PS3. PS is simply different. It costs more and it’s way more powerful. But it was overpriced for so long that it didn’t appear a reasonable to go for me. Although I have to admit, that now – at the beginning of year 2k8 – it’s the best time to buy it. As I’ve said Xbox is old and there’s no more Wii hype to distract consumer attention. The year 2k7 trend for game manufacturers was to either go Wii or both Xbox and PS, I expect this to change soon: Xbox is going to get dropped or will get game builds with lower graphics quality. So if you need console now go with PS or wait for a year or two for the next X.

The question is why I got stuck with X in my decision making. The reason is primary because of MS. Yep. The surprising thing about MS is that they are quite good at game development. I remember the Fable – it was a very high quality product, well packaged, well documented, well delivered. No hitches, no glitches. Very-very professional. And all other games made/published by MS are good, too. Besides, I love many of them. Unfortunately, they are not ported to other platforms (don’t count Windows here). In turn, PS has its own unique game series. But mostly those are anime-like stuff from Japan which I’m not interested in.

Format war.

I love HD DVD. I love the fact that it’s cheaper to roll it out. I heard a lot about equipment reuse to manufacture disks and readers – that’s great idea. The second thing MS and Toshiba made right was the name. Remember you recorded simple DVDs with simple cameras and viewed them on a simple TV? Now you should record HD DVDs with HD cameras and view them on a HD TV. Simple replace ‘simple’ to ‘HD’ – wise and consistent choice. Definitely I would support it. Blue Ray is cool, too. But the name isn’t consistent.

Personally I don’t care about technology – as long as both are far superior compared to ‘simple’ DVD I don’t really care.

The thing is that each party uses format war to attempt to make a fortune. And this makes me sad because it’s the customers who pay this fortune to both winners and losers. Everybody wants you to buy a new-format-media player and media for it. Here’s my guess why Sony wins:

- Sony manufactures game console, laptops, as well as media players, so they put BR on everything they could, including PS3 to gain revenues.
- MS haven’t put HD on Xbox because they had to support its partners (Toshiba) who produced media players. This could kill the HD media player market, although that would be a wise step from customer point of view. The thing is that no one cares about customers – see above.
- It’s clear now that fewer people would use next-format media to store backups – cloud storage is much more convenient. People will use this technology only to watch movies. So the major technology consumers are few movie recording companies, who can dictate the media prices for end-users (which is BAD) and technology providers – Sony, MS, and Toshiba – have to compete to gain their support. For me the winner was clear from the beginning – everybody knows that Sony controls Hollywood to a certain degree – quite enough to win.
- The only chance for MS to win a war was to nuke down the market. I mean to get HD on Xbox and to force its partners reduce the players and media prices. Consumers would certainly buy those devices and that would force movie producers to support the technology as well. We – the end-users – would eventually win, but the revenues gained in format war would be sliced by a power of ten. So they haven’t done it, because no one wants to earn less one is able to – the war not worth it – and that’s the reasonable decision, don’t blame MS.

What’s left afterwards?

- Some folks bought HD, and I’m sorry for them.
- We won’t get a BR player on the next gen Xbox, so one will have to buy a separate player box – may be that would be a PS3 (Lol!).

Hey, ain’t you gonna buy one for you right now?

Oh, I wish MS came up to Sony to rename Blue Ray into HD DVD and everybody would be happy. Well, not Toshiba I think, but who cares about them, anyway? Blue Ray sounds cool too, but not that consistent. Hey, why not us invent Blue Ray cameras and Blue Ray TV? Lol!

And don’t forget to bet on Duke, man, always! When it’s done

Vista stuff aside, I also feel that Android is a bit late in the game, but hopefully not everything is lost yet. And we’ll get tons of software for this platform quickly, due to community involvement in this Google App contest.

Well, thank you, Andrew! I always enjoy reading and answering your comments! Yes, there are some opposite points, but that’s great to have a healthy discussion!
And about new post idea… I’ll think about it

Sure, I need an admin rights for this blog – my comments are as long as your posts, man! Just kidding. But I found it particularly interesting way of blogging: major poster and major comment provider. It’s like a dialog, but the initiative always goes from one side.

Ok, let’s get down to business!

1. About Vista.

The situation with Vista reminds me the time when Microsoft released XP. There were so many “banish this OS” voices! To name a few:
- It’s just too eye-candy. No one needs this crap!
- It’s demanding – you’d better upgrade your PC to run it smoothly! 64 MB of RAM just to run the OS – that’s ridiculous!
- Why do we need Home and Pro? What’s the difference?
- I can’t reboot to DOS! I need DOS! Please, bring the DOS back!
- My recovery floppy disk can’t read this crappy NTFS partition! My Linux live CD can’t change anything in it!
- Blue screen of death? AGAIN ?!!
- My favorite game doesn’t run in it!
- New disk checker sucks!
- ACTIVATION? WTF ?!!
- That’s SP2 is a crap: it downloads updates and eats my bandwidth! This red or yellow shield is annoying!
- I’m an end-user, why the hell I need that dot NET?! It’s for developers!
- Still no tabs in IE?!!

Enough said. You see, every new version of Microsoft OS meets a lot of complains. It simply takes time to adapt, to master and, ultimately, to admit that it’s quite good and revolutionary. I used Win98 for strait 3 years after XP was released. And, you know, after three years I saw the gap between the older crap and a new reliability and performance (yes, performance!). I think it’s quite important to become an OS power user before justify the OS. And with each new release it actually becomes easier to be a power user.

It took me about 5 years to become a Win98 power user. And it took me another two years to power my XP experience. I’m an XP power user for about a year and a half only, I admit it. XP is a great OS, man. And I bet Vista is, too. You wrote “on 1GB of RAM it [Vista] worked faster than XP”. So it’s capable of being faster! And I bet I could make it run faster for the strait 1 year, after that I would reinstall it several times and it would be faster for strait 2 of 3 years which is more than enough for a desktop OS. How often do you reinstall Linux?

I found that you have to upgrade for each new version of MS OS, but that’s primarily because of long release cycle, so for me it’s not the point. Currently I haven’t got Vista yet, because I’m not going to buy a new PC for a while. And that’s the only reason for me not to upgrade. Vista is expensive to by a standalone copy, but it comes significantly cheaper with the hardware. I have tried several Vista applications on my XP machine, though. I liked the new media player and Windows Defender works fine either. I haven’t tried the EI7 yet, but it seems pretty good. One point is https connection: you get a green background in the address bar – that’s significant usability improvement over IE6 where we got only a small lock sign at the bottom. Oh, and it doesn’t break anything. I mean that everything that worked in IE6 still works in it. That’s great!

As for SP1, it won’t change anything much. Remember XP SP1? Me, I don’t!

As for Vista versioning it’s also quite reasonable: they got profile-based versions, so one can pick up an OS according to her needs and not pay too much. For example, for a business environment there’s no need in media center capabilities, so one can get Vista Business, which gives the same level of system and data protection as Ultimate. And there’s a Home Basic, which is particularly interesting because it aims to become an XP replacement for older hardware. Pros: you’ll get all the real power of Vista (UAC, DerectX 10, etc.) without wasting resources. Cons: if you’re a PC admin when XP can be sufficient, and you’ll have to pay for OS.

So, if you got a problem with Vista, than tweak it a bit (or ask your admin, if you don’t have enough rights).

Reinstall it, install some supporting tools (like improved defragmentation utility), tweak page file size, and be sure to install only the software you really need. And don’t use IE or Firefox for web browsing: the former is dangerous; the later eats all your memory and kills the OS performance (I bet you use FF). Use Windows Media Player instead of others – surprisingly it works greatly to save the OS performance in a long run. If you don’t like it keep it minimized as a media panel – it’s great. Don’t install codec packs – use separate installer for each codec, usually you need only one or two. Don’t watch movies on the OS with Visual Studio, that’s just stupid. Don’t run Linux live CDs on this computer – it turns out that they are not that “live” – on my laptop live CD kills the DMA till I reinstall XP.

Some other questions to think about:
Do you really need Office (MS or OOo, it doesn’t matter)? Do you need to keep your local copy of MS SQL Server? Do you need multiple Java VMs and JDKs? Do you need both .NET 1.1 and 3.5? Do you need Kaspersky or DrWeb instead of Symantec? Do you really need that picture viewer application? Got no Photoshop installed? Do you need all those small apps that make your live more convenient, but in fact make it harder? Do you need to burn CDs and a tool to do it? Do you need that Google toolbars, Accelerators, Picassas, Packs, etc.?

Ok, all these questions are controversial, but I don’t insist everyone should follow them? If you need Office, why not to have it, right?

So, wait a bit – 2 or three years before crying out laud. Take it easy! One more thing. I haven’t quite caught, why do you need Vista to test your dotNET applications, are they incompatible?

2. Eee PC

I decided to speak about it a bit. Imagine you’re living in the UK. Do you know how you get paid there? If you earn $2k in the US you’ll get 1k GBP – that’s a fair deal. But the prices are organized a bit different: if iPod Touch costs $300 in the US it would cost about 300 GBP – is it a fair deal? So, for most people in the UK your MBPro is too expensive, and they got nothing to do but to buy an Eee PC. Today there’re two trends in PC manufacturing: to sell a cutting edge next gen devices, or to produce a low-cost commodity hardware. It should be obvious that the low-cost segment is not that attractive for manufacturers. But today the concurrency in this segment is so high (IBM was unable to compete successfully), that they have to search for other ways to gain profit. The low-cost hardware (running Linux) was an obvious choice. That’s why we see gPC with Eee PC now.

Would I buy one? For now, no. the price is not that low as I would expect – I could by a powerful Xbox if I add a few bucks. Besides, I got my commodity hardware already, all I need is to configure my LAN and get Ubuntu for it. But the move is good, especially for those who seek for productivity without performance and costs.

3. Google Android.

I like the idea behind it: today the performance of mobile devices grow fast. And there’s no reason to stuck with Java ME and its restricted capabilities. Android gives us a lot more power, Open GL, new UI, better networking, mush-up-ability, etc. what I don’t like is its platform forking. Honestly, I expected something like this to happen since IBM initiated Apache Harmony project. I would love to see OpenJDK code as Android basis instead. And I bet Google could agree with Sun about the price.

Also Android provides us with great web capabilities, and that means that a user can easily gain a desktop web experience. I bet Flash and Silverlight are not far away, and that can bring us a nice way to develop Desktop-Android-Web-XXX apps and as a result we’ll see a lot of Facebooky and Google Mappy stuff. And the Adds, of course.

That brings me to Google App contest. You heard that story about the prices. I’m afraid that wouldn’t be as successful as Google expects. Certainly there would be thousands of RSS feeders and millions of media players, but there’s nothing brand new in it. Also they’ll get a couple of social networking ports, but despite location awareness these things won’t bring anything new. There would be some 3D casual games, and they are certain to get a dozen of prices, And only about 5 to ten really innovative products.

But the most important would be disappointments and failures of millions of developers who are spending the whole nights trying to create something that would seem revolutionary to them, but not to jury. Less than 1 percent of projects would be successful, more than 99 percent of developers would be angry and depressed. Don’t be evil, you say? Tell that to Steve Ballmer!

Android is good, but it would be truly innovative about a year ago, not today.

So, I’m done this time. I hope not to disappoint you, although I provide opposite points. It’s not a flame, of course. Besides, don’t you think it’s boring to read “Me too” comments?

My two cents.

Hey, man, can I request a post? Could you write about your windows experience: what software do you keep installed, what do you use, how do you maintain your environment? I know do use it not often, but still. Also, which web sites do you visit? That could be interesting.

If you’re learning Jva by writing a command line apps it’s ok, but here’s my 2 cents: don’t waste your time for Java UI – it’s a crap. You’d better use some other technologies for UI, like WPF, or Silverlight, or Flex, or HTML and stuff. It’s easier and gives you a much prettier result (from eye-candy point of view), and if you do, when what’s the difference between this and web apps?

Playing with Java? Good shot – I play with python, and I’m very excited with its functional-programming capabilities. It’s aver some! And it’s threading seems easy for me – start() and run() – just like in java.

You know, there’s lot of hype around Groovy and Ruby nowadays, but I see that there’re lots of areas where python is simply second to none. I’m starting to love duck-type scripting. You are still type-secure but you can write a very concise and streamlined code with it, ex:

myArray.each {doAnithingWith it; andMore() }
5.times { }

Cool indeed. And it’s mostly cross-platform. I mean I works on custom VMs, as well as on .NET and Java if you got one. And who cares about OS? Me, I don’t!

As a platform Java is very descent but it loose to C# as a language. No delegates, no true properties, now true generics, now strucs, no /* insert anything else here */, but it got java.util.concurrent and sets (Damn the C# – it doesn’t!) and lots of other things. Anyway my vision about it is different now. It’s hard to find a reliable hosting for your java project, and I think of it as a server-side, but internal-corporate-sever-side. Pyth and RoR are different, as well as .NET – that’s the Internet is made of.

One more thing about it is third-party libs – to know JEE is simply not enough to know the tech. You have to gain a broader view. Rails community is more focused. They got only one framework, but it is THE one framework they need, and they work hard to make it better. Code generation makes you write much less code and makes you extremely productive. Java require lots of effort and knowledge be put on to achieve the same goal.

My two cents:

JRuby (on 2nd Rails) on Jetty is the way to go! Grails is a second option. Wicket+ActiveObjects – for nothing-but-java cowboy coders only. But the true power is Scala-Python-Erlang. Stay tuned.

PS: If you know Py, why to learn anything else?

I was offline for ages, didn’t know you’ve started a blog. Nice posts, indeed. I’m your reader.

Here’s my 1 comment for all so far:

An interesting vision of the future of software development. F/OSS and Apple vs. Microsoft, and by .NET developer, actually, . Hm.

Here’s my thought:

Microsoft is a vendor, right? They give us a nice OS, a player, a game console. An Apple is a vendor and it does the same, too (Mac OS X and iPod). Than, what’s the difference? Apple is more F/OSS-friendly, isn’t it? Alright, let’s see who gives us more freedom.

Freedom is 1) an ability to choose and 2) an ability to submit your alternatives (to make them wider).

When one chooses MS, one has an ability to customize the platform, one can specify hardware vendors (perhaps, one likes AMD+ATI or Intel+nVidia).

Can I customize a Mac? No. Some minor changes like memory amount or hard drive capacity are not that important. And with Apple I have very limited alternatives: an underpowered Mac Mini, Mac Book (which isn’t an option because of Pro), Mac Book Pro – the ONLY choice, iMac – which is desktop and you don’t need one – buy MBPro, and their server – which is overpowered, overpriced, and god-damn good-looking.

So what’re you gonna buy? MBPro – and you’ve got it! What if I dream of a tablet? Than I choose Microsoft.

From software point of view BOTH CAN be free, just use GCC on it. The fact that you got Darwin behind the Tiger doesn’t make it opensource, does it? Apple doesn’t invest into opensource, and Microsoft doesn’t too. They simply don’t care.

OpenSource is not a new BIG THING; it’s a method of doing software business. A company invests into F/OSS because it forced to do it. Consider Opera and Firefox. Opera is able to compete with Firefox, Safary and IE without opensourcing their browser. Moreover, for them it’s the only way to protect their technologies. They can HIRE a developer and PAY her or him to compete. Firefox can’t compete without opensource. So, instead of paying, they get code for FREE. Note, that both Opera and Fox get their money from Google, both give us the best web-surfing experience, but isn’t it more fair to thank developers monetary like Opera does?

IBM and Sun invest into opensource because they can’t compete on the software market with Microsoft (and Apple) without it. So it would be fair to speak about F/OSS+IBM+Sun+.. vs. Microsoft+Apple. And Microsoft is LESS evil for F/OSS than Apple. MS is a software-only company – they work hard to develop nice software for every case. They sell licenses to hardware vendors, they support hardware market. Apple is both software and hardware vendor. They earn money from MBPro itself AND from Mac OS X. The fact that they put OOo and Fox into their boxes doesn’t make’em friendly. They do it to make the boxes more attractive for F/OSS guys like you. They don’t invest ( = SPEND money) into F/OSS, they use it to EARN MORE instead.

Another issue of Freedom is iPod-iTunes-iPhone stuff. They don’t give us a freedom of choice. I can’t write Java, or Silverlight, or Flex application for it. I forced to use JavaScript and XML for it instead. Certainly, AJAX is free. But it’s not easy to develop with it. Flex et al are much easier, and if they would be available, iStuff would be a lot nicer platform to develop on. Apple doesn’t let other vendors to gain from their market, so they restrict our ability to choose. Java and Flex are OpenSource, too. I wonder, why AJAX, and Google AJAX Stuff (GWT and Gears) are considered to be MORE opensource? May be, because it looks more googly?

My point is not against Apple. My point is: F/OSS is a way to do business – it’s not an organization or a single united community. It’s a business method. Don’t put everything into one soup. There’s no Apple+F/OSS=moreandbetterF/OSS. Apple utilizes F/OSS to profit. Microsoft goes its own way. They simply provide solutions for everything. F/OSS can do the same.

Funny stuff:
TRUTH IS: Every vendor enjoys vendor lock-in. Lock-in is a limited choice – EVIL. MS and Apple are vendors – EVIL. F/OSS can be done without vendors, so it can be GOOD, but F/OSS without vendors is RARE. Choose lesser evil!

Best regards.

Andrew.

And really, what do you think, when will this war of FOSS and commercial software stop??? You say: free – good, commercial – bad. For you, a software developer, commercial software is your daily bread . Why don’t you value your mental work and mental work of other software developers? Why don’t you want to make a good money from software?! I want to offer a simple way of co-existence for free and commercial software. Free software should be a method for developers to exchange their experience. It should be a field, where developers can freely discuss their ideas, ask their questions on how to implement some special features (MSDN is something like that, and although it’s dedicated to closed-source sofware, it’s very effective way of experience interchange). Closed source software should stay commercial classified information. It should drive IT world to the future in the manner of strong competition among the leading IT-companies. And, IMHO, not FOSS but the commercial products should set the heading in the growing world of IT-industry

Thoughts?

And about a more controlling company.. I think we both would agree that Microsoft is much more dangerous to our freedoms than Apple. Think about their latest Linux patent threats, for example…
And Apple? It was the first company to offer DRM-free music online! Now I admire that!
So, after all, IMHO Apple is not so black as it is painted…