Wasnt Seagate the company that bought Maxtor not too long ago? And will the buyout end there or will we see the great consolidation in the hard drive business as well, so that in the end it may look like the CPU market, especially for x86 processors?
I mean, there are not that many hard drive companies left anyway, the big players are Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung and thats about it. Let Seagate be bought and maybe merge another company or two and the hard dirve market looks an awfully lot like AMD/Intel or ATI(AMD)/NVIDIA, which may not be as beneficial as we think....
This is not proof of OOXML being defective by design. It only shows that apparently MS's software isn't able to handle OOXML properly
Um, isnt the fact that not even Microsofts own software can handle OOXML which btw. is designed by Microsoft themselves, proof enough that something is seriously wrong with the design of OOXML?
I mean if not even the maker of OOXML can get it to work properly in its own products, how are third parties supposed to do it? And if no one is able to implement OOXML correctly, what is this "standard" good for besides being a great smoke-and-mirrors tactic by Microsoft themselves?
I think the 160 GB refers to the hybrid disks Seagate also has in their lineup (which are also mentioned in TFA). Would be more logical too because even with todays cheap flash prices, a 160 GB flash drive would still be relatively pricey.
Where are the studies showing the truth about piracy, sales, and quality of recorded music?
Well, those studies have to be funded by someone and unfortunately, the big record labels have deep pockets to fund those biased, flawed ones like the one in the article while there is no opposite organization with enough money to counterbalance them.
Google Map, Google Earth, Google Sky.. I think it leads to Google Mind.
No, you got it all wrong, they will rename it Google Skynet. It will be like the one from the movies (enslave all of humanity etc.), but with AdSense technology;-)
We planned to give these users a full refund or more. And because we weren't sure if we had all the correct addresses, latest credit card information, and other billing challenges, we thought offering the refund in the form of Google Checkout credits would entail fewer steps and offer a better user experience.
Well, they have a point that Checkout credits would entail fewer steps, but I think Google tried to avoid a bit of work here as how I understand it, with Checkout credits, the Google Video users themselves have to make sure the refund gets to them, but with the credit card refund, Google has to make sure everyone gets their refund.
Still, they admitted their mistake and corrected it, which is good.
Seriously, why is this news? I mean, they already set the frikkin release date some time ago, of course Halo has to be "almost done" by now!
And considering they will need a bit of time to press the discs and ship them to retailers, it is about time that they are almost done now.
Sheesh, if they would have declared Halo 3 gold master, that would at least have been some sort of news, but "It is almost done" is not the least informative; right now, it is to be expected if they want to honor their release date.
It would be interesting to see the effect the new D&D Edition will have on other D20-based Games and third-party Sourcebooks.
According to TFA, the designers already took some clues from other D20 Games to incorporate into the new edition (the skill trees have been implemented into the new Star Wars D20, for example), but all changes into the D&D core books will in one way or another affect all the other D20 publications, especially (of course) alternative D&D settings and similar fantasy sourcebooks.
I am thinking primarily about things like the removal of prestige classes and the merging of core classes, because quite frankly, I was sick of all the more or less useful prestige classes seemingly appearing in every sourcebook, but their removal from the game means all those now obsolete classes must be converted or abandoned.
As there are so many D20-based books now, with a lot of them being supplements to the core D&D setting, the reaction to changes especially from other developers will be interesting to see.
Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.
Well, of course there is this site, whose content should be obvious;-)
Some of the CMS systems I tried and liked are Drupal and Joomla, but I am not sure if they match the features of Alfresco and such because the are mostly Web-based only.
Maybe something like Typo 3 will fit the bill better, as it is much more powerful (and complex).
You know, Yahoo offers a boatload of casual online games, which are very popular. They also offer Fantasy Sports games (Fantasy Football, Basketball etc.), which also have a loyal and enthusiastic following, which are all services that Google does not offer.
All those are huge online-time sinks and could give Yahoo an edge, especially when it comes to "average" internet users (coincidentally, Fantasy Football is the reason why Yahoo still has a place in my bookmarks bar...).
...another great developer studio getting swallowed up into a publisher, like Bullfrog or Origin or countless others.
Irrational Games was especially impressive to me because they produced some very diverse and excellent games, besides Bioshock they also made the spiritual precedessor System Shock 2 and they also developed the awesome and (IMO) underrated Freedom Force games.
So goodbye Irrational Games, I hope 2K Games will be better to you than EA was to Bullfrog and Origin.
Well, if China begins to invest massively in their own research and thus begins filiing patents and such, at some point they will really have to enforce some sort of IP Law to protect their own innovations and interests.
Up until now, for all those cheap chinese knock-offs and blatant copies of other companies work, disregarding IP Law in China was actually useful, but with own patents and ideas, I would guess that chinese companies will be enforcing IP Law more strictly in the future because now disregarding IP Law will actually harm them.
And yes IP Law can be useful, even if Patent Law is completely stupid and borderline dangerous at the moment. Because laws and rules of handling intellectual property can also encompass things like the GPL or the Creative Commons Licenses and I think it could be useful if such things can be enforced in China more strictly in the future.
Okay, maybe my point did not come across well. Of course the Playstation has a lot of "system seller" games and would have probably done fine without GTA 3. But GTA 3 was unprecedented in the freedom it gave you in a 3D-World and was at the time a PS2 exclusive, as the PC and Xbox versions came much later, so it was a very compelling reason to buy a PS2 and so it was a critical title to give Sony the lead in last generations console race. And all the even more popular successors in the franchise (Vice City, San Andreas) came first on the PS2, which was a huge boon to Sony, so that the simultaneous release of GTA 4 on PS3 and Xbox 360 now is a big blow to them.
Maybe a better example would have been Metal Gear Solid 2. At the time the hype around MGS 2 began, the PS2 was the only platform the game would be on, as Konami did not make PC versions at that time and the XBox was not even a rumour. So MGS2 was a huge part in the inital success of the PS2.
Look, the only point I tried to make was that the Sony guy was wrong to say that there was never a time when a single game would be critical to the success of the Playstation.
Oh, and the "two games" argument? You realize that the second game I mentioned, Metal Gear Solid 4 is made for the Playstation 3, which, you know is a different console than the Playstation 2? And I would think that people are waiting specifically for Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3 because at the moment it is one of the few (if not the only) remaining high-profile exclusives for the PS3. And without compelling exclusive titles, why should people prefer an PS3 over an Xbox 360?
Developers already have difficulties justifiying DirectX 10 support because Vista marketshare is still so low and most gamers are perfectly fine with XP and DirectX 9. Also, DirectX 10 lacks the backwards compatibilty of the older versions.
But at least the new Unified Shaders seemed to be useful for developers, so at least they had advantages to it. But now, DirectX 10.1 only seems to make certain features compulsory, thus removing choice for the developers and also does not add new features to make it compelling to use.
So when do developers say "Screw this, DirectX 9 will suffice for the immediate future and works well, we will eschew DirectX 10 and beyond, serve our XP-using customers and use OpenGL for future development"? Especially if the big advantage DirectX had (until version 9), the universal availability on the Windows platform is gone now with DirectX 10 and beyond?
I think Sony is wrong with the "no single game makes or breaks our platform" remark. I knew quite a few people who bought a PS2 specifically for GTA 3 and I think there are a lot of people who are specifically waiting for Metal Gear Solid 4.
And it would not be uncommen: I mean how many people bought an Xbox specifically for Halo?
are other UNIX-based Operating Systems vulnerable as well? Systrace and especially Sudo are very common in nearly all UNIX-like Systems, so maybe Linux and MacOS X users should also be concerned? And what about Windows, since commercially availabe anti-virus systems are also afflicted? That seems like a very serious vulnerability to me...
No, that is not the same. You see, the article you mentioned was about online rentals, so you do the movie selection process online, but still get a physical object (the DVD) through the mail.
Now Blockbuster enters the movie download business, so you actually get no physical object at all, you select the movie online and then proceed to download it. I think they refused to do this until now, so this is not old news, at least for Blockbuster.
They used a historic sample of only 48 ancient Britons and those were even spread out to a timeframe from about 700 years (contrary to the summary, the ancient samples lived between AD 300 and 1000 which is a relatively big timeframe).
I would think that their analysis could still be statistically relevant, but still they say themselves that more work is needed, so I think more historic sample data would be quite useful.
Well aside from that annoying habit of attaching that stupid SKU (stop it already. people!), I think those price drops are a bit odd.
Why didnt they drop the price uniformly across the board? With a price drop of $50 the Core version would have been priced directly against the Wii, which I think would have made sense for Microsoft at least from a psychological and marketing standpoint.
And why did the Elite get a price drop that soon? AFAIK it is still pretty new so the people who bought one already could be pretty annoyed (although $30 on formerly $480 is not too deep of a cut).
Oh and one laughable bit from the article:
"The fact that we have been able to keep our launch price longer than any other console while retaining our leadership position demonstrates that consumers believe in the value of Xbox 360," said Mitch Koch
Yeah right and it has nothing to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 was the only next-gen console available for about a year, which makes the leadership thing sorta automatic...
Then it means open standards initiative has failed, so the summary and title are right, two standards is the most stupid thing ever done, congratulations Massachusetts!
No, the summary is not right, although the title is correct the Open Standards Initiative has failed. Look, I despise Microsofts business practices as much as the next slashdotter and I think the decision is stupid and especially shortsighted because as the article says, they did not wait about a month to see whether OOXML would really be approved as an ECMA Standard, they just assumed it would and so included it on their belief alone.
So is the decision in Massachusetts premature? Sure, only a month of waiting would have made every doubt about an standards-approved OOXML disappear (whether it gets approved or not).
Is it stupid to just give up the Open Standards position just on good faith that Microsoft will make the cut? You Betcha.
Does it smell fishy that the interim CIO gives up a position his precedessors defended for two years all of a sudden? Definitely.
Is the summary right that Massacusetts chose OOXML? Well, no because ODF is still an accepted format. Of course that will open a whole new can of worms (that whole two standards thingie), but technically ODF did not get dumped in favour of OOXML, which is all I was saying...
if you read TFA it says that they are including both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats.
So while the original intention to only include really open formats is regrettably given up (curiously by an interim CIO, why does he decide that if he is only a temporary hire?), it is not like ODF got dumped for the Microsoft format.
I am not sure what you saw as the main problem of the pre-optical mice and trackball, but mine would have been cleaning the old roll ball, as it became quite greasy and dirty from extended use. >br>
With optical mice, that problem went away from mice for me. Although the surface still needs regular cleaning (I have sweaty fingers and use the mouse quite a lot), the bottom with the optical sensor now just needs a quick swipe or so every few months.
But with a trackball, the ball itself is still touched by myself, it only gets tracked optically. So it still gets dirty, at least in my limited experience (I do not use a trackball very much, but that is pure personal preference) and it still has to be cleaned as regularly as before. So at least in my opinion, optical technology did help mice much more than trackballs in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasnt Seagate the company that bought Maxtor not too long ago? And will the buyout end there or will we see the great consolidation in the hard drive business as well, so that in the end it may look like the CPU market, especially for x86 processors?
I mean, there are not that many hard drive companies left anyway, the big players are Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung and thats about it. Let Seagate be bought and maybe merge another company or two and the hard dirve market looks an awfully lot like AMD/Intel or ATI(AMD)/NVIDIA, which may not be as beneficial as we think....
...finally somebody thought of the cows! ;-)
Um, isnt the fact that not even Microsofts own software can handle OOXML which btw. is designed by Microsoft themselves, proof enough that something is seriously wrong with the design of OOXML?
I mean if not even the maker of OOXML can get it to work properly in its own products, how are third parties supposed to do it? And if no one is able to implement OOXML correctly, what is this "standard" good for besides being a great smoke-and-mirrors tactic by Microsoft themselves?
I think the 160 GB refers to the hybrid disks Seagate also has in their lineup (which are also mentioned in TFA). Would be more logical too because even with todays cheap flash prices, a 160 GB flash drive would still be relatively pricey.
Well, those studies have to be funded by someone and unfortunately, the big record labels have deep pockets to fund those biased, flawed ones like the one in the article while there is no opposite organization with enough money to counterbalance them.
Well, they have a point that Checkout credits would entail fewer steps, but I think Google tried to avoid a bit of work here as how I understand it, with Checkout credits, the Google Video users themselves have to make sure the refund gets to them, but with the credit card refund, Google has to make sure everyone gets their refund.
Still, they admitted their mistake and corrected it, which is good.
Seriously, why is this news? I mean, they already set the frikkin release date some time ago, of course Halo has to be "almost done" by now!
And considering they will need a bit of time to press the discs and ship them to retailers, it is about time that they are almost done now.
Sheesh, if they would have declared Halo 3 gold master, that would at least have been some sort of news, but "It is almost done" is not the least informative; right now, it is to be expected if they want to honor their release date.
It would be interesting to see the effect the new D&D Edition will have on other D20-based Games and third-party Sourcebooks.
According to TFA, the designers already took some clues from other D20 Games to incorporate into the new edition (the skill trees have been implemented into the new Star Wars D20, for example), but all changes into the D&D core books will in one way or another affect all the other D20 publications, especially (of course) alternative D&D settings and similar fantasy sourcebooks.
I am thinking primarily about things like the removal of prestige classes and the merging of core classes, because quite frankly, I was sick of all the more or less useful prestige classes seemingly appearing in every sourcebook, but their removal from the game means all those now obsolete classes must be converted or abandoned.
As there are so many D20-based books now, with a lot of them being supplements to the core D&D setting, the reaction to changes especially from other developers will be interesting to see.
Some of the CMS systems I tried and liked are Drupal and Joomla, but I am not sure if they match the features of Alfresco and such because the are mostly Web-based only.
Maybe something like Typo 3 will fit the bill better, as it is much more powerful (and complex).
You know, Yahoo offers a boatload of casual online games, which are very popular. They also offer Fantasy Sports games (Fantasy Football, Basketball etc.), which also have a loyal and enthusiastic following, which are all services that Google does not offer.
All those are huge online-time sinks and could give Yahoo an edge, especially when it comes to "average" internet users (coincidentally, Fantasy Football is the reason why Yahoo still has a place in my bookmarks bar...).
...another great developer studio getting swallowed up into a publisher, like Bullfrog or Origin or countless others.
Irrational Games was especially impressive to me because they produced some very diverse and excellent games, besides Bioshock they also made the spiritual precedessor System Shock 2 and they also developed the awesome and (IMO) underrated Freedom Force games.
So goodbye Irrational Games, I hope 2K Games will be better to you than EA was to Bullfrog and Origin.
Well, if China begins to invest massively in their own research and thus begins filiing patents and such, at some point they will really have to enforce some sort of IP Law to protect their own innovations and interests.
Up until now, for all those cheap chinese knock-offs and blatant copies of other companies work, disregarding IP Law in China was actually useful, but with own patents and ideas, I would guess that chinese companies will be enforcing IP Law more strictly in the future because now disregarding IP Law will actually harm them.
And yes IP Law can be useful, even if Patent Law is completely stupid and borderline dangerous at the moment. Because laws and rules of handling intellectual property can also encompass things like the GPL or the Creative Commons Licenses and I think it could be useful if such things can be enforced in China more strictly in the future.
Okay, maybe my point did not come across well. Of course the Playstation has a lot of "system seller" games and would have probably done fine without GTA 3. But GTA 3 was unprecedented in the freedom it gave you in a 3D-World and was at the time a PS2 exclusive, as the PC and Xbox versions came much later, so it was a very compelling reason to buy a PS2 and so it was a critical title to give Sony the lead in last generations console race. And all the even more popular successors in the franchise (Vice City, San Andreas) came first on the PS2, which was a huge boon to Sony, so that the simultaneous release of GTA 4 on PS3 and Xbox 360 now is a big blow to them.
Maybe a better example would have been Metal Gear Solid 2. At the time the hype around MGS 2 began, the PS2 was the only platform the game would be on, as Konami did not make PC versions at that time and the XBox was not even a rumour. So MGS2 was a huge part in the inital success of the PS2.
Look, the only point I tried to make was that the Sony guy was wrong to say that there was never a time when a single game would be critical to the success of the Playstation.
Oh, and the "two games" argument? You realize that the second game I mentioned, Metal Gear Solid 4 is made for the Playstation 3, which, you know is a different console than the Playstation 2? And I would think that people are waiting specifically for Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3 because at the moment it is one of the few (if not the only) remaining high-profile exclusives for the PS3. And without compelling exclusive titles, why should people prefer an PS3 over an Xbox 360?
Developers already have difficulties justifiying DirectX 10 support because Vista marketshare is still so low and most gamers are perfectly fine with XP and DirectX 9. Also, DirectX 10 lacks the backwards compatibilty of the older versions.
But at least the new Unified Shaders seemed to be useful for developers, so at least they had advantages to it. But now, DirectX 10.1 only seems to make certain features compulsory, thus removing choice for the developers and also does not add new features to make it compelling to use.
So when do developers say "Screw this, DirectX 9 will suffice for the immediate future and works well, we will eschew DirectX 10 and beyond, serve our XP-using customers and use OpenGL for future development"? Especially if the big advantage DirectX had (until version 9), the universal availability on the Windows platform is gone now with DirectX 10 and beyond?
I think Sony is wrong with the "no single game makes or breaks our platform" remark. I knew quite a few people who bought a PS2 specifically for GTA 3 and I think there are a lot of people who are specifically waiting for Metal Gear Solid 4.
And it would not be uncommen: I mean how many people bought an Xbox specifically for Halo?
are other UNIX-based Operating Systems vulnerable as well? Systrace and especially Sudo are very common in nearly all UNIX-like Systems, so maybe Linux and MacOS X users should also be concerned? And what about Windows, since commercially availabe anti-virus systems are also afflicted? That seems like a very serious vulnerability to me...
No, that is not the same. You see, the article you mentioned was about online rentals, so you do the movie selection process online, but still get a physical object (the DVD) through the mail.
Now Blockbuster enters the movie download business, so you actually get no physical object at all, you select the movie online and then proceed to download it. I think they refused to do this until now, so this is not old news, at least for Blockbuster.
They used a historic sample of only 48 ancient Britons and those were even spread out to a timeframe from about 700 years (contrary to the summary, the ancient samples lived between AD 300 and 1000 which is a relatively big timeframe).
I would think that their analysis could still be statistically relevant, but still they say themselves that more work is needed, so I think more historic sample data would be quite useful.
Maybe they always bring up the Stock Keeping Unit to differentiate it from the Wii, which should be labeled a Flying of the Shelf Unit or something ;-)
Why didnt they drop the price uniformly across the board? With a price drop of $50 the Core version would have been priced directly against the Wii, which I think would have made sense for Microsoft at least from a psychological and marketing standpoint.
And why did the Elite get a price drop that soon? AFAIK it is still pretty new so the people who bought one already could be pretty annoyed (although $30 on formerly $480 is not too deep of a cut).
Oh and one laughable bit from the article:
Yeah right and it has nothing to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 was the only next-gen console available for about a year, which makes the leadership thing sorta automatic...
No, the summary is not right, although the title is correct the Open Standards Initiative has failed. Look, I despise Microsofts business practices as much as the next slashdotter and I think the decision is stupid and especially shortsighted because as the article says, they did not wait about a month to see whether OOXML would really be approved as an ECMA Standard, they just assumed it would and so included it on their belief alone.
So is the decision in Massachusetts premature? Sure, only a month of waiting would have made every doubt about an standards-approved OOXML disappear (whether it gets approved or not).
Is it stupid to just give up the Open Standards position just on good faith that Microsoft will make the cut? You Betcha.
Does it smell fishy that the interim CIO gives up a position his precedessors defended for two years all of a sudden? Definitely.
Is the summary right that Massacusetts chose OOXML? Well, no because ODF is still an accepted format. Of course that will open a whole new can of worms (that whole two standards thingie), but technically ODF did not get dumped in favour of OOXML, which is all I was saying...
if you read TFA it says that they are including both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats.
So while the original intention to only include really open formats is regrettably given up (curiously by an interim CIO, why does he decide that if he is only a temporary hire?), it is not like ODF got dumped for the Microsoft format.
I am not sure what you saw as the main problem of the pre-optical mice and trackball, but mine would have been cleaning the old roll ball, as it became quite greasy and dirty from extended use.
>br> With optical mice, that problem went away from mice for me. Although the surface still needs regular cleaning (I have sweaty fingers and use the mouse quite a lot), the bottom with the optical sensor now just needs a quick swipe or so every few months.
But with a trackball, the ball itself is still touched by myself, it only gets tracked optically. So it still gets dirty, at least in my limited experience (I do not use a trackball very much, but that is pure personal preference) and it still has to be cleaned as regularly as before. So at least in my opinion, optical technology did help mice much more than trackballs in this regard.
at least we have /. to bitch about not getting laid ;-)