Really all they've done is made the underlying metabase database an XML database rather than proprietary, though it really wasn't difficult before to propagate metabases among machines before. Microsoft still recommends that you leave the xml file alone and instead either use the administration tools, or the powerful IIS administration components for programatic changes.
They took Windows 98 SE, dressed it up a bit, and called it Windows ME.
True but not true. Microsoft has a habit of releasing hundreds of little "upgrades" pieces at a time such that one doesn't even realize all that has changed: Compare a stock Windows 98SE machine with 98SE with updated Media Player, IE, Messenger, etc. At some point these teams have to derive revenue so they package all of the "free" upgrades together and make it a new OS. They are actually delivering a lot of value, it just happens to be devalued by the fact that it's free for older OS' as well.
Making your own Tivo is a exercise of feature creep.:-) Several months back I decided that I wanted a home-made PVR (why not a Tivo? a) I'm Canadian and it's not available here, and b) I also want to be able to play home encoded movies, as I had a baby coming [now arrived] and knew I'd be taking lots of digital video footage. In other words I wanted something not only to record television (it's tough getting up at 7:30am to watch those F1 races every other Sunday), but also to play back my own content. If it could double as a MAME console and MP3 player (really WMA, and I really did rip all of the CDs I actually own), then all the better.
Anyways I replaced the FreeBSD Celeon 300a firewall with 384MB of PC100 RAM in the basement with a little Linksys router and repurposed the PC as a PVR, putting a ATI TV Wonder PCI in it. I quickly discovered that the 300a was horribly insufficient for the task, even when overclocked to 450Mhz. Off to the computer store I went, getting a new motherboard and Celeron 1.7Ghz. Installed it and discovered that the real hitch then was the PC100 RAM. Off to get 512MB of DDR RAM. Off to get a 60GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Off to get a wireless mouse and keyboard. In the end I believe the only part of the PC that is what was the "economical repurposing of the firewall" is the case and powersupply...and I'm currently contemplating replacing the powersupply with one from quietpc.ca as it's just unreasonably loud.
Where did someone pull the "4" number for Afghanistan from? Being a Canadian I am of course well aware of the 4 Canadian soldiers who were killed when Major Schmidt dropped a laser guided bomb on them, so based upon those numbers that comprises all Friendly Fire incidents in Afghanistan? Of course I know that isn't the case. Off the top of my head I remember this incident, as well as an incident with a C130 killing several other Americans soldiers, among some other incidents. There were definitely at least 10 or so friendly fire incidents in Afghanistan (which throws that ratio off considerably).
Everyone else pretty much ignores female/male, since they know it doesn't matter what the avatar looks like it's the personality and skills behind it.
A similar thing can be seen in the Quake 3 mod "Urban Terror" : There are male and female "skins" that the players choose, and I believe by default the game makes the player a female, leading to radio calls, grunts, etc, being in a female voice, and visually looking like a female. The astounding thing is that no one cares. For gender equality, UT really opened my eyes.
7. All of their retail partners can boast ridiculous inflated sales values because everyone is paying 20% or more for goods under the pretense that they'll receive a rebate. Expect in a couple of years to be paying $400 for a blank CD-R (with $399 rebate!) so Best Buy can claim that sales are up 20% over the last quarter. Rebates create a false economy.
8. The government is laughing because it's collecting taxes on the pre-rebate amount.
9. The postal service is laughing as it's making money on all of the correspondence regarding the rebate.
10. Companies like VisionTek plaster all of their products with rebate vouchers...and then go out of business. This happened to me and I never saw that $50 US rebate promised.
The story is obviously bogus, and it's painfully clear to anyone just based on the "$800 -> $350,000,000". Doubling your money in two weeks is hard enough (even with insider information), but 437,500x...uh huh. There is no amount of information that could allow someone to work $800 to that amount so quickly.
How this got posted on Slashdot, even if the story weren't so obviously a fraud, is the real mystery. Someone must have gone back in time and...bah, I can't even think up a time travel scenario that would justify this being posted.
Indeed I remember being in the professional audio business for a short while (as a computer consultant for the industry), and virtually all of the audio applications required dongles, so you had exactly the scenario that you mention of chained dongles, playing around with the ordering because of conflicts, etc. However in the era of USB and its intrinsic chaining capability, one would think that there would be some sort of "key" standard worked out, and USB keys could be chained together (perhaps using a standard physical structure...like you get a key box with 16 key ports). I say this as a legal software using sort of person that can see a nightmare scenario developing: All sorts of software nowadays is doing product activation/system tying, so what was a simple "Call Microsoft to reactivate XP", is now becoming "Call Microsoft about XP, Office XP, Plus DME!, Quickbooks, Quicken, that Encyclopedia Software, that FTP program, etc, etc, etc.". It's a tragedy of the commons so to speak, and it is untenable over the long run.
Why are you italicizing your own post? Yeah, seamstresses have used "patterns" for centuries my wayward friend, and patterns in software is an analogy of the same. However the widespread and common use of patterns is very new: Perhaps the last year, if that. Suddenly everyone and anyone is yapping about patterns as if the software engineering field has revolutionized.
Personally I would prefer dongles if they insist upon copy protection: Generally you plug them in and forget about them, and if you rebuild your PC, or buy a new PC, there's no reactivation and trying to plead your case BS. In the era of USB one would think that dongles, about 20 cents of hardware, would be common.
A completely modelled environment that one can interact with using realistic physics (hell, even a realistically modelled physics and movement governing the player themselves). This is something that several games have purported to take a stab at, but all comers have been smoke and mirrors, and soon you saw behind the curtain that they really had a simile of physics on some magic points.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 1
There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago.
This is like saying that farms bring nature to the countryside by creating a blight of pesticides and human intervention. The "trees" that you're so proud of are intentionally planted for their processing potential, and they are in no way replacements for the habitat supporting old growth forests they offset. I've gone camping in a "new growth" forest and it's spooky having a common cover height with virtually no ground growth, and an amazing dearth of wildlife. Note that I'm not making a big environmental statement here (I get a paper every morning and occasionally don't separate all of my recyclables properly), but just am pointing out that it's horribly absurd to make grand claims about how forested we are now.
In addition the other point of the poster is that CDs are a pretty much indefinite polycarbonate: Little shards of plastic that'll withstand probably thousands of years. CDs can be recycled but the process is rare and not very efficient at present (because the foil layer has to be separated).
The submitter may have submitted the story days ago, and the "editors" just got around to accepting/rejecting it (I know I've had stories sitting in the bin for up to two days before they get around to rejecting them).
What's with the sheep like herding when someone coins a term and everyone rushes to look enlightened?
Everywhere I turn right now someone is yapping about "Patterns": No longer is it simply standard best practices, but rather now it's the new age "Patterns". No longer do you do code maintenance: Now you "Refactor". No longer do you wing it, now you do "Agile Development". It almost makes the speaker sound ridiculously naive hanging onto whatever terminology they hear, as if it's something new when it's merely renaming existing techniques and standards.
I need to get back to working on my dinner heating patterns.
I won a county type-off at 67.6 wpm...hehe, seriously. I was a two-finger typist extraordinaire because of my Commodore 64, and proper technique came to me quickly when I enlisted in the mandatory business class (typing). There are, of course, plenty of people dramatically faster than 70wpms, especially those using more efficient keyboard layouts (Dvorak, or the shorthand style that legal secretaries use, etc).
Add to that the fact that MPEG2 is a rather simplistic encoding technique, and other compression formats like WM9 or Divx are dramatically more CPU intensive. Now that I've got a miniDV video camera I dump these 12GB or so files to the PC, and having it compress overnight for a one hour movie in WM9 format gets a bit annoying: Doesn't really lend itself to experimenting.
Revisionist history. 3dfx acquired market dominance through superior engineer, and they then lost it when they became business oriented rather than technically oriented. The cross-promotion venture came at a time when everyone was questioning what 3dfx was doing, was question the usefulness of Glide, and generally the anti-3dfx movement had begun. Here's a hilarious thread one usenet that I could look up because I remember having that conversation some 5 years ago (I'm one of the participants in the thread), and it hilariously is an agreement at the time between EA and 3dfx. How ironic.
Imagine a series of games to comes with a 'NVidia' recommented stamp on the cover.
This is exactly what 3dfx did in their dying days: Lining up with a bunch of game makers, offering cross-promotion dollars for them to stick a "Works best with a 3dfx Voodoo X" stick on the box. Of course, we know where that led 3dfx.
This really is a negative sign for nvidia. I don't think that they're defeated at all, however things like this indicate a scary fundamental corporate philosophy shift: From a philosophy that pushed supreme engineering dominance, to one that pushes marketing dominance and "leveraging" partnerships and marketing. The former is actual magic, and the latter is smoke and mirrors. This is exactly the same shifts 3dfx went through when nvidia started to challenge them...
after Microsoft today said it would allow Windows CE licensees access to the OS' source code
I may be wrong, but it was my belief that CE licensees have always--for years--had full access to the CE sourcecode. Indeed to build a release for a target platform you used the Platform Builder application which built all of the OS source files to the desired target device.
Very funny, however the only flaw in the joke is that C# is a strongly typed language (hence requires a lot of explicit casts when converting between types). Visual Basic is the one that uses variants, and hence is pretty much untyped (a horrible, horrible, horrible idea from the getgo, but it's amazing how many people tried to proclaim it as a feature at the time).
Microsoft just set the #2 TPC-C result in the non-clustered category using Windows Server 2003 and a 32-way Itanium 2 machine. They did this, of course, because Oracle publicly derides clustered results as not counting (and really setting up horizontally partitioned views across a huge federation of serves is not the easiest thing, and it's far from transparent for the database developer: You have to specifically design around it), so now there's a SQL Server 2000 result higher than any Oracle result.
So there you have it: A 32-way machine that's actually useful (when available on 2003-06-30).
Slashdot Mirror
Really all they've done is made the underlying metabase database an XML database rather than proprietary, though it really wasn't difficult before to propagate metabases among machines before. Microsoft still recommends that you leave the xml file alone and instead either use the administration tools, or the powerful IIS administration components for programatic changes.
They took Windows 98 SE, dressed it up a bit, and called it Windows ME.
True but not true. Microsoft has a habit of releasing hundreds of little "upgrades" pieces at a time such that one doesn't even realize all that has changed: Compare a stock Windows 98SE machine with 98SE with updated Media Player, IE, Messenger, etc. At some point these teams have to derive revenue so they package all of the "free" upgrades together and make it a new OS. They are actually delivering a lot of value, it just happens to be devalued by the fact that it's free for older OS' as well.
You can get the unit from Bell, however it requires you to have the satellite service as well.
Making your own Tivo is a exercise of feature creep. :-) Several months back I decided that I wanted a home-made PVR (why not a Tivo? a) I'm Canadian and it's not available here, and b) I also want to be able to play home encoded movies, as I had a baby coming [now arrived] and knew I'd be taking lots of digital video footage. In other words I wanted something not only to record television (it's tough getting up at 7:30am to watch those F1 races every other Sunday), but also to play back my own content. If it could double as a MAME console and MP3 player (really WMA, and I really did rip all of the CDs I actually own), then all the better.
Anyways I replaced the FreeBSD Celeon 300a firewall with 384MB of PC100 RAM in the basement with a little Linksys router and repurposed the PC as a PVR, putting a ATI TV Wonder PCI in it. I quickly discovered that the 300a was horribly insufficient for the task, even when overclocked to 450Mhz. Off to the computer store I went, getting a new motherboard and Celeron 1.7Ghz. Installed it and discovered that the real hitch then was the PC100 RAM. Off to get 512MB of DDR RAM. Off to get a 60GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Off to get a wireless mouse and keyboard. In the end I believe the only part of the PC that is what was the "economical repurposing of the firewall" is the case and powersupply...and I'm currently contemplating replacing the powersupply with one from quietpc.ca as it's just unreasonably loud.
In other words...get a Tivo...
Um...which .NET security holes would that be? References please.
Where did someone pull the "4" number for Afghanistan from? Being a Canadian I am of course well aware of the 4 Canadian soldiers who were killed when Major Schmidt dropped a laser guided bomb on them, so based upon those numbers that comprises all Friendly Fire incidents in Afghanistan? Of course I know that isn't the case. Off the top of my head I remember this incident, as well as an incident with a C130 killing several other Americans soldiers, among some other incidents. There were definitely at least 10 or so friendly fire incidents in Afghanistan (which throws that ratio off considerably).
Everyone else pretty much ignores female/male, since they know it doesn't matter what the avatar looks like it's the personality and skills behind it.
A similar thing can be seen in the Quake 3 mod "Urban Terror" : There are male and female "skins" that the players choose, and I believe by default the game makes the player a female, leading to radio calls, grunts, etc, being in a female voice, and visually looking like a female. The astounding thing is that no one cares. For gender equality, UT really opened my eyes.
6. Profit!
7. All of their retail partners can boast ridiculous inflated sales values because everyone is paying 20% or more for goods under the pretense that they'll receive a rebate. Expect in a couple of years to be paying $400 for a blank CD-R (with $399 rebate!) so Best Buy can claim that sales are up 20% over the last quarter. Rebates create a false economy.
8. The government is laughing because it's collecting taxes on the pre-rebate amount.
9. The postal service is laughing as it's making money on all of the correspondence regarding the rebate.
10. Companies like VisionTek plaster all of their products with rebate vouchers...and then go out of business. This happened to me and I never saw that $50 US rebate promised.
The story is obviously bogus, and it's painfully clear to anyone just based on the "$800 -> $350,000,000". Doubling your money in two weeks is hard enough (even with insider information), but 437,500x...uh huh. There is no amount of information that could allow someone to work $800 to that amount so quickly.
How this got posted on Slashdot, even if the story weren't so obviously a fraud, is the real mystery. Someone must have gone back in time and...bah, I can't even think up a time travel scenario that would justify this being posted.
Indeed I remember being in the professional audio business for a short while (as a computer consultant for the industry), and virtually all of the audio applications required dongles, so you had exactly the scenario that you mention of chained dongles, playing around with the ordering because of conflicts, etc. However in the era of USB and its intrinsic chaining capability, one would think that there would be some sort of "key" standard worked out, and USB keys could be chained together (perhaps using a standard physical structure...like you get a key box with 16 key ports). I say this as a legal software using sort of person that can see a nightmare scenario developing: All sorts of software nowadays is doing product activation/system tying, so what was a simple "Call Microsoft to reactivate XP", is now becoming "Call Microsoft about XP, Office XP, Plus DME!, Quickbooks, Quicken, that Encyclopedia Software, that FTP program, etc, etc, etc.". It's a tragedy of the commons so to speak, and it is untenable over the long run.
Why are you italicizing your own post? Yeah, seamstresses have used "patterns" for centuries my wayward friend, and patterns in software is an analogy of the same. However the widespread and common use of patterns is very new: Perhaps the last year, if that. Suddenly everyone and anyone is yapping about patterns as if the software engineering field has revolutionized.
Personally I would prefer dongles if they insist upon copy protection: Generally you plug them in and forget about them, and if you rebuild your PC, or buy a new PC, there's no reactivation and trying to plead your case BS. In the era of USB one would think that dongles, about 20 cents of hardware, would be common.
A completely modelled environment that one can interact with using realistic physics (hell, even a realistically modelled physics and movement governing the player themselves). This is something that several games have purported to take a stab at, but all comers have been smoke and mirrors, and soon you saw behind the curtain that they really had a simile of physics on some magic points.
There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago.
This is like saying that farms bring nature to the countryside by creating a blight of pesticides and human intervention. The "trees" that you're so proud of are intentionally planted for their processing potential, and they are in no way replacements for the habitat supporting old growth forests they offset. I've gone camping in a "new growth" forest and it's spooky having a common cover height with virtually no ground growth, and an amazing dearth of wildlife. Note that I'm not making a big environmental statement here (I get a paper every morning and occasionally don't separate all of my recyclables properly), but just am pointing out that it's horribly absurd to make grand claims about how forested we are now.
In addition the other point of the poster is that CDs are a pretty much indefinite polycarbonate: Little shards of plastic that'll withstand probably thousands of years. CDs can be recycled but the process is rare and not very efficient at present (because the foil layer has to be separated).
The submitter may have submitted the story days ago, and the "editors" just got around to accepting/rejecting it (I know I've had stories sitting in the bin for up to two days before they get around to rejecting them).
Everywhere I turn right now someone is yapping about "Patterns": No longer is it simply standard best practices, but rather now it's the new age "Patterns". No longer do you do code maintenance: Now you "Refactor". No longer do you wing it, now you do "Agile Development". It almost makes the speaker sound ridiculously naive hanging onto whatever terminology they hear, as if it's something new when it's merely renaming existing techniques and standards.
I need to get back to working on my dinner heating patterns.
I won a county type-off at 67.6 wpm...hehe, seriously. I was a two-finger typist extraordinaire because of my Commodore 64, and proper technique came to me quickly when I enlisted in the mandatory business class (typing). There are, of course, plenty of people dramatically faster than 70wpms, especially those using more efficient keyboard layouts (Dvorak, or the shorthand style that legal secretaries use, etc).
Add to that the fact that MPEG2 is a rather simplistic encoding technique, and other compression formats like WM9 or Divx are dramatically more CPU intensive. Now that I've got a miniDV video camera I dump these 12GB or so files to the PC, and having it compress overnight for a one hour movie in WM9 format gets a bit annoying: Doesn't really lend itself to experimenting.
[Homer on his house burning down]
Homer- "I have a feeling there's a lesson to be learned here..."
Marge- "Yes.. The lesson is-"
Homer- "No.. I'll get it... oh- I know! The Lord is vengeful! Oh, Spiteful One; show me who to smite and they shall be smoten!"
Yeah, unfettered market dominance.
Revisionist history. 3dfx acquired market dominance through superior engineer, and they then lost it when they became business oriented rather than technically oriented. The cross-promotion venture came at a time when everyone was questioning what 3dfx was doing, was question the usefulness of Glide, and generally the anti-3dfx movement had begun. Here's a hilarious thread one usenet that I could look up because I remember having that conversation some 5 years ago (I'm one of the participants in the thread), and it hilariously is an agreement at the time between EA and 3dfx. How ironic.
What if, all of a sudden, the killer app for digital music fans were Mac-only?
Um, then Apple would go out of business because they sabotaged one huge market to try to gain a foothold in another?
Imagine a series of games to comes with a 'NVidia' recommented stamp on the cover.
This is exactly what 3dfx did in their dying days: Lining up with a bunch of game makers, offering cross-promotion dollars for them to stick a "Works best with a 3dfx Voodoo X" stick on the box. Of course, we know where that led 3dfx.
This really is a negative sign for nvidia. I don't think that they're defeated at all, however things like this indicate a scary fundamental corporate philosophy shift: From a philosophy that pushed supreme engineering dominance, to one that pushes marketing dominance and "leveraging" partnerships and marketing. The former is actual magic, and the latter is smoke and mirrors. This is exactly the same shifts 3dfx went through when nvidia started to challenge them...
Ooooh if the Register says it it's gotta be true!
after Microsoft today said it would allow Windows CE licensees access to the OS' source code
I may be wrong, but it was my belief that CE licensees have always--for years--had full access to the CE sourcecode. Indeed to build a release for a target platform you used the Platform Builder application which built all of the OS source files to the desired target device.
Very funny, however the only flaw in the joke is that C# is a strongly typed language (hence requires a lot of explicit casts when converting between types). Visual Basic is the one that uses variants, and hence is pretty much untyped (a horrible, horrible, horrible idea from the getgo, but it's amazing how many people tried to proclaim it as a feature at the time).
Microsoft just set the #2 TPC-C result in the non-clustered category using Windows Server 2003 and a 32-way Itanium 2 machine. They did this, of course, because Oracle publicly derides clustered results as not counting (and really setting up horizontally partitioned views across a huge federation of serves is not the easiest thing, and it's far from transparent for the database developer: You have to specifically design around it), so now there's a SQL Server 2000 result higher than any Oracle result.
So there you have it: A 32-way machine that's actually useful (when available on 2003-06-30).