I think when it comes to plugins (and, come to think of it, Quicktime) the designers are in love with what's possible, and the suits are unaware of the compatibility issues. Face it: a designer shows a net-illiterate suit two designs, one with Flash animation, and one without, and he'll choose the best looking one, even if it only really works on the designer's G3 (the suit doesn't know otherwise).
Let's assume 5% of browsers can't handle (some) plugins...
No store owner would be satisfied if 5% of all customers were turned away at the door; likewise I'm sure no e-commerce website owner would be satisfied that 5% of visitors were being turned away. I'm sure banner-advertisers would be disappointed to discover how many potential impressions they may be losing because a site is unviewable to a (growing, with the advent of set top boxes etc) proportion of the target audience.
Make the guys with the purse-strings aware of this problem, and it'll go away. 5% more turnover is the kind of figure these people like to hear about. --
Surely this is a useful feature. I'm assuming tools will be available to sign your own code.
I can envisage wanting to create a self-signed root CA certificate for myself, and signing anything I compile, such that nobody can sneak in with a trojan and replace my lovingly created binaries.
Freeware distributors could equally sign their binaries with certificates from their own Certificate Authority to reassure users that the version they have is kosher. --
When I worked at a school (up until 1998) we were still using 386 PCs, Windows 3.11 and MS Word 2 in some parts of the school because the headmaster was unwilling to dispose of machines which were still capable of doing something. Those Word 2 licences were, believe it or not, a major investment for the school, and they were determined to keep using that asset year after year.
Unless these subscriptions are cheap, having software expire after a year will be crippling for underfunded state schools who are used to struggling to wring the last little piece of value from an investment.
OTOH, having two versions of Word around on the network (95 and 2) with their conflicting keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, must have been problematic for pupils, and one could argue that it's a good thing to prevent organisations from having obsolete software in service. I'd have to say I think that choice should be the school's and not the vendor's, however. --
Actually there are mass produced handheld(ish) 2600s in production today, under the name "TV Boy". They're the size and shape of a joypad, contain enough circuitry to play Atari games, about 100 games on ROM, and an RF output.
Yeah I know it's not got its own screen, but it's a small step innit. --
AFAIK The IE team started with an already stable product (Spyglass Mosaic, itself based on NCSA Mosaic). Mozilla is a from-the-ground-up project.
But you're right that IE is a better browser: they made the (IMHO correct) decision to make a browser and a browser only: they left the mail client (for example) to the Outlook team, etc. Mozilla could learn from that. --
You could be right - but I have 1080 already. I'll need persuading before I buy yet another snowboarding game. I don't own any version of Missile Command... maybe it's time I did:) --
If you recall, the first games for the [Insert any console system here] sucked. It takes a while for the programmers to fully utilize all that the console has to offer. Dreamcast has had over a year now, so it's games-programmers are becoming veterans with the system. So, if the graphics only 'looked no better' than your dreamcast, then wait a year. The PS2 graphics will blow Dreamcast away.
Well, I'm a Sega zealot, but I can't argue with your logic here. The obvious message you're giving is: buy a Dreamcast now, enjoy its superior gaming for a year, then when the PS2 catches up, buy one of those. It will be cheaper by then, too, and if we're lucky PS2's network functionality will have been rolled out.
I'll be buying a PS2; I can't pass by Silent Hill2, and I'll need Fantavision at some point: but it's just not mature enough yet.
By contrast, Dreamcast was streets ahead of anything (bar a PC) you could buy on its release date. I had Power Stone and Sonic Adventure on day one, both classic titles I still go back to. Soul Calibur came a few weeks later; there's nothing on PS2 that looks quite as lovely.
Um, is Metropolis Street Racer out in the USA yet? It's seriously nice, especially if you've ever been to San Fran, Tokyo or London. --
A PS2 at RRP in the UK costs £299. You may have trouble getting one, and even if you do, IMHO there is only one interesting game at launch (Fantavision). The DVD player will be locked to Region 2, and there is no known software hack (there might be a hardware hack).
While the Dreamcast doesn't have a built in DVD player, Gem (Dreamcast's UK distributors) are currently pushing a bundle deal where you get a Dreamcast and a rather nice Encore DVD player together for £300. The Encore DVD player has DTS digital output, a built-in Dolby Digital decoder, and it's multi-region out of the box. You'll also be able to play Dreamcast games on one TV while playing DVDs on another. Oh, and there are dozens of really good Dreamcast games.
The bundle is available in most UK Dreamcast outlets, including places like HMV and Virgin, and online outlets too.
Plug over. I do not represent Sega, I just really like my Dreamcast. Nothing against Sony -- I'll certainly buy a PS2 when the price drops a little and the 2nd generation games start to trickle through. --
Not Sorenson -- and Sorenson appears to be the Quicktime codec of choice everywhere on the Web.
Marc Poplidec (sp?) says on the Xanim website that he asked Sorenson for specs so he could write a decoder. He routinely signs NDAs and implements binary-only Xanim modules for proprietary video formats. Give him a cross-compiler, and he'll compile it for whatever platform you run.
Anyway, Sorenson said they'd love to, but that Apple forbade them from doing so. Hence, Apple are preventing you from viewing a large chunk of the video available on the Web, and Mark can't do anything about it, despite having the willing and the technical expertise. --
I know we're talking about the FBI here, but you guys might be interested to know that the UK arrest patter now goes "Anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you; you are not obliged to say anything but your failure to mention now something on which you later rely in court may be used against you in evidence."
-- I paraphrase a little... --
At the same time the left castigates corporations as ever-more-evil, our jobs are better than ever.
Here in Silicon Valley, many companies serve lunch every day, have food in the lunch-room for breakfast and dinner
and snacks. Pete's coffee is almost a requirement. Oracle and other big companies have fantastic cafeterias with
very low prices.
Well that's just *special* for those of us lucky enough to have high-paid IT jobs.
Now, stop being so selfish, and start thinking about people on the minimum wage, or those with no job and no prospects. If you don't, some of them will get desperate, and you or someone you like may well be one who gets robbed. --
Politics affects everyone. Don't think that politics is just the suits at the top. At every level, politics affects you:
The quality of garbage collection on your street
How much you pay for drugs (tobacco, alcohol, medication)
What drugs you are/are not allowed to consume
Where and at what times you may consume alcohol
What modes of transport are made available to you
How is roadbuilding/maintenance funded
What sex acts you are allowed to indulge in, and with whom
Whether the next policeman to flag your car down will be armed
Whether a policeman will be available if a fight breaks out outside on your street
What RF frequencies you are allowed to broadcast on (and whether other people are allowed to jam your TV reception)
How much of your tax goes towards promoting the arts / science / education / environment
How much lead and tar you may pump into the air before someone comes and stops you
What happens to stray animals in your neighbourhood
What substances might you expect not to be present in shop-bought food
At the end of their jail sentence, how is a convicted paedophile's safety and privacy reconciled with their community's desire to know who's living in their midst?
I'm sure 99% of people will find *something* in that list which concerns them. If you find nothing in that list, it's because the list is incomplete. Politics *is* society (ahem, although Mrs Thatcher famously remarked that there is "no such thing as society" - but she was a daft old cow). If something about society bothers you, and if you choose to ignore politics, you have chosen to sacrifice your right to complain. --
The fact that the kexis file format may change in the future is largely a petty issue as you
can simply losslessly convert from the old format to the new one.
Yeek; that's fine until you have several gigabytes to convert each time the format changes.
One of the best things the Minidisc inventors and the MP3 inventors did was to keep the decoding algorithm static, while allowing the encoding algorithm to improve as technology improved. --
Let's see. Gnumeric & Pico vs. Excel and Word. Do you people actually produce documents any more complex than a OSS API doc?
Speaking personally, I've never really been sure what Excel is for. I've seen many people use Excel as a database: they should have been using a database package. The other use one often sees is rapid application development. I would do such things in CGI. Very few people seem to use it as a spreadsheet, because not all that many people need a spreadsheet (except when they're shoehorning the spreadsheet metaphor into something else, such as a database).
As for word processing: simple documents need something simpler than Word. Complex documents need LaTeX. With LyX, you don't even need to learn the markup language. For WYSIWYG, if that's what you want, you want proper DTP, not Word's WYSINWYG (n for "nearly"). Framemaker perhaps? --
The FBI has a packet sniffer. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
Correction: a packet sniffer *and* the authority to place said packet sniffer somewhere central in every US ISP's network.
Criminals needn't worry about this, you're right: they can encrypt. It's the rest of us who are doing nothing wrong but want a little privacy nonetheless, who are going to have to put extra effort into encrypting and/or anonymysing our net activities. --
History indicates that the market can really only support one console at a time for a 5 year period. That means 3 out of the 4 "eighth generation" systems are going to die a ugly or perhaps just a mediocre death.
However, never in history has the home gaming market been so large. A market this large has room for niches: for example the Saturn remained the machine of choice for 2D fighting game nuts long after the Playstation had trounced it out of the mainstream market. Nintendo's loyal following means that N64 games are still coming out and making money (Mario Tennis promises to be a treat; Mario Golf has given me hours of top-notch entertainment, and I've only played it at friends').
We will see a clear winner, but this will only be a major problem for the companies who've based their business model on getting a near-monopoly (i.e. the companies who don't just want to sell a few games - they want to become the hub of worldwide home-entertainment). Sega and Nintendo have less to lose; they can fill niches and continue to make money. MS and Sony have more riding on this, and one of them will win, one of them will lose. --
BS! You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages.
In the future, keep your uninformed ramblings to yourself.
Eh? That's what I said. Which bit of "you can/could compile any high level manguage you like to Java bytecode (especially if GCC supports it)" didn't you understand?
Maybe you parsed "from Eiffel to C to Ada to Java" as three conversion stages, when what it actually means "encompassing a wide range of languages including Eiffel, C, Ada, Java and many more". My sloppy use of English idiom, perhaps... --
I think Sun really did both Javas a disservice by giving them both the same name and marketing them as one thing.
Java, the object oriented programming language that's like C++ done right, is a very nice language to program in and deserves to do well. Note that you can/could compile Java source into any target language you like, from x86 machine code to Java bytecode.
Java, the portable bytecode and virtual machine technology is a very useful technology for the network age and is completely unrelated to the programming language. Note that you can/could compile any high level manguage you like to Java bytecode (especially if GCC supports it) from Eiffel to C to Ada to Java.
So, we're left wondering which of these, if any, or both, Sun plans to "open source"... --
Most of them that I know already do. Well, *compressed* air anyway. Put $0.50 in the machine and get air for five minutes.
Sure, and those machines aren't used particularly often, and the cost is based on recouping the cost of the machine and the electricity to use it. As usage goes up, cost per-use goes down. --
Can you explain something to me about the US system? Is your system inherently two-party, is it just historical happenstance that there are two mainstream parties who dwarf everyone else?
In the UK, the Labour and Tory parties are indeed the two major influences, but the Liberals always get a respectable number of seats; the Greens generally get a couple, as do the various Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties: these influences make sure the major parties gon't go out on too much of a power trip.
Barclays' (UK) Internet banking works fine for me from Linux and Netscape 4.7 -- it doesn't even use anything dodgy like Java.
Smile are 100% online (well, they're the online arm of Cooperative Bank, but that's good enough) and have nice touchy-feely we-don't-invest-in-arms-dealers value... also work OK in Linux/Netscape but I've suffered Java related crashes from them in both Windows and Linux. Of course, it's worse in Windows because the whole OS can go down... --
If this is the case, it's *possible* you'd be able to extract the ROM images from the distribution media, and play them on your favourite CPS emulator (MAME, say) - providing a legal way to obtain these games on platforms Capcom don't support directly.
Of course, I bet they put some kind of scrambling in there to make it harder than that. --
Now that I think about it, it is possible, but it will take a long time for them to get it right, but how will they get nintendo, and sega to go for it? Sega uses a custom chip, as well as nintendo. The only people using standard technology is Sony, Microsoft, and PC manufactures.
Nope.
Sony PS2 uses extremely custom chips, including its CPU, the "Emotion Engine", and weird-ass bus technology
Sega Dreamcast uses the commodity Hitachi SH4 chip, very much a standard, off-the-shelf offering, along with very mainstream video hardware from the PC world.
Nintendo Gamecube will have an IBM CPU closely related to the PowerPC.
Sony has USB, to be sure, but what's under the covers is weird stuff, hence the initial crop of disappointing software from developers forced to learn a new paradigm. --
Slashdot Mirror
I think when it comes to plugins (and, come to think of it, Quicktime) the designers are in love with what's possible, and the suits are unaware of the compatibility issues. Face it: a designer shows a net-illiterate suit two designs, one with Flash animation, and one without, and he'll choose the best looking one, even if it only really works on the designer's G3 (the suit doesn't know otherwise).
Let's assume 5% of browsers can't handle (some) plugins...
No store owner would be satisfied if 5% of all customers were turned away at the door; likewise I'm sure no e-commerce website owner would be satisfied that 5% of visitors were being turned away. I'm sure banner-advertisers would be disappointed to discover how many potential impressions they may be losing because a site is unviewable to a (growing, with the advent of set top boxes etc) proportion of the target audience.
Make the guys with the purse-strings aware of this problem, and it'll go away. 5% more turnover is the kind of figure these people like to hear about.
--
Surely this is a useful feature. I'm assuming tools will be available to sign your own code.
I can envisage wanting to create a self-signed root CA certificate for myself, and signing anything I compile, such that nobody can sneak in with a trojan and replace my lovingly created binaries.
Freeware distributors could equally sign their binaries with certificates from their own Certificate Authority to reassure users that the version they have is kosher.
--
When I worked at a school (up until 1998) we were still using 386 PCs, Windows 3.11 and MS Word 2 in some parts of the school because the headmaster was unwilling to dispose of machines which were still capable of doing something. Those Word 2 licences were, believe it or not, a major investment for the school, and they were determined to keep using that asset year after year.
Unless these subscriptions are cheap, having software expire after a year will be crippling for underfunded state schools who are used to struggling to wring the last little piece of value from an investment.
OTOH, having two versions of Word around on the network (95 and 2) with their conflicting keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, must have been problematic for pupils, and one could argue that it's a good thing to prevent organisations from having obsolete software in service. I'd have to say I think that choice should be the school's and not the vendor's, however.
--
Actually there are mass produced handheld(ish) 2600s in production today, under the name "TV Boy". They're the size and shape of a joypad, contain enough circuitry to play Atari games, about 100 games on ROM, and an RF output.
Yeah I know it's not got its own screen, but it's a small step innit.
--
AFAIK The IE team started with an already stable product (Spyglass Mosaic, itself based on NCSA Mosaic). Mozilla is a from-the-ground-up project.
But you're right that IE is a better browser: they made the (IMHO correct) decision to make a browser and a browser only: they left the mail client (for example) to the Outlook team, etc. Mozilla could learn from that.
--
Replace Fantavision with SSX
:)
You could be right - but I have 1080 already. I'll need persuading before I buy yet another snowboarding game. I don't own any version of Missile Command... maybe it's time I did
--
If you recall, the first games for the [Insert any console system here] sucked. It takes a while for the programmers to fully utilize all that the console has to offer. Dreamcast has had over a year now, so it's games-programmers are becoming veterans with the system. So, if the graphics only 'looked no better' than your dreamcast, then wait a year. The PS2 graphics will blow Dreamcast away.
Well, I'm a Sega zealot, but I can't argue with your logic here. The obvious message you're giving is: buy a Dreamcast now, enjoy its superior gaming for a year, then when the PS2 catches up, buy one of those. It will be cheaper by then, too, and if we're lucky PS2's network functionality will have been rolled out.
I'll be buying a PS2; I can't pass by Silent Hill2, and I'll need Fantavision at some point: but it's just not mature enough yet.
By contrast, Dreamcast was streets ahead of anything (bar a PC) you could buy on its release date. I had Power Stone and Sonic Adventure on day one, both classic titles I still go back to. Soul Calibur came a few weeks later; there's nothing on PS2 that looks quite as lovely.
Um, is Metropolis Street Racer out in the USA yet? It's seriously nice, especially if you've ever been to San Fran, Tokyo or London.
--
A PS2 at RRP in the UK costs £299. You may have trouble getting one, and even if you do, IMHO there is only one interesting game at launch (Fantavision). The DVD player will be locked to Region 2, and there is no known software hack (there might be a hardware hack).
While the Dreamcast doesn't have a built in DVD player, Gem (Dreamcast's UK distributors) are currently pushing a bundle deal where you get a Dreamcast and a rather nice Encore DVD player together for £300. The Encore DVD player has DTS digital output, a built-in Dolby Digital decoder, and it's multi-region out of the box. You'll also be able to play Dreamcast games on one TV while playing DVDs on another. Oh, and there are dozens of really good Dreamcast games.
The bundle is available in most UK Dreamcast outlets, including places like HMV and Virgin, and online outlets too.
Plug over. I do not represent Sega, I just really like my Dreamcast. Nothing against Sony -- I'll certainly buy a PS2 when the price drops a little and the 2nd generation games start to trickle through.
--
Not Sorenson -- and Sorenson appears to be the Quicktime codec of choice everywhere on the Web.
Marc Poplidec (sp?) says on the Xanim website that he asked Sorenson for specs so he could write a decoder. He routinely signs NDAs and implements binary-only Xanim modules for proprietary video formats. Give him a cross-compiler, and he'll compile it for whatever platform you run.
Anyway, Sorenson said they'd love to, but that Apple forbade them from doing so. Hence, Apple are preventing you from viewing a large chunk of the video available on the Web, and Mark can't do anything about it, despite having the willing and the technical expertise.
--
I know we're talking about the FBI here, but you guys might be interested to know that the UK arrest patter now goes "Anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you; you are not obliged to say anything but your failure to mention now something on which you later rely in court may be used against you in evidence."
-- I paraphrase a little...
--
At the same time the left castigates corporations as ever-more-evil, our jobs are better than ever.
Here in Silicon Valley, many companies serve lunch every day, have food in the lunch-room for breakfast and dinner
and snacks. Pete's coffee is almost a requirement. Oracle and other big companies have fantastic cafeterias with
very low prices.
Well that's just *special* for those of us lucky enough to have high-paid IT jobs.
Now, stop being so selfish, and start thinking about people on the minimum wage, or those with no job and no prospects. If you don't, some of them will get desperate, and you or someone you like may well be one who gets robbed.
--
I'm sure 99% of people will find *something* in that list which concerns them. If you find nothing in that list, it's because the list is incomplete. Politics *is* society (ahem, although Mrs Thatcher famously remarked that there is "no such thing as society" - but she was a daft old cow). If something about society bothers you, and if you choose to ignore politics, you have chosen to sacrifice your right to complain.
--
The fact that the kexis file format may change in the future is largely a petty issue as you
can simply losslessly convert from the old format to the new one.
Yeek; that's fine until you have several gigabytes to convert each time the format changes.
One of the best things the Minidisc inventors and the MP3 inventors did was to keep the decoding algorithm static, while allowing the encoding algorithm to improve as technology improved.
--
Linux Specific?
I know for a fact there's a BSD port of SVGALib.
For portability, though, GGI might be a better bet.
--
Let's see. Gnumeric & Pico vs. Excel and Word. Do you people actually produce documents any more complex than a OSS API doc?
Speaking personally, I've never really been sure what Excel is for. I've seen many people use Excel as a database: they should have been using a database package. The other use one often sees is rapid application development. I would do such things in CGI. Very few people seem to use it as a spreadsheet, because not all that many people need a spreadsheet (except when they're shoehorning the spreadsheet metaphor into something else, such as a database).
As for word processing: simple documents need something simpler than Word. Complex documents need LaTeX. With LyX, you don't even need to learn the markup language. For WYSIWYG, if that's what you want, you want proper DTP, not Word's WYSINWYG (n for "nearly"). Framemaker perhaps?
--
The FBI has a packet sniffer. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
Correction: a packet sniffer *and* the authority to place said packet sniffer somewhere central in every US ISP's network.
Criminals needn't worry about this, you're right: they can encrypt. It's the rest of us who are doing nothing wrong but want a little privacy nonetheless, who are going to have to put extra effort into encrypting and/or anonymysing our net activities.
--
History indicates that the market can really only support one console at a time for a 5 year period. That means 3 out of the 4 "eighth generation" systems are going to die a ugly or perhaps just a mediocre death.
However, never in history has the home gaming market been so large. A market this large has room for niches: for example the Saturn remained the machine of choice for 2D fighting game nuts long after the Playstation had trounced it out of the mainstream market. Nintendo's loyal following means that N64 games are still coming out and making money (Mario Tennis promises to be a treat; Mario Golf has given me hours of top-notch entertainment, and I've only played it at friends').
We will see a clear winner, but this will only be a major problem for the companies who've based their business model on getting a near-monopoly (i.e. the companies who don't just want to sell a few games - they want to become the hub of worldwide home-entertainment). Sega and Nintendo have less to lose; they can fill niches and continue to make money. MS and Sony have more riding on this, and one of them will win, one of them will lose.
--
(sorry qnonsense; my score threshold made it look as if you were replying to me, and not to novitk's errnoeous post)
--
BS! You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages.
In the future, keep your uninformed ramblings to yourself.
Eh? That's what I said. Which bit of "you can/could compile any high level manguage you like to Java bytecode (especially if GCC supports it)" didn't you understand?
Maybe you parsed "from Eiffel to C to Ada to Java" as three conversion stages, when what it actually means "encompassing a wide range of languages including Eiffel, C, Ada, Java and many more". My sloppy use of English idiom, perhaps...
--
I think Sun really did both Javas a disservice by giving them both the same name and marketing them as one thing.
Java, the object oriented programming language that's like C++ done right, is a very nice language to program in and deserves to do well. Note that you can/could compile Java source into any target language you like, from x86 machine code to Java bytecode.
Java, the portable bytecode and virtual machine technology is a very useful technology for the network age and is completely unrelated to the programming language. Note that you can/could compile any high level manguage you like to Java bytecode (especially if GCC supports it) from Eiffel to C to Ada to Java.
So, we're left wondering which of these, if any, or both, Sun plans to "open source"...
--
Most of them that I know already do. Well, *compressed* air anyway. Put $0.50 in the machine and get air for five minutes.
Sure, and those machines aren't used particularly often, and the cost is based on recouping the cost of the machine and the electricity to use it. As usage goes up, cost per-use goes down.
--
Can you explain something to me about the US system? Is your system inherently two-party, is it just historical happenstance that there are two mainstream parties who dwarf everyone else?
In the UK, the Labour and Tory parties are indeed the two major influences, but the Liberals always get a respectable number of seats; the Greens generally get a couple, as do the various Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties: these influences make sure the major parties gon't go out on too much of a power trip.
--
Barclays' (UK) Internet banking works fine for me from Linux and Netscape 4.7 -- it doesn't even use anything dodgy like Java.
Smile are 100% online (well, they're the online arm of Cooperative Bank, but that's good enough) and have nice touchy-feely we-don't-invest-in-arms-dealers value... also work OK in Linux/Netscape but I've suffered Java related crashes from them in both Windows and Linux. Of course, it's worse in Windows because the whole OS can go down...
--
If this is the case, it's *possible* you'd be able to extract the ROM images from the distribution media, and play them on your favourite CPS emulator (MAME, say) - providing a legal way to obtain these games on platforms Capcom don't support directly.
Of course, I bet they put some kind of scrambling in there to make it harder than that.
--
Nope.
Sony has USB, to be sure, but what's under the covers is weird stuff, hence the initial crop of disappointing software from developers forced to learn a new paradigm.
--