The sad part is that Dixons, Currys, The Link and PC World are part of the same chain. Everthing is marked up or just junk. To add insult to injury they attempt to rape you with an 3 year extended warranty when you buy something. Generally speaking I wouldn't touch anything they sell unless I new specifically what I wanted and could swallow the difference in price over mail order.
I had a "clacky" cherry keyboard for a long while that I got with my first 486sx. It worked perfectly and was very similar to the original IBM keyboard. But I threw it out in the end simply because it was huge and used an AT style connector. I know you can get adapters for USB but to be honest, I've got so many keyboards that it was getting in the way.
The modern "squidgy" keyboards aren't that great but they do quite well. I also feel that they're much less likely to induce RSI than the old ones. Even thinking about using my old cherry keyboard makes my fingers throb a little.
I've owned a B&W Brother HL1030 laser printer and an Canon S750 inkjet. To be honest I'd much prefer the inkjet. The laser printer was actually very good and cheap for what it was, but I just gave it away once I got the inkjet. Simply being able to print in colour makes a hell of a difference to what I print. My laser also began to produce quite noticeable lines and other flaws in its printing so even if the DPI in black was better, the lines were very distracting.
Money wise it's definitely more expensive to run my inkjet, but we're not talking a massive amount. I was smart enough to buy a printer with separate print heads and plenty of 3rd party refills so it is really quite cheap.
I read that some people recommend colour laser or dye sublimation printers, but I don't see how the situation with refills is any different from inkjets. Either way, the manufacturers could screw you over and probably do.
The same could be said of DVDs and VHS cassettes. DVDs are more expensive because the manufacturers promoted the myth that they cost more money. Perhaps they did for a short while, but it was quite obvious that they wouldn't forever. These days, DVDs cost pennies to make. Even if they cost the same as VHS, producers still save money on shipping and packaging and retailers enjoy selling more DVDs per foot than VHS.
The reason UMD costs the same as DVDs is again because Sony knows they can get away with it. The easiest way to force them to drop their prices is to not buy UMDs until they cost as much as you're willing to pay.
Personally I don't see them point of them at all. But then if I had any inclination to play movies, I'd rip them and use a memory stick. I'm sure Sony are gambling that the majority of PSP owners don't bother. Of course Sony get a slice from rippers too since you still have to use their their confusing & proprietary memory stick format.
I don't know about other things they cover, but I know their coverage of Mozilla has always been extremely negative, looking for "angles" when none existed and always thinking the worst. I recall that CNet was regarded with almost the same contempt as "MozillaQuest" for producing profoundly ignorant articles on the browser and goings on.
Yes I use VE all the time - that was in fact was I was referring to. If you've watched as it has mangled one of your classes beyond all hope of repair, or spent close to a minute after a simple operation like renaming a panel, or locked up entirely, you'd know why I said it.
Of course Java doesn't help either. Part of the problem for VE is that Java doesn't have a simple XY layout model, forcing anyone who wants to write a visual editor to support the box, flow, grid, gridbag etc. layouts. Trying to create a dialog in VE (even when you know what you're doing) is magnitude harder than DevStudio because of it. What VE *really* needs is an XY mode and a button that tries to translate that design to the gridbag layout afterwards.
The biggest annoyance with DevStudio
on
Visual Studio Hacks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Is the the help system. I don't program Windows CE, but it's infested with stupid bloody WinCE specific help. Search for a Win32 function such as CreateWindow and often you're lead to the WinCE implementation. And the same for ATL & MFC classes. Worse is if you chose not to install the WinCE help at all since it still includes the index to the WinCE help. So double clicking on a help item prompts you to insert a CD. Filtering helps a bit but not a great deal since often you want to search anywhere, especially if your app spans Win32 and.NET for instance.
Even with this annoyance it's still better than help in XCode on the Mac. XCode 2.x is a big improvement but it's still hopeless compared to MSDE.
A second annoyance to DevStudio is the sheer mess of dockable windows. VC98 had it just about under control but since DevStudio 2002 it has become a disaster zone of tabs, splitters, pushpins, floaters and toolbars. Just trying to get all the relevant information onto the screen is hard enough. The pushpin model just works badly - either you pin a window to a frame or it annoys you by floating in and out at just the wrong point in time such as when you're mousing around.
A final irritation is that DevStudio is extremely primitive compared to a lot of Java suites. Eclipse is hopeless for visual design but it kicks DevStudio around the shop for sheer coding. Being able to hit Shift+Ctrl+R and rename all references to a class or variable everywhere in Eclipse is mindbogglingly useful. While I expect the next incarnation of DevStudio will allow you to rename a class, it's notable by its absence in the current releases. It's not like Eclipse just introduced this feature since JBuilder has had it for years.
the US wants to raise an entire generation of woefully ignorant people. Oh well, it just means more patents, technology and business for the likes of Japan and Europe.
Anyone who claims that a Java VM, be it using JIT or Hotspot, is as fast as C++ is blowing hot air. C++ is precompiled into fairly tight assembly. There is little or no overhead when executing C++, nothing has to be analysed at runtime or compiled into native instructions because it already is. That is not the case with Java at all unless you sacrifice portability by running it through gcj or similar.
A VM might run code plenty fast and most of the time that's fine. I programme Java apps which are quite acceptable in their roles. I certainly wouldn't consider using C++ when a program is bound by other factors such as network / database / disk latency. Java also has other advantages such as the reasonable expectation that it will run anywhere and a superb set of APIs. But claiming performance is comparable is ludicrous.
In particular, Java is pretty hopeless for UIs. Yes you can produce apps with care, but the responsiveness compared C++ apps is nothing to write home about. Even the likes of Eclipse & Azureus which use SWT (native widgets) grind to a halt all too easily when they're taxed. The cutting edge in Java gaming is Puzzle Pirates which is a cute game but is about as graphically sophisticated as a Gameboy Advance.
As an aside I don't believe.NET is any better. I'm involved in writing a successor to a C++ in.NET and the performance is wretched compared to the old app. It's certainly cleaner, but god is it slow.
Winelib doesn't have to be a first option - it can be the solution. There isn't such a thing as a native widget set for Linux so WINE is as good as the next thing.
The problem comes in if the Win32 app in question was built with MFC or ATL. Perhaps there's a free version of those somewhere that I don't know about, but you would have a hell of a lot of trouble porting those kinds of apps.
Producing compatible versions of MFC & ATL would be a good companion project to WINE if its not already been done by somebody.
That "Hot Coffee" mod is so tame that its a wonder that anyone gives a damn about it. If I were Rockstar I'd just play it down for what it is - a lousy subgame where a fully clothed CJ bumps and grinds with a semi-clothed woman. Big fucking deal when the "official" parts of the game see you blowing people up, setting them on fire, slitting throats, killing cops, robbing, stealing cars, beating up hookers and more besides.
That depends on the title. I've seen some games which are shockingly short or shockingly awful, so much so that their nominal "entertainment time per dollar" is extremely low. On the hand, a title such as GTA: San Andreas can be played for literally weeks solid before you complete it and it has great replay value.
Personally I rarely buy a game when it is brand new if I can avoid it. My experience is that 9 out of 10 games are dross no matter what rating they got. If a game is that good it will stand the test of time and still be worth getting when it's discounted, or second hand in six months.
What I fear is that the online network play in games might effectively kill the second hand market. If games start to ship with serial numbers it will destroy the trade in market for consoles just as effectively as it has for PC games.
I made this point yesterday too. The ball is very tightly enclosed in the mouse. It seems a virtual certainty that it will clog up with muck and dirt in no time at all. Wheel mice used to have this same problem and widened the gap around the wheel to compensate. This mouse seems to have no virtually no gap so its bound to suffer the these issues.
Because someone does not know how to use their computer does not make them clueless.
Yes it does, by definition. Look it up in dictionary.com if you don't believe me. That doesn't mean they'll remain clueless, but at that point they are. If you'd read what I said you would have realised I said as much by asking how many learnt from calling support.
And yes I am clueless about what you're talking about. In the unlikely event that I ever need learn what you're talking about I will no longer be clueless. Got it?
Don't be silly. I just used my wife as an illustrative example. I've worked with enough novices to know that they are quite capable of learning how to use a two button mouse.
In fact you bringing up technical support shows you fall into the same trap. People who call technical support with basic issues are by definition clueless. Claiming that this self-selecting group are scared by dialogs or anything else from inadvertent right mouse clicks is meaningless. How many users *don't* call technical support or call with advanced questions? How many learn not to use the right mouse button until later when they're more comfortable with their machine? Besides it's just as easy to invoke something scary from a Mac and a single button since all the contextual actions are up in the menu bar with the non-contextual actions.
People who don't "get" computers, get them as soon as they've used them for a couple of days. A single button mouse is helpful at first but becomes an impediment thereafter. Naturally you could buy a new mouse, but that should be factored into the cost of buying a Mac since it ships a mouse that is essentially worthless except as an emergency device to a large portion of its users.
My wife is a novice user (she used to twist the mouse to move the arrow when she started using computers), but even she has grasped the concept of left and right buttons. She doesn't use the right mouse much, but neither is she confused by it and sticks with the left mouse button. She certainly does get confused by single & double clicking but that's a fact of life on any platform.
So why does Apple, Microsoft, Linux use double-clicking on their desktop so extensively if its evil? Single click desktops have been implemented several times from the IE4 "active" desktop to the KDE 1 & 2 desktop and the reason why they got dumped soon becomes obvious when you make a mistake with them. For example, you get punished for accidentally clicking on an icon since it might take 30 seconds to launch the app and then quit the app you never meant to start in the first place.
Double clicking is more deliberate and therefore harder to do by accident.
The mouse tracking is optical, but I see nothing to say that the ball on top is. If it the tightly enclosed ball that it seems to be then it *will* suffer from clogging. I've gone through many mice and its only the latest with wider gaps around the wheel that don't.
Of course it might just look like a ball but be a pressure sensitive tip (like those found on laptops) in which case it shouldn't clog at all, but the pics suggest otherwise.
I think this is a very weak argument. No one with more than a few days of computer experience has the slightest trouble with multi-button mice. And since that covers just about everyone, the rationale for shipping with such a device is non-existent.
Shipping with a single button mouse might benefit absolute novices, but they're virtually useless for intermediate or expert users. Inflicting them on everyone by default makes no sense at all.
One problem that has plagued mice before now is the wheel getting clogged up with gunk and simply sticking solid. That tiny ball in the middle of this mouse looks like it is going to suffer horrible from this problem. There's barely any space around the edges meaning that crap is going to accumulate and clog it up in no time.
Other features such as the multi-button functionality look interesting but they could have done this a long time back. I made just the point myself nearly 6 months ago on yet another Apple mouse thread - "It's a wonder given Apple's penchant for design that they don't produce a mouse with a single button that uses software to determine if you were left or right clicking on it based on the pressure on each side of the mouse. Then both camps can be happy."
Still the extra buttons, means that zealots will have modify their rhetoric to accomodate the fact that Apple do actually produce a multi-button mouse now, albeit one where the form factor resembles a single button design. Hopefully Apple will dump their shitty one button mice for good and ship these things with future models. People can still set it to single mouse mode if they want (and perhaps that is the default), but for the rest of us it makes the Mac more usable.
They are losing money. What do you think an 80% drop in profits is? A clue - 80% lost revenue.
As for Sony & Microsoft, you seem to be confusing "losses" from operating profits in the current platform with losses from investment and R&D in the new platforms.
Their main cash cows appear to be Pokemon and Mario with occasional sprinkles of Zelda or Kong. Having to make every game based around the same lousy characters is like trying to swim with concrete weights attached to your feet. Some of the games are fun, but there's only so much people can bear. Meanwhile Sony & Microsoft can make their games around anything they like.
Neither do Sony or MS have issues with releasing adult titles for their console. If Nintendo had the luxury of a killer console it might be in a position to hold to its principles. But it isn't. The GC is trounced by the PS2 & XBox both in hardware and in the sheer range of games. On the handheld market, the DS is still winning (just) in terms of sales to the superior PSP but it doesn't look like it's going to prevail.
It's hard to see how Nintendo can possibly survive as a console maker unless their next platform is pretty fucking spectacular and they loosen up what they're prepared to allow their box to run. If not, they'll go the same way as Sega - reduced to making Mario & Pokemon games for the PS & XBox.
I wonder if one of the console makers shouldn't allow "homebrew" software onto their consoles. Geeks might not represent much of the market, but I reckon that it could easily swing an extra 1-2% of sales. How to do that without opening the door to piracy? Produce 2 tiers of authentication for games (& apps). The first tier is for normal games who access to all the functionality of the console. The second tier is for homebrew, who are restricted in certain ways, e.g. having to run from CDR, not being able to access online gaming portal, not being able to render more than so many polygons etc. It means that someone couldn't use pirate a game and sign it as homebrew because it would stop working, but the homebrew guys could help promote the console by producing some nice stuff for it - jukeboxes, browsers etc.
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Don't be silly. If you're so upset that other countries are not following your example, slap a tariff on them until they do. It's not hard.
The sad part is that Dixons, Currys, The Link and PC World are part of the same chain. Everthing is marked up or just junk. To add insult to injury they attempt to rape you with an 3 year extended warranty when you buy something. Generally speaking I wouldn't touch anything they sell unless I new specifically what I wanted and could swallow the difference in price over mail order.
Darl is acting like like the Steward of Gondor - mad, resentful, and ultimately doomed.
The modern "squidgy" keyboards aren't that great but they do quite well. I also feel that they're much less likely to induce RSI than the old ones. Even thinking about using my old cherry keyboard makes my fingers throb a little.
Money wise it's definitely more expensive to run my inkjet, but we're not talking a massive amount. I was smart enough to buy a printer with separate print heads and plenty of 3rd party refills so it is really quite cheap.
I read that some people recommend colour laser or dye sublimation printers, but I don't see how the situation with refills is any different from inkjets. Either way, the manufacturers could screw you over and probably do.
The reason UMD costs the same as DVDs is again because Sony knows they can get away with it. The easiest way to force them to drop their prices is to not buy UMDs until they cost as much as you're willing to pay.
Personally I don't see them point of them at all. But then if I had any inclination to play movies, I'd rip them and use a memory stick. I'm sure Sony are gambling that the majority of PSP owners don't bother. Of course Sony get a slice from rippers too since you still have to use their their confusing & proprietary memory stick format.
I don't know about other things they cover, but I know their coverage of Mozilla has always been extremely negative, looking for "angles" when none existed and always thinking the worst. I recall that CNet was regarded with almost the same contempt as "MozillaQuest" for producing profoundly ignorant articles on the browser and goings on.
Well you learn something new everyday! Cheers
Of course Java doesn't help either. Part of the problem for VE is that Java doesn't have a simple XY layout model, forcing anyone who wants to write a visual editor to support the box, flow, grid, gridbag etc. layouts. Trying to create a dialog in VE (even when you know what you're doing) is magnitude harder than DevStudio because of it. What VE *really* needs is an XY mode and a button that tries to translate that design to the gridbag layout afterwards.
Even with this annoyance it's still better than help in XCode on the Mac. XCode 2.x is a big improvement but it's still hopeless compared to MSDE.
A second annoyance to DevStudio is the sheer mess of dockable windows. VC98 had it just about under control but since DevStudio 2002 it has become a disaster zone of tabs, splitters, pushpins, floaters and toolbars. Just trying to get all the relevant information onto the screen is hard enough. The pushpin model just works badly - either you pin a window to a frame or it annoys you by floating in and out at just the wrong point in time such as when you're mousing around.
A final irritation is that DevStudio is extremely primitive compared to a lot of Java suites. Eclipse is hopeless for visual design but it kicks DevStudio around the shop for sheer coding. Being able to hit Shift+Ctrl+R and rename all references to a class or variable everywhere in Eclipse is mindbogglingly useful. While I expect the next incarnation of DevStudio will allow you to rename a class, it's notable by its absence in the current releases. It's not like Eclipse just introduced this feature since JBuilder has had it for years.
the US wants to raise an entire generation of woefully ignorant people. Oh well, it just means more patents, technology and business for the likes of Japan and Europe.
A VM might run code plenty fast and most of the time that's fine. I programme Java apps which are quite acceptable in their roles. I certainly wouldn't consider using C++ when a program is bound by other factors such as network / database / disk latency. Java also has other advantages such as the reasonable expectation that it will run anywhere and a superb set of APIs. But claiming performance is comparable is ludicrous.
In particular, Java is pretty hopeless for UIs. Yes you can produce apps with care, but the responsiveness compared C++ apps is nothing to write home about. Even the likes of Eclipse & Azureus which use SWT (native widgets) grind to a halt all too easily when they're taxed. The cutting edge in Java gaming is Puzzle Pirates which is a cute game but is about as graphically sophisticated as a Gameboy Advance.
As an aside I don't believe
The problem comes in if the Win32 app in question was built with MFC or ATL. Perhaps there's a free version of those somewhere that I don't know about, but you would have a hell of a lot of trouble porting those kinds of apps.
Producing compatible versions of MFC & ATL would be a good companion project to WINE if its not already been done by somebody.
That "Hot Coffee" mod is so tame that its a wonder that anyone gives a damn about it. If I were Rockstar I'd just play it down for what it is - a lousy subgame where a fully clothed CJ bumps and grinds with a semi-clothed woman. Big fucking deal when the "official" parts of the game see you blowing people up, setting them on fire, slitting throats, killing cops, robbing, stealing cars, beating up hookers and more besides.
Personally I rarely buy a game when it is brand new if I can avoid it. My experience is that 9 out of 10 games are dross no matter what rating they got. If a game is that good it will stand the test of time and still be worth getting when it's discounted, or second hand in six months.
What I fear is that the online network play in games might effectively kill the second hand market. If games start to ship with serial numbers it will destroy the trade in market for consoles just as effectively as it has for PC games.
I made this point yesterday too. The ball is very tightly enclosed in the mouse. It seems a virtual certainty that it will clog up with muck and dirt in no time at all. Wheel mice used to have this same problem and widened the gap around the wheel to compensate. This mouse seems to have no virtually no gap so its bound to suffer the these issues.
Yes it does, by definition. Look it up in dictionary.com if you don't believe me. That doesn't mean they'll remain clueless, but at that point they are. If you'd read what I said you would have realised I said as much by asking how many learnt from calling support.
And yes I am clueless about what you're talking about. In the unlikely event that I ever need learn what you're talking about I will no longer be clueless. Got it?
In fact you bringing up technical support shows you fall into the same trap. People who call technical support with basic issues are by definition clueless. Claiming that this self-selecting group are scared by dialogs or anything else from inadvertent right mouse clicks is meaningless. How many users *don't* call technical support or call with advanced questions? How many learn not to use the right mouse button until later when they're more comfortable with their machine? Besides it's just as easy to invoke something scary from a Mac and a single button since all the contextual actions are up in the menu bar with the non-contextual actions.
My wife is a novice user (she used to twist the mouse to move the arrow when she started using computers), but even she has grasped the concept of left and right buttons. She doesn't use the right mouse much, but neither is she confused by it and sticks with the left mouse button. She certainly does get confused by single & double clicking but that's a fact of life on any platform.
So why does Apple, Microsoft, Linux use double-clicking on their desktop so extensively if its evil? Single click desktops have been implemented several times from the IE4 "active" desktop to the KDE 1 & 2 desktop and the reason why they got dumped soon becomes obvious when you make a mistake with them. For example, you get punished for accidentally clicking on an icon since it might take 30 seconds to launch the app and then quit the app you never meant to start in the first place.
Double clicking is more deliberate and therefore harder to do by accident.
Of course it might just look like a ball but be a pressure sensitive tip (like those found on laptops) in which case it shouldn't clog at all, but the pics suggest otherwise.
Shipping with a single button mouse might benefit absolute novices, but they're virtually useless for intermediate or expert users. Inflicting them on everyone by default makes no sense at all.
Other features such as the multi-button functionality look interesting but they could have done this a long time back. I made just the point myself nearly 6 months ago on yet another Apple mouse thread - "It's a wonder given Apple's penchant for design that they don't produce a mouse with a single button that uses software to determine if you were left or right clicking on it based on the pressure on each side of the mouse. Then both camps can be happy."
Still the extra buttons, means that zealots will have modify their rhetoric to accomodate the fact that Apple do actually produce a multi-button mouse now, albeit one where the form factor resembles a single button design. Hopefully Apple will dump their shitty one button mice for good and ship these things with future models. People can still set it to single mouse mode if they want (and perhaps that is the default), but for the rest of us it makes the Mac more usable.
As for Sony & Microsoft, you seem to be confusing "losses" from operating profits in the current platform with losses from investment and R&D in the new platforms.
Neither do Sony or MS have issues with releasing adult titles for their console. If Nintendo had the luxury of a killer console it might be in a position to hold to its principles. But it isn't. The GC is trounced by the PS2 & XBox both in hardware and in the sheer range of games. On the handheld market, the DS is still winning (just) in terms of sales to the superior PSP but it doesn't look like it's going to prevail.
It's hard to see how Nintendo can possibly survive as a console maker unless their next platform is pretty fucking spectacular and they loosen up what they're prepared to allow their box to run. If not, they'll go the same way as Sega - reduced to making Mario & Pokemon games for the PS & XBox.
I wonder if one of the console makers shouldn't allow "homebrew" software onto their consoles. Geeks might not represent much of the market, but I reckon that it could easily swing an extra 1-2% of sales. How to do that without opening the door to piracy? Produce 2 tiers of authentication for games (& apps). The first tier is for normal games who access to all the functionality of the console. The second tier is for homebrew, who are restricted in certain ways, e.g. having to run from CDR, not being able to access online gaming portal, not being able to render more than so many polygons etc. It means that someone couldn't use pirate a game and sign it as homebrew because it would stop working, but the homebrew guys could help promote the console by producing some nice stuff for it - jukeboxes, browsers etc.
To work shifts to watch over the build they started at the same time?