Oh I forgot that this gushing review of the future of the PS3 sounds remarkably like the rubber ducky demo that we saw for two years before the PS3 hit the shelves.
Seriously, nothing but hype for the PS3, and it totally under delivers. Now, the promise of this awesome online service. The thing is, it takes years to get the usability feed back from users to really make a UI powerful and intuitive. That's years of experience that Sony just doesn't have.
Re:That doesn't negate the point
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
Vista isn't beta, that's the point. It's ready to go.
The hardware manufactures however have not done their job, so the "instabilities" are related to crappy code not created by Microsoft.
Not every install is a nightmare. Mine went well. It takes a while though.
"Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"
I've been preaching this for a while now - Vista isn't at fault here - the hardware manufacturers are! Stick it to them - they have had 6 years to prepare for the launch. It's also been over a year and a half that Vista has been availble from MSDN and such.
Well almost, I recently built an AMD 4x4 system that is now running Vista64, you can check it out here: http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
Here are a few thoughts:
Getting setup is a pain in the ass. Prompts abound and I feel my anger bubble up every time I see one of those stupid boxes. However, the boxes go away for the most part and day to day operation becomes easy.
Driver support from vendors sucks hard. NVidia should be ashamed of themselves. I'm pretty sure that we will see a class action of some kind fall out of their negligence. I think ATI has better driver support from what I have been reading, but I'm more involved in the nvidia world. What is unfortunate about this situation is that Microsoft is on the hook for ensuring compatibility. I don't really see it as their problem - the hardware vendors seem to have completely ignored Vista as a potential OS that consumers would adopt. As such hardware support is pretty bad at the moment. It's really inexcusable considering how long Vista has been in development.
The same goes for various applications - web sites, consumer apps. What's odd is that IE 7 and Vista have some serious issues with web sites. Also, "Trusted mode" isn't really trusted and you can still have major issues. My test cases are somewhat fringe: Outlook Web with Exchange 2003 doesn't work at all without a patch that's not part of the regular OS updates - get with it MSFT, Outlook users are your bread and butter. MSDN is a mess under IE 7 and Vista. Invalid/Expired security certificates make IE 7 throw a hissy fit.
I can see the IE 7 and Vista user experience driving users to adopt firefox.
File syncing is jacked up. It's totally confusing to see what is being synced, and I have yet to figure out how to bring offline drives online when the server they are on is alive. Most of the check boxes pertaining to this feature are grayed out, but there is no explanation as to why they are not available. In addition the sync center keeps hounding me about syncing temp files and my iTunes library doesn't seem to stay synced (I'm using network mapped home folders)
Note to Microsoft, I wanted to switch Windows Media player but you don't have a codec for decoding non encrypted AAC files.
iTunes uses a ridiculous amount of ram (Almost 100 mb with 8500 songs), and is just generally slow. It also can't burn dvds or cds on 64 bit systems. So I'm stuck with it for a bit longer.
On the flip side, I installed the "Sync Center" and plugged my T-Mobile Dash in and it showed a nice pretty icon of my phone, and of course it worked. I liked that. And the sync center isn't nearly as nag ware oriented as Active Sync.
Remember the "new" view in Windows XP for things like the control panel? I never switched, and I preferred "classic mode". Nesting 30 odd control panels in arbitrary categories wasn't really something I was a huge fan of. In Vista, Microsoft has made the "new" style in XP the only way to view many of the system functions. There is a bit of a learning curve associated with this.
Also, something that I'm not a huge fan of - Vista has a tendency to hide things if you can't use them. While this seems like a good idea it's not. For example, when setting up a Bluetooth PAN with your phone you must have Bluetooth on the Vista PC turned on in order for this option to show up under the list of connection options. It takes three clicks and a full scroll to find the option in the first place so when you go hunting for it, but don't really know that you need Bluetooth turned on to get the menu option a user ends up wondering if they are looking in the right place. For the sake of learning where things are, it's nice to see the option perhaps grayed out with an explanation as to why it is disabled rather than mysteriously hiding something, when the conditions around toggle logic isn't well known.
There are some things that are worth the switch. First and foremost: The start menu re-design. Being able to type
Not to mention, "We can mine your corporate/personal data for whatever purpose we choose." Or "We can supply the government with any information we have because we have to."
I don't think the "hundreds of thousands" means what the product manager thinks it does either.
In general I'm skeptical of all of this. I for one enjoy that I own my data, hardware and software (not that i really "own" my software).
Are you sure you want to unlock your car? (Yes/No) Please confirm this action: Start car (Allow/Deny) The manufacturer of this car is not trusted, are you sure you want to start this car? (Yes/No) The car is attempting to use gas that does not fall between 89 and 91 octane are you sure you want to continue? (Yes/No) Are you sure you want to turn on the radio (Allow/Deny) The manufacturer of this radio is not trusted, are you sure you want to turn on radio? (Yes/No) Station 104.7 is attempting to play content that requires special priveliges, do you want to play 104.7? (yes/no) Please confirm your administrative username and password. Please confirm this action: Change to D (Allow/Deny) This feature requires administrative priveligeges, please enter your username and password.......
AMD has been skimping lately on its cache. I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of AMD's current performance issues are related to cache and lack thereof.
The Intel chips carry 4 to 8 Mb of cache. The thing about the Intel architecture is that the cache is shared across both or all 4 cores. In contrast the AMD chips have a dedicated *tiny* 1 MB cache for the consumer chips and 2mb per core on the high-end parts.
With that said, the reality of dual core computing is that one core is used much more heavily than the other. In Intel's case this means that one core is basically given the entire cache for its use - a significant performance boost when running a few tasks. In AMD's case the idle cache is inaccessible to the heavily loaded core.
The reason that makes me think that the cache is the current bottleneck is that the memory controller on the AMD chip is significantly faster than Intel's. Given that fact one would conclude that in non disk-bound applications that require large amounts of memory (games) the AMD chips would pull ahead. This is not the case. Of course there is more than just cache at play here but the fact that the Intel chips has 4 to 8 times more cache available to it has to make a fairly significant difference.
As I was attempting to determine what the maximum windows experience rating is for a computer, With skepticism I hit with the F1 key to see if "help" had been improved. Low and behold - I got my answer.
There were a couple other instances where help actually worked as advertised.
Who on earth would really read a manual supplied by msft?
"One thing that stood out in Russinovich's explanation is an admission of sorts that the default configuration of UAC puts the user at risk of a sophisticated code execution attack."
All right - Vista is tremendous improvement in some respects and in others it's a real pain in the ass.
However, the reason it is a pain in the ass is due to this absolutely retarded line of thinking quoted above. Let me explain, somewhere along the way the Vista architects decided that ALL users of Vista were not qualified to use their computers. As such, anytime any program is executed one is prompted to confirm that they do in fact, want to run the program that was just run. Then depending on how signed and trusted the program is, you may need to confirm again that you would like to run the program, and again, and again. Also, if it tries to use the network, you might need to let it.
"UAC puts the user at risk of a sophisticated code execution attack." - but the user has to RUN THE CODE FIRST.
UAC is a problem in search of problem.
You see the issue is that software is installing and running applications without the knowledge of the user. That is the problem. Not this business of me as a user clicking on a program and running it.
UAC assumes that the user doesn't know he or she is running a program. As such, you are warned and prompted to death when running applications.
The THING IS, I KNOW WHAT I JUST TRIED TO RUN.
UAC has no concept of the source of the execution command. What really needed to be added to Vista is a concept of the "source" of code execution. In the case of UAC there should be the notion of not only the code execution but of the source, such as a keyboard, mouse or other input device. These sources identify execution requests as coming from a HUMAN, and not some nasty zombie pc making virus.
UAC should really work as follows: if the action taken comes from a trusted hardware source, trust it and do the action. if not, warn the user. One more step that I could probably tolerate as a user is a notification of trust. Better yet, just show a little icon like that admin privilege escalation shield that indicates the code is trusted.
The devil is in the details of course, but I'm sure that something could be worked out that is infinitely better than what is now going on in Vista.
Howard Roark, if he were real, would weep at the notion of Vista.
maybe someone has pointed this out - but the reason the FPS suck is not because vista sucks - but becuase the hardware manufacturers have failed to provide stable drivers for much of their hardware.
the 8800 gtx has terrible support at the momement with a number of users threating nvidia through www.nvidiaclassaction.org. in general NVidia has been doing a poor job of supporting their hardware, for example under XP 64 the drivers are equally bad - barely implementing what is needed to perform well. at the vista launch a large portion of their motherboards (680a, 680i, NForce4)did not have WHQL drivers relased.
many software publishers have clearly not tested their software with vista as well making things less smooth.
vista has been under development for an extrodinarily long time - give then ease of aquiring the OS (CTP releases, RC releases), and wide availability of development tools that contain support for vista, the blame falls squarely on the hardware and software vendors who have not updated their software for this release.
Ironically, the upgrade to Vista on my AMD 4x4 has gone without incident. All of my games continute to work at roughly the same level as before. There are still some performance issues and a few interesting features of vista relating to multicore machines.
FFX is a fun game - the thing that I found though was that if you raced through, and didn't get your charachters to a high enough level you would get pwnd by the later bosses. So... keep playing and you'll pwn.
While Ford notes that "there is no better way to start an argument among a group of developers than proclaiming Operating System A to be 'more secure' than Operating System B,"
Unless of course Operating System A is Open BSD;-)
It's slower than XP. It's more resource intensive than XP.
For what its worth that's what I thought after installing RC1 on my Thinkpad T43. It seemed very, very slow especially with office and such. I recently installed the RTM business version, and it seems that it is at least as performant as XP now. You might give it a try.
I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
It's not that people don't think of PDF as a standard - it's that it's insanely expensive to have as a "feature".
I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF. Arguably the utility of Office applications is significantly higher than the ability to ship PDF's around.
It is also very clear from Adobe's pricing that they have you by the balls. Distiller isn't worth that much.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed. Performance wasn't really what they were after either and the ads in Reader were pretty awful too.
There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.
What we don't know if the handshake time is part of the spec for HDMI/DVI. It is possible that Westinghouse is within the specified handshake period, and that the PS3 is not waiting long enough because in their testing with their Sony sets, everything worked fine ^ ^. Of course it is also possible that Westinghouse is out of spec. It's also possible that there is no spec at all for that particular aspect of the protocol.
Now if I had to choose just one console? The 360. Without a doubt. But that's only NOW. In a year when Sony has built up a decent library of games like the 360 has, things may be different.
And if you had to choose when you first got the 360 which cosole would it be;-) You see Sony is behind, way behind. I think that the Vista integration is going to be the 360's ace in the hole.
In addition the PS3 is going to be for games, and likely isn't going to do much more than that. I think that you'll find you can pitch your TiVo (if you have one) in a year and use your xbox instead. You might be able to pitch your cable box too, and just rely on your high speed internet connection. You'll also find that your xbox games will run on your pc.
There is a unification going on in redmond and I'm not sure everyone appreciates the scale on which its happening. The core however is media, vista and the xbox.
Not really, Carmack is a polygon guru. The Wii is decidedly not about the graphics and more about the gameplay and usability. Thus, Carmack is not interested because his skills lay in making games that use traditional interaction methods.
he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
Jobs by no means says there is going to be no 3rd party wares.
Your parallel with the iPod isn't really correct. It is true that the iPod and iTunes took an otherwise complicated process and made it as easy as it should be. But then again how hard can playing music be? It's not! The difference about a phone, e-mail, wi-fi, browsing the web etc. etc. is that for the most part it isn't that "simple". It isn't just a few clicks, or a list of songs. It's a multitude of interfaces and a high degree of interactivity. My point is that you can only simplify things so far.
The notion of just "hopping" on a free wifi spot isn't really in-line with the reality of so many providers wishing to charge you for that access. Which means the transparent switching is going to be a PITA for the end user, because it is not going to be transparent. This is one design goal that will not work well out of the box. Also, WiFi drains a good deal of power and to be promiscuously sniffing for networks and hoping on and off is going to drain the battery. Which means an end user will prefer the cell connection.
EDGE is impossibly slow. So you'll find that you usually have a 384K pipe MAX to your phone. More realistically the phone will operate at dialup speeds. Which means that google maps will be much less cool. Another feature will not work well out of the box.
What I've notice on my "smartphone" (EDGE connected) is that most pages with ads, are about 200-300K. That's HUGE when you are sitting at the end of such a connection. And because safari advertises itself as a full version, you'll get the full content for the page, not something that is optimized for the amount of bandwidth available.
However EDGE is great for mail delivery, and messaging. It looks though that this phone isn't going to be great to type on. The touch screen is really not a good interface for a keyboard and unless there is tactile feedback of the key press (a quick vibrate might work well but it doesn't appear to do this) you'll find that it is slow and cumbersome and there is much uncertainty around if a key has been pressed. It "features" predictive text which is not that great (unless apple has some amazing contextual word predictor) too, a technology that just doesn't live up to the hype. So this is another area where the phone may not perform "properly".
Another area that the iPhone is going to have issues: battery life. Wifi draws an enormous amount of power for small batteries and so does a polling, always on data connection for IMAP/POP. Push mitigates this issue a bit but only yahoo, blackberry and exchange have this capability. Also, there is no "standby" time listed on Apple's site which tells me they haven't done enough testing on it. The net result is that we'll find the early adopters chained to their USB sync cable.
Some have compared this device to the Treo, and of course mentioned the measly storage for music, etc. etc. From personal experience I have found my smart phone to not be an effective music player mainly because mp3 playback takes a lot of battery, and I don't have stereo Bluetooth headphones. Then again, it wasn't designed as a music player. The iPhone is being advertised as a device that has music player capabilities. The thing is: it comes up short. 8 GB of storage is nothing. The price of FLASH is also not so high as to make 8 GB seem like a reasonable capacity for the price. Again, a not so "proper" music player.
Finally, and this is really the kicker - I've been reading reports that it is going to be closed. Apple can kiss the adoption of this phone goodbye if this goes closed. Almost every other mobile platform has more features today than the iPhone, and is less "provider tied" (cingular, yahoo, goog). Some of the stuff, gesture based interfaces are new - but that is icing on the. Apple is going to need its developer based to really fill out the capabilities of the phone. They will *need* them to push the phone to its limits - and thus make people want not only the phone but the leading edge, cool stuff they can do with it. And I'm n
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Oh I forgot that this gushing review of the future of the PS3 sounds remarkably like the rubber ducky demo that we saw for two years before the PS3 hit the shelves.
Seriously, nothing but hype for the PS3, and it totally under delivers. Now, the promise of this awesome online service. The thing is, it takes years to get the usability feed back from users to really make a UI powerful and intuitive. That's years of experience that Sony just doesn't have.
Vista isn't beta, that's the point. It's ready to go.
The hardware manufactures however have not done their job, so the "instabilities" are related to crappy code not created by Microsoft.
Not every install is a nightmare. Mine went well. It takes a while though.
http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
"Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"
I've been preaching this for a while now - Vista isn't at fault here - the hardware manufacturers are! Stick it to them - they have had 6 years to prepare for the launch. It's also been over a year and a half that Vista has been availble from MSDN and such.
Well almost, I recently built an AMD 4x4 system that is now running Vista64, you can check it out here: http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
Here are a few thoughts:
Getting setup is a pain in the ass. Prompts abound and I feel my anger bubble up every time I see one of those stupid boxes. However, the boxes go away for the most part and day to day operation becomes easy.
Driver support from vendors sucks hard. NVidia should be ashamed of themselves. I'm pretty sure that we will see a class action of some kind fall out of their negligence. I think ATI has better driver support from what I have been reading, but I'm more involved in the nvidia world. What is unfortunate about this situation is that Microsoft is on the hook for ensuring compatibility. I don't really see it as their problem - the hardware vendors seem to have completely ignored Vista as a potential OS that consumers would adopt. As such hardware support is pretty bad at the moment. It's really inexcusable considering how long Vista has been in development.
The same goes for various applications - web sites, consumer apps. What's odd is that IE 7 and Vista have some serious issues with web sites. Also, "Trusted mode" isn't really trusted and you can still have major issues. My test cases are somewhat fringe: Outlook Web with Exchange 2003 doesn't work at all without a patch that's not part of the regular OS updates - get with it MSFT, Outlook users are your bread and butter. MSDN is a mess under IE 7 and Vista. Invalid/Expired security certificates make IE 7 throw a hissy fit.
I can see the IE 7 and Vista user experience driving users to adopt firefox.
File syncing is jacked up. It's totally confusing to see what is being synced, and I have yet to figure out how to bring offline drives online when the server they are on is alive. Most of the check boxes pertaining to this feature are grayed out, but there is no explanation as to why they are not available. In addition the sync center keeps hounding me about syncing temp files and my iTunes library doesn't seem to stay synced (I'm using network mapped home folders)
Note to Microsoft, I wanted to switch Windows Media player but you don't have a codec for decoding non encrypted AAC files.
iTunes uses a ridiculous amount of ram (Almost 100 mb with 8500 songs), and is just generally slow. It also can't burn dvds or cds on 64 bit systems. So I'm stuck with it for a bit longer.
On the flip side, I installed the "Sync Center" and plugged my T-Mobile Dash in and it showed a nice pretty icon of my phone, and of course it worked. I liked that. And the sync center isn't nearly as nag ware oriented as Active Sync.
Remember the "new" view in Windows XP for things like the control panel? I never switched, and I preferred "classic mode". Nesting 30 odd control panels in arbitrary categories wasn't really something I was a huge fan of. In Vista, Microsoft has made the "new" style in XP the only way to view many of the system functions. There is a bit of a learning curve associated with this.
Also, something that I'm not a huge fan of - Vista has a tendency to hide things if you can't use them. While this seems like a good idea it's not. For example, when setting up a Bluetooth PAN with your phone you must have Bluetooth on the Vista PC turned on in order for this option to show up under the list of connection options. It takes three clicks and a full scroll to find the option in the first place so when you go hunting for it, but don't really know that you need Bluetooth turned on to get the menu option a user ends up wondering if they are looking in the right place. For the sake of learning where things are, it's nice to see the option perhaps grayed out with an explanation as to why it is disabled rather than mysteriously hiding something, when the conditions around toggle logic isn't well known.
There are some things that are worth the switch. First and foremost: The start menu re-design. Being able to type
Not to mention, "We can mine your corporate/personal data for whatever purpose we choose." Or "We can supply the government with any information we have because we have to."
I don't think the "hundreds of thousands" means what the product manager thinks it does either.
In general I'm skeptical of all of this. I for one enjoy that I own my data, hardware and software (not that i really "own" my software).
Imagine if MSFT made automobiles
... ...
It would be pretty horrific...
Are you sure you want to unlock your car? (Yes/No)
Please confirm this action: Start car (Allow/Deny)
The manufacturer of this car is not trusted, are you sure you want to start this car? (Yes/No)
The car is attempting to use gas that does not fall between 89 and 91 octane are you sure you want to continue? (Yes/No)
Are you sure you want to turn on the radio (Allow/Deny)
The manufacturer of this radio is not trusted, are you sure you want to turn on radio? (Yes/No)
Station 104.7 is attempting to play content that requires special priveliges, do you want to play 104.7? (yes/no)
Please confirm your administrative username and password.
Please confirm this action: Change to D (Allow/Deny)
This feature requires administrative priveligeges, please enter your username and password.
AMD has been skimping lately on its cache. I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of AMD's current performance issues are related to cache and lack thereof.
The Intel chips carry 4 to 8 Mb of cache. The thing about the Intel architecture is that the cache is shared across both or all 4 cores. In contrast the AMD chips have a dedicated *tiny* 1 MB cache for the consumer chips and 2mb per core on the high-end parts.
With that said, the reality of dual core computing is that one core is used much more heavily than the other. In Intel's case this means that one core is basically given the entire cache for its use - a significant performance boost when running a few tasks. In AMD's case the idle cache is inaccessible to the heavily loaded core.
The reason that makes me think that the cache is the current bottleneck is that the memory controller on the AMD chip is significantly faster than Intel's. Given that fact one would conclude that in non disk-bound applications that require large amounts of memory (games) the AMD chips would pull ahead. This is not the case. Of course there is more than just cache at play here but the fact that the Intel chips has 4 to 8 times more cache available to it has to make a fairly significant difference.
Check out my AMD FX-70 at http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
Well you don't have a "Windows" button, so I think you are on IBM's side. ;)
As I was attempting to determine what the maximum windows experience rating is for a computer, With skepticism I hit with the F1 key to see if "help" had been improved. Low and behold - I got my answer.
There were a couple other instances where help actually worked as advertised.
Who on earth would really read a manual supplied by msft?
-=-=-=-=-
Check out my new AMD FX70 system build, now with Vista. http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
"One thing that stood out in Russinovich's explanation is an admission of sorts that the default configuration of UAC puts the user at risk of a sophisticated code execution attack."
All right - Vista is tremendous improvement in some respects and in others it's a real pain in the ass.
However, the reason it is a pain in the ass is due to this absolutely retarded line of thinking quoted above. Let me explain, somewhere along the way the Vista architects decided that ALL users of Vista were not qualified to use their computers. As such, anytime any program is executed one is prompted to confirm that they do in fact, want to run the program that was just run. Then depending on how signed and trusted the program is, you may need to confirm again that you would like to run the program, and again, and again. Also, if it tries to use the network, you might need to let it.
"UAC puts the user at risk of a sophisticated code execution attack." - but the user has to RUN THE CODE FIRST.
UAC is a problem in search of problem.
You see the issue is that software is installing and running applications without the knowledge of the user. That is the problem. Not this business of me as a user clicking on a program and running it.
UAC assumes that the user doesn't know he or she is running a program. As such, you are warned and prompted to death when running applications.
The THING IS, I KNOW WHAT I JUST TRIED TO RUN.
UAC has no concept of the source of the execution command. What really needed to be added to Vista is a concept of the "source" of code execution. In the case of UAC there should be the notion of not only the code execution but of the source, such as a keyboard, mouse or other input device. These sources identify execution requests as coming from a HUMAN, and not some nasty zombie pc making virus.
UAC should really work as follows: if the action taken comes from a trusted hardware source, trust it and do the action. if not, warn the user. One more step that I could probably tolerate as a user is a notification of trust. Better yet, just show a little icon like that admin privilege escalation shield that indicates the code is trusted.
The devil is in the details of course, but I'm sure that something could be worked out that is infinitely better than what is now going on in Vista.
Howard Roark, if he were real, would weep at the notion of Vista.
maybe someone has pointed this out - but the reason the FPS suck is not because vista sucks - but becuase the hardware manufacturers have failed to provide stable drivers for much of their hardware.
the 8800 gtx has terrible support at the momement with a number of users threating nvidia through www.nvidiaclassaction.org. in general NVidia has been doing a poor job of supporting their hardware, for example under XP 64 the drivers are equally bad - barely implementing what is needed to perform well. at the vista launch a large portion of their motherboards (680a, 680i, NForce4)did not have WHQL drivers relased.
many software publishers have clearly not tested their software with vista as well making things less smooth.
vista has been under development for an extrodinarily long time - give then ease of aquiring the OS (CTP releases, RC releases), and wide availability of development tools that contain support for vista, the blame falls squarely on the hardware and software vendors who have not updated their software for this release.
Ironically, the upgrade to Vista on my AMD 4x4 has gone without incident. All of my games continute to work at roughly the same level as before. There are still some performance issues and a few interesting features of vista relating to multicore machines.
FFX is a fun game - the thing that I found though was that if you raced through, and didn't get your charachters to a high enough level you would get pwnd by the later bosses. So... keep playing and you'll pwn.
While Ford notes that "there is no better way to start an argument among a group of developers than proclaiming Operating System A to be 'more secure' than Operating System B,"
;-)
Unless of course Operating System A is Open BSD
It's slower than XP.
It's more resource intensive than XP.
For what its worth that's what I thought after installing RC1 on my Thinkpad T43. It seemed very, very slow especially with office and such. I recently installed the RTM business version, and it seems that it is at least as performant as XP now. You might give it a try.
You know where the really bad singer comes in and thinks he's/she's really good but is in fact atrocious.
Dude, maybe they didn't like you that much?
And yet you might not succeed as none one flaming has actually called MS and *not* gotten an activation key LOL.
But, cocoa and marshmallows sounds good to me. I'll join you.
Windows XP upgrade editions require the presense of a preivous, eligible operating system.
I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
It's not that people don't think of PDF as a standard - it's that it's insanely expensive to have as a "feature".
I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF. Arguably the utility of Office applications is significantly higher than the ability to ship PDF's around.
It is also very clear from Adobe's pricing that they have you by the balls. Distiller isn't worth that much.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed. Performance wasn't really what they were after either and the ads in Reader were pretty awful too.
There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.
Kids, diversity is bad, MMMM KAY?
Maybe,
What we don't know if the handshake time is part of the spec for HDMI/DVI. It is possible that Westinghouse is within the specified handshake period, and that the PS3 is not waiting long enough because in their testing with their Sony sets, everything worked fine ^ ^. Of course it is also possible that Westinghouse is out of spec. It's also possible that there is no spec at all for that particular aspect of the protocol.
OWEL
Now if I had to choose just one console? The 360. Without a doubt. But that's only NOW. In a year when Sony has built up a decent library of games like the 360 has, things may be different.
;-) You see Sony is behind, way behind. I think that the Vista integration is going to be the 360's ace in the hole.
And if you had to choose when you first got the 360 which cosole would it be
In addition the PS3 is going to be for games, and likely isn't going to do much more than that. I think that you'll find you can pitch your TiVo (if you have one) in a year and use your xbox instead. You might be able to pitch your cable box too, and just rely on your high speed internet connection. You'll also find that your xbox games will run on your pc.
There is a unification going on in redmond and I'm not sure everyone appreciates the scale on which its happening. The core however is media, vista and the xbox.
Not really, Carmack is a polygon guru. The Wii is decidedly not about the graphics and more about the gameplay and usability. Thus, Carmack is not interested because his skills lay in making games that use traditional interaction methods.
FTFA:
he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
Jobs by no means says there is going to be no 3rd party wares.
Is it though?
Your parallel with the iPod isn't really correct. It is true that the iPod and iTunes took an otherwise complicated process and made it as easy as it should be. But then again how hard can playing music be? It's not! The difference about a phone, e-mail, wi-fi, browsing the web etc. etc. is that for the most part it isn't that "simple". It isn't just a few clicks, or a list of songs. It's a multitude of interfaces and a high degree of interactivity. My point is that you can only simplify things so far.
The notion of just "hopping" on a free wifi spot isn't really in-line with the reality of so many providers wishing to charge you for that access. Which means the transparent switching is going to be a PITA for the end user, because it is not going to be transparent. This is one design goal that will not work well out of the box. Also, WiFi drains a good deal of power and to be promiscuously sniffing for networks and hoping on and off is going to drain the battery. Which means an end user will prefer the cell connection.
EDGE is impossibly slow. So you'll find that you usually have a 384K pipe MAX to your phone. More realistically the phone will operate at dialup speeds. Which means that google maps will be much less cool. Another feature will not work well out of the box.
What I've notice on my "smartphone" (EDGE connected) is that most pages with ads, are about 200-300K. That's HUGE when you are sitting at the end of such a connection.
And because safari advertises itself as a full version, you'll get the full content for the page, not something that is optimized for the amount of bandwidth available.
However EDGE is great for mail delivery, and messaging. It looks though that this phone isn't going to be great to type on. The touch screen is really not a good interface for a keyboard and unless there is tactile feedback of the key press (a quick vibrate might work well but it doesn't appear to do this) you'll find that it is slow and cumbersome and there is much uncertainty around if a key has been pressed. It "features" predictive text which is not that great (unless apple has some amazing contextual word predictor) too, a technology that just doesn't live up to the hype. So this is another area where the phone may not perform "properly".
Another area that the iPhone is going to have issues: battery life. Wifi draws an enormous amount of power for small batteries and so does a polling, always on data connection for IMAP/POP. Push mitigates this issue a bit but only yahoo, blackberry and exchange have this capability. Also, there is no "standby" time listed on Apple's site which tells me they haven't done enough testing on it. The net result is that we'll find the early adopters chained to their USB sync cable.
Some have compared this device to the Treo, and of course mentioned the measly storage for music, etc. etc. From personal experience I have found my smart phone to not be an effective music player mainly because mp3 playback takes a lot of battery, and I don't have stereo Bluetooth headphones. Then again, it wasn't designed as a music player. The iPhone is being advertised as a device that has music player capabilities. The thing is: it comes up short. 8 GB of storage is nothing. The price of FLASH is also not so high as to make 8 GB seem like a reasonable capacity for the price. Again, a not so "proper" music player.
Finally, and this is really the kicker - I've been reading reports that it is going to be closed. Apple can kiss the adoption of this phone goodbye if this goes closed. Almost every other mobile platform has more features today than the iPhone, and is less "provider tied" (cingular, yahoo, goog). Some of the stuff, gesture based interfaces are new - but that is icing on the. Apple is going to need its developer based to really fill out the capabilities of the phone. They will *need* them to push the phone to its limits - and thus make people want not only the phone but the leading edge, cool stuff they can do with it. And I'm n