The reason why it has a bad reputation is because of "people-who-call-themselves-web-developers-who-don't-really-know-what-they're-doing" writing generally horrible hacks with it.
There, fixed that for you.
(I was going to say "graphics designers who became 'developers'", but there are probably some of those who actually do a good job)
The problem with all of those web apps that have "already far eclipsed desktop applications in visual design, usability, and just overall experience" is that they haven't.
Install five GTK apps and what do you get? Generally it's five apps that look and behave fairly similarly. Go to five different web apps and what do you get? Five different looks, five different interaction methods, some using Ajax and some not, some using proper links and post-backs but some replacing every link with JavaScript so you can't middle-click.
Consistency is part of usability. Changing icon sets I can see the point of because some apps can't just pick up existing icons or they can't guarantee that there's a matching icon, so to get consistent icons you need icon sets. Anything beyond that in terms of styling (the oddities of Trillian's interface when I used it on Windows, the uglyness of Opera in Gnome no matter what theme, etc) breaks any level of consistency you might have had.
That'd probably be this challenge from further up the page - $500 at the moment, and apparently three companies have turned it down after the dd command was mentioned because they 'know' it isn't possible.
Qt bindings for Mono/.Net? Where? When I looked a few months ago Qt# was dead and Qyoto seems to have gone missing when I searched a in the past few weeks (all the sites are either dead or being squatted).
That depends on whether you're talking about the way the law works in theory or the way that criminal prosecution and the physical court room works on the human mind. While people like to think that they think "innocent until proven guilty" there are still triggers that make people assume guilty earlier than the evidence supports.
And all of those devices get stolen for the hardware (the iPods, phones and laptops at least - hard disks are probably stolen as "picking up something left behind" or "getting important documents"), not for the content.
Muggers and thieves want money. There is money to be made in selling off hardware, especially if it's new and shiny, but there isn't money to be made in putting MP3s on P2P. If they want to sell MP3s from one of those devices then they're probably already doing it on a bigger scale as it needs a different infrastructure to fencing physical goods.
But it would still be there, at which point people would get even more paranoid because when it was found then not only was the song tied to their account but it was secretly tied to their account.
Well, yes, but that's not the part that people get worked up about. I don't have a problem with it storing that data because it can be useful for purchase information (such as which account and when), but everyone seems to be jumping on the "arrrgghhh, now I can be tracked if I share it on BitTorrent" paranoia. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been put in to track people sharing songs to keep the music industry happy, even if it does have a more benign use.
What if the disk also contained word processed documents? Or a backup of your emails? Or you lost your MP3 player and it had your calendar and address book on? Or even your mobile phone with its list of phone numbers? We put lots of personal data on devices that can be lost, some of which is worse from an identity standpoint than an email address.
Besides, I'd expect most people who pick up a disk and don't hand it in to the police are likely to either a) nuke it and use it or b) look for bank details and other things they can sell, rather than music that they need to use their own bandwidth to share for no profit.
It's not difficult to put a checksum in as well. Even just a string length counter that invalidates the file if it doesn't match would defeat a lot of your more basic "I can open it in Notepad and see my email address, so lets delete it" 'hackers'.
But if you're not sharing it on P2P then what does it matter whether it is "purchaser details" that includes your email address or some ID string that maps back to an email address - it's still tied to your account whichever method you use. By not sharing your songs on P2P it won't be seen by strangers.
That would be an interesting new source of spam, though - trawl P2P for iTunes songs and pull the purchaser information out of it!
I think someone is digging this out again because Apple recently announced that all of their music is DRM free. As someothersay this is a reasonable enough compromise.
My songs aren't going anywhere beyond me and the wife, so why should I care if it has information about who bought it and when? No-one is going to see it except me, and I can finally play the music in Linux without having to re-encode it.
No, the reasons companies are moving to microtransactions are: 1) They can stop people re-selling and so anyone who wants the game has to buy it new (in extreme circumstances), 2) they can keep making money without doing much extra work ("We just sold the game for $50 and it took 50,000 hours to make, if this content took 1 hour to make then we'll sell it for $2 and make 2000% profit"), 3) there's a group they can blame and the media will support it, so the general populace will fall for it as well.
The only problem is that 1) leads to people not playing the games because they don't want to pay full price, 2) leads to people getting annoyed and moving to games that don't "nickel and dime" them for their gaming experience and 3) is all just a load of made up BS.
While some of the parent posts have potentially sensible uses, I can see this as being the real use (even if it has been modded Funny instead of Insightful). My wife bought some of the extra content for Oblivion, and that seemed interesting and of a decent quality, but once you get people used to "and you've got to pay another couple of GB£/US$/etc to unlock X" then the sales areas will milk it for all it's worth. Just look at some of the crap people are paying for already on things like the iTunes shop!
Exactly (except for in the equivalent British denominations). I don't get much chance to play games any more, but I don't want to feel that I've got to keep paying to play the games I do have.
Buying a game and playing feels like you're getting great entertainment. Buying a game (including this one, since it appears to be "buy and then free play") and then having to keep buying things seems more like a situation where you'd feel like you were an entertained piggy bank.
What's wrong with just making decently entertaining games that people are actually willing to go out and buy?
One problem is that some password managers can be tricked into submitting different password credentials to different parts of the same Web site.
And that's a "trick" because...? Surely there are times when you want to have different passwords in different areas. I've got basic HTTP authentication on an admin area of one of my sites. From there I've then got a number of tools, at least one of which requires a separate login. There's situations like that where you want different passwords for different areas.
What annoys me with password managers at the moment is Firefox filling in too many passwords! If you record a password for one set of login forms and then go to any other page on the same domain with a password box with a text box just above it then Firefox blindly guesses that they're a login box (even if they're called "foo" and "bar" when you recorded the details for the fields "username" and "password"). That can really start to cock up some of your settings in things like phpBB's admin control panel if you don't notice what it has auto-filled.
XBox only? Of course not. Why do you think Microsoft started all of those "Games for Windows" branded boxes? It'll be to cram in things like this and reduced moddability because of downloadable content (which is the way Dawn of War 2 appears to be going from some bits I've read).
That idea works for desktop apps, but what about games? People might be willing to swap IE/Photoshop/MS Office for Firefox or improved Gimp/OpenOffice, but there's the minor caveat that some people are just stuck in their ways with interfaces and aren't willing to change (which, of course, MS screwed up with Office 2007).
Games, on the other hand, are a lot more difficult. The only reason I have Wine installed at the moment is to play the Dawn of War games. The last expansion pack wasn't as good (it was out-sourced to Iron Lore instead of being by Relic) but I can't see an open source game being close to it. Also, desktop apps just need to be interoperable at the file format level and have similar (or learnable) interfaces. With games then if you're not running the actual game then you're not getting in to the on-line gaming or getting the additional content.
viruses, adware, ten million icons in the system tray popping up messages when you're trying to play,
I recommend you fix your PC then, because I've never had problems with those things;)
drivers, direct X,
I've never had driver issues, and installing newer ones can give better performance, so the PC improves over the console. DirectX has been quite static for a while as well (except DirectX 10, but very few games require that).
plus computer monitors make everything look shit compared to a TV.
Depends on your TV and your monitor. I'd rather have my monitor than any TV we've had as I find it more immersive than being sat in the middle of the floor in front of the thing that normally plays movies. I don't like widescreen either, so that puts even more modern TVs out.
Rubbish. Consoles were way ahead in the era when PCs struggled to show coloured text, never mind graphics.
Okay, so consoles like the NES beat Amstrads for graphics, but when my friend got a PlayStation then I could get better resolution and equal quality out of my PC, and I was only about 11 when the PlayStation came out, so it wasn't a spectacular PC. Ditto for the PS2 - the console had improved, but so had the PC, and if Wikipedia is correct then much faster Pentiums were available than the processor in the PS2.
Not too cheap when you throw in the rest of the cost of the PC needed to run them. Even then, that bottom-end card will be outdated in a couple of years when Crysis 3 or whatever comes out, being exactly the same game as before but with sharper graphics, which is all PC gaming is about these days.
Except that the article was meant as an "if your machine has fallen off the bottom end and you want to upgrade" article.
I tend to avoid the console ports and the "same but with better graphics" games (which is what I've seen in a lot, but not all, of the consoles). On the plus side to the improved graphics, at least you can get it. If you buy a console then you're stuck with what you've got for the next four or five years and nothing can look any better (unless developers start to understand the system more). With a PC then when you come in to the gaming market two years after the console is released you get graphics and performance that are two years better, where as new console users at that point get two year old graphics.
Each to their own, but I'd much rather have a proper machine for playing proper games on.
That's one thing that always gets me with games. PC games can come out between £25 and £35 (possibly up to £40 if it's FIFA or something similar), where as console games tend to start at £40 in the shops! Yes, a console is cheaper first off, but then you're slapped with the extra later on so that they can make their money back.
It's not even as if the quality of consoles has been great - it's only the latest generation that actually begins to approach pC quality graphics/resolution! I can't find the article now, but in the last couple of months I read about bottom-end cards that out-spec consoles and are available cheaply. The only reason PC games don't run as well seems to be because developers don't know how to optimise and just go "oh, they can upgrade it so it doesn't matter".
How has that not been modded up as insightful? That's the whole problem with situations like this - yes, child porn is bad, but [i]nudity[/i] has been used in [i]art[/i] and appreciated for centuries. Nude != porn. Showing flesh != end of all civilisation as we know it. Think classical Greek, Renaissance, etc, they had art work that's still appreciated and not-one gets so upset about that just because it's old.
I'm starting to feel like we need new laws, written by sensible people, for the benefit of the consumers, not corporations.
Unfortunately I think there's one problem with your suggestion, and it comes with the word "sensible". Given that a country runs on the money brought in by companies then any law is going to favour them to some degree. Even recent "corporate man-slaughter" laws in the UK were stripped of most of their power because companies were worried about the implications.
I know that in my country, the UK, there are many sensible laws written for the benefit of the people.
We have sensible laws in the UK? Wow, when did that happen? I must have missed those in amongst all the other crap the Government has done:D Or did you mean older ones?:)
Surely that depends on how functional it is? I didn't read the article (it's a console game, not a real computer game) but "matchmaking issues" is entirely different to "no online play at all".
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that for you.
(I was going to say "graphics designers who became 'developers'", but there are probably some of those who actually do a good job)
The problem with all of those web apps that have "already far eclipsed desktop applications in visual design, usability, and just overall experience" is that they haven't.
Install five GTK apps and what do you get? Generally it's five apps that look and behave fairly similarly. Go to five different web apps and what do you get? Five different looks, five different interaction methods, some using Ajax and some not, some using proper links and post-backs but some replacing every link with JavaScript so you can't middle-click.
Consistency is part of usability. Changing icon sets I can see the point of because some apps can't just pick up existing icons or they can't guarantee that there's a matching icon, so to get consistent icons you need icon sets. Anything beyond that in terms of styling (the oddities of Trillian's interface when I used it on Windows, the uglyness of Opera in Gnome no matter what theme, etc) breaks any level of consistency you might have had.
That'd probably be this challenge from further up the page - $500 at the moment, and apparently three companies have turned it down after the dd command was mentioned because they 'know' it isn't possible.
Qt bindings for Mono/.Net? Where? When I looked a few months ago Qt# was dead and Qyoto seems to have gone missing when I searched a in the past few weeks (all the sites are either dead or being squatted).
That depends on whether you're talking about the way the law works in theory or the way that criminal prosecution and the physical court room works on the human mind. While people like to think that they think "innocent until proven guilty" there are still triggers that make people assume guilty earlier than the evidence supports.
And all of those devices get stolen for the hardware (the iPods, phones and laptops at least - hard disks are probably stolen as "picking up something left behind" or "getting important documents"), not for the content.
Muggers and thieves want money. There is money to be made in selling off hardware, especially if it's new and shiny, but there isn't money to be made in putting MP3s on P2P. If they want to sell MP3s from one of those devices then they're probably already doing it on a bigger scale as it needs a different infrastructure to fencing physical goods.
But it would still be there, at which point people would get even more paranoid because when it was found then not only was the song tied to their account but it was secretly tied to their account.
Well, yes, but that's not the part that people get worked up about. I don't have a problem with it storing that data because it can be useful for purchase information (such as which account and when), but everyone seems to be jumping on the "arrrgghhh, now I can be tracked if I share it on BitTorrent" paranoia. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been put in to track people sharing songs to keep the music industry happy, even if it does have a more benign use.
What if the disk also contained word processed documents? Or a backup of your emails? Or you lost your MP3 player and it had your calendar and address book on? Or even your mobile phone with its list of phone numbers? We put lots of personal data on devices that can be lost, some of which is worse from an identity standpoint than an email address.
Besides, I'd expect most people who pick up a disk and don't hand it in to the police are likely to either a) nuke it and use it or b) look for bank details and other things they can sell, rather than music that they need to use their own bandwidth to share for no profit.
It's not difficult to put a checksum in as well. Even just a string length counter that invalidates the file if it doesn't match would defeat a lot of your more basic "I can open it in Notepad and see my email address, so lets delete it" 'hackers'.
But if you're not sharing it on P2P then what does it matter whether it is "purchaser details" that includes your email address or some ID string that maps back to an email address - it's still tied to your account whichever method you use. By not sharing your songs on P2P it won't be seen by strangers.
That would be an interesting new source of spam, though - trawl P2P for iTunes songs and pull the purchaser information out of it!
I think someone is digging this out again because Apple recently announced that all of their music is DRM free. As some other say this is a reasonable enough compromise.
My songs aren't going anywhere beyond me and the wife, so why should I care if it has information about who bought it and when? No-one is going to see it except me, and I can finally play the music in Linux without having to re-encode it.
Being a Catholic priest persuades most people to clear them? I must have missed that one!
No, the reasons companies are moving to microtransactions are: 1) They can stop people re-selling and so anyone who wants the game has to buy it new (in extreme circumstances), 2) they can keep making money without doing much extra work ("We just sold the game for $50 and it took 50,000 hours to make, if this content took 1 hour to make then we'll sell it for $2 and make 2000% profit"), 3) there's a group they can blame and the media will support it, so the general populace will fall for it as well.
The only problem is that 1) leads to people not playing the games because they don't want to pay full price, 2) leads to people getting annoyed and moving to games that don't "nickel and dime" them for their gaming experience and 3) is all just a load of made up BS.
While some of the parent posts have potentially sensible uses, I can see this as being the real use (even if it has been modded Funny instead of Insightful). My wife bought some of the extra content for Oblivion, and that seemed interesting and of a decent quality, but once you get people used to "and you've got to pay another couple of GB£/US$/etc to unlock X" then the sales areas will milk it for all it's worth. Just look at some of the crap people are paying for already on things like the iTunes shop!
Exactly (except for in the equivalent British denominations). I don't get much chance to play games any more, but I don't want to feel that I've got to keep paying to play the games I do have.
Buying a game and playing feels like you're getting great entertainment. Buying a game (including this one, since it appears to be "buy and then free play") and then having to keep buying things seems more like a situation where you'd feel like you were an entertained piggy bank.
What's wrong with just making decently entertaining games that people are actually willing to go out and buy?
And that's a "trick" because...? Surely there are times when you want to have different passwords in different areas. I've got basic HTTP authentication on an admin area of one of my sites. From there I've then got a number of tools, at least one of which requires a separate login. There's situations like that where you want different passwords for different areas.
What annoys me with password managers at the moment is Firefox filling in too many passwords! If you record a password for one set of login forms and then go to any other page on the same domain with a password box with a text box just above it then Firefox blindly guesses that they're a login box (even if they're called "foo" and "bar" when you recorded the details for the fields "username" and "password"). That can really start to cock up some of your settings in things like phpBB's admin control panel if you don't notice what it has auto-filled.
XBox only? Of course not. Why do you think Microsoft started all of those "Games for Windows" branded boxes? It'll be to cram in things like this and reduced moddability because of downloadable content (which is the way Dawn of War 2 appears to be going from some bits I've read).
That idea works for desktop apps, but what about games? People might be willing to swap IE/Photoshop/MS Office for Firefox or improved Gimp/OpenOffice, but there's the minor caveat that some people are just stuck in their ways with interfaces and aren't willing to change (which, of course, MS screwed up with Office 2007).
Games, on the other hand, are a lot more difficult. The only reason I have Wine installed at the moment is to play the Dawn of War games. The last expansion pack wasn't as good (it was out-sourced to Iron Lore instead of being by Relic) but I can't see an open source game being close to it. Also, desktop apps just need to be interoperable at the file format level and have similar (or learnable) interfaces. With games then if you're not running the actual game then you're not getting in to the on-line gaming or getting the additional content.
I recommend you fix your PC then, because I've never had problems with those things ;)
I've never had driver issues, and installing newer ones can give better performance, so the PC improves over the console. DirectX has been quite static for a while as well (except DirectX 10, but very few games require that).
Depends on your TV and your monitor. I'd rather have my monitor than any TV we've had as I find it more immersive than being sat in the middle of the floor in front of the thing that normally plays movies. I don't like widescreen either, so that puts even more modern TVs out.
Okay, so consoles like the NES beat Amstrads for graphics, but when my friend got a PlayStation then I could get better resolution and equal quality out of my PC, and I was only about 11 when the PlayStation came out, so it wasn't a spectacular PC. Ditto for the PS2 - the console had improved, but so had the PC, and if Wikipedia is correct then much faster Pentiums were available than the processor in the PS2.
Except that the article was meant as an "if your machine has fallen off the bottom end and you want to upgrade" article.
I tend to avoid the console ports and the "same but with better graphics" games (which is what I've seen in a lot, but not all, of the consoles). On the plus side to the improved graphics, at least you can get it. If you buy a console then you're stuck with what you've got for the next four or five years and nothing can look any better (unless developers start to understand the system more). With a PC then when you come in to the gaming market two years after the console is released you get graphics and performance that are two years better, where as new console users at that point get two year old graphics.
Each to their own, but I'd much rather have a proper machine for playing proper games on.
That's one thing that always gets me with games. PC games can come out between £25 and £35 (possibly up to £40 if it's FIFA or something similar), where as console games tend to start at £40 in the shops! Yes, a console is cheaper first off, but then you're slapped with the extra later on so that they can make their money back.
It's not even as if the quality of consoles has been great - it's only the latest generation that actually begins to approach pC quality graphics/resolution! I can't find the article now, but in the last couple of months I read about bottom-end cards that out-spec consoles and are available cheaply. The only reason PC games don't run as well seems to be because developers don't know how to optimise and just go "oh, they can upgrade it so it doesn't matter".
How has that not been modded up as insightful? That's the whole problem with situations like this - yes, child porn is bad, but [i]nudity[/i] has been used in [i]art[/i] and appreciated for centuries. Nude != porn. Showing flesh != end of all civilisation as we know it. Think classical Greek, Renaissance, etc, they had art work that's still appreciated and not-one gets so upset about that just because it's old.
Unfortunately I think there's one problem with your suggestion, and it comes with the word "sensible". Given that a country runs on the money brought in by companies then any law is going to favour them to some degree. Even recent "corporate man-slaughter" laws in the UK were stripped of most of their power because companies were worried about the implications.
We have sensible laws in the UK? Wow, when did that happen? I must have missed those in amongst all the other crap the Government has done :D Or did you mean older ones? :)
Surely that depends on how functional it is? I didn't read the article (it's a console game, not a real computer game) but "matchmaking issues" is entirely different to "no online play at all".