The controls were fine for the speeder levels, but once you got into open space they sucked. I gave up playing at the mission in the asteroid field (4?) because they were so terrible.
I seem to be the only person on Slashdot who really liked Luigi's Mansion. The vacuum mechanics, the ghosts, the way Luigi hums along with the music, it was really enjoyable. A bit short, maybe, but great fun. I think it's also one of my girlfriend's favourite games of all time, behind Mario 64 and Mario Kart, of course.
Pikmin 1&2 are two of my favourite games, Pikmin 2 being one of those rare sequels which is better than the original in every way. I just finished Pikmin 1 again and noticed that it actually has a lot of graphical glitches (for a Nintendo game, that is). Just little things like buried Pikmin not being drawn sometimes or dead creatures getting stuck in bridges, which you almost never see in Nintendo 1st party games. I wonder if it was hurried out because their game line up so thin?
That's fine if you're in a fairly slow moving market. For most of us in shrink-wrap software, we have competitors, we need to make money and our market may only exist for a few months to a year. If we take the time and resources to ship a 'perfect' product, then a competitor will release something cheaper and faster than us that's 'good enough' and we will lose money. You can't design your way out of all bugs.
All software ships with known bugs - if it doesn't, you are either not testing enough, or are only shipping tiny programs. At some point, commercial reality has to come into it and you weigh the cost of fixing the bug against its impact.
The Gamecube was 25,000 Yen in Japan at launch and was £130 IIRC in the UK. That included a price cut in response to competition, though, so £150 is probably a good guess.
IIRC, you have to click "Resample" in the Image resize dialog to actually resize the image in pixels. Not exactly intuitive, but it is there. I think PSE4 gets a lot right in the UI in general, but it has some rough edges.
I read The Humane Interface and it's an interesting book. Raskin had some odd ideas, but the book gives you a different view on interface design beyond the standard menu, toolbar and mouse layout.
I think his concept of a zooming interface is basically what iPhoto, Picasa and Photoshop Elements use in their browse modes and it works pretty well there.
The voiceover in the slideshow seemed to imply that their iPhoto-like program could do it, it's a bit hard to tell without the actual MS video, though.
A bit touchy, are we? You might notice that I never said Apple invented these things - claiming to have invented things like the slideshow or search would be a bit like claiming to have invented the question mark.
The point is, these features will have been well implemented and available in a major desktop operating system for around two years by the time Vista ships.
Other posts have already pointed out most of the flaws in your argument, but I'll add one more point.
There are lots of things where you make an investment up front in the hope of generating an income stream in the future which is worth more than the investment. Releasing recorded music is no different. Renting out property, for example - why should I pay the landlord any more than the cost of upkeep of the property?
By protecting the products of the musicians' investment, you give the musicians an incentive in invest.
It was just that I remember Earthsea being a school English class book when I was 11 or 12, which I thought was roughly Potter's target age group. But then, most of the people I see reading Harry Potter are 20-something, so I wasn't sure. I agree on Earthsea, by the way, definitely one of my favourite novels. I'm actually planning to re-read them all on the beach this summer, mostly to convince myself that they weren't as bad as the SciFi channel mini-series.
Exactly, it's the network effect. The value to Sony of a console sold early in the life cycle is much higher than one sold at the end. A larger target market attracts more developers, which means more games and therefore more gamers.
I think Harry Potter is something of a special case, though. It's also very simply written and plotted - compare it to its rough 1960's equivalent, A Wizard of Earthsea, for example.
From the sound of it, the fact that US schools make kids read Beowulf and Moby Dick probably has more to do with the decline in reading than videogames.
Re:Can it be better than EditPad [Lite]...?
on
Acme for Windows
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· Score: 1
EditPad is quite nice, but very buggy on Linux unfortunately. jEdit makes a good alternative, it has all of its features and many more.
For example I long ago decided I will never go to meetings again because I think face to face meetings are the biggest waste of time you can ever have.
It really depends on how much your time is worth to you. Linux on many modern laptops is fiddly and time-consuming and will often leave you with some non-functioning hardware (the SD card reader on my Acer 8104 doesn't work in Linux, the wireless cuts out with firmware errors under load, suspend to disk is very unreliable and the battery life is about 2/3 it is in Windows). If you can't spare a few days of tweaking, buy a ready-installed machine or stick with OS X.
Otherwise, I would generally recommend not buying the latest and greatest laptop unless you are absolutely sure it's supported, because the hardware support often takes a while to catch up
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I know I've ended up with ifdef's in a lot of code on Symbian devices, mostly to work round bugs in the OS.
That's a bandwidth and processing power issue. Adding a web browser to a phone costs pennies.
Apart from anything else, how long has it been since voice quality from a mobile was an issue? It's generally at least as good as a landline.
Ever notice how people who want to buy a cellphone keep complaining that they can't just get a bloody phone?
No, not really. There are plenty of small, light "just phones" around.
The controls were fine for the speeder levels, but once you got into open space they sucked. I gave up playing at the mission in the asteroid field (4?) because they were so terrible.
I seem to be the only person on Slashdot who really liked Luigi's Mansion. The vacuum mechanics, the ghosts, the way Luigi hums along with the music, it was really enjoyable. A bit short, maybe, but great fun. I think it's also one of my girlfriend's favourite games of all time, behind Mario 64 and Mario Kart, of course.
Pikmin 1&2 are two of my favourite games, Pikmin 2 being one of those rare sequels which is better than the original in every way. I just finished Pikmin 1 again and noticed that it actually has a lot of graphical glitches (for a Nintendo game, that is). Just little things like buried Pikmin not being drawn sometimes or dead creatures getting stuck in bridges, which you almost never see in Nintendo 1st party games. I wonder if it was hurried out because their game line up so thin?
My PAL Gamecube looks great in RGB SCART mode on my TV, many times better than the composite connection did.
That's fine if you're in a fairly slow moving market. For most of us in shrink-wrap software, we have competitors, we need to make money and our market may only exist for a few months to a year. If we take the time and resources to ship a 'perfect' product, then a competitor will release something cheaper and faster than us that's 'good enough' and we will lose money. You can't design your way out of all bugs.
There are several official Nintendo DS bundles (Mario Kart, Nintendogs etc). I think they mostly just leave it up to the retailers these days.
Lack of time for bug-fixing and the virtual impossibility of proving any reasonable size piece of code 'correct'.
All software ships with known bugs - if it doesn't, you are either not testing enough, or are only shipping tiny programs. At some point, commercial reality has to come into it and you weigh the cost of fixing the bug against its impact.
The Gamecube was 25,000 Yen in Japan at launch and was £130 IIRC in the UK. That included a price cut in response to competition, though, so £150 is probably a good guess.
IIRC, you have to click "Resample" in the Image resize dialog to actually resize the image in pixels. Not exactly intuitive, but it is there. I think PSE4 gets a lot right in the UI in general, but it has some rough edges.
I read The Humane Interface and it's an interesting book. Raskin had some odd ideas, but the book gives you a different view on interface design beyond the standard menu, toolbar and mouse layout.
I think his concept of a zooming interface is basically what iPhoto, Picasa and Photoshop Elements use in their browse modes and it works pretty well there.
The voiceover in the slideshow seemed to imply that their iPhoto-like program could do it, it's a bit hard to tell without the actual MS video, though.
A bit touchy, are we? You might notice that I never said Apple invented these things - claiming to have invented things like the slideshow or search would be a bit like claiming to have invented the question mark.
The point is, these features will have been well implemented and available in a major desktop operating system for around two years by the time Vista ships.
That's a funny video - the only thing I could see that wasn't in OS X was the ability to include videos in a slideshow .
The annoying thing is, most of the people who buy Vista really will believe that it's all innovative and brand new.
Other posts have already pointed out most of the flaws in your argument, but I'll add one more point.
There are lots of things where you make an investment up front in the hope of generating an income stream in the future which is worth more than the investment. Releasing recorded music is no different. Renting out property, for example - why should I pay the landlord any more than the cost of upkeep of the property?
By protecting the products of the musicians' investment, you give the musicians an incentive in invest.
It was just that I remember Earthsea being a school English class book when I was 11 or 12, which I thought was roughly Potter's target age group. But then, most of the people I see reading Harry Potter are 20-something, so I wasn't sure.
I agree on Earthsea, by the way, definitely one of my favourite novels. I'm actually planning to re-read them all on the beach this summer, mostly to convince myself that they weren't as bad as the SciFi channel mini-series.
Exactly, it's the network effect. The value to Sony of a console sold early in the life cycle is much higher than one sold at the end. A larger target market attracts more developers, which means more games and therefore more gamers.
I think Harry Potter is something of a special case, though. It's also very simply written and plotted - compare it to its rough 1960's equivalent, A Wizard of Earthsea, for example.
From the sound of it, the fact that US schools make kids read Beowulf and Moby Dick probably has more to do with the decline in reading than videogames.
EditPad is quite nice, but very buggy on Linux unfortunately. jEdit makes a good alternative, it has all of its features and many more.
For example I long ago decided I will never go to meetings again because I think face to face meetings are the biggest waste of time you can ever have.
Amen to that.
It really depends on how much your time is worth to you. Linux on many modern laptops is fiddly and time-consuming and will often leave you with some non-functioning hardware (the SD card reader on my Acer 8104 doesn't work in Linux, the wireless cuts out with firmware errors under load, suspend to disk is very unreliable and the battery life is about 2/3 it is in Windows). If you can't spare a few days of tweaking, buy a ready-installed machine or stick with OS X.
Otherwise, I would generally recommend not buying the latest and greatest laptop unless you are absolutely sure it's supported, because the hardware support often takes a while to catch up