Windows is only esay to use because people don't know any thing else exists. I been using linux for 2 years, and now even my mom and my little sister use Linux(Gnome) with no problems at all.
Can they run all the games that are released each year, even low-tech stuff like Roller Coaster Tycoon? Can they run all the kids' software available at Toys 'R Us? Can they shop at Internet Explorer-specific web sites? Can they run Photoshop and Premiere, if they needed to?
The bottom line is and always has been this: People want to be able to run the software that's out there. That's it. That's all. I've been a Mac user in the past, and it is frustrating any time you have to do something where all users are assumed to be running Windows. It's not worth being idealistic about it.
DivX;), Windows Media and other MPEG4 based solutions have already killed them. They take less bandwidth and scale from palm-based to near-DVD quality.
You completely missed the point. Think back to the state of movie playing on desktop hardware in 1991. Hint: There wasn't one. Quicktime was the first attempt to bring movie playing to personal computers. This was years before the huge full-motion-video multimedia explosion that started in late 1993.
To bad i still have to use Windoze at school. The administration doesnt know a good OS when they see it. Thats why they run mostly Win95 on a Novell network.
Sigh. These kinds of comments from know-it-all kiddies are _really_ annoying.
Compare and contrast that to/.: Right there on the main page is "Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Right off, I can get a pretty good idea of whom/. is targeting, and make a decision as to whether I stick around or leave.
Nonsense! You can't tell that Slashdot is really a flaming Linux advocacy site from the "News for Nerds" tag.
So, T1 rates are overpriced, and the true cost of bandwidth is vastly lower.
They may be overpriced but you're vastly underestimating the cost of bandwidth.
Funny to see SNK remembered for "innovation"
on
Farewell to SNK
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· Score: 2
When SNK appeared with the Neo-Geo, they were smack in the middle of the rush to create Street Fighter knockoffs and at the very tail end of the rush to create platform-oriented beat-em-ups that was in full force for the previous five years. Yes, Capcom was doing the same thing, though they get credit for Street Fighter II in the first place. But anyone trying to pick nits about which company was more innovative or original is missing the big picture. Both were just creating the mass market junk of the time.
Re:Fast CPUs might be bad.
on
CPU Wars
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· Score: 2
With the recent entrance of the seccond generation MMORPG on the gaming front, processors that were considered decent no more then six months agao are now not even worthy of the title 'decrepit'. Games like Anarchy Online, Starwars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot, only to name a few, are pushing the benchmark higher and higher for gamer.
MMORPGs are more dependent on *bandwidth* than anything else. You're just talking about the 3D side of things.
look at a few new less eppic games such as Giant: Citizen Kabuto from early last year, people couldnt run that with all the widgets and gizmos cranked up to the maximum level, I could barely even play it on my PIII 500, and that was almost a year agao.
That's because 90% of the time in games like that is spend inside of a 3D driver. Switch the game to pre-assembled display lists (i.e. "use the transformation capabilities of the card") and you'll get a 10x speedup on the same machine. The trouble is that game developers can't assume such a card, as there are lots of entry level machines that are shipping with bare-bones 3D capabilities.
Wether/. style, live CHAT style, or some hideous mix as we did recently these are the key to any site working.
No. Chats and forums drown a site in drivel in all but a handful of cases. Forums on small sites are pathetic. Seeing two new posts a week confirms to the user that it is an unimportant site.
Let's think about this for a minute. How much does it cost for a corporation to least a T1 line? Over $1000 per month, at least in the United States. Cable modem users are each getting bandwidth that's equivalent or higher than a T1. And they're paying $40 a month. Now, sure, cable modem users are all sharing bandwidth to some extent, but the point is that they can eat up a hell of a lot of bandwidth by downloading giant demos, sharing files, listening to streaming radio, and so on. And they're not paying nearly what that bandwidth really costs at the back end. It's no suprise that this isn't currently a money making proposition. ISP admins have seen this coming since day 1, but like everyone else their eyes lit up at all that bandwidth for so little cost.
vote with not just our money, but their overhead costs to handle all the returned merchandise and bad publicity when stores don't want CDs with those stickers
And what will this prove? That you really *were* going to copy the data to your computer and likely let your friends to the same? Look, if you're against this sort of thing then you shouldn't be looking to a giant record company to be providing you with your music. Listen to freely available MP3 files instead. Oh, they suck, do they? Well isn't that a surprise.
This is false. If used correctly Flash can add quite a bit to a page. No, I'm not talking about random stupid animations or intros, I am talking about applications and applets. Pieces that both draw the user in and give them interactive tools.
In 99% of cases this is not true. In all but a few cases, Flash is simply used to add pointless animation.
Jakob Nielsen has always perplexed me. I remember reading Flash: 99% Bad [digitalout.com] and being totally confused. If Flash is so "bad", why does everyone use it?
Flash is enticing. Web designers say "Oooh...I can put pretty animations on a site." Managers say "Doesn't it make our site look professional?" But the reality of it is:
* It requires you to have a Flash plug-in.
* It makes download times longer, often much longer for modem users.
* In exchange for these drawbacks you're not gaining anything.
Even so, the enticement is difficult to get over. At least if Nielsen rants about it he'll eventually get articles questioning Flash into the magazines that web designers read, and then maybe they'll listen.
Not only is the PS2 inferior to both the XBox and the Gamecube, but never has there been a game console with such a high volume of crap games compared to excellent games.
*Every* system is similar in that respect. The Atari 2600 had 10 crap games for every one. Ditto for the NES, SNES, and Genesis. If anything, I think the PS2 has had an abnormally high number of must-buy games released in the first year.
NONE of the publishers of the CAD tools that we use (Cadence, Mentor) are porting to Linux. Mentor ported one of their product lines (not the one we use) and stopped, Cadence never tried, both cite a 'lack of customer demand'.
Ditto for professional graphics tools such as Photoshop and Freehand. Please don't mention The Gimp. There was a beta of Corel Draw for a while, but no more.
This is not the traditional embedded market
on
Windows XP Embedded
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where smallness, understandability, low power consumption, and bullet-proof reliability are the key factors. I don't know who would put XP in a critical device. I don't know who would put Linux in one either, for that sake. "Embedded" in the Microsoft sense must mean "PDAs and museum kiosks" and such, and not the traditional embedded market.
with the election results being reported early before they are really known. Do we need this kind of story? Is the point just to make fun of RMS? This is one of the worst Slashdot stories ever.
I know a bit more about PL design. Being in academia pollutes the mind, I know, but I am sure that almost all I see in the slashdot PL community is reworking of old, mediocre ideas. Who in the world will use and develop new programming languages if not hackers?
(So, the PL fanatic in me wants to point out caml [inria.fr], which, even though it is not my personal favorite, I think could become really popular with slashdot-style hackers.
Of course ML languages are 20 years old, and Caml was developed *before* Perl and Python. So it isn't necessarily that the newer ideas are better, just that lots of good ideas tend to get lost to history for various reasons.
Intelligent people don't argue about language.
on
Lightweight Languages
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· Score: 5, Insightful
it wasn't the flame fest you might have imagined
Not surprising. The only people who get into flame-fests about programming language choice are insecure newbies. It comes down to the same reason kids argue about whose game system is better: they got one for Christmas and feel compelled to defend their choice, because they can't afford another. Once you know a sizable number of computer languages--especially different styles of language--then you no longer feel a need to be so petty. Different languages have different strengths.
I don't mean to sound curmudgeonly about this, but I've found every virtual community--read "online forums"--to get tiresome quickly. The original, wonderful intent, that people will all contribute and make the site a better place, is quickly replaced with the reality that people endlessly post the same questions, the same virus hoaxes, the same misinformation, and often seem to be filling time during study hall (which is frequently the truth). Slashdot is borderline unbearable as it is, but the moderation saves it just _slightly_. More and more I just post my thoughts when I have a real opinion about a subject, but I don't read other posts, and I don't care about karma. But other forums...ugh. Why even bother? Sites like metafilter.com, which is one of the better community sites out there, are still drowning in college-age smugness and uncontrollable urges to state the obvious.
A quick perusal of their website doesn't reveal any thing that would allow someone do their own coding. Toys like this are only worth having if they are hackable:). Anyone know of any projects to hack them or provide dev. tools.
You can get the development tools and documentation from the Cybiko web site. They've been available for free right from the start.
Kinda tiresome that any mention of Intel is cause for the AMD fanboys to come out of the woodwork. I'm not knocking AMD; it's just that it's endlessly boring to see so much empty froth and angst spewed forth in defense of a product
I have a 800 Duron system with a Geforce 2 MX. It plays any new game at 1152x968 flawlessly. The GeForce 3 can pump out perfect refresh rates at even higher resolutions on any of the newest and graphical intensive game available today. There simply is no challenge, whereas years ago there was always room to improve - refresh rates, resolution, bit colour, texture size, etc.
Game developers are no longer pushing the capabilities of graphics cards (note: I am a game developer). You can look at this several different ways:
1. We're glad to finally have enough power to not worry about getting just polygons on the screen, so we simply write games and no longer have the same technological obsession that many PC buyers do.
2. Newer cards like the Radeon and GeForce 3 are pricey enough and new enough that only the hardcore fanboy types are buying them. If you assume a GeForce 3 level card, then your market gets reduced by a factor of 20 or more. Probably more as there's been a growing trend to not even put 3D accelerators in new systems (other than bare-bones chips, that it is).
3. We still don't really know how to push older generations of cards yet. Ever see games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon on the Playstation *ONE*. Wow is that impressive. PC games look better, but not an order of magnitude better. On the one side we have a system that doesn't even have a z-buffer, and on the other we have state of the art. Sometimes I think that if cards stopped advancing past the Voodoo 2 then game graphics would have still kept advancing all the way to where they are now.
Disclaimer: I know, I know, people who drop $600 on a new graphics card the day it is released don't want to hear this. They're in their own world anyway:)
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is only esay to use because people don't know any thing else exists. I been using linux for 2 years, and now even my mom and my little sister use Linux(Gnome) with no problems at all.
Can they run all the games that are released each year, even low-tech stuff like Roller Coaster Tycoon? Can they run all the kids' software available at Toys 'R Us? Can they shop at Internet Explorer-specific web sites? Can they run Photoshop and Premiere, if they needed to?
The bottom line is and always has been this: People want to be able to run the software that's out there. That's it. That's all. I've been a Mac user in the past, and it is frustrating any time you have to do something where all users are assumed to be running Windows. It's not worth being idealistic about it.
DivX ;), Windows Media and other MPEG4 based solutions have already killed them. They take less bandwidth and scale from palm-based to near-DVD quality.
You completely missed the point. Think back to the state of movie playing on desktop hardware in 1991. Hint: There wasn't one. Quicktime was the first attempt to bring movie playing to personal computers. This was years before the huge full-motion-video multimedia explosion that started in late 1993.
To bad i still have to use Windoze at school. The administration doesnt know a good OS when they see it. Thats why they run mostly Win95 on a Novell network.
Sigh. These kinds of comments from know-it-all kiddies are _really_ annoying.
Compare and contrast that to /.: Right there on the main page is "Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Right off, I can get a pretty good idea of whom /. is targeting, and make a decision as to whether I stick around or leave.
Nonsense! You can't tell that Slashdot is really a flaming Linux advocacy site from the "News for Nerds" tag.
So, T1 rates are overpriced, and the true cost of bandwidth is vastly lower.
They may be overpriced but you're vastly underestimating the cost of bandwidth.
When SNK appeared with the Neo-Geo, they were smack in the middle of the rush to create Street Fighter knockoffs and at the very tail end of the rush to create platform-oriented beat-em-ups that was in full force for the previous five years. Yes, Capcom was doing the same thing, though they get credit for Street Fighter II in the first place. But anyone trying to pick nits about which company was more innovative or original is missing the big picture. Both were just creating the mass market junk of the time.
With the recent entrance of the seccond generation MMORPG on the gaming front, processors that were considered decent no more then six months agao are now not even worthy of the title 'decrepit'. Games like Anarchy Online, Starwars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot, only to name a few, are pushing the benchmark higher and higher for gamer.
MMORPGs are more dependent on *bandwidth* than anything else. You're just talking about the 3D side of things.
look at a few new less eppic games such as Giant: Citizen Kabuto from early last year, people couldnt run that with all the widgets and gizmos cranked up to the maximum level, I could barely even play it on my PIII 500, and that was almost a year agao.
That's because 90% of the time in games like that is spend inside of a 3D driver. Switch the game to pre-assembled display lists (i.e. "use the transformation capabilities of the card") and you'll get a 10x speedup on the same machine. The trouble is that game developers can't assume such a card, as there are lots of entry level machines that are shipping with bare-bones 3D capabilities.
Wether /. style, live CHAT style, or some hideous mix as we did recently these are the key to any site working.
No. Chats and forums drown a site in drivel in all but a handful of cases. Forums on small sites are pathetic. Seeing two new posts a week confirms to the user that it is an unimportant site.
Let's think about this for a minute. How much does it cost for a corporation to least a T1 line? Over $1000 per month, at least in the United States. Cable modem users are each getting bandwidth that's equivalent or higher than a T1. And they're paying $40 a month. Now, sure, cable modem users are all sharing bandwidth to some extent, but the point is that they can eat up a hell of a lot of bandwidth by downloading giant demos, sharing files, listening to streaming radio, and so on. And they're not paying nearly what that bandwidth really costs at the back end. It's no suprise that this isn't currently a money making proposition. ISP admins have seen this coming since day 1, but like everyone else their eyes lit up at all that bandwidth for so little cost.
vote with not just our money, but their overhead costs to handle all the returned merchandise and bad publicity when stores don't want CDs with those stickers
And what will this prove? That you really *were* going to copy the data to your computer and likely let your friends to the same? Look, if you're against this sort of thing then you shouldn't be looking to a giant record company to be providing you with your music. Listen to freely available MP3 files instead. Oh, they suck, do they? Well isn't that a surprise.
This is false. If used correctly Flash can add quite a bit to a page. No, I'm not talking about random stupid animations or intros, I am talking about applications and applets. Pieces that both draw the user in and give them interactive tools.
In 99% of cases this is not true. In all but a few cases, Flash is simply used to add pointless animation.
Jakob Nielsen has always perplexed me. I remember reading Flash: 99% Bad [digitalout.com] and being totally confused. If Flash is so "bad", why does everyone use it?
Flash is enticing. Web designers say "Oooh...I can put pretty animations on a site." Managers say "Doesn't it make our site look professional?" But the reality of it is:
* It requires you to have a Flash plug-in.
* It makes download times longer, often much longer for modem users.
* In exchange for these drawbacks you're not gaining anything.
Even so, the enticement is difficult to get over. At least if Nielsen rants about it he'll eventually get articles questioning Flash into the magazines that web designers read, and then maybe they'll listen.
Not only is the PS2 inferior to both the XBox and the Gamecube, but never has there been a game console with such a high volume of crap games compared to excellent games.
*Every* system is similar in that respect. The Atari 2600 had 10 crap games for every one. Ditto for the NES, SNES, and Genesis. If anything, I think the PS2 has had an abnormally high number of must-buy games released in the first year.
NONE of the publishers of the CAD tools that we use (Cadence, Mentor) are porting to Linux. Mentor ported one of their product lines (not the one we use) and stopped, Cadence never tried, both cite a 'lack of customer demand'.
Ditto for professional graphics tools such as Photoshop and Freehand. Please don't mention The Gimp. There was a beta of Corel Draw for a while, but no more.
Where smallness, understandability, low power consumption, and bullet-proof reliability are the key factors. I don't know who would put XP in a critical device. I don't know who would put Linux in one either, for that sake. "Embedded" in the Microsoft sense must mean "PDAs and museum kiosks" and such, and not the traditional embedded market.
with the election results being reported early before they are really known. Do we need this kind of story? Is the point just to make fun of RMS? This is one of the worst Slashdot stories ever.
I know a bit more about PL design. Being in academia pollutes the mind, I know, but I am sure that almost all I see in the slashdot PL community is reworking of old, mediocre ideas. Who in the world will use and develop new programming languages if not hackers?
(So, the PL fanatic in me wants to point out caml [inria.fr], which, even though it is not my personal favorite, I think could become really popular with slashdot-style hackers.
Of course ML languages are 20 years old, and Caml was developed *before* Perl and Python. So it isn't necessarily that the newer ideas are better, just that lots of good ideas tend to get lost to history for various reasons.
it wasn't the flame fest you might have imagined
Not surprising. The only people who get into flame-fests about programming language choice are insecure newbies. It comes down to the same reason kids argue about whose game system is better: they got one for Christmas and feel compelled to defend their choice, because they can't afford another. Once you know a sizable number of computer languages--especially different styles of language--then you no longer feel a need to be so petty. Different languages have different strengths.
I don't mean to sound curmudgeonly about this, but I've found every virtual community--read "online forums"--to get tiresome quickly. The original, wonderful intent, that people will all contribute and make the site a better place, is quickly replaced with the reality that people endlessly post the same questions, the same virus hoaxes, the same misinformation, and often seem to be filling time during study hall (which is frequently the truth). Slashdot is borderline unbearable as it is, but the moderation saves it just _slightly_. More and more I just post my thoughts when I have a real opinion about a subject, but I don't read other posts, and I don't care about karma. But other forums...ugh. Why even bother? Sites like metafilter.com, which is one of the better community sites out there, are still drowning in college-age smugness and uncontrollable urges to state the obvious.
You forgot:
Race with the Crash Bandicoot characters
A quick perusal of their website doesn't reveal any thing that would allow someone do their own coding. Toys like this are only worth having if they are hackable :). Anyone know of any projects to hack them or provide dev. tools.
You can get the development tools and documentation from the Cybiko web site. They've been available for free right from the start.
I was a little surprised these things didn't catch on more
They *did* catch on in a big way, but the target market is about 4th through 9th grade. 500,000 units in a year is impressive.
Kinda tiresome that any mention of Intel is cause for the AMD fanboys to come out of the woodwork. I'm not knocking AMD; it's just that it's endlessly boring to see so much empty froth and angst spewed forth in defense of a product
I have a 800 Duron system with a Geforce 2 MX. It plays any new game at 1152x968 flawlessly. The GeForce 3 can pump out perfect refresh rates at even higher resolutions on any of the newest and graphical intensive game available today. There simply is no challenge, whereas years ago there was always room to improve - refresh rates, resolution, bit colour, texture size, etc.
:)
Game developers are no longer pushing the capabilities of graphics cards (note: I am a game developer). You can look at this several different ways:
1. We're glad to finally have enough power to not worry about getting just polygons on the screen, so we simply write games and no longer have the same technological obsession that many PC buyers do.
2. Newer cards like the Radeon and GeForce 3 are pricey enough and new enough that only the hardcore fanboy types are buying them. If you assume a GeForce 3 level card, then your market gets reduced by a factor of 20 or more. Probably more as there's been a growing trend to not even put 3D accelerators in new systems (other than bare-bones chips, that it is).
3. We still don't really know how to push older generations of cards yet. Ever see games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon on the Playstation *ONE*. Wow is that impressive. PC games look better, but not an order of magnitude better. On the one side we have a system that doesn't even have a z-buffer, and on the other we have state of the art. Sometimes I think that if cards stopped advancing past the Voodoo 2 then game graphics would have still kept advancing all the way to where they are now.
Disclaimer: I know, I know, people who drop $600 on a new graphics card the day it is released don't want to hear this. They're in their own world anyway
The set of slashdot users that happen to post to a given article has much less uniformity of opinion than people seem to expect.
Not true at all. In most cases it is easy to predict what the replies will be before reading them.