Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken
on
Inside the Xbox 360
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· Score: 1
If you're right that HDTV is going to be a requirement then Microsoft have lost the battle for this generation of consoles already. This would be a recipe for them selling only a few thousand consoles.
There's not all that many HDTV sets in North America right now, and they're expensive - very few people are going to spend thousands of dollars for a TV for their $300 console.
Europe is behind the game on HDTV too - you can't buy an HDTV set here right now, and even if you could there's no broadcasts to watch anyway. They won't even start to take off for over a year, meaning that the XBox 360 could be on the market for 6 months until there's TVs available for them.
Microsoft aren't stupid - XBox 360 must be capable of working on standard definition TVs, otherwise they might as well not bother.
My understanding was that you won't be able to ask for season two of Buffy, since it's not made by the BBC and so they don't own a license to offer it on-demand.
I said properly align your controls, and I gave examples of what I meant.
If the baseline of text within a label does not line up to the baseline of text within a text box then the "Format... Align..." isn't going to fix it. Labels have a different height from textboxes and both are different than buttons. It takes a great deal of patience to work around this.
As I said, in contrast Apple's Interface Builder and the Aqua UI guidelines make designing UIs much easier on Mac OS X.
I haven't spotted a way of adding guidelines to a UI in Visual Studio beyond enabling the grid, and I don't have a PC in front of me right now to check that out. However the grid itself only serves to hilight the poor design of Windows widgets and their default sizes within Visual Studio.
Also - for God's sake - LINE UP YOUR CONTROLS. If you're a Windows Developer, whether it's VB/C/C++/C#, it's just a matter of laziness to not align your controls
As a Visual Studio developer it's a nightmare to properly align your controls. Windows widgets are of various heights and the position of text within them varies immensely. It is far from trivial to align a buttons, checkbox and a text box. The text baselines just don't match, and neither do heights. There also are no rules or advice for how close you should put controls to each other. As a result many Windows programs have bad interfaces, simply because it's incredibly hard to give them a good interface.
In contrast on the Mac the standard GUI design tool is Apple's Interface Builder, and the standard widgets are Aqua. Aqua controls are designed to be consistent - similar heights and the same baselines for text. There's also guidelines as to how you should lay out your interface with rules/advice as to how close controls should be to each other. Interface Builder knows the rules and helps the UI designer stick to them - controls snap to positions relative to each other according to the Aqua rules. You can even place guidelines in your UI (which don't get shown) to help align your controls.
It would help immensely if Microsoft employed some people to sort out the GUI design part of Visual Studio. Right now it's painful, and adds an immense amount of extra work to make the UI look right.
Now this is indeed an interesting question, but it hilights a big flaw in Slashdot's system.
Many people here know that there are many rabid Microsoft fans, as has already been pointed out. However this question has been modded up to +5.
Ideally I think for the "Ask..." topics moderation should be open to everyone, even those who post into the topic. You should just be prevented from modding into a comment tree to which you have already posted. Additionally it would be useful to have moderation levels that go past +5 to help the process of sorting the most interesting questions to pass on to the questionee. This would help the process immedurably, allowing for bad questions to be more efficiently modded down and the most interesting questions to rise above the average.
In the example of this question I have no mod points right now, so I can't mod it down, yet I know it's a waste to pass this question on.
As I post this comment there's over 50 questions (not counting those modded as funny) that have already reached +5. Just how will the final 10 be chosen? Surely the process would be easier if we could all mod?
Back in September last year my wife and I crossed the land border from Canada into Buffalo NY and didn't get fingerprinted. I'm British and my wife is South Korean.
Now the border officials did have webcams and fingerprint scanners attached to their computers, but they didn't use them.
Since the US/Canada borders tend to be quite busy I'd be suprised if people would tolerate being stopped and fingerprinted every journey. That would cause severe damage to trade relations, which could have a really bad impact on the US economy.
As you can see most are for hardware innovations, but there's a few software patents in there too. Given the trend for patenting software it's a good thing too - it gives Apple ammo to deal with other companies challenging them with patent breach allegations. The norm these days is to strike up a cross-licensing deal, so they need such patents for their self-defence.
I would disagree to your assertion that the Newton didn't do what people needed it to do well. It's essential applications (notepad, datebook, and address book) were all excellent, and exceed the capabilities and ease of use of their more modern Palm equivalents.
There were two flaws. Firstly Apple didn't concentrate quite hard enough on PC integration.
Secondly Apple failed to listen to users and developers who continually told them that a pocket-sized device was needed. The market even showed them the potential for a pocket-sized device with the success of the Palm. There was conversely a call for a much larger device (A4 sized) from users and developers. What Apple delivered in the form of the MessagePad 2000 was neither. Had Apple produced a Palm sized machine they would have had a good chance in taking the market back from Palm since their technology (OS and user environment) was significantly superior, and in many ways still is today.
There's considereable evidence to indicate that the more you have learnt the easier it is to learn new things. The reason for this is that you know more things you can relate new concepts to, and learning things is mostly a process of establishing relationships between old and new knowledge.
Coupled with that, if you exercise your brain by learning new things it gets easier to learn new things too. Research has also indicated that people with active brains are less likely to suffer from degenerative brain diseases such as alzheimers.
In other words if you keep an active mind and keep learning new things then it gets easier and easier to learn new things over time.
Assuming therefore that you stay fit and healthy, the optimum age for learning new things is just before you die.:-)
I have heard great things about PostgreSQL, and a buddy of mine recently told me that this release was pending.
One thing I'm not keen on though is tarball distributions. I don't want to have to compile the thing, I just want to grab a package for my platform and install it (just like I do with MySQL).
My favoured platform though is Mac OS X. There's a whole list of platforms in the FAQ, but Mac isn't amongst them.
So my questions are is Mac OS X supported, and if so are there any plans to make a Mac OS X.pkg installation file?
My wife (a South Korean) is a very impatient woman, and this is a common trait amongst Koreans; they want things instantly without waiting.
It's no surprise to me that instant messaging services are popular there.
Given the amount of spam around on the 'net these days it's also not surprising that people are sending less email.
However email is not only for old people. My wife regularly emails her family back in Korea, since it's much cheaper than placing international phone calls. Phone calls and IM don't tend to be very convenient anyway, since we're 9 time zones away.
Email won't die out in Korea, like snail-mail hasn't died, and like radio didn't die when TV came.
I've programmed for neither, so I can't comment on the programability of either a Palm or whatever name they're marketting WinCE as these days.
However I do know quite a bit about design for handheld systems, and have tried using both Windows based phones and Palm based phones. For me the Palm wins in terms of usability.
The problem I find with all of the mini versions of Windows is that they're too closely based on desktop Windows. The inclusion of a traditional filing system as the main storage mechanism is a big problem IMHO. It makes for confusing applications.
For example setting the picture on a Windows phone involves you navigating a filing system to find a picture. You have to know where the phone's camera stores its pictures, and where pictures downloaded from the web are stored before you can use this properly.
In contrast on a Palm all the pictures are stored in a database, making it easy to pick a picture. You can still file pictures away under different categories.
Frankly for the most part you don't need a filing system on a device like a phone or PDA. One place for contacts, pictures, email, appointments, music, etc. is fine.
1) Clearly the iPod Photo does have hardware that's capable of supporting video - it seems to me that playing a movie as a slideshow is proof of that.
2) The iTunes Music Store already contains videos, although they are admitedly not for sale. However if Apple can sell audio through their store I don't see much of a reason why they couldn't sell video, beyond having contracts in place with suppliers.
So why wasn't the iPod Photo an iPod Video? For the reasons that Apple has stated - they don't think that the public really wants that at this time.
There's a few other factors I can think of. Firstly the iPod screen is tiny - it's not what I would choose to watch a video on. Secondly I would expect that video would place higher demands on battery life. Thirdly the iPod is a portable device designed primarily for use whilst you're walking around - watching video doesn't really fit into that.
I expect Apple probably will sell a video iPod some time next year complete with a larger screen. For launch they'll also line up content for sale (or maybe also free download) suitable for use on the device, such as music videos, short films, and cartoons.
Whilst it is true that Apple's desktop interface was based on work done by Xerox the Mac UI is not all that similar to that which Xerox had.
There are some significant differences and several innovations in the Mac UI over Xerox's offering. Most notably the Mac allowed overlapping windows - Xerox did not.
To us now the use of overlapping windows is obvious, but back in 1981 it wasn't, and their inclusion on the Mac was a genuine innovation.
Apple naturally felt that they had the right to protect their innovation, and that having inferior competitors could damage their brand.
b) the success Microsoft has had with making Windows software development incredibly easy.
Hmmmmm.... Take a look at GnuStep and/or Apple's Cocoa frameworks some time.
If Windows development is "incredibly easy" then I'm lost for a superlative to describe how just easy Cocoa/GnuStep is in comparison to any of Microsoft's Windows APIs.
I didn't mean to imply that all Macs were dual processor, just that you can't buy anything beyond dual processor at present.
For the record, all iMacs, eMacs, iBooks, and PowerBooks are single processor machines, and the G5 is now available (once again) in a single processor configuration, as is Xserve.
The press release says that the phone is, in part, the result of a collaboration with Pentax, who have some considerable experience in making camera lenses.
It's true that Apple currently only ships dual processor machines.
Mac OS X, however, is heavily multi-threaded. Before Mac OS X was commercially released there were development Macs in Apple's labs running many parallel PowerPC 604 processors (I believe it was 32); the OS coped just fine and gave fantastic performance. They never shipped, however, primarily because they would have been very expensive.
Some time next year Apple will start putting in dual-core G5 chips into their top-end machines, giving you 4 CPUs. The word on the street is that there will be options for even more processors. Mac OS X is already designed to cope with this.
You can expect that versions of Xserve will also appear with many processors.
As for "high-end virtualisation, monitoring and enterprise volume management", I'm not really a server kind of guy. However does't Xserve RAID along with Xsan address those things?
Of course what you're missing here is the unspoken war that has been waged for decades, and that is the war on intelligent thought.
It takes intelligent thought to as the "why" questions you point out as being central to these silly "wars". It's not in the governments or corporations interests for people to ask why.
Intelligent thought has not been stamped out, the same as alcohol, drugs, and copyright infringement haven't been stamped out, and it never will be. It is also an unwinnable "war". However like the other "wars" the govenment doesn't need to win it, just have a few victories along the way. So long as the vast majority of the public remain unthinking sheep the government and corporations will be just fine.
Firstly foreign companies use US dollars to pay for goods in other foreign countries, not just the USA. Most dollar notes live outside the USA.
It does not matter if the US moves all of its manufacturing off-shore, so long as it still has "goods" to offer the outside world. Those "goods" can, as you suggest, be manufactured items or raw material. However "goods" can also be information, such as movies, music, novels, business reports, and goods can also be services such as accounting and banking.
Re-industrialisation would do nothing to save the US economy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're right that HDTV is going to be a requirement then Microsoft have lost the battle for this generation of consoles already. This would be a recipe for them selling only a few thousand consoles.
There's not all that many HDTV sets in North America right now, and they're expensive - very few people are going to spend thousands of dollars for a TV for their $300 console.
Europe is behind the game on HDTV too - you can't buy an HDTV set here right now, and even if you could there's no broadcasts to watch anyway. They won't even start to take off for over a year, meaning that the XBox 360 could be on the market for 6 months until there's TVs available for them.
Microsoft aren't stupid - XBox 360 must be capable of working on standard definition TVs, otherwise they might as well not bother.
My understanding was that you won't be able to ask for season two of Buffy, since it's not made by the BBC and so they don't own a license to offer it on-demand.
I could be wrong though.
I said properly align your controls, and I gave examples of what I meant.
If the baseline of text within a label does not line up to the baseline of text within a text box then the "Format... Align..." isn't going to fix it. Labels have a different height from textboxes and both are different than buttons. It takes a great deal of patience to work around this.
As I said, in contrast Apple's Interface Builder and the Aqua UI guidelines make designing UIs much easier on Mac OS X.
I haven't spotted a way of adding guidelines to a UI in Visual Studio beyond enabling the grid, and I don't have a PC in front of me right now to check that out. However the grid itself only serves to hilight the poor design of Windows widgets and their default sizes within Visual Studio.
Also - for God's sake - LINE UP YOUR CONTROLS. If you're a Windows Developer, whether it's VB/C/C++/C#, it's just a matter of laziness to not align your controls
As a Visual Studio developer it's a nightmare to properly align your controls. Windows widgets are of various heights and the position of text within them varies immensely. It is far from trivial to align a buttons, checkbox and a text box. The text baselines just don't match, and neither do heights. There also are no rules or advice for how close you should put controls to each other. As a result many Windows programs have bad interfaces, simply because it's incredibly hard to give them a good interface.
In contrast on the Mac the standard GUI design tool is Apple's Interface Builder, and the standard widgets are Aqua. Aqua controls are designed to be consistent - similar heights and the same baselines for text. There's also guidelines as to how you should lay out your interface with rules/advice as to how close controls should be to each other. Interface Builder knows the rules and helps the UI designer stick to them - controls snap to positions relative to each other according to the Aqua rules. You can even place guidelines in your UI (which don't get shown) to help align your controls.
It would help immensely if Microsoft employed some people to sort out the GUI design part of Visual Studio. Right now it's painful, and adds an immense amount of extra work to make the UI look right.
Now this is indeed an interesting question, but it hilights a big flaw in Slashdot's system.
..." topics moderation should be open to everyone, even those who post into the topic. You should just be prevented from modding into a comment tree to which you have already posted. Additionally it would be useful to have moderation levels that go past +5 to help the process of sorting the most interesting questions to pass on to the questionee. This would help the process immedurably, allowing for bad questions to be more efficiently modded down and the most interesting questions to rise above the average.
Many people here know that there are many rabid Microsoft fans, as has already been pointed out. However this question has been modded up to +5.
Ideally I think for the "Ask
In the example of this question I have no mod points right now, so I can't mod it down, yet I know it's a waste to pass this question on.
As I post this comment there's over 50 questions (not counting those modded as funny) that have already reached +5. Just how will the final 10 be chosen? Surely the process would be easier if we could all mod?
The original Apple Newton (and all of its successors) had a dynamic object oriented database as it's file system.
Of course it didn't need any backwards compatibility, but that problem shouldn't take 15 years to solve.
Back in September last year my wife and I crossed the land border from Canada into Buffalo NY and didn't get fingerprinted. I'm British and my wife is South Korean.
Now the border officials did have webcams and fingerprint scanners attached to their computers, but they didn't use them.
Since the US/Canada borders tend to be quite busy I'd be suprised if people would tolerate being stopped and fingerprinted every journey. That would cause severe damage to trade relations, which could have a really bad impact on the US economy.
On this subject, this may be of interest:
Apple patents issued in the last month
As you can see most are for hardware innovations, but there's a few software patents in there too. Given the trend for patenting software it's a good thing too - it gives Apple ammo to deal with other companies challenging them with patent breach allegations. The norm these days is to strike up a cross-licensing deal, so they need such patents for their self-defence.
I would disagree to your assertion that the Newton didn't do what people needed it to do well. It's essential applications (notepad, datebook, and address book) were all excellent, and exceed the capabilities and ease of use of their more modern Palm equivalents.
There were two flaws. Firstly Apple didn't concentrate quite hard enough on PC integration.
Secondly Apple failed to listen to users and developers who continually told them that a pocket-sized device was needed. The market even showed them the potential for a pocket-sized device with the success of the Palm. There was conversely a call for a much larger device (A4 sized) from users and developers. What Apple delivered in the form of the MessagePad 2000 was neither. Had Apple produced a Palm sized machine they would have had a good chance in taking the market back from Palm since their technology (OS and user environment) was significantly superior, and in many ways still is today.
There's considereable evidence to indicate that the more you have learnt the easier it is to learn new things. The reason for this is that you know more things you can relate new concepts to, and learning things is mostly a process of establishing relationships between old and new knowledge.
:-)
Coupled with that, if you exercise your brain by learning new things it gets easier to learn new things too. Research has also indicated that people with active brains are less likely to suffer from degenerative brain diseases such as alzheimers.
In other words if you keep an active mind and keep learning new things then it gets easier and easier to learn new things over time.
Assuming therefore that you stay fit and healthy, the optimum age for learning new things is just before you die.
To answer the first part of my question, I just found the Supported Platforms part of the manual, and sure enough Mac OS X is there.
The question remains though - are there plans for a Mac OS X installer package?
I have heard great things about PostgreSQL, and a buddy of mine recently told me that this release was pending.
.pkg installation file?
One thing I'm not keen on though is tarball distributions. I don't want to have to compile the thing, I just want to grab a package for my platform and install it (just like I do with MySQL).
My favoured platform though is Mac OS X. There's a whole list of platforms in the FAQ, but Mac isn't amongst them.
So my questions are is Mac OS X supported, and if so are there any plans to make a Mac OS X
My wife (a South Korean) is a very impatient woman, and this is a common trait amongst Koreans; they want things instantly without waiting.
It's no surprise to me that instant messaging services are popular there.
Given the amount of spam around on the 'net these days it's also not surprising that people are sending less email.
However email is not only for old people. My wife regularly emails her family back in Korea, since it's much cheaper than placing international phone calls. Phone calls and IM don't tend to be very convenient anyway, since we're 9 time zones away.
Email won't die out in Korea, like snail-mail hasn't died, and like radio didn't die when TV came.
I've programmed for neither, so I can't comment on the programability of either a Palm or whatever name they're marketting WinCE as these days.
However I do know quite a bit about design for handheld systems, and have tried using both Windows based phones and Palm based phones. For me the Palm wins in terms of usability.
The problem I find with all of the mini versions of Windows is that they're too closely based on desktop Windows. The inclusion of a traditional filing system as the main storage mechanism is a big problem IMHO. It makes for confusing applications.
For example setting the picture on a Windows phone involves you navigating a filing system to find a picture. You have to know where the phone's camera stores its pictures, and where pictures downloaded from the web are stored before you can use this properly.
In contrast on a Palm all the pictures are stored in a database, making it easy to pick a picture. You can still file pictures away under different categories.
Frankly for the most part you don't need a filing system on a device like a phone or PDA. One place for contacts, pictures, email, appointments, music, etc. is fine.
The display requires a projector, but it doesn't have to be "traditional". You just need to use a little imagination...
Lasers can be built onto a chip, so why not build a laser-based projection device and use optical fibers to route the light to the screen?
First stage of this though would be to build a laser-based projector to couple with this technology for laptop displays.
1) Clearly the iPod Photo does have hardware that's capable of supporting video - it seems to me that playing a movie as a slideshow is proof of that.
2) The iTunes Music Store already contains videos, although they are admitedly not for sale. However if Apple can sell audio through their store I don't see much of a reason why they couldn't sell video, beyond having contracts in place with suppliers.
So why wasn't the iPod Photo an iPod Video? For the reasons that Apple has stated - they don't think that the public really wants that at this time.
There's a few other factors I can think of. Firstly the iPod screen is tiny - it's not what I would choose to watch a video on. Secondly I would expect that video would place higher demands on battery life. Thirdly the iPod is a portable device designed primarily for use whilst you're walking around - watching video doesn't really fit into that.
I expect Apple probably will sell a video iPod some time next year complete with a larger screen. For launch they'll also line up content for sale (or maybe also free download) suitable for use on the device, such as music videos, short films, and cartoons.
Whilst it is true that Apple's desktop interface was based on work done by Xerox the Mac UI is not all that similar to that which Xerox had.
There are some significant differences and several innovations in the Mac UI over Xerox's offering. Most notably the Mac allowed overlapping windows - Xerox did not.
To us now the use of overlapping windows is obvious, but back in 1981 it wasn't, and their inclusion on the Mac was a genuine innovation.
Apple naturally felt that they had the right to protect their innovation, and that having inferior competitors could damage their brand.
Virgin Records hasn't been part of the Virgin Group of companies for a very long time now.
It was sold many years ago to EMI and financed the expansion of Virgin Atlantic.
Virgin is back in the record industry as the V2 label these days.
b) the success Microsoft has had with making Windows software development incredibly easy.
Hmmmmm.... Take a look at GnuStep and/or Apple's Cocoa frameworks some time.
If Windows development is "incredibly easy" then I'm lost for a superlative to describe how just easy Cocoa/GnuStep is in comparison to any of Microsoft's Windows APIs.
I didn't mean to imply that all Macs were dual processor, just that you can't buy anything beyond dual processor at present.
For the record, all iMacs, eMacs, iBooks, and PowerBooks are single processor machines, and the G5 is now available (once again) in a single processor configuration, as is Xserve.
The press release says that the phone is, in part, the result of a collaboration with Pentax, who have some considerable experience in making camera lenses.
It's true that Apple currently only ships dual processor machines.
Mac OS X, however, is heavily multi-threaded. Before Mac OS X was commercially released there were development Macs in Apple's labs running many parallel PowerPC 604 processors (I believe it was 32); the OS coped just fine and gave fantastic performance. They never shipped, however, primarily because they would have been very expensive.
Some time next year Apple will start putting in dual-core G5 chips into their top-end machines, giving you 4 CPUs. The word on the street is that there will be options for even more processors. Mac OS X is already designed to cope with this.
You can expect that versions of Xserve will also appear with many processors.
As for "high-end virtualisation, monitoring and enterprise volume management", I'm not really a server kind of guy. However does't Xserve RAID along with Xsan address those things?
Of course what you're missing here is the unspoken war that has been waged for decades, and that is the war on intelligent thought.
It takes intelligent thought to as the "why" questions you point out as being central to these silly "wars". It's not in the governments or corporations interests for people to ask why.
Intelligent thought has not been stamped out, the same as alcohol, drugs, and copyright infringement haven't been stamped out, and it never will be. It is also an unwinnable "war". However like the other "wars" the govenment doesn't need to win it, just have a few victories along the way. So long as the vast majority of the public remain unthinking sheep the government and corporations will be just fine.
Yeah, "Tutorial D" sounds a little bit too much like "Preparation H".
Errrr... Wrong.
Firstly foreign companies use US dollars to pay for goods in other foreign countries, not just the USA. Most dollar notes live outside the USA.
It does not matter if the US moves all of its manufacturing off-shore, so long as it still has "goods" to offer the outside world. Those "goods" can, as you suggest, be manufactured items or raw material. However "goods" can also be information, such as movies, music, novels, business reports, and goods can also be services such as accounting and banking.
Re-industrialisation would do nothing to save the US economy.