By all means, hardware vendors should use benchmarks and games to optimise performance. A well designed benchmark will exercise a driver in a controlled manner in a way it will be typically in real life and thus is a good way to improve real world performance.
But this is not optimising, it's deliberately cheating. That's what it's called when you ignore the settings you were told to use and substitute in your own faster ones, simply because you know you're running a benchmark programme used by consumers and reviewers to determine performance. Cheating may not a strong enough word - this almost amounts to fraud, claiming one thing and delivering another.
Sure you can choose any font, if you want your text to appear all ragged and uneven. And no you can't choose any width since Gutenberg is formatted and hyphenated to a set width.
Furthermore, you also can forget your reader being able to figure out what is a chapter heading and what isn't, or who wrote the book, or generate an index. Any illustrations also fly out the window too, and if you're expecting Unicode, well too bad about that too.
Any decent book format would preserve all these things.
Have you ever tried to read something from Project Gutenberg in text format? It's horrible! Try downloading something like the King James Bible and go mad as you slog through in 80 character monospaced print. Furthermore, say goodbye to an pictures or diagrams, e.g. illustrations in Alice in Wonderland.
A standardized rich text format is absolutely required, one which defines document structure so you get all the goodness like chapters, quotations, sidebars, footnotes, images etc., but doesn't impose how it should be laid for the most part, or the layout is specified by an accompanying style sheet.
Something like docbook might be suitable, but some of its more gross or esoteric things would have to be pruned or moved into different levels of support for the sake of simplicity.
I don't get this. Mozilla is open source. AOL 'own' it only in the sense that they are the people paying for the code to be maintained and thus steer its direction and development.
Perhaps the issue here is that Nullsoft.com is being used as the distribution mechanism for unapproved personal software. I'm sure if the guy got approval through a project plan to produce something that was GPL/MPL there would be nothing AOL could do about it. Perhaps if the software in question didn't have a P2P stigma about it, the AOL (a media conglomerate) bigwigs wouldn't be so quick to pull the thing for legal reasons or whatever. After all, look what happened (and is still happening) to Napster and ask if AOL is being smart or silly to yank a P2P file sharing software which enables the same thing in many people's eyes.
I use WinAmp and I find it perfectly usable. v3 certainly needs polish to remove some annoyances but I would still take it over the top heavy and even more skinned and bizarro UIs that Quicktime and Windows Media Player both have.
The one thing I would really like to see is proper and effective ripping built-in. Not just for MP3, but OGG too and not cripple bitrates like the piece of shit support in WMP. I guess WinAmp experts probably know of various filters to add this support, but I'd like to see it out of the box with the UI to support it.
I have Virtual PC but I'd be looking for something faster. Something equivalent to user mode linux, or Mac-on-linux which executes PPC code natively with some virtualized drivers for display & I/O so it renders in a window but otherwise has near native performance.
I could then run Linux as a process on the Mac, setting it up as an X/VNC server that I connect to with an OS X native client. The performance wouldn't be too bad and I could use it to supplement services already offered by OS X, or to run software which doesn't build on OS X or whatever.
Mac-on-linux looks cool and I'm keen to try it out, but is there anything that does the other way. i.e. Running Linux in a window on my Mac?
I'm an old hand with Linux on x86 architectures and I'm familiar with the likes of Gentoo, Knoppix and user mode Linux, but my Mac has to run OS X first and foremost which is why I thought I'd ask.
If I could fire up UML or Yellowdog in a window it would make it considerably easier to run some esoteric Unix app (even with a performance penalty) rather than struggling through fink or whatever I would take it.
Excuse me? So I'm not entitled to state things as I see them but you can say "But I must say, whenever there is a story on/. about SW, all of the George Lucas haters crawl out of the woodwork to expose the depths of their naked jelousy and dreadful envy in the most disgusting and pathetic manner: by hauling personal attacks on George Lucas.". It's funny, but I don't see an "In my opinion" in front of that blanket statement so that makes you a hypocrite.
If it makes you happy, insert 'some' and 'IMO' into the appropriate places if you like. Personally no film past, present or future is that important to me that I really care (beyond the odd comment), and in fact I find it kind of laughable that anyone would. But to some people, it is important and to them, yes their childhood memories were raped. That is to them a straight fact and quite obvious if you were to read just some of the resposes in this article.
As for other Lucas 'haters' as you call them, perhaps they just find it amusing to watch all the fanboys flail when their beloved Star Wars and Lucas are held up in the cold light of criticism. And perhaps others are former fans who became sick of being paying through the nose for their loyalty time and again by the SW marketing which promises 'limited / collectors / remastered' editions available the last time 'before they're gone forever' before Lucas goes and releases the whole bloody lot once again, or inserts some more shitty CGI into it.
The Lucas haters come out of the woodwork because there are so many who have felt their childhood memories being raped by shoddy prequels and one bloody merchandising ripoff after another. He hasn't created a compelling and cohesive universe for 30 years at all. The first three films were compelling and cohesive but the prequels feel like strap on movie franchises with wooden acting, boring script, CGI everywhere, implausible coincidences and a complete lack of suspense or action. The first three were epic with characters trapped in a huge universe, the latest two (and probably the next) were phony where the wooden characters *were* the universe.
And yes the prequels were shoddy. Appallingly bad films in fact, whose only redeeming feature was the special effects. If the Phantom Menace was not a Star Wars franchise, it would have sunk without a trace, rating somewhere next to Wing Commander and Final Fantasy in the movie goers collective memory - i.e. best forgotten.
Now you wonder why people spend time expressing this hatred. Perhaps because the likes of Slashdot keep dredging this shit up for it to be vented? Face it, the prequels stunk. Worship and idolise him if you like, but remember you're nothing to him but an aggregate in his earnings spreadsheet.
It took off exactly on time. Fingers crossed that all the other difficult stages in its voyage go as smoothly.
One notable cock-up was the UK's ITN news channel which had been advertising it's live coverage of the launch all day and just as it happened it cut to a commerical break. Professional journalism indeed. Fortunately the other stations also covered it.
The problem is, how do you distinguish between foo.mpg and some video called 32904809dfjlaewqeqweqwe.cust.id.093240988543248234 23 that could equally be returned?
I truly hope AOL doesn't dump Mozilla over this. It would be the ultimate irony (as well as a knife in the back) that their settlement with Microsoft ended with AOL killing the very thing they were suing over.
For the life of me I don't understand what the issue is with not using Mozilla as the embedded browser anyway. It is far superior in numerous ways and has already successfully proven itself in Mac OS X and elsewhere. Perhaps AOL has just grown to the size where people in client group are scared to leave their comfort zone and try the browser produced somewhere else in the company. I can't think of much that IE does that Mozilla can't do, sometimes better too. I saw this with IBM with OS/2 and it was a reason they lost money hand over fist.
Mozilla is a fine browser and perhaps some groups in AOL need to be slapped into using it.
Financial reward isn't everything, how about human endeavour? Basically mankind could sit on its ass and never explore, never colonise, never do anything because there was no perceived reward but I suspect we'd be extinct by now if that were the case. Exploration is risky but it can pay off in spades, to which all living humans are a testament to.
Unless humanity explores and pushes itself, it will stagnate. Space exploration provides a unique focus for that talent, and for all we know there may be very tangible rewards for the effort. For starters we would learn an enormous amount about space habitation, oxygen and waste recycling, crop growing, genetics, be able to do proper drilling and geological surveys. And ultimately, perhaps even establish a colony on another planet. If that's something not worth striving for I don't know what is.
Sorry but this is just dumb. Who do you think pays the bills for all those engineers to work on Mozilla and to run the servers??? AOL.
Why do they pay the bills? To leverage the technology to put into the Netscape branded browser and embedding it elsewhere. Basically if you wish the Netscape browser death you wish Mozilla death. If AOL pulled the plug on Mozilla it wouldn't be fatal. But it would be massive blow for the project, setting it back years. Dozens of AOL / Netscape employees would stop working on it, stop administering it and there would be a serious risk of stagnation.
Personally I'd just say to you, that if 20Mb is too much, why not use the net installer and pick and mix what you actually need instead of choosing everything? In fact, if you care about Mozilla but you're not prepared to use the Netscape browser yourself, you should still be recommending it to your less technical friends and relatives. Toss some more revenue AOLs way and they will be more inclined to keep the funding coming.
The only thing I'd like to have on XP / NT is an NFS driver. Cygwin takes care of the rest.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a free (and simple) nfs driver for Windows? The ones I've seen appear to be horribly expensive and/or ship with a bunch of other crap I don't need (e.g. Hummingbird's offerings).
I said it stinks because I thought it did obviously. Compared to the likes of Medal of Honour, the gameplay seems unimaginative consisting of alternating levels of monsters and Nazis, all coming at you in dribs and drabs, triggered as you move from one room to another, and cheesy cut scenes. Nor are you even given the feeling that you're in a squad with computer team members which would assist in firefights. I didn't think it was even very atmospheric and it was disappointing to see many of the levels were just primitive and poorly rendered versions of the multi-player maps.
The cardinal sin as far as I was concerned was the motion sickness inducing design to the game. I really hate games where you spend a lot of time spinning around, wandering back and forth through bland levels of twisty staircases, or corridors to hit switches to open doors and things of that nature. At the end of a level I'm just about ready to throw up. Postal 2 suffers the same problem but even worse and I just can't stand games like that.
I don't have that problem with multi-player where you have objectives and spend most of the time fighting towards it, or other FPS games such as Grand Theft Auto so I can only attribute the problem to unimaginative and tedious level design.
RTCW is a superb game multiplayer, but it stinks singleplayer. I wonder if the ET developers had the rug pulled from under them when attempting to develop the sequel because of the single player aspect being too weak. Throw in an aging game engine and perhaps they saw no viability in selling it and decided to toss the already designed maps and MP bits out as a freebie.
Still I thought the ET test game was excellent and I'm looking forward to this. IMHO, Wolfenstein just kicks the shit out of the likes of UT2003 with their flashier visuals simply because it is not one tedious fragfest with everyone bouncing around like kangaroos.
I don't see this issue as being exclusive to MP3. If you reencode a WMA file as MP3, all the DRM goes there too. So all the supposed benefits of a secure music format fly out of the window. But no matter, watermarking can be done in imperceptible ways that are not easily removed by reencoding, such as modulating the pitch, speed or even quality by minute but detectable amounts, not once but dozens of times.
Some or all could survive any high quality reencoding and one would be enough. The likes of Digimarc does the same for jpeg and is remarkably robust even when the picture is reencoded, resized or filtered. Digimarc even make a living from scanning the web seeking out for watermarked content for copyright owners. Of course someone could trash the audio to remove the watermarks, but it would rather defeat the point of doing it in the first place.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't make sense. AAC might result in smaller files but it is considerably more proprietary than mp3 which is the defacto music format supported in various music players. It makes no sense at all not to offer songs in mp3 as well.
The bandwidth costs is a complete red herring. They (Apple) would double their customer base overnight by offering mp3 and would send their profits through the roof, certainly covering the cost of any bandwidth issues.
Now consider how many millions more Apple have denied themselves by not offering an alternative mp3 format. If the aac format is so superior, where is the objection to offering an inferior mp3 format just for the masses of people who want to play their music on any number of different devices that support mp3? The fact that they don't is to shoot themselves in the foot.
An mp3 has the entropy in spades to hide a customer serial number multiple times in multiple ways, all imperceptable to the user and all extremely difficult to remove. This could be down by encoding and downloading on the fly, or by modifying the mp3 data through a filter.
All this is quite feasible and there are numerous patents on the subject, software that watermarks other lossy formats such as jpeg, not to mention stego software such as mp3stego which can already accomplish this feat. There is nothing infeasible or problematic about it at all.
iTunes supported mp3 format before it supported ACC.
Great, so why doesn't the site sell in MP3 format?
Simple for Apple--They want to provide higher quality at a lower bitrate, all of the people downloading their music would be doing so through the iTMS, they didn't want to bother with the technical difficulties of ripping from the masters to both mp3 and AAC (doing a quality check, selecting 30 seconds out for streaming, getting the track information added, &c) and then deal with adding the (very mild) DRM to mp3s as well.
Sorry but this is a complete and utter marketing lie. If AAC is better than MP3 offering higher quality at a lower bitrate, where is the harm in offering both formats? Let the customer decide what is the best format for them. Of course, by not providing MP3 format, Apple have certainly denied themselves a huge number of potential customers.
Apple does--your email address is in every AAC file.
So why can't it do the same for MP3s?
You must have flunked basic economics--either that or have been living under a rock.
No I think you must have flunked economics. The RIAA is whining about the sales they're losing to Kazaa and friends. Why are they losing that money? Because (and it is so obvious to be laughable) they offer nothing comparable to Kazaa. When they start to do so, providing a high quality mp3 from a guaranteed, high speed site with all trimmings like fan news, ratings, chat etc. the popularity of p2p networks will be slashed overnight.
Of course it bloody won't! Thus rendering it completely and utterly useless to the vast majority of people who might otherwise sign up for it.
It is a wonder that Apple et al do not support mp3. If their proprietary or licenced technology is so wonderful and superior, where is the harm of offering mp3 as well for backwards compatibility since it doesn't compete? If mp3 is perceived as not having DRM, why not watermark the songs as they fly off the server so they can be tracked?
Both are quite feasible and one wonders why these services hobble themselves like this. The net result is users will stick to free p2p services, grabbing their songs from Kazaa and the record companies will get NOTHING and the services will have a fraction of the customers. It doesn't make any business sense.
Verant decided to instantly obsolete a swathe of users with the Luclin release and subject everyone else to months of disruption because they couldn't pull their fingers out of their backside and test the thing first. Petitions and general responsiveness to problems in EQ (except exploits of course) is neglible and there was no sign they gave a damn about fixing the client, or introducing proper balance or form to the game. Everything seemed to be about stringing people along for as long as possible and selling more expansion packs.
Oh well, I voted with my wallet and frankly I don't miss it at all.
Well the same could be said of Great Britain and no doubt other parts of the Commonwealth. Does it mean countries should use the same outdated and illogical measurement system forever, or start thinking about transitioning?
In the case of the UK, the change has been gradual, but slowly but surely nearly all the weights and measures are now metric. You still get pints of beer and some people think in terms of miles and miles per hour, but for the most part everything else has changed over.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is not optimising, it's deliberately cheating. That's what it's called when you ignore the settings you were told to use and substitute in your own faster ones, simply because you know you're running a benchmark programme used by consumers and reviewers to determine performance. Cheating may not a strong enough word - this almost amounts to fraud, claiming one thing and delivering another.
Furthermore, you also can forget your reader being able to figure out what is a chapter heading and what isn't, or who wrote the book, or generate an index. Any illustrations also fly out the window too, and if you're expecting Unicode, well too bad about that too.
Any decent book format would preserve all these things.
A standardized rich text format is absolutely required, one which defines document structure so you get all the goodness like chapters, quotations, sidebars, footnotes, images etc., but doesn't impose how it should be laid for the most part, or the layout is specified by an accompanying style sheet.
Something like docbook might be suitable, but some of its more gross or esoteric things would have to be pruned or moved into different levels of support for the sake of simplicity.
Perhaps the issue here is that Nullsoft.com is being used as the distribution mechanism for unapproved personal software. I'm sure if the guy got approval through a project plan to produce something that was GPL/MPL there would be nothing AOL could do about it. Perhaps if the software in question didn't have a P2P stigma about it, the AOL (a media conglomerate) bigwigs wouldn't be so quick to pull the thing for legal reasons or whatever. After all, look what happened (and is still happening) to Napster and ask if AOL is being smart or silly to yank a P2P file sharing software which enables the same thing in many people's eyes.
The one thing I would really like to see is proper and effective ripping built-in. Not just for MP3, but OGG too and not cripple bitrates like the piece of shit support in WMP. I guess WinAmp experts probably know of various filters to add this support, but I'd like to see it out of the box with the UI to support it.
I could then run Linux as a process on the Mac, setting it up as an X/VNC server that I connect to with an OS X native client. The performance wouldn't be too bad and I could use it to supplement services already offered by OS X, or to run software which doesn't build on OS X or whatever.
I'm an old hand with Linux on x86 architectures and I'm familiar with the likes of Gentoo, Knoppix and user mode Linux, but my Mac has to run OS X first and foremost which is why I thought I'd ask.
If I could fire up UML or Yellowdog in a window it would make it considerably easier to run some esoteric Unix app (even with a performance penalty) rather than struggling through fink or whatever I would take it.
If it makes you happy, insert 'some' and 'IMO' into the appropriate places if you like. Personally no film past, present or future is that important to me that I really care (beyond the odd comment), and in fact I find it kind of laughable that anyone would. But to some people, it is important and to them, yes their childhood memories were raped. That is to them a straight fact and quite obvious if you were to read just some of the resposes in this article.
As for other Lucas 'haters' as you call them, perhaps they just find it amusing to watch all the fanboys flail when their beloved Star Wars and Lucas are held up in the cold light of criticism. And perhaps others are former fans who became sick of being paying through the nose for their loyalty time and again by the SW marketing which promises 'limited / collectors / remastered' editions available the last time 'before they're gone forever' before Lucas goes and releases the whole bloody lot once again, or inserts some more shitty CGI into it.
And yes the prequels were shoddy. Appallingly bad films in fact, whose only redeeming feature was the special effects. If the Phantom Menace was not a Star Wars franchise, it would have sunk without a trace, rating somewhere next to Wing Commander and Final Fantasy in the movie goers collective memory - i.e. best forgotten.
Now you wonder why people spend time expressing this hatred. Perhaps because the likes of Slashdot keep dredging this shit up for it to be vented? Face it, the prequels stunk. Worship and idolise him if you like, but remember you're nothing to him but an aggregate in his earnings spreadsheet.
One notable cock-up was the UK's ITN news channel which had been advertising it's live coverage of the launch all day and just as it happened it cut to a commerical break. Professional journalism indeed. Fortunately the other stations also covered it.
The problem is, how do you distinguish between foo.mpg and some video called 32904809dfjlaewqeqweqwe.cust.id.093240988543248234 23 that could equally be returned?
For the life of me I don't understand what the issue is with not using Mozilla as the embedded browser anyway. It is far superior in numerous ways and has already successfully proven itself in Mac OS X and elsewhere. Perhaps AOL has just grown to the size where people in client group are scared to leave their comfort zone and try the browser produced somewhere else in the company. I can't think of much that IE does that Mozilla can't do, sometimes better too. I saw this with IBM with OS/2 and it was a reason they lost money hand over fist.
Mozilla is a fine browser and perhaps some groups in AOL need to be slapped into using it.
Unless humanity explores and pushes itself, it will stagnate. Space exploration provides a unique focus for that talent, and for all we know there may be very tangible rewards for the effort. For starters we would learn an enormous amount about space habitation, oxygen and waste recycling, crop growing, genetics, be able to do proper drilling and geological surveys. And ultimately, perhaps even establish a colony on another planet. If that's something not worth striving for I don't know what is.
Why do they pay the bills? To leverage the technology to put into the Netscape branded browser and embedding it elsewhere. Basically if you wish the Netscape browser death you wish Mozilla death. If AOL pulled the plug on Mozilla it wouldn't be fatal. But it would be massive blow for the project, setting it back years. Dozens of AOL / Netscape employees would stop working on it, stop administering it and there would be a serious risk of stagnation.
Personally I'd just say to you, that if 20Mb is too much, why not use the net installer and pick and mix what you actually need instead of choosing everything? In fact, if you care about Mozilla but you're not prepared to use the Netscape browser yourself, you should still be recommending it to your less technical friends and relatives. Toss some more revenue AOLs way and they will be more inclined to keep the funding coming.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a free (and simple) nfs driver for Windows? The ones I've seen appear to be horribly expensive and/or ship with a bunch of other crap I don't need (e.g. Hummingbird's offerings).
The cardinal sin as far as I was concerned was the motion sickness inducing design to the game. I really hate games where you spend a lot of time spinning around, wandering back and forth through bland levels of twisty staircases, or corridors to hit switches to open doors and things of that nature. At the end of a level I'm just about ready to throw up. Postal 2 suffers the same problem but even worse and I just can't stand games like that.
I don't have that problem with multi-player where you have objectives and spend most of the time fighting towards it, or other FPS games such as Grand Theft Auto so I can only attribute the problem to unimaginative and tedious level design.
Still I thought the ET test game was excellent and I'm looking forward to this. IMHO, Wolfenstein just kicks the shit out of the likes of UT2003 with their flashier visuals simply because it is not one tedious fragfest with everyone bouncing around like kangaroos.
Some or all could survive any high quality reencoding and one would be enough. The likes of Digimarc does the same for jpeg and is remarkably robust even when the picture is reencoded, resized or filtered. Digimarc even make a living from scanning the web seeking out for watermarked content for copyright owners. Of course someone could trash the audio to remove the watermarks, but it would rather defeat the point of doing it in the first place.
The bandwidth costs is a complete red herring. They (Apple) would double their customer base overnight by offering mp3 and would send their profits through the roof, certainly covering the cost of any bandwidth issues.
Now consider how many millions more Apple have denied themselves by not offering an alternative mp3 format. If the aac format is so superior, where is the objection to offering an inferior mp3 format just for the masses of people who want to play their music on any number of different devices that support mp3? The fact that they don't is to shoot themselves in the foot.
All this is quite feasible and there are numerous patents on the subject, software that watermarks other lossy formats such as jpeg, not to mention stego software such as mp3stego which can already accomplish this feat. There is nothing infeasible or problematic about it at all.
Great, so why doesn't the site sell in MP3 format?
Simple for Apple--They want to provide higher quality at a lower bitrate, all of the people downloading their music would be doing so through the iTMS, they didn't want to bother with the technical difficulties of ripping from the masters to both mp3 and AAC (doing a quality check, selecting 30 seconds out for streaming, getting the track information added, &c) and then deal with adding the (very mild) DRM to mp3s as well.
Sorry but this is a complete and utter marketing lie. If AAC is better than MP3 offering higher quality at a lower bitrate, where is the harm in offering both formats? Let the customer decide what is the best format for them. Of course, by not providing MP3 format, Apple have certainly denied themselves a huge number of potential customers.
Apple does--your email address is in every AAC file.
So why can't it do the same for MP3s?
You must have flunked basic economics--either that or have been living under a rock.
No I think you must have flunked economics. The RIAA is whining about the sales they're losing to Kazaa and friends. Why are they losing that money? Because (and it is so obvious to be laughable) they offer nothing comparable to Kazaa. When they start to do so, providing a high quality mp3 from a guaranteed, high speed site with all trimmings like fan news, ratings, chat etc. the popularity of p2p networks will be slashed overnight.
It is a wonder that Apple et al do not support mp3. If their proprietary or licenced technology is so wonderful and superior, where is the harm of offering mp3 as well for backwards compatibility since it doesn't compete? If mp3 is perceived as not having DRM, why not watermark the songs as they fly off the server so they can be tracked?
Both are quite feasible and one wonders why these services hobble themselves like this. The net result is users will stick to free p2p services, grabbing their songs from Kazaa and the record companies will get NOTHING and the services will have a fraction of the customers. It doesn't make any business sense.
Verant decided to instantly obsolete a swathe of users with the Luclin release and subject everyone else to months of disruption because they couldn't pull their fingers out of their backside and test the thing first. Petitions and general responsiveness to problems in EQ (except exploits of course) is neglible and there was no sign they gave a damn about fixing the client, or introducing proper balance or form to the game. Everything seemed to be about stringing people along for as long as possible and selling more expansion packs.
Oh well, I voted with my wallet and frankly I don't miss it at all.
In the case of the UK, the change has been gradual, but slowly but surely nearly all the weights and measures are now metric. You still get pints of beer and some people think in terms of miles and miles per hour, but for the most part everything else has changed over.