I'm going to agree, when you have millionaire game developers bitching about "the industry" and then unwilling to put their money where their mouths are it rings really hollow. Hell, Gabe Newell signed with Electronic Arts after finally getting away from Vivendi. Yes, it's a limited agreement but Valve is still unwilling to take on their own marketing, retail distribution and such.
If someone else is paying your bills you play by their rules. This isn't a new concept.
I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously. The fact that the current beta uses the exact same rendering engine as IE6 doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence to me. It sounds like they're still hacking away on the old version.
Honestly there's a few fixes thay could make that would solve a whole lot of stuff fairly quickly:
- Fix the box model
- Fix inheritance issues
- Implement:hover: correctly
Hell, even if they just fixed the box model that would solve the bulk of the problems that people are having now. I'm still curious why they botheres with this "beta" except to show off their awesome new UI that breaks all known UI design conventions for no compelling reason.
Curses! I thought this was a followup to Dieselboy's brilliant 2004 mixtape entitled "The Dungeonmasters' Guide". Not that super-evil drum & bass fits with D&D that well...
Yeah, like most of the time we have misleading headlines and article.
Most analysts thought there was no way the the PSP would be less than $350-500 when it came out. Analysts are the people who were saying "Apple should become a software company" in 1996. Anaylists are the people who saw "significant upside" in Pets.com and Webvan. More recently, Merrill Lynch [who issued this report] paid $35 million in penalties for their involvement in the Enron scandal.
Also, the "go underground" thing was in reference to SCEE [Sony Computer Entertainment Europe] and the teams working on stuff like Killzone. Sony has an uncanny knack for taking the wind out of their competitors' marketing sails at very inopportuno moments.
Seamus Blackley who was at the time a Microsoft employee said it about the Xbox though:
"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"
Yeah, they suck so much that they've only moved almost 200 million systems and 1.75 billion games in the last decade. They totally suck ass and everything they do is so terrible that they outsell their closest competitors by a factor of 4.
Why on God's green earth would a programmer not use all of the processor(s)? Just to be lazy? Absolutely not! Games cost too much to develop not to take advantage of the hardware.
I'm curious about that one as well, it's not like any engineer worth their salt would be satisfied with themselves for doing that. This seems like just an elaborate troll by Anand. No one should be surprised that a multi-core chip won't perform well if you only use one of them. It sounds like his 'sources' are all in PC-centric developers who are stuck in their way of thinking.
He didn't even do very good research, at one point he claims that a single title can move "hundreds of millions of consoles" which is an order of magnitude or two off. The PS2 just hit 90 million shipped, and the XBox and Gamecube are around 20 million each right now.
Yes, a $1500 PC in 2006 will 'outperform' a $300 game console. This should surprise nobody. With the terrible piracy and low sales of PC gaming I'm sure Anand's sponsors are getting a wee bit nervous about the future of the PC "enthusiast" market and this just seems like pandering to his market of people who are willing to pay $500 for 8% better framerate.
Zeldman's book is good if you need to convince your boss that it's a good idea but it's alittle short on the "meat" part. He's a great writer though.
If you're really interested in learning about CSS it's best to go straight to the source [literally, these guys helped develop the spec] and get Bert Bos and Hakon Lie's Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, it's by far to most detailed and even goes into the design reasons behind a lot of the decisions made when CSS was developed. There's a new version out now, but if you've got another source about browser support and you ignore the irrelevant WebFonts and Aural stylesheet section the second edition is pretty much the same book but probably loads cheaper.
This book and the O'reilly XHTML book are the most useful technical references I've ever used.
That's funny, because all the people I know who are good at what they do here in the Bay Area are gainfully employed and making more money than we were in 2000 [and it's *cash* too]. Hell, I haven't worked at a company that didn't have 5+ open local programmer reqs since 2001.
The people who are still out of work 5 years later must be seriously lacking in any valuable skill other than "inflating executive egos", "blowing hot air" and "getting other people to do their work for them". Yeah, if you were a "producer", "integrator" or "chief creative officer" in '99 you're going to be driving a cab but there's always a demand for people who have good ideas and can deliver on them.
p.s. Please note that "writing some complicated text parsing code that kind of integrated with a database" isn't marketable in the valley anymore.
I prefer Rhodia and Miquelrius pads, but don't get me started on those Moleskine bastards!
I went through 2 electronic organizers and 3 generations of PDA until I realized that for me the portability, durability and usability of paper really can't be beaten. If you have an idea that's REALLY good you'll be happy to transcribe it again.
Suppose Coca-Cola offered to pay Joe Blogpack $2,500 to do a column talking about a dead rat found in a storage container at a Pepsi bottling facility, how quickly do you think he would jump? Do you think he would care if the story is true? And if he did, would he have access to the resources to find out if it's true? Suppose news.google.com is running 200 links to other bloggers who didn't take the time to fact check - our honorable Joe Blogpack checks his facts against the tainted stories and even thinks he's doing the right thing.
And this, kids, is the difference between 'reporting' and 'journalism'. We've just had our standards lowered by the willingness of our mainstream media to report anything - rumors, opinions, lightly edited press releases, as "news" and run on to the next hot topic and pray that you don't change the channel during the ads.
Blogging isn't going to replace journalism because of these exact problems. Blogging might do a lot of harm to the mainstream US news media but it's their own damn fault for abandoning true journalism and resorting to showing the same video clip everyone else has, just 2 minutes earlier and with more sensationalistic or opinionated commentary.
"The news is just a TV show, get past it" - Dilated Peoples
Thurrot is one of the biggest Microsoft fanboys/shills on the face of the earth and for anything that's not completely rah rah about them to appear on his site is newsworthy, if only for the fact that it further points out how much of a hack he is.
Maybe you can explain to me why I should need iTunes, ActiveSync or any other add-on software when my only goal is to move files into flash memory (my cell phone) or a hard drive (my daughters iPod) via USB? There is no technical reason to require this. Period.
It seems to me that there are valid technical reasons for both of those. I'm not really familiar with ActiveSync so I'll just address iTunes. The iPod doesn't just copy music files, it also manages all the associated metadata like the database of songs, ratings, playlists and everything else. The communication is two ways. Having all that information available to the device is one of the major things that makes the iPod's interface better than a lot of its competitors. Yes, the iPod could rebuild its database manually every time you disconnect it or on command but when you're talking about potentially having to sort through 60 gigs of music that could be very time-consuming and detrimental to battery life.
Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
What? You can install iTunes on one computer and your daughter can use that one to put music on her iPod. There's nothing about iTunes that prevents you from using any other software. What's incompatible? It sounds like you're just being indignant for the sake of it or just to hate on Apple and there's plenty of software for people like you as well [ephpod, anapod, etc.].
I'm still not convinced that we even need a next-generation format. HDTV is insanely scarce outside of the US [and most "HDTV" units already in the US are 480P EDTV anyway and most of the ones that actually are HD are rear projection units sitting in sunny rooms with the factory settings intact] and DVD is the most successful format in history. Obviously Hollywood wouldn't mind due to what I'm sure is much stronger DRM on new formats but we currently have two superior formats to CD and for consumers the convenience of lower-quality sound from digital files is winning out. Only a tiny percentage of audio nerds [and it's even a fraction of them because many audiophiles are terrified of any digital equipment] have bought into the new formats and they're people who ahve no problems with rebuying their favorite music over and over. The same may happen with movies.
Look at Laserdisc - far better picture and sound than VHS, no rewinding and pretty good studio support for a while but the cost, convenience and durability advantages of tapes won out in the end.
Usability is all too frequently seen as a "bonus add-on" than one of the core pieces of software design. Slick icons and app "skinning" do not make anything more usable. If you developers aren't down with taking design criticism from a non-coder [as many I've encountered are] about things other than the way something looks at least take the time to read up on these subjects yourself. People like Don Norman, Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, and teams from Apple and Microsoft all have a great deal of writings on these subjects available.
Re:I just wrote my local paper about this
on
PSP Launch Coverage
·
· Score: 1
As opposed to thos open portable game formats like cartridges? Everyone's making a tempest in a teapot ofver the 'proprietary' nature of UMD when every single major handheld has had completely proprietary media to date. As far as it being a popular movie format I think Sony's just putting it out there and seeing if it sticks. They don't want to threaten their own DVD sales.
I think most poeple are just grouchy because there's no way to currently pirate games. Cheapasses.
For at least the last 18-24 months it's been increasingly difficult to find non-spam/redirect/affiliate program links for a search on any popular consumer product on Google. Maybe they have too much faith in their current PageRank and think it needs to be tweaked instead of overhauled. Maybe they think they have enough momentum and don't care. They certainly should have the talent and resources to do something about this and it's kind of sad that they haven't. I predict we'll see another whizzy side project in a few months instead.
The thing is that all they have to do is keep it just good enough that people won't leave. Remember, AdWords is Google's product, everything else [gmail, orkut, etc] they've got is just a way to show you those ads. Google's success is entirely because they had clearly better search results than anyone else. If another company can clearly best them then Google may be in trouble.
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I don't like the fact that the people who write and report things not available elsewhere are lumped in with teenage Xanga users who complain about their English teachers or the 'digerati' RSS-feed meta-meta-meta-trackback circlejerk crew who just post a bunch of headlines about a comment that some guy made on another guys blog regarding a sarcastic comment made in reference to a NYT article from 3 days ago.
Bloggies.com defines a weblog as "A 'weblog' is defined as a page with dated entries." Now that seems a little presumptuous to backwards-include a large percentage of all websites to fit your trendy tea party.
AppleInsider has been operating since long before anyone except Dave Winer was using the term 'weblog' and when posting 50 times a day while creating no actual content of value was known as an "E/N Site" [Everything/Nothing]. The association of the defendants in this case with the 'blogosphere' as a whole is doing them a disservice and might just fuck the whole first amendment.
It's impossible to participate in the world when you're too busy sitting at home and making up snarky comments about it as it passes you by in your RSS reader.
Google is a good search engine but they've been completely owned by 'optimizers' [I have a slightly less polite term for them] for years now. Google really needs to radically change Pagerank soon, the worse their results get the more vulnerable they are to a competitor with better technology. It happened to us when I worked at AltaVista, we tried adding a bunch of features instead of improving core search results and we got completely killed by Google which had almost no features, just better results.
Can we drop the "XBox Next" thing? There is absolutely no way the console will be called that, It's just something some game 'journalist' at IGN or ZD made up one day.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to agree, when you have millionaire game developers bitching about "the industry" and then unwilling to put their money where their mouths are it rings really hollow. Hell, Gabe Newell signed with Electronic Arts after finally getting away from Vivendi. Yes, it's a limited agreement but Valve is still unwilling to take on their own marketing, retail distribution and such.
If someone else is paying your bills you play by their rules. This isn't a new concept.
I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously. The fact that the current beta uses the exact same rendering engine as IE6 doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence to me. It sounds like they're still hacking away on the old version.
Honestly there's a few fixes thay could make that would solve a whole lot of stuff fairly quickly:
:hover: correctly
- Fix the box model
- Fix inheritance issues
- Implement
Hell, even if they just fixed the box model that would solve the bulk of the problems that people are having now. I'm still curious why they botheres with this "beta" except to show off their awesome new UI that breaks all known UI design conventions for no compelling reason.
Curses! I thought this was a followup to Dieselboy's brilliant 2004 mixtape entitled "The Dungeonmasters' Guide". Not that super-evil drum & bass fits with D&D that well...
Yeah, like most of the time we have misleading headlines and article.
Most analysts thought there was no way the the PSP would be less than $350-500 when it came out. Analysts are the people who were saying "Apple should become a software company" in 1996. Anaylists are the people who saw "significant upside" in Pets.com and Webvan. More recently, Merrill Lynch [who issued this report] paid $35 million in penalties for their involvement in the Enron scandal.
Also, the "go underground" thing was in reference to SCEE [Sony Computer Entertainment Europe] and the teams working on stuff like Killzone. Sony has an uncanny knack for taking the wind out of their competitors' marketing sails at very inopportuno moments.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html?legacy=
Yeah, they suck so much that they've only moved almost 200 million systems and 1.75 billion games in the last decade. They totally suck ass and everything they do is so terrible that they outsell their closest competitors by a factor of 4.
I'm curious about that one as well, it's not like any engineer worth their salt would be satisfied with themselves for doing that. This seems like just an elaborate troll by Anand. No one should be surprised that a multi-core chip won't perform well if you only use one of them. It sounds like his 'sources' are all in PC-centric developers who are stuck in their way of thinking.
He didn't even do very good research, at one point he claims that a single title can move "hundreds of millions of consoles" which is an order of magnitude or two off. The PS2 just hit 90 million shipped, and the XBox and Gamecube are around 20 million each right now.
Yes, a $1500 PC in 2006 will 'outperform' a $300 game console. This should surprise nobody. With the terrible piracy and low sales of PC gaming I'm sure Anand's sponsors are getting a wee bit nervous about the future of the PC "enthusiast" market and this just seems like pandering to his market of people who are willing to pay $500 for 8% better framerate.
It was just a test to see if Slashdot would substitute in their own referrer code, I swear! Uh, yeah!
Zeldman's book is good if you need to convince your boss that it's a good idea but it's alittle short on the "meat" part. He's a great writer though.
If you're really interested in learning about CSS it's best to go straight to the source [literally, these guys helped develop the spec] and get Bert Bos and Hakon Lie's Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web , it's by far to most detailed and even goes into the design reasons behind a lot of the decisions made when CSS was developed. There's a new version out now, but if you've got another source about browser support and you ignore the irrelevant WebFonts and Aural stylesheet section the second edition is pretty much the same book but probably loads cheaper.
This book and the O'reilly XHTML book are the most useful technical references I've ever used.
That's funny, because all the people I know who are good at what they do here in the Bay Area are gainfully employed and making more money than we were in 2000 [and it's *cash* too]. Hell, I haven't worked at a company that didn't have 5+ open local programmer reqs since 2001.
The people who are still out of work 5 years later must be seriously lacking in any valuable skill other than "inflating executive egos", "blowing hot air" and "getting other people to do their work for them". Yeah, if you were a "producer", "integrator" or "chief creative officer" in '99 you're going to be driving a cab but there's always a demand for people who have good ideas and can deliver on them.
p.s. Please note that "writing some complicated text parsing code that kind of integrated with a database" isn't marketable in the valley anymore.
I prefer Rhodia and Miquelrius pads, but don't get me started on those Moleskine bastards!
I went through 2 electronic organizers and 3 generations of PDA until I realized that for me the portability, durability and usability of paper really can't be beaten. If you have an idea that's REALLY good you'll be happy to transcribe it again.
And this, kids, is the difference between 'reporting' and 'journalism'. We've just had our standards lowered by the willingness of our mainstream media to report anything - rumors, opinions, lightly edited press releases, as "news" and run on to the next hot topic and pray that you don't change the channel during the ads.
Blogging isn't going to replace journalism because of these exact problems. Blogging might do a lot of harm to the mainstream US news media but it's their own damn fault for abandoning true journalism and resorting to showing the same video clip everyone else has, just 2 minutes earlier and with more sensationalistic or opinionated commentary.
"The news is just a TV show, get past it" - Dilated Peoples
Thurrot is one of the biggest Microsoft fanboys/shills on the face of the earth and for anything that's not completely rah rah about them to appear on his site is newsworthy, if only for the fact that it further points out how much of a hack he is.
What? You can install iTunes on one computer and your daughter can use that one to put music on her iPod. There's nothing about iTunes that prevents you from using any other software. What's incompatible? It sounds like you're just being indignant for the sake of it or just to hate on Apple and there's plenty of software for people like you as well [ephpod, anapod, etc.].
I'm still not convinced that we even need a next-generation format. HDTV is insanely scarce outside of the US [and most "HDTV" units already in the US are 480P EDTV anyway and most of the ones that actually are HD are rear projection units sitting in sunny rooms with the factory settings intact] and DVD is the most successful format in history. Obviously Hollywood wouldn't mind due to what I'm sure is much stronger DRM on new formats but we currently have two superior formats to CD and for consumers the convenience of lower-quality sound from digital files is winning out. Only a tiny percentage of audio nerds [and it's even a fraction of them because many audiophiles are terrified of any digital equipment] have bought into the new formats and they're people who ahve no problems with rebuying their favorite music over and over. The same may happen with movies.
Look at Laserdisc - far better picture and sound than VHS, no rewinding and pretty good studio support for a while but the cost, convenience and durability advantages of tapes won out in the end.
Usability is all too frequently seen as a "bonus add-on" than one of the core pieces of software design. Slick icons and app "skinning" do not make anything more usable. If you developers aren't down with taking design criticism from a non-coder [as many I've encountered are] about things other than the way something looks at least take the time to read up on these subjects yourself. People like Don Norman, Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, and teams from Apple and Microsoft all have a great deal of writings on these subjects available.
Relevant reading on this subject by John Gruber:
Ronco Spray-on Usability
Sundry 'Spray-On' Clarifications and Corrections
As opposed to thos open portable game formats like cartridges? Everyone's making a tempest in a teapot ofver the 'proprietary' nature of UMD when every single major handheld has had completely proprietary media to date. As far as it being a popular movie format I think Sony's just putting it out there and seeing if it sticks. They don't want to threaten their own DVD sales.
I think most poeple are just grouchy because there's no way to currently pirate games. Cheapasses.
For at least the last 18-24 months it's been increasingly difficult to find non-spam/redirect/affiliate program links for a search on any popular consumer product on Google. Maybe they have too much faith in their current PageRank and think it needs to be tweaked instead of overhauled. Maybe they think they have enough momentum and don't care. They certainly should have the talent and resources to do something about this and it's kind of sad that they haven't. I predict we'll see another whizzy side project in a few months instead.
The thing is that all they have to do is keep it just good enough that people won't leave. Remember, AdWords is Google's product, everything else [gmail, orkut, etc] they've got is just a way to show you those ads. Google's success is entirely because they had clearly better search results than anyone else. If another company can clearly best them then Google may be in trouble.
Twisted Metal does internet play out of the box.
How can they declare the DS the "Gameplay" winner when the PSP has more launch titles than the DS has total games out 4 months after its release?
People are far too eager to compare systems by their hardware alone or their 'potential' when the only thing that matters are the games available.
Warning: rant ahead
I don't like the fact that the people who write and report things not available elsewhere are lumped in with teenage Xanga users who complain about their English teachers or the 'digerati' RSS-feed meta-meta-meta-trackback circlejerk crew who just post a bunch of headlines about a comment that some guy made on another guys blog regarding a sarcastic comment made in reference to a NYT article from 3 days ago.
Bloggies.com defines a weblog as "A 'weblog' is defined as a page with dated entries." Now that seems a little presumptuous to backwards-include a large percentage of all websites to fit your trendy tea party.
AppleInsider has been operating since long before anyone except Dave Winer was using the term 'weblog' and when posting 50 times a day while creating no actual content of value was known as an "E/N Site" [Everything/Nothing]. The association of the defendants in this case with the 'blogosphere' as a whole is doing them a disservice and might just fuck the whole first amendment.
It's impossible to participate in the world when you're too busy sitting at home and making up snarky comments about it as it passes you by in your RSS reader.
Google is a good search engine but they've been completely owned by 'optimizers' [I have a slightly less polite term for them] for years now. Google really needs to radically change Pagerank soon, the worse their results get the more vulnerable they are to a competitor with better technology. It happened to us when I worked at AltaVista, we tried adding a bunch of features instead of improving core search results and we got completely killed by Google which had almost no features, just better results.
Can we drop the "XBox Next" thing? There is absolutely no way the console will be called that, It's just something some game 'journalist' at IGN or ZD made up one day.