or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
CLEARLY if there are researchers on both sides of the argument then it isn't as cut and dried as you try to make it out. And why didn't Netscape go from PC company to PC company and work out individual arrangements to get Navigator Pre-installed on those vendor's PCs. Clearly Microsoft put in the larger amount of effort here, and deserves to be applauded for their shrewd negotiating.
I believe the larger lesson to be learned here is "Be the illegal monopoly, or get out of its market." The federal government is just too slow and incompetent to do anything about it anyway.
In the IM space, "encryption" is the extra feature they sell to companies when trying to convince them to upgrade to the 5,000 dollar version of AOL instant messenger. Convieniently forgetting, of course, that Jabber is there, jabber is encrypted, and jabber doesn't even have to leave your network, and Jabber doesn't suck.
Honestly, IM encryption is the most likely of all of the above.
HTTPS means more server overhead for little or not payout. It means you might need two sparc stations and some sort of load balancing arrangement instead of just one. And why would you need to encrypt more HTTP communications anyway, especially if your're just pulling a static page down?
Besides, the damning thing about HTTP is not what you see, but who you connect to. That, sadly AT&T already knows.
E-mail encryption is a sewer. I'm a pretty technically savvy user, and I communicate with other pretty technically savvy users, and I've managed to have reasonable conversations with just one other person over encrypted e-mail. Considering spam, lack of encryption, lack of verification, e-mail needs a major overhaul. I suspect that at some point IM clients will start holding old messages for later delivery, and e-mail as we know it will be obsolete.
VOIP should be encrypted. It came out late enough that the people at EbaySkype have no reason not to use encrypted communication channels.
First domain - 5 dollars Second domain - 20 dollars Third domain - 50 dollars Fourth domain - 100 dollars Subsequent domains - 1,000 dollars
Sure, you have the problem of people registering things under other people's names, but that can be solved.
Essentially, your e-mail and personal identity domain should be basically free, your first and second hobby domains should be reasonably priced, your third and fourth domains should have a lot of motivating factor behind them, and if you need 5 or more domains you're probably a very large company with a lot of people working for you.
Those domains displaying domain parking pages are OWNED. That means someone exchanged goods, services, or currency for property. The property was the registration of the domain name. Still with me?
OK, that is perfectly understandable.
No, it is not. They don't own anything.
Those domains displaying domain parking pages are BEING ALLOCATED to them by the domain name registrar, who has allotted these names to them on a first come-first serve basis. However, even that is a misnomer as really the registrar is agreeing to have their DNS servers resolve to the name that IP address.
Now, IP addresses are allocated more intelligently than domain names, for some reason. If someone won't be able to use an IP block, THEY DON'T GET IT. IP's are a limited resource in the system, and the system wouldn't function without them. Domain names are the same. If somebody goes out and registers my name dot com, then nobody else can use that domain for their communications (hence, why I have a dot net). If someone runs out and registers Chrystler.com, that is a resource that Chrystler can no longer take advantage of. If someone registers every single dictionary word in the book, then they've just effectively removed a huge chunk of the available name space.
Parking domains are the same thing. They're not like owning a car. They're a gentlemen's agreement between everyone in the system that whoever asks for the car first can use it. Then one person asks for the car for forever. Then they rent the car to other people in the system for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the system the system shouldn't be based upon trust, but that doesn't mean these people aren't parasites.
Personally, I'd love to see a secondary internet evolve where all of the 2nd tier DNS servers agree that anyone that is camping a domain name can go screw. Of course, I'd love to see registrars agree that anyone camping a domain doesn't really deserve to keep it and can go screw. To simplify, these people should get their domains taken away, their computers burned, and their dogs shot. They're fucking parasites, and don't deserve to breathe the same oxygen as real human beings.
Except that it lets editors search your bookmarks for cool stuff, and lets you submit your bookmarks for consideration in a story. And that this should be trivial to integrate with firefox or opera, so that people can "Submit this link to Slashdot" from a right-click menu. And it forces the editors to RTFA before they post the story, which is always good.
I agree, though, that they should have just made a deal with Delicious or (my choice) Spurl instead of re-inventing the social bookmarking wheel. However, even if we never use it, you and I should still see the quality and obscurity of the stories (and the frequency of dupes) go up.
Maybe I should give the more modern version a try. Those were the most annoying parts of the system. 'glad to hear they're addressing the issues with the system.
A: One developer, working full time. Get a tight iteration time on the gameplay and code side, making changes as you go. B: Incredibly limited scope. You're not making the world's greatest space opera: you're making a 5-minute title about flying around and shooting stuff (or what have you) C: Release early, release often. Make one thing and move on to make another.
Flash games are probably the way to go. Orisinal has a lot of original games in this vein.
Games like this are cheap enough to be developed on an ad-supported basis, and lots of them are. Some of them, like Orisinal's stuff, are made on the side in the evenings whenever he feels like it. And some of it, like Puzzle Pirates, fit into a larger metasystem that is not ad-supported.
Smaller games don't fit into traditional retail channels because the margins are not big enough to support the overhead. This appears to be changing with Xbox 360 Live, however, which should see a resurgance of originality on that console (and possibly all next-gen consoles).
There is a big debate going on in the gaming industry right now about accessability. When these things started out, we had a joystick and one button. Then it was a joypad and four buttons. Now we're up to a joypad, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, three menu buttons, two analog joysticks, and two joystick buttons.
Put the controller in front of a new user, and they will have no idea what to do with it. Even advanced users are getting confused all the time as to what each button does. I've met hardcore users who never knew there were buttons under the analog joysticks.
Games themselves are suffering from the same thing. In a lot of modern games, you can use one joystick to walk, the other joystick to control the camera, one button to shoot, another to jump, another for a secondary fire button, another for magic, D-pad to scroll through inventory, L1 R1 to adjust primary and secondary fire modes, crouch, reload, etc etc etc. Put a copy of God of War in the hands of a user who has never played videogames before and you'll see how quickly they get overwhelmed. Or those wonderful PC RTS games that use every key on the keyboard as the interface palette.
It is the zipper vs bra-strap debate. The zipper has one of two possible states, up or down. If you're up, you can only go down. If you're down, you can only go up. It isn't very precise, but it works damn well. And it is generally in a highly accessable location, masked by a small piece of fabric. Bra-straps, on the other hand, have multiple possible states. Not only do they have multiple adjustment settings, but they also generally have multiple hooks with which to make those settings. They are in an aesthetically pleasing but utterly inaccessable area, and are difficult to interact with. If you absolutely need a perfect fit, the bra strap model is the way to go. But for nearly all things, a simple zipper is your best choice. We're suffering through an economy of gadgets that are using bra straps when they should be using zippers.
It is also worth pointing out that the Shuffle was available on the day it was announced. For all we know, it could have been delayed for two years for revisions. But Apple knows what they're doing, and has decided to get users excited about things they can actually buy, rather than making them wait for things they may or may not want a year later.
X10 is a standard. Basically, X10 is also the most widely used standard simply because Radio Shack has been selling X10 compatible stuff for years. X10.com is evil and should be shot on sight, but you don't have to deal with them.
Unfortunately, X10 is passable but not particularly good. For example, you can setup your lights to go on or off when you come home by combining a light switch device with a clock device. But it doesn't get much smarter than that. If you turn off a light with the automation system, you have to go find the control panel to turn it back on: no turning on things from the device itself. The exception to this are the lightswitch pannels, but I found the Radio Shack version fell apart within a week and could not be activated without the remote anyway. The control panels are annoying in that you have to know what device number you're attempting to interface with, and even though 99% of these things are power toggles, you still have to press multiple buttons to turn something on or off.
I used these things before computer interface kits were standard, so maybe they've gotten better. Maybe. But I'd look into other systems first.
Trust me: the reason why you're getting derivative clones is because these people haven't been around for a while. Once you've made 20 titles, you can afford to take risks. When you're making your second one, you don't really know what it is you're doing and can't afford to mess up your career. You also can't push your weight around with a publisher to get something original made.
We need more people with experience. The problem isn't these people necessarily, but rather lack of practice at the craft combined with a lack of comfort level required to try new things. Why else would everything come off as a bit immature and undercooked?
I asked a similar question on OSNews about KMail when 1.5 went into Beta. One of the developers said, basically, that it all should run on windows in about 12 months thanks to the Qt port.
Now, we all know what 12 months means in Open Source calendars. But the point is that it should work before Vista ships.
* Crimson Editor An amazingly powerful freeware text / script editor.
* uTorrent Is there an open source Torrent Client in under 200k? Does it have RSS searching, bandwidth scheduling, automatic resume, and trackerless support? Yes? Oh, good then.
* As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere. It's a great piece of software, if you can get over the fact that the author barely speaks any english.
* 3 Plane Soft Screensavers. Ok, they're screensavers. And they're a rip off. But damn they're nice.
* The Bat! The second best mail client created, behind only KMail.
* IZarc If there were need for zip clients anymore, this would be the one to have. Also handles about 50 other file standards, integrates really well with explorer, is small and efficient, and did I mention free? Best unzipper out there, including the pay options.
* Folder Size Shows you how big your folders are. If explorer were made by Apple, it would do this by default.
* True Crypt Data so secure even it doesn't know if there is more to be found in a file.
* Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space, and there are ones out there with better interfaces. But it is the only thumbnail application I've ever used that can handle upwards of 20,000 files in a single directory. If you take lots of pictures, this is the one.
* DVD Decrypter Recently bought out by Macrovision to shut down it's decryptey goodness, DVD Decrypter is really a no-nonsense, no-fuss DVD ripper and burner. Want to rip a movie from a DVD so you can watch it later? One button. Want to rip it back to a DVD? Another button.
* Microsoft Power Toys Nifty stuff from people who both hate and make the operating system.
Basically, we tried using banks of samples which would be keyed off of the first key the player hit. Additionally, we authored licks which fit the button presses, so that the player had complete control but everything they played would be at least somewhat musical. Likewise, the first fret you pressed determined which key you were in until you finished that lick. Add in distortion by tilting the guitar (which broke in the demo, so Eric smashed it onstage), sustains, whammy, etc, and you had a nifty system.
The slides explain why it didn't go in, and everyone in the audience that listened to the demonstration will back up that choice.
Cool hack though, and kudos to Travis and Sunny for making it! We never thought anyone would go to the lengths they have with this game. It has been truly awesome to watch all of these people make the game their own... Just like rock.
I'm a game developer, so my view is probably skewed. But I tend to see things as "broadening." Studies have shown that the average age of a gamer has gone up to the mid 30's. At the same time, as gamers get older, the spend less time and more money on gaming. I'm happy with that arrangement, as quite frankly kids (or anyone) who spend 80 hours a week on World of Warcraft scare me. Even great games really aren't worth 60 hours of your time... Maybe Dance Dance Revolution.
Just like how movies in the 50's went from the thing all kids did all the time to the thing that everyone does some of the time, so too are we seeing gaming transition from hardcore gamers spending lots of time to the general population.
Of course, rehashing the same crap year after year hasn't helped either.
Also, we're in a console transition period. Expect to see the total amount of money and time spent on gaming to decrease this year. That has happened during every cosole transition since the days of Atari. This is basically normal behavior for the industry.
Why several dozen for an arcade game? Will this be used as a prototype menu interface, or are kids going to be thumping on this thing with rubber mallets at the museum of science?
Seriously. They cost a few hundred dollars at most, and you're going to be spending 1/2 of your waking life in front of it.
If management won't pony up, make thinly-veiled claims of RSI (don't worry, you'll get it eventually). If they still won't pony up, just buy your own. Working at a terrible workstation isn't worth it.
'Net connections are how things get done these days. If your village needs water, you need to go online and get an idea for how your government works. You need to then climb some latters communicating with people, in a combination of E-mail and F2F, and having searchable databases of people online make that much easier. You can also alert the media to the problem, and the media love "Danger! Danger!" stories.
If you don't have access to the internet, you have to rely upon libraries for information. And libraries are quickly out of date, especially in poor rural areas (if there are any at all).
It is much easier to setup businesses and distribution networks if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to find and utilize resources if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to keep up with your family if you have access to the 'net. It is easier to let people know about your plight if you have access to the net.
The internet is not an end unto itself, but a way of getting things done. There are people who already try to get food for people in starving areas. I'm glad someone is trying to get information appliances to them, so that maybe, just maybe, they can progress and manage to get food for themselves.
True. But Cringely is a good writer and a bad predicter specifically because he is known for somewhat wild, occasionally nonsensical assertions. He's the sort of pundit that would see ad-supported automobiles as the wave of the future, or predict the end of cellular phones.
His value isn't in how many of his predictions are right, but how much the wrong ones hurt and the right ones help. Generally speaking, the ones he gets right are obvious (IBM will continue to support linux) and the ones he gets wrong could be very painful if you put faith in him (Microsoft will have to play nice with smaller companies). In general, an interesting pulpit, but someone whom it could be very bad to listen to.
He really should be working at Wired, and not at PBS.
This is Cringely we're talking about here. He's basically an inverse oracle: everything he predicts will not come true.
Such classics in the past include: "Apple's future lies in computer-like devices" "Microsoft has already been crippled by the department of justice" "Sega may dominate personal computing" "Ending the culture of secrecy doesn't matter" "The next generation of processors will be clockless" "Intel will ride its new Merced processor to profit" "Y2K will be a bigger pain in the butt than most people think" "The stock market will continue to rise" "AOL isn't in the market to buy Netscape"
Etc.
Personally, I'd love to see some sort of Survivor style contest for that PBS columnist / NYT editorialist position. 19 Bloggers and Cringely are forced to live in a house together, where each week they make predictions about large announcements that companies make. Those with the most wildly incorrect predictions are forced into a future-past bakeoff, where they have to explain historical technological shifts to MIT professors while cooking representative food items. The professors then confer over dinner, and then walk up to the loser and shout in his face "You Fail!"
I'm guessing Cringely lasts three weeks, soley on his love of food.
I used to think this too. But now that I've had some time with the system , I have to say this shouldn't be an issue.
If you're downloading something, you're probably going to take a network hit. But the 360 could easily prioritize gaming packets over download packets, and even if you're losing 10% of your network capacity it should still fall within operating parameters.
In terms of processor speeds, these things should degrade elegantly. Assuming the app is terribly written and takes up one-and-a-half processors, that should still leave 30 FPS to the game. You already have the dashboard and music playback being given roughly 5% of system resources, so you know it can handle background processes. And games fluctuate pretty widely in FPS currently without major issue.
And if necessary, they could just leave the game paused and let you navigate the dashboard and Xbox Live while you download stuff.
The real issue is not one of usability or system resources, but of time. They just ran out of time to get that working. Hopefully a future update will fix it.
And if Microsoft really wants the japanese market, they should release an X360 controller that doubles as a cell-phone.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article
or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
CLEARLY if there are researchers on both sides of the argument then it isn't as cut and dried as you try to make it out. And why didn't Netscape go from PC company to PC company and work out individual arrangements to get Navigator Pre-installed on those vendor's PCs. Clearly Microsoft put in the larger amount of effort here, and deserves to be applauded for their shrewd negotiating.
I believe the larger lesson to be learned here is "Be the illegal monopoly, or get out of its market." The federal government is just too slow and incompetent to do anything about it anyway.
In the IM space, "encryption" is the extra feature they sell to companies when trying to convince them to upgrade to the 5,000 dollar version of AOL instant messenger. Convieniently forgetting, of course, that Jabber is there, jabber is encrypted, and jabber doesn't even have to leave your network, and Jabber doesn't suck.
Honestly, IM encryption is the most likely of all of the above.
HTTPS means more server overhead for little or not payout. It means you might need two sparc stations and some sort of load balancing arrangement instead of just one. And why would you need to encrypt more HTTP communications anyway, especially if your're just pulling a static page down?
Besides, the damning thing about HTTP is not what you see, but who you connect to. That, sadly AT&T already knows.
E-mail encryption is a sewer. I'm a pretty technically savvy user, and I communicate with other pretty technically savvy users, and I've managed to have reasonable conversations with just one other person over encrypted e-mail. Considering spam, lack of encryption, lack of verification, e-mail needs a major overhaul. I suspect that at some point IM clients will start holding old messages for later delivery, and e-mail as we know it will be obsolete.
VOIP should be encrypted. It came out late enough that the people at EbaySkype have no reason not to use encrypted communication channels.
Or else the application would be called gsetup_beta.exe
First domain - 5 dollars
Second domain - 20 dollars
Third domain - 50 dollars
Fourth domain - 100 dollars
Subsequent domains - 1,000 dollars
Sure, you have the problem of people registering things under other people's names, but that can be solved.
Essentially, your e-mail and personal identity domain should be basically free, your first and second hobby domains should be reasonably priced, your third and fourth domains should have a lot of motivating factor behind them, and if you need 5 or more domains you're probably a very large company with a lot of people working for you.
Those domains displaying domain parking pages are OWNED. That means someone exchanged goods, services, or currency for property. The property was the registration of the domain name. Still with me?
OK, that is perfectly understandable.
No, it is not. They don't own anything.
Those domains displaying domain parking pages are BEING ALLOCATED to them by the domain name registrar, who has allotted these names to them on a first come-first serve basis. However, even that is a misnomer as really the registrar is agreeing to have their DNS servers resolve to the name that IP address.
Now, IP addresses are allocated more intelligently than domain names, for some reason. If someone won't be able to use an IP block, THEY DON'T GET IT. IP's are a limited resource in the system, and the system wouldn't function without them. Domain names are the same. If somebody goes out and registers my name dot com, then nobody else can use that domain for their communications (hence, why I have a dot net). If someone runs out and registers Chrystler.com, that is a resource that Chrystler can no longer take advantage of. If someone registers every single dictionary word in the book, then they've just effectively removed a huge chunk of the available name space.
Parking domains are the same thing. They're not like owning a car. They're a gentlemen's agreement between everyone in the system that whoever asks for the car first can use it. Then one person asks for the car for forever. Then they rent the car to other people in the system for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the system the system shouldn't be based upon trust, but that doesn't mean these people aren't parasites.
Personally, I'd love to see a secondary internet evolve where all of the 2nd tier DNS servers agree that anyone that is camping a domain name can go screw. Of course, I'd love to see registrars agree that anyone camping a domain doesn't really deserve to keep it and can go screw. To simplify, these people should get their domains taken away, their computers burned, and their dogs shot. They're fucking parasites, and don't deserve to breathe the same oxygen as real human beings.
Except that it lets editors search your bookmarks for cool stuff, and lets you submit your bookmarks for consideration in a story. And that this should be trivial to integrate with firefox or opera, so that people can "Submit this link to Slashdot" from a right-click menu. And it forces the editors to RTFA before they post the story, which is always good.
I agree, though, that they should have just made a deal with Delicious or (my choice) Spurl instead of re-inventing the social bookmarking wheel. However, even if we never use it, you and I should still see the quality and obscurity of the stories (and the frequency of dupes) go up.
How long has it been since the slashcode has had any major, major features from a user standpoint implmented?
:)
Today
I'm so putting that in my myspace profile.
Maybe I should give the more modern version a try. Those were the most annoying parts of the system. 'glad to hear they're addressing the issues with the system.
Recommendations:
A: One developer, working full time. Get a tight iteration time on the gameplay and code side, making changes as you go.
B: Incredibly limited scope. You're not making the world's greatest space opera: you're making a 5-minute title about flying around and shooting stuff (or what have you)
C: Release early, release often. Make one thing and move on to make another.
Flash games are probably the way to go. Orisinal has a lot of original games in this vein.
Games like this are cheap enough to be developed on an ad-supported basis, and lots of them are. Some of them, like Orisinal's stuff, are made on the side in the evenings whenever he feels like it. And some of it, like Puzzle Pirates, fit into a larger metasystem that is not ad-supported.
Smaller games don't fit into traditional retail channels because the margins are not big enough to support the overhead. This appears to be changing with Xbox 360 Live, however, which should see a resurgance of originality on that console (and possibly all next-gen consoles).
There is a big debate going on in the gaming industry right now about accessability. When these things started out, we had a joystick and one button. Then it was a joypad and four buttons. Now we're up to a joypad, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, three menu buttons, two analog joysticks, and two joystick buttons.
Put the controller in front of a new user, and they will have no idea what to do with it. Even advanced users are getting confused all the time as to what each button does. I've met hardcore users who never knew there were buttons under the analog joysticks.
Games themselves are suffering from the same thing. In a lot of modern games, you can use one joystick to walk, the other joystick to control the camera, one button to shoot, another to jump, another for a secondary fire button, another for magic, D-pad to scroll through inventory, L1 R1 to adjust primary and secondary fire modes, crouch, reload, etc etc etc. Put a copy of God of War in the hands of a user who has never played videogames before and you'll see how quickly they get overwhelmed. Or those wonderful PC RTS games that use every key on the keyboard as the interface palette.
It is the zipper vs bra-strap debate. The zipper has one of two possible states, up or down. If you're up, you can only go down. If you're down, you can only go up. It isn't very precise, but it works damn well. And it is generally in a highly accessable location, masked by a small piece of fabric. Bra-straps, on the other hand, have multiple possible states. Not only do they have multiple adjustment settings, but they also generally have multiple hooks with which to make those settings. They are in an aesthetically pleasing but utterly inaccessable area, and are difficult to interact with. If you absolutely need a perfect fit, the bra strap model is the way to go. But for nearly all things, a simple zipper is your best choice. We're suffering through an economy of gadgets that are using bra straps when they should be using zippers.
It is also worth pointing out that the Shuffle was available on the day it was announced. For all we know, it could have been delayed for two years for revisions. But Apple knows what they're doing, and has decided to get users excited about things they can actually buy, rather than making them wait for things they may or may not want a year later.
X10 is a standard. Basically, X10 is also the most widely used standard simply because Radio Shack has been selling X10 compatible stuff for years. X10.com is evil and should be shot on sight, but you don't have to deal with them.
Unfortunately, X10 is passable but not particularly good. For example, you can setup your lights to go on or off when you come home by combining a light switch device with a clock device. But it doesn't get much smarter than that. If you turn off a light with the automation system, you have to go find the control panel to turn it back on: no turning on things from the device itself. The exception to this are the lightswitch pannels, but I found the Radio Shack version fell apart within a week and could not be activated without the remote anyway. The control panels are annoying in that you have to know what device number you're attempting to interface with, and even though 99% of these things are power toggles, you still have to press multiple buttons to turn something on or off.
I used these things before computer interface kits were standard, so maybe they've gotten better. Maybe. But I'd look into other systems first.
Trust me: the reason why you're getting derivative clones is because these people haven't been around for a while. Once you've made 20 titles, you can afford to take risks. When you're making your second one, you don't really know what it is you're doing and can't afford to mess up your career. You also can't push your weight around with a publisher to get something original made.
We need more people with experience. The problem isn't these people necessarily, but rather lack of practice at the craft combined with a lack of comfort level required to try new things. Why else would everything come off as a bit immature and undercooked?
I asked a similar question on OSNews about KMail when 1.5 went into Beta. One of the developers said, basically, that it all should run on windows in about 12 months thanks to the Qt port.
Now, we all know what 12 months means in Open Source calendars. But the point is that it should work before Vista ships.
* Crimson Editor An amazingly powerful freeware text / script editor.
* uTorrent Is there an open source Torrent Client in under 200k? Does it have RSS searching, bandwidth scheduling, automatic resume, and trackerless support? Yes? Oh, good then.
* As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere. It's a great piece of software, if you can get over the fact that the author barely speaks any english.
* 3 Plane Soft Screensavers. Ok, they're screensavers. And they're a rip off. But damn they're nice.
* Trillian. 'nuff said.
* The Bat! The second best mail client created, behind only KMail.
* IZarc If there were need for zip clients anymore, this would be the one to have. Also handles about 50 other file standards, integrates really well with explorer, is small and efficient, and did I mention free? Best unzipper out there, including the pay options.
* Folder Size Shows you how big your folders are. If explorer were made by Apple, it would do this by default.
* True Crypt Data so secure even it doesn't know if there is more to be found in a file.
* Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space, and there are ones out there with better interfaces. But it is the only thumbnail application I've ever used that can handle upwards of 20,000 files in a single directory. If you take lots of pictures, this is the one.
* DVD Decrypter Recently bought out by Macrovision to shut down it's decryptey goodness, DVD Decrypter is really a no-nonsense, no-fuss DVD ripper and burner. Want to rip a movie from a DVD so you can watch it later? One button. Want to rip it back to a DVD? Another button.
* Microsoft Power Toys Nifty stuff from people who both hate and make the operating system.
And remember to use an antivirus, a firewall, and two anti-spyware suites. My personal favorites are AVG Antivirus, Kerio Personal Firewall, Spybot, and Ad Aware.
Check out the presentation from the experimental gameplay workshop at GDC 2006.
t ml
http://www.experimental-gameplay.org/2006/index.h
Basically, we tried using banks of samples which would be keyed off of the first key the player hit. Additionally, we authored licks which fit the button presses, so that the player had complete control but everything they played would be at least somewhat musical. Likewise, the first fret you pressed determined which key you were in until you finished that lick. Add in distortion by tilting the guitar (which broke in the demo, so Eric smashed it onstage), sustains, whammy, etc, and you had a nifty system.
The slides explain why it didn't go in, and everyone in the audience that listened to the demonstration will back up that choice.
Cool hack though, and kudos to Travis and Sunny for making it! We never thought anyone would go to the lengths they have with this game. It has been truly awesome to watch all of these people make the game their own... Just like rock.
I'm a game developer, so my view is probably skewed. But I tend to see things as "broadening." Studies have shown that the average age of a gamer has gone up to the mid 30's. At the same time, as gamers get older, the spend less time and more money on gaming. I'm happy with that arrangement, as quite frankly kids (or anyone) who spend 80 hours a week on World of Warcraft scare me. Even great games really aren't worth 60 hours of your time... Maybe Dance Dance Revolution.
Just like how movies in the 50's went from the thing all kids did all the time to the thing that everyone does some of the time, so too are we seeing gaming transition from hardcore gamers spending lots of time to the general population.
Of course, rehashing the same crap year after year hasn't helped either.
Also, we're in a console transition period. Expect to see the total amount of money and time spent on gaming to decrease this year. That has happened during every cosole transition since the days of Atari. This is basically normal behavior for the industry.
Why several dozen for an arcade game? Will this be used as a prototype menu interface, or are kids going to be thumping on this thing with rubber mallets at the museum of science?
Seriously. They cost a few hundred dollars at most, and you're going to be spending 1/2 of your waking life in front of it.
If management won't pony up, make thinly-veiled claims of RSI (don't worry, you'll get it eventually). If they still won't pony up, just buy your own. Working at a terrible workstation isn't worth it.
'Net connections are how things get done these days. If your village needs water, you need to go online and get an idea for how your government works. You need to then climb some latters communicating with people, in a combination of E-mail and F2F, and having searchable databases of people online make that much easier. You can also alert the media to the problem, and the media love "Danger! Danger!" stories.
If you don't have access to the internet, you have to rely upon libraries for information. And libraries are quickly out of date, especially in poor rural areas (if there are any at all).
It is much easier to setup businesses and distribution networks if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to find and utilize resources if you have access to the 'net. It is much easier to keep up with your family if you have access to the 'net. It is easier to let people know about your plight if you have access to the net.
The internet is not an end unto itself, but a way of getting things done. There are people who already try to get food for people in starving areas. I'm glad someone is trying to get information appliances to them, so that maybe, just maybe, they can progress and manage to get food for themselves.
I don't have a lot of hard drive space. It would be really convienient for me if they just put the packs online.
Let's probe Uranus.
Uranus is big and gassy.
Hey Servo, we need to go to Uranus and wipe out the Klingons.
True. But Cringely is a good writer and a bad predicter specifically because he is known for somewhat wild, occasionally nonsensical assertions. He's the sort of pundit that would see ad-supported automobiles as the wave of the future, or predict the end of cellular phones.
His value isn't in how many of his predictions are right, but how much the wrong ones hurt and the right ones help. Generally speaking, the ones he gets right are obvious (IBM will continue to support linux) and the ones he gets wrong could be very painful if you put faith in him (Microsoft will have to play nice with smaller companies). In general, an interesting pulpit, but someone whom it could be very bad to listen to.
He really should be working at Wired, and not at PBS.
This is Cringely we're talking about here. He's basically an inverse oracle: everything he predicts will not come true.
Such classics in the past include:
"Apple's future lies in computer-like devices"
"Microsoft has already been crippled by the department of justice"
"Sega may dominate personal computing"
"Ending the culture of secrecy doesn't matter"
"The next generation of processors will be clockless"
"Intel will ride its new Merced processor to profit"
"Y2K will be a bigger pain in the butt than most people think"
"The stock market will continue to rise"
"AOL isn't in the market to buy Netscape"
Etc.
Personally, I'd love to see some sort of Survivor style contest for that PBS columnist / NYT editorialist position. 19 Bloggers and Cringely are forced to live in a house together, where each week they make predictions about large announcements that companies make. Those with the most wildly incorrect predictions are forced into a future-past bakeoff, where they have to explain historical technological shifts to MIT professors while cooking representative food items. The professors then confer over dinner, and then walk up to the loser and shout in his face "You Fail!"
I'm guessing Cringely lasts three weeks, soley on his love of food.
I used to think this too. But now that I've had some time with the system , I have to say this shouldn't be an issue.
If you're downloading something, you're probably going to take a network hit. But the 360 could easily prioritize gaming packets over download packets, and even if you're losing 10% of your network capacity it should still fall within operating parameters.
In terms of processor speeds, these things should degrade elegantly. Assuming the app is terribly written and takes up one-and-a-half processors, that should still leave 30 FPS to the game. You already have the dashboard and music playback being given roughly 5% of system resources, so you know it can handle background processes. And games fluctuate pretty widely in FPS currently without major issue.
And if necessary, they could just leave the game paused and let you navigate the dashboard and Xbox Live while you download stuff.
The real issue is not one of usability or system resources, but of time. They just ran out of time to get that working. Hopefully a future update will fix it.
And if Microsoft really wants the japanese market, they should release an X360 controller that doubles as a cell-phone.