So, not only is Windows no longer relevant, but the functionality of the operating system itself may have been trumped by our ability to communicate with other people. This doesn't invalidate operating system arguments but it does cause one to wonder about what is really important when you're getting a machine to work & play on.
Unfortunately, with the rise of Ajax and inept web programmers / short-sighted companies who only develop for and test on one browser, what's really important is going to be bug-for-bug fidelity with the latest version of IE, or more likely, IE and nothing but. So even if Windows is dead, IE and lack of choice live on.
Yes, that's fair. In my 7 years of DirecTV in Atlanta, I've come to expect about 5 rain-related outages per year of about 10 minutes each. Thing is, a storm powerful enough to knock out satellite is often powerful enough to also knock out the electricity, making the issue moot. And when I had cable, a storm that strong would often knock out the cable for days. Comcast's portrayal is that rain-related outages are common and frequent with satellite, which is both untrue and conveniently ignores the fact that cable is far less reliable overall.
Wasn't the animated series produced by Filmation, whose masters were all destroyed and replaced with PAL tapes, meaning the NTSC versions will play fast?
Perhaps they will CG Sisko, Dax, and Worf into a few background shots of "The Trouble with Tribbles" (since, canonically, they were there).
That said, who at Paramount thinks that the Trek fan-base is all about TOS now? Didn't that particular show debut almost exactly 40 years ago? Meaning that college students who watched it during its initial run are now 60?!" Do you really think they're going to get HDTV's to watch this (or that you'll be able to sell ads to this demographic)?
Seriously, Paramount, you still have some one-time fans from the 90's who would come back. It starts with a pitch that goes something like "Admiral Janeway secretly recruits Geordi, Dax, Bashir, and Worf to enter the wormhole and find Sisko." Not that hard. Try it.
In the meantime, we'll be watching stuff with strong characters and stories -- in my case, Fullmetal Alchemist and Doctor Who -- traits that Trek was once known for.
ThinkFree does more, works on more browsers, is better integrated with the user's operating system (OMG, I actually get to use all my own fonts?), works with two-byte characters (OMG, I can type in Japanese and the saved.doc won't consist of little boxes?), and offers a stronger user experience (OMG, I still get cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo? And print?). Of course,/.'ers are expected to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java.
Have fun reinventing the wheel as a stone cube, kids. Knock yourselves out.
When the next generation offers only a modest graphic upgrade and fewer in-game features (360) or wildly unaffordable hardware (PS3), one wonders what the result will be... will Wii win by default, or will less-hardcore gamers just not even bother with the next generation or move on to some non-gaming diversion altogether? Not hard to see 360/PS3's mutual suckiness crashing the industry pretty hard.
It certainly is more complicated than buying a space invaders box and harvesting money from kids, but maybe the market is there.
I'm afraid not. WDW's DisneyQuest is set to close in 2008 to become yet another ESPNZone. DisneyQuest was supposed to be a worldwide chain, but they bailed on it after opening two locations, and closing Chicago's after a little over two years. Disney has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into DQ since 1994, and they're done.
Maybe Dave & Busters and Jillian's are the future of outside-the-home gaming, although the latter went bankrupt and was absorbed by the former. And Brunswick walked away from its D&B wannabe, US Play, after opening two locations (Atlanta and Minneapolis).
You know what it is, it's those damn lazy programmers, only putting in 70 hour weeks, because they insist on having time for their precious little families... or sleep.
What cool sci-fi movie aren't you making, because you're making this instead?
I'm sure Paramount thinks there's this loyal audience just itching to come back and in a sense they're right. Unfortunately, that loyal audience consists of the fans of Deep Space Nine, not the aging baby boomers who cared about Kirk and Spock back when they mattered... forty damn years ago. Back when there was no other sci-fi on TV. At this point, well, if you're not planning on being better than Battlestar Galactica, then we won't be needing you.
I tried to post the katakana, but/. won't take it. Escaped, it's
エアリス
One thing that's so funny about the "Aerith" crowd is that even if "th" were a better transliteration of "su" than "s" (even though it's commonly used as both, as in "Sumisu" for "Smith" and "Kurisu" for "Chris"), they don't account for why the "E" and "A" have been exchanged from "Earisu". Maybe because then, along with the "th", it too obviously ends up as "Earth", which supposedly was the idea for her name in the first place.
Oh, but then the obsessive know-it-all fanboys wouldn't be able to go off about how the spelling on Japan-only toys and other other merchandise is somehow more canonical than the Square-supervised English localization of the game itself.
The PS3 is sounding dangerously vaporous, and adding new vapor features doesn't help. Seriously, the conventional wisdom on this was that we'd see a Spring launch in Japan, and Fall in North America. Well, Spring is getting pretty close, and the only news in the PS3 camp is that blogging on how it's too hard to develop for and not really "next gen" gets you fired.
Whatever the PS3 ends up being, I no longer expect to see it in 2006.
No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student.
No need to join an a cappella group, go to dorm meetings, fulfill political correctness requirements, or complain about how the Band / Gaieties / Chaparral / Psych 1 was so much funnier my freshman year? Oh, if only we'd had iTunes 20 years ago...
Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there.
Yes, probably JOGL for the OpenGL. For sound, core Java can handle raw PCM, and JOAL (Java Bindings for OpenAL) can sit on top of that. Java Media Framework is useless and effectively dead. Input can be handled by JInput.
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007? I'm much more comfortable with an array of choice from private sources. That's much less likely to lead to bad things like censorship and limits on free expression.
Exactly right. But there is no free market here. Cable and phone companies enjoy monopolies enforced by local and state governments respectively. The proper first step would be to eliminate those monopolies immediately and let anyone lay whatever wire they can charge for (and pay access rights to lay). Until we have real choice and real competition, there's no reason that the public shouldn't expect the government to demand better from their monopoly providers.
As it is, we have the worst of both worlds in the U.S.: the quality and responsiveness of a government-enforced monopoly, coupled with the interest in social goods you'd expect of private corporations.
Fark didn't lead their write of this with Proving Hollywood has run out of ideas...
Pity. Because it's true.
So what's the next crappy 80's cartoon that must be re-created with crappy CGI? God forbid we could have an original idea for a movie when it's easier to license something as a pre-sold commodity.
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
ThinkFree Office is written entirely in Java and has been available for years. Much as I like Java though, I have to say that ThinkFree is simply awful - not so much slow as it is simply unreliable. In my (paid) experience it managed to hopelessly corrupt documents, and when I wanted to use it for a presentation at ADHOC, I discovered that its full-screen presentation mode didn't work (and that this was a known bug).
So yes, Java means you can have it sooner. But it's not clear whether ThinkFree's wretchedness comes from implicit Java limitations, problems in Apple's Java implementation, or (most likely) the company's own failings.
Funny, most attempts to do an all-in-one set-top/console have been fantastic failures. Philips is estimated to have lost $1 billion (with a B) on the CD-i, which offered edutainment and movies and games... but none of them were in any way compelling.
By comparison, I seem to remember Next Generation magazine once lauding Sony's focus on games, to the point that they actually had representatives from an education software company removed from the building, since the original PlayStation was meant exclusively as a game machine.
Considering that the original PlayStation removed Philips, Atari, and 3DO from the console market, and mortally wounded Sega, I think that strategy worked pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they chose 18 stores because they've been told to only expect 18 units to sell, and they want to spread the love.
--realinvalidname
So, not only is Windows no longer relevant, but the functionality of the operating system itself may have been trumped by our ability to communicate with other people. This doesn't invalidate operating system arguments but it does cause one to wonder about what is really important when you're getting a machine to work & play on.
Unfortunately, with the rise of Ajax and inept web programmers / short-sighted companies who only develop for and test on one browser, what's really important is going to be bug-for-bug fidelity with the latest version of IE, or more likely, IE and nothing but. So even if Windows is dead, IE and lack of choice live on.
Yes, that's fair. In my 7 years of DirecTV in Atlanta, I've come to expect about 5 rain-related outages per year of about 10 minutes each. Thing is, a storm powerful enough to knock out satellite is often powerful enough to also knock out the electricity, making the issue moot. And when I had cable, a storm that strong would often knock out the cable for days. Comcast's portrayal is that rain-related outages are common and frequent with satellite, which is both untrue and conveniently ignores the fact that cable is far less reliable overall.
...to hear of Comcast lying about a competitor's product. Next thing you know, they'll claim that satellite TV goes out every time it rains.
Wasn't the animated series produced by Filmation, whose masters were all destroyed and replaced with PAL tapes, meaning the NTSC versions will play fast?
It would be more impressive if Sony were promising two original, non-sequel, non-license, and actually entertaining games to ship with the PS3.
Perhaps they will CG Sisko, Dax, and Worf into a few background shots of "The Trouble with Tribbles" (since, canonically, they were there).
That said, who at Paramount thinks that the Trek fan-base is all about TOS now? Didn't that particular show debut almost exactly 40 years ago? Meaning that college students who watched it during its initial run are now 60?!" Do you really think they're going to get HDTV's to watch this (or that you'll be able to sell ads to this demographic)?
Seriously, Paramount, you still have some one-time fans from the 90's who would come back. It starts with a pitch that goes something like "Admiral Janeway secretly recruits Geordi, Dax, Bashir, and Worf to enter the wormhole and find Sisko." Not that hard. Try it.
In the meantime, we'll be watching stuff with strong characters and stories -- in my case, Fullmetal Alchemist and Doctor Who -- traits that Trek was once known for.
ThinkFree does more, works on more browsers, is better integrated with the user's operating system (OMG, I actually get to use all my own fonts?), works with two-byte characters (OMG, I can type in Japanese and the saved .doc won't consist of little boxes?), and offers a stronger user experience (OMG, I still get cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo? And print?). Of course, /.'ers are expected to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java.
Have fun reinventing the wheel as a stone cube, kids. Knock yourselves out.
360 is currently being outsold by the PS2, fer cryinoutloud. Which is a really bad sign.
When the next generation offers only a modest graphic upgrade and fewer in-game features (360) or wildly unaffordable hardware (PS3), one wonders what the result will be... will Wii win by default, or will less-hardcore gamers just not even bother with the next generation or move on to some non-gaming diversion altogether? Not hard to see 360/PS3's mutual suckiness crashing the industry pretty hard.
--realinvalidname
I should have known things were going downhill when their Tempest machine disappeared several months ago....
Now that you mention it, DQ is the only place in the world I've ever seen an Ehrgeiz machine. Now there was an underrated game...
It certainly is more complicated than buying a space invaders box and harvesting money from kids, but maybe the market is there.
I'm afraid not. WDW's DisneyQuest is set to close in 2008 to become yet another ESPNZone. DisneyQuest was supposed to be a worldwide chain, but they bailed on it after opening two locations, and closing Chicago's after a little over two years. Disney has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into DQ since 1994, and they're done.
Maybe Dave & Busters and Jillian's are the future of outside-the-home gaming, although the latter went bankrupt and was absorbed by the former. And Brunswick walked away from its D&B wannabe, US Play, after opening two locations (Atlanta and Minneapolis).
You know what it is, it's those damn lazy programmers, only putting in 70 hour weeks, because they insist on having time for their precious little families... or sleep.
Seriously, Paramount:
I'm sure Paramount thinks there's this loyal audience just itching to come back and in a sense they're right. Unfortunately, that loyal audience consists of the fans of Deep Space Nine, not the aging baby boomers who cared about Kirk and Spock back when they mattered... forty damn years ago. Back when there was no other sci-fi on TV. At this point, well, if you're not planning on being better than Battlestar Galactica, then we won't be needing you.
I tried to post the katakana, but /. won't take it. Escaped, it's
One thing that's so funny about the "Aerith" crowd is that even if "th" were a better transliteration of "su" than "s" (even though it's commonly used as both, as in "Sumisu" for "Smith" and "Kurisu" for "Chris"), they don't account for why the "E" and "A" have been exchanged from "Earisu". Maybe because then, along with the "th", it too obviously ends up as "Earth", which supposedly was the idea for her name in the first place.
--realinvalidname
Oh, but then the obsessive know-it-all fanboys wouldn't be able to go off about how the spelling on Japan-only toys and other other merchandise is somehow more canonical than the Square-supervised English localization of the game itself.
--realinvalidname
The PS3 is sounding dangerously vaporous, and adding new vapor features doesn't help. Seriously, the conventional wisdom on this was that we'd see a Spring launch in Japan, and Fall in North America. Well, Spring is getting pretty close, and the only news in the PS3 camp is that blogging on how it's too hard to develop for and not really "next gen" gets you fired.
Whatever the PS3 ends up being, I no longer expect to see it in 2006.
No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student.
No need to join an a cappella group, go to dorm meetings, fulfill political correctness requirements, or complain about how the Band / Gaieties / Chaparral / Psych 1 was so much funnier my freshman year? Oh, if only we'd had iTunes 20 years ago...
Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there.
Yes, probably JOGL for the OpenGL. For sound, core Java can handle raw PCM, and JOAL (Java Bindings for OpenAL) can sit on top of that. Java Media Framework is useless and effectively dead. Input can be handled by JInput.
This is news? Was the poster not aware that Roedy's unmaintainable code doc has been growing for at least five years? http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mindprod.com/u nmain.html
Isn't Music Choice the service that got dumped by DirecTV (just this week) in favor of XM?
This conspiracy theory is conveniently reminiscent of New Coke, a theory Coke laughed off by saying, "We're not that dumb, and we're not that smart."
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007? I'm much more comfortable with an array of choice from private sources. That's much less likely to lead to bad things like censorship and limits on free expression.
Exactly right. But there is no free market here. Cable and phone companies enjoy monopolies enforced by local and state governments respectively. The proper first step would be to eliminate those monopolies immediately and let anyone lay whatever wire they can charge for (and pay access rights to lay). Until we have real choice and real competition, there's no reason that the public shouldn't expect the government to demand better from their monopoly providers.
As it is, we have the worst of both worlds in the U.S.: the quality and responsiveness of a government-enforced monopoly, coupled with the interest in social goods you'd expect of private corporations.
--realinvalidname
Fark didn't lead their write of this with Proving Hollywood has run out of ideas...
Pity. Because it's true.
So what's the next crappy 80's cartoon that must be re-created with crappy CGI? God forbid we could have an original idea for a movie when it's easier to license something as a pre-sold commodity.
-Chris (realinvalidname)
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
ThinkFree Office is written entirely in Java and has been available for years. Much as I like Java though, I have to say that ThinkFree is simply awful - not so much slow as it is simply unreliable. In my (paid) experience it managed to hopelessly corrupt documents, and when I wanted to use it for a presentation at ADHOC, I discovered that its full-screen presentation mode didn't work (and that this was a known bug).
So yes, Java means you can have it sooner. But it's not clear whether ThinkFree's wretchedness comes from implicit Java limitations, problems in Apple's Java implementation, or (most likely) the company's own failings.
--Chris (realinvalidname)
Funny, most attempts to do an all-in-one set-top/console have been fantastic failures. Philips is estimated to have lost $1 billion (with a B) on the CD-i, which offered edutainment and movies and games... but none of them were in any way compelling.
By comparison, I seem to remember Next Generation magazine once lauding Sony's focus on games, to the point that they actually had representatives from an education software company removed from the building, since the original PlayStation was meant exclusively as a game machine.
Considering that the original PlayStation removed Philips, Atari, and 3DO from the console market, and mortally wounded Sega, I think that strategy worked pretty well.
--realinvalidname