Lets be happy that we're probably the last generation that can watch how the beautiful girls walk on street in their red dresses and nice legs and ass. Sooner or later this will be reality, in a bad and a good way. While convenience is nice, it has bad sides too.
That being said, I would so use this. Can I get a comfortable computer chair version too, so I can get a beer easily (and one of those japanese beer serving machines please )
The boot time on both seem a little slow however. Would be nice if they also build really minimalistic OS that supports just browsing - kind of like Chrome OS. Maybe it gets integrated in the future versions? Would make a good sense with OLPC.
There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.
But what actually gave Wii some boost and made me pick it up again was the Motion Plus extension - it feels a lot better than the regular controller without it. Sadly, theres still not many games for it.
Also like was discussed a few days ago, Wii might be on end of its lifecycle soon and Nintendo might go a little different route with next console, which I actually find a little sad. The control scheme is a nice change and it could be utilized really well with some types of games. Nintendo should have pushed indie game developing a lot more, since thats where some great ideas could had been coming from and because of Wii's limited graphic powers, indie game developers could had concentrate on the control and gameplay a lot more.
Yep, thats the thing. Those hanging programs are even more of a problem with quad core, since they only hang one of them so you dont really notice. But when the meter shows that one core is all the time taking 100%, you know some program has hanged.
Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu:)
You also easily notice that which games need lots of memory and know beforehand to close the bigger programs. Games like Braid run without problems, but when running GTA IV it tends to go all the way to 95% RAM even with 4GB of it. If I leave Visual Studio or such big programs on the background, everything just slows down. It's a quick and easy way to notice wheres the problem.
There are actually other points you can look at. Things like how fast the browser starts rendering the page while its loading makes a huge difference too. If you sit there waiting for the page to load and looking at white/previous page, its slow. If the browser starts immediately rendering the loading page, atleast something is happening. MS improved this a lot in Win7 too. Just if you see that something is happening or whats loading, it feels faster than just waiting. Of course feel is hard to benchmark, so they usually don't, but it counts a lot too.
They dont need to be interacting all the time. This can be really useful for things like cpu/ram monitor, chatting, now playing or video. The another example people have here is the multidesktop thing, where you could change between desktops with the mini screens. Of course nothing world exploding, but small things like these can be quite useful.
However it seems like they only measured JavaScript engine, which by no means contribute everything to how fast browser or browsing feels. And everyone probably knew already that Google's JavaScript engine outperforms MS's (and being one of the main thing Google's thing use, they have a reason to optimize it till its dead)
This seems to be the usual thing with other browser benchmarks too, they only benchmark the javascript engines and similar under the hood things. Yeah it's easier, but it doesn't really tell the truth.
User interactions and GUI responsiveness contribute a lot, actually even more so, to how fast browsing feels. IE is horrible with this and has always been; everything lacks behind, scrolling is galaxies far from smooth and the general feeling is just bad. On that note, Firefox suffers a bit from the same things. I think only Opera and Chrome have done UI responsiveness good. Which also brings the question, does Chrome Frame improve it on IE too?
Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard.
Actually, when done correctly it works good. Myself I have Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard, which has 320x240 color LCD on the top of keyboard. Now I dont play much, but I find the keyboard really nice with its extra buttons that you can use for macros etc (and I get teh nerdy "command center" feel;)
The main thing I use it for is the cpu/ram meters. I know I could get it on the screen aswell, but I dont like that as I tend to run everything on fullscreen.. browser, visual studio, irc and just alt-tab between them. That is why desktop widgets dont work, because I never see them. On the other hand always-on-top widgets would be in the way all the time. But when its running on the lcd screen on keyboard that I dont all the time use for something else, its nice.
Another thing that I frequently use with the LCD is the YouTube player. When people paste some youtube link, I copy it to clipboard and instead of opening new browser tab and bringing it on top of the screen, it starts playing on the lcd screen. That way I can watch the video without actually putting all my concentration on it.
The screen is also great for providing all kinds of information from various programs, like chat windows, irc, rss reader, music player, stats or healthbars and so on in games. On an interesting note, someone even developed a counter-strike hack that used the lcd screen to display its menu and a radar. That way there wasn't any hack related menus etc on the actual screen, so screenshots didn't catch it.
However it looks like you would be looking at that laptop's screens from 45 or higher angle, which cant be that nice. Maybe they could had added another surface between screen and keyboard so that it would be angled better. But like the article says, its just a prototype to show off intel's experiements, and not likely a product.
Extra small screens can be really useful. It's a great place to show information or content that would get in the way if it was on your actual monitor. Having second monitor on side usually tends to go into other purposes and isn't usually on the view as good as lcd on top of your keyboard.
Oh thats the reason? I've always wondered why cant they try to make it work faster.
GUI responsiveness is one of the most major things that contribute to user experience. Even MS understood this with Win7, where they made the overall UI responsiveness faster, even if the actual things are still loading. As long as user feels he gets a fast response.
Actually, Ribbon takes more vertical space than the simple menubar. Theres lots of horizontal space to waste, but no vertical (and even more so with the move to HD dimensions)
However Ribbon's "contextual" system is horrible to user too. People get used to where things are, even more so with computers. That is why static, normal menus and buttons are good. When the system is trying to contextually offer the "best" options to user, in seemingly random places it thinks are most relevant, they just get confused.
I use browser and I I've learned where things are. I know better myself what I'm looking for than some algorithm that will just mix things up.
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
Seeing how many changes to the game and to the textures they've had to do, I'm not that surprised something that small slipped in.
The interesting thing now is if they're gonna remove that texture, remaster, repackage and send the new ones to all stores again, even more so because the game is over an month old now and the best sales are already gone.
I guess it depends on how you use it too. Myself I probably have little use to carry it around, so I would mostly be using it in a bed to read something or surf the web and so on. This probably dont have the same battery requirements as normal laptops, so the battery life would still be many hours.
The added advantage is that its not just eBook reader, but you can do a lot more with it. Personally I dont like using laptop in bed, its too clumsy or you cant get yourself in good position. If this is more book like, it works better.
Courier actually does look really nice. I have been thinking of buying a eBook reader, but the fact this has dual screen with multitouch makes me want to wait for this one, and that it can act as a tablet too. It makes it a lot more book like which you can see from the pictures too.
Besides eBook reader this would be a nice device to browse the web or do some work in the bed or sofa.
And I'm suprised to say this but compared to Apple's tablet this will probably be more open (in the not-restricted-to-apples-store way) and have a Windows platform. I hope they reveal more details soon.
The summary or the article doesn't mention all aspects on it. For a better article, see theregister. "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site." is wrong.
This only applies to files explicitly published using the suite's "publish as web page" or "publish/embed" options and linked to from a public webpage. This does not apply to files shared via the "Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)" option, which provides for document sharing without links to the public web.
So its not really as bad as it sounds. You have to explicitly publish them as webpage, which atleast for me tells that they might get indexed aswell, even more so if they are linked to from other websites.
The good thing Google could do here is to add explicit warning or small text under the publish option that the content you publish as webpage might be indexed by search engines aswell. Other than that I dont see a problem with this, as the users are explicitly publishing them.
Say what you will about nuclear weapons but they are probably the only reason that humanity hasn't fought World War III yet.
However, it seems they are being used as bullying now. If someone "new one" tries to make them, its a war. Or is someone else than N.Korea and Iran trying to make them now, as they are a bit extreme examples. But maybe they too are just trying to protect their own country (okay, N.Korea is a bit fucked up place)
And they are the reason world is getting more and more as a single nation. If you count in USA, EU, Russia and China thats pretty much 70% of the world. Now just create the same for Africa and we're close to 90%. What's left is to combine these 5 big ones together, and its one ruler over the planet. There might be good things on it, but I really wouldn't like to see it happen. While EU in here brings a lot of nice things like free trade and free moving and working between the area, there are downsides too.
Slashdot Mirror
I always keep wondering this. How the hell do you keep balance with just one wheel?
Lets be happy that we're probably the last generation that can watch how the beautiful girls walk on street in their red dresses and nice legs and ass. Sooner or later this will be reality, in a bad and a good way. While convenience is nice, it has bad sides too.
That being said, I would so use this. Can I get a comfortable computer chair version too, so I can get a beer easily (and one of those japanese beer serving machines please )
The boot time on both seem a little slow however. Would be nice if they also build really minimalistic OS that supports just browsing - kind of like Chrome OS. Maybe it gets integrated in the future versions? Would make a good sense with OLPC.
There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.
But that only tells the overall usage - its harder to notice with dual/quad cores since it only takes a small amount.
And the fact that xmas sales are coming soon.
But what actually gave Wii some boost and made me pick it up again was the Motion Plus extension - it feels a lot better than the regular controller without it. Sadly, theres still not many games for it.
Also like was discussed a few days ago, Wii might be on end of its lifecycle soon and Nintendo might go a little different route with next console, which I actually find a little sad. The control scheme is a nice change and it could be utilized really well with some types of games. Nintendo should have pushed indie game developing a lot more, since thats where some great ideas could had been coming from and because of Wii's limited graphic powers, indie game developers could had concentrate on the control and gameplay a lot more.
Yep, thats the thing. Those hanging programs are even more of a problem with quad core, since they only hang one of them so you dont really notice. But when the meter shows that one core is all the time taking 100%, you know some program has hanged.
Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu :)
You also easily notice that which games need lots of memory and know beforehand to close the bigger programs. Games like Braid run without problems, but when running GTA IV it tends to go all the way to 95% RAM even with 4GB of it. If I leave Visual Studio or such big programs on the background, everything just slows down. It's a quick and easy way to notice wheres the problem.
There are actually other points you can look at. Things like how fast the browser starts rendering the page while its loading makes a huge difference too. If you sit there waiting for the page to load and looking at white/previous page, its slow. If the browser starts immediately rendering the loading page, atleast something is happening. MS improved this a lot in Win7 too. Just if you see that something is happening or whats loading, it feels faster than just waiting. Of course feel is hard to benchmark, so they usually don't, but it counts a lot too.
They dont need to be interacting all the time. This can be really useful for things like cpu/ram monitor, chatting, now playing or video. The another example people have here is the multidesktop thing, where you could change between desktops with the mini screens. Of course nothing world exploding, but small things like these can be quite useful.
However it seems like they only measured JavaScript engine, which by no means contribute everything to how fast browser or browsing feels. And everyone probably knew already that Google's JavaScript engine outperforms MS's (and being one of the main thing Google's thing use, they have a reason to optimize it till its dead)
This seems to be the usual thing with other browser benchmarks too, they only benchmark the javascript engines and similar under the hood things. Yeah it's easier, but it doesn't really tell the truth.
User interactions and GUI responsiveness contribute a lot, actually even more so, to how fast browsing feels. IE is horrible with this and has always been; everything lacks behind, scrolling is galaxies far from smooth and the general feeling is just bad. On that note, Firefox suffers a bit from the same things. I think only Opera and Chrome have done UI responsiveness good. Which also brings the question, does Chrome Frame improve it on IE too?
Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard.
Actually, when done correctly it works good. Myself I have Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard, which has 320x240 color LCD on the top of keyboard. Now I dont play much, but I find the keyboard really nice with its extra buttons that you can use for macros etc (and I get teh nerdy "command center" feel ;)
The main thing I use it for is the cpu/ram meters. I know I could get it on the screen aswell, but I dont like that as I tend to run everything on fullscreen.. browser, visual studio, irc and just alt-tab between them. That is why desktop widgets dont work, because I never see them. On the other hand always-on-top widgets would be in the way all the time. But when its running on the lcd screen on keyboard that I dont all the time use for something else, its nice.
Another thing that I frequently use with the LCD is the YouTube player. When people paste some youtube link, I copy it to clipboard and instead of opening new browser tab and bringing it on top of the screen, it starts playing on the lcd screen. That way I can watch the video without actually putting all my concentration on it.
The screen is also great for providing all kinds of information from various programs, like chat windows, irc, rss reader, music player, stats or healthbars and so on in games. On an interesting note, someone even developed a counter-strike hack that used the lcd screen to display its menu and a radar. That way there wasn't any hack related menus etc on the actual screen, so screenshots didn't catch it.
However it looks like you would be looking at that laptop's screens from 45 or higher angle, which cant be that nice. Maybe they could had added another surface between screen and keyboard so that it would be angled better. But like the article says, its just a prototype to show off intel's experiements, and not likely a product.
Extra small screens can be really useful. It's a great place to show information or content that would get in the way if it was on your actual monitor. Having second monitor on side usually tends to go into other purposes and isn't usually on the view as good as lcd on top of your keyboard.
Oh thats the reason? I've always wondered why cant they try to make it work faster.
GUI responsiveness is one of the most major things that contribute to user experience. Even MS understood this with Win7, where they made the overall UI responsiveness faster, even if the actual things are still loading. As long as user feels he gets a fast response.
Actually, Ribbon takes more vertical space than the simple menubar. Theres lots of horizontal space to waste, but no vertical (and even more so with the move to HD dimensions)
There is user css for it in Opera, and some addon in firefox too. Maybe some firefox user can give a name.
Its possible to do almost full restyle of a site with custom css files. Maybe not the functionality so, but the look atleast.
However Ribbon's "contextual" system is horrible to user too. People get used to where things are, even more so with computers. That is why static, normal menus and buttons are good. When the system is trying to contextually offer the "best" options to user, in seemingly random places it thinks are most relevant, they just get confused.
I use browser and I I've learned where things are. I know better myself what I'm looking for than some algorithm that will just mix things up.
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
On an interesting question, how many police officers play Grand Theft Auto?
Maybe cops dont get paid that good after all, if they only get to play Wii when they're busting their owners.
Here's a huge list of screenshots of differences between uncensored and german version
Some of the changes I found a little fun too, like the hand.
It's also interesting that the game is 18+ and germans are still not allowed to see any blood.
Here's the texture they apparently forgot to modify.
Seeing how many changes to the game and to the textures they've had to do, I'm not that surprised something that small slipped in.
The interesting thing now is if they're gonna remove that texture, remaster, repackage and send the new ones to all stores again, even more so because the game is over an month old now and the best sales are already gone.
I guess it depends on how you use it too. Myself I probably have little use to carry it around, so I would mostly be using it in a bed to read something or surf the web and so on. This probably dont have the same battery requirements as normal laptops, so the battery life would still be many hours.
The added advantage is that its not just eBook reader, but you can do a lot more with it. Personally I dont like using laptop in bed, its too clumsy or you cant get yourself in good position. If this is more book like, it works better.
Courier actually does look really nice. I have been thinking of buying a eBook reader, but the fact this has dual screen with multitouch makes me want to wait for this one, and that it can act as a tablet too. It makes it a lot more book like which you can see from the pictures too.
Besides eBook reader this would be a nice device to browse the web or do some work in the bed or sofa.
And I'm suprised to say this but compared to Apple's tablet this will probably be more open (in the not-restricted-to-apples-store way) and have a Windows platform. I hope they reveal more details soon.
They actually are, thats why the quirks mode is still there for backwards compatibility.
The summary or the article doesn't mention all aspects on it. For a better article, see theregister. "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site." is wrong.
This only applies to files explicitly published using the suite's "publish as web page" or "publish/embed" options and linked to from a public webpage. This does not apply to files shared via the "Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)" option, which provides for document sharing without links to the public web.
So its not really as bad as it sounds. You have to explicitly publish them as webpage, which atleast for me tells that they might get indexed aswell, even more so if they are linked to from other websites.
The good thing Google could do here is to add explicit warning or small text under the publish option that the content you publish as webpage might be indexed by search engines aswell. Other than that I dont see a problem with this, as the users are explicitly publishing them.
Why do you think the slashdot article is here?!
Say what you will about nuclear weapons but they are probably the only reason that humanity hasn't fought World War III yet.
However, it seems they are being used as bullying now. If someone "new one" tries to make them, its a war. Or is someone else than N.Korea and Iran trying to make them now, as they are a bit extreme examples. But maybe they too are just trying to protect their own country (okay, N.Korea is a bit fucked up place)
And they are the reason world is getting more and more as a single nation. If you count in USA, EU, Russia and China thats pretty much 70% of the world. Now just create the same for Africa and we're close to 90%. What's left is to combine these 5 big ones together, and its one ruler over the planet. There might be good things on it, but I really wouldn't like to see it happen. While EU in here brings a lot of nice things like free trade and free moving and working between the area, there are downsides too.