Wired Releases Annual Vaporware List

alacqua writes: "Wired has an article titled Vaporware 2001: Empty Promises which is a top-ten list of last year's vaporware. 'You've Got Smell!' made it, but the Justice Department did not. Says Wired, 'Speaking of Microsoft, some smart-aleck readers opined that the most vaporous thing in tech last year was the Justice Department's failure to deliver on its promise to punish Bill Gates for his company's monopolistic misdeeds -- but we thought that a bit of a stretch.'"

Comments

Slashdot moving to PNG from Gif

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember that one?

Re:Slashdot moving to PNG from Gif

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

What are the differences between PNG and Gif?
Both are entirely lossless compression. GIF supports up to 256 colors, with one optional transparent color. PNG supports 24-bit color plus 8-bit transparency. Only PNG supports some color calibration/adjusting. Only GIF supports animation.

Which one is better at compression?
GIF is good enough, especially for line art and things that don't use more than 256 colors. PNG is almost always better than GIF, sometimes compressing images to 1/2 the size.

Are the encoders copywrited?
Of course, nearly everything's copyrighted (including a lot of GPL and other "free" code). The LZW algorithm, which is used to encode GIF images, is patented, and the patent owner (Unisys) tries to get people to pay if they sell software with a GIF encoder in it. PNG is patent-free and royalty-free.

Which one is supported more?
Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape 4.0+, and IE 5.0+ fully support PNG. That's 99% of normal web surfers. Unfortunately there were a few versions of IE (around 3.0 - 4.0) that actually crashed if a web page had any PNG's on them.

That's very unfortunate because it means that 0.1% of your website viewers will get a crash and write you hate mail. That's why very few sites use PNGs.

When I want to include a PNG of something on a webpage, I usually make a high-quality JPEG thumbnail which links to a PNG. That way people know it's the image that crashes their browser, not my webpage.

There's a great free, portable, easy-to-use library for encoding and decoding PNG images, so if you want to include support for some image format in a program you're writing, PNG is a great choice.

you know...

[Rev.LoveJoy]

Duke Nukem Forever should really be renamed Dikatana2.

Cheers,
RLJ

Re:Vapourware? Thank God!

[Violet Null]

Government has no business interfering with the market!

Yep. I dream of the day when food products no longer need to have those annoyingly informative nutritional labels upon them. I yearn for when we can break free of the schackles imposed upon us by "truth in advertising". I'll lead the parade when we get rid of "safety standards". I'll...

Oh, wait. You're a troll. Nevermind.

You can't have it both ways

[mESSDan]

3 items the article mentioned were games that have been in development for quite a while. Why is a 4 year development cycle a problem? What is wrong with "When it's done"?

I for one am glad that the software developers (3D Realms for Duke Nukem Forever in particular) are taking their time creating this game. I am sick and tired of games being released these days that need patch after patch, often times just to make the game PLAYABLE, let alone enjoyable.

Where and when should developers draw the line? Shouldn't that be for them to decide?

Photoshop for OS X was demoed today...

[Cutriss]

It's in the /. MacWorld coverage.

But still, they're right. I think I can be correct (mostly) in saying that Apple wouldn't exist today if it weren't for Adobe, and without X-native Adobe apps, X will flounder. It's a *wonderful* OS, but Adobe has long been providing Apple with the killer apps it needs to stay alive, and OS X is no exception.

Re:FPS are, by definition, cookie-cutter

[Erasmus Darwin]

"If it's another FPS, how can it NOT be cookie-cutter ?"

Half-Life was an FPS that managed to avoid being cookie-cutter, through the inclusion of plot and scripting. Most FPSes at the time consisted of "You're on a strange world. Go fight.", while Half-Life had a more immersive feel to it. The technology behind it may have been nothing revolutionary, but the overall effect was anything but cookie-cutter.

Thief redefined the term FPS to mean "first person sneaker". It's technically the same sort of game as Quake or Doom, but a few tweaks to the rules of the world result in entirely different gameplay.

Just because most FPS games have been content to go with very straight-forward games, there're significant changes that can be made to avoid being cookie-cutter.

Vaporware?

[dillon_rinker]

Wired doesn't get it: software development is HARD. I can't really blame them, though, when so-called software developers don't get it. How hard can it be, I say, when I myself have developed several Visual Basic applications? Naturally this doesn't distinguish between doing it and doing it RIGHT. There is the problem of defining requirements; they generally turn out to conflict; then they change every other week. I'll say it again: developing commercial software for general release is HARD. And for the terminally inattentive, I'll spell out the rule of software release:

It is released when it is released. Don't expect it any sooner.

Anyway, here's Wired's (software) Vaporware for the last three years. Consider this year's in light of it...

Vaporware 1998: Windows 2000
It's here now.

Vaporware 1999
9. Ideaworks3d's Vecta3D
It's here now.
7. Games for the Mac
Not a Mac afficionado; all I know is that there are Mac games, but not many. I'll give them this one.
6. SDMI
It's here now, though flawed in both concept and execution...
5. Daikatana
It's here now.
4. Diablo II
It's here now.
3. Netscape's Communicator 5.0
It's here now (though they secretly incremented the version number while no one was looking).
1. Windows 2000
See 1998's list, above

Vaporware 2000
10: Tribes 2
It's here now.
6: Warcraft III
Hey, they finally nailed one!
4: A New Linux kernel (2.4, specifically)
It's here now.
3: Black and White
It's here now.
2: Duke Nukem Forever
This one's not here, but the article itself states there's no scheduled release date! How is this vaporware?
1: Mac OS X
It's here now.

So, Wired, in the software category, you called 2 out of 14 (both of which are still under active development). The rest weren't vapor. How, then, should we view this year's software entries?

Re:Vaporware?

[dimator]

Ya, software development is hard. Someone tell the damn marketing department at 3D Realms that, because I remember seeing magazine ads for Duke Nukem Forever (wired's #1 vaporware), when according to the CEO, they havent even begun to think about a release date, four years after the game was announced! How can it possibly live up to the expectations it has amassed?

My take on the Vaporware awards is this: they're not so much making fun of late software (because as you said, it is hard to do) but they're making fun of companies that stand on the highest peak, releasing one press release after another, shoutting out how earth-shattering their product is going to be, while not having anything remotely complete to ship.

You don't see, for example, iD doing that. "When it's done" has always been their release date, and they don't go nuts bragging about the next game years before hand.