked, even when in the long run it saves them money or saves them from long term investing in troubled companies.
I'd say that you're one of the very few people who feels the need to explicitly state "XHTML" as if it's some separate, isolated technology from HTML, rather than "minor tweaks to HTML to make it comply with XML syntax rules".
Additionally, virtually no one actually deploys XML+XSLT for non-example websites, apart from examples of how to deploy XML+XSLT for standard websites (for a myriad of reasons including the fact that it offers virtually nothing over standard XHTML spat out from dynamic scripts. Yeah, sk00l me, but I using XML+XSLT for some sites over two years ago, but I still know not to pretend like it's a widespread mainstream solution).
Slashdot Mirror
This most certainly is not limited to games. The majority of software projects fail. It's a simple, sad fact. Why? Programmers play hero and intentionally, or ignorantly, underestimate the task. Managers think that by "pushing hard" for the impossible that they can actually achieve it. Upper management fails to give proper support and the project is waiting for D day. Etc.
The game industry actually has a very good success rate compared to the general software world.
Isn't it ironic that it's usually used to slam IIS, though? Most of the times that people see that IIS too-many-users screen they run to slashdot to expose the weakness of IIS, ignoring the fact that it's an artificial limit that the system administrator set to avoid the machine basically dying trying to accomodate too many visitors simultaneously.
Oh yes.. New games do suck
Let me guess: All new music sucks too? It all never lives up to that golden era when music was great. That, of course, was in [YOUR AGE AT 16-20]. Ah, those were the days.
There are a lot of incredible games nowadays. Personally I love Operation Flashpoint, and F1 2002 is quite good. I'm really looking forward to Hidden & Dangerous 2. Are there games that suck? Yup, just as there always has been. I remember having a pirate friend with a Commodore 64 with walls of pirate games (there were, quite literally, THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS). Of those I'd say about 99% weren't worth the time it took to load them.
But just as Daikatana failed, I think, because a lot of positive hype built it up, and it couldn't meet expectations
Daikatana was a really bad game. Honestly, I tried my hardest to like it when it came out, but it almost seemed like flashing back in the past and playing Hexen (though Hexen was actually fun). I've heard from some people who grunted through it that the game actually had merit halfway through and beyond, but extremely few people made it there.
Another reason, of course, is that Romero cast himself as a cult of personality. When someone has the gumption to do that, there will be a lot of people gunning for them. Couple that with endless articles portraying his game design brilliance and... people are just waiting with baited breath for a turd to present itself for analysis. It surely did.
he reason why this was a dumb scheme, and the reason why they got caught is pure math. The track paid out more money then they took in, and immediately knew something was amiss. If the systems worked properly, that can't happen. Long shots hit all the time, even 100:1 long shots, but if your computer system adjusted the odds according to the bets made before post, you won't lose money.
Obviously you understand horse racing. Having said that, I question your claim that it's entirely pool driven. Most tracks offer multiple win wins that are many multiples the win for a single race. i.e. If this guy changed a single $1 bet for #7 in the 3rd to be a $10000000 bet, then that seems obvious. If, on the other hand, he changed a $1 bet (so $6) for #7 in the 1st, #2 in the 2nd, #4 in the 3rd, etc, for $6 races, and the track offers a mega win for six successive wins, the difference that his bets make in the win is miniscule.
I apologize: I thought ahead of the speed that I typed. It can happen when you're in a teleconference at the same time.
Having said that, I find people who feel it necessary to point out obvious mistypes/word transpositions fascinating, and perhaps mentally handicapped (I'm not trying to be mean or ostracize. Just a fascinating study). When I read most of the mutated text here on Slashdot, what actually makes it to my "reading cortex" is a demangled text: teh becomes the, etc. I suspect that it's the mildly mentally handicapped that are really thrown off by such errors as they struggle to read from word to word.
I think there should be a study regarding this.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but it was my belief that they were saying that he won by winning 6 separate, probably successive, races. Most tracks have that sort of super payout, because of course the odds are successively worse and worse.
Why would he buy six of the same winning ticket? He could have just bet 6 times as much.
Sounds debatable to me. On the one hand a huge payout will garner a lot of attention, but on the other hand committing a fraud over and over every week sounds quite high on the risk scale too.
As a bit of background regarding this, these guys didn't transfer from one bank account to another, or some other thing that's caught "in the books": One purportedly made an electronic bet, and the other altered the electronic bet after the fact to match the winners. It really isn't that ridiculous of a scam as people do win every now and then. It isn't entirely inconceivable that someone one.
Having said that, it is the duty of responsibility of the operators to exercise due diligence, and truly not trust anyone: i.e. all databases have multiple layers including audit logs, in this case catching his transaction as it occurs for future analysis. In this case I presume that exactly that happened, as they obviously caught him.
Well I run win2k as a gaming OS but I'm pretty smart. The average gamer needs to run win98 or XP if they want to have a chance of playing the latest games. Linux is just not a feasable solution. Even things like WINE do not work with most games.
XP is, in all essence, Windows 2000 version 2, and is largely parallel with 2000 for gaming. 2000 wasn't a good choice for gaming in the early days because the drivers just weren't there for multimedia hardware: Soundblaster, Geforce, etc-- all of them had hackneyed, poor performance and poor compatibility drivers. As Microsoft made it clear that it was the future direction they got their ass in gear and made drivers that often exceed the speed of the 95/98/ME machines. As it stands if I were given a choice between 2000 and 98, I'd take 2000 hands down.
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
The bus and memory bandwidth has improved pretty much in lockstep with the CPU computational ability. While it might be nice on paper to have 16GB of memory bandwidth, and it might look good on a ridiculously synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark, in practicality such a imbalance would be just a monstrous waste of money: Generally processors actually do something with the data that they're processing, so the two factors have to balance: You need a system design that can keep the processor satiated. In the Athlon world such a situation was demonstrated superbly recently with the ramping up of the memory subsystem speed, DDR ramping up from 266Mhz to 400Mhz...what improvement did it demonstrate? Virtually none. The processor simply had no real need for the additional memory bandwidth, though I'm sure it will as they come out with the next generation.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
While I have spent considerable effort in the past disputing the Mhz-is-king myth (especially in regards to the P4 versus the Athlon), I think you're promoting just as false of an claim. CPU speed DOES matter. By your claims, shouldn't these benchmarks show no improvement as the CPU power ramps up, given your claims that it's starved for throughput?
Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
So you're saying that they should be increasing memory bandwidth and bus speeds? What a clever idea. You should write a letter to them because clearly they just haven't caught on...oh wait, yes they have.
If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
This is as much bullshit as claiming that only Mhz is a measure of a machine's performance. Obviously it's a combination of all of the systems in the machine, and the large CPU manufacturers aren't stupid (i.e. they want their machines to show up at the top of the benchmarks): As the need arises they increase bus and memory bandwidth accordingly, and for "cutting edge" needs they produce chips with huge L2 caches (though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU: In that case the only option they have is to increase the cache). A dual-channel RAMBUS solution isn't going to make a P4 1.4Ghz any faster than it would be with a single-channel: The CPU will never demand that memory bandwidth. Indeed, this was one of the original problems with RAMBUS: The extreme throughput it offered simply wasn't necessary for the early P4s, leading to a lot of the early naysaying about its usefulness. Of course we all know that it because the crucial point for P4 performance as the clock speed accelerated.
Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?
Some machine with hard-coded firmware is not going to make the grade.
Agreed, they shouldn't be putting their eggs in the Divx basket. MPEG 4, though, especially with the newest standard being ratified, represents the cutting edge of quality with some hope of stabilization in the codec wars. Soon... soon.
The reason that players haven't supported the new codecs is for exactly the reason that you mention: Hopping on the bandwagon for standards that aren't standards can be dangerous. Instead most manufacturers are waiting for it to settle out.
It's as simple as using a modified HTTP client. HTTP 1.1 defines a "referer" (it's actually misspelled in the spec and in usage) HTTP request header that allows clients to pass the page which forwarded it to that location. A lot of sites use referrer tag checking to ensure that people don't use their images on webpages at other domains.
Anyways, using common tools and about 10 seconds of time you can make a spider which iterates through the web, always passing your bogus referrer header.
Uh...take a train, or a bus, or a cab? I take one of those "Self driving cars" to work, and during that period of time I read the newspaper and work documents, etc.
It's foolish to blame the car companies for this, especially given that they've been working on making self-driving cars for years (haven't you ever seen one of those TLC shows?). The problem is that you can't just put a self-driving car on a highway: There is a MASSIVE regulatory machine that would impede in that, thankfully. (Imagine if every programmer decided that they could program their own car? No thanks...). The human mind is an astoundingly powerful thing as well, so simply presuming that it's a trivial action that can be taken over by computers is folly: While computers can perform the basics extremely well with absolutely precision, they can't deal with the unexpected very well (we still don't have computer vision that is anything beyond laughable). Because of this, the worldwide infrastructure would have to be modified: Be it radio pathways under each road, etc.
If you're going to bring the Newton into it, then it should be noted that Pocket PCs, such as my Toshiba e310, let you write out cursive text and it converts it to text. It does a fairly good job of it as well.
Of course I prefer the keyboard anyones. My handwriting, like most nerds brought up on a lifetime of computers and typing, is absolutely positively atrocious.
I don't understand this. What does using a BlueTooth enabled headset have to do with a ban on Cell phones while driving?
Most juristictions have only banned the use of handsets while in a car (due to the distraction of holding it to your head, looking at it to dial, etc), and usually there are loopholes for the use of headsets/handsfree.
I thought it was a rather funny pseudo-ignorant joke.
Of the dozens or so posts so far, the majority seem to have read the headline as if it was proclaiming that there is now a ban on "Driving Bluetooth" (good thing, too. The last thing we need is wireless protocols driving cars around), rather than the true meaning of the subject, which is
Manufacturer's Interest in Bluetooth Increasing Due to Car Cellphone Ban
Because he's defending a position and is enjoying the conversation? Is it more noble to come out with arms swinging at PayPal?
I've used PayPal for over a year now, receiving several payments and making several payments. I haven't had an ounce of trouble. I don't have the ability to know the customer satisfaction numbers, but it does seem entirely possible to me that there's a small number of very vocal cadre of disenfranchised customers who now a screaming for revenge for perceived ills. There is such a thing as noble crusader, but just as real is the revenge seeking maniac who'll stop at nothing to make an organization "pay" because they got slighted in some way.
I, as a taxpayer, have already paid for the code to be written. The GPL would stop people like Microsoft taking that code - that I've already paid for - and selling it to me again and again as if it were their own.
Idiotic train of thought (are you trolling?), though it's the standard attack against the BSD, which is why I presume that you aren't a troll.
If a guy on the street corner is giving away free bagels, and a guy beside him is taking those free muffins and putting cream cheese on them, selling those cream cheesed muffins for $1.00, the cost of the cream cheesed muffins is clearly for the cream cheese- The improvements to the muffin. He COULD NOT take those muffins and then try selling them, as obviously people would just get the free ones from the guy beside him.
This same premise holds for software as well: The value of software is in comparison to what people can already get for free. If Microsoft started selling Apache as Apache.net for $999, how many sales do you think they'd get? Now if they actually went through the code and did serious porting (versus the partial porting), hooked into the plumbing of win32 to yield extreme performance, etc, and they sold THAT, then they do have something of value, and the value is measured as what is above and beyond the free Apache that people can already download.
They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free.
While it might be true for IEs on alternate platforms, Microsoft has always subsidized IE as a part of the Windows platform, hence paying for Windows is paying for IE. This comes back to the whole "is it a part of the operating system", and I personally would say yes: Microsoft was trying to keep their operating systems relevant, and whether they were adding an encrypted filesystem, Super Solitaire, a disk defragmenter, or a web browser, it seems like a value add to me.
I think people have always had a problem with periodic and continuous billings, and it took many years for people to get accustomed to it for services like electricity (well, I suppose a better saying was in the years since that was the norm, people have started to think that everything is free). i.e. If the satellite maker sold only $500 receivers, but had no monthly fees, I'd bet they'd have far more customers. People hate being hen pecked, even when in the long run it saves them money or saves them from long term investing in troubled companies.
When the alternative is that creditors seize the assets and the stock basically is worth nothing, most shareholders will go along with that.
I'd say that you're one of the very few people who feels the need to explicitly state "XHTML" as if it's some separate, isolated technology from HTML, rather than "minor tweaks to HTML to make it comply with XML syntax rules".
Additionally, virtually no one actually deploys XML+XSLT for non-example websites, apart from examples of how to deploy XML+XSLT for standard websites (for a myriad of reasons including the fact that it offers virtually nothing over standard XHTML spat out from dynamic scripts. Yeah, sk00l me, but I using XML+XSLT for some sites over two years ago, but I still know not to pretend like it's a widespread mainstream solution).