I makes it not Java, however. If Sun are claiming that Java is fine for games, the fact that they can't get a decent UI toolkit without bypassing Java and calling native code is a definite piece of counter-evidence.
Amateur works are frequently (but not always) constructed more poorly than professional works, but there are certainly exceptions.
Well, maybe my perception is different because I'm a Mac user, but I generally find it's the other way around. Proprietary software is much more likely to be a buggy half-assed port of a Windows application, and is much more likely to be dropped by the maker within a year of your buying it.
Excluding games, I've bought more shareware on the Mac than I've bought commercial software. Too many companies exhibit clear signs of having basically zero commitment to the Mac, yet expect Mac users to be so grateful that they develop for us at all that we'll buy it regardless. I'd much rather buy shareware from someone who only develops for the Mac, and who isn't under commercial pressure to ship as quickly as possible no matter how many bugs there are.
I don't like WinZip either, and find Aladdin's DropZip and Expander to be much more usable. In fact, I don't find WinZip to be significantly better than the free WiZ front-end to Info-ZIP. It seems to me that WinZip is a classic example of marketing over quality; somehow they've marketed to the stage where everyone "knows" that WinZip is the way to unzip zip files.
I haven't pirated any e-books, but the only e-books I've purchased are the O'Reilly Java reference library books. Know why? Because they're plain HTML. I can read them anywhere I need to, on any system I need to, I can search them, and I know I'll still be able to read them five years from now.
The chances of me purchasing e-books in a proprietary copy-protected format are zero. Not low, zero. So it's your choice.
I considered getting a Sidekick device, but decided not to for one big reason: if I decided to switch from T-Mobile, I'd be left with a paperweight. All the functionality relies on being network-connected with T-Mobile's servers.
That being the case, they need to make it much cheaper. I'm not going to pay $200 for the privilege of committing myself to using T-Mobile.
(Yes, I have an unlocked GSM phone.)
It's a modification of a standard distro, so...
on
Would You Use SELinux?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"I also don't want to have to work my way through every line of code before I install..."
I recently ordered the Xin Super Mini Amp with crossfeed. It arrived today, and I immediately tried it out with my pair of Sennheiser PXC250 noise-cancelling headphones (which, with noise cancelling off, act like a pair of PX200s. Source audio was a Sony MP3 CD Walkman with LAME-encoded MP3s, either --alt-preset standard or --r3mix.
OK, enough hardware details. Let's just say that about half an hour later, my wife wandered in to the front room to find out what I was doing still out there. The answer is that I was hearing musical details I had never heard before. The amp drives the headphones effortlessly. The crossover circuit effect is subtle, but it does indeed seem to give an open, spacious feeling to the sound, particularly on techno tracks where there's a lot of left-right fooling around.
The Sennheisers, by the way, are much better than the Bose noise cancelling headphones in sound quality, with the added advantage that they fold up and are significantly cheaper. HeadRoom rate them the best active noise cancellation headphones available as far as sound quality goes, and I can believe it--they're comparable to my regular home-listening Sennheisers. I considered some Etymotics, but experimenting with silicone earplugs left me uncomfortably sore; my ear canals seem to be rather shallow and narrow. So the Sennheisers are recommended too--but they do need a headphone amp. The Walkman can barely drive them without one.
Right, and SWT isn't Java, it's a Java interface to native code, albeit one that's been ported to many platforms.
I know C++ and Java, but if I were writing a game, I'd probably use Objective-C, and not just because I'd be writing it on the Mac... Objective-C gives you dynamic object oriented programming with pretty much the speed of raw C. Profiling my 3D screensaver code, the Objective-C overheads were invisibly small. Plus it's less painful and ugly than C++. I'd like to say I'm surprised it's not more popular, but I'm too cynical at this stage...
Ah, I think you've misunderstood. I don't want a higher resolution screen, I want a bigger screen.
I want something about the size of a paperback book, so I can comfortably read books on it. I don't care if it fits in a pocket or not, because I never carry my Palm in a pocket anyway. The only thing that goes in my pocket is my phone.
Trying to sell me a PDA that's pocket sized and has calendar, to-do list and address book isn't good enough. My phone is smaller than a PDA and does all those things, plus it's a phone. So for Palm (or Sony) to sell me something, it has to be able to do more--say, browse the web, read books, write e-mail, take notes in meetings, and so on--which means it needs a bigger screen.
(Oh, and it has to not run Windows. I've never bought or stolen any Microsoft software and I'm not about to start.)
Well, I posted this list in response to a Dreamcast fanboy's theories about inventive games being the cause of Dreamcast's failure, but it didn't get much attention, so here it is again.
If you think PlayStation hasn't done anything for game innovation, what about Rez, Irritating Stick, Frequency, Herdy Gerdy, Roll Away, PaRappa The Rapper, Incredible Crisis, Stretch Panic, Mad Maestro!, Mister Mosquito, Fantavision, No One Can Stop Mister Domino!, Vib Ribbon, Kinetica, Monster Rancher, Shadow Of Destiny, State Of Emergency, and maybe Sky Odyssey? Just to pick a few...
As a fan of quirky games, I picked PlayStation and PS2 precisely because the platform tends to get strange experimental games that other systems don't. If you want to see a truly uninspired lineup of FPS and sports games (with one interesting game), look at the Xbox...
If that's the problem, that's easily solvable too. And believe it or not, the geocaching rules already say to use transparent containers when possible.
...I'd probably get a Sony CLIE, because they have the biggest screen.
As it is, I see no reason to upgrade from my old Palm V. Which, I think, is the problem--Palm really hasn't come up with anything compelling.
However, perhaps BIGGER SCREEN the merged company might BIGGER SCREEN be able BIGGER SCREEN to work out BIGGER SCREEN something that BIGGER SCREEN would encourage people BIGGER SCREEN to upgrade?
Actually, given a binaural recording, headphones will reproduce the soundstage more accurately than loudspeakers in most rooms. The problem is that for some strange reason the industry continues with stereo rather than binaural, in spite of the majority of listening being on headphones. (Consider all those personal stereo systems.)
A headphone amp with a good crossover circuit will also largely get rid of soundstage issues.
As for visceral sound, you could always wear headphones and connect a subwoofer. I have at least one album that recommends that combination in the sleeve notes...
Plus, we're talking Computer Science here. Harvard's reputation in Computer Science is comparable to, say, MIT's reputation in athletics...
I mean, Harvard has a Bill Gates Chair in Computer Science, fercrissakes. I look forward to their announcing the Ken Lay MBA Program, the Arthur Andersen Chair in Mathematics, and the Henry Kissinger School of Peace Studies.
It's also a good idea to digitize at higher resolution and sampling rate, do all the signal processing you need to, and then make an intelligent decision about how to squeeze the information into 44.1kHz 16 bit audio. That's one of the processes that has drastically improved the quality of CD mastering in recent years.
It's analogous to creating your web artwork at (say) 150dpi, or using a vector illustration program, and then downsampling the final image to 72 dpi and adding a touch of sharpening.
It's very worthwhile investing in good hi-fi equipment if you listen on headphones, as many (if not most) audiophiles do.
You certainly can get a worthwhile improvement from spending moderately serious amounts on equipment, but you're right in a way--the place to spend the money isn't always obvious, and a lot of expensive kit is wank that's beaten handily by stuff a fraction of the price.
For example, you can spend $1000 on a set of incredible audiophile speakers... or you can spend $300 on a pair of good headphones and a headphone amp. Unlike with speakers, you can put an audiophile headphone system in a shared apartment and not have to compromise. In fact, you can build a portable headphone listening setup that'll sound better than anything with speakers that you might plausibly set up in the communal living room.
Even cheap equipment can often be improved greatly by add-ons. I just upgraded to some Sennheisers for my Sony Walkman, and the difference is incredible. I have a better headphone amp on the way too...
Last time I auditioned CD players, one thing that surprised me was the amount of difference in sound quality in half a dozen big-name players at around the same price. If you're serious about sound quality, you really have to audition the stuff.
I use a tool called BookIt, which will sync bookmarks between all Mac browsers as well as Mozilla on Windoze. It'll sync across the net as long as you can mount the remote filesystem somehow. I carry my bookmarks on a 128MB flash memory stick that's about 25x12x2 mm.
The game is mediocre at best anyway. They are just trying to capitalize on the spectacle of violence.
Well, duh. The original game sucked, the only reason it got any attention was the controversy. I suspect that the poor sales are because the people who were suckered into buying the first one knew to keep away from the sequel.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe nobody has said: "For photos of Uranus, go to www.goatse.cx."
I makes it not Java, however. If Sun are claiming that Java is fine for games, the fact that they can't get a decent UI toolkit without bypassing Java and calling native code is a definite piece of counter-evidence.
Digital. I figured I'd set it once and not adjust it much, and it would be better than having a knob sticking out (fnarr fnarr).
It does the job. If I were adjusting it regularly it'd be an utter pain, but since any portable will have a decent analog volume control...
Well, maybe my perception is different because I'm a Mac user, but I generally find it's the other way around. Proprietary software is much more likely to be a buggy half-assed port of a Windows application, and is much more likely to be dropped by the maker within a year of your buying it.
Excluding games, I've bought more shareware on the Mac than I've bought commercial software. Too many companies exhibit clear signs of having basically zero commitment to the Mac, yet expect Mac users to be so grateful that they develop for us at all that we'll buy it regardless. I'd much rather buy shareware from someone who only develops for the Mac, and who isn't under commercial pressure to ship as quickly as possible no matter how many bugs there are.
I don't like WinZip either, and find Aladdin's DropZip and Expander to be much more usable. In fact, I don't find WinZip to be significantly better than the free WiZ front-end to Info-ZIP. It seems to me that WinZip is a classic example of marketing over quality; somehow they've marketed to the stage where everyone "knows" that WinZip is the way to unzip zip files.
Well, let me give you another perspective.
I haven't pirated any e-books, but the only e-books I've purchased are the O'Reilly Java reference library books. Know why? Because they're plain HTML. I can read them anywhere I need to, on any system I need to, I can search them, and I know I'll still be able to read them five years from now.
The chances of me purchasing e-books in a proprietary copy-protected format are zero. Not low, zero. So it's your choice.
I considered getting a Sidekick device, but decided not to for one big reason: if I decided to switch from T-Mobile, I'd be left with a paperweight. All the functionality relies on being network-connected with T-Mobile's servers.
That being the case, they need to make it much cheaper. I'm not going to pay $200 for the privilege of committing myself to using T-Mobile.
(Yes, I have an unlocked GSM phone.)
% man diff
Funny you should ask...
I recently ordered the Xin Super Mini Amp with crossfeed. It arrived today, and I immediately tried it out with my pair of Sennheiser PXC250 noise-cancelling headphones (which, with noise cancelling off, act like a pair of PX200s. Source audio was a Sony MP3 CD Walkman with LAME-encoded MP3s, either --alt-preset standard or --r3mix.
OK, enough hardware details. Let's just say that about half an hour later, my wife wandered in to the front room to find out what I was doing still out there. The answer is that I was hearing musical details I had never heard before. The amp drives the headphones effortlessly. The crossover circuit effect is subtle, but it does indeed seem to give an open, spacious feeling to the sound, particularly on techno tracks where there's a lot of left-right fooling around.
The Sennheisers, by the way, are much better than the Bose noise cancelling headphones in sound quality, with the added advantage that they fold up and are significantly cheaper. HeadRoom rate them the best active noise cancellation headphones available as far as sound quality goes, and I can believe it--they're comparable to my regular home-listening Sennheisers. I considered some Etymotics, but experimenting with silicone earplugs left me uncomfortably sore; my ear canals seem to be rather shallow and narrow. So the Sennheisers are recommended too--but they do need a headphone amp. The Walkman can barely drive them without one.
Take Nikon, for example. All their sub-$1000 digital cameras have crappy f/2.8 zoom lenses. Even Sony offer better glass than that.
Right, and SWT isn't Java, it's a Java interface to native code, albeit one that's been ported to many platforms.
I know C++ and Java, but if I were writing a game, I'd probably use Objective-C, and not just because I'd be writing it on the Mac... Objective-C gives you dynamic object oriented programming with pretty much the speed of raw C. Profiling my 3D screensaver code, the Objective-C overheads were invisibly small. Plus it's less painful and ugly than C++. I'd like to say I'm surprised it's not more popular, but I'm too cynical at this stage...
Ah, I think you've misunderstood. I don't want a higher resolution screen, I want a bigger screen.
I want something about the size of a paperback book, so I can comfortably read books on it. I don't care if it fits in a pocket or not, because I never carry my Palm in a pocket anyway. The only thing that goes in my pocket is my phone.
Trying to sell me a PDA that's pocket sized and has calendar, to-do list and address book isn't good enough. My phone is smaller than a PDA and does all those things, plus it's a phone. So for Palm (or Sony) to sell me something, it has to be able to do more--say, browse the web, read books, write e-mail, take notes in meetings, and so on--which means it needs a bigger screen.
(Oh, and it has to not run Windows. I've never bought or stolen any Microsoft software and I'm not about to start.)
Well, I posted this list in response to a Dreamcast fanboy's theories about inventive games being the cause of Dreamcast's failure, but it didn't get much attention, so here it is again.
If you think PlayStation hasn't done anything for game innovation, what about Rez, Irritating Stick, Frequency, Herdy Gerdy, Roll Away, PaRappa The Rapper, Incredible Crisis, Stretch Panic, Mad Maestro!, Mister Mosquito, Fantavision, No One Can Stop Mister Domino!, Vib Ribbon, Kinetica, Monster Rancher, Shadow Of Destiny, State Of Emergency, and maybe Sky Odyssey? Just to pick a few...
As a fan of quirky games, I picked PlayStation and PS2 precisely because the platform tends to get strange experimental games that other systems don't. If you want to see a truly uninspired lineup of FPS and sports games (with one interesting game), look at the Xbox...
Show me three good games written in 100% Pure Java.
As of today, I've only seen one decent application written in 100% Pure Java, and that's a text editor.
My yardstick here is that the software has to be good enough that you'd never guess it was written in Java if you didn't know.
If that's the problem, that's easily solvable too. And believe it or not, the geocaching rules already say to use transparent containers when possible.
...I'd probably get a Sony CLIE, because they have the biggest screen.
As it is, I see no reason to upgrade from my old Palm V. Which, I think, is the problem--Palm really hasn't come up with anything compelling.
However, perhaps BIGGER SCREEN the merged company might BIGGER SCREEN be able BIGGER SCREEN to work out BIGGER SCREEN something that BIGGER SCREEN would encourage people BIGGER SCREEN to upgrade?
Actually, given a binaural recording, headphones will reproduce the soundstage more accurately than loudspeakers in most rooms. The problem is that for some strange reason the industry continues with stereo rather than binaural, in spite of the majority of listening being on headphones. (Consider all those personal stereo systems.)
A headphone amp with a good crossover circuit will also largely get rid of soundstage issues.
As for visceral sound, you could always wear headphones and connect a subwoofer. I have at least one album that recommends that combination in the sleeve notes...
Plus, we're talking Computer Science here. Harvard's reputation in Computer Science is comparable to, say, MIT's reputation in athletics...
I mean, Harvard has a Bill Gates Chair in Computer Science, fercrissakes. I look forward to their announcing the Ken Lay MBA Program, the Arthur Andersen Chair in Mathematics, and the Henry Kissinger School of Peace Studies.
It's also a good idea to digitize at higher resolution and sampling rate, do all the signal processing you need to, and then make an intelligent decision about how to squeeze the information into 44.1kHz 16 bit audio. That's one of the processes that has drastically improved the quality of CD mastering in recent years.
It's analogous to creating your web artwork at (say) 150dpi, or using a vector illustration program, and then downsampling the final image to 72 dpi and adding a touch of sharpening.
It's very worthwhile investing in good hi-fi equipment if you listen on headphones, as many (if not most) audiophiles do.
You certainly can get a worthwhile improvement from spending moderately serious amounts on equipment, but you're right in a way--the place to spend the money isn't always obvious, and a lot of expensive kit is wank that's beaten handily by stuff a fraction of the price.
For example, you can spend $1000 on a set of incredible audiophile speakers... or you can spend $300 on a pair of good headphones and a headphone amp. Unlike with speakers, you can put an audiophile headphone system in a shared apartment and not have to compromise. In fact, you can build a portable headphone listening setup that'll sound better than anything with speakers that you might plausibly set up in the communal living room.
Even cheap equipment can often be improved greatly by add-ons. I just upgraded to some Sennheisers for my Sony Walkman, and the difference is incredible. I have a better headphone amp on the way too...
Last time I auditioned CD players, one thing that surprised me was the amount of difference in sound quality in half a dozen big-name players at around the same price. If you're serious about sound quality, you really have to audition the stuff.
I use a tool called BookIt, which will sync bookmarks between all Mac browsers as well as Mozilla on Windoze. It'll sync across the net as long as you can mount the remote filesystem somehow. I carry my bookmarks on a 128MB flash memory stick that's about 25x12x2 mm.
Well, duh. The original game sucked, the only reason it got any attention was the controversy. I suspect that the poor sales are because the people who were suckered into buying the first one knew to keep away from the sequel.
The key word is "percentage".
Turn off the "constant volume" feature and fluctuation stops.
Switch to WHAMB! and you get better decoder quality too.
Cut it out, RMS.