I certainly have no problem with id and others trying to push the limits of real-time 3D rendering power, or the hardware makers making boards that can do that.
However, I do question the point where much of the work for games is put into the engine, and little of it put into the gameplay itself. I realize that we're almost at the point where one company is making the engine, and another company licenses that engine to make the game, so the responsibility of good gameplay is on the shoulders of the latter company. However, it seems that a lot more of the games that have been published of late focus more on the realism and the 3d-modeling that the playability of the game, and the continuous push to up the abilities of rendering does not seem to allow the developers of new games to step back and think about gameplay.
The other problem is that right now, with the specs we're getting on Doom3 and other games, it sounds like another focused hardware upgrade cycle if you want to play these games reasonably. Sure, you can drop the screen resolution, and there's probably hundreds of tweaks you can apply to the engine to cut back details, but older, but still viable cards, will have problems. I know people don't want to develop for outdated systems, but there is a point where you have to include a reasonable amount of backwards compatibility to allow non-power gamers to play new games as well. One of the reasons that Half-Life and CS sold so well was that the game was optimized for play on a previous generation of processor/vidcards compared to the average system that was sold. (HL/CS, also, IMO, excels at it's gameplay as mentioned above). I know a lot of PC game writers are of the opinion that the gaming market will only move forward when vidcard makers put out new features into cards, and then when PC game makers follow up by using those new features in predominate titles, but the PC gaming market is just not healthy right now, and to make games that require the latest-and-greatest hardware will limit sales further and may push this part of the market into a slump, while console gamers will continue to see more improved titles.
Again, I'm not against improvements in 3d rendering tech and pushing polys as fast as possible; it's the game makers themselves that need to realize what the average hardware of their target audience is going to be and not just to focus on how pretty the game looks.
Season 1 of Futurama has been confirmed for R1 release on March 25, 2003 (3 disks, with audio commentary on each episode with some deleted scenes), and related, Family Guy's first box set for R1 (apparently the first season, but may be more) is listed on April 15, 2003 (4 disks, some selected audio commentary).
I know that Futurama season 1 has already been released in other regions (R2 I think), and has been reasonably well done from what I've talked to people about.
One thing that I've laughed at more than a few times: I've seen ads for the Brak Show and for their recent The Kids Next Door advertized in a 1/4page ad in the business section of the Chicago Tribune. I think they know who their audience is with these ads.
You're basically right on the schedule. There's a few old H-B shorts typically tossed in the mid-afternoon before the late afternoon block is in place.
I think the biggest change that they've made, intelligently, is that they've drastically cut back on Scooby Doo (particularlly after the movie came and went without much fanfare in the theaters). At one point within the 2 years prior to that, someone estimated there was a full day of Scooby programming on CN every week between the old shows, the various movies they'd show, and the new shows. That was overkill, and the failure of the movie to make massive profits may have convinced WB->CN to cut back on the Scooby programming. It's still there, but in much more reasonable amounts. Now, they've got their focus on tightening their biggest assets: getting more of the quality prime time shows (PPG, Samurai Jack, etc) in place, and securing strong shows for Adult Swim. Both areas right now are starting to show signs of wearing down, without a lack of new material: endless repeats of Dexter's Lab and PPG can get tiring, and while we are still in a period of new Sealab/ATHF/Brak episodes, we're nearly done with those as well, leaving nothing new on the ASwim comedy block, though with the changes in the schedule come Jan, that will be fixed as well.
I'm glad someone at CN has the guts to try Toonami, which eventually branched out to give the evening Toonamis, and lead to Adult Swim being put into place. It has really found it's niche and my understanding is that CN is having no significant problems filling ad time in those slots, so it's good for ratings and future profits. If they had simply stuck to the classic HB and WB toons, CN may be stuck in the ratings basement and potentally in trouble with the current growing pains on the AOLTW merger.
In regards to the books, there's plenty of 'time' between the end of the FOX movie (yes, BBC considers that canon) to when the BBC timeline starts in "The 8 Doctors" book (the first BBC-published novel, and where he picks up Sam, starting that storyline) for the Doctor to have solo adventures.
(Technically, the last Virgin DW-blessed book has Benny meeting the McGann reincarnation one more time; after this one, the series became the New Adventures, and Virgin wasn't allowed to use any characters or references to DW, only the characters that were specifically introduced in the Virgin run of DW books (Benny, Jason, Chris, etc), which of course went down the crapper really fast as they included elements of the big canon events in the BBC series but didn't actually mention them by name or details, and the vagueness of it all got annoying. From what I've seen, the Virgin books are not considered canon at this point, which unfortunately wrecks a lot of the good plot continuation they had with the 7th Doctor as being the Guardian of Time, more Valeyard foreshadowing, and more. Of course, most DW fans think that allowing even Ancestrial Cell to be considered canon wrecks the entire DW universe...)
And I don't think individual authors are necessarily screwing this up. I read the BBC writer's bible once at their Cult site, and it seems to me that prospective writers with stories will be asked to make their they are up to date on continuity, and not to introduce anything that 'upsets' the balance unless specifically asked to by the book series' overseers. That is, I'm pretty sure books like Interference, Shadows of Avalon, Ancestrial Cell, and the (something) of Hernietta Street one, where crucial canon elements were made, had been thoroughly discussed among a number of people before the athors were allowed to write them. Other books are more placeholders and not meant to disrupt the current canon too much (such as The Year of Intelligent Tigers and Hope, for example).
At least they aren't totally messing up the past continuity with the 'missing adventures' series using the other regenerations and past companions (though right now I'm reading through Asylum where they force a meeting of Nyssa well past her time in the TARDIS with the 4th Doctor before he even meet Nyssa... yeah....)
A lot of posts are complaining about price, time, DRM restrictions, etc.
However, what's more important is that the movie industry is at least starting off on the right foot into the online digital distribution model, compares with the music industry. Here, yes, you have to watch the movie within a month, and then for only 24 hrs since you start it, it costs about as much as a rental (and takes more time), quality is not as great as a DVD rental, and a list of other problems. But this is the first trial of their service. Maybe later they'll add the option that for $5, you can keep the movie, possibly burn it off to some standard format, or have a quick order method to get the DVD shipping automatically to your home, offering a discount since you've watched it already. Maybe they'll eventually increase the time allowance on the movie, since 24hrs is awfully short. I don't know but this is certainly not an attempt to alienate customers (except for those outside the US, but someone pointed out the legal reasons for this regarding work-for-hires), but a chance to work with them, and to see if they can improve the service.
Of course, half the problem right now with this service is that putting 550megs downstream is slow and time consuming due to poor broadband adaption and dl caps for most consumers. This won't be a permenant situation, but will be with us for a while.
It should also be pointed out that this may be preempted in your local area for football games, one of the reasons why there's still a backlog of Futurama episodes left.
Don Del Grande has made a handy list of what football games are where this season, and thus what the chances of Furutama (being the first show on the block, and most likely to be run into by long games) will be shown are. That post is
here from google's archive.
Most likely, your best chance to catch these shows is when it goes to Cartoon Network come next year (5 times a week).
There was a writeup of the Move2Mac program in the latest MacAddict magazine, and it specifically mentions that it doesn't just do file transfers, it also tries to transfer as much as it reasonably can from Outlook, OE, or some of the other more popular Win mail clients into the Mac equivalent, as well as internet bookmarks and cookies. Handling the email/PIM information is probably much more important to most than making sure the background picture is still the same, and that's part of this M2M program's selling point.
You can create bookmarks in P that take arguments just like you can with Moz. I believe you use "%s" as the argument string, so name a bookmark "g", use "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s", save, and then go "g whatever you want" in the address bar. (I'm not absolutely sure on the details, but I know the same trick works both in Moz and Phoenix.)
If AMD was truly fighting the MHzMyth, they wouldn't be naming their chips to comparible speeds of the Intel line, and instead, their "AMD Athlon XP 2100+" would be "AMD Athlon XP 1800" (not sure on the numbers, just an example); furthermore, they would also then spend the time to market aggressively that their 1800 line is just as powerful as the Intel 2100 chip.
But instead, AMD has simply decided to try to rank their chips with comparible Intel chips. That's certainly not trying to fight it, but instead simplying succumming to it.
Remember that the MHzMyth is propigated by Joe Six-pack, and not the tech sector.
I once heard (this roughtly around 1995) that when one compares the development cost vs profit as a function of version number, the curve typically breaks even on the 7th revision of a program (was this from Mythical Man-Month?).
Mind you, after the browser wars, which completely broke how version numbering should effectively be done, this is probably no longer true. Version numbering has lost out to commercialization; there's a lot of good examples of where software changes over a 'major' version number could really be classified as 'minor' version changes, at least to some people (photoshop, IE, to name a few), but marketing knows that customers are more likely to purchase an upgrade if its from "x.0" to "x+1.0", as oppsed to "x.0" to "x.1". Additionally, there's been a few hokey version jumps in some programs as to keep them on par with a competitors program (as the parent post alludes to) - just as AMD is trying to keep up with the Megahertz Myth with Intel in naming their new chips.
I'm surprised that in this day and age, where your power supply is becoming one of the more critical components to keep track of (along with the CPU and GPU temperatures), that there's yet to be a way to monitor the performance of the PS with hardware/software monitors, short of wiring your own. That is, just like you can monitor temperatures and fan speeds with most modern mobos, the power supply is completely independant of this. Yes, it would require some standardization of how that info is sent and a plug on the mobo (most likely situated near where most USB/KB/M cutouts are as to avoid a 20ft wire to get it to the northbridge site), but it would seem to me to be really useful information to determine the PS health beyond the current hope-n-pray methods...
FYI on Phoenix & 3rd party cookies, I found out today that you can implement the "ask about cookies" feature that Moz has that allows you to selectively accept or reject cookies as they come in, and make that choice permanent if you desire. You have to activate this by editing the users.js prefs file in your Phoenix profile, and adding the same lines as are needed for Moz (what those are, I can't recall off the top of my head). If you go to the Phoenix message boards and search on cookies, you'll find an informative post on that. This doesn't quite replace that feature that's there but uncheckable, but does allow you to effectly block those cookies.
In general, it's very easy to create a site that is accessible from the start, and takes more work to make it inaccessible (eg, adding JS navigation).
Adapting existing sites, on the other hand, can be troublesome. If the site was designed well from the start that certain elements are modulized, adaption to accessibity should be near trivial. However, those sites that build every page uniquely will have a much harder time of getting to the end goal of accessibility. Particularly for those sites that were build by WYSIWYG editors that do not account for accessibilty options (such as tag-soup output engines).
But the key is here that there's two critical legal elements that will affect site accessibility in the States at least: Section 508 rules that apply to gov't sites and those that want to contract with it, and the potental requirement of accessibility to those commercial sites that may be covered by the ADA (see the recent stories on lawsuits against American and Southwest Airlines by blind users). Hobbists', non-commercial, or otherwise personal web sites have yet to be concerned for accessibility and I don't believe they ever will be, as these provide no required service to the general public.
That's not to say that you shouldn't think about accessibility if you run that type of site. Accessibility is not only about making your site available to more people, but it's also about better web design in general; seperate presentation from content, don't treat the browser as a pixel-perfect rendering engine, and the like. A causal site design would certainly do no harm in converting an inaccessible site to one that is, and that could mean more visitors and also improving one's HTML/web page skills.
To some extent, I'd agree with this, or at least expanding the idea of a magazine to cater to the cross-platform scripting language, which includes, but not limited to, perl, python, tcl, ruby, and so forth. All the major non-scripting programming languages have significant journal support, but typically these languages are limited to sys admin magazines (I've seen a lot of scripting basics appearing in tLinuxJ/LinuxMag; heck, wasn't TPJ part of SysOp mag at some point?). More so, nearly all of these languages work with HTTP/CGI, XML, and other newer technology, so there is certainly some commonality amoung them.
Heck, add some sh/bash programming into that as well. Those aren't just for sysops anymore!
I'd even include adding language toolkits like PHP that are still scripting languages but for a specific application (in this case, web delivery)
Of course, I'm sure there are those that only want to read about perl, or only about python, etc. Of course, some magazines that proport to be just about a certain language typcially get a lot of sidetracks in them as well (for example, the C/C++ UJ often has an issue on Windows programming about once every 6 months, which gives no benefit if you aren't doing Windows programming). I'd argue that you provide columns on those and then give some good general columns (such as writing consistant UIs across platforms, securing scripts, using new techs & TLAs in these languages) and you'd have a pretty damn tight magazine. Call it "The Scripting Journal".
The RCA/S-video switch is apparent for all systems. I've got my PS2 through my sound system to TV as to be able to either play it through S-vid or through the RCA ports, just by switching between the two external port channels on the TV, and difference is quite apparent; the RCA picture, when compared to the S-vid, is fuzzy with blurred edges, like a bad anti-aliasing scheme; a lot of small text, for example, can be blurry and the like, as well as, in 3d games, far details that can get lost.
Windowblinds is fully supported under XP (in fact the 3.x series has skins that use special features of the Luna UI, and apparently Stardock and MS worked together as to make WB install cleanly and integrate well with XP). There's a few other XP theming packages, names that I can't recall, but you should be able to preview at www.wincustomize.com (OTTOMH).
No idea on LiteStep or other true shell replacements.
Ok, I won't argue that WinAmp supported skinning first (and I suspect someone could find even earlier examples), but Apple's QT4 was the most noticable, given their existing record of following HIG to the letter; in the case of WinAmp, a relatively new company, there wasn't any expectations for it. QT4 had a VERY significant online backlash when it was released, and while some of the poor controls were replaced in future versions (such as the thumb-volume control) it still sports the imitation of a real world device that aren't intuitive in their computer equivalents.
And yes, there are some cases where app-level skinning is necessary to achieve certain effects (such as minimizing winamp to a narrow bar that can be visible and accessible in a out-of-the-way corner), but otherwise, there should be IMO more adherance to standard toolkit controls than custom or cross-platform ones, particularly if you spend significant time 'in' the application, such as word processing, web browsing, or playlist editing. A front panel can be unique and skinable, but that should be above the OS-provided skins.
Not just IE, but just provide the standard hooks into the OS's GUI control box, and use that. I don't like applications that have their own 'skinning'; I want to have consistant window interfaces that I can change across the board from one control panel or preference box. Mind you, I have no problem with being able to set what skin a specific application gets from the OS, as one can do with a program like Windowblinds, or that built into KDE or GNOME, but that should be at the OS/windowing level, and not the level of the application.
This all started with Apple's QT 4 player, which completely broke the highly regarded Apple Human Interface Guidelines and was put onto the Interface Hall of Shame just for that. Then Winamp came out, creating one of the first in-app skinnable applications, which is cool, but led everyone to release skinnable apps, such as Windows Media Player, and a lot of similar ones on the *NIX side. Sure, it's a media player, you don't interact with it like a word processor or the like, but there's something to be said about interface consistancy when teaching computers to newbies. That's why it's odd that Apple broke that mold with QT4, as they lived and died by the HIG in their efforts to promote the Mac system.
Now with MOz's interface scheme, as with a lot of other cross-platform libraries like Java, QT, etc, it doesn't tie into the OS control toolkit and instead relies on drawing it's own widgets. To do the former would have to break cross-platform ability (I've yet to see a fully cross-platform system that uses the system's native toolkit, mostly due to lack of certain features in some kits compared with others. Even those that try to do this typically have to hard code certain settings that the user would normally be able to change -- I have a friend (hi paul!) that typically likes light text on black, and it's amazing how many Windows-native programs alone don't use the system colors, or use them inconsistantly as to make programs unusable.) It's understandable that WORA is a lofty goal, but there should be more push to try to provide some system native level that can be easily built without too much problem. For example, Nethack is a good example where out of the entire source tree, only a few special files are needed for supporting a different interface, including text and graphic variations; someone even pasted a Diablo-like orthorhomic few on top of the Nethack code, by only adding the appropriate hooks for that GUI. I'd rather see more effort here with Moz and other programs to provide this, though with much effort, than to keep on reinventing customization wheels that are inconsistant with the OS's customization.
There was a first trailer back in June (and shown with several movies, including MIB2, back then) which you can get from Apple's QT site as well as WB's site. This is a different trailer, and shows several new scenes (most which appear to be straight from the book).
(And coincidence or not, Pete Abrams has been doing a Potter parody at Sluggy Freelance for the last couple of weeks, based weakly off the first book/movie).
At the Cleveland Science Muesum a few years ago, there was a Star Trek exhibit, showing how 'close' we were to some of the ideas introduced from TOS (some TNG too). Eg: portable lasers aren't impossible, but we're still working on transporters and warp drive, though there are some taking such research seriously. Of course, most of the displays were stylized ala Trek (LCARS displays, TNG-style walls, etc), and several screen grabs from various episodes, information from the tech guides, and so forth, were throughout the exhibit.
It wasn't necessarily bad (IMO, the cost of admission,being above and beyond the normal museum cost, wasn't worth it), but it does give a way for kids to realize that some science fiction is a lot closer to reality than it might seem sometimes.
Of course, with Star Wars, it's much less *science* fiction, as just science *fiction*, so it would be hard pressed to argue that alone, a SW exhibit would be useful. (Would they explain what a parsec really is?) However, save for selected theaters, a good number of IMAX screens are only at science museums, and thus a tying of the movie with an attempt at a science exhibit can do nothing but to help boost attendence at these museums. (Yes, Lucas will get some portion of each pass sold, but there's still some money going back to the museum).
The preview does not call this "anime", simply "animated shorts". Anime has a specific definition, being animation from Japan, but that would include not only the good stuff like Mononoke, Akira, etc, but also the stuff like Hamatro and Pokemon. Certainly, none of the shorts are of the anime of the last type (thank goodness! "Jump, Neo!" "PIKA!").
Here, I think they are simply saying "Ani[mated] Matrix", as opposed to implying "Ani[me] Matrix". And in the first catagory, I'd certainly include CGI animation as a valid entrant, as well as American-directed shorts that may have been inspired by Anime but aren't truly anime.
Ever since the release of S&M, nearly every LucasArts game (both adventure and action) have had some easter egg in the form of Max's head being present. The Dark Forces map one is common, but it's been reported to find Max in Full Throttle, MI3, Grim, and others.
A quick web search has a good listing here
of other LA in-game jokes and easter eggs.
One quick note on The Dig: Orsen Scott Card ("Ender's Game" fame) helped with the plot and dialog, and also wrote a mini-novelization of the game plot.
This is a rather unfair comparison this day and age. With stores like Circuit City no longer selling VHS, and other stores like Best Buy reducing their VHS stock and/or moving out of high traffic areas in stores, the VHS format is not being presented in the same fashion as the DVD. You'd have to look at titles from, say, 1999 or 2000 to get a fair comparison; one example that would could to mind are movies like The Matrix or Chicken Run, both that had good simulatenous VHS and DVD releases ca. 2000.
And as for the next repeat cycle, I don't necessarily see it as rebuying the DVDs all over again, speaking only from a technical standpoint (there's other issues that may be at work, but...). As this article implies the new techs are still using the standard 5" circular platters for the storage medium, so a reader for those can easily include the additional programming or laser to also read DVDs, just like how most current DVD players can also read CDs. When the enhanced DVDs come out with 20000 extra hrs of footage for a movie, I would reconsider buying those for movies that I love, but not all of them.
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However, I do question the point where much of the work for games is put into the engine, and little of it put into the gameplay itself. I realize that we're almost at the point where one company is making the engine, and another company licenses that engine to make the game, so the responsibility of good gameplay is on the shoulders of the latter company. However, it seems that a lot more of the games that have been published of late focus more on the realism and the 3d-modeling that the playability of the game, and the continuous push to up the abilities of rendering does not seem to allow the developers of new games to step back and think about gameplay.
The other problem is that right now, with the specs we're getting on Doom3 and other games, it sounds like another focused hardware upgrade cycle if you want to play these games reasonably. Sure, you can drop the screen resolution, and there's probably hundreds of tweaks you can apply to the engine to cut back details, but older, but still viable cards, will have problems. I know people don't want to develop for outdated systems, but there is a point where you have to include a reasonable amount of backwards compatibility to allow non-power gamers to play new games as well. One of the reasons that Half-Life and CS sold so well was that the game was optimized for play on a previous generation of processor/vidcards compared to the average system that was sold. (HL/CS, also, IMO, excels at it's gameplay as mentioned above). I know a lot of PC game writers are of the opinion that the gaming market will only move forward when vidcard makers put out new features into cards, and then when PC game makers follow up by using those new features in predominate titles, but the PC gaming market is just not healthy right now, and to make games that require the latest-and-greatest hardware will limit sales further and may push this part of the market into a slump, while console gamers will continue to see more improved titles.
Again, I'm not against improvements in 3d rendering tech and pushing polys as fast as possible; it's the game makers themselves that need to realize what the average hardware of their target audience is going to be and not just to focus on how pretty the game looks.
I know that Futurama season 1 has already been released in other regions (R2 I think), and has been reasonably well done from what I've talked to people about.
You're basically right on the schedule. There's a few old H-B shorts typically tossed in the mid-afternoon before the late afternoon block is in place.
I think the biggest change that they've made, intelligently, is that they've drastically cut back on Scooby Doo (particularlly after the movie came and went without much fanfare in the theaters). At one point within the 2 years prior to that, someone estimated there was a full day of Scooby programming on CN every week between the old shows, the various movies they'd show, and the new shows. That was overkill, and the failure of the movie to make massive profits may have convinced WB->CN to cut back on the Scooby programming. It's still there, but in much more reasonable amounts. Now, they've got their focus on tightening their biggest assets: getting more of the quality prime time shows (PPG, Samurai Jack, etc) in place, and securing strong shows for Adult Swim. Both areas right now are starting to show signs of wearing down, without a lack of new material: endless repeats of Dexter's Lab and PPG can get tiring, and while we are still in a period of new Sealab/ATHF/Brak episodes, we're nearly done with those as well, leaving nothing new on the ASwim comedy block, though with the changes in the schedule come Jan, that will be fixed as well.
I'm glad someone at CN has the guts to try Toonami, which eventually branched out to give the evening Toonamis, and lead to Adult Swim being put into place. It has really found it's niche and my understanding is that CN is having no significant problems filling ad time in those slots, so it's good for ratings and future profits. If they had simply stuck to the classic HB and WB toons, CN may be stuck in the ratings basement and potentally in trouble with the current growing pains on the AOLTW merger.
(Technically, the last Virgin DW-blessed book has Benny meeting the McGann reincarnation one more time; after this one, the series became the New Adventures, and Virgin wasn't allowed to use any characters or references to DW, only the characters that were specifically introduced in the Virgin run of DW books (Benny, Jason, Chris, etc), which of course went down the crapper really fast as they included elements of the big canon events in the BBC series but didn't actually mention them by name or details, and the vagueness of it all got annoying. From what I've seen, the Virgin books are not considered canon at this point, which unfortunately wrecks a lot of the good plot continuation they had with the 7th Doctor as being the Guardian of Time, more Valeyard foreshadowing, and more. Of course, most DW fans think that allowing even Ancestrial Cell to be considered canon wrecks the entire DW universe...)
And I don't think individual authors are necessarily screwing this up. I read the BBC writer's bible once at their Cult site, and it seems to me that prospective writers with stories will be asked to make their they are up to date on continuity, and not to introduce anything that 'upsets' the balance unless specifically asked to by the book series' overseers. That is, I'm pretty sure books like Interference, Shadows of Avalon, Ancestrial Cell, and the (something) of Hernietta Street one, where crucial canon elements were made, had been thoroughly discussed among a number of people before the athors were allowed to write them. Other books are more placeholders and not meant to disrupt the current canon too much (such as The Year of Intelligent Tigers and Hope, for example).
At least they aren't totally messing up the past continuity with the 'missing adventures' series using the other regenerations and past companions (though right now I'm reading through Asylum where they force a meeting of Nyssa well past her time in the TARDIS with the 4th Doctor before he even meet Nyssa... yeah....)
However, what's more important is that the movie industry is at least starting off on the right foot into the online digital distribution model, compares with the music industry. Here, yes, you have to watch the movie within a month, and then for only 24 hrs since you start it, it costs about as much as a rental (and takes more time), quality is not as great as a DVD rental, and a list of other problems. But this is the first trial of their service. Maybe later they'll add the option that for $5, you can keep the movie, possibly burn it off to some standard format, or have a quick order method to get the DVD shipping automatically to your home, offering a discount since you've watched it already. Maybe they'll eventually increase the time allowance on the movie, since 24hrs is awfully short. I don't know but this is certainly not an attempt to alienate customers (except for those outside the US, but someone pointed out the legal reasons for this regarding work-for-hires), but a chance to work with them, and to see if they can improve the service.
Of course, half the problem right now with this service is that putting 550megs downstream is slow and time consuming due to poor broadband adaption and dl caps for most consumers. This won't be a permenant situation, but will be with us for a while.
Don Del Grande has made a handy list of what football games are where this season, and thus what the chances of Furutama (being the first show on the block, and most likely to be run into by long games) will be shown are. That post is here from google's archive.
Most likely, your best chance to catch these shows is when it goes to Cartoon Network come next year (5 times a week).
There was a writeup of the Move2Mac program in the latest MacAddict magazine, and it specifically mentions that it doesn't just do file transfers, it also tries to transfer as much as it reasonably can from Outlook, OE, or some of the other more popular Win mail clients into the Mac equivalent, as well as internet bookmarks and cookies. Handling the email/PIM information is probably much more important to most than making sure the background picture is still the same, and that's part of this M2M program's selling point.
You can create bookmarks in P that take arguments just like you can with Moz. I believe you use "%s" as the argument string, so name a bookmark "g", use "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s", save, and then go "g whatever you want" in the address bar. (I'm not absolutely sure on the details, but I know the same trick works both in Moz and Phoenix.)
But instead, AMD has simply decided to try to rank their chips with comparible Intel chips. That's certainly not trying to fight it, but instead simplying succumming to it.
Remember that the MHzMyth is propigated by Joe Six-pack, and not the tech sector.
Mind you, after the browser wars, which completely broke how version numbering should effectively be done, this is probably no longer true. Version numbering has lost out to commercialization; there's a lot of good examples of where software changes over a 'major' version number could really be classified as 'minor' version changes, at least to some people (photoshop, IE, to name a few), but marketing knows that customers are more likely to purchase an upgrade if its from "x.0" to "x+1.0", as oppsed to "x.0" to "x.1". Additionally, there's been a few hokey version jumps in some programs as to keep them on par with a competitors program (as the parent post alludes to) - just as AMD is trying to keep up with the Megahertz Myth with Intel in naming their new chips.
I'm surprised that in this day and age, where your power supply is becoming one of the more critical components to keep track of (along with the CPU and GPU temperatures), that there's yet to be a way to monitor the performance of the PS with hardware/software monitors, short of wiring your own. That is, just like you can monitor temperatures and fan speeds with most modern mobos, the power supply is completely independant of this. Yes, it would require some standardization of how that info is sent and a plug on the mobo (most likely situated near where most USB/KB/M cutouts are as to avoid a 20ft wire to get it to the northbridge site), but it would seem to me to be really useful information to determine the PS health beyond the current hope-n-pray methods...
FYI on Phoenix & 3rd party cookies, I found out today that you can implement the "ask about cookies" feature that Moz has that allows you to selectively accept or reject cookies as they come in, and make that choice permanent if you desire. You have to activate this by editing the users.js prefs file in your Phoenix profile, and adding the same lines as are needed for Moz (what those are, I can't recall off the top of my head). If you go to the Phoenix message boards and search on cookies, you'll find an informative post on that. This doesn't quite replace that feature that's there but uncheckable, but does allow you to effectly block those cookies.
Adapting existing sites, on the other hand, can be troublesome. If the site was designed well from the start that certain elements are modulized, adaption to accessibity should be near trivial. However, those sites that build every page uniquely will have a much harder time of getting to the end goal of accessibility. Particularly for those sites that were build by WYSIWYG editors that do not account for accessibilty options (such as tag-soup output engines).
But the key is here that there's two critical legal elements that will affect site accessibility in the States at least: Section 508 rules that apply to gov't sites and those that want to contract with it, and the potental requirement of accessibility to those commercial sites that may be covered by the ADA (see the recent stories on lawsuits against American and Southwest Airlines by blind users). Hobbists', non-commercial, or otherwise personal web sites have yet to be concerned for accessibility and I don't believe they ever will be, as these provide no required service to the general public.
That's not to say that you shouldn't think about accessibility if you run that type of site. Accessibility is not only about making your site available to more people, but it's also about better web design in general; seperate presentation from content, don't treat the browser as a pixel-perfect rendering engine, and the like. A causal site design would certainly do no harm in converting an inaccessible site to one that is, and that could mean more visitors and also improving one's HTML/web page skills.
Heck, add some sh/bash programming into that as well. Those aren't just for sysops anymore!
I'd even include adding language toolkits like PHP that are still scripting languages but for a specific application (in this case, web delivery)
Of course, I'm sure there are those that only want to read about perl, or only about python, etc. Of course, some magazines that proport to be just about a certain language typcially get a lot of sidetracks in them as well (for example, the C/C++ UJ often has an issue on Windows programming about once every 6 months, which gives no benefit if you aren't doing Windows programming). I'd argue that you provide columns on those and then give some good general columns (such as writing consistant UIs across platforms, securing scripts, using new techs & TLAs in these languages) and you'd have a pretty damn tight magazine. Call it "The Scripting Journal".
No idea on LiteStep or other true shell replacements.
And yes, there are some cases where app-level skinning is necessary to achieve certain effects (such as minimizing winamp to a narrow bar that can be visible and accessible in a out-of-the-way corner), but otherwise, there should be IMO more adherance to standard toolkit controls than custom or cross-platform ones, particularly if you spend significant time 'in' the application, such as word processing, web browsing, or playlist editing. A front panel can be unique and skinable, but that should be above the OS-provided skins.
This all started with Apple's QT 4 player, which completely broke the highly regarded Apple Human Interface Guidelines and was put onto the Interface Hall of Shame just for that. Then Winamp came out, creating one of the first in-app skinnable applications, which is cool, but led everyone to release skinnable apps, such as Windows Media Player, and a lot of similar ones on the *NIX side. Sure, it's a media player, you don't interact with it like a word processor or the like, but there's something to be said about interface consistancy when teaching computers to newbies. That's why it's odd that Apple broke that mold with QT4, as they lived and died by the HIG in their efforts to promote the Mac system.
Now with MOz's interface scheme, as with a lot of other cross-platform libraries like Java, QT, etc, it doesn't tie into the OS control toolkit and instead relies on drawing it's own widgets. To do the former would have to break cross-platform ability (I've yet to see a fully cross-platform system that uses the system's native toolkit, mostly due to lack of certain features in some kits compared with others. Even those that try to do this typically have to hard code certain settings that the user would normally be able to change -- I have a friend (hi paul!) that typically likes light text on black, and it's amazing how many Windows-native programs alone don't use the system colors, or use them inconsistantly as to make programs unusable.) It's understandable that WORA is a lofty goal, but there should be more push to try to provide some system native level that can be easily built without too much problem. For example, Nethack is a good example where out of the entire source tree, only a few special files are needed for supporting a different interface, including text and graphic variations; someone even pasted a Diablo-like orthorhomic few on top of the Nethack code, by only adding the appropriate hooks for that GUI. I'd rather see more effort here with Moz and other programs to provide this, though with much effort, than to keep on reinventing customization wheels that are inconsistant with the OS's customization.
(And coincidence or not, Pete Abrams has been doing a Potter parody at Sluggy Freelance for the last couple of weeks, based weakly off the first book/movie).
It wasn't necessarily bad (IMO, the cost of admission ,being above and beyond the normal museum cost, wasn't worth it), but it does give a way for kids to realize that some science fiction is a lot closer to reality than it might seem sometimes.
Of course, with Star Wars, it's much less *science* fiction, as just science *fiction*, so it would be hard pressed to argue that alone, a SW exhibit would be useful. (Would they explain what a parsec really is?) However, save for selected theaters, a good number of IMAX screens are only at science museums, and thus a tying of the movie with an attempt at a science exhibit can do nothing but to help boost attendence at these museums. (Yes, Lucas will get some portion of each pass sold, but there's still some money going back to the museum).
Here, I think they are simply saying "Ani[mated] Matrix", as opposed to implying "Ani[me] Matrix". And in the first catagory, I'd certainly include CGI animation as a valid entrant, as well as American-directed shorts that may have been inspired by Anime but aren't truly anime.
This is a rather unfair comparison this day and age. With stores like Circuit City no longer selling VHS, and other stores like Best Buy reducing their VHS stock and/or moving out of high traffic areas in stores, the VHS format is not being presented in the same fashion as the DVD. You'd have to look at titles from, say, 1999 or 2000 to get a fair comparison; one example that would could to mind are movies like The Matrix or Chicken Run, both that had good simulatenous VHS and DVD releases ca. 2000.
And as for the next repeat cycle, I don't necessarily see it as rebuying the DVDs all over again, speaking only from a technical standpoint (there's other issues that may be at work, but...). As this article implies the new techs are still using the standard 5" circular platters for the storage medium, so a reader for those can easily include the additional programming or laser to also read DVDs, just like how most current DVD players can also read CDs. When the enhanced DVDs come out with 20000 extra hrs of footage for a movie, I would reconsider buying those for movies that I love, but not all of them.