A music geek has a long list of music-related features he'd like to have and will not be swayed by fashion or other irrelevant criteria for deciding what DAP he wants....A music geek cares about things like gapless playback & parametric equalization
There's no better way to look clueless than to suggest that people who choose iPod are "swayed by fashion or other irrelevant criteria" and then proceed to list off completely pedestrian features like gapless playback and FM radio.
The majority of DAP users are not computer geeks anymore, they're music fans, and most of them use iPod/iTunes. You may be an audiophile, but you don't understand music or the creative ways people are organizing and listening to their music. Technology enthusiasts simply aren't qualified to offer advice to most music fans.
The computer geek in me thinks Rockbox is an interesting technical exercise. He's all for hardware hacking. Keep it going!
The music geek in me thinks that these guys don't understand music. The music geek has a long list of iPod improvements he'd like to see, relating to music organization, selection, and randomization. When he compares his list of improvements to what is offered by Rockbox (and others), he laughs and wonders why these people waste their time.
I have yet to find a player that gives me the functionality of itunes
Agreed.
I disagree with the premise of this article. Sure, the iPod is a pretty piece of plastic, but the reason iPod has remained so immensely popular over the years is because of the quality of its software, both iTunes and iPod.
One could easily argue that Sony's hardware is nicer than Apple's; their products look great and are very well engineered. It's their specialty, after all. But it all boils down to software, and Sony cannot write software, period. None of the MP3 manufacturers can write software, and that's why they haven't gained any traction against the iPod. They're now all dependent on Microsoft (except for Sony) and there is simply no way that the joint Microsoft/MP3 conglomerate can respond as fast as Apple can with respect to hardware and software innovation.
Instead of writing new operating software for the iPod, which it does not need, why aren't these guys focused on writing software for the other MP3 hardware? They're the ones who need it! (Sony in particular.)
There's a certain subtly to successful April Fools jokes; it works better when people aren't sure if you're joking or not (e.g. the Gmail introduction).
I remember April Fools back in '99, I was working my first job as a developer and I was sent way up to the oil fields in northern Alberta to get some of our software working. It was hell. Our software was pretty much crap at the time, and that place is fucked up enough as it is. Anyway, I spent half the day thinking that society was crumbling as each time I would visit Slashdot my head would explode. It wasn't until well into the afternoon that I realized what day it was.
My point is, instead of using some My Little Pony color scheme that fools no one, why not unleash a radical new, but serious, design for Slashdot. Keep people on their toes. And if it really sucks, they can always revert back and say it was a joke.
Did they ever stop going after the ROM sites? If you're hired as an IP lawyer, your job is to go after IP violations and you're probably going to go after the low-hanging fruit first.
But I hope they realize that the emulation community, rom sites and all, are not their enemy. If anything, it helps them by increasing interest in these old games. I think that most people who are really excited about the classic games offered by Nintendo are already well acquainted with these games via emulation, but they'll pay to play them on Nintendo anyway.
I've been following the emulation scene from the very beginning, yet, for example, I've just purchased the Midway Classics disc for GameCube despite the fact that I've been playing these games on my PC for many years. Why? Because it's convenient. I don't play these games all that often, but if I'm hanging out with friends and the idea of a little multi-player Gauntlet comes up, it's set up on my TV in a matter of seconds. No dicking around with controller settings or downloading new ROMs because MAME has been updated, or any of that crap.
I think Nintendo's classic game service will be a smash, despite the fact that most fans have already played these games on their PCs via emulation.
Yes, one would be very wise to create a new Google account strictly for this service, rather than use their primary Gmail account. I hope Google will eventually take out the middle step and allow people to specify a different URL for their Google pages without having to use multiple accounts.
Historically, these crazy new DHTML UI convensions have not been well received, and as technically interesting their UI may be I hardly feel compelled to switch from Google.
They haven't tried to reinvent the wheel with respect to tabbed browsing and search.
They got it mostly right. As a Firefox and Safari user I generally feel at home using IE 7,
which is a pleasent surprise.
I like the placement of the new-tab button and close-tab buttons. (Better than Firefox)
Clicking on a web page's orange XML icon brings up an RSS reader instead of dumping
raw XML. (Better than Firefox, again)
Real zoom. Try this: view this web page
in IE7 and hit Ctrl-+ a few times, then do the same in Firefox. Huge difference;
beats Firefox again.
Although the old menu bar is gone, the old menu accelerators still work;
e.g. Alt-F shows the old menu bar and displays the file menu as expected.
The Bad:
They *still* don't have smooth scrolling working correctly. In fact,
mouse wheel scrolling in general is very slow and choppy. (Actually,
it appears to be OK on some sites, crappy on others)
It's a surprising rough release. It's quite slow at
loading, scrolling, and resizing, and has crashed a couple of times
for no apparent reason. I'm surprised they released it
like this, beta or not.
Lots of rendering errors, too. I don't know if that's
because of actual bugs, or because IE is *now* rendering correctly and
the IE5/6 specific web sites are wrong.
IE *still* doesn't render large tables until the entire table has loaded.
Unacceptably large memory usage (over 70 MB of VM after a few minutes of use)
Draging links or text onto the tab bar or doesn't work as expected; Can't
drag text at all onto the tab bar, which is one of may favorite features of
both Safari and Firefox.
I don't like the lack of menu bar. I'm dreading the thought of having to explain over the phone to my parents how to open the options dialog.
Bottom line: There isn't enough here to get me to switch from Firefox
(or Safari:p), and if they don't reign in the memory usage I doubt I'll even
install it, but when I have to use IE on a friend or co-worker's machine, I'll be
very glad if they have IE7 installed.
Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...
on
SeaMonkey 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't trying to sound elitist. What I meant is that SeaMonkey codebase is in fact old and announcing it as a new 1.0 product is a little disingenuous.
You may recall that the fruits of Mozilla.org's efforts did not gain any traction with the general browsing public until the Firefox interface came along, at which point the old SeaMonkey interface was rightfully dropped. An independent group of developers has since formed to continue development, essentailly moving new Firefox and Thunderbird features back to the old codebase, but this fact remains: not very many people used the old SeaMonkey browsers (Netscape 6/7, Mozilla Suite), and virtually all of those users have since moved on to Firefox / Thunderbird.
If you didn't use SeaMonkey 4 years ago, why would you use it now? This release is for that relatively small group of people who resented Mozilla.org's switch to Firefox and want to continue using the old suite. And good on them, I say; that's what open source is about.
Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...
on
SeaMonkey 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
If you don't already know what SeaMonkey is then it's probably of little interest to you.
It's the original Mozilla codebase that has since been replaced by Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu.
Its user interface design is largely based off of Netscape Communicator 4 and is only meant for
those who are nostalgic for the days of yore.
My favorite is the spam recipe feed it shows when viewing the spam folder.
I don't understand why everyone is so negative about this feature. It's not meant to be a fully-fleged RSS reader; they already have one of those and duplicating that functionality in GMail would be horribly misguided.
It's just some extra stuff to look at when you have no new mail and some time to kill. It's a little thing but usually it's the little things that differentiate the best products from the rest.
It would be nice if it imported my feeds from Google Reader by default, but on the other hand most of those aren't appropriate as "web clips" and I'm sure the number of GMail subscribers dwarfs the number of Google Reader users, anyway.
According to this, it sounds like the Martian ambassador was annoyed that he couldn't get an audience with the president back in May, so I'd say an attack is imminent.
Yup, the current state of the industry is pretty pathetic. It's just the same old crap rehashed over and over again.
On the other hand, some games are classics and are as enjoyable now as they were 15 years ago. I think that says a lot about what passes for state of the art gaming these days.
I am completely ignorant as to why the XBox 360 and PS3 are as interesting as some people make them out to be.
If you look at the generation-defining consoles of the the past they were irresistible because not only were they quantum leaps in technology but the technology enabled dramatically new and different types of game play.
NES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS2, ???.
Even non-gamers were crawling all over themselves to get a peek at these consoles when they were first released. Is the same true for the 360?
XBox 360 and PS3 seem like incremental improvements at best. Not to mention that PC games have had high definition graphics and on-line play for years. The only thing that sparks my interest is the Nintendo Revolution, and that's based solely on the new controller. It could be a total bust.
Am I too old? I sure wasn't when the PS2 was released. On paper the new consoles are dramatically better than their predecessors, but I don't see how that's going to translate into dramatically better games.
Considering that most of the new features in Google Desktop 2.0 were pilfered directly from Spotlight, I'd say you already have it.
Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Rumors about real symbolic links in Windows have been swirling since before Win2000.
The problem with Junction.exe is that the Explorer shell and all other applications do not differentiate between links and real folders. That is, applications never expect two different paths to point to the same object, which makes Junctions much less useful in practice. For example, file search results take much longer to complete and display duplicate results. I believe that is why they initially limited Junctions to just directories.
Now, if Vista got persistent file handles, that would be interesting.
For the love of god, PLEASE stop posting articles from dvorak. It is just sadistic
The most thoughtful idea in this entire thread and article.
Now then, who's worse: Dvorak for continually writing such trash, or the (at least) two people who think it's a good idea to post said trash to Slashdot?
You know, I used to feel the same way as you about the perceived lack of keyboard support in OS X (I'm a big fan of the keyboard accessibility Windows), but now that I've used OS X for a few months I've changed my mind. I think that while OS X generally stinks at providing universal keyboard accessibility, it does the best job of any system at providing keyboard shortcuts for commonly used commands, and I think that is more valuable and useful.
The Mac way is to provide a shortcut for every common menu command, but, most importantly, you can use the System Keyboard Preferences to assign keyboard shortcuts to any other menu common in any or all applications. I can't overstate how awesome that is.
Some examples of universal shortcuts:
Cmd-Q: Quit Application
Cmd-W: Close Window
Cmd-H: Hide Application
Cmd-Opt-H: Hide All Other Apps
Cmd-M: Minimize Window
Cmd-,: Preferences
Cmd-L/R Arrow: Advance to Beginning/End of Line
Option-L/R Arrow: Advance to Beginning/End of Word
Note that text fields also accept Emacs Ctrl-Key shortcuts.
And here are some Finder shortcuts and are hilariously missing from Windows Explorer, for example:
Cmd-1: Icon View (Finder)
Cmd-2: List View (Finder)
Cmd-3: Column View (Finder)
Cmd-Shift-N: New Folder
Cmd-Shift-A: Open Applications Folder
Cmd-Shift-U: Open Utilities Folder
Cmd-Shift-H: Open Home Folder
Cmd-Shift-C: Open Computer (root) Folder
Note that those keyboard shortcuts work in all open and save dialogs as well.
Here's one more tip. The option key is most often used to execute a variation of an existing command. Try mousing through an application's menus while toggling the option key to reveal alternate commands.
The biggest problem is that the Find Bar is practially invisible down there.
I used to download the Firefox nightly builds quite often. I remember when the find bar was first introduced I used the browser for a week thinking that Find was broken, because Ctrl+F didn't appear to do anything.
Even months later I still sometimes hit Ctrl+F multiple times in Firefox because of the lack of visual feedback. It's not that I don't know how to use Firefox, it's just that it's so unlike from every other application.
Outlook uses a search bar at the top of the window. Apple does as well in Finder, iTunes, and Mail. And more applications now are using a side-bar for the find dialog. These methods work very well because they give the user some decent visual feedback.
This is wrong. They use JavaScript, not Java. Completely different entities.
This is a disussion on server-side development, not client-side. I don't know what Google uses to implement GMail on the server; a few people are suggessting Java and that's completely reasonable.
I bet that the existing DST does nothing to save oil now at this point. Sure, it's nice to have those extra daylight hours and what not but is it worth causing untold number of devices
I like daylight savings time because the extra hour of sunlight in the evening makes me happy.
But there's a very important question regarding DST and I'm perplexed that it's hardly ever asked, so I'll do that now:
Why do we switch off DST in the winter, anyway?
The time change in the fall is depressing because we lose an hour of evening sunlight, and it's aggravating in the spring because we lose an hour of sleep. Not to metion the hours I've lost debugging various database systems that fail to handle DST consistently (if at all).
Wouldn't it be much more compelling if we eliminated daylight wasting time completely, rather than simply reduce it to three or four months, as congress is suggesting. What little benefit there is to switching off DST in the winter must surely be outweighed by what a complete pain in the ass it is to change our clocks twice a year.
It's quite ridiculous. They've taken a technology (RSS) that was invented 8 years ago and has been in common use since at least 2002, shamelessly ripped the UI from Apple (again), and it's still a year and a half away!
It's one thing for the marketing driods to try and hype something like this, but developers? Who the hell do they think their audience is?
Check out this week's Quirks and Quarks podcast, which covers the same topic. They interview the Planitary Society project manager about the upcoming solar sail launch.
While I'm at it, they've also got a segment on quantum cryptography this week which is kind of interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no better way to look clueless than to suggest that people who choose iPod are "swayed by fashion or other irrelevant criteria" and then proceed to list off completely pedestrian features like gapless playback and FM radio.
The majority of DAP users are not computer geeks anymore, they're music fans, and most of them use iPod/iTunes. You may be an audiophile, but you don't understand music or the creative ways people are organizing and listening to their music. Technology enthusiasts simply aren't qualified to offer advice to most music fans.
The computer geek in me thinks Rockbox is an interesting technical exercise. He's all for hardware hacking. Keep it going!
The music geek in me thinks that these guys don't understand music. The music geek has a long list of iPod improvements he'd like to see, relating to music organization, selection, and randomization. When he compares his list of improvements to what is offered by Rockbox (and others), he laughs and wonders why these people waste their time.
Agreed.
I disagree with the premise of this article. Sure, the iPod is a pretty piece of plastic, but the reason iPod has remained so immensely popular over the years is because of the quality of its software, both iTunes and iPod.
One could easily argue that Sony's hardware is nicer than Apple's; their products look great and are very well engineered. It's their specialty, after all. But it all boils down to software, and Sony cannot write software, period. None of the MP3 manufacturers can write software, and that's why they haven't gained any traction against the iPod. They're now all dependent on Microsoft (except for Sony) and there is simply no way that the joint Microsoft/MP3 conglomerate can respond as fast as Apple can with respect to hardware and software innovation.
Instead of writing new operating software for the iPod, which it does not need, why aren't these guys focused on writing software for the other MP3 hardware? They're the ones who need it! (Sony in particular.)
That's cute.
There's a certain subtly to successful April Fools jokes; it works better when people aren't sure if you're joking or not (e.g. the Gmail introduction).
I remember April Fools back in '99, I was working my first job as a developer and I was sent way up to the oil fields in northern Alberta to get some of our software working. It was hell. Our software was pretty much crap at the time, and that place is fucked up enough as it is. Anyway, I spent half the day thinking that society was crumbling as each time I would visit Slashdot my head would explode. It wasn't until well into the afternoon that I realized what day it was.
My point is, instead of using some My Little Pony color scheme that fools no one, why not unleash a radical new, but serious, design for Slashdot. Keep people on their toes. And if it really sucks, they can always revert back and say it was a joke.
Did they ever stop going after the ROM sites? If you're hired as an IP lawyer, your job is to go after IP violations and you're probably going to go after the low-hanging fruit first.
But I hope they realize that the emulation community, rom sites and all, are not their enemy. If anything, it helps them by increasing interest in these old games. I think that most people who are really excited about the classic games offered by Nintendo are already well acquainted with these games via emulation, but they'll pay to play them on Nintendo anyway.
I've been following the emulation scene from the very beginning, yet, for example, I've just purchased the Midway Classics disc for GameCube despite the fact that I've been playing these games on my PC for many years. Why? Because it's convenient. I don't play these games all that often, but if I'm hanging out with friends and the idea of a little multi-player Gauntlet comes up, it's set up on my TV in a matter of seconds. No dicking around with controller settings or downloading new ROMs because MAME has been updated, or any of that crap.
I think Nintendo's classic game service will be a smash, despite the fact that most fans have already played these games on their PCs via emulation.
Yes, one would be very wise to create a new Google account strictly for this service, rather than use their primary Gmail account. I hope Google will eventually take out the middle step and allow people to specify a different URL for their Google pages without having to use multiple accounts.
Middle-click doesn't work.
Referer doesn't contain search term.
Historically, these crazy new DHTML UI convensions have not been well received, and as technically interesting their UI may be I hardly feel compelled to switch from Google.
Next.
The Bad:
Bottom line: There isn't enough here to get me to switch from Firefox (or Safari :p), and if they don't reign in the memory usage I doubt I'll even
install it, but when I have to use IE on a friend or co-worker's machine, I'll be
very glad if they have IE7 installed.
I wasn't trying to sound elitist. What I meant is that SeaMonkey codebase is in fact old and announcing it as a new 1.0 product is a little disingenuous.
You may recall that the fruits of Mozilla.org's efforts did not gain any traction with the general browsing public until the Firefox interface came along, at which point the old SeaMonkey interface was rightfully dropped. An independent group of developers has since formed to continue development, essentailly moving new Firefox and Thunderbird features back to the old codebase, but this fact remains: not very many people used the old SeaMonkey browsers (Netscape 6/7, Mozilla Suite), and virtually all of those users have since moved on to Firefox / Thunderbird.
If you didn't use SeaMonkey 4 years ago, why would you use it now? This release is for that relatively small group of people who resented Mozilla.org's switch to Firefox and want to continue using the old suite. And good on them, I say; that's what open source is about.
If you don't already know what SeaMonkey is then it's probably of little interest to you. It's the original Mozilla codebase that has since been replaced by Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu.
Its user interface design is largely based off of Netscape Communicator 4 and is only meant for those who are nostalgic for the days of yore.
My favorite is the spam recipe feed it shows when viewing the spam folder.
I don't understand why everyone is so negative about this feature. It's not meant to be a fully-fleged RSS reader; they already have one of those and duplicating that functionality in GMail would be horribly misguided.
It's just some extra stuff to look at when you have no new mail and some time to kill. It's a little thing but usually it's the little things that differentiate the best products from the rest.
It would be nice if it imported my feeds from Google Reader by default, but on the other hand most of those aren't appropriate as "web clips" and I'm sure the number of GMail subscribers dwarfs the number of Google Reader users, anyway.
The same PRWeb that carried the news of Andy Kaufman's triumphant return from the dead? How exciting!
According to this, it sounds like the Martian ambassador was annoyed that he couldn't get an audience with the president back in May, so I'd say an attack is imminent.
Yup, the current state of the industry is pretty pathetic. It's just the same old crap rehashed over and over again.
On the other hand, some games are classics and are as enjoyable now as they were 15 years ago. I think that says a lot about what passes for state of the art gaming these days.
I am completely ignorant as to why the XBox 360 and PS3 are as interesting as some people make them out to be.
If you look at the generation-defining consoles of the the past they were irresistible because not only were they quantum leaps in technology but the technology enabled dramatically new and different types of game play.
NES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS2, ???.
Even non-gamers were crawling all over themselves to get a peek at these consoles when they were first released. Is the same true for the 360?
XBox 360 and PS3 seem like incremental improvements at best. Not to mention that PC games have had high definition graphics and on-line play for years. The only thing that sparks my interest is the Nintendo Revolution, and that's based solely on the new controller. It could be a total bust.
Am I too old? I sure wasn't when the PS2 was released. On paper the new consoles are dramatically better than their predecessors, but I don't see how that's going to translate into dramatically better games.
Considering that most of the new features in Google Desktop 2.0 were pilfered directly from Spotlight, I'd say you already have it.
Rumors about real symbolic links in Windows have been swirling since before Win2000.
The problem with Junction.exe is that the Explorer shell and all other applications do not differentiate between links and real folders. That is, applications never expect two different paths to point to the same object, which makes Junctions much less useful in practice. For example, file search results take much longer to complete and display duplicate results. I believe that is why they initially limited Junctions to just directories.
Now, if Vista got persistent file handles, that would be interesting.
The most thoughtful idea in this entire thread and article.
Now then, who's worse: Dvorak for continually writing such trash, or the (at least) two people who think it's a good idea to post said trash to Slashdot?
And for context, here's the original thread in which Duff's post appears:
Google Groups
You know, I used to feel the same way as you about the perceived lack of keyboard support in OS X (I'm a big fan of the keyboard accessibility Windows), but now that I've used OS X for a few months I've changed my mind. I think that while OS X generally stinks at providing universal keyboard accessibility, it does the best job of any system at providing keyboard shortcuts for commonly used commands, and I think that is more valuable and useful.
The Mac way is to provide a shortcut for every common menu command, but, most importantly, you can use the System Keyboard Preferences to assign keyboard shortcuts to any other menu common in any or all applications. I can't overstate how awesome that is.
Some examples of universal shortcuts:
- Cmd-Q: Quit Application
- Cmd-W: Close Window
- Cmd-H: Hide Application
- Cmd-Opt-H: Hide All Other Apps
- Cmd-M: Minimize Window
- Cmd-,: Preferences
- Cmd-L/R Arrow: Advance to Beginning/End of Line
- Option-L/R Arrow: Advance to Beginning/End of Word
Note that text fields also accept Emacs Ctrl-Key shortcuts.And here are some Finder shortcuts and are hilariously missing from Windows Explorer, for example:
- Cmd-1: Icon View (Finder)
- Cmd-2: List View (Finder)
- Cmd-3: Column View (Finder)
- Cmd-Shift-N: New Folder
- Cmd-Shift-A: Open Applications Folder
- Cmd-Shift-U: Open Utilities Folder
- Cmd-Shift-H: Open Home Folder
- Cmd-Shift-C: Open Computer (root) Folder
Note that those keyboard shortcuts work in all open and save dialogs as well.Here's one more tip. The option key is most often used to execute a variation of an existing command. Try mousing through an application's menus while toggling the option key to reveal alternate commands.
The biggest problem is that the Find Bar is practially invisible down there.
I used to download the Firefox nightly builds quite often. I remember when the find bar was first introduced I used the browser for a week thinking that Find was broken, because Ctrl+F didn't appear to do anything.
Even months later I still sometimes hit Ctrl+F multiple times in Firefox because of the lack of visual feedback. It's not that I don't know how to use Firefox, it's just that it's so unlike from every other application.
Outlook uses a search bar at the top of the window. Apple does as well in Finder, iTunes, and Mail. And more applications now are using a side-bar for the find dialog. These methods work very well because they give the user some decent visual feedback.
This is a disussion on server-side development, not client-side. I don't know what Google uses to implement GMail on the server; a few people are suggessting Java and that's completely reasonable.
I like daylight savings time because the extra hour of sunlight in the evening makes me happy.
But there's a very important question regarding DST and I'm perplexed that it's hardly ever asked, so I'll do that now:
Why do we switch off DST in the winter, anyway?
The time change in the fall is depressing because we lose an hour of evening sunlight, and it's aggravating in the spring because we lose an hour of sleep. Not to metion the hours I've lost debugging various database systems that fail to handle DST consistently (if at all).
Wouldn't it be much more compelling if we eliminated daylight wasting time completely, rather than simply reduce it to three or four months, as congress is suggesting. What little benefit there is to switching off DST in the winter must surely be outweighed by what a complete pain in the ass it is to change our clocks twice a year.
It's quite ridiculous. They've taken a technology (RSS) that was invented 8 years ago and has been in common use since at least 2002, shamelessly ripped the UI from Apple (again), and it's still a year and a half away!
It's one thing for the marketing driods to try and hype something like this, but developers? Who the hell do they think their audience is?
Check out this week's Quirks and Quarks podcast, which covers the same topic. They interview the Planitary Society project manager about the upcoming solar sail launch.
While I'm at it, they've also got a segment on quantum cryptography this week which is kind of interesting.