I hope Mozilla gets a clue about their video tag implementation while they still have a chance. It is quite obvious that sites want HTML5 but they also want to stream h264. If Mozilla doesn't provide a way to do this, the browser is going to get sidelined.
Of course its become easier for new users. GNOME 1.0 was a passable first effort but it suffered from lack of functionality and too many rough edges. A new user couldn't even set up a network connection, or change the screen resolution because there were no tools to do those things. Many of the apps were unforgiving, crashy and lacking features. Ximian smoothed out a lot of the rough edges and standardized installation and look & feel. The biggest influence of course was the HIG which whipped the whole experience into shape making it easy for novices and power users to use the thing.
I think its very obvious why GNOME has gained mindshare while KDE has floundered. GNOME has made the occasional wrong turn but by and large it's a very usable desktop. By which I mean it's attractive, intuitive, forgiving, simple and task centric. By comparison KDE 4 may have more features but the experience is a disaster.
GNOME has sometimes lost its way with usability and I have my concerns about Mono and GNOME Shell in 3.0. But I have no doubt that it would trounce KDE in usability tests if the two were put head to head with a range of users. Even power users. It's just a more simple, cleaner, task oriented and better designed experience.
KDE 4 just has far too much complexity going on, not just compared to GNOME, but to Windows and OS X too. In particular the settings dialogs are WAY too complex with advanced, esoteric and simple settings all mixed together. Often you'll open one settings dialog to discover it contains a tree of subsettings each with their own panes of tabs and even secondary dialogs with even more settings. I thought KDE 4 was going to fix all this but it's as bad as ever. Konqueror (for example) has SIX "Configure..." menu items under its settings menus that each lead to dialogs with pages and pages of more options. Even Netscape Navigator was never this bad, and the likes of Firefox, Chrome (which also uses WebKit) demonstrate there is no excuse for this either.
Sometimes less is more. Even if KDE advocates like having all those settings, why can't they shove most of the esoteric & advanced ones out into some kind of power tool to keep things simple? There is no excuse the way it is and I suspect GNOME's success is testament to that fact.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
Thankfully Ubuntu seem to have garnished a clue in respect to the position of the close button. Some themes put it in the left hand corner, some in the right and people have a choice to pick what they like. Most importantly the close button is always in the corner and not not shoved over by the absence or not of maximize & minimize buttons.
You made it this far without people building custom firmware. Now you've forced people to find ways to put custom firmware on the PS3. Next up is "indie" games followed by pirates followed by the game industry going back to PCs or over to other consoles.
It's probably going to take some good while before its even know that there is a viable way to install custom firmware. If / when it does happen, good luck to the pirates who run the real risk of bricking their machines, who must spend days downloading huge games (and finding somewhere to store them) and enjoying their unpatched and unconnected experiences.
The bizarre part is Google must have brought far more visitors to his news sites than it ever took away. People who weren't the slightest bit inclined to visit The Times site on a daily basis did visit because the headline link popped up on their news page. That means more advertising revenue than if news aggregation never existed in the first place.
If The Times or other of his publications go behind a paywall then not only is he losing the random visitors but also his loyal visitors who suddenly pay for stuff they got for free previously. Needless to say ad revenue will fall through the floor and the site must rely on the patronage of subscribers to keep the site going.
Maybe there is a enough people who regularly fork out for his content that makes it financially viable, but everyone else will be quite content to get their news from the many hundreds of other news outlets providing similar / identical coverage. If someone needs a fix of right wing rhetoric they can get it from countless blogs. I hope his plans tank and tank badly.
... the best part of Transport Tycoon was sabotaging the AI companies. Wait until they built a station and started building tracks and then hem them in with diagonal pieces that they couldn't build over or under. Eventually they'd back up and you could eventually box off their station completely.
Better yet was the opportunity for murder. Run your highspeed trains back and forth over their truck / bus roads, wiping them out. You could even create train disasters by running a line to one end of their stations, wait for their fully laden trains to arrive and then set your own train off to crash into them. Puts them out of business in no time...
What are you talking about? If you had bought a profile 1.0 player you could still play discs which were profile 2.0, 3d or whatever. You'd miss out on the new functionality that your player would ignore but the movie would still play. Of course, new players are so cheap that I expect most people would probably go through at least 2 or 3 different players over the course of the lifetime of the format rather than stick with some crappy 1st gen player. In that regard it would be no different from DVD, or VHS probably.
As for the new format, go ask the BDA what it's for, but I doubt they intended or expected it to supplant the existing and set-in-stone 25/50Gb disc formats. More likely it's for data storage or something exotic which has no bearing on consumer kit.
That's because they're not intended to be responsive. They're intended to be read.
That's not a very good excuse since it assumes readability and responsiveness are mutually exclusive. Or that people like having a slug user interface that flashes the whole page on and off and takes up to a second to do something as trivial as turn a page. Pixel Qi demonstrates a solution which is responsive and readable. It and/or competing solutions that improve LCD or utilise AMOLED will bury E-Ink. Unless a responsive colour E-ink turns up soon, the technology is going to find itself looking for another market.
Even stalwart supporters of E-Ink such as Sony & Amazon are bound to jump ship. I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't already got plans to do so by the end of this year.
As a long-time e-ink user I always laugh when anyone starts telling stories how another "LCD-powered gadget X" is the "ultimate reading apparatus".
There is no doubt e-ink is far more readable than current LCD devices especially with bright sunlight. However devices that use e-ink pay a heavy price in terms of their unbearably sluggish unpowered UIs.
Pixel QI displays will start showing up in netbooks / pad devices shortly and they'll bury any existing reason for using e-ink.
protect game makers ability to make a profit while still providing a reasonable price to the consumer.
I agree with most of what you said apart from that bit.
Prices for new games on Steam are nothing short of a scam. A game that costs the RRP/MSRP on Steam can be had from a store typically for 30% less. For example Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition is 49.99 on Steam, and 32.49 on Play.com - 35% less. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is 49.99 on Steam and 35.49 on Play.com - 30% less.
That's even with the added burden of stocking, middlemen, production and postage that a physical game entails. I don't accept the argument that its publishers setting the prices either. Even Valve's own games like Left 4 Dead 2 are cheaper to buy in physical form than online. Digital downloads should be cheaper not more expensive. There are occasionally good deals, especially on old titles but forget it for the new stuff.
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories. The details on how you do that are highly flexible. Mozilla seems to like over-engineering things, so I'm sure they can come up with a Clever Codec Plugin Scheme to automate this, as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org.
A video tag is just a specialised object tag. It should be relatively straightforward for Mozilla to define a video plugin as a specialised NPAPI plugin that implements a nsIVideoPlayer interface, declares in some way what codecs & containers it supports, and fires media events through some kind of listener callback.
Their current stance of hardcoding to theora doesn't make much sense. IE, Safari and Chrome will all natively support h264. Flash and Silverlight already support it. Mozilla will just find itself marginalised if it doesn't do the pragmatic thing and open up the tag to other formats or at least the defacto standard.
Oh dear The Times doesn't read me read their content. Oh well I guess I'll have to console myself with the many hundreds of other sites that carry substantially identical content. For example if I want right wing rhetoric with my news I can always go to The Mail or Telegraph sites or any number of blogs.
If you have keyloggers or trojans running in your host environment I'd suggest removing them first rather than worrying about how to run a secure VM. Once someone owns you, they OWN YOU.
Sony has already done a couple of London based GTA-clones in The Getaway series. The Getaway wasn't very good and the series got worse with every release until it got canned. Still it proves the setting is viable especially if any GTA London riffed on some classic gangster flicks and made good use of the setting. I wonder if they'd use London though or a pastiche of London much like Liberty City is to New York.
No I'm European. There certainly was some shovelware on the PS2 - no denying it. The likes of White Van Racer are still well known and the PS2 also had its fair share of crappy licenced titles. But the amount wasn't anything close to where the Wii & DS are right now. It seems like 2/3 of all Wii / DS content is shovelware - entire swathes of shelf space are filled with pet / baby / brain training / fashion designer / cooking / puzzle crap.
Whatever Ubuntu's intention is (and it isn't clear they actually have one), they are pissing all over 30 years of convention that says the close button is in the corner at the top of a window. I can't think of any graphical desktop environment that didn't put the close button in either the top left or top right corner.
Aside from being convention it's predictable and convenient since its order never changes depending on if the window can be minimized and / or maximized. If there is a risk in closing a window (e.g. unsaved work), then the app can simply override the default close behaviour to allow the user the chance to cancel. This would have to happen regardless of where the close button is.
Do you really think the quality difference is due to Microsoft and Sony rejecting low-quality games?
I never implied any such thing so the answer is no. Indeed the PS3 & 360 have shovelware too (predominantly movie / tv franchises), though it's considerably lower amount than the Wii.
The reason for the shovelware on the Wii and DS is that they're easier to develop games for. Then companies rushed to cash in on their unexpected popularity.
Not really. If I was intent on pushing out shovelware, it wouldn't matter a damn what advanced features the platform supported since I'm not going to utilise them. Multiple threads? Don't need them? High poly count? Nope. Network play? No way. If you look at shovelware titles that are cross platform (e.g. Disney kids fare) you can see that aside from improved textures and other minor enhancements on the periphery that the PS3 / 360 versions are virtually identical to the Wii & PS2 version.
The reason shovelware exists so heavily on the Wii & DS is because the user population is more ignorant of what constitutes a good game than on other platforms - kids, grannies and other kinds of people who aren't traditional gamers. The hardcore gamers are simple outnumbered. So shovelware titles sell disproportionately for the amount of money invested in them. Conversely good games which don't have the advantage of being written by Nintendo suffer sales because again, the user base isn't so adept at recognizing them.
That's too bad if you own a Wii but its transparently obvious by walking into any game store and looking at the rack or sales charts that its true.
So? There's a lot of shit on any system - that's why you avoid the shit and just play the good games. And all posting a Metacritic statistic proves is that select journos, who are largely from the same demographic, prefer the PS360 over the Wii.
No dummy, it proves that Wii & DS consumers are less discerning and therefore the quality of titles on those platforms is poorer overall. Of course the Wii & DS has some good titles but we've heard time and again from 3rd parties who bothered to make decent games that they simply don't get a return on their investment. Why? Because owners cannot tell the difference between shovelware and a decent game, therefore what's the point of even trying?
Yes you can. The 360 & PS3 demonstrate far higher quality 3rd party games than the Wii, and many of them exceed or match first party offerings in terms of sales and critical consensus.
The shovelware problem is clearly far, far worse on Nintendo platforms. Why is the question but it probably boils down to:
A higher % of ignorant owners. Kids and grannies whose purchase decision boils down to - is it made by Nintendo OR was it advertised heavily on kids tv OR does it have a pretty box art.
Lack of motivation by 3rd party publishers to make high quality titles. If the consumers can't tell good from bad, why bother spending money making something good?
A couple of dollars of components would allow them to implement "3D". Namely put a tilt / magnetometer into the DS and games could change the display as the user tilted their device around. Nintendo like their profits so I really don't see them doing anything radical when a relatively cheap gimmick like this would garner them a lot of new sales.
Well like he said, there is nothing to correct. They have done this to experiment with a 'innovative' new something (didn't write what precisely) that will make use of the now available space on the right. Nothing wrong with that. Then again I still believe that everybody who can write a single line of code should be kept away from GUI's as far as is possible! Preferable by moving us to another planet where we can't do much harm.
I don't have an issue with shifting the buttons over to the left. Sure it might be a little strange at first but it's not a big deal. What is a big deal is not having the close button first in order. Virtually every UI since the invention of UIs has put the close button in either the top left or top right corner of the window. It's sensible, users expect it and it doesn't need changing. Moving the close button to the right of the minimize / maximize buttons means the button changes position depending on a window being resizable or not.
Ubuntu devs claim it is subjective but to me it is a usability regression. They've taken a simple 20 year old UI convention and messed it up for no good reason.
Just move the damn buttons yourself! I actually agree with camp that wants the buttons back in the old way, but I can't stop thinking... I have the source... I might just do that myself and place the.diff online. Problem solved. Unfortunately for all Ubuntu users, I use Debian so I'm fine.
The ability to move the buttons doesn't excuse a stupid default layout. By moving the buttons to the left edge they've screwed up the predictability of finding the close button. The order of the close button changes depending on the window / dialog being resizable. If they're going to insist on using the left hand side at least make the button order predictable. It's a basic usability issue and I'm surprised its gotten so far without being corrected.
When I want to close a window, I expect the close button to be in a predictable position. The new 10.04 beta doesn't do this because the minimize / maximize buttons are to the left of it. Some windows don't show minimize & maximize so the close button could be the first button, the second or the third meaning the user must consciously hunt for it. Additionally in Windows and in OS X, the close button is coloured (typically red) as another visual clue.
I don't know what motivated the change, whether it was a desire to ape OS X or what, but the current implementation is pretty stupid. If Ubuntu absolutely must move the buttons to the left, at least make sure the close button is the leftmost one in all circumstances.
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I hope Mozilla gets a clue about their video tag implementation while they still have a chance. It is quite obvious that sites want HTML5 but they also want to stream h264. If Mozilla doesn't provide a way to do this, the browser is going to get sidelined.
I think its very obvious why GNOME has gained mindshare while KDE has floundered. GNOME has made the occasional wrong turn but by and large it's a very usable desktop. By which I mean it's attractive, intuitive, forgiving, simple and task centric. By comparison KDE 4 may have more features but the experience is a disaster.
KDE 4 just has far too much complexity going on, not just compared to GNOME, but to Windows and OS X too. In particular the settings dialogs are WAY too complex with advanced, esoteric and simple settings all mixed together. Often you'll open one settings dialog to discover it contains a tree of subsettings each with their own panes of tabs and even secondary dialogs with even more settings. I thought KDE 4 was going to fix all this but it's as bad as ever. Konqueror (for example) has SIX "Configure..." menu items under its settings menus that each lead to dialogs with pages and pages of more options. Even Netscape Navigator was never this bad, and the likes of Firefox, Chrome (which also uses WebKit) demonstrate there is no excuse for this either.
Sometimes less is more. Even if KDE advocates like having all those settings, why can't they shove most of the esoteric & advanced ones out into some kind of power tool to keep things simple? There is no excuse the way it is and I suspect GNOME's success is testament to that fact.
Thankfully Ubuntu seem to have garnished a clue in respect to the position of the close button. Some themes put it in the left hand corner, some in the right and people have a choice to pick what they like. Most importantly the close button is always in the corner and not not shoved over by the absence or not of maximize & minimize buttons.
It's probably going to take some good while before its even know that there is a viable way to install custom firmware. If / when it does happen, good luck to the pirates who run the real risk of bricking their machines, who must spend days downloading huge games (and finding somewhere to store them) and enjoying their unpatched and unconnected experiences.
If The Times or other of his publications go behind a paywall then not only is he losing the random visitors but also his loyal visitors who suddenly pay for stuff they got for free previously. Needless to say ad revenue will fall through the floor and the site must rely on the patronage of subscribers to keep the site going.
Maybe there is a enough people who regularly fork out for his content that makes it financially viable, but everyone else will be quite content to get their news from the many hundreds of other news outlets providing similar / identical coverage. If someone needs a fix of right wing rhetoric they can get it from countless blogs. I hope his plans tank and tank badly.
Better yet was the opportunity for murder. Run your highspeed trains back and forth over their truck / bus roads, wiping them out. You could even create train disasters by running a line to one end of their stations, wait for their fully laden trains to arrive and then set your own train off to crash into them. Puts them out of business in no time...
As for the new format, go ask the BDA what it's for, but I doubt they intended or expected it to supplant the existing and set-in-stone 25/50Gb disc formats. More likely it's for data storage or something exotic which has no bearing on consumer kit.
That's not a very good excuse since it assumes readability and responsiveness are mutually exclusive. Or that people like having a slug user interface that flashes the whole page on and off and takes up to a second to do something as trivial as turn a page. Pixel Qi demonstrates a solution which is responsive and readable. It and/or competing solutions that improve LCD or utilise AMOLED will bury E-Ink. Unless a responsive colour E-ink turns up soon, the technology is going to find itself looking for another market.
Even stalwart supporters of E-Ink such as Sony & Amazon are bound to jump ship. I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't already got plans to do so by the end of this year.
There is no doubt e-ink is far more readable than current LCD devices especially with bright sunlight. However devices that use e-ink pay a heavy price in terms of their unbearably sluggish unpowered UIs.
Pixel QI displays will start showing up in netbooks / pad devices shortly and they'll bury any existing reason for using e-ink.
I agree with most of what you said apart from that bit.
Prices for new games on Steam are nothing short of a scam. A game that costs the RRP/MSRP on Steam can be had from a store typically for 30% less. For example Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition is 49.99 on Steam, and 32.49 on Play.com - 35% less. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is 49.99 on Steam and 35.49 on Play.com - 30% less.
That's even with the added burden of stocking, middlemen, production and postage that a physical game entails. I don't accept the argument that its publishers setting the prices either. Even Valve's own games like Left 4 Dead 2 are cheaper to buy in physical form than online. Digital downloads should be cheaper not more expensive. There are occasionally good deals, especially on old titles but forget it for the new stuff.
A video tag is just a specialised object tag. It should be relatively straightforward for Mozilla to define a video plugin as a specialised NPAPI plugin that implements a nsIVideoPlayer interface, declares in some way what codecs & containers it supports, and fires media events through some kind of listener callback.
Their current stance of hardcoding to theora doesn't make much sense. IE, Safari and Chrome will all natively support h264. Flash and Silverlight already support it. Mozilla will just find itself marginalised if it doesn't do the pragmatic thing and open up the tag to other formats or at least the defacto standard.
Oh dear The Times doesn't read me read their content. Oh well I guess I'll have to console myself with the many hundreds of other sites that carry substantially identical content. For example if I want right wing rhetoric with my news I can always go to The Mail or Telegraph sites or any number of blogs.
If you have keyloggers or trojans running in your host environment I'd suggest removing them first rather than worrying about how to run a secure VM. Once someone owns you, they OWN YOU.
Sony has already done a couple of London based GTA-clones in The Getaway series. The Getaway wasn't very good and the series got worse with every release until it got canned. Still it proves the setting is viable especially if any GTA London riffed on some classic gangster flicks and made good use of the setting. I wonder if they'd use London though or a pastiche of London much like Liberty City is to New York.
No I'm European. There certainly was some shovelware on the PS2 - no denying it. The likes of White Van Racer are still well known and the PS2 also had its fair share of crappy licenced titles. But the amount wasn't anything close to where the Wii & DS are right now. It seems like 2/3 of all Wii / DS content is shovelware - entire swathes of shelf space are filled with pet / baby / brain training / fashion designer / cooking / puzzle crap.
Aside from being convention it's predictable and convenient since its order never changes depending on if the window can be minimized and / or maximized. If there is a risk in closing a window (e.g. unsaved work), then the app can simply override the default close behaviour to allow the user the chance to cancel. This would have to happen regardless of where the close button is.
The PS2 in its hey day never had anything like the proportion of shovelware as the Wii and DS do. Nowhere close.
I never implied any such thing so the answer is no. Indeed the PS3 & 360 have shovelware too (predominantly movie / tv franchises), though it's considerably lower amount than the Wii.
The reason for the shovelware on the Wii and DS is that they're easier to develop games for. Then companies rushed to cash in on their unexpected popularity.
Not really. If I was intent on pushing out shovelware, it wouldn't matter a damn what advanced features the platform supported since I'm not going to utilise them. Multiple threads? Don't need them? High poly count? Nope. Network play? No way. If you look at shovelware titles that are cross platform (e.g. Disney kids fare) you can see that aside from improved textures and other minor enhancements on the periphery that the PS3 / 360 versions are virtually identical to the Wii & PS2 version.
The reason shovelware exists so heavily on the Wii & DS is because the user population is more ignorant of what constitutes a good game than on other platforms - kids, grannies and other kinds of people who aren't traditional gamers. The hardcore gamers are simple outnumbered. So shovelware titles sell disproportionately for the amount of money invested in them. Conversely good games which don't have the advantage of being written by Nintendo suffer sales because again, the user base isn't so adept at recognizing them.
That's too bad if you own a Wii but its transparently obvious by walking into any game store and looking at the rack or sales charts that its true.
No dummy, it proves that Wii & DS consumers are less discerning and therefore the quality of titles on those platforms is poorer overall. Of course the Wii & DS has some good titles but we've heard time and again from 3rd parties who bothered to make decent games that they simply don't get a return on their investment. Why? Because owners cannot tell the difference between shovelware and a decent game, therefore what's the point of even trying?
Yes you can. The 360 & PS3 demonstrate far higher quality 3rd party games than the Wii, and many of them exceed or match first party offerings in terms of sales and critical consensus.
Metacritic placed Wii and DS last in 2009 in ratings compared to other current platforms. And that's even without considering how much Wii/DS shovelware slipped under the Metacritic radar that would have dragged the scores even lower.
The shovelware problem is clearly far, far worse on Nintendo platforms. Why is the question but it probably boils down to:
A couple of dollars of components would allow them to implement "3D". Namely put a tilt / magnetometer into the DS and games could change the display as the user tilted their device around. Nintendo like their profits so I really don't see them doing anything radical when a relatively cheap gimmick like this would garner them a lot of new sales.
I don't have an issue with shifting the buttons over to the left. Sure it might be a little strange at first but it's not a big deal. What is a big deal is not having the close button first in order. Virtually every UI since the invention of UIs has put the close button in either the top left or top right corner of the window. It's sensible, users expect it and it doesn't need changing. Moving the close button to the right of the minimize / maximize buttons means the button changes position depending on a window being resizable or not.
Ubuntu devs claim it is subjective but to me it is a usability regression. They've taken a simple 20 year old UI convention and messed it up for no good reason.
The ability to move the buttons doesn't excuse a stupid default layout. By moving the buttons to the left edge they've screwed up the predictability of finding the close button. The order of the close button changes depending on the window / dialog being resizable. If they're going to insist on using the left hand side at least make the button order predictable. It's a basic usability issue and I'm surprised its gotten so far without being corrected.
I don't know what motivated the change, whether it was a desire to ape OS X or what, but the current implementation is pretty stupid. If Ubuntu absolutely must move the buttons to the left, at least make sure the close button is the leftmost one in all circumstances.