My point was that these are not the most friendly of pairings. Apple does try to promote and sell the Apple brand of software let's not forget. They each have minor incursions into each others territory mostly as a way to drive up sales [re: ipod, office] but also lure people to the other camp.
If they're doing the song and dance on stage together again it's because they're trying to divide the market again between OSS and non-OSS camps.
Given that I run neither MSFT nor apple products [aside from an ipod which has never seen itunes that was bought for me as a gift] I don't care what "vision" these two can come up with. The fact that they're talking like this at all suggests they're scared about "the other choice." Let's not forget it wasn't long ago that MSFT basically ripped off apple [who rippled off PARC] and they all got mad up in each others face about it.
If they feel good competing AGAINST a charity. It's like trying to run the red cross out of town because you want your own select staff of employees to profit from the same line of work.
Why didn't Intel work *with* OLPC to make a laptop to help educate people? Now all they're serving to do is divide the market and confuse customers [re: governments] with a laptop which imho is less suited for the task.
It isn't like OLPC *has* to run a geode. I mean at this point a rework is out of the question, but they could have switched it to an intel chip a couple of years ago if a low power chip was suitable for the task.
I think you're confusing private with embarrassing. For example, that you mispelt "room" in your grade 3 spelling bee is not private. It is embarassing though. Should the government go around and tell everyone what happened? no. Is it a violation of your privacy? no.
Just like the government shouldn't expose things you are not volunteering in public. That you go to a view bar 30 times a week, is not private. Should the government tell your pastor that? No. It's embarrassing, etc.
The responsibility of the government doesn't include morality police, or popularity police, etc. They shouldn't waste time on things that doesn't help them either protect people from crime, or stop crimes themselves.
So you're saying the government should have no records about people whatsoever? Then how do you dish out benefits, insurance, or other legal things like that?
Like I said, you're more likely to get mugged, cheated, robbed, killed, etc, from a total random civilian than the police.
If anything you should be upset at the cameras cost, not their invasion of your publicity.
Someone had to write and run the bot, they're responsible for it's actions. They registered a domain that is likely to get hits and are pushing unrelated content to the viewer. That's just lame and disrespectful.
Yeah, we all saw V for Vendetta. Here's a tip, it was a movie.
I've been to the UK twice, both times I was never hassled by the fuzz (actually I only saw cops at the football game and at the airport). I wasn't interrogated at customs, etc. Britain may be a nanny state, but they're not a police state. There just isn't any push to record every single persons every single moment.
Believe it or not, but the people who give out traffic tickets [and other parking tickets/etc] get hassled a lot, sometimes even violently. Traffic cops in the USA [and probably Canada and many other countries] already have dash mounted cameras. MY GOD THEY COULD BE FOLLOWING ME. Oh wait, they're not.
I hate how every time the word "camera" and "Britain" get mentioned people assume it's a "strength through unity" style moment. Could it just be that they're trying to balance for law and order? To be honest, in the UK I'd be more afraid of getting mugged by some chav then a cop [just like in the USA I might add].
CCTV cameras interrogate people and make them strip? My gosh, I didn't know.
Hello captain hyperbole!
While you may not go out in public and volunteer information vocally you are leaking it otherwise. I can *SEE* you leave your house, I can see which car you get in, I can follow you on public roads, etc.... That's all perfectly legal.
Once advertisers switch to pay-per-sale from pay-per-click these people will disappear. They provide next to no value and routinely snap up useful names and host garbage on them.
For example, look at libtomcrypt.org. The links there have NOTHING to do with LibTomCrypt. Someone looking for my projects will be disappointed to find links to random commercial shit [most of which is snake oil]. Of course in that case I didn't care about the domain [after Dan Kaminsky failed to renew it, it was taken by a usenet troll, then lapsed again and was immediately bought by the domainer].
Personally I wish all the worst in the world for this person. He spends his time and energy ruining what was supposed to be a good and just goal of widespread communication and equality. If he thinks he's a "good person" he's sadly mistaken.
I dunno about you but I can tell when I miss a note in GH by not having the note light up as it does when you hit it. I don't need a huge 72pt font message saying "YOU ARE TEH MISS!" The click-clack of the plastic guitar provides zero useful feedback. You can tell when you strum the guitar by the fact you pushed the switch down or up.
Maybe if you paid more attention you'd see there are plenty of cues as to what's going on already.
I found even with the 9 year gap that I could still read music but the co-ordination took a while to get back into. When I stopped playing I was level 7 RCM, I started in December of 2006 at level 3. Now I'm more on the ball but still wrestling with the finer elements of phrasing and dynamics hehehe.
As someone who plays the piano [royal conservatory series] I find your comments a bit misleading. Sure it's not hard to pick up pop or rock tunes, but most of them are not very hard anyways (re: coldplay). Mostly just a question of rhythm.
Real piano is fairly hard, and takes serious theoretical and plain experience to do well. For example, I'm playing level 4 pieces now, sure I can read the notes, and after several weeks play the pieces hands together with some dynamics, but a lot of the finishing touches that make them sound musical are things you won't learn from just reading notes on a page. You learn them from musical theory (e.g. what makes songs "make sense") and experience (having your instructor point things out).
If you're going to devote so much time to something that is ever so close to being a real world activity, why not do it for real?
Especially since a real guitar isn't that expensive [at least a run of the mill kind].
Racing games, and even most sport games have the penalty of costs. Sure, why don't I drive a 1.3 million dollar car 120 mph the wrong way through Italy, why didn't I think of that.
I know that adults learn a bit slower than kids but I should point out that adults can learn too. I used to play piano as a kid, stopped when I was 16, picked it up again when I was nearly 25, and am doing fairly well (finished level 3 in 4 months, zooming through level 4, starting to pick up on the technique and theory side of things, etc).
My case is a bit different since I played as a kid, but keep in mind the gap between me playing is longer than most kid students have been alive.
Well I'm sorry I don't go to parties with a bunch of planned activities. Of course, I'm also not 7. I go to a friends place and we play or do whatever is handy. And when you only have one TV anyways, it isn't like one crowd can play other games while a pair or solo plays GH.
At anyrate, to each their own. For me, GH looks like fun, but it's not a spectator sport. I don't like watching my friends play because there isn't much to do but sit on your thumbs. Combine that with, as I said earlier the fact that it sounds so annoying and it's not really a good time.
Yeah, but you could totally scale it down even on a real guitar. Make it so easy uses the first positions, and as it gets harder you use more of the guitar. That's how you learn guitar [and indeed most instruments] anyways.
GH is *not* a party game. You have 10 of your friends over and they all watch you play GH? How is that even remotely fun? The thing is really annoying if you're not playing as you can hear all the clicks, missed note sounds, and the badly rendered music. Oh and did I forget to mention that songs are usually 5-6 mins long? if you're doing round robin, even with 2 guitars, you'd have to wait ~20-24 minutes before you get to play next [hint: I've been there.]
I'd rather have my friends over taking turns playing Wii sports or other games of that genre. A game like Wii Tennis [single match] can be over in as short as 1-2 minutes, giving other people a chance to get up and play. Smoothmoves is very rapid where most players are only playing for 10-15 seconds at most per turn.
I think if you're going to spend so much time acing songs with a fisher price toy, you might as well step it up and learn to play a real guitar. And for all intents and purposes it is a "guitar simulator" of sorts. Sure it's a game, but so are flight sims and look how realistic [as best as you can get on a home PC] they are. If you were to spend endless hours perfecting your flying in a flight sim, the flight sim might as well be realistic and react like a real plane would, etc.
The people saying "it's not supposed to be real, it's a game, blah blah" are just afraid that if they had to actually learn a real skill they wouldn't be "expert rated" so quickly [if at all]. They're basically defending their higher status in the game and trying to avoid change [e.g. to make it better].
I dunno, I'm impressed by people who play music well [especially the piano and violin, but that's just my personal prefs]. If one of my friends got up and jammed on a real guitar that'd be pretty cool in my books.
Watching my friend sit on his ass and button mash a fisherprice lookalike is fun for the first bit but lame after that. It's just not a spectator sport.
The problem with your comment is that people ALREADY spend months acing songs in GH.
At the very least the buttons should be across the bar and they should put several rows in. Make the easy songs use the first row, medium songs the first two, etc... Actually you could do that with a real guitar as well though, when you FFT the input just allow them to be off an octave [or whatever it is in guitar terms] when on easy.
I get that it's supposed to just be a game and all, but it's really looks like a playskule toy and the clicking is really annoying.
You're admittedly young so I'll forgive this. But there are practical limits to how far you can go when accommodating stupid.
To put it bluntly, for every safe guard, or documented widget you put in software, there will be people who go beyond common sense, misinterpret or just plain don't read the instructions. You've probably seen RTFM? it's not a joke. In my OSS project I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation which included text, example code, and that sort of jazz. People still came to me with trivial problems that were addressed by the manual.
MSFT solution to this is to take away control of the computer and not even ship a manual. If you just want an "email machine" then you don't need a full blown PC and operating system. Certainly you don't need a machine the calibre of which is required for Vista.
The line that "Linux distros are hard" is oft repeated but I seriously question the motives of the speaker. Some repeat it because it's the popular sentiment, others because they didn't give it a fair try and are using it as an excuse not to feel stupid. Others are simply paid to spread FUD.
But where do you draw the line? Should I have to tell you that the CD goes in the CD tray? Or that the "ok" button means an affirmative response? How about that settings are under the settings menu? or....With your logic nothing is documented fully, and even if it were, it wouldn't matter since nobody reads the manual anyways.
At some point the users have to be responsible for their actions, and if they choose not to be, then they have to pay for it [lack of freedoms, expensive OSes, etc]. For those of us who take the responsibility on ourselves we benefit with a choice of software, configuration, and save money in the process.
Make the guitar more realistic, or god forbid use a real guitar and DSP the output to see chords they are playing.
I take piano lessons at a studio where a [what looks like] 10 year old kid is learning acoustic guitar. If a 10 yr old can strum and play chords, surely to god the target audience of 20-30 year olds can figure it out too.
That, or at the very least make the guitar silent, nothing like hearing the song + missed notes + *click* *clack* *click* *clack* as they button mash and strum. Real guitars don't click!!!!
Maybe you didn't read what [if any] documentation was present, maybe you didn't try hard, maybe you didn't put forth a good faith effort, maybe you didn't google online for suggestions.
When I was 15 (10 years ago), I was a MS-DOS monkey but at that point I had taught myself C and Pascal, was an assembly hacker [of sorts], ran [and wrote] my own BBS, etc.
Ubuntu is fairly easy to use, and from what I've seen with my less techy friends they can get by just fine with it. If you think Windows is somehow perfect you're sadly mistaken. There are tons of DLL hell, install troubles, random crashes, driver problems, etc to be had in Windows just as in Linux distros.
What really matters is how much good faith effort you put into getting things going. If all the user does is throw up their hands at the slightest speed bump, then computers become impractical, because developers can't accommodate every form of stupid.
That's not dithering though. Dithering is randomizing quantization error to prevent large spatially related sections of banding.
Mixing three different wavelengths in varying intensities is called mixing, and produces signals of various perceived frequencies. I'm not a DSP engineer but there is an entire science behind what happens when you mix signals and the resulting perceived signal.
This must be for older macs or something. Because most LCDs made in the last 5 years that I know of are capable of handling 24bpp resolutions just fine (via VGA or DVI or whatever). Certainly on my two LCDs I don't see any banding on gradients.
DNRTFA but I hope for Apple's sake these are old systems that have 16bpp resolutions...
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My point was that these are not the most friendly of pairings. Apple does try to promote and sell the Apple brand of software let's not forget. They each have minor incursions into each others territory mostly as a way to drive up sales [re: ipod, office] but also lure people to the other camp.
If they're doing the song and dance on stage together again it's because they're trying to divide the market again between OSS and non-OSS camps.
Tom
Given that I run neither MSFT nor apple products [aside from an ipod which has never seen itunes that was bought for me as a gift] I don't care what "vision" these two can come up with. The fact that they're talking like this at all suggests they're scared about "the other choice." Let's not forget it wasn't long ago that MSFT basically ripped off apple [who rippled off PARC] and they all got mad up in each others face about it.
Tom
Because intel will use their financial resources to push an INFERIOR solution over the XO design. Intel can outspend OLPC on marketing, PR, etc, etc.
It's kinda how everyone runs MSFT Windows even though it's rarely the ideal OS for most users.
Tom
If they feel good competing AGAINST a charity. It's like trying to run the red cross out of town because you want your own select staff of employees to profit from the same line of work.
Why didn't Intel work *with* OLPC to make a laptop to help educate people? Now all they're serving to do is divide the market and confuse customers [re: governments] with a laptop which imho is less suited for the task.
It isn't like OLPC *has* to run a geode. I mean at this point a rework is out of the question, but they could have switched it to an intel chip a couple of years ago if a low power chip was suitable for the task.
Tom
I think you're confusing private with embarrassing. For example, that you mispelt "room" in your grade 3 spelling bee is not private. It is embarassing though. Should the government go around and tell everyone what happened? no. Is it a violation of your privacy? no.
Just like the government shouldn't expose things you are not volunteering in public. That you go to a view bar 30 times a week, is not private. Should the government tell your pastor that? No. It's embarrassing, etc.
The responsibility of the government doesn't include morality police, or popularity police, etc. They shouldn't waste time on things that doesn't help them either protect people from crime, or stop crimes themselves.
Tom
So you're saying the government should have no records about people whatsoever? Then how do you dish out benefits, insurance, or other legal things like that?
Like I said, you're more likely to get mugged, cheated, robbed, killed, etc, from a total random civilian than the police.
If anything you should be upset at the cameras cost, not their invasion of your publicity.
Tom
Someone had to write and run the bot, they're responsible for it's actions. They registered a domain that is likely to get hits and are pushing unrelated content to the viewer. That's just lame and disrespectful.
Tom
Yeah, we all saw V for Vendetta. Here's a tip, it was a movie.
I've been to the UK twice, both times I was never hassled by the fuzz (actually I only saw cops at the football game and at the airport). I wasn't interrogated at customs, etc. Britain may be a nanny state, but they're not a police state. There just isn't any push to record every single persons every single moment.
Believe it or not, but the people who give out traffic tickets [and other parking tickets/etc] get hassled a lot, sometimes even violently. Traffic cops in the USA [and probably Canada and many other countries] already have dash mounted cameras. MY GOD THEY COULD BE FOLLOWING ME. Oh wait, they're not.
I hate how every time the word "camera" and "Britain" get mentioned people assume it's a "strength through unity" style moment. Could it just be that they're trying to balance for law and order? To be honest, in the UK I'd be more afraid of getting mugged by some chav then a cop [just like in the USA I might add].
CCTV cameras interrogate people and make them strip? My gosh, I didn't know.
Hello captain hyperbole!
While you may not go out in public and volunteer information vocally you are leaking it otherwise. I can *SEE* you leave your house, I can see which car you get in, I can follow you on public roads, etc.... That's all perfectly legal.
Tom
Once advertisers switch to pay-per-sale from pay-per-click these people will disappear. They provide next to no value and routinely snap up useful names and host garbage on them.
For example, look at libtomcrypt.org. The links there have NOTHING to do with LibTomCrypt. Someone looking for my projects will be disappointed to find links to random commercial shit [most of which is snake oil]. Of course in that case I didn't care about the domain [after Dan Kaminsky failed to renew it, it was taken by a usenet troll, then lapsed again and was immediately bought by the domainer].
Personally I wish all the worst in the world for this person. He spends his time and energy ruining what was supposed to be a good and just goal of widespread communication and equality. If he thinks he's a "good person" he's sadly mistaken.
Tom
I dunno about you but I can tell when I miss a note in GH by not having the note light up as it does when you hit it. I don't need a huge 72pt font message saying "YOU ARE TEH MISS!" The click-clack of the plastic guitar provides zero useful feedback. You can tell when you strum the guitar by the fact you pushed the switch down or up.
Maybe if you paid more attention you'd see there are plenty of cues as to what's going on already.
I found even with the 9 year gap that I could still read music but the co-ordination took a while to get back into. When I stopped playing I was level 7 RCM, I started in December of 2006 at level 3. Now I'm more on the ball but still wrestling with the finer elements of phrasing and dynamics hehehe.
Tom
As someone who plays the piano [royal conservatory series] I find your comments a bit misleading. Sure it's not hard to pick up pop or rock tunes, but most of them are not very hard anyways (re: coldplay). Mostly just a question of rhythm.
Real piano is fairly hard, and takes serious theoretical and plain experience to do well. For example, I'm playing level 4 pieces now, sure I can read the notes, and after several weeks play the pieces hands together with some dynamics, but a lot of the finishing touches that make them sound musical are things you won't learn from just reading notes on a page. You learn them from musical theory (e.g. what makes songs "make sense") and experience (having your instructor point things out).
Tom
If you're going to devote so much time to something that is ever so close to being a real world activity, why not do it for real?
Especially since a real guitar isn't that expensive [at least a run of the mill kind].
Racing games, and even most sport games have the penalty of costs. Sure, why don't I drive a 1.3 million dollar car 120 mph the wrong way through Italy, why didn't I think of that.
Tom
I know that adults learn a bit slower than kids but I should point out that adults can learn too. I used to play piano as a kid, stopped when I was 16, picked it up again when I was nearly 25, and am doing fairly well (finished level 3 in 4 months, zooming through level 4, starting to pick up on the technique and theory side of things, etc).
My case is a bit different since I played as a kid, but keep in mind the gap between me playing is longer than most kid students have been alive.
Tom
Well I'm sorry I don't go to parties with a bunch of planned activities. Of course, I'm also not 7. I go to a friends place and we play or do whatever is handy. And when you only have one TV anyways, it isn't like one crowd can play other games while a pair or solo plays GH.
At anyrate, to each their own. For me, GH looks like fun, but it's not a spectator sport. I don't like watching my friends play because there isn't much to do but sit on your thumbs. Combine that with, as I said earlier the fact that it sounds so annoying and it's not really a good time.
Tom
Yeah, but you could totally scale it down even on a real guitar. Make it so easy uses the first positions, and as it gets harder you use more of the guitar. That's how you learn guitar [and indeed most instruments] anyways.
Tom
GH is *not* a party game. You have 10 of your friends over and they all watch you play GH? How is that even remotely fun? The thing is really annoying if you're not playing as you can hear all the clicks, missed note sounds, and the badly rendered music. Oh and did I forget to mention that songs are usually 5-6 mins long? if you're doing round robin, even with 2 guitars, you'd have to wait ~20-24 minutes before you get to play next [hint: I've been there.]
I'd rather have my friends over taking turns playing Wii sports or other games of that genre. A game like Wii Tennis [single match] can be over in as short as 1-2 minutes, giving other people a chance to get up and play. Smoothmoves is very rapid where most players are only playing for 10-15 seconds at most per turn.
I think if you're going to spend so much time acing songs with a fisher price toy, you might as well step it up and learn to play a real guitar. And for all intents and purposes it is a "guitar simulator" of sorts. Sure it's a game, but so are flight sims and look how realistic [as best as you can get on a home PC] they are. If you were to spend endless hours perfecting your flying in a flight sim, the flight sim might as well be realistic and react like a real plane would, etc.
The people saying "it's not supposed to be real, it's a game, blah blah" are just afraid that if they had to actually learn a real skill they wouldn't be "expert rated" so quickly [if at all]. They're basically defending their higher status in the game and trying to avoid change [e.g. to make it better].
Tom
I dunno, I'm impressed by people who play music well [especially the piano and violin, but that's just my personal prefs]. If one of my friends got up and jammed on a real guitar that'd be pretty cool in my books.
Watching my friend sit on his ass and button mash a fisherprice lookalike is fun for the first bit but lame after that. It's just not a spectator sport.
Tom
The problem with your comment is that people ALREADY spend months acing songs in GH.
At the very least the buttons should be across the bar and they should put several rows in. Make the easy songs use the first row, medium songs the first two, etc... Actually you could do that with a real guitar as well though, when you FFT the input just allow them to be off an octave [or whatever it is in guitar terms] when on easy.
I get that it's supposed to just be a game and all, but it's really looks like a playskule toy and the clicking is really annoying.
Tom
You're admittedly young so I'll forgive this. But there are practical limits to how far you can go when accommodating stupid.
....With your logic nothing is documented fully, and even if it were, it wouldn't matter since nobody reads the manual anyways.
To put it bluntly, for every safe guard, or documented widget you put in software, there will be people who go beyond common sense, misinterpret or just plain don't read the instructions. You've probably seen RTFM? it's not a joke. In my OSS project I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation which included text, example code, and that sort of jazz. People still came to me with trivial problems that were addressed by the manual.
MSFT solution to this is to take away control of the computer and not even ship a manual. If you just want an "email machine" then you don't need a full blown PC and operating system. Certainly you don't need a machine the calibre of which is required for Vista.
The line that "Linux distros are hard" is oft repeated but I seriously question the motives of the speaker. Some repeat it because it's the popular sentiment, others because they didn't give it a fair try and are using it as an excuse not to feel stupid. Others are simply paid to spread FUD.
But where do you draw the line? Should I have to tell you that the CD goes in the CD tray? Or that the "ok" button means an affirmative response? How about that settings are under the settings menu? or
At some point the users have to be responsible for their actions, and if they choose not to be, then they have to pay for it [lack of freedoms, expensive OSes, etc]. For those of us who take the responsibility on ourselves we benefit with a choice of software, configuration, and save money in the process.
Tom
Make the guitar more realistic, or god forbid use a real guitar and DSP the output to see chords they are playing.
I take piano lessons at a studio where a [what looks like] 10 year old kid is learning acoustic guitar. If a 10 yr old can strum and play chords, surely to god the target audience of 20-30 year olds can figure it out too.
That, or at the very least make the guitar silent, nothing like hearing the song + missed notes + *click* *clack* *click* *clack* as they button mash and strum. Real guitars don't click!!!!
Tom
Maybe you didn't read what [if any] documentation was present, maybe you didn't try hard, maybe you didn't put forth a good faith effort, maybe you didn't google online for suggestions.
When I was 15 (10 years ago), I was a MS-DOS monkey but at that point I had taught myself C and Pascal, was an assembly hacker [of sorts], ran [and wrote] my own BBS, etc.
Ubuntu is fairly easy to use, and from what I've seen with my less techy friends they can get by just fine with it. If you think Windows is somehow perfect you're sadly mistaken. There are tons of DLL hell, install troubles, random crashes, driver problems, etc to be had in Windows just as in Linux distros.
What really matters is how much good faith effort you put into getting things going. If all the user does is throw up their hands at the slightest speed bump, then computers become impractical, because developers can't accommodate every form of stupid.
Tom
That's not dithering though. Dithering is randomizing quantization error to prevent large spatially related sections of banding.
Mixing three different wavelengths in varying intensities is called mixing, and produces signals of various perceived frequencies. I'm not a DSP engineer but there is an entire science behind what happens when you mix signals and the resulting perceived signal.
Tom
This must be for older macs or something. Because most LCDs made in the last 5 years that I know of are capable of handling 24bpp resolutions just fine (via VGA or DVI or whatever). Certainly on my two LCDs I don't see any banding on gradients.
DNRTFA but I hope for Apple's sake these are old systems that have 16bpp resolutions...
Tom