The one thing I think needs much much more attention is the OS X (Cocoa/native interface) port for OOo2.
It is apparently in a dire state at the moment (Ooo Mac Homepage), I have some Cocoa experience but am only a student so I lack enough experience to help at the moment, but I find it very depressing to hear again and again how the native Mac port is slowing down, or is *way* behind the X11 port.
Personally I think this is a bit of a shame. I know a lot of people here weren't too keen on the aggressive style and dubious legal grounds of this scheme, but to tell the truth, if there was a possibility it would eradicate or at least slow spam down, then I'd have to say I'm all for it.
Perhaps the problem here is that with Lycos being the single point of failure, as well as being a customer facing organisation, its position was just untenable.
There has certainly been lots of talk about building in such a system to mail clients, and perhaps having a distributed spam-attack system that way - perhaps this will be legally more tenable (they actually emailed you personally) as well as more resilient to pressure.
There is a need for GIMP as an application, sure, but my god there is a very long way to go, especially with the user interface, and look of the app, before Photoshop even begins to show signs of 'falling'.
I applaud all of the hard work done on the GIMP, by the many undoubtedly talented people who have given their time, but we are still four or five years away from a comfortable PS alternative, and allowing ourselves to think otherwise is totally counterproductive to actually achieving a Photoshop alternative.
Well this should destroy some Karma...
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know about anyone else, but I have to say that I was very much underwhelmed by the first Halo.
I simply don't think it deserves the huge scores it got, and I can't understand why it got them. I mean, the part when you fight through stage after stage after stage after stage of those plague things really is some of the most repetitive worst level design since the original wolfenstein.
Put that together with the sections after that which have you going through corridors and occasionally coming across a long bridge - again, so boringingly repetitive.
And the save system is horrendous, absolutely awful - I got stuck in one place having to save with very little health, and the next section just happened to be super-difficult, took me an absolute age to finish.
For what it's worth, I think the enemy design, although quite nice in places was not wide ranging enough - there are what, three different types of bad guy?? Look at the great stuff coming out in terms of enemies in Half Life 2 (Strider anyone?) and the nice assorted mix in Doom 3. Halo's really pale next to these. And what's with the cutesy-ness of those little alien things? Making cute sounds, I'm not watching a cartoon! I want to feel like these are serious assailants I'm facing, not some bastard offspring of Barney.
Now of course, there were some very good points to the game as we all know, the vehicles were great fun, and graphically I was very impressed. The storyline - well meh, I wasn't blown away, but I love the idea of the Halo in the first-place.
So I'm puzzled by all the crazed fanboi-ism over Halo, it was an OK game as far as I'm concerned, but people giving it crazy 10/10 scores? Did we play the same game?
But this is about Halo2... which I haven't played, but am not too buzzed up on it due to the disappointing original. Hopefully Bungie hasn't used the cut & paste method of world building this time round.
- Nex
You'll find that we Brits are very much a nation of newspaper lovers.
Looking here you can see that although we are but a nation of a mere 55m people, we have the top three newspapers in the world in terms of circulation.
That includes beating "The Times Of India", with a potential readership of over one billion into fourth place.
The New York Times comes in 8th place, with a circulation of 1.11 million.
Apple weren#t slothy and greedy... and they were certainly listening to people crying out for what was back then termed a 'modern OS'... this 'modern OS' crusade was at the center of almost all Apple's R&D for the vast majority of the 1990's.
There was Pink, Taligent, Maxwell, Copland, Rhapsody... all these projects cost billions of dollars... Apple just couldn't get it right... they certainly were not trying to be slothful as you suggest, and they certainly were working on a next-gen OS well before OS X turned up.
The Microsoft Music Store is categorically not cheaper than Apple's iTMS.
Let's all stop this myth right here
The MS store tacks on "additional taxes".
Also the choice of going with 160kbps WMA (and I'll leave the sound quality comparisons to the discussions above that are already underway) DOES however mean that your MP3 player that used to store 5,000 songs can now lonly store 4,000.
Plus no iPod support - 58% of all mp3 players, yes, even thte cheapo ones, are iPods.
Plus the fact that this is a half-launch, and MS risks giving the store a half-assed reputation. Plus the fact that WMP is a castly inferior user experience to use to buy music compared to Apple's iTunes. Plus the fact that, Apple already has 70% of the download market today... what does MS offer to change those people's habits that are already buying from Apple happily?
I think the hundreds of people who practically pulled a month long all-nighter to ship the Tiger seed for WWDC would object. Or the same teams that have been working their asses off to give us first access to many technologies, especially GPU accelerated GUIs etc.
It's true most companies these days are rather legal-happy, but the Apple engineers work hard and I think that's pretty obvious.
We got to get a sneak peek at WWDC this year, Motion is awesome for the price, the effects are just incredible.
Interestingly Apple are experimenting with the interface, everything can be controlled by gestures, which should please those die-hard fans of this control-method.
There are some things it won't do, I'm not a video-guy so I can't fully remember and I won't attempt to:) but there is room for a Motion 2. Having said that don't let that detract - this is an awesome product, I couldn't believe how easy it was to build simply jaw-dropping effects.
Might be worth the piffling $299 just to play with the thing even if you're not in video PP:)
I don't see a Fortune 500 (#236 I believe) as a small company in any way at all... how do you consider Apple Computer "small"?
Apple is not spending their (now over $4.5bn) cash on the music business. THe iTMS is turning a (and I quote from the latest financial call) "a small profit".
This is a service that was intended to just about break even, with the view to selling more iPods. So far, this service can only be called an unmitigated success in itself, and looking at the over $1bn of revenue that will come from the iPod in this year alone, the entire music division is doing incredibly.
BOOM napster sneaks in with the same products and services but just a little cheaper and suddenly Apple goes chapter 11
This is just ridiculous, maybe "sneak in with same products" is the best the Roxio management can come up with in place of a proper business plan, but no matter how many times you say "BOOM" it doesn't make it happen. You neglect to explain HOW on EARTH little Roxio/Napster can "sneak in" with the "same products" when Apple is a multi-billion dollar consumer product company and you can bet your granny that there are hoardes of extremely bright people over in Cupertino working on versions of the iPod that would make the current ones look like a 1980's walkman. What resources does Roxio/Napster have to compete with the resources that Apple both has and is willing to throw at this market?
Plus there's the headstart factor, every day that goes by Apple cements itself into the lead, evey million songs that are sold is another million songs that will be played through Apple's iTunes software or Apple's iPod player cement cement cement goes Apple's foundation bulding machine. And on top of this no other service comes close to the integration and quality of the whole music service from Apple.
So please, explain a little more about how Roxio/Napster, which has just become a totally profitless organisation is going to ensure that "suddenly Apple goes chapter 11"
WinAmp has always had a non-standard small, confusing and cluttered interface. It tries to have every control available to you within the space of a postage stamp on screen, and the effect is woeful.
From the sound of it you've never used iTunes. And iTunes "catching up" yeah... must be tough catching up with the full quality built in cd ripping to MP3 AAC WAV etc. that WinAmp does. Oh and catching up with the one click CD burning that WinAmp does. Oh and the online music sotre integration that WinAmp has. Oh and the easy interoperability with my iPod that WinAmp manages.
Seriously though, all the WinAmp features you've mentioned have been done in iTunes for years.
At the risk of seeming frightfully out of touch and un-733t over the last few month's I've been seeing more and more of this "One wor^H^H^H^H^H^H Another word I should really have used" kind of stuff.
I know how it's used and roughly what it means and how to read it... but does anyone know it's origins or it's precise meaning?
Thanks for enlightening me... I just finally had to ask.
You'll be glad to hear that Tiger, although not planned for release until early next year, will be full 64bit.
True, it's not quite here yet, but some already have seeds (and it's very stable).
Yeah that's so true... the submitter obviously didn't look around much. OS X 10.3 supports a lot of the basic 64bit functionality. Tiger (10.4) which is seeded already (final release early 2005) is full 64bit.
Apple themselves have a tendency to call actual boxes "CPU"s in their financial statements etc. (Where "CPU" actually means one box/computer despite the fact that the PowerMacs ship with dual processors/CPUs).
Well that's that sorted then... let's save the electrons and stop the discussion about heat-related failure right here after your considerably extensive data-gathering study that obviously offers a complete overview of the situation based on er... one person's experience.
Apple has shown that DRM (like it or otherwise) CAN work.
85m DRM'd songs sold.
70% marketshare when (some) non-DRM alternatives are available.
DRM is not strictly necessarily bad, it's just at the current state of play almost every implementation of DRM out there involves inconveniencing the user.
When (if) this is fixed then DRM may shed slightly the synonymity with "evil".
Slashdot Mirror
The one thing I think needs much much more attention is the OS X (Cocoa/native interface) port for OOo2.
It is apparently in a dire state at the moment (Ooo Mac Homepage), I have some Cocoa experience but am only a student so I lack enough experience to help at the moment, but I find it very depressing to hear again and again how the native Mac port is slowing down, or is *way* behind the X11 port.
If anyone wants to help, I know they need you.
Woz left Apple over a decade ago.
...and the fact that the registration for this site preceded macs trademarking of itunes...
Jesus, when will people get a clue and stop making this mistake? Mac is a product name Apple is the company.
What?
No way, after looking at the figures, by my calculations the U.S. tops the table.
Personally I think this is a bit of a shame. I know a lot of people here weren't too keen on the aggressive style and dubious legal grounds of this scheme, but to tell the truth, if there was a possibility it would eradicate or at least slow spam down, then I'd have to say I'm all for it.
Perhaps the problem here is that with Lycos being the single point of failure, as well as being a customer facing organisation, its position was just untenable.
There has certainly been lots of talk about building in such a system to mail clients, and perhaps having a distributed spam-attack system that way - perhaps this will be legally more tenable (they actually emailed you personally) as well as more resilient to pressure.
No... no, it really doesn't.
There is a need for GIMP as an application, sure, but my god there is a very long way to go, especially with the user interface, and look of the app, before Photoshop even begins to show signs of 'falling'.
I applaud all of the hard work done on the GIMP, by the many undoubtedly talented people who have given their time, but we are still four or five years away from a comfortable PS alternative, and allowing ourselves to think otherwise is totally counterproductive to actually achieving a Photoshop alternative.
I don't know about anyone else, but I have to say that I was very much underwhelmed by the first Halo.
I simply don't think it deserves the huge scores it got, and I can't understand why it got them. I mean, the part when you fight through stage after stage after stage after stage of those plague things really is some of the most repetitive worst level design since the original wolfenstein.
Put that together with the sections after that which have you going through corridors and occasionally coming across a long bridge - again, so boringingly repetitive.
And the save system is horrendous, absolutely awful - I got stuck in one place having to save with very little health, and the next section just happened to be super-difficult, took me an absolute age to finish.
For what it's worth, I think the enemy design, although quite nice in places was not wide ranging enough - there are what, three different types of bad guy?? Look at the great stuff coming out in terms of enemies in Half Life 2 (Strider anyone?) and the nice assorted mix in Doom 3. Halo's really pale next to these. And what's with the cutesy-ness of those little alien things? Making cute sounds, I'm not watching a cartoon! I want to feel like these are serious assailants I'm facing, not some bastard offspring of Barney.
Now of course, there were some very good points to the game as we all know, the vehicles were great fun, and graphically I was very impressed. The storyline - well meh, I wasn't blown away, but I love the idea of the Halo in the first-place.
So I'm puzzled by all the crazed fanboi-ism over Halo, it was an OK game as far as I'm concerned, but people giving it crazy 10/10 scores? Did we play the same game?
But this is about Halo2... which I haven't played, but am not too buzzed up on it due to the disappointing original. Hopefully Bungie hasn't used the cut & paste method of world building this time round. - Nex
You'll find that we Brits are very much a nation of newspaper lovers. Looking here you can see that although we are but a nation of a mere 55m people, we have the top three newspapers in the world in terms of circulation.
That includes beating "The Times Of India", with a potential readership of over one billion into fourth place.
The New York Times comes in 8th place, with a circulation of 1.11 million.
What about the first web browser for a start?
The first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices?
etc. Do some googling.
Agree with other poster - This should be Informative, the parent is certainly bordering on beligerent... (also seems to be a complete ass).
Apple weren#t slothy and greedy... and they were certainly listening to people crying out for what was back then termed a 'modern OS'... this 'modern OS' crusade was at the center of almost all Apple's R&D for the vast majority of the 1990's.
There was Pink, Taligent, Maxwell, Copland, Rhapsody... all these projects cost billions of dollars... Apple just couldn't get it right... they certainly were not trying to be slothful as you suggest, and they certainly were working on a next-gen OS well before OS X turned up.
The Microsoft Music Store is categorically not cheaper than Apple's iTMS.
Let's all stop this myth right here
The MS store tacks on "additional taxes".
Also the choice of going with 160kbps WMA (and I'll leave the sound quality comparisons to the discussions above that are already underway) DOES however mean that your MP3 player that used to store 5,000 songs can now lonly store 4,000.
Plus no iPod support - 58% of all mp3 players, yes, even thte cheapo ones, are iPods.
Plus the fact that this is a half-launch, and MS risks giving the store a half-assed reputation. Plus the fact that WMP is a castly inferior user experience to use to buy music compared to Apple's iTunes. Plus the fact that, Apple already has 70% of the download market today... what does MS offer to change those people's habits that are already buying from Apple happily?
My recent logitech does NOT have said cable collar (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/detail s/GB/EN,CRID=3,CONTENTID=4996)
Apple not working at turning a profit.
I think the hundreds of people who practically pulled a month long all-nighter to ship the Tiger seed for WWDC would object. Or the same teams that have been working their asses off to give us first access to many technologies, especially GPU accelerated GUIs etc.
It's true most companies these days are rather legal-happy, but the Apple engineers work hard and I think that's pretty obvious.
We got to get a sneak peek at WWDC this year, Motion is awesome for the price, the effects are just incredible.
:) but there is room for a Motion 2. Having said that don't let that detract - this is an awesome product, I couldn't believe how easy it was to build simply jaw-dropping effects.
:)
Interestingly Apple are experimenting with the interface, everything can be controlled by gestures, which should please those die-hard fans of this control-method.
There are some things it won't do, I'm not a video-guy so I can't fully remember and I won't attempt to
Might be worth the piffling $299 just to play with the thing even if you're not in video PP
a small company however many ways you look at it
I don't see a Fortune 500 (#236 I believe) as a small company in any way at all... how do you consider Apple Computer "small"?
Apple is not spending their (now over $4.5bn) cash on the music business. THe iTMS is turning a (and I quote from the latest financial call) "a small profit".
This is a service that was intended to just about break even, with the view to selling more iPods. So far, this service can only be called an unmitigated success in itself, and looking at the over $1bn of revenue that will come from the iPod in this year alone, the entire music division is doing incredibly.
BOOM napster sneaks in with the same products and services but just a little cheaper and suddenly Apple goes chapter 11
This is just ridiculous, maybe "sneak in with same products" is the best the Roxio management can come up with in place of a proper business plan, but no matter how many times you say "BOOM" it doesn't make it happen. You neglect to explain HOW on EARTH little Roxio/Napster can "sneak in" with the "same products" when Apple is a multi-billion dollar consumer product company and you can bet your granny that there are hoardes of extremely bright people over in Cupertino working on versions of the iPod that would make the current ones look like a 1980's walkman. What resources does Roxio/Napster have to compete with the resources that Apple both has and is willing to throw at this market?
Plus there's the headstart factor, every day that goes by Apple cements itself into the lead, evey million songs that are sold is another million songs that will be played through Apple's iTunes software or Apple's iPod player cement cement cement goes Apple's foundation bulding machine. And on top of this no other service comes close to the integration and quality of the whole music service from Apple.
So please, explain a little more about how Roxio/Napster, which has just become a totally profitless organisation is going to ensure that "suddenly Apple goes chapter 11"
Sheesh.
Second, why are they demanding share prices in the $100 range when Ebay/Yahoo (company's with more value) are priced significantly less than that?
As a day trader, I'm sure you know that the price of the individual share has no individual impact on the total value of the company at all.
Lacking in what way exactly?
WinAmp has always had a non-standard small, confusing and cluttered interface. It tries to have every control available to you within the space of a postage stamp on screen, and the effect is woeful.
From the sound of it you've never used iTunes. And iTunes "catching up" yeah... must be tough catching up with the full quality built in cd ripping to MP3 AAC WAV etc. that WinAmp does. Oh and catching up with the one click CD burning that WinAmp does. Oh and the online music sotre integration that WinAmp has. Oh and the easy interoperability with my iPod that WinAmp manages.
Seriously though, all the WinAmp features you've mentioned have been done in iTunes for years.
Go download it and give it a whirl.
Ok, now I really have to ask.
At the risk of seeming frightfully out of touch and un-733t over the last few month's I've been seeing more and more of this "One wor^H^H^H^H^H^H Another word I should really have used" kind of stuff.
I know how it's used and roughly what it means and how to read it... but does anyone know it's origins or it's precise meaning?
Thanks for enlightening me... I just finally had to ask.
You'll be glad to hear that Tiger, although not planned for release until early next year, will be full 64bit. True, it's not quite here yet, but some already have seeds (and it's very stable).
Yeah that's so true... the submitter obviously didn't look around much. OS X 10.3 supports a lot of the basic 64bit functionality. Tiger (10.4) which is seeded already (final release early 2005) is full 64bit.
Apple themselves have a tendency to call actual boxes "CPU"s in their financial statements etc. (Where "CPU" actually means one box/computer despite the fact that the PowerMacs ship with dual processors/CPUs).
Well that's that sorted then... let's save the electrons and stop the discussion about heat-related failure right here after your considerably extensive data-gathering study that obviously offers a complete overview of the situation based on er... one person's experience.
Apple has shown that DRM (like it or otherwise) CAN work.
85m DRM'd songs sold.
70% marketshare when (some) non-DRM alternatives are available.
DRM is not strictly necessarily bad, it's just at the current state of play almost every implementation of DRM out there involves inconveniencing the user.
When (if) this is fixed then DRM may shed slightly the synonymity with "evil".
The original article carries an almost identical headline, the /. editors have just taken it from there. RTFA? Try RTF Headline.