In the case of ad-supported TV, it kinda doesn't make sense for Hulu to show you ads for stuff you won't buy. Or am I missing something? As for Amazon, it's plainly their loss.
This is something that YouTube and others have solved already.
I think there are players who like the intellectual challenge but most gamers play games for the mechanical challenge.
Most games focus on hand-eye coodination and reflexes as that is what most gamers seem to want.
If I look at World of Warcraft, most players ignore the quest text and don't care for the stories.
This is even more true for PvP in MMO and FPS games.
Creating content is very expensive, and if most gamers don't care then why do it?
What I also see is that good graphics create sales, at least initially. So if you don't have a subscription model, it's much better to invest in looks than in content.
Then you aren't the kind of player who cares for the stories.
I see it all the time in World of Warcraft. A lot of people don't read the quests and just use follow the markets. It's fine if you play the game for the mechanics challenges that it gives you. Most FPS games, and even MMOs like WoW largely cater to your kind of player with heavy focus on PvP (which usually has no story) and cooperative play like raids.
You're just a different kind of gamer than I am. I like the stories.
To other players who like stories, I can really recommend City of Heroes MMO.
A lot of people don't really like the stories. They are there for the challenge the game mechanics offer. It's why for example raiding in WoW is so popular.
I found a nice MMO that has a lot of good stories, if you're interested in stories. It's the old City of Heroes MMO. I've played WoW for years, and it's not as polished as that, but City of Heroes has a lot of very good stories, also because there is a system for players to generate stories as well (holding close to 500k missions now).
Things like the Signature Story Arcs take 20+ hours to play though if you do them for the first time and make you feel like you're the main character in a superhero movie.
This is not a game for the kind of people who don't read the quests in WoW. But if you like stories, I can recommend City of Heroes, even though it's older than WoW.
I don't play any FPS, but I think the difference is that nowadays the focus is on the online part of most games, where you'll be facing other human players, not AI bots.
Why? Because then there is a valid reason to require DRM and an active internet connection, so the company can be reasonably sure that people will buy the game instead of pirate it.
I also think it's because creating content is expensive and scales with the quality of the graphics/engine in complexity and cost.
Your 486 DX2 66 should have at least VESA Localbus. You can get videocards like the ATI Mach64 which should support 1440x900 just fine.
I know there are few 486's that had PCI so I can understand your USB problem. There are also IDE DVD drives so you should be able to get that sorted.
Running anything beyond Win XP on a 486 might be a real struggle though, so I think that's where your attempt to install Office 2013 will fail for sure.
My dad still uses a 486 DX4-100 with 48 MB RAM, 4 GB disk and ATI Mach 64 video. He runs Windows 2000 quite well on that. He runs 1280x1024 at full colour. I think the video card has 4 MB memory.
I call his machine "the 486 on steroids" and I'm surprised how well it still works.
Religious memes obey fitness functions, just like anything else subject to evolutionary pressure. If the ruling classes had not found Christianity so darned useful, the Bible would just be another one of a thousand forgotten religious texts, waiting to be discovered by scholars in a hole in the ground, reported at a conference attended by perhaps two hundred people, and described in a journal that perhaps five hundred professors and grad students would ever read.
I've also realised this. I think religion is an important mechanism by which cultures survive. There were many sects in early Christianity who preached celibacy for all their members for example. Predictably, they didn't survive long. The ones that survive are the ones that preached "Go forth and multiply".
The problem is that the US still has a lot of frontier spirit, and isn't used to having a lot of legacy in their infrastructure or buildings.
The move to social security and universal health care is a sign of the same thing. Where in the past the US could rely on an influx of young healthy immigrants to keep things running and could afford not to care for the old and the sick, with the shift to much stricter immigration the US is much more dependent on the existing population for it's work force.
As the US gets older and less of an immigration country, it will have to adopt policies more similar to what Europe does. It will probably find it's own unique mix.
It's funny that its usually the other way around in Europe, where the tollways usually are better than the freeways. The thing is that the tollways are competing with free, so have to offer a better experience to get customers.
Usually airports have some of the best foundations, as airplanes are really putting a lot of weight on a few wheels. There are issues with the new airbus super jumbo not being able to go to some airports because their foundations aren't good enough.
I think if anything the tarmac wasn't designed for the current temperatures. Asphalt used in a place like Sweden is very different from that used in Spain or England, a lot of engineering goes into what mix should be used depending on expected temperatures, snowfall and rain.
What I've learned about software developers, is that they much rather develop something new from scratch, often reinventing the wheel, than change an maintain an older stable piece of software.
What is also known from Software Engineering, is that developing something new is relatively easy, maintaining it, is where it gets hard usually.
Ad that's why so many find it hard to replicate the success of Apple, they don't understand that Apple has a very good reason for everything they do, even if it sometimes isn't the best idea. Even in the old MacOS the UI design was very good. I remember the first time I sat behind a Mac and was more productive within 15 minutes than the WinNT system I was used to.
Technology and design wise Apple is one of the best. What most people don't like them for, is the fierce way they defend their image and brand. That's where they get really aggressive and a lot of people don't like that.
MS tries with Metro and the ribbon and such, but I don't find it nearly as good as the UI designs that Apple puts out.
Over here in radio astronomy, there actually are quite a few people who still use Linux or the X11 in OSX to run old unix software. I mean stuff like Miriad, built on the original Xaw/Athena in the middle of the eighties. I don't know their code in detail, so I can't say if it does bypass some of the X11 functions, but given that is was developed mostly the X window system reached version 11, I think it's pretty basic X.
There's also AIPS, which is even older. I don't think it knows about X, it uses a serial stream of bytes, where each byte is a pixel, to display images on "AIPSTV". This is a program that still thinks in input/output/program tapes and has no concept of a file system beyond "tape library".
What I learned when I ventured into radio astronomy, is that a lot of the software in use is still seventies and eighties FORTRAN code. Only recently, with the newer ALMA and LOFAR telescopes coming online, did more modern packages like CASA (1991) gain any traction.
Yes 2 decades old is considered "new" in radio astronomy.
This is a metrics problem. Management typically has to perform versus metrics and if the metrics are shit, the product will be shit as well. "cut IT costs" is a terrible metric by itself given that IT is pervasive to the functionality of a modern corporation.
This is very true and where a lot of management fails. I've personally experienced a board of directors trying to come up with performance metrics (Balanced Score Cards system), and completely missing "making a profit" as one of them, let alone one of the most important.
It's not as simple as that, but specifying the wrong metrics was a problem at all levels from the board of directors down. And these guys were earning 7 figure incomes.
I learned in that company "being a successful manager" had little to do with your skills in managing or business sense, it all had to do with how good you were at politics and social skills.
Microsoft became big when they could sell DOS to the clones, especially Compaq. They got in the door because of the price of a clone-PC. The magic was in "IBM compatible".
The next part is that I think most software environments tend to gravitate towards a monopoly. As soon as MS had established their first one, they then used some very aggressive moves to expand, their history in the eighties and nineties is one of lost lawsuits. What they used is that the judicial system is just much slower than the speed of software development, so by the time they would lose the lawsuit, it would be irrelevant because MS would have won whatever they were after.
You are right that in business there are wide superstitions like "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.". It perpetuates the monopolies.
I'm not sure why so many software fields tend to gravitate towards near monopolies, in some cases duopolies, but I see it everywhere (Windows, iOS/Android, Autocad, Photoshop, 3DMax/Maya, there are many more). There are economic theories about why the largest economic power tends to grow fastest, things like agglomeration effects, but I'm not sure what applies here.
I don't agree that in general Europe is business unfriendly. The US has two other major advantages over Europe, namely a large common market and a head start after WWII.
EU-27 has a bigger economy and more Fortune 500 companies than the US.
Europe certainly has problems for business, but those are mostly the fact that there are many languages, currencies and different laws to deal with, not that the climate is inherently business unfriendly. Some countries might be somewhat more unfriendly towards US companies than their own, but that's mutual.
And we manage this wile providing universal health care, guaranteed pensions, social welfare, more holidays and shorter working hours.
I think it stems in a large part from the thinking behind the Monroe Doctrine and especially the Roosevelt Corollary. It's in essence a veiled colonial attitude, even though the Monroe Doctrine started out as the opposite.
Exactly. The power of MS is Exchange and Excel (with VB scritping).
If the FOSS community would make a killer groupware tool and create a spreadsheet that's scriptable in for example python, then MS would be in trouble. Even if a closed source compettitor did it.
I think Windows will die when the desktop dies. I don't see Linux taking over. Linux works if the hardware provider provides the drivers and makes sure it works. Because of this it works in the phone market and similar areas. Linux as a consumer OS is too much trouble, as there are often problems with supporting the hardware, especially on laptops.
Linux on the desktop only works if most hardware vendors support it. It will not be the other way around, where Linux becomes a success on the desktop and then hardware vendors start supporting it. The problem is that this would require a major shift in thinking for the Linux developers, on two levels, the hardware abstraction level and the support for binary blobs in the kernel. I assume the latter one is known, but what I mean with the first one, is that currently a lot of the hardware abstraction needs to be done by the desktop manager, like Gnome or KDE because the kernel doesn't have high enough level abstraction. There are related issues, like a clear way to manage applications. I really like the single.app that OSX has in that regard.
Right, but not even 20 years ago they were a bit player in the office products business, and not a player at all in the game console business.
Times change, companies evolve. Microsoft has the cash to turn itself into a car company if it wants to (I'm not sure why it would want to, but it can do pretty much whatever it wants). Whether or not they will latch on to a successful strategy in the future remains to be seen. Right now they're riding their giant piles of free money from Windows and Office to experiment with other areas (gaming, mobiles, various corporate computing tools etc.), if one of those strategies pans out they may jump headlong into that rather than PC's.
This is the problem with MS. Just like IBM in the eighties, they don't want to jump into anything new, if it is a potential danger to their Windows and Office cash cows.
They will probably survive, but in a way that GM and IBM survived, basically by having a near death experience. Apple has proven that you can recover from that.
Fuck off, 1%, this is the land of the Free, not the land of let's fuck everyone in the ass like our mother country did to us.
But that's what kapitalism and the free market/enterprise are all about. With communist ideas like that you can't be a real American. The 1% earned their money by their hard work, the 99% are just lazy. What you say smells of socialist class warfare propaganda!
P.S. This was meant as a hyperbole, I'm actually from one of these socialist european countries that the USA despises so much.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of ad-supported TV, it kinda doesn't make sense for Hulu to show you ads for stuff you won't buy. Or am I missing something? As for Amazon, it's plainly their loss.
This is something that YouTube and others have solved already.
I think there are players who like the intellectual challenge but most gamers play games for the mechanical challenge.
Most games focus on hand-eye coodination and reflexes as that is what most gamers seem to want.
If I look at World of Warcraft, most players ignore the quest text and don't care for the stories.
This is even more true for PvP in MMO and FPS games.
Creating content is very expensive, and if most gamers don't care then why do it?
What I also see is that good graphics create sales, at least initially. So if you don't have a subscription model, it's much better to invest in looks than in content.
Then you aren't the kind of player who cares for the stories.
I see it all the time in World of Warcraft. A lot of people don't read the quests and just use follow the markets. It's fine if you play the game for the mechanics challenges that it gives you. Most FPS games, and even MMOs like WoW largely cater to your kind of player with heavy focus on PvP (which usually has no story) and cooperative play like raids.
You're just a different kind of gamer than I am. I like the stories.
To other players who like stories, I can really recommend City of Heroes MMO.
A lot of people don't really like the stories. They are there for the challenge the game mechanics offer. It's why for example raiding in WoW is so popular.
I found a nice MMO that has a lot of good stories, if you're interested in stories. It's the old City of Heroes MMO. I've played WoW for years, and it's not as polished as that, but City of Heroes has a lot of very good stories, also because there is a system for players to generate stories as well (holding close to 500k missions now).
Things like the Signature Story Arcs take 20+ hours to play though if you do them for the first time and make you feel like you're the main character in a superhero movie.
This is not a game for the kind of people who don't read the quests in WoW. But if you like stories, I can recommend City of Heroes, even though it's older than WoW.
I don't play any FPS, but I think the difference is that nowadays the focus is on the online part of most games, where you'll be facing other human players, not AI bots.
Why? Because then there is a valid reason to require DRM and an active internet connection, so the company can be reasonably sure that people will buy the game instead of pirate it.
I also think it's because creating content is expensive and scales with the quality of the graphics/engine in complexity and cost.
Your 486 DX2 66 should have at least VESA Localbus. You can get videocards like the ATI Mach64 which should support 1440x900 just fine.
I know there are few 486's that had PCI so I can understand your USB problem. There are also IDE DVD drives so you should be able to get that sorted.
Running anything beyond Win XP on a 486 might be a real struggle though, so I think that's where your attempt to install Office 2013 will fail for sure.
My dad still uses a 486 DX4-100 with 48 MB RAM, 4 GB disk and ATI Mach 64 video. He runs Windows 2000 quite well on that. He runs 1280x1024 at full colour. I think the video card has 4 MB memory.
I call his machine "the 486 on steroids" and I'm surprised how well it still works.
Religious memes obey fitness functions, just like anything else subject to evolutionary pressure. If the ruling classes had not found Christianity so darned useful, the Bible would just be another one of a thousand forgotten religious texts, waiting to be discovered by scholars in a hole in the ground, reported at a conference attended by perhaps two hundred people, and described in a journal that perhaps five hundred professors and grad students would ever read.
I've also realised this. I think religion is an important mechanism by which cultures survive. There were many sects in early Christianity who preached celibacy for all their members for example. Predictably, they didn't survive long. The ones that survive are the ones that preached "Go forth and multiply".
The problem is that the US still has a lot of frontier spirit, and isn't used to having a lot of legacy in their infrastructure or buildings.
The move to social security and universal health care is a sign of the same thing. Where in the past the US could rely on an influx of young healthy immigrants to keep things running and could afford not to care for the old and the sick, with the shift to much stricter immigration the US is much more dependent on the existing population for it's work force.
As the US gets older and less of an immigration country, it will have to adopt policies more similar to what Europe does. It will probably find it's own unique mix.
It's funny that its usually the other way around in Europe, where the tollways usually are better than the freeways. The thing is that the tollways are competing with free, so have to offer a better experience to get customers.
Usually airports have some of the best foundations, as airplanes are really putting a lot of weight on a few wheels. There are issues with the new airbus super jumbo not being able to go to some airports because their foundations aren't good enough.
I think if anything the tarmac wasn't designed for the current temperatures. Asphalt used in a place like Sweden is very different from that used in Spain or England, a lot of engineering goes into what mix should be used depending on expected temperatures, snowfall and rain.
What I've learned about software developers, is that they much rather develop something new from scratch, often reinventing the wheel, than change an maintain an older stable piece of software.
What is also known from Software Engineering, is that developing something new is relatively easy, maintaining it, is where it gets hard usually.
Linux is just a software developers dream.
Ad that's why so many find it hard to replicate the success of Apple, they don't understand that Apple has a very good reason for everything they do, even if it sometimes isn't the best idea. Even in the old MacOS the UI design was very good. I remember the first time I sat behind a Mac and was more productive within 15 minutes than the WinNT system I was used to.
Technology and design wise Apple is one of the best. What most people don't like them for, is the fierce way they defend their image and brand. That's where they get really aggressive and a lot of people don't like that.
MS tries with Metro and the ribbon and such, but I don't find it nearly as good as the UI designs that Apple puts out.
Over here in radio astronomy, there actually are quite a few people who still use Linux or the X11 in OSX to run old unix software. I mean stuff like Miriad, built on the original Xaw/Athena in the middle of the eighties.
I don't know their code in detail, so I can't say if it does bypass some of the X11 functions, but given that is was developed mostly the X window system reached version 11, I think it's pretty basic X.
There's also AIPS, which is even older. I don't think it knows about X, it uses a serial stream of bytes, where each byte is a pixel, to display images on "AIPSTV". This is a program that still thinks in input/output/program tapes and has no concept of a file system beyond "tape library".
What I learned when I ventured into radio astronomy, is that a lot of the software in use is still seventies and eighties FORTRAN code. Only recently, with the newer ALMA and LOFAR telescopes coming online, did more modern packages like CASA (1991) gain any traction.
Yes 2 decades old is considered "new" in radio astronomy.
http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/mark/AIPS.html
This is a metrics problem. Management typically has to perform versus metrics and if the metrics are shit, the product will be shit as well. "cut IT costs" is a terrible metric by itself given that IT is pervasive to the functionality of a modern corporation.
This is very true and where a lot of management fails. I've personally experienced a board of directors trying to come up with performance metrics (Balanced Score Cards system), and completely missing "making a profit" as one of them, let alone one of the most important.
It's not as simple as that, but specifying the wrong metrics was a problem at all levels from the board of directors down. And these guys were earning 7 figure incomes.
I learned in that company "being a successful manager" had little to do with your skills in managing or business sense, it all had to do with how good you were at politics and social skills.
You are partially right.
Microsoft became big when they could sell DOS to the clones, especially Compaq. They got in the door because of the price of a clone-PC. The magic was in "IBM compatible".
The next part is that I think most software environments tend to gravitate towards a monopoly. As soon as MS had established their first one, they then used some very aggressive moves to expand, their history in the eighties and nineties is one of lost lawsuits. What they used is that the judicial system is just much slower than the speed of software development, so by the time they would lose the lawsuit, it would be irrelevant because MS would have won whatever they were after.
You are right that in business there are wide superstitions like "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.". It perpetuates the monopolies.
I'm not sure why so many software fields tend to gravitate towards near monopolies, in some cases duopolies, but I see it everywhere (Windows, iOS/Android, Autocad, Photoshop, 3DMax/Maya, there are many more). There are economic theories about why the largest economic power tends to grow fastest, things like agglomeration effects, but I'm not sure what applies here.
I don't agree that in general Europe is business unfriendly. The US has two other major advantages over Europe, namely a large common market and a head start after WWII.
EU-27 has a bigger economy and more Fortune 500 companies than the US.
Europe certainly has problems for business, but those are mostly the fact that there are many languages, currencies and different laws to deal with, not that the climate is inherently business unfriendly. Some countries might be somewhat more unfriendly towards US companies than their own, but that's mutual.
And we manage this wile providing universal health care, guaranteed pensions, social welfare, more holidays and shorter working hours.
A precursor to MC ran into big trouble when their source was leaked. Notch wants to avoid this:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/20/proto-minecraft-abandoned-due-to-epic-error/
I think it stems in a large part from the thinking behind the Monroe Doctrine and especially the Roosevelt Corollary. It's in essence a veiled colonial attitude, even though the Monroe Doctrine started out as the opposite.
My problem with both Assange and Kim Dotcom is that this over the top reaction is making martyrs out of guys who are basically not very likeable.
But maybe that's exactly what those prosecuting are hoping, that those that could come to their defence are disgusted enough that they wont.
Thank you for sharing this.
Exactly. The power of MS is Exchange and Excel (with VB scritping).
If the FOSS community would make a killer groupware tool and create a spreadsheet that's scriptable in for example python, then MS would be in trouble. Even if a closed source compettitor did it.
What makes MS strong is Exchange (GroupWise and Lotus Notes aren't in the same ballpark) and Excel, especially combined with VB scripting.
Those are the two pillars on which the Office monopoly rests, not Word, PowerPoint, Visio or what have you.
Especially in large companies (1000+) these are real winners. Nothing FOSS or otherwise can compare.
I think Windows will die when the desktop dies. I don't see Linux taking over. Linux works if the hardware provider provides the drivers and makes sure it works. Because of this it works in the phone market and similar areas. Linux as a consumer OS is too much trouble, as there are often problems with supporting the hardware, especially on laptops.
Linux on the desktop only works if most hardware vendors support it. It will not be the other way around, where Linux becomes a success on the desktop and then hardware vendors start supporting it. The problem is that this would require a major shift in thinking for the Linux developers, on two levels, the hardware abstraction level and the support for binary blobs in the kernel. I assume the latter one is known, but what I mean with the first one, is that currently a lot of the hardware abstraction needs to be done by the desktop manager, like Gnome or KDE because the kernel doesn't have high enough level abstraction. There are related issues, like a clear way to manage applications. I really like the single .app that OSX has in that regard.
Right, but not even 20 years ago they were a bit player in the office products business, and not a player at all in the game console business.
Times change, companies evolve. Microsoft has the cash to turn itself into a car company if it wants to (I'm not sure why it would want to, but it can do pretty much whatever it wants). Whether or not they will latch on to a successful strategy in the future remains to be seen. Right now they're riding their giant piles of free money from Windows and Office to experiment with other areas (gaming, mobiles, various corporate computing tools etc.), if one of those strategies pans out they may jump headlong into that rather than PC's.
This is the problem with MS. Just like IBM in the eighties, they don't want to jump into anything new, if it is a potential danger to their Windows and Office cash cows.
They will probably survive, but in a way that GM and IBM survived, basically by having a near death experience. Apple has proven that you can recover from that.
Fuck off, 1%, this is the land of the Free, not the land of let's fuck everyone in the ass like our mother country did to us.
But that's what kapitalism and the free market/enterprise are all about. With communist ideas like that you can't be a real American. The 1% earned their money by their hard work, the 99% are just lazy. What you say smells of socialist class warfare propaganda!
P.S. This was meant as a hyperbole, I'm actually from one of these socialist european countries that the USA despises so much.