Come on, everything about Starbucks is just a bit creepy, the way they took the laid back Seattle coffee-house, encapsulated it into hyper-efficient soulless corporate package, and watched (with tight-lipped smiles) as the world collapsed quivering at their feet.
They're like McDonald's, not really where you wanted to go, but um, gee, soooo convenient (they even have a branch by my house, which is just about the least fashionable neighborhood ever). I go there too, but inevitably end up slightly creeped out by the way every branch is precisely the same as every other branch, and the way clerks respond to any question about their coffee with slightly irrelevant and clearly rote-memorized answers (ask for clarification, and watch them repeat word for word!).
Unfortunately for the forces of good, Starbucks has an almost irresistible feature: they're entirely non-smoking (I live in a place where "real" cafes are inevitably filled with cigarette smoke; man, isn't one drug at a time enough?!?).
I wrote: Come on, let's be honest: Bill Gates used the C word because he wanted to smear free software, as free software interferes with his personal plans for taking everybody's money.
You wrote: I don't think so. I think that he used the word to say "I have no intention of pleasing communists. My business caters to those people that believe in some degree of private ownership."
I don't think the above two statements are inconsistent. I have no doubt he really meant most of his statement, but the word "communist" doesn't fit, as it's absurdly inaccurate -- and obviously so, especially to someone who should be well versed in the issues like B.G. Morever, given that it's a well known "hot button" word, especially to conservatives/businesses, with a long history of being thrown about rather cluelessly as an invective against anybody that challenges the corporate mainstream, it has obvious smear value.
Of course it could have been merely a childish insult because he's feeling beleaguered. Poor Bill!
It's hard to see what you (or Bill Gates, according to your defense of him) is actually trying to say. The idea that because of "the involvement of China and India" the "FSF has a significant element of communists" is just completely bizarre -- (1) neither China or India has much presence in the free software world, though being poor countries they're naturally interested in avoiding microsoft's profit machine (2) China may be communist [in name, though more like bizarro authoritarian corporatist lackey in reality], but India is a firm democracy.
There certainly doesn't seem to be much communism or socialism in mainstream free software either. By far the majority of people in the free software movement seem to be either libertarian types or typical mild lefties (no that's not socialism), and far more concerned with preserving personal freedom than with mandating anything.
Of course free software itself isn't communist or socialist at all; RMS has this to say:
... it's not socialist or Communist because those have to do with centralized ownership of things. We're not talking about centralized anything. It's about individual freedom.
Come on, let's be honest: Bill Gates used the C word because he wanted to smear free software, as free software interferes with his personal plans for taking everybody's money.
Seems like most consoles get about 1 or 2 really cool games a year, a handful of "pretty good" games, a few more "cool if you're twisted" (naturally or artificially) games, and of course reams and reams of utter toss.
The reason of course, is that it's really hard to make a truly great game, especially with the insane budgets required to be graphically excellent these days, and most game companies are either barely competent and/or rigidly controlled by tasteless marketing goons. Typically even if a development group somehow manages to buck the trend and turn out something innovative and fun, it'll sell 1% under the marketing department's projections (i.e., guesses), and the rebel developers will be reigned in and forced to work on the next installment of "NASCAR prostitute hunting" -- a sure seller.
I guess the moral is: If you really want excellence, go read a book or something. Most of those suck too, but there are a lot more of them...
Comcast is not going to cater individually to your interests and they must believe that the gaming audience is larger or a more compelling demographic for advertisers than the old audience was. Can you argue otherwise?
These new shows seemed aimed more at (some bizarre subgroup of) the NASCAR/strip-bar demographic -- larger to be sure, but more desirable for advertisers?!? My impression is that the typical techie/nerd is a lot more free with his money than the walmart crowd...
Disclaimer: I've never watched G4 or techtv, or their mutant spawn. I don't have cable. Hell, I don't even live in the U.S.
The Celeron processor is still faster than the 1.25 GHz G4 PowerPC.
Er, have you ever used a P4 Celeron? In my experience, it's one of the most horribly anemic processors around, and performs far worse than you'd think by looking at the clock speed. As far as I can figure the main reason for the P4 Celeron's crap performance is the tiny 128MB level 2 cache, which just kills it on a lot of modern software.
The G4 used in the Mac Mini has a 512MB level 2 cache, which is a lot more reasonable. Memory bus speeds seem comparable: Dell 400MHz, Mac 333MHz.
Anyway, it's far from clear that the Dell is actually faster in any useful sense (though I guess they are in the "marketing to the ignorant" sense, which is usually why companies use P4 Celerons).
Yup, me too. I've been putting off buying a new PC for ages because they all seem really, well, sucky.
So I'm still using a 400MHz P3 -- this new mac may be slow for many but for me it will be great step up.... and it's beautiful, and small, and elegant, and all those other things other PC makers seem to have utterly no clue about. Even the various companies making small designer cases never seem to really get it right -- they try, but inevitably seem to turn out something just slightly bloated and clunky. Then along comes Apple, and just blows them all away.
See, what apple (but no other company it seems) knows, is that design matters. This is what I want.
Well, I have no money at the moment, but I'll wait a while until I do, and until Linux has been ported (OS/X is nice, sure, but I'm a linux guy), then I'm off to get a mini (and a gig of RAM)...
I'm definitely someone you could describe as "anti-social", and I'm sure this is a negative thing for me in many ways, in a society where social connections are very important.
I've thought about this a fair bit, and compared my reactions to that of outgoing friends -- and I've reached the conclusion that a large part of it is because I simply like people less(!): In equally stressful situations, the more outgoing person will put up with the stress, and the crap, because they want to be with people, but at some point I just say the hell with it, it's not worth it.
Some of the above-mentioned outgoing friends complain endless about the people they hang out with. I'll ask "If you don't like them, then why hang out with them?" -- and there will be this weird feeling of mutual incomprehension, and they'll say "Well there's no-one else to hang out with, I don't want anybody to think I'm alone!"
... but the reason they have a cell phone is to hide behind it.
Yeah I've noticed that too.
Cell phones are also often used in a more benign way, as a "fidget toy" to reduce anxiety in uncomfortable social situations (the same way you'd take a sip of your drink when you're not sure what to say).
This is especially good because for some people they seem to have replaced cigarettes for this purpose -- sure cell phones can be annoying, but they're a damn site better than clouds of foul smelling smoke!
As we can juge by the entire set of photos, not only that one, it seems CES on all all about empty mod cases. Nothing much else.
That's always mystified me -- on the rare occasion that I buy a new PC, sure, I'm all for an attractive case, but judging from a lot of tech sites (slashdot included), there are fair number of people that spend all their time thinking about it...
The extra clearance required beneath the USB port for the folded-down part of this card could be annoying in many cases -- e.g., I have USB ports on my keyboard that have enough room beneath them for a typical USB key, but it looks like one of these SD cards wouldn't fit; I'd think many laptops would have the same problem.
Lack of freedom is only annoying when e.g. a game provides buildings with doors that can't be opened.
Speak for yourself...
There more sucky and less sucky ways to force a player to stick to a linear path, but even in a very polished game, it's often pretty obvious what's being done, and yes, it can be annoying even when done "well."
Clearly it's impossible to give arbitrary amounts of freedom, but even a little goes a long way towards improving the experience; think of it as "sorta linear, but with a lot of fuzz aroung the edges", where the fuzz can be optional little side-quests or hidden things for the player to find, dealing naturally when players try to avoid restrictions (I'm thinking of the Metroid games here, where there was a clear order of things you should do, but extremely advanced players could sometimes skip ahead by using very tricky techniques to avoid "impossible" obsctacles).
In the end, I think many players (maybe not you) really like the feeling of freedom, so game developers have a lot of incentive to try more general techniques that avoid pre-computing stuff in favor of more realistic models. Maybe in the short term this can decrease the quality of games, but in the long term it could result in something extremely cool...
An insightful and elegantly written defense of blogs. [mind is boggling now]
As I understand it, the traditional meaning of "blog" involves people writing out lots and lots of text in a journal or something, and allowing others to read and/or comment on it. This sort of "me-centered" approach seems almost guaranteed to generate huge reams of naval gazing and banality, with some beneficial side effects that you mention.
It seems that a more traditional conversational model, whether usenet or a web-site forum, offers the same advantages with a lot less crap -- mind you, still insane amounts of crap, but compared to blogs...
That is, community is good, but too much freedom to blather isn't; the community should be the point, not a side-effect.
Maybe in 20 years you will be mooching off of someone who is mooching off of you now.
Ha ha, that's how I figure things, though on a personal/family level rather than involving the government: I'm very generous about giving and allowing myself to be mooched off of, but if worse comes to worst, guess who's gonna be on your doorstep...
Gee, I hope it works...
[I wish I could in some way depend on the government too, for assistance in dire circumstances, but I don't live in a country where that happens. I happily pay my taxes, on the off chance it helps, though I suppose they're pretty much directly funneled into Haliburton these days....]
Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with your last point - humans are not robots, and there are often other circumstances - but that should not preclude giving managers the tools to they need to manage.
But I think very often it has nothing to do with "the need to manage", but rather with the need for managers to feel that they're doing something, even when it's actually counter-productive for the company as a whole (though it can be in the manager's best interest by giving him something to cover his ass with -- "I implemented a plan to improve employee efficiency by nailing them to the floor; inspiring slogans will maintain morale!").
Of course sometimes it's also just that the manager is an insane control freak.
Huh? It's absolutely the right thing to do. The cops aren't going throw them in jail, they're going to scare the crap out of them, which is the only thing that will prevent them from doing the same dangerous, obnoxious, moronic thing again.
If they were doing something that was just obnoxious and moronic, calling the police is perhaps an overreaction, but this was beyond that, and Joe Random yelling at them is simply not going to have the same effect as the police talking to them calmly.
[I'm not sure what your problem with the police is anyway, in most areas of the U.S. (maybe not central LA:-o) they're pretty reasonable and perfectly capable of dealing appropriately with such situations -- including telling you to get a grip.]
A built in radio stops you looking like a complete nerd, having your MP3 player on one arm, radio on the other, graphing calculator in one pocket, cell phone on your hip, PDA in the other pocket and god knows how many pocket protectors.
So do they have special "nerd" t-shirts with pockets for the pocket protectors? Or do nerds just wear button down shirts in the gym too....?
Seriously. I wanted to buy my girlfriend an ipod mini for christmas; as the first n stores I tried were sold out, I looked seriously at the 10 zillion other "ipodalikes" out there (including many very nicely priced and very small flash players).
After doing that for a while, I realized that I'd just have to keep on trying new stores, because frankly the ipod mini is far more appealing than any of the competition. Not least (hey it's apple), it's so elegant -- the size, shape, and controls are perfect, it doesn't have the silly geegaws that most such products have hanging off them, nor the ugly chrome trim that seems der rigeur for other manufacturers. The screen and interface are relatively simple, but work wonderfully. Every other similar device I looked at seemed like cheap hackwork by comparison.
I'm not really a huge fan of the original ipod, which is just a little too big, but man, the ipod mini has me salivating. I'm not sure how I can use one myself as I run linux on an old PC (with neither firewire nor usb 2.0 ports), but if I can figure out some way to download music from linux, I'm gonna get one too...
[BTW, I did eventually find a mini, in a nice pink color...:-]
I don't know how hard it would be for Emacs to use XFT or FreeType
Chris Gray did a proof-of-concept port to XFT, and as I understand it, XFT's claimed compatibility interface (with existing X font mechanisms) was not compatible enough to work well. He expressed the opinion that Emacs would have to switch over to using native XFT interfaces, and this is something of a large task for Emacs, which demands a lot from the font interface.
[Note: I don't understand the details, this is a paraphrase of a message Chris sent me; any bogosities are likely due to my misunderstanding!]
I suppose it's only a small thing, but I think Apple could at least bring their good design sense to bear.
For all the huge number of cell-phone makers and phones, about 70% of them are completely awful in design, and most of the rest merely OK; even manuf.s who are normally good at product design, like Sony, seem to completely lose it when it comes to cell-phones (in Sony's case, they seem to be partnering with Ericson, so perhaps it's the latter's fault).
Re:Cockroach bomb shelters and buttered kitten pow
on
The Year In Ideas
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· Score: 1
Secondly, given that anything buttered always lands butter side down, has anyone considered buttering a kitten's back?
My sister used to have kitten that hadn't learned to wash (from its mother or wherever kittens are supposed to learn that). In order to induce this poor stinky kitten to wash its fur, they resorted to buttering it.
I don't think they tried flinging it in the air while buttered though (one can imagine the poor thing trying desperately to complete its washing, while spinning rapidly, before it hits the ground; talk about kitty stress!).
The PSP feels really heavy though (holding is like holding a typical 3.5" hard-drive), it's not something I'd want in my pocket.
While that sort of density definitely gives it an air of "quality", it's not very practical for use I think.
Re:Why I'm getting the DS instead of the PSP:
on
PSP Opened up and Exposed
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· Score: 3, Informative
I finally got a bit of hands-on time with a PSP, so I'd like to add a few more entries:
(7) The PSP is a brick. Honestly, the thing is really heavy, I felt like I'd need weight training to use it for any length of time. It feels bigger than it looks.
(8) The control scheme is kinda sucky, despite the presence of an analogue joystick. The analogue joystick seemed poorly placed (rammed way down in the lower corner), and very touchy to use. Furthermore, since the controls are clearly not directly compatible with the dual-shock anyay, my god, why on earth did they retain the same enormously crappy digital pad they've been using since the PSX, and why did they give the digital pad the "prime" location?!?!? It's not just annoying to use, it's downright painful after extended use.
The screen is definitely very nice (especially the amount of unit real-estate devoted to it -- makes the DS look almost primitive), and it's clear that Sony is really pushing the the technical envelope with the PSP, but it's also starting to seem like they forgot to include good user-design among their list of criteria for the PSP. It's pretty dissapointing to see a market-leading company with so much money -- and so much to win/lose -- making such silly mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, everything about Starbucks is just a bit creepy, the way they took the laid back Seattle coffee-house, encapsulated it into hyper-efficient soulless corporate package, and watched (with tight-lipped smiles) as the world collapsed quivering at their feet.
For a more journalistic take, I refer you to the famous Onion article Starbucks To Begin Sinister `Phase Two' Of Operation (weird URL because the original article isn't available anymore).
They're like McDonald's, not really where you wanted to go, but um, gee, soooo convenient (they even have a branch by my house, which is just about the least fashionable neighborhood ever). I go there too, but inevitably end up slightly creeped out by the way every branch is precisely the same as every other branch, and the way clerks respond to any question about their coffee with slightly irrelevant and clearly rote-memorized answers (ask for clarification, and watch them repeat word for word!).
Unfortunately for the forces of good, Starbucks has an almost irresistible feature: they're entirely non-smoking (I live in a place where "real" cafes are inevitably filled with cigarette smoke; man, isn't one drug at a time enough?!?).
I wrote: Come on, let's be honest: Bill Gates used the C word because he wanted to smear free software, as free software interferes with his personal plans for taking everybody's money.
You wrote: I don't think so. I think that he used the word to say "I have no intention of pleasing communists. My business caters to those people that believe in some degree of private ownership."
I don't think the above two statements are inconsistent. I have no doubt he really meant most of his statement, but the word "communist" doesn't fit, as it's absurdly inaccurate -- and obviously so, especially to someone who should be well versed in the issues like B.G. Morever, given that it's a well known "hot button" word, especially to conservatives/businesses, with a long history of being thrown about rather cluelessly as an invective against anybody that challenges the corporate mainstream, it has obvious smear value.
Of course it could have been merely a childish insult because he's feeling beleaguered. Poor Bill!
There certainly doesn't seem to be much communism or socialism in mainstream free software either. By far the majority of people in the free software movement seem to be either libertarian types or typical mild lefties (no that's not socialism), and far more concerned with preserving personal freedom than with mandating anything.
Of course free software itself isn't communist or socialist at all; RMS has this to say:
Come on, let's be honest: Bill Gates used the C word because he wanted to smear free software, as free software interferes with his personal plans for taking everybody's money.
Seems like most consoles get about 1 or 2 really cool games a year, a handful of "pretty good" games, a few more "cool if you're twisted" (naturally or artificially) games, and of course reams and reams of utter toss.
The reason of course, is that it's really hard to make a truly great game, especially with the insane budgets required to be graphically excellent these days, and most game companies are either barely competent and/or rigidly controlled by tasteless marketing goons. Typically even if a development group somehow manages to buck the trend and turn out something innovative and fun, it'll sell 1% under the marketing department's projections (i.e., guesses), and the rebel developers will be reigned in and forced to work on the next installment of "NASCAR prostitute hunting" -- a sure seller.
I guess the moral is: If you really want excellence, go read a book or something. Most of those suck too, but there are a lot more of them...
Comcast is not going to cater individually to your interests and they must believe that the gaming audience is larger or a more compelling demographic for advertisers than the old audience was. Can you argue otherwise?
These new shows seemed aimed more at (some bizarre subgroup of) the NASCAR/strip-bar demographic -- larger to be sure, but more desirable for advertisers?!? My impression is that the typical techie/nerd is a lot more free with his money than the walmart crowd...
Disclaimer: I've never watched G4 or techtv, or their mutant spawn. I don't have cable. Hell, I don't even live in the U.S.
The Celeron processor is still faster than the 1.25 GHz G4 PowerPC.
Er, have you ever used a P4 Celeron? In my experience, it's one of the most horribly anemic processors around, and performs far worse than you'd think by looking at the clock speed. As far as I can figure the main reason for the P4 Celeron's crap performance is the tiny 128MB level 2 cache, which just kills it on a lot of modern software.
The G4 used in the Mac Mini has a 512MB level 2 cache, which is a lot more reasonable. Memory bus speeds seem comparable: Dell 400MHz, Mac 333MHz.
Anyway, it's far from clear that the Dell is actually faster in any useful sense (though I guess they are in the "marketing to the ignorant" sense, which is usually why companies use P4 Celerons).
Er, well you forgot the main reasons people like the Mac Mini: small size and the svelte, elegant design of the hardware, software, and GUI.
Microsoft never could figure those parts out.
Yup, me too. I've been putting off buying a new PC for ages because they all seem really, well, sucky.
... and it's beautiful, and small, and elegant, and all those other things other PC makers seem to have utterly no clue about. Even the various companies making small designer cases never seem to really get it right -- they try, but inevitably seem to turn out something just slightly bloated and clunky. Then along comes Apple, and just blows them all away.
So I'm still using a 400MHz P3 -- this new mac may be slow for many but for me it will be great step up.
See, what apple (but no other company it seems) knows, is that design matters. This is what I want.
Well, I have no money at the moment, but I'll wait a while until I do, and until Linux has been ported (OS/X is nice, sure, but I'm a linux guy), then I'm off to get a mini (and a gig of RAM)...
I'm definitely someone you could describe as "anti-social", and I'm sure this is a negative thing for me in many ways, in a society where social connections are very important.
I've thought about this a fair bit, and compared my reactions to that of outgoing friends -- and I've reached the conclusion that a large part of it is because I simply like people less(!): In equally stressful situations, the more outgoing person will put up with the stress, and the crap, because they want to be with people, but at some point I just say the hell with it, it's not worth it.
Some of the above-mentioned outgoing friends complain endless about the people they hang out with. I'll ask "If you don't like them, then why hang out with them?" -- and there will be this weird feeling of mutual incomprehension, and they'll say "Well there's no-one else to hang out with, I don't want anybody to think I'm alone!"
Onwards we stumble...
Yeah I've noticed that too.
Cell phones are also often used in a more benign way, as a "fidget toy" to reduce anxiety in uncomfortable social situations (the same way you'd take a sip of your drink when you're not sure what to say).
This is especially good because for some people they seem to have replaced cigarettes for this purpose -- sure cell phones can be annoying, but they're a damn site better than clouds of foul smelling smoke!
As we can juge by the entire set of photos, not only that one, it seems CES on all all about empty mod cases. Nothing much else.
That's always mystified me -- on the rare occasion that I buy a new PC, sure, I'm all for an attractive case, but judging from a lot of tech sites (slashdot included), there are fair number of people that spend all their time thinking about it...
The extra clearance required beneath the USB port for the folded-down part of this card could be annoying in many cases -- e.g., I have USB ports on my keyboard that have enough room beneath them for a typical USB key, but it looks like one of these SD cards wouldn't fit; I'd think many laptops would have the same problem.
Lack of freedom is only annoying when e.g. a game provides buildings with doors that can't be opened.
Speak for yourself...
There more sucky and less sucky ways to force a player to stick to a linear path, but even in a very polished game, it's often pretty obvious what's being done, and yes, it can be annoying even when done "well."
Clearly it's impossible to give arbitrary amounts of freedom, but even a little goes a long way towards improving the experience; think of it as "sorta linear, but with a lot of fuzz aroung the edges", where the fuzz can be optional little side-quests or hidden things for the player to find, dealing naturally when players try to avoid restrictions (I'm thinking of the Metroid games here, where there was a clear order of things you should do, but extremely advanced players could sometimes skip ahead by using very tricky techniques to avoid "impossible" obsctacles).
In the end, I think many players (maybe not you) really like the feeling of freedom, so game developers have a lot of incentive to try more general techniques that avoid pre-computing stuff in favor of more realistic models. Maybe in the short term this can decrease the quality of games, but in the long term it could result in something extremely cool...
An insightful and elegantly written defense of blogs. [mind is boggling now]
As I understand it, the traditional meaning of "blog" involves people writing out lots and lots of text in a journal or something, and allowing others to read and/or comment on it. This sort of "me-centered" approach seems almost guaranteed to generate huge reams of naval gazing and banality, with some beneficial side effects that you mention.
It seems that a more traditional conversational model, whether usenet or a web-site forum, offers the same advantages with a lot less crap -- mind you, still insane amounts of crap, but compared to blogs...
That is, community is good, but too much freedom to blather isn't; the community should be the point, not a side-effect.
Maybe in 20 years you will be mooching off of someone who is mooching off of you now.
Ha ha, that's how I figure things, though on a personal/family level rather than involving the government: I'm very generous about giving and allowing myself to be mooched off of, but if worse comes to worst, guess who's gonna be on your doorstep...
Gee, I hope it works...
[I wish I could in some way depend on the government too, for assistance in dire circumstances, but I don't live in a country where that happens. I happily pay my taxes, on the off chance it helps, though I suppose they're pretty much directly funneled into Haliburton these days....]
Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with your last point - humans are not robots, and there are often other circumstances - but that should not preclude giving managers the tools to they need to manage.
But I think very often it has nothing to do with "the need to manage", but rather with the need for managers to feel that they're doing something, even when it's actually counter-productive for the company as a whole (though it can be in the manager's best interest by giving him something to cover his ass with -- "I implemented a plan to improve employee efficiency by nailing them to the floor; inspiring slogans will maintain morale!").
Of course sometimes it's also just that the manager is an insane control freak.
Huh? It's absolutely the right thing to do. The cops aren't going throw them in jail, they're going to scare the crap out of them, which is the only thing that will prevent them from doing the same dangerous, obnoxious, moronic thing again.
:-o) they're pretty reasonable and perfectly capable of dealing appropriately with such situations -- including telling you to get a grip.]
If they were doing something that was just obnoxious and moronic, calling the police is perhaps an overreaction, but this was beyond that, and Joe Random yelling at them is simply not going to have the same effect as the police talking to them calmly.
[I'm not sure what your problem with the police is anyway, in most areas of the U.S. (maybe not central LA
A built in radio stops you looking like a complete nerd, having your MP3 player on one arm, radio on the other, graphing calculator in one pocket, cell phone on your hip, PDA in the other pocket and god knows how many pocket protectors.
So do they have special "nerd" t-shirts with pockets for the pocket protectors? Or do nerds just wear button down shirts in the gym too....?
Seriously. I wanted to buy my girlfriend an ipod mini for christmas; as the first n stores I tried were sold out, I looked seriously at the 10 zillion other "ipodalikes" out there (including many very nicely priced and very small flash players).
:-]
After doing that for a while, I realized that I'd just have to keep on trying new stores, because frankly the ipod mini is far more appealing than any of the competition. Not least (hey it's apple), it's so elegant -- the size, shape, and controls are perfect, it doesn't have the silly geegaws that most such products have hanging off them, nor the ugly chrome trim that seems der rigeur for other manufacturers. The screen and interface are relatively simple, but work wonderfully. Every other similar device I looked at seemed like cheap hackwork by comparison.
I'm not really a huge fan of the original ipod, which is just a little too big, but man, the ipod mini has me salivating. I'm not sure how I can use one myself as I run linux on an old PC (with neither firewire nor usb 2.0 ports), but if I can figure out some way to download music from linux, I'm gonna get one too...
[BTW, I did eventually find a mini, in a nice pink color...
I don't know how hard it would be for Emacs to use XFT or FreeType
Chris Gray did a proof-of-concept port to XFT, and as I understand it, XFT's claimed compatibility interface (with existing X font mechanisms) was not compatible enough to work well. He expressed the opinion that Emacs would have to switch over to using native XFT interfaces, and this is something of a large task for Emacs, which demands a lot from the font interface.
[Note: I don't understand the details, this is a paraphrase of a message Chris sent me; any bogosities are likely due to my misunderstanding!]
So...Netcraft confirms it, blogging is dead?
Hold on -- blogging was once alive?
Whoa.
I suppose it's only a small thing, but I think Apple could at least bring their good design sense to bear.
For all the huge number of cell-phone makers and phones, about 70% of them are completely awful in design, and most of the rest merely OK; even manuf.s who are normally good at product design, like Sony, seem to completely lose it when it comes to cell-phones (in Sony's case, they seem to be partnering with Ericson, so perhaps it's the latter's fault).
Secondly, given that anything buttered always lands butter side down, has anyone considered buttering a kitten's back?
My sister used to have kitten that hadn't learned to wash (from its mother or wherever kittens are supposed to learn that). In order to induce this poor stinky kitten to wash its fur, they resorted to buttering it.
I don't think they tried flinging it in the air while buttered though (one can imagine the poor thing trying desperately to complete its washing, while spinning rapidly, before it hits the ground; talk about kitty stress!).
The PSP feels really heavy though (holding is like holding a typical 3.5" hard-drive), it's not something I'd want in my pocket.
While that sort of density definitely gives it an air of "quality", it's not very practical for use I think.
I finally got a bit of hands-on time with a PSP, so I'd like to add a few more entries:
(7) The PSP is a brick. Honestly, the thing is really heavy, I felt like I'd need weight training to use it for any length of time. It feels bigger than it looks.
(8) The control scheme is kinda sucky, despite the presence of an analogue joystick. The analogue joystick seemed poorly placed (rammed way down in the lower corner), and very touchy to use. Furthermore, since the controls are clearly not directly compatible with the dual-shock anyay, my god, why on earth did they retain the same enormously crappy digital pad they've been using since the PSX, and why did they give the digital pad the "prime" location?!?!? It's not just annoying to use, it's downright painful after extended use.
The screen is definitely very nice (especially the amount of unit real-estate devoted to it -- makes the DS look almost primitive), and it's clear that Sony is really pushing the the technical envelope with the PSP, but it's also starting to seem like they forgot to include good user-design among their list of criteria for the PSP. It's pretty dissapointing to see a market-leading company with so much money -- and so much to win/lose -- making such silly mistakes.