You'd have to be a masochist to run Final Cut Pro on Rosetta.
It won't run on Rosetta, as FCP requires a G4, I do believe. For that matter, parts of Apple's pro video line require a G5. So, unfortunately for Mac users like me, it will prove necessary to buy a new version of Final Cut Studio when the P4 PowerMacs come out - which adds like $1200 onto the upgrade price.
Why yes, I am still bitter that my old software isn't going to work. If Apple doesn't make this switch worth while, it's back to Linux for me!
The end of The Wind Waker was boring as all hell - I stopped playing halfway through the triforce hunt, and haven't picked it up since. That's unfortunate, because the game was quite excellent. I prefer cartoon-Link to "realistic" Link, and The Wind Waker is the first, and likely only, 3D Zelda I will ever appreciate. Just to rephrase that slightly, my favorite 3D Zelda is the one Miyamoto is poo-pooing on for being boring - yet it's the least boring of the bunch thus far.
As for the trend of developers trashing on their old games, I'm just glad that developers are finally realizing that many of the games in the recent past have been complete shit. The Wind Waker is probably my favorite 3rd person 3D game to ever be created - yet, I agree that it gets insanely dull. I've been itching for a new game or two, as I haven't bought any in quite some time, but I can't find a single game for any of the three consoles that I really want to play. Virtually all 3D games are the same - you run, you jump, you fight, and you collect cleverly hidden things that let you advance. About 90% of the games that have come out on consoles in the past several years are damned Tomb Raider clones, and I didn't like that game to begin with.
What am I playing to get my gaming fix? Currently, I'm playing Super Mario All-Stars, Super Metriod, and Zelda III: A Link to the Past. All are about 10-years old, all are completely dated in terms of graphics and gameplay, and I've beaten all of them several times. Yet, these games are far more fun, and far more interesting, than any of the garbage gaming companies are spewing out today.
Nintendo's money-makers have been Mario, Zelda, and Metroid - their 3D counterparts have not impressed me in the slightest. Mario and Zelda fit the run, jump, and fight cookie-cutter 3rd person game, and Metriod is now Yet Another First Person Shooter(tm). The rise of 3D graphics has basically taken all creativity out of gameplay - you have a 3D world, you do stuff in it. Without any limitations, all of the games kind of blend together... and, well, they pretty much all suck.
If Nintendo made modern games based on their old 2D counterparts, they'd probably be the #1 console within a year. Just imagine a side-scrolling Metriod with modern graphics, and absolutely huge worlds to explore. Or, a Mario game or Zelda game along the same lines. Sounds good, doesn't it? Right now, Nintando is struggling to produce more 3D crap to compete with the rest of the 3D crap... I wish they would wake up, and make the games that made Nintendo the best.
The problem with MMOGs is that casual players cannot compete with those who dedicate a significant portion of every day to playing. Someone who plays for a couple of hours on a boring Sunday afternoon is fresh meat for seasoned veterans of a game - and there's really no way to change this other than limiting how much people can play. I'm not entirely opposed to that, either.
In the digital world, there's currently no such thing as an archive. There are backups that last for quite some time, but I seriously doubt any of them will last forever. The only reason any of these backups last so long is because the people creating them put some serious effort into keeping the data safe - and even then, what's to say it's not going to fail tomorrow?
You're right about the 21st century becoming a second dark age. Half the time, it proves extremely difficult to find web-published articles from two years ago, never mind what someone was putting on the web 15 years ago. Servers come and go as those involved become disinterested with the media they created. But, the difference between a print magazine going belly up and a dotcom media source going belly up is that the printed magazine will still exist while the data from the dotcom will likely never be accessible to the public again.
In the case of personal media, digital is a disaster. My grandparents still have stacks of photos documenting their entire lives, as do my parents, as do my parents for me. However, my photo collection currently suffers a gap which will never be recovered, specifically 1997-2000. During those years, I used a digital camera, and I left the photos on a working hard drive for safe keeping - alas, when I went to retrieve some files off of the drive when I wanted to go back and read a paper, I discovered the drive had committed suicide in a year without use. Yeah, that sucks.
Currently, the best way to back up data is RAID - and that's not even backing the data up, it's just making it more persistent. When you move to another machine, move all of the data to the new RAID. Repeat forever. To be extra safe, have a backup RAID just in case the first one suffers from a catastrophe.
Why is digital media troublesome? Books rarely render themselves unreadable while sitting on shelves, and are likewise rarely destroyed when dropped. Carving something into rock requires a bitchin' act of god to get rid of. But the deleting of a file, or the death of a hard drive, can wipe vast amounts of history out of existence, both in a personal and societal sense. Without an ability to permanently archive digital data, none of the data from the digital age will exist in the future.
Exactly - without email, I don't even have work to do. Do I check my email when I wake up in the morning? Yup, that's how I know what I'm doing at work that day. Same with checking my email while at work, same with checking my email while at home. If I have work to do, I find out via email - if I don't check my email, I will soon get fired.
I do, however, have a separate email address dedicated to social email, and probably a sum total of 4 people ever send me mail there. On average, I get like one social email every two days or so, and that usually sits in my inbox for a few days before I reply. Does that make me an eJunkie? No, but the compulsive web surfing certainly does.
Maybe MS has already put the OS on a low priority, recognizing better ROI from office or integration of entertainment.
This is what I hope for. I don't think that Microsoft software is particularly a Bad Thing(tm), but the operating systems are complete crap. I'd much rather use Microsoft Office than OpenOffice or an open-source equivalent... It may be "bloated," but it's still gobs faster, and much more polished. For that matter, the best version of Microsoft Office is for OSX... which shows that Microsoft is definitely able to develop good software for alternate platforms. Why not Linux?
The XBox, I hope, is Microsoft's way of weening children off of the Wintendo and onto a machine that is intended for gaming. XBox 2 sounds like it's trying to be the all-in-one digital entertainment center. So, either Microsoft is realizing they should focus on things other than their OS, or they're just trying to get a monopoly in a new market. But given that their OS is many, many years behind in terms of security and stability - and always will be - I hope that they start encouraging people to move to better platforms... but I think that migration will happen slowly on its own.
...it is the speed of electricity through whatever medium you can use, which is must slower.
Eh... the speed of electricity through wires is like 0.9c... it's not actually much slower. But, regardless, this actually has to be taken into account on modern-day processors. There are actually signals on the P4 which take more than a clock cycle to travel across the chip... Scary, ain't it?
I, likewise, was a former, extremely happy Emusic subscriber. I looked at their catalog, saw lots of stuff I already had, lots of stuff I didn't... and a whole lot of stuff I had never heard of. This last category was one of my main reasons for subscribing, as I could explore a huge variety of music without wasting my money.
Their new business model limits the exploring a great deal. Sure, there is always the 30-second preview... but that tricked me many times. I probably downloaded 50 or so albums I'd deem as crap from Emusic, but I wasn't penalized - I payed the same amount each month whether I downloaded 50 albums, or zero.
The old Emusic was a service for music lovers. I found some of my favorite artists by chance on Emusic, and have since bought several actual CDs by these very artists. But, like many slashdotters, I cancelled my account once they announced their "new and improved" service...
Or, it could be the fact that the operating system is built with security as a primary concern, instead of as an afterthought. Unix was designed, oh so many years ago, to provide shared resources among many users, keeping their respective workspaces separated from the underlying guts - in other words, it was built on the philosophy that one user of a system shouldn't be able to take down the entire system(unless that user is an admin, in which case they've shot their own foot).
Conveniently, this philosophy has spread into many operating systems, such as all of the BSDs, Solaris, Linux, etc... and given that MacOS is based off of BSD, that means it falls into this category.
Windows, on the other hand, does not. Windows was designed to be idiot-friendly, such that an admin can read a 1-page sheet of instructions to get their server up and running. Features were piled on such that when you download files off of the web, they should be automatically opened... why else would you have downloaded it?! I can keep going on, but there's really no reason to - anyone who claims that Windows is more secure, by default, than MacOS/Linux/etc is on crack.
Try and make a worm that propagates through MacOS X, or Linux, or anything other than Windows and we can talk. Until then, accept what most of the world already has - Windows is not a secure operating system, regardless of how many people are using it.
I didn't figure out how wonderful TeX was until halfway through school... It has a bit of a learning curve when compared to Word/WordPerfect/etc, but the net result is getting beautifully formatted, professional-looking documents in both print and digital. Word processors are great for writing memos and stuff like that, but TeX blows them out of the water in any technical document.
The only problem with TeX is that after writing hundreds of documents with it, I'm still learning it - and I'll always be learning it. That's why the average person doesn't want to touch it... or know what it even is.
I've been playing Red Orchestra for several months, and have been waiting for this new version for quite some time. Yes, it's "another WWII FPS," but it's an excellent one at that. Believe it or not, it's more strategy than skill, so the old-timers can actually hold their own against the 12-year-olds... and impressive battles result!
I highly recommend this mod to anyone out there who wants something more out of an FPS game. The developers have polished this further than the vast majority of commercial releases, and it shows. But be warned - it has, by far, the steepest learning curve of any FPS game in existence... mainly because you have to think, not just click'n'kill.
Though modded as flamebait, I'd say this is pretty insightful.
XViD doesn't exist to make money... it doesn't exist for companies to sell their digital media to us... it exists as a good, open format which developers on any platform can play with, and any platform can play XViD movies without having to deal with royalty fees, DRM, and the likes.
Believe it or not, there are uses for mp3s other than stealing music, and there are uses for XViD other than stealing movies. I don't want the content _I_ produce to be bogged down with DRM crap, and I don't want to be locked into an officially-licensed player five years down the line that only exists on a platform I don't even want to use. So what if commercial publishers don't want to use XViD because it doesn't have DRM - not everything on the internet was put there by commercial publishers. XViD is for people, not companies.
There are quite a few independent labels on the iTunes music store. One of them, Anticon, just so happens to be my favorite label of the moment. I think that they're getting a much better deal with the iTunes music store, as they have less overhead... like funding the extravagant lifestyles of record company executives. In other words, the artists own the company, sell the music, and make money - iTunes music store or not.
I was amazed when I saw Anticon artists in the store, and I wouldn't have even bothered to look because they're such a small label. However, Apple was so kind as to put a few of their albums into the "just added" scroller, and as such, I downloaded several tracks.
Unless something has changed in the last week, the prices at the iTunes music store are staying right where they are.
From the Apple iTunes Press Conference, on April 29th:
But in any event, most of the albums on iTunes are priced at $9.99 and below and, no, they're not creeping up. There's always a few that are a little higher than you can go in and pull out, but they're very, very competitive and we see in the future the prices of the albums coming down, not going up, because that's what it's going to take to sell more albums and it's in everybody's best interest to do so.
Consider what you're saying - to optimize today's high performance 3d games, we should offload the number crunching from a highly specialized, highly optimized graphics processor... to a dynamically-configurable coprocessor. It doesn't sound like too good of an idea when phrased that way - modern graphics hardware was already created as a special-purpose, optimized processor.
How many uses of a dynamically-configurable processor can you think of for YOUR computer? You already have the CPU, which handles all sorts of fun... you already have the graphics hardware, which is extremely specific in its use... might have MPEG2 decoding in hardware... sound processor... and so on. We already have highly optimized, special-use processors in our machines for a variety of tasks. This chip basically sounds like an FPGA which can be programmed to do a couple things faster when it is absolutely necessary to do so - how often will that be?
We already have FPGAs... and people who really need to have customizable logic in their machines can already use FPGAs to do what this article claims. This is, by no means, a revolution in processing... It sounds like it's just a processor that tries to emulate hardware that you don't already have.
... Once Longhorn comes out, I'd find it absolutely hilarious if someone made a virus to use Microsoft's new GUI rendering technology as they used it in their demo. Imagine the joys around the office when all of the sudden, the windows on everyone's screens start spiraling around, flying through space... Ahh... refreshing.
Oh, you laugh... but I've seen a JVM running on an 8051 microprocessor. As far as computational power is concerned... they're probably on the same scale. Regardless, this guy at least had some faked screenshots to back up his ridiculous claims... as opposed to the OpenBSD on GameBoy kids:(
The article is very thin on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent. Just last night, I wanted to download the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo... and despite the fact there were literally hundreds of mirrors, I couldn't connect to many of them, and those I could connect to were utterly hosed. So, I looked for a torrent for the file, and a few minutes later, I was done downloading it.
Yes, you can use BitTorrent to steal stuff. But, all of the p2p programs are basically a mix of the roles of ftp and irc. BitTorrent is slightly different - it's a mix of p2p and the web, making a quick and easy means to find whatever you want. A great amount of content is completely legit, and BitTorrent is a dream come true for those times that everybody wants a certain file. I didn't expect NYT to focus on the good aspects of the program, but they didn't even mention how amazingly useful it actually is.
I think, in true Microsoft fashion, we'll see the new VPC changed slightly and then become the foundation of their (gaming) business.
How does this make any sense...? They're supposedly switching architectures for their next platform, yet emulating the architecture they're abandoning will be the foundation of their gaming business?
I honestly fear what Microsoft's plans are with their next console, as well as VPC, especially if they're adopting the same architecture as Apple machines. But, on the plus-side, if there's a dirt cheap PPC970 that I can mod to run MacOS X... set-top Apple here I come!
Is this flamebait? I'm honestly having trouble figuring that out. What I didn't have trouble figuring out was how to use my iPod...
I didn't know how to turn it off at first, so I didn't - I noticed that when you paused a song, the unit turned off automatically after a minute or so. One day it clicked that holding the button down accelerated the process. Pushing pause and leaving it alone caused the unit to go off - holding down the button seems like REALLY pausing it, which shut it off.
That's the absolute most-complicated part of operating my iPod... It didn't make sense to me at first, but now it's just intuitive.
Same with menu being associated with the backlight - as you are likely to be looking at the display when you push menu, holding down menu to turn on the backlight just kinda makes sense in an Apple kind of way. Holding menu, like holding pause, seems to suggest that you'd really like to see the menu.
And anything with the wheel - the wheel is a toy, and something to play with. I can't think of too many devices with such a wacky interface. When you first pick up an iPod, you fidget with the wheel, and see that it does stuff. The unlabeled button in the middle, as it's surrounded by the wheel, probably does something in conjunction with the wheel... like selecting things in menus, selecting time in track, etc.
So, though the iPod isn't an entirely straightforward device, you figure out what you need to know about it within a couple of minutes. In my opinion, the iPod, and Apple products in general, are textbook examples of how KISS should be. All of the functionality is there, but anything remotely complicated is invisible to those who aren't looking for it.
Dunno if this was one of the amazing devices shown, but recently an LCD display was installed outside of a food court at my school. All it seems to do is go through a powerpoint-like slideshow, telling us all of our lovely options in eating. For the past two days, however, all it has displayed is the Windows XP default screen saver.
Oh, I'm glad the money I'm paying for my education is going somewhere useful. Though this Windows-based LCD advertisement probably cost thousands of dollars, it's worth every penny in its ability to cause me to ignore the dining halls and make my own food.
Somehow, an advertisement running Windows seems to enhance my ability to ignore it - I'm ignoring two birds with one stone!
Stunts had its problems... Wacky glitches like being stuck at maximum speed for the entire track.... flying through the air doing the impossible, and not even crashing when you land. Or hitting bridges at just the right angle, and bouncing up in the air for a couple of minutes....
I wasted so many hours playing that game with my friends... You've got to admit, had they fixed up the physics, it was a pretty advanced game for its time. The level editor added a great amount to its value... and it was easy enough for the kids to use!
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to be a masochist to run Final Cut Pro on Rosetta.
It won't run on Rosetta, as FCP requires a G4, I do believe. For that matter, parts of Apple's pro video line require a G5. So, unfortunately for Mac users like me, it will prove necessary to buy a new version of Final Cut Studio when the P4 PowerMacs come out - which adds like $1200 onto the upgrade price.
Why yes, I am still bitter that my old software isn't going to work. If Apple doesn't make this switch worth while, it's back to Linux for me!
The end of The Wind Waker was boring as all hell - I stopped playing halfway through the triforce hunt, and haven't picked it up since. That's unfortunate, because the game was quite excellent. I prefer cartoon-Link to "realistic" Link, and The Wind Waker is the first, and likely only, 3D Zelda I will ever appreciate. Just to rephrase that slightly, my favorite 3D Zelda is the one Miyamoto is poo-pooing on for being boring - yet it's the least boring of the bunch thus far.
As for the trend of developers trashing on their old games, I'm just glad that developers are finally realizing that many of the games in the recent past have been complete shit. The Wind Waker is probably my favorite 3rd person 3D game to ever be created - yet, I agree that it gets insanely dull. I've been itching for a new game or two, as I haven't bought any in quite some time, but I can't find a single game for any of the three consoles that I really want to play. Virtually all 3D games are the same - you run, you jump, you fight, and you collect cleverly hidden things that let you advance. About 90% of the games that have come out on consoles in the past several years are damned Tomb Raider clones, and I didn't like that game to begin with.
What am I playing to get my gaming fix? Currently, I'm playing Super Mario All-Stars, Super Metriod, and Zelda III: A Link to the Past. All are about 10-years old, all are completely dated in terms of graphics and gameplay, and I've beaten all of them several times. Yet, these games are far more fun, and far more interesting, than any of the garbage gaming companies are spewing out today.
Nintendo's money-makers have been Mario, Zelda, and Metroid - their 3D counterparts have not impressed me in the slightest. Mario and Zelda fit the run, jump, and fight cookie-cutter 3rd person game, and Metriod is now Yet Another First Person Shooter(tm). The rise of 3D graphics has basically taken all creativity out of gameplay - you have a 3D world, you do stuff in it. Without any limitations, all of the games kind of blend together... and, well, they pretty much all suck.
If Nintendo made modern games based on their old 2D counterparts, they'd probably be the #1 console within a year. Just imagine a side-scrolling Metriod with modern graphics, and absolutely huge worlds to explore. Or, a Mario game or Zelda game along the same lines. Sounds good, doesn't it? Right now, Nintando is struggling to produce more 3D crap to compete with the rest of the 3D crap... I wish they would wake up, and make the games that made Nintendo the best.
The problem with MMOGs is that casual players cannot compete with those who dedicate a significant portion of every day to playing. Someone who plays for a couple of hours on a boring Sunday afternoon is fresh meat for seasoned veterans of a game - and there's really no way to change this other than limiting how much people can play. I'm not entirely opposed to that, either.
Mod parent up "brilliant."
In the digital world, there's currently no such thing as an archive. There are backups that last for quite some time, but I seriously doubt any of them will last forever. The only reason any of these backups last so long is because the people creating them put some serious effort into keeping the data safe - and even then, what's to say it's not going to fail tomorrow?
You're right about the 21st century becoming a second dark age. Half the time, it proves extremely difficult to find web-published articles from two years ago, never mind what someone was putting on the web 15 years ago. Servers come and go as those involved become disinterested with the media they created. But, the difference between a print magazine going belly up and a dotcom media source going belly up is that the printed magazine will still exist while the data from the dotcom will likely never be accessible to the public again.
In the case of personal media, digital is a disaster. My grandparents still have stacks of photos documenting their entire lives, as do my parents, as do my parents for me. However, my photo collection currently suffers a gap which will never be recovered, specifically 1997-2000. During those years, I used a digital camera, and I left the photos on a working hard drive for safe keeping - alas, when I went to retrieve some files off of the drive when I wanted to go back and read a paper, I discovered the drive had committed suicide in a year without use. Yeah, that sucks.
Currently, the best way to back up data is RAID - and that's not even backing the data up, it's just making it more persistent. When you move to another machine, move all of the data to the new RAID. Repeat forever. To be extra safe, have a backup RAID just in case the first one suffers from a catastrophe.
Why is digital media troublesome? Books rarely render themselves unreadable while sitting on shelves, and are likewise rarely destroyed when dropped. Carving something into rock requires a bitchin' act of god to get rid of. But the deleting of a file, or the death of a hard drive, can wipe vast amounts of history out of existence, both in a personal and societal sense. Without an ability to permanently archive digital data, none of the data from the digital age will exist in the future.
Exactly - without email, I don't even have work to do. Do I check my email when I wake up in the morning? Yup, that's how I know what I'm doing at work that day. Same with checking my email while at work, same with checking my email while at home. If I have work to do, I find out via email - if I don't check my email, I will soon get fired.
I do, however, have a separate email address dedicated to social email, and probably a sum total of 4 people ever send me mail there. On average, I get like one social email every two days or so, and that usually sits in my inbox for a few days before I reply. Does that make me an eJunkie? No, but the compulsive web surfing certainly does.
And the really sad part: I actually used - and liked - Alphas. I've never even seen an Itanium...
The XBox, I hope, is Microsoft's way of weening children off of the Wintendo and onto a machine that is intended for gaming. XBox 2 sounds like it's trying to be the all-in-one digital entertainment center. So, either Microsoft is realizing they should focus on things other than their OS, or they're just trying to get a monopoly in a new market. But given that their OS is many, many years behind in terms of security and stability - and always will be - I hope that they start encouraging people to move to better platforms... but I think that migration will happen slowly on its own.
Ditto. I was hoping it was being developed across Win32/Linux/MacOS simultaneously... especially seeing as the first demo of the game was on MacOS X.
Epic has been pretty good with their porting as of late, why is iD now falling behind?
I, likewise, was a former, extremely happy Emusic subscriber. I looked at their catalog, saw lots of stuff I already had, lots of stuff I didn't... and a whole lot of stuff I had never heard of. This last category was one of my main reasons for subscribing, as I could explore a huge variety of music without wasting my money.
Their new business model limits the exploring a great deal. Sure, there is always the 30-second preview... but that tricked me many times. I probably downloaded 50 or so albums I'd deem as crap from Emusic, but I wasn't penalized - I payed the same amount each month whether I downloaded 50 albums, or zero.
The old Emusic was a service for music lovers. I found some of my favorite artists by chance on Emusic, and have since bought several actual CDs by these very artists. But, like many slashdotters, I cancelled my account once they announced their "new and improved" service...
Or, it could be the fact that the operating system is built with security as a primary concern, instead of as an afterthought. Unix was designed, oh so many years ago, to provide shared resources among many users, keeping their respective workspaces separated from the underlying guts - in other words, it was built on the philosophy that one user of a system shouldn't be able to take down the entire system(unless that user is an admin, in which case they've shot their own foot).
Conveniently, this philosophy has spread into many operating systems, such as all of the BSDs, Solaris, Linux, etc... and given that MacOS is based off of BSD, that means it falls into this category.
Windows, on the other hand, does not. Windows was designed to be idiot-friendly, such that an admin can read a 1-page sheet of instructions to get their server up and running. Features were piled on such that when you download files off of the web, they should be automatically opened... why else would you have downloaded it?! I can keep going on, but there's really no reason to - anyone who claims that Windows is more secure, by default, than MacOS/Linux/etc is on crack.
Try and make a worm that propagates through MacOS X, or Linux, or anything other than Windows and we can talk. Until then, accept what most of the world already has - Windows is not a secure operating system, regardless of how many people are using it.
Right on!
I didn't figure out how wonderful TeX was until halfway through school... It has a bit of a learning curve when compared to Word/WordPerfect/etc, but the net result is getting beautifully formatted, professional-looking documents in both print and digital. Word processors are great for writing memos and stuff like that, but TeX blows them out of the water in any technical document.
The only problem with TeX is that after writing hundreds of documents with it, I'm still learning it - and I'll always be learning it. That's why the average person doesn't want to touch it... or know what it even is.
I've been playing Red Orchestra for several months, and have been waiting for this new version for quite some time. Yes, it's "another WWII FPS," but it's an excellent one at that. Believe it or not, it's more strategy than skill, so the old-timers can actually hold their own against the 12-year-olds... and impressive battles result!
I highly recommend this mod to anyone out there who wants something more out of an FPS game. The developers have polished this further than the vast majority of commercial releases, and it shows. But be warned - it has, by far, the steepest learning curve of any FPS game in existence... mainly because you have to think, not just click'n'kill.
Though modded as flamebait, I'd say this is pretty insightful.
XViD doesn't exist to make money... it doesn't exist for companies to sell their digital media to us... it exists as a good, open format which developers on any platform can play with, and any platform can play XViD movies without having to deal with royalty fees, DRM, and the likes.
Believe it or not, there are uses for mp3s other than stealing music, and there are uses for XViD other than stealing movies. I don't want the content _I_ produce to be bogged down with DRM crap, and I don't want to be locked into an officially-licensed player five years down the line that only exists on a platform I don't even want to use. So what if commercial publishers don't want to use XViD because it doesn't have DRM - not everything on the internet was put there by commercial publishers. XViD is for people, not companies.
There are quite a few independent labels on the iTunes music store. One of them, Anticon, just so happens to be my favorite label of the moment. I think that they're getting a much better deal with the iTunes music store, as they have less overhead... like funding the extravagant lifestyles of record company executives. In other words, the artists own the company, sell the music, and make money - iTunes music store or not.
I was amazed when I saw Anticon artists in the store, and I wouldn't have even bothered to look because they're such a small label. However, Apple was so kind as to put a few of their albums into the "just added" scroller, and as such, I downloaded several tracks.
From the Apple iTunes Press Conference, on April 29th: Complete transcript is available over nyah.
My question is, which one of Apple's competitors is propagating this FUD?!
Consider what you're saying - to optimize today's high performance 3d games, we should offload the number crunching from a highly specialized, highly optimized graphics processor... to a dynamically-configurable coprocessor. It doesn't sound like too good of an idea when phrased that way - modern graphics hardware was already created as a special-purpose, optimized processor.
How many uses of a dynamically-configurable processor can you think of for YOUR computer? You already have the CPU, which handles all sorts of fun... you already have the graphics hardware, which is extremely specific in its use... might have MPEG2 decoding in hardware... sound processor... and so on. We already have highly optimized, special-use processors in our machines for a variety of tasks. This chip basically sounds like an FPGA which can be programmed to do a couple things faster when it is absolutely necessary to do so - how often will that be?
We already have FPGAs... and people who really need to have customizable logic in their machines can already use FPGAs to do what this article claims. This is, by no means, a revolution in processing... It sounds like it's just a processor that tries to emulate hardware that you don't already have.
... Once Longhorn comes out, I'd find it absolutely hilarious if someone made a virus to use Microsoft's new GUI rendering technology as they used it in their demo. Imagine the joys around the office when all of the sudden, the windows on everyone's screens start spiraling around, flying through space... Ahh... refreshing.
Oh, you laugh... but I've seen a JVM running on an 8051 microprocessor. As far as computational power is concerned... they're probably on the same scale. Regardless, this guy at least had some faked screenshots to back up his ridiculous claims... as opposed to the OpenBSD on GameBoy kids :(
The article is very thin on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent. Just last night, I wanted to download the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo... and despite the fact there were literally hundreds of mirrors, I couldn't connect to many of them, and those I could connect to were utterly hosed. So, I looked for a torrent for the file, and a few minutes later, I was done downloading it.
Yes, you can use BitTorrent to steal stuff. But, all of the p2p programs are basically a mix of the roles of ftp and irc. BitTorrent is slightly different - it's a mix of p2p and the web, making a quick and easy means to find whatever you want. A great amount of content is completely legit, and BitTorrent is a dream come true for those times that everybody wants a certain file. I didn't expect NYT to focus on the good aspects of the program, but they didn't even mention how amazingly useful it actually is.
I think, in true Microsoft fashion, we'll see the new VPC changed slightly and then become the foundation of their (gaming) business.
How does this make any sense...? They're supposedly switching architectures for their next platform, yet emulating the architecture they're abandoning will be the foundation of their gaming business?
I honestly fear what Microsoft's plans are with their next console, as well as VPC, especially if they're adopting the same architecture as Apple machines. But, on the plus-side, if there's a dirt cheap PPC970 that I can mod to run MacOS X... set-top Apple here I come!
Woo, a sarcasm detector! What a real useful invention!
Is this flamebait? I'm honestly having trouble figuring that out. What I didn't have trouble figuring out was how to use my iPod...
I didn't know how to turn it off at first, so I didn't - I noticed that when you paused a song, the unit turned off automatically after a minute or so. One day it clicked that holding the button down accelerated the process. Pushing pause and leaving it alone caused the unit to go off - holding down the button seems like REALLY pausing it, which shut it off.
That's the absolute most-complicated part of operating my iPod... It didn't make sense to me at first, but now it's just intuitive.
Same with menu being associated with the backlight - as you are likely to be looking at the display when you push menu, holding down menu to turn on the backlight just kinda makes sense in an Apple kind of way. Holding menu, like holding pause, seems to suggest that you'd really like to see the menu.
And anything with the wheel - the wheel is a toy, and something to play with. I can't think of too many devices with such a wacky interface. When you first pick up an iPod, you fidget with the wheel, and see that it does stuff. The unlabeled button in the middle, as it's surrounded by the wheel, probably does something in conjunction with the wheel... like selecting things in menus, selecting time in track, etc.
So, though the iPod isn't an entirely straightforward device, you figure out what you need to know about it within a couple of minutes. In my opinion, the iPod, and Apple products in general, are textbook examples of how KISS should be. All of the functionality is there, but anything remotely complicated is invisible to those who aren't looking for it.
Dunno if this was one of the amazing devices shown, but recently an LCD display was installed outside of a food court at my school. All it seems to do is go through a powerpoint-like slideshow, telling us all of our lovely options in eating. For the past two days, however, all it has displayed is the Windows XP default screen saver.
Oh, I'm glad the money I'm paying for my education is going somewhere useful. Though this Windows-based LCD advertisement probably cost thousands of dollars, it's worth every penny in its ability to cause me to ignore the dining halls and make my own food.
Somehow, an advertisement running Windows seems to enhance my ability to ignore it - I'm ignoring two birds with one stone!
Stunts had its problems... Wacky glitches like being stuck at maximum speed for the entire track.... flying through the air doing the impossible, and not even crashing when you land. Or hitting bridges at just the right angle, and bouncing up in the air for a couple of minutes....
I wasted so many hours playing that game with my friends... You've got to admit, had they fixed up the physics, it was a pretty advanced game for its time. The level editor added a great amount to its value... and it was easy enough for the kids to use!