> Who are these groups of people that Nintendo is still making games for?
The Chinese and Japanese are two obvious groups, at the very least.
I recently spent three months traveling through East Asia, mostly in China (Beijing & southwards) and Japan (Tokyo & southwards). There is a huge amount of casual gaming compared to Europe and the US. People commute a lot using advanced public transit (even Beijing's subway looks like Sci-fi compared to NYC MTA, and of course Japan is a different planet altogether). So, all these people not busy steering (and gearing, if in Europe), have PSPs at hand for zoning out to and fro work. And it's not just young boys; also thirty-something women frequently whip out gaming gear rather than makeup kits.
Of course it's not only a subway phenomenon. In Japan for instance, apart from all the gaming at home, there are also at least three distinct types of public game venues: 1 - Tekken-style penny arcades, similar to those in the West, mostly crowded by young men. 2 - Incredibly packed places with Vegas-style machines, but with small silver balls that rush though mazes. These places are unbelievably noisy from all the balls, sounds like a small airport. People of all sorts hang out here, from young men in fancy suits to middle-aged women who apparently just drop in when shopping. 3 - Cafe-style manga libraries where there are also booths for reading, gaming and surfing - or just sleeping. The Japanese seem to be sleeping everywhere, even in the lobbies in the hotels where they stay for the night. I really don't know why they prefer the lobby to their own room..?
In Norway, the industrial designer Peter Opsvik designed a chair in 1972,
http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_14046_TrippTrapp_anim&ver=6
that legally has been defined as an artwork. He receives annual royalty for this successful product, and as a consequence he has been able to establish a design workshop that does both R&D of "commercial" furniture and more experimental designs with an unknown commercial application.
In some cases, I think a 14 year term can be a bit short. For artworks, copyright can be held for 70 years (at least in Scandinavia, where I'm from). It makes sense because artists don't get a payroll. Some artists only produce a few "hits" in their lifetime. If those few hits become public domain while the author/artist still try to make a living, it ruins the "business model" of that profession. So, if computer games can be regarded as art, it should still be about 40 years until the first ones enter the public domain under the Scandinavian model.
It's already like this in the mobile environment, and it's a terrible pain for developers.
When making apps in Java/J2ME or Symbian (e.g. for Nokia nSeries), you need to have the client signed by a third party in order to use native resources like memory efficiently. While the signing process it not technically the same as a white list, is has similar consequences: You are hindered in successfully demonstrating your software for potential customers until some unknown person has expressed his subjective opinion about it.
I know cause we make such an application right now, and during development we're screwed, as we can't get around these limitations even on our development devices. It's no good.
IF this idea catches on, real world developers need to test the god damn system before they enforce it on people.
In my opinion, MSO has never been good enough on the Mac for the latter to be a serious alternative in the corporate setting. For instance in my workplace, we use Outlook/Exchange to book meeting rooms, and although we have Entourage on our Macs, meeting room booking is not supported. I therefore run Win XP on my MacBook during daytime, and OS X for leisure activities. (And also, even if the religious won't believe it, Win XP has better keyboard shortcut support)
I have an Intel Mac at work, and after half a year of running OS X and Win XP side by side, I have given up on OS X and now use Win XP under Parallels for most of my professional work. There are two reasons:
1) MS Office works better under XP. I'm working in a corporate setting. I have to book meetings from time to time, and meeting rooms can't be booked in Entourage or Outlook Web Client. Sad but true.
2) Keyboard shortcuts are way better in XP. According to this article,
OS X's keyboard navigation support is generally superior to XP's. IMHO that amounts to propaganda. In XP, I can access most menu items using the Alt button plus two keystrokes. In OS X, it's Ctrl-F2 plus four keystrokes. Also, in dialog boxes, most items can be focused with Alt+[letter]. Real-world example: In Photoshop, changing the saturation is as easy as Ctrl-U and Alt-A in Windows XP. In Mac OS X, there's lot's of tabbing or mouse movement to reach the Saturation item. It's just not productive for me.
I'm a MiniDisc owner that eventually gave up on the device.
I bought the MD as a cheap home recording solution for band rehersals and so on. The hardware was excellent, but alas, there was no way to transfer my recordings digitally to the computer.
The analog transfer to my laptop was tedious, as I lost the track information. Just as bad, the quality of the recording was ruined in the extra DA/AD process.
So I bought an iPod, installed iPod Linux and used that as a recorder. And that was the death of my MD.
Well, Intel presumably have had 1000 people working on the new Macs the last 6 months. Is it possible that in order to meet the insane deadlines, that Jobs gave specs to Intel personnel, that then were in charge of the actual hardware layout?
I'd like to say that I don't think that this comment was trollish at all. It's OK to suggest some funding, in fact, if I was in charge of budget, I would propose it. But being a consultant this is beyond my scope.
Also the philosophical note is quite nice, albeit a bit nerdy. But that's why we are on Slashdot, isn't it. Moderators, don't troll people that are not offending.
Another poster suggested posting the sites to be broken to Bugzilla. I will do this, but I will get some page view statistics first as additional ammunition. These pages get a lot of hits.
This is because Firefox does not support soft hyphenation, a six year old bug that breaks the HTML 4.0 specification.
German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.
Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.
We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.
A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.
OK, one question here. I've had a mac OS X system since early last year. One of the few things that I still consider better in the MS world are the keyboard shortcuts. In MS Win, (almost) everything in a standard windows dialog can be reached without a mouse. Example: flipping through tabs with CRTL-TAB. I still haven't figured out how to do this in OSX.
Also, the keyboard shortcuts for typing are more consistent in MS Win. Example: CRTL-Forward Arrow brings you forward one word. On the mac, though, these shortcuts are not consistent, which is weird. And in many applications, HOME, END, PGUP and PGDN doesn't work.
Are there any settings to modify this stuff system-wide?
My (ex-)girlfriend poured her glass of red wine into my PowerBook at a party this spring. I became aware of her frantically wiping the keyboard with napkins, and when I asked her what had happened, se said, "uh, nothing!"
A month later or so she dropped the laptop a meter (3 feet) or so onto asphalt, so that there were dents in the aluminium, and the screen was displaced so much that the lid locking mechanism stopped functioning. But after reinserting the internal AirPort card, that shook loose due to the fall, the PowerBook is once again operating beautifully.
Would it be possible to have a webcam connected to this thing? I mean, it has a USB port. Are there limitations to what devices it can host?
It could make it easier to check on the baby, to see if he/her is sleeping on his/her back or not. Or a 1000 other uses, for sure, where you wouldn't like to invest in a computer of it's own.
There's one thing I've never seen in a M$FT product, and that's style. How the hell can this product outsell the design icon that the iPod has become?
Plus, potential iPod buyers does not necessarily want video functions if that adds to the bulk of their device. Listening to music is for example a pedestrian-friendly activity, which can hardly be said about watching video.
Also a PowerBook user, I must agree to this posting. The finder in OS X Panther is an improvement to the Jaguar finder. Still I find the Windows 2000 Explorer, with the folder tree and folder contents in separate windows, more useful. And there are some other strengths to the Windows Explorer too:
- Keyboard navigation is easier. It's both more consistent and more fully integrated into the UI. This is a fact throughtout Windows, as compared to OS X.
- The OS X Save As feature is horrible! It doesn't default to the original file's directory, but to the Documents folder. On several occations, this has made me open up old revisions of documents, which is a drag.
This/. poster has misunderstood the meaning of the term "prototype". Bombardier has not announced a prototype. A prototype, from an engineering perspective, has to work. This is a design concept. Which means it is about as operational as a Star Wars X-wing.
My question to the Americans on/. is: Will this make you feel safer?
As a consequence of your military might and will to use it, we, the others, fear you. Sometimes that leads to hate. That hate is what you fear. Isn't it?
Are new weapons the right protection?
I, too, have a little wobble, but what the heck
on
12" PowerBook Wobble?
·
· Score: 1
When the new PowerBooks were announced earlier this year, I took an advance order, and thus became a "switcher". As a long-time PC user, with many machines on history, I must say this is clearly my best computer purchase ever. Matter of fact, from being a "normal" computer user a few months ago, I now fit the description of a Mac fanatic.:-|
Yes, it wobbles, and it gets a little warm. But this is totally acceptable in my view. The wobbling is minimal, and a folded piece of paper (or my business card) underneath one of the rubber feet does the trick. And the heat, well, it doesn't hurt or anything, and the minimal fan noise (when it runs at all) is very positive.
One of the really nice things about the 12" is the sleep / battery combinations. It goes to sleep and wakes back up in about two seconds. So I never have to shut down, and it is always immediately avaliable. Combined with 3 hours+ battery life, light weight, small footprint, ultimate connectability, it is the most convenient piece of hardware I have ever bought. Maybe except for my bike.
Powered by... MS Windows
on
Robocoaster
·
· Score: 1
I guess that testing this baby will be thrilling in more than one way, given that it [shrudder]runs on Windows. Let's hope they don't multitask too much!
Re:With moz 1.2, my banking service stopped workin
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
online secure banking that works in Mozilla 1.1 may not work in Mozilla 1.2. It seems that Moz 1.2 does not send cookies to HTTPS sites, thus preventing some kinds of authentication.
Until this problem is fixed, people who use online banking etc. should stick to Moz 1.1.
With moz 1.2, my banking service stopped working.
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have been a happy moz 1.1 user since it came out. Particularly, I like tabbed browsing and anti-pop-up. Also moz 1.1 supported my Internet Bank, which uses certificates and https.
Unfortunately, with moz 1.2, my bank no longer accepts the certificate, even though I have a clean, new install. Why? Also, the keyboard shortcuts for tabbed browsing (like ctrl-shift-click), is gone. Why?
I use Moz because the older Phoenix didn't have a Quick Start. Does the new Phoenix support this?
Funny, but they actually misquoted me. I wrote "the difference is not so great, as expected.", and the jounalist quoted "the difference is not so great as expected.". Those are direct opposites..:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> Who are these groups of people that Nintendo is still making games for?
The Chinese and Japanese are two obvious groups, at the very least.
I recently spent three months traveling through East Asia, mostly in China (Beijing & southwards) and Japan (Tokyo & southwards). There is a huge amount of casual gaming compared to Europe and the US. People commute a lot using advanced public transit (even Beijing's subway looks like Sci-fi compared to NYC MTA, and of course Japan is a different planet altogether). So, all these people not busy steering (and gearing, if in Europe), have PSPs at hand for zoning out to and fro work. And it's not just young boys; also thirty-something women frequently whip out gaming gear rather than makeup kits.
Of course it's not only a subway phenomenon. In Japan for instance, apart from all the gaming at home, there are also at least three distinct types of public game venues:
1 - Tekken-style penny arcades, similar to those in the West, mostly crowded by young men.
2 - Incredibly packed places with Vegas-style machines, but with small silver balls that rush though mazes. These places are unbelievably noisy from all the balls, sounds like a small airport. People of all sorts hang out here, from young men in fancy suits to middle-aged women who apparently just drop in when shopping.
3 - Cafe-style manga libraries where there are also booths for reading, gaming and surfing - or just sleeping. The Japanese seem to be sleeping everywhere, even in the lobbies in the hotels where they stay for the night. I really don't know why they prefer the lobby to their own room..?
Even more exiting would be the vice versa.
In Norway, the industrial designer Peter Opsvik designed a chair in 1972, http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_14046_TrippTrapp_anim&ver=6 that legally has been defined as an artwork. He receives annual royalty for this successful product, and as a consequence he has been able to establish a design workshop that does both R&D of "commercial" furniture and more experimental designs with an unknown commercial application.
Point is, Opsvik is the only Norwegian designer that has been able to invest in R&D, and consequentially the only designer that has been able to create groundbreaking new seating products, such as the Capisco http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_10997_Capisco_anim&ver=6 and the Balans http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_11024_balans_Variable_anim&ver=6
So for this region and profession, the copyright was indeed an absolute necessity to create a sustainable environment for R&D.
In some cases, I think a 14 year term can be a bit short. For artworks, copyright can be held for 70 years (at least in Scandinavia, where I'm from). It makes sense because artists don't get a payroll. Some artists only produce a few "hits" in their lifetime. If those few hits become public domain while the author/artist still try to make a living, it ruins the "business model" of that profession. So, if computer games can be regarded as art, it should still be about 40 years until the first ones enter the public domain under the Scandinavian model.
It's already like this in the mobile environment, and it's a terrible pain for developers.
When making apps in Java/J2ME or Symbian (e.g. for Nokia nSeries), you need to have the client signed by a third party in order to use native resources like memory efficiently. While the signing process it not technically the same as a white list, is has similar consequences: You are hindered in successfully demonstrating your software for potential customers until some unknown person has expressed his subjective opinion about it.
I know cause we make such an application right now, and during development we're screwed, as we can't get around these limitations even on our development devices. It's no good.
IF this idea catches on, real world developers need to test the god damn system before they enforce it on people.
In my opinion, MSO has never been good enough on the Mac for the latter to be a serious alternative in the corporate setting. For instance in my workplace, we use Outlook/Exchange to book meeting rooms, and although we have Entourage on our Macs, meeting room booking is not supported. I therefore run Win XP on my MacBook during daytime, and OS X for leisure activities. (And also, even if the religious won't believe it, Win XP has better keyboard shortcut support)
I have an Intel Mac at work, and after half a year of running OS X and Win XP side by side, I have given up on OS X and now use Win XP under Parallels for most of my professional work. There are two reasons:
1) MS Office works better under XP. I'm working in a corporate setting. I have to book meetings from time to time, and meeting rooms can't be booked in Entourage or Outlook Web Client. Sad but true.
2) Keyboard shortcuts are way better in XP. According to this article,
OS X's keyboard navigation support is generally superior to XP's. IMHO that amounts to propaganda. In XP, I can access most menu items using the Alt button plus two keystrokes. In OS X, it's Ctrl-F2 plus four keystrokes. Also, in dialog boxes, most items can be focused with Alt+[letter]. Real-world example: In Photoshop, changing the saturation is as easy as Ctrl-U and Alt-A in Windows XP. In Mac OS X, there's lot's of tabbing or mouse movement to reach the Saturation item. It's just not productive for me.I bought the MD as a cheap home recording solution for band rehersals and so on. The hardware was excellent, but alas, there was no way to transfer my recordings digitally to the computer.
The analog transfer to my laptop was tedious, as I lost the track information. Just as bad, the quality of the recording was ruined in the extra DA/AD process.
So I bought an iPod, installed iPod Linux and used that as a recorder. And that was the death of my MD.
Well, Intel presumably have had 1000 people working on the new Macs the last 6 months. Is it possible that in order to meet the insane deadlines, that Jobs gave specs to Intel personnel, that then were in charge of the actual hardware layout?
Will do :-)
Hi and thanks for your comment.
I'd like to say that I don't think that this comment was trollish at all. It's OK to suggest some funding, in fact, if I was in charge of budget, I would propose it. But being a consultant this is beyond my scope.
Also the philosophical note is quite nice, albeit a bit nerdy. But that's why we are on Slashdot, isn't it. Moderators, don't troll people that are not offending.
Another poster suggested posting the sites to be broken to Bugzilla. I will do this, but I will get some page view statistics first as additional ammunition. These pages get a lot of hits.
German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.
Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.
We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.
A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.
OK, one question here. I've had a mac OS X system since early last year. One of the few things that I still consider better in the MS world are the keyboard shortcuts. In MS Win, (almost) everything in a standard windows dialog can be reached without a mouse. Example: flipping through tabs with CRTL-TAB. I still haven't figured out how to do this in OSX.
Also, the keyboard shortcuts for typing are more consistent in MS Win. Example: CRTL-Forward Arrow brings you forward one word. On the mac, though, these shortcuts are not consistent, which is weird. And in many applications, HOME, END, PGUP and PGDN doesn't work.
Are there any settings to modify this stuff system-wide?
My (ex-)girlfriend poured her glass of red wine into my PowerBook at a party this spring. I became aware of her frantically wiping the keyboard with napkins, and when I asked her what had happened, se said, "uh, nothing!"
A month later or so she dropped the laptop a meter (3 feet) or so onto asphalt, so that there were dents in the aluminium, and the screen was displaced so much that the lid locking mechanism stopped functioning. But after reinserting the internal AirPort card, that shook loose due to the fall, the PowerBook is once again operating beautifully.
Would it be possible to have a webcam connected to this thing? I mean, it has a USB port. Are there limitations to what devices it can host?
It could make it easier to check on the baby, to see if he/her is sleeping on his/her back or not. Or a 1000 other uses, for sure, where you wouldn't like to invest in a computer of it's own.
There's one thing I've never seen in a M$FT product, and that's style. How the hell can this product outsell the design icon that the iPod has become? Plus, potential iPod buyers does not necessarily want video functions if that adds to the bulk of their device. Listening to music is for example a pedestrian-friendly activity, which can hardly be said about watching video.
- Keyboard navigation is easier. It's both more consistent and more fully integrated into the UI. This is a fact throughtout Windows, as compared to OS X.
- The OS X Save As feature is horrible! It doesn't default to the original file's directory, but to the Documents folder. On several occations, this has made me open up old revisions of documents, which is a drag.
This /. poster has misunderstood the meaning of the term "prototype". Bombardier has not announced a prototype. A prototype, from an engineering perspective, has to work. This is a design concept. Which means it is about as operational as a Star Wars X-wing.
As a consequence of your military might and will to use it, we, the others, fear you. Sometimes that leads to hate. That hate is what you fear. Isn't it?
Are new weapons the right protection?
Yes, it wobbles, and it gets a little warm. But this is totally acceptable in my view. The wobbling is minimal, and a folded piece of paper (or my business card) underneath one of the rubber feet does the trick. And the heat, well, it doesn't hurt or anything, and the minimal fan noise (when it runs at all) is very positive.
One of the really nice things about the 12" is the sleep / battery combinations. It goes to sleep and wakes back up in about two seconds. So I never have to shut down, and it is always immediately avaliable. Combined with 3 hours+ battery life, light weight, small footprint, ultimate connectability, it is the most convenient piece of hardware I have ever bought. Maybe except for my bike.
I guess that testing this baby will be thrilling in more than one way, given that it [shrudder] runs on Windows. Let's hope they don't multitask too much!
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172097
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172097
online secure banking that works in Mozilla 1.1 may not work in Mozilla 1.2. It seems that Moz 1.2 does not send cookies to HTTPS sites, thus preventing some kinds of authentication.
Until this problem is fixed, people who use online banking etc. should stick to Moz 1.1.
Unfortunately, with moz 1.2, my bank no longer accepts the certificate, even though I have a clean, new install. Why? Also, the keyboard shortcuts for tabbed browsing (like ctrl-shift-click), is gone. Why?
I use Moz because the older Phoenix didn't have a Quick Start. Does the new Phoenix support this?
Funny, but they actually misquoted me. I wrote "the difference is not so great, as expected.", and the jounalist quoted "the difference is not so great as expected.". Those are direct opposites.. :-)