Your friend probably has more knowledge on HCI than all of the comments here combined. Trust her, don't trust/., because what is true for cryptography is also true for usability - it's easy to get it wrong and hard to get it right, and it takes an expert to spot the difference.
This is not necessarily true. HCI is like other "semi-soft" academic fields (social sciences, economics, etc.): excessively prone to fads and getting lost in their own navel-gazing. For all that they talk about hard data, whether or not they are measuring something relevant is often not clear; all too often, there seems to be a subtle bias towards data that is easy to measure rather than truly meaningful.
All of the HCI people I've known have been very smart, had PhDs -- and quite narrow-minded in their thinking about how humans and computers interact....
They're about making apple embarassed to have dumped bridges with IBM. triple core 3.2GHz G5... take that!
It's apparently a triple-core G5... with the out-of-order execution machinery removed.
While that might acceptable for a game machine (game developers are probably willing to hand-optimize stuff, spend significant amounts of time tuning, stick to special-purpose libraries for most of the heavy lifting, etc), it's likely to be much less impressive when used as a normal computer running typical code.
RTFM. And try the sIFR demo. If you did either of these, you'd see that the text certainly can be highlighted, copied and pasted, and so on. It's even searchable and degrades gracefully since non-flash and non-javascript browsers simply get an unstyled version of the text. This is the whole point to sIFR.
Maybe that's intended point, but it doesn't seem to work -- when I try that page I get no headlines at all, merely huge blank areas and the body text; clicking the "disable sifr" button gives me big headlines in what seem to be normal fonts.
To think that a user, untrained in typography or any design methods, would be able to choose the "correct" font based purely on - what? - what they like? is a little ridiculous. That isn't to say that the user shouldn't be able to choose their own font - go ahead, screw up the design and lessen your experience - however, I should be able to specify the exact font that I've determined maximizes content delivery.
I'm sure you think so.
In all fairness, maybe you actually do it well -- but the majority of web designers making such claims (and demanding fine control over what the user sees) are idiots without an iota of design sense, much less any idea of what makes a web page usable, and deliver completely execrable results.
So given that the majority of web pages abuse what control they're given, I dunno, it seems not unreasonable to given them a bit less control by default.
TFA says that the lock-in is slowing growth. Whatever the cause, is anyone denying that this is true? I don't claim Apple is in any way required to license their DRM, but their failure to do so is resulting in my (and apparently many other people's) refusal to buy tracks from them or anyone else online. The fact that they're allowed to do it legally doesn't change the fact that it's anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
Hardly "anti-consumer" -- everyone I know with an Ipod uses it to play MP3s almost exclusively. Perhaps the ipod is "anti RIAA's plans for world domination" but who the hell cares about that except for the RIAA (and perhaps businessweek)?
A pleasant side effect of all this is that we seem to be seeing big-music's hold over consumer tastes slowly being broken. The RIAA knows this damn well, and are going to kick and scream until the end, but the writing's on the wall: they're going down.
an encyclopedia: "reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner."
That does clearly not fit wikipedia as it is now.
It clearly doesn't fit traditional "encyclopedias" either, as it's an impossible criteria to meet.
Of course, if you read the definition as it is actually intended to be read, it fits wikipedia pretty well -- a reference work that contains somewhat comprehensive information on selected topics, and covers a very wide range of topics in a less comprehensive but still informative manner.
Indeed, the great thing about wikipedia is that it covers, even briefly, soooo many things that aren't in traditional encyclopedias, especially more obscure "local" (e.g., my local train line) and technical (e.g. HDR imaging -- this article is quite short, but provides a useful intro before following the link at the bottom to Greg Ward's excellent page discussing the gritty details) topics, in a manner that at least attempts -- and usually succeeds -- to be somewhat dispassionate and regular.
Wikipedia clearly needs more mechanism to establish lines of trust/authority that can be used to judge the trustworthiness of unusual or controversial topics, but I don't think anybody is denying that. What people are saying is that for typical uses, it's already an invaluable tool.
As for coffee in a can. Well it just confirms that japanese are weird.
My GF is Korean, and when I first met her, she had no concept of coffee as anything other than a sweet milky canned drink you got from a vending machine to warm up in winter. She was completely disgusted by the (real) coffee I drank.
Of course now she has to drink two pots, black, and smoke a cigar, before she can properly start her day... [Ok, kidding about the cigar]
Yet, surprisingly enough, for me anyway, the Starbucks in central Vienna - the one near the opera, for example - were packed with locals, while the "local" shops had only some curious turists.
Starbucks does do some things right; making coffee beverages is simply not one of them.
For instance, despite the tackiness and banality of much of their decor (especially the "graffiti art"), starbucks store designers seem to understand how to use natural light -- I've seen several cases where a starbucks has (regretably) replaced a more unique home-grown cafe, and despite the consequent drop in product quality, the change in atmosphere was quite amazing, from dim and dark to light and airy, and (dare I say it?) inviting.
Another point that separates starbucks (and many other chains) from some traditional cafes is that they maintain a sort of "distance" between the staff and customers, which can make people feel more free to simply sit there and relax.
Starbucks drives me nuts. You can order the most elaborate drink combination known to man and yet they can't manage a cappuccino to save their lives.
Yeah, amen. Starbucks cappuccino is like... I don't know, it's like "plastic cappuccino." I guess it's that they try to stuff in more foam/milk in to pump up the volume without using relatively expensive espresso. I bitterly (haha) recall the time I asked a sbux employee to simply put in less milk/foam into my cappuccino ("Less foam please." "Ok, so more milk then?" "No, less milk too, just less everything milky." "Oh, so more foam then? You want some honey-nut sprinkles?").
Around here another big chain cafe is Segafredo (Italian chain so better pedigree I guess), and their cappuccino is vastly superior to starbucks, so it's clearly possible to do better even in the context of a big chain. With a cappuccino from Segafredo, at least you can actually identify that it's a coffee-related product! At starbucks, this is often difficult...
[I suppose some people like the sbux stuff because Chicago's Intelligentsia cafe offers both "traditional" cappuccino and "American style" cappuccino...]
Coffee is naturally bitter. The real coffee bean ground up and made into a drnk is extremely bitter. The instant crap isn't the issue here.
Bitterness is a taste that people usually like in conjunction with other tastes -- e.g., with chocolate, bitter+sweet is well liked, and with coffee, a sort of "richness" (I use the word "creamy" to describe it, but no actual cream is involved; I guess it's from the coffee oils??) or for some coffee types, acidity, combined with bitterness. People also like a more bitter brew of tea combined with lemon or milk more than they like either of the component tastes alone. In all these examples, the combination is the key.
Now granted that if Coke did it, it's likely to be vile simply because they're a giant soft-drink manufacturer, but the concept is not inherently wrong...
I really don't bother with the whole concept of "home page" anymore. These days, when I fire up my browser, I'm either clicking on a link from an email, or I already know what site I'm intending to visit, so it doesn't matter to me what site is "home." I can't imagine the same isn't true of many others
Wait a minute, you start your web browser more than once a day???
FWIW, I start firefox when I login every morning; after that everything is a new tab, perhaps opened by another program sending a URL using moz-remote or whatever it's called these days (anyway, the standard interface programs invoke to open a link in the web browser).
In this context, a home page is really quite useful, because there usually is someplace I want to visit as my first task of the day -- at work it's my company's sort of "employee info board" (where employees record their current location in case others need to track them down); at home it's just gmail.
Not only are there many Christians (one of my good friends is Japanese Christian, not to mention Koreans and other foreigners)
Er, well, where many == approx. 1% of population...
[The few Japanese Christians I've known have been completely insane too; if they detected even the slightest hint that you might possibly not competely ignore them, they'd be camped out on your doorstep at 5am every morning for 6 months, just in case.... shudder.]
The Japanese cops around here (near Tokyo) do. Well I can't say they all do, but some of them do (on the odd occasion I've happened to walk behind a cop, I've sometimes noticed "hey, he has a gun!").
You're quite right though, it's very very safe, and probably even safer if you're a foreigner ('cause there's that tiny bit of uncertainty that makes a thief look for an easier target). One of the things that I absolutely love about Tokyo is the ability to wander around completely random areas at 3am without thinking twice about getting killed.
NYC is a wonderful place, but to some degree much of it feels a little off-limits if you're not familiar with all the nuances of not-getting-mugged; Tokyo by contrast feels sort of... free. It's a nice feeling. I've lived in Japan for a long time, but I guess I'll eventually leave, and that simple feeling is something I'm going to miss a lot.
[Back on topic, the xbox situation in Japan is pretty funny; MS spent vast sums on advertising the original xbox too, and well.. we see where that got them. Then too, they seemed to focus on Shibuya (they completely blanketed the area -- e.g. every lamppost for miles around seemed to be flying a banner screaming "xbox!"); they're clearly convinced they have to capture the eye of trendy youth to succeed, but the xbox itself is fundamentally sort of dorky, so it's not an easy task. I'm not sure how the 360 is going to change that -- it's slightly less dorky than the original xbox, but not to any great degree. Given that, and the fickleness of fashion, I just don't see how this advertising strategy is going to work, but hey it's their money...]
The impression I get is that at Capcom the division between the creative types and the craven weasels at the top we call "management" is somewhat more pronounced that at other companies.
The ones who make cool games are the creative types; the ones who took Nintendo's money, flopped around wildly, and then stabbed them in the back, are "management". Creative types like cool hardware; management likes imagining they are friends with Bill Gates.
You are never going to get the rest of the world to use the word 'hacker' the way you want them to. Isn't it about time you came up with a new word to mean what you want 'hacker' to mean?
It's not "want", it's "does" -- to people in the hacker community, the word "hacker" does mean what it means. They could come up with another word (e.g., "kersnoinker") but it would be just as artificial and hollow as some people view the word "cracker". Words, after all, can mean different things in different contexts.
Anyway, the general public can get stuffed. They all run Windows and shop at Walmart too.
Re:Wasn't this one of the point Ebert made?
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Why Ebert Was Right
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Well... Star Wars did come out in the 70's, and the Godfather parts I and II, and Jaws...
There were a lot of crappy movies, to be sure but so there are now. For every Lord of the Rings you get tens (or more) Dooms.
Seriously, there were a lot of great movies made in the 70s, maybe more than in the 90s. Sure the 70s had its share of embarrassing fashion trends and awful television moments... but so did the 90s, the 80s, the 60s, the 50s -- and the '00s will too.
90% of everything is crap, this hasn't changed, and it's unlikely to do so in the future. Nothing to see, move along folks.
3DO, NEC's stuff, Neo Geo, and the Philips CD-i were all very poorly advertised and poorly received at the time.
As I recall, they all had somewhat severe problems too:
the 3DO was "3D" but all the games I saw for it were pretty klunky, the technology for good 3D just doesn't seem to have been there.
NEC's stuff (or at least what I saw) seemed way over-focused on "play a video and have a few sprites moving around on top of it". Yawn.
The Neo-Geo was very, very expensive, and games were insanely expensive. It was more "real" than the others though.
The CD-i sucked in roughly the same way the NEC stuff did, it seemed to be entirely based on some lame concept of "multimedia" but didn't deliver anything very interesting. It was almost like a buzzword released in product form.
The above judgements are based on playing the respective consoles in stores, so obviously it's possible that there were awesome games available that I didn't see. Still, none of them -- except perhaps the NeoGeo and nobody could afford that -- really seemed to reach out and grab you and make you wanna buy it and play it immediately (something even the NES did very well).
Your main problem though is going to be the people offended that there isn't a.goddess TLD; someone's bound to think that's important and kick up a fuss.
OS X is so damnned good that I've pretty much abandoned Linux after been devoted to it for many years.
I think it kind of depends on the sort of person you are: if you spend lots of time looking at "folders" and place lots of stuff on the "desktop", and run "apps", then you'll probably love OS/X -- it's made for someone like you.
But personally everytime I've used OS/X my reaction is "meh"; it's very pretty, and stuff is very smoothly integrated into the GUI, but the whole thing feels wrong, like I'm being forced to wear a formal suit for no good reason. [My reaction to Windows is much the same, except of course it's a lot less pretty, and a lot more clunky.]
There are good things about GUI environments -- I use Gnome's task bar, it's a reasonably nice way to keep track of multiple windows and have a few widgets -- but the idea that they are some sort of ultimate good for all people seems a bit narrow-minded.
That's why I view the oft-seen claims that "all the engineering types are moving to OS/X and abandoning linux/bsd/whatever" with a bit of skepticism. No doubt some "engineering types" were just hankering after a really good desktop, and pounced when OS/X came along -- but surely some are like me, and view something like OS/X as well-crafted but pointless (and slightly annoying) bling-bling.
[What I do use largely comes down to Emacs and firefox. Emacs especially overlaps the functionality of many common GUI apps, but does so in a much more malleable and adaptable way (albeit less pretty).]
Does anybody know how to prevent Screen from capturing the C-a keystrokes when in programs like Emacs?
Set the screen escape/command-char to something else. I use ^\ (which is normally "toggle-input-method" in Emacs, but that's less useful in a terminal anyway, due to lesser font support).
Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird are SLOW in 64MB RAM, and to be honest the PIII isn't helping much either.
It's mostly the RAM though.
My home system is a PIII 450MHz with 512MB of RAM (running an up-to-date debian unstable/experimental), and I've absolutely no problem with firefox, gnome, etc. I even do ray-tracing on that box (though to be honest that's pushing it... I mostly do smaller test scenes there:-).
I use much more up-to-date systems at work, and honestly, the difference in usability isn't all that huge. I haven't upgraded the home system simply because it hasn't been worth the bother so far, though I admit the ray-tracing thing has made me at least think about it.
A crucial factor, I think, is that recent versions of linux (2.6 era) have an absolutely great scheduler for interactive use -- the CPU load can be pegged at 100% for hours and it simply has no perceivable effect on interactive use, as long as you've got the memory to avoid paging.
Indeed every anecdote I have heard from developers I respect who work in the field indicate that for CPU and/or memory-intensive tasks, Java is far slower than either C or C++.
I think it strongly depends on what you're doing, and the technology you're using (C/C++ compilers are more or less standard technology, so there's not all that much difference between them, but java implementations are all over the map).
My rather casual knowledge of Java suggests that for traditional computational code, the heap-allocation of temporary objects and lack of "value" semantics is a weak point -- a common technique used to speed up java progs is to make all your methods pass back non-scalar results by writing into an "output argument", and allocate static global temporary objects for callers to use with such methods. This really speeds things up in many cases, but unfortunately it clutters up the code and makes it much less readable. C++ on the other hand, directly supports (indeed, is obsessed with...) value semantics in a way that lets you write code that essentially does the same thing internally, but is far clearer.
OTOH, if you're doing lispy stuff where you truly do want lots of heap-allocated objects, and it's a pain keeping track of it all, Java's direct support of GC can make C++ look downright clunky and ugly.
Ideally, it would be nice if C++ supported real GC (maybe it does in some forms) and Java better supported value semantics -- but doing such things might bloat the languages unacceptably (C++ in particular is teetering right on the edge already); sometimes it's better just to grit your teeth and use the right language for the job...
Not to detract from your point, but, my god, I made the mistake of reading the accompanying article, and it has to be about the most gut-churningly fanboyish thing I've ever read. They swoon over every single thing in the Xbox 360's box -- they swoon over the color, they swoon over the cooling vents, they swoon over the logo design, they swoon over the packing material...
Singapore seems closest in spirit to a "benevolent monarchy" -- if you go along with the ruling family (in every way), things will be peachy, but if you don't... well... your indictment will probably be quite legal.
[FWIW, my friend's sister-in-law married a Singaporean, and was initially entranced by the country (especially the "everybody's happy!" atmosphere), but ended up loathing it (perhaps for the same reason).]
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Your friend probably has more knowledge on HCI than all of the comments here combined. Trust her, don't trust /., because what is true for cryptography is also true for usability - it's easy to get it wrong and hard to get it right, and it takes an expert to spot the difference.
This is not necessarily true. HCI is like other "semi-soft" academic fields (social sciences, economics, etc.): excessively prone to fads and getting lost in their own navel-gazing. For all that they talk about hard data, whether or not they are measuring something relevant is often not clear; all too often, there seems to be a subtle bias towards data that is easy to measure rather than truly meaningful.
All of the HCI people I've known have been very smart, had PhDs -- and quite narrow-minded in their thinking about how humans and computers interact....
They're about making apple embarassed to have dumped bridges with IBM. triple core 3.2GHz G5... take that!
... with the out-of-order execution machinery removed.
It's apparently a triple-core G5
While that might acceptable for a game machine (game developers are probably willing to hand-optimize stuff, spend significant amounts of time tuning, stick to special-purpose libraries for most of the heavy lifting, etc), it's likely to be much less impressive when used as a normal computer running typical code.
Doh!
RTFM. And try the sIFR demo. If you did either of these, you'd see that the text certainly can be highlighted, copied and pasted, and so on. It's even searchable and degrades gracefully since non-flash and non-javascript browsers simply get an unstyled version of the text. This is the whole point to sIFR.
Maybe that's intended point, but it doesn't seem to work -- when I try that page I get no headlines at all, merely huge blank areas and the body text; clicking the "disable sifr" button gives me big headlines in what seem to be normal fonts.
[Browser is FF 1.5]
To think that a user, untrained in typography or any design methods, would be able to choose the "correct" font based purely on - what? - what they like? is a little ridiculous. That isn't to say that the user shouldn't be able to choose their own font - go ahead, screw up the design and lessen your experience - however, I should be able to specify the exact font that I've determined maximizes content delivery.
I'm sure you think so.
In all fairness, maybe you actually do it well -- but the majority of web designers making such claims (and demanding fine control over what the user sees) are idiots without an iota of design sense, much less any idea of what makes a web page usable, and deliver completely execrable results.
So given that the majority of web pages abuse what control they're given, I dunno, it seems not unreasonable to given them a bit less control by default.
TFA says that the lock-in is slowing growth. Whatever the cause, is anyone denying that this is true? I don't claim Apple is in any way required to license their DRM, but their failure to do so is resulting in my (and apparently many other people's) refusal to buy tracks from them or anyone else online. The fact that they're allowed to do it legally doesn't change the fact that it's anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
Hardly "anti-consumer" -- everyone I know with an Ipod uses it to play MP3s almost exclusively. Perhaps the ipod is "anti RIAA's plans for world domination" but who the hell cares about that except for the RIAA (and perhaps businessweek)?
A pleasant side effect of all this is that we seem to be seeing big-music's hold over consumer tastes slowly being broken. The RIAA knows this damn well, and are going to kick and scream until the end, but the writing's on the wall: they're going down.
an encyclopedia: "reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner."
That does clearly not fit wikipedia as it is now.
It clearly doesn't fit traditional "encyclopedias" either, as it's an impossible criteria to meet.
Of course, if you read the definition as it is actually intended to be read, it fits wikipedia pretty well -- a reference work that contains somewhat comprehensive information on selected topics, and covers a very wide range of topics in a less comprehensive but still informative manner.
Indeed, the great thing about wikipedia is that it covers, even briefly, soooo many things that aren't in traditional encyclopedias, especially more obscure "local" (e.g., my local train line) and technical (e.g. HDR imaging -- this article is quite short, but provides a useful intro before following the link at the bottom to Greg Ward's excellent page discussing the gritty details) topics, in a manner that at least attempts -- and usually succeeds -- to be somewhat dispassionate and regular.
Wikipedia clearly needs more mechanism to establish lines of trust/authority that can be used to judge the trustworthiness of unusual or controversial topics, but I don't think anybody is denying that. What people are saying is that for typical uses, it's already an invaluable tool.
As for coffee in a can. Well it just confirms that japanese are weird.
My GF is Korean, and when I first met her, she had no concept of coffee as anything other than a sweet milky canned drink you got from a vending machine to warm up in winter. She was completely disgusted by the (real) coffee I drank.
Of course now she has to drink two pots, black, and smoke a cigar, before she can properly start her day... [Ok, kidding about the cigar]
Yet, surprisingly enough, for me anyway, the Starbucks in central Vienna - the one near the opera, for example - were packed with locals, while the "local" shops had only some curious turists.
Starbucks does do some things right; making coffee beverages is simply not one of them.
For instance, despite the tackiness and banality of much of their decor (especially the "graffiti art"), starbucks store designers seem to understand how to use natural light -- I've seen several cases where a starbucks has (regretably) replaced a more unique home-grown cafe, and despite the consequent drop in product quality, the change in atmosphere was quite amazing, from dim and dark to light and airy, and (dare I say it?) inviting.
Another point that separates starbucks (and many other chains) from some traditional cafes is that they maintain a sort of "distance" between the staff and customers, which can make people feel more free to simply sit there and relax.
Starbucks drives me nuts. You can order the most elaborate drink combination known to man and yet they can't manage a cappuccino to save their lives.
Yeah, amen. Starbucks cappuccino is like... I don't know, it's like "plastic cappuccino." I guess it's that they try to stuff in more foam/milk in to pump up the volume without using relatively expensive espresso. I bitterly (haha) recall the time I asked a sbux employee to simply put in less milk/foam into my cappuccino ("Less foam please." "Ok, so more milk then?" "No, less milk too, just less everything milky." "Oh, so more foam then? You want some honey-nut sprinkles?").
Around here another big chain cafe is Segafredo (Italian chain so better pedigree I guess), and their cappuccino is vastly superior to starbucks, so it's clearly possible to do better even in the context of a big chain. With a cappuccino from Segafredo, at least you can actually identify that it's a coffee-related product! At starbucks, this is often difficult...
[I suppose some people like the sbux stuff because Chicago's Intelligentsia cafe offers both "traditional" cappuccino and "American style" cappuccino...]
Coffee is naturally bitter. The real coffee bean ground up and made into a drnk is extremely bitter. The instant crap isn't the issue here.
Bitterness is a taste that people usually like in conjunction with other tastes -- e.g., with chocolate, bitter+sweet is well liked, and with coffee, a sort of "richness" (I use the word "creamy" to describe it, but no actual cream is involved; I guess it's from the coffee oils??) or for some coffee types, acidity, combined with bitterness. People also like a more bitter brew of tea combined with lemon or milk more than they like either of the component tastes alone. In all these examples, the combination is the key.
Now granted that if Coke did it, it's likely to be vile simply because they're a giant soft-drink manufacturer, but the concept is not inherently wrong...
I really don't bother with the whole concept of "home page" anymore. These days, when I fire up my browser, I'm either clicking on a link from an email, or I already know what site I'm intending to visit, so it doesn't matter to me what site is "home." I can't imagine the same isn't true of many others
Wait a minute, you start your web browser more than once a day???
FWIW, I start firefox when I login every morning; after that everything is a new tab, perhaps opened by another program sending a URL using moz-remote or whatever it's called these days (anyway, the standard interface programs invoke to open a link in the web browser).
In this context, a home page is really quite useful, because there usually is someplace I want to visit as my first task of the day -- at work it's my company's sort of "employee info board" (where employees record their current location in case others need to track them down); at home it's just gmail.
Not only are there many Christians (one of my good friends is Japanese Christian, not to mention Koreans and other foreigners)
Er, well, where many == approx. 1% of population...
[The few Japanese Christians I've known have been completely insane too; if they detected even the slightest hint that you might possibly not competely ignore them, they'd be camped out on your doorstep at 5am every morning for 6 months, just in case.... shudder.]
cops don't even carry guns there
... free. It's a nice feeling. I've lived in Japan for a long time, but I guess I'll eventually leave, and that simple feeling is something I'm going to miss a lot.
The Japanese cops around here (near Tokyo) do. Well I can't say they all do, but some of them do (on the odd occasion I've happened to walk behind a cop, I've sometimes noticed "hey, he has a gun!").
You're quite right though, it's very very safe, and probably even safer if you're a foreigner ('cause there's that tiny bit of uncertainty that makes a thief look for an easier target). One of the things that I absolutely love about Tokyo is the ability to wander around completely random areas at 3am without thinking twice about getting killed.
NYC is a wonderful place, but to some degree much of it feels a little off-limits if you're not familiar with all the nuances of not-getting-mugged; Tokyo by contrast feels sort of
[Back on topic, the xbox situation in Japan is pretty funny; MS spent vast sums on advertising the original xbox too, and well.. we see where that got them. Then too, they seemed to focus on Shibuya (they completely blanketed the area -- e.g. every lamppost for miles around seemed to be flying a banner screaming "xbox!"); they're clearly convinced they have to capture the eye of trendy youth to succeed, but the xbox itself is fundamentally sort of dorky, so it's not an easy task. I'm not sure how the 360 is going to change that -- it's slightly less dorky than the original xbox, but not to any great degree. Given that, and the fickleness of fashion, I just don't see how this advertising strategy is going to work, but hey it's their money...]
The impression I get is that at Capcom the division between the creative types and the craven weasels at the top we call "management" is somewhat more pronounced that at other companies.
The ones who make cool games are the creative types; the ones who took Nintendo's money, flopped around wildly, and then stabbed them in the back, are "management". Creative types like cool hardware; management likes imagining they are friends with Bill Gates.
You are never going to get the rest of the world to use the word 'hacker' the way you want them to. Isn't it about time you came up with a new word to mean what you want 'hacker' to mean?
It's not "want", it's "does" -- to people in the hacker community, the word "hacker" does mean what it means. They could come up with another word (e.g., "kersnoinker") but it would be just as artificial and hollow as some people view the word "cracker". Words, after all, can mean different things in different contexts.
Anyway, the general public can get stuffed. They all run Windows and shop at Walmart too.
Well... Star Wars did come out in the 70's, and the Godfather parts I and II, and Jaws...
... but so did the 90s, the 80s, the 60s, the 50s -- and the '00s will too.
There were a lot of crappy movies, to be sure but so there are now. For every Lord of the Rings you get tens (or more) Dooms.
Seriously, there were a lot of great movies made in the 70s, maybe more than in the 90s. Sure the 70s had its share of embarrassing fashion trends and awful television moments
90% of everything is crap, this hasn't changed, and it's unlikely to do so in the future. Nothing to see, move along folks.
As I recall, they all had somewhat severe problems too:
The above judgements are based on playing the respective consoles in stores, so obviously it's possible that there were awesome games available that I didn't see. Still, none of them -- except perhaps the NeoGeo and nobody could afford that -- really seemed to reach out and grab you and make you wanna buy it and play it immediately (something even the NES did very well).
Your main problem though is going to be the people offended that there isn't a .goddess TLD; someone's bound to think that's important and kick up a fuss.
.dess.god
Er, well obviously:
Think hierarchically!
OS X is so damnned good that I've pretty much abandoned Linux after been devoted to it for many years.
I think it kind of depends on the sort of person you are: if you spend lots of time looking at "folders" and place lots of stuff on the "desktop", and run "apps", then you'll probably love OS/X -- it's made for someone like you.
But personally everytime I've used OS/X my reaction is "meh"; it's very pretty, and stuff is very smoothly integrated into the GUI, but the whole thing feels wrong, like I'm being forced to wear a formal suit for no good reason. [My reaction to Windows is much the same, except of course it's a lot less pretty, and a lot more clunky.]
There are good things about GUI environments -- I use Gnome's task bar, it's a reasonably nice way to keep track of multiple windows and have a few widgets -- but the idea that they are some sort of ultimate good for all people seems a bit narrow-minded.
That's why I view the oft-seen claims that "all the engineering types are moving to OS/X and abandoning linux/bsd/whatever" with a bit of skepticism. No doubt some "engineering types" were just hankering after a really good desktop, and pounced when OS/X came along -- but surely some are like me, and view something like OS/X as well-crafted but pointless (and slightly annoying) bling-bling.
[What I do use largely comes down to Emacs and firefox. Emacs especially overlaps the functionality of many common GUI apps, but does so in a much more malleable and adaptable way (albeit less pretty).]
Does anybody know how to prevent Screen from capturing the C-a keystrokes when in programs like Emacs?
.screenrc file, put:
Set the screen escape/command-char to something else. I use ^\ (which is normally "toggle-input-method" in Emacs, but that's less useful in a terminal anyway, due to lesser font support).
In your
escape ^\^\
Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird are SLOW in 64MB RAM, and to be honest the PIII isn't helping much either.
:-).
It's mostly the RAM though.
My home system is a PIII 450MHz with 512MB of RAM (running an up-to-date debian unstable/experimental), and I've absolutely no problem with firefox, gnome, etc. I even do ray-tracing on that box (though to be honest that's pushing it... I mostly do smaller test scenes there
I use much more up-to-date systems at work, and honestly, the difference in usability isn't all that huge. I haven't upgraded the home system simply because it hasn't been worth the bother so far, though I admit the ray-tracing thing has made me at least think about it.
A crucial factor, I think, is that recent versions of linux (2.6 era) have an absolutely great scheduler for interactive use -- the CPU load can be pegged at 100% for hours and it simply has no perceivable effect on interactive use, as long as you've got the memory to avoid paging.
Indeed every anecdote I have heard from developers I respect who work in the field indicate that for CPU and/or memory-intensive tasks, Java is far slower than either C or C++.
I think it strongly depends on what you're doing, and the technology you're using (C/C++ compilers are more or less standard technology, so there's not all that much difference between them, but java implementations are all over the map).
My rather casual knowledge of Java suggests that for traditional computational code, the heap-allocation of temporary objects and lack of "value" semantics is a weak point -- a common technique used to speed up java progs is to make all your methods pass back non-scalar results by writing into an "output argument", and allocate static global temporary objects for callers to use with such methods. This really speeds things up in many cases, but unfortunately it clutters up the code and makes it much less readable. C++ on the other hand, directly supports (indeed, is obsessed with...) value semantics in a way that lets you write code that essentially does the same thing internally, but is far clearer.
OTOH, if you're doing lispy stuff where you truly do want lots of heap-allocated objects, and it's a pain keeping track of it all, Java's direct support of GC can make C++ look downright clunky and ugly.
Ideally, it would be nice if C++ supported real GC (maybe it does in some forms) and Java better supported value semantics -- but doing such things might bloat the languages unacceptably (C++ in particular is teetering right on the edge already); sometimes it's better just to grit your teeth and use the right language for the job...
And here the article the picture's from
Not to detract from your point, but, my god, I made the mistake of reading the accompanying article, and it has to be about the most gut-churningly fanboyish thing I've ever read. They swoon over every single thing in the Xbox 360's box -- they swoon over the color, they swoon over the cooling vents, they swoon over the logo design, they swoon over the packing material...
Sort of the anti-slashdot, come to think of it.
Singapore seems closest in spirit to a "benevolent monarchy" -- if you go along with the ruling family (in every way), things will be peachy, but if you don't ... well... your indictment will probably be quite legal.
[FWIW, my friend's sister-in-law married a Singaporean, and was initially entranced by the country (especially the "everybody's happy!" atmosphere), but ended up loathing it (perhaps for the same reason).]