I wish there were a way to mod parent up to some sort of sticky / FAQ status.
Yes, of course any sort of geek news is going to be filled with notices of high tech product releases, etc.. It shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it did.
I don't believe that with a computing device that I own, that I should have to be gated through a solitary portal to install software.
However, if they do insist on gating my usage in such a way, I expect them to approve applications quickly and based on criteria for the good of the application and the user, not the control of their own market, censorship or the other reasons I find distasteful that they have (in some cases) openly cited.
How Apple runs the app store to me, is highly subjective and non-competitive. Did I say however, that I hate them? I disagree with them.
I'm quite rational in my preferences. I'm quite able to think for myself thank you too without someone taking passive-aggressive shots at my sanity. *rolls eyes*
But hey, thanks for the ad hominem attack. You could have thoughtfully replied how you disagreed, instead of just spouting numbers of how successful you feel they've been and declaring me irrational.
I think it's a great move and a well made app & service like this can only help Apple.
Unfortunately, I've got the distinct impression that Apple approved this app because it was poised to give them a lot of bad press if they didn't approve it. Maybe if their track record for app approval was a bit better, I'd be throwing kudos Apple's way, but at this point I'm pretty jaded.
I find lately that I'm quite glad Apple never gained the top spot in the personal computer market, because I dread what sort of control they would impose over my PC. Yeah the alternatives haven't been great, but seeing what they've done with a market where they do have significant share, I shudder thinking about what it would have been like.
All of the credit should go to Spotify itself. I'd really like to see it brought to North America and specifically Canada, where I can use it. It's really spectacular and more of the revolution in music listening than anything we've seen in a long while.
None of the companies in this coalition had the balls to step up and do this themselves. I'm guessing they didn't think there was any money in it. Now that Google is doing it, all they see is an opportunity to take a shot at their competitor in other markets.
Note the wording of the writeup: "could make Google the main source". Not the only source.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three separate programming language/syntaxes (JQuery syntactic sugar would add yet one more pseudo syntax). To design graphical applications with them for the Pre, I'd have to use a text editor. And if I read the article right, I would have to fiddle with the command line to do development.
The Cocoa API is essentially one programming language/syntax. And I can design graphical interfaces with a graphical application (Interface Builder). And I never have to touch the command line.
No contest.
First, claiming that the Cocoa API is simpler than HTML, CSS and JavaScript together is misleading.
Second, it assumes starting from scratch, but the point of the route Palm is taking is that there are already bucketloads of developers fully immersed in web development.
Third, isn't this exactly how Apple started out for iPhone development? Okay, Apple was much slower but they're where they are now and that's mostly what matters. Still, you're being very disingenuous overall.
Now personally, I've been developing web applications for the iPhone. In part because I've got my hands on one today and the Pre is still in the future for us Canadians. Regardless, I'm not developing with the Cocoa API exactly for the reason you've inadvertently illustrated: I'm leveraging the knowledge I already have.
There really haven't been that many attempts at a wide-market OS overall. Not even if you start before Microsoft. I suspect most people here could name the major players off the tops of their heads.
Now if you're talking overall products, well you brought search into it and doesn't that kind of argue against your point?
They've been running their own flavour of Linux at Google internally for a few years now, so it only made sense they would release it as a packaged OS sooner or later.
I suppose that's just too mundane for news though.
To me, MxO just lacked the wonder and glory of the films. The obviously had to take a lot of shortcuts and compromises to fit it into a Diku-esque MMORPG and well, there was a lot to live up to for Matrix fans and it just plain felt non-cutting edge.
As one of the comments on the source article states "it catered to gamers instead of fans". Specifically they created a game firmly within an existing genre instead of something specific to The Matrix. I know that's easy to criticize, but regardless I think it's true.
This is my experience as well when I went through my old discs recently. All of my discs from '96-'98 work, every single one of them regardless of manufacturer, but if I recall there were few true manufacturers at the time, the rest were just relabelled / rebranded.
More recent discs have failed meanwhile.
Mind you, I recall how much of a pain it was to get a working burn back with my old 1X unbuffered burner, any bump on the desk or the slightest flaw in the disc and we'd have a coaster.
Is anyone else getting the feeling that the board of Facebook just might be the founders of Carrousel in Logan's Run?
You could have the greatest development the tech world has ever seen, but if you're over 30, prepare to be recycled as fodder for Andreessen's mythical 24 yr old.
The higher costs of service versus localized computing has been a known drawback since the beginning. It's part of the drive too, in the expectations of huge profits and / or market-share.
That doesn't mean that open source can't participate, it just means that the big players are the big players. It's not that much of a switch really, money drives a lot of things and "free" does too. I imagine in the drive for domination of the market, the big boys will be clamoring to have other software hook into their cloud resources. Certainly I imagine that will be a part of Google's strategy, leveraging their bandwidth and server farms to become infrastructure for others.
In the end, how is this so different from how the Internet has been so far? I don't mean technically or end-user experience, I mean in the nature of open source competing with closed. It's definitely a switch from desktop computing, but online services are already available in both "free" and various pay models.
You're so busy trying to make your point, you've wandered off topic and forgot to read the essence of what I was saying:
Firefox supporting Theora doesn't equate to Google having their pockets into defending it if submarine patents surface. Your opinion on Mozilla's arrangements with Google won't change that, but go ahead and bash away on a topic that's essentially unrelated. This is why I call your ilk conspiracy theorists, because you're connecting dots that aren't there and you're so determined to draw them in, you don't realize the scope of what you're talking about is just plain off-topic.
Webfonts (downloadable fonts), Workers (parallelism), Webforms 2, XHTML = XML while HTML 5 = incremental from HTML 4.
It's not "insightful" to list a bunch of things that are either in the spec already, in other specs, or way off base (what the hell, reversing fallback modes would be a disaster). How'd this clown get modded up for not having a clue?
Apple is already betting on H.264 and it seems they'd like to keep their cards in the same deck.
While I think we should be highly critical of that reasoning, it's not without logic. The patent risk using H.264 is spread out across multiple vendors & users who've invested deeply into it already. Theora could very well have lower risk of a submarine patent (who's to say, that'd take a crystal ball into the future), but to Apple it's a new risk on top of the risks they already have.
What Apple is essentially asking here is, why should they put eggs in another basket for very little reward (for them)?
Basically the situation here is that someone has to be the first to step up and put some deep pocket risk for the sake of Theora. Firefox doesn't have those pockets, they're non-profit and despite conspiracy theorists they're not really backed by Google (as in, Google doesn't have their back on this).
The good side is that if just one of the big three players (Google, Apple or Microsoft) were to vouch for Theora, the other two are likely to jump in sooner or later. That's pretty much how H.264 gained traction, isn't it?
Not only did Blizzard's RTS games gain popularity as LAN games, but they capitalized on casual LAN gaming (in offices, etc.) by allowing multiple players players on a single purchased copy of the game. That feature became standard for other RTS games for awhile, but at first it certainly helped Blizzard propel over the crowds (and it certainly was a crowded genre).
So I'm contrasting the old "free" partial copies of the games to gain popularity, to the server = copy-protection methods now that they have the popularity locked in.
I wouldn't care much about it, but I still love LAN options and I'm not all that fond of Blizzard's style of "community building" because I know it's going to be ladder climbing and stat building designed to capitalize on achievement-focused obsessions. I'm sure that will sell them many games, but I'd just like to fire up a quick game with friends without everyone so obsessed with the meta aspects.
TF2 has gotten a lot more content since and so did CS Source too. In the first year of their release, there was amazing count of new maps for these games and new features. L4D is way behind in the schedule.
TF2 was 11 years in the making. CS Source leveraged from the original CS. Both were based upon mods, so I do find the "mods aren't good enough" bit absurd when the premium professional products compared aren't far removed.
So that's what this is really about I'd say. Time versus money. I'd rather pay $100 in two years to get full content than wait a decade. Of course, it's human nature for most people to want it all, timely and cheap / free. But the expectations aren't reasonable when the release schedule, updates and overall product aren't comparable. In several ways Left4Dead can be considered a bigger project than TF2 or CounterStrike, it certainly involves a lot more design and code.
Maps aren't hard to come by once the tools are available, which is what this is all about.
What's bugging me more than the semantics of promises versus expectations? Some people want free, free, free, but mods aren't good enough for them? Have these guys been paying any attention to Valve products for the past 12 years?
As the article states, the beta for the SDK was already available, so that's what people have been using to develop maps. No need for alternative methods, it's mostly the same SDK. You can download it directly from Steam and follow additional information from their Wiki: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Authoring_Tools/SDK_(Left_4_Dead)
That link contains nothing but Gabe Newell describing exactly what they've done. Community support, SDK, the occasional gamemode and map tweaks.He talks about TF2 as an example, but did you think they were adding classes to L4D?
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if you had some specific promises that weren't met, or like many (many, many) other games that are bug ridden and missing significant features shown during pre-release. Left4Dead is nearly exactly what they described, so if you were let down, I don't know what game you thought you were buying.
If we were discussing the merits of the game and you didn't like it, I could accept that just fine. It's the premise about unmet promises that's bogus. List something concrete, otherwise you're just tossing rhetoric about your own failed expectations.
The game sold well, got good reviews and is currently played by many. If you didn't like it, fine, write a review, but stop with the high and mighty broken promises thing, it's just childish.
They're bothering because this is exactly the kind of support they promised for Left4Dead.
Let go of the silly nerdrage, you''re blinded by it.
A decent co-op game (a genre all too rare) and full tools for the community to mod with, and you're counting days until you consider abandoned? Seems like an odd perspective.
Valve is still one of the few companies that puts out full SDKs not only for mods for their engine, but pretty much every game they make on it as well-- Yet it's they're getting much appreciation, at least not by the comments above, and I expect some below as well. It makes me wonder why they bother, although I for one am really glad that they do.
Usually my complaint is that sequels take too long to come out, so I'm a bit at odds with those that are complaining a year is too soon. Seriously? A year = timely.
It's newsworthy because the game crashed and burned on release. It's still going and now it's being updated. Not completely unusual (Anarchy Online being the other example), but odd enough that it's a story of some sort of interest.
There's certainly been enough other fluff on Slashdot, like every little possible rumour that Apple is developing new iPocketLint. *rolls eyes*
Generally my impression of HTPC setups is that the PC is used to emulate older console games (NES, SNES), not really for ports of current console games, because if you've got a big screen, you've likely got a 360 / PS3 / Wii plugged in.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish there were a way to mod parent up to some sort of sticky / FAQ status.
Yes, of course any sort of geek news is going to be filled with notices of high tech product releases, etc.. It shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it did.
Let me be really clear whisper_jeff:
I don't believe that with a computing device that I own, that I should have to be gated through a solitary portal to install software.
However, if they do insist on gating my usage in such a way, I expect them to approve applications quickly and based on criteria for the good of the application and the user, not the control of their own market, censorship or the other reasons I find distasteful that they have (in some cases) openly cited.
How Apple runs the app store to me, is highly subjective and non-competitive. Did I say however, that I hate them? I disagree with them.
I'm quite rational in my preferences. I'm quite able to think for myself thank you too without someone taking passive-aggressive shots at my sanity. *rolls eyes*
But hey, thanks for the ad hominem attack. You could have thoughtfully replied how you disagreed, instead of just spouting numbers of how successful you feel they've been and declaring me irrational.
You, sir, are a shill.
I think it's a great move and a well made app & service like this can only help Apple.
Unfortunately, I've got the distinct impression that Apple approved this app because it was poised to give them a lot of bad press if they didn't approve it. Maybe if their track record for app approval was a bit better, I'd be throwing kudos Apple's way, but at this point I'm pretty jaded.
I find lately that I'm quite glad Apple never gained the top spot in the personal computer market, because I dread what sort of control they would impose over my PC. Yeah the alternatives haven't been great, but seeing what they've done with a market where they do have significant share, I shudder thinking about what it would have been like.
All of the credit should go to Spotify itself. I'd really like to see it brought to North America and specifically Canada, where I can use it. It's really spectacular and more of the revolution in music listening than anything we've seen in a long while.
/Agreed.
None of the companies in this coalition had the balls to step up and do this themselves. I'm guessing they didn't think there was any money in it. Now that Google is doing it, all they see is an opportunity to take a shot at their competitor in other markets.
Note the wording of the writeup: "could make Google the main source". Not the only source.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three separate programming language/syntaxes (JQuery syntactic sugar would add yet one more pseudo syntax). To design graphical applications with them for the Pre, I'd have to use a text editor. And if I read the article right, I would have to fiddle with the command line to do development.
The Cocoa API is essentially one programming language/syntax. And I can design graphical interfaces with a graphical application (Interface Builder). And I never have to touch the command line.
No contest.
First, claiming that the Cocoa API is simpler than HTML, CSS and JavaScript together is misleading.
Second, it assumes starting from scratch, but the point of the route Palm is taking is that there are already bucketloads of developers fully immersed in web development.
Third, isn't this exactly how Apple started out for iPhone development? Okay, Apple was much slower but they're where they are now and that's mostly what matters. Still, you're being very disingenuous overall.
Now personally, I've been developing web applications for the iPhone. In part because I've got my hands on one today and the Pre is still in the future for us Canadians. Regardless, I'm not developing with the Cocoa API exactly for the reason you've inadvertently illustrated: I'm leveraging the knowledge I already have.
Using what you already know = much simpler.
There really haven't been that many attempts at a wide-market OS overall. Not even if you start before Microsoft. I suspect most people here could name the major players off the tops of their heads.
Now if you're talking overall products, well you brought search into it and doesn't that kind of argue against your point?
They've been running their own flavour of Linux at Google internally for a few years now, so it only made sense they would release it as a packaged OS sooner or later.
I suppose that's just too mundane for news though.
To me, MxO just lacked the wonder and glory of the films. The obviously had to take a lot of shortcuts and compromises to fit it into a Diku-esque MMORPG and well, there was a lot to live up to for Matrix fans and it just plain felt non-cutting edge.
As one of the comments on the source article states "it catered to gamers instead of fans". Specifically they created a game firmly within an existing genre instead of something specific to The Matrix. I know that's easy to criticize, but regardless I think it's true.
Didn't we already hear this about 15 years ago or so?
Maybe if they concentrate really hard for another 15 years then wishful thinking might pop open an alternate reality or something.
Tap your heels together and make yourself less relevant.
This is my experience as well when I went through my old discs recently. All of my discs from '96-'98 work, every single one of them regardless of manufacturer, but if I recall there were few true manufacturers at the time, the rest were just relabelled / rebranded.
More recent discs have failed meanwhile.
Mind you, I recall how much of a pain it was to get a working burn back with my old 1X unbuffered burner, any bump on the desk or the slightest flaw in the disc and we'd have a coaster.
Is anyone else getting the feeling that the board of Facebook just might be the founders of Carrousel in Logan's Run?
You could have the greatest development the tech world has ever seen, but if you're over 30, prepare to be recycled as fodder for Andreessen's mythical 24 yr old.
The higher costs of service versus localized computing has been a known drawback since the beginning. It's part of the drive too, in the expectations of huge profits and / or market-share.
That doesn't mean that open source can't participate, it just means that the big players are the big players. It's not that much of a switch really, money drives a lot of things and "free" does too. I imagine in the drive for domination of the market, the big boys will be clamoring to have other software hook into their cloud resources. Certainly I imagine that will be a part of Google's strategy, leveraging their bandwidth and server farms to become infrastructure for others.
In the end, how is this so different from how the Internet has been so far? I don't mean technically or end-user experience, I mean in the nature of open source competing with closed. It's definitely a switch from desktop computing, but online services are already available in both "free" and various pay models.
You're so busy trying to make your point, you've wandered off topic and forgot to read the essence of what I was saying:
Firefox supporting Theora doesn't equate to Google having their pockets into defending it if submarine patents surface. Your opinion on Mozilla's arrangements with Google won't change that, but go ahead and bash away on a topic that's essentially unrelated. This is why I call your ilk conspiracy theorists, because you're connecting dots that aren't there and you're so determined to draw them in, you don't realize the scope of what you're talking about is just plain off-topic.
Webfonts (downloadable fonts), Workers (parallelism), Webforms 2, XHTML = XML while HTML 5 = incremental from HTML 4.
It's not "insightful" to list a bunch of things that are either in the spec already, in other specs, or way off base (what the hell, reversing fallback modes would be a disaster). How'd this clown get modded up for not having a clue?
Apple is already betting on H.264 and it seems they'd like to keep their cards in the same deck.
While I think we should be highly critical of that reasoning, it's not without logic. The patent risk using H.264 is spread out across multiple vendors & users who've invested deeply into it already. Theora could very well have lower risk of a submarine patent (who's to say, that'd take a crystal ball into the future), but to Apple it's a new risk on top of the risks they already have.
What Apple is essentially asking here is, why should they put eggs in another basket for very little reward (for them)?
Basically the situation here is that someone has to be the first to step up and put some deep pocket risk for the sake of Theora. Firefox doesn't have those pockets, they're non-profit and despite conspiracy theorists they're not really backed by Google (as in, Google doesn't have their back on this).
The good side is that if just one of the big three players (Google, Apple or Microsoft) were to vouch for Theora, the other two are likely to jump in sooner or later. That's pretty much how H.264 gained traction, isn't it?
Not only did Blizzard's RTS games gain popularity as LAN games, but they capitalized on casual LAN gaming (in offices, etc.) by allowing multiple players players on a single purchased copy of the game. That feature became standard for other RTS games for awhile, but at first it certainly helped Blizzard propel over the crowds (and it certainly was a crowded genre).
So I'm contrasting the old "free" partial copies of the games to gain popularity, to the server = copy-protection methods now that they have the popularity locked in.
I wouldn't care much about it, but I still love LAN options and I'm not all that fond of Blizzard's style of "community building" because I know it's going to be ladder climbing and stat building designed to capitalize on achievement-focused obsessions. I'm sure that will sell them many games, but I'd just like to fire up a quick game with friends without everyone so obsessed with the meta aspects.
TF2 has gotten a lot more content since and so did CS Source too. In the first year of their release, there was amazing count of new maps for these games and new features. L4D is way behind in the schedule.
TF2 was 11 years in the making. CS Source leveraged from the original CS. Both were based upon mods, so I do find the "mods aren't good enough" bit absurd when the premium professional products compared aren't far removed.
So that's what this is really about I'd say. Time versus money. I'd rather pay $100 in two years to get full content than wait a decade. Of course, it's human nature for most people to want it all, timely and cheap / free. But the expectations aren't reasonable when the release schedule, updates and overall product aren't comparable. In several ways Left4Dead can be considered a bigger project than TF2 or CounterStrike, it certainly involves a lot more design and code.
Maps aren't hard to come by once the tools are available, which is what this is all about.
What's bugging me more than the semantics of promises versus expectations? Some people want free, free, free, but mods aren't good enough for them? Have these guys been paying any attention to Valve products for the past 12 years?
As the article states, the beta for the SDK was already available, so that's what people have been using to develop maps. No need for alternative methods, it's mostly the same SDK. You can download it directly from Steam and follow additional information from their Wiki: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Authoring_Tools/SDK_(Left_4_Dead)
That link contains nothing but Gabe Newell describing exactly what they've done. Community support, SDK, the occasional gamemode and map tweaks.He talks about TF2 as an example, but did you think they were adding classes to L4D?
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if you had some specific promises that weren't met, or like many (many, many) other games that are bug ridden and missing significant features shown during pre-release. Left4Dead is nearly exactly what they described, so if you were let down, I don't know what game you thought you were buying.
If we were discussing the merits of the game and you didn't like it, I could accept that just fine. It's the premise about unmet promises that's bogus. List something concrete, otherwise you're just tossing rhetoric about your own failed expectations.
The game sold well, got good reviews and is currently played by many. If you didn't like it, fine, write a review, but stop with the high and mighty broken promises thing, it's just childish.
They're bothering because this is exactly the kind of support they promised for Left4Dead.
Let go of the silly nerdrage, you''re blinded by it.
A decent co-op game (a genre all too rare) and full tools for the community to mod with, and you're counting days until you consider abandoned? Seems like an odd perspective.
Valve is still one of the few companies that puts out full SDKs not only for mods for their engine, but pretty much every game they make on it as well-- Yet it's they're getting much appreciation, at least not by the comments above, and I expect some below as well. It makes me wonder why they bother, although I for one am really glad that they do.
Usually my complaint is that sequels take too long to come out, so I'm a bit at odds with those that are complaining a year is too soon. Seriously? A year = timely.
The corpse of Karel Capek seen sulking nearby.
Karel Capek's variation of the Czech "robota" was not mechanical in nature, so I'm not sure if it would apply for this list as a scientific term.
Asimov's Robotics however, was about the science and technology of electrical-mechanical devices.
It's nit-picking, for sure, but in reference to this particular list, Asimov's usage is the correct one.
It's newsworthy because the game crashed and burned on release. It's still going and now it's being updated. Not completely unusual (Anarchy Online being the other example), but odd enough that it's a story of some sort of interest.
There's certainly been enough other fluff on Slashdot, like every little possible rumour that Apple is developing new iPocketLint. *rolls eyes*
None of these words or phrases need to be banned as much as this list does, along with every other list that swarms the 'news' this time of year.
Overuse and general uselessness indeed. =P
Generally my impression of HTPC setups is that the PC is used to emulate older console games (NES, SNES), not really for ports of current console games, because if you've got a big screen, you've likely got a 360 / PS3 / Wii plugged in.