My boss got one and it's a piece of junk. You see how the word "vaio" is embossed across the cover? It's not embossed, it's painted to look embossed. The trackpad doesn't register my finger movement half of the time, and the screen is relatively disappointing. And attaching peripherals is a nightmare. They didn't think carefully about where cords and plugs should go, and they end up getting in your way. I haven't used one myself, but one of my coworkers used a Sharp Acticus (if I spelled it right) and said it was the best mini-laptop around.
Lombard is that curvy street in SF that you see in the Guiness Book of Records. It's also the British equivalent of Wall Street. Both references are plausible in connection to the new Powerbooks because 1) The current Powerbooks are codenamed "Wall Street" and 2) The new ones are supposed to be curvy as hell.
I was selling official VCD's three and a half years ago with a Taiwanese computer company that I worked at part time. I also saw bootlegs around that time too and I wouldn't be surprised if they were around before then.
According to the Slashdot Quotient, if my site gets slashdotted and crashes, I get the same amount of points as gettting slashdotted and surviving? How do you play a game if everyone gets the same score?
I've forced IP NetRouter to map out the necessary RTP/RTSP ports as described on Macintouch's QT4 feedback page, but it can only map out ports for one machine at a time! It's okay for now because the other people in my office don't care/know about streaming video, but if it's this much trouble to get one machine to view a stream, quite a few people are going to pass over QT4's streaming features.
I've also been informed that Apple has made available the source code to compile a RTP/RTSP proxy. This is no good to me, because it only works on 'nix. My software router's a Mac. Does anyone know of another solution?
I discovered why I couldn't view QT streaming at work. My office's DSL line is being shared with IP masqing, and the beta of QT4 doesn't handle the protocols for masqeraded addresses. This is really going to suck if they don't fix it in the final version.
Jeez, I think someone was taking the metaphors a little too seriously. I mean, when someone says "Love is a red red rose" you don't go asking him what part of love the petals or anthers represent, or complaining that the metaphor shows a lack of knowledge about botany.
I agree that Neal Stephenson's essay was not perfect, but the fact that it clicked with so many people on the internet reveals that it speaks to us in a way that we can all relate at about subjects that we all share.
Bottom line: this guy either has a big stick up his ass or he was just aiming for some quick publicity.
The reason why the 640 trailer doesn't playback sound in QT3 is that it uses the new QDesign2 sound codec. If you want any idea how good the new sound codec is, the old trailer was 480 pixels wide, had 22khz sound, and was 24.8 MB. The new trailer is 640 pixels wide, has 44khz sound and is 25.2 MB (video track is much larger, sound track is higher quality and is much smaller).
The quicktime streaming examples took forever to see (too many people trying to get on the same 3 sites) but when I finally got to see it, it was okay... about the same as RealVideo (as in, it sounds like talking through a tincan and looks like fingerpaint).
BTW, there's no point in converting this to MPEG or AVI. The file size would either be enormous or look crappy, won't be much better than the previous trailer you've already seen, and how many times have you already seen this thing!?!
Macintouch seems to have taken off the link, which was at the very top of their front page. Kinda curious why.
Either way, server is opensource, the viewers are not. I don't use Linux myself, but I believe that the Linux user base is big enough now to warrant a little more engineering effort on Apple's part to port it to Linux. Sorenson is an awesome codec and should be more widely available, free or not.
A poll idea? I'm no expert on law, but couldn't that kind of data be potential subpoena material in a court of law? I think we'd see quite a few AC's posting on that subject
It has 4 main buttons, and 2 trigger buttons where your index fingers are, plus an analog and 4-way direction controllers.
By boss brought one back from Japan. I'm sorry to say that there's no Panzer Dragoon in sight (It was the one of the greatest 3D games on any platform IMO). I got pretty far in Sonic Adventure, and although the game looked absolutely beautiful, the gameplay itself was incredibly counter-intuitive and you can't fast forward through the boring movies.
Virtua Fighter 3 was another great diappointment. I read in several magazines that the Dreamcast would have greater polygon count and 3D processing power than the Model3 motherboard that Sega used in the arcade version of Virtua Fighter 3. Boy, were they wrong! The arcade version had curved polygons, which I was eagerly awaiting to see in the Dreamcast version. Unfortunately the home version was completely made up of good old faceted polys. And the gameplay can't even touch Tekken 3.
There was also a penguin racing game. Avoid it. He looked like Tux on crack.
In all, Sega really screwed up. The Dreamcast came out behind schedule in Japan, and created more bad publicity by demoting the exec in charge of the launch. Sonic wasn't even available until a few weeks after Dreamcast went on sale, and the current crop of games that I played were an enormous letdown. The gameplay didn't even deserve the awesome graphical capabilities of this machine, and Playstation2 seems to have even greater graphical power. I was really rooting for Sega because of nostalgia over the Genesis and hoping they could get over their Saturn disaster in America, but Sony seems to have positioned itself to push Sega out of the home console market permanently.
Yeah, it might have been nice if the EvangeList switched gears and became a cool-Mac-news thing instead of Mac apologetics, but I guess the advocacy was ingrained into their name. Besides, there's a whole slew of other Mac groups and websites now.
BTW, Guy's at Garage.com now, a VC thing for startups.
LOC is definitely no way to measure quality or productivity, but there's some truth to the story. Many software houses have become so successful that many programmers with stock options have become filthy rich. The result is that the programmers have less incentive to put in extra time and energy for coding. They're rich alreay! Why work hard? There was an article a while back on CNet or ZDNet (can't recall which) which offered that explanation for the recent bloatware proliferation and why Windows2000 is running into so many brick walls.
Of course, that only happens to the programmers who don't code for the fun of it. =)
Last I recall, Sony was still on the fence about whether to add DVD-Video support or not. It's a given that the games will be on DVD discs, but Sony had concerns that movie playback might cut into sales of their DVD-Video players.
I've found that since the moderators have been given less points to moderate with, there've been a lot of good comments (or at least Score:1) that haven't been scored at all and consequently don't show up on my radar when I set my threshold to 1. I could set my threshold to 0, but then I'd be subjecting myself to a greater noise/signal ratio.
IOW, I liked it better when almost all comments were scored.
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember, Mindcraft sounds familiar for some reason, like they ran other studies and benchmarks for Microsoft in the past, and were poo-pooed even back then for their biased tests... does anyone recall this?
The Linux PPC guys figured out how to make Linux run on the beige G3's without any help from Apple, disproving Be's complaint that they need all the developer info in order to develop for a platform. Hey, they got N64 and Playstations running on computers after all.
Of course, it'll slow things down a bunch for Linux development, but either way, Linux will still have a future on the Mac. Besides, Apple just posted a job opening for a "Linux Master" a month ago, didn't they?
Slashdot Mirror
My boss got one and it's a piece of junk. You see how the word "vaio" is embossed across the cover? It's not embossed, it's painted to look embossed. The trackpad doesn't register my finger movement half of the time, and the screen is relatively disappointing. And attaching peripherals is a nightmare. They didn't think carefully about where cords and plugs should go, and they end up getting in your way. I haven't used one myself, but one of my coworkers used a Sharp Acticus (if I spelled it right) and said it was the best mini-laptop around.
Lombard is that curvy street in SF that you see in the Guiness Book of Records. It's also the British equivalent of Wall Street. Both references are plausible in connection to the new Powerbooks because 1) The current Powerbooks are codenamed "Wall Street" and 2) The new ones are supposed to be curvy as hell.
I was selling official VCD's three and a half years ago with a Taiwanese computer company that I worked at part time. I also saw bootlegs around that time too and I wouldn't be surprised if they were around before then.
According to the Slashdot Quotient, if my site gets slashdotted and crashes, I get the same amount of points as gettting slashdotted and surviving? How do you play a game if everyone gets the same score?
Who's gonna pony up the cash to buy a Mindcraft study? =)
I've forced IP NetRouter to map out the necessary RTP/RTSP ports as described on Macintouch's QT4 feedback page, but it can only map out ports for one machine at a time! It's okay for now because the other people in my office don't care/know about streaming video, but if it's this much trouble to get one machine to view a stream, quite a few people are going to pass over QT4's streaming features.
I've also been informed that Apple has made available the source code to compile a RTP/RTSP proxy. This is no good to me, because it only works on 'nix. My software router's a Mac. Does anyone know of another solution?
I'll try out the links you guys gave me
For those who haven't seen it: go check it out
Hopefully it will answer all of the burning questions we've been having about yoda's anatomy.
I discovered why I couldn't view QT streaming at work. My office's DSL line is being shared with IP masqing, and the beta of QT4 doesn't handle the protocols for masqeraded addresses. This is really going to suck if they don't fix it in the final version.
Jeez, I think someone was taking the metaphors a little too seriously. I mean, when someone says "Love is a red red rose" you don't go asking him what part of love the petals or anthers represent, or complaining that the metaphor shows a lack of knowledge about botany.
I agree that Neal Stephenson's essay was not perfect, but the fact that it clicked with so many people on the internet reveals that it speaks to us in a way that we can all relate at about subjects that we all share.
Bottom line: this guy either has a big stick up his ass or he was just aiming for some quick publicity.
The reason why the 640 trailer doesn't playback sound in QT3 is that it uses the new QDesign2 sound codec. If you want any idea how good the new sound codec is, the old trailer was 480 pixels wide, had 22khz sound, and was 24.8 MB. The new trailer is 640 pixels wide, has 44khz sound and is 25.2 MB (video track is much larger, sound track is higher quality and is much smaller).
The quicktime streaming examples took forever to see (too many people trying to get on the same 3 sites) but when I finally got to see it, it was okay... about the same as RealVideo (as in, it sounds like talking through a tincan and looks like fingerpaint).
BTW, there's no point in converting this to MPEG or AVI. The file size would either be enormous or look crappy, won't be much better than the previous trailer you've already seen, and how many times have you already seen this thing!?!
Macintouch seems to have taken off the link, which was at the very top of their front page. Kinda curious why.
Either way, server is opensource, the viewers are not. I don't use Linux myself, but I believe that the Linux user base is big enough now to warrant a little more engineering effort on Apple's part to port it to Linux. Sorenson is an awesome codec and should be more widely available, free or not.
A poll idea? I'm no expert on law, but couldn't that kind of data be potential subpoena material in a court of law? I think we'd see quite a few AC's posting on that subject
Ugh, it made me queasy. I guess if there's a demand for it, I there's a reason for it to exist. Me, I'll stick to the good ol' index.pl
Hey, but the cool thing is that in conjunction with the Star Wars theme, we see the Emperor on the cover of Time.
Guys, a beta of Quicktime 3.0 is available for Mac and Windows java machines. How hard would this be to port to a Linux java machine?
It has 4 main buttons, and 2 trigger buttons where your index fingers are, plus an analog and 4-way direction controllers.
By boss brought one back from Japan. I'm sorry to say that there's no Panzer Dragoon in sight (It was the one of the greatest 3D games on any platform IMO). I got pretty far in Sonic Adventure, and although the game looked absolutely beautiful, the gameplay itself was incredibly counter-intuitive and you can't fast forward through the boring movies.
Virtua Fighter 3 was another great diappointment. I read in several magazines that the Dreamcast would have greater polygon count and 3D processing power than the Model3 motherboard that Sega used in the arcade version of Virtua Fighter 3. Boy, were they wrong! The arcade version had curved polygons, which I was eagerly awaiting to see in the Dreamcast version. Unfortunately the home version was completely made up of good old faceted polys. And the gameplay can't even touch Tekken 3.
There was also a penguin racing game. Avoid it. He looked like Tux on crack.
In all, Sega really screwed up. The Dreamcast came out behind schedule in Japan, and created more bad publicity by demoting the exec in charge of the launch. Sonic wasn't even available until a few weeks after Dreamcast went on sale, and the current crop of games that I played were an enormous letdown. The gameplay didn't even deserve the awesome graphical capabilities of this machine, and Playstation2 seems to have even greater graphical power. I was really rooting for Sega because of nostalgia over the Genesis and hoping they could get over their Saturn disaster in America, but Sony seems to have positioned itself to push Sega out of the home console market permanently.
Yeah, it might have been nice if the EvangeList switched gears and became a cool-Mac-news thing instead of Mac apologetics, but I guess the advocacy was ingrained into their name. Besides, there's a whole slew of other Mac groups and websites now.
BTW, Guy's at Garage.com now, a VC thing for startups.
LOC is definitely no way to measure quality or productivity, but there's some truth to the story. Many software houses have become so successful that many programmers with stock options have become filthy rich. The result is that the programmers have less incentive to put in extra time and energy for coding. They're rich alreay! Why work hard? There was an article a while back on CNet or ZDNet (can't recall which) which offered that explanation for the recent bloatware proliferation and why Windows2000 is running into so many brick walls.
Of course, that only happens to the programmers who don't code for the fun of it. =)
Last I recall, Sony was still on the fence about whether to add DVD-Video support or not. It's a given that the games will be on DVD discs, but Sony had concerns that movie playback might cut into sales of their DVD-Video players.
I've found that since the moderators have been given less points to moderate with, there've been a lot of good comments (or at least Score:1) that haven't been scored at all and consequently don't show up on my radar when I set my threshold to 1. I could set my threshold to 0, but then I'd be subjecting myself to a greater noise/signal ratio.
IOW, I liked it better when almost all comments were scored.
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember, Mindcraft sounds familiar for some reason, like they ran other studies and benchmarks for Microsoft in the past, and were poo-pooed even back then for their biased tests... does anyone recall this?
Forgive me for sounding out of it, but do the x86 Linux distributions have support for USB? Or is it just Linux PPC that's missing it?
The Linux PPC guys figured out how to make Linux run on the beige G3's without any help from Apple, disproving Be's complaint that they need all the developer info in order to develop for a platform. Hey, they got N64 and Playstations running on computers after all.
Of course, it'll slow things down a bunch for Linux development, but either way, Linux will still have a future on the Mac. Besides, Apple just posted a job opening for a "Linux Master" a month ago, didn't they?