All and all, it should be very interesting to see this next generation. Between the X-Box 2, the PS3 (will it run PS1/2 games? What's up with cell?), and the Game Cube's successor (should also be interesting) we should be in for some interesting developments (not to say anything about Nintendo's DS, the GBA's eventual successor, the PSP, and the persistant rumors of MS looking at portables).
As I understand it the Playstation chips have always had this roadmap, whereupon the system of chips needed to make the console do what she does are eventually reduced into a single, commodity chip. This is what happened with the PS1 - it became the audio controller on the PS2. And now the PS2 is a single chip (see PSX) as well. So - I think they will simply include this chip as an add-on, and give it some menial duty within the newer console.
everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss, and they make up for it when users by software and maybe accessories.
Another, more accurate way to put it is: Everyone knows Xbox and PS2 are sold for near-cost, making a little money (more in Sony's case), and games are sold for a profit.
Well, Bluetooth rocks, but iSync is astonishingly slow compared to (for instance) Palm Desktop.
Just a point of interest - it might be the Palm conduit, or something similar. I don't have a Palm device in my sync setup, just the T68i and an iPod, and a big sync (for me) takes about 12-20 seconds. I guess YMMV.
Its not a matter of me thinking so. It was in the presentation Apple gave at Siggraph.
While QE may not offer a complete hardware acceleration scheme currently, it does make a big difference in use, and more importantly is available right now.
I hope Longhorn does have a a kickass graphics engine but lets talk about it when there's something to actually discuss, yes?
Besides, you think Apple's gonna sit still for the next 2 years?
The fact that tons of clueless Mac people believe that Quartz Extreme is actual hardware acceleration (like Longhorn's) instead of just acceleration for window compositing. Ie: When you draw a gradient triangle using Quartz2D, its done via the CPU, not the graphics card.
You think so? Actually, tell you the truth, what's even better than the Longhorn method - the magical operating system that I wrote myself. It's due out 2008.
Linux will always have that server/unix advantage against windows. With Mac's unless you were ichatting or hooking up digital cameras 24x7, there's no reason to have one. Games would be a damn good area to improve.
I disagree. 2003 was the first year in which consoles overtook growth of PC games, and is a trend that has been pretty evident for awhile. While PC games are not doomed in any sense I think there is a decline in the making, in favour of the dedicated game machines. This means 'PC gaming' and consequently Linux/Mac gaming will be less of an issue. IMHO.
Dixie Flatline, i thank you profusely for the clarification. This is useful information. I am in Toronto and about to go apartment hunting (again) -- I was just wondering about the SIN thing when I came across this timely Slashdot article, and your post.
Besides, if it's legal to download, then why shouldn't it be legal to upload? I mean, come on! The ONLY WAY you *can* download is if somebody sends you the file! Either prosecute both or neither!
The reasoning behind this, as I recall, was that a filename is hardly bona fide proof of the actual content of the file. For a really simple example, someone could rename a copyrighted file with the name of a file in the public domain. You would not know until it landed on your drive and you played it back; therefore it is not fair to hold you culpable for infringing on the copyright as you were duped.
Since there's no real way to tell a copyrighted file from anything else (at a distance, so to speak)... downloading is legal, since it could have completely legitimate purposes.
Uploading copyrighted work is not legal and pretty straightforward although I'm sure much will be made of the fact that many P2P applications share by default... which I'm not sure a lot of people know...
dude, the "gear" button? yo i'm a mac user myself, but are you talking about keyboard shortcuts? i'm pretty sure Linux has keyboard shortcuts.
No, I'm talking about the button with the icon of a gear on it, that is in the standard Panther Finder toolbar. Wasn't talking about keyboard shortcuts.
It's clear from your post that you don't use Gnome enough to give such an opinion. You lack knowledge of pretty basic things. Keep reading.
I keep getting this - why are you so threatened? I'm just discussing - and take this in carefully - specific interface features. You know, the ones the article was about.
It IS in the Edit menu too (and you can use the F2 key too), so the rest of that rant of yours about how unintuitive file renaming is in nautilus is worthless.
I responded to this point earlier. I never said Nautilus was 'worthless'. Do you see how your zealotry blinds you to rational discourse? You think I'm attacking Gnome; I was doing nothing of the kind. Put down the stick.
The GNOME minipreview thing sounds cool though...
"Sounds cool"? You talk about gnome like if you use it daily and you didn't see such a basic feature?
Alright I'm done with you. Fucking Slashdot drones. Can't have a rational discussion. Can't even find the balls to display a username, in fact. Next.
If anything Rename deserves its own spot in the Edit menu....
Gee... guess what? It does! DuH
My mistake. The author of the original article indicated that the rightclick was the only way to rename a file.
although a slight modification of that same keyboard shortcut will capture to the clipboard,
Seconds ago you argued that right-clicking an item is too complicated.... now all of a sudden you're talking of reassigning keys?
No, I'm talking about using the Control key instead of the Command key in the sequence, each function has its own keyboard shortcut. This is the advanced way to do it - you could also use the included Grab utility which makes it very easy. We are talking about shipping OS featuers, after all.
Interesting. So you'd rather see a whole directory full of "TTF" or whatever icons than a quick preview of the font? And yes, you can double-click it to see a full preview (although, you admittedly can't install it from there)
No, I'd rather use a dedicated app like FontBook. All I'm saying is that an icon font preview is minimally useful, at best. I understand Nautilus will give you the full preview with a doubleclick like OS X does so its all good.
No offense, but you don't even seem remotely familiar with Gnome. You REALLY ought to try it before you criticize it.
None taken. I am only minimally familiar with Gnome. I was using the talking points illustrated in the article.
While the guy has some good points, he has others that I wouldn't necessarily agree with. Taken as a whole I'd say that GNOME had improved in comparison to itself, but its still a mixed bag, like all the other OSes.
For instance, he said: Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu.
This is not intuitive at all. While most of us would try the right-click eventually, there is no reason to go looking Rename there, except out of habit. If anything Rename deserves its own spot in the Edit menu. He also neglects Mac OS X Panther's 'gear' button, which is a nice approach - click file, then the gear to perform any kind of file manipulation. That is consistent. Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function. I do also agree with having only the filename before the suffic highlighted - I've noticed some apps do this for you and others don't, on the Mac anyways.
In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDF is an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured by windows, as it often is, then there is little feedback of where your screenshot has gone...
This is true, although a slight modification of that same keyboard shortcut will capture to the clipboard, and gives you the same deal (and you can re-assign it). The GNOME minipreview thing sounds cool though. Windows would beat everything here if they would finally just rename PrtScrn to 'Screen Capture Button', and added a feedback sound.
The DVD capture thing is interesting, I haven't tried it yet. Would it not be different depending on video hardware? (I remember Mac ATI cards would do the solid-colour-overlay thing while nVidia cards could capture DVD frames just fine.)
While browsing font files (TrueType, OpenType, etc.) in Nautilus, the file icons are replaced with a small preview of the font. Very handy when you're browsing for a particular font
A neat trick, but not even remotely handy. This is no way to browse fonts, looking at just an upper and lower-case A, in a 32x32 (or whatever) size. OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users.
Now when I'm browing files, especially image files, on either Windows XP or Mac OS X, I find myself looking for the zoom controls - a good sign that Nautilus does it right.
Not to be coy but this is only a good sign that you are used to GNOME.:)
I do think that GNOME is pretty much in WinXP territory as far as usability, and you can take that as you will. Its a good thing, really... if they're starting to focus on things like font support and workflow, they may start to eclipse Redmond.
Really I want GNOME to take a page from the design of Apple's Safari browser. Make it clean, elegant, simple, powerful. Do not load it with features. Don't copy features, invent better ones. This is how GNOME will find more diverse users. I worry that with all the propellerhead demand for things like (ugh) themes, the simple and elegant approach will often get lost.
Because I shut down my laptop when I go home - I don't leave it suspended in sleep, since I have disks that also need to be protected from fault during the move...
Your hard drive is just as safe when it is asleep; the drive head parks itself, just the same as when you shut down (that little clickl.. whirrr you hear is it spinning up again when waking from sleep).
Re:Damnit. When will we get...
Re:Damnit. When will we get... (Score:1)
by torpor (458) on Wednesday February 04, @11:17AM (#8180160)
(http://www.ampfea.org/)
Not to be facetious, but why don't you just minimize it?
Because I shut down my laptop when I go home - I don't leave it suspended in sleep, since I have disks that also need to be protected from fault during the move...
It just seems really cheap to me that we don't have 'state management' properly implemented in most typical user interfaces. The "Open/Save/Close" paradigm is crap. Why doesn't the computer just remember everything unless I tell it not to?
How would you treat Open/Save/Close? I often revert to the saved file when I've gone down the wrong path working with something, and don't want it auto-saving for me.
What I'm talking about is that when you close Safari, it remembers all your current tabs, all your windows, all your sites, and then when you re-launch it, it restores the whole 'session' to the way it was... I can't freakin' believe that browsers don't have this as a standard feature, but oh well.
Not to be facetious, but why don't you just minimize it? That's what i usually do. There's not much reason to quit Safari (or anything really) under OS X, unless your virtual RAM is starting to chug...
It took me a while to get out of the habit of automatically quitting apps when you are done, but it really doesn't seem to hurt anything...
Yeah. Besides being one of the only (the only?*) director able to really shoot something on/underwater that didn't go way over on budget and ambition... he actually has the patent on those full-face helmets from The Abyss, and a few other things. His brother is a big engineer type as well.
* Peter Weir's Master and Commander didn't go over budget I don't think, and that was on the water, but I think it stands alone with Cameron's Titanic and Abyss as water-movie successes. He just asks for an astronomical buget up front and gets it out of the way.:)
This kind of statement really doesn't help the Mac cause... To a non-Mac user, it freaks me out, to tell you the truth. It seems too cult for my tastes.
Microsoft invented the term "dogfood." Eating your own dogfood was slang introduced in the DOS days. Dogfood is software that's not even in BETA yet: in other words, not ready for public consumption. Microsoft is famous for having its people eat their own dogfood. It is not like the networking company you worked at.
This is absolutely true, and not only that -- they eat their own dogfood to an unhealthy extent, I think.
I remember being amazed, when I was freelancing for MSN, that they would regularly fire out beta and even alpha builds of things for the general MSN working population to try out. At first I thought it was a mistake - surely, they don't just roll out crazy beta'd versions of things like Outlook and Word, all the time? But yeah, they do.
Now, I understood before that when MS picked up Hotmail they couldn't migrate from the Sun servers it was on, as their own stuff wouldn't handle the load. I think this is where the whole 'MS-runs-on-Sun' meme came from. i'd be really, really surprised if they hadn't rectified that yet.
Those Bureau Macs are running the most impregnable operating system ever, Mac OS Classic.
Man, is that ever a tough puppy to crack. The security is so tight that the services don't even exist. You'd have to write the services, insert them into your target Mac, and then exploit them. Just nuts.
Then again... I can't telnet into a fucking rock, either, can I?
You're right about the Karma, its a decent player, and has some wicked features (the ethernet is cool).
You said: Interface is a personal thing, I prefer the Karma one simply because it gives me many more options to tweak, such as full 5-band parametric EQ, on-the-fly playlist editing, etc etc. It's actually quite similar to the iPod one apart from that.
iPod has on-the-fly playlists, and the interface for that is much better than the Karma's (just hold down middle button). EQ presets are available too.. you can't create EQ sets right in the iPod but it ships with 25 or so and custom EQs sync from iTunes like everything else.
The Karma rules for the Linux support though, absolutely.
When it was first rumored that VT might replace its G5 boxes with Xserves, a friend of mine shared the idea that the pulled machines should be resold to the public, with some indication that they had been part of the cluster, perhaps a plaque or laser engraving noting that they had been included in the VT supercomputer.
That's a fantastic idea, and one that had occurred to me as well. The Mac people in particular would get a kick out of the 'historic' connotations.
I mean, look at the 20th anniversary Mac. It didn't even have enough RAM to run its own demo disc, but it looked like a Bang & Olufsen stereo so it's still considered 'cool'. (It did have the coolest Mac startup chime ever.)
Slashdot Mirror
All and all, it should be very interesting to see this next generation. Between the X-Box 2, the PS3 (will it run PS1/2 games? What's up with cell?), and the Game Cube's successor (should also be interesting) we should be in for some interesting developments (not to say anything about Nintendo's DS, the GBA's eventual successor, the PSP, and the persistant rumors of MS looking at portables). As I understand it the Playstation chips have always had this roadmap, whereupon the system of chips needed to make the console do what she does are eventually reduced into a single, commodity chip. This is what happened with the PS1 - it became the audio controller on the PS2. And now the PS2 is a single chip (see PSX) as well. So - I think they will simply include this chip as an add-on, and give it some menial duty within the newer console.
Yup, in multiple languages. Check it (scroll down - it wasn't pretty before 10.1).
Another, more accurate way to put it is: Everyone knows Xbox and PS2 are sold for near-cost, making a little money (more in Sony's case), and games are sold for a profit.
(apologies to simpsons)
Just a point of interest - it might be the Palm conduit, or something similar. I don't have a Palm device in my sync setup, just the T68i and an iPod, and a big sync (for me) takes about 12-20 seconds. I guess YMMV.
While QE may not offer a complete hardware acceleration scheme currently, it does make a big difference in use, and more importantly is available right now.
I hope Longhorn does have a a kickass graphics engine but lets talk about it when there's something to actually discuss, yes?
Besides, you think Apple's gonna sit still for the next 2 years?
You think so? Actually, tell you the truth, what's even better than the Longhorn method - the magical operating system that I wrote myself. It's due out 2008.
I disagree. 2003 was the first year in which consoles overtook growth of PC games, and is a trend that has been pretty evident for awhile. While PC games are not doomed in any sense I think there is a decline in the making, in favour of the dedicated game machines. This means 'PC gaming' and consequently Linux/Mac gaming will be less of an issue. IMHO.
Are you peeved at hardware acceleration for the desktop, or the goofy marketing name?
Dixie Flatline, i thank you profusely for the clarification. This is useful information. I am in Toronto and about to go apartment hunting (again) -- I was just wondering about the SIN thing when I came across this timely Slashdot article, and your post.
The reasoning behind this, as I recall, was that a filename is hardly bona fide proof of the actual content of the file. For a really simple example, someone could rename a copyrighted file with the name of a file in the public domain. You would not know until it landed on your drive and you played it back; therefore it is not fair to hold you culpable for infringing on the copyright as you were duped.
Since there's no real way to tell a copyrighted file from anything else (at a distance, so to speak)... downloading is legal, since it could have completely legitimate purposes.
Uploading copyrighted work is not legal and pretty straightforward although I'm sure much will be made of the fact that many P2P applications share by default... which I'm not sure a lot of people know...
Canada Leads US in Broadband Usage
No, I'm talking about the button with the icon of a gear on it, that is in the standard Panther Finder toolbar. Wasn't talking about keyboard shortcuts.
I keep getting this - why are you so threatened? I'm just discussing - and take this in carefully - specific interface features. You know, the ones the article was about.
It IS in the Edit menu too (and you can use the F2 key too), so the rest of that rant of yours about how unintuitive file renaming is in nautilus is worthless.
I responded to this point earlier. I never said Nautilus was 'worthless'. Do you see how your zealotry blinds you to rational discourse? You think I'm attacking Gnome; I was doing nothing of the kind. Put down the stick.
The GNOME minipreview thing sounds cool though...
"Sounds cool"? You talk about gnome like if you use it daily and you didn't see such a basic feature?
Alright I'm done with you. Fucking Slashdot drones. Can't have a rational discussion. Can't even find the balls to display a username, in fact. Next.
Gee... guess what? It does! DuH
My mistake. The author of the original article indicated that the rightclick was the only way to rename a file.
although a slight modification of that same keyboard shortcut will capture to the clipboard,
Seconds ago you argued that right-clicking an item is too complicated.... now all of a sudden you're talking of reassigning keys?
No, I'm talking about using the Control key instead of the Command key in the sequence, each function has its own keyboard shortcut. This is the advanced way to do it - you could also use the included Grab utility which makes it very easy. We are talking about shipping OS featuers, after all.
Interesting. So you'd rather see a whole directory full of "TTF" or whatever icons than a quick preview of the font? And yes, you can double-click it to see a full preview (although, you admittedly can't install it from there)
No, I'd rather use a dedicated app like FontBook. All I'm saying is that an icon font preview is minimally useful, at best. I understand Nautilus will give you the full preview with a doubleclick like OS X does so its all good.
No offense, but you don't even seem remotely familiar with Gnome. You REALLY ought to try it before you criticize it.
None taken. I am only minimally familiar with Gnome. I was using the talking points illustrated in the article.
For instance, he said:
Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu.
This is not intuitive at all. While most of us would try the right-click eventually, there is no reason to go looking Rename there, except out of habit. If anything Rename deserves its own spot in the Edit menu. He also neglects Mac OS X Panther's 'gear' button, which is a nice approach - click file, then the gear to perform any kind of file manipulation. That is consistent. Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function. I do also agree with having only the filename before the suffic highlighted - I've noticed some apps do this for you and others don't, on the Mac anyways.
In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDF is an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured by windows, as it often is, then there is little feedback of where your screenshot has gone...
This is true, although a slight modification of that same keyboard shortcut will capture to the clipboard, and gives you the same deal (and you can re-assign it). The GNOME minipreview thing sounds cool though. Windows would beat everything here if they would finally just rename PrtScrn to 'Screen Capture Button', and added a feedback sound.
The DVD capture thing is interesting, I haven't tried it yet. Would it not be different depending on video hardware? (I remember Mac ATI cards would do the solid-colour-overlay thing while nVidia cards could capture DVD frames just fine.)
While browsing font files (TrueType, OpenType, etc.) in Nautilus, the file icons are replaced with a small preview of the font. Very handy when you're browsing for a particular font
A neat trick, but not even remotely handy. This is no way to browse fonts, looking at just an upper and lower-case A, in a 32x32 (or whatever) size. OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users.
Now when I'm browing files, especially image files, on either Windows XP or Mac OS X, I find myself looking for the zoom controls - a good sign that Nautilus does it right.
Not to be coy but this is only a good sign that you are used to GNOME. :)
I do think that GNOME is pretty much in WinXP territory as far as usability, and you can take that as you will. Its a good thing, really... if they're starting to focus on things like font support and workflow, they may start to eclipse Redmond.
Really I want GNOME to take a page from the design of Apple's Safari browser. Make it clean, elegant, simple, powerful. Do not load it with features. Don't copy features, invent better ones. This is how GNOME will find more diverse users. I worry that with all the propellerhead demand for things like (ugh) themes, the simple and elegant approach will often get lost.
Your hard drive is just as safe when it is asleep; the drive head parks itself, just the same as when you shut down (that little clickl.. whirrr you hear is it spinning up again when waking from sleep).
Re:Damnit. When will we get ...
Re:Damnit. When will we get ... (Score:1)
by torpor (458) on Wednesday February 04, @11:17AM (#8180160)
(http://www.ampfea.org/)
Not to be facetious, but why don't you just minimize it?
Because I shut down my laptop when I go home - I don't leave it suspended in sleep, since I have disks that also need to be protected from fault during the move...
It just seems really cheap to me that we don't have 'state management' properly implemented in most typical user interfaces. The "Open/Save/Close" paradigm is crap. Why doesn't the computer just remember everything unless I tell it not to?
How would you treat Open/Save/Close? I often revert to the saved file when I've gone down the wrong path working with something, and don't want it auto-saving for me.
Not to be facetious, but why don't you just minimize it? That's what i usually do. There's not much reason to quit Safari (or anything really) under OS X, unless your virtual RAM is starting to chug...
It took me a while to get out of the habit of automatically quitting apps when you are done, but it really doesn't seem to hurt anything...
They handed out gold records, and such.
I'm not making this up. That's what they did.
Dude, you are hilarious! You have a structural problem with the page?? I didn't even notice...
*shakes head*
That makes two of us...
Yeah. Besides being one of the only (the only?*) director able to really shoot something on/underwater that didn't go way over on budget and ambition... he actually has the patent on those full-face helmets from The Abyss, and a few other things. His brother is a big engineer type as well.
* Peter Weir's Master and Commander didn't go over budget I don't think, and that was on the water, but I think it stands alone with Cameron's Titanic and Abyss as water-movie successes. He just asks for an astronomical buget up front and gets it out of the way. :)
You're right. In fact, if you use OS X, you should probably feel guilty about it.
This is absolutely true, and not only that -- they eat their own dogfood to an unhealthy extent, I think.
I remember being amazed, when I was freelancing for MSN, that they would regularly fire out beta and even alpha builds of things for the general MSN working population to try out. At first I thought it was a mistake - surely, they don't just roll out crazy beta'd versions of things like Outlook and Word, all the time? But yeah, they do.
Now, I understood before that when MS picked up Hotmail they couldn't migrate from the Sun servers it was on, as their own stuff wouldn't handle the load. I think this is where the whole 'MS-runs-on-Sun' meme came from. i'd be really, really surprised if they hadn't rectified that yet.
Man, is that ever a tough puppy to crack. The security is so tight that the services don't even exist. You'd have to write the services, insert them into your target Mac, and then exploit them. Just nuts.
Then again... I can't telnet into a fucking rock, either, can I?
You said:
Interface is a personal thing, I prefer the Karma one simply because it gives me many more options to tweak, such as full 5-band parametric EQ, on-the-fly playlist editing, etc etc. It's actually quite similar to the iPod one apart from that.
iPod has on-the-fly playlists, and the interface for that is much better than the Karma's (just hold down middle button). EQ presets are available too.. you can't create EQ sets right in the iPod but it ships with 25 or so and custom EQs sync from iTunes like everything else.
The Karma rules for the Linux support though, absolutely.
That's a fantastic idea, and one that had occurred to me as well. The Mac people in particular would get a kick out of the 'historic' connotations.
I mean, look at the 20th anniversary Mac. It didn't even have enough RAM to run its own demo disc, but it looked like a Bang & Olufsen stereo so it's still considered 'cool'. (It did have the coolest Mac startup chime ever.)